Leaders Rising: Johnny Perez
Welcome to Leaders Rising, where we explore the development journey of leaders who’ve risen from the ashes of adversity, examining the leadership gifts born from their experiences, the challenges that have held them back, and the moves they’ve made to transcend hardship and openly face the ragged edges that still remain.
For most of his life, Johnny Perez had operated under the notion that pain and abuse were normal parts of love and relationships that everyone was simply expected to endure. It wasn’t until going through a difficult divorce that a therapist nudged Johnny to look more closely at the deeper reasons behind why he had long held those beliefs.
“I remember thinking,” Johnny recalls, “Well, that’s just the way love is, right? Love is abusive.”
Throughout childhood, Johnny and his siblings were regularly beaten by his father, a Christian fundamentalist preacher who later blamed his violence on religious doctrine. Though physical abuse was a regular part of his everyday life, the long-term impacts it carried into adulthood for Johnny—now a business development executive with a robust creative practice as a poet and musician—were deeply affecting. Johnny’s poem Running Through Trees captures his haunting memories of childhood abuse:
The time your belt
made these scars on my back
I did not cry.
I was eleven or twelve.
I laid on your bed
clenched my fists and screamed inside.
It hurt like hell
I willed myself not to cry
turned and looked you in the eye,
you hit me harder.
Sometimes you used a switch
cut green from a tree
at least once I had to cut my own
but this time it was your black leather belt
with the thick razor edge
that left long welts
with droplets of blood
in the small
of my small back.
The beatings inflicted by his father entrenched feelings of isolation in Johnny—feelings that were only further compounded by the numerous cultural and religious differences that he perceived separated him from others, leaving Johnny with the feeling that he would always be different. Johnny’s poem Normal Kids captures this feeling,
We grow up knowing we are different, you and I.
We are not like Normal Kids.
Normal Kids live in ranch-style houses set back on
the country roads we drive on Sundays to church.
Normal Kids don’t go to church
Sunday morning
Sunday night
and Wednesday night
Normal Kids probably spend Sundays watching television
because Normal Kids have TV
or they play in yards big and wide and green
lawns so large their dads cut the grass on riding mowers
big enough to play a full game of football
or soccer
or just run
Normal Kids’ houses have wide driveways with basketball goals
where they probably play with their buddies
lots of friends
happy kids
Normal Kids smile a lot
they have blonde or light-brown hair
light eyes
freckles on sharp noses
and their skin is not tan or brown
like ours
Normal Kids have simple, strong “American” names
that no teacher ever asks them to spell
Normal Kids can afford to buy their lunch at school every day
in fact, they only bring their lunch from home on
cold winter days
when they have a brand-new Thermos full of
hot Spaghettios.
Normal Kids eat name-brand foods like Spaghettios
or maybe even Cheerios
not “Toasty-Os”
They don’t eat peanut-butter and jelly from a
brown paper bag every day
and they probably don’t eat beans and rice with
tortillas every night
Normal Kids have more than one pair of shoes
and their toes are not stunted from wearing
them all year round
even when they’ve outgrown them
to school
to church
on the playground
in the street
Normal Kids don’t get their clothes from older
brothers and sisters
they buy their clothes from the mall
And they have more than three shirts and two pairs
of jeans to alternate throughout the week
But we can’t have that
we don’t do that
we aren’t like that
because we are different
we are poor
we are religious
we are Mexican American …
In the household Johnny’s Mexican father and American mother stressed the importance of mastering English to be successful in America. Even learning Spanish, his father’s native language, was not as important as learning English – and speaking without an accent. It is no coincidence that Johnny became a writer early in life and would eventually end up studying English in college.
As an undergraduate at James Madison University, Johnny found himself struggling to cope with intense emotions. “I was very passionate,” he recalls. “I had all these feelings—you know, everything—anger, love, passion. I wanted romance. I wanted someone to love me. I also wanted to love other people. I just felt like I had something inside me that just needed to get out—that just needed to break free.”
The desire for freedom from his oppressive upbringing is captured vividly in Johnny’s poem, Running Through Trees, in which he describes the feeling of making himself small and hiding as a mode of survival. In the poem, Johnny relates a recurring dream of escape – a dream he has had hundreds of times since childhood:
The time I try to run
you hold me down
I am seven or eight years old
I get up to run to my room
I can’t stop crying
Stay here, you say
with your arm around me
When I resist you use both arms
Stay here, you say, just stay
I am hyperventilating
even though I don’t know that word yet
I can’t breathe
can’t move
you are too strong for me to go
But in between breaths I find
there is a space inside your arms
and against your side
it is the space between bars of a cage
it is the air
between branches
of closely planted
trees
But if I make myself small
and thin
and still
I just might fit.
If I shallow
my breath
and wait
… and wait
I can make room for myself in here
if I shrink and slow my breathing
there is a space I can make inside
inside your arms
and deep inside of me
and that is where I go and hide
you hold me
that is where I stay and calm
you pray
say you love me
And this is how I learn love is this way
abusive
those who love me hurt me
But everything will be okay
if I just
stay
and shrink
and learn to live
without
breathing
deeply
That night I dream of running through trees.
Though he was unable to physically escape his father as a child, as a young adult, Johnny tried many times to escape his past emotionally through unhealthy outlets. “In college on weekends, I binge-drank and chased women,” he recalls. And while unhealthy behaviors pervaded his life for a time, fortunately Johnny—a talented athlete—would find a healthier outlet to cope with his many emotions through sports. A walk-on kicker on the James Madison football team, Johnny found a taste of the escape he craved through constant physical activity. “Sports were always an outlet for me to break free,” he remembers.
Lacking the discipline to have achieved a successful sports career on a professional level, Johnny largely attributes the success he found in college to his ability to endure—a survival skill he carried forward from the trauma and abuse that defined his childhood and adolescence. “I know that’s one of the reasons I’m successful,” Johnny reflects, “I can just push through and get things done and accomplish difficult tasks. I’ve been in very difficult situations in my career, and I know no one else would have been able to get the job done. But I did it.” And while his ability to endure has at many times in his life been a key factor in his successes, today Johnny recognizes that in the past this quality has also sometimes resulted in less than desirable outcomes—especially in his interpersonal relationships.
“I tend to hang on to relationships even when they’re failing and try to make them work,” Johnny now understands—thanks in part to insight he received from the therapist who finally challenged him to re-examine his willingness to stay in abusive relationships. “Someone needs to tell you that you’re not supposed to accept that,” he recalls his therapist telling him. Johnny began to understand that just because we can endure something doesn’t mean that suffering through pain is necessarily what we should be doing. With this knowledge, Johnny would embark on a gradual path toward interpersonal growth and change. “One day I decided, ‘Wow, I’m going to either allow these scars to replicate these patterns in my life, or I’m going to forgive my dad,’” he recalls. “‘That’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
While it wasn’t until adulthood that Johnny found the clarity that he needed to shift his mindset around healthy relationships, what he didn’t realize was that he had already been cultivating one of the most important tools that he would need to break free from his past for decades—writing. Johnny had started college believing that his primary passion was for politics. But over the course of several classes and workshops he soon realized that he had a preternatural affinity for storytelling. “This is what I have inside me,” he remembers noticing. “These words, these stories were coming out. And I felt like writing was what I was supposed to do.”
So, after an early career stint as a sportswriter for a local newspaper, Johnny secured a full-time marketing position that allowed him to leverage his passion for writing in the business world. “I learned the art of marketing, writing, and telling stories in direct mail and newsletters. I could not get published as a writer, so I began using my English degree in a professional manner instead of creatively.” And his talent for effective communication, combined with his desire to connect with others stood out. “I’ve always been good at marketing and sales,” he reflects, “because I’m always trying to understand what people need and then connect with them.”
When Johnny landed a new position working for a large federal contractor, his boss spotted his natural communication skills, hand-picking Johnny for a leadership track in the organization. “He recognized that leaders are people who communicate. And he told me I was going to be in their leadership program.” Though it would be a defining moment in Johnny’s path toward leadership, at the time he remembers being puzzled about what the term ‘leadership’ even meant. “I was like, ‘Okay, I know what that means in sports, but what does that mean in business?’” Johnny laughs. His boss assured him that with the right training and certifications, Johnny would be poised to achieve essentially anything he wanted to.
And yet, despite the raw talent he possessed and the training he would end up receiving, Johnny’s early days as a leader brought challenges. While he saw himself as being keen in his ability to discern his clients’ deeper needs, amongst colleagues Johnny often presented as a hard-driven, overly task-oriented leader who sought to win through the ceaseless pursuit of perfection. He was, at the time, largely oblivious to the ways he could easily plow past the feelings and needs of coworkers, ignoring the potential for care and connection in his single-minded need to reach success. But then, during a series of 360-degree peer reviews, Johnny received invaluable feedback that would ultimately transform his perception of himself as a leader.
“We did 360-degree peer reviews,” he remembers, “where you pick people to rate you: colleagues, managers and employees. And I scored extremely well. But the main area where I was lacking at the time was that my employees didn’t think I was empathetic to them. They felt I was very focused and driven on the mission, or the goal of the business or project. But I wasn’t caring about them.” Johnny recalls one comment in particular that opened his eyes to the fact that he wasn’t nearly as nurturing or empathetic as he needed to be in order to be a successful leader. “I had a 24- or 25-year-old kid working as a graphic artist in my department. He was one of my employees, but his comment on my review was: ‘I don’t know if Johnny really knows me.’” Johnny recalls that the feedback was shocking. “I was like, wow. Wow, he’s right. I don’t know, him. And I need to take time to get to know him.”
So, in the following months and years, Johnny began working to transform his leadership through empathy. He focused his energy on becoming more nurturing, trying to soften away from the perception he had carried as a hard-charging winner and to focus more on facilitating spaces in which he could take time to pause and listen. “Leaders don’t always have the solution, but they understand how to enable others to bring that solution,” Johnny knows now. “To do that you need to be a person who can listen to others.”
As Johnny continues to grow in his willingness to connect with colleagues and employees, he has also grown in his understanding that success in his professional career hinges on his willingness to listen to exactly what customers want and need. “The thing I’ve been really successful at is learning what customers want to buy—at listening and then homing in and refining our solution to meet exactly that thing, and then communicating that vision.” And while he has achieved much professional success in the world of business development through his ability to communicate and willingness to listen, Johnny now dreams of extending these skills to connect with individuals outside of his professional career through his artistic practice as a writer and musician.
Though Johnny has been writing in multiple genres and forms since college, it wasn’t until after workshopping a draft of a novel-in-progress in a recent fiction writing workshop that members of his cohort steered him toward sharing his work at the numerous open mics and poetry slams held where he now lives in New York City. Johnny quickly became enthralled with the talent and energy of the city’s performance poetry community—and soon begin achieving acclaim himself for his compelling performances. The electricity he felt through delivering his stories live and in public was life changing. “I started performing my poetry at these poetry slams and open mics,” he recalls. “And I started becoming very successful doing that. Then I started performing the poetry over music, and even writing my own music. I then realized this is not a book. This is a show. This is something that should be performed and experienced live.”
Prior to the COVID pandemic, Johnny ran his own “jazz poetry” show on Tuesday nights at a small café in Manhattan’s West Village. “We had a small band – guitar, bass percussion, backup vocals – and they would play whatever they wanted to play, a simple groove, and we would turn down the lights and form a line to get on the mic to invent vocals, rap or poetry on top of the music.” As the artists came on and off the mic, the music continued, as one continuous song throughout the three hour show. “It was amazing – always a new and creative show that was bigger than any one of us individual artists.” For twelve straight weeks, Johnny’s “jazz poetry’ averaged sixty-five people a night in a café that only seats twenty-three.
This is a perfect example of Johnny’s servant-leadership model: his role as the host and curator was to create the environment and set the tone. During the show he would perform along with the others, and interject if he felt the need to improve the mood or tone. Through this process he facilitated space to feature artists that many others wanted to see improvising with the band.
When COVID hit his show was paused. The extra time Johnny has gained through the shutdown has given him the freedom to work on his own music craft and get better as an artist.
Now Johnny is developing his songs and poems into a live show he plans to launch in New York in the coming year—a show that will combine the poetry he so deftly commands to express himself authentically and vulnerably with his passion for playing and learning guitar. “I wake up and I hear music every morning,” Johnny expounds, “and I can’t always play it. But I’m trying to play it the way I hear it in my head. I play guitar throughout the day. I have my guitars around my room. And wherever I’m sitting and working, I’ll take a break every hour or two hours and play for fifteen minutes. And then later at night, I play even more. Over the course of the day, I probably play about four or five hours.”
And while Johnny maintains the intense focus that was at many times linked to the pursuit of perfection that defined his early career as a leader, Johnny’s commitment to his creative outlets is today driven less by a need to win than by a calling to connect. It has taken him years to overcome the challenges of his difficult childhood, and to grow into the empathetic and caring leader he has finally become, but each day Johnny now lives out the hard-won knowledge that vulnerability and openness are the keys to realizing meaningful connections. For Johnny, letting go has in many ways become the heart of success in both his creative and professional practices. “The more I open up,” he knows, “the better leader I am. The more I try to hold on and be intense and focused about certain things, the less successful I am. My success has been giving others the space to use their creativity, bringing people together, and enabling the space for creativity and fun, or interaction that wouldn’t have otherwise existed.”
Now, Johnny’s calling to perform his life story for live audiences is built on what he sees as a deeper purpose to serve others by delivering messages and lessons that will help them grow into their highest selves.
“I really do believe that there’s an eternal purpose for each one of us,” he reflects, “and that I need to help people grow spiritually and realize their eternal purpose. I need to help them fulfill that. And that’s much more important than whether I make money. It is much more important eternally.” At its core, Johnny’s message to others is that none of us are alone, a powerful sentiment that is captured vividly in the final lines of Johnny’s poem Running Through Trees.
I will no longer just dream of running through trees
but I will live it every day for the rest of my life
And to my dear brothers and sisters
who got it worse than I
You may have scars inside you
no one has ever seen.
So if no one’s ever told you this
please hear it now from me
We are worthy of love
We are worthy of peace
and we no longer need to lie down and live
in emotional slavery
yes slavery
Because oppression
even if it comes in the name
of Love
or Religion
or Justice
is still oppression
is oppression
is oppression
and we no longer need to take its scars
on our backs
in our hearts
in our minds
The time has come for you and me
Let us
rise up
break away
run free.
Rise up
break away
run free
Rise up
break away
run free.
You can read and hear more of Johnny Perez’s writing on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube at @perezpoetry
Learn more about his professional work as a leader here.
Know someone who’s risen from ashes of adversity to become an amazing leader – learning to leverage their gifts while continuing to soften up the rough edges?
Maybe it’s you?
Message me. I would love to explore highlighting your story in my Leaders Rising Blog Series!
