How to Get Time, Priorities, and Energy Working in Your Favor
Episode Stats
Summary
Kerry Newhoff shares his story of how he overcame burnout in his career and personal life, and how he turned it all around. In his new book, "At Your Best: How to Get Time, Energy, and Priorities Working in Your Favor," he talks about how to overcome burnout and turn it into a positive thing.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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Now, when you think of your assets, you probably think of your money, but you also have three
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other hugely important assets at your disposal too. Your time, energy, and priorities. When
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you manage these assets poorly, you can feel overwhelmed and scattered and yet unproductive
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and unfulfilled. When you manage them well, things in your personal and professional life
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click and you experience traction and satisfaction. So how do you avoid the first situation and
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achieve the second? My guest today, Kerry Newhoff provides answers in his book, At Your Best,
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How to Get Time, Priorities, and Energy Working in Your Favor. We begin our conversation with
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Kerry's story of achieving success only to suffer burnout and how burnout has become less of a job
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problem these days than a general life problem. We then talk about how to leave what Kerry calls
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the stress spiral and get into the thrive cycle. We discuss the two mental shifts you need to make
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to better manage your time, how to keep other people and yourself from hijacking your priorities,
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the power of categorical decision-making and separating the good from the best, and why you
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need to put even your personal commitments on your calendar. We also talk about scheduling your daily
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tasks and what Kerry calls your green, yellow, and red energy zones, and how to spend your time
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more strategically. After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash at your best.
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All right, Kerry Newhoff, welcome to the show. Hey, it's great to be with you. Thanks so much for having
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me, Brett. So you got a book out called At Your Best, How to Get Time, Energy, and Priorities
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Working in Your Favor. And this book talks about the changes you made in your life when you experienced
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some pretty massive burnout in your career and in your personal life. It's about 15 years ago.
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Can you walk us through what led up to the burnout and at what point did you realize,
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man, I got a problem and I got to do something about this? One of my problems was I didn't realize
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I had a problem. And I think that's how a lot of people get into this spiral of burnout,
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whatever degree it happens to be in. Yeah. So for me, I had been in leadership for about a decade.
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I was leading a very fast-growing not-for-profit organization. And I had a really terrible formula.
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And the formula was that the more growth I had, the more hours I had to work.
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And that doesn't scale. It just doesn't scale. I tend to be kind of a driven person,
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strong-willed leader, strong-willed person. And I had convinced myself that I didn't have any limits,
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that other people might have to sleep more, other people may have to take time off,
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but I didn't really need to do it. Sort of a classic entrepreneurial mindset.
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And that worked for a long time. I had people warn me all through my 30s. They're like,
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hey, dude, if you keep working like this, you're going to burn out. And I'm like,
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nah, that's not going to happen. And then what was the most shocking part of that for me
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was in many ways, I was at the top of my game. I had just spoken to 2,500 leaders in Atlanta
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at a major conference. It was like the biggest speaking event I had at that time to date in my
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life. We were growing really fast. And I thought my life is fantastic. And then my body went on strike.
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And I woke up one day and my usual passion was gone. And my thinking was not very clear. And I
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thought, oh, I got to get some more sleep. So I did. And what was worse is I just kept getting
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worse and worse to the point where my passion was gone. My joy was gone. I thought, wow,
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maybe this is it. Maybe this is the end of road for me. And I had brain fog like I'd never had before.
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So that's how burnout hit me. And yeah, I didn't recognize the signs.
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I guess it was sort of like the boiling frog. You didn't recognize it as it was happening?
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Yeah. No, exactly. And then one day you're dead. And looking back on it, I'm like, okay,
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I did not declare a finish line. So my body decided to. And that seems to be a more and more common
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story that you hear from leaders is like, I thought everything was okay, or I thought it was normal.
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Now, having lived the last 15 years a lot healthier, I can look back and say that level
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of fatigue is not normal. Like when you're driving your car for five minutes, you feel like you need
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to pull over at the side of the road and have a nap. That is not normal life. When you're kind of
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redlining your emotions all the time, or actually, what was weird with my emotions, and this could be
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a clue for people to see how close they are to burnout, is I had found myself growing increasingly numb.
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I wasn't feeling like life is a series of highs and lows. And as much as we'd all love to avoid
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the lows, you're supposed to feel them. Like when somebody close to you gets sick, that is supposed
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to register in your heart. And conversely, when someone has some really good news, you know, they
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broke some kind of sales record, or maybe they're expecting a child or something, you should feel
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happy for them. And I was increasingly just experiencing life as going through the motions, and I was kind of
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numb. And then when my emotions would surface, they would often be not related to what they
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should be. So if I've got two boys, if one of them was supposed to take out the trash, they didn't take
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out the trash, I might melt down on them. And like, that's a three out of 10 on the problem scale, but
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I treated it like a 12 out of 10. So there were signs at that point, but I just ignored them and blew
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through them because I thought, well, the rules don't apply to me. And of course, they never apply to you
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until they do. So you said you were a leader of a nonprofit organization. Is this the church that
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you were leading? Yeah. So I was running a church at a time. I'd originally trained as a lawyer,
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so I spent my 20s in university, which is a whole other story for another day, but went through the
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whole law thing in the middle of law school, felt a call into ministry, and ended up finishing law and
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then going into seminary. And I started at three very small, like handful of people, country churches
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that really hadn't changed in about 30 years. And then obviously new leadership brings change.
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And we became the fastest growing church in our denomination in the country and one of the largest
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in the country in a period of about a decade. So it was that rocket ride that I was riding that just
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about killed me. Well, and you make this point in the book, like you were doing the thing that you
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wanted to do, right? You wanted to, you know, this is something you were passionate, you felt called to,
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but the thing that you wanted to do was causing you burnout. This was happening, this happens,
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you said this happens to a lot of people, people who they're doing the thing they love,
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they're starting a business, they're whatever. And that's the thing that's, that's killing them.
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Like what's going on there? Well, you know, it seems to be a human condition. Yeah. Because
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that's really surprising. Like from my own perspective, as a person of faith, it's like,
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how could any of this be bad? And I think that kind of got in my way, to be honest with you,
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because I thought, well, look, the church is growing like crazy. I can't be unhealthy.
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And of course, I was unhealthy. But it also reminded me of what I saw in law. I mean,
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I went to law school, I worked in downtown Toronto for a year, I'm Canadian, and I worked in the
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financial sector. So I saw law at what you might call the top of the game, right? Like Wall Street
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law kind of thing. And what I noticed there is all these people had dream jobs, my colleagues and the
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people I was working with for that year had dream jobs. And most of them hated it. Like they had the
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house, they had the, you know, I remember one guy had a horse farm in the country.
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And every day he or every week, he would buy a lottery ticket, walk it into the firm. Of course,
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I'm in my mid 20s. At that point, he'd wave it in my face. And he goes, Carrie, if I ever win this
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lottery, I'm out of here, you'll never see my face again. And I thought, really, this is like the
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pinnacle of success, right? Like if you're if you're gonna do law, this is near the top of the food
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chain. And you hate the life you built? Like, what is that? And then I began to run into that
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same kind of thing in ministry. And I've seen that in so many people's lives. It's just the stress
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gets to you and you don't have a formula for how to deal with it. And success can leave you feeling
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empty on the inside or burned out. What do you think is the nature of the type of work that causes
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burnout? So like, I know that pastoral burnout is pretty common. Yeah, I can see lawyer burn. I know
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that. And then like, there's caregiver burnout, like nurses, doctors, people, right? Is it like,
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is if you're dealing with people? Like, is that what is that what causes burnout? Because I look at all
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those, all those jobs, like, you just deal with a lot of people in difficult situations all the time.
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Oh, for sure. In ministry, I mean, it's really hard to say no to people, people you love,
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people you care about. We were navigating 30% growth year after year for a number of years.
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So there was just a run. I've heard, I don't know how true this is, that 15% growth is scalable. Like,
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you can handle that. Anything above that becomes difficult to manage. I was finding it difficult to
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manage at that point. I don't know. It is endemic to certain careers. For sure, burnout, as I understand
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the origin of the term, was originally a term to describe the feeling that doctors had in the 1970s.
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It was like, I feel burned out. I've got compassion fatigue. I've got, you know, too many hours. And
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the stories you have from the internships of doctors and the residencies are just crazy. And you do know
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a lot of burned out lawyers. It's easy to get cynical. But what I'm noticing, and I don't know
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whether you'd agree with this or whether you see this or not, Brett, in your work, but I'm seeing
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it move from like a work condition to a life condition in the last decade. I meet burned out
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people everywhere. I meet them in helping professions. I meet them in other jobs. I meet
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them online. I meet them, stay-at-home parents feel burned out. I've met retired people who are
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struggling with overwhelm. And I'm like, whoa, what's going on? I think technology maybe had a role
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in that. And I'm a fan of technology. I'm a podcaster like you are. I run a digital company.
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But for the first time in history, for the last 15 years, we're having to deal with being on call
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24-7 with devices in our pockets that give the world access to us. I don't know that we're built
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to handle that kind of scale of communication and access. So I see it expanding. And I've also seen
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some very happy lawyers, some very satisfied pastors. You know, my last 15 years, totally
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different story than the first 10 years in leadership. But yeah, that could definitely be
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an issue. But I see it as pretty widespread now.
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Something you also talked about in the book, when you started this burnout, like you didn't know,
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you didn't recognize you were burnt out right away, but you did notice like, there's a lot of
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stress and I'm just, it's crazy town. Things are growing fast. And you would start telling yourself
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these excuses of, you know, what's going on here. And one of them was like, well, this is just a
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season. Like, well, we get through this, like we get through this year and things will level off and
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be better. And you get to the end of the year and it just got crazier. I mean, any other excuses you
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found yourself telling yourself as you started experiencing this increased level of stress?
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Yeah, that was, I mean, it could be a whole podcast. I had all kinds of reasons. And I had that.
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Fortunately, I have good friends and good family. And they would say, you know, what's new with you,
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Carrie? I'm like, well, I'm flying here, flying there. I'm writing this book or whatever.
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Things are really busy. It's just a busy season. And eventually they started calling me on it.
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And I realized, oh, like seasons have beginnings and endings. And if your season has no ending,
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it's not a season, it's your life. So, you know, I got called out on that one.
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Another lie I think I probably bought into or an excuse I told myself is this is the price of success.
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Like if you want to have something that's growing quickly and you want to accomplish your mission,
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it's going to cost you personally. I don't believe that anymore, but I fell for that hook,
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line and sinker. And yeah, those are a couple of lies I believed. The other thing I really struggled
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with was I had a sense of time famine. And I lived in this imaginary world where I thought,
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if I could only have more time, if I could only have more time, and I just don't have enough time
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to get a proper day off. I just don't have enough time. And I think the answer for me was always
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around the corner, like one more hire or one more season, or if I can just get to Christmas vacation,
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then I will be better. And of course, that never solves the problem. The problem was internal.
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The problem was the way that I was approaching leadership and the way that I was stewarding
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this life I had been given. And once I fixed that, all the problems, well, those problems
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Yeah. Once you get to Christmas vacation, then Christmas vacation is crazy busy because you got
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Yeah. Then you're living for spring. But then you live for those moments and you have to do a lot
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of work before you take the break. And then you can kind of enjoy your break. And then when you get back,
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there's all this work that's built up because you've taken a break. And then you just have to
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work like the Dickens to catch up on your work. It's yeah. All right. So yeah, that's an excuse
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you got to get out. Like this is just got to accept that this is the normal. This is the norm.
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I've got stuff. Things are out of control. I need to get a handle on it. Let's talk about first,
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like how we get on that pathway towards burnout. And you argue that it's all because we hop on what
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you call the stress spiral. And there's stages to this. What's the on-ramp? Like what gets us onto
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I tried to put my finger when I was writing the book, I tried to put my finger on the condition
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that so many people find themselves in. And I named it the stress spiral. And the stress spiral is
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really three conditions we find ourselves in, overwhelmed, overworked, and overcommitted.
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And I would say the majority of leaders I interact with these days, and the majority of people I know
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in my life would identify with two or three out of three. I feel overwhelmed. I feel overcommitted.
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I've said yes to too many things. And I'm overworked. I'm putting in too many hours doing whatever I do.
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And how do you get there? Well, I think you get into the stress spiral. As I really thought about it,
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there are three primary assets all of us are handling every single day, no matter what your life
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situation is. Time, energy, and priorities. On a vacation, you're dealing with that. How are we
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going to spend the day? What's the most important thing to do? Do we go out for breakfast? Do we eat
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in? Do you think we have time for a round of golf today? Or so-and-so wants us to do X. So it's time,
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energy. I'm pretty tired today. I don't know whether I can do 18 holes, or at least maybe we better get a
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cart, right? Or priorities. So even on vacation, you're dealing with that. And at work, that's what
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you're dealing with. And in life, in normal life, you're dealing with that all the time.
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And when I began to look back on the period leading into burnout, I noticed that my time was
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unfocused. I spent it very randomly, usually in a reactive mode to whatever was happening in the
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moment. My energy levels, I was really unaware of other than most of the time I felt tired.
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And then the priorities that I was dealing with, I just let other people hijack my priorities all the
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time. And so when you have unfocused time, unleveraged energy, and hijack priorities,
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you end up feeling overwhelmed, overworked, and overcommitted. And hence, you're in the stress spiral.
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So this unfocused time, I mean, you said you were reactive. I mean, would you just wake,
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walk in the office, look at your inbox, and let your inbox dictate what you would spend your time on?
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Totally. I let everybody. Knocks on the door, inboxes, you know, texting was becoming a thing in 2006.
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And again, rapidly growing organization. Everybody wants to meet with you, and you want to meet with
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everybody. And then, of course, in ministry, in a helping profession, you're dealing with a lot of
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crises. I was talking to a pastor the other day who said his Saturday got blown up by two families that
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were in crisis. And of course, what I've learned is when your marriage is falling apart, that didn't
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happen on a Friday night, and now you need help on Saturday. Your marriage has been falling apart
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for years. So perhaps I can't meet you on my day off, but maybe I can meet you next Tuesday at three
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o'clock. But I didn't know that back then. So I just let other people determine how I spent my day.
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And then the really stressful part of that is like, now I run a digital communications company. But back
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when I was working at a church and leading a church, there was a message due almost, you know,
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every Sunday. And so I had to show up with something fresh to say, something faithful to say,
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and something marginally creative, so that engaged people's attention. And again, you know, when you
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lead a larger church, preaching is an awful lot of the formula for why people come. And so I had that
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pressure. And when I let other people hijack my mornings, my afternoons, that left like late afternoon
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for me trying to come up with something I was going to say on the weekend. And of course, then that always
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bled into the evenings and into days off. So it was just a mess.
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And it's going back to this working, not in align with your energies. Like sometimes you just work
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on like these really hard, like writing a sermon, for example, like something that's really creative,
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requires a lot of thought, a lot of energy. And you'd have to work on that when you weren't feeling
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that. And sometimes it would end up subpar. Exactly. Yeah. Like in the stress spiral,
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unleveraged energy is something I had to think about as I got healthier, because I realized my energy,
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even on my best days, when I'm fully rested, I'm healthy, I'm feeling good, I'm not burned out,
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it waxes and wanes over the course of a day. And everybody who's listening to this knows that
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because you've identified yourself at some point as a night owl or a morning person or Daniel Pink
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would argue a lot of people really peak midday, let's say between 10 and 2 or they're afternoon
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people. But there's a percentage of people who are morning people. Do you have a bias one way or
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the other? Like, would you say you're a morning person, Brett, or a night owl? I would say morning
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person, like late morning. That's when I get my best work done. So your peak hours would be what?
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After nine? Yeah, I'd say after nine. So like between, yeah, nine and 11, nine and 12, I would
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say would be my best hours. Okay. You know what you just did? You just confirmed science.
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Oh, wow. And I lived in my 30s as though I had 12 peak hours in a day. And nobody does that.
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Like maybe a robot does or your car can run for 12 hours at a certain speed, but human
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beings can't. And you've just affirmed what I discovered the hard way. You get about three
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to five peak hours in a day where your energy is at its best, where you have no brain fog or
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very little, and you're feeling great. And the ideas flow. If you're a writer, like you produce
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your best content in that time. If you're working on strategy, your thinking is clear. You're able
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to map out the future. If you're working on spreadsheets, you just haven't got that many
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errors, right? Or maybe you came up with a really creative pivot table that you haven't
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thought of before. That's about three to five hours where your energy is at its peak. And
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then all of us end up with an hour or two in a typical day where we're kind of dragging.
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For me, that's between four and six in the afternoon. Do you have an hour or two where you're
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like, yeah, I either need a nap or I need to go for a run or something?
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Yeah, like three, between three and five. That's when I usually do my workout. It's
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Very typical. And a really good use of your workout zone. I know that's important to you,
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but are you training for the Olympics? Probably not.
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So you don't need to take your prime time to do your workouts. A lot of morning people still
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work out in the morning. And if that really helps you be more productive, awesome. But I've
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moved my exercise to the late afternoon because otherwise I either want to have an app or I want to
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I want to get moving my body so that I sort of get re-energized for the evening.
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So what I discovered with that time is I was spending it really unstrategically,
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wasting my best hours of the day where I could produce the best content that I was capable of
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producing and often putting it off till the late afternoon when I was already tired, over-caffeinated,
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and when I didn't feel like doing it anymore. And it just created this stress spiral that led me
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further and further and eventually into burnout.
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And I want to talk more about how we can leverage our energy. And part of that is getting on what
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you call the thrive cycle, which is the opposite of the stress cycle. And the first step of getting
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on the thrive cycle is focusing your time instead of having unfocused time. And the first step in
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focusing your time is you have to make two critical mental shifts about time if you want to do a better
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job managing your time. So what are those two mental shifts?
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Well, the first mental shift I made was I had to get past my excuses, which we've hinted at already.
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And my excuse was, I don't have the time for that. And I read this little book. I don't think it's
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even in print anymore. And I don't remember where I got it or even what the title is. But it was about
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what is your life like if you're the President of the United States? I think it was written for
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eighth graders. I don't know how I ended up reading it. It was probably a bad season of my life.
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But it was really fascinating. And I remember having this aha moment where I thought the President
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of the United States gets as many hours in the day as any other human being. And he or maybe in
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the future, she has to, at that point, govern the free world with that same 24 hours in a day that I
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get. And it made me think about all the really successful leaders I admire and the very best.
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They make you feel they're never in a rush. They have all the time in the world for you.
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They really pay attention to you. And they might be running 20 companies, but you'd never know it.
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They're not frantic. And I started calling myself out on my speech and auditing my speech. And I made
00:21:48.820
myself stop saying things like, I don't have the time to do that. Because I realized I did. All through
00:21:55.460
my 30s, people said, Kerry, you got to write a book. You got to write a book. And I'd always say,
00:21:59.160
I don't have the time for that. I don't have the time for that. Well, since I burned out,
00:22:02.420
I've written five books over the last decade. And I had the time for it. I just wasn't taking it.
00:22:08.920
I also got rid of my excuse language when it came to, sorry, I couldn't get that done.
00:22:13.620
Well, actually, I could have gotten it done. I chose not to. And when I got honest with myself,
00:22:19.640
it really made me come to terms with how I was squandering time.
00:22:22.880
And then the second shift I made when it comes to time management, and these are easy to recognize
00:22:29.700
and to understand, very difficult to do. But I would say, just to wrap up the first one before
00:22:35.000
we dive fully into the second one, is stop saying you don't have the time. Start admitting to yourself
00:22:42.440
you didn't make it. Now, that's really hard. But if you're consistently for a month not making the time
00:22:48.880
to work out, that tells you something about your priorities. Or if your mom's been saying,
00:22:53.340
hey, when are you going to call me? And for a month, you haven't called your mom because you're
00:22:57.140
telling yourself, I don't have the time, I don't have the time, I don't have the time. Well, really,
00:23:00.440
you haven't had like 20 minutes to call your mom in the last month, like it makes you get really
00:23:04.500
honest with yourself. And then the second mental shift was to decide to abandon balance and embrace
00:23:11.440
passion. I had thought about balance as a life goal for a long time and probably put it on my
00:23:17.240
New Year's resolutions on different years. And then I began to look at balanced people, people,
00:23:22.900
very few people claim to have achieved balance. But when I saw it, it started to bother me. Because
00:23:28.740
in the lives of the people I knew who would say, hey, I'm really balanced, it seems like their
00:23:33.580
balance was a retreat. They kept stepping back, I'm doing less work, I'm doing less of this, I'm doing
00:23:39.700
less of that. And as I thought about it, I thought, you know what, like, I don't want to do less with
00:23:46.020
my life, I want to make a difference. And so I decided to abandon balance and embrace passion.
00:23:51.500
That whatever I allow on my calendar, whatever I allow, if I'm going to preach on the weekend,
00:23:56.320
I'm going to do a killer job. If I'm going to do this interview, I'm going to walk in prepared.
00:24:00.580
If I'm going to have a date night with my wife, and we've been married for decades,
00:24:04.520
I'm going to show up fully present. If I'm spending a day with my sons who are now grown,
00:24:10.220
I'm going to be there, not like half on my phone.
00:24:12.680
So I just decided, whatever I allow in my life, which is a minority of the opportunities that I
00:24:18.180
have, I'm just going to be fully present, and I'm going to do it passionately. And that has made a
00:24:23.560
huge difference. And by the way, that also applies to time off. If I'm going to vacation, I'm going
00:24:28.320
to vacation. If I'm going to sleep for eight hours, I'm not going to apologize for it. I'm going to
00:24:32.400
sleep passionately. I'm going to get a great night's sleep, so I can hit the ground running the
00:24:37.140
next day. So those were two really helpful ways to think about time and how to approach time.
00:24:42.980
I've got the time. If I didn't do it, I just didn't make it. And then whatever I allow myself
00:24:48.140
to do, I'm going to do passionately. And I imagine what that did is it made you
00:24:52.280
pickier about the things you committed to. Way pickier. Way pickier. And it got me to the point
00:24:59.660
where I thought, I'm just not going to say yes. And this is still hard. If you're looking at an
00:25:04.240
active thing, I have to work on daily. Like you, I get far more opportunities than I have
00:25:09.660
time available to do them. Just this morning, I had a text from a friend. Hey, you want to be on
00:25:14.100
my podcast? I asked my staff. They said, well, you're booking three months in advance. So I had
00:25:18.580
to let them know, no, I can't do it. And old me would have found a crack in the calendar and would
00:25:24.580
have said, yeah, I can do that with you. And my assistant said, but Carrie, you need to write a really
00:25:29.240
good article for next week. You got a book launch coming up and you got this coming up and you got that
00:25:33.040
coming up. You really can't do it. So yeah, that allows me to be fully present for this interview
00:25:38.760
as well. We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors. And now back to the
00:25:45.280
show. Well, so this, you know, focusing your time is very connected to hijacking or preventing hijack
00:25:51.320
of your priorities. So this is an example. You have these filters in place that you've put in
00:25:55.860
place for yourself where it makes it harder for other people to hijack your priorities. Any other
00:26:00.920
tips that you found that are useful to prevent that from happening?
00:26:04.620
One hijack priority person is you. You are a good hijacker of your own priorities. I know I am
00:26:10.980
because I can be completely undistracted. So let's say I recognize I've got those peak energy times,
00:26:17.300
which mine are about seven to 11 AM. And I'm going to work on a really big article for a major
00:26:22.120
publication. I am fully capable of distracting myself. I may have put the world at bay and said,
00:26:28.500
you guys stay away and they stay away. And next thing you know, I'm five videos into a YouTube
00:26:33.520
wormhole that I can't get out of, or I get bored. We're getting addicted to being constantly connected
00:26:41.780
to other people. So I think you can hijack your own priorities. So I encourage, and this is not new
00:26:47.380
advice, but I encourage everyone, turn off all notifications on all of your devices. And a shocking
00:26:55.080
number of people have never done that. And you can program a few people to ring through. I have
00:27:00.360
some favorites on my iPhone that can get to me anytime, but they're the kinds of people that
00:27:05.240
tend not to interrupt me on a constant basis, or they wouldn't be a favorite. So if you're worried
00:27:10.820
about your daughter, well, your daughter can phone through. That's fine. But if she's interrupting you
00:27:14.820
five times a day, you can have a conversation with her about that. So you have to watch your own
00:27:19.860
distractions. Another one definitely is people. People can be a huge distraction. And there's a
00:27:27.600
principle, I think, for how you manage your time, which I hope helps a lot of people. And it's simply
00:27:34.400
that the wrong people will always ask for your time, and the right people never will. Maybe your
00:27:40.340
spouse, if you're married or your partner wishes that they could spend more time with you, or your kids
00:27:44.820
wish they could spend more time with you, or you haven't talked to your best friend in a little
00:27:48.580
while, they're rarely going to be as persistent as some of the chronic underperformers at work,
00:27:56.140
or the people whose lives are constantly in crisis. So again, being in ministry, you know,
00:28:01.060
we had crises almost every day. And what I learned over time, and this is hard, but people who are in
00:28:06.680
the helping profession will probably realize this, there are some people who actually do not want to
00:28:11.880
get well, and they will suck your time. So sometimes it's the people who always have a new crisis in
00:28:17.720
their life. It's like, well, last week, it was this, but this week, it's this, and they want to see you
00:28:21.660
and they want to see you this morning, and they want to see you on their schedule. And I had to learn
00:28:26.320
that probably that is not the best use of their time and not the best use of my time. Psychologist
00:28:33.220
John Townsend says people like that sometimes have a flat learning curve. They just want your time,
00:28:38.320
but they don't want to get better. Another thing you'll do as a boss, and I've been a boss for over
00:28:42.660
two decades, is you'll say, well, I got to spend time with my low performers, the staff member
00:28:47.560
who's always late, or somebody who just can never hit their targets, right? You're really not doing
00:28:52.860
very well at this job. So I got to meet with you again. And you owe that to everyone once or twice.
00:28:58.160
But the reality is, there's probably some people in your life that you've been meeting with now for
00:29:02.720
months about being late, and they're still late, or the people who never hit their quotas.
00:29:07.920
And you got to ask yourself, like, is that the best use of your time? Because number one,
00:29:13.180
those meetings are draining. Number two, you're not helped by it. And number three,
00:29:18.060
neither are they. And if they're looking for a way to improve their lives, you're probably not the
00:29:24.680
coach that's going to help them do it. So what I've had to do over the last 15 years is make sure,
00:29:29.620
yeah, I'll meet any team member anybody wants. But if my coaching isn't making them better,
00:29:34.680
why do I keep coming back to that week after week after week? When I cleared all of that off
00:29:40.380
of my calendar, first of all, I had way fewer meetings. Secondly, I then started to call up
00:29:46.060
some of the best people in my life, like the top performers, who is your best salesperson,
00:29:50.780
who's your best vice president, who is your best associate pastor, who is your best whatever,
00:29:56.500
and meet with them because they're not asking for your time. And they're doing a great job doing what
00:30:00.900
they're doing. But what I've learned is those meetings are almost always energizing. Number
00:30:05.600
two, everybody gets better. So your mission actually gets accomplished. And number three,
00:30:11.140
they really appreciate it and will lean in even harder. And you should do the same with the most
00:30:15.960
important people in your life, with your family, with your best friends, with the people who are
00:30:20.520
really producing well. It creates kind of a virtuous loop, a virtuous cycle.
00:30:25.860
How do you handle, okay, so what's about those people who come to you for help? Like they're just
00:30:30.160
struggling and you keep meeting with them and nothing seems to get better. How do you tell them
00:30:35.380
this isn't, I can't do this anymore in a way that's, I guess, compassionate is the right word?
00:30:40.380
Because obviously they're struggling and they're hurting and they're, they need something. So how do
00:30:43.980
you say, this isn't the best thing for either of us? What does that look like?
00:30:49.620
Yeah, it's hard. It never gets easy. But what I would typically do, it's not that different from
00:30:54.580
your question, is to sit down with them and say, you know, I really appreciated meeting with you.
00:30:59.440
Clearly you've got a lot going on. I am not sure that I'm the person who's going to be able to
00:31:04.800
help you with that. So I did go to seminary as well as law school. And, you know, I'm not a
00:31:10.960
counselor. I don't have a doctorate in that. And so what I would often do in a case like that,
00:31:15.340
and of course, as our church got bigger into the thousands, I had to start referring people almost
00:31:20.360
immediately to trained professional counselors. But that would be one thing. And that happens in business
00:31:26.220
too, right? Where sometimes you're meeting with people and you realize I'm not really helping
00:31:30.520
them with that. And if that's the case, you can get them professional help. You can do an outside
00:31:36.100
referral, or maybe there's somebody else in the firm or someone else in the organization that is
00:31:40.780
better positioned for that. But I started to have that conversation. And I would just say,
00:31:45.740
I don't have the toolkit to fix your marriage. That's not what I trained for. I can preach a decent
00:31:51.260
sermon. And I would often tell people, I can counsel a thousand people on the weekend. I'm
00:31:55.840
just not very good at doing it one-on-one. And most people got that. Most people understood that.
00:32:01.260
When it comes to low performers at work, if you are not seeing results, that's the time where perhaps
00:32:07.300
you don't have the right fit. It's that adage of hire slowly and fire quickly. And as much as we hate
00:32:13.220
firing people, I had to do that once or twice at the church. I've done that on occasion in my company,
00:32:17.940
but sometimes we get it wrong on the hiring, or the skill set isn't right. And I've learned to do
00:32:24.020
that a lot better over the last 15 years. But if you do it well, and you do it compassionately,
00:32:28.720
usually a year down the road, they're better off, and so are you, because it wasn't the right fit for
00:32:32.820
them. And if you can help them see it, then that's great. Or alternatively, perhaps you're not the
00:32:39.320
coach to bring that out in them. Maybe there's someone else in the company, an outside person,
00:32:43.020
who really can motivate them to show up on time and create better habits, but you're not doing it.
00:32:48.920
So I think when it starts to feel like that movie Groundhog Day, where it's just the same thing
00:32:54.260
happening over and over again, that's a clue that that is not a healthy relationship. And it's
00:32:59.980
probably time for you to spend your time doing other things.
00:33:03.340
And besides managing people who take a lot of your time, energy, and resources,
00:33:08.760
you also, there's the other problem with managing your priorities is that you might have so many
00:33:13.460
good opportunities presented to you, that if you say yes to all of them, you just overextend
00:33:18.200
yourself. So how do you, one, figure out, okay, what is the thing I should say yes to? And then two,
00:33:24.520
how do you say no to opportunities without sounding like a jerk or snooty or whatever?
00:33:30.980
It's easy to sound like a jerk. It's not hard at all to do. So you got to be really,
00:33:35.500
really careful. And that's a situation we find ourselves in. Our content that I write and
00:33:40.360
produce gets accessed over a million times a month, which is insane when you say that out loud.
00:33:45.580
But just imagine the inbound that comes in as it would for your show, Brett. It's crazy sometimes
00:33:52.420
when you see the inbound, and I'm really grateful for it. But yeah, like most leaders listening to this,
00:33:57.800
whether you lead something small or large, you have more opportunity than you have time available.
00:34:04.040
That's just life. Too many people want to do things with you, and that's a good problem to have.
00:34:09.200
So a couple of things. One thing that is kind of a secret hidden power is the power of categorical
00:34:16.140
decision-making, that you will start to see patterns in your invitation that comes in.
00:34:22.820
So I get a lot of speaking requests. And we've been able to pinhole some speaking engagements that
00:34:28.640
I'll always say yes to, and increasingly, a number I'll almost always say no to, unless there's a
00:34:34.920
very compelling reason. So for example, I tend to speak to leaders rather than just general audiences,
00:34:41.060
which means counterintuitively, I'd rather speak to 100 leaders than 1,000 generally assembled people.
00:34:49.300
Why? Because I think the leaders are going to have a bigger impact down the road.
00:34:52.760
So as a leadership event, that's a categorical decision. Much simpler examples could be when
00:34:58.700
I was leading a growing church, I decided I don't do weddings, which seems really weird. It's like,
00:35:03.660
you're a pastor, you should do weddings. Well, I didn't because it wasn't the secret to the growth
00:35:09.280
in our ministry and the life change we were seeing. Secondly, they almost always happen on a Saturday,
00:35:14.560
and that was my family day. I had two sons who were at home at the time and a wife I love very much,
00:35:18.740
and I didn't want to spend every Saturday out doing weddings for people I barely knew.
00:35:24.880
And third, we set up a system where we had outside referrals they could go to,
00:35:29.080
so that made it easy. And people would sometimes say, well, that's not fair. You don't do weddings,
00:35:33.000
you're a pastor. And I would make exceptions. So if you were in my family, or you worked for me,
00:35:38.820
you were my assistant, I would do your weddings. And if people didn't like that, I'm like, well,
00:35:43.180
you can marry into my family or become my assistant, and then I'll do your wedding.
00:35:46.520
But otherwise, it's not going to work. It just doesn't scale.
00:35:51.060
And so I think that helps. Another example of categorical decisions, you've seen this in Mark
00:35:55.840
Zuckerberg and used to see it in Steve Jobs, they wear the same thing every day. What is that?
00:36:00.660
It's one less decision they have to make. So what are the decisions you can make right now
00:36:05.760
that kind of pre-decide it? So another classic example that's really easy to implement,
00:36:11.580
because I'm best in the mornings, when I realized that, I stopped doing breakfast meetings.
00:36:16.560
Breakfast meetings were generally not the most strategic thing I was doing with my time anyway,
00:36:21.460
I could easily flip them to afternoon coffees or lunches. And then I got my writing done in the
00:36:26.540
morning, which is one of the most important things I do, as well as my vision casting and
00:36:30.440
planning and strategizing, got that done in the morning. And so if people ask me for breakfast
00:36:35.620
meetings, it's not personal, Brett, I just don't do breakfast meetings. Oh, okay. And most people get
00:36:40.400
that. So those are some categorical decisions. And then how do you do it so it doesn't sound
00:36:45.160
mean? Well, if it's a category, that helps. It's like, I'm sorry, I'm just not available for breakfast
00:36:50.300
meetings. So that's one way to do it. The other thing I would do is I would be very kind in the
00:36:56.640
way you do it. So I joke with my staff all the time that basically I pay some of them to say no
00:37:01.180
all day, and that's what they do. And so it sounds like this. Man, I'm so honored you would ask
00:37:06.340
Carrie to do your event. Thank you so much. Looks like you're up to some really great stuff.
00:37:11.260
Unfortunately, given our present commitments, we're not able to say yes, but we really appreciate
00:37:16.440
you asking if there's any other way we can help. Please let us know, Carrie, something like that.
00:37:22.220
That's what I think you can frame it in such a way because it is a privilege. And you got to be
00:37:27.360
sincere. If I don't want to do the event, I wouldn't phrase it that way. But the reality is,
00:37:33.000
I would like to do almost everything that comes my way. I like people.
00:37:36.340
I can't believe I get to do what I do. People are good. They have wonderful things that we'd
00:37:41.460
love to be a part of. But in order for me to do the things that I do that seem to move our mission
00:37:48.340
forward, the podcast that I host, the writing that I do, the speaking I accept, I have to be focused
00:37:54.580
on that rather than on some of the other priorities that come our way.
00:38:00.420
And one thing I want to point out too is when you say like, hey, I have a commitment that I've
00:38:03.500
already made, that doesn't necessarily have to be a work commitment. It could be a personal
00:38:10.620
Bingo. That used to, I was coaching a leader this week who got stuck on a Saturday, which
00:38:15.640
was his day off. And he's got five kids. So that's a serious investment and they're all
00:38:20.740
at home still. None is in college. And I used to get caught on that all the time. And so this
00:38:26.500
Thrive calendar, which is part of the system that I talk about in At Your Best, basically
00:38:32.200
gives an assignment to all of your time. So if you look at my Saturday, I have a recurring
00:38:37.340
appointment every Saturday that says family time. Now, right now at this stage of life,
00:38:41.480
family is my wife and I. And sometimes we see our kids on the weekend and friends. But
00:38:45.420
that way, if you come up to me and corner me at a party or something, you say, Carrie,
00:38:48.880
what are you doing this Saturday? I can pull out my phone and go, oh, I've got a commitment.
00:38:53.460
Why? What's up? And then most reasonable people leave it at that point. I got pigeonholed into
00:39:01.920
so many things that I ended up doing on a Saturday that I didn't want to do because I had nothing
00:39:07.140
in my calendar. Friday night's date night with my wife. We usually were involved with a small
00:39:12.240
group with our church. So that goes into the calendar. And then Sunday afternoon for years
00:39:18.100
just said rest and refuel on my calendar. So if you're like, what are you doing Sunday?
00:39:22.260
It's like, I got a commitment. But I needed that to do Monday well. So yeah, you can totally
00:39:26.840
program that right into your calendar. Just set up recurring appointments. I've actually got a free
00:39:32.120
calendar download that can do that for you. You just set it up once and then it's done.
00:39:36.400
And then if you want to break your own rule, go ahead. If it's a really great opportunity and you
00:39:40.380
want to give up a Saturday, you can always say, well, you know what? I can change my plans and I'll do
00:39:44.580
that on Saturday with you. But for the most part, that gives you an out. And it makes sure that
00:39:49.260
the people that you care about the most get the best of your time because they're always
00:39:53.880
the victims, right? When you squander your time, the people you care about most are always the
00:39:58.000
victims of your squandering of that time. Yeah. I think that's an important mind shift
00:40:03.300
to happen in people. It's like you treat your personal commitments the same way you'd treat
00:40:07.440
a work commitment or even like a doctor's appointment. Because I think oftentimes we think
00:40:11.260
personal commitments like, well, it's not that important. And so you can be like, well,
00:40:15.640
yeah, I can do that thing. But that takes away time from your family.
00:40:19.980
Well, and blank space on your calendar is a trap. It looks like freedom, but it's really
00:40:24.940
jail disguised as liberty. And I would encourage you when you're listening to this, as long as
00:40:29.960
you're not driving and you can do it safely, pull out your calendar right now and look three months
00:40:35.160
ahead. Chances are what you'll see is a whole lot of white space on your calendar. And you think,
00:40:40.320
oh, good. December is going to be amazing. Or February is going to be fantastic. And then you
00:40:47.420
get to February or December, it's no better than it was right now. And you're overwhelmed,
00:40:51.940
overcommitted, and overworked. If you make some pre-decisions about how you're going to spend that
00:40:56.060
time now, that Saturday is always going to be family day and Sunday is going to be games day.
00:41:01.140
And Monday night, I'm going to take some personal time to do a hobby. And Tuesday night,
00:41:05.840
we're going to get together with friends. And Wednesday night, I'm going to bed early because
00:41:10.500
Thursday is always a meat grinder. If you put that in your calendar and you program it,
00:41:15.380
you're going to start to live in a way today that will help you thrive tomorrow. And I think most
00:41:18.840
people, you're exactly right, Brett. They don't feel that they have permission to do that. You have
00:41:23.140
permission. All right. So we've talked about focusing your time. We've talked about managing
00:41:27.120
your priorities better, making sure other people don't hijack your priorities and you stay on top of
00:41:31.100
that. Let's talk about the energy. We've kind of been kind of flitting about it through our
00:41:35.140
conversation. So you make a big point is that you need to get an idea of when are your energy
00:41:41.040
levels the best during the day and do your most important work then.
00:41:45.400
Yeah. Everybody's going to have a slightly different time window. Yours is nine till noon.
00:41:49.360
Mine is about seven to 11. And that's on a good day. Sometimes it's like seven till 10. That's all I
00:41:53.900
got, right? We're not robots. But you will have three to five peak hours in the day. And everyone from
00:41:59.800
David Allen to Cal Newport to others and the brain research that's been done shows that are really
00:42:05.000
maxes out at about four or five hours. So you're not going to get eight. But figure out when that is.
00:42:10.440
And if you're a night owl, it could be 8pm to 11pm. I'm not going to argue with that. If that's when
00:42:16.140
you're at your best, pay attention to that. So I call that your green zone. Your red zone is what
00:42:21.780
we've already touched on. That's when you're tired, you need a nap, you need more caffeine,
00:42:25.520
you got toothpicks to keep your eyes open, right? You got them poached between your eyelids,
00:42:30.380
that kind of thing. And you're just tired. And then everything in between is what I call a yellow
00:42:34.940
zone. You're not at your best. You're not at your worst. And so what I would do is give every one of
00:42:41.160
those zones a main task every day. So for me, I'm a writer. And I also do podcasting. So it's
00:42:48.340
interview preparation. And it's also original writing that I do in my green zone. I do almost no meetings
00:42:54.780
because I can do those fairly well in my yellow zone. In my red zone, that's what you should assign
00:42:59.980
to your least important tasks. Or something like a workout. Again, if you're not training for a big
00:43:05.180
event where you're a professional athlete, your red zone is fine for working out. It's going to
00:43:10.660
rejuvenate you. It's going to make you feel better or take a nap or do something routine like just
00:43:15.820
empty your inbox or fill out that expense report and get it in. Something that isn't going to take a lot
00:43:20.920
of original cognitive energy. And then your yellow zone is for everything else. And so you have green,
00:43:27.660
yellow, red. And the most important thing in managing your energy, and this is where I started
00:43:32.820
to see exponential returns. Because the irony in my story is I'm leading 10x what I was when I burned
00:43:39.240
out. And I feel like I have more time. I feel like I've got more energy. And it's because I protected
00:43:44.480
that green zone. It was canceling breakfast meetings. It was not allowing other people to interfere with
00:43:49.860
that green zone so I could get the message written when I was still leading a church. So I could get
00:43:53.900
that article done. So I could get the book edited. So I could think strategically about where we're
00:43:58.560
heading in the next few years as a communications company. Occasionally, I will bring in some team
00:44:03.340
members. We'll do some really important brainstorming in those morning hours so we can move the needle
00:44:07.900
on our mission. And when I protected that time, it began to produce exponential returns.
00:44:14.840
The other thing I would say about your green zone is when your energy is at its peak,
00:44:20.780
don't just move through your task list. Yeah, you probably got some catching up to do.
00:44:25.020
But you've got to start developing your giftedness. If you want to be a communicator,
00:44:29.760
that's when you start looking at TED Talks and watching TED Talks or reading a book on how to become
00:44:34.360
a better communicator. If you're a lawyer, that's where you study cross-examination techniques or read
00:44:39.700
up on the latest case law. So you're not just prepping for that next day in court, but you're
00:44:44.080
actually becoming a better litigator. And it's like Malcolm Gladwell's rule that the way to become
00:44:49.920
world-class at something is to spend 10,000 hours doing it. And an hour a day in your green zone spent
00:44:56.720
to developing, to thinking, to exploring, to developing that gift will make you better and
00:45:04.880
better. You won't notice a difference right away, but give yourself six months and then give yourself
00:45:09.060
six years. And you'll be astonished at your development as a person. Because what happens
00:45:15.800
is if you don't protect that time and you don't do that, again, you're doing your most important
00:45:20.420
work. Because nobody ever emailed you to do your most important work, right? They're asking you to
00:45:25.820
do what is most important to them. So you get to that at four o'clock, you're half brain dead,
00:45:30.280
and you're never spending time developing your gift. You're just using it. So when I started doing
00:45:35.260
that with my green zone and then leaving the medium important stuff to the yellow zone and
00:45:40.860
the least important stuff to the red zone, that's where I've seen productivity soar.
00:45:45.360
And I've had the privilege of training thousands of leaders in the system. They've seen very similar
00:45:50.460
results. So it's a breakthrough for a lot of people.
00:45:54.240
So there's people listening to this saying, this all sounds great, but I'm not my own boss.
00:45:58.600
I'm not the CEO. So I don't have much control over my schedule. So how can I take advantage of this
00:46:04.140
green zone, yellow zone, red zone framework if I can't make my schedule?
00:46:08.860
It's a great question. I hear it all the time. So let's break that down a little bit.
00:46:13.660
First of all, think about an entire week. It's 168 hours in a week. A work week tends to be about 40 of
00:46:20.980
those. So you've actually got ridiculous control over 128 hours in the week. You can determine
00:46:28.140
your boss isn't telling you when to go to bed. There's no law that says the kids have to be
00:46:32.640
enrolled in sports seven nights a week. Those are all choices. And if you're finding your
00:46:38.760
overwhelm, and this is what's really interesting because having run healthier organizations for the
00:46:43.180
last 10 years, I'm realizing in coaching my own staff that a lot of them are realizing,
00:46:48.440
oh, the overwhelm isn't coming from work anymore. It's coming from life. So take a look at those
00:46:54.260
choices. Are they really working for you or are they working against you? And my wife and I have
00:46:59.340
raised two boys. They're in their 20s. And we had a rule back in the day where we just said,
00:47:04.920
you can each enroll in one sport at a time and one music lesson at a time. So we had one son who was
00:47:11.660
very musical, wanted to do drums and keyboard and guitar and everything. We said one at a time.
00:47:17.820
And so he did one at a time. And as a teenager, when he wanted to take up drums and we said, well,
00:47:22.100
that'll be on your dime and on your time because we're committed to other things. He taught himself
00:47:27.880
how to play the drums. They get ingenious. And then another son loves sports and wanted to do
00:47:32.840
everything. And we said, well, when hockey season's over, we can play football. When football's over,
00:47:36.740
we can play soccer. And so we just did one at a time. And we found that was a choice that really
00:47:42.540
worked for us. So you have a lot of agency in your life. But now let's talk about work.
00:47:46.680
So you have 40 hours on average as a work week. I polled hundreds of leaders. And these are office
00:47:53.140
workers. So if you're slinging macchiatos at a coffee shop all day, you'll have a slightly different
00:47:57.760
answer to this. But if you're a knowledge worker or entrepreneur, you work in an office,
00:48:01.640
that kind of thing, ask yourself, how many of your working hours are actual command performance
00:48:08.720
hours where you have to be in the boardroom for a meeting at 10am or on the Zoom call every Wednesday
00:48:15.060
at 9? And the answer that I get back is somewhere between 5 to 12 hours a week, 12 hours being the
00:48:23.360
all-time high watermark I've heard from anybody. So even if you're lower on the hierarchy, even if
00:48:29.700
you're middle management, you probably don't have more than 10 to 12 hours of that work week that
00:48:36.020
are prescribed for you. In other words, you have a lot of agency. So to do a little bit of math, and
00:48:42.020
let's go on the high side, because there might be somebody listening to this podcast, Brett, who's like,
00:48:46.320
listen, Carrie, you should see my boss. I have 20 hours a week where I have to be in this boardroom,
00:48:51.480
and then I have to do this, and then I have to do that. I don't have any control. If you are that
00:48:55.520
person, 20 hours a week prescribed by someone else means you still have control over 88%
00:49:02.560
of your hours every single week, which is an insane amount of agency and control.
00:49:10.440
So what I would do is I would focus on what you can control and not on what you can't.
00:49:16.360
And then as you work through this material, we encourage teams to work through it.
00:49:20.100
You can start to have some really fun experiments as a team. You can even say to your boss,
00:49:24.580
Hey, I listened to this podcast. I read this book at your best. I realized my peak hours are from
00:49:30.760
nine till noon, and I'm in meetings most of the time. I want to become more productive.
00:49:36.860
I want to help the company succeed. Is there any way we could move a few of those meetings so that
00:49:41.940
I could do this work on fill in the blank, developing sales leads, closing deals, whatever
00:49:47.420
you happen to be doing? Is there any way that I could work in that field? And maybe we move some of
00:49:52.460
the meetings around. And I'll do that for a couple of months. At the end of the two months,
00:49:56.420
you can evaluate. If you don't see an improvement, we'll go back to the way it was.
00:50:00.220
Unless your boss is insane, they will probably say yes. And if you open it up as a desire,
00:50:06.500
not a demand, I think you'll be surprised at how many reasonable bosses would love to see you win.
00:50:12.080
Well, Kerry, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and
00:50:15.360
your work? Yeah. You can learn more about the book and my work at atyourbesttoday.com. That's
00:50:21.340
just atyourbesttoday.com. And then everything you can butcher my name. It's very difficult to spell,
00:50:27.080
but I'm sure you can see it on your podcast app. It's kerryneuhoff.com. Just kerryneuhoff.com. And
00:50:31.860
for the book, it's available widely everywhere and atyourbesttoday.com.
00:50:36.520
Fantastic. Well, Kerry Neuhoff, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:50:39.040
It's been a joy. Thank you so much for having me.
00:50:41.680
My guest is Kerry Neuhoff. He's the author of the book,
00:50:43.760
At Your Best. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more
00:50:47.420
information about his work at his website, Kerry Neuhoff. It's N-I-E-U-W-H-O-F. Also check out our
00:50:53.280
show notes at aom.is slash atyourbest, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve
00:50:57.380
deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Check out our website
00:51:09.100
at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles
00:51:12.740
written over the years about pretty much anything you'd think of. And if you'd like to enjoy ad-free
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00:51:34.120
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00:51:37.500
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00:51:40.660
this is Brett McKay, reminding you to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you've heard into action.