FROM DELOITTE AND FASTCO WORKS: The Mental Health Key — A conversation with Deloitte’s Deb Golden and Andy Dunn (Part Two)
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Hey, Most Innovative Company listeners, it's Josh here. Today we have the next episode in Lead Through Disruption, our special mini-series from our friends at Fasco Works and Deloitte. Enjoy! Brought to you by Deloitte Cyber and Strategic Risk. Helping your organization drive peak performance through crisis and transformation. So no matter where you're at in your journey, you can move forward fast.

I'm Deb Golden, Deloitte's US Chief Innovation Officer, and this is Lead Through Disruption. As businesses look for new ways to maximize opportunities and innovate in a post-pandemic landscape, some of the strongest leaders emerging are those who've had to navigate and endure professional and personal disruptions in their lives. Through these challenging moments, these individuals have embraced curiosity,

creativity, and the courage to think outside the box and have re-imagined the possibilities of what could be. They've forged new paths and have broken barriers that changed the way we experience the world today and see the potential of tomorrow. In finding their resilience, they've been able to turn these bold moves into lasting change and have inspired others at every level.

Welcome back for part two of our two-part interview with Andy Dunn, entrepreneur, founder, and CEO. We left off in part one discussing Andy's perspectives on risk-taking as an entrepreneur and how taking a universal view of risk has helped him navigate difficult decisions. In part two, we dive a bit more into the subject of Andy's recent memoir, Burn Rate, Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind, which discusses how a mental health diagnosis played an integral part in Andy's journey.

an inspiring discussion around how Andy reclaimed his mental health and in turn, the life lessons that have come into focus for him, layering in his personal struggles that in some way ignited the success of his many endeavors.

You've thrown out there a little bit around the connection between obviously your own mental health journey and entrepreneurship, but maybe we can, for our listeners who might not be familiar with some of the connectivity there, both in your own journey, but also maybe I'll throw out a couple of statistics and then we can dive a little bit into your journey as we think about

and or positively or negatively correlations that have been made in the field around the struggles and highs and lows of entrepreneurship. And so a recent study by psychiatric support, Michael Freeman and the team at UC San Francisco said,

stated that almost half of entrepreneurs deal with mental health issues compared with 32% of non-entrepreneurs. The same study found that bipolar affects 11% of entrepreneurs compared with just 1% of non-entrepreneurs in depression, 30% versus 15%. I think the one thing we can all say, and again, it doesn't matter which study you've read, with the pandemic, mental health has altered drastically with the pandemic for a number of reasons. And certainly,

At the end of your book, which obviously a huge, huge reader of it. So Burn Rate, you contemplate whether you could have succeeded with or without your own mental health journey. And so maybe we could share a little bit on both your thoughts when you were writing the book about how mental health has impacted your journey. But I'm also intrigued in the last handful of years since writing the book, you know, have your thoughts changed? Yeah, it's such a fun one.

I was with a group of folks yesterday from an accelerator called One Mind, which is a mental health not-for-profit where the leader of the enterprise has experienced schizophrenia. The family went through, as you might imagine, such a difficult time with that. His name's Brandon Stagelin. He's leading this really special mental health research group.

mental health not-for-profit, and they have an accelerator of companies who are building mental health tech. And someone asked me, "Well, why are you building another company?"

And I made a joke that I wanted to see if I could build a great company when I'm on so much medication. And I guess I'm really fortunate in that I have a great doctor and I have great psychiatric medication. And it's something that I wish for everyone. And it's a fundamental challenge in our society that we have issues with affordability and access to mental health care. Because it's hard to have the mental illness that I have, bipolar 1,

and still feel like you have access to a wide range of moods, that you can still access peak experiences, you don't feel numb, but wall off, ideally do your best to wall off the frightening extremes, which are mania, psychosis, or going off the rails on the high side of mood.

And then all the issues on the low side, both mild and severe depression, as well as suicide, which has, you know, there's devastating statistics around bipolar one and suicide. 60% of folks with bipolar one will at some point attempt suicide based on the backwards looking data. I hope that changes. And to date, it's been about 19% of people with bipolar one end up dying by suicide.

So it's a terrible illness, and yet it's eminently treatable if we have access to care. And so on my new venture, I want to prove two things. First, neurodiversity can in fact be an asset. And also addressing that and checking that neurodiversity as best one can

need not impede building great things and building new things. And so it's this paradox, and I'm really excited to be at TED next week talking about the role of delusion in innovation, which is there is a right amount of magical thinking required to conjure things that don't exist.

And yet there is also a too much. And it comes back to that idea of walking this knife's edge between fantasy and reality. For my part, I would prioritize people taking care of their health first and foremost. It's not worth the risk. It's not worth it if there's a health crisis

even if that produces some wonderful things for society. And I think we can do it. I think we can do great things. We can harness the assets from our neurodiversity and still work to keep ourselves and each other healthy. Neurodiversity in and of itself provides yet another angle of that complexity of the world to be able to envision. If we can't envision that we can change it, we won't change it.

And to be able to have almost a boundless view, to be able to even draw up what it might look like is, again, I think what's going to be broadly provide even more access as we talk about access, whether it be to mental health care, access to food and water, just access to sustenance. There's going to need to be a lot of creative thinking. And so being able to harness that thought process is,

is really important. I think to your point, I'm curious, you know, how you've been on your journey walking that edge. You have to have an incredibly disciplined support team.

And so maybe you could talk a little bit about your support team. I know you do a lot for both mental and physical health from what you eat, how much sleep you get, the things that you do in your own kind of journey. But that also comes with a support team and whether mental diagnosis or not having a support team is critical. So maybe you could talk a little bit about your support team. Yeah, totally. The first thing is psychiatric medication. A lot of people have an objective to get off of it.

We often declare with pride, well, I'm not on the antidepressants anymore or fill in the blank. I don't take it anymore. I have a different objective, which is to always be on psychiatric medication, right? Because I have a condition that necessitates it. I have a condition that doesn't, at least for me, I don't have the freedom to go off my meds.

And so the job isn't to figure out how to get to a place of wellness that doesn't require it. It's to get to the right titration of the right medications for the right moods so that I can endure with it. So it's a different objective. And it's a beautiful thing that we have these medications. I mean, Van Gogh might have been thrilled to be on lithium or Lamictal, right? Right.

but wasn't availed. At least I don't think. I don't know how far back lithium goes. Maybe it wasn't. That's one. Two is I accept the frequency with which I have to see a mental health professional and I frame it as a benefit rather than a burden. And for me, that's twice a week. So I want to make sure that I don't have more than 72 or 100 hours pass without having

A psychiatrist lay eyes on me, assess where I am, and it's a lot. Every Tuesday morning and every Friday afternoon, I have a 45-minute conversation with a doctor. Also, we've talked about this, it's ridiculously expensive, and I think we need mental health insurance the way that we have vision and dental insurance.

but that's a conversation for another day. And you know, it's annoying. It's annoying to interrupt your day and get into a therapy dynamic sometimes. And I try to train myself, this is the cost of doing business as someone with bipolar one. And by the way, what a privilege to be able to do the work on oneself, to be in therapy with a great doctor, and to have that be kind of bedrock to my life and all the ways that that helps me hopefully show up

at work and at home and with loved ones in a better way than if I weren't in therapy. That's the mental health care part. Then there's sleep. Sleep is, I think, important for all of us. And for me, it's a massive lagging or leading indicator of mood. And so if I'm going lower and lower on sleep, that usually means I'm going higher and higher on mood. And if my sleep is going longer and longer, that usually foretells a depressive episode.

And so I wear this handy Fitbit, and every morning I have a sleep report that lays out light sleep, deep sleep, REM, and time awake. I take a screenshot of it, and I send it to a WhatsApp group that includes my wife, my doctor, my mom, and my sister. And it's kind of...

emasculating to like report out on one sleep every day. Like I call sometimes my Fitbit my parole bracelet. But it's such great data for everyone to have so that they can be aware. Because the thing about bipolar is when you're too far gone, you can't help yourself by definition. You're not able to self-intervene. And so having people around you who might be lulled into the idea that you're doing well

Giving them a data point so that they can kind of see what's coming Enabling them to coordinate if they need to in a crisis with my doctor That's another part of the foundation and so if I'm seeing a doctor if I'm on my meds and if I'm transparent about my sleep to me that is like bedrock and then okay great if I'm Exercising even better eating. Well, you know, there's really interesting stuff in metabolic psychiatry and

There's ways to get better and better, but those are the three non-negotiables. Because without any one of those three, I could slip into depression or slip up into dangerous levels of hypomania and then mania. And neither of those are, back to our conversation about risk, neither of those are acceptable risks for me at this point in my journey. I'm just curious, I mean, how in that same period

vein of that journey when you think about whether it's conscious or unconscious bias, particularly in mental health and your ability to share. I mean, not only your ability to share your diagnosis with obviously those that are close to you, you obviously have investors, co-investors, employees, stakeholders, and you've been very transparent about your diagnosis. You know, what are some things that

either people listening could do to help because it's still a staggering statistic that

don't share with their employers these types of diagnoses because of the bias that's considered or because of the shame that's considered associated with mental health because we don't, in today's day and age, treat it like if it was a heart attack or if I need to go to see an eye doctor to get glasses. And yet we talk about it quite a bit and the need for it to change. Are there things that you think either an individual subconsciously

suffering could do to help with that and or those of us who have the ability to listen to others can help to shed some of that bias? Yeah, for sure. I think the first thing is to observe that no one is free from mental health challenges, whether there is a diagnosis or not. I don't think one makes it

certainly to the age of 40, without having been thrown on their ass in some way, shape, or form, such that there were very challenging mental health repercussions. Let's set aside the data from the University of California, San Francisco study, which is a remarkable one, by the way, that talks about depression and ADHD and bipolar disorder.

Let's look at relationships, right? The demise of a relationship or a marriage, the passing of a loved one, you know, which we all face, grief, issues with substance use and addiction, financial stress, even things that portend good, right? Whether that's a new job or a move or

loneliness, there's social isolation. There's just no way to avoid dealing with hard stuff mentally. And so if you can, and if we can all include ourselves in the idea of difficult mental health moments, then there is no other rising required to process someone else's challenges. Yes, my bipolar one may be a more severe mental health condition,

than someone going through an acute episode of grief after the passing of a loved one. But let's be honest, I don't know. I'd rather have bipolar I today with great medication than have just lost a loved one. I'm in a better place mentally today, even though I have a severe mental illness, than people who are going through an acute crisis of some other cause who may have no underlying diagnosis whatsoever.

And so it's somewhat arbitrary that we look to the diagnosis or the condition of

as what puts one in a bucket of having quote unquote mental health issues. And I've been on some hilarious podcasts where some people have said to me, well, I've never been through any mental health issues, so let me know. And I think to myself, that's a mental health issue right there, right? That's called, I don't know what, a profound lack of self-awareness or some other form of narcissism, I don't know. So that's one.

We all deal with stuff. And then two, and this one's critical, is we have to separate, let's say it is a mental illness, which is where the stigma is the most profound. We have to separate one's illness from their identity. We shouldn't say that someone is bipolar. We should say that they have bipolar. We say that someone has cancer, not that they are cancer. And so there's this weird thing we do with mental health that we frequently don't do with physical health.

i guess we used to do it from what i understand cancer used to be spoken about in hushed tones even within my own lifetime hiv and aids were spoken about with hushed tones

Certainly, even sexuality was spoken about in hushed tones within my own lifetime. One had to hide one's sexuality. In some places, one still does. We need to say, this actually isn't the same as someone's identity. I am not bipolar. That is to equate me with a disorder. No, I have it. It's different. And so I think if we can accept the difference between an identity and an illness—

That then frees us up to say, oh, okay, this is just a part of Andy's story. There's much more to him than that. And okay, let me help him with that part of a story if it's appropriate, but it doesn't fundamentally change his identity. And I think when we make that separation, it will enable people to bring their full selves to the workplace because they'll be able to say, hey, Deb, just, you know, this is what's going on for me, or this is what's going on in my family. And it'll be like, okay, yeah.

That's just another thing that's going on for that person. Maybe it'll become acute. But now I know so that I'm in a position to help. And oh, by the way, I'm not immune either. I may not have that issue or a diagnosis, but life's hard for me too.

Yeah, I think sometimes people just also don't know how to react or respond. And sometimes it's as simple as listening. And I think particularly when you talk about, I'll say any invisible disease, so whether that's mental health, I suffer from a severe autoimmune disease. When you have

People who can't see that, I think they also assume, A, there's nothing wrong, or B, if there is something wrong, they can't physically see it. So it's not an open wound unless it's a situation, whether you're having a manic episode or I'm physically almost dying, right? When you can actually see it at that point, it's probably far too gone for people to actually have an impact other than saving you. And so I think, at least for me, one of the things is how do we help vocalize that?

the art of listening and asking questions when people don't necessarily see the things that are leading up to ultimately what would be any sort of episode. Because I think we tend, particularly in pandemic days, particularly in days when everything's on Zoom, you know, we don't necessarily ask questions

And spend five minutes saying, how are you doing today? What's going on? How can I help you? And actually, listen, we're running from thing to thing to thing to thing. And instead of taking that moment to take a step back because we don't see that somebody has a cold or we don't see that somebody's in the hospital, that's not necessarily to infer that there's not something going on with them, whether positive, negative, mental, or physical. It's almost that it's invisible. And so therefore, how do we teach and educate and help people want to have

that time to be empathetic and not necessarily know how to solve things, but how to ask questions and listen to somebody. Yeah, that's right. I think there's two amazing things you raised there. One is how do we react or show up in a way that invites disclosure? And you nailed it, which is actually the best thing to do often is a non-reaction other than to listen and accept.

and offer, you know, a reassuring smile. Because when, for me, speaking for myself, when I, prior to the book and making this a very public disclosure, what I was most looking for was a negative reaction. And so the absence of a negative reaction, just a, oh, thanks for sharing. And it's not a big deal. It doesn't change anything. Not minimizing it.

But, okay, oh, got it. You know, thanks for sharing that with me. I even had one woman say, oh, that's, thanks for telling me about that. That's like you're telling me you've got a green sweater in your closet. I didn't know that there was a green sweater there, but now I do. And I think she was intuitive and sensed that for me it was a momentous disclosure that

So recognizing that we are not all mental health professionals, we are not all in a position to be helpful in that way, but we can all deploy our empathy, our listening, and just by the way that we listen and our body language and facial expression, the way we lean in, the warmth that we can show and deploy in that moment makes someone feel so much more at ease.

And then the thing that we can do to create those conditions is to volunteer with our own vulnerable disclosure. And so I encourage all leaders to at least once a quarter share a vulnerable fact about their life to their teams.

It can be at the beginning of a staff meeting. It can be something that you share one-on-one and just say like, hey, here's what I'm dealing with right now. You may not have known this about me, but I deal with depression. I'm not in a great spot. Or you know what? My daughter's going through a hard time right now. She's facing a lot of bullying at school and it's just weighing on me. And just that little micro comment can change the culture.

Because what that says is, oh, this is a human versus just this, I don't know, stoic leader or whatever. And also now I have an invitation to reciprocally share. And if leaders don't create those conditions, it's unlikely that those conditions will arise. And my pitch to folks is it will actually make you a better leader because it turns out that vulnerability builds more influence than strength.

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I think the more we can share our stories, the more people will realize also they're not as different as everybody else might think they are. Because I think sometimes when you do have anything, it doesn't matter what you have, you could have a green thumb or a purple arm, you tend to identify as being different. And I also think the more that you actually share your story, the more you realize not only how similar you are to others, but how others can actually then

affiliate with you perhaps in a different way than they otherwise would have. Because candidly, that's individual that I was talking about. We had historically not had the best of relationships. And so it was interesting that now we're actually probably some of the closest people that we would have ever expected to be. So it's also interesting, your own flip of your own mind that you can make in these types of situations, realizing that you're not really that different. Totally. And one of the best parts about publishing Burn Rate has been

recognizing in the best possible way that no one really cares about me. They care about themselves and their families. And when they hear my story or if I'm lucky enough for them to read about it, it lights up their own life story, their own journey, their own issues in their family. And it creates permission to bring that up.

And I've been on the receiving end now of thousands of stories, some of them in person, most of them on social media DMs. It's everywhere. Whatever it is, it's everywhere. Let's call it human psychological strife from something. And

By the way, it's actually the engine for connection is the disclosure. I recently was reading a wonderful book called Platonic by Dr. Marissa Franco that's about the under-discussed history and art of platonic friendship. And she posits that there are two ingredients in the formation of a platonic friendship. Seeing each other in a small group basis five to 10 times, and then at some point,

for reasons that are hard to figure out, a mutually vulnerable sharing. That's the engine for friendship. And so we'll be better friends and we'll have better friends if we can just be honest about the stuff that we're dealing with. And obviously Brene Brown has built a large empire on this idea of vulnerability and her Netflix special is amazing and her books as well.

Because it's an underappreciated superpower that is, it's on the move. And it's great to hear your story about the woman who you connected with and the example that you were able to play. And it's something that I've noticed to take a gender frame on it with men is men hold a false hypothesis frequently about what strength is. It is assumed to be the projection of

of strength, a stoic, stiff upper lip or what have you. And the truth is, is that there is room for that.

There is room for stoicism and the power that comes from, let's call it the freedom from fear. And also, it is a massive missed opportunity to think that sharing tears or expressing what would typically be called weakness is weak when it's actually strong. Matt, it might just be about finding your greatness, right? Because

I mean, I like to believe that we've all become accepting of this word called normal. And I kind of want to break the myth of nothing is normal. I mean, I just don't, normal is acceptance or complacency. And I think we also create this bias around what we expect that to be. And if we expect a senior executive to be stoic or we expect something like, maybe we should take the expectation of normal out and think about,

What will help not only each of us, but others grow in that capacity? Because I think going all the way back to the beginning of the podcast, when we started talking about kind of what's in it for you and debating things, you'll realize the generation, your own, somebody else's, three kids from there, 12 adults from there, that you're having that natural impact on because you're simply sharing a part of who you are and you're solving problems.

problems that, again, I think go beyond this hypothesis of what is normal. Because I think when we start to say what that expectation is, we are missing out on an opportunity of much greatness if we expect normal to be the same for everyone. And I just think that that's a hypothesis we should really start to debate because I think it's a myth. And as we think about the things that we've been talking about today, whether it be bias or myths, is there something

you think you want to tackle around a myth that's out there that you're like, I absolutely want to break this myth, or this is the next thing I'm trying to break around some myth that's out there for you. Wow. I love that. Well, I'd echo what you said around normal being a myth. I recently read a

piece around how there's no such thing as a political moderate. There just are like eight or nine different issues that we tend to kind of like bucket. Well, there's extremism here and extremism there, and then everything is moderate. But the truth is, it's all a complex, like weighted average calculation across positions.

and that if you actually do the segmentation on it, there's no such thing as a moderate. There's just a different blend of points of view on different things. And I know we're talking about mental health, not politics, but I think it's true. There is no such thing as normal, and accepting that, to me, is very freeing. Who would want to be a normal person anyway? You know what I mean? It sounds like money. It's not aspirational anyways. No one in Gen Z thinks of themselves as normal. Now I'm talking about Gen Z again. Yeah.

Okay, so a myth. I think the myth I'm trying to bust in my day job right now is the idea that technology is going to continue to drive us apart or that smartphones are mostly or can be, particularly in young people, although I don't think it's just young people,

drivers of social isolation. So my new company is called PyLabs, and our mantra is more social, less media. And we want to build products that are actually social, and we'll have a lot more to say about that soon. Because funnily enough, what we call social media is an anti-social experience.

A social experience, by definition of the word, is when you're in communion with other people in real life or connecting, let's say, if it is a digital conversation. Our hypothesis is that if we did in some ways use technology to drive ourselves apart, to increase human isolation, loneliness, rates of depression, so many things that we're seeing in the data, that it might be that we can use it to glue things back together, that we can reconnect together.

through it. And our focus is actually on convening people in real life. How do we use technology to decrease friction to small group communion? That's what we're working on. And we'll see. I'm confident that that will not only be a necessity, because especially as the world, quote unquote, gets back together, being able to do that in ways that find synergy. Again, I just think about the art of the possible. If you put

minds together that perhaps otherwise wouldn't be together. Just think about the relationships, the problems, the opportunities that we can create. So I'm confident you're going to be successful at busting that myth a bit about technology. So you got one more person in your corner because I think that's definitely an area where we're

going to see a big shift over the next couple of years. So you're once again, ahead of technology here, so to speak. So, all right, well, we're going to get into one or two more last questions. I could literally talk to you all day long, but I know we've got to get through the rest of our questions. So as I think about where we've been and the journey and I've listened, there's so much about what you shared and I think your own

Evolution, particularly as you touched a lot on your own spiritual journey and recognizing how much of that is now influencing kind of where you're looking at your life. What's the thing that you've done say in the last year or the thing that you're looking forward to in the next year that really will push you outside of your comfort zone?

Comfort zone is an interesting thing, too, because we could all debate whether or not we actually have a comfort zone or not. But something that you feel like you're pushing yourself in different ways than you would have pushed yourself before. Yeah, I mean, right now I'm just trying to watch less TV late at night so I can get up earlier in the morning and see my son. It's a bit of a glib comment, but I did take a lot of inspiration from...

Atomic Habits, which is going around a bit now. And one of the things I hadn't really thought about was the power of compounding when it comes to micro choices. And like sort of like a weird example of this would be

like today, the schedule's a little tight, I'm going to Vancouver tomorrow, there's not really time to exercise. But it's sunny out, I know those sun rays will be good for me, whether or not there's some tanning effects or not. And so if I define the stakes as I don't have time to work out, then I won't do it at all. But if I say to myself, you know what, I've got this window where I can go for a walk for 30 minutes while I do that call,

I'm going to go get like, I don't know, three, 4,000 steps and some sunshine. So do I like raise the white flag on not working out today or find a way to keep the compounding of some activity going, even if that's just by going for a walk?

And my wife taught me this, which is just go for a 20-minute jog or something. It's like, 20 minutes? It's not going to do anything for me. But Atomic Habits makes it clear that the power is in the compounding. It's in not having the day of regression. So do I have time to learn Portuguese? No. But do I have time to do a 20-question thing on Duolingo every day that might result in me one day being a little bit better at Portuguese? I do.

So what I'm working on in 2023 is how do I decrease my personal need for greatness and just accept modest gains, tiny, modest accomplishments?

And so I was like, well, I read this book and she's like, why is it that you always have to go seek external validation for something that I already told you to do? And then come back to me all excited. And I'm like, yes, that is a, that is another thing to work on. And, you know, I just finished a book a few weeks ago or whatever, and it's,

It's having an impact. So it's nice when you read something and you can start to feel a change that might come if you can stick with it. No, I'm definitely a believer of doing small things that may or may not lead to something larger. And funny enough, we must be a little bit of the same brain. I went for a walk this morning. I happened to have some time. I thought I was only going to take a 30-minute walk on a call. I ended up walking for almost three hours on calls. It was on calls the whole time, but it was absolutely beautiful outside. And

I actually also just realized how much more at peace I was that the meetings were not easy meetings by any stretch of the imagination, but just being out away from the laptop, away from the screen, in the fresh air, in the sunshine. What started as 30 minutes was my only expectation. And then when I finally looked down, I was like, wow, I've been walking for three hours. So I also think...

Had I not even said I was going to go outside for those 30 minutes, I probably wouldn't have had any of that experience. So I do think thinking in incremental bits also helps sometimes because then you also can say, well, you know what? Yeah, I did get out for 30 minutes and that was great. Versus to your point, the flip side of like, wow, I'm busy day. I'm not going to be able to do X, Y, and Z. So finding...

Any increment of time to be able to find that X is going to be, I think, helpful to be able to build things. Like I don't like running. So me waking up tomorrow saying I'm going to go run a marathon is probably not the smartest of ideas, but yeah,

saying, maybe I'm going to go run five minutes every day. And at some point that may or may not build to something else. Absolutely. It might be the case. A hundred percent. And what I love about it also is this sense of identity that emerges, right? I am the kind of person that does this thing becomes your own narrative. And so even if the accomplishments are minute, you can start to tell yourself a new story about your identity, which comes back to like

the positive impact of identity conversation, right? Going back to, we talked about separating the mental illness from the identity. Okay. Amazing for one's identity. And then on the flip side, like, wait, I'm not a writer, but wait, what if you write a paragraph a day to having just gone through the process of writing this book last year? I never thought I was a writer, you know, or an author like books. You look at a book and you're like, how the heck

Well, it turns out that you can spend four or five hours a week writing for two years and you'll have a book. It sounds like a lot in a way because four or five hours is a lot. But the way that it began was much easier, which is spend an hour writing, you know, writing an essay and put it out. And so we have these beautiful moments.

this beautiful compounding effect from small changes. Well, I absolutely love it. And I tell you what, we're going to have to have a whole nother separate conversation on the notion of external validation. So that's a whole separate conversation because you had me chuckling because I think my husband would have said the same thing that your wife said. So we'll definitely have to have a conversation on that at some point. Totally. Yeah. My wife says she has to operate by inception. Inception, the idea, go watch me do some stupid journey and then come back and try to give someone else the credit.

I love it. I love it. Well, thank you for your time. I end every podcast with the same question, which I'd love to get your perspective on, which I know might be difficult to summarize, but in one word, we'll say one word or some words with maybe a little bit of explanation. What do you think is the single most important trait or characteristic a person needs to lead through disruption in their lives? Because the entire conversation is about

Disruption will happen. It'll happen with us. It'll happen without us. It's going to happen to everyone. It doesn't just happen to one person. And so what's something that our listeners can take away from and maybe perhaps lean into a little bit more than they might otherwise? I have this like three C's framework I've been playing with and I'll have to pick one, but curiosity, candor, and courage, right? So like tell the truth and invite others to do the same, allow the best ideas to come from anywhere.

ask a lot of questions, right? First one being candor, curiosity is somewhat intuitive, but it's not in practice. Like working for Doug McMillan at Walmart, the CEO of the Fortune One, what struck me most about his leadership was he rarely gave his point of view in meetings. I assumed, you know, here's the leader of the free world from a capitalist standpoint. And he just asked great questions all the time. And I realized, oh, if you know that you have the decision, why do you need to give your opinion so much? Right.

I realized I spend so much of my time in meetings trying to persuade other people. Why? Why not give them a chance to try to persuade, right? And then courage, right? Courage is ultimately the ability to make the unpopular decision, which would be a definition of it. And I think of the three, that's probably the most important because it's the most rare. I love it. And I appreciate you and I appreciate your story and I appreciate you spending some time with me this afternoon. So thank you, Andy. Thank you. It's great to be here with you.

Andy Dunn began his entrepreneurial career by reimagining the retail experience and in turn disrupting the fashion and tech industries forever. Today, motivated by lessons learned throughout his professional and personal journey, he continues to redefine what it means to lead with candor, curiosity, and courage. Andy inspires everyone to prioritize mental health and gives permission to those around us to do the same.

It's important to remember that you never know what someone else is dealing with. And Andy reminds us that even the smallest thing, like instant affirmation, may be an open recognition to have the most vulnerable discussions. Thank you, Andy, for your authenticity and your inclusiveness.

Lead Through Disruption is produced by Fasco Works in collaboration with Deloitte Cyber and Strategic Risk. Our show was produced by Avery Miles and Matt Toder, as well as editor Nicholas Torres. We'll be back with more incredible stories from disruptors who are positively impacting change in business, culture, and society. We hope their journeys filled with curiosity, courage, and resilience inspire your own as they have countless others. I'm your host, Deb Golden. Thanks for listening.