Dr. John Delony: The Mental Health Crisis Silently Destroying Entrepreneurs | Mental Wealth Series | E2

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I look at anxiety as a good thing. It's an alarm system in your kitchen. Your smoke detector is annoying. It can ruin your evening when it's going off, but it also will save your life. Dr. John Deluney is a best-selling author, a mental health expert, and the host of the Dr. John Deluney

show, where he helps millions navigate anxiety, trauma, and life's toughest situations. What are you worth? What's your worth?

“We answer the question, what are you worth in our culture with a number?”

It's insane. The problem with men, not feeling like they can open up. They just want to keep going and going and going.

Men are socialized from the age of two to shut up and just go on to the next thing.

For all of you in history, men were able to share who they were, but they did a shoulder to shoulder doing things. Those things have been taken away. For 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s will be built on the foundation you built at 20 and 30. The mental health community has failed dramatically, telling people that mental and emotional

health is getting all the right thoughts in the right order. That's false. If I would give 30-year-old entrepreneur, who has dreams of success, I would tell him. Hello, YAPGANG! Welcome to Week 2 of our four part mental-well series, where we're learning how to build

successful businesses without living in constant stress and survival mode. Today we're sitting down with mental health expert Dr. John Deloni to talk about anxiety,

burnout and why you're anxiety may actually be a signal from your body that's something

in your life needs attention. If you haven't yet, head to YAPGANGMedia.com/mentalwells to download your free mental wealth playbook. Your challenge for Week 2 is to complete the safety audit worksheet. You're going to find out what a safety audit is in this episode.

And the safety audit will help you stop white knuckling your way through life and start building a more peaceful, grounded business and life. YAPGANGMedia. Let's dive right into today's conversation and build our mental wealth. John, welcome to Young Improveding Podcast.

What's up, Paula? Thanks for having me on. Yeah, I'm so excited for this conversation. I feel like the topic of anxiety is so important for entrepreneurs because we're highly anxious people and there's lots of reasons why entrepreneurs tend to have anxiety or

something. They have anxiety. Let's take it back to 2010 when you actually realize that you had anxiety and you were quite burnt out. And so it seemed like you were living the perfect life, you know, you had a beautiful

family and everything like that, but everything kind of came crashing down for you in 2010. So talk to us about those moments.

“I mean, I think they start really when I was young and trying to figure out what's”

my role going to be on this little planet we're on this little rock we're floating around on. And how can I fulfill my role in my family, how can I make my little mark on the world, right? And I think like all of us, I just did the thing that was in front of me, like go to school and go be successful and then go get married and then do your best to have a kid and then

try to make as much money as you can and then get this job title and this job title. And similarly, what started out is small little cracks in the foundation and it became I try to solve those things by making more money and getting promoted again and buying something bigger and just doing the next thing that the world told me was going to make me okay. And yeah, it didn't in well, it didn't in well.

And I guess I'll say this, you and I, all of the people listening, we all know those big stories, the big crashes, right? Like you blow your business up or you cheat on your spouse, like that didn't happen to me. For me, it was and over the last decade, as I've sat with people sitting behind closed

doors, especially young entrepreneurs trying to figure out what to do next. It's not the big huge explosion that makes the headlines. It's these quiet young men, these quiet young women, these new dads, these these business

They just burn from inside out.

“And so I had a young baby and I had a wife that I cared about that we had grown a thousand”

miles apart from each other. And so I had to get well, I had to figure out what's going on while we were still flying down the highway. So I had to change the oil on the car while still moving. And that in and of itself was its own adventure, right?

But it started with me getting a car and driving three hours away and sitting with a buddy and saying, he happened to be a physician. I just said, hey, I'm at the end of my road, man.

And that was the first time I ever opened my mouth and said, hey, I'm not okay.

And it's been a long, steady figuring out why that happened and how that happened and what happened to me and what happened to my marriage, what happened to my friends and what happened to our culture. That's laying to me here. I think you call this white knuckling, right?

Kind of just like getting by through life and like just pretending that everything's okay and it's like very performative, right? You're just like performing instead of really listening to what's going on in your body. Why do you think that so many high achievers and entrepreneurs kind of white knuckle themselves through life like this?

“And how can you tell if that's what you're doing?”

Our culture has no places, no value on the why. Why are you doing this? I want to start a business. Why? I want to be my own boss.

Why? I want to make this many millions of dollars in this amount of time and I'm haunted, absolutely haunted by that Michael Jordan series. I think it was called the last dance on ESPN when they walked through the Chicago Bulls. I remember Michael Jordan sitting in a hotel room and the greatest basketball player of

all time just signed this bajillion dollar contract. He was the guy. Still listening. I remember him looking at the camera sitting in a hotel room and they were talking about how he couldn't go out in the lobby and use the bathroom because there's too many

people out there and he looked at the camera and he said, you don't want this life. And I remember exhaling and saying, yeah, what's all this for for sick pieces of cloth hanging in a gym somewhere, like so that people talk about you and your dad. And I was looking at, I remember watching that video and saying he doesn't have anybody in his life, not on his payroll.

And I remember just saying, why? And so our culture does not place any value on the day and in day out, lived experience of our human lives. It just has this metric that keeps moving.

“And here's where I think for me, I just dialed all the way down to this.”

We answer the question, what are you worth in our culture with a number? It's insanity. What are you worth? What's your worth? What's your business worth?

What's your net worth?

And the answer to the question, what are you worth is never a number.

It's who do you love and who loves you, period? And we've just gotten out of order. We're trying to hack our way to this sensation is feeling. And so I guess how you know you're there is eventually your body will start to shut you down.

And so for me, I had to take chemicals to wake up. I was loaded up on a thousand milligrams of caffeine just to get up to door. And then I had to take chemicals to go sleep. And then I had to take chemicals to have fun. And then I had to take chemicals to like when you start having to augment your just human

existence, basic human ups and downs, that's when your body's telling you, hey, I'm about to shut the door on this whole thing. And eventually your body will say, I quit. I'm out. And that's burnout.

Well, and I want to talk about like medication and what you think about that related to anxiety and things like that.

But first, let's talk about masculinity and you know, the problem with men, not feeling

like they can open up. I feel like this is much more problem with men. And then also like really high achieving women who might be leaning into their masculine energy. Right?

We just want to keep going and going and going and not really listening to ourselves. So talk about that problem and why it's so dangerous. I mean, I'll reverse engineer that question. It's dangerous because it'll kill you. It's dangerous because look around at our culture.

There's nobody writing blogs of them like Scott Coward. There's nobody writing blogs on the plight of men. And if you look at the suicide statistics, if you look at the mental health catastrophe that is men, if you look at the loneliness, the joblessness, the incarceration rates, men are not thriving.

Like there's a few at the very tip tip top and we like to point at all them and say, look at that. But men are socialized from the age of two to shut up and just go on to the next thing. And nobody cares about how you feel, stop whining, stop complaining, and just go, go, go, go, go.

And so all men are taught at a very young age. How do you feel about a thing? The things going on inside your chest simply do not matter, nobody cares.

catastrophic job loss.

Like technology is taking away jobs that traditionally men have done and men have also been

blamed over the last 50 to 100 years for every single solitary problem on the planet.

“And so I think in mass men have gotten the message, we don't need you, we don't want”

you, you're a burden to all of us. If you can't sit still in a classroom at the age of six, then we're going to say something wrong with your brain and we're going to dope you up and we're going to blame you for wanting to move or wanting to go outside or wanting to have experiences, right? And so I think men in large have gotten the message that the world doesn't want them around.

And so there's just been this, this detachment from the world that we're going to either stay at home and play video games or we're going to start just lighting stuff on fire. And that's what we're seeing all around us. And so I think it's baked into us culturally and in the past and for all of you in history,

men were able to share who they were, but they did a shoulder to shoulder doing things.

And those things have been taken away and so it's just be quiet or type on a computer, tell the computer, tell the keyboard, you know how you feel about something. And those little ecosystems are created. So it's a whole bunch of things happening all at the same time. And I think it's the worst case scenario for the, for the, for every inhabitant of the planet.

“And then I think for women, um, they've been told, hey, the only way you can experience”

joy and success in this world is to interact with the world like men. You got a drink like a guy, you have to sleep around like a guy, you have to play these boardroom games like men, and there's been a quiet drop off that again, I haven't seen it's it's it's rather under-reported of women getting to be CEOs and just saying, this is stupid, like, what are you, what are you all doing?

Like, I got, I gave up all of my life to play y'all stupid game.

And this is what it is. You'll sit around a table and like try to out, like out, early, this is not a life, right? And so I think it's all at the same time, but I think we've all just been given a really ugly script about what success and joy and purpose is and it's costing us all our very souls.

Yeah. As you're talking about this, I'm thinking about like the men in my life and I've got a lot of like successful entrepreneurial men in my life. And I actually feel like they're quite healthy in the way that they interact because I do feel like when you're a leader, you lead teams, you often know how to lead yourself, right?

And so they are meeting up with their guy friends. They are playing, you know, poker or going golfing or whatever. But I feel like it's this tier of like younger men who are still lost playing video games, like haven't found themselves or not necessarily successful. And they haven't yet been able to like get to that like different level of self-awareness.

“So what advice you have to the 30 year old, you know, the average person listening to”

the shows a 30 year old male millennial who might not be an entrepreneur yet, but it is ambitious. What's your advice to thems to make sure they don't like fall into this trap? If I could sit down with my 30 year old self and I'm 40, I'm 47. I'm an old man now. If I could sit down on my 30 year old self, I would look them in the eye and say, I know

you feel like going all in with my wife and co-creating a world together. I know it feels like you're going to sacrifice quote unquote like you time. The things you love, your dreams. I would tell them, you have no idea what's common when you're not going on 50. What your life will feel like.

I would tell myself, I know you think kids are going to ruin your life. It's extraordinary. I know you think you're missing out when you're 30. Be quiet and just take on two jobs, three jobs. Keep saying yes to hard projects and new experiences and your 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s

will be built on the foundation you built at 20 and 30. And so it's I think we love the Instagram pictures of the guy who's been in the gym for 10 years. We don't love the pictures of the day and the day out, you're exhausted and it's five. It was me this morning at 5.45 this morning.

The last thing on earth they want to do is go lift weights. But I want to be able to roll around with my grandkids and I have a nine year old daughter. I want her to see me running alongside her, her little fourth grade cross country meet. I can only do that if I'm getting in and putting in the work and I speak to big stages all over the country.

A big corporate events when I recently started a few months ago at a local comedy club here going up and doing 10 minute segments. So I can get better at bringing joy to people, being better as those hours aren't wasted. But we keep being obsessed with what we think the finish line's going to feel like.

My 30 year old self, by the way, would be rolling my eyes at myself right now.

It's those long, thankless midnight hours that you put in in your 20s and 30s. It's those relationships you invest in that end up borrowing in a way that you could not fathom and you can't see them on a spreadsheet. Yeah. You got to get out and do stuff, you can't just be isolating yourself with, you know,

computer games or just video games and on the computer and things like that. If I would tell, if I would give 30 year old, like a 30 year old entrepreneur who has dreams of success, I would tell them be in your home as as as as as little as possible. Go be out laughing with people, having coffee with people, having experience putting yourself out in weird situations, take a class, go dancing, go, go, take you just to classes,

go try stand up, go put yourself in situations that are going to make you uncomfortable and where you can be around other people doing their craft. It will lift up every part of your life and when you're 65 and you're sitting with a group of people who gave their souls to a dollar amount, you will realize, I've got a rich life well-lived.

Yeah. I love that. So you mentioned the eSpeak on stages and you recently said on stage, or you've said on stage in the past, I don't have anxiety anymore. So that's a really hopeful statement for a lot of people listening in who feel like anxiety

is something that they can never get rid of and you've said, you straight up, don't have

it anymore. So talk to us at a high level, how you did that and then of course we're going to kind of unravel it and go through detail. Well, I got hope I didn't say it that boldly.

“I still get anxious, I guess what I would say is this, I think our framing or discussion”

on anxiety is at a whack. I look at anxiety as a good thing. It's an alarm system in your kitchen and it's a smoke detector and so your smoke detector is annoying, it can ruin your evening when it's going off, but it also will save your life. So I think in our culture, we have a story that is if you're uncomfortable or if something

is painful, then it must be eradicated, we got your rid of it. And so the way I look at anxiety now and I start to feel anxious is, what's my body trying to protect me from? Because it's detected something in the world that's not safe and that's not a bad thing. I don't like it and feel right, but man, so if I did say that on stage, I was probably

a little too boldly, but I lived a very anxious existence because I outsourced my feelings to a paycheck, I outsourced my feelings in my health to business metrics and to achievement metrics and to performing with people instead of being with people, being over people instead of being with people and so I don't live that life anymore. And underneath all that, I took a bunch of steps to create a non-injust life.

So that when I do get anxious, then I know the alarms, let me something's on fire, I'm going to go deal with the fire. I'm not just going to climb up in my kitchen and take the batteries out of the alarm and call it good because my house will burn down. Yeah.

“When you say signals like, what are some of the signals that people have when they have anxiety?”

If you put your head down on your pillow and your brain takes off and starts racing, if you snap awake at 242 every morning or at 515 every morning and your eyes are wide open and your heart's racing, if people slowly stop wanting to be around you because you're an electric presence, if you are walking around thinking, if they would just and I don't care who they is and I don't care what just is, but if you've distilled the world down

in very simple calls and effects that you think you've got the answers, those are usually signs that your body's trying to get your attention. If you think you have identified the reason the world is falling apart, if the world was

just listen to you, if you think essential oils will cure cancer, if you start coming up

with these crazy, if you spend more time on conspiracy theories than on trying to be healthy and trying to do the next right thing for your relationships and your job, that's usually sign that your your body's starting to implode on itself. Yapking as Yap Media has grown, we've gotten more and more applicants for every role, which sounds great, but in reality, most of them are not a fit.

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Yeah, same.

And for me, it's even worse because I'm always traveling, bouncing around cities, and

so I don't really plan my health care weeks or months in advance. Most of the time, I wake up and think I better go to the dentist, and if I don't go right then and there in the next day or two, it can easily turn into months.

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again, that's Zock Duck.com/propheting, and things to Zock Duck for supporting this message. Yeah, fam, I'm all about doing health recess. I'm on a health kick this year. I tried juice cleanses, cutting sugar completely, even intermittent fasting. But they didn't stick for me, because they were just too hard to follow too strict.

And so I was on the hunt of a way to lose five pounds transparently. That's how I came across pro-lon. So, me and my boyfriend have been together for about a year, and we gained some weight over the holidays. We're just like in love, and eating too much, and going out to eat, and just like in this

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“And that's what helps support cellular, rejuvenation, and renewal.”

But the biggest thing for me is how easy it is. Everything is prepackaged and labeled day by day, which is great for somebody like me. So, you know, exactly what to eat, when to eat, no prep, no planning, no guesswork. They just put you in the right fasting state so you can lose weight and reset your body. Are you ready to lose five pounds, and for your own reset for limited time, pro-lon is offering

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She was talking about how it's really dangerous to identify herself with these mental health conditions. So like I have anxiety. I have ADHD and she thinks it's just a really dangerous trend that people are kind of latching on to these identities and you also say something similar in your book. So talk to us about why it's not that healthy to kind of identify with certain disorders and maybe how that can make

“us more addicted to these disorders in itself. Yeah, I think it's again, I keep talking about the”

curses of our time. But the curses, that's one of the chief curses of our time is that we're identified with our identity becomes these labels that we're given. You have anxiety. You have depression. You are depressed. It becomes the way we enter into every room and it becomes our the lens by which we view the world and we're told we're broken. And so if your house is on fire and your smoke detector's going off, nobody would say your house is broken, right? No one would say

that. They would say your house is working perfectly. It's on fire. And so I think it's just changing the language. I love that these are all psychiatrists. He's passed away many years ago.

anxious. He would make them say, I am anxiety or I'm depressing. I'm compulsioning, right?

My body is doing these things in an effort to take care of me. Let's get to the bottom of why my body thinks this environment I'm in isn't safe. This relationship I'm in isn't safe. This business I'm running isn't isn't going to hold water, right? That's a much healthier way to view the world instead of viewing ourselves with these labels that are the challenges we have. It's a silly way to do life. But also the other side of it is none of us. You and me are not allowed to go to a

party. And when someone says, hey, how's it going? We're not allowed to say, you know what things

“are actually going really good. Our my romantic life is going well. My kids are healthy. My job”

is doing great because when we walk away and people go, the only way we're allowed to enter a room is to say, well, you know, times are tough or do you see the tweets or you know what's happening with, I was going to take my business. So we're really fighting. We're not allowed to be people of peace or people of joy or people of optimism. We have to be people of pessimism and sarcasm. And that's just, that's the, that's the air we all breathe. And so we have to, we're, we're

stamped with labels that tell us what's wrong with this. I just reject that whole heartedly. Yeah, I totally agree. I definitely want to get into you with that. But I do want to ask you about medication because you brought it up earlier. And I had an ex-boyfriend that was on anti-depressants for like 14 years that didn't find out about it until like six months into the relationship. He's addicted to these anti-depressants. He was a great guy. But he couldn't get off

them. And when I asked him why he got on these anti-depressants to begin with, it all happened because he didn't get a promotion once. This guy's like a brilliant guy, top executive at like a fortune, 50 company. And it's because one time, 14 years ago when he first started his career, he didn't get a promotion, he was upset about it. And then his doctor put him on anti-depressants.

And now he's been stuck on them. And so I always felt so sad for him because that just feels like

everybody faces adversity. You've got to figure out how to get over it, you know? And build, build that like mental resilience because you can't always be perfect. And now he's just addicted to this medication and can't get off it. So talk to us about how you feel about medication and have you heard similar stories like this? Sure. So I've got a pretty nuanced review of it. I'll talk globally and then we'll get really specific. We've created the loneliness generation

in human history ever. And we've also pathologized. We've made wrong or a problem to solve any uncomfortable feeling or any quote unquote bad feeling. And so I often have what have students come into my office and say, I'm depressed. My dad just walked out of my mom and has a whole other life he's he's had. And I would say, well, well, maybe you're struggling with depression right now, but what you just described to me is sadness, you're sad. We have no, we have no permission to be

sad. We have no permission for grief. And the human biological being is not designed to experience grief by itself. It's what every major religion for all of human history has has gatherings that take place.

“That's why they have this thing called confession and some shape from a fashion. It's been co-opted”

into tell us the bad thing you did. That's not the origin of confession. The origin of confession

is man you too. Like here's what happened. And that's all gone. And so when your friend found

himself without the promotion, if you're if you're a crushing killing executive, you're not allowed to grieve. You're not allowed to say a lot. I really wanted this thing and it didn't happen. You're not allowed to say, I went all in and it this particular moment. I wasn't good enough. Or I went all in and they pick somebody else. And so we don't have like, when that happens, you're supposed to be sad. You're supposed to not want to get out of bed for a few days.

You're supposed to just want to go eat junk food like those things in and of itself are part of the human experience. And so yes, it's easy to run to a doctor. You crank off a series of symptoms and they'll write you a script and you head out the door. And they get your copay and then they bill your insurance for as much as they can get. Your insurance fights them for all that.

“And in the meantime, you are duct taping over that uncomfortable feeling. And I think that's been a”

great tragedy. On the other side, I ignored anxiety for so long that my alarm system was dysregulated. It didn't work anymore. It was going off all the time. And so I'm also really open

So that I could go talk to a professional. So that I could go sit with a group of guys who are

also struggling and say, hey, guys, me too. And so I am a big believer in the right medication for the right moment. And I also think that Instagram, all the, man, how often do we hear, that guy's a narcissist? Now, that guy's an idiot. He's an idiot. Yeah, right? He's a complete in total, like, just scumbag. We've, we've, we've normalized these diagnostics as insults or discomfort as I've got depression or man really worried about the economy. So I have anxiety.

And so we just use those words all the time. There, if you have major depressive disorder, medication will save your life. If you are having a really ugly experience, a sad grieving moment, if a loved one passes away, if you're, if you're loved when cheats on you and leaves you, if you get passed over for something that was going to change your life professionally, if you're an entrepreneur and your business gets eaten up by AI or your neighbor's business or

whatever the thing is, I really want people to sit with a community. And sometimes in these days, and he's just one other person or two other people. And then just give yourself permission to grieve and be sad for a while. And then if you're unable to do the next right thing, then medication can play an important role. But it, it, it, in and of itself, doesn't quote unquote solve the problem.

“And I think that's the big thing. It helps it to be a great bridge to get you from here to there.”

And so man, if somebody needs anxiety medication for a season, that's awesome. But the research says, that stuff works. If you do that, and you do these other things.

And we have to be honest about exercises really powerful, sunlight and community and friends

and laughter are really powerful. Journaling is incredibly powerful. Like these things that are not quick fixes, but do have life altering benefits to them. I, I, much rather see somebody start there, especially if they're under the care of a good counselor, good therapist who's walking alongside you. There's a whole other side to this. That same medicalization of every uncomfortable feeling, especially in the entrepreneurship space is how we've landed with

the madhouse amounts of entrepreneurs who are taken at our all riddling, right? That are finding themselves at capacity biologically. Like you got to sleep. You got to go hang out with people. Well, you can't work on your business 24/7, 365 for 14 years. Your body will sack qued. And so if you start taking infedemines to amp you up and you're taking speed all day, just to get through the next thing, it will help you. No question about it. And it will cost you everything

on the back end. And so if you spend your, a lot of time around folks who struggle with various forms of addiction, whether it's alcohol or, or add or all or sex, whatever it is, the dirty secret

is, those things really weren't. They're amazing. Until they take everything from you. And so it's

being able to forego the short term benefit of, yeah, it really helps. I got to do this thing and not get to do this thing with, hey, that's going to cost you everything in the end. And so let's get to the bottom of why you're struggling, get to the bottom of capacity. And let's build a life over the next 10 or 20 or 30 years that's sustainable. Yeah. So let's dig deeper on that. I know you

“talk about becoming a safe person, living a peaceful life. I'm assuming that's what you're talking”

about when you're saying like, hey, like you can't just be like work, work, work, work, work, work, you also have to build in some balance. Can you talk to us about what it means to be a safe person in that regard? I guess the best example I can give you is just a personal one from my life. My show took off. So like you have to understand like for 20 years, I was in education and universities. I was in nerd. And so suddenly, I didn't have social media or anything when I started

doing this. And then I'll send it took out, took off out from under me, right? In this wild way, and suddenly I'm all over the place. My big dirty secret after having a top five mental health and wellness show was, and it was mostly on parenting and relationships is my own little daughter wouldn't hug me. She wouldn't be in my presence. I made her unsafe, I've made her feel unsafe.

“And I remember going into hug my daughter, what she was probably five or six. And she was like,”

no, she ran off. And I just started crying to think that I was sitting at the kitchen table. And my wife, who was Dr. Deloni long before, she's waste smarter than me. She said, has it, have you ever considered that her little tiny body, her tiny little fire sexual body has identified you as not safe? And I got pretty upset and I said, I don't yell,

no, no, no, you're the best dad I've ever seen. And you have a nuclear reactor in your chest. And we can all feel it. And that was what ultimately drove me to see a therapist here in Nashville. And I sat down on her couch and I was like, all right, here we go. And it was six or seven months of really, really work. And I ended up telling my wife stuff that happened to me when I was a kid that

“I had never told a single soul on the planet. And I'll never forget months after that,”

wrestlein' around with my son and my daughter came and she's always the protector. She'll come and just swing in like a hurricane. She's awesome. But I remember the words coming out of my mouth,

Josephine get off me. And then I stopped for a second because I'd never said that sentence before.

And I was like, no, no, no, don't get off. Don't get off. Let's just keep going. But now I can't keep her off of me. I'm a human jungle gym for her. And so what I had identified in her as she won't, she can't, she doesn't. I realized due to me. And what I want all our entrepreneurs to know, if you will switch your metric from, I got a crush, crush, crush every second of every minute of every day too.

I will become the most sturdy, peaceful presence in every room I walk into.

“Which means my personal finances are okay. My personal health is okay. My personal relationships are”

okay. My spiritual life, whatever that looks like is okay. You ability to work. Your ability to earn

will be so much greater than being a kinetic always on the go presence. And so yeah, for me,

it is I am solving for peace. People gave me such grief online when I paid off my mortgage owes at 2.7%. And mathematically, they were right. I could have made 5% in a high-old savings account. But very few people know what it's like to put your head on your pillow and know that nobody can take your house away from you. And that extra edge of peace sends me into the next business meeting. And the guy says, I'm, I'm negotiating with says, I want this and I can smile and

go, I don't need that because I don't have a house payment. And then they go, all right, we'll make this deal, right? It changes every fiber of your being. So yeah, for me and my family,

“I don't solve for our line anymore. I solve for peace and I solve for just, and I work more now”

than I have ever worked ever. And I'm busy, and I've ever been, but the return on that is infinitely greater. Is getting to this peace related to your six daily choices? Yeah, yeah. Now, I mean, that was really taken all the neuroscience and all the nerd stuff. And then my own experience, both coaching, I mean, walk alongside people for two decades and my own experience and saying, if I could distill this all down and make it very simple, what are the six of six places I would

start to build a non anxious life? Yeah, let's go through them quick fire style. But first, talk to us about like the biology of your body. When you're a safe person and a peaceful person and a non anxious person versus when you're an anxious person, and then we'll go through the sex. Yeah, I mean, the biology is if you are constantly cranking through adrenaline all day, every day, right, and we don't have to get too nerdy. But if you are constantly in fight or flight

onto the next deal, onto the next thing, got to get up, crush it, go. You're body can do that for a while. Those chemicals were designed for very tiny short bursts to keep you from not dying. They were not designed to keep you alive. Here's the best example I can give you. If you poor drainow down your sink because there's a clog, if you do that once every four or five years, it'll eat that clog and it will open up your drain. If you wake up every day and just

dump drainow down your drain, it will eat through all of your pipes in your house. And so it's not designed to be the lifeblood that flows through your plumbing system all the time. And so same with these stress hormones, they're not designed to be the you're operating strategy. And then when you run out of those, when you move on to four energy drinks a day and add a roll, it may be a little cocaine. And when you start buzzing through all these things to keep you going going going,

the crash gets bigger and bigger. And I promise everyone listening, that crash will come. Okay. So we want to avoid the crash. We want to live by your six daily choices. So I'm going to rattle each one off. And then you give me like a 30-second summary. And then we'll do like follow-ups on specific stuff. So let's do choose reality. Yeah. I mean, essentially choosing reality. Our whole world is based on avoiding reality. Like I'll pay that off later. Our marriage is fine. That's just how

teenagers are. I can eat this now and it'll be fine. I don't have to exercise. I'll just take this

pill. Like everything is about avoiding reality. The problem is your body is always solving

for reality. Your body knows that you're lonely. And it would be failing you if it let you sleep

Your body would be failing you if your romantic partner walked to the front door. Your body knows y'all are 6,000 miles apart from each other. Even though you're both sitting on the same couch, you're just both scrolling Instagram on your own devices. Your body would be failing you if you owe money to investors and you owe money to a mortgage and you owe money on a depreciating asset, which is a stupidest thing you can borrow money on, which is a car. It would be failing you

if it let you sleep all night knowing that one wrong turn in the economy and you they take your house, they take your job, they take your food. Your body would be failing if it let you sleep all night.

And so when I say choose reality, there's something powerful and harrowing for most people to

“pull out a yellow pad, not an Excel sheet, but a yellow pad and write down. Who do I owe money to?”

What is the state of my romantic relationships? Write down 2, 3, 5, 7 friends that I could call it 2am that would show up at my house and say I got you. If you don't have that, then that's where you're going to start. You got to choose reality with how safe is your body. So good. Okay, choose connection. Yeah, I think it's back to we've just created the loneliness generation ever and I just said it mean your body would be failing you. Think back to you know 10,000 years ago, if you woke up on

the planes of Kansas and your tribe had left you and you're just all by yourself, you're going to die. You're going to get you're going to eat in by something you'll dive exposure, dive starvation or whatever. And so we've got built in biological mechanisms designed to keep us together and we have outsourced all of those to these digital boxes. And so we are we have like two mile long text threads

“from old high school friends that are mostly emojis and funny memes and we have a whole bunch of”

networks and we have zoom conferences with our our mastermind groups, right? We like whether we want to believe it or not do I had a great conversation last night, great conversation with chat GT on I was trying to work through two different therapeutic modalities and I kept thinking I was

onto something, chat GT and I had a great conversation. The problem is my body knows that's not

connection. That's just transferring information. And so communication is not connection. There's got to be in person. I know that person, I'm seen by that person, the person knows all my words and they're going to still love me anyway. And then we can go, oh exhale and now I'm going to go do do life. Well we're like rambunctiously, right? Only then can I do that. But if you are lonely, if you don't have four or five people, two or three people you can call, your body's going

to sound every alarm it has because you're not safe. Yeah, that is such a huge problem. I feel like for a world right now. I feel like it's getting better. Like there was a time when it was worse.

Like it feels like it's getting better. I have to say, but there is a beautiful rejection happening

where more my son is 15 and I'm watching his friends like walk, they walk into our house and people say I'm a lullite and that's fine. I come live in a cave but they walk into house and they all drop their phones in a basket and like that's just one of the rules of our house is I don't give like teenagers. I want them to hang out with each other and it is our house has almost become a drug for young people. Though all pile into the house drop their phones and

then they go do silly ridiculous teenager things and I don't like all the things they're doing but they're having human experiences and they're literally their body craves it and so I get texts and phone calls from parents saying thank you for doing that for holding the line on those

“phones. So it's happening but I think it's because it just feels better to be with somebody”

than to be scrolling and have all these what I would call pseudo relationships. These digital relationships. Yeah. Okay next one. Choose freedom. Yeah that goes back to asking yourself the hard question who owns you and I don't care who you are or how sophisticated your math is. If you owe somebody money especially a bank or an investor they decide what you're going to do tomorrow not you. If you don't owe anybody anything then you can walk away from an abusive relationship.

You can walk away from a scumbag who's yelling in your face or screaming at you. You can move to go help an aging or ailing sick parent but if you owe somebody they decide what you're going to do tomorrow not you and we don't have a psychology for that in our country. It just seems madness to think that way and that's where like for me and my house we're going to solve for peace and we're going to solve for freedom. I don't I want to be owned by as few people as possible.

And then they're also additionally to that choose freedom and we can kind of nerd out in the book a little bit but clutter we're not designed for all of the crap we have. It's just we're not

we have so much stuff, so much information, so much data. Data is the new is a new is anx. Right. Like I just need to go have another cup of coffee and just need to look at the numbers and get some more to it's madness. It's madness and so choosing freedom is about

“unhooking from all these other voices that are telling you what you have to be doing and then”

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i was always wondering like what is your connection to Ramsey solutions and like how do you fit

into this bucket and that like instantly snapped for me right now because part of living a peaceful non-ingious life is make sure you don't owe anybody any money and living debt free

i didn't know he was i mean i i knew he was just a guy that sold books and had a radio show but um

“i got sick of all these different people calling me every day saying you owe me you owe me you owe me”

and i got sick of my wife and i made a great salary she was a like a 10-year trek research professor i was a senior leader at a university we made a more money than our parents could have fathomed and we couldn't breathe couldn't breathe and so i came to him out of out of a series of of desperation and um then as i got into the biology of how anxiety works it's like oh yeah your body would be failing you if it let you sleep all night um if you're not financially independent

if you're not on your own and that may here's what here's the reality of that we don't talk about this

enough i was a dean of students at a law school and the truck i drove was $3,000 my colleagues laughed at me my students would laugh at me and it was laughable the car i drove is ridiculous my wife was a uh fancy pants nationally renowned researcher in her little nerd segment that she studied and she drove a used corolla like we lived in a tiny tiny house i

“remember our mortgage person was one of the the woman who did our mortgage at the bank was one of my”

wife's college roommates and she laughed and she's like what are you all doing and i was like hey i would rather live in a much smaller house in this side of town and get this stupid thing paid

off than have this bank always owe me own me just for the sake of having a spare bedroom that

very few people ever wanted into right it was just a trade i made and then we had to go to the park sometimes instead of having our own park in our backyard that we couldn't afford but and by the way that we ran into other people and then we met their dogs and then we ended up with dinner partners and we ended up having to get hold with your life because of that um but we've just created our own cruise ship inside of our own little encapsulated life and um we can't afford it and our bodies

are screaming at us 24/7 365 and so yeah i was i mean it's not pretty it took 15 years for us to get there by the way it didn't happen overnight um but it was just chipping away at it and chipping away at it and i tell you what man i struggled to get to ten o'clock before i fall asleep most days so it's just after being on ambient for years and so it's just a it's a it's a it's a it's a blessing yeah and this ties into choosing health we just got so stupid we're just dumb and i say that like

i'm this is the pot talking to the kettle here if you don't sleep and you're not a good it's we treat our cars better than our bodies we do we change the oil we get the cars washed and clean we vacuum them out we take care of them we just don't take care of our bodies very well and then we um and by the way i struggle i've struggled to sort of eating my whole life with the body dysmorphia i go the other way i work out too much i'm too restrictive with what he so it's not

even about obesity it's just about this idea that we can just ignore our bodies one way or the other and that still accomplish what we want to accomplish be the husbands and wives and fathers and community members and citizens that we need to be in we can't you can't get mad at your car with for breaking down if you don't take care of it and the same thing applies to our bodies and so um probably the most common questions i get on my show revolve around sexual dysfunction

revolve around young men and ED young men and um pornography addiction young men and social media addiction young men and a great rage and anger and we live in a little sliver of history where there's doctors that will talk to you we can go see somebody it's just it's the new courage is choosing health choosing peace and saying okay i'm in a lot of pain or my body's not working like i wanted to or like it should be at this age i'm gonna go talk to somebody and that appointment

will be awkward my wife always rolls her eyes and she's like you don't know awkward appointments

john but the point to be awkward and um i'm gonna go choose health on the other side of that so that i can show up for who i want to be in my life and in my business yeah i'm gonna ask this question because i don't think it will fit naturally anywhere else but i know that you often talk about sex shaming and people not really being able to talk about sex and how it's ruining relationships and things like that talk just about you know what's going on there i'm rustling

“with the hypothesis is it okay if i just throw it up yeah um i think we overused the word need”

a lot when it comes to relationships and when i say to my wife i need this i need this what i'm doing is i'm hate i've got a cinder block i'm holding i'm handing it to her and say it's your responsibility to make me feel x y or z with whatever that is the truth underneath

did you want like if you want to million dollars if that's your answer okay what is that going to

get you time is it going to get you freedom is it going to get you laughter is going to get you a pre-neutral fishing more like what do you want and in the bedroom um what do you want and what do you want to try what do you think would be fun where is play where is joy where is laughter and our culture so idolizes sex that every encounter has to be the superball and fireworks

“i think it's the great ester pearl that says most of the time most meals are like you open the”

fridge and see what's in there right and we somehow say well then that's bad when it comes to sex when then that's bad when it comes to intimacy sometimes you just make out and fall asleep

sometimes you got nine minutes and like are you in i'm it right yeah they all have to be this big

extravagant i think that's this performative side of things and so if i can't talk to the person that i've made humans with my wife and i've created people together if we can't talk about our money if we can't talk about hey i have a dream for x y or z i have a picture of what our life could look like if i can't talk about sex with her then my relationship is not nearly as strong as as i want to believe it is and so i think it's a getting the courage to ask myself hey what do i

want and why do i want those things and then having the courage to look at somebody that i care about and say hey i'm putting this on the table and that requires people to choose curiosity over judgment right to it's to ask the question wow why do you want that versus that's sick or your gross or something like let's let's engage in a playful thoughtful deep conversation that's curious based instead of judgment based and then we can begin to explore somebody think

it really takes all of the drama out of sex it really does yeah okay let's go through the last two so choose mindfulness and choose belief choosing mindfulness i'm mindful it's just turning into this hole it's a whole thing Michael Easter's written about it if you haven't had him on your show you should he's he wrote a book he's the he's the best one the greatest guys behind closed or you can find um he just wrote a great piece on mindfulness here's here's how to describe it it's not an old man

“on a cloud with essential oils it's mindfulness assembly the gap between stimulus and response”

what just happened and what are you going to do next run holiday talks about that in his work like this just happened what are you going to do and that is a thing you practice extending that space between that guy just cut you off in traffic you just got a bad report your ex-boyfriend just got

passed over for for the for the promotion what are you gonna do next and I it never occurred to

me that my reactivity was a thing I could practice and that a thing I had control over over time and so being mindful is exhaling um one of my former students a great friend of my Jefferson Fisher says go first lead with your breath right like so this thing just happened instead of speaking instead of reacting I'm an exhale and then say okay what am I going to do now that's mindfulness right and the last one was choose belief um this has become unpopular talk about although strangely

there's been a wild resurgence over the last two or three years um for all of human history people walked out of their caves are out of their tents and they looked up to the sky and said dear god or dear gods or dear whatever please rain or my film is gonna die and in the last century or so we've been able to run water into every room in our house we've been able to push a button in some little guy and skinny jeans will roll up here with the sandwich and say

here you go sir right we've gotten so arrogant about our role in the cosmos and we are biologically wired for belief and even the great David Foster Wallace who's an atheist he's openly he wrote about every act every person worships something and so if you don't regularly take a knee just something bigger than you my family and our Christian I'm having a gum I can even tell

“everybody that's what you got to do but you got to take a knee to something bigger than you and say”

please help and if you don't do that on a regular basis um your body cannot carry the weight of the cosmos it can't carry the weight of the self um we are self actualized and we're finding out the self can't hold right and so you have to submit something bigger than you and if you can't do that here's my promise to you you will find yourself in submission at some point whether it's in an AA group whether it's in a divorce court whether it's

in a hospital you will submit at some point and so practice that on a daily basis and it

on choose belief so you called out how churches sometimes weaponize scripture like be anxious for

“nothing against people in pain oh it abused it like crazy talk to us about that I think people have”

always used scripture and faith and their version of God to try to control people I think it's

always been that way um and the way I look at it is um you can drink too much water to the point that it'll kill you and that doesn't mean water is a bad thing that means that application of drinking water was not the right dose right it was not the right application for it and so yeah I mean it's backing all the way out and saying if this person is giving me wisdom and they're walking alongside me and when it comes to people weaponizing scripture the fruits of the spirit

what are the fruits on that tree is that person patient that person kind is that person joyful if they're not then that tree isn't bearing fruit and so if people are beating you over the head with um that type of messaging then it's it's usually not from the core central teacher before you were bringing up the fact that we need to have like a decluttered environment and I kind of want to circle back to just some like more general things that we need to be aware of so you talked

“about decluttering our environment why is that so important to kind of just like simplify our life”

if we want to live a non anxious life okay so can I tell you it like is this a silly thing that happened to me yeah of course um there's a great friend of mine her name's Dawn Madsen and she has a youtube channel called the minimal mom she's brilliant and very kind of wonderful so we're talking and she she said that she said John every um object in your home is having a conversation with you all the time and I was like that's the stupidest woo woo thing I've ever like I laughed she laughed

and I like whatever so I got home from that trip and I walked into my into my house and in the basement I've created like a little I don't call it man cave but it's kind of where my wife has said this is where all your chaos can live it's where all my hunting stuff is all my guitars are all my books are everything and so I just stood there quietly and I was like okay start talking things and then I sat there and then I sat there and then I started pretending and then I got all choked

up after about 30 minutes because if I listen carefully those guitars were saying are you just not going to play anymore remember you're cool remember you had dreams remember when you wrote songs and the hunting gear was like is this make you feel tough is this what this is and the

books on the shelf are like hey are you never going to read us you're just going to be stupid forever

or hey you've already read us or are we up here just so in case somebody comes over they'll think you're smart and then I went upstairs and I got kind of I was kind of getting heavy and then the dishes in the sink were like you're just going to walk by you're going to be that husband that doesn't help out around the house um and I started realizing everything in my house is trying to talk to me the clothes oh are you ever going to get back in shapes you can wear us again

are you just going to keep us in here for decoration while there's people on in your neighborhood that don't have enough clothes like everything was barking at me all the time and that started a profound conversation with me and my wife and some of my closer friends about I don't need all this stuff and I'm letting this stuff try to tell my story about what I'm worth and what value I have and I have imaginary conversations with this stuff and it talks back

I have stuff in my house that's supposed to tell the world when they come visit here to this guy is and instead of letting my kindness and my hospitality and my generosity speak for me I'll try to get that bookshelf to speak for me and that whatever so it was a powerful, powerful humbling experience of how much I'd outsourced my it's the same way we talked about earlier we outsourced our net worth to our mental health diagnostics I was also meant I was outsourcing my worth to

what brand guitar I had on the wall and what bow and arrow I had on the wall and what books I

have in my house what clothes I have on and I realized how hollow and shallow that is I've never I spent

most of my career in working with crisis stuff I've never met with somebody who just lost a child and they said hey you want to go to the car out front I've never said with somebody who just lost

“apparent and they're like yeah but man you should see there for okay I've never heard that”

yeah I have heard people say I'll give away everything for five more minutes just so I can say what that one thing I can use I've heard that and so it was just a reframe of if you were surrounded by all these voices all the time your body will sound every alarm it has and so it's just beginning to declutter that nonsense and get out of your head hmm it feels like that choose reality part of your six choices like choosing reality is like mental right like taking like a mental

to look at your physical environment and and kind of try to declutter that as well it's at

“at least that's what I think of when you when you're excited yeah that's the I think that to me is the”

Dr. Aiman's talked about the failure of just stealing the human experience down into symptom clusters that we're going to look back in a hundred years and be ashamed of ourselves at how we pathologize the human experience we give everybody a label I also want to add to that I think this is my community the mental health community has failed dramatically telling people that mental and emotional health is getting all the right thoughts in the right order

that's false you have to go take action you have to go do things your physical environment matters your relationships matter your financial situation I went through all of grad school two PhDs I have zero classes none on the effects of financial stress and human flourishing

I never had that course I didn't have a class on that much of a course on that

and then to see in my work with Dave Ramsey to see the impact oing people money has on your relationships on your soul on your mental and emotional health it's a huge miss and so yes part of being well is writing things down and getting them out of your head the mental thought the thinking part of it but a huge part of it is your relationships in your actions what are you going to go do I want to close out this interview talking about relationships right connection and all these

great ideas that you have about connection so let's start with your you're talking about charity and I talked to a charity all the time it's like my assistants I stopped going to my therapist and I talked to a charity as my therapist now and I actually think it's more effective personally but you were mentioning how you don't feel like your body knows it's not a real relationship so talk to us about like what you like your vision of AI and how it's going to impact

our relationships in connection I mean it one since the overlords are listening I love AI the best I think a conversation with you at GBT is a emotional pornography it looked you can see it and you can experience it but it is different than being with somebody in a room with a door shut and that awkwardness in the temperatures and the feeling that that human connection you have and so yes and I think it's a challenge for mental health professionals to overcome if mental health professionals

have just still down therapy into a series of advice transactions then Chagip he's going to take that job I'll I'll give you this this is awesome my therapist here in town she's older than me by a decade or two she's an oracle very wise and she said this one day and it was unmoving for me

“she I'm telling you how I think she golf-clap me that's how I remember it but I can't imagine”

a therapist golf-claping a client right what does golf-clapic mean I don't just going like wow like with it with an answer um and she said I've been wondering and I'm right you John are smarter than me and I started laughing and she started laughing and she goes no but seriously you've read more than I've read you have an answer for every question I have and she said so next time you come to come to therapy we're going to sit we're going to look at each

other and we're going to breathe and I started laughing and I said well since I'm so smart I know that's not what therapy is therapy is talking um back and forth and she said oh John you have an answer for everything but you can't sit in my presence and be okay with you and that is why at this point I'm not concerned about Chad she'd be taking over the human experience

“it will give us some great answers and I think mental health professionals have sold out to a”

degree to the right framework and the right six steps and the right and here I am right in the book with the six steps right but like to what's the advice instead of one of the most profound

mental and emotional health moments of my life was when my wife was having her third miscarriage

and as many months I mean many years and it was an epic pregnancy that ruptured and she was in emergency surgery to save her life and a cowboy from west I was in west Texas a big tall six foot three cowboy walked in with his hat on his boots and he sat next to me as a friend of mine he said no words we nodded to each other I don't even know how he knew I was in this in this 12 by 12 room all by myself in a hospital waiting room he came and sat by me said no words and then when the

doctor came in and said we lost the baby but your wife's okay I looked at him and he started crying tears that I didn't have yet and that was the first time I was sitting by a guy who knew me

advice and their you need to's and their why don't have it used Chad GBT's gonna do better than

that all day long Chad GBT can't sit with you Chad GBT's not gonna cry with you at your funeral

“and so that's where you can get advice great but well somebody just sit with you and that's what”

the art we don't have is a culture anymore and it took this body of mine is a cowboy and by the that's not the only experience I've had friends who show up and just we'll say I'm here I got an old cast role in a half bottle of wine and I'll sit with you until the sun comes up that's the human experience and entrepreneurs have they've got their mastermind groups and their bros and they're like checking but you have some guys that just come over and say would you if you don't have that

you got to invest the time in the energy to get that and by the way you can't just you can't put a classified ads for that or you can't like it's not an app for that there's just show it up and show it up and show it up yeah any any like just advice for for people in terms of like making more meaningful relationships that aren't transactional um the two big ones I'll tell you is to have friends who do things that you don't do that guy is a middle school um English

professors your writing professor our teacher um and he also is a children's author one of my best friends on the planet is a banker literally the guy who's the executive of my wheels and executive at a bank I work for Dave Ramsey his whole job is telling people debt and my whole job is telling people to not take on debt right so and he is my closest friend on the planet other close friend I have sales insurance another close friend I have works in HVAC so when we get together it's not

this cyclone of of recursive conversation about the same topics and the same ecosystems and the same articles we sit down and have a drink we sit down and watch the fights we sit down and go hunting we sit down and do whatever and we're talking about different things so we can have a broad human experience and so for young entrepreneurs find people who do jobs that you don't do that are doing things with their life that is different than you that you just agree with find those people

“because that's the key to a rich life don't just don't own a Mexican food restaurant and just”

only hang out with people who own Mexican food restaurants you're gonna all end up making the same meal right and then if there's ever a shortage on case so you're all going out of business learn how to make other things right and that's number one and the second one is go first and be awkward just invite people to a thing and if your entrepreneur has had a little bit of success one of my rules now is I've been blessed over the last few years with the businesses that I'm a part of have

done well it's been a good couple of years won't be like this forever but I'm in a little snapshot

so when I'm going to a punk rock show I always buy one or two extra tickets and I invite a

couple of people to go with me and if they don't pay me back I don't ever ask to then money money if they do awesome that's great but I'd much rather be 85 and have gone to a cool punk rock show with some buddies than to have gone be 85 and have gone to a show by myself that didn't share that with because they didn't have 50 bucks and so it is go first be weird and just trust if somebody can't do something maybe they've got stuff going on in their life and it does nothing to do with you have people over

to your house go do your weird things go fishing go bowling I don't know what people do these days but go do those things you get off the scoop it screens and go have shared experiences in real life instead of playing Fortnite go play paintball instead of playing duck hunt on the computer I don't know let's just shut it all down go hunting right go do stuff and you're more likely to get hurt you're more likely to have your heart broken you're more likely to

be made fun of all this up true and you're also more likely to have a life worth having lived

I got asked you this question before you go so you built this incredible brand you are a

creator entrepreneur you've got an amazing podcast you've got books you've got you know millions of followers across IG and YouTube a lot of people's dream right now is to become a creator entrepreneur like you and you will like basically have owned this category or your your a thought leader in the category of anxiety and mental health talk to us about like just you know some guidance of somebody who wants to become a creator entrepreneur to build a personal brand like you

and who wants to kind of be dominant in in a certain category walk them through that who how honest can I be can I be super honest can I all right all right

“this in you live in this world too and so you'll know what I'm talking about I think the great”

the super challenge the the highest challenge of content creators is people trying to create content

like media wise I know my whole life was based around I don't want to be on the internet and not here I am like what did it but it was 20 years of meeting with people behind closed doors and going to funeral homes and going to psych wards and sitting with people that now allows me to have my show where I sit with hurting people and a close buddy of mine Lane Norton who's like a

PhD in nutrition he's a world champion body like he's he called me after I wrote my first book

and I had a little thing about nutrition and there needs to hey quick note you're wrong you're incorrect you got out over your skis on this one and he's totally right and so it was a commitment from that point forward I'm only going to talk about things that I know and that's number one so

“if you want to be a content creator in entrepreneurship go start businesses go do stuff so that you”

have true real experiences and I think the I think the wisdom stool has three legs on it one have you done this thing to do you have real and I hate to say that you have real academic knowledge do you know what you're talking about most content creators in your in my world they haven't experienced and they want to tell everybody about that experience and listen the number of people who write into me and are like hey I cheated on my wife nine times but we decided to work it out

and now we have a course on how to be married I'm like dude you're the last person you need to tell people how to be married right you have an experience you started a business right that doesn't make you an expert in entrepreneurship that makes you an expert on your one thing that you did awesome congratulations if you want to tell people about your experience doing that fantastic but until you've walked started a bunch of businesses or spent time with a whole bunch of business leaders and listen

“to them we and listen to them when and still not be full listen to them blues then you have to”

know what you're talking about and then the third one is I think it really is helpful to have a lived experience we've all had professors that teach you how to do real estate and you're like hey

why don't why don't you have real estate you're like you've never done this thing and so having a

lived experience helps so that's that's number one like know what you're talking about the other thing this comes from my wife and it's the single wisest piece of of wisdom I received I was at a university here in Nashville was my dream job it was going to set our family up for life and she comes from a house of school teachers and my dad was a policeman and then a minister and then back to being a policeman so we had nothing neither of us I mean we had everything we needed but we did

not come from stuff and then I was like hey I'm gonna quit all of this and partner up with Dave Ramsey and start being in media and she's like oh cheese so here's the piece of wisdom she gave me and it was so it's proven so why she said if you create an avatar if you create some version like I'm gonna be the funny guy or the bro guy or the if you create some version of yourself eventually that will run out of gas the energy to keep up that persona or that facade or that

thing will exhaust you to the point that you're not able to keep it up and then I responded with yeah I'm gonna just be me bro I'm gonna be me and authentic and whatever I used all the nerd words and then she looked at me and she said hold on though you're weird and I was like what you mean and she said you're a Texan who's got a lot of tattoos you have a counseling degree you hunt and you drive a Prius and you go to Sunday school and you've been to Pantera shows all like for years

and you're like you're in the heavy metal and punk rock music she goes you're a weird guy and she said you're gonna have to go all in on you and if it doesn't work you're gonna have to go to bed at night knowing America doesn't like me and I just got I got real quiet and she looked

to me and said I'll always love you your kids like you your friends like you but you're gonna

have to go to bed at night knowing they didn't like me and that was the wisest piece of information and so I just on my shows I dressed like a dress and I'm not polished because I don't that's not I'm not a polished guy and I don't hate anybody and so everybody's welcome on my show and I know that makes all different people uncomfortable but that's just how I am in real life everyone's welcome

“at the Deloni house and everyone knows that right and so you have to just double down on being”

fully you and people meet me and they meet Dave Ramsey and like how are you guys friends trying to go so different but if you distill way way way way down we both want to help folks and we're both people of the same faith but if you distill it down sometimes he thinks helping people would be to really get after him and sometimes I think helping people would be to hug him but that core like that's just I'm gonna be this fully myself as I can be here and if it works

false image of myself and so know what you're talking about and don't be afraid to go be your full wacky weird self and then maybe just maybe it'll set off and work. Hmm such a good advice and I have to say like I've interviewed a lot of people from Ramsey Dave Ramsey can come in now you I'm so happy that I had you on the show and you guys all really do want to help people like you guys just seem like you have such a great mission and business and general

and I just really love having you guys on the show. I appreciate it's it's the ethos of this company um that and I have the luxury of seeing Dave at 2 a.m. with a ball cap on in the basement of a hotel and I see how how he tips people when there's no cameras on and I see how he takes care of

people in the hospital that never makes the new like and so that's just the ethos of Dave it's

ethos of this company you gotta be about helping other people. This has been such an awesome interview I animate interview with two questions that I ask all of my guests so the first one is what is one actionable thing are young and profitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow. Call a friend or a a person and say these words hey can we get together I'm not doing okay and then go tell the truth. Why do we need to be truth tellers if we want to live a peaceful life?

Um when I used to teach graduate classes for therapist I always tell them rule number one your clients will lie to you and um they won't tell you the full picture and I think we just don't have any place in our world where we can tell the truth and if you go see a doctor

“if you go see a therapist if you have a close best friend if you've got a spouse you have to be”

able to say who is the truth and um I think we're dying from that I mean we're gas lit on our news we're gas lit on it we're just our whole culture built around look over here look over here and so being able to just call someone say here's the truth um is a freeing freeing thing Okay last question is what is your secret to profiting till in life beyond just bank accounts? Oh man I it goes back to um if somebody asked me the question on my death bed what what are you

worth I'm gonna tell them I'm worth my wife I'm worth my faith and I'm worth these experiences I had with these buddies um and underneath that is that old it's an old zig-ziggler quote to

Dave quotes around the office all the time if you help enough people money will you'll never worry

about money if you go help people and so um if your business if your entrepreneur the business you're creating if it profits on other people's losing your business will fail period it's when it's when blockbuster put in their revenue line um late fees when they started banking on their customers having penalties that's the end of their business and so if your if your your business is about helping somebody have a better life a more efficient life a meeting a need in their world your

business will do well and so I want that question at the end of what what what what what are you worth to be relational and and then at the end of that I want to be able to say I was about helping people and I didn't have to worry about money John this has been so great thank you for spending

“so much time with me where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?”

I'm I'm I'm on the internet at John Deloni um the social stuff and you can go to John Deloni dot com I guess for the for the other nerds to I'm terrible with the internet that's still not fully not the org like and come find me what for all your links in your channel you too Dr. John Deloni show you could find it everywhere yeah yeah you've got an amazing podcast awesome we'll stick all those links in the show notes John thank you again for joining us on young and

profiting podcast thank you fear hospitality I'm really really grateful this conversation couldn't have come at a better time but Dr. John Deloni makes so clear is that

anxiety is not always something to suppress or push through for entrepreneurs anxiety is often

a signal your body's way of telling you that something in your life or business feels unsafe unsustainable or out of alignment and if you keep whitenuckling your way through stress eventually your body will force you to pay attention so here's what I want you to do yapping go to yappingmedia.com/mentalwells and open the safety audit worksheet that's yappingmedia.com/mentalwells to get your safety audit worksheet then I want you to block 20 minutes on your calendar two

days not this weekend not some day today do it sit down with a pen right out the specific areas where your nervous system does not feel safe right now ask yourself where am I constantly on edge what am I avoiding what am I using to know about what is draining me the most and then choose one real action to take in the next 24 hours you may want to text your friend and say I'm not doing

“great and I need to talk you might move a non-essential meeting off your calendar or set a hard”

stop for work tonight or delete an app that keeps you spirally. Book your doctor's appointment

week and just do it yeah fam and once you do that notice what changes notice what happens to your

“body when you stop ignoring the signal and start responding to the signal instead because once”

you create a little more safety in your life you can start to see the deeper mental patterns that

have been driving your stress all along don't miss week three because we're diving into the

“inner critics and cognitive traps that hold high achievers back with performance psychology expert”

shot a x-ray so take the challenge you have fam do the worksheet yappingmedia.com/mentalwells to download

So that, and I'll see you in the next episode.