In the Field: The ABA Podcast

Lead Yourself First: A Leadership Conversation with Bryan Tanner

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0:00 | 39:27

In this episode of In the Field: The ABA Podcast, I sit down with Bryan Tanner, BCBA, and owner of Leadership Mindset Coaching, to walk through his path from behavior technician to BCBA® business owner to somatic executive coach. Bryan reflects on the leadership lessons he gathered (and slowly unlearned) along the way, including how a "distant and professional" approach to leadership gradually left him more isolated and, over time, took a real toll on his connections, his business, and his life outside of work.

We talk about why stress lives in the body long before we notice it, how self-reflection is a skill most leaders were never taught, and what it actually took to build an agency with 0% turnover. Bryan also walks through his PACT framework for building stronger supervisory relationships.

Key Topics:

Leadership as Behavior, Not Distance:
Why Bryan's early definition of professionalism (staying above it all) led to isolation, stress, and burnout, and what changed when he redefined it.

Retaking the Assessment:
How six years of focusing on one goal let everything else drift, and why leaders should reassess themselves as often as they reassess clients.

The Somatic Side of Stress:
Recognizing what the body is signaling (a back that "goes out," a tightening throat, a clenched jaw) and building quick, usable tools to regulate the nervous system in the moment.

Self-Reflection for Leaders:
Why practitioners trained to analyze everyone else's behavior often struggle to turn that lens on themselves, and the power of asking "What is blocking me?"

Values, Alignment, and Intention:
How knowing your values prevents conflict, shame, and reactive anger, and why the gap between your actions and your values is where stress comes from.

Fear vs. Skill in Marketing:
Untangling genuine discomfort from real values-based boundaries, and noticing when reinforcement and shaping are already at work.

Building 0% Turnover:
The concrete moves behind an agency with zero turnover, including structural support, fair compensation, leadership growth paths, involving staff in decisions, and a simple rule to be nice to each other.

The PACT Framework:
A four-step approach (Pregame, Assess, Consequence, Transform) for building the supervisory relationship in a mindful, intentional way, and reclaiming the word "transform" for behavior analysis.

Key Takeaways:

  • Leadership is a skill that can be taught, and distance is not the same as professionalism.
  • Stress registers in the body first; noticing those signals early is a trainable, valuable repertoire.
  • Leaders benefit from analyzing their own behavior, not just their clients', and from asking what is blocking them.
  • Clarity about your values and goals is what keeps actions intentional and reduces avoidable stress.
  • Retention is built through everyday systems: support, fair pay, growth pathways, shared decisions, and genuine care.

Keywords: Leadership, Somatic Coaching, Executive Coaching, Stress Management, Burnout, Self-Reflection, Values Alignment, Supervision, PACT Framework, Turnover, RBT® Retention, Leadership Circle Profile, Early Start Denver Model, Bryan Tanner, Leadership Mindset Coaching, ABA Leadership, BCBA® Supervision

Resources Mentioned:

  • Leadership Scorecard: bryantannercoach.com/scorecard
    • A brief assessment that supports executives in discovering which area of work would create the most powerful results in their leadership and business.
  • The PACT Framework for Podcast Listeners: bryantannercoach.com/inthefield
    •  A site made specifically for In the Field listeners, sharing the PACT framework to support effective and stress-free supervision. The Pre-Game worksheet is also available for delivery straight to your inbox, to make every supervision meeting focused and smooth, while also full of clarity, efficiency, and effectiveness.

Connect with Bryan Tanner and Leadership Mindset Coaching:

Disclaimer:

BCBA®, BACB® [or any other BACB® trademark used] is/are registered to the Behavior Analytic Certification Board® BACB®. This website and products are not in any way sponsored by the BACB®.

All information and products are for educational purposes only. 

Bryan Tanner: [00:00:00] Being a leader and being able to have influence on a group of people who can grow and continue to support our clients in their ability to improve their lives is really powerful.

Allyson Wharam: Hello. Welcome everyone. I am here with Bryan Tanner. He is the owner of Leadership Mindset Coaching. He is a BCBA, has been a BCBA since 2009, and has an experience and journey of going from behavior technician to BCBA business owner, now executive leadership coach. And so Bryan, I am excited to have you here.

Thank you for being here.

Bryan Tanner: Yeah, thank you for inviting me. I'm excited to be here too.

Allyson Wharam: Yeah, now that we've talked a little bit about all of the hats you've worn, I'd love to hear more about your journey, if you'd like to introduce yourself a little bit. And in that, one thing I'm really curious about is what leadership lessons you learned across these different roles in this evolution that's brought you to what you're doing today.

Bryan Tanner: That's a great question. I appreciate [00:01:00] that. So yeah, I'm Bryan Tanner. I've been a BCBA since 2009. I've been a business owner since around then, maybe a couple years before that actually. And recently, shifted gears over the last four or five years to somatic executive coaching. I've worn a lot of different hats.

I've always been I guess asked to or ended up in different leadership positions and that's always fascinated me. I compared myself to people who were my mentors because they were brilliant. And so that did two things. It created this less than kind of belief in myself. Or maybe it just kind of cultivated something that was already there, right?

But it also inspired me. And especially with the mentors that I've been blessed to come across, there was something about them that was inspiring to me, awe-inspiring really. It's just kind of this thing that's inside me that I want to and can when I'm at my best kind of [00:02:00] bring out and pass on to people.

But I thought that leadership was, you know, we grow up and who is one of the first leaders that we come in contact with? Somebody like George Washington, right? Or these kind of passive and distant kind of leaders. You know, I grew up in Louisiana and that was kind of thing that I started really enjoying about leadership was this above it all kinda-ness of it.

And so I started respecting that and I started thinking that that was the way to lead. And so that was one of the things that was really a focus of mine through a lot of this leadership. And it worked until it didn't. People don't want their leaders to be distant. People don't want their leaders to be passive.

And so far, that was my definition of professionalism, right? Certainly showing up on time and suiting up and showing up, right? And also having this professional distance. And so kind of going into my story, I owned a business in Fort Collins along with my wife for several years.

And all of those things kept being the driver, right, for my leadership. And we need to have a respect for knowledge, [00:03:00] although what I did with that was try to get people who are smarter than me around me, which was probably the best move.

Allyson Wharam: Usually is, yeah.

Bryan Tanner: Always, right? You know, but then there was this respect for distance and professionalism, you know, my definition of professionalism.

And I didn't know how to be a different kind of leader. And there were costs to that, right? So people started feeling like they couldn't trust me, or they couldn't open up to me. They weren't sure if I could handle some of the emotional responses that come along with being a behavior technician or a BCBA in this field.

And so people maintained that distance from me. And that was isolating, right? We talk about the leadership isolation, right? And fortunately I was in a good relationship, right? And we were able to talk and we were in business together, right?

My wife at the time and I. And then that isolation turned into stress, and that stress turned into burnout, and that burnout started affecting my relationship at home. And so we started growing further and further apart, and I started being more transactional, and I started being more distant, right?

And leaned into these things that were [00:04:00] my root, my belief in what leadership really was, 'cause I wanted to be a leader in my family as well. And so we got divorced and we continued being friends. We realized that we were friends and not more than that, and continued running the business that we made successful.

And in February of 2020, she and I high-fived each other because we had made this great, successful business. And then of course March of 2020,

Allyson Wharam: Yes.

Bryan Tanner: comes and the world changes a little bit for everybody. One of the things that COVID did was really shine a light on any problems, right?

And that's what COVID did for my leadership.

I realized that I didn't have any more support, and so that isolation became more real and it started, you know, being even harder, and so stress turned into burnout. And so I finally went on vacation, one that everybody in my company told me, "Go." It's like, "Oh, well, I don't know. Maybe I can, uh, make sure that you can call me."

And they're like, "We'll call you. Sure, yeah, whatever. Go," right? "Go on vacation 'cause you're awful." And I did, and I was free. I was on Highway 1 in California, just, you know, windows down, watching the [00:05:00] ocean, going into the forests, just free. I met family. I was a supporter in one of my best friend's weddings, and I went and saw my sisters, and had beautiful conversations with them, was really free.

And I came back, and within an hour, all of that weight just fell right back on my shoulders. And I started distancing myself again, and I started delegating, right? So my distance in that point had turned into delegation. And the person that I delegated the most to was my ex-wife, Susan, the COO of the company.

And at one point when I was delegating something to her, she just said, " Are you leaving?" Cause it was that much, right? And without really thinking about it in that moment, I was just like, "Yeah. Yeah, I'm gone." And it was almost like I was given permission. It was almost like I, was able to finally see what the company and the people in the company really needed from me.

And that was hard. And throughout the process, you know, if I had to redo that conversation, I would have made it a conversation instead of just a declaration. [00:06:00] But really, you know, writing was kind of on the wall there. And so, jump back five or so years and I took this leadership assessment with our leadership coach, and it showed me to be an unbelievably creative leader.

I mean the coach that we were working with was like, "Oh, wow, you know, I haven't seen these high of scores in a leader that I've worked with." And I was just like, "Oh, wow, great." You know, pat myself on the back and work a little bit on work-life balance, right? You know, so let's choose that as a goal.

So for six years I worked on that one thing. And so when I left, I took that assessment again. I started getting interested in coaching and I started getting interested in leadership, and one of the things that I was familiar with and decided to go ahead and learn a little bit more about was the Leadership Circle Profile.

And so I took that assessment again, and I was unbelievably embarrassed. All of these reactive tendencies of the passivity and you know, distance, all of that had blossomed back up, and a lot of those creative tendencies that are kind of the challenges to the reactive tendencies had just all but gone away.

But balance, work-life balance was there. So I had spent six years [00:07:00] working on work-life balance, and everything else had fallen apart. So, couple of lessons there. One is don't wait six years to take this assessment, to retake your assessments. Just like with the clients that we work with.

And the other thing that I learned was that it's a moment in time, right? And I had a choice, and I didn't realize then that I had a choice. I was just kinda like, "Well, I don't have another option 'cause I've left this other business that I built." And I think that just in wrapping up this whole ordeal, the idea that there is a choice whenever we come into a moment of whatever it is, embarrassment or being seen or getting, like, really angry that we become aware of the fact that we have a choice there, that's kind of what I help leaders realize because that moment of choice is really powerful.

The outcomes that mattered to me were the opposite of what showed up on that leadership circle profile. And so I was able to take what I was struggling with, you know, it's literally a circle, and the top half of the circle is these things that you can work on.

Some of those became important to me. Building relationships became important to [00:08:00] me, developing, mentoring, working as a teacher. All of those things were really supports in working against this passivity and distance that I'd created again. So long story, but it's my story, and I guess I'm sticking to it.

Allyson Wharam: Yeah. Well, I appreciate your candidness because I think people can relate to a lot of the themes in terms of isolation or the stress of taking it all on and, you know, you're just kinda going through the motions, but not really understanding how it's affecting you. There were a number of times where you became aware, I think, through people's reactions to you of how you were actually feeling less so than actually feeling what you were feeling in the moment. It was more the feedback that you were getting from your environment, and I think those of us that have built a business understand the stress that comes with that.

And those of us that are in leadership positions understand that as well. And so I appreciate you sharing more about your story. And now a lot of the work that you do is around stress, is that correct? And understanding that in yourself as a leader and how [00:09:00] you're responding to that.

Bryan Tanner: Yeah, our leaders have a lot of influence over both the business of course, but the success of the people within the business, right? I realized early on that behavior technicians in particular were the driving force of an ABA business. And over the last 10 years certainly they've come to realize that and begun getting paid like they deserve

and it's a struggle, right? Because there's a novelty to it. I didn't know when I started work, I was working at Aspen Center for Autism, which became Firefly. I didn't know what I didn't know, and it was a lot, right? It was not just the nuances of what the clients that were in front of me were.

You know, so that's the technical nature of applied behavior analysis itself, but also different things I didn't realize were important, and I just kind of did what I was taught growing up. Every once in a while I gave reinforcement 'cause every once in a while I was given reinforcement myself growing up.

And of course back in the day, we didn't even have behavior technicians, right? We were not registered behavior technicians. We were life skills specialists or something like that.

But now there's a lot more training. I think that there's some [00:10:00] realization that that's important. But like you said, being a leader and being able to have influence on a group of people who can grow and continue to support our clients in their ability to improve their lives is really powerful.

I realized that as a behavior technician my clients did better on days where I was feeling better. And I was like, "Okay, what's going on here?" Again, I'm the distance kind of leader. There's a lot of different type of things that are challenging for leaders, pleasing, belonging, all these different things. But I was the distant guy and so that made it hard, right?

It made it hard both to learn how to manage my stress, and so I just kind of again, did what I knew from growing up. It also made me a little bit less able to be influenced. And so the people who influenced me had to come in kind of sideways. They couldn't come straight at me.

And so I was fortunate to have a leader who recognized that. And so having different styles of leadership, I think, is really important, having different skills. But all of this is a [00:11:00] skill. And none of this is stuff that we talked about the University of North Texas. I didn't learn anything about leadership at the University of North Texas, but I was immediately asked to supervise several very important direct care staff.

It's nothing on the task list. It's just like you need to learn when this person is going to be able to take direct feedback. And fortunately, we have a lot more resources now. But one of the things that I think is missing in the resources is in particular timing, right?

So timing of when we provide the support for doing a specific stress management tool. You know, there's a lot of companies who will just give you a Calm app subscription, right? And it's like, great, you know, when I go home after being beat up all day, maybe I'll click on the Calm app or maybe I'll just go to Facebook.

Allyson Wharam: You can tell when people have had a really rough day, 'cause there's not often a great outlet.

Bryan Tanner: There's not. And if we have something that we can actually do really quickly, and that was what I understood, although, when I was a BCBA looked down on, um, if there's [00:12:00] something that I can do really quickly to my nervous system that will actually help it, then I need to do that. I need to find the value of that and then do it.

That's part of what I teach leaders to teach people to do.

Allyson Wharam: Talk to me about that, 'cause you said some of the practices you use today, you used to look down on. You are not just an executive coach, but some of that is somatic coaching. And so I'm assuming that that's kind of what you're alluding to, is some of these things that seem separate from behavior analysis, but think if you really peel back the layers can be integrated into a behavior analytic framework.

When you said that, what did you mean there?

Bryan Tanner: Absolutely. My foundation is behaviorism. I went to Louisiana State University, psychology was the route that I came into behavior analysis. When I left Tanner Autism Services, I decided that I was gonna become a leadership coach, right? We talked about that. A leadership coach had helped me, and I was gonna learn from him and reciprocate. So he said "You're the mindset guy."

And I was like, " First of all, what is that? And second of all, that doesn't sound very [00:13:00] behavioral at all." And he said, "Well, there's an important aspect of leadership, and it is that way of thinking as leaders think," right? I was talking to one of my buddies the other day, and he's an employee at an agency that is doing certain things that aren't legal, right?

Not ABA but an agency that's doing things that aren't really legal and he has been the owner of a business, and so he has this mindset of, "Look, y'all are gonna get in trouble," right? And he's not only looking out for himself as an employee now.

Of course, he is, but he's also looking out for this business, and that's where there is a shift, right? So he takes ownership in the business that he's reasonably frustrated with. And so that mindset piece is a big piece of leadership. That's one example of many.

Everybody talks about the ownership mindset and all that good stuff. We don't talk about the stress that comes along with ownership mindset, but we do talk about wanting people to be better at that kinda thing. And the somatic side of this is recognizing that whenever we are in stress, our body has been in stress for a while already.

And where that showed up for me [00:14:00] was the last maybe seven or eight years of my leadership at TASC, my back went out on me about once a month. Like, went out like laying in bed, can't move kinda stuff. And what I've realized since going through some of the somatic work is that my back is telling me, " Hey, maybe there's something that you don't like that's going on here.

Maybe you should look at that." And I never, never would have associated those two things if it hadn't been for some of that somatic training because I would have thought, "Oh, back hurts, go to OT," or, "Back hurts, go to, you know, physical therapy or go to the doctor," right?

Again, I'm not gonna discount any of that because all of that has its place, and I read the other day 70 to 83% of doctor visits are because of stress? I think we could avoid a lot of that trillion-dollar industry if we were able to recognize the signs that our body was telling us.

On a more simple level, what I'm doing right now is I'm exercising the muscles in my lower back. Like, that's [00:15:00] physically what I'm doing. That is the behavior that is happening right now. All of the things that are going on in my muscles are actually happening.

And this other thing that's happening is my throat is tightening up. And so I have to be aware of all of those different things that happen that my body tells me are important, right? And I don't have to, but I think that it is a particularly nuanced thing that can be taught, that can make people just that much better at handling their own and others' stress.

So that's a long answer to a very straightforward question. But

if you haven't figured out by now, I'm a weaver.

Allyson Wharam: No, it's good. And all of these things are very interrelated, and yeah I clench my jaw, for example. And so I'm very aware that so much of that is just stress, and probably could be treated with addressing some of the root cause instead of the symptomology.

But it really does take that integration of thinking about things holistically. And one thing that I'm curious about is you've mentioned multiple times work-life integration or balance and times that you've tried to keep that very distanced, times [00:16:00] where you really worked on that.

How has that shown up for you or evolved over your leadership journey as well?

Bryan Tanner: Yeah. Thanks for asking cause that's that real stuff, right? And that's part of what coaching is, is allowing for a container, and I don't only coach, but one of the things that I'm excited about that I get to do is, is that coaching piece. And it's different for everybody, so I'll just share about what you asked about for me is when I was in my distance and critical kind of passive stage, I was protecting something.

And so what was helpful to me is to ask questions, and that's part of coaching. Part of executive coaching in particular is asking questions like, "Well, what is it that you're protecting?" Not why am I protecting something, because why questions, if anybody who's tried to teach WH questions to kids knows, is like a very challenging question to answer, and it's not actually an all that helpful answer.

But what am I protecting? And for me, I was protecting things like my image. God, what would happen if [00:17:00] people thought less of me? Oh my goodness. Then I'd be you know, a second grader who gets straight A's and is ridiculed for making good grades again, all over again. Gosh, that would just be awful.

That would be the end of the world, right? Because my brain and my body go back to when I'm in second grade, right? You know, just this is the worst thing ever. But doing work like that, I take it lightly. I laugh at it, right? And it's like, "Okay, you know what?" So what is the opposite of that?

And so some of the things that I never would've thought of that are really on some of the assessments that I get to do with people are things like courageous authenticity. I get to come into a meeting and know that my definition of the word bold is to say what needs to be said when it needs to be said.

And part of being bold is knowing when you don't need to say that thing, right? So I've been a member of several organizations. After a while, you become an elder in these organizations, right? And I'm not, like, old. I keep saying how old I am. I'm 48. I'm not that old. But anyway, I've just got [00:18:00] experience with these organizations, and you become an elder, and you have a choice.

You can become a bleeding deacon, right? Or you can become one of the more wise elders for these things. And when I am not saying something that needs to maybe come up in a particular meeting, sometimes that's on purpose, and that can be being a wise elder. One of the things that we did with the Early Start Denver Model that was really, big, which is what we did at the Aspen Center for Autism and Firefly, was letting kids make their own mistakes, and that's hard especially when you have this perfectionist tendency like I do.

But there's a time for that, right? And there's a time for errorless prompting. You know, so all of these things have their place. Courageously authentic, right? What a great, noble idea. Part of that is knowing when to shut up.

Allyson Wharam: Yeah, it is. And even as you were talking about you as a technician and how your supervisor knew how to approach. I've done a lot of school-based work, so you're working with teachers and paraprofessionals and people, and it's their environment, similar to also going in and working with parents.

I think that same frame or understanding when to say something or when to bring [00:19:00] something up and when to wait, maybe it's still something you have to address at some point and you know that, but you're kind of filing it away. Like, what is likely to be successful right now for where this person is at?

And it doesn't mean that the other things aren't an issue or something that you're going to work on or address at some point, but so much of it is just having that filter as you learn and grow of what needs to be done right now versus what can wait.

Bryan Tanner: Yeah, and part of being passive is being afraid. And the opposite of being afraid is, you know, of course, we talked about courageous authenticity, but there's this other part about being a learner,

and you're quiet when you're a learner, so it's the same actual behavior, but the motivation behind it is very different, and the behavior following it is very different.

And so that's where there's a little bit of a limitation, I think, with observable and measurable, is that I'm doing the same things for different motivations. Now, over time, of course, we know that those motivations will come out in observable and measurable behavior. But being able to self-reflect, I think is really more efficient than just waiting [00:20:00] for, okay, is this guy actually learning something or is he just being passive?

Because those are two different things. It's self-awareness. Like being a personal learner is like I'm being self-aware. Oh, I don't know this thing. I need to be quiet and learn and lean in maybe and I look a little different probably than when I'm being passive and it's just like I'm starting to feel like, oh, I don't know this thing.

That means that I am less than, right? Whenever we were talking about that right at the beginning. So it's the same kind of thing but it's a very different mindset.

Allyson Wharam: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And in ABA, we are trained to analyze other people's behavior. Why do you think so many leaders in particular may struggle to analyze their own behavior or engage in that kind of reflective practice?

Bryan Tanner: I think part of it is 'cause they got here with what they got here with, right? And people can be incredibly ambitious and become great leaders. Driven is almost a requirement for leader, right? But there are costs to being ambitious and driven and they're different for each person.

But I think self-reflection [00:21:00] becomes unnecessary. And when I look back at it, yeah, I might be super passive, but hey, I got my master's, right? And I've got this business, right?

And I've got all these good things, and even though in less than two years, this business is gonna become too much, and I'm gonna leave it, and I'm gonna, lose my family, and you know, even though all those costs, I didn't want those things anyway, right?

So we start to rationalize, and we know about all of these things, and we start to say "Okay, but I do know how to sit down with a kid and make them comfortable with me in five minutes. I am really good at that, and so I'm gonna go, and I'm gonna do that for 20 bucks an hour."

And so we stay small, right? But I do know how to task analyze a behavior really, really well. I've done that in the past. Now it maybe wasn't something that I was particularly passionate about but I know how to do that, and so I'm gonna spend a lot of my time doing that.

Even though what I really need to be doing is going back to that personal learner piece or maybe even thinking about the systems that I'm in. I need to learn more about those systems. I need to learn more about the effect that being distant to my [00:22:00] staff and my team.

You know, the things that are happening because I'm that way, I need to learn a little bit more about that. But I don't know how to do that, so it's uncomfortable, so I'm not gonna do it. Or every time I think about doing that, I get physically sick. Or any list of things that are both aversive, and then we start saying all the things that are gonna be good about this aren't that big of a deal.

Or we can't even think of the things that are gonna be beneficial to learning more about. One of the things that I like about learning all of these things is that you are coached yourself.

And so throughout the process of learning all these assessments and learning about somatic work and learning about executive leadership is that I get leadership coaching, right? And so I get to have some mindset shifts. And this is another story, again, for BCBAs who are maybe like I was, struggling working direct with families.

I got to a point where I burned out on that, right? And so I totally understand that. And there's people who come to me and want to know what else can I do, right? That's the big question we see in a bunch of Facebook posts. "Well, what [00:23:00] else can I do?" And there's a number of organizations that can help answer that question.

If you wanna stay with this, if you wanna not burn out from work, super passionate about working with families and really enjoy that, then there's a way to do that too. And so it's all about, I think, becoming clear in what you really want, which is a big first step and recognizing that the magic of coaching doesn't happen necessarily in the coaching container.

It happens out in the world whenever you're figuring out what your body is telling you and being able to manipulate and work with that and being able to make clear decisions and make clear aligned actions in the real world. So I think that's part of the reason why people don't do it, and some hope for those who wanna stick with it or who are really done with it and wanna not surrender their BCBA, like I didn't.

I worked hard for this, you know?

Allyson Wharam: So much of what I hear you saying too is just the noticing, becoming aware of being able to tact some of those things, but also, like you said, the first thing is just doing some reflection of what are you actually working towards or what is your overall goal?

One way this shows up for me is marketing is really uncomfortable for me, and I think it's [00:24:00] uncomfortable for a lot of people because it's a lot less certain. You're putting yourself out there, all of those different things.

And so I have a tendency to, like, I'd much rather just go and answer an email or be helpful to someone directly, and you get that immediate reinforcement. It's more certain. Or work on the product itself, and a lot of people, I think, run into that loop, I certainly have, where it's like, " I just need to make this better and better and better and better, and maybe then it will be, like, worth it to someone," rather than, like, "Hey, I've already built this, like, really, really, great thing that I'm very proud of." And so much of that, again, to bring it back to awareness, is once you begin to notice those things and you know the overall goal, and the overall goal is to actually get what we've designed and developed into the hands of people because I believe in it and it can help people.

And so having that goal in mind, noticing where my blocks are, helps me to be a better steward of what we're doing and a better manager of my own behavior. So, I very much relate to what you were saying there. But it's an evolution, right? This is not like, an overnight thing.

This is years of growing and processing and learning things along the [00:25:00] way.

Bryan Tanner: I had a mentor who used to say, "You're not gonna get this by Tuesday," right? So it's just like, it's not gonna come by tomorrow. And then there's what is my vision for a year from now, right?

That's important and figuring out what my goals are or maybe vision is and what the gaps are there, and what's blocking me, right? You talked about that. That's huge. How come I never thought about what is blocking me? The first time I heard that was in a coaching session, and that is a brilliant question.

But it's on the coaching test, right? It's like literally a number one coaching question. It's like, how have I not thought of this? And it's like, oh, because what I learned was behavior modification and behavior intervention, and that's just not part of it, right?

We're not taught to do that for ourselves. We're taught to do that for our kids, right? You know, what is blocking the kid from X, Y, or Z, but we don't then turn that on ourselves, and wonder about that for ourselves, as leaders.

I know many, many, many, many BCBAs who get to work with kids and love it, and it's just like realistically really, what's not to love? We get to go to work and play with kids all day. Even when I owned the business, it was just like, " What do you do?"[00:26:00] 

I love my job. I get to go to work and play with kids all day, right? And get paid to do it, right? And of course we know that it's more than that, but it's like, what is your goal? What do you really want, and are you in alignment with that? Because the lack of alignment or that gap, that's what creates the stress.

And sometimes, like you said, people talk about like marketing. I don't like to market, and so there's a bunch of reasons for that. For me, it's both skill. I'm uncomfortable in front of a camera, or I was.

And I also didn't wanna sound salesy, right? BCBAs pick that stuff off, they just know it, right? It's just like, " Oh, that's sales," right? "Nope, not interested." We hear these wonderful organizations and combinations of different behavioral technologies that come together, create a system, and then provide it to the field, and it's like, "Nope, I don't like it.

It's salesy." And it's just like well, maybe you ought to look at the fact that it's shaping and that it's reinforcement.

Part of being animated is sometimes seen as salesy, right? Even using my voice the way that I'm using my voice right now is sometimes seen as salesy, but it's more interesting, right? Do I want people to turn off this podcast? No. I'd like for them [00:27:00] to hear what might come out of my mouth in the next 10 minutes.

I don't know. And knowing the balance there I think is really important. Knowing where it's fear that is stopping me from doing something and where it is like, "Oh, I really probably shouldn't start sounding salesy right now,"

Allyson Wharam: That's a good point too, because so much of it is like, yes, I need to understand, again, my own blocks, and legitimately some of it is not how I want to have relationship with the people that I work with. And so it is that balance of, again, what am I working towards? What are my values?

What's in alignment there? But also that I'm taking action towards those bigger things and that it's not unnecessary blockers, that I'm intentional, is the word that I'm looking for about the decisions that I'm making there.

Bryan Tanner: I love that word, yeah, intentional. And you know your values, right? There's plenty of even business owners who just don't know their values, how do you know why something's bothering you? One of my top values and one of the values that just followed me every business that I had was genuineness.

It's just really important for me to have the [00:28:00] people who are under my care or have the people who I supervise or especially myself, it's really important that we all be real. And just don't be fake, right? Probably the biggest amends in my life that I probably still to some degree owe was when I was having a conflict with a supervisor who I viewed as disingenuous

and I didn't handle that well.

Part of the reason there was such a big conflict is that I wasn't aware that that was the value that was in conflict, and so I was just mad, and so I just get mad, and I start saying things that I don't mean.

I start saying mean things to this unfortunate soul who had to listen to me, because I was not in alignment with my value and I didn't even know why I was angry. When people sit down and they do the values, I think that's really important.

Now you don't need to do it fifteen times, but review it every once in a while, and that's why, right? So that you don't have this full of self-shame, or you don't have this full of anger, or you don't have this full of stress, and then you gotta fix everything.

I got so tired of fixing things, so just don't mess it up in the first place, right? Having to [00:29:00] go back and make amends to people, that is a, phew, that's a pain.

Allyson Wharam: One thing I wanna make sure we touch on before we end, because we've talked a lot about the stress or the hard things that have come up and all of the lessons that are learned by that, and then how you can again be more intentional in moving towards what is valuable to you or what your values are. But one thing that people wouldn't know just from our conversation that you had shared with me before was that your turnover rate was extremely, extremely low. Was it 0%?

Bryan Tanner: Yeah, so we did the BHCOE thing and one of the things that they did in their reevaluation was a turnover evaluation. And yeah, we had 0%. And I didn't realize how big of a deal that was.

Early on in Aspen Center I was working with a kid, and he folded socks, and that was what got me into being an ABA provider was that the kid folded socks independently for the first time, and the behavior specialist came in, 'cause this was before we had behavior analysts and said, " Oh my gosh, I can't believe he did that.

He just folded socks." And I'm like, " Oh, great. Wow, that's huge, right?" And so this tiny little thing. But I was sitting there with this 0% turnover, [00:30:00] number and BHCOE reviewer said " Zero? Like 0%?" I'm like, "Oh yeah, that's pretty good." And she was like, " No, like 0% of the companies that we have reviewed had 0% turnover."

I was just like, "Oh, that's kinda cool." Right? Again, as a leader, sometimes you gotta notify your people that they need to pat themselves on the back, right? I was just really excited about that, and so I started thinking about that, and I was like, "What did we do?"

It was easy to be general. We had a great culture, right? We had uh I was gonna say great leadership, but I was the leader. So I think what the great leadership part that we had was that the leaders who were working with me kept everybody else away from me.

But, the first thing that we had was the structural support, and so we had this value of supporting each other, right? When I was a behavior analyst working directly with clients, I didn't like when I didn't have everything I needed within reach

and so we had the structural support. We had a baseline compensation, right? So we had a slightly above [00:31:00] average compensation at the time. Now our BCBAs had slightly below average compensation. We didn't realize at the time. I didn't talk with a whole bunch of business owners who made me realize that businesses don't really run on BCBAs.

They run on RBTs. That's how they make their money. And so we had a little bit lower compensation for them, but we had other things that made BCBAs wanna stay, like leadership growth-

path or mindset or just this idea that everybody is involved, right? So everybody is able to be a leader within the organization, if it's a behavior technician working with a client, that behavior technician is a leader there, right? And so we start teaching behavior technicians leadership-type things early on, right?

So one of the gaps that I noticed in my training was that I didn't get leadership training, so I wanted that, right? So that ability to have them learn that kind of thing was the second thing that we did. The third thing was just the structural support. So early on, we got electronic data collection, and we talked to staff members about that.

We involved [00:32:00] them in those decisions, right? We were always working with clients with the idea that we were here to be our best and to get better. And so I was still working with clients as the owner of the company.

Susan was working with clients as the COO. I think there was only one person in the entire company that didn't work directly with clients because she requested not to. We had plenty of administrative things for her to do. But we were always learning how to get better at our job and learning how to get better at working with the kids and adults.

And the fifth thing that we did was we had a rule, and it is just be nice to each other, right? So, what we did was we hired behavior technicians who were nice to kids, and we taught them skills.

And that's the thing with leadership, leadership is a skill, right? That can be taught. And if you have this way of being, that I think can also come from daily practice, some sort of either contemplative practice or being quiet for a while, kind of [00:33:00] practice. Studying your craft, studying leadership, all of those things can come together to form great leadership.

And I think that's just aspiring. We weren't perfect. We had a tough set of situations all around, from insurance companies to location. Oh, we had all kinds of difficulties, but we always were trying to get better, and I think that that came through in our agency and we, we really, really cared about the clinical side of what we did.

And we were real about the business side of what we did, you know. It was a business, right? And clinicians, I was one. I was a behavior technician, I was a BCBA, I was a supervisor of BCBAs, I was a owner. I came up through the ranks kind of thing, right? And I understood that we don't care about the business side of things as much as BCBAs, and that's okay, that's expected.

But it's important, right? We were a small business. If we're gonna be able to have clinical quality be the top thing, because small businesses tend to care about that a lot, then we needed to do it in a [00:34:00] way that was sustainable.

So, all of that being part of what we did, I think that was kinda how we did that.

Allyson Wharam: One thing that stuck out to me as you were saying that is just how multidimensional leadership is because you prefaced with, it wasn't basically because of your leadership, really everyone was keeping you away, and it was not because of you.

But then I heard you list a number of different very explicit things that while that may have been true in certain dimensions of leadership, I also heard things like being extremely transparent and being clear with your folks and honest about the business and how things are being run. Making sure that your folks were supported and compensated fairly. You're still on the floor with clients. I think there's a lot of business owners that wouldn't still do that. And there were more things that you said that I was thinking about, "Well, well, that's a clear leadership behavior," something that most people, I think, would want in a leader. But just how multidimensional leadership is and how we can really excel potentially in certain areas but really struggle in others. There was one other thing that you had mentioned to me before, and I would love to give you a chance [00:35:00] to talk about it which is a PACT framework to help establish the supervisory relationship, because we've talked so much about that and that's not something that's explicitly taught in coursework most often or even in fieldwork.

So could you give just a quick overview? And we'll link resources related to it in the show notes, but I just wanna put that out there for folks.

Bryan Tanner: Yeah. Thanks for bringing that up. You know, first I wanna preface this by saying nothing is new. The ideas that are within PACT are things that come from the BACB, they come from CAQH, they come from quality leadership skill development programs and executive programs.

So none of this is new, but what I'm aiming for is to make something really simple so that people can come together with one four-step kinda thing where they're able to really build the relationship with their supervisee in like what you talked about earlier, this mindful way.

And so the first [00:36:00] three steps... You got a pregame, right? And so I went to Louisiana State University. Go Tigers. And we would pregame, we're assessing, right? So when we figure out what we want to actually work on with supervisees, then we start assessing whether or not it's gonna be reasonable to work on these things, right? So you ask the supervisee, "Hey, is this something that is valuable to you?" And maybe part of our pregame isn't to come up with a whole bunch of goals, but maybe it's to come up with a whole bunch of questions, right? And then of course, we need to consequence those things. So, I noticed that you decided in our last meeting that coming to work on time 100% of the time was important to you. And I noticed that you were late for three of the five sessions this week, and so I want to talk about that, right? And so it's building that relationship within the consequencing that is gonna really create support for that next step, which is you really believe in them, and you really believe that they can transform.

I cannot tell [00:37:00] you how many times I hired someone and was just not sure that it was gonna work out after a couple of weeks And then something about the way that we taught, something about the way that we were working with them, and pulling out that joy of what they were doing, pulling out that passion, pulling out the purpose, but you know, all kinds of different things, transformed.

And that's where an expectation moves from this external kind of standard that we have decided upon to an internal thing that they've claimed as their own. And we shy away from that word transform in ABA, but it is a word that we must claim as behavior analysts because it is a thing that happens that is observable and the outcomes at least are measurable. And I think that that's really available to everybody within a supervisory relationship. I'll link all that in your program notes. And the other thing is an assessment for leaders that's free.

It sends people information on what of the four categories that we work on, might be [00:38:00] ideal to work on first. That can help people understand a little bit more about how they keep people and as a business owner, I understand how expensive it is. Turnover is expensive. We didn't always have 0% turnover. We did have to figure out how much it costs.

And we figured that was not a cost that we wanted to keep doing. So that's one of the things that I help leaders with as well. The other way that people use coaching is as a benefit for their staff, right? When an owner allows me to get my own personal business coach, that's kinda cool, right? You know, that really shows devotion. And that's another way that we work with businesses. So thanks for letting me explain all of that. I am just so grateful that you had me on and I hope it's interesting for people. 

Allyson Wharam: I learned a lot or and thought a lot about my own experiences, so I hope others will be able to reflect and do the same. And we will link all of that in the show notes. Thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it.

Bryan Tanner: Thanks. [00:39:00]