Founder, Be The Torch · Keynote Speaker · Executive Coach
It was a dark, rainy evening in Seattle. I'd just dropped my kids off at a handoff with their mother and was sitting alone in a parking lot outside a hotel. Divorced, and now at the end of another broken relationship, with a business that kept falling short and another venture that was about to fail. I sat there in the dark, drowning in my own darkness, and dreaming that someone would come save me.
That's when a thought hit me like a bolt of lightning.
Nobody is coming.
The only person who was going to get me out of the darkness was me.
With this new level of awareness, I quickly could see that every result in my business, every broken relationship, every venture that had fallen apart, had one common denominator. Me. The results I was getting were reflecting back exactly the work I had not done on myself. And in that moment, sitting in the rain in a parking lot in Seattle, I understood something I have never forgotten.
“Everything I wanted to experience in my career, my business and my life, I needed to become first.”
The Be The Torch philosophy and the Mirror-Based Leadership principle was born in a parking lot, from a person in enough pain to finally stop looking outward and start looking at himself.
I had been an athlete my whole life. I played professional football in the Canadian Football League and the Arena Football League from 1997 to 2001. In 2010 I competed with Team USA at the World Indoor Championships and brought home a gold medal in the 4x200m relay, and I still compete in masters track and field today. Everything I know about what it costs to build a real standard, I first learned on those fields.
The mirror principle works the same way in every arena. Business. Leadership. Relationships. The results always reflect the person producing them.
I have been speaking since 2018 and have worked with organizations including State Farm Insurance, Charlie Palmer Collective, Tri-Source International, Chicago Bears, Seattle Kraken, Washington Commanders, Seattle Sounders, and the Special Olympics. In every one of those organizations I have seen the same thing I saw in that parking lot. People working hard and quietly waiting for something outside themselves to change.
The work I do through the Be The Torch Series is built on one principle.
“You cannot get more out of others than you have built in yourself.”
What I know now is, like a moth to a flame, the people and opportunities will come your way when you finally choose to light your own torch.
Are you ready to be the torch?
When the standard changes, everything downstream changes with it. The leaders who do this work change what their entire team produces.
Book Cletus Now →