Why Your Hypervigilance Is Destroying You (And How to Fix It)

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I loved it. There were times where if we didn't have some major critical incident occur, if I went a week without a critical incident, it was bothersome to me. It's like I was missing that adrenaline rush. We were starting to worry there was going to be something even bigger than what we've ever dealt with and who's going to get hurt or whatever. Foreign.

From others of herself. It's hardcore and at ease. A show about people who are keeping their edge without going over the edge. I'm host Shelly Rude and today's guest is taking us on the adventure that is his life. In this conversation. We're going behind pretty prison bars, we're breaking up gang riots, we're even spearfishing in Aruba. Along the way, Tim Honeycutt is building a non profit that keeps hardcore people mentally strong. And his story spans from helmets flying at his face to teaching blind veterans how to hunt buffalo. We're talking about channeling hyper vigilance into your superpower and why generating momentum beats networking every time. This is hardcore and at ease. As a leader in high stakes situations, you know the weight of responsibility. You've put the right team in place, you've put the right systems in place and thought about those contingencies that might occur. But there is something that few people talk about. You're still lying awake at 3am running these worst case scenarios through your head. Because when the stakes involve people's lives, their livelihoods or even the mission, preparation just doesn't feel optional. It feels like survival. And that vigilance, well, that can be both your greatest strength and also the thing that's slowly destroying you. Vigilance can be another word for anxiety. Today's guest, Tim Honeycutt knows this tension intimately. He's the guy who stays calm when helmets are being thrown around in his face during gang prison riots. He's the one who makes split second decisions knowing that lives are hanging in the balance. And he's the one who watches his teammates at a 96% divorce rates, destroying themselves trying to manage that intensity through all the wrong outlets. Instead of accepting that as the cost of excellence, Tim has built something different. And what makes his story matter isn't just the fact that he survived dangerous situations. It's what he figured out about the difference between strategic preparation and destructive anxiety. It's how he learned to recruit hardcore people by saying, I can't handle this on my own instead of you need this program, it's why he gives away land and resources and somehow ends up with more opportunities than people who spend their lives networking. For 13 years, Tim's been building systems where people step up with ownership instead of waiting to be told what to do. Where excellence doesn't require him touching everything personally, the mission moves forward. Even when Tim is spearfishing with his wife and Aruba. He's living proof that you can maintain impossibly high standards while actually sleeping at night. That serving others doesn't have to deplete you, when it's connected to real purpose. And that trusting the process isn't about lowering the bar. It's about building something sustainable enough to carry the weight when you cannot. So let's get into it now. Today we're talking to Tim Honeycutt. He has become a dear friend of mine over the past few years. Tim is the CEO of Zero Day, which is a nonprofit located here in Michigan, and they do some incredible work. So, Tim, without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to you. Tell us a little bit more about who Tim Honeycutt is.

Oh, thank you. It's a wonderful intro. So I am a retiree of law enforcement from paramilitary entities, and I moved into real estate development and construction management and became a community developer. And that led me into a whole bunch of different pathways that really inspired me to continue into community development. And in 2012, on Veterans Day, a pinnacle of things occurred that inspired me to launch into this program entity called Zero Day. And here we are in our 13th year. And it has been a very defining part of my life, and it's become a defining part of my family's life and everything that that I'm about. And I've adopted an entire family of veterans from across the country, which has been cool and met incredible people like yourself. And it's just been an incredible chapter in my life of service. And I'm just riding on a huge wave of enjoyment for my space, or my allowance in that space, I should say, by the veterans.

Because you did not have personal military service. You come from a paramilitary background, correct?

Yeah. So I had, you know, a few good friends that were in the military. When I graduated high school, almost everybody that I went to school with them was close with went into the military. One of my best friends especially, and he became a helicopter pilot flying the Apaches back in the earliest generations. So that was super cool. And that was the biggest exposure that I had to the military. And then as I was launching Zero Day, I had a New friend move into my neighborhood, and I got to learn a lot about what Ranger Battalions were all about. He was a Ranger for 24 years, and the more time we spent together, the more I got to understand the military culture, especially from the grunt side of things.

And you learn not to sneak up on his back porch at night.

That's right. I found out that especially the infantry types rarely have somebody that has their six. Quite often, everybody sees them as too tough to have a need for somebody to come down for them. And that was a huge inspiration for at least a third of why we started Zero Day.

Now you have this incredible background of what we like to call tech to cool or cool by association. You know, your life is just a beautiful symphony of being with and around incredibly wonderful and hardcore people. And I want to know before we get into all the details of exactly what Zero Day does and what your hand is in it. I mean, Tim, you come from this incredibly smart business background in business management. You mentioned you were in community development throughout your life. I want to know what makes Tim Honeycutt so hardcore. I want to know what you are intensely dedicated to. What makes you fiercely passionate when you wake up in the morning and you're just so committed? What is that, Tim?

It's. It's just a service purpose that I have to serve. And it keeps me up sometimes all night for a few nights at a time. And it does get me up at 3 and 4. And it is what makes me hardcore. I loved this, the service. I love being able to serve others that have served, and it gives me purpose and it's a huge driver. I've always lived a purpose driven life. I always had some type of drive, some purpose that needed to be fulfilled and would push me to try to be the best that I could be in that. So I've always been competitive. So you combine the competitiveness with purpose. And I've always been very blessed as well with having some athleticism and having.

Yeah, I saw a little bit of that at our wellness retreat last year.

Well, the competitiveness or the athleticism?

Both.

Both.

Trying to get the balls in the buckets.

Okay. All right. Yes. If you're not cheating, you're not trying. Right.

So is that a quote from the Ranger?

All that stuff carried into who I am today. But, you know, back in the law enforcement days, I was driven to. To do the best that I could do there. And I always wanted to pursue those things that other people were afraid to do because they seemed cooler. And I did it. And then when People were trying to find outlets to blow steam off after those types of work environment days that were very challenging. I would go pick up a hammer and go do something nice for a neighbor or teach myself new skills or dive into new sports to burn through some adrenaline and things like that. And those were really the things that helped me evolve into the newer opportunities and just kept opening more doors in my life and introducing me to new people. That inspired me even more and introduced me to new purposes that just really expanded that drive.

Now, when you say your law enforcement days, I mean, you had a full career in paramilitary law enforcement before we even got into the nonprofit world of Zero Day. And when we talk about service, service is very, very challenging. And there's unique challenges that come with every demographic that we're trying to serve. Take me back to your law enforcement days, if you will, Tim, and tell me a little bit about some challenges that you encountered trying to serve that population.

The majority of my time was spent in prisons, and I had a lot of really cool coworkers that were super high speed. Most of them were former military themselves. Some of them were still garden reserves. So I had a lot of influence there. Loved the shooting sports, love the special response team types of things that we did. The martial arts side of it, it was all during an era in the Department of Corrections where we were flooded with gangs. They were doing some major transitions from the days I would hear of 10 years before I started, where, oh, well, we just fix that with thump therapy. Um, and we were becoming a more professional organization at the time. There was resistance both at the convicted criminal side and the staff side. So it was a really challenging time. Some of the most fun opportunities I had during that era were the trainings that we were going through for the special emergency responses. And that's where I saw the military side of my teammates and how cool and calm they could be in those. And we get out of it, and they just fall apart from that adrenaline rush for two or three hours or whatever. And it's like, oh, this is cool. I like falling apart, too, but how do we control that and then how do we recreate that outside of work and not get into trouble or not get into situations that are dangerous?

I mean, you know, you said the influx of gangs, right? And I can just imagine the adrenaline rush that would come from having to be a law enforcement officer and responding to that type of situation.

Yes. And I loved it. There were times where if we didn't have some major critical incident occur, if I went a week Without a critical incident. It was bothersome to me. It's like I was missing that adrenaline rush. We were starting to worry there was gonna be something even bigger than what we've ever dealt with and who's gonna get hurt or whatever. A lot of the same things that happen that I've grown to understand in our military culture, too, where people go out on regular patrols and they have regular little skirmishes and where they don't have anything, and they start to worry about, okay, what' coming, and then you start building up to that.

Yeah. And so this hyper vigilance keeps us from ever having that internal sense of actual peace and actual calm because you are constantly in a state of anticipation.

Right. And I've never really lost that. So I've encountered a lot of veterans that I've worked with that their hyper vigilance is very unhealthy. And I have found ways to channel mine into new areas and not necessarily find distractions, but to control that energy and flow it into the purpose, if you will.

So this. I mean, this challenge that we're talking about. Tim, reframe this for me. I mean, is the challenge of this life of service that you live how to find a balancing point between this constant expectation of something's going to hit the fan? What is that challenge?

It is that I'm always watching for something bad to happen, But I'm not that naysayer as, like, oh, my gosh, something horrible is going to happen. You know, people like that, that they're constantly on pins and needles and anxiety. Instead, I find myself preparing for it. For example, the worst thing that could happen in my world is one of the veterans that we're serving commit suicide. The second worst thing was that their family will fall apart. The third worst thing is that they'll get busted for a DUI because I wasn't there to. To coach them into not going to get drunk so that they could go to sleep. And, you know, stuff like, you know, all the different things that go on, a billion of them, they're rushing through my head right now that I could put into hierarchy of concerns. Suicide being obviously the greatest. How do you combat that? Well, you can sit and worry about it. I use prayer. My spiritual life is very strong in that arena. And I've learned that I'm being very sinful and neglectful to God if I'm not allowing him to take those burdens and help me through them.

Tim, you make it sound so easy.

It is.

I mean, you really do. But we're talking about situations where, you know, I just. I picture you in battle gear and a riot is happening, and it's your job to step in and break it up. I mean, I imagine you in that moment, and I can't help but think of just a flood of emotion. You learn to compartmentalize that right in the moment. But then when does it come out? It has to come out or does it not come out? And that's where the trouble is.

So for me, it would come out if you go into the, let's say, a critical incident back in the prison riot days or something along those lines. I think I've always been very calm and cool in the situation because I was prepared. I had the right gear, I had the right training, I had the right teammates. We practiced, we rehearsed what we were going to do if things went wrong. The worst thing that ever happened to me in a team situation, one of my teammates got overzealous and flipped out. And he happened to be a marine, and I think he ate too many crayons for breakfast or something.

No, Marines don't flip out. Ever.

Knocked my helmet down over my face as we were going into the situation from behind me. So my helmet gets shoved over. But I was so used to the hand to hand stuff that. That we did that it was like fluid blind. And you know, when you come out of that, it's like, how in the heck did that just happen?

And you went straight ninja. You went blind ninja. Breaking the conflict.

But right after, you know, it's like, you'd think it's like, all right, you're all jacked up from this thing. All I wanted to do was kill him. I'm gonna kill my partner. And not, not literally, but I wanted to beat his face in for shoving that helmet over my face. I mean, we all could have gotten hurt. I could have gotten killed. There was a knife involved. It was a terrible situation. And today we'd probably be laughing really hard about it still. Like. Like we did a week later, but we blew that steam off. That particular guy was the type that would go to the bar after work after that incident. A group of them would. I knew watching the downfall of all my mentors, there was like a 96% divorce rate in. In my teams, and I was not going to follow them down the same path. So that's where I started my construction career. Honestly. I'd go carry shingles up on a roof for a little lady next door and count them all down on the roof. Just hammer things out and think about what just went on and burn off that adrenaline.

So while you were in law enforcement, you had construction on the side and you used that as a little bit of physical therapy.

It was great physical therapy. And that's part of how we started the whole zero day thing. All right, These people that are dealing with stress, they don't know how to unbundle and take care of. Let's put them into really, really cool hardcore jobs, and they can work alongside me and learn new skills. They can learn how to fix their own houses. They can learn how to start a business. They could, you know, learn new careers.

Yeah, we'll take it from a bundle of stress to a bundle of shingles.

Perfect. I like it. Yeah. And it literally went from me doing, like, roofs and shingles and decks and carrying heavy timbers and realizing how much healthier I was getting as a result of that and translating that into new opportunities for other people. I started recruiting other people. And I learned way back then that you don't recruit tough guys by saying, you need to go do this. You recruit them by saying, I can't handle this on my own. Can you help me? So I would take on bigger and bigger jobs, and before I knew it, I was building apartment complexes and medical facilities and leaving my state. Clear.

This challenge that you're facing is out of a choice to move forward. It's because you recognized that in your law enforcement career there was something happening to your mental wellness. It sounds like looking at what you called the failure or the downfall of your mentors with that high divorce rate, and you said, that's not going to be me. Is. Is there other types of lifestyles or behaviors that you were looking at? And you just said, you know what? I can't live that way.

Yeah, it was all of them. Any vice you can think of, my teams were going to participate in, and they didn't invite me along to go to some of them. And I found that sports and construction was key to my health. I couldn't understand why they would make a different choice. I'm going to make money and I'm getting in better shape and learning new skills and enjoying myself and helping people. This is just way too cool. Why would I want to go that route?

And you're watching your true teammates make these decisions that are not good for them. And that's the easy way to put it. What were you witnessing in their lives?

Well, I made my share of some of those in the startups and riding along with them on things, and I saw people lose their careers because of drugs. I lost people to alcohol, alcohol related car accidents. I saw a couple suicides, saw a lot of domestic violence occurring, Things like that. A lot of the people just would spiral out and get further and further into that hole. And none of us were faith driven enough at that point. If you were, you were ostracized. You were too much of a weirdo. If you were Jesus freak in those days, my early 20s, it just wasn't where any of us were at.

I feel like whenever you watch a cool guy movie like Top Gun, there's always one character who's the spiritual freak.

Yeah. Who was that in Top Gun?

I don't know.

I'm not sure either. And we never had that in. We never had that influence in those days for me. And it really didn't come along that strong for me until I was into more of the real estate development career pathway and had some really good influences there and some good interactions. And the more cool things that happened for me and in my life with my family, the closer I became with God and just recognizing where all these really cool things were coming from. Why was it that I chose to go pound nails on a roof for somebody that needed a good deed done versus going with one of my guys that was going to go out and do bad stuff? It has to be a God driven, purpose driven, enabled, empowered type of lifestyle.

Because that choice is not an easy choice. It's actually the more difficult of the options when you're choosing to turn away from the substances that kind of take that edge off.

It is, yeah. And I don't know why it's so hard. I guess that's the way we were born and made and learning a lot about that through Genesis. Right now, it all makes sense and it comes around and it wakes you up pretty well. And the older I get, the smarter I get in those arenas. I guess you just saw in the background my. My other tool that helps a lot of people. It's Scout. I find that, that pets, therapeutic pets, are a huge resource for people too. Scout has more interventions under his belt than most of my team members do.

So I love that.

Pretty cool.

Now, you did mention the downfall of your mentors. Did you have a positive mentor or a guide that has really helped you navigate that journey?

I did, but not in a positive way. So in the same way, I've had a very blessed and fortunate professional life. I had a lot of very bad mentors along the way. When I mentioned in the law enforcement days, I was able to see ahead of me what was going on? I had one really positive mentor there, but he wasn't in that same arena. He had a son the same age as me that they had a falling out and he had a construction business also. And he introduced me to some of the business side of things. So he became partners and he was a good mentor in what not to do that he had done and how not to blow your family life up and things like that.

When you work on, let's just say marriage counseling, do you want to listen to someone who quote unquote, has had the perfect marriage for 50 years or is it better? Does. Does it make you feel a little better when you can actually relate to somebody that may have had a couple of hiccups in their relationship and how did they work through it?

I think that credibility is very important with life lived and being able to coach it. All of my team members, I run through life coaching classes so that they can apply the skills that they're learning in the life coaching class to the positive and negative experiences they've had in their life. And they qualify quite often, will have conversations, very deep ones, about the bad mentorship that they've experienced in their life that I was mentioning. I saw the same thing in the professional world post my first career. There were a lot of people that were driven by greed and numbers. And I just kept finding that if I focused on the mission, let's take affordable housing as an example. All the affordable housing developments that I did were full of purpose, where I had partners and colleagues in the industry that were driven to only pursue the developer fee and higher level communities, which they normally didn't need that kind of help. They were just building another apartment complex and getting all the incentives for it. That wasn't enough for me. It didn't have purpose in it. And I pursued those communities that were struggling that really needed that ugly building in their downtown fixed. So that would fix all these ancillary things like give people jobs and it would take that eyesore out of the downtown and create some momentum for community development. And that's where I developed a lot of inspiration for doing the deeper good.

As you are going out into the community and recognizing this want and this desire, I would imagine that there's a lot of collaboration and deep relationship building that has to happen.

Absolutely, yes. I am a result of collaboration. I think all the people that I've worked with in the past helped me see that I couldn't do things without the team. And everybody on the team needed their own purpose. So you take that from the individual situation of going into a critical incident, and you've got the front guy, the side guy, you got a camera guy, you got a gas guy, a sharps guy, everybody's got their own thing that they have to do. When people talk about translating military skills into civilian life, that was my first thought when I started working with the military. Space wasn't necessarily so because the teams are so big. People don't realize that they had their own purpose, or maybe their smaller unit had its own purpose. And it just wasn't as personal as it was connected to me. So when I started doing community development work, I recognized people that I knew becoming city councilors or mayors. Now they're into politics, and then they become state reps or senators, and then they become national politicians, or they become a bank owner or the bank president, or they started a new construction company. Maybe somebody that I mentored in the past that wanted to go help me on a deck project or something, or was a young person that I hired, and now they own their own business doing window installation or whatever the case is. I've kept all those relationships alive. I've never burnt a bridge that I'm aware of. I see myself as a bridge builder.

I think that's absolutely incredible, Tim, because I do see you filling that role of a guide and a mentor for so many people. And that's a lesson that I personally was not even aware of until I was probably almost 30 years old. All throughout my 20s, I had these incredible opportunities for relationships. But I'll be honest with you, I was totally selfish, and I was just that dude with the gun that was rocking out life, and I wasn't intentionally building relationships. There was so much wasted time. And now that I'm in this other decade of my life, I really have this different outlook on what it means to interact with people and to not build bridges and to just have this feeling of like we are genuinely doing life together. Yes. I just met you, and I'm probably gonna see you next year, and I'm probably gonna see you in five years from now, and I hope I see you in 10 years from now. And it's so incredible, isn't it, when you can walk alongside someone and just watch them flourish?

It is. And to help them flourish, the steps that we're in right now is empowering other people to flourish. And with that comes deeper collaboration. And if you're encouraging them to develop those collaborative relationships as well, that's just expanding yours. I have an entire file cabinet full of business cards. And I try to keep them in piles of what arena of my life they fit in. And I actually have some interns at Silver Star that work for me that now do that for me. And it's really cool. There's thousands of them there. And I know almost everybody that gave me those cards.

I'm laughing because I have little Ziploc baggies of business cards. Every time I go to an event, I have a new bag for it.

Those are important to people. They either are somebody that has earned the right to have their name and title on a business card, they develop themselves professionally to need that, or they have been pretentious and created their own version of who they are and being able to discern them.

Hey, now, is. Is that a bad thing? Because I'm pretty sure I've created my own business card.

Creating your own business card is not a bad thing, but being pretentious about it is. Is not you in any kind of way. I'm just thinking about all the people that have. There are people that have started up veteran organizations, for example, that I've tried to mentor, but they're so set on being called CEO or president or founder. And that's first. I mean, I think we had business cards a year and a half after we started Zero Day, and we're up and running and had over a million and a half dollars in revenue from projects that we were doing. And it's like, oh, geez, I guess we probably need people to know how to get a hold of us. I didn't need another business card. I had plenty from past years, so it wasn't like a focus of ours. But being able to discern those people that are looking for that, that grandiose acknowledgement versus the people that truly want to collaborate, I think is one of those other gifts that God has blessed me with over the years.

I agree. And that's also an incredible business skill too. You know, if you are in business not just for the money, but if you are in business and you're looking at making that deeper life fulfilling purpose, then I love the advice that Tim is giving here is that we absolutely have to be focused more so on the mission and be on the watch. Be on the watch for people who are obsessed with titles and obsessed with position and power because they are out there, whether you want to believe it or not.

There are a lot of them. And greed and everything else that goes with that is a big challenge to stay away from. I can't allow myself to be distracted by that. And when I Have those people come along. I'll call them out, say I don't have time for whatever this is you're trying to work through or use me for. I have lives to focus on and I'm not going to drop that ball. So later, good luck.

That's a very strong statement.

Well, I hide a lot, right?

And you got range buddies too, right?

I feel like I'm hiding often by not getting out there and doing the socialization and the conferences and things that I used to have to do a lot of that and now I don't. I have great people like you that are great collaborators. And I know that if I need to know the latest trends on what, especially in the women buttered strong space, what types of things are, and we've talked about this in the outdoors, you know, what types of things would you like to do? I know I can go to you specifically and directly and have that conversation versus going to three women's conferences around the country and having all kinds of people pitch stuff to me that I really don't have time for. I can go directly to my collaborative partners in this space. Take care of business instead.

You just said it. Collaboration is like an arrow that just drives right through all the BS that's out there and allows you to have that, that educated, pre vetted influence that you're willing to have. I love that so much, Tim. So let's talk about your life now. Right? We spend a lot of time talking about the law enforcement and you're at this point where there is success all around Tim Honeycutt. And I know that you don't want, you don't want that personality of I'm a successful man. Right, but you are, whether people see it or not, that is who you are. And so what I see when I look at the success of Tim Honeycutt is I do see a happy marriage and I do see a good fulfilling life. And I see a sense of peace. And I want to really dig into this idea of being at ease. So the other side of our conversation is really understanding that for people like us, Tim, it is not enough just to be this crazy high performer. We always have to be able to lay our heads down and sleep at night and be held accountable to our creator. There is this element of allowing yourself to be at ease. And when you own that, that is such an incredible feeling because it feels like you've made it. So I want to know, as you've gone over the years and you've pursued these seriously ambitious goals, how have you Kept one foot firmly planted without going over the edge, if you will. So practices strategies. Tell me how Tim Honeycutt is really finding peace.

I find my greatest piece in seeing the empowerment that I've instilled with other people and they pursue a purpose. I know that sounds like, okay, it's just more work. I'm driving into more work. But if I take like a Father's Day Sunday as an example, I should be with my dad and my son and going out to do the things that you see on Hallmark movies. That's what they go do, right? Or you go throw Frisbee in the park with your dog or something. That's not who I am. My door is open to that veteran that worked for me 10 years ago and worked for himself moving his life forward, out of the bottle or out of whatever issue he was dealing with. And now stopping by with his three year old son to show me, you know, his family and how intact they are and great things that are going on and tell me about his career. And that's. That is my piece place. In addition to that, obviously you mentioned my wife and I have a great relationship. My son's 28. He doesn't need a whole lot of dad time right now, but we have some really cool time together. We usually make it pretty adrenaline filled and good hang time. And that's about what we have right now for the relationship space.

Well, so much of fatherhood is that mentorship.

Yes.

What I'm hearing you say is that when these veterans are coming to you on Father's Day and they're happy and they're in a good place, that has to fulfill you as a father.

Yeah, it does. It does. It's validating. Not that it's something that we want to pursue, but it's definitely validating to see a lot of these veterans actually have a solid relationship with my son and my wife. They've become part of our family. There's a couple that we've taken to my family Christmases to like my whole core family because they didn't have any place else to go. Yeah. So the zero day raising my hand.

Over the years, that's been me a few times.

And you know, there are critics out there, especially in the mental health world, that would just lambaste me for the way I run zero day. But it is a family business in terms of we'll take care of family business first. And that consists of the veterans that are in our space and if they need a place to stay or they need my wife to help coach the female side of things. We have spouses that have worked with my wife. My wife has taught cooking and cleaning and cake decorating and all kinds of stuff with kids, stuff I don't do.

I want to go back on your adventures.

Absolutely. And that's the other side of the workspace that keeps me at ease. I get to have in the adventure therapy side of things, really cool opportunities to do things that other people don't get to do.

And let's talk about that. Because a huge part of zero day is providing recreational therapy.

Correct.

And you have given us some little tidbits so far about how you found your own mental wellness through these. You're hinting at like adrenaline opportunities and adventure getting. What are you talking about, Tim? Tell me about some of these incredible adventures you've been on.

Every year we do an anniversary trip and last year was our anniversary week. And it's always a working vacation for me. But she will allow that as long as I do straight up Tim time, which is something that's stupid. It's going to hurt. It's adrenaline filled. For her version of that. We did ATV day and that was pretty cool. We were down in Aruba and you can go anywhere you want off road down there and drive over rocks and cliffs and drive along the ocean. And it was pretty adrenaline packed for her. Not so much for me because I get to do that type of stuff all the time with vets and the outdoors and things that we do. For me, it was kite surfing. So it's the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.

It's a hard, so hard, so hard.

And it's something that I want to get proficient enough at that I can introduce to veterans.

Really leisure. I mean, this is a skill that you're going after being a kite surfer.

Yep. So the week before that, I was working toward my dive master certifications while teaching other veterans how to scuba dive and spear gun fish in the Florida Keys. That's two weeks out of my life. Next week we're doing wild boars again. That's a huge adrenaline rush for infantry guys especially. They love to do. It's all night vision and thermal optics. And so it might only be a couple seconds of pure, unstoppable adrenaline, but to see these adrenaline drunk grunts at the opposite end of it is so rewarding for me. And I know that I'm the same guy that that they are. Right. Then when I'm going through the little tidbits of stuff that I do, like the Kite surfing is only two hours a day, but I'm wiped out for two hours from the adrenaline afterwards, and my body's bruised and my neck's sore.

You have taken on the elements of nature when you go kite surfing, windsurfing, all of it.

Yes. Yep. And all the things that we do as much as possible are diy. So I'm trying to make everything as attainable as possible. Like the wind sports. They're actually quite cheap. The equipment's not expensive, especially if you buy it used or if you have a great organization like Zero Day that will give it to you if you show that you're actually going to use it. Because we have the ability to pick up new stuff or maybe something that I wanted to transition and pass it on to somebody else. We do a lot of that. We have the ability to empower people with equipment and gear and space and places to go.

You know, you're just tearing down all those brick walls that people build up as excuses. Right. We make excuses for why we're not doing the cool stuff. We make excuses for why we're not living out our lives the way that we feel like we want to see ourselves. I mean, who doesn't want to picture themselves kite surfing right now? I mean, we live in Michigan, and it's like 30 degrees outside.

Right.

You know what? There are kite surfers right now. I live right on Lake St. Clair. I promise you, if you go right around the corner, you'll find a kite surfer out there decked out in a full wetsuit. Yes. It's cold, but you do it. I was just at the gym this morning, Tim, and I was getting my two miles in. I got my two miles in. Yes. I'm gonna own that.

Good thing.

And you know what I was watching on the screen in front of me? The GoPro channel. Have you ever seen that?

Yes.

Oh, my gosh. I was up there doing some type of skydiving thing this morning while I was getting my two miles in.

That's really cool. And to live that through that lens is super cool. And then there's a trap also, that we talk about different things that we have to work through and encounter. Some veterans will actually. They'll get the rush out of that without doing it in a healthy way. You're doing it while you're working out. You're making yourself healthy. You've got endorphins kicking in, and you're watching this, and it's inspiring. Other people will sit and watch it on YouTube and convince themselves that it's not something they could ever do. Think about the guy that's doing the backflips off a cliff with a mountain bike or using the body glide suits and stuff like that. They just, they built her building barriers. Well, I can't do that. And they start talk themselves into a funk. And I have to battle that all the time. I have two vets yesterday that I talked out of that funk successfully to go on our next trip with us. That they were both thinking, well I've done on these veteran things before. I don't like groups. I don't, you know, I don't have this equipment, I don't have these clothes. And there wasn't anything that they could come up with that I couldn't shoot out of the sky for them. It's like, look, you're going, this is something you need. I don't care that you're blind. This is something that's going to happen next. Say, you know, we're, we're booked and we're ready to go.

Tell me about that because I heard a story from you, I think it was just last year about buffalo hunting.

I even give you his name because he does a lot of public speaking and stuff. He wouldn't mind. His name is John Turnbull. John was a Delta team commander. Very publicized event took his team out. They were assassinated in the 2019 suicide bomber attack in Syria. John lost his eyes. Both his eyes was pronounced dead four times. I've known John since he was four and his dad and I used to work together. So when we linked up and he was updating me on John's situation, all these things are racing through my head about okay, he was this high speed, he'd love to do this. How can I start to put these together? He's not gonna be able to see. So I started building him equipment and when I went to visit him shortly after he had been home. So what's your number one bucket list thing that you always wanted to do that you never could while you still had your eyesight? He had done the scuba diving thing and I might have been an inspiration here and there. And a lot of stuff he was pushing on. He was a hard driver. He graduated West Point and to be a Delta team commander, you're not a slouch.

Highly capable, highly achieved.

Right. It's my job and my purpose now to remind him how effective and capable and driven he is even though he can't see. So what is it that I can be your eyes for? And he said, I always wanted a Buffalo hunt. They're dangerous, they're big, they're cool. He had hunted a lot of other animals. We made it happen. We had an invitation to do a blind hunters event at a place that buffalo were accessible or attainable, and we did it. And he. He is so pumped about it. I had a blind veteran from. This guy from Oklahoma, I think, called me last night, said, is there a chance you could. Could take me on this too? I used to serve with John. He lost his site for some other purpose. I was like, yeah, we can make this happen. We used John's equipment that I built for him. And so we had to find ways that I could translate that into something that John could understand and see and still get the rush from. It's not me pulling the trigger for him or anything. I'm his sight.

And that's all continuing to be the guide.

Yeah. So it's super, super cool. I get a huge rush out of that. I probably got as much joy out of that as anything that I've done in the last few years.

I love seeing this journey that you've been taking from the big community building. I mean, like, here's a new park and here's a new apartment complex. You're going from these large, impacting many people. And, you know, as your life is going on, it's about the person right in front of you.

It is.

And we don't have to. We can, but we don't have to build these giant, incredible, ambitious things. You can take those ambitions and funnel them right into the person in front of you and make just as much, if not more of an impactful difference.

Absolutely. Yeah. You'll never see me in a group setting. All the things that we've talked about are all very individualized activities. I have people that their job is to do the group stuff, and it's just not where I feel like I'm making an impact. And I don't have that sense of accomplishment or that I've empowered somebody. I coach a lot of the veterans that come into our space to step away from the group things and get out of group think and start developing their own current realities and personalized visions and get out of the social media, especially, because that's a giant pool of groupthink. So that's where a lot of that happens. When you talk about the projects for community developers. For example, let's look at a recent project I was asked to take on was housing for women that are survivors of human trafficking. So I still am allowed to step back into my Real estate development world from time to time. And this was one of those. There was a need for about 450 households to be served and they wanted this large scale community development project. Like, I can't take the risk of doing several hundred apartments. I don't have time for it. I'd have to put humans down to take something like that on. But I have a partner that likes to collaborate with different people with me and very faith Driven land. We've done a lot of really cool stuff together. We started talking about how we could do this project and some other collaborating partners came into our world and said, hey, we'll give you this land. It's not very big, but it'd be great for this mission and vision that you guys have to help this project that's going to be 18 apartments instead of 400. But think about the impact we're making for 18 lives.

We'll give you this land. They came to you and they said, we'll give you this land. Those are the incredible moments of generosity that some people don't believe ever happens.

They do.

Stuff like that happens every day.

It does. And the reason that stuff happens is because I'm doing the same thing for other people. I gave a veteran family a parcel of land for free so that they could leverage a construction loan and learn how to build their own home. I helped them through the whole process and yesterday I spent most of my day drawing a house out for another veteran family who I'm doing the same thing with. I was able to buy the lot super cheap and it was an advantage to zero day overall. And here we are able to do that. So groups like the MVAA comes forward and says, hey, you're doing these housing projects. We would like to support housing. Could you go to the legislators with us and collaborate with us and show them what you're doing? And more people could do if they could get more funding. So all of our things get leveraged. It starts out really small to be super generous and don't allow greed into the mix and just do it because it's the right thing. And don't tell anybody about it because we want attention. It it comes out someday and then it's like, oh, we need to do more of that. And the next thing you know, we've got a couple of grants to buy a couple more houses specifically for a population that nobody can house, which is the homeless female with kids that we've talked about in the past. If you're a female veteran, you have children, you can't get into a shelter? Hardly.

That's a whole nother episode.

You got it. Yeah. We can talk for days about that. Right. So I was able to actually provide that because of our relationship and collaboration with the MVAA and the relationship and rapports that we have with the legislators, it all rolls forward. So those are all just.

But you said it starts with that ambition. It starts with that passion. It starts with the one person thinking, I really want to do this. I want to go after this. And you do it quietly, you do it intentionally. You start to bring in the right collaborators. Would you say you don't let greed in the door and oh, my goodness, these incredible, incredible dreams do unfold, and they really do happen. Well, I love this for you, Tim. So we're looking at zero day. We're thinking about recreational therapy for people who have served in the military and their families. What is next for Tim Honeycutt?

Retirement. So I declared to my team three years ago that the future of zero day was in their hands. And in 2030, I was going to be stepping away from all leadership aspects in zero Day. So we had a sustainability plan and have ways to continue forward, and it's funded. But they needed to know that my wife's going to get the rest of our cool days that we can have. I plan on traveling the world with her as much as possible and seeing things that we've always talked about and thought about that we get to pursue.

I can imagine that your bucket list, is it not everything checked off? Does it just keep going?

It just keeps going. Right now, a lot of the things that I'm doing, my bucket list items are actually other people's bucket list.

Yeah. For real? Oh, you know, get into a prison gang fight. Check. Go shoot buffalo with a blind, really cool veteran, check.

Yes. When people have their bucket list items, then I'll say, hmm. I haven't done that either. Okay. Right now, I'm not focused on my stuff. I'm putting my stuff off in the back bucket and checking a few other things off along the way. It works out well.

Thank you for your wife, for giving you to the community for so many years. And I'm right there with her. Yes. Give her the rest of the good years of your adventure life, please.

She's earned it. She's been around through some really crazy times, and we've been so blessed in every kind of way. She's got her own ministry right now that she's working through and her own pursuits, and she needs to be able to focus on that.

Five More worried about Tim Honeycutt spearfishing in Aruba.

She's. I think she's getting over the worrying things a little bit, which is pretty cool. When we first started Zero Day and the adventure stuff, I was combining the adventure therapy, adventure programming as a recruiting tool and an outlet and a way to get to know the veterans that I was working with. And it worked very well because just putting out flyers that, hey, I'm hiring veterans that need jobs is not the way to do it necessarily either. We took on Habitat for Humanity houses, and of course, those are seen as a good purpose and a good mission. I was actually paying the veterans to come learn construction to help me on those houses.

Right.

Well, that worked out really well because they knew that I needed help, but some of them weren't driven by that. They needed to be in the outdoors. They needed that time to build a camaraderie with me first before we could get them into therapy so that they could be trusted to run a saw or swing a hammer up on a roof. Right.

Such a good point. Get them into therapy so that you can trust them at those other levels.

So imagine this really cool movie coming out. At the same time, I'm going off doing these crazy adventures with veterans who my wife had never met. American Sniper comes out. We go to see at the movie theater, and the big flash in her head was like, oh, my God, you've been doing all this stuff. You've been going to gun ranges and teaching people to shoot. Going into the mountains with veterans who I don't know that they all have these same things going on. They're seeing demons.

They're all unhinged. They're all going over the earthquakes. Oh, Tim, come home.

So that was a huge concern and a lot of stress for her. I was recognizing very quickly at the same time that there were so many mental health issues coming at me that I didn't know how to address. I had some mental health training for the last few years working inside the prisons. I had a lot of counseling experience, but I wasn't prepared for a lot of the things that I was dealing with in the veteran space.

It's crazy. The veteran care space is absolutely insane.

Yeah. Yeah. I found that I was at the whole world because I had donated a lot of money for veteran causes, and their issues weren't being taken care of. I assume that the American Legion, the vfw, and the VA could take care of most of what's going on because those are who are always asking for more money and paralyzed Veterans of America or whatever the billboards are that are showing these veterans without legs and holding kids and doing all these fundraising things. I didn't understand why veterans needs weren't taken care of. And that was a big driver when we first started and I had to develop our own mental health team. We have Zero Day Supportive Services, which is a licensed mental health agency. And I have a whole separate team that handles all of our intakes. We started doing that back within the first 30 days of zero day. Actually, unlike most other things that I've started, I was able to spend six months investigating, researching and planning Zero Day out before we actually launched. That made a big difference too.

There's such wisdom behind hearing you put together the need for physical therapy for the body and for the release of endorphins and for the validity that we are just as cool as we've always been. With mental wellness and the stigma that exists around mental wellness, especially with hardcore people like myself, that's a huge hurdle to get over.

Yep, it is hard. It's my biggest struggle. I mentioned earlier that suicide prevention is the hardest. One of my best and strongest cases that I've worked with in the past few years, a battle buddy, committing suicide around Christmas. And it's been really hard to watch the impact of that hitting one of the Zero day guys. It has derailed him for the most part. He's not able to function right now. He's essentially hiding, isolating, going through those phases. And we're not even 90 days since that occurrence happened. We're so blessed at zero day. We never had a suicide. I have a running caseload of 300 plus, and we've never lost anybody in our 13 years. And this is probably the closest I've been to feeling like I needed to stay vigilant. And this is a state of hyper vigilance for me. I really haven't slept well for the last six weeks. But, you know, I'm still doing self care. I still know how to take care of the things I need to. I still went on vacation. I was able to stay vigilant through that.

You said it at the very beginning, you said that the key to being calm is being prepared.

Yes.

And so this particular incident is a tragedy. I mean, it is one of those moments that marks your space in life. Right. And it's not something that's ever gonna go away. It's something that has to be managed. And what I love about this situation, Tim, is that Zero Day is prepared to manage it. And like you said, we're not even 90 days in. This isn't something that we're gonna jump on right now and we're gonna fix it. Right. You don't fix stuff like this. This is just how do we work through this for the rest of our lives? And there's all different kinds of stages and phases as we move through.

Absolutely. We are. We're trained for it, we're prepared for it, and we have the resources to be of assistance. So we provided for the affected household. In addition to the family that's the victim of the suicide, you know, we have a widow that one of my team members was to assemble every resource that she'd be eligible for, and through her friends, we're devolving, divulging those to her and helping her get in touch with those resources. At the same time, we're trying to take care of the zero day vet and his family, who. He's just not in a state where he can take care of stuff. He needs us more than ever. And now it's a matter of re empowering him like we did three years ago when we first started working with him to get him back to where he was at before December 23rd.

And you know what? He's only ever going to be better at his job for having gone through this experience, even though I know that he would never want to relive it again.

Right? Yep. But we have to stay vigilant and stay prepared and be ready for the next one.

Well, Tim Honeycutt, you are out there doing the hard work that most of us would not even want to dip our toes into the water of. So, from the bottom of my heart and my team, I want to thank you and thank your team at Zero day for supporting our military and our first responders and everything that you're doing. A couple of nuggets of wisdom that I wrote down from you is that you can be a mentor to somebody who is in a totally different arena. So if. If you're listening and you're in one industry of business or you're a certain nonprofit that, you know fits the need of a certain demographic. And when you think about yourself as a mentor or who could be your mentor, don't be afraid to go outside of the lines. Don't be afraid to approach somebody in a completely different industry, because human beings are incredibly knowledgeable, and everybody has something that you can learn from. And then the other giant nugget that I take away from Tim Honeycutt is pay it forward. You were given some land. You're Giving away land. Do unto others as you'd have done to you. And I love that you're living that out.

Amen.

Thank you so much for being with us, Tim.

Oh, thank you. Thank you for all the great work that you do and you're making a huge impact on the world. Keep it up.

Appreciate you. Tim shared something today that most leaders don't talk about. That 3am hypervigilance, that weight of responsibility that never quite lifts. Watching people you respect destroy themselves because nobody taught them that there was another way. His willingness to talk about his own battles with anxiety, to share what he's learned through the years of actually doing this work. Now that's the kind of vulnerability that changes lives for the better. This closing segment is usually called get the Gear and it's where we share tools and resources. But today we're leaning into Tim's lesson about paying generosity forward. The wisdom that he shared didn't come cheap. It came from prison riots, failed marriages that he witnessed, and years of figuring out how to serve without burning out. When leaders like Tim give freely of what they've learned, it deserves to to be honored. This podcast takes real resources to produce every week. If Tim's story served you, if his vulnerability helped you to see your own path forward, then please consider supporting the show. There's a donate now link down in the show notes, and whatever amount feels right honors the gift that Tim gave us today. Next week we're diving into the others over self advantage. Why? So serving others actually multiplies your impact instead of depleting you. I'm Shelley Rude and I'll see you next Tuesday morning. Until then, stay hardcore, be at ease and trust the process.

You're listening to Hardcore and at ease.

Keep the conversation going@join.othersoverself.com Joel here with notion Design Group. When it comes to your website, people don't really care about your company or my company. What they care about is how we can make their lives better or easier. Think about your website for a minute. The top of your homepage. It should answer two questions. Number one, what exactly do you do? Number two, how does it make your customers life better? If you answer those two questions, it will drastically improve the effectiveness of your website. Want to learn more? Grab our homepage cheat sheet @notion design group.com or Schedule A call with us. We'd love to chat with you. At Notion, we design sites that drive sales.

Hi, I'm Doug Slocum, the author of the book Violent Positivity. I was Blessed to spend 35 years in the US military, the Air Force, working with some of the most amazing men and women you'd ever want to meet. Well, throughout my life, throughout my career, I learned lessons. I developed this leadership style that I like to call violent positivity. And this book was my opportunity to tell that story, but also put forth those principles. Violentpositivity.com More information and how to order the book.