Meet Corey Gaston

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Corey Gaston. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Corey below.

Hi Corey, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?

My work ethic has been developed over the years! I began work at a young age with my maternal grandfather who owned his own businesses. He owned a commercial building cleaning service as well as a lawn care service and I worked with him in the evenings and during my summer vacations. My paternal grandparents were farmers so I spent a great deal of time with them on their farm at a very young age doing age appropriate tasks. I would pick peas and beans, potatoes, and corn for the local farmer’s market in our town. These experiences acculturated me in a deep way by showing me that hard work was normal, but it also showed me that the fruit of my labor was a direct result of the work that I do. This has served me well for my entire life as a student, as a United States Marine, and as an educator.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I help organizations overcome hurdles that may exist in their current culture! Organizations are made up of people and people have the natural tendency to change over time, as do our organizations. Organizational leaders can shape their organizational culture and cause positive behaviors and habits to flourish in their companies, churches, clubs, etc… but most do not have the capacity or language to articulate the needed changes or the tools needed to do so. I help them accomplish the goals that they may have and resources them with what I can to best serve them.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

We aren’t islands unto ourselves; we each need each other to fulfill our life’s purpose. The sooner we can realize that we are to help others, and others are here to help us, the better we can all become. Our stories are inextricably bound together in a stream of mutuality that creates a larger narrative of who “we” are and are to be. All of our learned and intrinsic skills aren’t solely for us individually, everything we have should be used to help us create a better society for us all.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?

The Serving Leader by Dr. Ken Jennings and Dr. John Stahl-Wert has been a tremendous resource to me. It challenges the normal paradigm of leadership and how leaders ought to think about those that they lead. It flips the standard pyramid mentality that leaders are atop of the pyramid and those that they lead are stratified beneath them. Conversely, it upends the pyramid and uses language that should cause leaders to think about those that they are entrusted to serve. My summation of it, serving is better than leading. It is a heart posture of the leader more so than a physical placement of the leader.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://proximitypartners.org
• Instagram: @drbaldheadedbro
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cgaston78/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-corey-l-gaston-704180161/