CHRIS DUCKER: Bouncing Back from Burnout

25:53So what does it mean to set the right pace? What does it look like? And maybe even tell us like, what is the pace of your life outside of all the health stuff that you've done? Like just your day-to-day life, what does the pace look like now compared to pre second burnout? I think the really big difference for me in terms of my schedule. And I believe it was you, Mike, that said this many, many, many years ago now, but you said something to the effect of if it doesn't get scheduled, it doesn't get done. Yep. Is that a Mike original? It's a Daniel Harkavy original because we wrote about that in our book, Living Forward.

26:29That's right. That's right. Okay. So that for me has become something I've really kind of taken on board quite strongly. And everything that I need to do day to day goes on the schedule. I think what has happened here, because the schedule is a finite amount of time, I start work at 10 a.m. And then I finish work at 4 p.m. And I do that Monday through to Thursday. So I take care of my personal health side of things first thing in the morning. So it'll be exercise, those dreaded cold plunges, and all that sort of stuff. Which, by the way, I've gotten to love. I've actually gotten to love it now.

27:06But it was brutal at first, I'm not going to lie. And you're not a big fan of this, Michael, at all. We've had this discussion, right? Yeah, it's not that I'm not a big fan. It's just that as a cardiac patient, my cardiologist doesn't want me to do it. It's too risky for me. Yeah, no, I get that. I get that. So, you know, I get all the health stuff out of the way first, and then I get to work. I make sure that I do my creative work first in the morning, because that's when I've got the most kind of mental energy I've discovered. Usually, the first part of that kind of work area from like 10 to 11, 30, 12 o 'clock, it'll all be the creative stuff so it'll be either writing emails or newsletters it'll be working on copy for maybe some landing pages or programs that we're running or whatever the case may be it could be devising ideas for another book believe it or not the fourth one is already in planning session right now and so a lot of it sometimes it's podcast recording sometimes it's shooting stuff on video i don't do a lot of video but when i do i just make sure i do it when i've got the most energy, which is absolutely in the morning.

28:06And then I go into admin for a bit, and then I'll take some lunch, and then I go for a walk. This is a non-negotiable on my schedule. Every afternoon after lunch, I go out into nature. And this, I believe, for me, was the biggest game changer. Okay. I want to know all about this. How did you decide to do it? Why? What does it give you? Tell us all about it. Because I love walking. I'm not sure we can do it at Tennessee at noon, at least in the summer. Yeah, right now it's 85 degrees outside and it is 10.32 in the morning central when we're recording this. It's a little humid. And I'll bring this full circle moment in a minute.

28:41But I had an early morning walk in Nashville when I was there a couple of weeks ago, which blew me away. And I'll tell you why. An early morning walk blew me away in a minute. Because you lived to tell about it because it was so hot. Oh yeah, totally. I was not arrested in the process or anything like that. Trust me, it was amazing. So it was actually my naturopathic doctor who told me to get out into nature. She said to me, it's going to lower stress levels. It's going to clear your mind. It's going to be great for you from a physical perspective. You'll be doing some walking. You'll be breathing in some fresh air.

29:11The Japanese have a name for it. I might butcher this. So please don't quote me on it. But I believe it's something along the lines of Shinjin Jukko, which means forest bathing. Yes, I'm familiar with that. Yeah. And so I was like, okay, all right. I said to her, well, I guess I can go out. I can walk around. I can listen to a podcast. And she went, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't take your phone with you. You can't take your phone. You can't listen to anything. You can't bring anything with you. You've just got to walk. How do you get credit for the steps? Well, yeah, exactly. Well, the whoop on the risk certainly helps.

29:46Hashtag not sponsored. So I went out and I did this walk two or three times in a row. Honestly, I felt better coming back from this walk. So I made it a non-negotiable and we kind of took it in there. And then I was coming back every afternoon. afterwards. And I was telling my wife Erz about, oh, you know, I sat down on this old log and it was a squirrel 15 foot away from me. And it was amazing. And he just sort of stuck around for like three, four minutes and wasn't scared of me at all. And the next day it would be, oh, you know, there's this lovely little Robin that came and, you know, sat down on the bench next to me and all this kind of stuff.

30:17And I kept having all these little wildlife moments. And she said to me, well, we've got that old DSLR, you know, that we never use. Why don't you take it out with you and start taking photos of some of the wildlife that you see. It might be quite nice to document. I said, yeah, you know what? I'm going to do that. That's tech, but it's not really tech. I don't mean I can get in trouble with the doc. I'm going to do that. And so I started taking photos of birds very specifically. And now I can honestly say I'm a very proud birder. I'm a bird watcher. Yes, I love that. That's very English of you, by the way.

30:51So you can check that off your bingo card. Thank you very much. So, and now I'm the guy that's walking around with the big 600 mil lens for hours of lens, you know, looking for birds, all the rest of it. Full circle moment to Nashville and my early morning walk before our first day together, Mike, at Don's Place. And I went out for a 45 minute walk. It was about 6.30 in the morning. And in one walk, I saw a barred owl, which are beautiful. I've never seen one before, ever. I saw a red-shouldered hawk just sitting there ready and waiting for me to come along and say hello and a host of other little woodland birds including your gorgeous red cardinal that we don't have here at all all of which I took amazing photographs for so now I can obviously share them with my kids and so what I'm getting at here is that it's a non-negotiable now because I know that I will never come back from that afternoon walk not feeling better than when I went out initially.

31:53Schedule everything that's important to you. And what that's meant is that I actually spend more time working in my zone of genius, more time doing the things only I can do. More importantly, it means I get to spend more time with the people that I enjoy spending time with and little birds as well, obviously. The birds don't argue back, which is a bonus, obviously. The thing I like about the walk, the way that you do it, as a recovering overachiever, I always make the walk about, you know, how far I can walk or how fast I can walk. And it sounds like you don't do any of that. You're just out enjoying nature, forest bathing.

32:28Yeah. And some days I don't actually walk that much at all. Some days I'll go 20 minutes into the forest or something and sit down quite literally on the forest floor and just sit there with the camera waiting for whatever might come my way. Other days, wildlife does not want to call me a friend at all. It doesn't show itself. And I carry on walking around searching for it. Either way, I'm out. I'm not at work. I'm just at peace with myself. And it's got to the point where my wife has come with me a few times. It's not the same. It's really not the same. So I tell her to stay home now. I want to be on my own.

33:05I love this so much because increasingly we're talking about the idea of human flourishing. And I think that - own business and kind of our own concept of what we're about. Yeah, exactly. So you'll be hearing more and more from us about that. But one of the practices of human flourishing is experiencing nature. And I do not think you can flourish as a human without nature. I don't think you can biohack your way there. I don't think you can check off enough metrics on whatever your wearable is, or your app. Like it, there is something about being in nature that human beings from literally the beginning of time have needed that cannot be replaced by anything else.

33:52And I think we overcomplicate things like nervous system regulation, for example, we need all these gadgets and they're expensive. We need you to do all these practices. And in reality, if we would just go outside, just go outside without any of that junk on us. I mean, we have just got to get outside. It's amazing to me how simple it is to take care of ourselves actually. And we overcomplicate it and we make it seem like something we don't have time for, something that we can't afford, something we don't understand. And it's actually the basic behaviors and practices of being a human being that are the things that restore us to our humanity, which is what feels lost in a season of burnout.

34:36So I love this example because it's accessible to anyone. Even if you say, well, I can't get out during the day because I have a regular nine to five job. Okay, fine. But you could get out in the morning, you could get out in the evening, you could get out for 15 minutes. I mean, that you could, you know, just make it, keep dumbing it down until it's as easy as possible and get outside.

35:02One of the things that I also know about you that I was just like, like, wait, we have got to talk about this. I'm so excited. Is that you take this love of nature to another level and you, I hear, are a bonsai gardener? Yes. Okay, like I am a gardener and so we share gardening in common, but I know very little about bonsai and I would love for you to tell us all about this. Do you call it a hobby? Is that like demeaning to call it a hobby? No, no, it's absolutely fine to call it a hobby. I think it's a great way of being able to, kind of describe what it is. It's a pastime. And actually, when I started writing The Long Haul Leader, I hadn't planned to really talk so much about hobbies or pastimes.

35:45And there were three main principles of the book. And we called it our life OS or our life operating system because the premise of everything was, well, if the computer's got an OS, our phone's got an OS, why can't we have an OS? Why can't I have an OS? And so originally, there were three kind of points. And it was kind of directed as a triangle. And there was personal mastery, there was impactful work and there was love and relationships and how they all kind of form and kind of intermingle with each other. But as I started writing, I started telling more and more stories about things like getting out into nature, spending time with my little baby trees and all these kind of things.

36:19And I realized actually a lot of my recovery over these last three, four years have come from time on my own, comes from time when I'm sitting with a tree with a pair of scissors or when I'm out in nature, photographing birds or because I'm a watercolor artist as well. So I like to paint. Oh, wow. You know, I went from doing a lot of urban sketching with my father, who was an architect, in my teens and my 20s, to doing absolutely nothing through my 30s and 40s. And now my 50s, I started watercoloring again. And, you know, I started out doing buildings because that's what I was happy doing. But now all I do is birds.

36:54So just watercolor birds all the time. And so hobbies actually came out of left field. and I didn't realize I was going to include it. And now there's a whole chapter dedicated in the book to hobbies and pastimes. And we actually did some research on hobbies and pastimes as well. And I'll get back to the bonsai in a minute because I can see you genuinely - I'm really excited to talk to you about this. We should probably also tell people what bonsai is because there may be people listening that don't have a reference point for that. So bonsai is basically the art of miniature tree keeping. So it was originally from China, but then the Japanese kind of brought it over and imported it and called it very much their own.

37:30is basically the art of keeping miniature trees, which we'll get to in a minute. But the hobby side of things, huge. And this is why I decided to actually include it quite substantially in the book. We actually did a lot of research on this. And we realized that about 67 % of entrepreneurs, 67, 68 % of entrepreneurs who experienced burnout, didn't have a hobby or a pastime to call their own. So I started looking into that a little bit more. And then I realized, well, holy moly, like if we were to have these hobbies, particularly creative hobbies, such as painting or journaling or photography or whatever the case may be, how does that look?

38:15We actually found that hobbies, particularly creative hobbies, if you spend a minimum of two hours a week on your hobby, you will be as much as 30 % more productive in your work. Wow. You quoted this last week at the Mastermind and I wrote it down and I've written about hobbies too. We've written about hobbies, but I missed that stat. Yeah. That's fascinating. That's amazing. Yeah. And so I got into bonsai because I was a big fan of the Karate Kid movie back in the 80s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my mama took me to go and see the Karate Kid movie, Mr. Miyagi and all that sort of stuff. And she fell asleep in the cinema about 30 minutes in.

38:57I loved it. It instantly became my favorite movie. And then about a week later, I got my dad to take me again because it was PG rated. They're in the UK. And I was just amazed. I mean, it was a cool story and, you know, good versus evil and the kids getting bullied and there's a baddie and, you know, all that kind of sweep the leg stuff. And then I was like, these little baby trees look really cool. Can I get one of these? And so my dad, at the age of whatever it was, 14, 15 at the time, bought me a little shrub at the garden center. And I clipped it away. I killed it, obviously. But all these years later, Cobra Kai, the TV show on Netflix, came about.

39:34And it just threw me back into what they now know as the Miyagi-verse. And I was like, you know what? I got nothing better to do. I'm going to become a bonsai guy. And so I joined the local bonsai club here in Cambridge, in England. I went out and I bought a couple of bonsai trees and a whole bunch of garden shrubs. And I learned how to wire and I learned how to prune. I learned how to not kill them and to feed them and all that kind of stuff. And here we are five, six years later. I got about 40 bonsai trees on the property. Oh my goodness. Yeah, but varying degrees of development and growth.

40:09I've developed my own forests where I've got 16, 17 individual trees planted in one pot together. all this kind of stuff. And, uh, yeah. And actually about a month ago, I received confirmation that one of my trees is going to be exhibited in a bonsai show in London next year. So I'm kind of excited about it. Wow. This is the coolest thing ever. Like I'm like, you're doing this. I'm like, okay, this might be my next hobby. I was, you have to understand she's like a shrub maniac. She has so many plants in her home and here at the office. It's ridiculous. I mean, And it feels like a jungle. It does feel like a jungle.

40:44In a good way. But this year I started gardening outdoors. So my husband and I, with the help of our friend Natalie, put in a raised bed garden that included all manner of vegetables and flowers, of course. We have one too. Yep, you have one too. And one of my favorite things about it is that I have a pollinator garden to attract bees and butterflies and all the friends that help us pollinate, which I didn't even understand anything about pollination. It turns out it's very important. You really need those guys to help you out. Otherwise you're out there with a Q-tip trying to do it yourself. And let me tell you, it's harder than it looks, but it's been such a joy.

41:22There's nothing I love more than being out in my garden. And I usually am out there in the morning first thing, not for a long time. You know, I'm not, it's not like I'm out there all day long, but I might be out there 15, 30 minutes in the morning and same in the evening. And there is just something, I make it a point that I don't take my phone. I don't listen to anything. I just want to be present to the sound of the birds, to the bees. Actually, I get so excited. I take pictures of the bees and send them to the family members, you know, like, this is amazing. I have two bumblebees, you know, but like, really, I get so excited.

41:56And I talk to the neighbors as they're walking by. So, you know, another practice of flourishing is connecting with others. And so I'm doing that at the same time. It's like, there's so many things that get in these kinds of hobbies. Do you know of the cooking show guy, Alton Brown? Have you ever heard of him? He's like a science-y cooking guy. Okay. Well, some of you, he used to have a show called Good Eats and he was like Mr. Science. And so he would always tell you like, here's how to make this recipe, but he hated things that were what he called unitaskers. Like, you know, where you have a kitchen appliance that can only do one thing.

42:32Right. So you have like a popcorn maker say, you know, he's like, if you've got a great pot with a lid, you don't need a popcorn maker. Like you can just make this. And I think the great thing about hobbies that are like the ones you and I are talking about is they're not unit taskers. You know, you're not just like nature check. You're also connecting with God. You're also connecting with others. You're also taking care of yourself in the process. You can accomplish so many things at the same time without needing to do 15 different things. One thing can actually accomplish many things at once.

43:01And that's one of the things I love about these hobbies. That's great. The big thing for me with bonsai was initially, I don't want to kill these trees. That was the big thing. So I kind of went on a little horticultural course. You know, they need sunlight. They need water. They need care. So I went on this horticultural course, which was like a six-hour course. It was done over a couple of weeks online. So I learned, okay, you know, you learn about photosynthesis and putting them in the shade when it's too hot and all these kind of things. and then I was like well okay now I can keep them alive how am I going to make them look pretty well I'm going to have to learn how to prune things properly and how to wire branches and how to select certain branches and through the process of doing these things sitting with a tree and sometimes I'll sit with the tree for an hour looking at one branch because once you cut it off you can't put it back on you you can't super glue the branch back to the trunk you know it's like if I'm going And sometimes I pray, please, Lord, give me the guidance I need to make sure that this tree doesn't look horrible by the time I'm done hacking away at it, right?

44:05And I will do. Honestly, I will look at a branch for 30, 40 minutes sometimes before I decide to either remove it or to wire it into a different position or whatever the case may be. And one thing I can promise you is for sure, every single time I'm there in my bonsai garden, and that is the last thing I'm thinking about is work. The absolute last thing I'm thinking about is business. All I'm thinking about is the tree and whether or not it's going to look better by the time I'm done with it in this session. And there's also a longevity point to Bondi as well because I know if I do the job right, the tree will outlive me.

44:45So I'm just a steward. I'm just a caretaker of the tree as it stands right now. And I have some trees that are very expensive trees that I bought myself who were imported from Japan 40, 50 years ago. you know, I've invested in these kind of the jewels of the collection, so to speak. I can't mess that tree up. I got to look after that tree because it was around before I got involved. And hopefully it'll be around when I'm done with it, whether that be because I passed it on to somebody or because I've passed on one or the other, you know. So it's really important to me to have that longevity look of not just the trees, but also the business, the legacy, the life stuff, the family stuff, it all comes into one.

45:24I'm pretty sure Mr. Miyagi would be very, very proud. I think so too. I think the thing that I love about hobbies, and you said it, you can't think about work. You have someplace else to focus your thinking. And whether I'm fishing or playing the guitar or now writing songs, it's like an all-in kind of thing that steals my focus in a good way so that it uses another side of my brain that's not activated you know when I'm at work I have a question though about this bonsai gardening how does that apply to our lives what are the life lessons in that first and foremost like I touched on a longevity view knowing that you know what I do to the tree today will have either a benefit or a detriment to the tree tomorrow and so on and so on.

46:18So if I water the tree properly, if I feed the tree with the right fertilizer, if I give it enough light, if I make sure I protect it when it's too hot and so on and so on and so on, if I do all those things right, the tree's got a better opportunity to flourish. Whereas if I look after myself personally as the leader that I am, as the patriot that I am of the family and the leader of the community that I run, if I look after myself, then I know that from a sustainability perspective, I'm going to be around a lot longer and therefore to be able to affect more change and more opportunity for people in the future as well.

46:55Likewise, if I don't look after the tree, if I take my eye off it, and if I leave it for a week on its own, soil is going to dry out, the tree's going to get sick and eventually die. So a lot of the time I use it as an analogy myself, actually for myself, a lot of the time. And I don't really do woo-woo. It's not really my thing. But I think that it's a good analogy. It's an analogy that I can connect myself to. And it's one that I've become quite viscerally connected to over the years. Unfortunately, I have lost a couple of trees over the years. And when I look back as to why, it was because, you know what, I couldn't be bothered to move it that day.

47:37But the sun was blaring down on it for 10 hours. you know, those three days of sun that we get in the UK every year, you know, or maybe I, I over watered it and the roots rotted. Whatever analogy you like to, to use a lot of the time, I'll bring it back to me and how I'm looking after myself. I love that. Okay. One of the questions we get all the time from people like you talked about, Chris, you know, people say, well, how do you find a hobby? I don't know. You know, what would my hobby be? And they just act like it's this total black box, right? Of mystery, like hobbies are things you have when you've retired maybe or something like that.

48:16The other thing that I hear, I'd love for you to talk in a minute about how do you find that thing? Like how do you discover what it is that you would enjoy? But then the other thing that I hear a lot from people are fake hobbies, hobbies that, when I think of hobby, first of all, I really don't like the word hobby because it sounds like dinky in some way. Kind of trivial in a way. Kind of trivial. Like it's a thing that, you know, like it doesn't properly vest it with the importance that it actually has. That's why like, what do you call it? I'm curious. Well, I don't know. I mean, I'm really upset about it because there's not another word.

48:51She calls it that thing. That thing. That thing that we do. To my mind, it is supposed to be like the idea of recreation being recreation. Like that is what a hobby is supposed to do is it literally recreates us. It puts us back together when we're fragmented. It reorients us. It grounds us, all those kinds of things. But alas, I have no better word. But sometimes people think, you know, my hobby is playing Pokemon Go or my hobby is learning something, which I think learning is great, but learning is not a hobby. You know, like even reading is not a hobby in the way that you and I are talking about it right now.

49:26You know, like that's a, it doesn't have an embodiment to it. And I think that's a really important part of hobbies is that engages your physical self and it's not just intellectual or, you know, maybe something like that. But I'm curious, what would you consider, like, I'm looking for like a list of like fake hobbies that people are like, oh yeah, my hobby is, or I don't need a hobby because I do X, Y, Z. Like what are like the counterfeit hobbies that people have? How about work? Well, work for sure. Yeah. I love that term, counterfeit hobbies. The term I use quite a bit is pastimes, hobbies and pastimes.

50:01You know, these are things that will past the time, which I guess is maybe Maybe I'm with you though. You know, it doesn't really do the act of what it is you're doing the thing. It doesn't do it a lot of justice when you say I'm just passing the time kind of thing. It doesn't have as much of a connection as it probably should do. The one that I hear a lot when I ask somebody, what kind of hobbies do you have? It pops up all the time. Well, I go to the gym or I exercise. I'm like, well, it's not a hobby, man. Like you're supposed to move your body. God gave you this amazing vessel that is the body.

50:33You should look after that. You know, if you want to be around for a long period of time, you should move it. You should take care of it. You should look after it. Going to the gym is one of the things that you need to do in order to achieve that. Or exercising is one of the things you need to do. And so I don't really look at that as a hobby. I think that's really right. That is true. That's like saying, you know, changing the oil in your car is a hobby. It's like, well, that's just maintenance. You know, that's just... Or eating. Yeah. Or eating. Now, if you eat out, you know, certain culinary things or cooking...

51:00Sure, that are creative. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And so for me, the way I've approached hobbies, and like I said, here we are, we've gone, what, 15 minutes into this discussion now, probably, if not a little more. I think this is a really, really important discussion for leaders to have because we're not spending enough time away from work. We're not spending enough time enjoying time for ourselves and doing things for ourselves. And any kind of success that costs you your health or your family or your joy isn't really actually success. That's sacrifice, right? And so to use your popular colloquialism of the winning at work, succeeding at life thing, if you're winning at work or winning at business and you're losing at life, then you're not actually winning at all, are you?

51:47You're losing pretty hardcore, quite frankly. And so I like the idea that, and learning is important. Learning is super important. In order to lead, you've got to learn as much as you can as well, right? Just not a hobby. Yeah. And here's the way I look at it. The short-term wins that we are kind of aimed to go after nowadays, both in our lives as well as in our businesses, in our work lives, our careers, those short-term wins, because of the way that we've been programmed by society to consume content in three seconds instead of 60 seconds, lo and behold, those short-term wins are really, really loud.

52:25But long-term impact, long-term impact is that consistent kind of whisper that pops up over and over and over again until it just roars, right? Like we want that big win, that big roar. And you only get that by being really consistent. And the real game here is patience. It's consistency. It's showing up when it's not sexy, when it's not flashy. It's doing the unsexy work, or as my good friend Phil Jones says, the work before the work. He's a professional speaker. He's on stage 50 days a year, which is his bag. I can't think of anything worse to do. But he's on stage 50 times a year around the world.

53:02And what he always does, which I really love, is my favorite stuff that he shares on particularly Instagram is what he calls the work before the work, where he walks the rooms the morning of or the night before where he's going to be performing. And I love that. And that's the consistency that I'm talking about. It's showing up over and over and over again. And so whether it's showing up at work, showing up with family, showing up at hobbies, you've got to do all these things consistently in order to live that long-haul life that I'm talking about. Why is being a long-haul leader important? What is it about that concept that captured your imagination and made you put in the work, which writing any book is an enormous amount of work, but what was it about that that intrigued you?

53:48through the recovery process I went through on that second burnout, I realized really clearly that I was the engine, not just at work, but also in our family life as well. I was the engine. I was the spark. I was the difference maker. I was the change maker in what we were doing. But even the engine needed that maintenance, it needed that time away to be able to kind of work on itself, so to speak. And I realized what it was actually that the hustle culture that we've been fed quite a lot over the last decade has crept up on a lot of us. And one thing that I became really quite viscerally connected to was the fact that I realized that hustle is a season.

54:34It's not a lifestyle. It's not something that is sustainable at all. Hustle in and amongst itself is not a bad thing. We all need to hustle. That means work hard for old people tuning in. It means going all out towards that deadline or that project or that KPI to be hit, but then stopping when that deadline or that project comes to an end, recharging, recalibrating, resetting, and then creating more opportunity to engage upon additional hustle in the future. And so when I realized that, I thought, you know what? the first book I wrote, Virtual Freedom, was about working in the outsourcing and the delegation world for a decade.

55:17The second book, Rise of the Youpreneur, is about building my personal brand for over a decade at that point. So I'll write that and I'll write a handbook about that. This book, I had to write because through talking with a whole bunch of people that had gone through similar situations that I was going through, I realized that if I didn't get it into a journal, a manual, so to speak, a handbook, so to speak, if I didn't do that, I'd be letting myself down as well as hopefully a few other folks so I could help along the way as well. So it's not about one thing or another thing. It's not about making one choice over another choice.

55:50It's about making sure that you make a good amount of right choices across the board. And it's about making the right priorities stick out. And for me, that means being around for my family. It means being around for my business, my friends, and everything else that I do day to day for as absolutely long as possible. And for me, that's what's important now. It's not about making tons more money or accolades or winning different things. All that sort of stuff is actually pretty irrelevant to me now. For me now, I just want to be around for the long haul and to make as much difference as I can. Beautiful.

56:25Okay. Well, we have a kind of rapid fire series of questions that we ask all of our guests. And so I'll kick us off here. What is currently your biggest obstacle in getting the double win, winning at work and succeeding at life? We've heard a lot about in the past, but today, what's your biggest obstacle? That's a really good question. I would say probably not taking, still not taking enough time to figure out different projects that I work on. I think we have a lot of issues, like entrepreneurs in general have issues to deal with. And I think the big thing for me has always been picking what project to work on next.

57:07So I think I'm going to say having too many great ideas, something to that effect. Yeah. I feel your pain. Yeah. Same. Yeah. The struggle is real. And cue the group therapy right now. Oh, man. Well, that's why I lied to myself for years because I thought as soon as I get through this project, you know, then I'll be able to live a little bit more relaxed. But by that time, I've got 10 more ideas cued up that I'm ready to race off to. There's no bottom to that. Oh, my gosh. So true. So true. Okay, second question. How do you personally know, you, Chris Ducker, how do you personally know when you're getting the double win?

57:41I know because I feel balance, not burnout. I know because I feel balance. I'm doing things with balance. When I'm with my kids, I'm not thinking about work. When I'm on date nights with my beautiful wife, who we just celebrated 18 years of marriage. Congratulations. Thank you. She still likes me as well, so there's a win for you. And when I'm with her, I'm not thinking about the kids per se. And when I'm at work, I'm not thinking about the wife and vice versa and all the rest of it. Balance. It's about being in harmony, whatever it is that you're doing at any one time. Very good. That's great.

58:17Okay. Lastly, what is one ritual or routine that you rely on to do what you do well? That would go back to being out of nature. Yeah. I'm going to throw it back to that one. There's a good few things, but that for me is really the biggest non-negotiable on my calendar. day to day, even to the point where it's not always possible on a weekend because kids' birthday parties and all that other good fun stuff you do. But when I do skip a day, for one reason or another, where I won't get out, I feel it. I feel it genuinely. And the one thing actually that I found that particularly during the week when I'm doing work, if I don't go out for that day, something pops up, a call needs to take place or whatever it is, I don't sleep as well that night.

59:04I've really noticed that. So for me, the one thing is getting out into nature and saying hello to all my little feathered friends as much as I can. I love that. I don't think in all of our guests, we've ever had anybody with that answer. I know, but that super inspires me and look at your big smile. I know. I'm like super excited too. If only it wasn't 90 degrees right now, I'd be out there. I'm headed to Park City, Utah tomorrow and it will be much nicer in Park City than it is here in Nashville. So I'll be getting outside there. I can't wait. Your dad's got my mobile number. You can get it from him.

59:36If you have any questions in regards to Bonsai. I mean, I'm not kidding you. I'm going to hit you up because that sounds like a blast. Next time I'm in Nashville, we'll hang out. We'll do something together with a little tree. Okay, great. Fantastic. Thanks for being with us. The book is The Long Haul Leader. The author is Chris Ducker. Right now, before you lose the glow of the show, go order it. You won't be disappointed. This is a great book, an inspirational book, and I really recommend it. Thanks, Chris. Thank you, guys.

1:00:14Well, first of all, as we've said before, if the guest has an English accent, it's going to be good. That's really 50 % of our formula is just bring in the Brits because whatever they say sounds so smart. and charming, you know, but. They could read the phone book. Yeah, they could read the phone book. Except we don't have any more. That's right. I know. You say that to my kids and they're like, what's the phone book? But seriously though, that was such a wonderful conversation and it kind of went in a direction that I wasn't expecting. That whole conversation about hobbies, like you said in the intro, we really haven't talked about that a whole lot on the Double Win Show, but man, I got some great insights.

1:00:48What about you? Absolutely. I mean, it inspired me. I think the biggest thing that inspired me in that conversation is not about hobbies. So let's get back to my idea. here in a moment. Okay. But let's just talk about hobbies. I have a question. I know you garden. Yeah. What other hobbies do you have? Or do you have any? Gardening is kind of the one that I spend the most time on and the one that right now I'm enjoying the most. And one thing that's interesting about gardening is it changes so much season to season. So the kinds of things that I was doing in my garden in the early spring are very different than kind of when it's in its peak.

1:01:19Good point. Versus now, it's the late summer when we're recording this. And so I'm pulling things out and getting ready for the fall, et cetera. So it just changes a lot, which I really like that variety. I also love to bake and cook. And so that is definitely a hobby. I love for you to bake and cook. Yeah. I was going to say that's my family's favorite hobby that I have. So the other day I had a bunch of peaches that were kind of last of the season peaches that I made into a galette, which is sort of a, an informal pie, you know, no, no pie plate, just, just sort of crust folded over and everybody got to have pie for breakfast.

1:01:51And that was really exciting. And I forgot to bring you some. So, you know, sorry about that. I'm going to have to try to forgive you on that one. I know. So Megan makes the best cherry pie you've ever tasted. Yeah. And I mean, I love it. It kind of makes you never want to eat cherry pie from a restaurant because those have, are kind of gummy and they have coloring in them. And this is just like real, just like real, real. So I love to do that. I also love walking and I don't mean walking for exercise as Chris was quick to point out. Exercise does not count as a hobby. That's, you know, like maintaining your car, but I love to just walk slowly.

1:02:26And sometimes it frustrates Joel because Joel's a really fast walker. Naturally. I'm like, baby, you got to slow down, you know, like we walk together, but I love walking slowly. I love walking by myself. I love just noticing nature and being outdoors. So I love that. I think I have several hobbies that I'm working on cultivating. Like they're kind of like on my to be discovered list. One is beekeeping. So I think I'm going to, I'm going to start that in the spring. Yeah. Well, like I was talking about with Chris, it's really important if you are a gardener that you have bees and other pollinators to pollinate your plants.

1:02:59Like they actually have to be pollinated. It doesn't just happen naturally. Our friend Kyle is your man. I know. I know that's true. Mom was telling me that the other day. So I'm going to, I'm planning to do beekeeping next year. This bonsai thing. I'm like, Oh, I got to really check that out. I actually know somewhere locally that sells bonsai trees and It probably is like a club or something. So that could be really fun. And then drawing and watercolor are things I've done before, but I haven't done in a long time. And I'm thinking that would be a great winter hobby because if your hobby involves nature, you kind of have to think about how you are able to do it or not in the winter.

1:03:31Oh, knitting. That's something else I do. I do love knitting. You might have too many hobbies. No, you know what? I have five kids. I'm very busy. I'm not spending hours and hours and hours. I mean, I feel like if I can have a hobby, anybody can have a hobby because I have a very full life. Well, that's absolutely true. So my hobbies are golf when my arm's not in a sling, fishing, and I'm really hoping I can still fish because my dominant hand is not in the cast. And I've got a big fly fishing trip planned for this fall. And then playing the Native American flute, the guitar, and now songwriting, which I'm really studying that like it's a craft.

1:04:07You know, I'm listening to songwriters talk about, you know, how they get the hook and how they structure the song and all that kind of stuff. And so I'm just enjoying the sort of craft part of that. Oh, birding is another one I want to do. Have you ever thought about birding? I don't know why it doesn't appeal to me. Part of it is I hate having those big cameras with those big lenses. Well, you don't have to take pictures. You can just like go look for the birds. Yeah, but if you don't take a picture, did it really happen? Well, I mean. Okay, my biggest takeaway, although the hobbies was super inspirational, my biggest takeaway was being outdoors more.

1:04:43Yes. Oh, yes. That was so great. So the thing I do now, which is limited, I've got so much room to grow on this. When I'm golfing, I'm outdoors. When I'm fishing, I'm outdoors. That's all good. But the slow walk and forest bathing really inspires me. So what your mother and I do now is first thing in the morning, we go outside and we sit on our patio. Yep. Except that we hang our feet off the patio into the grass. So we're grounding. Oh, yeah. And I spend 10 minutes and I just pray. I love that. We've done that too this summer. We put Adirondack chairs at the beginning of our garden. Our garden is like a rectangle and on the front part of it is the short side of the rectangle.

1:05:29And so we put three chairs there because we often end up with a kid outside with us. And we bring our coffee out there every morning. We like we get up, we get dressed, we make our coffee and we go straight outside. We plan our day. We, you know, do our kind of devotional stuff. We talk like we stay out there as long as we can. You know, now that school's back in, it's a little bit shortened, but we try to get at least, you know, 20 or 30 minutes outside. and it is like become our favorite ritual that we do. Well, those Adirondack chairs are so underrated. I know. I love those chairs. Yeah. We have some at the lake, but I never sit in them.

1:06:03Yeah. What's wrong? We have those ones that are made of Pollywood, you know, it's like a composite so they don't like flake off their paint or, you know, break down. And they're wonderfully comfortable. We put our feet in the little garden pebbles, you know, they're at the base of the garden and it is just a lovely thing. So oftentimes Naomi, our six-year-old, She's like playing in the driveway with her toys. And, you know, she's not necessarily sitting the whole time. She's mostly just playing. Dogs are out there with us. And it is a wonderful way to start the day. I think part of what I loved about the idea of being in nature and hobbies is that they all slow you down to a human pace.

1:06:38You know, you're not just running around like a nut, like you're actually in your body. You're able to slow down to a human pace, a human scale and be present in ways that are really important. What was that term you used in the conversation with Chris about one activity sort of meeting several days? Oh, yeah. Like I was using that example in the kitchen, you know, not having things be unitaskers. Unitaskers. Unitasker, you know, it's like your popcorn maker or whatever, you know, a butter melter thing or something. You know, it's like we want, I think when we're thinking about human flourishing, we want the practices that we do to not be single things.

1:07:13We want to be trying to have the activities, the practices of flourishing to accomplish many things at once. For one thing, that's how it becomes sustainable, where you don't feel like, oh my gosh, I need a morning routine that's three hours long. It's like, you don't. You can actually check a whole lot of boxes and feel much more like you're thriving and flourishing if you can do one or two things that accomplish many of those at once. So true. Well, guys, if I were you, if I was sitting there, I think I would take away three things from the show. One, the need for self-care. Chris made a great case for that.

1:07:45And then the need to get outside more. I can tell you from a neuroscience perspective, not that I'm a neuroscientist, but I've done a lot of reading on this, is that nothing regulates your nervous system more than being outside. Relationships, too, are a big one. But you can do both of those at the same time. And the third one is get yourself a hobby. You know, all of us need a hobby. We need some way to spend our time that's not work. And if you're one of those people that says, I love my work, My work is my hobby. I just want to call a big BS on that. You cannot have work as your hobby. You can enjoy your work.

1:08:19I love my work, but it ain't my hobby. That's right. Right? Yeah. You guys can do us a huge favor as we're relaunching for this fall with the podcast. If you'd go to the podcast page or wherever you listen to podcasts and you would rate and maybe even write a short review, you can use ChatGPT and just dump some rough ideas in there and let it have a beautiful review. but that would be hugely helpful to us in terms of getting the word out and getting more listeners because we are committed to getting this message out about the double win and about human flourishing and you have a role to play. So we'll see you next time.

1:08:56See ya.