Self-Leadership in Healthcare:
Why Leading Yourself First Unlocks Growth

Transforming Healthcare Coaching Podcast — Episode 111: Self-Leadership Critical to Unlocking Growth with Dusty Holcomb. Host Lillian Liang Emlet, MD MS CHSE CPC ELI-MP interviews guest Dusty Holcomb, founder and CEO of the Arcqus Group. Published June 1, 2026.

Dusty Holcomb: I firmly believe this to the core of my being, that leadership is a learned behavior and it's because it is a learned behavior we constantly have to be unlearning and relearning and new learning, and so we're always in this leveling up game. Most of the times we're busy doing things that don't matter, or we're busy doing things that were part of our former self and aren't part of our future and we just have to give ourselves permission to say no.

Lillian Emlet: Welcome to Transforming Healthcare Coaching. my name is Lillian Emlet. I'm the founder and CEO of Transforming Healthcare Coaching, and we're joined today by Dusty Holcomb, who is the founder and CEO of the Arcqus Group, which is an executive coaching and leadership consulting firm dedicated to helping leaders connect purpose to performance through clarity, consistency, and accountability. And Dusty has over 26 years of senior executive leadership experience before founding the Arcqus group, he's had roles that span operations, marketing and presidency, in multi-billion dollar organizations. And so Dusty is a servant leader at his core. And so we are really excited to have him on today to, because we actually say the same things except just to slightly different audiences. and his really all about enabling purpose and success in others. And so, welcome, Dusty to the show.

Dusty Holcomb: Lillian, thank you so much for having me. It's exciting to talk with someone who has similar beliefs, but then such a different angle on it and a different audience. And I'm really excited for our conversation today.

Lillian Emlet: Yeah, I'm super excited to talk with you today too because I think the reality is, a lot of us think that leadership can scale pretty easily. you and I both know that's not necessarily true. You can be a great leader for maybe two or three people. Probably even 10 people. But then when you get a 50, a hundred, 200, 1000, it starts to change a little bit.

Dusty Holcomb: It does. It starts to change. I would say the principles of leadership don't change, but how you lead yourself and how you need to show up differently to be the leader that is necessary at that next stage of growth or that next level of, scale is different, and you have to unlearn skills that got you to where you are and you have to learn new skills. The beautiful thing though is, and I firmly believe this to the core of my being, that leadership is a learned behavior and it's because it is a learned behavior we constantly have to be unlearning and relearning and new learning, and so we're always in this leveling up game. And then that's a wonderful thing, right? You get to what you did with two people is different than what you do with 2000, but leadership is leadership and John Maxwell, has my favorite quote on this, which is leadership is influenced nothing more and nothing less. And I find that that, when you think about it that way and you understand that influence is a manifestation of behavior and it's setting example for others, it's a little less terrifying whether you're leading two or 2000. It's just influence and how do we need to show up and influence others?

Lillian Emlet: I think, least in my world, healthcare professionals often feel really stuck in the middle. They know they're leading people. They know they can lead their own little tiny team in the office or in the hospital, but they don't always feel like real leaders. In your 26 years of executive experience, what is the most common gap you see between how leaders see themselves and how they actually show up?

Dusty Holcomb: Yeah, I love this question and regardless of what environment it is, leadership at a first principle level is the manifestation of behavior. So Saint Francis of Assisi, is purported to have said, it's no use walking anywhere to preach unless you're walking is your preaching. And so, leadership is the ability to influence the outcomes and behaviors of others first and principally by our own outcomes, our own behaviors. And so I have this firm belief, a first principle belief that the more effective we are at leading ourselves, the more impactful and influential we can be on others and what we want to do is we want to enable others to understand where we're going and how they fit into that. And we connect the dots for them, whether it's a big team or a small team, like when we get people to change their behaviors based on how we're showing up, that's leadership and size of team doesn't matter, big group within a hospital or office, doesn't matter. What we're doing is we're making sure that people understand where we're going and where they fit into that. I mean, at the simplest level. And when we start getting rid of all the complexity and all the management stuff and we go, "Huh! Okay, this is what we're trying to do. Let me go help my people." My first mentor gave me the greatest gift of my professional career, I was 21 years old. He taught me and exposed to me. "It's kind of that thing you can't unlearn once you've learned it is that — leadership is not about you. Leadership is about enabling and empowering others. And when you do that well, oh by the way, you become more successful." So, the thing that I would say that the gap that I see, the gap regardless of role, position, whatever, is that people think that leadership and management are the same thing. And they think leadership is about themselves. And it's not at all.

Lillian Emlet: Yeah, that's really good point. And I think the other hard thing too is we often also take on everyone else's identity and everyone else's definition of everything else. Meaning like whatever the outcomes are, whatever the way it's exhibited the way it's supposed to be. A lot of things there is in a hidden curriculum in terms of how you're supposed to show up and there's often dissonance. I think, throughout our entire career where we try on so many different outfits, we try on so many different like models of leadership and they don't ever feel quite right. And so I think what you're talking about, the fact that it begins with you and that you have to walk the talk first.

Dusty Holcomb: Yeah, you have to know who you are. You have to be comfortable being authentic. And I find so often that, we try to be like everyone else, like everyone expects us to be, from a role perspective. And even more dangerous to that is then we try to make everyone else happy. we try to amend ourselves and we end up being the unhappy one because we're not being authentic. We're not being real, we're not being true to ourselves. And when you do the work to work on yourself and just understand what you value, how you show up, what it is that you want others to know because they've interacted with you when you can show up that way, you're not having to play in the theater anymore. You're just showing up. And I have found, bar none zero fail here, that when people show up that way, what happens is those that they're leading level up to those that they're leading show up better because they trust the person that's leading them. Because they know that it's an authentic and real self. And it's not just a role or a label or a title.

Lillian Emlet: Yeah, and that's hard. I have to admit, throughout your career, you don't really know what you don't know what you don't know. And so a lot of healthcare professionals, whether you're a physician, a nurse, an NP, a PA, they often tell us, "Oh, they're waiting. They're waiting more for more." Or they're waiting for our coaching, they're waiting for more learning, more resources. They're waiting to become more senior before they feel ready to lead. And what would you say to that person right now? the juniors who are practicing a couple years into practice and they really just don't feel like they're a leader and they're raging against the system the entire time.

Dusty Holcomb: I'd go back to this idea that leadership is influence. And some of the most important influence we'll ever do is influencing up, or it's influencing horizontally. And, if we're raging against what we're doing is we are surrendering any influence that we have. We're surrendering any control that we have. And so, I have this, work with leaders all the time and they'll start raging about something. And these are people who have the title right. And I'll go, "Wait a minute, but what can you do? What is the influence that you get to have? Maybe you're not ready in your mind for a leadership role, but what is the outcome that you want to shift or change? And what is it that you can do?" Because that's leadership — identifying an opportunity to change your behavior that creates a manifestation for and on others — that's leadership. And I think we get wrapped around the axle thinking about it as a title or a position, and we don't think about what it really is, which is influence. And that's in our ability to influence is predicated on our ability to make choices and to see the world to make better or different choices. And that's the thing, I always encourage people. think about, to talk about is: what is the choice you can make? What is the input that you can create? What is it? And when you start doing that, you realize that you have agency. You realize you do have effect on the system. And, maybe you're, a small team and a massive system and you can't change the entire world. But what you can change is the three people around you, or what you can change is the patient experience for the person in front of you. You can change that. And if it's only your mindset that you change, you know what, who's going to be happier at the end of the day because you chose to show up and have a positive effect. You are, seems like a pretty good value exchange to me.

Lillian Emlet: right. so with this self-leadership, it has to come before you can lead other people. And so walk us through what you think that really means in practice. What does leading yourself might look like day to day? Maybe for someone who's in a busy clinical or administrative role? I mean, these are often, 10, 12 hour days for many days in a row. I'm curious what that might look like.

Dusty Holcomb: Well, one of the things when you talk about leading yourself, like if we want to have a positive influence or impact on the lives of others. Whether it's the team we manage, or a company that we run, we have to recognize and understand: "here's where we are today and I want to grow. I want to get better." And so to lead myself says "I'm going to have done the intentional work to decide in advance how I'm going to show up differently and I'm going to be a little bit better. I'm going to be a little more proactive." when you think about it in 10, 12 hour days in a busy operating environment. oftentimes we're reacting to the environment that's around us. And, the way I like to think about this, because I spent a lot of years studying judo is when we're reacting, we're on our heels. And when we spend all of our time in a reactive state, and you can, the football or baseball or any other sports metaphor works here. When you're on the ball, the heels of your feet, you're not ready to play. And what we want to do when we lead ourselves first, we shift to the balls of our feet. We're prepared no matter what happens around us to react better, to react more proactively. So when I think about leading yourself first, it is intentionally setting aside the time. And it doesn't have to be a lot of time, but the intentional mind state to understand: "this is where I'm going. This is what I need to do differently and this is how I'm going to get there. And I'm going to shift to the balls of my feet." So even in a 12 hour day where the world's coming at me fast, I have the ability to make choices and I've decided in advance how I'm going to show up. What's important, what I'm going to say yes to, what I'm going to say no to. And when we do that, what we really have created for ourselves is clarity. When we have clarity, we can then choose to align our actions, our behaviors, our responses, our leadership. We get to choose all these things. And when we align, what happens is we get better results. We start to execute at a better and different level. So the way I would wrap a bow around all of that is understanding and defining what you want to achieve. Choosing how to align your behaviors to accomplish that. And then executing against your plan is a shift from your heels to the balls of your feet. And it lets those 12 hour days go from being just crazy reactive states to proactive focus. And when you do that and you do that well, little things shift and it's not massive shifts. It's not like an overnight, "Hey, I'm suddenly leading myself and now I am the grand puba of all things." No. You've shown up differently today and you're better tomorrow.

Lillian Emlet: it's really funny. I think that's part of the reason why there is so much emphasis on many wellbeing programs. On mindset and things that you can do for your own health, your mental and your physical wellbeing, and the physiological foundation, because it is grueling for 12 hours a day to, be on your feet, or dealing with unprepared emergencies, and yet the most important person in the room is yourself. And so you're no good to anyone else if you don't take care of yourself first. And even the old healthcare professionals hear this, they often can't begin to imagine what it looks like to lead yourself first, to do the tiny little actions, to talk about those tiny actions and tell other students: "this is how I get through the day — I go for a walk, I meditate." people don't talk about these things except recently. So it's really kind of amazing that we don't really acknowledge that this is the true foundation. So I'm glad you're talking about it.

Dusty Holcomb: Well, it's interesting. I want to react to something you said there. It's like, you know, a good example of leading yourself. And for years I had this idea or this mindset that if I was working on leading myself, I was being selfish. And it's not that at all if: I want to show up differently and I want to have an impact. I need to take care of myself. So, you know, it could be, simple things about working out or water or hydration or a 10 minute break or whatever it is. But the better job I do at taking care of myself, the more impactful I can show up authentically for others. I really love this. "Do not pursue influence for its own sake. it will show and you will lose all credibility." I couldn't agree more. And so when I say, "Hey, if you're showing up and recognizing that leadership's not about you, you aren't showing up to create influence to make it you know about you, you're truly showing up to serve another person." So you're not showing up to create influence on others because it's about you. You're doing it to serve, to help, et cetera. And that's what leadership is. And you know, when we take care of ourselves, self-leadership isn't selfish. And sometimes we have to get past maybe some common programming in our or societal norms that say, "Hey, that you know, you've got to be this, you know, who lays it all down and, gives it all away. You can't give your best self. You can't serve at the highest level if you're not taking care of yourself. And that's part of self-leadership along the journey journey

Lillian Emlet: Yeah. You know, I think the other thing is though, something that you really work on quite a bit with all of your, C-suite and high ticket business owners with your different coaching incubators that you, run at Arcqus so you have five key questions that help leaders connect their purpose to clarity, because I think a lot of times sometimes, whether we've been coached before, previous in the past, or now, we do sort of know generally what we want out of life. We do generally have some north stars. We have SP spirituality, we have faith, we have a reason why we're spending all our time in our business or, showing up to work as a healthcare professional. But, you know, sometimes these questions can actually take us deeper in terms of recommitting and understanding what you need right now in this next, you know, year or to reverse engineer what you want in the next five years. So could you share those questions with us? and walk through those things with your clients, to help them gain some clarity.

Dusty Holcomb: Yeah, absolutely. And somebody asked me recently, I said, "Dusty, if you could make wave a magic wand and change anything in the world, in business today, you know, like unlock for others the reason you have this business you have and the things that you do?" And I told them, I said, "the problem I would solve is our ability to connect the dots between why we're here and the actions and activities are going on within business." And so these five questions are those questions that I believe allow leaders to very succinctly begin to connect the dots. And you can apply these for yourself through a self-leadership lens. You can apply them through the lens of corporate leadership or team leadership. And the reason I think it is so powerful is that when you can ensure that your team can answer these questions and answer these questions well, when you're not in the room, what the magic is, the real value that's happening is that the people who are closest to the problem, the opportunity, the patient, they're equipped to make the right decision. And they have more context than you will ever have. So as leaders, when we instill these answers for others and they can answer them authentically, honestly, openly, when we're not in the room, then magic happens. And, here's what those questions are. Question number one: why are we here? What is our purpose making money? people say, "well, you know, purpose doesn't and you know, blah, blah, blah." And I go, yes it does. You know, there've been all kinds of research studies that show that when there is a lack of purpose, people will leave organizations. I saw a study recently that showed where 76% of people who were Gen Y, Gen Z millennials, said they would leave the organization they were at to find a different opportunity where they felt the purpose of the organization was aligned with their own personal purpose. Like, "okay, holy smokes, it works. 76% of people said they would leave this job to find one that has more purpose in alignment for themselves. It really matters. People do care about that, and I'm intentional in using the words purpose beyond making money. Because if you're working in a large organization, they say, our job is to create, our purpose is to create shareholder returns. Like that's not going to manifest in my individual choices of behavioral level when I'm taking care of a patient. But when I understand why we're here beyond making money. Yeah, I can start to make different and better choices. My dots are being connected. Question number two, is where are we going? You know, that's the vision, that's the understanding of what it is that we're building. And again, people will tell me, and you know, the research will contradict this. They'll say, "Hey, why do people care? People don't really want to know what our big strategic vision is. And that's BS. People do want to understand. They do want to understand what the vision is, what the strategy is. Harvard did some research a year or two ago, and they showed that 5% of the people in an organization can speak actively and truly understand the strategy of the organization. Only 5%. And I like to think of that differently. It's like, well, 95% of the people in the company don't have any idea what we're doing and why we're here. We're not going to get anywhere if we don't solve that question, right? And so we, as leaders, we connect the dots. Question number three, how are we going to get there? This is where we start to take the vision and the strategy, and we turn it into the plan. And when people understand the plan, they begin to make better and different choices about their actions that align with the purpose, with the vision, and with the plan. They need to know, the plan though, because otherwise. we're delegating to them their interpretation based on their last best job, based on their last best boss, or last worst job, last worst boss. So we have to connect these dots and the magic happens. And this is where I have found that, the overwhelming majority of companies and leaders do not do this well, is question number four. How do I fit in? Where do I fit into this? How does my work connect to the purpose, the vision, and the plan? Let me give you an example of that. And so I was working with, prior life I was running an automotive repair organization. We had, you know, four or 500 employees and 40 locations. And I had a person who was in our accounting group and we were having one of our quarterly, all hands leadership meetings and she said, "Hey, dusty, I'm in accounts payable. I process invoices. There is nothing I do that is about fixing cars. I don't understand all this work about, you know, fixing cars and protecting people and how any of that matters. I just process payroll. I just process AP." And I said, "well, thank you for raising the flag here, but here's what you really do." I said, "so when you do your job and you do your job exceptionally well, what happens in the field?" She goes, "well, I don't know. I said, well, do you pay invoices for NAPA? They were one of our partners." She goes, "yes. I said, and what happens if you don't pay the invoices on time, or you don't manage these things well?" She goes, "why are accounts get shut off." I said, and who feels the pain when the account gets shut off? She goes, "well, the manager then has to go to the local store and they have to get all this stuff." And I said, "and when the manager's doing that, what are they not doing?" She goes, "well, they're not taking care of the customers and they're not taking care of their team members in the shops." I said, "yes." So don't think for a second that what you do doesn't matter. When you do your job and you do your job well, you are ensuring the manager has 100% of his attention on the place where he needs it to be so that he can take care of the customer. We can make sure people are safe in their cars. So you do matter. That dot connecting capability is so incredibly powerful. And, and the last question and question number five, and this is one I'll get a little flack about, I'm sure is what's in it for me? And I think we as leaders have to address the question, but through an honest and authentic understanding that it's not the money question. It's understanding what really matters to that person. Where do they fit in and what's in it for them? Do they want opportunities for growth? Do they want professional growth opportunities? Is this a job they're doing while they're in college and it's not where they're going to be for their, you know, entire career? Great. Then help Let us help them become a better version of themselves and learn some things along the way when we can answer those five questions. And we give our teams the information so they can answer those questions. When we're not in the rooms, what happens? Is the magic where we unlock discretionary effort, where we get people showing up and bringing their full selves to work, not just the mercenary work where they're just paid to do a job and they're doing the minimum viable outcome. What they're doing, what we're delivering is their ability to show up as missionaries because they believe in the work we're going to do and bring discretionary effort. So long diatribe, those are the five questions and that's why they matter.

Lillian Emlet: I love that. And so, it works for, you know, C-suites of large million dollar companies. It also works just for your individual self in terms of, as you think about the Wheel of life and all the different things you want to accomplish as. Just as a human, but I'll also argue that it really works for organizations to strategically plan how are we going to reduce the churn? How are we going to stop this leak of human capital again and again? Our nurses turnover, all the people in our group turnover, and there's been a lot of issues with that in general in healthcare, that the staffing and turnover is quite large, and I do work also with healthcare professional organizations. Lots of nonprofits. Nonprofits also have this problem because people aren't engaging. The different generations believe in different things and have been taught and mentored different things, and now there's just so many more opportunities, whether you're in private practice or you decide to join a large academic group where you decide to get involved nationally or not. There is always a what's in it for me? I actually start that with what's in it for you, right from the very get go, and how can you make a two for one? How are you going to get what you want out of this particular learning experience for this time in your career? Do we have to make the partnerships and the experiences to put them on your CV? Because these are the experiences then that, again, then get you the next position or the next opportunity or the next network. and I think we all know this in business, I think, business and networking much more so even then in when you're in training through the pipeline, what I call the linear ladder. So I'm trying to now teach everyone in healthcare that life is really a diversified portfolio. Your experiences, all the things and the things in your, non medical, I suppose life also matter, when I see on the thing at the very last line of the CV saying, "I like to travel, or I'm a foodie, or I'm a juujitsu star, that tells me something about you." And so all of the things you do in life do matter, and they do somehow align to the definitions of your purpose and your values. It's just that sometimes we haven't really thought much about it. Sometimes we let other people's ideas, knock us over. We sometimes have to get, just get realignment again. And so I think the question is, well, I guess another question for you is, how often do you think we should realign, when we're the CEO of our own life and for our team and our group?

Dusty Holcomb: Yeah, I think we have to think about it as dynamic management of our own life or our own teams. And I do believe very strongly in installing rhythms of success. And these rhythms are where you make intentional appointments with yourself to do the most important things because those 12 hour days will knock us off our kilter and we won't take the time to do that very important work of leading ourselves. So, On an annual basis, you need to be doing a reset. You need to set aside some time to do the reflection. On a quarterly basis, you're setting your goals and you're checking in on a weekly basis. You're planning and you're always doing these check-ins. But you have to plan them and you have to really drill it down to when life happens because, life is happening right now. These decisions I'm making right now, it didn't happen yesterday. That was yesterday, So I plan my week, I plan the day I check in and how I review on those things. When we build these habits or these rhythms of success, what happens is we start to show up differently in the real life moments, which are always the five seconds that are happening right in front of us. And we need to install these as habits. We need to install them as rhythms because we do have to check in. We do have to have a recurring process of defining what great looks like, where our gaps are to that, and what we're going to do differently to make ourselves better for this next season. Like, because it is, I love seeing on the CV as well, that someone like to, they're a foodie, they love to travel or all those things because we're not managing transactional elements when we lead others, we are leading people, we are leading entire full human beings. and I always tell folks, and if you're a CEO listening or if you're you know, the junior person who's washing the bottles, it doesn't matter. Everybody puts their britches on the same way in the morning. We are people first. We simply have different roles and responsibilities, which means there are outcomes that we are charged with creating, but we are always first, forever and foremost people. And so we're going to have interest beyond what we are. We are not here to manage transactions, we're here to create outcomes, and we do it with people even in the age of ai, We've got to think about this really, really smartly. And when we do that and we manage these relationships, and we check in with ourself to make sure we're on target, that our compass points are strong, we get to show up better and different. And our people do, they benefit from that because ultimately that's why we're doing it.

Lillian Emlet: Yeah. And really there are, there is a lot of fear around, AI and at the end of the day, the, even with agentic AI, who do you think is controlling the agent? It's your agent that you created, and so you are still the human behind all of it. You have a lot of choice in terms of how that shows up. What I do think is, what you're describing about is consistency and repetition and this rhythm. So how do you build that muscle when you're a leader, especially when you're in healthcare environments where every single day looks and feels a little bit different when you're in more on the front lines. And then when you're way up in the administration, those, that rhythm may look a little more, regular. Yet, I feel like they're still always dealing with emergencies, supply chain emergencies like policy or funding emergencies or random outbreaks that they often rarely have the time to really step away and figure out what the strategy is going to be, because sometimes it's told to them, right? So even for very large healthcare systems, they're multi-state, multi-building, multi-group million, billions of dollars, it feels like they're still being told what to do. How do you get a consistency and repetition in this rhythm that you're talking about?

Dusty Holcomb: Yeah. And so l let me just start by saying this inconsistency or reactive state applies if you're in the organization or if you're running the organization. I have clients who are the CEOs. I have two I'm thinking of in multi-billion dollar healthcare organizations and the, we'll be talking about, they were like, I don't have any time. I don't have time to think and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We have to decide that this is important and even when you're in the middle and everything's coming at you and you don't feel like you have a lot of agency over these decisions, what you do have agency over is how you respond. And so when, what I always recommend and what we do in our leadership programs is we install that rhythm of success, but we don't do it on a daily basis. We start with the year. And then we zoom, we go from out to end, from the future back. So what are the three most important times in this coming year? And it's going to be your family time. It's going to be perhaps some work time. It's going to be the deep focus time. Okay? If you need half a day, or even two hours, or once a quarter to go check in with yourself. Put on your calendar. Make that appointment with yourself and hold it to the same degree. You would hold it with your number one client, your number one boss, your spouse, whatever that is, make these appointments so that you can do the work and check in, and then take it down from that quarterly to the monthly to weekly. it doesn't take a lot of time. And that's the other thing I hear all the time, and I had to overcome my own fears about this as well. I need an hour every day at the beginning of every day to have this beautiful idyllic, wonderful rhythm. No, you need five to seven minutes. You need just a few minutes to go. What's the most important thing that I'm going to do today? And how do I make sure that I have time to do it? And then at the end of the day, did I do it? Why or why not? What am I going to learn? How do I get better tomorrow? And so when we install these rhythms and we don't feel that we have agency over this strategy as being forced upon us. We're surrendering what control we do have, how we show up, what different decisions we can make, the influence we can create for others, and the impact we can create for them. So being intentional is probably the word that I would say is the most important thing to do, is just intentionally give yourself the space to think and throw out this idea that it takes hours or days on a mountain in order to figure all this stuff out. I love to tell folks, and we do this actively in our accelerator programs, where we'll set a time and. You have three minutes to make this next decision. What are the things that come to mind? And it's amazing how when you use time as a forcing function, you can make really good decisions, but it's because you've decided to decide. You've decided to act. And I think that's the real secret behind the rhythms of success, is you've made a decision to do these things in advance so that when the world happens and the storm clouds are there, you've already decided what's important and what's not. And you know how you're going to react to that.

Lillian Emlet: Yeah, I talk about this a lot with a lot of our clients, especially because they're, often working physician moms and leadership positions who are like, when they do say yes to that position, they're like, "oh, great. I just added an entirely nother boulder into this jar of really big, important rocks. like being a physician and managing my family and being a human and exercising is, not enough. and you're right, it always feels like there's not enough time, but with the right strategy, the right time boxing, the right ways of productivity and little support tools, whether it be white space or time chunks, there's ways to get these things done. And that's what we love. I think about being coaches for high executives. We get opportunity to help work through that accountability piece.

Dusty Holcomb: Well, Lilly, and I think the most important thing there is we have to go from the understanding that it's not always additive. Like when we get this new role, it's not always adding more like the most important thing that I talk about with leaders is, the permission they need to say no. What is it they're going to say no to? What is it is no longer part of their role because what we do is we're successful for a reason. We get to these positions and then we get an opportunity to go to the next one, and then we add all this stuff, but we hang on to all the things that made us successful in the last role or successful to get to that next role, as opposed to sloughing those things off and saying, that's no longer what I'm going to do anymore. I need permission to say no. I'm working with the CEO of a very large, transportation logistics company and we were going through his calendar. This is literally what we're doing. We're going through his calendar. I'm like, why are you in this meeting? Because I've always gone to this meeting. who's in charge of being there? Who's going to make the decisions? Do you need to make these decisions? No. I have these people now, recently promoted to CEO. It's like, okay, now you've got to change your mindset here. You have to say no. You now have this massive new big rock. You're responsible for the whole company. The holding onto these things because you don't trust or you haven't created delegation protocols or all these other things are holding you back from doing the things you need to do. Yet we're always going to be busy. I mean, that's a truism of life. There is no, we're always going to be busy. If you ask anyone you meet, how are you doing? Well, I'm really busy. Are you busy doing the things that only you can do that create the impact that you want, that will create the value that you need? Most of the times we're busy doing things that don't matter, or we're busy doing things that were part of our former self and aren't part of our future self, and we just have to give ourselves permission to say no. And that's why we need folks like you or and I have a coach because we can't read the label from inside the jar. Sometimes we're so busy being busy that we don't know that we're busy doing the wrong things.

Lillian Emlet: Well, it's also interesting, you know, we're not 20 anymore, neither of us. And, it's interesting always to be questioned. So how true is that? How true is it that you do need to be the one, like we're not used to really getting questioned that often sometimes. And so like, how true is it that you actually have to do all of the laundry yourself? Or how true is it that you actually have to do the cookies for the you know, PTO or whatever things you also have also signed up for, and so you have to think outside the box. And sometimes it's nice to have someone who helps you think outside the box. so it is been amazing talking with you, Dusty. How can people work with you, get to know you, find out about your programs?

Dusty Holcomb: Yeah, the first thing I would encourage people to do is simply, check out an asset that I want to give everyone, and it's called "My Rules of Engagement". it's a playbook for clarifying for yourself what's really important in how you show up as a leader. And if you go to my rules of engagement.com. We give you a playbook, we give you a complimentary DISC assessment that gives you the access and ability to understand your own behavioral profiles. If you do that, like that's a free gift for me to you, because I'm so passionate about helping people create clarity first. So that they can lead and impact others. we'll send you some information and give you some tools to that. If you'd like to learn what we do from a leadership impact accelerator or coaching programs, you can check out arcqusgroup.com, A-R-C-Q-U-Sgroup.com but the number one burning thing I would say is. Do the playbook that creates your rules of engagement. Because what that really does is you're codifying for yourself what you believe, why you believe it, and how you're going to show up. And once you've done that, you can't unsee it. It changes how you actively show up every single day. And I found it to be one of the most powerful frameworks that we teach leaders. And I want to give it to your audience as a guest.

Lillian Emlet: Oh, thank you so much, Dusty. So thank you so much for being here. It's This conversation has been such a gift. thank you everyone for being here. Leadership in healthcare is really hard, but you're not alone and you don't have to figure it out by yourself. And we are excited to be able to see the growth of coaching and executive coaching in healthcare in general, because we really feel that the way it's been is really not how it's going to be or needs to be for the future. And together we want to transform healthcare one person at a time. So thank you so much, Dusty, for coming. And thank you everybody for listening Follow us for more at Transforming Healthcare and at Arcus Group. Thanks, Lillian.