EntreLeadership - How to Manage the Weight of Entrepreneurship with Dr. John Delony

Episode Date: October 2, 2023

Today we’ll hear about: •       How to combat stress as a business leader •       How to help an employee that’s struggling with self-harm •       The 6 daily choices every healthy business leader must make Links mentioned in this episode: •       The EntreLeadership Podcast •       EntreLeadership Elite •       Dr. John Delony’s New Book: Building a Non-Anxious Life •       Have a question for The EntreLeadership Podcast? Leave a voicemail at 844.944.1070 or submit your question for a chance to be on the show with Dave Ramsey: https://www.entreleadership.com/ask Start growing in business and leadership with the EntreLeadership Newsletter. Sign up to receive tactical tools, advice and resources in your inbox every week: https://bit.ly/3IRWnsL   Support our sponsors: •       NetSuite •       BELAY •       Payority •       Trainual Learn more about EntreLeadership Events: •       EntreLeadership Summit •       EntreLeadership Master Series Learn more about EntreLeadership Coaching: •       Elite •       Advisory Groups •       Executive Coaching •       Workshops Listen to all the Ramsey Network podcasts anytime, anywhere in our Ramsey Network app: https://apple.co/3eN8jNq Learn more about your ad choices: https://www.megaphone.fm/adchoices Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy: https://www.ramseysolutions.com/company/policies/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the headquarters of Ramsey Solution, it's the Entree Leadership Podcast, where I take calls from leaders like you about what it takes to win at any stage of business and leadership. I'm Dave Ramsey, your host, with over 30 years of experience leading in the trenches right alongside you. We'd love to have you as a caller on this show. You just call, leave a message. We'll get back to you. The number is 844-944-1070, or you can leave the question and the idea you've got

and you want to talk about here at entreleadership.com slash ask. Today we're doing something a little different because tomorrow, Dr. John Deloney's brand new book, Building a Non-Anxious Life comes out. So I've got our own Ramsey personality, Dr. John Deloney, one of the fan favorites, if you've ever been to an entree leadership master series or Entree Leadership Summit, where you've heard him speak. He's always very popular with our business owners of two people or 250 people, 500 people, whatever. Small business owners love Dr. John Deloney.

And so we wanted to have him on today in honor of that book coming out tomorrow, but also because he's got a lot to say to businesses and to small business people. And because small business people turns out are people. Who knew? Who knew? There you go. So this whole thing of anxiety, there's something about the entrepreneurial experience. I always remember the famous John Johnson, the editor of Ebony Magazine. He said, the entrepreneur is the only person who can go from sheer terror to sheer exhilaration and back every 24 hours.

Every 24 hours. I mean, it's like, you know, you are riding the tiger with a rattlesnake in your teeth. I mean, there's just something going on all the time. And so it's almost as if anxiety is built into the idea of running a small business. Yeah, I think if you back out, when I was more of a snobby academic nerd, I like to hold anxiety over and just, you know, push my glasses up my nose and say it's just a, it's a clinical word that doesn't apply here. I think in our current culture, it's jumped the shark. It's become the word we use instead of worry, instead of stress, instead of, of burnout instead of all these other words, we just say we're anxious.

Well, it's like instead of stuck-up jerk, we call someone a narcissist. Right, exactly. And they're not technically a narcissist. No, they're just a jerk, man. Just a stuck-up jerk. If you've ever been in a psych ward and been around a narcissist, you wouldn't call anybody that. Exactly.

So I think if you're with somebody who's stressed or, yeah, that's part of entrepreneurship, man, is you are stepping out into the ocean with the hope that you can swim long enough to get on a little boat so you can build a bigger boat and you can build a bigger boat or whatever you're trying to do there. But there's an inherent anxiousness because you're jumping off the ship. Yeah, I mean, you're riding a roller coaster. It's thrilling. But anxiety does apply.

I mean, I'm anxious. The fear of the roller coaster is anxiety, is it not? So, yeah, all anxiety is, and I've said this a million times, I'll keep saying it. All anxiety is, it's an alarm that your body sounds when things aren't safe. Yeah. And if you might not get paid tomorrow, you shouldn't sleep tonight. Your body would be failing you if it let you sleep. If your business is underwater and you don't know how your family is going to keep a roof over their head,

your body would be failing you if it let you just go right to bed. So the problem is not anxiety. The problem is you're not getting paid tomorrow. That's exactly right. Which causes anxiety and anxiety is telling you you're screwed. You need to do something about this. That's right. So anxiety is almost never the problem.

It's a great indicator. Most of us go through our lives duct taping over our gas gauge on our dashboard. And we just don't want to look at the gas. And when the car starts rattling, we hope we provide a gas station instead of paying close attention. Letting it just tell us, hey, it's a good gauge for where we happen to be right now. Dr. John Deloney, the brand new book comes out tomorrow, building a non-anxious life. If you order it this instant today, you get the pre-sale deal, which includes $75 or the free bonus items. You can get that at ramsysolutions.com in the store.

Be sure and check it out. That's the way to get the bargain on this. This is very applicable to small business. So I wanted to have him on the Entry Leadership podcast and talk about this stuff a little bit. So one form, I guess, I don't know if it's a subset or not of anxiety is overwhelmed. And, you know, this sense of everything's coming at me, chaos. And a lot of times when somebody's in the treadmill stage of business or even in the next stage up, There's a lot coming at you, and there's a lot of disorganization, not a lot of good systems.

You're at it by yourself or virtually by yourself, and so you are overwhelmed. And with that comes this tremendous stress. So talk about the chaos and moving away from overwhelmed and how that lowers chaos, or how that lowers anxiety. I want to use a marriage analogy, if that's okay. Sure. So there's a great marriage therapist. She's an author, and she gave us analogy.

She was talking about a couple who one of them had cheated on the other one. And she said, you could never have gone back on September 12th and swept up, after the Twin Towers fell, and swept up all of the glass and steel and wood and rebuilt the towers with those materials. Those buildings fell. There's two choices. You walk away and let nature take it back over, or you get some professionals in there. You'll excavate the whole thing. You get some architects and you do some great R&D. and you build something new.

The challenge is we always want to go back to the way things were, the way things, what used to be. I don't want to. And so when you're on a treadmill and you're onto the next stage, and all of a sudden you've got 10 employees instead of five, or you've got two employees instead of one, or you've got 10 customers and you're still the sole person there, you have to understand that the business you were running is over.

Those towers have fallen, that part is over. The object now is not to crest it like it, like it was, it was to build something new. And the faster you can transition to that, the more pleasant that adventure is. So in my own house, my wife and I don't cheat on each other or anything like that, but we recognize this year, we have never been the parents of an eighth grader and a second grader at the same time. So our marriage will be new. What we do, the rhythms of this year will be different. So we're going to put some things into place. As a business owner on this treadmill, you get to, you're running and running and you get more

business here and then more business here. You need to count over. here, the quicker you can stop and say, okay, I got to build something new in this season, now you get back in the driver's seat of your own life instead of getting pushed to the backseat by all the stuff coming at you. Yeah, the stuff coming at you, I don't know if this is saying the same thing a different way, but you've almost got to get above it so you can organize it because the way you eat an elephant is a bite at a time, it is not trying to eat the whole thing. Once, you can't boil the ocean here.

You can't. And so you've got to get the ducks in a row, line them up, and then the stress goes down when there's like a system or there's a, okay, we're going to prioritize this. Okay, we've got six things to do. I'm overwhelmed. Well, you're no longer overwhelmed when they're one through six when they're prioritized. When you force rank them. If I don't do anything else today, I'm going to do this, number one. If I get that done, I'll do anything else today.

What am I going to do? Number two. That's simple time management. But simple time management like that when you've got six things coming at you and you're stressed, you're overwhelmed type of stress, that type of anxiety. If you force rank them, you're organizing it and developing a plan to manage the activities so they don't manage you. And the most common frustration I hear, and you've heard infinitely more frustrations than I have, but the ones I hear the most from small business owners is when they're in that gap between I need to hire two more people and either my business hasn't big enough. to hire two more people, so I'm having to do it all, or I can't find those two people. And so anxiety is not taking away the stressor all the time.

It's what you said, sometimes sitting down. So I've got a book, I've been on the road, I'm going to continue to be on the road. My wife and I sat down in July and said, okay, when August 15th hits, it's going to be chaos until October 15th, October 30th, until November. We know it's coming, and we can begin to set up these things in play. it's when we think we're supposed to do everything and this thing on top of it. And so sometimes it's not even getting to that new thing.

You're going to have to work some 20-hour days as an entrepreneur. Probably a lot of them. It's when everybody in your world knows it. And when you go, okay, I'm going to give myself some grace over here, some piece over here. And when you know there's an end to it. It has to have a finish line.

We can do this until Christmas. When it's rat in the wheel in perpetuation, you get, quote, unquote, burned out. The most overused phrase on the planet. And let me just say, here's what burned out means. It's when your body says, I've given you enough signals, I'm out.

I quit. That's your body saying I'm done. Because I've told you, I've tried to get you with anxiety. I've tried to get you with loneliness. I've tried to get you with depression and shut the whole thing down. I've tried to get your attention. You won't hear me.

So before we give a stroke, I'm out. And that's when you can't get out of bed in the morning. Or it feels like you got an elephant's in on your chest. And when I was a kid, they called that like a nervous breakdown. I don't think that's technically a phrase probably. It's your body saying I'm out.

Yeah, right. And it's funny when you're a kid, we all knew a guy who had a nervous breakdown. And in the last 30 years... He's talked about in Hush, Tom. But in the last 30 years, that's the world we've created for all of us. There was that one guy that just couldn't quit working and was always just bananas and hated it and never was around his family and going and going and going. That's all of us now.

He was frenetic. That's all of us now. We've created that world for ourselves. Dr. John Deloney, the brand new book, is building a non-anxious life. We're going to take some calls from those of you out there that want to be part of this discussion. The phone number is 844-9-4-4-10-6. and he's one of our fan-fave speakers at Entree Leadership Summit and Entree Leadership Master Series. We'll be right back on the Entree Leadership Podcast.

Well, not only is Dr. John's book coming out tomorrow, but the Entree Leadership Master Series is coming up in just a couple of weeks here in November. In-Rome tickets, in-room tickets are completely gone, so just get your FOMO ready. You're not coming. But you can join us on the live stream, and you've heard me talk about the stages of business on the podcast. You've heard me talk about the six drivers of business on the podcast. If you're a business owner trying to level up to the next stage, you need the tactical advice to get there in the Master Series live stream in November will help you.

The conference will be a deep dive into the skills you need to grow your business through every stage. This is not theory. These are lessons taken directly from what we've learned here at Ramsey, moving this thing from a treadmill operator at a cart table in my living room all the way through the five stages, all the way to Legacy Builder stage now. in the last 30 years. It doesn't have to take you 30 years. I did it the hard way. We'll show you how. The live stream is happening November 6 through 9, and you can watch from the comfort of your own

home or office. As a matter of fact, that's all you can do. So go to Entreeleadership.com slash master series and get your ticket before it's too late. We're talking with Dr. John Deloney today. The brand new book coming out tomorrow is building a non-anxious life. Aaron is with us in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Hey, Aaron, your question for Dr. John. Hi there. Thanks for taking my call on her to talk to both of you. You too. Question for you guys. It's kind of twofold. I'll take Dr. John first with his insight and then Dave you can speak to maybe the business side. I manage a pharmacy. I've got a staff of about 23 people. One of my technicians, I inadvertently kind of stumbled into this, but they have been struggling with self-harm and the form of cutting.

And upon further kind of discussions with them have found out they struggle with suicide. thoughts. My question... And they're handling pharmaceuticals? Yes. Sounds dangerous. Kind of, yes. But that's part of the question. How do I protect the delicate nature of the individual struggle while also prioritizing running the day-to-day function of the pharmacy and the rest of my staff who are not privy to it yet? Oh, man. Well, one, thanks for being a boss that cares. and wanting to think through this, both your team and the impact this has on your team and the individual here. So I think in a global sense, we'll get into some ADA issues. And so you need to check with your local or state ADA codes.

I don't think you can quote unquote, you couldn't remove somebody for having a mental health issue. What you can remove somebody for is behavior. Okay. So if you ever see medication missing and things like that, you haven't said that at all. The bigger question I always want to bring up with somebody is cutting is sometimes that's super benign. It's not a big deal, right? Sometimes it's a precursor to something significant. And if they're suicidal, then sometimes it's a ramp up. It's a practice attempt, right? So a couple of things I always would bring up when I'm sitting with somebody who's struggling with cutting is one, making sure we've got a game plan internally. If you ever need,

if you ever feeling like hurting yourself here in the office, you will commit to me that you'll come let me know, and I'll pull you off the floor, and we'll get you the care that you need. We'll get you where you need to go. The second thing would be, I want you to honor both the clients here, the people come to get their medication

and honor your teammates by making sure you're bandaged up and you've got long sleeves on. I can't have you bleeding out here in the open. Does that make sense? Absolutely. And up until now, if I hadn't stumbled upon,

on it, I don't know that I would have necessarily. I have had a couple discussions with the individual, just to kind of get a little bit more context for myself to understand to what degree the struggle is for them. And this has been kind of intermittent, I guess, over time, they've had periods where they really struggle with it, and then they kind of are able to, you know, get on top of it for a while. They have been medicated. They currently are not. They're not. They're don't feel like the medications have been helping them. They do talk to their therapist and a psychiatrist, one every week and one, like every couple months. So I think that's the cornerstone here. You should not get involved in their psychiatric world. Yep. And I have, I have, I've drawn that

line with them already. I just, good, good, good. The only thing that I've done with them that I've wanted to, I want to hopefully maintain is they could have very easily taken the, um, the way out of not being forthright with anything. They have felt comfortable telling me these things, which I do find to be a positive. And right for now, where we've kind of left it is they are, I mean,

a simple thumbs up, thumbs down is kind of our language for how they're feeling for the day. And they've been comfortable to do that. I think that's super wise. And what I would do is begin to draw this boundary. When they come in and say, Hey, last week, I was struggling with, I want to stop and just put your hand up literally and say,

hold on, hold on, hold on. A, I'm your boss and I care about you and I want you to be well and I'm your leader here. And this conversation is going to be best for your counselor. And you begin to honor this person by giving them their space because what I'm afraid of is they're going to tell you something that you have to respond to and it's going to cause chaos. And I start in the back of my mind. my mind, yes. Yes. So make sure that you encourage this person to go talk to their mental health professional. You are not a mental health professional. I'm going to go ahead and stop here, that kind of thing. And but also ask, how are you today? You doing okay? Yeah. Right. And so there's a human component.

Absolutely. And honestly, Dr. John, I've, that's what you just said is kind of where I've got it right now. And I'm kind of glad that it hasn't gone any further than that with my discussions with them. Like we've thankfully drawn the boundary there. And I've also encouraged them to you know, if they need to bump up and ramp up the number of appointments that they have during the week or the frequency other than that's good. Okay. You two guys got to help me with this because my head's about to explode. I can feel it. I can feel the heat coming off. And help me from the pharmacy perspective and the PhD in counseling's perspective because I'm a regular guy sitting over here going, this guy's got access to messing up other people with drugs and has got access to the drugs to,

create a suicide. I'm really uncomfortable leaving him with access to all of this person with access to all of this. So it's the psychiatrist and the psychologist job, if they believe someone to be acutely suicidal, that they have to make the recommendation, you can no longer be in this environment. Or if he gets... Do they have to make that recommendation to me then, or disclose that to me? I think you need to probably seek some legal advice on your library. That's why I say you need checking with ADA in your local area.

You need to talk and find some legal advice on what your A. able to do because I want to love this person well by not giving them the tools to harm themselves, number one, and number two, by not putting them in a position where someone else gets harmed by their misbehavior. If I know someone's drinking too much, I'm not giving them the keys to the 18 wheeler to drive it, you know, if they have a drinking problem. They're off the, they're off the clock. They're not going to get, you come to me, say I'm an alcoholic. I'm going to honor that. Thank you. That's a mental illness. We can categorize it as that. But I'm not going to going to let you, I don't care if you got your CDL, you're not driving my 18 wheeler.

And I think the challenge here is the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, I hate to use this word, the spectrum of, I'm having dark thoughts. And at 4 o'clock today, I'm getting my gun, I'm going to take my life. I'm going to die by suicide. There's a, one of these is, we got to get involved now, and one of them is, okay, you're having some, it's a tough season, right? And so I think it's knowing when to get involved, and when to say, do we have a plan. Yeah. Okay. I guess, I'm going to, I'm going to advise you as the business owner side, Aaron, to go get some legal advice because I'm worried about what happens if something goes real sideways here and you have this knowledge and didn't act on it.

More specifically, instead, we're just trying to pat them on the hand as they continued to go see their psychologist. And then all of a sudden the thing goes sideways and you are left holding the bag. I don't want that for you. That's what I'm worried about here. So anyway, not sure about it. I don't know. I don't know that, but I have found, in these situations as the owner of the business, when I don't take action on things, it ends up biting me in the butt later. When I don't take the action to serve in the name of whatever, to serve the person and the constituency, serve the other people than I get bit.

But good advice all the way around. You called on the perfect day with Dr. John here, so you got good help. This is the Entree Leadership podcast. Dr. John Deloney is with me today here on the Ones. Tray Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Dave Ramsey. Thanks for hanging out with us. Hey, if you like the show, please follow it, subscribe, click the follow button, the subscribe button, the like button, click the five-star review. That's helpful. Share it in any way you can, whether it's a YouTube share, a share on your podcast venue, however you're doing. Hey, we appreciate you. When you spread

the word on this, our numbers are skyrocketing on this show, which means nothing about the host, it means everything about you guys sharing it. Thank you very, very much. The brand new book is building a non-anxious life by Dr. John Deloney. So, John, we're talking in the first segment that anxiety is an alarm. It's the symptom, not the problem. And out of that construct, you built the six daily choices that you go through in the book to build a non-anxious life. Yeah. So the idea being more people than ever before in human history are under the care of a mental health professional, more people than ever before in human history are medicated.

We have access to more people via our devices than anyone could ever fathom throughout history. You have four million quote-unquote followers or friends on Instagram, right? I'm not confused that they're friends. That sort of human access is insane, just going back up, 50 years, right? and the anxiety and depression and all these different things are off the charts.

And so we have to step back and say, okay, what we're chasing this thing down, whack-a-mole isn't working. And that led me to, what if I created a world? What are the steps I could teach? Sit down with somebody who's not have 15 PhDs and figure, what are the steps I can take in my house so I can be a more present dad, a better business owner, better leader so that my alarm stopped ringing off all the time. And when they do go off, I know that there's actually something there.

And so that was, how can I distill all this stuff down? And we landed on those six choices. The first one of which is you have to own reality. You have to choose reality. What is the state of your marriage? Are you 30 pounds overweight? Are you working 20 hours a day and you're on year four? Because it's not sustainable.

What's the state of your finances? What's a state of your business? What's the state of your team? Do your kids walk in the house and they walk past you and shut the door because they don't want to talk to you? And that's choosing reality. Where are you? last 10% of truth, Jim Collins calls it. We are in an age of distraction.

Everything in our culture helps us avoid that. And denial. That's right. But we can deny it. I don't have to believe in anything bigger than me because I can go outside and just hit a button and food shows up on my front porch. I can pretend I run the world. You have a magic wand in your hand. Until COVID comes and the supply chain happens, right? And suddenly there's fields of F-150s missing an inch by one-inch

little piece of computer chip and none of them run, right? Now you've got to choose reality. The second one is you have to choose connection. And if you've, in the EMS crowd hears me all the time, there is no mental or emotional health built on anything other than a foundation of you've got a group of people that you can lean on. When the human body understands it's lonely, it will sound every alarm it has to get you back with other people. It was not designed to run the ship by itself. And, you know, Steve Mansfield spoke a few years ago at Entry. for some of you that were there. And he talks about the 10 signs of a leadership failure,

a moral crash or a breakdown or a meltdown of leadership. And one of those is loneliness. One of those is no connection. Well, it's lonely at the top. No, it's lonely if you choose, if you choose it. But you have to, it is easy. The default mechanism, you know, it's harder to find eagles because they don't flock. if you're flying at a high level, but you can find them.

And it's a work you have to do. Yeah. It's a part of the job. Yeah, you have to go, okay, I cannot be the Lone Ranger, even he had Tonto. I mean, I've got to be, I got to have some guys, if you're a gal's, I got to have some other business people that I can share with. I got to have a group. I get together and do X or Y with, whatever you're, maybe it's really. recreation. Maybe it's just hang time. You know, I got a bunch of guys I get with once a month,

cigar night. You know, we just sit around and they're all high players, but sometimes we just goof off. We don't say anything important. And other times we talk about, you know, it's really deep book that John Deloney wrote on building an on anxious life. It can be goofy, goofy, goofy, hey guys, my marriage is in trouble. Yeah. Right. And I think when we over, over dramatize those moments together, we like, we got to get an ROLI. on this? No, dude, just go be. If you just go be and just go be, the other show up. One of the guys will show up, right? And then you move on to, you have to choose freedom. And I think you and I have had some great back porch conversations about this.

If you lay the stock market growth over the last 150 years, and then you lay the national debt and the personal debt on top of that hockey stick, and then you lay the everything from mental health diagnosis to people in jail, we have a very sick cold. We have a very sick culture and I can't attach causality to it. Those studies haven't been done. But when the human body knows you are not in control of what you do right now, that you get up tomorrow to go to work because the bank told you to, because they're going to take your car from you, they're going to take your house from you, they're going to take your food from you. Your body would be failing if you let you sleep. So if you owe money, if you, if somebody else is running your life, whether it's your mother-in-law,

whether it's your kid's soccer coach or whether it's a bank, your body will sound the alarms. Yeah, the freedom. And, you know, the joke line we always use on that is if, you know, if you're an employee and you come in Monday morning, the ball starts cussing at you and you don't have any debt, you start walking off. Yeah. Where are you going? I don't mean debt. Not listening to this. Not listening to your crap.

And that's true. That's true if you got a nasty vendor. It's true if you got a nasty customer that you need to fire. You can't fire a nasty customer if you're broken. You've got SBA payments. You got no freedom. You're stuck. and that creates anxiety.

Correct. And you have to deal, you have to swim in sewage. The opposite of it is peace. That's why we call it financial peace. Two words that don't go together, like airline service, right? I mean, unbelievable.

The next one is mindfulness, and I really debated making this the title, because when I think of mindfulness, I think of an old man with a long beard on a cloud, sitting like, you know, with this, you know, meditating. Doing LSD. Right, right, right. All, here's all, when I say choose mindfulness,

here's what I mean. choose awareness and choose curiosity. Those two words will get more people through more situations. So when you start to snap and yell at the little league coach in your kids game, just for a second, be curious. Why am I so mad at that 15-year-old wearing the umpire suit that's too big? This is a little league game. Why am I so enraged?

It's not against that guy. Or if that guy cut you off in traffic, why did I instantly create a story about how he's on drugs and he hates everybody? and he's just trying to kill people, stupid millennial. Instead of creating a story, he's just trying to get to his wife in the hospital before she dies. I get to pick which one of those stories. One of those is going to give me a stroke and a heart attack.

One of those is going to calm the body down. So if you can be aware and curious, that employee just came in late for the fourth day in a row. I'm going to... That's not like that guy. I'm aware. I noticed it. I'm going to go sit down and be like,

hey, you're not right because this isn't like you. That's curiosity and awareness. And it brings the temperature down in every room you come in. too. That guy, I trust him in every one of the things he does and he just brought me a presentation that's awful. I'll be curious about that because me hitting him in the mouth right now is not, I mean, he knows this. The presentation wasn't great. So those, and that happens with your wife, with your kids, with your employees, with your, that vendor's late again on that payment. I can get enraged and go to war or I can go visit them, one of those two, right? And then the last,

and then you got to choose health and healing and that's really, own your past, change your future, right i got to choose to move my body i got to choose to exercise if you wake up and have four monster energy drinks and two cups of coffee and you put a dip in and you wonder why your heartbeat is beating out of your chest you're not choosing health right and um some of us have old traumas we got to heal from we have relationship issues we got to heal from and that's in that bucket and that final one is choosing belief and here's here's ultimately what i mean by that for all of human history your tribe was bonded by God or whatever your tribe believed in that higher power that God told you what you're going to wear what roles were who was going to do what where but that bonded you together and you walked outside and you looked up in the sky and you said dear God please rain or my kids die and over the last hundred 200 years we've gotten real cocky because we pump water from four miles underground and we hit a button and food delivers and we start to think we're the center of the universe and we start to think we're the center of the universe and we came up with these cute little psychological theories that told us all,

the goal of life is self-actualization, that you can finally become the center of your universe. And if you look back what Carl Jung wrote about and Freud wrote about, we're here, we made it, we're all self-actualized, we have everything. And the self was never made to hold the universe. And so you have to take a knee to something bigger than yourself. I'm a Christian guy. I've chosen belief in God and Jesus. That's my path. But dude, I tell you what, this idea that I'm the center, the world revolves around me, is killing us all. Now, the most mental illness prone is the hedonist.

Because it's self-centered. Well, and look at our culture, Dave. Pleasure-driven. We cut all the tethers, right? And this is all sides of the political spectrum, the writers are saying, like, we cut all the tethers from belief. and when you worship yourself, you end up worshipping, how do I feel about this?

And then you start creating things and saying insane things like feeling is truth. My truth, right? That's not even, that's an oxymoronic statement. It doesn't make any sense. How I feel about something is true,

but you can't, my truth, that's not even a thing. But you start going down this path that I don't want to feel uncomfortable and then all of a sudden we get the mess we have now. Right. Peretti said, you can't have your truth

and I have my truth because one of them, by definition, is not the truth. That's exactly right. And you can't have a bunch of little spheres bumping into each other as we're all in these little bubbles. Because that's what we've created with our little cell phones. We stare at our phones.

We bump into each other's little bubbles and your body screams off the hook. And then they troll up. Yeah. That's where it comes. So you have to have the courage to say, I cannot hold up the center of the universe. I'm going to choose belief. And, man, that's just, that goes in a loop and some things are easier from others. A couple of those are going to be real easy for you.

A couple of those are going to be like, that's a challenge. And a couple of those. Well, and it depends on the day. Real heart. That's exactly right. That's why it's a daily choice. I mean, some days you can choose reality more than other days. Some days you can choose freedom or working towards it more than other days.

Some days you can choose belief for health or healing. Yeah, and so, but it's why it's six daily choices. The book is building a non-anxious life by Dr. John Deloney. You can get it right now if you go at the second real quick on presale because it comes out October the 3rd. After that, all the extra $75 worth of goodies is gone. and so you know you want to go ahead and get it at ramsysolutions.com as fast as you possibly can that about puts this edition in the books remember better a weary warrior than a quivering credit leaders serve leaders are active not passive leaders act on principle not appearances

this world needs more high-quality leaders so choose to lead i'm dave ramsay your host thanks for listening to the entree leadership podcast