A (0:01)

What's up, guys? Welcome back to Build. And today we are going to talk about something I have not hit on before, which is how to handle work, business, etc. When your personal life is exploding. So I wanted to make this because over the last 12 months, especially as my team has grown, our team has more than doubled this year. I have supported a lot of people through a lot of really hard shit. Especially, you know, this goes from grief and loss to families being torn apart, to health issues, to just struggles as humans do, for whatever reason that might be. And I was talking to somebody recently and I started really thinking about all the things I've learned this year through watching people that got through those times with strength and came out better on the other side. And, and watching people who, honestly, who didn't and who, you know, allowed the situation to, I would say, like, waterfall into other areas of their life. And so if you are struggling right now with your personal life or you know, somebody who's struggling with their personal life, you have someone in your company who's struggling with their personal life, please hear me when I say this. You do not need to find some secret productivity system to manage this. Most people, when they're dealing with a lot in their personal life, that is the first thing they go to. This is the observation I've made. They're like, I need a new morning routine, I need to get a different schedule, I need a new app. I need like they, they almost double down and try to like optimize their way out of this mess. And I am here to tell you that usually makes it worse. So I would rather walk you through what to actually do when it feels like there is too much going on rather than just give a pep talk. Because I think a lot of the times there's a lot of rah rah. You've got to get through it, be great, you know, work hard, like persist. And it's like, what the fuck does that actually mean? Let's talk about what we actually do so that we don't allow personal issues to cascade and ruin our business, our careers, our every, you know, whatever goals it is that we are working towards. And I feel like I can also say this, guys, out of somebody who has dealt with grief, loss and health issues this entire year. I have done my damn best to make sure that it did not seep into my business and my work in a bad way. And I have tried really hard in a way that is different than you might expect. So here's the first thing that we want to do. If somebody comes to me and they tell me I am overwhelmed, and then when they start talking about why they're overwhelmed and they're telling me that they think they're overwhelmed with work, and then it happens that they have a big health issue, Their child is struggling in school, they're going through something with their spouse, they're having a health condition. I don't actually hear that they have work overwhelmed. I hear that they have interference. And a lot of the times I think what people immediately go to is that, oh, they hear that and they think they have time management problems. They know how to manage their time at work with the things going on in their personal life or, oh, they're just not disciplined enough. They just can't keep these things out. I don't hear that at all. I actually hear that there's interference. Because when your personal life is unstable, it drains your attention. It literally takes all of your emotional regulation capacity and you're using it towards that. And your tolerance to frustration, your patience with progress, and your belief that you can handle things. So what actually is happening when somebody comes to you and says, I'm feeling overwhelmed, and there's a lot going on in their personal life is that the things going on in their personal life have sucked up so many of their resources that even just normal work, which they no longer know what is or what isn't because their view is distorted by this, even normal work starts to feel unbearable. Now, that is not somebody being weak. That is literally just how systems work. And I think that what makes this really confusing is that we're really, really bad at knowing where stress actually comes from. So when you're stressed at home with relationship stuff, health anxiety, money problems, whatever it is, that stress doesn't stay contained. Stress spreads. This is like, if you have to remember something from this episode, stress spreads. It spreads. And it's almost like this puddle. It's like you can't keep it contained. It's like a puddle on a flat surface. It just keeps spreading until it's as thin as possible. And so what it really is like our nervous systems, like our brains don't label it. It just registers that there's a threat to some degree. And so you walk into work already maxed out with your capacity to handle the situation, and so suddenly everything feels harder. So, like a normal email that would have been totally fine to respond to feels like somebody's, like, attacking you or. Or a deadline that would have felt completely reasonable feels fucking impossible. Small mistakes start to feel catastrophic. And because you feel at work. You think work is the problem. But work hasn't changed. Your capacity to handle. It has. So I'll tell you kind of what this looks like in my opinion and what I have seen. You come into work, you sit down before you even open your laptop. You are replaying whatever it was that happened this morning in your head. Maybe it was a call at the doctor, maybe it was an appointment. It was a fight you had with your spouse. Maybe it was something that your kids said to you. You sit down, you play that before you even come in. Then your phone buzzes. What is it? It's another text about that situation with no resolution. So you have this giant open loop in your head, and you try to focus. You're sitting there like I'm trying to focus, but every 15 minutes, either the thought or someone literally texting you or calling you is pulling you back in. And so this could be a decision you're avoiding. It could be something that you're avoiding thinking about. It could be a conversation that you are dreading and you don't want to have. It doesn't matter. But by lunch, you've probably not accomplished much and you're fucking exhausted. Now, that is not a lack of discipline. That is not a time management problem. That is true interference. Your personal life isn't just stressful. It literally hijacks all of the resources that you have to focus and make progress, and it steals them. And because that stress spreads, you don't know where it's coming from anymore. That's the insidious part. You just know everything feels hard and impossible and you feel like you can't focus and you feel overwhelmed. And so there's a phrase that a very good friend of mine said to me a long time ago when we were talking about this was the first time, it was like nine years ago. I was dealing with somebody who had a really fucked up family situation happen. And he said to me, you don't rise to your work systems. You fall to the stability of your life's systems. Now, what does that tell us? That means that you can only succeed so much in your career as your life allows you to. So if your life is unstable, it's very difficult to succeed in your career. If your life is stable and grounded and calm and you have support, very easy to excel in your career. Okay, now we've established that we have diagnosed the actual problem. It is not coming from work. It's coming from all the very obvious things outside of work that make it very hard to Work hard because you don't have any capacity, right? Makes tons of sense. Stop trying to power through. Stop trying to white knuckle it. This is literally the first instruction I will give you. Or you can, you can take this, you can give it to the person that you're thinking about as you're listening to this. Okay? Stop trying to fix this by working harder. I know, and especially if you're listening to my podcast, that's probably your instinct. But I will tell you what I have watched happen, okay? Somebody that I really respected, really, really respected. This was like three years ago. Their relationship was falling apart and I knew that they weren't sleeping well. They constantly had like, you know, like low grade fights and crisis happening at home. And so I watched them double down at work. They put in more hours, they were like producing more, but there was like a feeling of more pressure and like frenetic energy at work and like they were more stressed. And what I saw was like, they thought if they could win at work, it would compensate for how shitty everything else felt. Here's what happened, though. Literally, like clockwork, within about four and a half, five weeks, they weren't doing good at work either. And now what are they left with? They were left with this story. I'm failing everywhere. I suck. I'm failing. Nothing's working. And then what I watched is that story actually became much more damaging than the actual problem at hand because they constantly kept saying to me, oh, I suck. I can't do this. I'm really sucking right now. I'm. And I was like, honestly, can you shut the fuck up? Because it's not that I can't listen to this even though I don't want to, but it's that when you say that, you're actually making a problem worse. Because here's the thing, when life is chaotic and then you push harder at work, you are not building resilience. You are actually just overloading an already compromised system. It's not that you need to increase your ability to handle things, it's that you need to handle things so that you can handle more things that are more important to you besides this drama. It's like you need to take care of the things in your personal life so that you can excel everywhere else rather than trying to excel everywhere else so you don't have to think, think about your personal life or your problems or your grief or your stress or your sadness. And so I tell people a lot when they're going through these things, constantly. One, I encourage them frequently in fact, I bet you people listening to this are like, yep, she told me this a month ago. I say, take a week. Take two weeks. Take time. I'm like, take time. I need you to prioritize your health, your relationship, your family, whatever it is. I'm like, take time. Please go do this. Like, you need to handle it. Got to handle that shit. The second thing that I tell people is I say, your job right now is not to try and excel. I just want you to just do the minimum required. That's it. I had a conversation with a young gentleman in my place of work about four months ago. We went on a walk, and he was telling me about some really hard stuff personally. And he was always somebody striving to reach different goals and move up in the company. And I said, hey, I'm just gonna be really honest with you. What if this quarter you just didn't try to grow? And it was like the most foreign concept that I could have said to him. He was like, what? I was like, yeah, I feel like it would be better if you took that energy, put it towards fixing your personal stuff and handling this family situation. And you know what? He messaged me, like, two weeks later after I told him that, and he was like, honestly, that was like, the biggest gift you could have given me. Because I think I was just trying so hard to maintain my output that I had been at work while this was all going on. And I said, listen, you don't need to demand peak performance from yourself when things are going awry in another area. And you kind of gotta stop beating yourself up for operating at 80% instead of a hundred percent. Or in his case, it was like 120%. I think sometimes what we have to come to the realization of is it is not always going to be a season to, like, crush all your fucking goals. It might be a season for stabilization or for mending personal issues, and that's okay. In fact, I actually think if you are okay with this, you don't fight it, you will probably be more successful than if you do. Now, what do we do after this? We've admitted that this is just a energy management problem, right? It's not a time management problem. This is just interference with your life. We don't push through now. What we want to do is identify the active stressor. Okay? Now, you are not allowed to fix your entire life right now. Whether this is you or you're listening to this for somebody else. I know that when something is stressful and when one thing's Going wrong. The natural inclination is I should make everything else better. And I know you want to do that, but that is not fucking how this works. What instead you want to do is identify what is actively draining you every single day. Because that stressor. That stress spreads everywhere. And so you have to get really specific. Not like, oh, I just. I'm so overwhelmed. Everything's so stressful. No. Ask yourself good questions. Don't let yourself off the hook for this. Ask yourself useful questions. What are the top one to two things in my personal life stealing my daily energy? Usually, it's the things that are kind of lingering in the back of your mind that you haven't taken the time to sit down and look at. It's like these thoughts that are on repeat in the back of your head that you don't do anything about because you don't want to look at them. And you also don't want to face what you would have to do if you looked at them. The second thing is thinking about the conditions that you've created for yourself by ruminating on all the stress. Maybe it's like you don't get consistent sleep right now. Maybe it's that there's unresolved tension in your relationship. Maybe it's that every time you come home, you're getting into a fight when you go into the kitchen. Maybe it's that you have really bad health anxiety. Maybe it's that you have zero time to decompress every day. I don't know what it is, but what are the one to two things that take the most? And then you don't fix everything. You just look at plucking those really bad leaks. And so it's almost like you're triaging. You're not trying to transform something. Okay? It's literally just like, we're on triage right now. So it's not like, how do I get my whole life together? It's what is actively punishing me every day, and what is the minimum intervention to stop the bleeding? That's it. Because here's the thing, when stress has spread everywhere, everything feels equally overwhelming. But I promise you, it's fucking not. There are usually two to three things that create 80% of that stress in your life, and it's just about finding what those are. So I'll give you an example. I had a young gentleman who was working for me, and he was doing super, super well. And then he ended up moving in with a girlfriend. And when he moved in with the girlfriend, I noticed that when he showed up at work, he seemed a lot more stressed, and I thought it was interesting. I was like, okay, he has this girlfriend he really likes. He moved in with her. You would think it would be a good thing and he would be operating better, but instead, it was the opposite. And so one day I pulled him aside. It was probably, like, three weeks after I said, hey, like, just checking in, you know, how is it now that you are living with so and so? Like, how's it going? And he was like, oh, you know, it's. It's good, it's good, it's good, it's good. It's. It's a lot to get used to, you know? And I was like, yeah, it's absolutely a lot to get used to. You know, living with another human's a big deal. Like, tell me, like, what are you dealing with? Like, what's been the hardest part for you? And I knew that I would get out of that question exactly what I wanted to know, which is like, okay, what is the thing that's stressing you out, that's affecting your performance? And he said something that is so freaking relatable that you guys are probably gonna be like, I totally know what he's saying. He said, you know, one thing I didn't anticipate is that when I lived by myself, when I got done with work for the day, I would come home and I would just veg out for, like, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, and just, like, sit and decompress and, like, scroll Instagram or, like, something. And then I would get up and I would, like, make myself dinner and, like, you know, have a conversation, call my girlfriend. He's like, now when I get home, it's like, the moment I walk in the door, she's like, she wants to talk to me. And, like, a lot of the time, she didn't have a good day, and she wants to talk to me about how her day went. And he's like, it's just really hard. I feel like I have no alone time, and it's just, like, stressing me out. So I said, can I give you a piece of advice? He was like, sure. I was like, great. I don't think you have any work stress at all. I think that you are learning how to live with somebody. Sounds like you need to set a boundary. Sounds like you don't know how to ask for it, and you're afraid of hurting your feelings. And I feel like if you solve this, it would probably solve most of your stress. He was like, I agree with you. And the Funny thing is that he did do that, and he said it was so incredibly helpful for the relationship. And within a couple weeks, I noticed that at work, he was, like, showing up like his old self. So, again, it's like we think there's all these giant things we've got to fix, but it's like that's just the tricks that your brain plays on you. There's usually one, two, maybe three things that cause 85% of everything. So we just want to find what those things are. Now, the next thing that we want to do, once we have identified those specific things, is we want to install stability. So again, notice the theme here. When you're overwhelmed, I know you often want to change everything. You want a fresh start, some kind of giant transformation that is often the wrong move. It's taken me two decades to learn this because I'm really great at just changing my entire life, like, very drastically most of the time. You instead, just need, like, very boring, reliable, consistent routines. Stability. When I mean boring, I mean, like, maybe it's that we say we're going to sleep at the same time and wake up at the same time. You know, not optimal. Not when we feel like it, but like the same time, seven days a week for two days straight. Maybe it's that we're going to have the same breakfast, the same morning, start the same lunch, same dinner. We're going to see the same people on the same days, the same workout, the same walks with people that we like or trust. Like, it's not about optimizing for happiness or even health or any of these things. It's about how do we remove friction and install predictability. Because predictability restores tolerance. Your tolerance for stress is often dictated by how predictable your life can be. And once you restore that tolerance, it restores your capacity. But when everything else is chaotic, these very boring anchors become essentially like the scaffolding at which you can build off of. So a lot of the times when I know that my life has gotten more chaotic, I anchor myself more with some of these routines. So I give you an example of, like, a more of extreme one. So when I sold my company gym launch, and suddenly I was living in the middle of suburbia in this big house that was very quiet area away from the city with not much going on, and I had zero stress in my work life, I wanted to blow my brains out. Not actually, but I was like, oh, my God, I'm so fucking bored. I need to get out of here. Why do I live here? I hate this Place. It's so quiet and so boring and I have nothing to do. And ah. And so what did I do? I moved to the middle of like one of the most chaotic cities in the United States where I was like, wow, it's amazing. There's people everywhere and so much to do and nightlife. I can go out and get different dinners and do all this stuff. And I loved it. I was like, this is amazing. And then I started a different business, acquisition.com. and when I started the business, I was like, oh, this is great. I'm in the city. All this stuff, it's so cool. It's gonna be awesome. I'm gonna go to work and then go out to dinner after and go, ah, oh my God. Not at all. In fact, what I noticed is that the bigger the business was, the more it grew, the more I was like, fuck this shit. I wanna go home and just like eat like chicken and froyo and like not see people and not talk to people. And why the fuck did I even like going out to this stuff? Staying up late doing all this? The hell I don't wanna stay up late now. I get anxiety if I think I gotta stay out late. Cause I got shit to do tomorrow. And so what I realized by the way I ended up moving outta the city very recently is that it shifted. It's like, oh, if I have like instability in my personal life, very hard to also be okay with instability in my work life, chaos, stress, et cetera. If I have instability in my work life, I definitely need to have stability in my personal life. And so recently I made the decision to move out of the city into a quieter neighborhood. And guess what? I feel like suddenly I have way more capacity. It's like my brain is working better, I can think better. Why is that? Because I've created more stability. Stability builds tolerance. Tolerance means we have more capacity to grow and to take on more things. Works like we're all human. It works for all of us. So after you start stabilizing your life, you've created more routines, right? And a lot of us, by the way, make up excuses as to why we can't do that. But, like, we can, I promise you, you can come up with one to two routines a day. Now. We can touch work. Now, when life is unstable, my theory is that at work you need faster feedback loops. What does that actually mean? It means that we need to focus on fewer things for shorter timelines. Okay, so when your personal life feels shitty and stressful, delayed wins. Don't work as well, it's much harder to work towards. So if you're working very hard towards something that won't pay off for three months, every day feels tough and your brain stops believing that the effort matters. And so instead what we want to do is take those goals and shrink them down into little bite sized goals. And so then you can make something done achievable this week. You get boxes to check off, you get stars, you get unicorns in a sauna. Whatever it is, you want to break it down so you have smaller goals that you can achieve in a smaller time frame. I'll give an example which is like, right now I'm writing a book and I do not write on my to do list. Write book, finish book. Like, of course that's the first thing I need to do is finish the fucking book. But instead I say like, okay, this week my goal is just that I can write all the stories for every chapter. Or my goal is that I add in examples to every story that I have. So I make it much more tangible. And what's been cool is that it actually keeps me very motivated because I actually don't feel anymore like this book is this insurmountable amount of work. I'm like, oh, I can do this. I just have to have more stories and then XL at examples. And then I only have frameworks. And then I'll look at the sequence, say, does it make sense? Then maybe I can question if it's even the right book at all. But we'll get there on a different day. And so what that tells you though, is like small wins, they rebuild your competence. And then the more competent you feel, the more you don't feel overwhelmed. But if you constantly set yourself up for these little failures, then you're constantly setting yourself up for overwhelm. Which brings me to the last point that I will make. Overwhelm becomes very dangerous when you turn it into an identity. Okay. I think a lot of the times that happens in these situations is that you might follow my advice, but you're still shaming yourself. Okay, you start saying things like, I should be able to handle this. I should be able to do it. Other people can do way more. What's wrong with me? I don't. I don't know why I can't focus. I don't know why I'm so overwhelmed. So instead you're just adding shame on top of the overloads you already feel. And you're treating like a very systematic problem. Like it means you're a incompetent fool or a moral failure. And so think about like this. If the problems you like to tell yourself, your character, your worth, your competence, then there's no fix. You just feel bad and you just keep working. But if you believe what I said and you see that this problem is that you have interference, you can actually address it. And so I would ask you to change your language, okay? Instead of saying I should be able to handle this, ask yourself, what's interfering with my ability to handle this? Instead of asking yourself, what's wrong with me? Ask yourself, what variable in my life is unstable? Instead of asking yourself, why can't I push through this? Ask yourself, how could I make this 10% easier? There is no need for shame. Like, this is a mechanical systems problem. And so if I had to zoom out and give you something to take away with this when life is lifing, because life's gonna life, okay? The goal is not to grow in all other areas. The goal is to contain the problem. Containment creates stability, and then stability makes growth possible again. You are not going to rebuild a system by demanding more from it. You rebuild by removing the interference until the effort actually becomes reinforcing again. And so once your personal life stops punishing you because you're punishing yourself for it, work then starts feeling overwhelming without changing the work at all because the stress spreads. So once you stop the spreading, you give your nervous system a break. And then finally work feels manageable again. And it's not because you got better at work. It is because you got better at building your capacity by containing the original stressor. So the tldr stop trying to outwork a life problem. You cannot productivity hack your way out of instability in your personal life. You want to stabilize first, then you can push back. That is the order. And if you are dealing with this right now, there is is nothing wrong with you. You are not broken. You just have a system that has too much load and you need to relieve a valve, reduce the load, plug the leaks, install very boring, predictable cadences, and then you can build upon it and stop beating yourself the up. It doesn't help. Seriously, that's what I've got. Don't beat yourself the up. Such a waste of time. I wish somebody told me that earlier in my life, the amount of hours I wasted just telling myself I'm a piece of wish I could get those back. But you can't. So I hope this was helpful. I was really excited to share this podcast with you guys because I've been thinking about this so much recently, and I felt like I really crystallized, like, how to overcome this. And really thinking through the examples with all the people I've worked with of who has and who hasn't, and it just comes down to understanding our brains. They all work the same way. And if we run this system, then we can have success just like anybody else.