Jim Young: Helping Men with Burnout

Burnout & Expansive Intimacy

Julie and Jim discuss burnout for business owners and how expansive intimacy can help. Jim also shares how his marriage was a victim of his career, and how he’s helping others avoid that same path.

In today’s episode, Julie talks with Jim Young, Men’s Burnout and Leadership Coach at The Centered Coach. They discuss burnout for business owners and how expansive intimacy can help. Jim also shares how his marriage was a victim of his career, and how he’s helping others avoid that same path. Don’t miss the discussion about The Wheel of Life and learn how to get your hands on Jim’s new book, Expansive Intimacy: How “Tough Guys” Defeat Burnout.

[00:00:00] In today’s episode. I talk with coach Jim young about burnout for business owners and how expansive intimacy can help. He shares how his marriage was a victim of his career and how he’s helping others avoid that same path. You can have weekly leadership tips and insights delivered straight to your inbox.

Sign up@thejulieb.com. And if you’d like to connect with Julie, she’s available on the web and most social media platforms like LinkedIn. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Welcome back to they don’t teach this in business school where we discuss the behind the scenes realities of being a business owner.

I’m Julie B, and I’m truly appreciate you tuning in today. Today, I’m excited to have Jim young on the show. Jim is a men’s burnout coach and author of the book, expansive intimacy. How tough guys, defeat burnout. I know we are going to get some really valuable insights today. So Jim, welcome to the show. I’m really glad to have you here, [00:01:00] Julie.

Thank you so much. I really just love the idea of a show that talks about what they don’t teach in business school, because it gets real when we get out here. So they’re excited to be here in the conversation with you. That is very true. And I’m, I’m really excited to have your, your insights into your, behind the scenes.

So let’s get started and just give us a brief overview of your business as a coach. We’ll get into talking about the book in a moment, but just talk to us a little bit about what you do as a coach. Sure. A lot of what I do is I work with business owners, the majority of my clientele, and I keep a pretty small group of coaching clients, cuz for me, there’s a lot of energy exchange going on.

We’re getting into some pretty deep stuff. So I tend to work with anywhere from six to 10 people at a time doing coaching, but that also frees me up to do breadth work. So my one-on-one coaching is depth work and really with my clients, we get into everything. How to run your business is something.

People are often coming to me talking about, and I’m burning out in the process, but it’s also spanning into their lives. But I also [00:02:00] like to do breadth work. I like to do work that raises awareness and that’s one to many work. So that’s speaking engagements, retreats workshops out in the corporate setting.

So a nice blend for me really is, you know, working with my coaching clients on those deep conversations, but then also getting out, meeting tons of people and helping say, Hey, this stuff that we’re we’re dealing with is normal. It’s okay. And there’s such a need for raising that awareness. I know the reason you and I were introduced is because I’m also talking about burnout kind of in a different, in a different setting, but just normalizing it and saying, you know, it’s okay if you’re experiencing burnout, it’s okay to talk about it.

Cuz that’s the only way that you’re going to actually address it and recover from it. And then, you know, hopefully prevent it in the. I really want to have you tell your story with burnout, because I think it really sets the stage for kind of how you’ve gotten to where you are and also sets the stage for why you wrote your book.

Expansive intimacy. [00:03:00] Yeah, my story. I could pick it up in a lot of places and I might try to dot a few of them across here, cuz really it starts when I was nine years old and my mom kicked out her alcoholic. Abusive boyfriend from our apartment and it was Tuesday night and she said, it’s trash night.

You’re now the man of the house. It’s time to take out the trash. And I was confused, terrified. Didn’t know what to do. And I said, yeah, sure. I’ll take that trash bag and the mantle of man of the house and do it just so that I could keep her feeling a little safe or a little happier. And I got rewarded for.

And that set down a pattern. And, you know, if I fast forward, as I got into my adult years and into the working world, I was still doing that. I was still taking out the trash for other people. I was still trying to protect everybody else. And I was getting rewarded because I was in an achievement culture.

And I think in particular, my book talks a lot about this, that as a man in this culture, there’s an expectation and a [00:04:00] high value placed on achievement. And so I did that. I worked to climb all the ladders that I could all the way up to and including president of a tech company, which was sort of the pinnacle job for me.

I was really excited to arrive at that place. And within months I had to walk away. I was completely burned out. I had, I had already taken prior to being elevated to that role a month off while I was dealing with so many things. I didn’t know it was burned out at the time. I just knew I couldn’t function anymore.

And I had to go into my CEO’s office and say, Hey, I need to need to go away. And I don’t know when I’m gonna come back. And it turned out to be about a month later. Mm-hmm and the, the pressures of trying to. You know, a really good dad trying to be a great leader at work, trying to deal with, you know, all the things that were going on in my life was just too much.

And I, I kept hanging on because it felt like I’m not allowed to let go. What’s interesting to me about that story is I feel like [00:05:00] once you hit the pinnacle, which is getting that president’s role, it sounds like that’s kind of when you had your realization that, that burnout. Was setting in or had been there a long time probably.

And you were just kind of realizing, and I’m wondering if, if it had something to do with getting into that role and not having to take out the trash anymore, and they’re not being that stretch for achievement anymore. Like there were there weren’t more summits to climb. See, that’s a great question, Julie.

I don’t, I have never actually contemplated the way that it lands with me is yeah, that’s certainly possible. My system got jolted into this new state because I had all the resources available at my disposal for the most part where I had gotten to where I wanted to be. I had a team of people that if I said, Hey, we need to do this.

I had them to execute that. And. Yeah, and I was still very unhappy. I was still feeling like, [00:06:00] geez, I can’t continue to do this. And I was working a lot. I was working 60, 80 hours a week. I was a, I had been divorced. Not that long prior to that, I was trying to be there for my kids. Mm-hmm half the time when I had them.

And yeah, the, the, the challenges, I think, I, I guess I had gotten to the top of the mountain mm-hmm and I’d looked around and I said, this is it. And I think that’s really common. I know when in with business owners, that’s a really common thing that happens is you, you strive and you strive and you strive and you get there.

And then you say, this is it. And I really believe, and you you’re, you can speak to this too. Probably that. One, you’ve gotta define yourself your success outside of things like that. But two burnout plays such a crucial role, because like you said, and especially for men, there’s this achievement culture there, there’s this mindset of you have to keep getting more achievements.

And there’s a lot of ways to define that. And I, I think that [00:07:00] there’s a, there’s a theme here from. You being in a corporate role to what I see in some other business owners, they get to the top and they’re like, wait, this is all there is like, I thought it would be better than this. Why am I not happy?

They start having all of those conversations with themselves. And usually burnout is right there with it. Yeah. And I think for me, a big piece of that, and your question is still resonating with me. I’m getting new awareness as I’m sitting here thinking about it. Great. is that. Work was the thing. If I could just keep accomplishing things at work and it wasn’t like there was nothing left to accomplish.

Certainly we growing a, you know, a business that was just past the startup phase, but then, I realized that I had achieved this really big goal that I had set for myself. And I looked around at what else was going on in my life. And I didn’t have any close, connected friendships anymore. Mm-hmm my relationships with my kids.

Weren’t where they wanted. I [00:08:00] wanted to be, I had, I had lost my marriage, you know, that that was a casualty of my career. And I was like, all I have is work. And it’s, it’s feeling like pressure and stress. It’s not feeling like achievement and accomplishment and excitement anymore. And I. What I’ve discovered over the years is that it was that lack of balance that it was, I was too invested in work and I wasn’t invested enough in all the things that work is supposed to give me, which is a life.

You know, we talk about work life balance a lot in this culture. Mm-hmm and. I’m not a fan of work life balance. I think if we have to, if we have to leave our work so that we can go enjoy our lives, we’ve got it backwards. And so a lot of what I started to reckon with was, wow, I’m really out of balance and I’m not leading the life that I wanna have.

Yeah. And for me, I’m, I’m right in the same line with you that I really, I, I kind of hate the term work life balance because. [00:09:00] When you think about balancing that inevitably means you’re constantly kind of trying to keep things level or you’re moving from one to another. Think about the kind of scales. That’s what I think about when I think about balancing and it just doesn’t that that in itself becomes a stressor.

Like my work, my work, I don’t have work life balance. Oh my gosh, what do I do? I mean, that becomes a stressor itself. I try to find more harmony than, you know, work life balance. And I think especially for business owners, it’s hard to separate your work and your life. That’s something that we find. So, so fast forward a little bit.

I, I, I kind of know that you ultimately resigned from your position and then you started a, a coaching business. Basically. Talk a little bit about that transit. The one detail we may not have hit was I, I resigned that president role and I was about to go start a business. And with about a month before my contract was up, I was in a little bit of contracting back to my employer.

I realized I wasn’t ready. And so I took another [00:10:00] job and I was in that for about a year and a half. And I went further into burnout or just in a different variant of burnout, if you will. And then one day I realized, I said, I can. Do this anymore. I just have to stop. And without any plan, I walked into my boss’s office with a resignation letter and I said, I need to go.

And I remember her asking me, she said, well, where are you going? I think a little concern about maybe I was going to some competitor mm-hmm and I said, I don’t know. Mm-hmm I just need to leave. And it was really remarkable. I had set up a. I didn’t have no plan. It was a really thin plan. I had set up a, a meeting a couple days later with a head hunter to just see if I could find some contract work in it leadership while I figured out what I wanted to do.

And that person in the course of that conversation, they didn’t have any really interesting prospects, but they said, Hey, I’m, I’m actually considering, or I’m in the process of selling my business. And I’m looking for a successor. Would you be interested in running [00:11:00] my recruiting company? I was like, I never knew that possibility existed.

And the very next day I had a friend of mine reach out to me about a business networking group in my area that the executive director was similarly stepping down and looking for a successor. And that was kind of interesting. I was like, I didn’t know that existed either. Mm-hmm . And so until I picked my head up.

From where I was. I had no idea what was out there and actually it was then the day after those two that I ran into an acquaintance from a local peer group downtown, on a Saturday morning. And I was telling this, this acquaintance of mine, what was going on in my week and how crazy I felt. And like, I can’t believe I’m doing this.

And, and she said to me, you know, what is it about the career you’re leaving behind that you loved? I said, oh, Well, I loved helping people that I led figure out what they really loved doing and, and get them into position to be able to do that. And I really loved helping [00:12:00] my teams come together and do things that they didn’t think were possible.

And she said, well, that’s basically coaching. And I was like, oh, you could do that full time. And so I very quickly got onto that track. And within months I was, you know, my, my coaching practice was up and running the importance of picking your head up and, you know, seeing what’s available, it’s such a simple concept, but it’s so hard to do when you’re burned out.

Yeah. That you, you miss so many opportunities when you’re just heads down and work and burnout, whatever it is. It’s so hard to see what’s possible out there when you feel like it. You’re doing what you’re supposed to do. That is funny how quickly that all came together. I’m not surprised, but it’s also interesting how quickly that all came together for you to start your coaching.

And I do wanna throw a caveat in there. That’s not a prescription for anybody. You shouldn’t just go quit your job and then figure it out. That’s not the answer for, you know, for everybody, you have to [00:13:00] figure out your own path. It was the answer for me. It turned out like I had the risk tolerance for it. I had a small cushion that I could make it work, but I just wanna be clear that I’m not saying, go, go, quit your job, tear it all up and start over.

That works for somebody and not everybody. That is a very good, very good cautionary piece of advice for sure. Julie has spoken to countless organizations for 13 years on topics, including leadership management, employee engagement, and morale, workplace culture, small business ownership, and entrepreneurship.

If you’d like it, engaging relatable and inspiring speaker for your next event, book, Julie, to speak to your. More details@thejulieb.com. Hey, this is Julie B and you’re listening to, they don’t teach this in business school. I’m here with Jim young author of expansive intimacy, how tough guys defeat burnout.

So, Jim, we just kind of went through your burnout journey. Thank you for sharing that. And [00:14:00] so now, you know, fast forward, a little bit of, of, I guess maybe, I don’t know, a couple of years and you are. Positioning yourself as a men’s burnout coach and you have written a book about helping tough guys defeat burnout, basically.

So talk a little bit about how that book was born and, you know, share some, some insights that you can from the book as well. Yeah, to connect the dot back to the last piece. Once I started my coaching business, I did the things that I knew how to do, and it was much more business coaching and some consulting and over time.

I started to notice the clients that kept coming to me, looked a lot like me from a few years back, or several years back, they were guys who were CEOs. Founders usually have small businesses sometimes in a corporate leadership role and they were dealing with burnout. And so year and a half, two years ago, I started to really shift my focus and [00:15:00] say, the people that I really wanna serve are men who are dealing with burnout cuz in our culture.

Burnout has been in the zeitgeist for the last couple of years. The pandemic really helped us recognize what was going on and made it a conversation we could have. But I didn’t see a lot of those conversations happening for men. I saw a lot of conversations. I there’s some great books about burnout for women, a lot of resources there, podcasts, and I didn’t see a lot going on for men.

So I realized I need to. I need to share my story because it took me a long time to realize I was even out of burnout. And then I had to figure out, well, how did I get out? Mm-hmm. And as I retraced those steps, that’s where the book was born. Cause I realized that what I did that was different. Going back to that, that part about, I was really out of balance in my life.

Mm-hmm what I did over the ensuing years was I just started to build all of these close, intimate relationships with other people, with friends. I became a much better dad [00:16:00] and developed a lot more intimate connection with my kid. And I just realized like, oh, it’s having these rich deep relationships across my.

That made me feel happy and excited and energized again. And it also keeps me from having my stress tip over and to burnout again. Cause I have all these places to take my stresses. Yeah. It’s, it’s important to, I guess I would say diversify where mm-hmm, your really intimate relationships are because I know a lot of individuals who, a lot of business owners who.

You know, some of their closest relationships, actually, a lot of their closest relationships are with other business owners or people they work with, you know, they don’t have, they have, it’s all work related, you know, mm-hmm, , it’s, it’s all there. They have a key employee or they have, you know, business networking, associates, partner, business partners, that type of thing.

And they don’t have those other relationships. Yeah. And. Is that basically what expanse of [00:17:00] intimacy is, is just making sure that you have really deep relationships across a bigger expanse, I guess. Yeah. It’s really across the whole landscape of your life. So if you’ve got that key employee or you’re in a peer group, and you’re able to get to the stuff that’s really going on for you.

It’s not just, you know, from the head up talking business, mm-hmm , it allows us to let some of our stresses be out there and get supported for them, but also to then take that out. And I know a lot of guys, a lot of the guys that I end up working with. They don’t have a social life anymore. Mm-hmm, , they’ve gotten so busy.

They’re raising a family, they’re running a business and they’ve just put themselves aside and they don’t give themselves the time to go skiing or get out for a beer or a bike ride or whatever it is that they enjoy with their buddies. And, and it’s also, you know, connecting with family, connecting with a spouse or partner connecting with your kids.

Are you really, you know, getting fed in all of those relationships and are you really bringing what you [00:18:00] wanna bring into those relationships? Mm-hmm one question I wanna ask you is when, when you first kind of started coaching and you started to notice this pattern of men, CEOs founders, business owners who were basically dealing with burnout.

Did they know they were dealing with burnout or did they come to you with another problem? And you discovered it was burnout. That was really at the root of everything. Initially it was the latter, you know, they’d come to me with, I just can’t grow my business. I’m just kind of feeling bogged down, you know, all of these.

Code words for what I realized was burnout. Since I’ve, since I got the courage to call myself a men’s burnout coach and to say, that’s what I work on now, people are coming to me and saying, yeah, I’m burned out. And I share my story, a lot blog posts and on my website and in the book mm-hmm and I think, you know, normalizing and validating like, Hey, [00:19:00] this is part of the deal, guys.

It’s not something to be ashamed of has opened those doors. And really normalizing it. But I had a hunch that I had a hunch that initially, before you started calling yourself a men’s burnout coach, that a lot of the people who did come to you, they weren’t coming to you with burnout. They were coming to you with business growth problems or things along those lines.

Because, and I, I will say even while there are, I think a lot of resources for women, even women business owners have a hard time calling it burnout. There’s, there’s definitely an, an achievement. Mindset and a success mindset that I think business owners tend to get into. And that just it’s, it’s a ripe environment to end up in burnout.

And what’s really scary to me is when. They aren’t will, they aren’t willing to admit that they have burnout. Like they fight that had, did you ever have clients kind of fight that realization? Like, no, I’m not [00:20:00] burnout. It’s just that I’m not doing something right in business. Yeah. I’ve had that. And I’ve had people who come to an introductory call and.

Get to the edge of it. And they say, yeah, I’m really interested in working with you and then they never call back. Mm-hmm when I was writing the book, I, I uncovered something that I didn’t expect to write about. I didn’t really even wanna write about. And I think it really gets to what you’re just talking about is that in between burnout.

And expansive intimacy is shame and, and shame is actually a lot of what creates burnout. I talk about it in the book for men, it happens for women as well. It happens for any, any gender in our culture that says you have to achieve, you have to be, you have to tough it out. Not doing that means that you’re weak.

And if you’re weak as a man, that’s shame. And so you’ve gotta keep your man card by just continuing to [00:21:00] double down grind, like put yourself last on the list and succeed at all costs, suffer in silence and there’s all kinds of cliches. Right? And they’re there for a reason. And then on the other side of shame, like if we decide like, Hey, I really need to reach out.

I need to build a network of people who know me and can, can help me through all this stuff and can be there when I need ’em. Well, there’s shame in saying like, Hey, I need help. Cuz that’s not something that men are supposed to do. And yet this is the best part of it. When we do share our shame with somebody of feeling like, man, I just, I’m not enough.

I can’t hack it, whatever mm-hmm we open up intimacy cuz that other person invariably has a story just like it, that they’re like, oh, I know what you mean. That’s so. And then we’re like, oh, this is normal. I’m okay. And I see you and we’re, we’ve got a bond. You can have weekly leadership tips and insights delivered straight to your inbox.

Sign [00:22:00] up@thejulieb.com. And if you’d like to connect with Julie, she’s available on the web and most social media platforms like linked. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, you’re listening to, they don’t teach this in business school. And I’m the host. Julie be I’m here today with Jim young author of expansive intimacy.

How tough guys, defeat burnout. And Jim, we were just talking about how people and especially men tend to suffer and silence with burn. That if they’re not achieving their failing kind of mentality. And I’m curious as to what your take on defining success is these days, because you know, the other side of, I guess, failing or failure is success, but I would imagine a big part of what you help your clients do is redefine what success looks like for them.

And I’m just curious as to anything you can speak on that topic. Yeah. I have a client who [00:23:00] came to me a few months ago, who. Was he, he knew he was in burnout and he came to me because of that. And we started working together. And one of the first things that he explained to me was I’ve got these goals, you know, I’m gonna, I wanna be a $25 million a year business, and he’s on track for that.

And we started talking about, okay, What is it about that? What, what matters about that? And really when, when we boiled it down, when we got to the crux of it, it was to achieve, you know, win the race. And we started looking at what his stresses were. And he wasn’t getting, you know, he’s got all the toys, he’s got the boat, he’s got the, the beach house, he’s got the motorcycle.

He’s, you know, he is got, you know, a family, he’s got a couple of kids and he’s like, yeah, I don’t, I don’t ever get a chance to do the things that I wanna do because I’m constantly pushing. and so working with him, it was to open up like, all [00:24:00] right, what does success actually look like? And I have my own version of it.

Mm-hmm . And for him, we ended up in a very similar place, not cuz I told him what success was mm-hmm but he arrived at it himself, which was that he doesn’t wanna give up the achievement and nor should he he’s worked his butt off to create a business where he employs dozens of people. Mm-hmm and does a lot of good.

And it’s dialing it back down and getting, you know, recalibrating it so that he can take time off. He wasn’t taking any time off. We started with part of success is he’s gonna have one day off on the weekend to do stuff with his family. And eventually we’re working to, you know, get that down to a place where he’s got, you know, a couple of days, a week of his choosing he’s an entrepreneur.

He owns the place. He could take Wednesday off if he wants. Mm. But, you know, I see success as a place where. You know, you, you have freedom to, to accomplish your goals and also to do. With, with joy and connection in [00:25:00] your life, you know, that you can pursue the hobbies that that job is supposed to give you.

Like you can get out on the boat. I have another CEO client who also was a boater, and that was one of his big accomplishments. A couple years ago was he spent six weekends on the boat with is his family last summer. And that, that was a new version of success for him. So I think everybody’s is different, but I, to me it’s like, are, are you getting to live the way you wanna live?

Not just racking up the numbers. Yeah, it sounds to me and again, you know, numbers are important and, and I, I think this is where we lose a lot of when I say we, I mean, just people who give advice about, you know, running a business and that type of thing, I think where we lose people is when we start to talk about things that aren’t, you know, the toys, the money, the number of employees, and it is, it is.

You know, self care and, and meditating, or being on a boat for six weekends straight or [00:26:00] whatever it, whatever that may be. Mm-hmm . But the thing that I think is really important is, you know, we come back to that idea of harmony of alignment with, yeah, you can still like your client he’s he’s doesn’t wanna give up what he’s already created.

You don’t have to do that, but you do need to find something beyond. You know, those numbers of dollars and, and that type of thing as a way to define success and relationships for me, that’s, that’s one of the thing is the, the quality of the relationships I have, not the number, the quality. Yeah. And I think it’s really important to stress that, that, you know, a business coach like yourself, you want your clients to take care of themselves.

You also recognize, yeah, you’ve worked your butt off for this. I’m not gonna come in and tell you to, like, if you still want it, if there’s a valid reason for keeping it and keep, you know, continuing it. Yeah. You’re not gonna say stop doing it. We’re gonna figure out how to, how [00:27:00] you can have that as well as take care of yourself.

Yeah. It’s not a binary choice. Mm-hmm the. Part of the satisfaction for somebody in that, with that mindset is to have a thriving business. Mm-hmm and actually there’s an irony that I’ve seen with, with the clients that I’ve worked with. And also some of the organizations I’ve worked in is that when the owner is kind of holding onto everything and like driving for success and not letting other people take the wheel ever, that’s where the burnout starts to really build.

And. Getting that connection relieving that stress oftentimes comes through saying I don’t have to be the guy who’s wearing 17 hats anymore. In fact, if I let my team do it, I now get to take the time off and enjoy whatever pursuit it is, have the meaning and purpose in my life and my business, all those goals that I have, it might.

Do it on its own. It, it might thrive even more if I take a little [00:28:00] bit of a step back so that other people can start to bring their gifts to the table. I see that a lot with my, my clients. They’re just afraid to let, let go of something cuz nobody else knows how to do it as well as they do. Yeah. That’s and that’s usually, that’s usually.

Sometimes is true, but some, what it really is is that they just do it differently. yeah, mm-hmm . Yeah. And, and there’s an opportunity because they probably don’t do it as well. Otherwise they would own the business mm-hmm mm-hmm and can you coach them into becoming somebody who can do it so that you can know, go focus on the things that you love doing.

And I’ve got a, I’ve got a client, who’s a CEO who started multiple tech businesses and he loves being involved in the technology. And a lot of consultants or coaches would say, You’re the owner. You shouldn’t have hands on anything. Mm-hmm and it’s part of what charges him up. So I’m like do it, but just do it in a way that doesn’t get you tangled up and wrapped around the axle.

The way that mm-hmm it has in the past. And he’s made a lot of great strides in doing that. So there’s no one size [00:29:00] fits all. It’s like, what’s my purpose. What are my strengths? What gives me joy? And. You know, what is my version of success? I, I love that you asked that question cause I don’t think enough people ask themselves what that question is.

And I would love for, you know, anybody who’s listening to just sit down and take some time for yourself, like define your success criteria for life, not just for, you know, this year’s P and L. Absolutely. So listen, you have a book that we have not really talked directly about, and I really wanna ask you, I think why you wrote it as pretty clear, you want to get this out to as many people as possible, but what are you excited about for your book to, to do, and, and just, what are you excited about for it?

My ultimate goal is world love. I wanna go one notch above world. Peace I gotcha. And that’s, that’s, that’s mostly serious. Uh, I know that that’s not a goal that I can accomplish. I, I just think that our culture puts us into these positions where we think [00:30:00] we have to accomplish these things all the time in order to be valued and to be worthy.

And. So many people are suffering right now, depending on what study you look at. The one that I, I value the most says about a third of people globally in the workforce, or somewhere on the burnout spectrum. It’s a lot of people suffering mm-hmm . And so I wanna alleviate suffering because when people are in that burnout state, I know it from my own experience.

We’re no good to other people. We’re no good to ourselves. Our health suffers and there are direct links. to mental health addiction, suicide, some really, really terrible outcomes when we have gotten so out of balance with our work where we’ve got Rere burnout, mm-hmm and I just don’t want people to be suffering.

I have two, two different guys in my, my client base, who in their forties and fifties, respectively suffered burnout, induced heart attacks. Mm-hmm and they, they survived. Right. But man, what a wake up call and I don’t want anybody [00:31:00] to have. Have to go through the wake up call if they don’t have to. And certainly I don’t want the worst outcome.

So, you know, really just, I I’d love to open the conversation where more men can say, yeah, you know what, this ain’t working for me. And I think your, your book and your passion behind it and the work you’ve already done on it will certainly, I think you’re going to definitely get that, that conversation opened up and that awareness opened up and, you know, hopefully enough enough people read it.

We will get to the, the world love. And I like that one step above world peace because. The opposite to peace is usually what you have to have to get to peace. So yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s a harder one. If you look at the opposite of love, it’s fear, right? Yeah. So how do we get away from the fears that are keeping us trapped in a situation where we’re burning out?

And a lot of that’s the shame that we experience and the fear of revealing ourselves is somebody who needs something different. So that’s, that’s perhaps a juxtaposition to, to world love. How do we, how do we get there when we gotta gotta move through the fear? [00:32:00] So Joe, listen, this has been a great, great conversation.

And I kind of asked the same question at the end of every interview that I do on, on, they don’t teach this in business school. So I’m gonna ask you, if you were asked to teach a class about being a business owner to future business owners, what is the one thing that you would want them to learn from. I thought a little bit about this question, cuz we, we talked a little bit about it in prep and what jumped to my mind immediately.

And I’m gonna, I’m gonna respond with this is the very first tool that I learned when I went through my coaching training and it’s called a wheel of life. It’s a very simple diagram. It looks like a pie. Chart. And it has all these categories around the edges work being one of them work, excuse me, money being another, but also friendships and health and all of these other aspects of life.

And I wish that when I was going through business school, I’m a proud alum of the Eisenberg school management at U [00:33:00] university of Massachusetts, that somebody in my management or other classes had shared with me the importance of maintaining that wheel of life and, and having a plan to say, yeah, you’re, you can have this wheel that actually rolls pretty well, because if you, if you.

Do that exercise, the visual ends up looking like this really uneven wheel for most people. Mm-hmm, , it’s bumpy and life feels that way. And so I think that’s what I would’ve wanted to learn is somebody to tell me don’t just focus on work. Put it in context with everything else that you want to create.

That is a really important lesson that I wish I had also learned in business school. I did not, it was all about get a job, make the most money you can and, and get promoted and all of those things. So that will of life exercise probably would’ve served me really well going through business school as well.

Yeah. Well, Jim, listen, I have really enjoyed this [00:34:00] conversation and I know our listeners will as well. I just wanna thank you again for being on the show. Yeah, thank you so much for all the work that you’re doing to get stories out for business leaders. We, we have a lot of influence over how people’s lives go, and I love that you’re opening up these conversations to help us.

I, I love doing it. So it, it works out. It’s part of helping me also balance my own will of life. So it’s, it’s been a good, it’s been a good thing for me to. So that is a wrap on this episode, be sure to subscribe so that you don’t miss out on any future conversations. I’m Julie B and they don’t teach this in business school.