Episode 063: On Air with Life Coach Rich Ruff

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show, a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show.

All right. Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I'm your host, Josh Turley, joined today by Jeff Jenkins. How you doing?

I'm good.

Joining us today. So a couple of— a couple of weeks ago, I did an episode on mental health. Uh, and today I thought I would actually bring in somebody who knows what they're talking about with mental health. Uh, so I'd like to introduce our guest, Rich Ruff.

Thank you.

Licensed— I'm gonna totally get this wrong because it's LSC, LCS.

Close. So in Arizona, it's an LPC, Licensed Professional Counselor.

There you go. All right. Um, and Rich, and you deal with just mental health of all varieties. But specifically here at RTA, we brought you in as kind of a— how would you describe the position? I'd say business life coach, but I don't think that quite captures it.

Business life coach and performance coach for individuals. Really, a little bit of the story was a few years ago working with some important CEOs and executives and realizing as they went through their tough journeys, it was affecting their companies, it was affecting their lives, of course. And the employees that I was talking to or other clients were saying, "Our environment here in our company is struggling. Like, it's causing our mental health issues." And so I was really open to the idea of saying, how do we help companies be aware of their mental health issues that they have within their own company and organically look at how to get it out and be aware of it?

And how are they contributing to that environment, right?

Absolutely.

Where they're adding to the mental health issues of their own employees versus helping be a place they can come as a refuge.

Yep, that's exactly right.

So I know one of the things I like to say is I'll quote, uh, like Jeff Bezos said, he talks about like there's no work-life balance, you know, where there's trade-offs between work and life, that it's a work-life cycle, that what happens at home impacts what happens at work and what happens at work impacts what happens at home.

Yep.

Um, and so like as part of that belief, it's one of the reasons why, you know, Rich brought this opportunity to me and I said absolutely, we want to sign up for this and have this be a part of what we offer to our employees because it benefits us. It benefits us to have employees that are whole, that feel better about who they are, where they're going, that have direction. There's another book I'll throw out there for any of the listeners that also kind of got me on this path, although Rich has a different implementation of it, would be A Dream Manager. There's a book called Dream Manager by Matthew Kelly, and he basically talks about tapping in. We've talked about this on the podcast before, I think.

We have, yeah.

Figuring out what it is that employees, like, what their goals are and how are they going to go achieve them. And in this book, like, they brought in financial advisors and people to kind of help them on their path and on their journey so that they actually could go achieve things. You know, this is a janitorial company, so it wasn't like there was a lot of upward mobility or, you know, it wasn't a professional career, you know, where you're going up the ranks or anything. And so for them, it was all about how do we help them achieve their dreams? Like, why are they here? And so like, I thought this was a good play or kind of a first step into that process for us as well.

Yeah.

So when we interview, or at least when I interview, I always ask people, where do you want to be in 5 years? Like, where do you see yourself? But it's all professionally based.

Yeah.

Right. It's never personally, hey, what do you want out of life in 5 years? And I would liken that to like this, right? It's not just professionally where do you want to be, but just in life in general.

Yeah.

Because professionally, that's only half your life.

Yeah.

And the relationship that's created by that question in expanding it above just your professional life, it's the life of, we're a team and a family that we're worried about all aspects.

Yes.

And that creates an entirely different relationship where now you're actually a part of a team that's more than just profits. You're part of a team that's worried about individuals and families and children.

And you were talking a little bit about this idea of seeing your team and believing that they're with you, right? Talk a little bit more about that philosophy that you have and where that came from.

So just here at RTA in the last few weeks and visiting with a number of employees and understanding RTA's vision and their goal of, we're all on a team together to produce the best product and best customer experience that we can. People along the way, we naturally get in our way because of our own negative tapes, our own thoughts that we're a weak link or that we have a problem. And we don't necessarily always know how to approach that in a professional setting. And so just in safe conversations and having a safe place to say, "Let's explore your thoughts," allows employees to begin realizing when they are getting in their own way and taking themselves out of the team. There isn't anything the team necessarily did in that moment. It's just their, aware of their own insecurities. And being too aware of your insecurities makes you insecure. So, and that might seem trite, but that's the reality of it, is sometimes we think too much of ourselves. And so thinking of the team aspect and how the company or the environment is promoting and supporting them, a number of people have said just the opportunity to talk to someone where they can share these thoughts makes them more confident to walk out onto the floor and do their job.

Yeah, that's a great point because when I started out in trucking, I always wanted to be number one, like, and we did it based off of miles on a truck, like dispatched loaded miles. And I killed myself to be number one just because I'm a super competitive person. And I tell you what, I was kicking ass. Like, I was just— I was doing so good as a dispatcher. But you know what? I was coming in at like 4:30 in the morning and I would stay until 6:30 at night and I'd come in on Saturday and Sunday just to set my trucks up. Because it was about me. It wasn't about the rest of the team. And that was my sole focus. Right? But when I look back on that, we probably didn't do as well as a company because I was just worried about me and my 60 trucks. I wasn't worried about the other 400 trucks that were running in the company.

And the problem with that is when they come to you with a curveball of someone else's team needs help, you feel like it's directly going to affect you. Yeah.

And it's a no.

Someone would call me like, hey, my driver really has to get home. You're on this load that goes 1,000 miles over the weekend. Can I have it?

And I'd be like, no.

And it's a guy that had to get home, and my guy didn't have to get home. He could have done whatever I wanted him to, but I was so selfish thinking about how it was going to affect me and how I looked in my perception. I wasn't considering the team.

And repeat that over a number of times when someone feels like they need the help and support of the other team and they don't get it. Now the identity is we're not really about people, we're about profit. And they don't want to sacrifice for the greater good. They don't want to put in the extra effort for anybody else other than themselves, which becomes toxic.

Yep.

It's interesting as you say that, like repeating it too. What does that do for the individual as they're part of that? As they constantly are telling themselves this thing or they're seeing this thing over and over again. I know one of the things that we've talked about is like this idea of a narrative, like your own personal story.

The story you tell yourself is your reality. And in that example, or even in the example in someone who works at a desk every day, if the story is that all they have to worry about is their project or their part of the puzzle, they begin to feel like that's all that matters. And if anyone asks them to do anything outside of that, then the company's holding them back, the company's not in their best interest, they don't care, and it really creates this mindset of, why would I do more? The other part of that narrative story is people believe that they are not capable of more because they've never done anything on the other side of the road or the other aisle. I've never done that, so I can't do it. And the reality is, is every company I've talked to they're looking for just people who are open and willing to try things, and they'll mold them. So many in today's, so many companies in today's society are looking for just talented people who are willing to work and be open to learning. But if the story that they tell themselves is, is that they can't do it, they'll be stuck. Yeah. And so will the company, 'cause they'll never get that person out of that spot. So one of the examples I give people to do is imagine yourself creating a new narrative. What would you like it to be? Would you like to be someone who could work on two different aisles or to help the company in different ways? In truck driving and in fleet management, drivers often get stuck in the idea that that's all they can be. I'm just a driver. And I know for a fact, I have a good friend who works for a trucking company. He's now their CEO of marketing. He's been with the company 9 years. He started off literally in a truck. Driving around, talented guy, very smart. They saw it, they brought him in, and over the years, he's just evolved into something more because he saw it. He saw himself doing more things, and he would practice that repetition in his mind that I can do more and didn't believe that anybody was holding him back, didn't listen to his own negative thoughts, and it really turned into a positive experience for him.

It's interesting, there's a lot of similarities as I look at building a company, right? Like, one of the things that we struggled with for a long time is we didn't have quite that vision. We didn't have a north star that we were pointing towards. And so we were just kind of like reacting to the world and reacting to the needs of the business without really having a direction. But you have that intentionality and you start changing the narrative and say, no, this is where I want to be, this is what I want to do. Clayton Christensen talks about this a little bit in How to Measure Your Life, but it becomes like this emergent strategy where as you point in a direction, like the actions you take, just they're almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it starts reinforcing itself until you create this momentum behind it. And as an individual, I don't know that we do that enough. We don't have that positive, you know, vision setting where we say, "This is the narrative that I want to be true. What am I doing today to make it true?" And it's the small steps too. I think the thing that usually stops us from doing it is we're afraid. You know, we get in our own head, we say, "Oh, well, I want to be that, but I could never be that." And how important are actually having the conversations with your teams or with your company of that type of vision?

We're trying to create the North Star. We're all pursuing the same thing. So many companies will— the executive team will give the goals and say, "Here's your marching orders, go make this happen." And instead, the element that really creates growth is when the team itself creates the goals and all buys into it. But that doesn't happen unless you have very open conversations about what are the weaknesses, what are the vulnerabilities. And again, very hard to have that. You can't do it just once, right? You can't just have one meeting and say, okay, we did it. It's gotta be a repetition of meetings over an extended period of time to start building the confidence of people that we can have honest conversations about what our goals are and what are we needing to do to hit 'em. Because it means being vulnerable and people do not like being vulnerable. Right.

Well, they don't like being wrong either.

Yeah.

There's a definite insecurity around that. It's interesting that as we've gone through, because we tell our listeners about doing SWOT exercises, where you do strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, but how you need to include everybody in that process. And so we talk about our process where each department does their own internal SWOT and then it surfaces all that up to the executive team. So it doesn't start with the executive team, we source it from the ground up. As we've gone through that process though, the more they've done it, the more confident, the better the quality of the answers that we've gotten, because the first time we did it, it was all very new and foreign to them, and they're like, well, I'm not really sure this is what I could do. But then the more often it gets going, they're like, okay, I see how this played out into the strategy, now I understand how I influence that. Now I understand why the company's focused on these things because we had these SWOTs. And we had these key strategic issues that we needed to focus on.

How long would you say that you've been doing that exercise? And when did you feel like it started to really produce those type of results?

We've been doing it probably about 2 and a half years, maybe 3. And I will say is that it started producing results probably 6 months ago. So it took some time.

Right.

It absolutely took some time.

And what did you see? I don't want to totally turn this around, but I'm curious for RTA, how have you seen the results start to come from that exercise? What were some indicators of it?

Some interesting things as we've done it, you know, like we come out with our strategic issues, we come out with our goals and objectives from that exercise. So the outcomes have always been there, but the quality of the outcome has improved. The other thing that I've really noticed has happened is that once we come out of that meeting, it actually goes back full circle, and now the departments are setting their own goals aligned with Some of them are aligned with the company initiatives. Some of them are like, no, this is just stuff we have to do. But the departments are starting to own their own process, and they are buying into their own vision setting within their department.

In another company that I'm working for, one of their lead managers, his problem was, is he really didn't believe that he was the manager, and he kept looking for excuses of why he couldn't have his team trained far enough, They were always under a lot of pressure. And after a number of visits with him, being able to help him see that the company really does wanna support him, but they can't support him unless he steps out into trying new things and being vulnerable. And we would give him really small invitations to try things, sending an email to someone he hasn't ever sent one before. Go ahead and email the CEO, tell him your need. There's guys who are just paralyzed to do that because they're going to either be afraid to be wrong or make a mistake. And it was holding him back for months. And until he realized his confidence and the story he was telling himself that it wouldn't matter, they wouldn't listen to him, he wasn't important enough, he wasn't really a manager— until he overcame that, they were really stuck in their department. When he does, the department feels better, and it affected everyone on the team. He's over 7 people. All of them felt the pressure because the manager was stuck. And when you get them unstuck, the whole team starts to breathe. They all start to feel more unified and like, hey, we can do this now. Yeah. So it's a pretty cool experience to see when people get unstuck.

Yeah.

Well, typically when someone's stuck, the defense mechanism kicks in, right? More pressure then goes down to the team. So they're trying to relieve it off themselves. So they're being a lot more aggressive and—

All the defenses of fight, flight, and freeze. And you have to figure out what yours are. If you don't know what your natural fight, flight, or freeze reactions are, then you're probably living in them pretty regularly, especially if you have a company that's being aggressive and trying to grow and needing people to lead. Now, again, some companies I find think they're leading, think they're trying to create change, but aren't really getting the results that they need because they don't follow up with all these conversations that we're touching on here. Repetitively. I mean, going for someone to say 2+ years of doing a program to get results, you know, after 2+ years, not many people are gonna stick with them.

Nope, it takes patience. It takes patience, discipline, and you have to, you have to trust that process, uh, because otherwise, yeah, you're, you're like, well, why are we even doing this? There's no value out here. This is just wasting their time. We've even had people say that, wow, why are we doing this again? Nothing's changed, you know, and We're like, well, that's why we have to keep saying it.

And leaders have to grow. If the leaders aren't growing, they cannot get their team to grow.

Yeah, and one of the things that we've talked about is the law of the lid. It's something that I've shared quite a bit, is this concept from John Maxwell, is one of the irrefutable laws of leadership, is that the leader creates a lid on the organization, and the organization can't grow past that.

Yeah. And the same with an individual. They can't grow unless they face their challenges.

Well, and that brings up a good point, because I've always been of the opinion that you as a leader, you have to put your own oxygen mask on first. If you are not whole, then you can't give your whole self to your people. You can't lead. You can't help them. You can't feed people around you because you're malnourished, right? So What are some things from your perspective that people can work on to help with some of that self-care, to self-feed, to take care of their own needs and kind of be that whole leader that they need?

Yeah, the first question of all time is honest assessment of where you're at and what are your real issues and taking ownership of what you can control and what you can't. So we do a little needs assessment of what are your core needs? And we look at it both from a perspective of as an individual in your life, in your family, in your family life, and then in your career, in your business life. And one of the most important needs that we look for is personal growth. And when people stop feeding themselves to grow, we start losing mental capacity, we start losing emotional strength. We have to grow as individuals. That includes in our career and in our individual life. And so, Growing physically, you know, take care of your body, obviously, physically. Emotionally, making sure you have healthy relationships and support systems. And then making sure that you're reaching out and growing individually, whatever that might be. I'll tell people there's a difference between relaxing and distracting. A lot of people go home and they grab their phone and they say, I just need to shut down for a bit.

Just need to relax. I need to chill.

Need to chill. 'Let's look at the politics.' Unfortunately, then that's, that's a whole nother like trigger, right? They go down another rabbit hole. But they say they need to relax, and then 2 hours later after scrolling on their phones, they have no more energy. They're just as tired as they were when they sat down 2 hours later. So by default, that wasn't necessarily relaxing. They didn't do anything for them. And people don't realize that all they're really doing is turning off the world and that's slowly killing them because they're not really growing. So they have to make conscious choices of how they want to relax. And everyone might be different. I do enjoy reading a book. I can sit down and read a book for 45 minutes and afterwards, if I'm grateful for it, if I'm grateful that I got to read a book for 45 minutes and that no one interrupted me, that then becomes relaxing and gives me energy. I can go out and interact with my family. I can go and interact— if I'm at work, if I get to spend 30 minutes brainstorming of how I want to grow and what I'd like to learn and give me some time to develop myself, then I want to go interact with my, my company and my team. And so people really need to check in. Am I relaxing or am I just distracting?

I like that you said, am I grateful for it? Because I know there's times where I will, like, I'll read a book, but it's hard to get myself or throw myself into the activity because there's all these other things going on. And it's like, I can't shut off certain areas. And like, my wife, I know, has this problem just going to sleep. Sleep. She's like, "Well, I gotta think about all these things that I have to do tomorrow," and da-da-da-da-da, right? And you can't just let it go for a little while and enjoy the activity that you're in.

And so learning— one of the things that, like, we tell people when they're trying to go to sleep and turning their brains off, I'll tell them to go ahead and take 5 minutes to write your to-do list for tomorrow.

Brain dump.

Yep. Set it down. Know that it's there. It'll be there when you get there in the morning. Giving yourself permission to turn off your brain. Our brain works better when we can visually see an activity and thinking at the same time. So that writing down our thoughts for tomorrow is a real easy way to help yourself shut down for the night to go to sleep. Again, be honest with your sleep schedules. Everyone says, "Oh yeah, I go to sleep plenty early." And then you ask them, "Okay, do you fall asleep right away?" "Oh no, it takes me a while. I gotta watch a show or on my phone or whatever." And now they say, "Well, yeah, now it's 11 o'clock, 11:30, probably before I fall asleep." "What time are you getting up?" Well, 5:30, 6:00. So you're operating on 6, 7 hours of sleep, which is not optimal.

If you're lucky.

Right. And that's if you get— that's not talking about sleep apnea. Right. Half of America has sleep apnea, and so they're not even getting good sleep that way. So be honest with yourself of what you're doing. Be intentional about how you want to relax and how you want to recover. If you do that, you'll have energy for the struggles of the day.

Yeah. I think the— One of the things that I've gone through and done when I'm going through my anxiety attacks or anything like that, when I'm stressed out of my mind, I'll sit with Ang and I will just verbalize like, "This is what I'm thinking about right now," and she writes it all down. There's an activity, you know, like if I write it down, it helps. But then just by getting it off and seeing it on that list, it's like I have permission. I don't have to carry this right now. The paper is carrying that load for me. And if I need to pick it back up, I can look at the paper and then I can start thinking about it again. But now I'm like, okay, I don't have to keep all of this straight. It's on the paper and the paper is now where it's organized. And honestly, the first time we dump it, like it's just a dump. There is no organization to it. And then we'll kind of go through, we'll resort it. We might prioritize and say, okay, what do we need to focus on right now? And let's not worry about the rest. What's in our control, what's out of our control.

There's a good analogy. It's called the WIN analogy. What's important now?

Yeah.

And even doing that in your company exercises where you say, write all the things that you feel like are on your plate in your job. What are you responsible for? What are you thinking about? What are you worried about? And then you ask them, what's important in this list now? And all of a sudden, the energy that is going to 10 places narrows to 1 or 2. And now they can actually accomplish something. There's a great book called Eat the Frog, doing the hardest thing first in the day so you save yourself the rest of the day with energy. Energy management is something that we talk a lot about with people so that they realize when they get depleted. If it's first thing in the morning, for some it's a parent dealing with their kids, getting them off to school. They get to work and they're already depleted of most of their energy just because getting their kids. So they have to do something between dropping the kids off to school and plugging into work to give themselves some energy. And that might be 2 minutes of sitting in the car a little bit longer doing a little breathing and a little relaxing to say, I've already done my hardest thing of the day, and I actually enjoy my job, and to give them some energy to come in and do it.

And those are things like you would call mindfulness exercises, right? So as people go through, you're just being aware of your body in the space it's in. You're being aware of your breathing. You're being aware of just your thoughts, and you're just having this intentionality about, OK.

And one of the great things that what we're doing here is helping people create that awareness and find those tools, what they need. In visiting with many of your employees here, they each have their own ways of meeting their needs and taking care of themselves, but everyone struggles with, "Well, where is my blind spot? What don't I know?" So you need a safe place to be able to talk that through. It doesn't necessarily mean you need to go to 6 sessions of therapy, but having a safe place who's gonna be honest with you, who has no consequence in your life, other than I wanna help you for a few minutes, feels really good to be able to learn your blind spots and learn, hey, I can work on this.

[Speaker] Yeah, and that's why I really recommend, you know, go see a therapist, go see somebody that is, you said it perfectly, that doesn't have consequence in your life. So you can't just go talk to your spouse and dump on them all the time 'cause they input on that, right? They might be a source of some of that stress. They may be, impacted by some of your stress, right? Like they have influence and they feel it and they're integrally involved in it. But you go talk to a therapist and it's like, hey, I'm not gonna take any of your stuff. Like I'll listen to you and I'll help you and I'll give you that positive feedback and I'll give you the truth. But at the end of the day, like we walk out and that's it. So that's the no consequence thing is really key there. Well, any last tips that you'd share with listeners about self-care or anything that, you know, that they could work on or like a tactic they could take home tonight and say, hey, just try this before you go into your door?

The biggest mindset that I always try to work with people is that growing is fun. Don't look at facing problems as just a negative thing. That if you have a challenge in your life, we feel like we should be mad or we shame ourselves. Have a growth mindset that learning something and growing is a great opportunity to become better. And just changing yourself that I'm okay with my flaws because I'm going to grow is a much healthier mindset. It provides better energy. It has a better relationship mindset, everything, if you're okay with growing. But if your belief is, is that I have a flaw, you're going to have negative energy. That energy is going to be shared with those around you. And it's going to feel stressful, shameful, and discouraging. So allow yourself to be okay to grow. All right.

Well, that's gonna do it for this week's episode. Thank you guys for listening. As always, if you want to hear more about topics like this or want to get more information, you can go follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn. Where else are we at, Jeff?

Twitter, Facebook.

Twitter, all the places.

All the distraction places.

All the distraction places, right? Come distract yourself with our show.

But if you choose, it's positive.

If you choose and you're grateful for the opportunity. That's right. See, we learned something new.

New today. Email us if you want to get a copy of the Fleet Success Playbook, or you can go to fleetsuccessplaybook.com, where we talk about building some of that vision in your team, incorporating your team's feedback into the whole process, and how to show up as leaders in building that healthy organization. And we are doing another Fleet Success Summit next year.

We are.

So we'll start announcing that and give you some more details. I do know it's going to be in Las Vegas at the Luxor. Dates TBD and information will probably be up on fleetsuccesssummit.com once we have all that information. So until next time, thank you guys very much.

Thanks, guys.

Thanks.

Thanks for joining us on this episode of the Fleet Success Show. If you liked our show, we'd appreciate your 5-star review. Be sure to subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts and come hang out with us anywhere on social media @FleetSuccess. See you next time.