After Dinner Leadership
Clear and Compelling
A conversation with Simon Fagg on After Dinner Leadership. Published July 7, 2025. 42 minutes.
Watch on YouTube, inside the full playlist.
THE CONVERSATION
Leaders who react fast, accommodate everyone, and run on fear, obligation, and guilt eventually pay for it. Around Simon Fagg’s virtual dinner table, Salvatore shares three lessons he wishes he had learned earlier, the story behind his mantra, not about me, and how boundaries, purpose, and healing shape the way a leader shows up.
KEY IDEAS
Three lessons, learned late
Asked for the leadership lessons he wishes he had learned earlier, Salvatore names three. First, people care far less than you think. The spotlight effect describes the belief that others are watching closely, when most of their reactions have nothing to do with you. Second, boundaries. Years of compromising until friction built up cost him relationships that clear limits would have protected. Third, lead from purpose. The acronym FOG comes from recovery circles: fear, obligation, guilt. Too much of his early leadership ran on those three. Calling your mother because you feel you must is FOG. Calling because you want to honor the people who supported you comes from purpose and values.
A mantra, repeated ten times
Salvatore gamified the spotlight effect. Before a talk, a meeting, or a hard conversation he says not about me ten times, and in a tense moment he repeats it silently before responding. It lives in the gap Viktor Frankl described between stimulus and response, where a choice is possible. Early leadership tends to prize quick reaction; a pause and a considered response shows more leadership. The mantra points his mind outward: what else could be going on for this person? Two upsides follow. Presence, which causes people to lean in and value what you say. And room for a deeper relationship, because a reactive state can trigger a shadow part that cuts people off or puts them down first.
Make the mantra your own
Simon pushes back: does repeating the word me reinforce the self it is meant to set aside? Salvatore invites listeners to find whatever phrase works for them. His own is rooted in an ice cream parlor. After a long wait, a curt what do you want from behind the counter stung, and then he heard it in his head: this person is having a bad day, this has nothing to do with me. The mantra takes him back to that moment. He also points to Cafe Gratitude in the Bay Area, where staff greeted a difficult interaction with we have an opportunity, which moves a leader from victim to supporter.
Know your no
Friends called Salvatore type AA, and his way of managing it was accommodating everyone until he exploded. The roommate years taught him the pattern: dishes in the sink, nothing said, resentment, then a blow-up nobody could heal from. Living with someone who wrote every chore on paper ended the friction, and he began entering projects by asking what his agreements were with himself and his colleagues. A friend once refused his I’m open to anything with a line he still uses: she needed to know his no before she could trust his yes. At work the gap shows up when a new manager slips into parenting, which accommodates, where managing sets the limits that keep the work moving.
Purpose, and the wound behind it
For two years after college Salvatore traveled and asked everyone the same question: what gets you out of bed? One person answered with warm toast, and the simplicity reset his search toward the practical: where is the purpose and the joy in this moment? Later, at a leadership retreat, an exercise located a life mission in the deepest wound of childhood. Growing up in Kansas with a name nobody could pronounce, he felt like a square peg in a round hole, so his mission became a world where everyone feels they belong and has a place at the table. His purpose today: helping leaders use their voice to achieve, inspire, and connect.
Healing, and packing lightly
Simon notices how often the word healing comes up. Salvatore’s explanation: as people struggle and bump against each other, the friction leaves splinters, splinters become stories, and stories harden into beliefs, the way a child bitten by a dog grows into a teenager convinced all dogs are bad. Healing is someone holding up a mirror so the story can be released and rewritten with more resourcefulness and agility. His own example is control. Micromanagers made him bristle until he traced it to his own sense of lacking control and turned toward what he could control. His advice to his twenty-year-old self follows the same line: pack lightly, and drop the stories that no longer serve.
IN HIS WORDS
“Presence is what commands the room. It’s what causes people to lean in to your leadership.”
“I don’t need to wait until I’m triggered to have a response. I can know what my boundaries are and I can reinforce those boundaries in a polite way.”
“Release that story, create a new story, one in which we have more resourcefulness, more agility, more ability to be present with one another.”
LISTEN AND FOLLOW
Thank you to Simon Fagg for the invitation and the questions. Subscribe to the show for the rest of the catalog.
The frameworks behind this conversation.
Clear and Compelling collects the principles, strategies, techniques, and frameworks Salvatore teaches on shows like this one, written for analytical, technical, and introverted leaders. Morgan James Publishing, October 2026.