EntreLeadership - #400: How to Deal With Anxiety with Dr. John Delony

Episode Date: November 9, 2020

It’s been an unimaginable year: a pandemic, hurricanes, tornadoes, economic implosion, deaths, loss and lots of “new normals” to navigate. Especially for business owners. If you’ve felt anxious—or feel anxious just reading about the chaos—it just means you’re normal. Yep, you read that right. Dr. John Delony, mental health expert and Ramsey Personality, breaks down what anxiety really is, what it’s trying to tell us, and why we need to pay attention to it. In this episode, Dr. Delony gives leaders practical tips for taking care of their mental health so they can show up and lead people well—even in the midst of stress and uncertainty.   entreleadership.com/podcast Dr. John Delony's website The Dr. John Delony Show podcast The Dr. John Delony Show on YouTube Fear Gone Wild by Kayla Stoecklein Redefining Anxiety by Dr. John Delony Communication Field Guide Review this episode for a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card   Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, check this out. In a recent study of CEOs, it was found that the highest predictor of success is knowing your own strengths and weaknesses as a leader. In other words, self-awareness. You've got to be self-aware. But as business leaders, if we find ourselves on all the time and we don't have self-awareness and we're trying to push through stress and anxiety and we feel panicked all the time because there's so much going on, ultimately that kind of behavior leads to a crash. from the Ramsey network, this is the Entree Leadership Podcast, where we help business leaders grow themselves, their teams, and their profits. I'm your host, Daniel Tarty, and my guest today is Dr. John Deloney.

Dr. John Deloney is a leading voice on relationships, emotional wellness, and he's the newest Ramsey personality. I love this guy. He's from my hometown, Lubbock, Texas, what's not to love? Dr. Deloney and I got to sit down and talk about what we need to do to avoid a crash if we're leading a team. You can't afford that. And if we ignore the stress and the anxiety, we're just ignoring an alarm and we need to understand why those alarms are going off to begin with. Right this second, we've got pandemics and tornadoes and hurricanes and fires and economic implosions and magical money that they're just, this is where we're at.

They're literally just printing trillions of dollars and sending it. to our mailbox. We don't even have to, it's just coming in the mail now. Like we have crossed all lines of reality. And then on, on top of that, we've got the racism challenges. We've got the protests. We've got all of these discussions about systemic issues, all the stuff that's going on. And then we've got locking down. We've got education issues. We've got medical, nobody's trusting anybody anymore. Um, masks are real. No, they're not. Yes, they are. No, they're not. We got all of this. If you have anxiety, that means your body works, right? That means your brain works. All anxiety is, is an alarm system that says you can't, you're out of control, right? You can't

predict what's going to happen. So you have no control of your environment or the future. And it's an alarm that says you're disconnected. You don't have a tribe. You don't have a community with you. You don't have people that are in your corner. To use Dave Ramsey language, people are our emergency fund for life. And so again, we're starting to reverse engineer now. We've told ourselves for the last 100 years, the last 200 years, that life is an individual game to be won and lost and you raise yourself up or you collapse all on your own. And that's just a myth. It's just not true. And I don't want it to be true. It is. And so we have created a world that's all about me and my world and my family and my, my, my, me, me. And then we find ourselves in a

house on a device that gives me everything I want. It gives me only the news I want, only the ads I want. Now there's people on demand that will do whatever I want. I mean, we have just moved ourselves into a bubble, right? And man, our alarm systems are just ringing off the hook saying, this is not good. I want you to say more about this word anxiety. It's getting thrown around a lot. actually in society. What is it? What is it not? How do you define anxiety? So I define it. Yeah, all anxiety is as an alarm system that just says you're disconnected. And like I said, you're disconnected and you are in a situation where you're not safe. You can't control what's going on. An easy way to say it is anxiety is a fear of the future. Right. And we have turned it into a medical

disease. We've turned it into the problem. And I like to say it's not the problem. It is letting us know there are problems. And so it's a smoke alarm in your house. And think of your kitchen being on fire and think how ridiculous it would be if the kitchen's on fire, all of a sudden the alarm's going off and we get a ladder and duct tape pillows around it. Right. That's what we do. Or take the battery out. Take the battery out of that thing. It's making noise. Yeah, it'd be if the firemen showed up and we were like, stupid alarm won't quit ringing. And he's like, that's not the problem, lady. Your house is burning in, right? And so when we, our alarms go off, we need to stop and look what's wrong with environment, right? And we don't like to do that because because we're told to power through,

snap into a slim gym, right, lift more weights, grid our teeth more and just go keep driving through. Yeah. And so, and we've got medicinal things to turn those alarms off. We've got numbing behaviors, right? We've got addiction. We've got another girlfriend, another job, another client, another drink, all these things that help silence those alarms for a minute. And then we wake up the next day and they're even louder, right? But that's what anxiety is. Yeah. So I think it's pretty tempting for all of us, especially as leaders, to power through. It's very Western, it's very American. We even brag about how strong we are as leaders to make it happen, solve problems.

You could even say that's the job description of a leader. Right. Right? You got big problems. Figure it out. Yep. That's why you get paid the big bucks or the medium-sized bucks. Dozens a year.

What do you mean when you say change the environment? I like to look at my body and honor it. And like the way I said that is like I pictured myself in front of a mirror flexing. That's right. It is not an honorable sight when I do that, right? If you wake up and your heart rate's racing, you wake up and you just got cortisol surgeon through your body. Or you find yourself unable to sleep for the fifth night in a row. or you on week after week get that 2.30 or 3.30 a.m. you just pop open awake, right? That's your body telling you something. It's not that your body's broken. And so what I love to do when that happens to me is to look around and it can be as little as am I watching too much TV? When's the last time me and my wife look each other in the eyes and held hands? When's the last time I was out directly with my kids playing in the yard? When's the last time I reconnected with my church family? When was I?

human last. And usually, when's the last time I ate right? You know what I mean? And usually I can see a pattern of behavior that leans into my body saying, hey, we're not well. We're not safe. We're not safe. Or if I just sit there and doomscroll all day, you know, what's this politician said? What's that politician said? And I'm doom scrolling through a new device that's just going to give me stuff I want to know, right? And I already know what I think about it. So I'm not going to actually change my mind. And then, man, I'm sitting in a fire, right? I'm just dumping more gasoline all around me. Yeah, yeah.

I think it's tough to turn off that noise because, you know, I think about seasons where I felt tremendous anxiety and I didn't see it coming. You know, I thought everything was fine. I'm happy, go lucky, I'm a joyful person, and then boom, my body's doing this crazy stuff. And I didn't know what it was at the time. It turns out it was anxiety attacks and I had this whole season of going through depression and all this stuff. And I'm a high performer. I'm a leader.

I'm a take charge, make it happen, suck it up, Buttercup. And I didn't realize at the time that everything I was doing to try to plow through that was actually putting me further and further into this tailspin. Uh-huh. You know, and I'm Googling my symptoms and I'm on more devices trying to read more and figure out more and doing all the stuff. Because that's the modern solution. The modern solution is, you know what we need? More info. that's the problem how do I fix my wife how do I fix my husband's behavior how do I fix my kids my I had a

death in the family how do I feel better quick and four easy steps right and we just think it's an information problem and so you're seeing me if you're watching this on on the on YouTube it it's a frontal lobe issue we think we just need more data and my good friend he's a mentor mine Dr. Bonner has reminded me data has become our new addiction. It's an addiction. If I just got more data, if I could just get more stats, more analysis, man, you know. Yeah.

You know what I mean? You know. And we just continue to plow through. I also want to say this, there are seasons when leaders got to plow through. And we live in this either or, right? And it's both. It's both and. And that's what a leader's got to do is to know there are seasons.

I've got to just get the work done. and when I do that, I've got to consciously remember my body's, to quote, Van der Kolkot, my body's keeping the score. Right. It is taking a tally of the toll I'm putting on it. And I'm going to have to pay that back with rest. I'm going to have to pay that back with extra attention to my wife and my kids and and and, right? You know, I mean, if you think about many small business owners, they're always putting out fires, right?

And like you're saying, I agree, there's a season you have to push through, you have to put out the fires. But if you think of actual firefighters, if 24-7, they're in a house that's burning. down and they never go back to the station and fill up the truck with water and check the ladders and take a nap. And most firefighters aren't actually fighting fires more than about 10% of their job. Very rare. It's very rare. And so there's that space you have to create that's getting ready for the next fire. You know, and I think that's what you're saying is turning off the noise, creating an environment where your soul and your mind and emotions can kind of like exhale. Is that the That's right. And we are addicted, literally, chemically, to stress. And

to anxiety, to cortisol and adrenaline. It's an addiction. And we all know people, not ourselves, of course. We all know people that if they don't have chaos in their world, they will begin to create it. If they don't have emails coming in, they'll just check and check and check and check and check. We are addicted to that. And so it's finding ways to create new systems for our brains, for our bodies, for our relationships that, like you say, what's the other 90%, man? When you're not putting out fires, are you building resilience?

Are you resting? Are you putting in the wait room time? Are you cleaning the trucks? Are you making sure everything is running? So when it does happen, then you're ready to rock and roll. I have found that I only do that stuff well if I go upstream and I turn off the things that otherwise are just going to suck me on alerts on my phone. You know, to the point now, I don't get any alerts. Text, notifications.

I don't even have my email on my phone anymore. That was, whoa, that was weird, dude. I thought it, yeah, I'd try it for a day. And then I'd be right back. And it was this super weird, like, I want to go back, but this is kind of nice. Oh, and nobody died. That's amazing. Nobody died because I took my email off my phone.

And over time, because of my story and what I went through with all this anxiety, I've been learning how to, by degrees, like, turn things off and realize, okay, life goes on. And I can actually be more present and focus. But, you know, it's hard to do in our world today, like actually unsubscribe from things. Why do you think we have such a hard time saying I'm going to turn off. the alerts or delete the app from my phone or fill in the blank, right? But we're oversubscribed to all this stuff. It's a war that we can't win. And we have to understand that there are neuroscientists and digital marketers and computer programmers who all work together to get past our information,

get past our common sense, rational part of our brain, and to tap into the parts of our brain that respond to certain colors, certain dings, certain responses. And they've hacked, you know, thousands of years of biochemistry. And we literally get addicted. We get the same hit chemically when that phone buzzes saying that someone's contacted you, right, that we do when someone we love walks in the room. That's the reality. And so when we know that, we then have to say, this isn't real, that is. And this is now taken all negative stuff away. It just gives me what I want. This relationship, this real one, is going to be vulnerable, and it's going to be hard,

and there's going to be moments that she doesn't like me, or he is snappy, and that's going to be more of a challenge. So it's actually easier to deal with just this box, right? And we just have to know that, and then we've got to do the hard work of disconnected from it. Most of my friends are small business owners, obviously a lot of country leadership clients. That's who we're working with every day. and what they tell me is, and I've heard this so many times, but it's this, okay, in this season in our business, I just have to get back on my computer after dinner time and crank until 10 o'clock at night, like I have to, you know, because we've got this big deal tomorrow or we've got

this client that's about to fall apart or this vendor issue. And, you know, you go, okay, yeah, for a season, that maybe that's the case, but I've seen so many business owners just live there forever. It's almost like they don't feel like they can get off this treadmill. And I think we'd tell ourselves this lie that, well, one day I'll be caught up. No such thing. And when I catch up, then I'll get my life kind of more balanced and do the stuff that we're talking about. There's no such thing is caught up. That's when I, when I've worked with leaders, especially executive leaders, who have transitioned from low level management or entry level management, they used to go home with a clean desk. And the sooner a leader can understand that, a business owner

I can understand there's no such thing as a clean desk. And in fact, if there is a clean desk, you probably aren't enough into the future of your business. You've got to be at peace with that. There's no such thing as that. So if you say, okay, I'm never going to get caught up. And tonight, instead of opening up my email, I've got this habit now that every night I work on my business and I got meetings all day tomorrow and then I come home, see the kids real quick. And then as soon as I can, I jump right back into the fire of getting the stuff done. if I'm the lifeblood of my business, how do I get from that addiction to the stress and really

holding it all together and create this space, this margin to breathe without losing the business, without things falling apart? How do I go from here to this place that you're talking about? So I think you have to reframe it in this way. If you don't love your customers, if you don't love who you're trying to serve, don't be in business. So this whole conversation has to do with that. Right. You want to be in a place where you are honoring the people that you're doing business with. And this comes back from a, it's, let me just say this way. It's unethical to serve people when you're not well because you're not bringing your best. Your product's not going to be the best it can be. Your service isn't going to be the best it could be. And on the long term, it's like not putting air in the tires of that truck. It could be the best fire truck on planet Earth, the best trained people. If there's no air in those tires, the machine's not going to run. And so if you reframe it and say, I don't have time to and you reframe it with I don't have time not to.

I have to take care of me and my family first. And that means I'm going to take about a week and I'm going to scrub my time. What do I do from eight to five? Because in my life, I found literally hours at times when I am down a rabbit hole on YouTube. I start answering emails and then one of them sends a link and I check on the link and then I text. some buddies from home that I haven't seen in 10 years and now I'm looking for a funny meet and it just spirals out on me. Or I spend an extra 30 minutes with a customer in the lobby.

We're just talking. I'm just shooting it. And I tell myself, this is good customer relations. This is good business. And what I'm lying to myself about is that's 30 minutes I just took from my kids. That's 30 minutes I just took from my wife. And cumulatively, right, that's one, two, two, three, four hours a week. I took from my family.

That's several days over the course of a month. Death by a thousand cuts. There you go. And now I'm bleeding slowly. And so I am choosing to honor somebody I've never met with my time. And over time, that's going to end up giving them less of a product, less of a good business, less of a good relationship with me. Say more about the importance of community and having, like, actual friends that you can connect with and talk to. A lot of times, if you're like me, you hear about community group and church, you're like,

yeah, the church program, I'm not sure that's me. I've really had to learn that I need friends. You know, I need people that get me, that love me, and it's not contingent on I've got this title or this role at Ramsey that they just love me for me. Right. I looked up one day, I didn't have those. I was like, of course I got a lot of friends, and then I realized, oh, God, no, they, I'm a friend with benefits to them.

I'm the guy at Ramsey. Right. And I had to get some real friends. That's right. That love you in spite of being here. So here's a funny thing that happened. It was a good reminder. I took this new job and we are running 90 miles an hour here, right?

And whenever I take a new job, my wife and I will sit down and plan the next season. And we, every time I've transitioned jobs over the last 15 years, it's usually about six months. We know it's going to be a season of winter. And we just say, man, we're going to, I'm going to have to say yes to every coffee. I'm going to say yes to every afternoon evening event because I want to build relationships. relationships here. And then we're going to make that time up. We're going to deeply invest in family. So we're running and running and running. And then all of a sudden, COVID hits here. And it is Deloni. You're shoved in the deep end of the pool, brother. We're going to figure out on the fly. And then we kick off this little podcast that that night, we kick off the podcast. It goes out. And my boss texts me. Just wanted you to know, congratulations. This will launch number one in the morning. And I'm not a guy.

Dude, I don't take much seriously at all in the world. It's just life's too short. And I, my, my breath stopped for a second. I'm by myself. It's 10 of something at night. My family's asleep. And I was like, oh, gosh. And I thought, I'm not ready for this.

And I started my whole, what was the feeling? It was exposed. The world's about to find out that you don't know what you're talking about. I got two PhDs. I've been doing this for you. years and years. I know what I'm talking about, but my thought was you're going to be exposed. Or that person that you said something really ugly to one time, they're going to come out, right? Or that time you screwed it up, that's going to be found out, right? Or, or fill in the blank. And then you start making up stuff, right?

The next morning, I had just moved out into the woods, literally, so I don't have any cell signal. The next morning, when I get into cell range on the way to work, I got a text from a buddy that has been a friend of mine for 40 years. We grew up, we've been, for instance, we were zero together. And it was a text. from him and it just said, Deloney, your podcast sucks. That was it. And I, dude, I was like, and we're back, right? He doesn't care. He doesn't care if I'm a street sweeper.

If I am on, win an Oscar, none of that matters. It's like, oh, you're on the radio now? Boo. Hey, remember that time? And that's it, right? So you have to have people. You've got to have people. We are bioregulated with other people to be a nerd, right?

Our body chemistry depends on other people. It depends on human touch. It depends on vulnerability. It depends on honesty and integrity. Those are not mythological character and moral issues. They are, but they are chemical issues in the human body. We are designed to be in community of other people. And the more we try to plow through without it, man, the more we do harm to ourselves.

And we scorch other people, man. We burn other people around us. I've experienced that. I'm at a point, I guess at this point in my growth and, and as, I've developed this, I don't know what you call this, authentic, authentic connection, authenticity, like getting more comfortable with taking off my mask, basically. I'm able to do that with a lot of people now that I even work with. But I'd like to talk about if that's an overwhelming thing for you and you're listening to this and you're going, wait a second, the people I work with,

I didn't start there with my colleagues. I was able to find some friends who swam in, basically swam in a different fish tank, you know, and they didn't have all these biases that I have about Ramsey and everything. And once I connected there and I was like, oh, this is good for me. It made it more normal for me to do it here. And as a leader, my team started doing it more. And oh, my gosh, now everybody's more healthy. And I didn't do that.

I mean, I didn't have like a master plan to do that. I'm glad it was the experience. But what's the significance of having friends who aren't just tied into your mission? And especially as a leader, if everybody works for you, it's difficult to create that kind of connection that we're talking about sometimes. Yeah. In fact, I'm a huge fan of having friends outside of your job. that way you don't talk about the same things all the time, and your head's not in the same things all the time.

You're actually able to talk about different things, and your worldview expands. I'm a big believer in having friends that don't think like you do, that have different opinions than you do. I've gotten into two political spats with two old buddies today, and they're not real spats. They're just mockery spats, right? Because they're clearly wrong and idiotic.

But it's important to have folks that are not in your ecosystem, and here's why. I've had private, gut-wrenching vulnerable conversations end up in a performance review before. That's something I've personally experienced. And so what that taught me was don't be vulnerable at work. And that's not a healthy place to be. And in one season, it was wise, right? And so you've got to have people that you can fully say, hey, I'm scared for my kids.

Or I'm really nervous how this plays out. I'm terrified of X and Y. And you've got to have people you can do that way. Otherwise, you carry that around with you. It just weighs on you like a sack of bricks. What are some of the signs that you can be looking at that might be the early warning signs of you're headed into a tailspin? You know, I didn't see mine coming. And this is 10 years ago.

Yet in hindsight, I can see. Saw it a mile away. I saw it a mile away. Had I known what to look for, what should we be paying attention to that's a mile away, right? or a year before the crash that we can go, hey, we don't have to go off the cliff here. There's a little guardrail that we can bump into and come back on the road.

I love that question. Here's a couple things off top of my head. Number one, sleeping, intimacy, going to the bathroom. Those are basic biologic functions. If you are taking medication for one of those three things, talk to your doctor about stress and environment also. This isn't a medical show.

I don't go down some of those roads, but I can't tell you how many people have been like, oh, I haven't slept in years. And so I'm taking X, Y, and Z. I took sleep meds for years, Daniel. And no one ever questioned, hey, why aren't you sleeping, man? That's a core basic biological function

is to your body to repair itself. Why is your body so on alert that you can't sleep a full night? Why are you sleeping next to somebody that you love and your intimacy life is shot? something there's a gulf there that's not that's not the way we are biologically designed what's going on there right so begin to ask questions about our physiology a second thing is um if you can't get out of your chair if it hurts to move to the front door to go get in your truck that constant living in pain

all the time my knees hurt my back hurt my shoulders hurt honor yourself and the people who love you enough to get that work done right to take care of yourself or that means you're going to have to lose some weight you're going to go a surgery you've been putting off for years you're going to go have to deal with the physical therapist. Those are the kind of pains. Again, the body keeps the score. And some people stress and broken relationships will end up in anxious, anxiety. They'll end up in depression.

And some will end up in knee pain and back pain. And then the other big one, man, is when you find yourself having divided the world up into us and thems. That's a thing our brain does to protect us. When our amygdala gets fired off, right? When it detects threat, it immediately says, who's with me and who's against me. And there's a cool feature that gets people in trouble,

gets all of us in trouble, where your brain will switch from accuracy. It will trade accuracy for expediency, close enough, right? That's how a young man might get shot holding a cell phone. It looked close enough, right? And our brain is saying, I'm going to trade accuracy for safety. I'm going home, right?

And when you feel yourself saying things like, if they would jest or it's those idiots who keep fill in the blank and usually that's political but it can also be local business it can be your employees if your employees are constantly doing things that are hurting the culture of your company that could be a leadership issue right it could be a clarity issue it could be a mission issue or could be you have a bunch of knuckleheads working right who knows but you've got to stop and ask those questions when you feel your world as us as and thems me versus the world that's your brain telling you you're not safe. You're talking about these physiological symptoms, sleeping, intimacy, using the restroom, pain in your body.

When I started having all this anxiety, depression, crazy stuff going on, I didn't understand it. And my doctor said, are you stressed? I said, no, I don't think I'm stressed. He said, you might be a little stressed. Here's an Ambien, here's Alexa Pro. And I took it for a while and it has all these crazy side effects, and it's not getting better. And I go back and talk to the doctor. And I'm going, it's not working. What do we do? He never talked to me about stress. He said, well, I've got some more pills you could take. And that's when I was like, whoa, time out. I'm not going down this path. And I had to go find people that weren't just going to hand me another pill. Who were the right people to talk to that don't just get you into this, you know, okay, you're going to stay in a tailspin, but we're going to make you feel a little

bit more numb while you're in it. There you go. I feel like that's, I mean, I don't, I don't like how the medical community approaches this sometimes, because it's not necessarily designed to get you out. It's designed to medicate. Right. I look at this the same way the Rams, ecosystem tells folks to work with a smart bester pro or a one of the entree coaches, which is I have just continued to work to find doctors and I've got two great. I've got a, a call her a sorcerer. I've got a holistic doctor and I've got a traditional medical doctor. And they both are teachers with me. They teach me why are we doing what we're doing. Here's what this is going to benefit. Here's the side effects of this. They don't get upset when I send them an article. And I'll literally email

them an article and say, what do you think about this? And they don't get upset about that. They consider themselves teachers, not automatrons and not kings and I'm a minion, right? And so I think it's being real intention about finding a doctor that is willing to go on a journey with you and letting them know up front, I want medication to be a last resort for me. And they may say, this is that last resort. Great. Or if you're really struggling with anxiety, there was a season why I needed anxiety meds to turn the alarms down so that I could even hear a counselor so that I could even sit down and talk to my wife, right? The alarms were so loud by the time I actually started dealing with them, I needed something to help shut them down. Some don't need that. I did. And then finding a great

relationship counselor, finding a professional who will sit there and help you learn some of these skills how to be in relationship, how to feel, is that, is that a feeling I have, right? How to check your own feelings for whether they're being true or they're being dishonest because feelings will lie to you right and so it's those are skills we got to learn and we don't like to think of feelings as skills we don't like to think of relationships as skills and they are i want you to say more about the the counseling aspect and why that matters so much i went to the hospital thinking i was having a heart attack i go in the er my body's feeling real pain it wasn't like this imaginary I'm having a panic attack and it's all in my head

and I just need to think happy thoughts. I mean, there was pain in my chest and my muscles are twitching and there's like crazy stuff my body's doing and they check me out and they run all these tests and they go, hey, you're fine, you should probably talk to a counselor. And I thought that is so confusing.

How does talking to a counselor about feelings get this pain in my chest to go away? Like, that's fine, we can talk. But I didn't understand the connection between the mind and the body. And how is that a helpful resource? So what I would tell you is there is no connection between the mind and body because they're not two different things. They're the same thing.

And they work and they work. It's like saying which part of my leg is the knee. And I mean, I guess we can extrapolate it apart, I guess, right? But that's your leg. And your knee works with your ankle and your ankle works with your knee. Your knee works with your hip. And if one of those is off over time, right, it's going to cause problems. And so our body holds so much.

What we say in counseling is it's leakage. You can deal with trauma. You can deal with broken relationships or they will deal with you. Eventually your body will say you're not hearing these alarms. We've been telling you for a year. We're not sleeping. I'm waking you up every night. You are 35 and robust and your testosterone is scoring so low.

It doesn't even register. We're telling you and you're not getting our signals. So we're just shutting you down, right? We're taking the car off the highway, right? And that's just your, the body disconnecting itself, right? And good for it, right? It's just getting your attention. What a counselor will do is it will teach you how to be vulnerable, how to be whole with somebody, how to have a relationship.

And we could get in all the psychiatry and all the, all the biology at the end of the day. We store those things in our body. We store old traumas. We store old family histories. We store that stuff in our body. And what a conversation with a therapist does is it releases it. It lets it out. And it also teaches us how to have conversation, how to listen, how to look somebody in the eye.

And so a good counselor is also a great teacher. They are someone who reflects with you. And they talk to you and they say, you've been telling yourself for 15 years that this is all on you. You know it's not, right? You've been telling yourself for 15 years that your wife only loves you because she doesn't. You know that, right? And it just reintroduces new thoughts. Because when you feel you're alone, then your body cascades the chemicals through your body.

Did you know that there's some remarkable research? The actual biochemical poison of being lonely. Really? When your body feels lonely is more damaging to your physiology than smoking. There's like a loneliness chemical? It will kill you from the inside out. The stress response in your body saying you find your tribe, find your tribe, find your tribe. Because think about it 200 years ago, if you're out in the plains of West Texas and you wake up

and you're alone, you will die. Yeah. And everything about your body would say, find your people, find your people, find your people. And we can be alone in a crowded room. Yeah. And there are people listening to this podcast right now with headphones in,

in the same room as their family. And they are 10 feet apart from their family and 2,000 miles away from their family. Right. In my case, you know, so I did get on Lexa Pro for a little bit in Ambien, but I knew I wanted that to be a 10,000.

temporary thing. I start talking to a counselor. They're doing all this stuff like feelings and tell me about when you were a kid. I'm going, I don't get it, you know, but I'm doing it because I'm desperate. I mean, I'm dying, you know, I'm in this tailspin. Can I stop you there? Yeah. You were literally dying and I don't want to undersell that. Literally your body was taking itself. It was slowly taking itself apart. It was shutting me down. That's right. It was like, we're not going to do this. And it was so debilitating. It was basically all I could do is like get to work, kind of make it through the day. I was in sales at the time. I tried to make some sales calls. And then somewhere around two or three o'clock, I hit this wall. I kind of fake it through till time to go home.

I get home. I collapse on the couch. Or I start Googling these crazy symptoms that I'm having. Or I try to put on some worship music and just veg out. And I've got this new baby. And my wife's like, hey, can I run to the store? And I'm going, I don't think I can watch the baby. I'm a new dad. I'm in my 20s. I should be healthy and fine and competent. And I'm just looking at are like, I don't trust myself to watch this kid. I called a friend to get my gun. I said, you got to come get my gun. He comes over. I'm like in tears. I'm going out of, who am I? Right. Start talking to a counselor. A few months goes by and I'm still having these symptoms. This is what I want people to hear. You don't go to a counselor on a Friday afternoon and then

you jump back in next Monday and you're kind of back to the races like used to be. For me, it was a two-year process. Me too. Or before I felt like myself again, you know? And even after that, more time before I kind of felt healthy and alive and joyful. And not everybody's going to be like that, but it really can't be a journey that takes a lot of time. That's exactly right. If you find yourself on Ambien, if you find yourself on these, they call them hypnotics. They are pharmaceutical baseball bats to your head.

I heard a doctor who I love describe them as, he said, you can sleep for eight hours, or I can hit you in the head with a baseball bat and you'll be unconscious for eight hours. Those are two vastly different biomechanical processes in your brain. One is restorative and one is lights out, right? And so, yeah, if you're, what I found, and I took those sleep hypnotics for years, what I found is after five or six years of not sleeping and I was asleep, I was unconscious, right? I was medicated, but I wasn't sleeping. And that's when, man, every alarm I had was, whoa. That's when, man, every alarm I had was, whoa. That's, a core basic function, right, that you got to have. You got to have those. And I love what you just said that. Kind of like people will leave entree leadership and they're like, I've got it. And they got

80 pages of notes and their brain is just like overwhelmed. They got 50 ideas. And they go Monday and they walk in Monday at 830. Like, we're doing it. And it's like, Billy quit. And you're like, oh, God. And it just goes, right? Counseling is that way. I love that you said that. If you want to turn your business around, sometimes it's six months, sometimes it's a year, sometimes it's two years. You want to get out of debt. Sometimes you've got to sit down and pile all your debts up and go, ooh, we're in for a journey. If you have a lifetime of childhood trauma of parents who were ill or they weren't well or dysfunction and and and, it's going to take a season. A friend of mine gave me this image that it helped it make sense a lot, and it actually gave me the tenacity to

keep pushing through and stay with this work. And he said, you know, the old scale, like the justice scales where you've got the plates on either side and then kind of the bar up the middle and they're on the chains, imagine you've got like this 20 pound weight on this side. And each time you turn off your device or each time you go to counseling or each time you drink water instead of soda or each time you, you know, fill in the blank with all this stuff we've been talking about. It's like taking this little one ounce fishing weight and putting a plink over here. It's like plink and the scale doesn't budge. Right.

But then you do it again the next day and it's plink and the scale doesn't budge and you do it over and over and over and over. and you're offsetting this lifetime of like you've conditioned your body and your emotions and everything to respond this way. And you've got these old stories that are limiting beliefs that your body's still living out of. It's your blueprint. But plink, blink, blink, blink. And then one day there's this just little, oh, it moved a little. Yep. And then it moved a little.

And then eventually they offset and it starts to go, boom. And now this side of it's like in control at this point. And one day you turn around and that 20 pound weight isn't even there. That's right. And I have, through the curse and blessing of Google, I guess, I found old emails that I sent 20 years ago. And my first thought is, who is that guy? Right? I'm not even that, I don't even know that guy.

Or I saw old pictures. I was going through some old pictures last night for a Ramsey event. And I don't even know that guy, right? That 20-pound weight doesn't exist. It just, you realize that it was a 20-pound mist. It was a 20-pound weight of mythology, a fantasy. And it's just, whoosh, it's gone, right? You're talking about one of my favorite things, and that's the power of transformation.

Roman says, don't conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by renewing your mind. Say more about transformation. What is it that causes that mind renewal that we can really make practical, especially as leaders who are going, we're busy, we've got all this stuff going on, we've got family, we're trying to keep it all together. How do we renew our minds and not get stuck in this pattern of the world? Well, you change your verb, and so I think it's important to hammer on that. That verse says renewing. It's a constant process that's never over. And there's a great theologian.

He was a songwriter. His name's Rich Mullins, and he once said, the worst part about being a Christian is that it's every single day. And something along the lines of, you can never memorize all the Old Testament books of Abraham, and then you're good. You've got to get up the next day. and I've taken that into fitness.

I can never have such a killer workout on Monday that I'm squared up for the month of October. The key is I've got to get back in the gym the next day. And the next day, and same with diet. I can never not eat a pie on Monday and be like, sweet, I've done it. Now I can dive in, right? That's it. The thing about our physical fitness

and our mental fitness and transformation is that it's a process. The biggest hurdle I have found folks walking through life journeys with people is getting to understand this doesn't end. And checking out, choosing to step out of the conversation, choosing to not be engaged every day, is a choice to die younger.

It is a choice to be less of a parent, less of a father. It is a choice to be less of your full self. And so you have two options, really. It's binary. They call them diseases of despair. We are literally killing ourselves slowly in this country, through addiction, through organ disease issues,

which is heart disease and liver disease, we're just killing ourselves through stress. We're killing ourselves through disconnection. And so the idea of transforming is a daily practice. And in some seasons, I'm about to enter into the winter season. When I know, I just begin to turn to mush. And so November 1 begins, Deloney gets out his note cards again

and starts writing out what his day is going to look like. And it starts with daily check-ins. My wife knows I need to make sure I hold my hope. husband's hand because touch is a big deal for me and I'm going to look him in the eye and I'm going to ask him how his day went. And I also know that for my wife, I'm going to give her some dedicated time for herself that's going to be no kids, no volumes, no nothing. But it's a process, right? And it's seasonal and it moves. But it's about getting in and being the master of your own heart and mind. Well, you're talking about a really important thing and that's developing routines and habits.

And intentionality. Yes. And being intentional. Because it's, if you leave this mind renewal up to, again, when I'm all caught up today, I'll work on renewing my mind. I've developed some really almost obsessive people make fun of me. My wife is like, okay, I get it. Morning routines, evening routines that are just non-negotiable. And every time I do negotiate, I'm like, ugh, I knew I shouldn't have. But creating that space in the morning to do the check-ins, to check in with yourself, to journal, to pray, to listen to music. I jump on a trampoline and I say affirmations. I do all this cheesy stuff. That's why I'm not kids and wife.

I did the same thing. That's so weird. I've got a morning trampoline too. Do you? It's great for your adrenal system. It gets you going. And I take a cold shower. Yep.

So there's all this stuff. I mean, through the years I've learned all these biohacks. I mean, we could geek out on that for a long time. I don't want leaders to hear like, oh, I have to do that to feel like I could. What you do have to do, though, is you have to have a routine. And you have to do this daily. And you have to figure out what works for you that's going to set you up for success each day. and then you're going to fail and then you're going to try it again,

and then you're going to fail and you're going to try it again. But it's that every day, that little fishing weight on the side of the scale, what are your routines, aside from checking in with your wife and the things that, you know, kind of get you ready to come into the day so that you don't get hijacked by lunchtime. I love it. So best I can, and again, I'm being graceful with myself, but one to two hours after I wake up is when we turn any sort of social media nonsense on.

I want my thoughts to be of my own making or my own choosing in the morning. I go outside in the dark and I put my feet in the bear grass and I sit there this morning. I had scripture. Other days I've got poetry. Other days I've got just a book I'm working through. But it's intentional quiet time. And then I do have a rather non-negotiable exercise program because that clears my head up. I'm past like I'd love to look 18 again.

I'm not going to. And so, but that's part of it. But I'm really, it clears my body, my head and mind up. A daily gratitude journal is super, super important. Daily checking in with my wife every single day of the week, every single day of the year, I ask her or she asks me, what does your picture of today look like? I want an actual firm photograph of today, not things like, well, I'm going to need some time after work. Well, time after work for me may mean I'm going to walk in the door and I'm off. I'm off duty till midnight.

I'm going to watch office reruns. I'm vegine out. And time alone for her might mean, okay, after John helps with dinner. and he helps with the kids' beds, and then he's going to go for a walk for 10 minutes. So I want a snapshot, what is today going to look like? And then I'm really graceful with myself. I'm really intentional about calling friends.

I've got to be on the phone or in connection with somebody. And I've got to be hyper-intentional about sleep. Hyper-hyper-intentional about sleep. That's a big deal. I've learned to do a lot of the stuff you're talking about, and I tried to do it for a while, and then it wouldn't work, and I kept fumbling. And I had to do an exercise.

somebody said you need to sit down and list out like what are the enemies to you having a successful morning routine and i realize like every morning my phone i'm turning off the alarm on my phone and then i just open my email why right because it's right there's right there you know and then you open that email and you start reading then you see another email and you like you said click a link and your whole morning of intentionality has been reactive to this point now the kids are like hey can we have breakfast and everybody's stressed and i don't want to wear that to school you have to wear that to school and you know And then you run out the door and kiss your wife and you boom, go. And then you're in the car in traffic and everybody's angry in traffic.

And then you show up in your first meeting and you're highly caffeinated because you jam coffee all morning. Oh, I forgot to eat breakfast. And now you're like you're screwed at this point. That was me. And the podcast you listened to on the way or ones specifically designed to get you nice and fired up. Right. I mean, we're just in it, right? And I had to go, okay, if I'm going to have this morning routine, I can't.

And you said it. Like, you don't turn on social media for the first hour or two. I cannot. So I have a not-to-do list that empowers my ability to do these things that I'm, you know, supposed to do that are really good for me and emails on it, right? Don't check the calendar. Don't check text. Don't check.

And to really get into that habit, like, I had to put the phone in the other room for a couple of months and just use an old-fashioned alarm clock. Yep. Like, that's weird. I've got an awesome old-fashioned. Yeah, that's right. What are some of the common enemies that keep us from doing these things that are really good for our soul, but they're subtle and we don't really realize that it's happening. Distraction is a big one.

When I get tired, my nutrition goes to trash. My nutrition goes to trash. My ability to focus. My kindness to my family goes to trash. It just is a cycle for me. I've dialed in pretty close. If I eat a pizza, I'm going to be a crappy dad the next day. It just is.

I'm not going to sleep well. Cause an effect. I'm going to wake up late. Yeah. And then there's some things, they're a little bitty, like you say, the little woo-woo things. things like changing your physical state and get sitting in an ice bath in the morning just to just to show myself I can instead of racing out to the gym I started slowly over years accumulating gym equipment off Craigslist and now I've got my own gym in my garage and that's 30 minutes there and 30 minutes back that's an hour I've gotten my day now instead of spending 10 minutes being so angry with the kids in the morning why are you yelling let's go all right what if I spent two minutes sitting outside their door praying for him before before I started my day, right? Or if the first thing when they walk out,

the first thing I do is I say, hey, come here, and we just start the day with a 30-second hug. I've got a four-and-a-half-year-old daughter when she sees me, she's like, no hugs, dad, no hugs. But my son now, he's just like a rote zombie. He'll come straight to me, and we will just start the day that way.

And it just has a lovening effect on everything. But it's being highly intentional. And for me, touch is a big thing. Yeah. Touch is a huge, huge thing for me. what do you do going home to kind of reset, to leave work at work, to be ready to be full-time, dad, husband, like, you know, our real job? Right, right.

That's tough transition for me because I'm still kind of churning from the day or I might take a call. Like I'm running out and somebody's like, hey, can you, no, I got to go, but call me. I'll talk to you in the car on the way home. And then I'm still in the car on my driveway and my girls are coming up like, Daddy, can you play? I'm like, not now. I'm like, who am I? Like, I'm coming home to the people I love.

but I found I have to have some intentionality at that point too. Yeah. And this is one I struggle with. And for me, now that I've got a longer commute, I used to walk home from work. And, I mean, it was tough because I would take that last meeting home with me. I'd come in. Everyone could feel my body energy, you know, the dad energy. And it got to where my wife would be like, hi.

Everybody, you know, like, we're all safe, right? And it was just this energy I'd bring into the house. Now I've got a longer commute, and so this is going to be cheesy. I sing real loud. I don't listen to podcasts on the way home anymore. It just had a negative effect on me. Because it's opening loops? It's just spinning.

It's taking you back to work things. I'm back to thinking things. I have a rule that I don't read science books in the evening. And I'm a nerd. I read fiction in the evening. I don't think a lot of people struggle with that. Science books? But for some people, that is, don't watch the news in the evening.

Do not watch the news in the evening. don't check social media in the evening don't get into those things that are going to send you down your loop trails right and everybody's got different loop trails but I make sure I call a friend or a family member on the way home just so I can have a human conversation

that's not about work and then when I get home sometimes I'll sit in the driveway for a few minutes I'll check what I need to check one more time and then when I get out of that car they're off and man that's hard they're off occasionally I drove up yesterday my son was outside I saw him

as I was driving in. He saw me, sprinted inside, came out with two baseball gloves. I've got makeup on because I've been on TV and whatever. I'm in my work clothes. And, dude, I took my shoes off, rolled my pants up, and we played catch barefoot in the yard until my old man arm couldn't work anymore. And it was like every routine I've got out the window because that little boy just saw me. He's been thinking about playing catch all day.

My daughter came out last night dressed like Muana, which is some, I'm convinced, communist Pixar movie of some sort. I don't know what it is, but she came out dressed like Muana, and I told my wife, she looked exactly, I remember that face, and it was on my wife when she turned the corner in her wedding dress, and I looked at her down the aisle, and my four-and-a-half-year-old daughter looked at me, and with the face, it just said, tell me I'm beautiful. And it was like, everything stops, right? And it's me being open to those moments and not being such a slave to my routine, which is critical, but looking for, the, the routine drives human engagement. How about that? I love that you're able to do that with your kids. I think one of the most

devastating phrases a child hears is not right now. And it's filled with our best intentions to eventually whatever they want us to play with them. But what they hear is, whatever you're doing is more important than me. Right. And of course, there are sometimes that's, hey, welcome to life, kid. You're not the priority right now. But if we're not careful, that becomes the norm. Right. Because whatever stupid thing we're looking at on our phone, or God forbid, my work clothes have to be, go, we've got to go change my work clothes before I can say yes to baseball. And he knows that as soon as you go in that closet, now you got on your phone and now it could be two hours or never even happens that night. That's right. So we're going to stay out there. Instead of, not right now, not yet, I think a much better phrase is, come here real quick. Here's what the plan's going to be. And sometimes that plan is, I'm not going to be able to play catch with you tonight. You're on your own. I want you to go have adventures. And he'll go, come on, dad. we know i'm not going to be able to do it tonight and you're right he needs to learn that boundary my job isn't to entertain him but my job also isn't to leave him hanging because what kids do when they feel that dot dot dot when they feel that ellipsis they back fill that separation with this is my fault

they back fill this separation with i've got to do something to get their attention that is more important than whatever's on that little screen and some kids try to be perfect and some kids try to be little nuclear weapons in the house, and some kids just disappear and they never come back. And so, yeah, if you find yourself saying, not yet, not right now, either give your kid the grace of no with a period at the end of it,

I'm not playing catch with you tonight. Then that's not going to happen tonight. Or say, I have to go do this. Want you to walk with me? Let's talk about your day. I'm going to change my clothes, and we're going to go. You were talking to me about for leaders,

especially, you know, when we're not well, everybody around us that we lead us not well. if we're starting to get well, you know, we're digging in on this stuff. And then we realize, okay, we've got, we've got team members. How are they doing? How do we begin these conversations or how do we set up a culture? Like, what can we do as leaders who have a lot of agency around this is how we're going to do things here that ensures that, yeah, we're still a high performance organization. We get stuff done. We have a mission. And we make sure that our people are okay.

I think so much of that starts with clarity, Daniel. So much of that is with the clarity and intentionality. If we know where we are all going, if we have a plan that we're going to get to, that's an anchor point. And then I find myself being well. And what we're going to, what people find when they get well is they begin to look at other people and you begin to sense when people are doing well and when they're not, right? And after you have got clarity of where everybody's headed, here's the direction of this organization. And then I've got intentionality about my routines and my day. Then I'm going to start feeling this scary feeling called empathy. I'm going to start recognizing, hey, she's not doing good.

And that's when most people feel like, well, I'm not a counselor. I'm not trained. I'm not dot, dot, dot. And most people, most of the time, need someone to walk up to him and say, I see you, you don't look like you're having a good day. I want you to know that we care about you. If I can do anything to help, let me know. There's something about just being seen that is so empowering.

Yeah. It's powerful. You said there's this scary feeling called empathy. I thought, like, that didn't scare me. And I thought, no, yeah, totally scared me. Why did we struggle with empathy? Because, I mean, we don't have our crap together, personally. First, we don't have our, I don't know what I'm doing, right?

The second is we think that everything's been so professionalized. Like, hey, her marriage is struggling. Well, my marriage has struggled, too. And I don't know what to say. And it gives us a pass out out of the conversation. We just know what to do, man. And then all the old demons come back, right? what about you, man?

Who are you to be talking about? And so I tell fucks off and you know what people need more than anything as presence. Yeah. They just need you to come sit there. They need to look in the eye and say, this sucks, I'm sorry.

That's as technical as 95% of these conversations need to be. Yeah, say more about this because as leaders, we're so prone to fixing things. Oh, dude. We've got to fix the problem. And if I lean in and I find out,

oh, you've got a problem because I'm trying to be empathetic, I've got this impulse to go, let me fix you real quick. If your listeners get nothing else out of this, people are not problems to fix, they're not machines to fix, and people are not puzzles to solve. They're not. They're not machines and they're not puzzles. They're just people to be with. So if you don't know what to do, if you're listening to this and you own a tractor supply store and you wear overalls every day and you are a grease monkey and you can fix stuff and you ain't ever had eight words in a sentence together, and you're, Admin walks in and she's crying, don't think, I can't fix that.

Think, I'm going to walk up here and tell her, I see you, and it looks like you're hurting. I want you to know that we love you here and we care about you. If I can help, let me know. And that gift of presence is, it's everything, Daniel. It's everything. I had to learn to separate the, you know, if somebody's struggling, they have a problem. I ask them how they're feeling and they go not good. you know, I care about them, but also my thoughts go to, okay, well, it's kind of been showing up

in your work, and I should probably talk to you about that. I learned the hard way. The time to talk to them about their productivity is not right after they got vulnerable and exposed themselves. That's right. That's right. You know, you can still talk about that, but batch it to another conversation when it's not as sensitive and raw. And if you'll just be with them, you earn the rapport and the credibility to kindly have this discussion later in a way where they go, oh, thanks, you're helping me kind of navigate through me getting to a better spot in my performance. I learned from one of my original mentors, Jean-Will Thompson, if you've done leadership right, the day you have to terminate somebody, they hug you on the way out the door, right? That's somebody who knows through this entire

time they loved me. They invested in me. They cared about me. They cared about my kids. And then they had to have a hard conversation that says this isn't working out professionally. You're so right, man. It's those moments we choose to have with our spouses, right? It's, I haven't slept in four days, and I haven't been helping around the house, and she says this, and I say this, and she says this, and I'm like, well, you've never loved me. That's not the time for that conversation, right? Let's do that when we go out for breakfast one day, and then that's the time to say, hey, I don't think we're communicating well, right? Same with your employees. You're exactly right. Be with people. And hear me say, if your employees are struggling, if they're going through hard, hard seasons, that's a context, not an excuse.

You still got to get the work done. You've got to be accountable to the job. You've got to be accountable to the work. And there may become seasons where your employees are going through, your team members are going through stuff that's so heavy, they are unable to get the work done over four months, six months, two months, one month. And they can't work there anymore. I love them. Hopefully you are in a financial position that you can send them away with dignity, right? And let them gracefully enter another. space. That doesn't mean that you just are going to fund their sadness. Yeah, you don't sanction it forever. But there's also some compassion and humanity that needs to come back to the workplace. I'm reading a book right now that just came out. It's amazing. It's called Fear Gone Wild. And it's written by a lady who is the spouse of a pastor who a couple years ago took his own life. and it's his whole story of them dealing with depression and mental illness. And, you know, she just makes this really compelling case for leaning into these relationships and checking in with people. And once you figure out that maybe they're not okay, don't do what we're all tempted to do, which is freak out and go, oh, I don't know, you're going to have to, like, sweep that under the rug.

And I think we're so ill-equipped to talk about these things. if we do talk with people and we find out they're not okay, what are the key signs of, okay, they're having a rough week versus, wow, we really need to get them some resources. We need to figure out, like, they could be a flight risk here, or maybe you're going to hurt themselves or do something really, you know, devastating. What's our role as leaders to figure that out and to mind for that? And what's our role to get them connected? How do we help?

How do we not be the counselor, but also appropriately kind of get them to a place where if they need help, they can kind of, you know, be on a path towards healing and hope? So I think that starts, A before the crisis, a good leader knows his people or her people. And you check in with them, you ask them, how's your kids? You ask them, how'd that ballgame go? If you have to put it in your calendar, know your people. And then when those things happen, which they will, when one of your great team members, mom's moms get sick when one of your great team members dad passes away suddenly whatever the thing is then you can lean into that conversation take the time that you need i'll see you next week i don't

want to see your butt in here anymore um i want you to go take some time your marriage is a mess i'm telling you right now it's wednesday you will not come back in this building till tuesday you're gonna get this taken care of i can't fix that you will go see somebody right it's being intentional about that um one of the cornerstones of working with somebody who's not to and well. And when I say not doing well in my world, that is someone's going to hurt themselves, someone's going to hurt other people, is overcoming the fear of asking the question, are you going to hurt yourself? I ask that question with alarming regularity. And it's not a shameful question. It's just a fact question. We live in the illusion that if I

ask somebody, hey, are you going to kill yourself that we're somehow going to plant that idea in their head, which is a total myth. That's not true. Nobody ever is doing so bad and somebody asks him, hey, are you going to hurt yourself? And they go, no, I never thought of that. I am now. Thanks for... Appreciate that, man. I was just going to drink a lot today. And, man, so that's not how that works. So have the courage to say things like, how's your marriage? Have the courage to say, I heard from Billy that you sent some direct messages to him last night telling that you didn't want to be here anymore in the world. I need to know, are you going to hurt yourself?

ask that question. Make them look you in the eye and say, no, I'm not. Or make you look at the eye and say, I'm not doing well. And that's when you know you're over your head. That's when you know I'm not equipped and 95% of people aren't equipped for that. And we're going to call somebody. And if I don't mess around with this one, Daniel, I will call 911 on my family members. I've just been around too many suicides. I've been around too many folks who end up in the ER. You've seen it. Too many hard conversations. I'm going to call on the Calvary 100% of the time. People who are. around that person after they're gone, I imagine, tend to think back and say, I wish I could have. What are the things that they're saying? You know, had I called, is it, I wish I called 911, or I wish I had asked them if they're going to hurt themselves. Or what are these things that we would hear from these people who would say, if you could go back in time, this is what you would do? Yeah, I think, I think we are an obsessively cause and effect culture, and we are a pathologically obsessed blame culture.

Whose fault is this? And when somebody takes their own life, it's not a rational act. It's not an act done with all the puzzle pieces. It's a solution. It's not the problem. People are hurting so bad. They just want it to stop. And so suicide's an answer there.

Those of us who are left are, yeah, we are storymaking, meaning making machines, us people, and we are starting to grab every data point we can to construct a why, right? But there are plenty of data points that say, if there hadn't have been a bridge there, they may not have jumped, right? If there hadn't have been a gun in that door, they may not have done something. So there is an illusion that if they're going to do it, they're just going to do it. That's not true. So that's why I'm big on intervention. I will look for you in the aisle, I'll come to your house.

I'll make it real uncomfortable that you're going to tell me what's happening or not. And then once you tell me, I've been doing this for 20 years, Daniel, I still call people. I'm not going to be the person to take you from, I'll intervene, and then I'm going to get you to help of someone who. who's got more skills than I do. A lot of leaders are lonely, like you said before, alone in the middle of a crowd. And I think it takes a lot of courage the first time, especially if you've got 20 years of wearing that mask. I know for me, the first time I took it off and I told the people I lead, hey, I'm not doing okay. And I've been performing and I've been trying to get you to impress me and say things that I didn't really believe or do things to be funny that I didn't really think were the right thing to do.

and you know what, I'm not doing that anymore. And I felt so afraid that it wasn't even that I felt like I would be rejected. It was that I didn't trust myself to follow through on that. Yep. Because I have all these habits. And I thought, if I tell them, if I do this line in the sand moment and I'm going, I'm pulling this mask off, then I'm a fraud if I put that back on again because tomorrow I'm too scared to actually keep it off. You know, I wrestled with, can I really tell them the truth?

how do we start to build relationships, go away from being alone, yet know that we're going to trip, man. You know, like, we should tell people that. We should invite them into this, right? What's that dialogue sound like? It starts with understanding, the dialogue starts with looking in the mirror

and saying, I'm lonely. And that is not a sentence, that is not a phrase in our lexicon these days. And I think loneliness is the chief, I think it is a far more damaging, devastating, traumatic issue than COVID will ever be. Loneliness is killing us, killing us. Individuals, business owners who are trying to scrape by, trying to deal with their local municipalities, trying to deal with up and down tax codes and weird clients and whiny team members.

Man, we're lonely, dude. We're just lonely. And so it starts with looking in the mirror and saying, I'm lonely. And then it starts with vulnerability. And it starts with just saying this is who I am. The baggage of trying to be somebody you're not all the time will cripple you and kill you. And getting to a point where if this is who I have to be to have this job, I got to find another job, man. I just have to, right?

Because eventually my family's not going to like me. My team is going to be ineffectual. And I'm going to die young. I mean, it's that simple. And we've just punted that and punted that and punted that. So it's, but the vulnerability part comes, has to come with a hefty dose of grace. Here's what happened two days ago in this very office. I swear conversationally worse than any sailor you can ever imagine.

When I get mad, I don't cuss when I get mad. I never, I just get silent. I get real still. But dude, I don't know what's, I swear, I, my roommate from college came to visit me this week. and he, last week, and he was like, you have the foulest mouth. And he's like, everyone talks about you're the kindest guy in the world, your radio show, you're all kind. Why do you talk like that?

And I was like, I don't know. Is it that bad? He goes, dude. And so, as I did, I went into my office, to the office suite in there, and I was like, I'm putting a cuss jar here. This word's 10 bucks. This one's 20 bucks. This one's.

It wasn't. It wasn't 17 minutes. not only this, that I made a big announcement. I've got to change this. This is not good. I've got young kids now. Now my son's starting to realize, wait, what? He asked me the other day on the way to work, like on me on the way to ball game.

Hey, dad, what's this word mean? And I was like, well, that's probably, that's probably on me, right? And I said something, 17 months later, I not only said a bad word, like an offensive word, I responded to myself with, so I'll just say, I said, oh, do. Do-doo. To which I responded, oh, fill in the blank, I'm not cussing. I cussed about just having cussed. After making a big global announcement to the team, I've got to change my ways. So you lost 80 bucks right there. $1.70 in one. But here's the thing. I've got to be graceful with myself. You got to just say, I'm going to change patterns. I'm going to change habits. I'm going to change ways I've talked for 40 years. Literally, I've been swearing since I was a little tiny child, and we thought that was cool. I'm going to change patterns. I'm going to change habits. I'm going to change ways. I'm going to change ways. I'm going to change ways. I'm going to change habits. I'm going to change ways. I'm going to change habits. I'm going to do I'm to change that, and that means I'm going to stumble and fall, and stumble and fall. I'm going to try to lose weight, and there's going to be days I wake up, and I'm going to eat burn through an entire box of Little Debbie, and then I'm going to do the only rational thing, and I'm going to

eat donuts to shove down the shame that I just experienced from eating the little Debbie's. I've been there. And then after I get off the diabetic coma, I'm going to shake it off. I'm going to start anew, and then I'm going to start a new. We have this idea. Faith communities have set resurrection as a destination, as a singular event. I like resurrections happen daily. They happen minute by minute. They happen seasonally. They're always happening. It's about getting back up and getting back up and getting back up and getting back up and allowing yourself to be picked back up. Well, I believe, and I think this is what you're saying, that if you really understand the resurrection, you understand what you've been saying prior to this, which is this idea of

grace. And we're not earning something to get God to love us more, to somehow do enough work for him. But this idea of grace in our journeys, grace in our loneliness, grace in our failed attempts to lead and not doing it well, grace in talking to the team and saying, I'm going to be this way, and then the next day I don't actually do it. And I think leaders need to hear that, man. And they're not fooling anybody.

Yeah. Dude, if you are not well, everyone around you knows it. No one's going to tell you, because you're probably a bully, you're probably a leader, you're the boss. No one's going to come tell you. They're going to tell you the things that you want to hear, or they're going to ignore you,

or they're going to just get the job done and keep their head down. like happy little sheep. But if you're not well, everyone around, you can feel it. Well, what you're saying is they already know, I know in my own journey, the hardest person to start telling the truth to was myself. Yeah. Yeah.

I didn't think that. I thought I'm going to have to tell everybody. And I'm working to tell myself the truth. I'm like, oh, this is really hard, really hard. I'm working through it. And then by the time I tell everybody else, they're like, yeah, we're good. They're high-fying. We've created a bunch of systems to deal with your unwellness, right?

And here's how you can really hurt people. Besides the hurting, you ask inhuman things of people. You ask them, you develop cultures where the person who's the busiest wins, the person who's the first in and stays later than everybody is the winner, nonsense like that, old school nonsense. Beyond that, when you're with people and you're always tense, when you're always angry, when you're always sleep deprived and energetic and you're propped up with nicotine and caffeine and nicotine and a steady dose of talk radio

that's just got you cortisol and adrenaline up. Plenty of alcohol. That's right. And that's right. That takes the edge off of it. The people around you think it's them. And you are communicating to people around you. Y'all are the reason this is all the way this is.

And then you send a million of people out on their own solution-finding missions that involve chemicals and dysfunction and disconnection. And if you are well, people will come to you like a magnet, man. They will all want to sit by you.

They're all going to say, hey, you look great today. On those moments when you're low, they're going to lean into you, not away from you. And just know, if you choose to not be well, not only are you choosing

a life of disconnection and early death, you are actively hurting the people around you. It's just a choice. man. I remember the first time I really experienced that last, I guess it was last year. I was given one of our staff meeting core value talks about fear. It was the first time I really told my story like out loud, big to like the whole company. It's a thousand people, you know, and I'm a board

member and I'm supposed to have my act together. And I just felt like God said, like, you've just got to tell the story. You've got to own like the whole ugly dealing with anxiety, dealing with the, I mean, I'm talking about this podcast now because I've just gotten really comfortable sharing it. But I had all this shame about like, that's something I went through and I conquered it, but I still don't like talking about it, you know. And I stood on a stage and I basically told everybody, I deal with this. I don't have it together all the time. I still don't. I still struggle with fear. And you know what? It's okay because here's what the truth is and here's what the Bible says about fear. And it was, you know, just kind of this talk of sharing my story and talking about our core value that says fear

not. And I kind of set it up where I was like, hey, I know we have this core value, but I don't do that one very well because I fear a lot, not fear or not. And here's what I figured out about what's going on here. And here's my story. And dude, the number of people, like dozens of people afterwards knocking on my door, emailing me, hey, can we talk about that? Hey, I'm dealing with the anxiety thing. Hey, I'm dealing with, I'm so stressed out, man. Hey, I'm having these panic attacks. I didn't really know that's what those were. But when a person in power makes themselves powerless, like you're saying, that magnet effect, people flock to that and they go, oh my gosh, if it can have, happen to you, then maybe I'm not crazy for dealing with it. Can you help me? And you're set up to be in the

position of being a guide. And where's real power? Right. If you are a Christian and you understand that Jesus narrative, there was power. And then there was a broke penniless carpenter who just went and sat by people at the well. And he broke social convention. He just went and talked to people you weren't supposed to talk to and said, hey, I see you. Here's some water, right? Little stuff. When leaders think power is flexing, and leaders think power is always having the right answer and always looking flawless, Botoxed emotionally and physically, get up on a stage in front of a

thousand people and say, hey, I don't sleep sometimes because I'm freaked out about what's happening. And then you're going to see what real power looks like because when you finally are vulnerable, you're going to have a line out your door of people who want to be with you, and you want to get on that train with you and want to go solve the world's issues with you in a ways that you never could have imagined. We're in a world right now, Daniel, if our current president, any political leader,

anybody running for office right now, if they would get up on a stage and say, hey, I just want everybody, no, I'm sorry. I probably shouldn't have said that. I probably shouldn't have done that.

Dude, it would be a, the era would just be like, oh, thank you, that's the best, right? That's where we're at.

And it's just this prop up, prop up, prop up, prop up, prop up. Saying I'm sorry is not weakness, man. That is true strength. Saying I'm struggling and here's the things I'm doing to make it right is power, true strength, right? Because no one can take it away from you. You walked up and you pulled that bullet out of your gun. So much energy we spend all day trying to make it look like we've got it together and we don't, man. Let's say more about this tendency we have as leaders to build up.

an empire, a business with good intentions, but still an empire that makes us feel powerful. And our purpose, whether it's conscious or unconscious, our purpose is actually to try to compensate for something that we should have dealt with in our past or dealt with about our parents. Or we meet so many business owners that go, yeah, we've got a mission, we've got a purpose. But if you pull back the hood and you go, your purpose is really, you need to have the sense of certainty and control and power, and you're trying to make enough money to get your dad's approval, or you're trying to make enough money to offset whatever you didn't have growing up that you said, I'm never going to live this way, or you're trying to prove something to your high school teacher

that said you're a failure or, or, or, right. And we talk about this idea of purpose and why you need a purpose in business. And starting out, a lot of businesses start there. But there's this transcendent purpose, this journey we can go on where we go, hey, as soon as I get healthy, I don't have to do this to build myself an empire. I can do it to serve. I can use this business as a vehicle, and the purpose becomes more virtuous. It becomes like this eternal thing.

And it becomes sustainable. Say more about that. There is no amount of money you can earn to get your dad to like you if he doesn't like you, because it's his problem, not yours. Your mom was mean to you, not because you were broken, because she's messed up. She had issues. She had challenges she was working through.

And so there is nothing you can chase down that's going to fix that. And my promise is, if you do earn enough money and she calls you and says, I'm proud of you, it won't feel like you think it will. It's not. I've sat with those people. It won't. There's not enough. You can't achieve your way to wellness. You can't achieve your way to a good night's sleep.

You can earn enough money that you're not in poverty anymore. You can earn enough money where you feel safe. That's true. but there comes a point of diminishing returns, right? That's when you, a more sustainable thing is, I'm just going to be a person who helps people. I love this idea of missions versus, I've got a true mission, a true life purpose,

and then I'm going to have different assignments through my life. And that assignment may be a high school, like for me, the assignment may be a high school teacher, the assignment may be a senior college administrator. it may be, I don't even know what this job is on tune right now, a guy who wears makeup and talks on the radio. You're killing it, whatever it is. Just killing it.

Except for your buddy you grew up with, apparently he thinks you suck. Again, he would go to the Oscar party and be like, you're an idiot. But the assignments changed. The mission stays the same, right? We're going to get messy and money, and we're going to help you. You know what I found, though? Early on, before I was well, I had some. dang good mission statements.

Yeah, dude. I checked the box. I read the book about personal mission. I filled out a life plan. I had it in my wallet. I'd whip it out to make sure people knew that I was on track. And then I realized I wasn't well. Yeah.

And I did the work. And years later, I looked at that thing. I was like, what is that? It's like you saying in the emails, when you look back, who sent that email? I'm like, who wrote that mission statement? It is so blah. That's written to try to impress people.

That's not what's in my heart. And so what if, what if, and I'm just spitball in here, what if we stopped writing mission statements and we just ask people to bring their last three months bank statements and their last three months calendars, and then I'll tell you what your mission is, right? You bring me a letter from your wife written to you about the state of your marriage. I'll tell you what your mission is. Let me talk to your kids for a couple hours about you as a dad. I'll find out what your mission is. Oh, now we're getting naked. Right? That's what your mission is. And so stop thinking of missions as a statement.

Missions are things that you are. They're not things that you write down. And you've got to have goals. You've got to have places that you're headed, especially when you're on different assignments, right? But missions are much, much bigger than something you put in your... I would say, man, I haven't thought about this until just now. If you can put your mission on a three by five card in your wallet,

it's probably not big enough. It's not something that's going to sustain you. So let's say we do this proverbial, exercise where you pull out the bank accounts and the calendars. And I know just personally hearing that and probably a lot of leaders are going, oh, I feel a little shame. I'm not sure I want to do that. And you got to pull out your phone and it's got to have your time spent. All your text threads, time spent in apps, an audit of your life. Your actual behavior. What if we go, okay, I don't like it. Today, how can I start changing that? What are the steps I can take? Give me a path to go. If I want to give up on that, that crappy mission, And I want to move towards something that's really meaningful. So here's where I think every leadership symposium, every leadership seminar gets it wrong. Because this is the moment in the retreat where they pull all of your data out and you finally get raw and real with who you are. And then the next step is to spend 30 minutes and they strum a guitar behind you and they tell you write out who you want to be.

And that's where we screw it up, Daniel. Because what we got to do in that moment is get with somebody else. So if I actually want to change my life tomorrow, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go sit with my wife, who is one of five people in the world, I've given permission to speak into my life. I've got five people. My parents aren't on that list. My in-laws aren't in that list. They are five specific people, and they know who they are, that I've said, you have permission to hurt me. You've got permission to call and say, stop doing what you're doing.

That's happened. I posted some on Instagram out that was hilarious. I had a buddy call, and he was like, take that down. And I took it down first, and then I said, why, that was hilarious. And he goes, dude, I will laugh forever on that, but that cast you in a light that you don't want to be cast in. And I had given him permission, so I was out. I quit. Instead of getting in a closet or getting in a room or getting in a serious kumbaya moment and writing out what you want it to be, get with somebody and say, the words out loud, I don't like who I have been.

I don't want to continue living in the way that I'm continuing living. I don't like what my bank statement and my calendar and my apps, time spent on my computers, say about me. I want to begin to live differently and I'm inviting you to help me. Now you've got a partner. Now you've got an emergency fund and now you can go make it. You can go move forward. Most people would never be able to have that level of vulnerability, which is why you have a counselor, a professional. That's what you're going to do with that person.

That's what you're going to do with a pastor you trust. That's what you can do with a 30-year-old friend who's going to text you and be like, hey, your podcast sucks. That's what you can tell that guy. I don't like how I'm living. I need some help. If you've got a wife or a spouse that you trust, a husband who's in the thick of it with you, that's where you start.

And then you guys co-create a plan to get you. So start with people that know you. You can't do this by yourself. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. You know, John, this year 2020, it's been one of the hardest years for so many leaders on so many levels. I mean, like, we've been talking about people that are lonely, scared, the market's been disrupted.

People have had to make really tough decisions, lay off people on their team that they didn't want to, but because of funding and their business getting shut down or scaled back. And most business owners that I'm talking to, they're still pushing forward. I mean, it's just so inspiring to see them pick themselves up and move forward. But they're exhausted. They're tired. As we wrap up today, what would you say to encourage their hearts about going forward? find some people you can sit down and say I'm exhausted I'm tired I'm scared find a person that you can sit with

preferably a friend a professional if you have to that you can say those things out loud with write a letter to yourself with three months to go here's who I've done take inventory one of our good friends here took themselves away for a few days a leader here at this company took themselves away for a day and just inventory here's how many things have happened sometimes just putting it down we go

oh, this is sucked. You know, it's death by a thousand cuts. I had to fire that guy and we had to furlough these three and I had to cut full-time hours to hear and I know she's got a kid in school and that's been weighing on me and my kids are at home and write that stuff down. Just look at it and just let it sink in for a second. Feel your feelings and then go be with somebody. Go be with somebody.

And if you've got to make a plan, move forward, make a plan to move forward. But often, if you're a leader and you are making the tough calls and you have made it this far through 2020, you've got what it takes. You do. You've got a gift. You're a, you are a leader for a reason. You have launched into something, whether you meant to or not, and you're there. Don't give up. Don't quit. Don't say it's hard. I'm out. Now, man, sit down and be honest with yourself about what you've been through. Acknowledge that those alarms are going off for a reason. It has sucked. It is scary. We don't know what tomorrow's going to be like, right? Honor it, acknowledge it. and then get with some people that you can be with.

That's really encouraging. Dr. John Deloney, Ramsey Personality, America's foremost voice, I believe, on being well and taking care of yourself as a leader. Personal leadership is one of the six drivers of a peak performing business. We teach that. Many times we teach it, we think,

oh, be a better leader, read all the books, learn how to be a people want to follow me kind of leader. And what we're saying here is it starts with taking care of yourself, paying attention to these things. And what number is that? number one. That's right. Yeah, that's your first job. So you got to book out and you got a podcast. Tell people how they can learn more about those things because they got to be following you if they want to really do this stuff really well. I think you're one of the best things that they can stay

plugged into second to the Entree Leadership podcast. Then you listen to your podcast. A distant second, but yes, yes. They can find me at John Deloney and there's a YouTube channel, John Deloney YouTube's and the book is a quick read on anxiety. It's reframing anxiety. Good. It is a, it's looking at it more positively. It tells you the myths of it, that it's not strictly genetic. It's not strictly medical. It's a much bigger issue than that. And it's more importantly, it's something that you can heal from. And then the Dr. John Deloney Show, the podcast, it's a blast. We're taking live calls. And we are helping people who are in the thick of life and helping them find the next crooked wobbly step. Love it. By the time this is

out, that book is out and available on Dave Ramsey.com. So check that out and anywhere the books are sold. Dr. John, thanks for being here today. Thanks, brother. You too. West Texas for life. 806. Thanks, man. All right, man.

Well, I don't know where you're at right now. Maybe you're going, hey, I'm not dealing with stress and anxiety. I'm fine. Good. But pay attention to why you're fine. You're probably in balance right now, so don't get out of balance. But if you're out of balance, if you're spiraling, if you're exhausted, the good news is, with the few tweaks, you can get right back on track.

But either way, leaders, hear me, our job is to take care of ourselves so that we can take care of the ones around us. And if you're not taking care of yourself because you're so macho and you're working so hard and you're serving your team so much and you're showing up for your customers over and over and over and over, if your car runs out of gas and you're stalled out on the highway, guess what? You can't take care of your customers or your team or your family. You have to lead yourself first to be effective at leading other people. You guys know this. When you get on an airplane and they say, hey, if you're traveling with other people that need help, small children, If the oxygen mask comes down, as counterintuitive as it feels, as selfish as it might feel,

you put your oxygen mask on first. Why? So that you can help others around you. Take care of yourself. Top off your tank. Do this stuff. It really matters. Hey, by now you know, every great entree leadership company works really hard on communication. This gets thrown around a lot. Everybody knows communication matters, but oftentimes we don't do anything about it because there's just so much going on. And our Entree Leadership coaching team sees this all the time with companies we work with, and that's why they put together an incredible free resource for you, the Entree Leadership Communication Field Guide. This guide is designed to help you get started in creating a culture of communication. It includes how to handle difficult conversations. I hate those, but you know what? There's a way to do them that makes them a lot easier

and how to make them most out of meetings so that they're productive and effective and fun and engaging. Check it out, start improving your communication today and get your team on board with this stuff with this free guide. Just click on the link in the show notes. Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode

of the Entree Leadership Podcast. Hey, do you know somebody that would enjoy this episode? We'd love it if you would send them a link. Help us get the word out. More business owners hear about this stuff because you're the champion of this podcast, so thank you for doing that. Also, you can follow us on social media at Entree Leadership,

and you can follow me on Instagram at Daniel Tarty. We'd love to hang out with you there. For a chance to win a $25 Amazon gift card, you can review this episode by clicking the link in the show notes. This episode was produced by Tim Hull. It was edited and mixed by Will Rudder. I'm your host, Daniel Tarty, and on behalf of the entire Entree Leadership team,

thank you for listening. Until next time, keep learning and keep leading. If you enjoy this podcast, you should check out other great podcasts from the Ramsey Network, like The Dr. John Deloney Show. Mental health challenges and hurting relationships happen to everyone, but they don't have to define you. I'm Dr. John Deloney, and I help people navigate through the messy things in their lives on the Dr. John Deloney show. I'll walk alongside you as you face parenting, marriage, and other relationship challenges, and I'll walk alongside you as you try to connect with people as you face depression, overcome anxiety, learn how to change your life.

Listen, I want you to be well. Listen to the Dr. John Deloney show wherever you listen to podcasts.