In this opening episode of the Chris Project, host Christian Brim recounts a harrowing client case in which a trusted advisor’s warning was ignored, leading to the client’s conviction and eventual suicide. The story reveals how deep, unspoken pain can drive entrepreneurs to make self‑destructive decisions. Brim explains that this realization, combined with numerous other observations of entrepreneurs suffering in silence, inspired him to launch a podcast (originally envisioned as a book) focused on entrepreneurial mental health, mindset, and self‑awareness. He discusses the neutral nature of character traits—using persistence/stubbornness as a case study—illustrating how the same trait can be both a strength and a liability. Two personal anecdotes (completing a private pilot license despite dread, and enduring a disastrous marketing role until hiring a fractional CMO) demonstrate the cost of unchecked persistence and the relief that comes from recognizing anxiety and delegating. The episode concludes with a call for listeners to subscribe, engage, and apply the insights to better understand and shape their own brains and behaviors.
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My name is Christian Brim and this is the Chris Project. I had a client many years ago that reached out to me for my advice and it didn't go as planned. You see, this guy was in his 50s. He had a very successful business. But he was tired of running the business. He was tired of messing with employees and operations and customers. And he was looking for someone to come in and run his company. And he asked me to interview a candidate for this president position to free him up. And I went on this lunch meeting with the man I had never met. And in the course of the conversation, he essentially bragged about his adultery. I was shocked, not so much by his actions, but just because he was So brazen about it and frankly not knowing me, willing to share that information with me. We left the lunch and my client called and asked me what I thought. And I said, well, I wouldn't hire him because if he cheats on his wife, he'll cheat on you. Well, my client went ahead and hired this man against my advice. And a year later, something happened. You see, this president had been caught trying to bribe a contract officer, and this man threw my client under the bus. And said it was all his idea. Now, I'm 99% sure that my client knew nothing about it and had nothing to do with it because his business was solid. His, his product sold itself. He had no reason to bribe anybody to obtain business. But because the president rolled over first, the federal government pinned the charges on my client, and he was sentenced to 2 years in a federal penitentiary. I never spoke with my client after that time, after he was in jail, and I'm not sure about his mindset. But 2 months before he was to be released, he killed himself. I was haunted by this story for a long time, and I still am. I wondered if there was something that I could have done differently. I thank God that I cleared my conscience and gave him my advice to not hire him, because had I not and this happened, I think, I think it would have really tortured me. But it wasn't until last year that I really saw that situation through a different lens. And what I realized was my client was in such pain in his business that he was willing to forego valued advice from a trusted advisor and hire a known cheater to run his business. That's how great his pain was. I didn't realize that at the time. I didn't see the pain that he was in. And, you know, he, he, I would say, hid it fairly well. He wasn't the type of person to share his feelings. And, and so this revelation came to me that and all my experience that I've had with other entrepreneurs, both firsthand and secondhand stories of entrepreneurs that suffer in silence and don't have a place to go with those emotions. With those struggles. And so I set out to start this podcast, not really thinking of a podcast. Originally, I wanted to write a book, and I may still, but the idea behind the book was to explore what we know about the entrepreneurial mindset, about their brain, from psychology and psychiatry studies and papers, and share that in layman's terms and actual experience with what with the intent to disseminate the knowledge, just get the information out there. But as I was talking to my business coach and my, my colleague— those are two different people— I realized that it, it needed to be more than that. And one of the things I love to do is I love to hear people's stories. I love to interview people and ask them questions and kind of dig in and find things. And so that's what this podcast is about. This podcast is intended to raise entrepreneurial self-awareness around mental health and state of mind, mindset, to understand better how our brains actually work and be able to work with it as opposed to against it. Because you can't really change the way your brain's wired. I know some people think that you can and maybe you can, but my experience is, is that when you're dealing with things that are embedded in you, encoded in you, who you are, personality traits, characteristics, it's, it's much easier to deal with those things when you have a more complete understanding of it. I was at a conference one time, and it was, it was essentially the speaker was talking about being different. And the statement that he made was that character traits are agnostic, they're neutral, they're neither good nor bad. They're what we ascribe to them. So one of those characteristics that shows up in me and shows up for a lot of entrepreneurs is this persistence or stubbornness or, well, persistence or stubbornness. And it's, it's only in context that it has a value, right? So the fact that I am disposed to sticking with something and pursuing it to its end can be a good characteristic trait, or it could be a bad characteristic trait. The important part is that I understand that about myself, realize when I'm acting from that, and then being able to discern whether or not that is serving me in the moment, in the context that I'm using it. So I'll give you an example. I, I'll give you two examples. The first is personal. So I decided because a lot of my friends and entrepreneur colleagues were private pilots and I'd had an interest in flying for a long time. My grandfather flew and I flew with him a lot. I decided to get my private pilot's license.. And about halfway through the training, I realized that I didn't really like flying. It caused me great stress. I was proficient at it. My instructor said I was good at it, but I didn't like it. But halfway through the training, when I had this realization that I didn't want to do it, I still completed the training and in a lot of ways it made me miserable. But I had to finish what I'd started. My second example is last year I had been in charge of marketing for my company by default because there was no one else to do it. For, for many years, and it had been a constant source of frustration because I'm not trained as a marketing person. And in a lot of ways, I don't think like a marketing person. I didn't really know what to do. And so like every entrepreneur, you start out with what you think is best and you try it, and if it doesn't work, you iterate and you change and you try something else. Well, I had done that until last year. We had the absolute worst results in our marketing that we'd ever had in our company's 25-plus years. We spent more and sold less than we ever had. And last fall, the fall of 2023, I, I was uber anxious. And I didn't even realize at the time that I was like really anxious. And anxiety for me presents as irritation, irritability, short-tempered. And my leadership team actually could see this behavior, but they didn't know what was going on. And I finally had a conversation with my, my business coach where he asked me, is, is this behavior serving you? And I'm like, no, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm miserable and it's making everybody else miserable.. And so I decided to hire a fractional CMO and turn those responsibilities over to somebody else after several months of wrestling with it. And the relief that I felt after I had done that was amazing. I mean, it was like, you don't realize what the pain or the pressure is until it's gone and you're like, God, that sucked. But my point in telling you these two stories is that they're the same characteristic of mine, which is to not give up. And, and I, I don't know why I have that characteristic. I'm not going to delve into the psychology of why I have that characteristic. But the reality is, is that's who I am. And so I have to be aware of it because if I don't, I can find myself in places where I'm, I'm holding on to that rope where it's, it's literally burning the hand, the skin from my hand down to bone. Right. And it's like, why are you still holding on to that rope? When you're 2 feet off the ground. And that is the power of self-awareness, understanding yourself. This podcast, I hope, will help you gain insight from experience of others and help you understand yourself better so that you can choose to be who you want to be. So I hope you subscribe. I hope you tune in. I hope you listen. I hope you apply. But let's go do this thing.
