Kevin Lawrence coaches high-performing CEOs on staying sane while scaling. Jim Collins found leaders pay a 30% health tax from stress. Lawrence says replace work-life balance with passion units across work, self, and life, and don't let emotions drive decisions.
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All right.
Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and Gazelle's business coach, Bill Gallagher. We're talking about keeping it together, growing as a leader while you grow your company without melting down. On the phone with us today is an expert in this area. He's a fellow and really a senior coach. Been with and been involved in the development of our work for a very long time. Kevin Lawrence from Vancouver. Welcome to the show, Kevin.
Thanks, Bill. I'm glad to be here.
Yeah, super. This is a great topic. I was talking with a couple CEO and president earlier today who are grappling with keeping themselves and their leadership team together as they battle with the growth of stuff. And you're in Vancouver today?
Yeah, correct. I am, yep. Happy to be at home.
But you're a coach who travels all over the world working with people on a pretty global basis.
Yeah, yeah. I've got companies that I work with in Australia, India, Middle east and then obviously US and Canada. So yeah, I get to great experience of actually taking these theories and concepts that we learn about and actually seeing them in action in different companies, different cultures, different stages of economies and and really being able to boil them down and seeing how we're all so much the same. It's quite interesting.
We really are. And yet the expression is different, our cultural and other references are different. And yet there are some things that are really universal. I know I've done some work in the Middle east as well and what worked in Bahrain or Oman doesn't work quite the same in Saudi and Pakistan is a whole other thing. And you've worked in many of these places and seen it. In fact, I last week was visiting with one of your clients in Hawaii during our time there and I had a chance to see one of our long term clients and what it looks like when they've got and worked with a values driven company based in the rock habits over a long period of time and really have grown a business from 30 to 270 people. And everybody looks sane and happy there.
Yeah. And that's an incredibly, incredibly high performing business that that just implements incredibly well. It's a great company.
So let's talk about keeping your stuff together, holding it together while you're growing a business and the challenges that leadership faces. I know you're working on a book in this area. It'll be coming out next week. But tell us a little bit about some of the big points that you're seeing so far in this area.
Yeah. And for sure. And by the way the book comes out next year, not next week, I would love it to be.
Did I say next week?
You did. I don't want to set the wrong expectation.
I just misspoke. I'm sloppy with my work words sometimes.
No worries. We all have our moments. So, yeah, it's, you know, basically I've been coaching CEOs and super high performing executives for more than 20 years. And I've always been fascinated with why some people can do it and have an amazing life at the same time and then most can do it, but really don't enjoy the ride and actually are quite miserable and behind it. And that's been a fascination of mine. And what I've really been curious as I dug into this and as I've seen you see people over the years like Elvis and Kurt Cobain and recently Robin Williams, people that were at the peak of their careers and appeared to have it all and yet they imploded. So I've always been fascinated by that and how that works. And the thing that I've seen and found is the same is true with executives is that the stress and pressure, Bill, is that.
You mean the phone's just ringing off the hook when you're.
Yeah, exactly.
The demands on our. And our attention.
Exactly. And that's what happens to be a real high performing person. It's extremely hard and often the individual who's doing these amazing things becomes a victim of their own success. And that's what my passion's been around all these years. And if you look at working with all the CEOs and executives that I have, and I know you have as well, the thing that I like to call the dark secret of the boardroom is that we have our own Elvis's and Kurt Cobain's and Robin Williams, who end up bonking along the way or mentally imploding along the way. But we don't read about them in the business magazines and we don't hear about them in the media because they're not famous people. But there's a lot of carnage along the way in growth companies. So for me and my work as a coach, it's about helping people to find that high performing sweet spot and stay there as the company grows and demands and expects more of them.
Right. Well, I have a CEO, a new CEO of a larger client that I've been working with, especially earlier this year. And this guy's all over the place and he's still behind the curve and he's still struggling with. And I'm not going to name him. I'm not going to out him yet. So he's still grappling with it, but he'll send emails to people in the middle of the night, ask him to have things ready first thing in the morning. And I just am like, oh dude, you've got to stop that. It's not good for you or for them. Now I think that we wake up in the middle of the night with demons and things like that. Many CEOs talk about what wakes you at three in the morning and what do you stress about and how do you sort that out. And I think you're going to talk to us a little bit about that. But that doesn't mean to get everybody's phones ringing off the hook or filling people's email baske.
No. And one thing I want to the principle that really resonated with me around this was something back actually in August of this year, I did a private two day event with 16 CEOs from around the world and Jim Collins, who in the business world is the master of building enduring great companies. He's the person that most of us would bow to. He's the guru. He is the guru who has the best data on what makes companies perform enduringly great. So I could go on about two days or 44 hours with this man in his laboratory, he calls it in Boulder, which was something I worked on making happen for five years. It was insanely, insanely powerful. But I'll leave that aside. But the thing he talked about is, and he called it, and it's something he hasn't written about yet, but he calls it the stress and drudgery tax. And he goes, all of us, when we really care deeply about what we're doing, we're passionately working about something that we're committed to. He goes, we all pay a 30% tax with our health and our energy because we're so incredibly committed. And if you look at your typical quote, worker in a 9 to 5 job, they don't pay that tax because they're not the one who's on the phone at 10 or 11 at night solving a problem or sending an email at 2 in the morning or up at 5 in the morning to get their day started and doing things that many people would think are crazy. So when he framed this up as a stress and drudgery tax, I'm like, that's it. That's the program we're on. You know, people think we're nuts, but we wouldn't have it another way. And he even talked about Steve Jobs. And he, in a conversation he had with Steve Jobs after Jobs went back to Apple and he was still involved in Pixar and at Apple. And Jobs said to him, he said to Jim, he said that, you know, I'm pretty convinced that the seeds of the cancer that ultimately took me out or took him out, the seeds of the cancer were planted because he was paying way more than a 30% tax at that point.
Yeah.
And because he, because he cares. So the, the root of it is this, this, this caring, this really giving a crap is the thing that makes high performing people very, very successful. But it's the same thing that takes them out and makes them implode.
Well, I can. So I've been pivoting my coaching business and focused significantly on growth the last two years. And as I began that a couple of years ago, I had a significant family drama unfold and had to step in and support some additional family members and stuff that wasn't on my radar all of a sudden and immediately and without notice, like everything in my diet, my exercise, our routines, the physical space of our house, like everything got upset and now I had to deal with new things and my weight jumped 30 pounds. Right. And everything went out. And then I found myself on business trips going, I deserve this. And having a little extra wine, I deserve this. Having a little extra dessert. Right. And it just like, you know, my sleep was upset, my stress. I definitely sought some therapy and things in the middle. And now it's been two years later and I've come a full circle. But it took a mass, it had a massive impact on me to sort of take on that during that time frame in the middle of all the rest of. So, you know, life meshing with business, meshing with everything else.
Yeah. And you just gave a prime example, Bill, of the catalyst for these in the mental health world. What they say is all of us are one or two life events away from a notable mental health issue. And you just described you had one that you told us of and whether there's another one as part of that, don't know. But it's basically if you think of boxing, two shots to the head and you're out. And the same is true for us executives. So if you take a look at executives, it could be, and I'll share an example with you, one of my clients that I've worked with for years named Nigel. And then I'll tell you about some of the principles after this. Nigel's a guy, he's incredibly successful. Entrepreneur was a part of a family business, went off on his own, started his own company with a partner and was doing incredibly well. Made some smart investments and cashed out a notable amount. So he made lifetime money or generational money. He's still running his business, which he really liked. Great family. Like everybody. On the surface, everything looks great. But then his business partner started to go toxic. And Nigel is a guy who has it made from every perspective, from the way entrepreneurs would measure themselves. And he literally would go and walk to his company, put his hand on the doorknob, and it was feeling like he was getting electrocuted. Like, the intent, he did not want to enter because he was entering this toxic place, mostly because of his business partner. So. And that really dropped him. Now, I worked with Nigel and was almost gonna write another book on it called, you know, I don't know, 150,000 steps to freedom. And it's probably a million steps to freedom. But Nigel and I, from the time we started, we go for a walk or a hike or a bike ride, anywhere. From now it's about four times a year, but for a while there, it was once a month for half a day and worked through all his challenges. So Nigel went from. He cleaned up the issues with his partner, and it ultimately bought him out because it was just too toxic. And then he had even more intense issues with his father that actually started to cause the side of his face to go numb, literally.
Right.
And then we had issues with one of his sons that had all kinds of issues going through school. So Nigel and I, as we'd walk around and hiking in the mountains around Vancouver, walking the seawall, have worked through every single area of his life and probably a dozen of these almost catastrophic events. And as a result, he now not only does it look like he has it made, he has probably the best life, has an amazing company, great family, but he's actually worked through all these areas. So all the areas of his life are rock solid. He's not perfect, but he spent the time to go and work through all of these things, which most of us don't want to do. We want to just keep our head down building a business, and that tends to implode.
So here's the thing. I notice people who know our work and scaling up and who've read the book and so on, know that as coaches, we get together and we do annual strategy and quarterly planning days and stuff with the leadership team, and we get the teams aligned, and we implement the Rockefeller habits, and we go into the Additional areas from scaling up. But in between those quarterly sessions, most of us in different ways have our conversations with the leads and sometimes some other people in the company. And that's a lot more about this leadership inventory and index and leadership health where we're dealing with the individual health and the growth of the person as they confront all of it. And I find, and maybe it's because of my background and training and that kind of thing that so many of my conversations are about things that came before and what was your family like? Tell me about your siblings, tell me about your parents. And again and again we notice all of these issues of how they deal with stressors and how they deal with conflict and where they go when things are upsetting, whether they freeze or they flee or whether they fight. All of those are things that started very early on and the strategies that they employ are things that they started early on and the coping mechanisms or all those kinds of things. And surprisingly, most of my in between conversations are pretty personal, dealing with where they go when things. And the really powerful ones are the ones that tell one on themselves. You know, the ones that are willing to say, right. But for the most part they don't go, well, I just get some drugs and I. But they do those things.
Yeah. So if you look at it, I mean there's what you're talking about, one of the chapters I have in the book, which is never be needy and needy meaning that you're running on emotional reactions. And what you just talked about are people's different emotional reactions that they tend to have in situations.
Yes.
And basically if you're having an emotional reaction, you are a horrible leader. And full stop emotions are used to engage and entice and inspire people to move and do things. But as a leader, emotions are the worst possible thing that we could step into. We need to use them for perceptions but not for decisions or reactions. So one of the things that I work with people on is part of this mental health is to get their needs met so they don't have to run an emotional channel. And if you look at the work that I do with a lot of CEOs in particular and really high performing executives is learning how to work around their emotional reactions. Because as you mentioned, sometimes the emotional reactions to fight and you know that's dangerous, it's like they want to get out a shotgun and blast everyone. I said no, no, no, no, that's, that's not effective leadership. Sometimes there are reactions to turtle and not deal with issues.
Right.
So that's about emotional neediness. And in order to be a high performing leader, you got to clean it up and your emotions need to be able to be switched on and off based on what you need, that is. And if you're, you know, any mechanisms like some of the people I work with, it's like, okay, when you get so incredibly angry, you make notes on a piece of paper in front of you and then you sleep on it, you don't deal with it for 24 hours. There's lots of these techniques and everyone has different techniques.
I think you point to a good thing though, that's worth underscoring. So I learned that I'm always going to have emotions. I can't change my emotions, I can't switch them off. Exactly. What I can do is have the emotion, let the emotion flow through or past me and then take some action that is not driven by, from the emotion. I have it. It's separate from the action, the commitment, the behavior that I have.
And that's a very high level skill because most people, when they have the emotion, they instantly act on it. So you're still going to have them. But the discipline is to not do anything or say anything. And that's just one. But again, if you go to people that are starting to get, if you're not getting enough sleep, if you're not getting enough exercise, if your health isn't as good, if your blood sugar is crashing because you're not eating well, you have much less likely to be able to manage and control yourself and you turn into a ranting toddler rather than a grown adult because you're not coming from a good place. So that's a real key piece. So if you'd like, Bill, I'll share a couple of the key concepts. So the first one is screw or forget. Work, life, balance. It's a joke. It's for normal human beings. You're not normal. Don't waste your time, don't even try because it doesn't apply to high performing thoroughbred racehorses. That's for regular people who are not regular. Otherwise you wouldn't be listening to this show. So work, life, balance. Even thinking about it because it makes you feel guilty and it does all these things. So don't. And the thing that I recommend instead, and I call it work, self, life, passion, this is where it's at. And if you think about it, if you've got a hundred passion units that you have to use every week, a hundred passion units. And if you spend or use 99 or say 98 of them at work, you've got one unit left for yourself, and then you've got one unit left for your family. It ain't gonna work right. You can do that for one or two weeks in a row, but you're gonna implode and your family probably will too. So the idea of work, self, life, passion is, it's saying, look, you know, everyone's got a different formula that feels right, but it's kind of get to know your numbers, you know, maybe you're a person that wants to use 70% of your passion at work, 30 in your life with your family and other things, and maybe 10 for yourself. Maybe that's a sustainable model, but that's a model that can work. Now, to most normal peoples, you're still going to look crazy and out of control because you're a high performing, high committed leader. But for yourself, you got to find that ratio that works. So as an example, what most high performing executives do when they get in trouble is that they end up having typically 10 or 20 units for their life, which usually isn't enough, but it could be, but they have almost none for themselves. And when you watch when high performers get in trouble, they almost always stop the things that fuel them, like exercise, the annual trip with their friends, the time they want to read, or maybe they're into gardening. That whole self category is usually the reason people get into trouble because then basically they run out of juice because they're not getting inspired. And unfortunately, we have this principle in our society which I just drives me crazy. Is this servant leadership or selfless leadership? It's just the worst concept because then it has people. My job is to dispel all the silly concepts and myths out there that don't relate to high performers. But this idea of this selfless leadership, it's beautiful and it sounds amazing. It just doesn't work. Because if you don't really continually focus on yourself and refueling and replenishing yourself, you give it all away. But now you're just an empty shell. So just to go back and pull this together, if we look at work, self and life, you got to figure out how much energy you need to allocate in each of them and then stick to that. And the self is the most important. So for me, I know that I need to exercise regularly, I need to have time to sit and write and I need to get out and do some crazy things with cars or motorcycles or whatever it happens to be on a regular basis.
That's right, you like to go fast I do.
That's me. I like to go fast and push through limits. That's. And if I don't do it, I'm not the same.
Yeah.
So. And I put travel into that as well. But if I don't do those things, I fade. And if I even go back further to this concept of work life balance, which don't listen to that. But I know also I am not a good version of myself. I'm out of whack when I'm not planning interesting things to do with my friends and family because that takes extra energy. So if I don't have the time to plan interesting activities or adventures or trips with my friends and family, I know I don't have enough passion units going in that category. Otherwise I'd figure that stuff out.
I notice, as you say, that I feel more generous. So when I'm well taken care of and have attended to my fundamental concerns, then I have a lot of capacity for others and for things. And I'm pretty introverted in spite of being a public speaker, which I think actually is a secret of many of us. Right. So I notice when I have that. But at the same time I see that self and selfishness are not necessarily the same thing. And that when I'm doing my work, the kind of work, so the servant leadership, it's like I put my work and my life in service of something that I care about. When I'm purpose centered, when I know that my life purpose and my business purpose are aligned and what I'm about to do next or tomorrow or in the next hour is when I can see the relationship between the two and I'm sufficient. Even if I'm a little bit out of the tank. Right. If I'm a little bit overtired, if I'm not well rested, if I'm behind on food, that the purpose can make up for a period, can make up some of that by having that aligned and that, that thing that I'll. That I'll be a servant to is is purpose centric, right?
It is. And it's lethal because. Because it will fill it for a period. Right. Like you get that fulfillment from that purpose. And it's happened to me so many times. Yeah. Because I'm so purpose led that and I just so give of myself. But it's. It's lethal because if you by nature you're more likely not to take care of yourself and do what you need and you'll do things for your family and for your clients first and then as a result you get deeply cooked, and it makes you very, very vulnerable. For bad things. Yep.
So then the vices and the excesses and the things can get out of hand and you run a deficit and you don't, you don't refill the tank, and then you end up with a problem.
You end up with big problems. And again, those, those, those, those addictions, in whatever form you want to call them, whatever form they are, are just coping mechanisms because you're typically feeling empty and worn out. And so whether it's you drink more sugar or more caffeine or more alcohol or you gamble or whatever it is that you do, they're just a reaction to being overspent and trying to fuel up. But unfortunately, those fuels actually make it worse. So the key is that if you don't manage that whole self piece, you. It'll work for a while. It basically, it works until it doesn't. It actually explodes often. So an example, you know, I got a call from. I mean, I get calls on this all the time now that I'm openly talking about this challenge that we all have, all have. And even in a book I talk about, look, if you haven't had a mental health issue yet that's affected you, don't worry, you will. And you need to have a plan B in place. So when it happens, you got someone that can help you. You know, one of my clients, this guy's been rock solid for years. And then I get a call from him on a Friday morning, hey, can you talk? He's never done that. He'll usually send me an email. He followed up with me three times that day. I'm like, this is strange. Then I had a conversation with him the next morning. He was basically having a nervous breakdown mentally. He just went. And he doesn't know what happened. So when I start asking questions. He had made one major mistake in his work that really deeply, deeply, deeply bothered him. It was almost catastrophic for him. Number two, his sleep had been. He had not been sleeping well for the last six months. So those two events come together and he felt like he was losing his mind. Now it's 18 months later, the guy's on a solid track, but he just hadn't been taking care of himself from the sleep perspective in it. And that one event really threw him in the ditch. So that first principle about forgetting about work, life balance, and you got to think about those passion units and really take care of yourself, that will give you. Without that, you can't sustain. Without that, you'll have great times of energy and then you'll bonk and burn out and then you'll have great times of energy and bonk and burnout again and again and again.
So here's the big things that I'm hearing from your saying. The first thing I think is pretty fundamental and that is remember that if you're a person listening to the show, if you're a follower of our stuff, if you're one of our clients, you're not a normal person. And stop pretending you're a normal person now. You're human. And I think that's a fallacy, right? You're not a normal person, but you're still human. And so you have to take care of yourself. You have to manage your mental health, your well being, your passion units over time so that you have enough reserve to give. And then when you are leading and you notice that you've got emotion, you cannot act on those emotions. You need to act consistent with your commitments and principles and values as a leader and have room to have your emotions but not let your emotions have you.
Yep, 100%.
Yeah, it's really valuable stuff and I think we need to remember it again and again because we see time and again either ourselves, the people around us, our clients and the folks leading these fairly intense productive lives, but then start to develop real issues and any number of things can trigger and set you off to new demands on your job, new impacts on your family, other crises or upsets, relationship issues. All of these kinds of things can take what's pretty tightly wound and blow it up.
Yeah, 100%. And it tends to, I mean everyone has these challenges, it just tends to really more be more likely as your words, to blow up when you're a really high performing leader because you're closer to the edge anyways. And the truth is, high performing leaders, most of what I'd call the A players that I work with, they live on the verge of almost exploding all the time. They run close to the edge, so it's even more sensitive for them.
Well, from your world, if you think about, you think about what are Ferraris known for? Aside from being red and going fast, they're also known for catching fire. We think about the catastrophic engine blow ups of high performance cars in Formula one and the issues that they don't just run out of gas and pull to the side of the road, they go bad spectacularly because they're wound so tight.
I was on the racetrack last week actually, they built a brand new world class racetrack about three and a half hours from my house here in Vancouver.
Nice.
And I was on the track last week with some of the top racers in sports car racing in North America. Doing a day on the track. Yeah. And when you're going at the limit, which I like to experience the limit in motorized things as well, when things go wrong, it's. Yeah. And you don't want that to happen yet it does. And that's where you need expert help. And the advice I give to people is, first of all, is to be open around mental health and realizing you've already experienced mental health challenges and you will experience more. Two, and you mentioned it earlier, you need to know a good psychologist or a good therapist because when the yogurt hits the fan and it becomes a mess, you need to get some sort of help. And your friends and family are useless. Useless. They will actually do more damage. And here's the way I place it. I think about it. So if I actually. We had this example on Thursday, my son had a volleyball game. One of the kids in the other team went to go get the ball out of bounds and tried to do a soccer style bicycle kick. And then he's coming on the ground, he placed his arm down, his arm turned into a bit of a zigzag. Yeah, yeah, it was. It was actually pretty traumatic. He was okay. I mean, his arms, not okay, but he's okay. So, you know, when we see it. And now it wasn't compound, but it was a zigzag. So did any of us try to fix his arm?
No, no.
We're smart enough when it's a medical emergency because you do this thing called 91 1, call 9 1, get professional help. Problem is, when there's a mental emergency, somehow we think we can help and we're useless. We are just as useless as we are with a zigzag arm with a nervous breakdown. And the only way to get these people on track is to get them to a psychologist. Typically when it gets really bad, a coach can help on minor stuff if they're just a little off track. But if it's serious, it's right to a psychologist. If they don't have a psychologist, then it's go to the doctor and then the doctor can refer to a psychologist.
Well, and I think the thing is brilliant about dealing with the emergency. But then in the day to day, remember to fill your tank, remember to tune your car, remember to like, remember to attend to all the things, do the safety check, put your helmet on, do the things to take care of yourself in between so that we have fewer systems going wrong when things blow up.
Correct. And have a plan B for when it does blow up, because we're going to need it. The other thing, one of the chapters that I have in the book is to love the pain. And if you don't love being stretched and challenged and that feeling almost of overwhelm because it's so intense, you know, odds are leadership in a growth company is not for you because it's messy, it's challenging. And the other thing I see with a lot of leaders is they end up in this woe is me when things get really tough. And the reality is in a growth firm, of course you're getting your ass kicked. Of course it's painful. Of course there are sleepless nights. That's part of the program. So if you don't love that, that you actually take a small problem and make it bigger in your head and then really mess yourself up mentally. So, you know, one of the things I work with people a lot on is changing their story. And it's a little bit cheesy, but it's. The principle is changing it from a woe is me to wow, I'm gonna learn a lot here. And if you can love the growth that all this challenge creates, that frees up your brain from all this extra baggage that's created when you. When you almost resist the learning, I.
Think that's probably a great place to end our show for this week. To embrace this whole world and life instead of suffering it and to acknowledge that there's something that we're drawn to here and there's something to stop suffering, but to learn to deal with. So I think. Thanks for being on the show. This is really great stuff. Are there any particular resources? We'll put a link to your website in the show show notes. Anything else that you want to direct us?
You know the model for mental health, There's a model called the mental health continuum that I was introduced to a few years ago that really helps to explain what happens to us when things start to get messed up in our head. And some guidance on how to get back to healthy. It's a great resource. So if you put a link to that, that would be very helpful.
Absolutely. We'll put a link to both those things in the show notes so people know where to turn to for help. As always, it's been a pleasure to have you on the show and thank everyone for downloading, tuning in and checking us out. Thanks again. We'll see you next week.
Sa.
