Dusty Staub’s message to Northern NV business leaders: ‘Be more loving and humane’

When noted speaker and author Dusty Staub appears in Reno for the first time on Jan. 17, more than 300 business leaders and others attending the Northern Nevada Business Weekly’s 2018 Book of Lists Launch & Awards Gala will gain insights into his mantra, “Leading from the heart.”

And with a new year at hand, the timing couldn’t be better for telling his story of ways to develop and nurture wholehearted leadership practices, Staub said in a recent telephone interview with the NNBW from his North Carolina home.

Staub has spent more than four decades, as he describes it, “helping liberate the passion and power of people and organizations.”

He’s done that in many roles helping people from all walks of life, be it as a marital and family counselor, author of numerous self-help books and, for the past three decades, as CEO and Lead Consultant of Staub Leadership International.

“I’ve never been to Reno,” said Staub, adding he looks forward to meeting the region’s movers and shakers at the Book of Lists event.

“I’ll talk about transformation, being a transformative leader,” Staub said of the evening gathering at the Atlantis Casino Resort Spa that will celebrate the region’s business community as represented in the 10th annual Book of Lists, as well as winners of the NNBW Readers’ Choice 2017 Best in Business. “I’ll talk about practical methods, not just inspirational, but practical.”

More than ever now, he believes, business leaders — all people, for that matter — face difficult challenges to some degree keeping steady in today’s world where conflict seems to dominate the daily headlines.

“I’ve always seen conflict,” Staub, 67, said. “My mother said she never saw it so bad, but I reminded her that we used to practice fallout drills by climbing under our desks (during the Cold War and Cuban missile crisis). Things are much better now when you’re not facing imminent nuclear war with Russia.”

But today’s world is still challenging, especially for business leaders, he said.

“When you watch the news, you become disenchanted, frightened, angry,” Staub said. “My work is to help people get a more positive attitude, make significant changes so their teams can run better when they learn to move in a transformational way.”

With a nod to a popular phrase sometimes seen on bumper stickers, Staub added, “We know that ‘s**t happens.’ It’s totally accurate and it’s very descriptive, but it’s not useful.”

Rather, Staub said, “I’m interested in ‘shift happens’ — being able to open up and be more loving and humane. Our purpose is to be our authentic, whole selves.”

He recalls standing up to a bully as a fifth-grader and diffusing the confrontation through words rather than responding with aggression.

“I had the power to shift into something much better, appeal to a higher reasoning, and that has shaped my whole life,” he said.

So to his Reno audience, he will say that true leaders are able to make the move to shift into transformational mode.

“It’s easy say and hard to do, but I’ve developed the methods to do it,” Staub said.

And he said as he gets older, he gains more patience, knowing that each person has his or her own pace to achieve that “transformational shift.”

“People will get there when they get there,” he said of reaching goals. “No one can do it for you. If they aren’t willing or have the courage to make changes, they won’t, and I can’t make them.

“But if you have the courage to take action, take risks,” he said, “you’ll need help and be able to realize you are vulnerable, that you can’t go off into a cave and then come out 20 years later and be enlightened. You can’t do it alone.”