What Pain Taught Me About Leadership | Ep 282
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And what I realized is like, what if letting go is my strength? And what if the way to do things and to get bigger isn't to have more control, it's to let go and only have control over the things that are the most important and you get the most leverage from? What's up, guys? Welcome back to Build. And today we have a special episode coming straight from my couch.

with me posted up. And I really want to talk to you guys about this. So I said, screw it. Like, I don't have my recording set up, but I really want to just get this out and share kind of what I've been going through and the lessons that I'm learning because I think I'm in a spot where I can talk about that. And really what I wanted to talk about today is losing control. And I wouldn't even say it's like losing control. I would say it's

gaining freedom. And I think it's something that a lot of people don't talk about when you're a really high performer, you know, you own a business, you're a CEO, you're just trying to be better in life, right? You spend most of your life trying to get control, you try to get control of your body, you try to get control of your time, we try to just all the outcomes, relationships, friendships, etc. And then when you have it, it's like the idea of letting go feels like a failure, it feels foreign, it feels like you don't even know how to do that. And

What I've learned over the last, I want to say six months, is how to let go of control and the freedom that you get from that. Because at some point, and you know, everybody has told me this my whole life, at some point, you'll be forced to stop.

Right. You'll be forced to rest. You'll be forced to avert your attention elsewhere. And for me, the last six months, that's been my health. I've been in pain. I finally have surgery. And now, you know, hopefully I'll be out of pain. I know many of you have been asking what I had done. I don't really feel like revealing the details of that, but I'll just say like it had to do with my stomach. And so that being said, I was forced to rest and.

Yeah.

It was so hard for me. Six months ago was probably the hardest time I'd gone through in, I want to say 15 years. Just really dark, being in pain all the time, seeing doctors, nobody knowing what was wrong because you're seeing the wrong doctors. I mean, it's just like I've learned so much about health and my body and advocating for myself throughout this time. And it's completely averted me away from what I was doing with my business. And here's the thing that's crazy. The thing that's crazy is things are going so well in my business.

That's what's crazy. And I have never been the kind of person who can't delegate. Obviously, I teach that. I'm very good at delegating. I've never been the kind of person who suppresses others. I always empower them. But to truly be out, like I cannot go into my office. I cannot be there. I fly and I have surgery in a different state and I'm gone for weeks and I'm not responding. And the business goes crazy.

incredibly well. If not, it continues to improve and grow without me there. And, you know, for somebody who's used to, you know, running a very large company, training really hard, managing teams, being hyper present every room,

I at first felt like I didn't even know who I was. It was like a sense of identity, right? And it made me uncomfortable as fuck. Like it was very hard. And not even just because I was in pain, but because I wasn't in control. You know, I wasn't there leading the meetings. I wasn't there being able to support my teammates. I wasn't there making the decisions and I wasn't productive in the way that I'm used to measuring myself. Like I am used to being so productive, but I

That's what's crazy is that looking back and looking at the progress of my business, I'm like, wow, even with me at like very low capacity and all these other people stepping in and doing things, my business has grown more and faster without me.

The team that I hired and put in place, they've thrived. The people that I worked very closely with have stepped up and the systems that I've put in place have held and if not gotten better. And so the first time in my life, I feel like I've been really smacked in the face with this lesson.

which is maybe my strength is not in having control, but my strength is in letting go. And I recognize that I've had all these beliefs about how I need to hold on so tight. I need to control. I need to, that's not even just like that. It's just like, I want things to go well. I want people to love working for me. I want people to love interacting with my business. I want people to have a great experience. Like I just, it probably comes from a people pleaser place. And what I realized is like,

What if letting go is my strength? And what if the way to do things and to get bigger isn't to have more control, it's to let go and only have control over the things that are the most important and you get the most leverage from? And so, you know, I think the thing is, is I see so many people that think if they stop, everything's going to crumble.

But the reality is, is if your company can't grow without you, then you really just have a job that you've built around yourself. And I think to a degree, anybody who's especially the CEO of the company, like that's a job. However, if,

your identity collapses the moment that you're not the utmost productive, leading and grinding and suffering. I don't actually think that that's resilience. And I think what I've realized to a degree for myself is that it's fragility and it's just disguised as resilience. It's disguised as being tough, but it's not being tough. It's acting out of fear. And I had to confront

I didn't have a choice. You know, I haven't been well and I've had to rest and I've had to be home and I haven't been able to go into the office and I haven't been able to do as much content. I haven't been able to be on stage. I haven't been able to do podcasts. I haven't been able to lead big meetings. Like I haven't been able to do all those things. And I realized that my ability to produce, to grind, to lead, it is such an important skill. But if I do not also have the ability to rest and

and to step back and to let go and to check out, then I'm fragile. And the most resilient system is what wins. The most flexible system is what wins. And so I really started looking at rest as a skill, not as something I'm failing at. That's, I would say, like one of the biggest things I've learned. And I really had this realization that most people fail.

quit when they need to rest. And, you know, thinking for myself, like the idea of quitting has never been an option for me. I really just fucking love what I do. I do. But I don't want the me operating at an 11 out of 10 capacity all the time to be something that hurts my body or hurts my relationships or hurts my life. And so when I started not feeling well and having all these weird symptoms, like I realized, like, I think I'm pushing way too hard.

And I've always been good at pushing. I've always been a great pusher. It's never a thing. It's like I'm very good at suffering. I'm very good at taking the pain. I'm a pain taker. But resting, resting, I always equated to quitting. And so I've really learned that rest is its own kind of work, right? Like it takes discipline to sit still when other people are executing and it takes discipline

a lot of humility and humbling yourself to let people that you've trained run with it and not pass things by you and do things that you used to do, right? And I think it takes like a lot of strength to believe that you're still valuable even when you're not

producing at the highest level. And that's been the biggest lesson that I've learned is just that I cannot equate my value to the hours that I work, to the control I have in my business, to the, you know, every single little thing that's happening because it's not helpful. And it doesn't help you when you are forced at some point to rest. And I think that

you know, all in all, real control comes from the internal, right? And a lot of times I think the control actually, I think what's much more powerful is acceptance. You know, it's being okay with the fact that, you know, you can't produce at a 10 out of 10 level all the time. It's being okay with not knowing maybe the exact date that you'll get back to normal. Maybe you have kids, maybe you got a divorce, maybe someone died, maybe you're sick, maybe it's health, right?

It's trusting that your value doesn't just like evaporate into thin air because your output slows down. That means we find peace without needing performance to justify it. That is probably one of the biggest lessons that I've learned is,

You can find peace without performing. And for me, it's been incredibly helpful. And this will be a short episode because I am lying down. But just here to say, if you're in a season where you've had to step back, whether by force or by choice, just know, you know, you're not your output. The strongest people that I know are not the ones who do everything.

They're the ones who built something that can keep working even when they can't. So that being said, I appreciate you guys. I miss you guys. I'm excited to get back to making content when I'm feeling better and more recovered. And hopefully I can provide you with some more snippets. Until then.