Latest / RHYTHMS OF REST℠ Leadership Podcast / Episode 14: It Wasn’t the Hours (What Actually Breaks High-Performing Leaders)
Transcript
- Kent: If you've tried everything the wellness and balance menu has to offer and ended up right back where you started, I know what it feels like. The new routine, the better calendar, the optimization techniques. One of my clients, Phil, put it this way when we first started coaching. He said, When things at home, when things at home are going well, work suffers. And when things at work are going well, home suffers. Maybe that's you right now. You're trading one for another and never getting both. I lived in that loop for more than 12 years and I want to tell you how I got out. This is the story. Leaders, you don't need balance, you need the right rhythms. Much like a heart where all four chambers work together, real success depends on four key rhythms working together in harmony: relational, emotional, spiritual, and tangible rhythms. I'm your host, Kent Muroski, and welcome to the Rhythms of Rest Leadership Podcast, where I help business owners and leaders who feel like they're winning at work and losing at work. Before we dive in, would you just take a moment and do me a favor? Would you just hit the follow button wherever you listen or watch this podcast? This ensures that every time I drop a new episode or special episodes, which I do from time to time, you'll automatically get it in your feed. And I would really appreciate it as well as it helps this podcast get out into the world. Let's go. Hey leaders, if you live in the Northeast, I hope you fared well during the recent Nor'easter. Or as my oldest son says, the Norista. Despite that, this despite the fact that that storm lasted all weekend, we had a magnificent weekend just laying low and staying in. We did a family, our whole family did a collage together. It was fun. We played a game. I did some work with my hands. I took a nap. It was glorious. Those stormy weekends can be great. Just a great excuse to lay low and not do much at all. Well, over the next several episodes, I'm going to lay out the whole Rhythms of Rest framework one piece at a time. But first, you need to know a little bit about where it came from. This framework was not born from success. There's an origin story, and it actually came from personal failure. This is also going to be the subject of my new book releasing in February of 2027. On Sun, just this past Sunday, I finished reading the first edit of the book and making notes on that. Just shout out to my editor Allison. She cut about a hundred pages, which it really needed. And it feels so light in a good way. Kind of like when your hair, if your hair is long, which mine was at one time, and you get a haircut, and it just feels so much lighter. Well, more on the book in future episodes. I just wanted to let you know that's coming. Well, let me begin with a story about how the Rhythms of Rust framework came to be. And I have to go all the way back to when I was 15 years old. Don't worry, I won't bore you with all the details. I'll just tell one story to keep it light and quick. When I was 15, I talked my friends, several friends, probably four or five of them, into repelling off a bridge. With garden hose and rubber gloves. Definitely not my finest moment. Luckily, every nobody got hurt and everything worked out okay. It worked the first time. The second time was a wet summer evening, and I volunteered, of course, to go first without testing it. Well, you you know that sound like in the movies when you hear somebody sliding down a rope that's, you know, out of control? That's what it sounded like like zzz zzzz. I hit the ground with a thud, and then I waited a minute before I laughed just to scare my friends. Now I had watched too many movies and and parkour things at the time, and I did know luckily how to drop and roll when I hit the ground, but I waited a minute to laugh ca just to scare my friends, and they were definitely scared until I laughed. So that's the story of me repelling off a bridge when I was 15. Ever since I can remember though. I had always been a leader. I was always a leader and a risk taker. I went first, I didn't test anything, I trusted my own grip, and that basically defined my leadership the first half of my life. Now, growing up with an alcoholic father, there was a lot of risk and ambition that I had that was really a cry for attention and affirmation. Without knowing it, I tried to make up for my father's missing attention. In my young years through acting out, and then as I grew older, through success and accomplishment. And it is a great fuel for accomplishment, but it doesn't work very well for life. My first leadership roles when I kind of came out of those teen years into after college in my 20s were in a church where I led the youth ministry as the youth pastor, then the college and young adult ministry. I started from scratch. And then my wife and I were also leading the music program at this church of about four three three or four hundred people, which was a a big endeavor. at you know, practice every week, two services on Sunday, one on Thursday night. And so at that same time, that's when the cracks really started to show up. I was two years married about then. Well, I mean, a year, one year, two years around there, screaming matches with my wife. Using intimidation and rage to try to gain control, which it never worked, high triglycerides at age 27, relentless overworking, and a spiritual life that I was actually using without knowing it to cover up an immature emotional life. During that time, it was interesting, not one leader or mentor, and I had several, pulled me aside to really show me a better way. I was literally a ticking time bomb. So here's what happened. At 27 years old, I was headed, me and my wife were headed to a weekend training and leadership conference. And instead, when we were about to leave, I hit the kitchen floor. I basically had a nervous breakdown and I cried for hours, didn't know what was happening. I've told this story before in full on previous episodes. I'll tell it in in a deeper way in the book as well. So I'm not going to retell it today, but it suffices to say I was a hot mess. Now it took me months to climb out of that hole and years to realize not only what went wrong, but how to actually get myself in a place that was help where I felt healthy and whole. Now after that, the next 12 years after that fall down on the floor breakdown, Things got incrementally better. I learned some lessons for sure, but none of them, a few of them stuck, but I still didn't have what I needed to really grow into the person, into a healthy person. So things were mediocre at best. At 39, 12 years later, I was close to burning out again. At that time, I was just trying to be a good husband and father to my three children. I was leading an organization that we'd started four years earlier. I also had to work part-time at an urban youth center to make ends meet. And I had tried everything on the wellness menu and still ended up back where I started, but not for a lack of trying. Now that's what I want you to hear today. Effort was never what I was missing. In the same way that if you fall into quicksand and thrash around, you actually sink quicker. You can't dig your way out of a hole by working harder. It's kind of like being in the hole, and the way that you're trying to get out is by taking a shovel and digging. More effort just makes the hole deeper. Now that's when at that same time, 12 years later, like I'd mentioned, that's when I had instead of another fall down on the floor breakdown, I had an epiphany. And the epiphany was this: you don't have to understand or control everything to live from a place of peace and rest. Now, most people think burnout is a workload problem, but it's actually a control problem and even more precisely a rhythm problem. Now, there's a lot of burnout research right now that says control actually protects employees and leaders. And they're right about part of it. When you have autonomy over your work, you know, your your own work, that really matters. It's an important piece of not feeling like you have no control. Now the problem is the illusion that you're in control of every outcome. You're holding on too tightly. Leaders do this all the time. And that one was killing me. And I guess it's my guess would be it's probably doing the same thing to you because you're holding on to outcomes too tightly. Doesn't mean letting go of responsibility. It means letting go of outcomes. Now that day when I let go of that illusion of control, it changed everything for me. The scattered practices that I, you know, of balance that I'd been piecing together in a Frankenstein-esque manner for years, they started to crystallize into something that worked, something whole. Gone were the days of trying to balance everything. What surfaced instead were rhythms. Everywhere I looked, I saw a rhythm. The sun rose and set, the waves ebbed and flowed, the seasons came and went, crops were planted and harvested. The body doesn't balance its cycles. Seasons don't balance, they rhythm. We have sleeping and waking, hunger and meal, tension and release. The most productive things on earth are not balanced. They are rhythmic. I like to say it this way. You're not burned out from too much work. You're burned out from the wrong Now here's what living in rhythm did for me over the next four to five years after I came to that realization. It compounded things in a good way because my posture had changed. So I'll give you a few examples. Our marriage went from a five to an eight. Of course, with counseling, marriage counseling and real work. I started exercising regularly and lost 15 pounds, which I had not been able to do. I found a sustainable work pace and a weekly day of rest built in as well as a daily stop time. Fun and hobbies started to come back into my life. And leaders, listen, I understand when you got lots of heavy responsibility, you got a young growing family. It seems like where is their time for fun and hobbies? but start with one. Fun and hobbies came back one at a time into my life. Now my kids are in a different spot in life and I'm able to pursue a little more. But and then my emotional life was no longer that of a toddler, which opened up a spiritual depth I didn't have before. So what happened? Well I found an ancient practice and simply put it's a structure of support that leads toward thriving and wholeness. Now the roots go back thousands of years and it's been tested by everyone from high-ranking government officials To monks. In other words, people carrying real responsibility. It's called a rule of life. I like to call it a rhythm of life. But if you've tried everything and you've already proven that effort is not your problem, you have the discipline you need already. Now you're finally going to have something worth pointing your discipline at that's going to help you integrate all those four chambers of your life. Now, most leaders can name one or two areas of life going well and one or two other areas that aren't going so well. These aren't new areas. We we know them. I'm not recreating the wheel here, but how we put them together and structure our live ma lives matter. So what we usually lack is a clear picture of the whole. You know, in other words, what are the areas we should pay attention to? How is each area doing? Do I have a gauge or a metric? For that, how do they all fit together into a cohesive whole? And don't misunderstand me, when I say a gauge or a metric, I don't mean everything has to be a performance. And I don't, I'm not talking about optimization, but we do need a way to gauge how we're doing in these different areas. Life is not balanced and not every area needs equal time and energy. But the word balance actually means equilibrium, so it's the wrong word. Now I discovered four core rhythms that work together, and each one affects the others. They need different amounts of attention in different seasons, but none of them can be neglected. They have to work together. So that's why I said, much like a heart, where all four chambers have to work together for blood flow, your life depends on these four core rhythms working together in harmony, not equality. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to share my screen so I can kind of draw this in picture form. And I'll explain it to you while I'm going if you're just listening to the podcast. But if you're watching on YouTube, you'll be able to see this, you know, in a picture on your screen. So here it is. I call this the Rhythms of Rest. It's called the Rhythms of Rest. Well, I got to get off eraser and onto my pen. There we go. Rhythms of rest framework. Rhythms of rest. Now, rest stands for these four things. I'm not, I just have to warn you, I'm not a great artist, but I try, and so I'll do my best here. So we've got four chambers, like the four chambers of a heart. And then we've got a heart right in the middle. I'll try to shade it in so you can see it. That heart heart represents a whole life, a thriving life, an integrated life, wholeness, however you want to say it. Okay, so here are the four rhythms. We've got in the top left-hand corner, we've got the R is relational. Rhythms. Okay, and what that stands for, or how I describe that, is relational rhythms are cultivating deep connections that energize you rather than drain you, even when your schedule is packed. The next chamber in the top right is emotional. And mental rhythms. Okay? The E. Emotional and mental rhythms means creating space to process, reflect, heal, and grow instead of just pushing through everything. The bottom right corner, we've got spiritual rhythms. And how I describe those as being grounded in your faith, transcendence, or a philosophy of life that gives you meaning deeper than your next achievement or deadline. And then the last chamber on the bottom left is your tangible rhythm. Tangible refers to caring for your body, your finances, and work in ways that support rather than sabotage your other rhythms. So there's the picture. I'm gonna take that down off the screen. And when we think of these, better scheduling is not going to fix a rhythm problem. Why? Because working too much is just a symptom. The root is that we have no framework for seeing life as an integrated whole. So we live compartmentalized in these four areas and treat each one separately. And so we are misaligned and we are fragmented. Like the heart. All four have to work together, but but where you start is with one rhythm, not four, in view of all four. So, what is this? This is the framework that I've developed, and I'm excited to share it with you over the next four weeks. But for today, I want to end there because I wanted to just take some time to introduce you to the framework at large, give you the origin story, and Next week, we're going to focus on the R or the relational rhythms. And I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a minute. For today, let's end with a rhythms check, I call it. So, what is a rhythms check? Each time we take a moment to focus on one of the four, usually take a moment to focus on one of the four rhythms of rest and give you one action that you can take in the next 24 to 48 hours, along with a reflection question to help you go deeper. Now, since this week is about the whole, we're going to do something a little differently. I'm going to ask you to do this to start. I want you to go and take the rhythms of rest assessment right now if you can. Because here's why. In under three minutes, you're going to have real clarity about which rhythm is off, and you're going to have a plan in your inbox and how to fix it as soon as you finish it. Now Before you take the rhythms of rest assessment, and you can find that at my website, KentMoroski.com, you'll see the button, it's everywhere, but it's in the top right hand corner in that key piece of real estate. Before you take the rhythms of rest assessment, I want you to write down your guess to this question. Which of the four rhythms, relational, emotional, and mental, spiritual, and tangible, needs your attention most right now? Then I want you to go take the assessment and see if you were right. Now, when you do this, you're going to become a leader who looks is able to look at his whole life or her whole life instead of managing it just one fire at a time. Yes, you start with one area, but you you have to put it in the frame of seeing it, seeing it as a whole. Now that's the first thing that I had to learn to do. Here's a reflection question. For this week. Think back to when I said let go of control or talked about the illusion of control. If something internally and you pushed back at that, and you were saying, Well, I should be able to figure that out on my own, it's normal. Almost every leader that I work with either thinks that or lives like that. And it's the same one that kept me solving the wrong problem for 12 years. So here's the question. What's one area of your life you've been handling alone because asking for help feels like losing control? And who in your life has been paying for it? I'm gonna read that one more time. What's one area of your life that feels out of control? And who in your life has been paying for it? If you would, I'd love to have you leave a comment on YouTube, send me a DM on social media, or if you're on my email list, just reply to the emails you get from me and tell me which rhythm you guessed and what you know which rhythm you you guessed and after you took the assessment whether or not you were right. It took me 12 years to figure out I was solving the wrong problem. You get to find out which one you're solving in under three minutes and have a plan for it this week. So you get to walk into next week as the leader who finally knows where to start. Well, next time we will go over the R for relational rhythms. Now, this rhythm is really important because it's the rhythm that goes first and usually gets noticed last because the people it costs you are the ones least likely to complain. Okay, so next week, relational or in two weeks, sorry, relational rhythms. Now, if you're achieving by every metric that matters and you still feel like something's off, the rhythms of rest assessment will show you exactly which of the four rhythms is out of sync. I hope you'll take it this week. And If this episode described a challenge that you knew too well, that's what the newsletter is for. Every other week I send tools I use with clients to build rhythms into how they lead. No filler, just go to Kentmaroski.com forward slash newsletter and get on the list. It's free and it's where new frameworks show up first before anything else. I'll see you in a couple of weeks. I can't wait.