IDL47 Season 1: At Your Best: Overcoming Overwhelm with Carey Nieuwhof
Is your definition of success sustainable? Does insecurity lead to burnout? How can you make commitments to yourself to honor your time?
Carey Nieuwhof is a renowned podcast host, leadership speaker, and author. His new book, At Your Best, comes out later this month and it will be the Impact Driven Leader Bookclub book for December. It really helped Tyler reflect on the times in his life when he was overwhelmed and stressed, and how his relationships were affected. There is more fatigue in our world today than ever before, so understanding it, and how we can overcome it, makes Carey’s insights both necessary and rewarding.
Carey Nieuwhof is a best-selling leadership author, speaker, podcaster, former attorney, and church planter. He writes one of today’s most influential leadership blogs, and his online content is accessed by leaders over 1.5 million times a month.
Carey’s mission is to help people thrive in life and leadership. He has extensive experience helping organizations lead through change, develop high-capacity teams, and deepen their personal growth along with their health.
His most recent book, At Your Best: How to Get Time, Energy, and Priorities Working in Your Favor, is designed to help you live a life you no longer want to escape from. Instead, you might actually start loving it.
Visit Carey’s website and connect with him on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Youtube.
IN THIS EPISODE WE DISCUSS:
Burnout
Unsustainable living
Tips to overcome overwhelm
Insecurity and burnout
Burnout
“I’m an enneagram 8 and I will plow through that brick wall … when I burned out, it [was] like … my body broke up with me and said: “no, we’re not doing this anymore”. It just went on strike and quit which shocked me because I was always able to push through everything. ”
Carey experienced burnout for four to six months from the spring of 2006 until the end of the year. Some of his symptoms were:
- Feeling tired
- Numbness
- Low energy or utter depletion
- Lack of passion and drive
- A feeling of apathy
- Self-meditating through over-working or over-eating to gain a sense of “fullness”
- Under-reacting and over-reacting to life events.
“Sleep and rest did not refuel me … that’s when I realized I had no control over things, and it was brutal. ”
If these symptoms feel or sound familiar to you, it is worthwhile reviewing your lifestyle and seeing whether you are heading towards burning out.
Success is not defined by intensity. True success is sustainable.
Unsustainable living
“Burnout historically has been a work term, but I think it’s morphing into a life term. A lot of the people that I work with, it might be that their job isn’t really in their lane, but they feel like their life is out of control; overwhelmed, overcommitted, and overworked. ”
Burnout used to be a medical term to describe feelings of being overworked in your job. Recently, this term has changed, where a vast majority of employees and leaders feel burnout both in the office and at home.
It is important to reframe the idea of success as an intensive commitment to success as a sustainable environment.
You are successful when you can work, rest, and enjoy life as opposed to you being successful when you work until you cannot work another day. Success is in balance, not in extremes.
Tips to overcome overwhelm
Start making categorical decisions
Many successful people avoid burnout by making the same decisions every day to save mental energy. This can look like:
- Walking the same route
- Wearing the same or similar clothes
- Preparing the same meal
Of course, varying these things occasionally is good, and beneficial to do. However, sticking to the same decisions can help you ward off burnout because it is one less thing to think about.
Spend your time with people who bring value
If you have someone on your team who is a drain to your energy, who always has the same or similar issues, who is often late to meetings or deadlines, and does not try to change, stop meeting with that person.
Instead, spend time with your top-performers and those that bring true value to the team. They will inspire you, and your meeting with them will inspire them to keep going.
“You should be meeting with your top-performers, you should be meeting with your best people, because that leaves them feeling energized, it leaves you more aligned with them, and it leaves you feeling energized. ”
Insecurity and burnout
People who may constantly work overtime, who try to do everything, and who want to fix all problems and be a part of all solutions are more prone to burnout because this work ethic is unsustainable, and it stems from a source of insecurity.
Secure people know what their strengths and weaknesses are, they admit to them and do the best that they can with what they know how to do. They know when you slow down, and they know when they can work harder.
Ultimately, they are less prone to burnout because they do not succumb to the need to be the best at everything, because they know that is a pipedream, and they commit to doing the best they can with what they have.
Resources, books, and links mentioned in this episode:
BOOK | Carey Nieuwhof – At Your Best: How to Get Time, Energy, and Priorities Working in Your Favor
BOOK | Stephen Covey – The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
BOOK | John Maxwell – The 5 Levels of Leadership: Proven Steps to Maximize Your Potential
BOOK | Gary W. Keller and Jay Papasan – The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Result
BOOK | Robin Dunbar – How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar's Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks
Visit Carey’s website
Connect with him on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Youtube
The Impact Driven Leader YouTube Channel
Join the Impact Driven Leader Community
Connect with Tyler on Instagram and LinkedIn
Email Tyler: tyler@tylerdickerhoof.com
About the Impact Driven Leader Podcast
The Impact Driven Leader Podcast, hosted by Tyler Dickerhoof, is for Xillennial leaders who have felt alone and ill-equipped to lead in today's world. Through inspiring interviews with authors from around the world, Tyler uncovers how unique leadership strengths can empower others to achieve so much more, with real impact.
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You can easily end up feeling overwhelmed and burned out when you are living at an unsustainable pace.
Carey Nieuwhof
Podcast Transcription
[TYLER DICKERHOOF]
Hey there. Welcome back to the Impact Driven Leader podcast. This your host, Tyler Dickerhoof. Glad you're here today. We are wrapping up here in 2021, a year full of amazing interviews. I was at an event here the last week and a lot of people who listen to my podcast - if you're listening in, thank you for listening in, obviously you're here - and they said, man, Tyler, who has been the greatest interviews? Who's been something that you've really enjoyed. As I sat and I thought, man, it isn't necessarily about the individual. It's about the experiences. It's about the relationships.
And today's episode I'm thankful to be able to share because of the relationships that I've built. That's why we had a chance to talk. So today's guest Carey Nieuwhof, amazing podcast host himself. He's an author. He has a new book this month, new book that's out At Your Best. It will be the book for the Impact Driven Leader book club here in December. So excited to unpack it. And here's why. As I was reading the book myself, as I was preparing for this interview, as I was going through it I thought back in the times in my life where either I've been overwhelmed and frustrated and maybe not at my best. I thought about those people around me, whether it be my spouse, whether it be other people in business, business partners that really took on a lot.
I actually thought about one person as I was reading this and I'm like, Ooh, I'm really seeing where they're exhibiting some of the signs of burnout or fatigue. And as I start asking questions to more and more people and feeling myself, we have this overwhelming amount of fatigue in our world today. And Carey in his book, At Your Best gives you some great tools to combat that, to help you really work through it. So I'm excited for you to listen to this podcast, but also join the book club, read the book with us where you're going to get a lot of value.
But here's the other thing that I know too. Carey talks about this and I believe this wholeheartedly, when you link arms with others, man, that's how you're really able to be at your best. Now I've shared this story. I'm going to share it. Now give me another minute. I learned this from a friend who is a Navy seal. He said, "Tyler, the Navy seals that don't make it through hell week, they're last weakened, and really kind of the toughest weak are the ones that stand there on the beach by themselves trying to fight the waves. The people that survive are the ones that link arms with everyone else and say, we're going to do this together."
Man, that story is really what the round table part of the Impact Driven Leader is all about. It's linking arms with others in the order that you can get through. Because sometimes it's tough. It's hard. And I want to use this as an opportunity. If you are looking for that community, come join the Impact Driven Leader round table. We're getting ready, gearing up, we're going to finish off 2021 and get ready for an amazing year in 2022. So inquire, tylerdickerhoof.com. Would love to have you join. Now let's get to that conversation with Carey. Listen in.
[TYLER]
Carey, I'm excited to chat with you today. I'm excited to have you as a guest of the Impact Driven Leader podcast and excited to talk about your book, At Your Best. But before we get there, I'd love for maybe some audience members that don't know who Carey Nieuwhof is. I don't know how they could be where there's 1.5 million people as it's reported consume your content every month, which just blows my mind. Would love to just share a little bit more, more about you from your heart.
[CAREY NIEUWHOF]]
Well, that leaves about 8 billion people who don't. So let's assume a lot of people have no idea who I am. But thank you Tyler, I appreciate that. I'm, well a lot of formers currently, what I do, let's start it that way, I'm a former pastor. I'm a former lawyer, but basically I'm an author. I lead a communications company and we're devoted, we get up every day trying to help people thrive in life and leadership. As you know life is hard. Leadership can have its own set of difficulties. So what we try to do is to produce resources that really help leaders in a variety of circumstances, church leaders, business leaders, entrepreneurs motivated, stay-at-home parents. I mean, you name it.
If you've got a little bit, like if you might have bought The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, if you're that kind of person, if you're a podcast listener, if you're trying to say, Hmm, how do I get an edge or how do I, like that's what we do all day. So that's been a real joy. I have small team that helps me do that. Prior to that, I led a church for two decades and before that I thought I was going to spend my life in law. I finished that, but got called out of it in a ministry. So that's a little bit of the background the great joy of my life. I'm married to my wife, Tony. We've been married for over 30 years. We have two sons and just love, I live north of Toronto. We just love it up here, hosted a whole group of leaders that came up, flew from all over the US to be with me in my backyard for a day. It's just yes, it's a good seasonal life and really enjoying things right now. And I write books in my spare time.
[TYLER]
Well, I understand that and appreciate that. One of the best things that I gather there is one, leadership doesn't matter where you're at. Is all about people. You talk about that. A lot of your content is understanding, hey, we're just people but your focus is your wife and I think there's probably some trying times in your career. As I speak for myself, I'll be married 16 years here later this month. There's some ups and downs. You have two kids. I have three where sometimes those core relationships, when they're at their best means that you're best but sometimes when we're at our worst, those relationships can get our worst as well. I'd love for you to just kind of, as we're talking about your book, At Your Best, as you're talking about this overall arch of leadership, I'd love to just kind of start there, something that you realized through that process in your life, how it led to kind of what you're doing, but also this book, At Your Best.
[CAREY]
Yes, well you're right. I mean, Tony and the kids have seen me at my worst as have some of my team for sure. I mean, leadership is hard and life is hard and we all have moments that we're not proud of. We all have things that happen where, you know I was in a season where I was trying to lead and I wasn't at my best. So it's sort of a before and after. I think my life operates a little bit on a hinge point in my adult life. So about 15 years ago, after 10 years, I've been in leadership about, yes, close to 30 years, I've been an adult and 15 years ago I burned out. I had a decade in leadership where everything was up and to the right.
I was leading a church at the time, we were growing and of course for any church leader listening or people involved in church, you really believe in the mission. Like it's really hard to disentangle yourself from what you do because I'm a Christian, but I'm also leading people to Christ. I'm also a pastor. So that became super challenging and my response to the growth was not particularly healthy. I just said more people equals more hours and that doesn't scale. So it got me burned out after about a decade.
I looked back on my leadership when I was in my thirties and I wasn't, there wasn't a trail of bodies everywhere, but we were growing faster than we were losing people. Let's just put it that way. Okay, so that you can get away with that for a while. But I look back on that and go, wow, we were moving so hard and so fast that it took a toll on me, but also took a toll on all lot of people, some team members, some staff, some people. And not like headline worthy stuff, but just like there was a churn going on and there was definitely a churn going on in me that led me to burnout.
I'm like, wow, that was so painful for me. I thought I can't live that way in the future. If you've ever burned out you realize, wow, I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy. So I felt that way and I thought, I've got to figure out a different way to live. So I did recover from burnout, which I'm very grateful for to this day. Not everybody gets out of it, but I got out of it. Then I spent three to five years trying to figure out, okay, how can I live differently? Because living the way I was living got me burned out and was not, we had good results, but when you really look back on it's like, yes, there was some churn and there was some collateral damage there that doesn't need to happen.
So I developed a whole new approach through coaching and counseling that I used personally for a few years and felt a lot better. There was a lot less collateral damage. We continued to grow, but it was a much healthier growth. I never thought it would become a book. I thought it just a personal system I had for myself and then people started asking me in droves, like, how are you getting everything accomplished? I would answer it anecdotally. Then about five or six years ago, I got invited to a talk with Mark Patterson in DC. I thought, oh, okay, I'll try to turn some of these principle and just see if they resonate with anyone else. It was an instant kind of moment where everyone's like, my goodness, this is gold. Mark said, "Kerry, you got to put it into a book."
I first launched it as a course that I used to call the High Impact Leader, ran a couple thousand people through it and I'm like, oh, these principles work. They're not just idiosyncratic. They're not just for me. Then I kept revising the ideas, refining the ideas, expanding the ideas and now they're in a book called At Your Best. So the goal is to help people get time, energy, and priorities working for them. The general, it's been encouraging, book's been out about three weeks. We're getting messages every day from people who are saying, I'm seeing instant results in productivity, margin, peace, rest in my life. And I'm like, yes, like, that's fantastic. That's why we released the book. So that's what it's all about.
[TYLER]
Okay, so you gave me a lot of things to think about and hopefully everyone listening into. I made a lot of notes. It kind of coincides with a lot of notes I had beforehand, but let's, you had on a couple things that I think are imperative, and I want you to start with this for our audience. If you could, could you describe some of the symptoms or when you burnt out, what did that look like? How did you feel? What symptoms did you have so people maybe can relate to that part of it?
[CAREY]
For me, I had a pretty like in the burnout period itself, which lasted about maybe four to six months in the summer of 2006, started in the late spring, started to get better by September, October of that year. There were a lot of symptoms. I probably had pre-symptoms. So prior to burning out, I was kind of tired all the time, sort of numb, not feeling great, but I'm an Enneagram eight and I will plow through that brick wall, like just get out of the way. Then when I burned out, it's like my body said, it broke up with me and said, we're not doing this anymore. It just went on, strike it quit, which shocked me because I was always able to push through everything. So what was that characterized by?
When the burnout hit in earnest, it was low energy, like very low energy. We all have a little window a day. We would get a little tired. I would wake up feeling like I hadn't even slept the day before and I got out to bed, but it was miserable. Even more alarmingly than that, my passion was gone. I did not feel passionate about ministry. I didn't feel, like I never lost my faith. It wasn't a de-conversion story. I still intellectually believed in what I believed in, but I didn't have any passion for it. It's like, I just didn't care. I didn't care about anything. I didn't care about my marriage. I didn't care about my parenting. I didn't care about my life. I didn't care about fun. I didn't care about ministry. I just kind of went numb. Mostly I did not experience emotion and when I did, they were wrong.
You know you're supposed to be happy when other people are happy. You're supposed to be sad when people are sad and it wasn't causing effect anymore. So I didn't feel that. Then when my emotions would surface, it would usually be anger and it was over something I necessarily shouldn't have been angry about. My 10 year old didn't take out the garbage. It's like, okay, you shouldn't have a nuclear meltdown over that, but I was. I was self-medicating. For me, it wasn't alcohol or drugs. It was just overworking or overeating. So that was a challenge.
Another symptom was that sleep and rest did not refuel me. I'm like a control freak. So I'm like, okay, I don't feel good. I'm going to take three weeks off. I had three weeks off scheduled in July of 2006. I'm like, I will be running Ironman by the time I'm done the three weeks off. And I didn't get better. I got worse. That's when I realized I have no control over this. It was brutal. So those were some of the symptoms.
[TYLER]
I love that. One of the, so I've experienced burnout with people in my life. In your book, you kind of threw a non-official survey. I heard you kick out where there's 93% of people feel like they've burnt out and then 7% are like, what is this? I think that's very telling, but I think there's information there to wonder as a leader. And ultimately I'm hoping through this conversation, we answer the question as a leader, how can we recognize burnout in ourselves and or others and help be a part of the solution. So, as I'm thinking of this I've seen my wife burnout and one of the things that hit me there, and this is what I believed, and I'd love your take on this is I believe there's two ways that people end up burning up.
I think there's a combination a little bit, but it's taking on too much or doing things that we feel ill equipped to do. And having this responsibility, I'm the only one to do it. So I think there can be a combination. That's what I've seen in my life, people that have burned, what I gathered from you kind of that. I'm going to, we're hyper-growth, I'm taking on all of this and I'd love for you to just kind of break that down a little bit, what your thoughts are there, or kind of what can lead people into that. To me it's a responsibility that sometime leads to burnout. Would you agree with that or?
[CAREY]
Yes, I think you're right. Those are good insights, Tyler. For sure, if you're not in your lane, if you're not working in the area of your giftedness, that is going to produce some malaise in your life and feelings of burnout. What's interesting is again, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a psychologist, so this is like the amateur guy, but I have worked with thousands of leaders who have burned out. So I have a few data points. It would be interesting, like you could be out of alignment in your job, but then if you're going home, are you still having fun? Are you enjoying time with your family. Like it's just work. Life is bad. Well, that could be like work burnout, but I find for a lot of people, burnout was a term developed in the 1970s to describe a physician, what physicians were dealing with, which is, they were just exhausted from like long hours and a everything.
But I'm finding, so burnout historically has been a work term, but I think it's morphing into a life term. So a lot of the people that I work with, it might be that their job isn't really in their lane, but they kind of feel like their life is out of control. They're overwhelmed, over committed and overworked. So in that 93% that you referenced, I was at a conference in Dallas, this was probably in 2019, I think and I was speaking live and the hosts wanted me to do an instant poll. The question was like, how many of you have experienced symptoms of burnout in the last year? I expected like 30%, 40% of people to chip in and say, yes, that was me but when 93% said that they did it just stopped me in my tracks.
Then you look at other data, 70% of millennials say they've experienced symptoms of burnout in the last two years. There was a Deloitte study in 2021, like 83% of executives go home exhausted every day and 59% can't sleep at night because of the stress that they're facing. So I think what's happened is, to your second condition I think is right, that we live at this unsustainable pace. We're just at the point where we are going so fast because it's not just work. Work could be demanding and exhausting, but then you got life and you got to drive the kids to different events and you've got this thing happening on the weekend with your family.
Oh, you want to go to this concert and then you want to go here and you've got 17 unread text messages, and you've got all these emails that are clogging up your inbox and everywhere you look, someone is asking you for something. There are times when I haven't been in a healthy season of life and I'm like, I'm just tired of everybody asking for a piece of me. Like everybody wants a piece of me. I think that I would define as an unsustainable pace and I think you can easily end up feeling overwhelmed and burned out when you're living at an unsustainable pace.
[TYLER]
One of the things that I gather here and I think happens, and as a leader, a parent, you kind of hit on this age range. I'm 42, my kids are 14 through 12, 15 through 12, and 10 years ago it was crazy. My wife, it was a crazy season and I think one of the things that I really pick up and I see, and I wonder is we have to give ourselves grace through some of those seasons to understand the best thing we can do is just move forward today and not worry about how can we climb Mount Everest from a career point of view, if that makes sense. I think it's hard because sometimes opportunities come at us and it's, how do we say yes to what's important and no, to all the things that aren't. And you give some kind of tools, some framework within your book to kind of think through some of those things and I'd love for you to kind of talk about that.
[CAREY]
It probably should be seasonally adjusted. Like I did not start writing books until I was around your age. Part of that was, it was just crazy. I didn't know how to control my time, but yes, saying no is really, really, really important and very difficult for people. I'm going to guess that most people listening to this podcast have more opportunities than they have time available, whether that's on their social calendar, stuff the kids are doing. A couple of ways to get out of that perpetual state of overwhelm and to stop letting other people hijack your priorities is, I would suggest what people should do is start thinking, start making categorical decisions. So rather famously like mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs kind of wear the same thing every day, the black, the t-shirts, or in Jobs’ case, it was the mock turtleneck and the khakis, that kind of thing.
And you're like, these guys do not have a wardrobe budget problem. Like they could buy whatever they wanted and have a custom tailor at their house every morning to make them a new set of clothes. Why would they do something like that? The reason is, and Einstein did the same thing is it's one less decision I have to make. I don't have to stand there in my closet going, what am I going to wear? What do my people want me to wear? What do the cameras want me to wear? It's like, I just wear the same thing every day. It's like a lot of people who are very good at time management will eat the same thing for breakfast every day, the same thing for every day. Why? One less decision.
So I call that categorical decision making. And one of the things you can do, if you find yourself overwhelmed is just decide, all right, there are certain things I'm just not going to do for a season or forever. So for example, when on the other side of burnout, I discovered that I was probably at my best in the morning, but I was also the king of breakfast meetings. So the thing that moved the needle for the last two or three decades of my life is I'm a content creator. I'm producing, writing messages for a weekend church service, or these days I'm writing chapters for books, or I'm writing an article for my website, or I'm prepping for an interview. I'm also a podcaster like you and I only have a few peak hours in a day, like three to five peak hours in a day.
If I go to breakfast meetings day after day, by the time I get into the office at 9:00 or 9:30 and then people want to talk to me, and then I got all these unread messages, like my best hours, my most productive hours are already spent. 4:30 rolls around, I've still got to write that chapter. I've still got to get stuff done. So what I did was I made a categorical decision years ago that I was just going to stop doing breakfast meetings or severely limit them. So I rarely do a breakfast meeting. Now will I meet with you in the afternoon? Sure, but I'm not at my best anymore.
Well, what that does is that allows me to free up some time in the morning to get those big rocks moved, to get those really critical things finished so that by 10:00 or 11:00 AM, most days I've checked off the massive things off my list. That's categorical decision making. Other things you can do, I'm a speaker, I do a lot of speaking engagements, so we say no, ironically to about 90% of the requests that come our way. And that's tough, but my team and I have developed filters and we try to figure out, okay, I'd rather speak to leaders than just a general crowd and then there's specific types of leaders.
So almost, rather than looking at every decision like it was fresh, because that leads to decision fatigue, it's like, okay, well we already know the filters we're going to run these speaking requests through. If they meet those criteria, then yes, we'll definitely have a look at it. Most of them don't. So I would start thinking, you know I have a friend, she was over today, she works on my staff, but she's got three kids too. They're all under five and limited finances, that kind of thing. She just decided, because her life was so crazy she wasn't going to do those like essential oil parties and that kind of thing because she gets a million requests from her friends and she's like, "Hey, I'm just not going to those right now. I'll be happy to get together with you for a cup of tea or something like that or a drink later but I just don't do parties like that in the season."
So I would encourage you to think through categories. Another example from when our kids were younger, both were athletic and both were musical, but we said, no matter how athletic and how musical you are, you get one sport per season, you get music lesson per season. We only had two kids. Other people have like eight. It's like, I don't know how they do it. But that was enough for us because that would put us out of the house four days a week after school or in the evenings and we figured that was a bandwidth. Another categorical decision for us is Friday night is date night. We almost never break that. You just put that on the calendar. So you start to program health in that way. If you ask me for a breakfast meeting, it's like, "I'm sorry, Tyler. I'm just not available." See how that makes it a little easier.
[TYLER]
Oh I, so that is a, and I know he is a friend of yours, Craig Rochelle has talked about this in his life and what's funny is you see me wearing a black t-shirt is at the start of COVID March of 2020 on Zoom and on Facebook live and doing these things. I'm like, I don't want to have to worry about, figure out this five minutes what am I going to wear that I didn't wear yesterday that's not going to, so I just love black t-shirts. That's what I wear every single day. It drives my life nuts, but it's just like, I don't want to have to think about it. And even just the freedom of it.
So I found a brand of black shirts that I love. And I think as you bring that up, it's those decisions that we may think are weird, that Jobs or other people have done but when then you understand how much brain capacity, some of those little things can take to free it up to what you're best at. And that's what I love you sharing that I think is so imperative. Yes, go ahead Carey.
[CAREY]
That's science too. We think of ourselves as robots. A lot of us think like I'm super human. I can do everything. I can do it all. I think we're kind of like our phones. You start at a hundred percent and then the battery starts to meet down, little by minute, just ticks down and by three o'clock in the afternoon, we're at 42% and by five o'clock we might be at 28%. Like often if I'm doing the late day meeting, I'll just say to my team, I have three brain cells left. So how do you want to use them? That's a very counterintuitive thing, but then that starts to work for you when you realize, wow, this is like, if you have a hundred dollars left in your bank account, you're going to spend it differently than if it's like, well it'll just replenish itself or I'll just rack up credit card debt.
You got a hundred bucks left. How are you going to spend it? Well, you start to think strategically and that's where you get into energy management, not just time management. Because you get 24 equal hours in a day, but they don't all feel equal. So for me, I'm at my best in the morning. I've got to treasure those hours. Like you, I don't want to be making stupid decisions every morning that I can avoid because if I've got to write some really great con intent, I know that I've probably got three to five peak productive hours in me. I'm only going to feel at my best till about 11:00 AM and then it's kind of downhill from there.
If you're night owl, flip it. Okay, in the evening you come alive. Great. But you're not going to be alive until 5:00 o'clock the next morning. Like at some point your week is going to snuff out and you're going to be like, well that's it for me? I think people don't think about it. I mean they know it, but they don't really think about it and then they don't program their lives around their energy levels and that's why they struggle so much, one of the reasons they struggle so much with overwhelm. So good for you. That's a great decision.
[TYLER]
So I want to transition here a little bit. One of the topics that you bring up in your book, At Your Best is this flat learning curve, the flat learning curve people, and I really love it. I threw this kind of ideology onto the end of it. This is my belief, is our job as a leader is not to guide everyone, but it is define who can. So in other words, if I am leading you, and this comes back into that delegation and this whole idea of this kind of topic of burnout, which I'd love to dig into more in some of our insecurities, but it's like my role as a leader is not to be everything to everyone.
My role as a leader is to say, "Hey Carey, I'm not the guy for you, but let me go find the person who is, and let me connect you with Brad because he's your guy and you know what, I'm part of that solution. Therefore I am leading you." I find that a lot of leaders struggle with that or inexperienced leaders, new leaders, maybe new in a position because there's this insecure of feeling like, oh, if I pass on that I'm abdicating my position. So would you, could you dig into that a little bit?
[CAREY]
So the flat learning curve is a real challenge to me because if you think about how I used to spend my time, how a lot of people spend their time it's with their lowest performers. So for example, if you have someone who's perpetually late, they miss all the meetings, they're 10 minutes late. Everyone's supposed to be in the office theoretically at 8:00 AM and they always roll in at 8:15, you're like, I got to meet with Nieuwhof and tell him, "Hey, you got to show up on time for these things." And what a lot of us discover, whether it's the salesperson who keeps missing targets, the person who's always late in time, the person who never gets the report done, the person who misses their quotas, whatever it is those are never once and done meetings.
It's like the guy who's like, I sat down, talked to him like, don't be late, then he's late tomorrow. Okay, I got to bring him in. I got to talk to him again and, or the drama king or the drama queen. Like you ever noticed we've all got that one person in our life who has the crisis of the day, the crisis of the month. It's like, "Okay, well you solve that one problem, but now you've got five new ones and you want to talk all day to me about it." John Townson, the psychologist says that those people have flat learning curves because me investing an hour of my time in trying to make you on time is not helping you be on time.
If it does, that was a one-time meeting and it's over. But a lot of us, like if you look at the time we spend meeting with people, it's with the pardon me, the drama king who's got like yet another problem that he can't solve and needs our advice but our advice last time didn't really help him. So what do you do with that? My suggestion is you stop meeting with that person. That might sound really hard and tough if you're a person of faith, maybe even unchristian, but that's okay, because think about it. Are they being helped by your interaction with them? The answer is no, because they're still late. They're still missing all their quotas. They've still got drama in their life every day.
So clearly, as you said, I am not the person who's going to be able to help that person. If I am, I don't know how to do it. So I'm not helping them and they are not being helped by it. So they just say I don't, I either need to let you go or we're going to tolerate this, but I'm not going to be the person that's coaching you on this stuff anymore. So take those meetings out of your life because they're not, you're not helping the serial offenders. Then what you should do is spend your time with the people who deliver 80% of your results. So you have that one top salesperson who never bugs you, who's always on time, who's smashing her quotas and call her up and say, "Hey, do you want to go for a lunch on Thursday?"
She'd be like, "I'd love to. That would be fantastic." How are those meetings? Energizing. They're great. You should be meeting with your top performers. You should with your best people because that leaves them energized, it leaves you more aligned with them and it leaves you feeling energized. Meanwhile, all those people you weren't helping are now not being helped by somebody else. So that kind of frees up your time and it makes your meeting schedule and you're meeting with them a lot more energized.
[TYLER]
That's something obviously I can tell that you've learned through. Did it take a while to learn through that and what really allowed you to learn it and be free with, hey, I'm not the guy for everybody?
[CAREY]
Well, I think like 700 attempts to be the guy for everyone and realizing none of them have really worked out, probably helped with realizing, okay, and then really good counsel from people like Townsend and Cloud and others. And just talking to leaders. I spend a lot of time talking to top leaders and I'm realizing I'm not really helping anybody. Then some of those people, I still know them, they're still friends, but there'll be a new crisis next month and I don't have to wade in up to my chin every time there's a crisis because for whatever reason they enjoy living that way. I don't enjoy living that way. It is not the most valuable spend of my time. I'm not helping. And every time I'm trying to help that person, I am not helping hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of other people I could be helping if I invested my time in another way. So I think that's really, it's a boundary issue and you just have to say, I'm really sorry you're having these challenges, but yes, I'm not free to meet with you about that.
[TYLER]
One of the topics that I've heard you to discuss and you share personally, and this is my personal belief, it's what I've had to overcome the most is my personal insecurity as a leader, as just a person. I'd love to hear maybe thoughts, how you see whether personally or within others that insecurity can be a factor to burnout. It's trying to feel like I'm enough or cover up these supposed holes we feel we have in ourself. I'd love for you to kind of wade through that. What are your thoughts there and how have you seen that in yourself or others?
[CAREY]
Tyler, that's a very perceptive connection. So yes, I do think they relate. I hadn't really thought about that explicitly, but yes, if you're insecure, you are probably more likely to work extra hours to try to say, well, I have to be the solution for every thing and everybody and every situation. I struggle with insecurity like most people do. You're either insecure or you're a narcissist. So I hope I struggle with insecurity rather than being a narcissist. But I'd say it's less of an issue now than it was 20 years ago in my life. What that has allowed me to do is to accept my limits. I'm okay with my limits. I know I'm not a robot.
I had people at my house last night till 11:30 and we didn't get to bed until after midnight. It was a great day. It was an 11 hour hosting of a half dozen leaders who flew in from across the US to hang out for the day. So it was really good. It was like a mastermind, but I didn't get to bed until 12:30 this morning. I let myself sleep in until 7:30, 8:00. I took a relatively easy morning because I had an 11:00 AM meeting. I have this, I have a few things after that, I have a podcast later in the afternoon. I'm like to be fresh for that, I need to prepared. I also realized I am bad at most things in life. Like I really am. I have such a narrow gifting. It's so small, but if I stick in my lane, I'm a communicator, I can express ideas in writing, I'm a decent interviewer. I can interview people.
Okay, well, that's what I'm good at. And for the rest, I really not good at most things in life. It was even like dinner last night. I would've tried, the old me would've tried to do everything. The new me, I had everything catered except the meal, because I know how to run the big green egg. I know how to do that. So I got a nice tender line, we sliced it up, everyone enjoyed it. I had the rest of the meal catered. Why? Because you wouldn't want to eat my bread. You don't want my vegetables. They're terrible. But I have this little tiny lane and I think that's the security of knowing, yes I'm not good at most things. I'm probably never going to run a triathlon, but that's okay.
Probably one of the most instrumental teachings on that for me, Andy Stanley said this years ago, and I just think about it all the time, insecurity is often tied to jealousy. Why is this person selling more books than me? Why does this person have more downloads than me? Why is their company church organization bigger than the one that I lead? And Andy, it's just such a powerful little line, but he just says, look, celebrate what God has given others, leverage God has given you. So when someone's leaving something bigger, better, they're stronger, faster, smarter, you just go, "God, thank you for making them that way. And here's my little thing and help me to be a really good steward of that."
So I think for insecurity, because I've been okay, letting stuff go because I've been all right, like going, yes, I'm probably, I don't need to play in that space. And I've kind of narrowed my world a little bit to my strengths, my real strengths, relationally and professionally. I'm okay. I don't really struggle with FOMO. Like if someone hits a New York Times list and I don't, it's great, good for them. If someone's selling more books than I am, that's great. I just want to help the people who read my book. That's okay, but you have to become secure to be able to do that. I think that's in large measures, a spiritual journey as well.
[TYLER]
To me it's a spiritual, it's a healthy, it's a wisdom gaining lesson. As Enneagram eight as well, that has been part of my personal journey. It's just finding out, all right, this is who I am. I have a few giftedness. I'm good there as opposed to feeling like I have to find this perfect spot that everyone else wants me to be. I was listening to a podcast that released today. Jenny Catone released this and it was about delegation. It was so good. There was this last question she shared and I think ties into this, exactly: are you more concerned about your image or helping others grow?
I think in this idea as we're talking about in leadership and burning out and insecurity and delegation, if we stop and say, "All right, Carey, your role is X, Y, Z. That's all it is. How can you help others grow," it isn't Carey doing everything. It is. How can I work with others through that process and that delegation and being secure enough to say, I'm only here to do one thing and that's it. Everyone else. The reason you're here is because I can't do those things nearly as well as you and releasing that responsibility feeling like because it's the Carey Nieuwhof leadership podcast that you have to do everything. And it's like no ---
[CAREY]
Well, you work a lot with John Maxwell's content and everything. I love, one of my favorite books he's ever written is The 5 Levels of Leadership and level four is people development. The older I've gotten, the more I kind of realize one of the greatest things I can do is bring out the best in other people. Some of that is not trying to be, you know I have somebody who's really good at the podcast. My lane is so narrow in the podcast. It's like recruit guests and do good interviews. Like that's about it. That's all I do. The team does the rest and they make sure it gets out there, but I'm not going to try to be the producer. I'm not going to try to be the manager, not going to try, like my lane is pretty narrow.
When you do that, you realize that the things that you're not good at God has gifted other people to be able to do. Then my job is to really let them run in that lane and not interfere and support them and give them the resources and the tools that they need. Then everyone wins. I'm happy doing my job. They love doing their job. We reach more people. It's pretty cool.
[TYLER]
Yes, I think one of the greatest lessons that I've kind of talked about and learned with John to this point is the greatest way that you can add value to someone else is empowering to do something that they love to do and then are great at. To me it ties into this whole delegation and insecurity and burnout. Maybe I'm part of the seven. I don't know. I know when my rubber band gets stretched. I know when I have a little bit too much on my plate and I can recognize and be like, oh, okay. I got a narrow back in. I had a year where God really spoke to me and read the book, The ONE Thing, by Gary Keller. I had read focus. It was about, hey, you have too much going on. But I think part of that is being okay saying, "Hey Carey, you're great at this. Dude, take it." I don't need to control it because I know as part of a team and thinking about my experience in sports dude, that's when we're all great. If I try to be the basketball center and the point guard and the shooting guard, as much as that's an enviable person that could do all that, you can't play all the positions. That's where I find this idea.
[CAREY]
You're also not going to win a world championship.
[TYLER]
No, not like the Raptors did. You're still living on that, I'm guessing, I'm hoping you are.
[CAREY]
Oh, yes. If I followed sports, I would be, I'm not a sports guy. That's another thing too. People are like, how do you produce so much content? You wouldn't believe what I don't do. Like, I don't really track with sports. I haven't watched a lot of classic movies. My life's pretty narrow, but I'm actually having a lot of fun and it's okay. I don't have to keep up. I don't have to be the cool guy. I don't have to be the guy who knows everything about everything. That's all right. I know a few things about something and that's good.
[TYLER]
That is a lesson I have learned as well. As I describe it you're better off being the sharpest knife in the kitchen rather than all the utensils in the drawer. That's how I envision it. So I want to take a last little deep dive because I think this is so fitting in our world of leadership today, so many contact points in social media, you led a large church, you lead a very large community now, the rule of 150. I love to know how this ties into this, again, idea of burnout, because I think there could be, well, yes, and the idea that thinking, okay, Carey, you lead this, think back when you were a pastor. It's like, you knew more than 150 people that were key in your organization. How did you manage those relationships, so that one person in 150, 1 through 250, who was still very vital to that organization, felt connected and that you weren't aloof to them or you weren't just, I guess, aloof to it or just not connected. So I'd love for you discuss some of that stuff.
[CAREY]
I'm so glad you asked that question. So Dunbar, Robin Dunbar is a British evolutionary psychologist, and he has a theory which he bases both historically and on neuro research that basically human beings historically, and today are capable of about 150 relationships. So when I stepped out of the lead pastor role at the church, we were, probably 3,500 people called our church home. We'd have over a thousand on the weekend, but about 3,500 people would say, yep, that's my home. Well, I do not have the capacity to learn 3,500 names, but I started when the church was like less than 40 people. So when you have 40 people, you can know everyone in your church, their dog's names, their cats names, their kids names, their cousins names, all that stuff.
So over two decades, we grew from that handful of people to where we are. How do you scale relationships like that? Dunbar says you can't do it beyond 150 and I think he's right. The problem is he wrote his book, How Many Friends Can One Person Have, I think is the title in 2010, just as social media was taking off. And he goes, social media is breaking down those boundaries. It's like, well, there isn't a single person listening to those podcasts who has fewer than 150 contacts, followers, et cetera on social. We all have more than that. And he goes, this is what's killing us guys.
So he looks back at history and realizes that the average medieval and ancient town was about, village was about 150 people or less. So you knew the blacksmith and the cobbler and the baker and all those people and you knew them by name. And he says that hasn't changed. That is hardwired into our design as humans, like neurologically, emotionally, we can't process more than that. Then he breaks that 150 down. He says, you got about 10 to 15 people in that 150 that are truly friends, people that you're generally caught up with, you see on a semi-regular basis and three to five, you have a capacity of three to five best friends where these are people everything about them. They know everything about you. You talk every day or every other day, and that's about it.
He goes, that's all you can have. Now, what do you do when you live in a digital universe where I have, yes, we connect with over a million, like millions of leaders a year. How does that work? The answer is I can't. So you have to scale it. What I would suggest is you start to prioritize relationships and the people closest to you should get the quickest and the deepest response. So if you look at your phone and you have 28 unread emails, they're not all equal. One spam, so you can delete that without opening it. Another one is from someone that you met five years ago at a conference that you haven't heard from in a long time, another one is from a friend. Or take it to text messages. If you've got your mom, your wife and a couple of colleagues, and then somebody you haven't talked to in two years, we know that even though there are five equal text messages you should probably talk to your wife first. Your mom shouldn't be too far behind. And that colleague, do you have to get back to that colleague right away? Probably not. Should have been an email. Could have waited until our next meeting.
So what you have to do is start doing triage and what a lot of people struggle with is now everywhere you go, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every platform you're on has an inbox. You used to have an email inbox. Now you get an inbox on Facebook, Instagram. You're getting messages everywhere and we just feel inundated. So the idea is to do some relational triage and try to figure out the depth of the relationship should determine the depth and the speed of the response. So who are your three to five? Who are your 10 to 15? Talk to them when they text you. That guy from high school you haven't talked to in 15 years, he can wait or maybe you don't need to respond.
I have inboxes that I don't use. That's just a decision because of the volume of correspondence. Then eventually if you have a public platform like I do, I always never understood people who like, "Well, I'll always answer my own email." Well, you start getting thousands of emails a week and you're like, "Okay, I can't do that anymore. Or I won't do it. I'm choosing not to." So now I have staff who monitor that for me. If I need to know about it, I will find out. Then my private inbox is actually very manageable. I spend less than 30 minutes a day on it. It's easy. So you got to figure that out and when you don't figure it out, you're overwhelmed all the time.
By the way, since At Your Best release, iOS 15 came out and they did something I asked for in the book. I'm sure because they read the book. You now have focus modes. So you used to have, do not disturb. I've had my device on disturb, do not disturb for years, but now you have focus modes. So when you're at work, you can block out everybody, but allow like 5, 10, 15 people to ring through. When you're at home, you can flip it and let a different group of people ring through so that you can protect your family time. And you can customize it based on the time of day or where you are. So I would encourage people to take a look at that because otherwise, every time you look at it, you have all those like red badges on your phone and you're just overwhelmed all the time. You should shut those off. Get rid of the notifications. Only allow a handful of people to ring through at the right time, in the right way and the world will function without you responding every 15 seconds to inbound messages.
[TYLER]
I think that those are all challenges for people with a high level of responsibility, but I believe if you put focus your responsibility to those relationships that deserve the most, then it becomes real easy to filter through that. To me, that's what you've kind of suggested, and I agree with, and that's one of the practices that I've had. I've noticed that the recent update is you have those focuses. I've used those limits and it's really helped. So I thank you for sharing that. I think one of the things that I hear, I feel, I sense and I realize that relationships go like this, we have times where we ebb and flow, where we're growing into different places in life.
I know for, say my wife or her counterparts or women that I work with, I tend to find that it's harder for them to understand that relationships are going to ebb and flow. So in other words, those six to 12 people that are important in your endeavor today are going to be maybe different in six months. But as you shared, I think it's so important to just accept that for what it is and know it doesn't mean you're cutting the person out of your life. It's just saying, "Hey, right now, my focus is on these relationships for this reason," and it just ebbs and flows through that.
[CAREY]
Yes, I think that's right. I've also realized, and this is kind of sad, but I think a reality of just human life is sometimes relationships are there for a season. Like if you think about your closest three to five, they're probably different than they were a decade ago because you moved or you moved on or your interest changed or whatever. Even your best friends sometimes morph over time. That's okay. That's all right. Now I really believe that and I think the longest friendships are the best and we have some multi-decade friendships that we wouldn't trade for anything. But yes, you have to, like your bandwidth is fixed.
[TYLER]
Well, and I would even ---
[CAREY]
It's like your dishwasher. You can only fit so many plates and cups into it and then it's full. I promise you, your relational bandwidth can take a lot less than your dishwasher.
[TYLER]
I would probably gather that as well, no matter how big your dishwasher is, but to use that analogy as dishes, like you can have dishes in your cabinets that you love and appreciate that maybe you only fit a certain season, but it doesn't mean that you're going to throw them out in the trash instead of washing them. I think that's how I look at some of these relationships and ideas. I think that can, if you were feeling responsible to those, instead of saying, I'm just going to set that aside because right now I need to focus on what I need to focus on. Going back to that phone, you could toggle your phone on different focuses and it doesn't mean that you've forgotten about those relationships. It's just right now is not the place for it.
[CAREY]
Yes, and I'm not saying ignore everybody. What I am saying is inbound, like I was a minute late for this, which I hate being late, but my doorbell literally rang and it was our postman. He said, "I got to see you to be able to deliver this." I'm like, "Okay, okay." I said, you have my permission because we have couriers all day. But your phone is kind of like that. Like imagine that that was somebody knocking at your door every time there was a text, every time there an email, every time somebody likes something on social, every time somebody messaged you on Instagram, that that was like a knock on your door. You wouldn't live. You would get a restraining order against all these people and tell them, stay off my property and put up a gated like fence and you're not allowed in and have security cameras.
It's like, I need my peace and privacy. Leave me own people. I'm trying to sleep. But we have this device and we allow it to come into our lives and just interrupt us left, right, and center. And research shows that if you're interrupted, once it takes you about 25 minutes to refocus. So one interruption in this conversation to really get your brain back to where it was before 25 minutes. As you know, if you're creative, like I am, sometimes you're working on a really good idea, you get an interruption and you go back to it and you're like, now what was I thinking about and you can't remember because you're human. And sometimes those ideas are just gone. So try to find distraction-free space.
[TYLER]
Well, Carey thank you so much for joining me. I'm so excited about your book, At Your Best. I'm excited for it to be part of the Impact Driven Leader book club here later this year. So thank you for writing it. Thank you for sharing it. Thank you for spending time with myself and our audience today. I really appreciate it. Thank you to Brad, Brad, Lamenik for connecting us and great shoutout. Great friend.
[CAREY]
Thanks Tyler.
[TYLER]
A piece that I really took away from that conversation with Carey was this whole idea about you can't just do and do and do, and then finally take a vacation. That doesn't work. It's kind of like, as I'm sitting here thinking now it's kind of like throwing all your expenses on your bank account and then after all your expenses have been debited realizing, oh, I need to put 5,000 or a thousand or whatever thousands of dollars, hundreds of dollars into your bank account to cover all your expenses. It doesn't work. If you're not making weekly routine deposits and not spending as much as what you're putting in, you're going to run out of business. You're going to be broken. You're going to be bankrupt. To me that was, as I'm sitting here and I'm thinking, it's when we create a budget and a plan and we look at seasons and we look at those things.
As he talked about in the different green, yellow, red outlines, where are you at in your day? If you're packing as much good stuff into the green and then seeing what's in the yellow and red, man, that's, what's going to allow your engine to continue to operate. But here's what I also know. It's what's going to allow you to be the best leader that you can be, to make the impact that you're looking to make. I know times where I'm stretched thin man, people don't want to be around me. My wife, my kids, anyone else they've told me far enough times, but it's also where I know that being tapped into community with others to be engaged with them is when I get fueled up and I kind of stay in line.
I'm thankful. I have a couple of those groups. I'm thankful that we have the round table here as the part of the Impact Driven Leader community really help us work through that as well. I invite you to be a part of that. I also would love for you to, if you're just listening to this episode, subscribe, get notifications for the new upcoming episodes, comment. I'd love to read your comments. I'd love to know what value you got out of this episode. That way I can hopefully keep bringing more value to you, make your time worth it. Thank you for listening in today. Can't wait to finish off the rest of 2021 in an amazing fashion. Next week's guest, man, get ready for it. It's going to be a great conversation.
