The Reality of Balancing Your Life

John: You’re listening to The Present Professional.

Tony: Where we explore the intersections of personal and professional development.

John: To change your experience of life and work with every episode. So tune in, grab your notebook, and let’s go.

Tony: Let’s go.

John: Welcome to another episode of the present professional today. We’re here to talk about balance and what does balance in your life really mean in reality versus in theory, maintaining this state, this achieved state. And I’ll go right into how I feel about it. And, Balance is not an achieved state. It’s not that this place that we come to where all things meet and we’re in perfect harmony. It is a dance around equilibrium that we don’t exactly know when we’re there, except this fleeting feeling when, you know, it feels like you’re in alignment with the things that are of value to us. And I do a lot of teaching around balance and a lot of experiential learning around balance. It means a lot of different things to me. As a yoga and meditation teacher, it shows up in different ways in the physical space, in the mental space, the emotional space. Then as a coach and facilitator, one of my signature programs is Burnout to Balance. I don’t focus on what burnout means to people and these strategies to just alleviate burnout, but really moving into what balance means for each individual in the room. And, you know, would love today for you to get an introduction to some of the ways that we move towards balance in our lives, some of the tools that we use and Maybe just a little bit of insight that will help you take a step in your life to more Balancing your energy around your roles and commitments that are important to you in your life And that’s that’s a great introduction because you have a lot of the science behind balance in your repertoire in your tool bag so

Tony: I can’t wait to hear some of the things that you bring today. I know for me, balance is something that I just believe in because it’s just principle, really. Especially if you’ve ever been unbalanced in the regard of going too far, if you’ve ever overloaded yourself, if you’ve ever had too much on your plate. And then you’ve achieved the other side of balance. Like there’s one side to me where it’s like minimal effort or you’re kind of cranking up the engine or you’re getting to the state of balance like that equilibrium as you talked about. But if you ever went to the other side, and you’ve ever crashed or you’ve ever overexerted or you’ve ever had anything that’s related to doing too much. If you’ve ever been there, then you know that balance is important. And I’ve been there. I’ve been to a place where I’ve just having completely overexerted and it was years ago. And since then, I’ve made balance a priority and I will never go the other way, or ever do too much again, and that’s kind of why I started meditating. And it was really back in, I think it was 2017, and it was my first attempt with the doctorate, and that was when I realized that you can overdo it. You can completely overdo it, and I overdid it, and I only, Only thing that really helped me get through that was, of course, my wonderful wife. And then 1B was meditation. So I’m interested to hear what you bring today. I know that if you people out there, especially our listeners, are probably high achievers. So this will be a good one for them.

John: And a couple of things that you said that I want to highlight are around the the rest aspect of it and like knowing when you’re overexerted. And it’s, what I find is it’s not so much of that we’re doing too much or expending too much energy, but a lot of the times it’s, we’re using all of our energy in the wrong places. It’s where we’re neglecting the parts of our life that bring us joy in order to dedicate the energy to work, a project, something else that is going on that is taking precedent because of some level of significance you’re putting on it, right? And when we neglect those parts of our lives in a macro picture of our lives, it shows up in ways in our body. It’s not even just… Oh, I haven’t thought about that or I haven’t been the friend that I want to be. I haven’t been the son that I want to be. I haven’t been the father that I want to be because I’ve been focusing on this project so much. A lot of the times, it’s not just doing so much, but it’s where am I doing it? Where am I taking my time and energy? And is that what fulfills me? Are these areas of my life? what fulfills me. And it can, and that’s why I say it’s at that dance around equilibrium, right? Because, and sometimes it will be swayed one way or the other, but then where burnout happens is where you don’t recognize that, or you don’t recognize that and take conscious steps to moving the energy back to those areas that make a difference for you, the areas that you live for. So I like to presence that that it’s not so much a balance between rest and production. I’ll say that again. It is not so much the balance between rest and production as it is a balance of spending your energy in areas that represent your values, your commitments, your purpose, and be in integrity with what that is. So that’s keeping the promises that you make to yourself. And I find that a lot of that, you know, when folks are feeling unbalanced, when we’re feeling burnout, we’re not keeping the promises we made to ourself. And as we continue to break those, you know, not working out, not going to your kid’s game, you know, not just sitting down, to write the email that you’ve been thinking about. Just write it. When we keep breaking those promises, we lose trust in ourselves, and then life starts running us, and that’s when burnout happens. I try to make it like an action-oriented, you know what I mean?

Tony: When you were talking, it made me think about something I’ve been studying very recently. It’s called cognitive overload. So by definition, cognitive overload is a situation where a person is given too much information at once or too many simultaneous tasks resulting in not being able to perform or process the information as it would otherwise happen if the amount was instead sustainable. And man, you know, I was talking with a young guy actually last night, and we were just kind of talking through some of the places he is now in his life compared to where he was prior. And what he was telling me is that for his age group, he’s, I guess he’s Gen Z. He’s like mid-20s. And so he was saying that, and he was just being honest and saying that he spends nine hours a day on social media, like hardcore. And that’s just where he is, and many of his friends and peers, and he said that it’s got a hold on us. He was speaking for people within his age group, and he was like, it’s got a hold on us. It’s got us. It can keep us trapped, you know, he was describing his experience with that. And it made me think about this word or this definition of cognitive overload, because even though you’re not necessarily, quote unquote, learning from social media, sometimes you’re just literally looking at videos or media. That is a lot of cognitive overload actually because you’re taking in information. And the more information that you take in, just by the definition as it says, it can result in you not being able to be sustainable. It can result in you having too much information at once and then you’re not able to move and you’re not able to get things done like you wanted to. And then you wonder where did the time go? Where did my productivity go? And you look up and it’s 8 p.m. and the lights are off. And you’re tired and now it’s time to restart the day. So just wanted to throw that in there because that’s what I experienced in my story in the beginning was cognitive overload, but it doesn’t always necessarily happen when you’re in school or something. It can happen just by nature of you mindlessly scrolling. Wow.

John: And I think that’s a perfect parallel to exactly what I was just mentioning, right? It’s now if you think about where he was spending his energy there, nine hours a day moving through other people’s content on Instagram or whatever social media. Right? Is that, is that him spending his cognitive, emotional, and I would even say physical energy following that? Now, instead of like, what else could he have been doing with that time and energy? And then I come back to the three expressions, like the three ways that, you know, really make a difference for us, the ways that we want to show up in the world and to create, to contribute, to connect, right? And is it doing any of those three? I don’t think so. And to me, There’s something to be said about downtime, right? And how you want to spend your downtime as well. You know, what rests and restores you? And, you know, maybe folks say that a good laugh, a good laugh from a TikTok here and there is restorative. Maybe, but I would say just look at that question, what makes you feel restored and see if it’s just short-term pleasure. But then I think that if you’re using social media for a way to express yourself, It can be helpful. It can be useful if you’re using it as a way to express yourself, right? Not for seeking accolades, but as a platform for self-expression. I think it can be really almost restorative or rejuvenative in that way.

Tony: Yeah, and I think the thing about that is that social media and our phones are always accessible. So we have to be careful, especially if you’re talking about balance, the reality of balance. You gotta be careful with that theory of thought, too, of saying that, oh, well, this is the way that I restore is, you know, I just watch some funny videos. Well, you can always do that because our phones are always connected to our hip. If this was the wild, wild west, our phones would be our pistol, all right? So it’s always right there, but. But how often do you get to connect with people and loved ones and folks that you haven’t seen in a while? How often do you create time to take a walk, a nature walk, foamless nature walk, a sweaty walk, getting the sun, getting some of that vitamin D in you? You know, think about that when you say what it is that you use to restore yourself or find that balance is think about what is always available. and understand that you can always come back to what’s common or what’s there, but as you restore, try doing things you haven’t done in a while. Like for me, I really wanna go fishing. I haven’t been fishing in years, and I really, really wanna go, but the excuses, oh, I gotta get a license, oh, I gotta get a new fishing rod, Oh, I have a fishing rod, but I haven’t used it. I gotta go buy bait.” All the things that it takes to go fishing, it’s probably like, no, I’d rather just go watch some basketball highlights on Instagram. That’s my response to what you’re saying. It’s like, but the opportunity to go fishing is not always there, and then you have to do it in season. So it’s just a lot of Life is just not what it used to be. So we have to create those things for us instead of just leaning on what’s easier, what’s common. The phone’s going to be there. It’s not going anywhere.

John: And let me know when you want to go fishing. It’s been a while. It’s been a while, but I would love, love to get back to that. I got you. That was my Sunday ritual back years ago, probably seven, eight years ago now at this point. So this brings me to what I’m hearing in what you’re saying is a little bit more of this reaction versus response. Like, are we making a conscious choice to pick up our phone? Right. Right. Or is it just an automatic behavior in reaction, like to reach for that little bit of that little dopamine hit you can get every time that you pick up the phone and see a funny video. Or are we going to make the choice that has a little bit of delayed gratification, like getting all of that together to sit by the lake and fish? Exactly. Right. Because you’re right, we can always reach for that thing that’s easy and fun. We’ve talked about the procrastinator’s brain before. And there’s our automatic or primitive part of our minds, right? So the hippocampus are more towards the amygdala, your fear-based center, like the core of our brain that got us to this point, the survival part of our brain, the part of the brain that helps us react to situations, specifically reacting to danger. that helps us notice facial expressions immediately. All you need is a flash of someone’s face and you can see anger, you can see sadness. And it’s because that social cognition was extremely important to our survival. How is everyone in our tribe feeling? Is this tribe going to try to kill me? Am I welcome? Like all those little things are just reactions. You don’t have to think about it, right? There’s the little things like that. And a lot of those behaviors are learned as well. So as you continue over and over again to pick up your phone, get another dopamine hit, another dopamine hit, another dopamine hit, it starts training that part of your brain to want that, to react, to reach for that. So all of that to say that there’s another part of your brain that is the executive decision maker, like the part of your brain that makes the hard choice when the hard choice is the right choice. is your neocortex or prefrontal cortex specifically. And this is where mindfulness comes in because the more that you cultivate mindfulness and your self-awareness practice, the more that those parts of your brain can communicate. So it needs space to communicate. So your prefrontal cortex can say to the amygdala, no, let’s calm down. This isn’t really important to us. It just feels good right now. Let’s move forward and go fishing. let’s move forward and have the conversation, you know, have the conversation with my wife instead of trying to defend myself right now and without any ground to stand on, you know, it’s a lot of the, like, that’s the part of our brain that, you know, where we want to make the decisions that move our life and our really civilization forward. You have to have space for them to communicate because again, the automatic brain or your primitive brain comes first. So this is another way that burnout manifests, right? We’re just reacting. You know, when you’re not balanced, you’re reacting. It’s like, just think about even like you’re literally on a tightrope, right? Every time you kind of sway too far off center, you’re jerking back to center, like harder and harder, just more reacting. But when you’re more in a stable state and taking, you know, one step forward after the other, you can look a little bit farther ahead. You can see the beauty on the horizon. You can see the things in your life that you really want to step toward on the other side as opposed to just trying to stay where you’re at and get back to your center. So the way that I tie all this together is the more that you increase the space for conversation between that executive part of your mind, the automatic part of your mind, the more you can choose in the moment. Do I want to be disciplined and develop a skill that brings me true joy? That be fishing or writing or even just going on a nice walk or something as opposed to reacting to reach for what feels good. Like it starts in that moment, the conversations for those two parts of yourself. So start there and choose balance, whatever that means for you. And that could be taking an action in any of the areas that bring you joy, that align with your values. And really check in with that, understand what those are. I’ll talk a little bit more about that process in a little bit.

Tony: Yep, that’s a really good breakdown and really good understanding of the entire process, especially as you brought in the survival mode pieces. And that survival mode piece, it stuck out to me because it made me think about just as you said, caveman, trying to survive in the wilderness, in the jungle, or wherever he may be. As I mentioned, the cowboy with the pistol, survival mode, trying to make a living, what have you. And then today. And today, the common human that walks America, I’m not gonna say the whole Earth, but at least in this country. We have the phone and You think about what that does to the human? Because we we always have been in some form of survival mode and today we still are but it’s a different survival mode, our survival mode now is information. It’s either receiving information, or lack of information, or fear of lack of information, and you wonder why anxiety is at an all time high. It’s not because we’re scared of a lion attacking us and mauling us, or we’re scared of an enemy popping out and just shooting us as we walk down the tumbleweed. downtown that doesn’t really exist. We’re going to the saloon, right? We’re just in our houses peacefully, more peaceful than we’ve ever been in a long time. Knock on something hard and hope it stays that way, but we sit with that. And then a lot of it, it seeps in our mind, it creeps in our mental and then it just stays there and lives there. And that’s the beauty of meditation and the beauty of this conversation of what balance is. and how to find that balance, that peace, and restore yourself in a way that allows you to recognize the total reality that we live in so that you can have all the things. You can go fishing and you can Google something amazing on your phone and find out information that we only have had in this specific generation for the first time ever in humanity. I seen you wanting to comment. I’ll let you go if you had a comment to that.

John: No, it hit me how profound that was about that it’s the battle for information right now, that the survival mechanism is around having the information. whether it be the confirmation with likes and comments or the first piece of news or even like a new meme to send the group chat or something. It’s just like information. Right.

Tony: When you said that, it really hit me. I mean, think about it. It’s like, you know, I don’t know if it’s true, but it feels like we have put a new value on information in a way that prior generations just was it was only monetary. It was only monetary. The stock market bill goes off. the whole world wakes up, boom, right? Now, it’s literally, you go on Twitter, and whoever sets the tone for what the news story is, that is the story or stories of the day. And those stories last all day, and that is all people talk about for the day. And that is almost a new currency, what people are talking about. because it used to be in the newspaper, and it still is, don’t get me wrong. I was just talking to a baby boomer about the power of the newspaper, and it still carries a ton of weight, so no disrespect to the newspaper. But we, as millennials, The newspaper is like not the way we get our information is strictly 90% or more online maybe the news so the value of information has gone up in that way as well. And so one thing I talked to the guy last night about too was he brought up FOMO. fear of missing out. And that is so real that we wake up in the morning and the first thing we do is see what’s going on so that we don’t have the fear of missing out. And I can say for me, when it comes to balance, I have learned, and this has been practiced for a while now, especially as I talked about things I’ve achieved or been through that have allowed me to reshape how I look at things, but I don’t, I’m not gonna say I don’t care, because that’s kind of cynical, but I don’t check my phone first thing in the morning. Sometimes I do, but my goal is to make sure that my entire being is properly aligned before I know exactly what’s going on in the world. Because knowing what’s going on in the world, how will that serve me if it’s not a healthy piece of information I’m learning? And is that going to affect me from an anxiety standpoint or any standpoint as I lead myself, lead my household, lead my job, my work, my business, my community? What is that going to do for the people that I serve? That’s how I check in before I even check out what’s going on in the world.

John: Yeah. You check in with yourself and be in alignment with yourself before you step into your day. And I feel like that’s been disrupted a little bit for me because now I have to take this dog out first thing in the morning. I don’t even know if I’ve brought up Enkidu, the listeners yet, but there’s a new puppy in the picture. Well, I guess he’s a year old, so he’s getting there. He’s still a kid and dog, but yeah, that’s been an interesting adjustment into my morning routine. Sometimes it feels like he’s taking me for a walk. he actually will grab the leash with his mouth, it’s super cute, and pull me along out the door in the morning. Who’s really walking who here? I could go in with the mindset of, oh man, I’m digging into my meditation time here. No, I can make our time together in the morning like a mindful exercise. I can go out on a walking meditation with him and leave my phone in the house, get to hear the sounds in the morning and watch him sniff everything that he walks around. It’s our mindset. can make the activities that we step into completely different. So, you know, I just wanted to presence that based on what you said, but I want to circle back to the roles and commitments a little bit, unless you had something else you wanted to talk about on that.

Tony: Yeah, I’ll just say too that checking in is not always doing the checklist. Checking in is doing what brings you peace and joy in the morning, or yeah, especially in the morning, primarily. How you start your day is usually how you finish it. And so even if it is checking the news, watch the news with your freshest cup of coffee, tea or whatever it may be and just find your solitude, whatever it may be, whatever, without judgment. That’s the key. And so whatever brings you that joy in the morning and gives you that peace, you do that. I know for me, it’s not letting anything filter me before I check. So long as I’ve filtered my own way of being and thinking and feeling and having my own emotional state decently controlled before I start my day. That’s my goal. So I just want to make sure people don’t feel bad about checking Twitter first thing in the morning. Do you?

John: Yeah, that’s the first thing. I love how it always parallels to a meditation practice too. Don’t beat yourself up about it. Do your thing. If that’s aligned with your values, choose it.

Tony: Exactly.

John: Speaking of alignment, I call it macro mindfulness. It’s the way that I look at my life week to week and all of the roles and commitments that I have in my life. So I really have a chart that I check in with every week, and maybe this is the old engineer in me coming up, wanting to look at it on the spreadsheet, but it helps. It helps me right now. And when I mentioned at the beginning of the episode about how burnout can really be spending your energy in places that do not support you, or maybe in one of the aspects of your life, but forgetting about all the rest. And so that’s why I have all of the things, all the roles and commitments that are significant, that are part of my values and principles, I have them listed on one sheet. And I check in with them every week and rate myself like one to five stars on am I living up to the contribution that is in alignment with each of these roles. So I’ll give a couple examples or I’ll just read you my list. So right now there’s eight roles in the picture. Friend, boyfriend, dog, dad, brother and uncle, son and grandson, entrepreneur and leader, professional coach, yoga and meditation teacher. So those are all the eight core areas of my life that I check in with every week and see the first thing that I did for each of them is say, what does five stars really look like? What is the ideal state, my ideal contribution? And it can be simple. It can be to talk to your sister once a month and visit once a quarter. It could be call mom every week. It could be little things that can always change too. So what does a five look like can change as things shift, right? I’m sure a lot of the roles and commitments in your life shifted, Tony, whenever you became a dad. That’s a new role that’s come in, really important to you, aligned with your values. So maybe what five stars and all the other areas of your life look like, are different, and that doesn’t mean you’re still not up to par, but you define what that is for you in this moment and check in with it. So I check in with this every week, and it’s not a judgment tool like, oh, I’ve been bad in this area. It’s just a reality check. So when we’re talking about balance in reality, it’s how are you actually going to do this, listener? How are you going to take the steps to create balance? That’s why I wanted to make it very clear that it’s not just a balance between work and rest. It’s a balance between using your energy to all the places in your life that fulfill you, that make a difference for you. Now, this is the way that I actually do this in reality. is I look at all of these roles and it literally populates a chart that shows the balance of my life around a circle and all of these roles, right? So, obviously, I would have that. And I will share a link to this resource with all of you in the show notes. So, if you want to download this and you have this engineer spreadsheet mind you’ll uh you’ll love this way to to take a macro picture of your life so i call this my macro mindfulness exercise i check in every week where am i out of alignment and it’s just oh you know i give myself a one here this week okay so now what’s my plan to rebalance you know give give this friend a call line up five people on linkedin that i want to reach out to just list them And then I can start the reach out process next week. But it’s like, what action are you going to take to create balance in your life? And one of those actions might be rest. It might be. But I just, I don’t want you to have the only option as rest to create balance in your life. So again, I’ll share the access to this tool. It’s made such a difference for me in my life and I hope it does the same for you guys as well.

Tony: John is the master of tools, so I would definitely take him up on that. You need to put that calendar, too, the big calendar in the show notes. I know you probably have at some point. But I know that would definitely help people. I’ll link that. I’d say, as you were talking, it made me think about this principle that I’ve kind of worked to instill, or at least I definitely tell people about often when I talk with people, is the 80th percentile. What I mean by that is if you are doing your best, right, which is one of the four agreements, we’ll talk about that too, but if you’re doing your best or you’re seeking or trying to do your best, then What’ll happen is if you know that you’re striving to be 100% completion on every task, but knowing that in reality that’s not always sustainable, or maybe it’s not always achievable, especially if you have transitions in your life, like you talked about me being a dad and you being a dad too, and a lot of things that just happen and just change in life. And if you can just score in that 80th percentile consistently, you will achieve consistency. Like, you literally are trying to do your best every time. And a lot of times you’ll hit that 100% mark. Like, you’ll get there. Boom, perfect score. Boom, perfect score. And that is Great but if you have something new that happens in your life in the relationship a job change your career change your location change and environment change and if you haven’t adapted. Are adopted the principles at least allow you to get. within the same mark on a regular basis, it’s a lot harder to do that if you’re all over the map. So imagine a target, right, as if you were throwing an axe or throwing a dart. If all your darts are in the same area and it’s close to the middle, that is much better than your darts being all over the map and you having a few of them right in the center. That’s actually not what you want. You actually want to have that consistency factor because if most of your darts are landing in the same place, all you need is an adjustment to just slide yourself over a little bit so you then can hit right in the center every time. And I’m sure that for you, John, with whenever you have everything rolling, especially thinking about transitions and changes and things like that. When you’re rolling, you’re probably right there in the dart in the center every time, especially as someone that takes note and looks at your performance. I would guess that the only time you may have shift changes is if you’re sick or if you have a huge transition.

John: You know, I’d say you’re giving me a lot of credit, man.

Tony: I mean, what do you think?

John: I think I developed these tools. I developed these tools to work around my own psyche and my own way that I used to really get, you know, dive into my own rabbit holes and forget about whole parts of my life. So I created a system to not forget about parts of my life that are integral to who I am. Yeah. So I think what you’re saying about hitting the mark is like, I think the first one is taking the shots, throwing the darts in the first place, you know, it’s like those areas of your life, things that you, you know, projects that you want to finish people, you want to see places you want to go. You know, things that you want to do that take more time than just picking up your phone for a dopamine hit, right? Like, you got to throw the darts at it.

Tony: And have the right darts, too. Like you mentioned, those eight things. Like, sometimes people have 20 darts and wonder why they… Your arm’s tired, man.

John: Man, when I teach this workshop, I say six to seven roles max. Even right now at eight is like, it’s up there. It’s like after you start getting to seven roles, things start, like something’s always neglected. It’s just, and there’s no, there’s no winning for having the most roles, right? Or the most commitments. I would actually say that winning is narrowing down your roles and commitments to things that directly feed your soul. there, you might find a career that satisfies, you know, two or three of those aspects. And then, you know, then you’re down to your work in the world, something creative, friends, family, and like, like those, those roles, man, Then you can really, like you mentioned, start hitting the target. You get really dialed in on what you’re working with. I always encourage, if you’re up six, seven rolls, really question. or is this one in full alignment? Is it contributing to my overall joy? There’s something to be said about simplifying your life too. It’s easier to create balance the less things that you’re juggling.

Tony: This makes me think about our Richard Baird episode because One of the keys in the chart that he signed, I took away one specific thing, and I think that it plays into what you just said, and I think it’s very helpful for people to consider, and that is learning how to manage crisis mode. That is one of the first major steps to achieving balance. Because when you can manage crisis mode and just understand that a fire is a fire and it’s going to happen, you become almost invincible. Because when things happen in your personal life or with others or at work, you then become reliable because you have trust. And when you can have that trust for your own self and your own life and when crises arise, you just kind of I mean, I’ve naturally been doing that for years and I didn’t know it. I had someone ask me one time years ago, how do you stay so calm, cool, and collected? And I didn’t even have a proper answer. I told her I drink a lot of water. I don’t know why that was my answer. But in all seriousness, it’s like, I don’t let those things interfere. And maybe it’s the practices that I talked about earlier with the morning and things like that. But I think that’s compounded. I don’t even wanna say that it’s just my morning routine that’s allowed me to deal with crisis. I think it’s fear-based. I think when you have fear, it can control you when things go wrong. Because when things go wrong, you automatically assume that it’s going to go to the worst end. I’ll give you an example. So remember that what I’m saying here is managing crisis mode. So me and my wife, we took our son to the park a couple of days ago and it was a park in our neighborhood. Very nice park. Kids are all around, but there were wasps everywhere. Right. And so he’s playing, having a great time and they’re constantly was like flying around them. So we’re both like kind of freaked out a little bit. You know, we’re like we don’t want to be helicopter parents, but there is a freaking was flying around our son while he’s playing. So. We sat back and we just kind of relaxed and let it be. No wasp stung any kids. No wasp stung our son. But me and my wife had a conversation. I said, see, the wasp is exactly what’s happening in society. So in our lives, bad things can happen. So we can get stung by bad things and so we get freaked out, we get worried, we get scared, we think, oh my God, this is the end, you know, or oh my God, people are going to find out this or this is going to go wrong or go left. When in reality, it’s not going to happen. It could happen, but the likelihood of it happening is slow. And if you just be present and not allow that thing to overtake you internally or externally, Maybe nothing will happen at all and you can just stay focused and accomplish and achieve your dreams or things that you’re trying to get done. Because my son didn’t even see the wasp as a threat. We are trained to see the wasp as a threat. So he’s just sitting there playing and he’s like, look at this little bug. He probably thought it was a butterfly, I don’t know. And it’s like, how many times do we let potential bad things or potential crises cause us to get distracted, deterred, or even self-sabotage? If I would have went in there and started killing wasps everywhere in that park, do you know how bad that could have been for every other kid, including my own? How crazy I would have looked? But I would have thought, wait, this is the right thing to do. I’m killing wasps. And so, you know, I just hope that people can take that. story and that scenario and apply it to your life. Bad things could happen, yes, but if you can manage the potentiality of a bad thing happening, that can change you into a person that is trustworthy in a crisis. You learn to trust yourself even more and you don’t be surprised at the leadership opportunities that occur for you when people realize that they can depend on you.

John: Man, I like that you circled back to the Richard Barrett episode because that comes to one quote actually from him that I remember that’s related to that, and I’ll close with that. And it’s, be who you are, but don’t allow fear to run your life. and not allowing this fear into your life, then you can courageously step into what it is that you want to create, the people that you want to connect with, and your contribution to the world. So first step to improving on all of that, building more trust in yourself is committing to your own development, committing to knowing yourself, understanding yourself, your tendencies, and learning more, trying things on, experimenting. And I hope that you take things from this podcast and try it on in your life. Do the experiment. See what works for you. Maybe the chart looks completely different for you. Maybe your approach looks completely different from Tony’s or my own. And that’s perfect. Go test it. Be who you are. Don’t allow fear into your life. And thank you for being a listener for the present professional podcast. We’d love having you as a part of the community. We’d love for you to connect with us on the presentprofessionalpodcast.com. So reach out, don’t hesitate, go out there, be courageous, make it happen. Take care of my friends.