Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - YAPClassic: Brad Stulberg on Emotional Intelligence for Entrepreneurs, How to Stay Grounded and Present

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

When Brad Stulberg was 31 years old, he suddenly developed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. His mind was plagued with thoughts of self-harm and depression. He quickly sought out therapy, and in the process of getting help, he learned about what it means to be grounded and how mindfulness can help us navigate the suffering of everyday life. Since then, Brad has established himself as a top expert in sustainable excellence, mental health, and authentic success. In this episode of YAPClassic, Brad teaches us how to be grounded through tactics like combatting heroic individualistic thinking, distancing ourselves from our emotions, and intentionally seeking out community.  Brad Stulberg is a bestselling author, coach, and co-creator of The Growth Equation, an online platform dedicated to defining and attaining a more fulfilling and sustainable kind of success. With more than 400,000 copies sold in 20 languages, his books have been helping people express their potential, avoid burnout, and attain a more sustainable and genuine kind of excellence.  In this episode, Hala and Brad will discuss: - How getting diagnosed with OCD changed Brad’s definition of peak performance - The problem with heroic individualism - Signs of a heroic individualist mindset - How to combat heroic individualism - What does it really mean to be present? - How hyper-productivity can harm your long-term goals - The benefits of self-distancing - Why you need to accept where you are in order to grow - How to be emotionally flexible - How community can keep you grounded and present - And other topics…  Brad Stulberg is the author of four books: Master of Change, The Practice of Groundedness, Peak Performance, and The Passion Paradox. With more than 400,000 copies sold in 20 languages, his books have been helping people express their potential, avoid burnout, and attain a more sustainable and genuine kind of excellence.  Brad coaches executives, entrepreneurs, and athletes on their performance and overall well-being and spends his time as a co-creator for The Growth Equation, an online platform dedicated to defining and attaining a more fulfilling kind of success. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wired, New Yorker, Forbes, GQ, Time, and more. LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass, Have Job Security For Life: Use code ‘podcast’ for 30% off at yapmedia.io/course. Resources Mentioned: Brad’s Books: https://www.bradstulberg.com/books  Brad’s Website: https://www.bradstulberg.com  Brad’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brad-stulberg-009b168b  Brad’s Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/thegrowthequation/?hl=en  Brad’s Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/bstulberg  Brad’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BradStulberg/ Sponsored By:  Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify Relay - Sign up for FREE! Go to relayfi.com/profiting **Relay is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services and FDIC insurance provided through Evolve Bank & Trust and Thread Bank; Members FDIC. The Relay Visa® Debit Card is issued by Thread Bank pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A. Inc. and may be used everywhere Visa® debit cards are accepted. More About Young and Profiting Download Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com   Get Sponsorship Deals - youngandprofiting.com/sponsorships Leave a Review - ratethispodcast.com/yap Watch Videos - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Follow Hala Taha LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ TikTok - tiktok.com/@yapwithhala Twitter - twitter.com/yapwithhala Learn more about YAP Media Agency Services - yapmedia.io/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's episode of Young & Profiting Podcast is sponsored in part by Shopify, Relay, Co-Pilot, Masterclass, and Indeed. Shopify simplifies selling online and in-person so you can focus on successfully growing your business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash profiting and that's all lower case. Take control of your money with Relay, an online banking and money management platform that puts you in complete control of your cash flow.

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Start hiring now with the $75 sponsor job credit to upgrade your job post at indeed.com slash profiting. As always, you can find all of our deals in the show notes. What's behind a life electrified? What's lighting up our communities? Powering more carbon-free commutes? And boosting homegrown innovations?

Its electricity generated right here at home. From renewable hydro to nuclear, our lowest carbon energy source. Ontario Power Generation is shaping the clean energy future by investing in Ontario and electrifying life every day. See how at opg.com. What is going on my young and profiting family? In today's the app classic, we're pulling my interview with Brad Stulberg from the Archives. We're dustin' it off and playing it back because it's a great episode. Brad is a best-selling author, coach, and co-creator of the Growth Equation, an online platform

dedicated to attaining a more fulfilling and sustainable kind of success. In this interview, we're talking all about the practice of groundedness. Brad will teach us how to be grounded through tactics like combating heroic individualistic thinking, distancing ourselves from our emotions, and intentionally seeking out community. We don't talk a lot about groundedness on the podcast because we like to hustle here at YAP. But in talking to Brad, I learned that it is possible to stay grounded and also accomplish

your goals. So I think you guys will like hearing this episode. It's a really important topic, especially for all of us entrepreneurs who are constantly on the go, go, go. And speaking of going, let's go right into it. Enjoy my interview with Brad Stoolberg. Hey Brad, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. Hey, it's so good to be here. Thanks for having me. I am very excited for this conversation. So for those who don't know you, you are an author, executive coach, researcher, and expert on all things human performance,

sustainable success, and well-being. We're going to really focus on your book, The Practice of Groundedness, because I think it's something my audience really needs to hear about. But before we get into it, I'd love to get more color about your background. So let's take everybody to 2017. This was a dark time in your life. You were around 31 years old. To the external world, you had everything going on. You were an expert on human performance, already training elite athletes and coaching entrepreneurs.

You were a best-selling author on peak performance. But inside, you were suffering and you developed OCD. And you actually started getting suicide all thoughts and self-harm thoughts and anxiety and it kind of came up out of nowhere from my understanding. So talk to us about that time in your life because I think that was really the trigger for you to start thinking about success differently. Yeah, it definitely did, as you mentioned, blindside me from nowhere. I had no prior history with depression or anxiety, at least not that I knew of. And it was like a switch in my brain got flipped in a devastatingly wrong direction.

I was fortunate to have such a stark experience between before and after that it didn't take me long to get help. That was very quick to go to my partner, Caitlin and say like, something is wrong with my brain. This is scary, I need help. And I think that in my story, the pivotal moment was getting help and getting a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder,

because I thought I had some kind of like unrelenting depression, but it actually is a fairly common theme in OCD to become obsessed with the potential to hurt yourself, or to hurt others, and constantly have these intrusive thoughts and then try to make them go away, and then the thoughts get worse, and it's just this vicious cycle. And as fortunate enough to see a wonderful therapist in psychiatrists that fairly quickly diagnosed me with OCD, began treating me based on the evidence for OCD. And though at the time it felt like forever, each minute felt like a day, each day felt like a year, it was probably about six to eight months where I was really in it

before I started to see out of the dark forest and get to the other side. And during that time period, as you said, I began to just reevaluate, well, what does success even mean? And what does it mean to be excellent? And before I had this experience, I thought that I knew what depression or anxiety or OCD was. And it's as if you look across a river and you see people on the other side of the river and you're like, Oh, I can see what they're going through. I get it. But it wasn't until I myself was on the other side of the river that I actually had any idea what it meant to be depressed, what it meant to be anxious. And it really did lead to like a re-evaluating of kind of the basic principles

that I think and that I write about. And it's not to say that the first two books are defensible. The way that I like to talk about it is those books are for when everything is clicking and everything is going well. Groundedness is much more about what's the foundation that is going to hold you not only when things are going well but also when things aren't. And what's funny is because it recently came out, everyone thinks it's a pandemic book. So they think I wrote this book because we're all going through this pandemic and outside of people in book publishing that makes sense. But the truth is it takes like three to four years to publish a book. So the manuscript was mostly done before the pandemic. And I think what the pandemic has shown is that yes, what we experienced these things differently, suffering is universal and anxiety is

universal. And it ebbs and flows for different folks at different times of their lives. And yet, it is part of the human experience. Yeah. So I'd love to learn how you pulled yourself out of it. Was it the writing of this book that really helped you figure it out, or how did you get yourself out of that, or is it something that you never get out of? I think it's a little bit of both. So what I'd say is that I still have OCD, but my experiences of it are much less frequent.

And when I have them, I have tools and more less intense. So if these intrusive thoughts and feelings used to take up eight, nine hours of a day, and that's what it was like when it was bad, now maybe it's a few hours a month. How did I get there? The short answer is through eight months of therapy and medication. And I'm so grateful again that I got the right care. I got in treatment early. And now I meet with

my therapist about once a month. But now it's more just like a coaching relationship. Since I do have the skills to navigate the the OCD when it comes on. But yeah, for those eight months, it was pretty intensive therapy. And then the book helps me make sense of all this. So at first, I'm going through this and I want to intellectualize it. And I want to problem solve. And actually, that just makes it worse. So when I was in the thick of it, the thought of writing it, I would be faking it, going through the motions. There was no, I was not in good enough mental health to create any kind of good intellectual work. When I got to the other side of it, that's when I could look back and examine,

hey, here are the things that I've learned in therapy, here are maybe some of the things that I've overlooked in the past. And oh, when I hear so many people that I work with in my coaching practice complaining about being restless or never being able to turn it off or constantly checking their email or social media, I now have this new framework to think about it, which are, sure, these aren't extreme clinical obsessions, but so many of the things in day-to-day life that

make us feel restless and anxious are very similar in the fact that they're things that we don't want to be thinking about or we don't want to be feeling, but we feel like we get sucked into them and we're not really sure how. And that became the operating hypothesis on the book. I think something else to say that's really important is about four to five months, let's see, no, actually it's closer to seven months into experiencing OCD. I decided to write an essay that went into pretty intense detail about my experience. And the genesis of that was exactly what you said when we brought up this

topic. To the outside world, I'm like 31-year-old wayscate, coaching world-class athletes and executives and bestselling book and another one on the way, but inside I'm totally falling to pieces. And the cognitive dissonance that I felt when I get emails from people along the lines of how you figure it out, tell me about your path, especially young men, like how did you get to do what you did? It just that became almost as bad as the OCD itself. And at that point, I'm like,

I'm either gonna stop doing this kind of work, or I need to reconcile that this is a part of me, but I can't hide it. And a psychiatrist told me that a huge part of peak performance, which was literally the title of my first book is the ability to play through the pain. And that really stuck with me. So I wrote this essay saying,

hey, some of you might think that I'm a fraud, I'm a fake, you're never gonna wanna work with me again, but this is my experience, this is what I'm experiencing right now and I believe that I can know and coach towards these concepts and struggle myself. And I was a little bit scared about the response to that essay, of course,

but it was so overwhelmingly positive. And I think that was another aha moment when all these people that I never would have guessed come out of the woodwork emailing me about, oh, me too, or I have bad depression or I've experienced things either. Oh, I've never felt like this, but my colleague has and you've given me a whole new way to think about it. I think that my own experience plus that was the juncture that led me to say that, hey, I've spent enough time exploring the evidence-based principles for when everything is clicking,

the top of the metaphorical mountain. Now I want to explore the base. Totally. Let's get into some of the key phrases that you talk about in this book and some definitions. So you talk about heroic individualism, and you say it leads to unhappiness and burnout and it is perpetuated by modern culture that relentlessly says you need to be better, feel better, think more positively, have more and optimize your life. I'll confess that Young and Profiting podcast talks a lot about that kind of stuff. So talk to us about heroic individualism and what's wrong with that. Well, so you defined it from the book.

And I think that the, the way that I think about it when it becomes problematic is when you're more worried about beating yourself or other people, then you are about the actual effort in your level of presence in the moment. And this manifests in what I call if then syndrome. So if I just get 5,000 subscribers to my newsletter, then I'll be happy. If I just publish my first book, then I'll be content. If I just win that NBA championship or that Olympic gold medal, or if I just get that series B round of funding,

then I'll feel like I have real self worth. That is an illusion is all this time. Literally, stoicism and Buddhism were both in some ways created to address the illusion. Modern science, we call this the arrival fallacy. And it's just that. It's this notion that if I just do this, then I'll arrive. And I think that heroic individualism often

can perpetuate that by telling us that we need to get something out in front of us for ourselves to feel whole. And groundedness is not about checking out into a monastery and letting go of striving and desire. What it's about is trying to channel striving, desire, motivation, energy drive in more skillful, productive ways. So if you think about there's two ways to climb a mountain, and this can be a real mountain, but it can also be a metaphorical mountain.

You can think of this as career advancement, relationship advancement, you name it. And one way is to constantly be thinking about the top of the mountain, and thinking about the selfies that you're gonna take when you get there, and how good you're gonna feel when you finally arrive. The other way is to just be where you freaking are, and to even enjoy the view from the site, to have fun as you're climbing.

And what I argue in the book and what the science supports, is not only do you obviously feel better if you're having fun and you're grounded as you're climbing, but you also perform better. Because caring the way of that anxiety to need to get somewhere is never, never, never, ever helpful. Whereas if you can be free and you can be both good enough now and truly have self confidence and believe that you're good enough now and want to get better because you're curious and it's fun. That kind of energy and drive is so much more sustainable. The last thing I'll say because I think that it is such a ripe topic for listeners of

this podcast is it's not all or nothing right. We're all on a continuum between like heroic individualism and groundedness and the point of this book is just to help people shift a little bit more towards groundedness. I know this myself. The week that my book comes out, I am spending more time than I want to admit in heroic individual mode. I'm checking my sales rank. I'm trying to get App Ed's placed in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and I'm constantly checking to see if I got emails back from editors. I did it for a week, but then I put this really hard boundary on it because I know that that's ultimately unhealthy.

And I'm using myself in the example to elucidate the A, it's very hard to be like 100% on this, and if you get it 60% right, it's good. And then B, so much of heroic individuals is the environment that we operate in. So it's all fun and good to say B be where you are, so on and so forth. But then when you try to sell sponsorship for a podcast and then like, how many downloads do you have?

Well, that number matters. So it's not saying that these end results, these peaks don't matter. It's just trying to help us feel a little bit better as we strive and have our self-worth be something more than an external result, which again the big paradox is that gives you the best chance at getting the external result and actually enjoying it when you do. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. Okay, young profitors, let's play a game.

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Indeed.com slash profiting terms and conditions apply need to hire. You need indeed. So sticking on heroic individualism, we love actionable advice on this podcast. So, what are some questions that we can ask ourselves to see if we are in this frame of mind? So, there's a few that immediately come to mind. So, these are like the key signs of heroic individualism.

One is you're exhausted, but you have no idea why and you're actually sleeping well. Another is that you don't feel good when you're working all the time, but when you try to turn it off, you don't feel good either. This is something that comes up for me when I'm writing. I have a really hard time turning it off. Another telltale sign is that you dread working, you dread going on social media and posting, but you also dread not doing it. So it's a feeling of stuckness. Like I have to keep pushing, but I don't really want to push, but if I stop, I'm scared,

but if I keep doing it, I feel like crap. Another is restlessness or inability to focus. So a lot of people will now come to me and say, I don't know what happened to me. I used to love reading and I can't read a book anymore. I'm reaching for my phone every two minutes. I don't have the attention span. And then I think one other one that's really important to mention is feelings of not being enough in a way that isn't healthy and motivating, but in a way that is really self-judgmental. So it's one thing to say, hey, I'm at point A,

and I wanna expand and get to point B because I'm curious and I'm gonna grow. That's wonderful. It's another thing to say that I'm at point A, and I won't feel like I have internal inherent worth until I get to point B. And that is, like, by definition, the wrong way to strive. And we often end up less happy than more even if we get to that place.

Yeah. I don't feel like I have heroic individualism because I love accomplishing the next goal, accomplishing the next goal. Like, I love the moment and I love accomplishing the next goal, accomplishing the next goal. Like, I love the moment and I love accomplishing my next goal. So is there like a personality type thing that we need to be aware of in terms of like who actually gets impacted by this? So what happens when you don't accomplish a goal? I just figure out a new solution to like keep going at it. Like, I don't get that low because I've faced a lot of rejection in my life. So I kind of know how to like quickly just figure something else out and either focus on a new goal

very quickly or try to figure out how to accomplish the goal that I originally wanted. So. And then I hope this isn't like turning into like a personal coaching session, but then how do you define success? Success to me is working on the things that I love. Done. Done. I'm interjecting. So that is beautiful and that's likely why you're not experiencing this. So if you love the work that you're doing, if you love climbing, then yeah, you want to get to the top of the mountain and it will feel good if you do, but if you don't, you're going to be like, whatever, I didn't get to the top of that mountain. Maybe it'll hurt, maybe you'll be down for a day or two, but then you'll start climbing

again because you genuinely like climbing. Heroic individualism comes into play when you are so worried about the goal that you cannot any longer enjoy the process of getting there. And it's like this, this thing that often creeps in, because the path that a lot of people take is you start doing something because it's fun and you like it. You start a podcast, you literally when you start have zero subscribers, but you like podcasting, it sounds like an interesting thing. And then you get good at it. And suddenly you get subscribers and you get media coverage and you get people talking about you. And it's at that point that it gets harder to focus on doing the work itself, to focus

on the process of the work, not the outcome, because suddenly you've got all these bright and shiny objects around you that you can chase. And the job of ground in this is to, if you think of it on one end, you're just chasing the brain shiny object on the other end, you're just focused on the work, ground in this tries to keep you closer to the end, you're just focused on the work. Ground in us tries to keep you closer to the end where you're just focused on the work. And I think it's an especially important quality in today's world because more and more people do have to be their own publicist and they do have to be their own marketer and they do have to develop their own brand. So if you want to go into a creative pursue, it's not

like the days of the old where you can just go into a hermitage and write a great book and then let's sell a million copies. If you don't tell people about your book, it's not going to sell any copies. So how do you arm yourself to go out into the world to swim in this water of dopamine and external validation in results without getting completely drowned by it? Does that make sense? Yes, it does. So it's like centering yourself on doing the work more so than the external stuff. But I think that oftentimes two people get into this trap where they're like, oh, I don't

care about results. All I care about is the work. Bullshit. Like if you're saying that, you're projecting because it's normal to care about results. So the goal isn't to be perfect. The goal is just never to let that obsession with results become a more important force than the obsession with the work itself. Totally.

So I'd love to get to those six principles that you researched so diligently for your book. They're super interesting. The first two have to do with presence and patience. Patience is something that I really have a problem with. So if there's anything from your book that I really learned from, who is this patient's thing because I have zero patience. So I'd love to hear about those first two principles. So presence is owning your attention and energy. And I think a lot of people hear presence

and they think of it as just being where you are. And that's true, but it's hard to be where you are if where you are is an environment where you are. And that's true, but it's hard to be where you are if where you are is an environment where you're constantly being distracted. So in the book, I argue that presence actually happens upstream of the moment. And if you can own your attention by designing your environment

and you can own your energy by being really diligent about what you say yes to and what you say no to, then that actually gives you a chance of being present in the moment. So I think obviously there's so much more in the book, but from this podcast, the important thing to take away is we can't just think about present in the present moment. Ironically, we have to think about present's upstream of the moment in trying to design your physical environment and your mental, your psychological environment

to allow you to be present. If you want to be a really present to meditate, probably not great to scroll political Twitter for the 20 minutes before you meditate. Yet we think that presence is just this thing that we turn on, but it's actually a lifestyle that, again, says, what does it mean for me to be successful? What does it mean for me to profit?

And how can I then start building a life that allows me to be present for those things? And for a lot of people, it comes down to identifying the things that distract them, that encroach upon their attention, that are almost like little addictions, where it feels good, the first little hit that you do, but eventually it makes you feel bad, and then trying to gradually make those things smaller parts of one's life. So that's how I think about presence. So patience is really about this paradox

that for most big meaningful projects in life, going slower today helps you go faster tomorrow. So the principle title in the book is be patient to get there faster. So often, we don't correctly define the time frame for our endeavors. So if I want to be the best writer, the best coach that I can be, or the best interviewer on podcasts like this for the next month, I would slam four red bulls every day and work for 20 hours. And I'd be great for a month. I'd get so much done and I'd be on my game. But what would happen

on day 32 or 33 or 34? I'd totally fall apart. Whereas if I define excellence performance success over a year or a decade or a career, suddenly the way in which I work has to look a lot different. So it helps to be able to zoom out and ask yourself, all right, I want to quote and quote optimize or I want to be efficient. That's great, but on what time horizon? Because often being the most efficient I can be today actually is inefficient for a long haul, especially in creativity.

We know the creative thoughts and creative feelings happen not when we're doing the work, but when we're daydreaming. So if you're so focused on productivity and efficiency, again, you get a lot out of yourself today, but perhaps you shortchange yourself over the long haul. So the first step of patience is really defining the time horizon that you want to operate on.

And then the second part is having some restraint. So stopping one rep short. You know that you could crush yourself every day and it feels really good. It's like in a gym workout where you just go to fatigue, you feel so worked. But if you try to do that every day and you chase that feeling in sports, you end up injured. In the business world, you end up burnt out. So, patience means stopping one rep short today so that you give yourself a chance of building an inertia and building a rhythm that you can pick up tomorrow. I love that analogy, that's so good.

So, I did skip around. I missed the first principle, and that's acceptance, and I think it's super important for us to discuss this as well. So you really have to accept where you are to end up going where you want to go. So can you tell us about that? Lots of people struggle to see their situation clearly because you become so close to it. What ends up happening is for those that are watching on video is you fuse with your situation.

So this is the situation you're in, this is you and there's space between, but sometimes you fuse. And when you fuse, it's very hard to see clearly. And if you can't see where you are clearly, then whatever actions you take, whatever habits you try to develop aren't actually going to help, because you're working on the wrong thing, you're not starting where you are. So acceptance is really about being able to objectively and clearly see your starting point. Now, how do you do this if I just said how easy it is to fuse

especially in meaningful and emotional situations? Researchers call this self-distancing. And what self-distancing means is creating some space between the thing you're experiencing and your wise or self. Couple ways to do this. One way that I'd love is to pretend that a close friend is in the exact same situation as

you and really visualize that friend going through what you're going through and then give advice to that friend. And then of course you actually have to take that advice yourself. Another way to do this if you're making especially if you're making an important decision that feels really tough is imagine yourself 30 years down the road looking back on current you. What is 30 years from you now going to be proud of? And then that's the thing that you should do. A third way to do this is through some sort of mindfulness meditation or contemplative practice where your focus is on the breath, you have a thought or feeling, you recognize it, you come back to the breath. Ultimately, what that's training you to do is to be able to see thoughts and feelings

as separate entities from yourself and it's creating that space. And then the fourth thing to do that is supported both by ancient wisdom and modern science is to simply name what you're going through. When we name something, researchers call this AFEC labeling.

Back in the Bible, the quote is, if you give something a name, it loses its power over you. And basically what you're quote is, if you give something a name, it loses its power over you. And basically, what you're doing is, once you give something a name, once you put language to something, you allow yourself to wrestle with that thing, and if you're wrestling with it, then it's separate from you.

So a big part of what I try to do as a writer actually is to help people name things that they're experiencing. Because once you can say, oh, that's heroic individualism, then instead of just being it, it can be something that you're experiencing or something that you're struggling with but you're separate from it. And therefore, you can see it more clearly

and take wiser action as a result. Yeah, so I interviewed Ethan Cross, he wrote chatter and he talks a lot about this basically, like trying to get out of your head, trying to quiet down the chatter in your head by being objective, kind of taking that wider view. Like you said, pretending it's your friend or pretending that it's not necessarily you and separating you from your thoughts. So I think that's really good advice, but you also need to make sure it's neutral, right?

I think this is a really important part making that feeling neutral. Why is that important? Can you explain that to us? The neutral feeling is important because if you're really charged up, that's gonna influence the action that you take. So if you're like in the state of anger or resentment, well, you have to let yourself calm down first,

because if you're angry, you're going to give your friend an advice. So, yeah, go punch her in the face. Or go punch her in the face. Whereas if you can try to command it a little bit more neutrally, then again, you can be a little bit wiser. You know, in the book, I write about all these decisions that people end up regretting, tend to be like heat of the moment decisions.

Right? The one that is the most commonly discussed is like extra marital affairs. And the reason that we make poor choices in those situations is because in that moment, you're just completely overwhelmed by passion, by feeling. So whatever advice you're going to give to your friend, you don't even have your brain can't even turn on. And it's about again, creating that space to then let your brain turn on and make a wiser decision. And that's where meditation is so effective because you strengthen that muscle. So a lifelong meditator is going to have a much easier time creating space in the moment than someone that's never done it before. What if we find ourselves kind of resisting accepting where we are right now?

Like we're in denial or we just can't get ourselves to get to that point. What do you recommend? I think the first is just the mindset shift that you're never going to get better unless you start with acceptance. So it's the first principle of Buddhism is acceptance. In many ways, it's suffering exists, which is accept suffering. Stoicism teaches us that we have to be able to see our situation clearly, to do anything about it.

All the more recent evidence-based programs for behavioral change all start with acceptance. So I think a lot of people can tell themselves a story that if I just pretend it's not so, it won't be. And what I'm here to tell you is that the research says that eventually you're going to hit bottom, and you might as well realize it now, then wait six months to hit bottom and then do something about it. And the last strategy that is perhaps the most powerful is to have people in your life that you love and trust, that can say like you're seeing things wrong, you're delusional right now. And then you actually have to listen to those people.

Yeah. There's this concept you talk about called emotional flexibility. Can you help us understand what that is? In simple terms, it's the ability to hold two competing strong emotions at once. So joy and despair, anger and love, and it's an extremely counterintuitive thing, but the more that we can embrace the full catastrophe of all these emotions, the more free we become, because we don't resist the bad. If you try to resist something, it just gets stronger. Whereas if you can say, oh, they're sadness.

Sadness is here, sadness hurts. It's okay to be sad. Then it takes the edge off the sadness and when you experience happiness, you're not scared to be happy. You can fully experience happiness. So it's this ability to be flexible within the course of a year, a week, a day,

even within the course of an hour. To be able to have a wave of sadness, let it course through you, feel it, and then be really happy. There's this story that I came across, it didn't make it into the book when researching about the Dalai Lama. And just, I think, this exemplifies emotional flexibility, is genocide came up in a conversation with him and he just started weeping, just weeping, like crying full force tears of sadness and sorrow.

And then they were brought cookies by his attendant and he took a bite of a chocolate chip cookie and the biggest smile came came on his face. And within the course of a couple of seconds, so being able to hold it all, like the despair in the sorrow of genocide, in the joy of a freshly baked cookie, and just to create enough space for all that, that is another capacity of wisdom. I'm not there yet. I intellectually know enough

about it to write about it. So much of my own practice of groundedness is this notion of emotional flexibility of being able to hold everything at once so that I don't get pushed and pulled around by it. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors. Young and profitors, even though I interview the brightest minds in the world, I still seek out ways to keep on learning to become a better entrepreneur and a better leader. And that's why this year,

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pursuant to a license from VisaUSA Incorporated. a debit card is issued by Threadbank pursuant to a license from Visa USA Incorporated. So, let's move on to your next principle, which is having a sense of deep community. How does community keep us grounded? It's hard to go out of the loan. You know, it's hard to stand, the path, it's hard to have fun, it's hard to be consistent, it's hard to accept where you are, it's hard to be present. It's hard to be vulnerable. So let's make it easier and more fun. And how do you do it?

You find people that get it, that are walking a similar path as you, and you say, hey, let's do this together. So before I get any of the science, I like to say it like that. Like it's just more fun. And on our deathbed, no one remembers that they had a hundred million podcasts down though, it's over if they want a gold medal. What they remember are

the guests that they had in the show, the training partners, the coaches, it's all about the relationships. And this gets back to this broader theme of heroic individualism, like on what time horizon are you looking? Because the most optimal, efficient thing to do in the moment is very rarely community. But if you don't make time for that, then come one year or two years, three years, you might find yourself lonely. Like our culture of efficiency and productivity so often crowds out deep community. Whereas when you're playing the long game, not only doesn't make it more fun, but it also

supports grounded striving. And I think it's important. There are two ways to build deep community. So one is actual physical in-person connection. The other is a sense of belonging. And that can be to a spiritual tradition, to a religion, to a lineage of intellectual thinkers, to a group of other podcast hosts

that you kind of like have a mastermind group and you're all helping trying to share a similar message. And deep community is the combination of both those things. So according to the literature, it's not enough just to have people that you see in person. And it's not enough just to feel like you're a part of something larger. Both of those things put together.

That's what supports mental health and sustainable excellence. Totally. I think community is so important. It's been so important on my journey. And especially as an entrepreneur, we have a lot of entrepreneurs that are tuning in. And a lot of you entrepreneurs out there think that you've got to do it all on your own and that like everything's just on your shoulders.

When you start to have a community and you can bounce ideas, it's to your point. You don't have to go at it alone. And I think that's so important. So I'd be curious because you've built your company really fast and you're quote unquote successful. How do you balance this tension between pushing, pushing for work and optimizing today

versus carving out time and space to cultivate relationships? Oh, I'm failing miserably. I'm failing miserably. I've lost, like in the last miserably. I've lost like in the last three years, I've lost so many friends and I've, you know, it's hard like I'm trying to carve out the time to keep my relationship strong. I really only have time for a family because sometimes I'm working 18 hour days and that's why I kind of called that out to entrepreneurs because it is

really tough. And for me, the relationships I have cultivated have been other podcasters and even like my clients and my team members and my business partners because I've created this community around the people that are doing the same types of stuff that I'm doing so that I'm not distracted with my goals and still accomplishing my goals with people who also love podcasting and things like that. So I actually created a mastermind of podcasters with 70 podcasters and I'm the one who started it. And that's one of my secrets to building communities to actually be the glue who creates that community.

And I'm very good at that, but not everybody has that like natural skill to like get a group together. So I definitely encourage everybody out there to join a group with people with similar interests or start one if you're that type of person. Yeah, love it. You're alluding to a really an important point here,

which is that if you're in a period or a season of your life where you're going all in on something and building a business is a great example. Parenting an infant is another good example. Training for a big athletic accomplishment is a great example. Parenting an infant is another good example. Training for a big athletic accomplishment is another good example. Your community can be a part of that endeavor. Just don't go out and alone.

So it's okay for a season of your life to perhaps leave behind other sources of community outside of your goal, but when you go towards that goal, have community within that goal. So don't train alone for your Olympic medal, train with a group. Don't just do a solo podcast,

team up with someone else, create a mastermind group. Don't just view your staff as people that you work with, view them as friends, particularly if you also want them to be all in. And then, Hala, you're not gonna like this advice, but like my advice to you would be do everything that you can to carve out, even if it's just like two hours a week for non-work related community. And the reason I say that is because God forbid something happens and you have a huge failure

in work. I don't think this is going to happen because you're great, but let's just imagine that. It's so helpful to have another part of your identity that you can lean on when that happens. I see this all the time with the Olympians that I've worked with, is there's so singularly focused on the metal, and then after the Olympics, it's just empty,

because their entire identity was this one thing. So, I counsel entrepreneurs, I counsel the athletes. It's okay to go all in. Part of what makes life meaningful is intensity and building something and giving something you're all, just protect a couple percentage points of yourself of your identity outside of that thing. It's really hard and really important.

It is really important. I totally agree. I'm on the same page. Speaking of Olympians, let's talk about your last principle. Move your body. Don't have to be an Olympian to move your body, thankfully. This was an interesting back and forth with my publisher, because the first five principles are these broad, ambiguous, but also really aspirational. We get to create our own definition, principles. And then it's like, you're telling people to exercise. But the reason that I thought really strongly about this is that all the recent academic inquiry on mental health and ground illness, when you actually talk to people that are grounded, whether they have always been that way, or whether they've experienced heroic individualism and worked their way out of it, or depression or anxiety, what have you, some sort of physical activity is generally a part of their process.

And then I got looking to the ancient wisdom traditions, and particularly in the West, so stoicism in the Greeks, they didn't separate mind and body. School was the genesium and intellect. And it always fascinates me because you look back thousands of years and then today there's all this research that shows that when we're regularly in movement practice, we're more creative. We have better emotional control. We remember more. There's studies of kids that show that when they're vigorously exercised, they score better on tests. So I think that we separate the mind and body at our own peril, and it's actually in the book, right?

It's not mind or body. It's not mind and body. It's a mind body system. So if we want to take care of our mind or psychology, we have to take care of our body or physiology. And movement does not need to be crossfit. It doesn't need to be powerlifting. It doesn't need to be triathlon.

It can be as simple as a brisk walk. Just something that elevates your heart rate a little bit and puts you in your body is so, so impactful for your whole being. Totally, I couldn't agree more. We are wrapping up, running out of time. So the one thing I wanna ask you that kinda wraps us up nicely is your analogy

for Redwood trees. I think this really summarizes everything very nicely. So I was at this beautiful Redwood Park one day and it was super windy and you look up and the overstory of the trees is blowing in the wind. But you look down and they're held to the ground and they're solid. And these trees are 100, 200, even the old growth redwoods 300 feet tall. And what's holding them to the ground are roots. And you don't see those roots. But if those roots aren't nourished and watered, then the trees are going to fall over

in rough weather. And the principles of ground inness are really like those roots. These aren't things that you necessarily see when you look at someone, but if you internally take care of patients, acceptance, presence, vulnerability, community movement, it helps you stand strong throughout all that weather. The second thing that's so beautiful about redwood trees is the roots only run 6-12 feet deep. So the tree, 300 feet high, the root structure, quite shallow. And I'm like, I literally, asking the park ranger, I'm like, well, wait a minute, how do the trees hold to the ground?

And she said, it's because the roots intertwine with the roots of all the other trees in the park. So there are a system of roots that are all holding each other up throughout all kinds of weather. And man, if that's not beautiful and that's not what we ought to strive for is like taking care of our own root system but also doing it with others so that we can help hold each other up, then I don't know what's the point of any of it. So that really became the overarching metaphor for the book and for how I try to live my life. I love that. That is super beautiful. So last couple of questions I ask on Young and Profiting

podcast. What is one actionable thing we can do today to be more at Young and Profiting tomorrow? I think define profiting. So what does it mean for you to be profiting? What are those values? Is it a certain amount of money? Is it a certain amount of autonomy? Is it living in a certain geography? Is it starting a family? Is it staying single and curious so that you can explore? The point is there's not a right or wrong. What's wrong is not taking the time to regularly step back and be able to define what profiting means for you. Because how you define that will then dictate the actions that follow. What is your secret to profiting in life?

It's going to be the answer to that forward question. Knowing my values and what it means to live in alignment with them, and I find that when I'm not living in alignment with those values, I feel disused. And when I am, I feel wonderful. Amazing. Well, thank you so much. This is such a great conversation. Appreciate your time. Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed this. you