Leaders Rising – Christian Espinosa
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.
Growing up amidst the chaos brought forth by his mother’s drug addiction, Christian Espinosa often struggled with a deep sense of guilt for having been born into his mother’s life well before she was ready to be a parent. As a young child, he watched as his mother fell into abusive relationships again and again, while an ever-growing collection of pill bottles filled the door and shelves of the refrigerator in their family home. “My mom was always doing some sort of prescription medication, or pot, or cocaine since as early as I can remember,” Christian recalls. Drug-fueled outbursts and violent interactions were a regular part of life at home.
There was the time they were confronted by a man at the front door who threatened to kill Christian and his mother if she didn’t hand over her stash of marijuana. Another time, his mother nearly killed Christian’s brothers herself by wrecking the family’s car while driving to buy alcohol. He remembers coming home that day to find his brothers injured and bandaged while his mom sat at the kitchen table eating raw hamburger straight from the cellophane package with her fingers. “She was totally out of her mind,” Christian recalls.
Another afternoon when coming home from school, Christian remembers hearing loud music blaring from inside before stumbling onto the destruction his mother had enacted by hurling a collection of glass eggs—an assemblage that he had always found interesting and beautiful—around their home. She had destroyed the art that had hung in frames on the walls and shattered an aquarium. Christian watched with horror as fish flopped on the floor amidst broken glass.
I spent as much time as I could outdoors to minimize the time I was around the chaos.
“After that I just kind of turned around and went up this hill behind our house in California and hung out there until it was dark,” he remembers, “until I thought things might have calmed down.” Christian learned early on from situations like these that he could find refuge from turmoil at home by retreating into nature. “That was a recurring theme of my childhood… my mom, in one sense—she really wasn’t the parent. So I could come and go as I wanted to, even when I was extremely young. There was nobody stopping me from leaving and going to nature. I spent as much time as I could outdoors to minimize the time I was around the chaos.”
For Christian, nature was one of the few places where he felt secure. “I couldn’t trust my mother or the people that were supposed to take care of me,” he recalls. “But I always felt like the animals in the park—the ducks and the geese—I could trust them. They were my friends.”
As Christian matured into adolescence, he recalls his mother involving him more and more in schemes to feed her addictions. She would persuade him to lie to doctors about having headaches so that he would be prescribed pain medication, which she would later take herself. Other times, she would enlist him to lie to pharmacists. “We would go to literally every pharmacy in a 100-mile radius of where we lived,” he remembers. “She would park far away from the pharmacy and I would go in and say I was there to pick up a prescription for, you know, Linda Hamilton, or some weird name. My mom had figured out how to work the system. And I would go in and pick up these prescriptions for her,” Christian recounts.
As his mother’s addiction became an ever-increasing influence in his day-to-day life, Christian began to feel more and more that the situations he was being pulled into by his mother were anything but normal. “For some reason I just knew in my gut, ‘this doesn’t feel right’… I knew I needed to get out of that environment.” Perhaps he could sense even then that his mother would never escape her addiction—she ultimately fell victim to a fatal Oxycodone overdose in 2011—and realized that he would need to find a way to break free on his own. In 1988, after a conversation with his high school counselor, Christian discovered that with some focus on improving his academic performance, he might easily qualify for college scholarships that could help steer him toward a different life. “I’ve always been fairly competitive,” he recalls. “I think I was 17—a junior—and the counselor showed each student where you were in the class rank. And I was like, number six. I thought, you know, what if I just apply myself and really work hard this next year? I could probably be number one or two.”
So, all while having to manage the demands of an all-district football career, Christian decided to enroll in as many advanced classes as he could. He began his senior year of high school with a personal commitment to not seek out a girlfriend—so as to not become distracted—and moved in with his grandparents in order to focus on his studies. And by the time he graduated, Christian would secure the number two rank in his graduating class along with an invitation from the Air Force Academy.
Looking back, Christian now credits the extreme circumstances he had to endure throughout childhood as cause for many of the traits that defined his path toward leadership—including the resilience that bolstered his early career. “My mom used to wreck the car all the time,” he recalls, “she would be put in jail all the time. It would be in the newspaper. It was embarrassing, but it wasn’t something I had control over.” Out of this embarrassment could have come deep shame, but instead Christian developed an ability to feel confident in his own skin—regardless of others’ perceptions. “I had to just become comfortable with whatever people thought about me,” he remembers.
One of the challenges was that I didn’t trust anybody else, and thought I didn’t need anybody else.
Christian had built a strong ego around the notion that he could solve any problem and tackle any challenge, and outside of his career he pushed himself to accomplish some of the toughest achievements imaginable, including teaching wilderness survival, summiting the world’s tallest peaks, completing ultramarathons, hundreds of skydives, and over 20 Ironman Triathlons. And in his professional life—having followed up his military career as a defense contractor who would move later to commercial companies—Christian continued to place intense value on being the smartest person in the room.
Ultimately, it would be this same personal drive that compelled Christian to force change when, after years of freelancing he began to feel stagnant in his professional growth. “I got bored,” he recalls. “I felt like I wasn’t contributing at a level I wanted to. I thought the next step would be to start my business.” So, in 2014—with the notion that investing his own money and that taking on the responsibility of hiring and scaling would all but necessitate the jumpstart he craved—Christian’s cybersecurity company, Alpine Security, was born.
Yet despite the many personal and professional successes that had preceded Christian’s decision to start his own company, he admits that his business’s early years were in many ways defined by mistakes. Though the ego-based mindsets that had helped him believe he could always do things better than others could had once helped him tackle immense challenges, by leading his own business Christian began to realize that his relentless drive and competitiveness were actually getting in the way of his success. “One of the challenges was that I didn’t trust anybody else, and thought I didn’t need anybody else,” he reflects now.
When colleagues would underperform, Christian would often fail to delegate and to hold others accountable, swooping in instead to take on their unfinished tasks himself. He also struggled with feelings of guilt over being unable to manage people toward working differently, watching with frustration as he kept trying to force new results, only to continue meeting the same outcomes again and again. As his business lost money, Christian’s work life began to feel less and less sustainable. Where his freelance career had been defined by excess income and free time, running Alpine Security was leaving him broke and with almost no time for himself. He cashed in stock to maintain operations and used personal credit cards to make payroll.
It took me a long time to realize: this thing worked, but it’s not working anymore. Even if I try to do more of it, I’m still stuck.
It was becoming clear that many of the mindsets that had once served him personally and professionally were no longer effective. So just as a young Christian had been able to shift strategically toward a new and intensive approach to his academics in order to create new pathways toward change, Christian now knew he needed to step back—a skill he now refers to as “condor vision”—in order to gain a broader perspective and to think creatively about how to approach leadership in a different way. “For me it took me a long time to realize: this thing worked, but it’s not working anymore. Even if I try to do more of it, I’m still stuck. I needed to shift something and let go of something that had worked so well for the majority of my life.”
He began internalizing there weren’t enough hours in the day for him to lead by taking on every task, and that he had been enabling underperforming colleagues rather than empowering them to work better and smarter. “I realized that I couldn’t ‘brute force’ everything, that I needed to hire people that were good at things that I didn’t like to do… I realized that if somebody can do something, then I should have somebody else do it. I needed to focus on doing what I’m good at, versus trying to do everything,” he explains.
Christian also began to realize that as an adult professional he still carried the same feelings of guilt around asking colleagues to meet expectations that he had as a child wanting his mother to show up as a parent. “I realized if I looked back on my life that that guilt caused me a lot of suffering and gave little benefit to the people that I felt guilty about not helping… I had a hard time letting guilt go, and it cost me a lot of money in the business,” Christian recalls. “But I came to the realization that, as difficult as it was to let my main sales guy go, or a different team member, and hire somebody new, I got different results with someone new. I realized that was the right decision. I had been trying to mentor someone that really wasn’t ready to be mentored, or they didn’t have the desire to shift in the way that needed to be shifted.”
As eye-opening as these realizations were, perhaps the most powerful mindset shift for Christian occurred when he finally understood that his need for intellectual prowess was inhibiting his progress. In fact, he realized that he and his colleagues all needed to let go of being the smartest person in the room. “One of my engineers kept telling me that one of our clients just didn’t get it—meaning that the client didn’t understand what we were telling them,” he recalls. “He kept saying it in a way that made the client seem stupid. I heard that and I thought, ‘Wait a minute, this doesn’t make any sense. I didn’t start a company to make our clients feel stupid, to not help them get it, and to not improve their security.’ That moment is when I really started focusing on developing people skills with my team, to make sure the clients do get it. Because otherwise, we would be no different than everybody else.”
For Christian this awareness marked the beginning of a new professional direction defined by connections grounded in soft skills and EQ. He decided that intellect would no longer be the marker of success for his technical team. By doing so, Christian found a way to disrupt the industry standard of posturing and positioning around intelligence. “To focus on people skills above technical skills,” he notes, “that’s not what people typically do in my industry.”
But in order to overcome his personal drive to always be the best, Christian had to learn that he would need to trust others enough to let them in—that he had to ask for help and listen closely to others’ responses. So with the support of a therapist and a life coach, Christian embarked on a professional path grounded in personal reflection. “I had the awareness for a while of how guilt was causing an effect on things in my life,” he recalls, “in my business—in all aspects. But even though I had that awareness, I wasn’t able to do anything with it by myself. Getting a therapist or finding some other way to work through what you’re aware of so you can make a change is the component I think a lot of us are missing.”
Christian became more willing to embrace the reality that he didn’t always have to have all the answers, and that he could rely on outside influences to help him see his blind spots. Within Alpine Security, he began to lean on others organizationally by building around clearly articulated core values with the trust that others would operate within those values. And he now prioritizes a work environment where trust is valued over intellect—where people are allowed to make manageable mistakes and can be empowered, through them, to grow.
To focus on people skills above technical skills… that’s not what people typically do in my industry.
Today, in his coaching practice and in his recent book, titled The Smartest Person in the Room: The Root Cause and New Solution for Cybersecurity, Christian teaches a seven-step methodology designed to transform technical leaders with high IQ and low EQ by providing them a framework to develop those skills from a logical perspective. And having transitioned from CEO into his new role as Managing Director when Alpine Security was sold in 2020, Christian now sees his next major growth opportunity being leading from a place of influence over a place of authority. “Leadership, to me, means setting a vision of what you want to accomplish with your team, and having the influence to help achieve that vision,” he explains.
On his path toward leadership, Christian has learned that having influence requires more than being the best—it requires the ability to tune in deeply to what motivates others, along with a sincere desire to understand their individual ways of seeing the world. “There’s a difference between listening for insight versus listening for agreement,” Christian explains. “I think we tend to fall into this habit of listening for things we agree or disagree with, instead of listening to what somebody is saying from the perspective of gaining insight into their world.”
For Christian, transcending the adverse experiences of his childhood and evolving into the leader he is today was only possible because he wanted to grow—and believed he could. “I’m a big believer in the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset, and I think we’re all capable of growing,” he explains. “I used to be part of the problem. I used to be the one that was intellectually bullying other people and who got my significance from being smarter than people. I realized through the journey of my own business that the steps I made to increase my team’s relationship and people skills made a difference not just in revenue, but also in fulfillment.”
You can read more about Christian’s work coaching technical minds through developing soft skills on his website, www.christianespinosa.com.
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