Conversations on Leadership: Clinton Begley on Humility and the Power of Intuition

This year I’m exploring a new interview series to tap into the wisdom and expertise of the visionary, creative leaders that Mighty Arrow partners with. We’ll talk about important leadership traits, what we learned along our journey into leadership and how to give confidence to each other as we work on hard things together, like building back the world we believe in. 

As Executive Director of American Whitewater, Clinton Begley works to protect and restore America’s rivers and to enhance opportunities to enjoy them safely. Before his current role, he volunteered with the organization for almost two decades and is deeply and personally involved in river stewardship—including serving seven years as the Executive Director of the Long Tom Watershed Council in Eugene, OR. 

Begley’s relationship with rivers began in his youth, and his journey with leadership began in the outdoors as well, though—like a river—it hasn’t always followed a direct path. He’s most interested in the human dimensions of natural resources, and how people’s personalities, values, and motivations to experience the outdoors guide their activities and stewardship behaviors - even their careers and how they do their best work. So I was interested in hearing more about his philosophy as leader of a nationwide organization and what shaped his outlook. Begley chatted with me from his home on the McKenzie River in western Oregon on the Cascade Foothills.

Jordana: Thanks so much for chatting with me today Clinton. I’d love to get some more of your background first—can you tell me about your career before American Whitewater?

Clinton: I went to community college right after high school in my small Midwestern town and then dropped out pretty quickly. I got into the workforce in the healthcare business, then worked for a web design firm, and then in wealth management. I wasn't a broker, but I was a relationship manager for a wealth management firm. And I would take my vacation time all at once so I could have these big adventures out west. 

A buddy of mine who worked at Georgia State University said, ‘Hey, I'm putting together a trip to Big Bend National Park in Texas, and I need a volunteer trip leader. If you can get to Atlanta, I'll take care of the rest.’ So I did this thing as sort of a vacation and I went, oh wow, this is a job?! 

I was in my late 20s, and as soon as I got back from that trip, I went to the local community college and re-enrolled and finished what began as an associate's in psychology and transferred to the University of Montana into a parks tourism and recreation management program with a minor in nonprofit administration. And then I went straight to grad school at University of New Hampshire for recreation management and policy. That was the lightbulb—the fact that leadership in the outdoors, this thing I loved, was a career path. 

Jordana: Working in healthcare, web design, relationship management for a wealth management company—that's a crash course in running a business right there before you even went to college. And now you’re running a business as a nonprofit. 

Clinton: I think about the difference between the things that get you a job and the things that make you good at the job. And my educational trajectory and all that experience is a little bit of both, but really I think my first experience with entrepreneurship and running a business was opening a recording studio in my parents' basement.

I was in the music industry locally and helped record local bands and put on shows. Where we lived was this no man's land between Chicago, Kansas City and St. Louis. So anybody going to a show in any of those places probably had to pass close to us. So I'd grab all these acts that were going to a weekend show and I'd have them perform in the middle of the week in our hometown. And I opened a recording studio and had this event promotion business on nights and weekends while working at the hospital and the web design firm and wealth management.

Jordana: It wasn’t a linear path, was it? It’s more like a river—they’re not linear in their natural form. When did rivers enter your life? 

Clinton: I grew up in a river town on the banks of Mississippi. It's in my blood. One of my favorite photos is of me at about four years old and my grandfather is sitting on a bucket with a can of Busch Light in his hand watching me throw rocks in the river at our family farm. I grew up catching catfish and carp. And first thing, whenever we got to the farm, we'd drive immediately to the back of the property and go see what the river level was, what the river had been doing.

Clinton and Grandpa Begley, North River, Missouri

Jordana: Did you start kayaking that young too? 

Clinton: No, I saw a snippet on ESPN or something. And I went, oh wow, I have to be a part of that. Nobody did that where we lived, but I managed to catch somebody on their way somewhere selling a whitewater boat. I convinced my friends to buy kayaks wherever we could find them. And we had waterskiing vests from Walmart and two-piece paddles and a skateboard helmet and just sent ourselves down flooded creeks. I would have been 20 years old.

Jordana: I’m starting to see a pattern around entrepreneurial spirit here.  As far as your role as a leader goes, was there a moment in your life when you looked around and realized everyone was looking at you for direction? What did that feel like? 

Clinton: I remember climbing with my friends at Jackson Falls in southern Illinois, and I'd just gotten a GPS from my dad. It was like a handheld Magellan. I was 20 or 21, thinking, oh, I've got a GPS now—I can always know where I'm going. And we got done with the day of climbing and went to explore. 

We set out into the Shawnee National Forest and I became very aware that I actually had no idea where I was. So I pulled up the GPS but it turns out you have to load a base map—just telling you where you are in space and time does nothing for you. But since I had the GPS in my hand and nobody else had one, everybody was looking for me to have the answer. But I didn't have it. And that was an interesting feeling. We made it out and it was fine, but it was largely on intuition more than the GPS. 

I think a big part of my leadership journey has actually been shedding some of that self-imposed expectation to always have the right answer when people look to you for it. It’s actually not my job to always have the right answer—it's my job to get us to the right answer or to a good enough answer to move forward, learn something, and take the next step. 

Jordana: There's a lot of humility in that. Leadership doesn’t necessarily mean always having the answer. How would you define leadership? What does that word mean to you?

Clinton: I draw a lot of metaphors from gardening. I think of growing tomatoes or roses—I can't independently produce a tomato. I can't manufacture a rose. I can understand what a rose needs and try to plant it in the right soil with the right sun and give it the right amount of water and prune it in a way that can give it shape and help it to mature and bear fruit, produce a flower. But I can't make it do that. And I think a lot of my leadership is creating the conditions for excellence. I think that's how I view leadership: supporting the people who have the expertise and their own strivings to be able to do that to the best of their ability. 

Jordana: How do you apply that as you lead an organization with a national footprint and a team spread across the country? What does that look like in reality?

Clinton: A lot of it is about just asking what they need. Where can I provide tailwinds and where can I remove barriers? Fundamentally that requires trust. It requires me to trust them, being closest to the issue or problem or opportunity, they understand all the context around the decisions that are in front of them. And that they can trust me with what they're struggling with or what their needs are. I don't need to know everything they know, and they know they can trust that if they bring something to me, it will be taken seriously. And that my job is to try to help them solve problems, or design our organization in a way that there are fewer frictions between them and the work that needs doing. 

Jordana: Leadership can be full of uncertainty, and even lonely sometimes. What is it that makes you willing to go forward, to continue to work on really hard things? 

Clinton: My dad's first job was as a carpenter. He still does that work. He did that with his dad and his brother, and we have that in common—we fix things. I work on cars, I weld things, I make stuff. I like asking how can I creatively solve something with what I have versus going and buying something new? There's this real element of that in my DNA. There is satisfaction that comes from that work. And as much as I beat my head against the wall and get frustrated and things are hard and sometimes lonely, it's like type-two fun. You know what I mean? The type-two fun of having solved a puzzle with a limited toolkit, and that includes my internal toolkit. Maybe it's a pathology, but there's some element of me that just likes the puzzle and the challenge of fixing. 

Jordana: Is there anything along the way you had to unlearn about leadership? 

Clinton: In my 30s I got my first executive director job. And in my second year, on my way to work, I had a panic attack for the first time in my life. I pulled over on the side of the road. I didn't know what was happening, tunnel vision, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, the whole thing. I thought I was dying. Through the course of doing a lot of work and therapy and introspection, I realized it's because I was not aligned to my values and I was wearing somebody else's uniform around leadership and not my own. 

There's a saying in organizations that it's more likely the culture will change you, than you'll change the culture. So it took a couple years, but I experienced the consequences of really not being an authentic leader. I was cosplaying a version of leadership that I thought was expected of me. 

But, as my parents told me, it's just a job. Your health is more important. I am a human being, not a human doing. My worth in the world is not defined by the job I have. So letting go of that was thing one. 

And letting go of that enabled me to then let go of what I thought the uniform was and what I was supposed to be wearing as a leader. And I could figure out what my own uniform was, my style, and it became more authentic after that. And I'm still working on it. It's a process. I still catch myself leading in ways that I’d like to jettison. We have examples of leadership all around us. We're going to have some of that seep in. But the biggest unlearning for me was that it's a strength, not just a vulnerability, to be authentic to who you are and let that drive your leadership style. 

Jordana: When I was a tour guide at New Belgium Brewing, where I got the start that led me down the path to Mighty Arrow here, I gave a tour to a group from a country in Africa that wanted to come over and learn about employee ownership. At the end of the tour, we asked about their greatest takeaway. And they said, ‘None of your employees wear uniforms.’ They realized that when you wear a uniform, you don't get to be yourself. And you can't expect someone to act like an owner and be an owner if they don't get to own themselves first. I feel like what you just said is kind of another version of that. What does authenticity mean to you? How do you find the confidence to allow yourself to be yourself as a leader?

Clinton: There's a paradox for me. I think of confidence in who we are as different from confidence in what the right action is, or was. We need to be confident enough in who we are and our values and our compass to acknowledge that we might not have confidence about what the right next thing to do is. I have to be confident enough to recognize when a change in course of action may be needed to stay the course on my values. You know what I mean? Making difficult choices to keep values alignment is one of the hardest things to do in life, but being open to being wrong about a choice, and having the humility to course correct to stay mission and values aligned gives me way more confidence to lead authentically and retain fidelity to my values rather than some performative fidelity to my past decisions. Context changes, new information comes to light, I have to always be willing to reconsider an idea or action, and paradoxically, that makes it easier to keep fidelity to my values and builds confidence in my own approach to leadership.

Jordana: Or try new things and give yourself grace to be messy about it. 

Clinton: Yeah. People have different definitions of authenticity. I have been involved in organizations and conversations where I think authenticity is perceived as getting to say and do whatever I want whenever I want and the consequences aren't my fault. That version of being your true and full self is to let the chips fall where they may with the impacts of your behavior and words. And I don't view authenticity that way.

I think authenticity and transparency get inappropriately conflated sometimes. To me, a responsibility of leadership is to not information-dump or data-dump. We need to be aware of the impacts of the information we share, and understand there are different contexts for when and how information can and should be provided. I do view authenticity as more of a fidelity to values - that my team can rely on me to be consistently values and mission aligned. And that I’ve got their interests in mind when I do share something difficult, not just my own needs to be heard or seen or whatever.

Clinton surfing Otter Bar Wave, Salmon River, CA

I think communication is one of the hardest things about authentic leadership. I think about having a service orientation, thinking how do I make sure the message is received and people can hear it and they're in the space to hear it and the greater truth is actionable in some way. Leaders are part of the organizational immune system - part of our job is to neutralize problems and protect critical systems so the rest of the organism can stay healthy and do the work. So I have this obligation to protect my team’s attention and effectiveness, but also an obligation to be real and approachable and trusted. It’s a challenging balance I don’t always get right.  

Authenticity is complicated.

Jordana: It's good to point out those differences. You can't use it as an excuse to make a mess. Looking at the hard problems we’re working through, the scarce resources and threats to our communities and environmental spaces, what would your call be for leaders to step into right now?

Clinton: I have been on a campaign of sorts to get people to think about how we deal with complex issues, where there is no single right answer. That’s a domain where expertise can actually be a liability because there is this impulse to say, oh yeah, I know exactly what to do. Everything looks like a nail because I’m a hammer.

When things are complex, it actually is the time to widen the sphere of thought that's present and bring in folks who are maybe naive about some of the issues, coming to it with a fresh perspective or from an adjacent industry. Complexity requires diversity of thought. And the more leaders want to move their assessment of a problem into a domain that they know, and feel they can control, the more we're going to keep getting the response wrong. 

Jordana: If you could leave emerging leaders with one invitation, what would it be? 

Clinton: I'm not sure. And maybe that’s it—inviting them to unlearn the impulse to have an answer right away. 

And I think there's a theme here, but that impulse to have the right answer or impulse to have an answer at all, those are rational things. But then there's proprioception, right? Like when somebody is throwing the baseball to you. You're not calculating how to move your hand and then clearly communicating to your board and staff where your hand will be when the ball is thrown —it’s instinct developed from experience. 

With a baseball, you throw it enough, you practice it, you do it, it just becomes faster and more accurate than conscious thought. And I think there's a bias in leadership towards a posture of rationality, even though everybody knows how big the role of intuition is in human decision making. We ignore it to our peril. But we can’t just lead on vibes either - the role of discernment in being able to consider the rational and the intuited at once is something that needs to be cultivated. And this is why trust with your team becomes so important. I make way more decisions based upon the trust I have in the instincts of my team than I do because they have overwhelmed my left-brain with irrefutable logic.

Maybe my invitation is for emerging leaders as they are taking classes and understanding what best practices are and learning about how to be persuasive or how to put a budget together, is to take steps to intentionally cultivate and explore the role of intuition. 

Jordana: Anything else you want to add or any other questions you had that you were hoping I'd get to? 

Clinton: I think you used the word humility early in our conversation. And I do think in leadership it’s easy to become attached to your own ideas, or be seduced by the idea that we are our ideas. But as soon as they leave your mouth or your mind or they're read on paper, it's out in the wild. It's not yours anymore. And they're going to live and evolve and have a life of their own. And that's a good thing, especially for an organization that's trying to navigate complexity. 

So I think humility isn't like this nice, soft skill. I think it's actually an essential component of being open and receptive and allowing your ideas to flourish, or whither, upon contact with reality. Once they leave your mouth they belong to the universe.

Jordana: Sending it out into the wild. I like the way that you said that. Clinton, I just want to say thank you so much for participating in this. We always have more to talk about every time we see each other.  Thanks for sharing your journey with Mighty Arrow.