Welcome to Close it now, the podcast that's revolutionizing the H Vac and home improvement trades industries.

Get ready to dive deep into the world of heating, ventilation and air conditioning.

We're turning up the heat on industry standards and cooling down misconceptions.

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This is Close it now, where excellence meets excitement.

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Your host, Sam Wakefield.

All right, welcome back to Close It Now.

Sam Wakefield here.

I am really stoked to bring you this guest today.

This is an episode that I've been wanting to do for a long time, and when I came across this person, I was really thrilled.

We connected and had a great conversation.

And I know that he's going to bring some value to everyone here today.

This is Will Frewen.

He is a mental health expert, especially focused on men's mental health.

Not leaving you ladies out, of course, Everything applies as well.

But I'm really stoked about this episode.

We're going to focus on some mental health, some give you some tools and skills to be able to handle that and start to normalize this conversation.

As you know, if you've listened to my podcast for a while, this is something that we talk about pretty often is how everything is psychology based.

We talk about the brain, science and inner workings of the brain.

Well, a huge part of that is not just the psychology around cells.

It's the mindset and the psychology.

The bigger limiter in all of our lives is our own internal workings and how we think and how we process and how we deal with things.

The baggage that we carry, the trauma that we've had, all of these components build into who you are.

And if you don't deal with some of the things that are in there, like it or not, know it or not, everyone has junk in their trunk.

And so that is, that's why I have this guest today.

So thanks for being here, Will.

I'm excited to have you and greet everybody here for us real quick.

My name is Will Frewen.

I worked for the VA at one point as a peer specialist.

I run a podcast that focuses on normalizing men's mental health.

It's a big passion of mine and I am privileged to be on this guest.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I appreciate it, man.

Well, and so let's do this.

Give everybody so I don't normally start like this, but I think for this episode it credibility will be very helpful.

Give everybody a little bit of context because I know a little bit of your background from us talking.

It's walk us through your journey.

You know, how did you, you know, take us through your life and where did you get the spark and the drive to want to dive into this area of research and the way to be able to give back the way you do?

So it really starts from the way that my childhood was.

My father unfortunately was not able to be the father I wish I had.

He was on his own mental health journey.

Like most of us or like some of us, our parents have a huge impact on how we see the world.

And they shape the prism of how reality is and create that glass ceiling.

And then mine was sprinkled or peppered more with my time that serves in the Marine Corps and it created a whole other type of narrative.

And one of the things I've noticed is they get recruited from lower social economics and I've lost numerous buddies to suicide.

I lost, almost took my own life.

And it was a time for a change.

So I started to do a lot of me search and it landed up into a master's in social work that working towards.

And I started on the journey of my podcast, which I've interviewed over 60 people from clinical psychologists to people that have actually walked the walk.

And the common themes of people are learning about boundaries, communication, their self fulfilling prophecies, even though they don't want it.

And it just led me on this beautiful journey of getting to know myself, understanding my perspective, but also getting a chance to get the message out there.

So just a second ago you said something I'd like to go back to about reshaping your narrative because that's something that so many of us have in our life, but we don't necessarily understand or even know how to do that.

So it's that how do we navigate through that?

When you come to this realization that, hey, I've got to change, you know, how do we, how do we change?

That's the next step.

Awareness is key first step.

But after that, then what?

The huge part to it is that the unspoken part is that we all want change.

We all want to say, hey Kay, we'll go to the therapist and we want to change, but at the same time we want the predictability, we want the patterns, we want that recognition.

We go to a therapist and we'll talk with them.

And what happens is if we start to change, we have resistance with these thoughts will come into our head.

Why didn't we do this sooner?

How come I didn't know better?

And then we'll actually create this whole other narrative to be stuck in.

And it's the way that we filter pretty much the reality.

Like I have had multiple conversations.

Some people use very harsh words, the verbiage.

Other people have more encouraged.

But it's not uncommon for people to want to stay with a familiar held an unfamiliar heaven.

Because to move forward means that you also now have to take on this other identity, this other role.

You have to keep making these patterns and making it discipline.

Everybody wants change until discipline comes involved.

That's a powerful statement.

That is a really powerful statement.

So when you talk about the comfortable hell versus the uncomfortable heaven and then you know, of course, winning change.

Let's talk about the discipline it takes and what are.

I mean, first of all, where is that tipping point in that uncomfortable hell?

What are we looking for?

Because there's.

From what I understand and I very little study in this aspect of mental health in the brain.

But from what I understand is there's some trends that start to appear and some commonalities that will appear in people's lives when that uncomfortable hell gets to the place where I can no longer stand this place.

So let's start there.

Maybe what are some signs or what are the things that we're looking for in our lives that start to show up as indicators that, okay, this is not a good place to be, it's time to make a change.

And how do we know?

How do we recognize that?

So I believe these signs come up a lot.

And they come off really soft in the beginning.

To me, I refer to it as somebody like knocking on a door.

Somebody knocking very gently.

You can't even hear it.

It's almost like a butterfly.

You know, you realize these little rifts are happening until they become to the really extremes, which is, hey, I'm losing my wife.

I am gambling away my money.

I am.

I don't even know who my kids are anymore.

Addictions start popping up.

I start to reshift my relationships with my friends.

And these are the people I believe.

It's starting to lose ourselves in the moment.

Not trying to do an Eminem quote right there, but it's like you start really losing yourself.

And there's signs along the way.

Like you'll start to notice the tips between you and your partner or the tiffs between you and your friends and your relationships.

And when you're starting to try to change, you also will start having these rifts, but they'll be differently.

They would want you to be predictable, they want you to be pattern orientated.

But if you go about it and you start to isolate yourself and stop having healthy boundaries with people, you're going to create these signs of, hey, you know what?

I'm isolating these people out.

This is where I'm being hyper focused on.

And this is my whole life.

This isn't part of my life.

This isn't actually supplying me the resources for me to live my life.

This has just totally consumed it.

And you start noticing that people would have higher risk factors and you'll start to like, it's usually their friends that are able to see it first because you're living every day in your shoes.

Until somebody, you have to have like a trusted confidant to be able to call you and be able to believe and take a step back.

Yeah, it's that drift, right?

We all have that in life.

We think we're doing one thing and then it's those subtle gradual steps that we don't even realize are happening until all of a sudden somebody calls us out on it, like you're saying, and we realize we're so far off the course from where we thought we were.

It's almost this, you know, basically this moment where an intervention style type thing a lot of times seems to happen.

And of course one of the goals, you know, one of my goals, that's one of the reasons I started this, this whole podcast and company is to raise the standard of, you know, of home services and home improvement.

Because I was tired of going to events and hearing these long veterans in the industry like talk to each other.

Almost like the scorecard of how many heart attacks have you had and how many wives have you had?

And it was gross.

I was like, oh, this is awful, we have to do better.

And so, you know, that's one of the reasons why I love that you're here today.

And so of course, ideally the goal would be for us to be able to catch those things before someone.

We go so far that someone has to have an intervention with us and be like, hey, beside the face and be like, what are you doing?

So once we get to the place where either we've self realized or someone's pointed out to us and we have this moment of okay, yes, it's time to start making a change, it's time to improve.

It's time to go inside.

Then what?

I mean, what are some of the next steps here?

I want to just stay right where we are for just a split second, if you don't mind.

Absolutely, yeah.

It's one of the things that you'll also notice is porn increasing, like I said, substance abuse.

You will also notice about the weight change quite a bit.

But an area that we also don't really think about is am I creating this change for the person I'm with or the people I care about, or am I creating for myself?

And I'm expecting them to come along and when we're not able to.

So if you're doing these scorecards, we're just doing it for ourselves.

Are we actually doing it for the family, the times that they really love and what they need?

But I wanted just to throw that out there because we don't usually, when we look at the changes in evolution, we don't always include everybody else that's along for the ride with us, that we want to stay with us.

And when you talked about the healing, what's next?

So you have therapy, you have mindfulness, learning how to stay still.

We live in a very capitalistic society where if we're not doing something, we are doing nothing.

Like Alan Watts really talked about this in one of his books.

It was the Asian people.

They could be able to do walking meditation In America, if we try to sit in lotus pose, we're going to be overwhelmed because we feel like we didn't accomplish anything.

What happens is when we fill up our day full of stuff, and that's really what it is, is stuff, we are not actually able to hear our emotions.

And when we're able to understand what our emotions are lying, we'll start to realize that things can change.

We could be able to say, this is good, this is bad.

But some of the things that can really help us at extremely low cost is hydration, sleep, meditation.

Pick up a book, read for 10 pages.

Even if it's hard for you, just pick it up and read.

It's very low cost and it has profounding effects on about changing your mind and how you look at the world.

But if you have a partner or if you have a family, check in with them, make date nights for them.

And I know it's hard to say that when you working in a business of like, making money and you're giving so much time to everybody, but you also gotta give time to the family that you said that you're building a castle For.

Yeah, yeah.

That's huge.

Something I say pretty often on here is, you know, work to become a family man with a business, not a businessman with a family, because they're two very different things and where we put our priorities.

So I'd love to take a little detour from this, a little side side quest for a second because, you know, one of the things especially in depending on the generation, one of the things especially surrounding mental health is the stigma around mental health and how it's different than other types of healthcare.

You know, when we in, you know, so many times the, in home improvement home services, you know, we get injured in all kinds of ways.

I've slammed my head against the underside of a roof deck and you know, poked holes in my head with nails.

I've, you know, stepped through ceilings.

People have had all kind of different injuries and when some catch a cold, something like that happens.

Of course we go to the doctor and it's normal.

But when it comes to the brain and brain science and mental health, there seems to be a lot of times the stigma around it that prevents us from even like we have this idea that something's wrong with me if I have to see somebody about that or have a conversation with a counselor or a therapist or any of those types of things.

So how do we address the stigma to start to normalize it and make it.

Mental health care is healthcare.

So the best way I can define it is, especially for business folks, is the return on investment, the roi.

We are not seeing a instant roi like you're bleeding from a nail in your head.

You actually patch it up, boom, you can be able to go back to work, you're working on your mental health, you're spending hundreds of dollars weekly.

And if you don't have good insurance now it's like, what am I doing here?

And we haven't been really taught.

But to me, when I look at the return on investment of mental health, especially for you, or not for you, but just for a person like myself, it's the way I interact with people, it's the relationships.

It's a long term investment, it's a compounding investment.

Like we can say that we all worked on the job site where we had this one guy, no matter what actually happened, he's happy, he's happy, he does a really good job and we all want to be around that dude.

And then we have had the other guy that we were very cautious about him coming to work.

You know, he was probably drunk.

You know, that Stanley cup right there probably has three fifth.

Three fifths of it.

Vodka, two fifths, coffee, and.

But we know the guy can work, but he's a liability.

Think about that guy.

Like how he doesn't have the same type of temperament now.

When he goes back home to his family, he's probably gonna be treating him the same way.

He probably doesn't even have a family at that point.

It's.

And also, he has a higher chance for heart attack.

He has a higher chance for other issues.

When you work on your mental health, it's one of the selfless things that you can do.

You're giving it to other people.

It's not only that you create this emotional bandwidth between yourself where all of a sudden, something happens.

You're not over there metaphorically kicking your dog.

You're over there like, holy crud, this sucks.

I'm actually feeling pain.

What can I do?

Instead of actually just thinking only about that, the hypervigilant moment and then being overwhelmed with that compounding emotions that you have not processed.

So with therapy, even though we have this stigma around, prevents certain people from getting jobs where they've been doing a better job at trying to help individuals not be excluded from it.

It's been one of the biggest things for the military guys, talk about ptsd, but then also for other guys, it has the stigma.

And if I know when I worked on the job site, sometimes I would put duct tape on my leg if I was actually bleeding out of it.

Or it's just like, oh, yeah, you're.

Speaking to that community for sure.

It's like, oh, put some.

Rub some dirt on it and walk it off.

But the bone's showing.

Okay, well, we can take care of it later.

Yeah, we've still got a job to do.

But at the same time, it's like, that's what happens with mental health.

Mental health also becomes like, well, the.

You heard the word resilience, and I never looked at this until another way that you become so resilient that becomes that your new homeostasis.

And you keep rubbing dirt on it.

You talk to your kid, your kid scraped his arm.

Rub some dirt on it.

But at the same time, that boy just needs to be, hey, what's going on?

I really hurt myself allowing him to be able to process it.

So it's okay to process it instead of just keep shutting it down, shutting it down, shutting it down.

And we will take care of ourselves better when we work on the mental health.

We will love our kids better.

We will love our families better.

We will love our Friends better and do you see the gains right away?

No.

Do you want to go back to the old person?

Yes, sometimes because of the predictability.

But this is where you start to change.

And the healing is not just for yourself.

It's for everybody.

It's a compounding interest, you know, that is so apparent.

I've seen it, definitely seen it in my life and plenty of other people around me.

You know, one of the interesting things is, you know, coming from the.

Going through some change, but also having conversations with people.

So I'm just going to use myself as the example here.

The people around me across time, I've had the conversations with them where they've come back to me and said, thank you for whatever you're doing, because I no longer feel like I have to be on eggshells around you or used to.

You would have reacted to this in a certain way.

So now I'm kind of gun shy to bring this up.

And so, like, as I grow, those relationships are growing with me because now they're able to feel comfortable, to even express some of those thoughts where before I would have just shut them down and almost they have this PTSD from the way I used to react.

And so it's almost like, okay, no, this is safe now.

I take criticism now where I didn't before and those types of things.

Yeah, we don't even realize how we're affecting those around us until the change starts to happen and we see.

And in my life, it had to come to a huge, huge, huge tipping point, which was that uncomfortable hell that you were talking about.

It got so uncomfortable.

I had to make a change in my life.

And it's one of the reasons why I wanted you on here is to help people.

Maybe not have to get to that horrible tipping point and then catch it earlier and start to realize, hey, now is the time.

So, because like we discussed, construction workers have a huge rates of suicide and the.

The addiction of all addictions per capita, the highest rates are gamblers.

And I don't know if actually people know that, but it had.

They have the highest rates of suicide and completion.

But when we actually decide to say, you know what, it's time for a change, it's uncomfortable.

It's really uncomfortable because that means that, hey, did my dad show me wrong?

Did society show me wrong?

Was I too stupid to actually to get off the wagon?

But at the same time, you start learning how to treat yourself with kindness.

And I remember how many times I thought in my head, you're so stupid.

Will you're so stupid, Will.

And I'm like, I really believed it.

And I'm also grateful to remember those narrative because when I actually meet somebody else that's doing the same thing or something similar, I'm able to sit with them and not judge them, but help normalize where they're at.

Because that healing, it also, it doesn't just happen one for one, tit for tat in those type of relationships.

It's also in other areas where like, hey, you'll come across an investor and they're unsure about what they want to do and you could tell them like, hey, maybe it's not the right time.

Even though you want to be able to use that money, you probably just saved that guy money.

He's probably going to come back to you or her.

And if not, they're probably going to refer somebody to you because they're like, wow, this person didn't just try to take my money and scam me.

And they actually felt seen and heard, like the human connection.

Like, one of the things that I've learned is if from a business book and it really helped me out a lot.

It was called Never Eat Alone.

And it's looking at relationships as being infinite instead of finite.

And if you are trying to grow those type of relationships, it's a way to really connect.

And that's where mental health comes in.

You know, thinking about the relationship with others and how we're seeing it.

And you're so right.

It unlocks how as we start to process those things inside, as we start to heal, we see everyone else differently as well.

In fact, this is really interesting, very timely.

I got a text from one of my coaching clients this morning because we do some of this work in my coaching and he said was talking about the exercise we've been doing has unlocked extreme awareness.

It's crazy.

Says forgiveness is becoming organic.

And it's allowing me to see into what causes people, the way they behave and the way that they behave and what they do, not in a judgmental way, but in a more empathetic way.

It's kind of frightening, but also very enlightening.

And so it was just a really cool text to get because when we start to unlock our own mental prison cell, so to speak, then all of a sudden we can clearly see the self that everyone else, that others are living in.

And so it shifts this.

Where before I was judgmental because of the way they react, now I see it as they're in this prison of their own mind, of their own doing that they can't even see.

So my brain shifts to, how can I have empathy?

How can I help them in a way without judgment?

And so the way that we function in the world starts to change because of the way that that shifts.

So I'd love to get some commentary on you about that because I feel like it's very timely in this conversation because just like you're saying, it's not just for us, obviously, we have to put on our own oxygen mask first.

We can't pour from an empty cup.

But then, you know, the secondary consequence of that is it's so much more massive than I think we even realize.

So when we actually.

We're usually helping creatures and you just use the reference of putting the Ashkin mask on us before somebody else, well, if we can't breathe, we can't see, we can't actually help.

And when we are able to really heal, like, we'll start changing the narrative between the relationship.

And it's like, oh, they're just having a trigger response that's not fully them.

They are behaving because this is their program.

Like, all of a sudden, if you think about if your spouse ever got a bill in the mail.

And all of a sudden it was so overwhelming.

Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in the book Blink.

And people have this split second and they have this reaction.

And then all of a sudden, people go into this narrative.

I'll share a quick story.

I was driving around the country in an RV with my ex.

And our RV landed up actually scraping the bottom of it, the tranny pan.

And we land up putting nine quarts of transmission fluid in it.

It was supposed to be 14.

Found out later, destroyed the whole clutch mechanism.

It was $4,000.

When I was actually healing, the first thing I did was actually we stopped the car.

I put my hands on her shoulders and I put my head against.

But from somebody that was a state trooper pulls over from his perspective, since his world, his reality.

And this is where we actually have to start to be able to shift reality.

He thought I was actually doing something wrong to her.

And coming from a world of, like, really hate and discontent, I could understand where he was coming from.

I wanted to make sure that he had the space.

And if anything, I thanked him for making sure that she was safe.

But if I was not in the right headspace during that time, it would have been like, what are you talking about?

I've been very confrontational because we're actually having this misalignment of communication.

And if we think about how we are communicating with other people.

We realize like, whoa, this is their reality, this is their prism, this is their limitation, this is the world that they're living in.

If are they welcoming to a different perspective?

Are they welcoming to another thing besides a snapshot judgment?

Because like we'll see that one person going back that has a 3/5 of vodka in his coffee and we're like, this is normal to him.

To most people, this isn't normal.

And I know like you're smirking because it's true.

Using that word normal sounds funny, but it's.

They're normal.

Yeah.

And how do you do the intervention?

Like, you gotta stop drinking.

Well, hey bud, I know you're doing three fits.

Do you wanna try half?

Yeah.

And then slowly work em down.

Because you're meeting with them because that alcohol is doing something for them.

It's helping them, it's through supporting them.

Yeah.

Even though we, it's the numbing or whatever it is they're using it for.

Right.

Yeah.

And so when we start healing, we can start having more compassion to people.

The compassion fatigue can actually really set in because if we don't know how to refill our cups, we just going in full force trying to fix something.

We're releasing everything too quickly, we're draining out and if anything then we start becoming resentful.

This is a really, really good topic for this community especially because we're so very sales focused here.

But the intention and the way that we do it here at the closing down community is service at the highest level and to always do what's right for the client and those types of, those ideas and concepts and function and integrity.

But what I've come to realize over the years of doing this year after year after year and thousands and thousands of appointments and it's now what I help people through is, and I found myself in this trap in the past is I pour into people so much, so often all day long and then there's nothing left for my family when I get home.

And so my clients who, yes, we have to serve at that level and that is sales truly.

So there's a couple different angles that perspectives we could talk about.

This one is we have to work to improve ourselves.

This is a natural byproduct.

By working on ourselves and just like you were saying, being able to see from their perspective, when we put ourselves in their shoes and we can start to see the way they're mentally processing, then we can have a better, healthier conversation with them from a sales vantage point.

But then this is really the bigger picture here is not letting our clients get the best of us and having nothing left for our families and the ones we truly care about the most when we get home.

And so that leads to.

I've been in that trap before and it led to some really dark places that I've been.

So this is a conversation I love having with people.

It's called around boundaries.

And boundaries has a taboo word in certain sales.

And.

But boundaries is really to show people love.

Carl Jung talked about this.

Jordan Peterson paraphrased it.

And they talk about like setting these boundaries is these limitations because it creates this resentment over time and then becomes a master slave and then you become resentful towards a person and then it becomes in a chaotic relationship if we are not able to say, hey, you not allowed to Text me past 8pm unless it's an emergency.

This is my time for my family.

Or if I'm not actually saying from 6 to 7, my phone is on silent unless I know I have an extreme deal that I need to take care of.

The accessibility.

Oh, somebody else is going to go somewhere else.

They don't need to be in touch with me.

My family needs to be in touch with me.

I need to be able to show up for my family.

I say I'm building this castle for my family, but where is my family?

They're in the other house while I'm building this other one.

And I'm expecting them to move with me even though they don't even know who I am.

So when you have these boundaries in place, you're able to start setting up so you can be able to give to the people that you really love and you care about and you're able to show up intentionally for the people that you are trying to serve with the sales.

But then you're also trying to.

You're able to show up to the people you love.

And setting boundaries is very difficult.

What, so what are what.

And boundary is.

Boundaries, of course, are such a huge, important conversation.

And I work with so many business owners especially that don't understand that.

And, and obviously to, to a degree, all, everyone, most people don't understand boundaries.

One of the things that I found is business owners feel like they have to be available for their clients.

And I'm constantly reminding them.

It's like you run your calendar, you get to decide when it's available and when it isn't.

And so that's a hard step for a lot of people to take.

So let's camp out on this boundaries concept and idea for a minute.

What are some ways that people can start to incorporate better boundaries?

One, recognize where boundaries need to be is probably maybe a good first step.

And because so many times we just don't even know that I should have a boundary around a certain thing and we don't realize how it's affecting us.

So let's start there and then walk into maybe some of the ways to, you know, to start setting healthy boundaries.

Well, we have, I'm pretty sure we all have seen the eye roll from our partners of the phone is ringing and all of a sudden you see any kids, like being dismissed and you watching people give up, that's a huge sign we're in murky territory already.

The other thing is, is to look at your priorities.

It's like, am I prioritizing money or my prioritizing my family?

Most people say that if you do one, you're going to get the other.

And when you start looking at it, why do we need to set it?

It's also setting limitations, expectations for the people.

And it's not to say that you dislike them.

It's actually you're saying to the person that you really do care about them and you care about them that much.

They're saying, this is the time that we can talk, this is the time that we can communicate.

If you send me an email, I might not be able to get right back to it unless it's urgent.

And urgency is different from you to it is me.

And the other part of setting boundaries is also for relationship, healthy relationships, like if your kids are playing baseball, you want to show up to watch the baseball game, even though your kid might be sitting on the bench the whole time.

And you want to pick up that phone.

You want to pick up that phone because, hey, it might be another 5,000, it might be a $20,000 deal.

And at the same time, it's like, what's going to change from 8,05 to 9.05?

Absolutely nothing.

The other thing to it is they have actually done different types of theories and different types of perspectives.

People that are always available are the ones that usually get walked all over.

And you're able to set up your own calendar of saying, these are the times I can be present for.

And if you're chasing that dollar, you're blind to everything else around you.

That is such a powerful statement, being blind to everything else around us.

I feel like we're replaying so much of my life in the journey that I've gone through as exactly that person.

I can remember my kids, softball games and me missing key moments because all of a sudden I had a phone call and had to walk away game.

I remember.

In fact, this is probably one of the most.

The deepest stories that I have about this is my whole career and my whole journey.

I was doing this for the family, doing this, creating this life, Creating this life.

But I was so focused on the future that I was not living in the present.

And the moment that absolutely broke me was several years ago.

In fact, there's pictures on my wall.

My wife and my two kids, my two daughters at the time, they're about 4 and 6, 5 and 7, somewhere in that range.

They took a vacation one summer with my father in law to Colorado to go fishing and hang out in Colorado for.

It was about 10 days without me because I was busy in the summer selling air conditioners and getting those.

The pictures sent to me and just completely, every single day realizing that I'm never going to have those memories.

They're not my memories.

All I have are the secondhand stories that I was told because I thought I was prioritizing my family.

And all along.

Absolutely not.

Could the company have made it without me?

Of course it was fine.

We had a whole team of people.

Were we fine with our bills?

Yes, absolutely.

But in the moment, it didn't seem like it.

I was like, oh, I don't know that I can do this.

But looking back, of course I could have.

And so that's one of the reasons why I'm so grateful to have you on the show, because I want to help as many people prevent them from going through that as possible.

So I'd love for you to speak to that prioritization and how do we start to make those adjustments that truly show the people that we care about that we do care, and so they stop getting dismissed and they stop having those.

They just stop asking after a while.

And it's what I don't want.

Right.

That's what none of us.

So one of the great things about therapy and therapists is that they don't have the emotional investment that our family does, our friends do.

We don't have the shame.

We don't have to hide it from them.

Then if they're a good therapist, they'll be a sounding board.

Like, you just displayed some really great emotions.

I could just tell that you were holding it back behind your eyes.

And imagine if you had that conversation with a person that you could truly trust when you were feeling that they might have said, sam, you got the Money, go grab a flight, go grab a rental car and go meet them on the lake or the river.

And you would have probably thought about and changed.

And having a person that you can talk to that is a true confidant.

You can be able to now look at what's your priorities, what really matters to you.

The most important currency that we usually do not protect because we're in the moment of it is time.

Like time will never get back.

And you're the way that you were talking about selling air conditioners.

This is not uncommon from people say people that have PTSD that go to war and all of a sudden they're living in a time fragmented time.

You're living in a fragment of emotions and which was like, hey, I need to make money.

That survival mentality.

I want to be able to show up.

I want to be able to make sure my kids have everything I didn't have.

But guess what they're also missing is that debt.

Yep.

And when we are actually able to talk to a person that's outside our immediate circle or even a couple degrees away and saying this is what I'm doing, this is what I believe I'm doing, but I'm not getting this.

In dialectical behavioral therapy, you can have multiple truths, but there could be opposing views.

Like I want to be with my family, enjoy that time.

I also want to be able to give money to make sure my family's secure.

They both are true.

But at the same time, which one really matters more to you?

And is that a hundred thousand dollar sale going to let you know about hey, how many times your boy hit the home run?

Like it's just.

It's a very different thing.

And then.

Or seeing your kid jump up, super excitement.

And then all of a sudden the way that he looks at you is because you're more present each day compared to him hitting that home run, looking at you in a face of disgust like he didn't even freaking see.

He didn't even see this.

He's looking down in his phone and missed the whole thing.

Yeah.

Oh, it's.

This is, this is such a, such a sensitive topic.

I know in this community because of all of these reasons, everyone that touches home improvement and home services goes through these seasons.

And I know it's in other industries too, of course, especially just the workaholic.

In fact, as you're talking about this, it's dawning on me right in this moment, I was literally today years old.

The way that I have always functioned around work versus being there for My family up until a few years ago, when I made a very concerted, definite decision to change.

It dawns on me that that's what was modeled for me from my dad.

He was in the oil field and he took jobs, and he would be gone for 6, 7, 8, 9, 11 months at a time in a foreign country or South Korea or Thailand or wherever.

And we just communicated via phone.

So it was me and my mom the whole time.

And so that's what clearly dawns on me right now in this conversation.

So thank you, Will.

You're helping me break through some things.

That's what was modeled for me.

So clearly that's what I did for a huge portion of my life, even though I thought that it was for them.

And, you know, there's something I heard recent, not too long ago, when, you know, it was around people that interview seniors and people on their deathbed and those last statements, type of interviews, and not one time did any of them ever say, man, I wish I'd have made one more sell.

But every time, they always say, I wish I'd had more time, right?

And so more time with the kids, more memories.

I wish I would have done this instead of so focused on work.

And so, man, that's what I want for everybody in this community that listens to this show, is to adjust those priorities and truly take the step to make the change.

And so, man, I wish we had a ton more time to go through a lot of this, because I feel like we're really just starting to get into the meat of some things.

But take the next.

I'd love for you to take the next 5, 10, 15 minutes, however long, and give some good insight.

First of all, I'd love for you, if you have any tools that you can share with the community, of how to start recognizing how to start dealing with something that some of the stuff.

And then, you know, maybe some insight and some direction into, you know, where to go after that.

A tool that I've told people when I was working with them is to journal.

You don't have to actually formulate sentences.

It doesn't have to be punction, grammar, please don't type it, write it.

And then after you're done with it, five things you're grateful for.

You do that for a month, you're going to see a huge change in the way that you write, the way that you think you're changing your narrative.

The other thing is to take a list, a prioritized list of what really means to you, what is actually what does one mean to you?

And not only just go one for one column, but actually prioritize it.

Take some time out.

Another aspect that I will say is to meditate the breath like people when they're becoming social workers, psychologists, therapists.

One of the things that we have to learn to do is to show up for ourselves before we show up for the clients.

And it is true in your business too, because creating that extra breath, when I say that breath, when somebody says something to you, you're taking a breath before you respond.

That is your first word.

And when you're breathing, you're able to listen to what a person's saying, what emotions are captivating them, and then all of a sudden realizing it's their emotions, their sense of urgency is their sense of urgency.

It's not your urgency and how you respond to it.

It allows you to be more direct, productive, because you're not getting wrapped up into their emotions.

Another area that I would actually highly suggest, friends and family, spend time with them, understand those relationships.

And if you're a foreigner to it, great.

That means that you get the chance to explore.

If you're not amazing, just cherish them, make those memories.

Because relationships are going to.

They're what we make them.

They're also the return on investment.

Our mental health is return on investment.

But also be honest with yourself.

Do you enjoy the chase, or do you enjoy what the chase is trying to give to you?

Like the happiest people in the world, they never look at retirement Okinawan people, and they live with purpose and attention and meaning, but their community is really, really important.

And it's always okay to take a me day.

And it doesn't mean just to play hooky or whatever type of term that you want to say.

But sometimes schedule that Wednesday, that random day of the week, and say, hey, I'm turning off the devices.

I'm going to include the people I want to, but at this time, I'm done.

I'm playing.

And schedule those days for yourself, because on the other days, you're going to be a lot more filled.

And if any of this actually hits you at all, therapy, it does suck.

It's like working out.

Most of these things have been at your feet for a while, but with therapy too, it allows you to grow, allows you to change, and allows you to really show up for other people that you say that you love your clients, your family, your friends, even your animals.

Yeah, I definitely concur it.

It's definitely made a huge difference in my family's life.

The Things that we've gone through.

And it's just constant.

I mean, most of the successful for everybody listening too.

I mean, most of the highly successful people I know, almost every single one to everyone has a therapist and, or counselor or both, even multiple sometimes to go through all of this stuff.

Because success in life is limited by our brain and by our thoughts.

Dealing with this is.

This is like.

I heard a great analogy from my business, from my coach, my life and business coach.

He said all of this stuff is like carrying around.

It's like you packed up the suitcase of this trauma when you were five and when you were seven and when you were nine and when you were 14 and when you.

All these different moments in your life.

It's like packing up a suitcase with each one.

And now we're walking around with literally carrying all this luggage and we don't even realize it because we've gotten so used to it over time.

That uncomfortable hell like Will was saying and going through these exercises, therapists and really especially the ones that are super effective, that can really help with a lot of these things as transformational things.

Every single time you have these breakthroughs, it's like setting one of those suitcases down.

We're not throwing it away, but we're putting it up and you don't have to travel with it anymore.

And so we become lighter and lighter and lighter.

And that's what frees you to be able to make better decisions.

Frees you to be able to show up for your community and for your family and for your, you know, for your employees and for your co workers and for your clients and you show up in life better, show up for yourself, most importantly, better.

And so that's how it was explained to me.

And it just makes all the sense in the world and so.

Well, I am so grateful you were on this show today.

This has been so insightful.

Tell everybody how they can get ahold of you, have a conversation, you know, just like if there's anything else that they want to want to know and you know, if there's anything that you want to promote or, you know, how to connect with you, love for you to share because I know there's a lot of people that will be.

It really helped by this episode.

And so I'd love for you to give the opportunity to share what you're doing.

So what's Will excited about in life and how can we connect with you?

First, I want to say thank you for allowing me to be on your show.

It's great always to Talk to you.

You're an easy talker.

You got a good voice to you and you just have a great cadence.

The way people can get in touch with me or even hear about what's going on.

I like I said, I start up a podcast.

It's called Normalizing Men's mental Health.

I have a Facebook page to it.

But all I'm trying to do is I'm not trying to sell you anything.

If anything, like I was telling Sam, I'm in the business of losing money.

My money is just I want to help people out.

I lost too many buddies to suicide.

If this is my passion is about men's mental health and trying to reframe the narrative.

So if you guys are ever interested In Gals too, 50% of the audience is females.

Shoot me a message on Facebook Normalizing Men's Mental Health.

Even check out the podcast.

Just always up to talk to people.

If I don't get back to you right away, I apologize.

I'm also doing stuff between schoolwork, work and trying to spend time with the my dog.

So I appreciate you giving me the time, Sam.

Absolutely.

Normalizing Men's Mental Health.

What platforms is your podcast where they can where they can catch it?

So YouTube, Spotify, Apple the and Facebook.

So it's been mostly say prioritize towards YouTube as a video platform.

I'm always looking for guests to talk to.

I'm actually at the point right now that I have possibly about to release two episodes a week because it's just becoming a lot and it's a good thing.

It's a really, really good thing.

But Spotify, Apple, YouTube and Facebook, perfect.

And for everybody listening, the links will be in the show notes.

So if you're in your drive time university grateful for you listening but yeah, grab the link out of the show notes.

You'll be able to connect with Will directly that way on Facebook and then YouTube and the platforms.

Check out his show.

I listened to a few episodes now and it is really high quality.

So many great tools.

His guest that he has on will totally help set you on this journey.

Even if you're not comfortable and ready to take this step towards a therapy purpose.

Start here.

Start with resources like Will's podcast and I'm sure you connect with him on Facebook.

I'm sure he can point you in the direction of plenty of others as well.

The point is start somewhere.

You don't have to run the 100 miles today.

You have to start with a step.

So if anything just get started because you are worth it.

I appreciate every single guest on Will.

Thanks again.

Thanks for being on.

It's been a great conversation and I'm excited to I am now a subscriber so I'm excited to hear more episodes coming from you.

And yeah, it's been an honor for everybody else.

Thanks for listening today and I hope you got some value from this one last request.

If you've ever gotten value from Close it now podcast or from today's episode, I'd love if you left me a review.

The the more 5 star reviews I get, you can leave that on Apple podcasts or go to Google and leave me a review on closeit.

Now, the more reviews I get and the higher rating, the better guests I can have on the show because I don't know if you know how that works, but when I'm working to get guests on the show, that's one of the first things they look at.

They want to see how the show's rated.

And so the more reviews we get, the better guests we can have.

And just like Will here.

So thank you so much everybody for listening and until next time, this type of work, this is how you become someone worth buying from.

You've been listening to the Close it now podcast.

Our passion is to dive headfirst into the transformative movement that's reshaping the very foundation of H Vac and home improvement and at the same time time covering fitness, nutrition, relationships and personal growth, proving that we can indeed have it all.

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