Retired Air Force Colonel and Vietnam War POW Lee Ellis on How Insecurity Undermines Your Leadership and Your Professional Services Practice (The Price and Value Journey, Episode 162)
Insecurity doesn’t announce itself. It appears as overtalking in a client meeting, avoiding pricing discussions, and presenting your credentials instead of listening to the client’s actual needs. Lee Ellis, a retired Air Force colonel and Vietnam War POW, has dedicated decades as an author and leadership consultant to studying why capable individuals undermine themselves, and his framework identifies the underlying causes.
In this second appearance on The Price and Value Journey, he and host John Ray explore what insecurity really is, how it shows up in leaders and practitioners, and what it costs, both in the organizations they lead and in the practices they’ve built.
Lee’s Security Continuum model shows that no one is simply secure or insecure; everyone slides between the two, and the triggers that push capable people toward the insecure end are more common than most will admit. Fear of embarrassment, the need to look strong, and the refusal to acknowledge what you don’t know: these are the same forces that make a consultant overtalk their qualifications, underprice to avoid rejection, or back down from a conversation where their value needs to be clearly stated. Lee didn’t set out to teach a class on professional service pricing, but the framework he’s built from a lifetime of leading under pressure maps directly onto the challenges you face every day in your own practice.
The Price and Value Journey is presented by John Ray and produced by North Fulton Business Radio, LLC, an affiliate of the Business RadioX® podcast network.
Key Takeaways You Can Use from This Episode
- Insecurity is not a fixed trait. It’s a position on a continuum. Everyone slides between secure and insecure depending on circumstances. The goal isn’t to eliminate insecurity but to recognize when you’ve drifted and know how to move back.
- Insecurity shows up in two very different ways: dominating and withdrawing. Some people mask doubt by taking over: overtalking, over-performing, and pushing. Others pull back into silence or avoidance. Both patterns cost you in client relationships and business development conversations.
- The same dynamics that undermine leaders undermine your practice. Fear of embarrassment, performing strength you don’t feel, and avoiding honest conversations show up in pricing discussions, client meetings, and moments where your value needs to be clearly stated.
- Humility is an outcome of security, not a substitute for confidence. You can’t manufacture humility by dialing back confidence. Security is what makes it safe to say you don’t know something, own a mistake, and still hold your ground.
- Adapting to who you’re talking to is a discipline, not a personality trait. Lee’s Platinum Rule, “Do unto others as they would like to be done unto,” requires reading your client or prospect quickly and adjusting. Some people want facts and brevity. Others need a deeper relationship before they’ll trust you. Getting that wrong costs you.
- Daily reflection compounds confidence over time. Lee critiques his own performance after meetings and conversations the same way fighter pilots debrief after missions: what went well, what didn’t, and what to do differently. That habit is available to anyone.
Lee Ellis, Colonel USAF (Ret), Leading with Honor®
Lee Ellis is Founder and President of Leading with Honor® and FreedomStar Media®. He is an award-winning author, leadership coach, and expert speaker in the areas of leadership, team building, and human performance. His past clients include Fortune 500 senior executives and C-level leaders in telecommunications, healthcare, the military, and other business sectors. Some of his media appearances include interviews on networks such as CNN, CBS This Morning, C-SPAN, ABC World News, and Fox News Channel, plus hundreds of engagements in various industry sectors throughout the world.
Early in his career, Lee served as an Air Force fighter pilot, flying fifty-three combat missions over North Vietnam. In 1967, he was shot down and held as a POW for more than five years in Hanoi and surrounding camps. For his wartime service, he was awarded two Silver Stars, the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star with Valor device, the Purple Heart, and the POW Medal. Lee resumed his Air Force career, serving in leadership roles with increasing responsibilities, including command of a flying squadron and leadership development organizations, before retiring as a colonel.
Lee has a BA in History and an MS in Counseling and Human Development. He is a graduate of the Armed Forces Staff College and the Air War College. He has authored or co-authored seven books on leadership and career development. His latest bestselling book is entitled Captured by Love: Inspiring True Romance Stories from Vietnam POWs. Two additional, award-winning books share leadership insights gained from his POW experience. Leading with Honor: Leadership Lessons from the Hanoi Hilton won book-of-the-year awards and was selected in 2013 for the USAF Chief of Staff Professional Reading List. His follow-on book, Engage with Honor: Building a Culture of Courageous Accountability, was selected as best in class for the “Leadership” category.
In 2014, Lee was inducted into the Georgia Military Veterans Hall of Fame, and in 2015, he was a DAR Medal of Honor recipient for a lifetime of patriotic service as a military officer and spokesman for leading with honor.
Lee and his wife, Mary, reside in the Atlanta, GA, area and have four grown children and six grandchildren.
Website | Lee on LinkedIn | Leading with Honor: LinkedIn | Instagram
John Ray, Host of The Price and Value Journey
John Ray is the host of The Price and Value Journey.
John owns Ray Business Advisors, a business advisory practice. John’s services include business coaching and advisory work, as well as advising solopreneurs and small professional services firms on their pricing. John is passionate about the power of pricing for business owners, as changing pricing is the fastest way to change the profitability of a business. His clients are professionals who are selling their expertise, such as attorneys, CPAs, accountants and bookkeepers, consultants, coaches, marketing professionals, and other professional services practitioners.
John is a podcast show host and the owner of North Fulton Business Radio, LLC, an affiliate of Business RadioX®. John and his team work with B2B professionals to create and conduct their podcast using The Generosity Mindset® Method: building and deepening relationships in a non-salesy way that translates into revenue for their business.
John is also the host of North Fulton Business Radio. With over 900 shows and having featured over 1,300 guests, North Fulton Business Radio is the longest-running podcast in the North Fulton area, covering business in its region like no one else.
John’s book, The Generosity Mindset: A Journey to Business Success by Raising Your Confidence, Value, and Prices
John Ray is the author of the five-star rated book The Generosity Mindset: A Journey to Business Success by Raising Your Confidence, Value, and Prices, praised by readers for its practical insights on raising confidence, value, and prices.
If you are a professional services provider, your goal is to do transformative work for clients you love working with and get paid commensurate with the value you deliver to them. While negative mindsets can inhibit your growth, adopting a different mindset, The Generosity Mindset®, can replace those self-limiting beliefs. The Generosity Mindset enables you to diagnose and communicate the value you provide to clients, which allows you to price your services more effectively in order to receive a portion of that value.
Whether you’re a consultant, coach, marketing or branding professional, business advisor, attorney, CPA, or work in virtually any other professional services discipline, your content and technical expertise are not proprietary. What’s unique, though, is your experience and how you synthesize and deliver your knowledge. What’s special is your demeanor or the way you deal with your best-fit clients. What’s invaluable is how you deliver outstanding value by guiding people through massive changes in their personal lives and in their businesses that bring them to a place they never thought possible.
Your combination of these elements is unique in your industry. There lies your value, but it’s not the value you see. It’s the value your best-fit customers see in you.
If pricing your value feels uncomfortable or unfamiliar to you, this book will teach you why putting a price on the value your clients perceive and identify serves both them and you, and you’ll learn the factors involved in getting your price right.
The book is available at all major physical and online book retailers worldwide. Follow this link for further details.
Thomas Barr is the Vice President of Business Development for 
