Humility And The Rain Barrel
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Audio Transcript:
What role does humility play in flourishing, especially when you feel like you failed at something you preach? But first, reviews, I guess, in podcasting are a powerful thing.
So if you've been listening along and value what you hear, man, we really appreciate a rating and a review so others can find us and join in. All right, now on to the questions. Yeah, man, and we just had this, right?
So with a little bit of a health issue here I had a couple of weeks ago where I just drove myself into the ground and I preached not to do that. So that's a tough one.
And I got to tell you, you can be authentic about all kinds of things when you're dealing with your team. And again, everybody's different. I try to be authentic.
I don't share everything, but everything I share is genuine. And I think that as a baseline is really important. And that also means humility's got to be there.
I mean, I just think you're setting unrealistic expectations. And also, there's got to be disingenuousness. I mean, when I see folks and influencers online, you know, life is always great for them.
And everything's like, that's not really genuine. On the flip side, it's like, oh, it's poor me, always victim, victim. That's different, too.
But this level of humility where it's like, I may not have it right, guys. I may not have executed well here. But this is what I'm going to do in response.
I think, so for me, humility is a big part. It plays a huge role in flourishing. I don't have all the answers.
Even when I'm talking to you guys, I think you hear. I mean, this is what works for me. I can't tell you what is going to work exactly for you.
I can't tell you, you know, I love the here's the five things you must do now. I can't stand that stuff because I just don't know what you must do now.
And really, I think even as a leader in an organization, it's easy for you to think you know exactly why somebody is doing or not doing the thing they're doing in your organization. And you think you know exactly what they should do.
Man, you may not even be close. And yeah, you may be really insightful.
You may have great high EQ, high IQ, have all that stuff, be aware of what's happening in an organization, but you still don't know what's happening inside the head of that person or in their life or whatever else.
And that can be huge to the impact of things. So humility is huge for me, both in my own behaviors and in how I lead.
And I've found it, honestly, so you fathers and mothers and guardians out there, I've found humility is one of the most powerful things for our kids, for me to behave that way.
Not that I walk around hat and hand all the time, but I'm not saying that. But like when I mess up, it does so many, there's so many things on the other side of being honest and being humble. When I mess up and I can cover it, it does two things.
One, it disarms the kids a little bit that they don't have this expectation of needing to be perfect. You know, there's a lot of that out there.
But on the flip side of that, it also teaches them how to be humble and how to recognize and not just hold the ground because, oh my gosh, we've got to be right, or we'll die. And so I think humility is important across the board.
You know, in the community, it's a little tougher, I guess. But I mean, everybody feels like they've got the answer for what should happen in your community. And the reality is almost always, the actual solution is much, much more complicated.
And you can see that play out on social media every day. But humility, I think, is still a super important part for all of that. So hopefully, that answers that question.
Next question, yes. How do you know when stress is helping you grow versus when it's about to overflow your rain barrel? You know, I mentioned in the last episode that there's just lots of things that pour into this stuff.
And obviously, my barrel overflowed not too long ago. And yeah, so how do you know? Okay, back to the earlier question, humility.
I don't. I don't know. I think there's a couple of things.
There were signs. And those signs are physically, mentally, emotionally, those things. You know, I'd like to think I'm tied in pretty well and tapped into who I am and how I'm feeling.
But sometimes the idea, it's an easy example. It goes to working out. You know, let's say you're doing resistance training and you're pushing weight.
There's a difference between strain and injury. And you just have to, honestly, unfortunately, sometimes you got to injure yourself some to know where that line is. And I'm not advocating go out and hurt yourself.
I'm just saying that I don't know if you could just know. I almost feel like you have to break it a couple of times. And that's terrible advice.
I don't want to be telling you to go do that. But in my experience, man, how do you know what the limit is until you hit it? And so that's dangerous.
That's risky. Again, I'm not telling you to go push yourself until you explode or hurt yourself or anything like that. I guess, but when you're trying to push yourself to do great things, I just don't know how you don't bump into the limit sometimes.
So I think it's paying attention to indicators and learning over time what you can push and what you can't. And I have, unfortunately, recently not been paying as close attention. And I was able to, I hurt myself, I injured, I went over the limit.
And so I think, you know, you could try to reduce stress in all kinds of ways, for sure, but that indicator is really listening to yourself. It's listening to your body. It's listening to your emotions.
And I think to do that, and this is an important piece, I think to do that, we have to stop for a minute and listen. Even right now, I'm running my mouth the whole time. But the pause, take that pause, take that pause and think.
So whether that's, you know, as a founder, a father, and a friend of my community, those are busy roles, and you're constantly being engaged. And so you got to carve out some time for yourself to just assess, self-assess, what's going on here?
And I'm not saying you got to climb to a mountain and go monk mode for three days. I mean, that's awesome, and that's a valuable experience. I would encourage you to do it.
But just a walk, a quiet moment in the chair, a standing, even just anything to take a moment and assess.
And maybe if you're doing a brief meditation or prayer, whatever it is that you do, take a moment for a body scan and kind of go through, what am I feeling? Where's the worst things at? And I think that can help.
So again, I hate to say, you don't know the limit to hit the limit. That's kind of, that seems like terrible, terrible advice. But the reality is for each of us, our limits are going to be different.
But I can say, take that time to assess. And I'll also add, sometimes you can push really hard at work, and if you aren't doom scrolling and eating terribly and all that kind of stuff, you'll never reach the limit. You'll be fine.
And so there's this notion of the rain barrel comes, there's a lot of sources of, you have multiple gutters running into that rain barrel, if you will.
And if you limit the trash from one, as long as you have good habits otherwise, you can maybe not hit that limit, and that's okay. So I don't know, this is not great advice. I'm sorry, there's humility here.
I don't have the answers, but I assure you that for each of you, it's a moment where if you really truly are assessing how you're feeling on a generally routine basis, you're gonna see it. You're gonna see it coming. You're gonna feel it.
It's when I put my head down and ignore that stuff. That's when I find myself in a hole. I hope that's helpful.
Man, that feels like it's just a terrible answer. All right, so last question. You mentioned a company-wide Sharpen the Saw Week.
How do you create buy-in for something like that in a high-performance culture? Oh, this is a great question. We have tried some of the craziest things at Mount Leverage over the 20 years we've been running this company.
And even still to this day, we'll go to try something, and people are like, that's crazy. Why are we even doing this? Well, this is an internal-facing thing.
We gotta be external. There's all the things. And you know what?
Those are all good arguments. And sometimes they're right. Sometimes, whoops, that was a mistake.
We don't hit every one of them out of the park. And even Sharp in the Salt Week, there were people that were... There were a couple people that had fit issues that were like, well, how could we ever do this?
And how could we ever, you know... But mostly, even people who are completely 100% aligned are like, how are we gonna pull this off? And is this gonna bring the value we want?
And you want those questions. You want... That's not not buying in.
That's somebody... Actually, I find those kinds of questions often... You can tell the spirit.
You can tell the spirit where somebody is when they ask these things. But I often find those things, that's totally buying in. They're really under...
They're trying to assess, how can we do this thing, crazy guy, that you're asking us to do, and it be valuable? What value is gonna come from it? So you want that challenge.
But there still are these moments where sometimes, you have to just gather together, and it's kind of a disagree, but commit. Okay, so I get your concern. Let's do this.
And then the other side, see where it goes. And I think for us, there's just a long track record of trying things and being open to them, and many of them working, more often than not working. And it creates a culture of exploration and innovation.
So I guess that's the thing. If you've never done anything like that at your company and you just pop in and say, Hey, I want to do this big, grandiose thing. I don't know how much mileage you're going to have for that.
It's taken years and years and years of implementing layer after layer after layer of an organization that's willing to test and innovate and correct and iterate and just keep going. And we've been doing that since day one.
And you will hire employees over time that are more inflexible for all kinds of reasons.
And they will grow with you or potentially they're folks you need in your organization that can keep reminding you that, hey, you're in your own echo chamber, bub, this is going to cause a lot of problem for us. And this is why.
Obviously, you want to get as much culturally aligned, but culturally aligned does not mean homogenization. It doesn't mean everybody's on board with everything all the time and it's a bunch of yes men and yes women. That would be a nightmare for me.
So, you want the questions, you want the challenges, but ultimately, at the end of the day, the buy-in is important.
So, I think that the hard answer for anyone who's thinking about doing these kinds of things, at least from my experience, is it's just going to take a long time and have a track record of you honoring these things.
Because lots of companies like Try Stuff, you know, Fart in the Windstorm kind of things, and it just doesn't go over well, or it's not sustained, and it's challenging, and we've got a record of those two.
But we have lots of history where we've put these kinds of things together, and they've been beneficial, or where they haven't, we've made changes for the next time. And, you know, so I think it's a mix of things.
There's a follow up on those changes. But if you want to try something, I'd say start small and go from there and get some wins, get some momentum, get some confidence from the team.
Not that they will, without question, follow everything you say, but that they will be intrigued. They will be curious. They will want to invest.
They will want to ask the questions. They will want to implement. They will want to look for the outcomes.
That's the culture that allows these kinds of things to pull together. So, yes, you have high performers. So I think about a sales guy or sales gal saying, hey, there's no way I can come off the road and do this thing.
It's just not going to be valuable. Or a developer saying, hey, I can't get it. I've got to finish this system.
How can I do this thing? And I think you could just take the same argument to someone, you know, a logger who's cutting trees and saying, hey, I just can't stop and sharpen the saw.
I've got to keep going while you watch them grinding a dull chainsaw into the wood. That looks just as silly as the others do, but that one, we can look at that and see how silly it is.
But I think, you know, using those examples, playing it out, getting some actual track record of it working, that all kind of plays out, makes it better. So anyway, those are the questions. Again, I don't know how well I answered them.
Hopefully, there's some value for you. And you can see, I'm at least genuinely trying to go after it. I am going to have to think more and more about this whole knowing when the stress barrel is full, stress ring barrel.
And you know, maybe that's something we'll talk about in the future. I'd love to hear how you guys handle some of these.
You know, if you got answers to these questions, or you have other questions related or not with your experience of trying to flourish, I'd love to hear them. So send us an email at flourish at reneman.com. That's flourish at reneman.com.
And I'll answer as many as I can on the show. So hey, thank you all. I hope wherever you may be, you are flourishing.
Alex Reneman is the founder of Mountain Leverage and Unleash Tygart and host of Flourishing w/ Alex Reneman. For 20+ years he has worked as CEO of Mountain Leverage, honing the concept of flourishing and experimenting with it in the business. In July of 2024, he decided to begin to share this idea with others, which led to his podcast, social content, and the plans for other initiatives in the future.
