Lead Yourself First: A Leadership Conversation with Bryan Tanner
Most of us learn to analyze everyone else's behavior long before we ever turn that lens on ourselves. For leaders in ABA, that gap can quietly become the difference between a team that stays and a team that burns out.
In a recent episode of In the Field: The ABA Podcast, I sat down with Bryan Tanner, BCBA, and owner of Leadership Mindset Coaching. Bryan has worn a lot of hats: behavior technician, BCBA® business owner, and now somatic executive coach. He walked me through his path across those roles and reflected 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.
It is an honest conversation about stress, self-awareness, and what it actually means to lead yourself before you try to lead anyone else.
When Distance Becomes the Default
Bryan's early idea of leadership came from the leaders he first encountered, distant and above it all. Growing up in Louisiana, he came to associate that "above it all" quality with professionalism, and for a long time it seemed to work.
It worked until it didn't. As he put it, people do not want their leaders to be distant, and they do not want them to be passive.
That played out in the business he built and ran in Fort Collins. Even as the company grew, Bryan noticed the distance was quietly working against him. It left his team unsure whether they could bring him the emotional realities of the work, so a gap stayed between them. What started as isolation became stress, then burnout, and the weight of it did not stay at the office.
When COVID arrived in early 2020, it did what Bryan says it did for a lot of people: it shined a light on the problems that were already there. The isolation grew heavier, and it took a colleague simply asking, "Are you leaving?" for him to recognize what his team actually needed from him.
Do Not Wait Six Years to Reassess Yourself
Years earlier, Bryan had taken a leadership assessment that scored him as an unusually creative leader. He gave himself a pat on the back, picked one goal to work on (work-life balance), and stayed focused on that single goal for six years.
When he retook the Leadership Circle Profile after leaving the business, he was surprised by what he saw. His work-life balance had improved, but the passivity and distance had resurfaced, and many of the creative strengths had faded.
The lesson translated directly from the work we do with clients: do not wait six years to reassess. We would never let that much time pass before checking in on a client's progress, yet leaders routinely go years without honestly evaluating their own growth.
What the Body Knows First
We also spent time on something Bryan once would have dismissed: the somatic side of leadership. His foundation is behaviorism, and for years he kept his distance from anything that did not sound strictly technical. Then he began noticing what his own body was telling him.
For the last several years of running his agency, his back would go out about once a month, the kind that left him unable to move. Through somatic work, he came to see it differently: his body was signaling that something in his environment was not sitting right, long before his mind had named it. He is careful not to dismiss physical therapy or medical care, all of which have their place, but he now pays attention to the tightening throat, the clenched jaw, and the tension that shows up when stress has already been building for a while.
He also noticed something powerful back in his days as a technician: his clients tended to do better on the days he felt better. That observation stuck with him. If a quick, usable tool can help regulate the nervous system in the moment, then it is worth finding the value in it and using it, rather than waiting until the end of a hard day to open a meditation app that never quite fits the moment.
Turning the Analysis Inward
In ABA, we are trained to analyze other people's behavior. So why do so many leaders struggle to analyze their own?
Part of it, Bryan suggests, is that ambition and drive get us far enough that self-reflection can start to feel unnecessary. We rationalize. We retreat to the things we already know how to do well, like sitting down with a child and building rapport in five minutes, instead of leaning into the harder, less certain work of understanding the systems we are in and the effect our own behavior has on our teams.
The turning point for him was a single coaching question: What is blocking me? He had spent a career asking what was blocking a client from a goal, but had never turned that question on himself. We are taught to do that work for the learners in front of us, he notes, but rarely for ourselves as leaders.
He also draws a subtle but important distinction between being passive and being a learner. The observable behavior can look identical (staying quiet), but the motivation and what follows are entirely different. Self-reflection, he argues, is often more efficient than waiting for those motivations to reveal themselves in observable, measurable behavior over time.
Values, Alignment, and Intention
A recurring theme in our conversation was alignment. When Bryan was in his distant, critical, passive stage, he was protecting something, often his image and the fear of being thought less of. Naming what he was protecting, and then asking what the opposite of that might look like, opened the door to qualities like courageous authenticity: saying what needs to be said when it needs to be said, and knowing when it does not need to be said at all.
He is clear about where stress comes from. When our actions and our values fall out of alignment, that gap is what creates the stress. One of his core values, genuineness, followed him into every business he built. When he once found himself in conflict with a supervisor he saw as disingenuous, the real trouble was that he did not recognize which value was being stepped on, so the frustration came out sideways as anger.
Knowing your values, and revisiting them from time to time, is what lets you understand why something is bothering you before it turns into shame, anger, or a mess you have to go back and repair.
Fear or Skill? Untangling the Blocks
Bryan and I both admitted that marketing can feel deeply uncomfortable. It is less certain than answering an email or improving the product, and it means putting yourself out there.
His framing was helpful: some of that discomfort is about skill (he used to be genuinely uncomfortable on camera), and some of it is a real, values-based boundary (not wanting to sound salesy). The work is telling the two apart. Sometimes it is fear stopping you from doing something worthwhile. Other times you are right to hold back. And sometimes, he points out with a laugh, the very things behavior analysts dismiss as "salesy," being animated, using your voice, holding someone's attention, are simply shaping and reinforcement at work.
The word we kept landing on was intentional: taking real action toward the bigger things you value, while making sure your blocks are genuine boundaries rather than avoidance.
Building an Agency With 0% Turnover
When a BHCOE reviewer told Bryan his agency had 0% turnover, he did not immediately grasp how rare that was, until she clarified that zero percent of the companies they had reviewed had reached it.
When he looked back at what made the difference, it was not one big thing but a handful of everyday systems:
- Structural support, so staff had what they needed within reach.
- Fair, thoughtful compensation, including slightly above-average pay for technicians, with clear reasoning behind the trade-offs.
- Leadership growth paths, so everyone, including technicians, was treated as a leader and taught leadership skills early.
- Shared decisions, like involving staff in the move to electronic data collection.
- A simple rule: be nice to each other. They hired technicians who were kind to kids, then taught them the skills.
Woven through all of it was a leader who stayed on the floor with clients, was transparent about the realities of the business, and genuinely cared about clinical quality while being honest that it still had to run as a sustainable business.
Making a PACT for Better Supervision
Bryan also shared his PACT framework, a simple, four-step approach for building the supervisory relationship. He is quick to note that none of the ideas are new; they draw on the BACB®, CAQH, and established leadership development work. The goal is to make them simple enough to actually use.
- Pregame: prepare for the meeting, sometimes with a set of questions rather than a list of goals.
- Assess: figure out, together, whether the things you want to work on are reasonable and valuable to the supervisee.
- Consequence: follow up on what was agreed, using that follow-through to build the relationship.
- Transform: believe the person can grow, and watch expectations shift from an external standard into something they claim as their own.
He makes a case for reclaiming the word transform in behavior analysis. We tend to shy away from it, but transformation is something that genuinely happens, and its outcomes are observable and measurable.
Key Takeaways
Leadership is a skill that can be taught, and distance is not the same as professionalism.
Stress registers in the body first, and 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 keeps your actions intentional and reduces avoidable stress.
Retention is built through everyday systems: support, fair pay, growth pathways, shared decisions, and genuine care.
Connect with Bryan Tanner
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.
Keep the Conversation Going
Leadership is not about titles, distance, or having it all figured out. It is about the quieter work of leading yourself first, so you can show up for the people who make meaningful outcomes possible. To hear the full conversation with Bryan Tanner, listen to this episode of In the Field: The ABA Podcast.
For more resources on onboarding, supervision, and staff development, visit Sidekick Learning.
