Why Successful Men Secretly Feel Like Failures (And What No One Tells You)

In this episode, I'm going to share the real reason why high achievers struggle with balance by working harder isn't the answer. And the three shifts that will help you sustain success without sacrificing your well being. We're going to take care of the entrepreneurial men in the way of the inside man, not the outside man. There's plenty of that going on. We're going to give you the inside man root cause about burnout and why this thing happens. Welcome back to the Inside man podcast. I am Gary Katie, you can call me gk. And today we're talking about high performance without peace, why so many successful entrepreneurial men hit burnout and how to break free from it. If you ever felt like no matter how much you achieve, you always feel like you're running on empty, well, this episode's for you. In this episode, I'm going to share the real reason why high achievers struggle with balance by working harder isn't the answer. And the three shifts that will help you sustain success without sacrificing your wellbeing. Before we dive in, please hit subscribe. And if this resonates resonates with you, please share it with your friends because this is good stuff for the soul man. We're going to take care of the entrepreneurial men in the way of the inside man, not the outside man. There's plenty of that going on. We're going to give you the inside man root cause about burnout and why this thing happens. See, the root cause of the problem, and I was one of them. We could not slow down because we equate rest and resetting with laziness or weakness. Yes. And the idea of stopping even for a moment feels uncomfortable, like we're losing ground. Right. It's because the more is better machinery of that inner unevictable roommate is always running. And we're believing that we're not enough. We're not doing enough, we don't have enough. More is better. All those conversations are hitting us all day long and we don't realize it's there. We're not living our life. We're living a life that of some voice that just turns on in the morning no matter what we do and says, get going. That's why instead of rolling over and maybe, you know, hugging and kissing your wife or doing whatever you'd like to do there in the morning, come on. You roll over the other way and grab the phone and start looking at emails. I know, I've been there. I've been there. So look Burnout isn't about working hard. It's about working sustainably. Hard work doesn't cause burnout. You know, we're built for hard things. We tend. There's a whole study on. We'd rather do hard things than easy things. But when it's frying you, that's the difference. That's the line of demarcation here. You know, I remember, you know, on Mondays, I would go to work and I would have all my setup meetings for the week. I would literally come home and be so wiped out that I couldn't even be with my family. And then Thursday and Friday, I was out being on a stage somewhere. So I had basically Tuesday and Wednesday, if I was lucky. And so that's no way to live. And you don't want to miss your family because that ultimately, you know, I. I walked my. My dad to heaven. He was two weeks in the hospital. I was there with him, you know, bedside. There was no regrets. We. We worked on and cleaned up all this stuff because it wasn't always that way. I used to get beat physically and mentally, and all that trauma caused this. I'm not enough. I'm not enough. I got to do more. I got to prove to my dad. I got to prove to the world that I matter. And none of that was true. I just. That was my coping mechanism. That was my survival. See, success should be a fuel source, not a drain on your life, right? If your success is leaving you exhausted, that's an indicator that something's broken. Pay attention to that. See, pain is necessary. Suffering is optional if you're staying in the suffering, because that's all you've known. This is your opportunity to step out and take a new path. Winning shouldn't come at the cost of your health, relationships, and inner peace. And the key question here is, what is the point of winning if you feel so exhausted you can't even enjoy it? I mean, let's cut that out. I did that for many, many years. And I'm here to say it doesn't have to be that way. And we're going to talk about it, because I know this cycle all too well. For years, I operated at full throttle. My wife. This is so funny. Judith. You're going to get to meet her someday. She's going to come on. She agreed to that, which is cool. I didn't think that that would ever happen because I said, we need to talk about, you know, our relationship. And she's like, okay. I was like, wow. Surprised. Anyway, for years, I was full throttle and she'd be like, dude, like, you went from zero to, to a hundred in two seconds. I go, I idle at ninety. My RPMs are freaking jacked all the time. And you know, she, she calls me dopamine man, because, you know, I just like, jacked on dopamine. My foot's shaking, you know, my knees move in when I'm sitting down, you know, like, I just got a lot of energy. But being on full throttle is fine when you're 30, 40, but when you start turning 50 and you can't shut it off and 60 freaking, forget it. There's no way I should be jamming the same way like I was. And as you learned in earlier podcasts, I got hit in the middle of Manhattan on a bike by a pickup truck and nearly saw my life flash. Well, it did have my life flash in front of me. And it's only because I'm drained, I'm fried. And I can't take time off. When I was on vacation, I was working. When I was working, I wished I was on vacation. Wherever I was, there I wasn't. I wasn't just tired, but I was mentally and physically empty. I was snapping at my team. I was short tempered with my wife, hence the zero to a hundred, you know, And I had this anger thing where I just like, would send everybody, you know, searching for a hiding place because that's the only way I got peace and time to myself. And worst of all, I didn't know how to stop. It was the iOS. I keep talking about the iOS, you know, we have them in our phone. I got the iOS, you got the iOS, the internal operating system of our being. And we don't know how that is and we got to interrupt it. So, you know, one of my clients, I'm going to call him John, just to honor his anonymity. He was the kind of guy that never took this foot off the gas, just like me. So that's why he was probably, you know, attracted to working with me, because he's like, oh, that guy gets me, right? He built a million multimillion dollar company. I think it was a nine figures. He led top performers from the outside. He had it all together. But behind the scenes, dude, this guy's health was deteriorating. His wife was begging him to be more present. She'd be like, he's like, ah, I bought you Gucci shoes. And, and I tell you, you're beautiful all the time. Isn't that enough? And. And she's like, no, I just want your attention. You're your head's in the phone all day and when you get home it's still there. And it's like you're never with me. So it was like, you know, either you keep pushing or it's going to fall apart. And that's what he was thinking. And it wasn't until he landed in the hospital with like high blood pressure, severe exhaustion, stress related health issues. I'll leave out here. But success doesn't come at the cost of well being. It shouldn't. And that's when he started to make real shifts. Please don't do these things. The moral of the story is success at an expense of peace is just slow destruction in disguise. You know, I always say my alcoholism was slow suicide. I was slowly trying to kill me and I couldn't believe that I was doing it. And that's the internal operating system trying to get free, trying to get numb from the pain that we live in as entrepreneurs. So I want to talk about three key shifts in avoiding burnout. And you don't have to quit everything to avoid burnout. So this is not like dropping everything, but you need to shift how you operate. And I want to first talk about your energy. Manage your energy. Manage your energy, not your hours. See, most men focus in on time management, right? Like you want to get a time manager in here. But the real game is energy management. And high performers don't just work hard, they protect their energy. And you're going to meet Jim Do. He is our wealth advisor in our community. He is profound and one of his models of wealth building is protecting. It's your time and energy shield he created. And he takes away you meeting with anything related to your wealth. Like if you have a new opportunity to invest in, he does it for you. See, that's what I had to do. See, I had to stop being a control freak and find people that were aligned to my values. And you're going to meet all of them. You're going to meet Sachin Patel, who I couldn't lose a pound. I could not lose a pound. I tried everything. Keto, no carbs, no fat, no sugar, no. And no. Alcohol was easy for me because I would have died if I kept drinking. But. And Dave in the mental health area and just Gio in the men's health area. You're going to meet all these mentors of mine. I'm going to share them with you because here's the thing I'm going to use. Let's use Jim. He puts in in his support of your wealth Management, a time and energy shield. And if you look at it, it's a virtual family office. And if you're in the center of that and talking to your cpa, your investment banker, you're a real estate broker, you're all these brokers, insurance broker, if you're having to manage all that, that's a full time job in itself. What I love about Jim's work is he puts the time and energy shield in and now I know that's being handled. I have a one hour a week, I mean one hour a month meeting. I have my whole thing set up and I know how I'm doing and I can make adjustments each month. That's getting your arms around your wealth management and not having to do have another full time job. Right. Another example would be with my health. I could not lose weight and my energy was horrible. I wasn't sleeping. I don't know if you're not sleeping. I was snoring. I thought I was have to go on a cpap, all this crazy stuff. And then by the way, all the mentors that mentor me that are going to be mentoring you, they all have the inside man mentality. See, Sachin Patel of the Living Proof Institute believes that the patient, the doctor is the patient. You can heal yourself from the inside out. Here's what I learned about dropping weight. I dropped almost 50 pounds and kept it off. How? Because I needed to reset my metabolic system. This is not a diet. And if you don't have to lose weight but you can't sleep or it resets your body, your digestive system, your circulatory system. I'm not going to be a doctor. That's why I have the experts here for you. But ultimately it's like I'm going to give you what to do and who to use so that you can just handle it. And here was the metaphor for everything. You have to stop and reset. Like, you know, I was working out on this metabolic reset. You, you walk or you do some low impact stuff. Because what Sachin learned is you get to a parasympathetic state. By the way, I lived for 59 years in a sympathetic state. Fight or flight, in a parasympathetic state, your body is at rest. So I'm resting most of the time. And then my energy comes up on the podcast because my purpose is alive. And I'm here wanting to really make sure that this message gets delivered powerfully and succinctly and understandably. But I'm still resting when I'm delivering It I used to be like, I gotta run to the next appointment right when I finish this podcast so that I can get on to the next thing and the next thing and next thing. So what you're going to do is start decentralizing yourself from having to do it all and stopping, resetting, and then you can get back on the bike or back on the ultra marathoning. But one of the guys that went through this program with me, he was lean, mean, fight machine, but he's eaten 30 cookies a day, he's running 25 miles to keep the weight off. All that takes time. We're coming up with solutions that are not root cause solutions, but rather what we're doing is we're masking things. Let's get out of the superficial solutions, popping drugs, popping all this stuff, and let's get to the root cause and let the body do what the body does. Let the business do what the business does. Let your team do what your team does. But what gets us here is control freakism and holding onto it all. And the first thing we have to do is create space. And I read. My wife and I, we just read different things and I read this this morning and I wanted to bring it into the podcast today. It's. Space permeates everything. Things happen to us all the time that open up space. This spaciousness, this wide open, unbiased, unprejudiced space is inexpressibly and fundamentally good and sound. It's like the sky. Whenever you're in a hot spot or feeling uncomfortable, whenever you're caught up and don't know what to do, you can find somewhere to go and look at the sky and experience some freshness, free of hope and fear, free of bias and prejudice, just being completely open. See, those things that are in our head, they take up space. I want to start quieting those by getting to the root cause. The first place to do is handle the symptom, which is here's your action. Step on today's session. Audit your energy. When do you feel the most focused and powerful? If you haven't gotten an aura ring, I highly recommend it. It brings tangibility. I love statistics. Most business owners love statistics. It tells you what kind of sleep you got, how much sleep. It brings tangibility to it. It really changed my energy and it really changed behaviors and decisions that would maybe keep me up till midnight. I started going to bed literally at 9 o' clock because I found that that's better for my rhythm. And I wake up early. I love getting stuff done early. But I have a lot of energy in the morning, so the first thing I needed to do was audit my energy. Oura ring is great if you want to invest in something O u r a great. You just wear it and it tells you what kind of sleep you have and it brings up your resilience level, how resilient you're going to be throughout the day. And then days that I really have a bad resilience level, I don't make big decisions. It really gives you good information. So your action step is audit your energy. When you feel most focused, when you feel the most powerful. When do you hit a slump? Are you hitting the Monster, the Red bull, at about 3:00'? Clock? That usually has to do with diet. So we're going to get to the root cause of that. But first you have to be aware of what you got going on, right? And just filling yourself with energy drinks all day. Five hour energy drinks and Monster and Red Bull. I used to drink a ton of Red Bull and now I have more energy because my mind is quieter. My body is taken care of. By the way, if you don't sleep, you're not washing your brain. My mom had dementia. If you have mental health issues, your brain's not getting washed every night and cleansed off. It's a huge part. If you're on a cpap, you can get off that. If you're on Ambien, you can get off that. It doesn't have to be that way because I know a lot of guys that have done it. And then structure your most important tests around your peak. Energy windows. You might have an energy window at night. Working out is better, but that might not be a good time because then you can't get to sleep. So I'm a morning guy and I have my time blocked for the morning to get things done, workouts, education, things that are important, that I got to fill myself up before I start taking on the day. So even if it's for 15 minutes, take that action step of auditing your energy. The no muscle. Protect your time and focus. So when I say the no muscle, the muscle to say no. That's what I mean by that. You know, most of us are yesers, right? We're yes to an opportunity, yes to an opportunity. And saying no is like. Is like, oh, I might miss out. You're, you know, you're. I'm the FOMO guy. Fear of missing out. I'm like, yes to everything. I'm like, I'm going to stupid concerts just because I don't want to miss out like on Cher or something stupid like that. But like, you know, or Tyler the creator or something crazy like that. Anyway, see, high achievers tend to say yes to everything. Meetings, calls, opportunities, until their schedule so packed that we have no breathing room. By the way, when I sold my company, the week after I sold it, there was nothing on my schedule. Oh, dude, I almost lost my shit. I was like a caged animal not knowing what to do. Unwanted is not something that we default into and we don't realize until we have a breakdown. Getting hit by a pickup truck on a bike, getting landed in a hospital, fat drunk porn fanduel. Numbing out. And then like, you know, we're wondering why life sucks. Well, you know what? One of the biggest things that guys don't want to show is their screen time. Because screen time is the fastest way you can get in there to start breaking this up. But I want you to really look before you saying yes to yourself or to someone else on a request. First thing I want you to do, I want us to learn how to pause. Pause. Pause. You don't have to like just say, let me think about that. I got to a place where I could pause before I responded. I always tell people I need to look into that. And now my wife holds the schedule for everything. I go, I don't know if I could do that. I cannot trust myself because my unevictable inner roommate is going to say yes. What I do now is I say, let me check on that. Let me see. And then I talk to my wife. I said, honey, I can't say no. She goes, let me help you. And I go, that's cool. See, we got more intimate by that too. And she now helps me. I go, I have this opportunity. What do you think? And she'll go, yes or hell no. And then I get back to the guy or gal and I go, no, I can't do that. Or I can do that. So really putting an interrupter, if you can't trust yourself around this, it's really, really powerful. So that's another structure to put in place. Rest is a strategy. Rest is a strategy. I never thought about it how recovery, your recovery fuels your peak performance. See, top athletes don't train 24 7. If you look at the hockey schedule or basketball schedule, they're back to back games. They're fried, right? They optimize for recovery. Things like I do cold plunges, I do cryotherapy. You want to start hyperbaric therapies. Restore is a Great. Jim Donnelly, who created Restore, is a guy who I've met over the years and it's extremely. I love Restore. Just go there, get a membership. There's one in every big city and it is awesome. If you don't have that in your rural area, start to look at having a cold plunge at your house. Infrared light, these things have you reset. It's not a luxury, it's a competitive advantage. These are the competitive advantages. They're not a luxury. Like, I'm going to take some time off. By the way, your, your, your vacations, when you start looking at them as like, I gotta get outta here on this Friday, I'm dying, I need a vacation. You're gonna start when you put this in and you start living it day to day, you're not gonna have to be hungry for that vacation. Cause you know what happens on a vacation? You get there, you start working, and then the day before you're leaving, you're in paradise and you're miserable because your future is giving you your present, saying, oh crap, I'm going home to that bedlam. We're gonna give you a lifestyle that's not defaulted, but designed. That's what you're getting from this. We're designing, we're putting in structures so that you can break free from the inner roommate that tells you you're not enough and step into a world of really a powerful peak performance athlete. I want you to begin to start thinking of yourself as a professional athlete that happens to run a business. If you start thinking in that context, you're going to have a better shot at doing what they do because they rest, I'm sure. They party and they smoke pot. Now, I heard Kevin Durant, this is a rumor in town here that I know his neighbor, they're, they're playing video games, smoking pot and eating candy all night. Well, you can tell because the Suns had the season that they had. Anyway, I digress. Anyway, the key takeaway today is high performance without peace is a path to burnout. You don't have to learn how to. You don't have to learn how to manage your energy. You do have to learn how to manage your energy, not your time. That's what I meant to say. Oh, man. Maybe I need an energy break here. So you want to learn how to manage your energy, not time. So remember, you'll never sustain success if you're on that idling at 90 kind of thing. So here's your call to action. If you feel stuck in the cycle, you can join my my my coaching program. I can be your mentor. Yes, it's available. Go to lifeonallcylinders.com Gary Katy.com they'll take you. How to help I help men build lives that don't require burnout to be successful. And send this episode to a friend who might be struggling with the same thing that you have. Or if you're a female, watching this for your man and learning how to communicate with them. And just send it to them. It's easier, right? So this is Gary Katie, reminding you that your success should fuel you, not drain you. And I'll see you on the next episode. Peace.