Dr. Richard Shuster On The Impact Of The Pandemic On Work And How To Manage Stress

Life happens, and not always the way we expect it to. Every single day we face change, stress, and uncertainty. What if you could learn to thrive no matter what life throws your way? Resilience expert Adam Markel and his inspiring guests explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change-proof. Welcome to Change

Proof. Life happens, and not always the way we expect it to. Every single day we face change, stress, and uncertainty. What if you could learn to thrive no matter what life throws your way? Resilience expert Adam Markel and his inspiring guests explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change-proof.

Hey everybody, welcome back. I'm your host, Adam Markel, and I am feeling just wonderful today. Wonderful because I made time for my morning practice today, which I, I do pretty consistently. I would say almost every day, but not every day do I get a really good chunk of time to not feel rushed through my morning practice. I don't know if you all have any morning routines or rituals. I know a lot of people do, obviously. Part of our show is talking about resilience, and my own beat on resilience is that it's about recovery, not about endurance. And the greatest form of recovery that I know of personally is morning ritual, spiritual practice. Some people pray, some people meditate, whatever it is that you do, maybe just sit in stillness. I frankly love to pray. I know prayer is just It could be anything really. For me this morning was just simply gratitude, just feeling grateful. And I'm so happy that the guest that I have on the show today, just before we were getting ready to record, that's kind of what he said, that he was just feeling filled with gratitude. So I knew we were immediately kindred spirits, as they say, simpatico. Read a little bit about this gentleman and then we're going to dive right in. Dr. Richard Schuster is a clinical psychologist, TEDx speaker, CEO of Your Success Insights, renowned media expert, and host of the Daily Helping Podcast, which I absolutely love the name of that show, which is regularly downloaded in 150 countries plus. His mission is to help people become the best versions of themselves and make the world a better place. So, Dr. Richard, is that okay I call you Dr.

Richard? Yeah, absolutely.

Awesome. So great to have you on the show today. I read your What is a condensed bio, but there's a lot in it. What's something that is not in that bio? Maybe one thing that you would just love for people to know about you.

That I have a competitive barbecue team, probably, because I love barbecue. But no, that— it sums it up. And it's really funny because, you know, we— I go on a lot of these shows and, you know, some people want to read the voluminous kind of manifesto of everything that I've ever done in my life and Yours was short and sweet, but when you drill it all down and peel back all the layers of the onions, for me, everything that I do is about helping people in some way, even if it's of no benefit to me. In fact, in most instances, it's of no benefit to me. And I think that's the best way to be. We can talk about the science of that as we get into things, but I've never been happier. I'm having fun and we're going to have fun today. I'm looking forward to this and grateful to be here and hope I add value to your audience.

I already know that's going to be the case. So why don't we— I love to start with an origin story. You've been on a TEDx stage, and our company, among other things, trains people to get on a TEDx stage, deliver their idea, create their idea, craft their idea, deliver it, etc. And one of the things that we do typically in that work with people and training them to create a script to begin with is to find their origin story, the sort of the first domino, if you will. I'd love to get a sense of just what's the origin story for you in terms of the life that you're leading right now? Yeah.

I'm glad you asked. Actually, that was the nature of my TEDx. I talked about my origin story in that. When I was in my early 20s, I would not have been a candidate to come on this show. I was insufferable, arrogant, really never wanted a family, only focused on acquiring stuff for the purpose of just having stuff. Used to use terms like the empire building and did refer to it as the Schuster empire. Would get on eBay and look up private islands I was going to name after myself. And I'm not kidding about any of this, including you can buy islands on eBay. And when I was at that age, I bid on A government contract with the Department of Defense that I had no business whatsoever, and I won the contract. And so now, this was not building bombs or missiles or anything like that. This was simply to build the pipeline, the HIPAA-secure pipeline for all the medical records in the Army between 2 military bases. Still a big deal. And so, but in my mind, I was off. I was going to be the next Tony Stark. Before anybody knew who Tony Stark was, and everything was humming along gloriously until one day I was in a car accident in which I broke my spine and almost died. And so the thing about that, what's really interesting is that there's a phenomenon known as tachypsycheia, and I didn't know about this at the time, and now that I'm a psychologist, I can speak to this with some authority. This is something that we've known that soldiers have experienced The best way to describe it is the first time Neo is in slow motion in The Matrix and those bullets are going by him and he's looking around. Basically, the brain slows down our perception of time.

Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. In times of massive change and disruption, the rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as And entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience, but that of our teams. So right now we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. Some years ago, my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It's It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are.

When we're in imminent danger so we can get the heck out of there. So this car accident for me was maybe a 3-second span in which the car slams into me from the side. I'm sent spiraling into oncoming traffic. My airbag's already gone off, and then I crash into a telephone pole. So we're talking literally maybe, if even, 3 seconds. In that time, it was literally like Neo in that Matrix moment. I could see the center console slowly crushing into my ribs. Like it was an empty can of Coke.

Hmm.

I could see my shattered windshield, little bits of the glass floating in the air, the sunlight reflecting off of it, and it's all very surreal. And the thought that I had to myself was not one of, oh dear God, please let me live, and if you do, I promise I'm going to be a good person for the rest of my life. It wasn't like that, Adam. I was dead, and I became really overwhelmed With shame, guilt, grief. I knew my parents, who were out having a great time on a Saturday night with their close friends, were about to get a call that their son was dead. My brother was going to find out that I was dead. Thinking about this car that was almost paid off that I can't take with me. The watch I was wearing that I was so proud of isn't going with me. And all of these thoughts flooded me in that moment. And then I hit the telephone pole. Spoiler alert, you know, I survived. Here I am still, right? But that was the catalyst. It didn't happen right away. I'd love to say I balled up a fist in the hospital bed and shook it at the sky and said, I'm going to change lives and do this stuff forever. It was a process, but recovering from that broken spine, having all that time to think about where I was going in my life, that was the catalyst. That was the origin story or the moment really that began what I'm doing.

That's the inflection point of a sort. It's interesting, the collecting of stuff. We're sort of gluttonous in many ways, and meaning that I think we collect a lot of things that we don't necessarily need. So were you— did you go through a period after that where you just started to get rid of things, or how did your attitude about

Well, the first thing that changed is I stopped researching islands to buy. That was the first thing. I didn't go through this necessarily purging of stuff, but I looked at things very differently. And I thought about what did I really need? What value did I assign things? And I still— we all like stuff and there's nothing wrong with having things. Because something that has intrinsic value to me might not have intrinsic value to the next person. I think where we get into trouble is if we're buying stuff because our neighbor on Facebook is posting about it and, oh, I got to have that too, to keep up with the Joneses. It's if we're getting it for the wrong reasons. And so for me, I just really started being more mindful about stuff that I needed and what did I really need. And I no longer wanted to have You know, the fleet of cars. I no longer wanted to have Omega or Rolex watches just for the sake of being able to wear a different one every day of the week or something. It just became more of a focus on what really matters to me. And as I went through this journey, more and more, it was the people in my life. And more and more, it was finding that thing that really kind of brings me joy and fulfillment because it wasn't the work that I was doing. I actually went back to the work after I recovered. Were you

a psychologist before this happened?

No, never, never, never. I was a partner in an IT consulting firm. In fact, even though I did my undergrad degree in psychology, I remember having beers with my buddies on the last day of school saying, here's to never setting foot in a classroom ever again for the rest of my life, and how wrong that was. So no, That wasn't even on my radar. I was going to build this massive consulting empire. That's what I thought I had to do. I went back to the work, but everything just was like this achromatic shade of gray. I thought it would be the money, and it wasn't. I was just more unhappy day by day to the point where I just eventually walked away. I quit with no idea what I was going to do. That was the most terrifying moment of my life. But I knew I had to make a shift. I had to pivot. I just said, okay, I walked in, I told my partners, I'm out, I'm gone. I go from about 80 hours a week to nothing. That was scary. I was sitting in my place for months alone, and I was wallowing in regret. I shouldn't have done this. I shouldn't have started that business. I shouldn't have gotten that contract. All the while, there's people in my ear because everybody, when you do something that's unexpected, I'm going to start a business or I'm going to go on American Idol, whatever it is, when we tell people we're going to do that, you're going to have people in your ear. A lot of times, those people in your ear, and they don't even necessarily do this out of malice, it's just— When you buck the trend, when you do something unconventional, people like conventional. As soon as that was over, immediately—

They like safety for one thing.

That's right. One's telling me, oh, go be a financial planner, go to medical school, or go to law school. Everybody's telling me what I'm supposed to do, and I wanted to find my own path. It's so wild when you go take 20 years and you reverse, do the breadcrumbs of what led to this and what led to that. So it's really interesting. I don't know what I would be doing, Adam, if that accident and that story happened in 2021, because we have things like Instacart and we have things like Amazon Prime and Fresh. Back then, you had to go to the grocery store, you had to go to places. This was circa 2002 at this point. And so for me, the first taste was I had gone to the grocery store because I needed food. Nobody was going to bring it to me. And I overheard these 2 women talking about their teenage daughters on MySpace. And they were a little freaked out and all making inappropriate gestures. And everyone was in a bikini and taking these pictures. And this is pre-cell phone, but MySpace was the thing. And I, I'm not typically the person who goes and interrupts other people's conversations, but in this moment I did. Because that's the world I was in, network and technology and security. I said, okay, these are some things you need to think about to keep your kids safe online. Sorry to interrupt, but I overheard you. Their eyes got huge. I didn't mean to freak them out, but I did. One of them was the school's PTA president and said, will you come talk at our school? I did. It was weird because there was no agenda. I wasn't up there trying to sell anything. This was simply me helping other people with the knowledge and skills that I had acquired doing my IT stuff. That was really the first inkling of this little light glowing in my heart that maybe I'm onto something here. There was a guy in the audience who was actually on that city's cybercrime unit. He said, hey, you're a really good speaker and you can say things as a civilian that we can't in law enforcement. Would you team up with us? Well, now I've got a speaking circuit, right? Like, how did this happen? And I'm talking to schools and I'm educating parents. And at one of these, a guidance counselor came up to me and said, hey, you know, we're really desperate for male mentors. We have a lot of female mentors, but no male mentors, which I'd never done anything like that before. And I said, okay, I'll try it. And they gave me a kid who was in the 7th grade. His parents had split and he was acting out. And I'm not so arrogant to say I'm the reason why he changed, but I was certainly a part of that change process. And that was just another little, oh, well, that's really exciting and that feels really good to me. I wonder if I can make a career out of that. And so I went and got my master's in social work first. That was my first master's, and I worked with families that had been It's right when Hurricane Katrina happened when I was in school and where I was living, there was a lot of influx of evacuees from New Orleans. So I worked a lot with Katrina families, really powerful, and, and just continued on and got my doctorate in clinical psychology, subspecialized in forensic and neuropsychology. And that was the thing, right? And so whenever you go through something like that, you put this really ambitious goal You put it up on the wall and you're like, I'm going to be a psychologist. It's like this 7-year odyssey between internships and boards and this, that, and the other. The funny thing is now I'm not even doing that work at all, which was another pivot. But the journey for me to get from being this insufferable materialistic person to a licensed clinical psychologist was really about— it was this 12-year journey. Yeah, about 12 years.

You know, it's interesting, before we hit the record button on this show, I said to you we had an almost commonality in where we went to school because you're a Michigan State grad, right? You're a Spartan.

Absolutely.

I only know about the Spartans because I went out to see the campus and meet the swimming coach back in the day, and I almost became a Spartan. Instead, I became a Minuteman. Just gotta It's funny to say it, but UMass Amherst, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, that's where I ended up going to school. And fortunately that I did in so many ways because I met my wife, Randi, then. We were college sweethearts. And I don't know, this summer— it's crazy to say this, but we'll be married 32 years.

That's awesome.

I don't even know what's more surreal about that, the time that has gone by in such a blink of an eye, or just the way that our love has developed beyond my comprehension at the time that I— what, we fell in love and I asked her. So the other thing too is, so we didn't go to the same school, but I was close to going to Michigan State. And ultimately, I meet Randi, I meet my wife, in Psychology 101. That's how we met, man. So it's the only psychology class I ever took. But—

Well, I've never said this on air before, Adam, but I actually took my first psychology class because there was a girl I really liked that had signed up for it.

Ah, there you go.

Didn't end up marrying her, but yeah.

Child psych too.

Yeah, back in undergrad.

I want to ask you, I know that you're not a day-to-day practicing psychologist these days, clinical psychologist, and still in looking at the pandemic, not just looking back at it because it's not released its grip on so many people and so many segments of our world, and There's a mixed bag of things, both difficult and challenging for folks, and some really wonderful blessings that have already begun to emerge. And we've seen a lot of that already as well. What would you say, as, as a clinical psychologist, might be the, the biggest issue that you've noticed in terms of what's gone on over the last year? Because there's a lot of statistical things that we're kind of getting wind of, and I'm not trying to tie all this stuff together, but just there's a rise in suicides. Yeah. There's a rise in anxiety and depression. I know my, my pivot story's a little different than yours. I didn't end up in the hospital because of a car accident. I ended up in the hospital because of a panic attack. So I know what anxiety feels like. I think the, the statistics are pretty stark there across the board in a lot of demographics, especially with young people. And of course, we've seen a rise in mass shootings and things of that sort as well. So not to try to put any kind of a bow around a big topic like this, I just want to get your thoughts on it as a clinical psychologist.

So it's interesting because I don't believe that we're really going to know the impact on emotional well-being for people for years. as to what the fallout of this is going to look like, in particular for young people. One of the things that was really striking to me is that we dropped our kids off to camp last week. They started camp.

The happiest day and the saddest day.

Yes, at the same time, all wrapped into one. But it was neat, though, because another sign that things are starting to get back to whatever normal is. My other litmus test is You go to Costco and the sample people are back, that's a really good sign that we're on our way as a society. But in all seriousness, what was really wild, the drop-off for camp, the carpool, you show up, you open your door, your kid gets out, you wave goodbye, and you're done. They unload all the campers' cars in basically 15 to 30 minutes. Well, in this instance, where my kids go to camp, Not only did it take 2 hours, but it caused a traffic jam in the community because all the way down the road, the cars were backed up. The reason why is that these kids, these young children who hadn't done anything since the pandemic, were terrified to get out of their car and were afraid that they would get coronavirus if they went to camp. Much in the way that we're in uncharted territories in a lot of ways for the younger children, because as an adult, we can process this, right? And we can rationalize information. We can take things and say, okay, A plus B equals C. Young children don't necessarily do that, and they manage things very differently. So I think the data that's going to be really interesting is to see What are the long-term ramifications? And I don't think they're going to be good for children. I think you're going to see increased separation anxiety. You're going to see issues with this pervasive fear, like, could this happen again? And what I think is also very interesting, and I hope that I'm wrong about this, but I don't think so, is that we get as a society primed for certain things. Okay? And what I mean by that is if you've ever been in South Florida or the East Coast between August and November, what starts popping up on your television around late August? Hurricane season.

Hurricanes.

It's hurricane season, right?

One after

another. One after another. And so there's a number of things in play. Number one is we're living in a period and we're going to— this is just the way it's going to be forever. There is a 24-hour customized information cycle that's just for you, Adam. You've got your own information cycle and everybody listening to this has their own information cycle. It used to be, this is like my, I should use my old man voice. It used to be that you'd watch the news and they'd have you—

You should do that for sure.

Yeah, I can see if I can keep that up. You'd have the news at 5, 6, and 11, and the national news at 6:30. And they would talk about, okay, Here's a hurricane, and you'd get your news. If you lived in an area that you'd be impacted by the hurricane, you would take the appropriate action. Now, what do you got? Now, you've got weather.com, and you've got all these things that are bombarding your phone. Now, we name winter storms, and we do all these things. When things enter the vernacular, when we become conditioned as a society, and this is not a tinfoil hat thing, this is science. They become part of the expected norm, just like there was no such thing as road rage. It didn't exist until somebody made up the road rage. What it did was it created— it took the personal responsibility away from people, and now you could allocate it to road rage. With this pandemic, we as a society, as a planet, have not dealt with anything like this since 1918. When the world was obviously quite different. What's happened is now we're primed. We've gone through this experience, and it would not surprise me if, hopefully not this year, but in the future, we wake up and all of our phones are blasted with this news update as we're reading our morning news. If we do that, hey, new strain of coronavirus completely resistant to all forms of vaccines, Lockdown 2.0. We're primed for it. We're ready for it. And we're not ready for it emotionally, but we're conditioned to expect that that's a possibility. So it's a very long-winded and possibly tangential answer to parts of your question, specifically addressing the other aspects— the anxiety, the depression, the increase in violence. There's a— there's been a tremendous upclick in domestic violence.

Yes.

We know that that's a significant thing. Drugs and alcohol use are up radically. And so this goes back to a part of what I was talking about before, is that we're not built for this. We're built to— and our biology doesn't change, or at least doesn't change but over millions of years. To encounter stress, we have a neurobiological response to deal with whatever that stress is, and the response is to get the hell out of there so that we have safety. And then we hormonally return to baseline, our heart rate returns to baseline, and we go back about our day foraging, hunting, doing what we do. It's the saber-toothed tiger kind of analogy. What coronavirus was is a saber-toothed tiger that's in our house, that everywhere we look, whether we look on TV or on our phones or in our communities, that's all anybody talked about for a year, and understandably, like this is uncharted territory. It's been that saber-toothed tiger. Whereas these stress hormones, that are supposed to just flood our systems to help us—

Run.

Run and then get some degree of homeostasis and normalcy. We've been bombarded with that. You don't get a break physiologically. The information stream, wherever you're taking that from, is going to be based on this. It was doom and gloom. We really didn't know You know, what were they telling us initially, right?

We're talking about here, if I want to sort of reflect this back to you and see if I got it right, is that on some level it's the crisis du jour. Now, we talked about the fact that there— that hurricanes are just one part of that crisis du jour, but because of the way we are so connected to news cycle And to curated news cycle or personal news cycle based on algorithms and things we have no control over. Basically, we're being fed a slow drip, like an IV drip of things that put us— that trigger that fight-flight. Correct. That trigger cortisol, that trigger other chemicals so that they're sort of just always trickling or dripping inside of us versus the, oh my God, that I didn't see that coming. And we respond in the moment, and then we go back to, as you said, this equilibrium or homeostasis, or somebody might call it something else. But, you know, our heart rates return to normal and we just go about our day. It doesn't seem like we're getting a break from it, as you described. To have the saber-toothed tiger not just a thing that happens every so often and we deal with it— It lives with you.

Mm-hmm.

We don't really know what the ramifications long-term are. We're seeing short-term things that appear to be aberrational, or at least appear to be— what is it? You're seeing a trend with greater violence, higher incidence of alcohol and other abuses of drugs, etc. And the question is, I don't know that there's any returning to normal. I mean, normal is— it's like returning to the past,

right?

We can't return to yesterday. So I'm not sure. I think people want to go back to something we call normal, and I think that in and of itself is another stressor because normal is not returning any more than yesterday is. Am I wrong about that?

No. And I'm not a virologist, so I can't obviously speak to, you know, herd immunity and all of these on things, but it's what normal represents to the individual. If normal represents taking their kids to a Yankees game, the people in Yankee Stadium and not cardboard cutouts, that's some semblance of normal. So there's going to be a return to something, but we don't know exactly what that is. And then the next question is, so what happens next? Because These vaccines appear effective. I took mine, you know, full disclosure.

As did I.

Yeah. So appear effective. But what happens? You know, there were a lot of people who didn't take them for whatever reason they didn't. And it's not a political statement. They didn't take for whatever reason.

That's a personal choice. Right. And that's entirely a personal choice.

That's right. And so, you know, what happens when Ticketmaster now has a new edict that says, hey, if you want to go to a concert, you have to prove you've been vaccinated. If you want to get on a plane or— so there's probably half of you listening to this saying, yeah, I got my vaccine, that sounds totally reasonable. And there may be some of you saying, wait a minute, and now I'm left out of things, or I'm left out of family events. And so this is such a complicated thing, Adam, that We're just only starting to look at the possibilities of what things are going to look like. I know that I can say this with confidence: businesses are never going to be the same.

Wow! The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new. New, but the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are.

Commercial real estate is never going to be the same. You know, businesses found out pretty quickly That, hey, wait a minute, our employees are working from home.

Yeah.

We're still turning a profit. Now, the health and wellness, the homebound employee, that's a totally different subject matter. But from a revenue-generating standpoint, if my company's totally virtual, if I own a company, multi-location company with brick and mortar, and I'm paying All the things that are involved in maintaining a commercial property, why am I doing that? When we take away that thing that was a normal part of the way things have been done forever, like what was— you'd go to work, you'd come home, you'd go to the kitchen. Get up in the morning,

eat,

drink a cup of coffee, go to the office. Kiss the wife goodbye, go to the office, you come home,

Or the husband.

The husband. All of a sudden, it's different now. What we know is that there are 2 things that happen when an employee works from home, and this is pre-COVID data. Employees tend to work more hours when they're at home than when they're in an office because there are no boundaries anymore. That's a problem when you used to shut it down. at, say, 4:00 to 6:00 PM, it's a problem now when an email comes in at 9:00 and you're expected to deal with it, that there's pressure. Hey, this is work. Work is work. And so I think those are the things that we're going to really wrestle with. Certainly, we're social beings. So the fact that we were isolated for so long, obviously, that will increase emotional distress. We need to be around each other. Yes, we need to be, you know, we need to be—

just need to, period. Yeah.

And so, you know, thank God that's happening again, but there's a ton of fallout that's still, still to come from all that.

I'm fascinated about this, the topic that we're on right now, which is the impact of being— the impact on the future of work, on the presence, the present of work, because statistics are kind of all over the place, but for the most part, many employers are finding that They didn't achieve productivity gains during the pandemic. There are some that did.

Some did.

Some organizations that were more culturally resilient, that were taking care of their employees, their health, their wellness, mental wellness, physical wellness, et cetera, that those companies that were committed at that level, that understood that it's not about encouraging and rewarding even the behavior of the night owl, the person who works The extra 20 hours a week kind of thing. It's rewarding the behavior of practices and routines that enable a person to go the distance, that enable them to recover as athletes do from stress and the exertion of competition, et cetera, so that they can continue to perform at higher and higher levels. Organizations that understood that going into the pandemic fared better during the pandemic. They were the more resilient ones.

Yes.

But that is a small percentage. of organizations globally. The, the opposite was true for so many, which is that they were used to exhausting their workforce, whatever they could squeeze out of them, get the most out of them for the amount that they're paying them, etc. And with those organizations, the productivity really fell off the table. And now a lot of those same companies want to bring their employees back, bring them back into the office, the commercial space, as you said, because that's where they have some control over what they do with their time. So it feels like there's already tension between those two— There is. The employer on the one hand that wants to bring that person back or those teams back into the space to collaborate and be creative and produce more, and those same employees that have been working at home and learned on some level, yes, It is a challenge to create boundaries for your time when work is all— when there's no separation between the workspace and the home space. And yet those employees, in many cases millennials, would like to now maintain that control over their working conditions. So if they're on a Zoom and they're in there, have a dress shirt on, but they're still in your pajama bottoms, that that's okay to do. because it's how they've gotten used to doing it and it gives them a lot of personal freedom. What can you say about that? Any thoughts on that?

My other business is in this space of employee wellness and balance and has been pre-pandemic, so I've already kind of been here. What's really interesting is that you do have that conflict. There was already a bit of a cultural conflict because Millennials work quite a bit different than Gen Xers, Boomers, and that's a whole nother show in and of itself.

It is, but yes.

You already had this generational divide on what you thought work should be. Now, yeah, the example of the pajamas was perfect. I think what you're starting to see, it's similar to one of my favorite guests I've ever had on my show was Bob Burg, and he, you know, The Go-Giver.

Love Bob Burg.

Bob's amazing. And so when Bob wrote The Go-Giver and talked that companies should really have a— everything they do should be mission-centric in helping people, a lot of people kind of looked at that and were like, nah, you know, that's nonsense. But over time, that's taken hold to where many businesses now have a value-laden built-in mission into why they do what they do, which is something that millennials in particular really strongly gravitate towards because they want to work for companies that know that they're doing good on the planet. So similarly—

Start with why.

Right, Simon Sinek.

Delivering happiness and Tony Hsieh. So you're right, it, it was— and Bob Burg's book came—

Right, he was the godfather of that. But I think the analogy to that is apt When we're talking about wellness with employees, because you're right, it was really a small percentage of companies that had preexisting mechanisms to deal with the overall wellness and happiness of their employees. And the data is so clear on this, is that employees that have balance, employees that feel fulfillment, feel respected, feel part of a team, feel safe to be able to express their values, those companies thrive, those employees, the retention rates are higher. There's so much good data on all of this stuff. So what I think, much like what Bob Burg did to mission-centered work, is now there's going to be— and I don't really care that the reason why was because they lost revenue during a pandemic. I'm just glad that we're going to see organizations moving towards This is some nonsense that you just need one HR representative to go around to 1,000 people and occasionally pop them an email and say, how you feeling? Here's a link to our EAP, whatever, to really having wellness being a focus, primary table setter for the organization. So that's a really positive thing that came out of this pandemic.

Indeed, yeah. And that's— I'm so happy you brought that up because I do feel like there is a shift there. I'm among The work that I do more frequently is keynote for organizations, deliver workshops for organizations. I get hired for that quite a bit. And the topic that I've been speaking about for years now is resilience. And I have a book coming out later this year that's all about resilience, but we've been training and teaching about resilience for a long while now before, again, that was fashionable, I suppose. In fact, resilience for the most part was thought of as a sort of a soft skill. You talk about homeostasis or getting, helping employees produce equilibrium or balance or work harmony, work-life harmony. You know, these are seen as soft skills pre-pandemic. Right. And I think right now organizations have a sense that this is anything but soft. So I'd love to get a sense from you. You have a, a company called Your Success Insights, involved in a podcast called The Daily Helping. I'd love to get from your perspective how you, you yourself look at resilience, this topic of resilience, how you speak about it in those, in those outlets where you have influence, because so many people define it differently. As a fact, I almost feel as though there's as many definitions for resilience as there are people to ask to define it. So I'd love to get your beat on that.

Sure. I mean, if my kid asked me, you know, what's resiliency, Daddy? It's if somebody knocks you on your ass and you get up and just keep going. But obviously—

and that's funny because those of you watching this on YouTube, I'm just flitting around with some pictures on the screen.

But there he is, there's Rocky. I love that. Yeah, I mean, Rocky is resilience, right? It's the belief. A lot of what I do, you know, and I've had 2 pivots. I mean, I know we don't have time to talk about my second one probably, but I, through my podcast and in particular through my company, really became focused on finding ways to help people through algorithms and technology that we've developed to help people achieve that balance. And with resiliency, there's a lot of things that go into that. There's internal resiliency. Why is it that if you take 2 people and you put them through the same situation— let's take a hurricane since we talked about that earlier— why can somebody who saw everything they own get washed away, Why is that person able to say, it's just stuff, and not miss a beat? That's person A, but person B, they may never recover from that emotionally, and they're traumatized, and that's where they stay. They stay focused there pretty much for the rest of their life. It's such a complicated thing. You have genetic predisposition. You have the degree of preexisting stress in one's life. The best analogy that I was taught When I was on my internship at an inpatient forensic hospital in Florida, I had a supervisor who defined stress like this. It's a bucket of water, and everybody's got— and anxiety and stress is the water. Everybody's got a bucket. Some people, their bucket's higher. And so, you know, when you're talking about resiliency, the people who are the most resilient are able to Empty out their bucket quicker so that it just doesn't spill over and ruin their lives. So being able to manage your anxiety comes— involves a variety of factors. One, what degree of support system do you have? How is your health and wellness? Are you— you talked about a morning routine to start off the day. Are you engaging in wellness practices so that you're better equipped to handle stressors? Or is it all, okay, look at this. Here we go. Mental, emotional, physical, spiritual. I love that because—

It's holistic, right? It's not just Rocky. It's not just about—

That's right.

Taking the physical hits and getting back up the way he did.

But it's being able to take the mental hit. And so for me, it's always been— there's always been— I've had a high degree of self-determinism. And I think I learned a lot of that from my late father, who was an entrepreneur, and he was a dentist. And did his own thing, and doing your own thing can be scary. So there are many, many factors which go into resiliency. We call it multifactorial, to throw out a $5 word your way. At the end of the day, it is that combination of, can you get back up? Do you believe that you can take the next punch? Because the next punch is always coming.

Sure, exactly. Anybody that thinks That this is the last time, as you said earlier, the last time we're going to get challenged in this way, you're— that's silly. I mean, in fact, the, the likelihood, as you were, I think, pointing out, that we'll get challenged again in a similar way is, is pretty high at this point because it is now part of this collective consciousness. Yeah,

yeah.

It's interesting because I think maybe we all have to understand is that we've The time to be developing your resilience is now. And I want to get your sense of this too, because if you don't agree, I want to hear it. I feel that resilience, while there is epigenetics involved, there's genetics involved, there's all kinds of things that would more predispose a person to be resilient, and even to the point where kids that have had really adverse life experiences early on in their lives are in many ways More resilient if they're still around. And yet it can be learned at any age. There's a way to— and I love the way you just described that. I've never heard that analogy used before, but to be able to empty your bucket regularly so that it doesn't spill over is a pretty interesting thing. How it is that you do that, which leads into the next question I have for you, which is, what do you do to empty your bucket? Because You're an entrepreneur, you've got a lot of things going on, as many of us do. And so what do you do for yourself to keep the bucket from spilling over, as it were?

Time for me is always the most valuable resource I have. And I build into my schedule personal time. And that might be, hey, I want to try this really wild Korean barbecue restaurant I learned about, or recipe I learned about online, or I want to watch, you know, some Marvel movies with my kid, whatever it is, spend time with my wife, I build it into my schedule.

Hmm.

I make sure. And if anybody is listening to this saying, well, that's easy for you to say, Dr. Richard, I'm too busy. BS. Like, we can always find a way. Maybe it's 20 minutes in the morning. before we start our day. Maybe it's during lunch, we spend 10 minutes to meditate or whatever it is. There's always a way to build some of those protective factors into our lives that we can utilize so that we're better insulated when things hit the fan.

Yeah. Emptying the bucket is— I just want to keep to that visual for myself because I think Again, we feel somehow that we get more points in— at work or with people or in heaven, I don't know where, because we have this capacity to just sort of be busy all the time. And sometimes I'll ask an organization, I'll say, so are your people too busy to think big? Are they too busy, too overwhelmed, too burned out even to think big? Because thinking bigger and broader is what we all have to do at any point in our lives. I mean, that's just the way— we wouldn't— going back to the start of time, we wouldn't have fire if somebody didn't think bigger and broader. We certainly wouldn't have an automobile or a plane or a moonshot or anything else. So to be able to think and act in accordance with those greater, those bigger and broader ideas and even dreams. I think it's everything. It's certainly everything in business, but I think it's everything to the human heart. We perish if we do not have a big vision.

It's Maslow, right? Like, how— if you don't have basic food and shelter, how do you self-actualize? If you're

right—

and so if you're always running around like a chicken with your head cut off, Where do you have the space to reflect, to plan, to dream? You know, you have to allow yourself that space at an organizational level or at an individual level. Have to.

So true. So I, uh, I'd love to just— as we are winding some things down here, if there's, if there's something that we covered today or maybe even didn't cover but that you just would love to, you know, either close an open loop here or Even put something else in for emphasis. I'd love to get your final thoughts, Dr. Richard.

About a year ago, almost to the day, as I was on top of my game, I just done my TEDx and signed some big contracts, and life was, life was perfect. I suffered a stroke and almost died.

Wow.

And I'm not the type of person who you would expect to have a stroke. I don't drink, I don't smoke, I've never done drugs. I've had some friends tell me that's probably why I had my stroke. You know, and I work, but in all seriousness, like, I ate right, I worked out sometimes twice a day, 7 days a week. I meditated. I did everything, and it still happened. It's because I was out of balance. I didn't think I was. The lie that I told myself, and many entrepreneurs do, is that it's not work if you love what you do. If you were working an incredible degree, and your body will tell you, you might not want to listen, but it's so important to have balance. It's so important to take the time to do the things so that that bucket, if not fully empty, because the bucket's never fully empty, but keep that water level low. And if you do those things, you'll be all right. We'll all be all right.

Yeah, it's not stress that kills us, is it? It's the lack of recovery from stress that kills us. And even as I heard somebody say some years ago, It's not stress, it's the way we define stress. How do we see stress? Because our mindset around it, our mental outlook about it, I think has a great deal to do with it as well. I know, for example, today we're going to finish up the show and I've got some other things going on. We've got a mini TED evening that we're producing tonight with 3 of our folks that are going to deliver their talks. But in between, I'm going to go— we have this place that we live in a few months of the year. more than a few months now that we're empty nesters, and I'm going to go down to the water and I'm going to get in the water and swim. I mean, like in the ocean and get on Instagram and in places and talk about self-care and doing these things. But it feels on some level like there's a lot of that kind of conversation happening. I always feel a little strange about that too, because there are genuinely people who, if you're working a job right now and It's an hourly wage job, and sometimes it's a minimum hourly wage job. It's like, well, you can't just go to the beach and have a swim. I mean, it's just not possible for a lot of people to do that. And yet, while that might be an ideal of sorts, it's not the only way to take care of yourself. As I said, to me, the most important time of the day is the first 10 minutes when I can sit quietly. And, and in a great day like today, I got to sit longer than 10 minutes. And just be where I'm peaceful and create peace on the inside that permeates everything on the outside for me. With that, I can't control whether I get an email that's disturbing or some other shitty piece of news today. There's just no controlling. I mean, I think we— uncertainty drives us a bit batty, doesn't it, Doctor?

It does, yeah. But, you know, it's like anything else. Whatever comes at you, you have control as to how you react to it. And I know intuitively that— wait a minute, no, like, if I— somebody robs me, like, I— there's— I'm gonna feel this way. I'm gonna be upset. I'm gonna be— I don't— we have control over how we react. And most importantly, we have control over how long we allow that thing, whatever it is, be it an email or hurricane, a pandemic, to impact us. Knowing that is freeing because if we realize we're in control, then we can really, instead of being impacted outward by outward things, we can turn inward with gratitude, with love, and focus on the good things.

I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof Podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool.

It'll just take you 3 minutes to to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term.

Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today.

Because when we focus on that, it can't be in 2 states at the same time. You can't be grateful and fearful at the same time. It's physiologically impossible.

They're mutually exclusive.

That's right. So why not be grateful?

And so wrapping this up, I'll just say I love the analogy you provided us. I'm going to continue to come back to it again and again, Dr. Richard, because to me, what you truly do have control over is how you empty that bucket. Because that drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, the email here, it's this news, it's that situation, it's what I saw on TV, it's, you know, my blue team or my red team, you know, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip till the bucket just fills up. And then, you know, again, sometimes it's called the, you know, the straw that breaks the camel's back, or in this case, it's the bucket that just spills over because there hasn't been a conscious and concerted effort To empty the bucket, to empty the stress out of the bucket. And that's why it's so vital that no matter what you do for a living or where you are in the world, that your rituals, the routines that you create for yourself to create recovery zones, whether those are 10 minutes to sit quietly or it's 20 minutes to take a walk or put your feet up the wall and close your eyes in the middle of the day, Or it's to just go hug somebody or go volunteer or go do something that just makes your heart feel good or whatever it might be. These are small things that clump together collectively, help to continue to empty the bucket so that it's not one thing after another thing after another thing that produces a A dis-ease of a sort. Really so appreciate your time today. So appreciate the conversation we just had.

I loved it. It was great being here. Absolutely.

Awesome. Awesome. Everybody have a wonderful rest of your day. Now, before you go, if you know somebody that would really benefit from hearing what it is that we've been discussing, that Dr. Rich and I have been talking about, please feel free to share this episode with them. Of course, we love to get your thoughts as well. Because your comments, your feedback is vital to us. So you can leave a comment at adammarkel.com/podcast. And also, I'll give you a link, a URL that I think is really powerful too. We want people to know where they stand at this moment when it comes to their own mental, emotional, physical, yes, and spiritual resilience.

And you can go to resiliencerank.com. 3 minutes is all it takes. to answer 16 questions.

Again, the assessment, if you will, will take about 3 minutes, and then you'll get a score as well as resources. It's entirely free. We're not selling anything there, just a very good way for us to help you to find out where you're at at this moment. And we so appreciate you, uh, you taking the time to do that. And lastly, Dr. Richen and I both did a TED Talk around the same time, actually. And in my talk, I shared my waking ritual, which is 3 easy steps, which I, I just remind everybody of right now. If you haven't heard it, be the first time. Wake up. So, Dr. Richard, did you wake up today?

I sure did.

I could tell, man. And some of us were still in the process of waking up, right? You know, that's good. Wake up. In that moment, you realize you're actually getting another day. You're waking up. You can realize too that there are people who are not waking up at that moment, didn't get that, the blessing of a new day. So you can feel gratitude, as Dr. Richard was saying just a moment ago, how gratitude is so important. And that's step 2. Just feel gratitude in that moment that you wake up and realize it wasn't guaranteed when you went to bed the night before. And third, lastly, if you feel inclined to do it, put your feet on the floor and say something out loud to start your day. I used to put my feet on the floor back in the day when I was practicing attorney, spent 18 years in that field. And when I used to put my feet on the floor, I used to feel anxiousness to begin the day, and sometimes even worse feelings than that. And sometimes the words came out of my mouth I can't repeat right now. They're rough. But now when I put my feet on the floor, I say the words that are written on my t-shirt at this moment. 4 simple but really impactful words for me: I love my life. I love my life no matter what. I wish you all a beautiful and a blessed rest of your day, everybody. And again, Dr. Richard, thanks so much for being a guest on the show today.

Absolutely. I loved it.

Awesome.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience and become change-proof. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com. For more resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change-proof teams, visit adammarkel.com/becomechangeproof.

Thanks for listening. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience and become change-proof. Remember to leave a review on Apple Podcasts and you may be featured in an upcoming episode. For more resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change-proof teams, visit adammarkel.com. To get your To take your own free resilience assessment, go to rankmyresilience.com.