What’s in Your Reservoir?
- Feb 10, 2025
- 4 min read
Dain Dunston is a master coach who focuses on radical self-awareness for leaders. An award-winning author and speaker, he is the founding partner of Reservoir LLC, a consulting company with deep resources for leaders.
In the 2009 film Up in the Air, George Clooney plays the role of Ryan Bingham, a corporate downsizing expert who travels constantly to fire employees on behalf of their companies. In his spare time, he gives a talk at conferences titled "What’s In Your Backpack?" and invites audience members to fill it with all the things in their house and all the people in their life, then set it on fire. The point, which is later abandoned as his character discovers what he truly wants, is to let go of all the stuff that's weighing you down and just focus on yourself.
We disagree with that thinking, and we bet you do, too. In fact, we don't think a backpack, or even a rollaboard, is big enough to contain the resources you need to be a leader. We believe you need a reservoir. A reservoir filled with resources you can tap into whenever you need them. First, for yourself, and second, for the team or organization you lead.
A reservoir filled with what you need
People you can talk with
The old saying "It's lonely at the top" is only partially true, and it doesn't have to be true at all. Sure, you can't go running down the hall sharing all your feelings and frustrations, but you can reach out to peers in similar roles with whom you can share your fears and frustrations, your discoveries and breakthroughs. You can find a coach who can talk you off the ledge. Even better, you can find a peer coaching group with a coach leading conversations among six or seven people who share your challenges.
When I started off as a speech coach, I noticed something surprising. Over the course of my first decade, the leaders who came to me for help and were vulnerable enough to express how they felt were more likely to rise to the top job or even bigger positions. Those who couldn’t ask for help tended to fade away.
Books you can read
Your teachers told you to read more in school, and nobody ever told you to stop. According to the Pew Research Center, the typical college graduate reads just seven books a year. I read between 30 and 60, and my friend Peter Olsen, former CEO of Random House, reads 100 books a year. Reading novels puts you inside the minds of others and dramatically improves your empathy and EQ (Emotional Quotient). Reading books on history makes you significantly better at predicting and recognizing trends, innovations, and coming disasters. (Want to know what comes after plagues and pandemics? Try Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror. Guess why she chose that title.)
There are plenty of books on leadership, innovation, and how to rewire your mind. Start with mine: Being Essential: Seven Questions for Living and Leading with Radical Self-Awareness (Disruption Books).
Hearts you can touch
When I was writing Being Essential, I included a whole chapter on learning to ask yourself how you are feeling in your heart as a gauge of your self-awareness. If I write a sequel, I may just start there, because I've learned that where the heart goes, the mind will almost always follow. This is a state neuroscientists call coherence.
According to Dr. Rollin McCraty, research director at the HeartMath Institute, “Coherence is the state when the heart, mind, and emotions are in energetic alignment and cooperation. It is a state that builds resilience.” In that state of calm focus and presence, researchers find that we are better at learning and make better choices because we can see a wider selection of options. When you learn to do that, you can touch the hearts of others in ways they'll never forget.
Futures you can see
William Gibson said, "The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed." That means the future of your business and your industry is already happening, though it may be broken into pieces that no one has yet put together. What if you were the one to do it?
One way to get there is to do a lot of listening to people smarter than you (see above), read about times of change like the one we’re going through now (see above), and get into the right open-hearted, open-minded flow state (see above). This is where you can suddenly see what's out there in a way no one else ever has. That's how Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, and Philo Farnsworth did it. Young Philo was riding a tractor, plowing a field, when he envisioned how to use radio waves to create a moving picture on a screen. (Read The Man Who Invented Television.)
You don't need to be a genius to get ahead of the curve in unwrapping the emerging future. You just need a reservoir you can tap into. One that’s fluid with new ideas and unexpected ways of thinking, allowing you to assemble "the next big thing" in your world.
At Reservoir, we provide deep resources for leaders through coaches and consultants, authors and educators, PhDs, CEOs, and road warriors. Your own team of game changers is all focused on helping you find solutions based on your own ideas, not someone else’s. Dive in. The future is just below the surface.
Dain Dunston, Author, Speaker, Teacher, Coach
Dain Dunston is a storyteller, future-finder and CEO-whisperer who has been fascinated with the concept of elevated awareness and consciousness since he was in college.
Dain grew up in a family surrounded by literature, art, and music, from Prokofiev to Bebop to Blues. His mother was a reclusive painter and his father was on the fast track to becoming a CEO by the age of 45. From his earliest memories, he found himself fascinated by two fundamental philosophical questions: “Who are we?” And “Why are we here?”
