Webdelics Podcast

How Psychedelics Can Create Great Leadership with Diego Ugalde

Episode Summary

“Are you telling me that in order to be a great leader you need to have done psychedelics?” host Scott Mason asks Diego Ugalde, former Navy SEAL now CEO of the Trident Approach and psychedelic integration coach. In this episode of Webdelics, they explore the counterintuitive connection between psychedelics and leadership. Diego shares how plant medicine aligns individuals with truth and transforms leadership in unexpected ways. They challenge taboos, question the essence of leadership, and explore the impact psychedelics can have on every facet of life.

Episode Notes

“Leadership means inspiring and motivating others around you … to get them to do things that they ultimately want to do...” - Diego Ugalde

Diego Ugalde is a former Navy SEAL with over 15 years of military service, including three combat tours in Iraq and participation in over 250 classified operations. He has been decorated with four Navy Commendation Medals, three Navy Achievement Medals, and a Combat Action Ribbon. Diego now serves as the CEO and founder of the Trident Approach, a leadership consultancy firm. Beyond his military achievements, Diego has ventured into the realm of psychedelics, becoming a psychedelic integration coach.

Highlights from the conversation:

Psychedelics don't automatically make you a better leader but can align you with truth, which Diego sees as important for leadership. He says, “I don't think that psychedelics are right for everybody. …However, just like everything else with psychedelics, it's not teaching you anything special, it's just aligning you closer to truth. And so really psychedelics I think can have a really huge impact on everything you do in life…”
Leadership should aim to inspire people to achieve their potential by understanding and empowering their talents. “Leadership means inspiring and motivating others around you … to get them to do things that they ultimately want to do that maybe they didn't necessarily know they could do without you. …sometimes we all …need help and we need a little pushing, a little extra motivation. And so really that's what leadership is. So leadership is like almost every interaction in life,” Diego explains.
Diego sees the ego not as inherently bad but as something that shows your limits to help you grow. Psychedelics helped him deeply understand his own ego.
During his first 5-MeO-DMT session, Diego realized he was still clinging to things he thought he'd moved past and learned what deep letting go means. “My first time with 5-MeO, it showed me that the things that I had thought that I had let go of and kind of dropped and just moved on with my life, were right with me,” he tells Scott. “...So what it showed me was what it actually meant to actually let something go beyond this conscious decision to just from …a cellular level of just setting the bags down, thanking it for what it was and moving on free.”
Psychedelics can help leaders understand how to create psychological safety for others to thrive. “Being able to see somebody who's not healed and helping them and assisting them through an actual healing process is probably one of the biggest gifts you can actually give anybody,” he comments.
Diego sees curiosity as more constructive than "knowing", which psychedelics helped reveal to him. “One of the big lessons that I got from psychedelics is converting myself from a place of knowing to a place of curiosity,” he says. This openness also enables leadership.
Leaders should focus first on understanding and bettering themselves before trying to lead others: "Heal the self, empower the self, …develop the self and you'll see the aftermath of what happens to the world around you when you start from that place."
Diego recommends focusing on personal growth and healing when entering the psychedelic space rather than trying to achieve external goals like career advancement.
“We're not meant to do this alone. If you are on this journey, whatever it is, whether it be healing or you just want to learn and grow and develop, doing it by yourself, there's so much that can be missed. So do this with somebody you know you love and you trust and you'll see sort of the returns coming back several times over,” Diego advises listeners.

Resources

Diego Ugalde on LinkedIn | Email

The Trident Approach | Heroic Hearts Project

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