Why Your Success is Killing You & How To Break Free | Toolbox

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2:07That's T-R-Y-S-T-U-F-F dot A-P-P. Or simply by searching stuff, S-T-U-F-F in the app store. And to enjoy everything stuff has to offer, you can get 50 % off your first year of extra stuff by using code charm at checkout. Get stuff done and start closing your open loops. Download stuff from the App Store today. Johnny and AJ here. Hey, your success is killing you. All right. Now that I have your attention, let us explain a couple of things. Loneliness and isolation have become the latest epidemic in adults, young and old. Some of you haven't been back into office since COVID and you're losing out in your day-to-day interactions.

2:52Unfortunately, its health effects have shown to be the equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Now that doesn't mean you have zero friends. It means you lack quality relationships outside of your immediate family. If you're not actively maintaining your network, it's shrinking. But there's something you can do about it. After coaching over 10 ,000 clients on how to master social confidence, we've learned a thing or two about what it actually takes to spark an instant connection with someone. We've packaged these insights into our download called the Instant Connection Kit. And as a thank you for being a podcast listener, we wanted to give you this kit for free.

3:24Inside the Instant Connection Kit, you'll get three resources to help you build out your network and win friends right now. These resources include our popular conversation formula, small talk conversation starters, and a resource to understand emotional bids. To get your hands on this kit and immediately start improving your relationships, go to theartofcharm.com slash instant. Remember, you could do something about your loneliness or isolation today. Start with our instant connection kit at theartofcharm.com slash instant. Welcome to the Art of Charm podcast, where we break down the science of powerful communication and winning mindsets so you have the cheat code to succeed with people.

4:07Every episode is jam-packed with actionable steps to unlock the hidden superpowers inside of you. Level up with us each week by listening to interviews with the best in business, psychology, and relationships. We distill thousands of hours of research in the most effective tools and the latest science so you can start winning today. Let's face it, in order to be seen and heard, your communication needs to cut through the noise, and we're going to show you how. I'm AJ, successfully recovered introvert, entrepreneur, and self-development junkie. And I'm Johnny Zubak, former touring musician, promoter, rock and roller, and co-founder here at The Art of Charm.

4:41And for the last 15 years, we've trained thousands of top performers and teams from every background. We have dedicated our lives to teaching men and women all they need to know about communication, networking, and relationships. You shouldn't have to settle for anything less than extraordinary. All right, now let's kick off today's show. Michael and AJ join me on a special toolbox discussion about the troubling rise of loneliness. We unpack the darker side of the pursuit of success and how constant goal setting can hurt you. How confidence is built through identifying your own personal values and your definitions of success and why identifying the right people to build deeper connections with is critical to combating the loneliness epidemic and living your best life.

5:28All right, welcome to the show, guys. If you're a successful professional, but have hit a ceiling, feeling overworked, or feel like you've sacrificed your personal life for success, you're going to want to listen to these eye-opening stats that we're about to share. You see, for almost 20 years, we've been coaching successful professionals on how to grow their social capital to succeed in their professional and personal lives. from finance professionals, founders, lawyers, doctors, engineers, and C-suite execs, to name a few. We've helped them along the way. And if you're listening to this and dealing with the feeling that success is slowly killing you, that self-doubt or blinking red light that you've got to fix something here, and you don't like that feeling of self-doubt or feelings of isolation and loneliness because you can't get vulnerable with people in your life.

6:15Maybe you've become an NPC, a non-playable character, feeling like Groundhog's Day in your interactions, or you're in search of the right tribe. You're not alone, right, Michael? Oh, yes, definitely. There is a big survey that was done by the Cigna Group. This was post-pandemic, so December 21, and they had nearly 6 ,000 participants there. So what they found, and I'm just listing a couple of the many findings that they had, But one, for example, was that young adults are twice as likely to be lonely than seniors. Now, it's a little bit ironic to say only 41 % because even that is a high number.

6:53Also, more than twice as many younger adults as older adults experienced feeling left out. So the younger you are, the more you feel left out. More than two in five adults, so 42 % precisely, aged 18 to 34, reported always feeling left out. Nearly half of Americans reported sometimes are always feeling alone, 46%. And these numbers seem to only climb compared to studies that in surveys that were done earlier. So two in five Americans sometimes or always feel that their relationships are not meaningful, 43%, feel like their relationships are not meaningful, and that they are isolated from others, also 43%.

7:41And then lastly, only around half of Americans have meaningful in-person social interactions. So for example, an extended conversation with a friend or spending quality time with family on a daily basis. Only 53 % of Americans report that. Not only are they startling numbers, but it's normalized, right? Like 53 % of Americans can say that they have meaningful interactions. That's right. It's slightly over half. That's a lot of people who are, who are feeling left out, feeling isolated and feeling lonely. And what we're going to discuss today is why that may be. And, and if you do feel that way, listen, you're not alone.

8:31You're not abnormal. This is the phenomenon that all of us deal with due to modernity. But we will also go into identifying it and identifying the hurdles that we're going to face. And then we're going to talk about solutions and getting over that today. So I'm very excited to present this because this is very important to all of us. And it's going to be important for you to understand this so that you can see it in your friends and your family and take notice of this. Exactly. If you're not feeling it, someone you know is feeling it. These numbers are so startling that you might be in a great place of not feeling isolated or loneliness.

9:12And we're going to talk about the health impacts of that. But if you are in that place, turn to your friends and family and look to them and ask them if they're having the meaningful interactions and support them if you're lucky enough to be in the minority right now that aren't feeling this way. And there are a lot of factors that go into feeling this way. I mean, we've been doing this for 20 years now, and we started this mission. It was to cure loneliness in romance. Many young men were struggling to meet romantic partners, and that was the impetus to starting the podcast. And as we've coached clients over the years, we've recognized that even if you find that romantic partner, you can still feel alone.

9:52You can still feel a lack of friends and vulnerability in your life and feel isolation from coworkers at work. Then the pandemic hit. Then we shifted to work from home. Then the social fabric got pulled away through social media and its rise. And we've talked about all of these factors on the show, but overall we're recognizing now that this is a real problem. In fact, our former surgeon general talked about the loneliness epidemic and how it's causing the rise of drug use. And I think a lot of people, when they hear loneliness, they think of that person who's in complete isolation with no one in their life that they can talk to.

10:31But loneliness actually hits us around the holidays. It's one of the reasons we're sharing this in December, because as you travel back home, you reconnect with old friends and maybe you see families. And for many of us, we may have moved away from our families. We start to recognize that we have through chasing success in our career, chasing accomplishments, we've moved into a place where isolation is more likely to be a part of our lives. AJ, I want to bring this point up as well. So Michael's last stat here of only around half of Americans, 53%, have meaningful in-person social interactions, right?

11:08Now, out of that portion, how many would consider themselves lonely, right? So outside of that, you're going to have a bunch of people who are surrounded with friends who wouldn't necessarily think that they are lonely. However, they're unable to connect with them in a meaningful way that serves their overall well-being. And there's a reason for that. And I want to get into those right now, because this is just the reality of the situation. And what we talk about here is radical acceptance of those realities so that we can then make the choices to correct that. Okay. So here's the reality. And I brought this up many years ago.

11:58We did a podcast called the third place and about finding your third place. And I was inspired by a book by a man named Ray Oldenburg called the great good place. Now, what Ray was discussing in that book is we have our office, we have our home, and then we have our third place. This is the place that we go to feel connected, to have those discussions, to meet people, to socialize. And in that episode, AJ and I talked about how our fathers had their place, the VFW or the fireman's club, that place that they could go after work from working in a factory and then blow off some steam, talk about what's going on in the community and make some plans and just feel connected to others who were going through the same thing that they were.

12:54But here's the issue. That book was released in 1987. So I'm here to tell you that things haven't gotten any better since 1987 and they've continued on the same trajectory that Ray Oldenburg was very concerned about, which is we are losing our great good place, our third places. Ray was talking about the coffee shops in France and Italy, the pubs in Britain, the corner bar here in America. And also church. 100%. For many, religion was that third place. And you bring up a point. You had home and you had work. Right. Well, look at what's happened. We don't have it. Many of us have now, we don't even have a second place.

13:41We're now the one place. And our escape is streaming, video games, the internet, and non-in-real-life interactions. And we could go down a whole rabbit hole of how those impersonal interactions are not fulfilling to your health, to your mental, physical, and emotional well-being. But it is important to recognize that due to convenience, we have collapsed our social lives, our work lives, and our home lives into one place. And we focused on external outcomes and external accomplishments for success to the detriment of our own health and well-being. And it's perfectly normal. Growing up, going through the educational system, especially here in the U.S., And into your career, you were praised for being independent and setting ambitious goals and reaching them on your own.

14:36And at one point, you learned that being fiercely independent and with maxed out self-sufficiency and self-reliance, you were rewarded. Praise from parents and teachers. And then in your career, that led to success. That led to promotion by you working harder than everyone and choosing isolation as a path to external accomplishment. But over time, by making that choice habitual and making that choice of isolation your comfort zone, you've actually set yourself up for poor health outcomes. Right, Michael? AJ, you were talking about Vivek Murthy, the former U.S. Surgeon General, just a few minutes ago.

15:16And he, in his book Together, he says that loneliness has become a silent epidemic and it has become, get this, one of the top reasons for medical appointments as well as emergency room visits. Loneliness is one of the main reasons for this, both in the US and the UK, by the way. So approximately, he writes that approximately 20 % of emergency room visits are related to loneliness. Patients show up with symptoms that include panic attacks, dizziness, severe emotional distress, heightened physical pain, and so on. 20 % of emergency room visits. Nathan Tate and Holt, Lundstedt, Baker, Harris, Stevenson, a lot more, have coined the term, loneliness is the new smoking.

16:07This is backed up by quite a few researchers. and it's the new smoking due to the fact that loneliness is as dangerous to our health as smoking 15 cigarettes per day or daily alcohol abuse not use but abuse so of course not loneliness is not going to give you lung cancer or it's not going to kill your your liver but it can shorten your lifespan just the same way as chronic drinking and smoking does. Moving on, Chuck Chiopo, apologies, dear gentlemen, for not being able to pronounce your name the right way. He and his colleagues Fowler and Christakis write that loneliness when it's chronic has been linked to heightened risk of heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, increased mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and there's also inflammation, there's immune and autoimmune problems.

17:08And before I go on, just let me remind you that we're talking about loneliness here, right? I'm not talking about like chronic drug abuse. I'm talking about loneliness, inflammation, immune and autoimmune problems, higher risk of suicide and higher risk of premature mortality. So I'll leave it at that. But trust me, I spent quite some time going through studies and this is just the tip of the iceberg. When you're making good money, it's easy to get complacent. You don't track every dollar, then the holidays hit and you realize you have no idea where it all went. If you want to keep your finances under control this holiday season, you need to be using Monarch.

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20:06That's q-u-i-n-c-e dot com slash charm. Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash charm. And we've seen it in our clients. You don't get to smoking a pack of cigarettes a day by chiefing down all 20. You start with the choice of smoking one, and then it's two. And that's exactly how loneliness starts. You put off going out one weekend. You put off hanging out with friends. You put off going out to that third place because work is more important, and I got to get this promotion, and I got to save this amount of money to make sure that I can buy that house or buy that fancy watch or that car.

20:42And we see this with our clients that you look at a period of time and all of a sudden you've gone three months without actually investing in building and strengthening relationships. You've gone six months without actually going out and meeting new people. And as that world and that sphere of influence closes, you start to feel the heightened stress, the heightened fear, the heightened anxiety that chasing performance, trophies, achievements creates. We're human beings, right? We're not made to be, we're not wired biologically to be lone wolves. We're pack animals. We're herd animals. We feel best and have the best overwhelmed being when we have acceptance, approval, and attention from those around us.

21:30And vice versa, the people around us need that from us in order to feel good and safe in our relationships. This is why loneliness is so dangerous as the causation, because when we have this strong network of close friends that we can call, that we can ask for support, we have a certain safety net we can lean back on. Yes, life might be difficult right now, but I know my friends have my back. If it becomes worse, if it stays like that, they will rush to my help. Now take away that safety net and you're suddenly coming home after work, being fully stressed out about the meeting that's happening tomorrow and you have no one to lean on.

22:10And that's what's causing the dizziness, the premature mortality and all of that stuff. And sometimes it takes a major life event for you to recognize this. And I know we see this in our clients, a divorce. And you recognize that you didn't maintain those social ties and actually loneliness strikes. Maybe it's a change in your career and you started a completely new company where you don't know anyone and now you don't have those co-worker relationships that were so supportive in that environment. Or maybe your career takes you to a new town and you're starting all over again. And another big aha life-changing event is when your friends marry and start families.

22:48And in those moments, they choose their family and their spouse over the relationship that you are comfortable in building. you can feel isolated and lonely that you have lost that connection, that deep tie to that friend because they've gotten busy with important things in their life. And those life events can be triggering in recognizing that I have isolated myself. Subconsciously, I've made choices to invest in my career, to invest in external validation, achieving great things to the detriment of the social ties and maintaining the connections in my life that actually create the vivacious vitality and fulfilling life that I'm looking for.

23:32And then when that life event strikes and things shake up for you, you recognize I got to make a change here. I got to shift some things in order to actually get that connection back into my life. So this brings up the hurdle that everyone faces once they realize that they have to make some changes in their life to fix the issue, right? Once you've identified, I've been isolated. I'm, I have some feelings of loneliness. I'm not surrounded with meaningful relationships. And that is starting to take its toll on you. This is where you start to look for answers. And we call this the elephant in the room because you're now going to have to do some new things.

24:16And in doing some new things, you'll be walking into the unknown, which has its own complications, right? And so the first thing is excuses and rationalizations of why you don't need to do these things or why these things are out of your reach. Well, there is a psychological concept in psychology or more specifically in acceptance and commitment therapy, which we use in our programs extensively. And this is called self as a story. So this means that I, as Michael Harreld sitting here, I have a certain story about who I am. Some of those things are just set in stone, right? I was born in Germany.

24:59That's part of who Michael is. Michael is also a confidence coach. Michael is someone who likes to learn new languages. There are a lot of aspects to me. If I were to put everything down on paper, we'd find hundreds of points that I could say, like, this is my self. This is my self story. This is what I tell myself about who I am. Now, the problem becomes like the problem starts, like you said earlier, Johnny, when I'm holding on to this story and I'm not able to let go. When I see the story of who I am as something that is very rigid, it's unchangeable. I don't want to change it. Why don't I want to change it?

25:40Because just like AJ said earlier, this is my comfort zone. This is who I am. This is who I have been in the last couple of years. And it kind of worked. It kept me safe. Like this is my safe place. If you ask me who I am, if you ask me how I behave in certain situations, what my habits are, how I behave when I'm out, when I'm by myself, when I'm with friends, here are my 100 points. This is what I'm doing. This is my story. This is the manual of how Michael works. Now, this is also my glass ceiling. because I can't grow beyond those points. There's no way for me to get better than that stuff that I've just written down.

26:18So for example, maybe it is that I'm holding on to my career, my business as that one thing that really defines me as a person and more importantly as a good person because I'm good at what I'm doing. I bring great products to people. I help make their lives better. This is who I am. I'm leading a team. if this is all I have and my definition is that I'm good at it, what happens the moment I need to ask for help? I come home and I'm struggling because here's one thing I can't do. I can't call my friends and ask them for help and say, hey, AJ, I need to talk because I'm really struggling with this meeting.

26:56I'm really struggling with some self-doubt, really struggling with the inner critic. Why can't I do it? Because my behavior can't violate the story that I'm telling myself about who I am. So what's better than that self story is the flip side of the coin. It's called self as context. So this is more, this is becoming flexible in how you see yourself. This is seeing yourself in the context that you are in right now. So yes, it might be great to have the self story of, you know what, I'm really good at what I'm doing. I'm really helping people. When you're pitching to investors, when you're talking with a future client.

27:39This is a really good story to hold on to. But the moment you're struggling, maybe you want to leave that story a little bit more flexible and say, and sometimes I'm struggling and sometimes I'm the one who opens up to friends, becomes vulnerable, ask for help, ask for support. So the question that we need to ask ourselves all the time is, is the story that I'm telling myself helping me right now or is it holding me back because it only allows me to bring out a certain set of behaviors. And let's be honest, none of them help me right now. What would be more flexible here? And then we can start the change.