Perry Maughmer
Well, welcome to the Potential Leader Lab podcast, and I'm your host, Perry Maughmer. And I'm excited because today, as you can see, if you're actually watching it, there's a guest. And so now you don't have to listen to me drone on endlessly for 30 minutes about something. You can listen to somebody else drone on for 30 minutes about something and I'm really excited to have Mitch. I'll introduce him in just a second. I just want to tell you, I've heard Mitch speak several times to groups that I have, and it was an amazing experience. And his message was, I guess so powerful enough. I wanted to have him on, to have him share with more people, because I think more people need to hear what he has to say. So welcome, Mitch.
Mitch Harrison
Thanks. It's great to be with you, Perry.
Perry Maughmer
All right. And think the easiest way to do this kind of. I'm going to do the intro. I'm going to let you do the intro by explaining how you came to the thing that you're doing, which is also a great intro into you yourself. So at this point, I'm going to turn it over to you and, and let you tell the story about how you actually came up with these with this with this structure, this framework that you share with people. So take it away.
Mitch Harrison
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I, I got introduced, you know, to burnout the hard way. And, you know, burnout is not one of those things that you think, you know, sometime early in your career, man, Maybe one of these days I'll get a travel around and talk to people about how not to burn out. You know, you tend to want to think of going around and sharing your success stories. But this story really came out of my own failure. I found myself several years ago, uh, burned out, man. I just hit the wall, and it was something that had never happened to me before. I mean, sure, I'd been tired. I'd needed some time off, those kinds of things, but I really never found myself in a place where, man, I just couldn't keep going. And it was much like the time that I was running this half marathon in Vegas here, and I hadn't fueled enough before the race, you know, I thought I'd done everything right, but I just hadn't eaten enough. And I got out to about a mile, 11.5, and found myself in the middle of Las Vegas Boulevard, not being able to run anymore and, you know, hit the wall as a runner. Well, I had that same experience, except this time in my work life where, man, I had just realized I just was not fueling myself correctly. Actually, at the time, I didn't really know what was going on, but I just I just hit the wall emotionally and, you know, I'd heard other guys talk about burnout. I'd heard other people talk about experiences that they'd had like that. And I kind of sloughed it off and thought, Man, that'll that'll never happen to a guy like me. I'm I work hard. I'm the guy who's got seemingly boundless energy. I can keep going.
Mitch Harrison
I can do the thing and, and then all of a sudden, you know, after a pretty tough season, after several years of going pretty hard at it, I, I found myself not being able to get it together. I went to some counseling and this was over a period of months, um, just discovering what was, what was going on and how bad of shape I was really in. My senior leader wisely sent me away to get some counseling. I spent a week with a counselor. After that, I came back and was doing a little better as I began to understand what was going on with the fatigue that I was feeling and kind of the chronic levels of fatigue that I was feeling. And uh, and then eventually took five weeks completely off of work and spent some time in some real deep self-reflection about what I had done to myself and why, more importantly, and began to find a way out of it. And it took about six months total before I started feeling like a normal human being again and again. It really caused me to have to look back and to reflect and to start asking myself some real serious questions about how I was going to manage my energy, how I was going to manage that, that this internal life, you know, that I bring to the things that I do, realizing that youthful enthusiasm was not going to save me anymore. You know, you get out past about 35 or 40 and youthful enthusiasm goes somewhere else. And I realized that I was going to have to start getting serious about making a plan to deal with this, uh, to deal with this replenishment issue that I had ignored for so many years.
Perry Maughmer
All right. So tell me. So break down the framework for people so they understand like there's five R's here, right in your framework. So kind of just quickly go through and let people know, okay, these are the things and kind of and how they fit together for me.
Mitch Harrison
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. What I discovered was that instead of just approaching it, like many people approach their replenishment, what they tend to do is to say, Well, I'm feeling a little tired, I'm feeling a little, little worn out. I'll. I'll go do this or I'll go do that. And they do just enough to keep getting by. What I realized for me was I needed an actual plan. I made plans for everything else. I discovered I really needed an actual plan. And in our organization, we actually gave people sabbaticals. So I mean lengthy times off. And I would often coach people in terms of how to take their sabbatical After the burnout and recovery and some learning, I started coaching them a lot differently. And I would ask five questions. I'd say, number one, where are you going to get some rest? Like what really is rest to you and where are you going to go find some. So when somebody would come to my office and they would have this time off staring them in the face, I would make him answer the question, Where are you going to really find some rest to set aside your work and to be able to shut down and to actually find some rest. And then the second thing I would say to them is, where are you going to find some kind of emotional where are you going to unpack your emotional bags? And, you know, in leadership, we pick up all kinds of emotional baggage along the way from people to quit to difficult decisions to just the weight of leadership that we often carry, the weight of decisions that we make that oftentimes can weigh us down or weigh on us to the really hard things where oftentimes relationships will get broken or you have to lay people off or somebody does something that just, you know, stings you in the heart.
Mitch Harrison
Somebody criticizes you deeply about who you are or what you're doing. We pick up this kind of emotional baggage as leadership. So I'd ask them, Where are you going to unpack your emotional baggage? Where are you going to release? And that was the second are where are you going to release this emotional baggage? The third one I would ask is where are you going to go to get reconnected with your sense of purpose? You know who you are and what you bring to the table. Realizing that our sense of mission and purpose and calling, if you will, is oftentimes the fuel that drives us. It's the fuel that actually gives us energy. You think about somebody who's lost their sense of purpose, what kind of energy they have. They don't have a lot. And I would ask people, where are you going to go somewhere and receive some inspiration that reconnects you with your sense of purpose and gets you back in touch with your unique contribution, the contribution that you make when you show up in a room and how are you going to restore that? Re Reconnect with that and get in touch with that.
Mitch Harrison
That's what I call receive and then the last two were simple. I would say, Where are you going to have some fun, Where are you going to go find some real recreation and have some fun, maybe have some fun that you wouldn't normally get to have over a long weekend or over a couple of days off. Where are you going to do something that just you just deeply enjoy and finding some recreation? And then where are you going to connect relationally with people that have deep meaning to you? Where are you going to connect with people that give you empathy, that encourage you, that you enjoy the time with them. You enjoy just having great conversation about anything or about nothing but that you enjoy spending time with. So those five R's develop from those questions. Where are you going to find some rest, some emotional release? Where are you going to receive some inspiration to reconnect you with your purpose, or are you going to find real recreation? And then where are you going to connect relationally with people that have deep meaning to you? And that became a framework to begin to make a real plan for personal replenishment, to keep us at our best, to keep us at an eight out of 1,080% of the time.
Perry Maughmer
And that's, that's awesome. And it's funny because it's interesting to me because I've been struggling with this myself. And it isn't, it isn't what your framework does. It's the framework itself, right? Because what you came up with and understood was an idea or a thought or whatever those aren't enough. Like there has to be a framework and I forget who said it, but there's a management thinker who said a bad system beats a good person every time. And I think that it's inherent sometimes with people that are in leadership roles. They get the idea they have to create their own. Like it's never I can't borrow somebody else's system has to be mine, like I have to make it up. And therefore we never adopt the system we keep. We take somebody's system. We're like, Oh, we'll have to tweak it. I have to do this. I have I don't like this part. I don't like that part. And I think it really robs people of the opportunity to leverage systems that exist already. Right? So just that's just a little aside that I hear when I hear this framework, because it's it maybe it isn't perfect, but you can critique it after you do it, like actually do it and then see how it works for you. Right? Because absent a system, we do nothing. We can't scale anything.
Mitch Harrison
Absolutely. Well, and we were and, you know, we talked when we were together about James Clear's book, Atomic Habits, you know, where he says in the book that it's it's really not about our goals. It's really about our systems, that we have systems that are perfectly created, that that are perfectly designed to create the experience that we're we're having. And a lot of times people come to me and they're completely dragging and they're struggling and they can't get their head above water. And I ask them, what's your system? What's your process? And they say, Well, I don't really have one. I just kind of take a day off here or vacation there or whatever. It's the absence of the system like you're talking about that really is the problem. You know, it's that thing of we don't rise. James Clear says in his book, We don't rise to the level of our goals. We sink to the level of our systems. And without a system like this of some kind, some kind of framework that gives us guidance, some kind of framework that tells us what is working, some kind of framework that tells us when it's not working, that we can look back at and gauge ourself against. We tend to wander with this issue. I find a lot of times with business leaders and Perry, I know you work with a lot of business leaders and you can attest to this. Um, they don't really have clarity around what they look like. What is their goal here? What are they working towards here? How what is their life actually look like when they're an eight out of ten? And oftentimes what ends up happening with them is they just kind of make it up as they go and never really get their head above water and end up really struggling.
Perry Maughmer
Yeah. And that's what's, I guess, the struggle, right? So when you're going across the country talking to folks and business leaders and groups of people about this, you have five R's. So we have rest, release, receive, recreate, recreate however you want to say it and relate. Right. So is there are there ones that people struggle with more than others? Are there ones where like, Oh yeah, I got this, I got this, I got this and one where they're like, Yeah, I don't, I don't know about that. Yeah.
Mitch Harrison
Yeah. You know, the, I think it's the simple and the most obvious one and that is rest. It may be simple, but it's not easy. It's very easy for us to say, Hey man, you need to get some rest. But when I talk to leaders about real rest and ask them what it feels like, when is the last time they actually felt rested? What causes them to feel rested? I get a lot of blank stares oftentimes because nobody's really thought about it. And the common theme around the rooms that I speak in is that Rest is about disconnecting from work. And that really is the crux of the issue. It's one thing to drive away from the office. It's a whole different deal to shut the work off that's going on inside our head. And that's what oftentimes I find with executives and leaders is they may have left the office hours ago, but they can't seem to shut the work off so that they can actually get some sleep so that they can actually let the system reset, that they can actually find some real rest. And so they find themselves working all the time, even though they left the office hours ago. And because of that, it can wear them out quickly.
Perry Maughmer
Yeah, One of the most fascinating things like when I heard you speak is we talk about rest, is that you ask the people like some of the folks in the room were like, When's the last time you took a vacation? And then felt like when you came back, you need a vacation. So could you explain, like what people say? Like, I know one of the folks in the room was like, the last time I took a vacation, I took my kids to go see my parents. And that was not a vacation like that was not rest.
Mitch Harrison
Exactly. Yeah. Oftentimes what we what we find is that people, you know, they. They have some time set aside to be away from the office, but they don't really have a plan for how they're going to actually spend that time in a way that's restful, that's going to bring them back more energized than they were when they left. They often pack their time off and then their vacation so full of stuff that it's not really a vacation. And then they say, well, we you know, we often say coming back is, man, now I need a vacation from my vacation. And yeah, the thing about, you know, looking at a vacation is, again, what's the standard for a great vacation? Most people just say, well, I'm away with my family, with my kids, and we're doing something that isn't in the office. And yet they've taken their office with them on their phone. They've, you know, taken their office with them on their laptop and all their work just comes with them. And they've just transferred their work from their office to wherever they happen to be vacationing. And now they've got two jobs. Now they've got to be dad or mom, They've got to be, you know, caretaker to parents or entertainer of friends or things like this. And they've got to do their job because they've got their laptop with them or their phone with them and things like that.
Mitch Harrison
It really comes down to how do you disconnect from your work and to trust your work to the people that you can trust your work to so that you can actually set it aside and find some rest. We talk about this issue in the category of rest called Toxic Responsibility, and it's that toxic responsibility that keeps us at work even when we're not in the office oftentimes. And, you know, that term actually came out of some groups that I was speaking to. As we would have conversations around this issue, I'd hear people arguing with me about their inability to get rest, but how irritated they were that they couldn't get any rest. And we kind of coined this term in one of the conversations and said, is that what we're talking about here? This this responsibility that's gone overboard, this responsibility, sense of responsibility that's gone so far, that now it's this very good and noble characteristic that every leader ought to have has become this negative that's actually wearing us out and potentially taking us out of leadership at some point because we can't seem to get past. Our sense of real responsibility and separate that from what has become toxic responsibility.
Perry Maughmer
Yeah and think some of that like I and in fact I think in one of the groups when you spoke to one of my groups, we got in kind of an argument with one of the folks because they kept they kept justifying, rationalizing. You know, they weren't really willing to give that up. Like they weren't willing to acknowledge that could be a problem. And to be honest, I it reinforces to me, I'm kind of in this place where I've I've decided that I think leading and managing should be verbs and never nouns like we should never make them nouns. And I think that that there's a there's a piece of this that that dovetails into what you're talking about. Because if I look at my like if I'm leading, if I'm, if there's activities that I'm doing that are that are I'm leading in an organization or I'm managing pieces of the organization and I'm not there anymore, then somebody else should be able to do those activities because they're not connected to me. There's not labeled to me as a human. Like if I leave those activities, don't leave with me. Yeah. And I and I think that's part of this transition is just having in some levels the humility to say, well, somebody else can do this. Not only can they do it as good as me, maybe they can do it better than me.
Perry Maughmer
Like maybe, maybe if I left, I might be pleasantly surprised. I mean, had a it was the most amazing conversation. I had a leader who said they were sitting in a meeting and they said I had this happen and this happened and this happened, these three big issues in their life and said, I was actually out of the office for three weeks. I had no choice but to be out of the office because of these succession of things that happened. And my team did an awesome job. And they did. They didn't need me and everything was great when I got back. And yet this person is then talking about how they were struggling to think they could take a one day out of the office a week. And I'm like, you know, wait a minute. You just said you were going three weeks and everything was awesome, and now you're talking about just working from home a day. Like, I explain, like, break that out for me. Yeah. And so I get it, man. I think that people just get a sense of I think it's more of a comfort. It's like they're comfortable being at work. And so that turns into they need me at work.
Mitch Harrison
Yeah, it's.
Mitch Harrison
That sense of it's that sense of control that we think we're supposed to show up with as a leader. You know, we get this idea somewhere that the leader has to have all the ideas, The leader has to know everything that's happening in the organization. The leader has to have their hands on every outcome when in actuality, the best leaders that we all know are the leaders that show up and wisely ask the right questions, the leaders that show up and stir the best out of their team and draw the best out of their team. And sometimes the best doesn't come out of your team until we as the leader are out of the way so that those people can express real leadership and express real agency in our organization. And that this idea of toxic leadership or toxic responsibility oftentimes gets in the way, not just of our own personal rest and replenishment. It actually gets in the way of us building really high-performing teams because it never really requires anything of anybody else besides ourselves. And, you know, when we take are taking all the responsibility to ourselves. Think about it. Nobody else is having to bear the weight of responsibility, and their leadership muscles are atrophying to some degree. And so we're not only not doing yourself any favors by living that way, we're not doing anybody else on our team any favors. And ultimately, we're not doing our customers. We're not doing our organization any favors by doing that, because what we're also doing is setting an example for everybody else that this is what leadership actually is when it isn't, and it cascades through the organization. And now the guy at the very edge, the people at the very edges of the organization can't take a break. They're wearing themselves out. They're not calling the best out of their teams because the person at the top is not calling the best out of them.
Perry Maughmer
Yeah, because it's I mean, you essentially are creating whatever you're doing as the leader. You're saying this is the system. Like no matter what I'm telling you, what I'm showing you is this is how leaders are supposed to behave in this organization, regardless of what I say, Right? So, yeah, I might be telling you, Hey, you should take time off. But if every time they leave, you're still in the office, then the message is, well, you work until you drop.
Mitch Harrison
Absolutely. And that's the thing about this issue is it becomes insidious in an organization where you want to set the culture of man. We are a hard working, high performing organization and there is nothing wrong with that. I am all in favor of getting people that love to work hard, that love to work well, that love to perform at a high level, and managing out the people that just want to take a nap all afternoon and get paid double for it and all those kinds of things, man, it's I'm all for that part of it. But what happens inside an organization is when sometimes when those bars are set, we forget what it requires to be a high performing person. We forget that we need periods of on and off. I mean, every high performing athlete knows that it's about stress and recovery. It's about activity and rest. It's got to be those things in the right kind of rhythms for me to perform at my best. I mean, you take a you take somebody who is, you know, like a marathoner and you tell that person, great, you can set the world record in a marathon. Do that every day for a month, somewhere in the middle of the month. They stop doing that, You know, somewhere there, they're going to need to rest. And, you know, I had a friend who actually did that one time. He did what they call the World Marathon Challenge, seven marathons on seven continents in seven days. It's crazy to think about. And he said, you know, you can do that for a little bit, but eventually you've got to rest. You've got to let your body recover from whatever stress you've put yourself under so that you can then come back and perform even better later. And it's what we do in those times of recovery that are so, so impactful to how we do in times when we are required of.
Perry Maughmer
Yeah. And I think, too, that I think at that point the rest if you think about rest and activity it's actually it's inverse right It's a ton more rest for this high level of activity like this high performance and I and I think we get those confused too. It's like we put in quantity of work versus quality of work where we're not measuring the output and how great the output is. We're saying, I'm going to do more of it when in reality the example you gave, like if you take any athlete or any great team, I mean, they're not doing that activity all the time. They're actually practicing and resting far more than they're ever performing.
Mitch Harrison
Absolutely. We're we're loving it in Vegas these days because our Golden Knights are in the Stanley Cup now. And, you know, we've been we all love watching the team. And, you know, it's funny because everybody thought Vegas people wouldn't be good hockey fans, you know, because what do we know? We're out here in the desert. We don't pay attention to things like that. But we've become great hockey fans out here in the desert and learned a lot about the game. And this is one of the things that I learned about the game that was fascinating to me that they you know, they run, they run their team in shifts. They have lines, you know, that run in shifts together. And those shifts are 45 seconds long when they're at their optimum. So in other words, they're sitting on the bench waiting and waiting and waiting, and then they get on the ice for 45 seconds at an incredibly high level, make their contribution and then get off and hand it off to the other to their other team. And when they talk about the number one line or the number two line or number three line or number four line, you know, you think it's the first string, second string, third string, fourth string. That is not how hockey works. They got to have high performers at every level so that as they take these turns on the ice, these 45 second shifts on the ice, they can show up at their very best, perform at a high level and then come back, recover, rest, and then get back on the ice for another shift and perform at a high level again.
Perry Maughmer
Right. And I think that this is what amazes me, too about us is just as learners like, you know, we're trying we're all trying to evolve. It's we know these things like we see that. We see it everywhere. And we acknowledge intellectually that, hey, this works and it appears to be a great model, but yet we have this kind of emotional attachment to the way we do things and the eight hour work day and four day, five days a week and, you know, one day, you know, two days off. And and it's just amazing how we're challenged in and of ourselves to make changes where we see the data. Like we know full well that we can get better results by doing it a different way. But it just is so challenging for us to make that change.
Mitch Harrison
Absolutely. And you know, I talk about this in the workshop, as you all know, that there is a difference between us solving technical problems and us solving adaptive problems. And Ron Heifetz and some other professors at Harvard University did some study around this. You can read it in the Harvard Business Review where they talked about these technical and adaptive kinds of problems that we face. The technical problems are relatively easy to solve. Technical problems are, hey, I need some instructions, I need an app, just give me a good tool and I can solve this problem. And they're typically solved very simply. Adaptive problems are different. They're much more complex. They take a lot more reflection. They take a lot more thought. They take a lot more soul searching. They take a lot more personal work to be done. It's the simple illustration is all of us who have ever tried to manage our physical health and our weight and those kinds of things. Nobody is confused about how it works. You know, exercise and eat right, eat less calories than you burn. And nobody is confused about the technical part of the issue. What we are mystified by is why I can't seem to make the kind of choices that I need to make to do what is I know to be good for myself. It's the most interesting thing about our human nature is that we seem to resist things that we know are good for us, and it takes there is no app to help you with that.
Mitch Harrison
There is some soul searching that has to be done around that kind of question. There are some adaptive work that has to be done to unravel that inside ourselves so that we will actually let our self do the things that we know are good for us and taking time to rest, we know that's good for us. Nobody would argue that we don't need to get good quality sleep every night. Nobody would argue that a regular exercise regimen would help us to be mentally more alert and physically at our best. Coming to the table with energy. Nobody would argue that clarifying our sense of purpose and mission as we show up to work our sense of meaningful contribution. Nobody would argue any of those things, and yet to be able to find it within ourselves, to actually do the things that we know are going to help us, that's that adaptive issue that we've. All got to do a little soul searching around. And man, I wish I had the silver bullet that I could just offer somebody to say, Here's how you unravel all your personal issues so that you'll do the stuff you need to do. And if I could figure that out, I'd be a millionaire, because that is the issue, isn't it? I mean, that's the one that we are constantly struggling with to do what we know we need to do.
Perry Maughmer
But in a sense, I think we do have the silver bullet, which is you have to do the heavy lifting, like you have to do it for yourself. I mean, we do know what the answer is and we don't. I think part of it is we don't want to sit with our own thoughts like we because just the stuff you were talking about, getting to the base of this stuff, you know, the answering the question when you're getting ready to do something, is this going to help me get closer or further away from my goal? Is it what I want now or what I want most? Right. And being able to answer that question every time we're doing something and just own the answer, like there's no wrong answer, You're not you don't have to blame yourself. And I think and actually I'm exploring this for myself and I'm going to do some writing on this issue of guilt. Like, I think that leaders possess a tremendous amount of guilt, and we have to figure out how to how to work through that because I think we're all in our personal lives. And it really there's a question and I'm going to I'm going to get it off your sheet here because I'm looking at your replenish the replenishment plan. Right. And there's a question on here that just stops people in their tracks. And I and I now I start to ask it at the beginning of every meeting, what are you caring?
Perry Maughmer
And you get.
Perry Maughmer
The most dumbfounded looks, right? And they're like, What do you mean? I'm like, Well, what do you think? I mean, like, this is you answer the question you think I asked, like, whatever it is, just that's what we want to know. What are you carrying? And people in leadership roles, if they really start like listing that out, that can be a long list. And that isn't just about what I have to do at work. You know, you said mentioned earlier, you know, aging parents and family and all these other things like do you ever stop? Does everybody ever stop and go, what am I? What is why do I feel this way? Why feel this way? Because of all this stuff I'm carrying and might have to carry it. But I also have to recognize that I'm carrying it. Yeah. I have to be open and honest.
Mitch Harrison
Yeah, absolutely. And it really is a lost art of leadership. This. This discipline of reflection, you know, man in in our American culture. And I'm not bagging on our American culture, man. I love living in America. Trust me, I've been to other places in the world and this is a great place to live. But our culture is a forward motion culture. It has become about speed. It's become about it's you know, it's first to market. I mean, it's you got to go from 0 to 10. You know this today it's idea this morning delivery this afternoon and you know we get so preoccupied with the speed and the pace at which we're going and brag about it, frankly. How are you doing? Oh, man, I'm so busy right now. Oh, man. Things are cooking right now. You know, we brag about it that we oftentimes miss what it is like you're saying that we are carrying along the way as we're trying to pick up speed. I mean, anybody knows, man, if you want to make a race car faster, lighten the thing up in terms of its horsepower, it doesn't matter how much horsepower you've got. If the thing is weighed down with all this extra baggage that it's carrying, same way with us, if we don't take some time to really reflect on and examine some of the things that we are carrying along the way, the weight of responsibilities that we're carrying both at work and at home and in our personal lives. And oftentimes, as I ask the question in rooms full of leaders, you know, take a minute, write some things down, and just usually give them literally like 60s of reflection, um, and watch them start writing most of the times, most of the things on their list, not all, but most of the things on their list are personal things that related to their personal life or their family, or the health of their children, or the health of their aging parents or their health of their spouse.
Mitch Harrison
It's those kinds of things that weigh us down. It's oftentimes broken relationships that we have with family members or with coworkers or with past friends or, you know, those kinds of things are the emotional weight that we carry before we ever show up at work and then carry the weight of leadership. And it's it's this it's this lost art of reflection that gets us back in touch with those and at least able to recognize. Man. This is why I'm feeling a little heavy today. This is why things feel like I'm kind of walking through the mud today, um, so that we can acknowledge those things, maybe find someone, just a group of friends, maybe find just a coworker, a mentor to talk with about these things, to lighten our load a little bit as we talk about these things out loud, to let us keep going at the pace that we actually want to go by, lighting our load from the things that we're carrying, or at least to find someone to help share the load with us and to support us in those things that we're carrying that are so heavy.
Perry Maughmer
Yeah. Think it was Carl Jung who said, Until we make the unconscious conscious, we will call it fate and it will direct our lives.
Speaker3
Wow. Yeah, right.
Perry Maughmer
And that's to your point. If we what we need to do is just get it out. Like, let's just talk about let's just acknowledge that it's there. We don't it's not. And I think we're in such a rush to judge. Like I'm a big, you know, one of one of the things I believe is you can't if you judge, you can't. There are three L's that are really important in life. Learn love and lead. And you can't do any of those if you're judging. And I think we're so quick to judge everything, especially I think now in our society, we're so quick to rush to judgment that we can't learn anything if we're judging everything. We certainly can't love somebody and we can't lead. Right. And so I think to be able to kind of manage our own rush, the things we're trying to do in a hurry and then figure out for each individual person what's important for you, like what really is important, which you know what, how much rest do you need? What's really in your business? What's truly important? What outputs matter? Yeah, right. Not everything. I mean, how many There's how many companies. I say you can do anything, but you cannot do everything.
Speaker3
Yeah.
Mitch Harrison
Yeah, absolutely. And the really, the whole key to this issue of personal replenishment. Is awareness because I talk to leaders all the time and I was one of these leaders taking a day off. I took a day like a reset day once a month where I would take a day out of the office to go, you know, kind of reset and things. I would take two vacations a year, one in the winter, one in the summer very intentionally. But it was my awareness around those things. It was my awareness of what I was doing in those things that were making them completely unhelpful to me. I would just burn through a day off, like I would burn through a work day and I would get to the end of my day off going. I wonder. Like I would honestly, I wouldn't even ask the question. I would just, you know, put the shoes back on and go to work the next day. But when I started asking myself, what is a real day off look like, that actually lets me start feeling more rested. And the awareness around that. Now, my day off took on a whole different kind of component now, this day away that I would take took on a whole different kind of effectiveness because I was just aware. And the one thing that I tell you about speed is speed narrows your focus. I mean, just get in your car. And I'm not recommending this, but you know what I mean. Get in your car, drive 100 miles an hour down the freeway. The faster you go, the more that motion blur starts to do this and tunnel your vision and you become less and less aware of what's going on around you and only aware of what's happening in front of you.
Mitch Harrison
And man, speed is kind of this self. What am I trying to say? This self-propagating problem, you know what I mean? It it the faster you go, the more exhilarating it becomes. But the narrow your focus becomes and the less aware you become. And that's what that's why speed will kill you is because eventually it'll make you so unaware of what's happening around you that you'll end up in a pile by the side of the road and, um, and not really maybe even understanding how it happened. So what you're know, what I hear you talking about is this awareness building of man, what is going on in my life? What is my energy level actually like? When do I stop and take a dip stick on? Where am I? On a scale of 1 to 10? Like how full is my tank? You know, how how, how well am I doing? How much energy do I actually have? What are the things I'm carrying? What is affecting me? How clear and sharp is my contribution and how much am I actually living into that? Rather than just focusing on doing the mundane of the everyday, you know? You know, how much time have I taken for recreation? That's why I think this framework that I talk about is so important to be able to have some standards, to have some benchmarks that ask you the questions that you need to be asking and keeping you aware on a regular basis.
Perry Maughmer
Yeah, no, it's awesome. And I want to be cognizant of the time. I think we could talk for another hour, which we might, or maybe I'll, we'll do this again because I think there's a lot more in this space that the things that you're concerned about, the things that I'm, I'm concerned about overlap with people that have chosen to take on the mantle of leading right to to like burden, to take themselves and put themselves in a position to do those activities for people and take responsibility. And there has to be an awareness, there has to be an intentionality about it. And I think we have to start asking ourselves bigger questions. You know, I sit with people and they say, Oh, my goals for next year with the with the we're going to double the revenue. And I said, well, why? And there's no answer. It's like mean. So is that the ultimate goal? Is it just so next year you're going to double and then next year you're going to mean, so what is the and then why is that important? Like, why is that doubling of revenue important? What is it you're trying to accomplish? What's the end game here? Yeah. And I think to your point, just slowing down and being more aware of let's figure out some different questions to ask. Yeah. Like let's some meaningful questions that deal with the humanity of what we're doing and not just the business side of it. So I, I love what you're doing. I think it's, it's great work that leaders need. So tell, tell everybody where they can find you. Like if they want to get Ahold of you, where would they find you? Your website, your email? What's the best place to look for you?
Mitch Harrison
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The best place to find me is through my website refill coaching.com and you can just email me at Mitch at refill coaching.com if you want to go that way and I'd love to have a conversation around this and to begin to explore with people you know where they are and how we can maybe come alongside them and offer some real help so that they can live and lead more at their best all the time.
Perry Maughmer
Well, I think it's awesome, too, because you just you don't just work with one person. You'll work with an entire leadership team. You when this starts permeating a company. Right. When a leader says, hey, this is what I'm doing and this is also what we are going to do, like we are going to slow down and ask these questions. And you can literally see an organization transform at that point.
Mitch Harrison
Absolutely. And that's one of the most critical pieces. It's great when an individual begins to take this kind of stuff up and live a different kind of lifestyle and live at a better level for themselves. But, man, it is powerful when it happens inside an organization. And there's some things that organizations can definitely do to begin to help themselves and do some work with organizations like that, to do workshops with them, to do coaching with their teams, to begin to stir a different kind of culture inside an organization that helps keep an organization at an 880% of the time as well.
Perry Maughmer
Yeah, well, I think that's one of the things I walked away. I mean, you even said when you do that exercise with the group and you say, don't leaders have a responsibility to be an 880% of the time? Isn't that if and if nothing else, if you just walk out with that idea that what a how do I know I'm at an eight? Like for me what is an eight like to define it? Like you walk people through and say okay, this you've just defined this as an eight for you. Now the next question is how do you show up as an 880% of the time? And if nothing else, if they just walked away with that and they actually did that all the time, it would be a huge transformation for themselves and those that they care about.
Speaker3
Yeah, yeah.
Mitch Harrison
It's a game changer when you begin to identify the qualities that you actually want to have, because once you do that, then you can do things to get those qualities as opposed to just kind of going around the room going, How's everybody doing? And everybody goes, I'm fine, I'm good. Thanks for asking. You know, I'm you know, I'm a nine this week or whatever and never really get specific about it. You know, you can't shoot at a target that isn't there. So, yeah, absolutely.
Perry Maughmer
All right. Well, Mitch, I greatly appreciate you coming on. It's been great talking to you. I look forward to talking to you again in the future. I wish you the best of luck.
Mitch Harrison
Great, Harry. Thank you. Yep.
Perry Maughmer
So we're signing off on another episode. First guest. So love to hear what you think of the conversation Mitch and I had. And as always, make sure you're taking care of yourself and take care of everybody else as well. Have a great rest of your day.
