How agency owners can get ahead of burnout with Eric Recker

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Welcome to the Agency Management Institute community, where you’ll learn how to grow and scale your business, attract and retain the best talent, make more money, and keep more of the money you make. The Build a Better Agency Podcast, presented by a White Label IQ is packed with insights on how small to mid-size agencies are getting things done, bringing his 25 years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant. Please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Hey everybody. Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute to welcome to another episode of Build a Better Agency. You know, sometimes they talk about when the student is ready, the teacher will come. So I feel like this is one of those episodes for me, and I hope for you as well. So my guest is a guy named Eric Rucker, and he’s an author and he talks about how basically we’re in burnout mode and how we have to be better about giving ourselves some recovery. What Eric doesn’t know, and I probably won’t tell him during the interview, but what Eric doesn’t know is I was up till three in the morning last night getting some work done because we’re going into two and a half days of all day meetings, and I had things that I have to get done, and I ran out of time.

And so I literally was burning the candle at both ends. And so it’s ironic, I think, to me, that we’re gonna talk today about what we’re doing to ourselves when we work like that. And I know that I have a tendency to go 120 miles an hour, and I don’t always do the things that I need to do to take good care of myself. And so I just feel like the universe, you know, again, I went to bed at three in the morning, and by the way, my interview with Eric is at seven in the morning. So you can do the math after you figure I gotta take a shower and get ready, you know, before I show up on camera. It was a short night for me. So I sort of feel like the universe is saying, Hey, stupid.

Really need you to pay attention to this, really need you to just stop for a minute and think about, yep, you got a lot done last night, and yes, you were on a lot of deadlines. And fill in the blank. Fill in the blank, fill in the blank. ’cause we do that to ourselves all the time. And so I think it’s ironic that he and I are talking this morning, and my job is to get ideas out of his head to help all of you not go into burnout mode. And I think obviously, I need to be listening and take a little bit of his medicine for me as well. So I’m gonna do that. So without further ado, let’s get to Eric so that both you and I can learn how to take better care of ourselves. So we’re more productive, we’re more alive, we’re more available to the people that we love.

We are healthier, and we can do the important work we do for longer. So all of those are good reasons to pay attention to how we’re treating ourselves and maybe do a little better job of taking care of ourselves. So with that, let’s talk to Eric. All right. That’s it. Thanks everybody. Eric, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me, drew. I’m excited to be here.

So tell everybody a little bit about who you are, your background, how you came to write the books that you’ve written, and then I’ve got a ton of questions for you. So, but give everybody a, just a sense of who you are and what you’re about.

Yeah, so I am a dentist by trade. So I’ve been a dentist for about 20 years, and I have gone through three significant seasons of burnout. And so one of those seasons of burnout actually led me to almost selling my dental practice in walking away. And it felt like the only thing I could do. Burnout had such a grip over me at that point, and I actually was within a couple months of selling my dental practice, and the person I was going to sell it to was in a horrific car accident. Oh, geez. And we quickly realized that that was not the route to go. He survived, but we decided that was not the route to go. And so I was faced with this thing of, I was trying to escape burnout.

I was trying to go around it when in reality I needed to go through it. I needed to figure out how can I get through this? How can I move forward into the life that I want? And now I am in a place where I’m seeing patients in my dental practice three days a week I’m doing coaching, speaking, workshop, facilitation around these topics because I feel like I’ve been through all of these things in my life, and I want to be able to help other people on their journey.

Okay. So in your books, you talk about sort of the, maybe signs isn’t the right word, but the, you know, ev ev you, as you and I were talking before I hit the record button, you know, everybody works hard. Everybody’s on the go, everybody’s burning the candle at both ends as business owners, yada, yada, yada. How do we know that this isn’t just normal business owner stuff and that we’re actually heading towards a danger zone?

Yeah. Recently I was asked, you know, can you describe, describe burnout in a word? And for me, the word that I used was gray. And the reason that I used that, one of my favorite movies of all time, is The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I don’t know if you’ve seen that Drew, but I absolutely love the movie. It’s about Ben Stiller, and he is a character who works for Life Magazine. And in the beginning, his life is boring. It is dull, it’s gray. He hasn’t done anything. I would not describe him as burned out because he really hadn’t done anything to, to get to that point. But in that movie, the cinematography portrays what I see burnout as really, really well.

Everything is gray in the beginning. There’s not a lot of color. And that’s what happened to my life when I was burned out. I had a hard time getting excited about things. Yeah. I had a hard time celebrating things. I was just in the grind. And when I think we, when we start to get gray, when we start to get flat, when things don’t excite us very much, and we, we can even get to the beginning of a week and say, I don’t have enough. We time In this week to get the things done. And that is on repeat, your life just gets monotonous on repeat gray. And so those, those are a few of the things that I really notice about myself.

And I, I’m guessing that every business owner, not just our audience of agency owners and leaders, but every business owner and leader goes through seasons of gray. So how do I know when this is a moment versus this is potentially a crisis?

Crisis? Yeah. I think it is. One of the things you have to do is you have to be in relationship with other people, and you have to be in relationship with other people who are willing to give you feedback on, on where you’re at. So one of the things that my wife really noticed about me is that I was getting very reactive. So when she would ask me questions, I would be quick to snap back with an answer. Nothing that I was talking about was well thought out. Hmm. And so I think, well, that’s one thing that we can really do, is we can lean on those people who are close to us and ask them for feedback on, on how we’re doing. Those are tough questions to ask, but we were not meant to do this life by ourselves.

I think that’s one of the great lies that Covid told us, is we had to be isolated and that other people were toxic. Well, a lot of people have kept that going, and they’re not around people. They’re not in networks. And so when, when you’re by yourself, it’s, it’s a little bit harder to know. But these things that I’m talking about when every week feels like the same week over and over again, when you don’t ever feel like you can get ahead. When things start feeling like if you’re in a pattern or you’re in, you just can’t break free from it, that’s when it starts to be a problem. We’re all gonna have a bad week. We’re all gonna have a week where we feel like we are in a funk.

But if that is every single week, we have a problem.

All right. So let’s say I’m feeling, or that’s, that’s accurate. That’s me. I’m, I am feeling like I am on the hamster wheel and I just can’t get off. I think, I think one of the other things that is probably true is when, you know for a business owner, you know, if a portion of the time that they spend doing work needs to be doing sort of that deep thinking work, that I’m not making a thing. I’m not, I’m not producing something, but I’m, I’m really thinking about the future of my business. I’m mentoring my people. I’m, I’m present and available. And I think one of the other things, when somebody is burnt out, one of the things that we see is that they really struggle to be present.

They struggle to do the deeper work of their job, partially because they just don’t have the time. But also just because they don’t have the mental bandwidth, they’re so exhausted mentally and physically that it’s hard for them to sort of do that deeper work. So, so let’s say somebody’s checking the boxes and they’re saying, yep, this, I think I’m at, I think I’m at risk for this. What do you do next? What’s, what? How do, how do you de sort of crisis yourself? And, you know, you’re not probably gonna go on a three month sabbatical. You’re probably not gonna, you know, as you almost did, you’re they’re probably not gonna sell their business. Although, I will say, I think one of the things we’re seeing, and you may be seeing this too, in some of the work that you’re doing, one of, one of the crisis points that we see is when an agency owner is just like, I, I have to be done.

I, I need to check out. And so they do begin the process, or they do begin to entertain the idea of selling their business perhaps before they had really planned at it. ’cause they just have no more gas in the tank.

Yeah. And for some people, that’s an option. It really is. It, it, and it might be the best option, but we wanna make sure that it’s an option that has, we’ve had some of that deep reflective time to decide, is this really what I want? Or am I just escape trying to escape the problem?

Right. So I’ve self-diagnosed, I’m like, yep, I’m at risk of really kind of crossing over the threshold of this is just a moment into, boy, this season has gone for a long time. What do I do next?

Yeah. So the biggest first step is just to raise your hand. And that’s a big step for a lot of people. It’s, it’s really surprised me. So for about six months, I have had a free challenge on my website, a five day knockback burnout challenge that people can sign up for. And I think that’s a great step to take, just to click on that. And it gives five days worth of tips on how to kind of loosen the hold of burnout. But I’ve been surprised that a lot of people have told me that they’re not even sure they can raise their hand on that. Hmm. So I think what’s important is that things that are kept in the dark have power over us.

Yeah. They do. If we don’t talk about it, then it’s always gonna be this thing that festers, it’s always gonna run around in the back of our minds. Yeah. So, talking to someone that we can trust. If we don’t have someone that we can trust, talking to a counselor or a therapist, that is hugely important. I, my whole family has seen a therapist, and when we need to, we do see a therapist, and why would we not want to have an ally to work with us? I’ve had people, coaching clients that have raised their hand and said, Hey, I’m feeling burnout. I need you to help me get through this.

And it all starts with that place where we say, here I am, kind of the, the aa, I’m Eric Wrecker and I’m burned out and I don’t know what to do about it. So I think that is, that is the biggest step. And then I’m not sure how we move forward without Wyatt reflective time. I’m just not sure. And believe me, I know that this is, this is super important. When my office closed for Covid, I had something that I hadn’t had in years, and that was discretionary time.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. As a dentist, I’m sure you were just shut down for a period of time. Right.

We were, it was so strange. So we were shut down, but we were also deemed essential. So how can you be closed but have to be available? So we had to see emergency patients, and it was super vague. One definition of emergency was if somebody chipped a tooth, you had to help ’em. The other one was only things to keep people out of the hospital. So how do you rationalize that? Right. Right. So I had this no schedule, but I had to deal with emergencies. But I had a million webinars to watch to figure out all of the things as all business owners had to do. Right. And so what do you do in the midst of that? I, I was being pulverized by what we were talking about earlier before the podcast, the false sense of urgency.

Yeah.

So, to me, talk us,

Talk to us a little bit about that.

Yeah. So I think the false sense of urgency is a background app that runs in our mind. So we all have apps that run on our phones, right? They’re running in the background, doing all this stuff that I’m quite frankly happy. I don’t know what all they’re doing on there, but we have to swipe ’em and shut ’em down. The false sense of urgency runs around in the back of our head and says, what you are doing is not enough. You are not doing enough. You are not being enough. The false sense of urgency thrives on the word should. My dad always told me, don’t should on yourself. Right. And it’s true. But we get tormented by this. And it leaves us either stuck in the past or worried about the future.

And what I decided that I needed to do in that time, and it went against everything that I had done in the past. But I knew that I needed quiet. And I, I feel like God was telling me, Eric, you need to quiet your mind. You need some space here, or else you are just gonna implode over this time. So I committed to 30 minutes of quiet every day, which is crazy. It’s absolutely ludicrous. I had no quiet in my life before that, and I was gonna go to 30 minutes a day. Right.

And I’m sure that felt like, I’m not sure I can do it.

Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. So I sat down and I didn’t even know, what do you do? How do you sit, what do you find? Any of that kind of stuff. So I said, I’m just gonna do it, which is always how I’ve done. I shot first and asked questions later. Right. So after, so

What did your, what did your first day of quiet look like?

Oh, drew, I tell you what, after what felt like at least 45 minutes, I looked at my watch. I was 46 seconds into it.

Oh my gosh. So you were just like sitting in a chair.

Yep. Just sitting in a chair and just kinda looking around. And I thought, oh boy, what have I signed up for? So I picked up my phone, set a timer for 30 minutes. Right. Put it on Do Not disturb, and just let my thoughts run. When they started going to a bad place, I just started saying, I am here, right here, right now to try to ground myself. Probably set it 50 times that first, that first time. Yeah. Yeah. But I think I could have seen that looking at it at 46 seconds as failure. And whether it was or not, who cares. But I learned from that. I said, okay, I have to boundary my time. I have to set a timer so that I know when it’s gonna be done so I don’t have to think about when it’s gonna be done.

Yeah. Otherwise, you would’ve been looking at your phone every 30 seconds.

Yeah. And I will tell you, after about three or four days, I started craving that time. My body needed that time. My mind needed that time so much that I wasn’t gonna miss it after that. And when I went back to my dental practice, when we were back open, I went back to, to almost no margin. But what I did, and I, I think this is so important, is I learned that 30 minutes a day is what I want, but it’s not always possible. What if I can have five minutes? What if I can have two minutes? What if I can just be in a space that’s relatively quiet and breathe for two minutes, just breathe.

And it’s amazing what that can do. The science is off the charts. I’ll save you the time. You don’t have to look at, look it up. But five minutes of deep diaphragm belly breathing is ridiculously rejuvenating for us. It can reset our mind, it can get us in a lot better place. So I think quiet is just one of those things that even if we don’t have time for it, if we’re gonna do the deep work of seeing what we want, pushing back, burnout, being more present in our lives, I don’t know how we do it without it.

So for you, quiet was literally unstructured. So it wasn’t, you weren’t listening to some meditative music or somebody in a James Earl Jones voice walking you through a meditation. You were, you were just literally in silence and you just let your mind wander.

Yep. Well, at first that’s what it was. And then I knew that then I wanted to start experimenting with some different things. So I studied a little bit on mindfulness, and I started doing some body scanning, and I started doing, I would, I would just focus on breathing one time. And another time I would have some, I would try to think about the future a little bit. So it started to be where I would just do, do different experiments with the quiet, which is what I love about life, all life really is, is we’re just doing a bunch of different experiments. Right. We’re trying something out.

And I think the, the super, super important thing about Quiet is that we don’t judge ourselves for it. We just go into it. And you know what, if we have, if we have 30 minutes, or if we have five minutes, let’s say you do five minutes of quiet, let’s a good goal to work up to at the start.

Yeah.

And let’s say your mind is all over the place. Well, guess what? You didn’t do with that five minutes. You weren’t on your phone. You weren’t distracted by a screen. There weren’t other things that you were doing. You were letting your mind do what it wants to do, and that is idle and not be stimulated. So I tried to be, I had a mentor that I worked with through this, and he said, Eric, you are so hard on yourself. You set ridiculously high standards for yourself in this bracketed time. Don’t judge yourself. Don’t have expectations. Just

Let it happen. It happens. Rules for you.

Yeah. No rules. Just enjoy it.

I’m, I’m guessing though, you see with some of your clients, your coaching clients, that they need something more structured. So I just wanna make sure everybody who’s listening is not hearing, like, if, if you know yourself well enough to know that you need some, you know, background, white noise music, or you need somebody walking you through, so, you know, there’s lots of apps that, that walk you through some breathing exercises or whatever. That would be okay too. You’re still quiet within yourself. You’re just having some external tool help you stay in that quiet, right.

Yeah. Yeah. And quiet can look like a lot of things. Some people are gonna pray while they’re quiet. Yeah. Some people are gonna journal while they’re quiet. One thing that I think helps a ton before we had enter a space of quiet is to do a brain dump and just write down everything that’s swirling around in our minds. Just get it down on a piece of paper, every single thing, again, without judgment. And then you have that outta there. So it’s less likely to spin during that time. There is not one right way to do quiet. Some people will even move while they’re quiet. Right. They’ll walk around

The block, could they walk or something? Sure. Right.

Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely. We are just such a society that’s, that is, we’re so stimulated. Yeah. And everything we have is stimulated. We’ve lost these little pockets of time that we’re unstimulated. So, right. Used

To be you just reach for, you just reach for the phone. Right, right. Whether you’re, whether you’re checking the news or Facebook or whatever your app of, you know, puppies of the day, whatever your app is, right? Yeah.

Yeah. We all have this phone routine, right. Where we pick it up and maybe we go, whether ESPN, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, we go around the horn on all of our stuff, fail, fail videos, whatever your thing is. And then sometimes that takes us so long that we’re worried we missed out on something. Should we go through the loop again and then we go through the loop again? Used to be when we stopped at a traffic light, we just had to stop at a traffic light. Right. We could look around. Yeah.

Now’s this thing. We were, we were listening to the radio, right? Yeah, yeah,

Exactly. So that, you know, when we’re in the checkout line, we used to be in the checkout line. Now it’s mostly self-checkout. We’ve just, our, our brains are craving that white space. And we have, we’ve mostly shut those out because of our automations and our phones and different things that we have. So really, and, and I understand people who start this is gonna be crazy uncomfortable the first time you try this. And maybe the first five times you try this ’cause it’s way against what you do. This is one of those things that we just have to give it a little bit of time. And your mind, although it’s incredibly foreign at the beginning, remember me, 46 seconds. I totally blew it, but that’s okay.

I didn’t give up that first time. I kept going with it.

Yeah. So I wanna take a quick break, but we won’t come back. I wanna talk about two things. One, how frightening it is that the idea of 30 minutes seems daunting to find 30 minutes of quiet every day. And to your point, maybe you start with five, but that finding any sort of window of time. And two, I wanna talk a little bit about after you’ve done the quiet for a little bit, if that doesn’t feel like enough, what’s sort of the next step? So let’s take a quick break and we’ll come back to, to those two topics. And I’m sure much more. Hey everybody, just wanna remind you before we get back to the show, that we have a very engaged Facebook group.

It’s a private group just for podcast listeners and agency owners that are in the AAMI community. And to find it, if you’re not a member, head over to facebook.com/groups/baba a podcast. So again, facebook.com/groups/baab podcast. All you have to do is answer a few questions to make sure that you are an actual agency owner or leader. And we will let you write in and you can join over 1700 other agency owners and leaders. And I’m telling you, there’s probably 10 or 15 conversations that are started every day that are gonna be of value to you. So come join us. Alright. We are back when we were talking to Eric about burnout, which I’m sure many of you, as soon as you heard the word, you’re like, yep.

One of two reactions either. Nope, I’m fine. I’m good. I’m, I I’m wired to be moving all the time. Or two. You’re like, yep, that’s me. I need to hear this. So let’s talk for a minute about, so let’s assume that the listeners have found a handful of minutes of quiet for a period of time. When did you know, or did you know that that wasn’t enough? That you had to do something deeper or different to shake you out of that season of burnout that you were in?

Yeah, so I did that, I did that for eight weeks because that’s how long my dental practice had to be closed. But I knew that, like I said, it was gonna be crazy when we got back. Yeah. So one of the things that I’m learning is that we constantly need to be thinking about our own recovery. What do I mean by that? So I, I think that we are empty when we’re burned out. We’re empty. Yeah. That’s another thing. We’re just, we’re just chronically empty. So we have to figure out how to fill back up. That’s the whole premise of my book, that damn analogy. We, all we are is a conduit of energy that flows through us.

That’s all we are. We have an inflow and we have an outflow. As business owners, we’re really great at the outflow. We are gonna freaking get it done. Right, drew, we are gonna get it done. We are gonna find a way. We’re gonna bend the space time continuum by losing sleep, by cutting other things out. We are just gonna find a way to do it. Right. But we suck at the inflow part. We just do, we don’t take care of ourselves. And that was the equation for me. I was overcommitted and I wasn’t taking care of myself. That was the burnout equation. The problem is now our overcommitment looks a lot like phones, it looks a lot like Netflix.

It looks a lot like all these things that we say we’re so busy. But if we did a time audit, we’re just terrible at how we use our time. Yeah.

Right.

So one of the things that when, when quiets not enough, I like to talk about how we scale our recovery. So we always have to be thinking about how we get something back in the tank. And I think the dangers that we think, well, the only way I recover is a week on a beach. That’s it. That’s all I can do.

Right? Yeah. And that’s, that’s tough to do on a, on a regular basis. It’s tough

To,

To do it right?

Yeah. It’s tough to do on a Tuesday, right? It really is when you got stuff going on on Wednesday, right. So when ideally a week vacation on a beach would be awesome. Okay, I don’t have that. Okay. What’s the next weekend look like? Is there a beach or a lake or something that I can go to for a weekend? Ah, no, I don’t have a weekend. Okay. Do I have a day? Can I take a mental health day? Can I do that? No, I don’t have a day. Do I have two hours? No. I, I don’t even have two hours. I have, I have five minutes. Okay, you have five minutes. Okay. Get up, walk around your block, walk around your, your business, maybe plan your next vacation because anticipation is huge.

Maybe send an encouraging text to a friend, maybe All of, there’s so many little things that we can do. So we always think that we have to be focused on the big right. And guess what you did before you went on that week vacation. You had a horrific week before you went.

That’s right. Yeah. You just rearranged time, right? Yeah.

You loaded yourself to the gill. You are coasting in on fumes to your vacation. And this is gonna take you day five before you’re uncorked enough to really enjoy it. Right? So we have to be thinking what are the things that we can do on a daily basis to, to do that? And maybe it is just sitting in front of the window with a cup of coffee and looking around. Maybe it is taking 15 minutes to listen to some music. Undistracted. Maybe it’s, you go get on, on your way home in your car instead of your normal drive home. You take a different route. Maybe you just disrupt your routine a little bit. Maybe instead of email, first thing in the morning, you do something different, right?

So we have to look at Einstein and there’s some debate whether he was the one who made this quote the first time, but he said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Right? Well, how are we gonna disrupt our routine? Sometimes disrupting our routine can make a massive difference. That meeting that’s always at the same time, maybe we move it, maybe we see if that affects the energy of it. There’s all kinds of things we can do. We look at our routine and say, how can we disrupt this to maybe change things up a little bit?

So what I’m hearing you say is, first of all, I would assume that there are some basics, right? So if you, if you’re feeling burnt down, if you’re feeling like the gas tank is empty, there are some basic things. It’s, you know, sort of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, right? Like you, you have to look at your sleep habits and patterns. You have to look at what you’re putting inside your body. You have to look at if you’re moving your body. Like those to me are sort of the base of the pyramid of our, our, our, the, the shell that we are, our physical being needs, those things. And so, listening to great music, when you’ve only had two hours of sleep, or you haven’t eaten all day, or you’ve eaten nothing but junk all day, or you know, you’ve been in a chair for eight hours, which, you know, I think for all of us, we have days where we go, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

Right? So I’m assuming those are sort of the, that’s where we have to start at, at the rudimentary level, we have to just say, you know what? My body is a physical machine. What, what do I need to fuel it with to be able to have the energy to do some of these other things you’re talking about, right? Yeah,

A hundred percent. So we have to control the things that we can control. Yeah. Most things we can’t. We can control how we take care of ourselves. Granted, things are gonna pop up, we’re gonna have to deal with them. But on a basic day-to-day level, we can control how we take care of ourselves. We can control the attitude that we can choose. We choose, we control our effort. We control how we show up. We control our systems and habits. Those are the things we can control. Then we start to think about the things that we can influence. And then I think a big problem of burnout is we don’t know which things we can let go and the things that we need to let go end up fueling that false sense of urgency and keep spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning.

Okay, so I, I see that I need to sort of think about recovery. Is there sort of a recipe for recovery? If I’m like, all right, I’m the kind of person, I’m a planner. I, I need to, I need to, I can’t just start with getting more sleep. I need to see what my whole recovery plan is gonna be. I need to build a plan, even though I know I’m gonna have to ease myself into the plan. What, what are the sort of elements of a recovery plan that is not a week of vacation? And then I’m gonna go back to the same crazy, but it’s like, look, I have to, I have to recognize there are things that are gonna happen. You know, I get two weeks of vacation, or even four weeks of vacation a year, but most of the weeks are not vacation weeks.

And let’s be honest, most of the people listening, even when you’re on vacation, you’re still checking email, you’re still checking in on the office, you’re still doing a little work in the morning while everybody else is in the bathroom getting ready, or you know, you’re walking on the beach with your husband or wife and you’re texting at the same time. Right? Let’s be honest, that’s how most of us are living our lives. So what do we do? What, what is the recipe for this sustainable recovery that just consistently puts some gas back in the tank? What are, what are the elements that we need to be thinking about?

Yeah. So we need to schedule time for recovery. We just do, we schedule everything else. We prioritize everything else. So one of the things that I think is really huge is that we actually do a time audit. And when we say we don’t have any time, okay, prove it right? What does your screen time look like? What does Netflix look like? What is all of those? What do all of the things that you do in a week, what does that look like? And then looking at where can I put a block of time into schedule recovery? Maybe I want to go for ice cream with my family. You wanna jump in the car and go for ice cream? Alright, that’s gonna happen Thursday night from this time.

Yeah, it’s scheduled, right? Of course, we schedule a meeting. Why would we not schedule these things, right? Because when we get busy, if they’re not scheduled, they’re not gonna happen. Right? And so

Yeah, it is the argument for date night, right? It’s like, well, of course you should take your spouse out to dinner or spend time talking to each other or whatever. But for a lot of couples it gets lost and thereby the time they get to it, or they have an open two hours, you know, it’s once every quarter.

Yeah. My wife and I have a scheduled date night on Wednesday nights at six 15 at our favorite restaurant. It’s there. I see patients Monday through Wednesday. That is the hot butter knife that cuts the week. Yeah. And then we go and we regroup. How’d the first half of the week look, what’s the next part where the next part of the weekend look like? And then I get ready to switch into coach, speaker, author, that part of my, that part of my life. And, but it’s scheduled, it’s always scheduled. And so I think we need to do that. And I think thinking of things of how can we set ourselves up for success Sunday afternoons used to be the false sense of urgency spinning and other Yeah, I gotta get stuff done.

I gotta get stuff done, I gotta get stuff done. I really try to schedule an hour on Sunday afternoon for, for planning for the next week. That’s huge for me. I can get everything laid out, get ready to go. But most of Sunday is for fun and relaxation. So it is reading a book, it is sitting out in the sun. If it’s nice enough. I’m in Iowa right now. It is rainy and gloomy and it is not a good day for that.

Yeah. Today is not a good reading day, right? Yes,

Yes. But what else can we do? We, we play games, we put puzzles together, we just talk. And sometimes it’s just being quiet and doing some thinking about the future. But if it’s not scheduled, especially for business owners, if you have a free range schedule and your time is not blocked, that is one thing you can do that will change your life. Yeah. Including scheduling, recovery. I have a friend who says always have joy on the calendar. Yeah. So I think the power of anticipation is enough to help get us through some of those burnout times. We can all work hard, we can all bust our tail for a couple days.

And sometimes that Wednesday night meal is that thing that I hang on to, right? It’s that thing that, oh, I just gotta get to Wednesday. And then it is so, it’s so bucket filling, but it is scheduled and I, I, we don’t unschedule it.

So, so one of the things I heard you say is that for some people they need kind of a trigger that says this. This is, so, this is a moment of change. This is a moment I’m shifting from, you know, work dad to home dad, or I’m shifting from, you know, business owner to spouse, or I’m shifting from, I’m here for everybody to, I’m here for myself. And that for some people, they need a trigger. So, you know, whether it’s a, I I, so when I was a kid, my dad was a banker, so he’d come home every night in a suit. Right? And so that was work dad. And the first thing my dad did after, you know, greeting all of us and chatting for five minutes was he went upstairs work, dad went upstairs and he changed his clothes.

And when he came down work, dad was kind of put away. Now this was of course before computers and all the things that distract us now, but for him, that was like a trigger of the minute he put on a pair of jeans, then he was in home mode. So I’m hearing you say, sometimes we need a trigger that says to our, to our mental psyche, there’s a shift happening here. Two, what I heard you say was recovery. Yep. I have to, I have to think about the physical vessel, right? So I have to think about energy, meaning enough rest, I’m, I have to think enough about what I’m putting in my body in terms of food, and I have to think about moving that vessel enough to get the blood flowing and the endorphins going and all of that.

Then I’m looking at recovery in two different ways. One, I’m looking at spending time with people who are, who fill me up, who give me some joy. And I’m also looking at some time where that’s back to that quiet again. Whether I’m just sitting and there’s nothing going on, or I’m listening to a meditation app, or I’m praying, or I’m journaling, whatever that is. What are other, so what am I missing in that recipe? What’s missing?

So I love that you talk about that trigger point and it, and it looks different for, for different people, people who work remotely. Boy, it’s really hard to know what mode you’re in, especially if it is you’re moving from one room to the next room. Yeah. So how can you,

And, and you’re in pajama pants all day.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I’m a huge advocate for getting ready for your day. Do something to signify that you’re in the mode. And then, and then even when you’re done with the day, go physically leave your house and come back, even if that’s where your office is. Maybe you go walk around the block, maybe you just go drive around the block, do something to signify this is this time and this is this time. So sometimes it’s, instead of tearing outta work at the end of the day, can you, is it possible to take five more minutes, make your list of stuff so that you can leave it there? Because if we don’t do that, and our head is still swirling, we’re gonna be in one place at home physically, and our brain is still gonna be at the office.

So how can we, how can we do that? So yeah, I, I like, I really like what you’re saying there. It’s, it’s any way that we can separate, this is what I’m doing now. I think we’re in such a place right now that we don’t even know what we’re doing. We’re we’re, yeah. Partially with our family, but we’re on our phones, but we’re watching a show, but we’re checking social media, but, and we’re just not really in our, we’re not present with ourselves. We’re in multiple places. And, and it just feels yuck.

Yeah, it’s interesting. So back in the day when we all worked in an office, I loved the commute to and from the office because for me it was like a, as you said, it was like a hot butter knife that just sliced through the day and said, okay, you gotta sort of wind down from work. And so you walk in the door and you’re super present at home, or here are the four things I gotta get done this morning. So I’m sort of in my head getting ready for the work. And it’s harder when you’re basically walking down the stairs into an office or, you know, you’re walking to the kitchen table for some people that don’t have an office in their home, but they’re doing a lot of work from home. Or, you know, folks who are, you know, like our world, you know, we’re constantly on planes.

And so, you know, my office could be a, you know, united club. It could be a plane seat, it could be a hotel room and fill in the name of the city. So it, it is challenging to sort of know how to create some boundaries when everything just flows. So that leads me to question I wanted to ask you, which is, you were saying, you know, it’s hard to be in recovery when you’re watching Netflix or whatever. So what, what do you say to the people who go, well, that’s my recovery, right? I sit on the couch with my partner and we watch, you know, fill in the blank. Is that recovery?

It can be, it can be, but I’m not gonna, I’m gonna argue that four hours of that in an evening is not recovery. Right. I just don’t think it is. I think we’re being, I think we’re being too stimulated when we do that part. Partially our brain is being stimulated, but I think we’re also bored with that. I really think we are. So I would argue, if you’re gonna sit four hours on there, what else could you do with half of that time? Could you do two hours of that and could you, or even three hours of that and maybe an hour of a walk, could you guys go for a walk together? Could you play a game together? Could you put a puzzle together? Could you do something that is not screen stimulating?

Yeah. Right. I, I think, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. My wife and I watch shows on, on Netflix. We have a few that we watch from time to time. But what’s more important, instead of just easing into zone out mode, can we talk about our day? Can we plan some things for the future? Can we do something where we really connect? It’s, it’s no wonder to me that, that people who are so busy all day and they come home and even if they sit right next to each other on the couch and watch a show and don’t communicate at all, it’s, it’s no surprise to me that those people eventually look at each other and say, who the heck are you? I haven’t known you for the last 10 years. This is all we do. Right?

Right.

Yeah. And we’re missing out on these golden opportunities, man, when we have humans right next to us. That is such a gift and such an opportunity for both of us to, to recover. But we choose these, these zone out things so we don’t have to face anything. What if you really have that thing swirling on, in, swirling around in your mind, and you look at that person sitting next to you and you say, Hey, I’m struggling with this. Can we talk through this a little bit? Wow. And then once you’ve talked through it, then enjoy that because you’ve done something really great for yourself.

Yeah. And, and for folks who don’t have somebody at home, how do you, how do you fill parts of your week with humans that are, you know, there, there are people in our life that are draining and, and they’re part of our obligation and responsibility and, and, and we love them. And, but there are people that just sort of soothe your soul. And I think a lot of times those are the people that we need to make sure, back to your earlier point, are on our calendar that we are, you know, touching base. We are having a check-in phone call if they’re not physically in the same part of the world as you are, or we are meeting them for coffee or a walk or, you know, I think also, you know, I see a lot of agency owners sort of combine some of these things.

Like they, they have a good friend that they will meet at a park or a lake or a fill in the blank, and they walk together. So now I am, I’m socializing and I’m filling my bucket up with this human being that makes me feel good about life and asks me hard questions and I can have a deeper conversation, a more personal conversation, but I’m also moving my body. So we’re a, we’re awesome at multitasking as business owners and leaders. So you can also multitask to take care of yourself, right?

Oh yeah, absolutely. There’s times when I will go for a walk with a friend and so, or my or my wife. And we’re, we’re talking and we’re sharing life and we’re moving. Those are, yeah, those are win-wins. We’re filling each other’s buckets. We’re, yeah, we’re getting recovered. Sometimes when I am exercising, I can be exercising and being quiet at the same time. Sure. That’s great. I’m doing two things to help myself recover. And that just, that really stacks on it. And I know some people are gonna say, I’m introverted, I don’t like to be around people. All of that. I recover by myself. All of that kinda stuff. And while I will say, okay, that’s fine, but we need people.

I’m gonna argue it till I’m blue in the face. We need people. Well,

We’re hardwired, we’re hardwired to need people. I mean, to have, we, we’re hardwired to belong. We’re hardwired to have connection. And so again, even if you are super introverted and, and big crowds of people are exhausting to you, I have to think there is a human being or two, that on a, in a one-on-one basis, they are soothing for you. They are challenging, they are comforting. Fill in the word, but they, they give you something that is hard for you to give to yourself.

A hundred percent. I found it. I have found it over and over again. I’m not a huge fan of traditional networking things, but man, you get me in a room with three or four friends and we’re sharing life, oh my gosh, that is so good. Or a friend that I, I have a friend that we have lunch almost every Tuesday. We’ve done it for over 15 years. He comes to my office, we have lunch. And that is another one of those things that’s a huge part of my week. And when that’s not there for a couple weeks, if we’re busy, if it just feels like we can’t make it for that time, it feels like something’s missing.

Okay. So time alone, time with people that are rejuvenating and, and healing for us. Time away from screen food, sleep movement. Am I missing anything in the equation?

That’s pretty good. I think you got a, I think you got a great list there. Yeah. We just, I think the mindset of constantly thinking like we’re gonna drain ourself, life is gonna drain us. But the app instead that should be running it, that I would like to be running in the back of my head is how can I recover a little bit today? So let’s say that everything moves us to the left on a one to 10 scale. Every life moves us to the left. How can we move to the right?

So I know we’re getting to the end of the hour, but I’m curious in your work, because my head goes to, it’s not just us that needs it, it’s everybody on our team. It’s, it’s our fa our entire family. So how do you gamify this? How do you create a team? How do you make this a team sport? How do you, how do you work the idea of recovery into your business so that, because let’s face it, as bosses, we want to get the best performance out of our people. And if they too are on empty all the time and they don’t have time to do the deep thinking and they don’t have time to bring their best self to client meetings or internal meetings. So have you seen business owners kind of codify this and weave it into the sort of the structure of their business?

Well, I think what happens, obviously culture starts with the leader. And so when the leader starts to practice some of these things, then they become more present at work. They become a better version of themselves. They’re not so stressed out. So when other people see that, they see that that’s modeled. So I think that’s a great thing. One of the things I love to do is come into companies and do a that damn analogy workshop. And so what we do is we do talk about these things. We talk about how to decide where you’re at on that one to 10 scale and be able to communicate it inter office wide. And then we talk about the things that fill us up, the things that drain us, and then create common language for that. And it gets everybody on the same page.

And then we start, we, I find that people start talking a little bit less about the negative and a little bit more about what they’re doing to try to right the ship in the other way. So if the team can come together and learn on that, then it’s just a, it’s a great way to encourage it. It’s a great investment to make in your team to help give them some tools to learn how to do it better.

So I think about one of the very first things you said, which is it’s dangerous for this to live in the dark. That when we don’t speak of things or we hide things or we don’t acknowledge things, maybe we’re not actively hiding it. But, you know, I think, I think the standard idea of I’m a machine, I go go, go, go, go is part of how we judge ourselves, right? And, and so even by just saying to your team, you know what, I realize that I am, I’m running on fumes. And so you’re gonna see some things on my calendar that are not something you can violate and here’s why. And so again, whether it’s that 30 minutes of quiet or it’s a walk over the lunch hour, I know a lot of people like work out over the lunch hour.

So maybe that’s our exercise slash quiet time. Like by just acknowledging that you’re doing that for yourself and then talking about it a little bit in team meetings or goal setting or you know, that you just are, and by the way, I it, I think about this in your family too. I mean, think of the, think of the habits you could teach your kids to have while they’re still kids, right? Because if anybody’s overstimulated by screens, it’s our kids. But you have to sort of live it out loud. And so what I’m hearing you say is it starts with us living that out loud and acknowledging that maybe we have some needs that we have not been really great at meeting and we’re gonna make a commitment to being better to ourselves and then encouraging them to start exploring that for themselves.

A hundred percent. So when I raised my hand at work and told people that I was struggling with this, most of them didn’t know it. I’m a high achiever, I can run a hundred miles an hour, but things were starting to bleed over. I was getting a little chippy and reactive and all those things we talked about earlier. but it’s amazing. When I raised my hand at work and said this, my team rallied around me. Yeah. And my people asked if they could take some things off my plate and they did. And I let them, I was never good at doing that. But I let them, and it made such a difference. It brought our team closer together. It’s not a sign of weakness, it is not a sign of weakness to be, it just means you overshot doing a good thing.

Burnout happens ’cause we do too much. It’s just what happens. And, and most of what we’re doing are good things. We’re just doing too much of it.

Yeah. So, Eric, as we wrap up, how can folks find the books? How can folks learn more about the work you do? How can folks follow you on social? ’cause I know you’re talking about tips and tricks of how to do this, how to master this and still be highly successful and high producer. So give everybody a little bit of information on how they can track you down.

Yeah. My website’s the easiest place. Eric reer.com. In there is all the information about hiring me as a coach or a speaker. Links to the books. The books are also on Amazon. If you just search Eric, er they’ll, they’ll pop up on there.

And wrecker is spelled without the W. So it’s just R-E-C-K-E-R Just FYI guys. Yeah.

Yep. Yep. And I’m super excited about the book, that damn analogy. I think it’s a game changer. I really think when people can start to see their lives that way, that we really can focus on on it. We, the reality is, is we have to be a little selfish to be selfless. And I think we can do it.

Yeah, I think we can too. This has been great. Thank you for, thank you for sharing your expertise and your experience and hopefully people are gonna be like, okay, five minutes of breathing, I can do five minutes of breathing. Right? Yeah. So thanks for being with us today.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me Drew.

Alright everybody, so this is not, I suspect this is an episode that even if you wanted to sort of passively ignore it, like, oh yep, I listened to it. Check the box. This is gonna bang around in your head a little bit. You probably, there may be a few of you that you’re like, Nope, I’m good. I do all these things. But for many of you, for most of us, there’s room for improvement, let’s be honest, right? Yep. We take a vacation. Yep. On occasion we have lunch with a buddy, but we’re probably not consistently. You know, I, when I was younger, I had a bad habit of running outta gas. I st I just wasn’t paying attention to the gas tank. I was on the go, I was a young dad, fill in the blank.

But, you know, once every three, I know that sounds ridiculous, but once every three months I’d end up on the side of the road because I was outta gas. And I, it’s not gonna shock you, but all I had to do was fix that problem was keep an eye on the gas tank. And I think that for many of us, we don’t really keep an eye on the gas tank. We are just so used to going a hundred miles an hour. And we’re so used to being a little tired, a little distracted, a little focused on the screen that we just don’t have our eye on the gas gauge. And for some of you it might be self-reflection for the others of you, you might have a friend or a spouse or a business partner. You could say, you know what?

I know these are the three signs that tell me that my gas tank is getting pretty low. When you see me behaving this way or doing this, or, you know, I’m not coming to bed till two in the morning, or whatever it is. I need you to say to me, all I need you to say is you better check your gas tank. And I think what Eric said was in the beginning, let’s just start by monitoring and paying attention and seeing what we need to see. So if you do nothing else from this episode, I want you to figure out what your gas gauge is. What are the, what is the half tank? What is the quarter tank? What is the, you know, that red zone at the bottom that’s like, seriously, you’re gonna pull a Drew McLellan and you’re gonna be on the side of the road?

Which by the way, I’ve not done for years, so I’m, I’m evolving. But what is the gas gauge and how do you know when you’re getting close to empty? And then what do you do? So that’s step one. Number two, what do you do to make sure you always have a half tank of gas? So I grew up in Minnesota and you knew in the winter that if you didn’t have at least a half a gas, a half a tank of gas all winter long, your tank was gonna freeze and you were gonna be stuck. And so how do you stay at least half full all the time? Yep. Great. Three week vacation to Italy. Full tank. But even if you could keep the tank half full all the time, maybe that’s the goal.

Let’s be realistic, right? We all are crazy. We’re stretched in a million directions. What are you gonna do? So those are the things I want banging around in your head. Those are the questions I want you to ask yourself and want you to talk about with sort of whoever your trusted tribe is. You know, if you’re coaching with us, talk to us about it. If you’re in a peer group, talk to your peer group about it. Talk to your family. But this is definitely a put the mask on first and then put it on somebody else. You need to live this out loud. You need to sort these questions out. You need to start taking good care of yourself. A lot of people depend on you. A lot of people are counting on you to stay healthy and vibrant and have great ideas. And you can’t do that if you’re on the side of the road ’cause you have no gas in the tank.

So please do something with this episode. Please apply it. Please think about it. Please talk about it. And five minutes, five minute incremental change. You don’t have to go whole hog. You don’t have to go on hour long walks and have deep conversations about the meaning of life and whether or not there’s a heaven and hell. I just five minutes of breathing exercises, give yourself that gift and see what happens. Okay? So put this to use for you. Alright, so before I let you go, two things. Number one, huge shout out and thanks to our friends at White Label IQ, as you know, they are the presenting sponsor of the podcast. They do white label design dev and PPC so that your agency can deliver those services at a level of excellence and profitability for your clients.

So head over to White Label IQ dot com slash AAMI and learn more about them. And two, please know that I am super grateful that we get to spend this time together. I know for some of you, this is part of your recovery. This is, I am walking with you. I’m on a golf course with you. We’re on a subway together. I’m grateful to be in your ear. But remember, this is still noise. This is still you thinking, this is still you working. So I I, while I don’t wanna be, I don’t, I don’t wanna not be with you every week. And please know I’m super grateful. Carve out some time for yourself too, right? So maybe, maybe we’re the trigger.

Maybe it’s like after I listen to the Build a Better, Agency Podcast, I’m gonna take 15 minutes and journal on what that meant to me or how I can apply that to my life, how I can apply that to my family. Maybe it, maybe we can be a trigger for you. That would be a lovely thing. But nonetheless, I’m super grateful you’re here. Guess what? I’ll be back next week. I hope you will be too. I’ll see you then. Alright. Thanks for listening. Take care of yourself.

That’s a wrap for this week’s episode of Build a Better Agency. Visit agency management institute.com to check out our workshops, coaching and consulting packages, and all the other ways we serve agencies just like yours. Thanks for listening.