He Led Global Companies, Then His Body Shut Down: Art Blanchford on Finding Purpose After Burnout

Art Blanchford on childhood cult, corporate collapse, and purposeful living, Give A Heck Podcast with Dwight Heck

🎧 Listen and Watch Give A Heck Podcast

He built companies worth billions of dollars overseas, then his body shut down completely. Art Blanchford shares his journey from a childhood cult to corporate collapse to a life built on real purpose.

─────────────────────────────

🎙️ Give A Heck Podcast

The Give A Heck Podcast helps you learn how to live life on purpose, not by accident, through honest conversations on money, mindset, and what truly matters.

🎧 Episode Overview

Art Blanchford grew up inside a religious cult, where he learned early that survival meant pleasing the man in charge. That same drive carried him to the top of global corporate leadership, running operations worth billions of dollars overseas, until his body finally shut down during COVID and forced him to stop. In this conversation, Art walks through the collapse, the slow work of rebuilding a marriage and a sense of self, and how writing his book and founding the Midlife Transition Mastery Community became the next chapter of a life he once thought he had to earn.

🔥 What You Will Learn in This Episode

Why children raised inside a controlling environment often become the most driven high achievers
How years of ignoring his own limits ended with Art’s body shutting down completely
The difference between performing your worth and actually knowing it
Why the collapse period matters, and why so many high performers refuse to allow themselves one
What it actually looks like to rebuild a marriage, a career, and a sense of self after everything falls apart
Why Art founded the Midlife Transition Mastery Community, and who it is built for

⏱️ Chapter Summaries

0:00, Cold Open: A stranger’s words about being invisible open the episode.

1:09, Meet Art Blanchford: cult childhood, global executive, collapse, and the life he found on the other side.

8:33, Origin Story: growing up inside a religious cult and learning to please the man in charge to survive.

25:25, The Collapse: how years of ignoring his own limits ended with his body shutting down during COVID.

29:22, Letting Go: joining Workaholics Anonymous and walking away from the corporate ladder he had built his identity around.

1:18:14, Writing Purposeful Living: the book Art started for his kids and finished ten years later.

1:33:44, What Art Gives A Heck About Today: authentic connection, his men’s retreats, and his wife’s new cafe.

💡 Key Takeaway

Worthiness is not something you earn through performance, it is a birthright. A mind that refuses to rest will eventually force the body to collect on the debt.

🔗 Continue the Conversation

👉 Stop Fixing Yourself, Derek Rydall and the Law of Emergence

An experience that nearly killed him forced Derek to stop fixing himself and start emerging into who he already was, a parallel path to Art’s own collapse and rebuild.

👉 Why Leadership Burns Out High Performers, Sira Laurel

Sira unpacks why the highest performers in an organisation are so often the first to burn out, the same pattern that caught up with Art at the top of his career.

👉 Jim Tracy, Building Men of Character

Jim’s story of building character from a hard start echoes Art’s own path from a difficult childhood to a life of purpose.

👉 Fred Moss, You Are Not Broken, You Are Unheard

Dr. Moss explores the isolation so many high achievers carry quietly, and what real connection actually requires.

👉 Are You Drifting Through Life, Purpose and Direction

A solo episode on what it looks like to live without intention, and the first step toward changing it.

👉 Caught Between Adult Kids, Aging Parents, and Your Retirement

A solo episode on the pressures of midlife, when generations above and below are both pulling at once.

👉 300 Conversations Later, Dwight Heck on Regret, Money and Purpose

Dwight’s own milestone reflection on regret, money, and what actually matters after 300 conversations.

🧩 Key Themes Discussed

Childhood conditioning and survival
Corporate burnout and collapse
Faith, surrender, and letting go of control
Marriage and authentic connection
Writing as legacy for the next generation
Midlife reinvention and purpose

👤 About Art Blanchford

Art Blanchford spent decades in global corporate leadership, running operations worth billions of dollars overseas, before his body shut down completely during COVID. He is the author of Purposeful Living, Wisdom for Coming of Age in Complex Times, the founder of the Midlife Transition Mastery Community, and host of the Life in Transition Podcast. He is also an endurance athlete who has completed a full Ironman and a hundred kilometre foot race in Nepal, a husband, and a father.

🤝 Connect with Art Blanchford

🤝 Connect with Dwight Heck

🎧 Listen and Watch This Episode

Use the platform links at the top of this page to listen or watch this conversation with Art Blanchford wherever you get your podcasts.

🙌 Final Thoughts

Art’s story is a reminder that the things we build to survive a hard childhood can carry us a long way, right up until the body refuses to go any further. What comes after the collapse, the willingness to be seen, to let go of earning love, and to build something real, is where the actual life begins.

📣 Call to Action

If today’s conversation landed with you, please take two minutes to leave a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. It genuinely helps more people find the show.

If you’re watching on YouTube, hit subscribe and turn on notifications so you never miss an episode. And remember, live life on purpose & not by accident.

📄 Full Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Art: I was walking by a homeless guy once, a panhandler in Denver, and I just kept walking. I didn’t even look at him and he said something to this extent. He said, Hey, dude, I may not be rich and important like you, but I’m not invisible.

[00:00:16] Dwight: Welcome to Give a Heck. I am your host, Dwight Heck, and for much of my life, lived my life in quiet, desperation wondering how I was going to pay the bills, take vacations, save for retirement, and one day wondering if I would get off the hamster wheel of life and have purpose, a life that most of society lives, which takes us to work, then home, then repeat, and pays us hopefully enough. Just to survive the harsh truth that most live with more months than money and have no idea how to live life on purpose, not by accident. This ensures the mass majority are living not just financially broke, however, emotionally and mentally as well. Due to financial pressures and each episode, I will introduce you to thoughts, ideas, and guests that can help you to learn how you too can live life on purpose, not by accident. Welcome back to the Give a Heck podcast. I’m your host Dwight Hack, and today we are diving into a conversation I have genuinely been looking forward to. My guess is walk through some of the most defining experiences a person can face from growing up inside a religious call, to climbing to the absolute peak of global corporate leadership, to completely collapsing under the weight of it all. And then on the other side of that collapse, finding something he describes as the life he always dreamed of. He is an author, a podcast host, an executive coach, a husband, a father, an endurance athlete, and someone who has completed a full Ironman and a hundred kilometre foot race in Nepal. He is the author of Purposeful Living Wisdom for Coming of Age in Complex Times, and the founder of Midlife Transition Mastery Community Art Blanchford. Welcome to the Give a Heck podcast.

[00:02:10] Art: Thank you, Dwight. I’ve really loved our long pre-conversation that we’ve had here, and I’m really excited to be recording with here today. and congratulations on having 300 episodes of your podcast, too. That’s amazing.

[00:02:22] Dwight: Yes. Thank you so much. It’s been a labour of love because as a podcaster yourself, depending on how much you invest in it, I spend, my daughter asked me the other day and she went, oh my gosh, I never knew that dad. I said, yeah. I spent six to eight hours per episode right from the initial reading somebody wanting to be on my show, to doing the research, to building the conversation, to reviewing the conversation, to putting it up, and then doing the reels. I used to have somebody hired to do all that. But when I took over this past February, my podcast, has grown because now it’s more, I’m more vested in it.

[00:03:00] Art: Right?

[00:03:00] Dwight: I’m more vested in the reels. I’m more vested in what’s shared And right. So now from start to finish, it’s just me. I chose that as well. That’s a journey of life. nice. Before we get into every, everything, I just wanna say the fact that you’re doing the work that we, we talked about and have read about, and, sitting across from other men and saying, you are not alone. That matters. So thank you for, agreeing to come on here and thank you for helping out men that have been struggling. so many people, they go through challenges in life and they become very, okay, I figured it out. I’ve got it, figured it out. But they don’t share to the village, right? They don’t have that village mentality to search, out people that are struggling and there’s okay to, for it to be monetized. I tell people that all the time. It’s okay.

[00:03:50] Art: Yeah,

[00:03:51] Dwight: God did nowhere did God say you can’t make money and support your family and yourself. congratulations, brother. I wanted to start that off,

[00:03:58] Art: right? Oh, thank you. I really appreciate it. I think, you know where I’m at in my life now. It’s the deepest calling I think that we all have is to find the work, the contribution, the purpose, the meaning that if we don’t do it, it’ll kill us. And that’s a great privilege to get to that place, right? And then to be clear enough about that, then to bring that back to the village, right? To go on our own hero’s journey, right? If you read Joseph Campbell, that go out and do our quest, do our soul work, figure out who we are and what we’re about. But why do we do that? first it’s to heal ourselves and to learn about ourselves, but that’s not enough. The second part is then to share those gifts, right? I love what, Julia Cameron says, like our creativity, right? That work that will kill us not to do our creativity is God’s gift to us. What we do with it is our gift to God. And so that’s where I’m at and it’s still bumpy and I’m still learning and I’m not making near as much money as I used to and all that stuff. And yet I have, three quarters of my days or a piece and a sense of strength now instead of my maybe 5% or something before when I, your

[00:05:20] Dwight: level of satisfaction is gone up, right?

[00:05:23] Art: Yeah. And the connection and the relationships I have, my relationship with my kids and my wife were good before, but they’re outstanding now. And the depth of the friendships that I have I had friendships before, but I didn’t even recognise them as friendships. I was so into performance and performing and doing everything I should do that I didn’t even recognise them really as true friendships, even though they actually, now I can see that they were and are, but a lot more friendships as well. And, and just enjoying life. Like I’m measuring success, right? We, whenever we say success in America, and it’s pretty much everywhere in the world now, I’ve lived a lot of places in the world, and of course there’s some remote places that’s not the case. But whenever we say success in North America include Canada here, we mean money. We mean making money, and that’s it. The problem is that’s only one of nine dimensions of life. And if we focus on that and we expect that on its own is gonna make us happy, then we are gonna, we’re gonna be sorely disappointed. And if we don’t have the quality of relationships or community where we can talk about that, talk about our disappointment, especially after we’ve earned a lot of money, if we don’t have a place where we feel safe to talk about that, because oh, that’s what everybody else wants, and here I am making it, then, the long and the short of it is we can spiral down really fast and end up in deep in some addiction and or taking our own life. So it’s really important to recognise that life has a lot more dimensions than money. Money’s important, but it’s only one of nine. And to have a community where we can grow and share together, and as you said earlier when we were talking, Dwight, to be seen, to see and be seen, I even think that’s a more powerful word to see somebody I feel like today is more powerful than to say you love somebody. Oh, absolutely. Because love absolutely has so much baggage and so much stuff around it. It’s defined

[00:07:21] Dwight: wrong too, though. Love

[00:07:22] Art: is defined

[00:07:23] Dwight: wrong

[00:07:23] Art: in my opinion. But everybody has a whole different definition for it too. So it’s hard to say, but if I can see you so clearly that you can see reflected back to yourself the amazing human being that you are, then I’m doing my job.

[00:07:40] Dwight: Wow. So true. So true. So one of the things we’re gonna get into your book, we’re gonna get into what you’ve gone through, but I always, my podcast starts from the person’s origin and builds so that my community of people that follow the show and listen can truly tap into what we’re communicating. I believe we can create connection and chemistry through our voice, through those that are gonna watch us on my YouTube channel. And I know myself, I feel incredible chemistry with you just from talking for an hour. Yeah. and just getting to know one another. So yeah. Part of that though is giving people something that they can, if they’re, flagging in Flag Wap, flopping in the wind, they can actually, get some sort of direction and purpose. And I like starting out with a person’s origin. So art, most people hear someone say they grew up in a religious cult. I wanna start there and immediately have questions. Sure. Before we get into the leadership career and everything that came. After, can you take us back to the beginning? What was life actually like growing up in that environment and what did it teach you for better, for worse, and who you needed to be to survive?

[00:09:00] Art: Yeah, there’s a lot of questions inside that, but I like the last one. I think early on, was, it was in some ways wonderful, right? It was, there was this person that was God and was a benevolent God. And, and that changed, in a very traumatic event when, I was hugging mom’s leg and he started beating mom while I was hugging her when I’m about five or six years old. And all of a sudden, this benevolent God turned into a evil God in my mind. But when I saw that nobody was gonna step in and protect her or protect me, then I realised, and this is the lesson to survive, that I had to please the man, right? That if I want to survive, then I need to please the man. And so I got real busy and really good at pleasing the man. And, that has two sides to it, right? On one hand that, and there’s an episode on my podcast called from, called the Captain of Industry, where I talk about this. It’s an early episode, maybe seven, seven or eight or something, so a long time ago. But it’s, an industry in a corporate, multinational corporations. If you can answer the question the boss has before they can ask it. Which is the highest level of pleasing the man, quote unquote. Then you got up, you go up the ladder really fast. And I also had a lot of empathy. I had a lot of pain and a lot of loneliness, and that also builds a lot of empathy. So I was very good at connecting with people as well. So I was very good at leading my team. I was very good at connecting with customers, and I could please the bosses before they could even ask. So that was what I learned to survive. The other thing, and I think also served very well in corporate in the corporate world, and I see this like when I think about other people that worked for me, that I know their stories as well and how good of executives they are. The other thing that I learned is to be, we were, the kids were feral and we raised ourselves. the parents were busy doing their cult business and saving the world, and we raised ourselves. And what’s good that comes out of that, two things. One is you learn, you can handle stuff. So even if I was incredibly insecure socially and doubted my self worth, I could do shit. I could do stuff with my hands and I could figure stuff out and I could feed myself and I could build buildings and milk cows and butcher animals, and I could do stuff. I could plum and I could wire, I mean everything because I had to, I could fix cars, fix tractors, plan harvest. So there’s a certain amount of confidence as far as being able to survive. Total lack of confidence in how to interact with normal people. Because I spent the formative years inside this call when it was always us against the world. The other really great thing that came out of it was the relationships I have with my siblings and my cousins. Because we all went through that together. We’re still, most of us are super close today and really, and that those relationships are incredibly strong. So that was also a really wonderful part of it. So this sort of basic ability, when you talk about business, there’s this, the two acronyms people talk about. When you hire somebody, you wanna have somebody that can, f, SO and GSD, those acronyms,

[00:12:12] Dwight: not

[00:12:12] Art: off the top of my

[00:12:13] Dwight: head.

[00:12:13] Art: Figure stuff out and get stuff. Oh, okay. if I say it a nice way. Or you can put another four. Yeah, of course you can. Yeah,

[00:12:20] Dwight: of

[00:12:20] Art: course. but I could do those things really well. But I also felt like that I had to perform, and this is a problem with a lot of men that we have to perform to earn our right to breathe. We have to perform to earn our right to love, to be loved, to earn our place in our marriage, to earn our place at the top of the family, if you will, as a, father to our children. we have to earn that. And I was very insecure about that. I remember as I was starting to wind my way out of my big corporate job by my intention and I needed to, I remember there was a new HR vp, the CHRO that came into the company and I talked to him for a little while and he said, okay, lemme get this straight. So you’re basically an insecure, overachiever. And I said, yeah, I don’t like that very much, but yeah. But yeah, that’s, Swedish guy, right? so yeah, so those are the things that I learned from the cult. I learned that I was different than everybody else, which made me very socially inept and insecure, but that I could also feed myself at a very young age. So I was completely on my own by the time I was 16 years old. Wow. And, moved outta the house, went to college, and in a sense, never looked back. it was very bumpy times and I felt very isolated and alone a lot of those times. But, but I did what I knew how to do, which is survive and please the man, and then got rewarded very well financially for that.

[00:13:48] Dwight: So you were resilient as a young child, and so are the people around you. You were resilient enough to learn all the different things you mentioned in regards to survival and thriving. ’cause you were thriving, to say you weren’t, would be unfair to you and your siblings and other people around you. Would you say that the traditional person though, in the same, was everybody like that around you, like other families or were, was that a resilient nature to you? Like sometimes people can have Yeah. I think in my family can be more tenacious and resilient than others.

[00:14:23] Art: Yeah. I think in my family, yeah, everybody had that. we all had different ways of coping with the crap from the cult. Some people disappeared, some people stood out front, some people pleased the man. there’s different ways of coping, but we always had a strong commitment to each other. And on the on, on the outside looking in, all of our lives are thriving today. And have been since, since we were, since we’ve been on our own. which most of us was, mid-teens to late teens when we were on our own. So it’s, yeah, there was, overall I think, we learned how to do enough stuff that on the check the box, external looking success looks really good for all of us. But I think there’s still, there’s still a lot of, other things going on that we all need to heal, which everybody has. I don’t Oh, absolutely. Don’t get that wrong. everybody has that. Absolutely. But it’s, yeah, there’s still, there’s. The level of pressure I put on myself to try to earn my okayness, which is not necessary, right? All of us are just as worthy as any other human being, just by being a child of God. Just by being a human being. We’re all a hundred percent worthy. That’s the first chapter in my book that I wrote. You Are worthy because that’s the maybe one of the hardest lessons to understand. And when, as Brene Brown says, when we understand that our belonging and worthiness is a birthright, then anything is possible.

[00:15:49] Dwight: She’s amazing,

[00:15:50] Art: but I’ll add to what she said, that if you don’t get that almost nothing is possible from a healthy heart connection standpoint, you can still be successful in business. That’s a one dimension of nine dimensions of life. But, but you’re not gonna have good relationships. You’re not gonna be at peace unless you get it. That your worthiness is a birthright.

[00:16:11] Dwight: Yeah. That’s, I love that. I like Brene. Not like I love Brene Burn Brown stuff. She’s got a lot of impact. just like any author though, there’s, I treat it like a buffet. There’s some things that Buffet mentality of life has helped me raise my five kids is a single dad. It’s helped me have a successful career. More than one as a solo, a serial entrepreneur, part of me, more than one successful business. But at the end of the day it’s just, it’s all noise, right? it’s all great. And my connected to my inner self and my supporting and realising that I have the seeds of greatness in me. What can I do to water ’em? What associations do I need to continue to grow and water them? How do I fertilise back? How do I water back? How do I, where is that interconnection? And life has its curves, its valleys rightly. And I tell people that all the time. You could, one moment I can be in the quiet desperation and snap out of it because of all the years of things that I’ve learned, that I’ve adopted, that I’ve adapted to make it so I can snap out of it. Does it mean it’s never gonna happen again? Absolutely not. It just means that I hopefully can pull myself up quicker. Yeah. Put a bandaid on the booboo what, no matter if it’s emotional or physical and move on.

[00:17:35] Art: And even if it takes some time, it’s also okay, keep walking the journey. If you’re going through the stuff, keep walking. The

[00:17:41] Dwight: journey.

[00:17:42] Art: Yeah. That’s the whole point is to keep walking and it’s it can take time. And when you say the seeds of greatness in me, I think I also want people to hear that greatness is not. One dimensional. Like again, in this country, we think greatness means, oh, you made a lot of money, or you’re famous, somehow you’re famous, rich, and powerful. Then it’s greatness. Whether it’s selling a million books or 20 million books, or 300 million books like JK Rowling it’s, but that’s not greatness. Greatness is how do you treat the people that you interact with? How do you treat people that can’t do anything for you? How at peace are you when you go to sleep, when you wake up, right? How comfortable you are you being, this is what I’m still working on. How comfortable are you sitting there, quiet in your own skin with no phone, no agenda, nothing to do on a Sabbath or your rest time, right? How comfortable can you be there? Does your mind go crazy? Do you spin? So this is greatness, right? This thing about, what, we idolise a lot in this country and the billionaires and the powerful that is not greatness. And if it were, then none of those people would have problems. Master of the world. Yeah, you might be great in the way we call it, right? But master yourself, right? And then you’re mighty. And that’s, I just want to caution, and like I still get triggered even by those words. So I’m like, oh, I gotta be you have the seeds of greatness and okay, that means I have to have, 10 million listeners to my podcast and I have to make in \$10 million a year. And I have all these standards of what I think means greatness. No, I think, am I at peace? Am I kind to the people next to me? Do I see everybody that I interact with? And am I doing what it is that God put me here to do in the way I believe it? What’s my life’s purpose? What’s my soul work to do?

[00:19:40] Dwight: thank you for defining it. That’s because I’ve never thought about it as being wealth or having more clients or having more podcast listeners or more sales of my own book. I’ve never, honestly, for me, greatness is just what God has wanted me to be. I’m his child. Yeah. And I was brought into this world to do great things. And do I have, am I strong enough? Am I resilient enough to get through those valleys of despair to get to the back, to the top, to be on the climb and not camped in my mindset that I’m making a difference in other people’s lives? Because if I enrich others’ lives, their energy, their what they bring back to me is tenfold, even if they never ever know. It’s that level of satisfaction seeing their li especially in my industry with financial planning and helping people goal set and understand their life and money monsters doing the co the brain, the six inch coaching, not the yes, the money numbers don’t matter. And they’ve realised realise when they’re dealing with me, they’re going, this is all about numbers. No,

[00:20:43] Art: that

[00:20:44] Dwight: doesn’t matter. The rest, we need to work on you. Because if no matter what I do for you, no matter what, how I help you with money and your goals are all about money and retirement and this and that, where’s all the rest of your journey? Where are you experiencing life? I want you to slow down and let’s put it down on paper. Let’s have discussions and then we’ll figure out the money side and people just don’t get it. So when I that, yeah, your money should

[00:21:09] Art: support your life. Your life

[00:21:11] Dwight: absolutely should just

[00:21:11] Art: be about making money. Your money should support your life.

[00:21:13] Dwight: So seeds of greatness wasn’t, I appreciate you though, because there is a lot of people that now in the future, I’ll make sure that I articulate the fact that it’s this, I made

[00:21:23] Art: assumptions,

[00:21:24] Dwight: which

[00:21:25] Art: sometimes will all be Yeah. And you have that because that’s the way you understand it. But I’m not as lucky as you from that perspective. So I still, a lot of times I think of it another way as that’s a rich powerful And that’s why

[00:21:34] Dwight: we’re talking

[00:21:35] Art: Yeah. Your perspective matters. It’s important for me to say that for myself and to know that Thank you. That’s, that, that’s a differentit’s a different way of looking at things and there’s not, there’s not. are we treating people right? Are we treating ourselves right? Are we loving our neighbour? Are we living in a community that we’re supporting and helping and being helped by and being supported by? I think about a lot, I love this movie called The Bank of Dave. if you’re listening and you haven’t watched it yet, it’s a must watch. And what I love from that movie is you think about we are all in as an individual, we’re threads. And if we’re, if we get broken as an individual thread coming off a spool, we flap in the wind and maybe blow away and disappear. It’s a big difference. If we’re broken, if we’re an individual thread, then if we’re woven into a fabric, if we’re one of thousands of threads woven into a fabric and we break, we don’t even move. The fabric holds us. All the other threads hold us in place. And that’s a visual like I have of life now. we’re not meant to live it alone, and, but yet most of us think we are. And we try to do that and we strive and then if we break, it’s very dramatic, like it was In a sense for me when I broke, if you will. Whereas if I’m living tightly in a community and I had pretty good community, so maybe socially and emotionally it wasn’t too bad. It obviously changed a lot of things financially. but it, I love that picture of being woven into a fabric where I got that from the Bank of Dave, this movie. That’s really great. True story by the way. And just looking at community and the impact we have in community that we maybe don’t understand, and that’s so much more important. If I think about that all pathology shows up as addiction in one way or another. We avoid, we, we don’t wanna do. It shows up as a, in some form of addiction and addiction, a lot of people say, oh, if you’re an alcoholic, then you need to be sober. that’s the opposite of addiction of being an alcoholic. It’s not, connection is the opposite of addiction, not sobriety. If we live in that fabric, if we live connected to one another, then in there we can find the peace and the shared experience, strength and hope the buffet part of, taking what works from other people so that we don’t feel like we need to soothe ourselves or avoid things or hide from things because of our addiction, which leads to pathology.

[00:24:08] Dwight: Wow. That’s for those that are listening or watching. Rewind and listen to that again. Or wait till the podcast’s over. What, listen to the whole thing because that’s, there’s gonna be so many more nuggets. I’m just looking down here at everything I prepared. There’s absolutely no way we’re gonna get through it all. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna jump, sorry. I’ll

[00:24:29] Art: shut up and let you

[00:24:30] Dwight: run the show here. Okay. no, no. That’s not what I was, that’s not what I was meaning, I’m just saying that. I know it. it’s a great thing. It’s awesome because you’re very. Obviously with what you’ve gone through in your life and being a leader of others, you’re very good at articulating yourself and you’re a great storyteller that’s able to emote and I really appreciate that. Oh, thank you. but you might be one of the people. I’ve done this a quite a few times. It just did, it did it to for a gentleman this week is his second episode. He was on a month ago, and I had to have him on again. I asked him to come on again because there was so many things when I went through my notes that we missed, that I felt robbed. And I thought if I feel robbed, my listeners might feel robbed

[00:25:11] Art: me too. So it’s

[00:25:13] Dwight: Paul Harvey

[00:25:13] Art: might have to come back for the rest of the story.

[00:25:15] Dwight: Yeah. Yeah. And if you’re game, I’m game. So one of the things that I’m gonna jump forward a little bit.

[00:25:21] Art: Yeah.

[00:25:21] Dwight: You described, so this is gonna be into the CO years. Yeah. You’ve described collapsing it bed for two to three months during COD, what broke first? Your body, your mind, or your belief system?

[00:25:34] Art: Oh, that’s a good question. I think the only one that we can measure very clearly for me is the body, because that’s what shut down. But why did the body shut down? there’s two, the ma you could say it’s either two reasons, whether they’re in parallel or series, it’s hard to say. But the reason the body shut down was because the body had been being abused for a long time. Now, why is the body being abused? Because the mind’s not healthy. So my thinking was that I had to earn, as I mentioned, I had to earn love, had to earn performance, had to be perfect, had to be Superman all the time. And somehow my mind also was thinking that I could be Superman, right? That gravity didn’t apply to me. Jet lag didn’t apply to me, boundaries didn’t apply to me, right? I could optimise the machine and just go 24 7, which of course, so the mind’s telling me that’s what I need to do out of fear. Like almost always it’s fear, right? I was diagnosed with general anxiety disorder during this time, which I would say I definitely don’t have today, but I did at that point because everything was about survival and safety and security, even if it was totally irrational. And, so I think it’s the mind caused the body to break down, but the body, like I could function. ’cause my mind was so strong in both good ways and bad ways that I could function at a very high level, even when I was going so crazy that I was running my body into the ground. But once we, and I had seen this in smaller fractals, the same pattern in different scales. I had seen this before, like I’d go hard all year and then I’d come home for Christmas and be sick for two weeks because the body’s Oop, now I can come off of adrenaline and I can come down and recover, right? And the Navy seals, they call it the collapse period, right? You train, perform, collapse. I never allowed myself to collapse ’cause that’s not cool. it’s not okay. I’m not performing. But sometimes I would collapse by being sick. And it would only happen in times when I could, and by definition of could is if I’m home and I don’t have to travel for a couple weeks. So I had seen that before. So what happened at COVID was just a bigger fractal of that when we decided to stop travelling in the company. And I was travelling three weeks, a month, not the whole week, but I was doing three trips a month, two overseas, one domestic and one of those, at least around the world during that time. And when COVID came and we decided to stop travelling, my body went, Ooh, this isn’t just a two week break for Christmas. This has stopped travelling. We’re gonna shut down and recoup. So my, I just, my adrenal system, which had been overtaxed for decades, just stopped and nothing functioned right. And I couldn’t, I had no energy and I couldn’t get outta bed and everything hurt. It was really intense. and I still kept trying to work from bed, which I did do quite a bit. But I also at that time changed my job. Promoted three people to run the job I was running and, and took a step back. But even when I was that sick, it was very difficult to step back, like my ego and my fear, both, which is just the yin and the yang of the same thing. Fear and ego just go together. It was very difficult for me to step back, even after my boss said, Hey, don’t worry about anything. Just get healthy. I didn’t wanna let go. It was very difficult. And, what allowed me to let go is really. Going from a. I don’t know what you wanna call it. Superficial seems too light, but going from a normal spiritual walk to a real deep spiritual walk. So I joined Workaholics Anonymous and really surrendered and really gave my will over to higher power and had the courage out of that to recognise that, I’m not gonna starve even if I quit this job. And, and had the courage to, in a healthy and responsible way, set boundaries and work myself out of a job over the next year and a half. And did, and took six months completely off after I finished up in October of 2021. How long?

[00:29:36] Dwight: that’s quite the journey. And I know I was reading too, like about your GA diagnosis and I went and did more research about it because I’ve, just, to be honest, I’ve suffered from anxiety, a good part of my life.

[00:29:53] Art: Most

[00:29:53] Dwight: people debilitating a anxiety. And it wasn’t until I got into my thirties that I even understood the difference between anxiety and depression. Oh,

[00:30:00] Art: wow.

[00:30:01] Dwight: I didn’t, nobody ever taught me, and we don’t know that

[00:30:04] Art: language.

[00:30:04] Dwight: There were just terms that were thrown around and Right. And until I started personal development in 1993 with the first few books that a very famous millionaire friend of mine started giving me these books. You need help. Yeah. This will help you between your six inches. And I didn’t understand thoseI can appreciate, not that I have ever had gad, I don’t know, maybe I did, but at the end of the day,

[00:30:28] Art: probably a lot of people are undiagnosed with it. For sure.

[00:30:30] Dwight: Yeah. I’d have dec it would be crippling. It would be literally, and it led to the quiet desperation. I lived that for many years of my life, especially raising my kids full time. I talk about it in my own book. a single

[00:30:43] Art: dad with five kids. That’s

[00:30:45] Dwight: very, yeah. Four daughter. Very isolating. Four daughters. Four daughters too. So I had to reach out and had to, and it was constantly criticised because a man can’t do what you’re gonna do. You need to get yourself a woman in your life as soon as possible to help you. And I dug my heels and then said, you know what? I, God’s with me. I can do this.

[00:31:04] Art: Right.

[00:31:05] Dwight: May maybe a woman will think have things that I don’t, but at the end of the day, I have a community, I have a village I can reach out to their female, some of them. So I can ask them questions. But yeah, it, thank you for being raw and honest about what you went through. Yeah. and it is, it’s something that the pandemic caused a lot of people to reset in different ways, right? Yeah. And it, same for me. Everybody uses that. The fancy word to pivot whatever floats your boat. I reset myself. I went through stuff and, but I was lucky. I had some people that were really proud of me. The gentleman that wrote the Forward for my book, Tony Watley and the organisation, a group of people that I’d go to these different events, like I told you in 2023. Yeah. Going to Portugal, he’s the one that runs all this stuff, and he was just prodding us. We’d have weekly calls on Sunday and anybody could come on to them and he’d say, you know what, where are you gonna be? Where are you gonna be at the end of this? We don’t know how long this pandemic, like I remember his first words. We don’t know what’s going on, what the truth is. Are you gonna sit back and be the person when it’s over going, geez, I wish I would’ve done something. Are you gonna be the person that sits back and goes, wow, instead of not investing my time, I learned to slowly invest time through it, and I built a momentum, right? I wanted to be, I learned to, instead of avoiding my comfort, avoiding the fact that I was in a comfort zone, now I’m getting out of my comfort zone. Just different conversations like that. Were there people in your life that were, besides books and different things that you talk about movies, was there somebody that was so inspirational that you always could fall back to or maybe not talk to, but you thought of what they were, had told you or taught you?

[00:32:53] Art: Yeah, I mean there’s, I’ve done a tonne of personal development as well, both in person and in, reading or watching. So there is a lot of, there’s a lot of names that come to mind when I think about that, my heroes, if you will. Tony Robbins Zig Ziglar, OG Manino, Stephen Covey, right? There’s a lot of people at that, early on in my, when I was in my twenties that I was exposed tomy business mentor, I lose used a lot too. And a wonderful man. I love him to death and he was, so useful from my business perspective. But I think that the people that I walked the closest with during that time were the people I was raised with. These ones that I became so close to, growing up when we were raising each other. And it’s my first guest on the podcast, I think it was episode number nine’s, Jim Hunt, who’s my brother, cousin’s exactly my age, raised in, in the same house with me, my dad’s sister’s son. And, he had just, blown up his life in a way, right? Divorced, quit his job, west Coast computer scientist from Carnegie Mellon, and he lived with me during the pandemic, and he was the one that even said, and, he was trying to figure out what’s next for him, right? And he’s at work you’re being gaslit a lot. I was like, the thing about this, I’m running a multi-billion dollar business, and I’m thinking, what’s gaslit? And now everybody knows what it is, but I didn’t know what it was and he’s telling me. I walked very closely with him. I walked very closely with a couple of my other brothers, I walk closely with men in my men’s group and the, where we’d do the work every week, we’d meet and work on ourselves, right? With a lot of different processes. If you’re curious, go watch the movie, the Work. I don’t think it’s on Netflix anymore, used to be on Netflix, but I’ll give you some idea of the work that we were doing. So I had a, I did have a really good community. But somehow at that time, I thought the most important community was the professional one, which it’s not a hundred percent, but that’s what I thought. So I was still had all this anxiety about who would I be if I identified and put my whole heart and soul into this, to being this big corporate executive. Who would I be if I’m not that anymore? And then I also had the community from wa, from Workaholics Anonymous too. That was really helped, during that time. And last and definitely not least probably even most, is my wife, right? She’d been with me through everything and, even in all this, all the moves we made and all the crazy stuff. But she was, and she was the one that gently pushed me into WA as well, right? So there’s a lot of, a lot of authors, as I started down this path, I read a lot of David Brooks. I read a lot of author Arthur Brooks. a lot of, we just talked about, Richard Rohr. Alright, so there’s a lot of authors. And then as I started my podcast and I started having really interesting guests on the podcast too, that I could learn from and connect with as well. So there was a, there was, looking back, thank goodness there was a village, there was a fabric to be woven into even and I didn’t really recognise it at the time. And even so it’s been a really tough journey. Like it’s not easy. And that’s also something we need to recognise, like life is. Struggle. Life is pain. Whether we make it into suffering. If you think of the Buddhist ways that like life is pain, that we can choose the suffering or not the suffering we make up in our own mind, but stuff does happen and it’s difficult and then you can choose it. But if you think about, if I look at my life, most of the things that I’m the most proud of, that brought me the most joy, were also the hardest to do. And also had a high degree of pain and discomfort in, right? So

[00:36:28] Dwight: absolutely.

[00:36:28] Art: Even today, I still want to avoid the discomfort in certain ways. And, physical ways, like I’ve been doing all these physical things for a long time, physical ways. I, I love the discomfort now. I don’t hate it and I don’t even see it as a price. I have to pay for the, for, I don’t see the training as a price for the race. I see the training as something I get to do on a daily basis, which keeps me happy and healthy. And then I get to have the joy of the race as well, right? But in building my own business or reaching out to people, what people think about me, I still have that fear. I don’t want to do the uncomfortable thing. And just last year, Dwight, it was the darkest year of my life. I was so depressed last year, even after all that hard work. And I think it’s because I was avoiding, I was getting pretty clear on what it was. It’s my work to do as we talked about earlier. But I was avoiding doing it. And so that, that gets very, and then of course I had a lot of big changes too. I, empty nested, my last kid moved outta the house and I sold the big house that I was raised in or that I raised my kids in. And, I was tearing down the foundation of the monument I had built to myself of what I thought I should be. So our first half of life, and this is nothing wrong with this is fairly normal. We climb a mountain or we build, we become somebody. I call it building a monument to yourself. I was building this big monument to myself and one of my 3:00 AM April, 2020 mornings when I couldn’t get out of bed and couldn’t sleep and couldn’t get into bed. When I was deep in the chronic fatigue, I had this download that life is not some grand monument to be built, but an unfolding adventure to be lived, to be experienced. It’s a very different place, but still tearing down the monument, quitting my big job and getting rid of the fancy cars and selling the big house and, not having all this to hold onto that I thought had completely defined me was very difficult. And last year, the only thing that really felt could light me up there was two things, but I’m gonna just focus on one, the one it was to go hike the Appalachian Trail. I’ve been calling to me for a long time and then I was gonna go do this workshop with Richard Rohr called the tier of thing. It was called the Profits Something, profits Path is what the workshop was called, but it was based on his latest book called The Tier of Things. So I took that book with me on the trail and read it while I was hiking for two weeks in the most remote parts of Maine by myself. And, having that time alone. With nature, with God, with myself, was unbelievable. Totally transforming. And then I went straight from there to the prophet’s path with Richard Rohr and a bunch of other amazing leaders that I learned from Tom Zo and James Allison. And, and that really shifted things. So I feel like in a very different space than I was last year. But I guess my point is that just because it’s really dark and really hard doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. You just gotta keep going and you gotta show up and do what life expects from you, even if you don’t feel like it. And that’s things I still remind myself every day. Now I have better tools and I feel like II, as you said, snap back from it faster, but it’s not always, it’s not always fast. It’s not always a snapback. It’s sometimes it’s a crawl back or a be lifted or be drug or be carried back by your friends and community around you. And that’s okay. That’s why it’s so important to have that community, there were times last year where, I come back from the gym in my truck. I didn’t wanna go in the house because I was just crying for no reason. And I’m like, what? And then I’m like, what the is wrong with me? and then I start to be, but that critic, that doesn’t help anything either. But I had the community and I had the tools to check in with myself and to check in with others. So I call somebody on the phone, Hey, this is what’s going on. And being really authentic. I don’t, I’m supposed to have the answers, but I don’t right now. And this is what it feels like. And then to have, okay. And that, and those people were, some of ’em were the people I told you about. Like my brothers and cousins that I was raised with. Some were friends that I’ve done institute for self-actualization for 20 years with some of ’em were friends from my men’s group. I had a whole bunch of community that I could reach out to and be really authentic with, even when I wasn’t, when I felt like the, like I was about to collapse. So that’s why I think the relationships are so important and things aren’t necessarily gonna be easy, but if we’re in community, if we’re woven into that fabric they can still be meaningful. And, and my life looks very different. Like coming out of that last summer when things were so dark, we decided to move from Nashville to Florida. My wife’s opening up her dream business. I’m helping her with that. My business has taken off. I’ve gotten clear on what I want to, how I want to serve. When I went on the trail, I thought I’d stop doing the podcast. Similar reason to you is it costs money, so I should just let it go. But then I No. Do the podcast ’cause you love it and because it’s, and then learned to make money in it as well. Treat it like a business and learned to make money in it. And I got my first sponsor since I got back from the trail. Oh, good for you. and I’m launching. Yeah. So just and I’m aware of How I treat the homeless person that I see on the street that I know now, and I know her name, how I treat her is just as important as how I treat my wife or how I treat the president of the company that I used to work for. And to be able to recognise that and to be comfortable enough in my own skin that I can relate with any three of those, in the same way that to me is a much higher level of success. So I don’t count success anymore in terms of monuments or how many dollars I have in the bank account, but what are, how many authentic connections do I have today? How many sunrises have I seen this week? How many sun sets have I seen this week? How am I eating? How am I taking care of myself? How’s my sleep? Like I said, there’s nine dimensions to life overall. Where, money is just one of them. So I, I’ve, and here’s the biggest thing, like. The first work is to know myself because there is so much stuff that I did that I thought I should do. That’s not really me. Like I’m living in city for the first time in my life. I did once when I was really young in Iowa. But, and I love it, I’m in this totally crazy diverse neighbourhood and, all kinds of different houses and people and it’s wonderful. I can walk places, it’s totally different because this is not what I thought I should do when I’m making all this money and stuff than I thought I should be in the gated community and should have the big house and all this stuff. No, but what do I want to do? So we even have this lot in a gated community on top of a mountain in Tennessee that we were gonna build our forever house. And I’m selling it not because I can’t afford to keep it. I can because it’s not the life I actually wanna live, because now I finally have the courage to look myself in the mirror and know what it is I actually wanna do and be, and that’s not what I want.

[00:43:02] Dwight: Wow. That discovery, you’re talking about people listening or watching, there’s so many people that would love to have a 10th of that, right? Yeah. they’d love to have that discovery, even though you shared and were very vulnerable. But what happened with you last year? I’ve gone through that too. I went through the valley of despair and more than once have gone through extreme, depression and anxiety. One moment I’m feeling one, one moment. I’m feeling the next and feeling helpless, even though they’re around me. I had so many mentors, I had so many men’s groups I belong to. Yeah. People that would support me. I put up a wall.

[00:43:41] Art: Yeah, that’s

[00:43:41] Dwight: a tough right. Not to and it’s tough. It’s, it really is tough to understand. Okay, I’m gonna do this. I’m just gonna take a baby step. But if you’ve had success mentally and emotionally and then all of a sudden you get into that tough circumstance, for me it was like, I felt like a failure and I wanted it over with. Right now, I didn’t realise I had to start back at, start on the monopoly board. I had to start at start again, though. I could get through it quicker.

[00:44:10] Art: Yeah.

[00:44:11] Dwight: To heal. I needed to go through that. And I needed to accept people into my sphere of issues and challenges and ask for guidance and be vulnerable and realise that those people aren’t gonna think less of me. And if they are, that’s a tricky part. Then it’s, and if they are, then that’s time to reevaluate my associations.

[00:44:32] Art: Which is the right way to say it, but I’ve never, ever experienced that. You’re absolutely right as a way to convince yourself that it’s the right thing to do, to be open and be vulnerable with somebody that if they are, if they think less of you, then you don’t wanna hang out with ’em anyway. I have never experienced somebody thinking less of maybe ’cause I was showed up as I was. You know what I’m saying? When I was younger I did a lot. I had to, when I was in my thirties, I did a lot. Unfortunately. Yeah. maybe may. Yeah. So then, it can go that way. But I think, if, we have all this armour or we’re pointing guns at each other, especially dudes, right? We’re pointing guns at each other and we think that if we take our gun down, the other guy’s gonna shoot us. But what actually happens if I take my gun and hold it by the barrel and sit hand you the grip, you actually don’t shoot me. You set it down and you set yours down and go, oh dude, wow. We can have a conversation now. Wow, this guy doesn’t wanna shoot me. That’s what you’re worried about, that I was gonna shoot you as soon as you didn’t realise I’m not gonna shoot you. Then you can set your gun down too, and then we can have a conversation, right? And we can connect, we can see each other as we talked about earlier. So I think it’s, it’s, this life that we have is a, is an amazing gift. And the way that I can live more presently to that is to try to remember that more often than I used to.

[00:45:49] Dwight: Ag Agreed. It’s awareness. FII think of awareness and having those moments, minimum twice a day where I have awareness and gratefulness and think about what I’ve gone through. Did I have any moments through my day where I felt anxiety, depression, did I were, my triggers triggered and I ignored it. ’cause I needed the next task was in front of me. The next call was in front of me. And for me, awareness has been so crucial and key to, to educate others. Absolutely. To be more aware and Right. But by teaching others, it constantly is a reminder. That’s why I love being a hundred percent coaching people constantly a reminder of where I need to be or to course correct. To be my own co-pilot.

[00:46:39] Art: Yeah.

[00:46:39] Dwight: To be that person that’s gonna correct my degrees so that I’m not ending up in another part of the world. I’m a pilot. Right.

[00:46:46] Art: but as you said, the first step of that is this awareness. So if I am feeling depressed or anxious, can I notice that? Can I name that? Can I see where that is in my body? Like where is it manifesting in my body? If you take it to another level, it can, I even identify what part of me is feeling it. Like those were coping skills too. Anxiety and depression. All the feelings that we have they’re coping skills from some part of us that’s trying to help us make it through something. But to be aware of it, to recognise, because as soon as I’m aware of it, here’s the magic. As soon as I’m aware of it, then I also recognise that it’s something different than me. My depression is not me. If I’m aware of it, I’m the one that’s aware of it. So it can’t be me. And that’s the first distance to not feeling swallowed by it, to not feeling overwhelmed or helpless by it. Oh wow. I’m feeling depression right now. Or if you really want to be good, make a third person. Oh wow. There’s art, feeling, depressed feelings again. To get some separation to recognise that’s not me. So that awareness is absolutely key. And here’s the flip side, that’s also just as true. The happiness isn’t me either. There’s something deeper that’s me, and those are just the feelings that I’m having.

[00:48:09] Dwight: Yeah. ’cause they’re fleeting. They

[00:48:11] Art: can

[00:48:11] Dwight: be

[00:48:11] Art: superficial. It’s like the weather, right?

[00:48:14] Dwight: Yeah.

[00:48:14] Art: Be the mountain, not the weather.

[00:48:17] Dwight: A hundred percent agree. If we were, you deal with a lot of men, right? Yep. That are in midlife they’re stuck. What are they experiencing that they don’t have the words for? What would you say that they’re, they need to hear from you right now if they’re listening.

[00:48:37] Art: Yeah. I think most of all the thing is that because I was there, like we wouldn’t say that we’re stuck. We’d say our life is going exactly as expected to, and we’re doing all the things right. But the problem is we don’t feel good. We feel isolated. We feel depressed, we feel alone, we feel lonely. We feel anxious. That’s where it’s, the conversation starts. We’ve done everything we feel like we’re supposed to do. We’ve done everything right. We’re successful in the old way of talking about success, just being, making money, but we don’t feel good. Maybe our relationships aren’t right. Maybe our health Aren isn’t right. But in general, it’s just a feeling of something’s not right. And the reason is because we’re, and it could be, there’s two things. One is we haven’t been living a life that’s aligned with us the whole time, but that’s often not the case. Often we’ve done the things we wanted to do, but that’s the first half of life that’s building a monument to ourself. And that’s okay. Nothing wrong with that. But what made us happy and fulfilled in the first half of life, even if we did it exactly the way we wanted to, even if we did it for the right reasons, is not gonna be the same thing in the second half of life. And if we cling to that, if we resist the change that life is calling from us, it gets really difficult. And then how hard does life have to shake us to wake us up? Is it a heart attack? Is it a divorce? Is it chronic fatigue syndrome like I had, right? How hard is life gonna have to shake us to wake us up? Or are we gonna be willing to have the courage to say, you know what, something needs to change here before it gets completely broken. Something needs to change. And all change starts inside. So what is the work I’m gonna do? What group am I gonna put myself in? What practise am I gonna start to make myself more healthy in all nine dimensions of life? And to start focusing on a different way so that I can get to know myself well enough to understand what it is that I wanna be about in the second half so that I can flower, so that I can open, so that I can live so I can be fully alive instead of building regrets and resentments and anger as we get older, right? Like one of the things my wife and I really notice, as we’re getting older into our late fifties now we notice people that are a lot older than us that either have a spring in their step and a sparkle in their eye, or they don’t. And it has nothing to do with age. It has to do with whether we’ve done our own work. So I’m inviting men into a conversation to stop the speeding train long enough, as Victor Frankl says to, we, there is a gap between stimulus and response. Most of us, our first half of life, we run completely from stimulus. We don’t recognise there’s a gap, and we just go. And now I’m inviting people into a conversation to say, okay, first let’s recognise there’s a gap. And in that gap is our power to choose. And in that choice is our whole life. What is it that we really want? What is it that we, that we’re after? It’s really that simple and that difficult because answering that question

[00:51:47] Dwight: is

[00:51:48] Art: very hard. It’s very hard.

[00:51:49] Dwight: Trust me, after this is my gonna be my, I’m gonna complete my 24th year since I left the consulting industry of computers and got into finance and coaching and working and building me so I could coach and build others.

[00:52:06] Art: Yeah. Others, yeah.

[00:52:07] Dwight: Those questions, when I ask those tough questions, I’m just sitting across from somebody, and now it’s a lot more zoom calls. Even people across the city would rather jump on a Zoom call than me drive there.

[00:52:19] Art: Unfortunately.

[00:52:19] Dwight: Yeah. And yeah the human connection isn’t there as much, but I hear the same thing all the time. They’re stuck. They don’t know, they, they don’t know where to evolve. They’ve never had anybody ask them simple questions, but yet tough questions like you just said. they don’t know how to answer them. So getting into the weeds with them, right? Yeah. Getting into the, into Right. And helping them weed out their mental, and I’m not a, I’m not a psychologist, I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m a person that’s lived life. Yeah. And I have stories and I have different things from all my clients and myself that a lot of times I can share something with them. And I watch their, we talked earlier about human, development and watching body language, becoming a student of human nature.

[00:53:07] Art: Yeah.

[00:53:07] Dwight: I look for their body language. I look for their shoulders to drop. I look for them to uncross their arms and lean forward. Yeah. And I use those as indicators that I can push a little bit more.

[00:53:21] Art: Yeah.

[00:53:21] Dwight: Or put up pump the brakes a little bit. Yeah. Because everybody, they’re there to find pa how fast they’re gonna get around the game of life or the game board of life. Yeah. Which is there is them. All I can do is be a guide. I can be a servant, I can, and if I don’t know those people listen, are watching, I’ll tell you, I’ll say, you know what, I really don’t know how to answer that. But, in my 24 years of my career, I hear somebody I think you should talk to.

[00:53:51] Art: Right.

[00:53:51] Dwight: And I can give you a referral or it’s okay to get mental health.

[00:53:55] Art: Absolutely.

[00:53:56] Dwight: There’s nothing wrong with that.

[00:53:57] Art: But creating this, I had a quote on my, when I was president of billion two, billion dollar company in China, I had this quote on my computer that there’s more to life than increasing Its speed. Because I was all about doing everything faster and more efficiently all the time. But when I think about the best moments, the most alive moments I have, most of the time it has to do with creating space. Not speed. Like you can see behind me over here, this picture of me and my family in the Montana, Bob Marshall Wilderness 2023. What a miracle that me and my brother created this trip for. There was 12 of us, went in the woods for a week completely off the grid. to drive to the trailhead was like, I don’t know, two or three hours down a dirt road, right? We didn’t see any other human beings for four days. Wow. You don’t even hear aeroplanes out there. Wow. And yet, the miracle of living and the realisations that came to me the same as when I went on the trail last fall, right? There’s something about nature and there’s something about being alone. There’s so much research and there’s so many studies which I could cite at infinitum, that brings us alive. But if we don’t ever make time for that, if we don’t ever make space for that ’cause we’re running so hard, then we’re don’t live life. I remember the, when I drove out to New Mexico from Nashville for my sabbatical, I decided I was not gonna drive on the interstate, and I was gonna stay the first night with my cousin. And she said, when are you gonna be here? I said, I don’t know. She’s what do you mean? I was like, I don’t know it, probably two or three or four days. I’m not sure. ’cause I don’t know where I’m staying. And, I would just drive and I would stop in a little town somewhere, some little local diner for lunch. And I’d say, Hey, what’s the prettiest road west? Not the fastest. What’s the most beautiful road west? I remember having this conversation at Arkansas. That was the only point I had on the map, is I wanted to go to the Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas. That was the only point I had on the map. And, I was asking after that at the little diner for breakfast, said, where’s the most beautiful road west? And they said, wow, it’s up through the Ozarks. There’s this road. it’s mostly closed now. There’s no traffic up there, but it’s pretty rough. And I said, oh, I have a four wheel drive truck. That’s fine. And they said, okay, cool. So I found this, they told me how to get to it. I found this little road running across the ridge of the Ozarks and drove that for, I don’t know, four or five hours west and ended up somewhere else, for dinner. And then I drove Route 66, next to I 40, across Texas, Oklahoma. But that space, that space is where you can notice things, right? And if we don’t create that space, then we’re built. We’re still in the building a monument mode of life instead of the experiencing life. We’re not experiencing life. If it’s just a point to point journey, the only point that we’re gonna reach is death. Eventually. Everything else is experienced. So do we want to, are we, do you wanna just race toward death and not live your life? That’s the way most of us live.

[00:56:49] Dwight: Oh

[00:56:49] Art: goodness. To keep ourselves so busy that we don’t notice. And I’m, I still, that’s my addiction. I still find that, but it’s in those slower moments. It’s in the long walks. It’s in the long talks. It’s in, this morning I had a podcast that I was a show was gonna be on that I didn’t show up. My wife tapped on the door, Hey, I’m gonna take the dogs for a walk. I’m break for my business right now. You wanna go for a walk? And to be able to say, yeah, I’m gonna hold your hand and notice the, the amazing Spanish moss hanging off the live oaks here. Wow. And feel the breeze. That’s life. That is actually life. whether I die with 1 million or 10 million or a hundred million. It can’t replace going on a walk with my wife and holding her hand.

[00:57:32] Dwight: No, it can’t.

[00:57:33] Art: So we just, we ha I had it so backwards. I won’t say we even, and so many of the men that I work with, they’re going through those struggles, right? And there’s a lot of great resources out there that can help with that. But to change, there are two things. One is most of us are lying to ourselves from the beginning with the if then equation of happiness. If I do this, then I’ll be happy. And at midlife we do change from fluid intelligence, from high performance, just get stuff done to wisdom, to crystallised intelligence, to making sense of the pattern, to connection, to authenticity, to language, to beauty, to love that. And if we try to stay in the fluid intelligence, if we try to run in that pattern in our second half of life, we’re guaranteed to be miserable. Doesn’t mean you even have to change careers, but the way you do it will be very different if you’re not miserable. If you try to hang on to the way, if I tried to go back to being the same hard driving executive that I was in my thirties and did it the same way with that same energy and, thinking I was Superman, heart attack,

[00:58:42] Dwight: central.

[00:58:43] Art: Yeah. One, I couldn’t do it. And two, if I could, I would be, I’d be making myself miserable. So those that’s, so many men, we’re doing everything we think we should be doing. But we have nobody telling us about, as Chip Connolly calls it, middle essence. It’s not a midlife crisis. it is actually, but it’s also, it’s a midlife chrysalis is another way of looking at it. And do you have the courage to go into the dark and let yourself be turned into glop? Yes. It’s a scientific word. The caterpillar becomes glop inside the chrysalis. Do you have the courage to do that with the promise, but no guarantee that you might be able to become a butterfly. But if you don’t, you won’t. That’s for sure. So are you going to be willing to go into the dark to take the walk in the valley of the shadow of death? To do your soul work, to manage the descent, to let go of everything that you think is important in order to have a chance at living the second half that really lights you up. That’s your soul work, your sole purpose and mission to do. That’s a question.

[00:59:52] Dwight: Wow. What a great response. I tell people that all the time, especially type a successful driven, never stop, go from one success to the next. And I’ll ask ’em specific questions when I sit down with them and they’re, they look, you can see in their body. They’re not physically healthy. You can hear in the way they talk. It’s like they can’t wait to get done being with me. So they can, They’re even, they’re not even present. and I’ll ask them, tell me something of a journey of your life, right? Tell me, success, but then tell me from the start to that success, the journey and what was good, what was bad, what was indifferent? tell me some things. A lot of times they’re just like a deer caught in the headlights. They did. They only can say, oh, I started and then here’s the success. They were so busy that their mind, they couldn’t even access in their own mental images what the journey was.

[01:00:48] Art: Yeah.

[01:00:48] Dwight: And I, and it doesn’t even have to be work related. I’ll say anything. Just family.

[01:00:52] Art: Yeah.

[01:00:52] Dwight: You know what? your children are teenagers now. Yeah. Tell me some great adventures when you were younger. Oh, I

[01:00:58] Art: was

[01:00:58] Dwight: working all the time. I was too busy.

[01:01:00] Art: Yeah. I’d send them off on

[01:01:01] Dwight: holidays, but I didn’t

[01:01:02] Art: go. Yeah. And here’s the sick part, Dwight. Here’s the sick part. We say that with pride. No, I was too busy. And we say that with pride, like I did my son, I did it when my son turned 18, my middle son. I asked them this, just, this’s a good question to ask your kids. What’s been the highlight of your life so far? So a great way to learn about your people that you love. So then what’s been the highlight of your life so far? You know what he said? Philmont. Do you know Philmont,

[01:01:35] Dwight: raceway?

[01:01:36] Art: No. It’s a boy scout reserve. It’s a 300,000 acre boy scout reserve in Northeast New Mexico. And we did a 12 day backpacking journey there.

[01:01:50] Dwight: Awesome.

[01:01:50] Art: Three dads, six boys for 12 days, completely off the grid. And it was, I was starting to wind myself out of my job, but I, and I was a big part of this ’cause we were selling the company by then, and I told them very clearly, I’m going off the grid. And I was, had the courage enough by then to not worry how the, how it fell. And it turned out to fall just fine. Like we got the memo under any of understanding signed. I disappeared for two weeks, came back when they needed me, or two and a half weeks. But even if I hadn’t been, I was okay because that was more important and thank God it was, that led me to buying a home out there, which has led to this crossing event that I’m doing for, helping men to find purpose in their second half at the property that I bought out there because I fell in love with it from that trip. And it’s been the highlight of my 22-year-old son’s life.

[01:02:39] Dwight: Wow.

[01:02:40] Art: Of his whole life at that point. So

[01:02:41] Dwight: your heart was probably just pounding outta your chest. I would’ve

[01:02:45] Art: had a smile from ear to ear. It’s so amazing. And then, and because I did that, I learned how to do it so then I could lead my siblings and five nieces and nephews and one brave sister-in-law on that, on a seven day trip in Montana a couple years later. And but none of that has to do with being successful besides that. I can manage my time and often have some intention and know how to, plan and prepare. But it’s another dimension of life. So all in the end, all we have is the journey. That’s all we have, right? The success is just a point. It’s not a journey, it’s not a trip. And it, and if we’re doing something only for the outcome, which by the way, we don’t control, then we’re missing the point. If I were doing the business that I’m doing now only for the outcome, which I don’t control anyhow I’ll be missing the point. I need to love the process. I said, I think it was Mike Tyson that said, if you should never be a boxer if you don’t love getting punched in the face.

[01:03:50] Dwight: Yeah. It was him actually.

[01:03:51] Art: Right?

[01:03:52] Dwight: Yeah.

[01:03:52] Art: So what’s your, what’s your, I remember when I was president of Bottle of China, I was running my second Shanghai marathon. I ran a lot of marathons while I was over there in ultra marathons. And this was, it’s in November and there’s always one day in November, early December when it gets cold enough in Shanghai that everybody starts burning coal to heat their apartments. So the air, it happened to be that night before the marathon. So the morning when we were going to the marathon, I think the air was, the air quality was like over 300. I don’t run outside, I run outside, oh, I hate treadmills, but I would not run outside if the air was over 150. I wear a mask if it’s over a hundred and it’s logarithmic, so it’s 10 x every number. It’s 10 x more particular. And that was pushing 500 that day. And I thought about not even gonna the marathon, but it was my van and driver that was taking all the guys to the marathon. So I went and I wore a mask and it was right at freezing sleeting, rain falling. And I’m out there running this, and at mile 17, I’m cold. it’s like just cold enough where you can’t wear a tonne of clothes or just warm enough, but just cold enough where you can’t be warm and all extreme, it was just like miserable. And I, my mask clogged up so I couldn’t breathe through my mask. Mile 17. So I have nine miles to go. And I was, crying and I’m like, what the hell am I doing? This is so hard. And then I thought, yeah, it is hard and it’s exactly what I signed up for. And just because it’s hard doesn’t make it bad. if someone asked me if I had a hard day at work, if I told someone, they say, Hey, I was tired your day. And I would say, oh, it’s hard. I would have made the assumption at that point in my life that it was bad. After that race, we changed one of our core values in the company that we do hard things.

[01:05:39] Dwight: That’s awesome.

[01:05:40] Art: And it was so cool to see it. Like I remember having a conversation with one of my VPs, we were building this whole campus, huge investment, very difficult. And he came in and he’s art. And I’m like, That’s all true. That’s all true, Fabian. Yep. That’s all true. Oh shit. That’s right. We do hard things. All right. Got it boss. See you later. Like I didn’t say anything.

[01:06:05] Dwight: Self-correction.

[01:06:06] Art: Yeah. This is super difficult. Yeah, it is.

[01:06:09] Dwight: Core values are so important though.

[01:06:11] Art: Yeah. Who must do the difficult task? Japanese proverb, the one who can, you’re the man for the job in this case. You’re the person for the job. Go get it. All right. Got it. But that came out of pushing myself physically in a way that I never would’ve thought I’d be able to do in a work situation. But it’s the same thing, but doing hard things. Ken Rideout a neighbour of mine that, I don’t know him personally, but I’m one degree separated in Nashville. When I lived there, he just wrote a book called everything that You Want or everything that Brings Happiness is on the other side of hard at 50. He’s exactly my age. At 50 or 51, he outright won the Mongolian Outback race. That’s I don’t remember, 600 miles over seven days or something. Wow. And he didn’t win it for his age group. He won it outright, so when I’m out there running on the same track he is on Strava and I’m thinking, I just got a new PR ’cause I did this mile and on the, on the path at seven minutes 30. And then I look who’s got it, who’s got the king of the, the number one, it’s Ken ride out at five 30 at my age. So he knows something about heart and he’s also been through addiction and stuff too. But I really think that we, and I’m talking to myself here ’cause I have to remember this every day right now, is that doing the things that scare us, do the things that are difficult. It’s on the other side of that. That’s, we have the chance to be the butterfly coming all the way back to the chrysalis. Is it a midlife crisis or is it a midlife chrysalis? It depends. Are we gonna surrender to the dark night of the soul? Are we gonna allow ourselves to go into the cocoon where it’s dark and all this old structures melt down and there’s nothing we recognise so that we can come out, which is very hard and very uncomfortable so we can come out the other side and really love our life? Or are we gonna be too afraid to do that? And then continue to build stress and fear and anxiety and depression?

[01:08:04] Dwight: Yeah. Changes the decision. And unfortunately, it’s a tough choice for many women and men. It’s not just men. Hundred percent men.

[01:08:13] Art: No,

[01:08:13] Dwight: a hundred percent. And Right. We just need to yeah. it’s tough to push to the hard when we don’t know. It’s that, that we’re constricted, that we have that barrier. That’s right. Some we’re so oblivious to it. and we

[01:08:26] Art: don’t know what’s coming out the other side. And that’s true. We don’t know. We don’t know. We as a caterpillar, you have no idea what the butterfly is like.

[01:08:34] Dwight: Yeah.

[01:08:35] Art: Right.

[01:08:36] Dwight: But look at the word fear. So many people live in fear. People listening to this right now. Yeah. We’ve both been there and I know my whole life, people say to me, it’s false evidence appearing real. All the acronyms the one that I’ve hung on to now for over about 15 years is what I coach is every time you feel fear, feel fearful. Remember, fear stands for face everything and rise. Quit telling your mind that negative connotation of fear.

[01:09:06] Art: Right.

[01:09:06] Dwight: Fear. Your brain has fear. You feel fear. It’s a protection thing, but it doesn’t mean it’s a bad protection thing. It doesn’t mean you’re supposed to cocoon and hide. It means you’re supposed to lean into it. Yeah. Move forward into it. I love it. so that’s everything in Rise. I love it. That’s great. I haven’t heard that

[01:09:24] Art: before.

[01:09:24] Dwight: that’s been my mat, that’s been my mantra and been preaching it for more, probably longer than 15 years. And I get people that chuckle at it and go, oh, little sayings this and that. you know what, sometimes that can be your grounding rod, right? Absolutely. That can bely something that can make a huge difference in your life by creating habits that are more integrated into catching you on the fall.

[01:09:51] Art: Yeah.

[01:09:51] Dwight: So you don’t fall all the way, so you just Yeah. you get a little bit of a bump.

[01:09:55] Art: Absolutely. You

[01:09:55] Dwight: get to, you get to move

[01:09:56] Art: forward. Absolutely. And the key to that, there’s a couple things I wanna say that the key to that is awareness, like we talked about before.

[01:10:01] Dwight: Yeah.

[01:10:02] Art: If you have, if you’re emotionally literate, that’s the first step, right? I have a practise where I do every morning to check in with myself emotionally. Second thing I wanna say on that is like that what you say about Face Everything and Rise is a hundred percent right? And there’s a couple of references. One is a very popular one today, which is Ryan Holiday, the stoic author. The Obstacle is the Way it’s all about that. and then the other one and this one, I’ve read both these books. and the other one is, Pam Chodron. Go to the places that scare You. That. One is, Ryan’s is really good to me. It’s a little bit more like a textbook. The other one was a spiritual experience. I read it out in the mountains of New Mexico by myself and cried my eyes out for a long time and realising that’s the places that I’m afraid to go to. that’s the hard that I need to face. So it’s I love what you said about face everything and rise. It’s not about, dishing fear or getting rid of it, or it’s not like it’s ever gonna go away, but face it, go into it, lean into it instead of away from it. And I know it in my physical life very well. Like I’m on the top of a, a new cornice, double black diamond chute ski. and I, there’s this incredible fear like, I’m gonna die. that’s the thing. I think almost every time I’m gonna bounce off that rock and hit that tree and I’m gonna die. And so far, knock on wood, so far, skiing it, even if I wrecked, has never been as bad as the fear was at the top. So I face it and go, okay, and if I’m lucky, I’m in a place where there’s no option. ’cause I have to get down. Okay, if I have to get down, let’s face it, let’s face it. And then let’s rise the occasion. Okay, where do I need to make the turn? Where do I need to do Right? And then go. And I know that from skiing, I’m still trying to learn into my life every day, right? In the other areas of my life. So it is it, I love that what you say there. But those two references are also really go to that. And there’s a third one, little bit lesser known, it’s written by Art Blanchford called The Eight Steps to Master Midlife Transition. And the second step is to meet fear with data. Because that, we have all this fear, you do this all the time, I’m sure in your business, Dwight, with your financial clients, right? They’re afraid. And then what do you do? You make a plan. You meet it with data, right? So if you meet fear with data, instead of sitting there and spinning, I can literally remember dozens of 3:00 AM mornings where I got outta bed and said, okay, I gotta go meet the fear with data. I’m sitting there spinning and I would go get out my Excel spreadsheet, which had financials in it, and I had a red, yellow, green dashboard with all these different aspects of life about whether I should quit my job or not. But if I just stayed in bed and just let the fear spin, all I would do is spin. But if I would get out and say, okay, what’s the data say here? What’s the data actually say? It’s, again, comes back to awareness. But it’s a step first, accepting what is first step. Second step is me fear with data. So I love what you said about the face, everything and rise. I actually haven’t heard that one or didn’t remember hearing that before and that’s really good. and there’s a lot of other resources written in that vein and it’s really true. So if we fight for our comfort zone. Sorry to say it so bluntly, our life is gonna suck and we’re gonna die unhealthy and unhealthy on a

[01:13:21] Dwight: hamster wheel,

[01:13:22] Art: right?

[01:13:22] Dwight: Yeah. That’s

[01:13:23] Art: what I talk about all the time. Unhealthy mind, unhealthy body. If we recognise that everything we want is on the other side of hard and we’re willing to do things that push us, guess what? That’s what also makes us feel alive. There’s and I mean I could talk about this stuff forever, but the concept of Ma Sogi, which I read in Michael Easter Lee’s book called The Comfort Crisis, which is absolutely how to address the fact that we all wanna hang out in our comfort zone. But that doing something that challenges you enough that you only have a 50% chance of success but you won’t die, is a oggi. And I can tell you like, I love skiing, but the highlights of last year and two years ago, when the whole year from a, like when I felt the most alive was when I did these winter hikes that were really challenging, like really tough in the winter postholing and like the little seeding down the side of a mountain and, not like I was gonna go out there and be foolish and die. No, I have food and I have water and I have emergency equipment and everything. But it’s a challenge. what can I actually handle? What can I, what am I actually made of? Why do you think people do tough Mudders or do these really crazy extreme athletic events? ’cause they wanna see what they’re made of. And that’s where, when we find our edge is where we find our joy. Why do we love sports heroes? I was just watching, with my wife Rafa Nadal’s Netflix series since he retired, right? He wanted, and he said this several times, I wanted to see what I could do. I wanted to see what I was made of. How far could I push into the endurance runners, call it the pain cave. So these are extreme examples, but it’s easier to understand examples in sports than it is to say, I don’t wanna sit here and call the next client. I don’t wanna make that, I don’t want to ask the girl out or ask the guy out. It’s too scary. everything you want is on the other side of that. I talk with my kids about that a lot recently that I think there’s a, this is a line in a movie. I don’t remember which one, but it’s like life changes. Life completely changes on just 20 seconds of courage. In that time when life is calling to you, do you have the courage to say yes? Do you have the courage to ask that person out that you’re attracted to? Do you have the courage to ask for that raise? Do you have the courage to ask that client to give you a clear yes or no to pick up the phone when you don’t feel like it, to sign up for that race or that fitness class? Do you have the courage to do that? And that’s 20 seconds or 10 seconds or five seconds to say hello to that person on the street. That feels invisible. I was walking by a homeless guy once, a panhandler in Denver, and I just kept walking. I didn’t even look at him and he said something to this extent. He said, Hey, dude, I may not be rich and important like you, but I’m not invisible.

[01:16:16] Dwight: Wow. Now, right here,

[01:16:21] Art: right into the heart. And I stopped and I was like, whoa, you’re right. Sorry, I’m not gonna give you any money. And thank you for reminding me that you’re just as important a human being as I am, or I’m just as important as you are, whichever way you want to say it. Equal human beings and you’re not invisible. Sorry.

[01:16:43] Dwight: Wow. That is so true though. Look at all the people you can see in the street or wherever you are that are disabled.

[01:16:51] Art: Yeah.

[01:16:52] Dwight: That are in a wheelchair.

[01:16:53] Art: Do you look through ’em? Do you look past them or do you see ’em?

[01:16:55] Dwight: Yeah, my oldest daughter has health issues is, and spends quite a bit of time in a wheelchair and with walking crutches that walk onto her arms and stuff. Just, I won’t get into the details. And she feels that I know she has. She’s

[01:17:09] Art: not seen.

[01:17:10] Dwight: She’s not seen as, I’ve got two perfectly good legs. I can do this and that. I don’t need help off the curb. I don’t need help upstairs. I don’t need, Like it’s just, we need to all be more cognizant of those around us. But we’re gonna, we’re gonna jump into this. It’s now, I don’t know how much time you have left, but I want to at least get into your book a little bit before we wrap up the show. Yeah. Is that okay?

[01:17:34] Art: Absolutely.

[01:17:35] Dwight: Do you have enough time for that? Absolutely. Okay. That’s great.

[01:17:37] Art: I’m just looking over here. I’m gonna grab one off the show.

[01:17:39] Dwight: Sure. So one of the things I do, I want to step back for a second before I ask you about your book, because writing a book is something I understand from the inside of me,

[01:17:51] Art: right?

[01:17:51] Dwight: And I can tell you there are moments in the process where it stops being a project and starts being a confession. There are things you write and then immediately wonder if you went too far. There are things you do not write because you’re not sure you’re ready. And there’s this private thing that happens when you finally hold that finished copy in your hands and nobody around quite understands what that moment actually cost you. Art. I want to talk about the purposeful living, but I want to start there. When you were writing Purposeful Living, was there a chapter or a moment when you realised you were writing something you, you had never said out loud before.

[01:18:31] Art: Yeah. Yeah. there’s a few of them.

[01:18:34] Dwight: And go ahead and show your book, by the way. Yeah. For those that are watching on YouTube,

[01:18:37] Art: this is

[01:18:38] Dwight: Oh, nice.

[01:18:39] Art: Purposeful living wisdom of coming for coming of age in complex times. And, There was a couple of them, where I talked about, my starting to understand that I have worth because of burning our life savings in the business and my wife picking me up off the floor and not leaving me. and that being the first experience that I have of being loved without earning it in my own mind. Of course, it’s not the case, but that’s what I thought. So that was one that I hadn’t, that I hadn’t talked about before. and I started writing this book 10 years before I finished. And I started writing it specifically for my kids. I said, I want to give them some of the things that I have learned in my hard, my hard, the hard road, the school of hard knocks that I’ve been on. So hopefully they don’t have to report, they’ll have their own mistakes, they’ll have their own suffering, but hopefully they don’t have to repeat all the ones that I’ve made, especially if they’re learning from me, and I’ll help them to not have to, to learn that. but so that was one, but there was several. And I think the other thing, the other thing that was, man, maybe this was the, maybe this was the toughest one. ’cause you talked about there’s at some point when you’re standing there holding it in your hand. I did everything wrong in writing the book besides like just the, getting the thoughts out on the page process. But everything was, as far as trying to get it published and all this stuff, I did everything wrong and. There’s still a point where you have to put something out. It’s never gonna be perfect. I made a lot of mistakes. I was reading at a reading at the book launch party when I realised when I was doing this reading that the publisher had used the wrong level of the manuscript.

[01:20:16] Dwight: Wow.

[01:20:16] Art: Yeah. Humbling, to say the least, right? And yet it still had something out there, and I still got cards from people that read even that really jumbled up version that wasn’t near right yet and didn’t have all the complete edits in it. That really still made a difference for. So it doesn’t have to be perfect, but if it’s not out there, it can’t do anybody any good. So at some point you gotta sh you gotta push a ship button. And that was something so antithetical to what I, the way I ran business where we talked about ppms and single digit ppms parts per million of quality problems, right? So you’re really perfect and they’re really strong focus on being perfect in this messy thing of human relations and sharing with people and helping each other grow. It’s not about that. It’s about getting something out there that can start the conversation. And so that was very good and difficult for me. As far as writing this book. I was just, I popped into this one chapter I just opened to that has a quote that we talked about greatness a bit ago. DI, human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness and frank.

[01:21:31] Dwight: Very powerful.

[01:21:32] Art: The world’s most known diarist and Jewish victim of the Holocaust, as we all know. Yeah. So that, that, that process. But I think being willing to be willing to put something out there. If you have something, if you have something to put out there, whatever it is, if it’s art, if it’s teaching, if it’s music, if it’s a book, at some point you gotta hit the send button.

[01:21:57] Dwight: Sometimes you gotta do like a guest add on. You originally you talked about trying to think of the, this was back in the 18th century where they were facing, 20,000 soldiers facing 50,000 or whatever, and they burned the boats, right?

[01:22:12] Art: Yeah.

[01:22:13] Dwight: They burned all the boats because there was no going back. Sometimes you just have to push off from the shore and realise you’re gonna go somewhere. It might be have a storm, right? And ride the waves.

[01:22:25] Art: Yeah.

[01:22:26] Dwight: you gotta figure it out.

[01:22:27] Art: Sometimes you have to burn the boats

[01:22:29] Dwight: and push forward.

[01:22:30] Art: Yeah. You can still iterate, you can still do things, but it’s, at some point you gotta ship. if you have something to say. I remember I wrote a blog first couple of years, every Friday, and and I realised that the main reason I was doing that was to get over the feel, to get over the fear of looking stupid in front of others. That was the main reason I was doing that.

[01:22:47] Dwight: That’s an epiphany.

[01:22:48] Art: So I put stuff out and sometimes it landed with a thud and sometimes it landed with a cheer, but I put stuff out so that I could get over the fear of it

[01:22:58] Dwight: being your unique self. Yeah. And just giving it to the world. Hard

[01:23:02] Art: thing. Yeah.

[01:23:02] Dwight: Accept or don’t accept, right?

[01:23:04] Art: Yeah. Either way is fine.

[01:23:06] Dwight: You go, here’s the fork of the road. Are you coming with me? Are you going this way off a cliff? And I’m going this way on my journey. Yeah. It depends how you perceive and apply to, and

[01:23:16] Art: neither of them is bad or good, right?

[01:23:18] Dwight: Yeah, of course.

[01:23:19] Art: Neither direction is bad or good, it’s just that’s the way that it is. And it’s okay. I don’t

[01:23:22] Dwight: control outcome. Absolutely. So the subtitle is Wisdom for Coming of Age in a Complex Time. That phrase coming of age is usually applied to young people. You’re applying it to midlife. Why?

[01:23:34] Art: I’m applying it to both.

[01:23:36] Dwight: Okay.

[01:23:37] Art: I, I started writing this kid for, I started writing this book for my kids, but what I found out is that the lessons, a lot of the lessons that I had learned and want to teach them for coming of age are things I learned in midlife. So it’s really, there is a lot of stuff in here that’s a applicable to both. But as I mentioned before, like the first chapter is called You’re Worthy. I did not start to understand that until I was in my forties. So of course I want my kids to understand it now. But how many of us are operating out of a deficit in fear and not understanding our worthiness? How many of us in midlife are there? Then there’s a lot of stuff in here too, where we’re talking about trying to understand that voice. What is it? What is that inner voice? What does that inner guidance really trying to tell you? Of course you wanna figure that out when you’re 20, but you gotta re-figure it out when you’re 50 ’cause it’s different. And so you have to develop that connection. I didn’t develop that connection at 20, I just did what I could do to make money. ’cause that’s what I need to do to survive and that’s okay. And I did do it in areas. I love cars and I did do it in areas that I was, worked in the automotive industry where it was interesting to me and I did have aspects of the job that I really loved. But the deep work of finding out who I am and connecting that and going forward has come in midlife, not in my twenties or teens for me. And that’s true for a lot of people. So a lot of folks that are reading this that are my age, the tools are the same, whether it’s at 20 or 50 because it’s not a prescription for what you should do. It’s a little bit of a prescription for how to tune into yourself, tune into God, so that you can get the guidance and then the tools to be able to go where that guidance is telling you.

[01:25:35] Dwight: Wow. Again, I mentioned this earlier, about an hour ago into this conversation. People, you’re gonna have to listen to this again. There’s so many nuggets of truth and knowledge and wisdom that you can glean. Remember, people such as art and myself, we share and are vulnerable to help you collapse timeframes in your life. There’s books out there and podcasts, they’re all doing the same, right? Zig Ziglar, Les Brown. Yeah. Some of the most, you look at Stephen Covey, you look at Viktor Frankel, right? There’s people out there that are sharing their truths and they’re putting it all out there on their sleeve. You can learn. You can understand, take advantage of it. I wish I would’ve had somebody more mentorship in my twenties, into my thirties until I finally found somebody that was really concerned to help me grow. I was just a flag flapping in the wind. I had success, but I had no journey. I had no real connection to my life. I was doing what everybody else labelled that I should do. I was having expectations of a very successful entrepreneur, father, very successful family. I, that was my badge of honour, just like you talked about, right? It was my badge. It was what I needed to do to prove myself to them,

[01:27:04] Art: right?

[01:27:04] Dwight: I didn’t know that I needed to prove myself to me, to God, first and foremost. So thank you so much for sharing that. So we don’t get too much longer, we’re gonna have, you and I are gonna get onto another episode though, just to continue on with some more stuff. Absolutely. Love

[01:27:20] Art: to.

[01:27:20] Dwight: So with your steps, I’m mastering a midlife transition anchor, a lot of your community and coaching work without giving away like completely the whole book. You’ve shared some, obviously. What is the step of your steps that most men want to skip, and why is that the one that matters probably the most?

[01:27:38] Art: That’s a really good question. And I think the. The one that’s coming up for me right now that I think that men wanna skip the most is, believe it or not, it’s seeking advice. So one of the steps is seeking advice. Now there’s three categories of seeking advice and the most important one. Is making that connection that I talked about from this book as well. Making that connection with God, with your highest self, with your inner self, to be able to hear that still quiet voice. And that’s the one I think we, we avoid the most because we don’t know how to access it. We don’t know if we can trust it, and we’re afraid to slow down. ’cause what if the wheels come off, if we slow down? And it’s necessary to slow down to get that advice. So I talk about getting advice in three categories. Most important is from yourself, from God. The second one is from professionals, coaches, mentors, advisors, people that are around you. And then third is people. That, and this is third for a reason. People that know you and love you and are really close to you emotionally, mostly family members. But the, and the reason that’s important is because they see you in ways that you don’t necessarily see yourself, but you also have to recognise that they also have a horse in the race. And that’s why it’s really important to have anchored with yourself first. And then also seek advice from mentors and professionals, because that can give you a lot of, coaches or, whatever it is. and there could be a lot of ’em. If you’re making a big life change, you need to be seeking, advice in all the different nine areas of life, right? And that’s important. And you need to like, I need to talk to my wife about it, talk to my brothers about it, talk to people really close to me. But in those situations, it’s also important for me to remember that they also have an agenda and not, and it’s not bad, but they have their own agenda for me based on what they need and what their comfort is, right? So I think that’s the one that we avoid the most because it’s requires us to be vulnerable and it requires us to be still. And neither of those things come naturally to driven midlife executives and our business owners. So that’s, I think that’s the one that, yeah. I think the other one that a lot of people are afraid to do is, I just call it do something right after you’ve gotten clear about something that’s calling to you to take action and be willing to take action, like we talked about with the book, be willing to take action even if you don’t know what the outcome of that act action’s gonna be. Even if it’s not perfect, even if it’s not good, even if it’s just following some curiosity, right? Taking action is the antidote to fear

[01:30:22] Dwight: actions. And it increases

[01:30:23] Art: your

[01:30:23] Dwight: believability, right?

[01:30:25] Art: And it take and it creates and just, yeah, it does. It creates your believability, it creates experience. It creates the next action because you learn from it. And by engaging, I always say that the motion creates the emotion. We want to feel good in order to take action, but it’s actually taking the action in spite of feeling bad, is when we start to feel good when we take the action. So the emotion creates the emotion driving consistency. Yeah. Yeah. So I think about myself last year, right? Like I, I spent a lot of time like, ah, I don’t know what to do and we’re doing this and we’re doing that, but nothing feels good and it’s awful and ah, so well, what am I curious about? I love the word curiosity, right? That’s when you’re seeking advice. if I don’t know what I should do or what I want to do, what am I curious about? It’s a little bit easier than, oh, this is what my next career is gonna be or whatever. What am I curious about? what’s been calling to me, right? And journal about it. And I’m like, go to the at and there, that, there’s no way that made any sense at that time. There’s nothing logical about that except that I was really curious. It was really calling to me and by going to the at without any expectations. The Appalachian Trail, I’m doing that two weeks solo hike by myself and the most remote wilderness in Maine. So many things came into clarity. That would not have come into clarity if I wasn’t there. So following that little curiosity, even though it wasn’t like, and I had those thoughts because I’m like my, I still have this really stupid either or thinking like, oh, okay, maybe I should go to the trail and through hike it and blog every day and do a vlog and get a million followers and monetize it and all that stuff like that came up for me. I was like, no, this is for going to disappear and be by myself. Like the only goals that I had is connect with myself, nature and God and rest. Even though I was pushing myself really hard physically, it was still very much rest because I was also a pretty simple life. Walk, eat, sleep, right? but so many things came out of that because I was willing to follow the curiosity and to take action. Not trying to figure out right or wrong, indifferent. I wanted to also do for six months, but that wouldn’t really work. So I said, what can I do? What’s the smallest action? And that’s one of the things that came very clear on the trail too. what’s the smallest viable action I can take when I’m hiking? Actually, what’s the smallest step I can take that keeps my forward momentum, right? ’cause momentum is so powerful. So that’s, again, taking action once I’m stopped, if I’m climbing something really steep and I’m really tired, right? My old self would be like, oh, I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna step up on that one. I’m gonna take a three foot vertical step right After you’ve done, 10 days of 5,000 feet of vertical carrying a pack. No. It becomes how do I keep my momentum? What’s the smallest step I can take now to keep my heart rate the lowest while still keeping forward momentum? And that works. And then you can keep going. You don’t have to stop and catch your breath, and then it takes all this energy to get started again. So action is the other one that just be willing to try something.

[01:33:23] Dwight: Absolutely. I completely agree. What an amazing conversation. This is gonna be the last question for you.

[01:33:30] Art: Yeah.

[01:33:31] Dwight: This show is called Give a Heck. It’s about living with intention and giving a heck about what truly matters. So I have to ask, what at this moment do you give a heck about the most?

[01:33:44] Art: Yeah, there’s two things that come to mind. One’s general, one’s specific. Okay. And maybe there’s two that are specific, but connection, authenticity, and connection or authentic connection. That’s the broad one. And there’s so many ways that shows up. And that. so I’m, I am pouring into that all the time. Right now, everything I’m doing is about authentic connection, right? Whether it’s, I was cooking dinner for my cousin on Sunday night, cooking dinner for my wife and my daughter, who’s home for the summer from university. It’s about connection. About connection with myself, connection with others, so authentic connection. And then the other thing that’s really, I’m just really on fire about right now, and it’s two things actually. One’s mine, one’s my wife’s, but is this crossing. This is a four day nature based, intensive for men that are successful enough to know that success isn’t enough. And they’re looking for finding meaning and purpose. And what we do there is we connect with ourselves, with each other, with nature, with God, and with clarity. A purpose for the future, very small group of men. This is something that’s really good for me, is it’s just five guys. So it’s not like I’m not trying to be Tony Robbins, but this thing is really fun and my, I’m really on fire. Whether the next one is in August coming up. And, it combines, this is the work that I’m meant to do. This is the sole work, right? The nature of the hiking, the personal growth, the learning, the teaching, the authentic connection, and the making a difference for myself and others. So I’m really on fire about that. And then I’m also just so proud to be a supporter and a cheerleader and a partner for my wife as she launches the Coastal Tea Cafe here in Fer, Athena Beach. The whole reason we moved here, she’s always wanted to live on the beach, and she’s always wanted to have a tea cafe. And so we have this full, full scale, wonderful iced tea, hot tea, coffee fresh fare for breakfast and lunch restaurant that we’re gonna open this fall. And, congratulations living her dream and going at that with gusto and to be, willing to embrace the heart. Like we had a lot of discussions about how hard this is gonna be. And she’s I know. So what? Let’s go, right? And that’s really, so I’m really excited about that too. So those are a few of the things I give a heck about. Of course, it’s ours, always children and other relationships. But again, authentic connection is the main one. And then there’s so much stuff that fits underneath that.

[01:36:06] Dwight: It’s amazing. Thanks for sharing art. This has been a really meaningful conversation, honestly, brought to this. The willingness to talk about the cult, the collapse, the recovery, all of it that you’ve been through. That exactly is what this show is about. Thank you for trusting us with your stories, with your knowledge and your understanding, compassion, your empathy. I could go on and on. Your kindness. it comes across tenfold and I really appreciate it. Before we let you go, where can you, where can people find you? The book, the Midlife Transition Mastery Community.

[01:36:43] Art: Yeah. And everything is available at, art blanchford.com. So just my name, a RT Blanche Ford, just as it sounds, uh.com and everything’s available there. And reach out to me there. DM me on socials and Art Blanchford. I’m the only, I’m the only one out there, so it’s easy to find LinkedIn as well. I have a, I have some presence, and I am, and I do all this stuff myself. So I’m, I love interacting with people. I love the feedback. The podcast is out there everywhere as well. Life in Transition podcast. It’s wherever you listen to podcasts or YouTube if you like to watch ’em. But all of that, you can reach all of that through art blanchford.com.

[01:37:17] Dwight: Sweet. For those new to the Give a Heck podcast, go to give a heck.com. Go to the top hit podcast. You will see arts Smiley face, and you’ll see detailed show notes where there’ll be chapter summaries, all the links to his social media, his website, about his book. You’ll be able to, if you really want to though, I always put the full transcript in there as well, but there’s no need to worry about finding information about art. It’s a one stop shop. The link will be there too, if you wanna pop over to YouTube. You all the different podcast players, easy place for you to find. Even easier though, just on any podcast player, just type in, give a heck. I’m the only podcast with that name, so you’ll find it. Anything, any last comments before I wrap up?

[01:38:05] Art: I just wanna say to somebody, if they’re listening to this show and somebody that it can make an impact for, we talked a lot about fear and courage, which is just overcoming fear of taking action. And in spite of fear, share it with them. It could really make a big difference for them. So Dwight’s doing really good work here, and if something’s resonated with you and you have the thought, oh, you know what? I need to share this with this friend. That may be just the thing that they need to have to really help them over a hump or a slump that they’re in right now. be willing to love somebody enough that you’re willing to go through the discomfort you have about sharing something worthwhile.

[01:38:38] Dwight: What a great way to put it, man. I’m gonna have to go back and copy some of that wording because I was just about to say, if today’s conversation landed with you, please take two minutes, leave us a review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. It genuinely helps more people find the show, and that is how this community keeps growing. And if you’re watching on YouTube, hit subscribe, turn on notifications. So you never missed an episode, right? There’s somebody out, people out there that this needs to be shared with this message. somebody, if you’ve made it right to the end, you’re thinking of somebody, just share it with them, right? it’s not gonna hurt. It won’t be something that’s gonna be painful. The worst they can say is not interested, and you just go, that’s fine. Next, just move on. Don’t take it personal, but utilise this podcast for your own use, your own strength, your own growth. Again, thanks Art. I appreciate you coming on, brother. And and to everyone listening, remember, live life on purpose and not by accident. And remember, it’s never too late to give a heck. Thank you for taking time outta your day and listening to Give a Heck if you find value. I’d appreciate you sharing with your friends and family so they too can learn how to live life on purpose, not by accident. So you do not miss the next episode. Please subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and please also post a review. I look forward to reading your comments. This has been Dwight Heck. If you want to check out other podcast episodes or today’s show notes, please check out my website. Give a heck.com, and until next time together, let us all strive to give a heck.