Chad Silverstein on catching negative self-talk and turning it into action. When things get hard, lean on trusted people instead of going dark. A Navy SEAL story shows the difference between isolating and asking for help.
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Being hard on yourself, not down on yourself. This is one of my favorite mantras of built a lead just because, you know, I have a tendency to look at that devil's advocate situation, and I am hard on myself. But it's really important to understand that nuance, that you don't want to be down on yourself. And when you are talking to yourself in your head every day and you're telling yourself things that aren't healthy, it's important that you catch it and that you turn it into know something where you can actually take action and do something about it. It's okay to go through hard times. It's okay to be hard on yourself, but not okay to be down on yourself. And one of the ways that you can actually work against this is to make sure that you have someone in your life that you feel like you respect, that you know cares about you. And that is your go to when you find yourself occasionally in a position where you need help. And people usually tend to kind of do one of two things when they're going through something really hard. This is something that we talk about in Build to lead. When Navy SEALs go through their training and they're asked, what's the hardest thing that you've ever experienced and how did you handle it? And they're looking. They're looking for how the person handle it. They don't care what happened to the person. Everyone goes through hard things, you know, and you can't understand what it's like for someone else to go through something that you haven't experienced. But how you dealt with it says a lot about you. And people do one of two things. They either go dark, which means they kind of close themselves off in an office environment. I saw this all the time. You'd always see someone's door shut up. Never saw it shot before. But now all of a sudden, I see it shut every day. So I know something's going on. You got to tune into that. And the other way is to lean on. Lean on someone and ask for help. And so they asked the Navy SEALs this, because the Navy SEALs, they don't want you on the SEAL team if you're going to go dark, because that means that someone's going to die. They want teammates that are going to lean onto each other and ask for help and not be too proud and not be too much of a big shot to not ask for help. You got to know when to ask for help. And if you're going through something hard, nobody can do it alone. And I found Just personally that every time I'd go to Chet, because we were practicing every week, it was never as bad as I thought. And when it was, he still found a way to help me see it a certain way, to either do something that can make me feel a little bit better, to make me take into consideration something that I had not thought of, or to completely shift my mindset because I was focused on one thing, and I really should have been focused on something else, which changed how I felt about the entire situation. And look, you can throw a lot of scenarios out and give a lot of examples like that, but the bottom line is you either go dark or you lean on others and ask for help. And you have no excuse to not reach out to people and ask for help unless you just don't have anybody. And if that's the case, that's sad, and that's something you should do something about. Meaning take a real hard look at your relationships and ask yourself that question. Why don't I have someone in my life that I can lean on, that I can depend on, that I can be transparent with? And ask yourself if you have anyone in your life that you can be completely transparent with. 100 vulnerable, feeling, completely naked, you know, like, they know everything about me. Most people can't say they have that, but when you do have that, those people are so special because you can literally go to them and you can tell them anything, and they won't judge you because they care about you. And it's important that you have people like that in your life. And again, you're lucky if you have a few, you're lucky if you have one. But make sure you lean on them when you got something going on. And be careful not to dig too deep in your own head going down the bunny hole. Being negative. It's a dangerous place to be, and nothing could come from that. So dig yourself out of it when you find yourself there. And if you're there now, go lean and ask someone for help.
