Protect your joy isn't about avoiding hard things. It's about enduring the ongoing hard things for mission critical reasons. When the demons circle back and they will, you need to know why you're still holding the line.

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From Others Over Self®, it's Hardcore and At Ease™. This show is about people who are keeping their edge without going over the edge, I'm host Shelly Rood, and if you spent 2025 watching your calling being held back by unhealthy patterns and negative situations. Well, today's episode is your bridge to 2026. We explore what it means to protect your joy as mission stewardship instead of self-indulgence and why the demons of conflict don't die easily. You'll discover the seven protection decisions that liberate. Is driven plus a preview of what comes next when protection meets focus. this hardcore and at ease.

In January of 2025, a year ago today, I chose three words that probably saved my calling. Protect your joy. Now, before you roll your eyes and think that this is an episode where I'm gonna talk about day spas and gratitude journals, let me be crystal clear about what that actually meant. The mantra of protect your joy wasn't about protecting my happiness. It was, and it certainly wasn't about protecting my comfort. You see, joy is the evidence that I am living in alignment with my calling. When I feel that joy is present, my purpose flows through me with power, and when joy is absent, my calling is compromised. I have felt this idea deeply run through me in multiple decades of my life, and last year was the final straw where I decided that no matter what, I was going to protect my joy. So protect your joy to me means that we protect what allows our purpose to work through us. Think of joy being a fuel indicator instead of this destination that we're trying to achieve. When the indicator drops to empty, our purpose-driven capacity becomes depleted. And here I was last year watching my gauge coming down to zero. I was watching my calling being held back. It wasn't about Shelly and it wasn't about her energy. It was about the mission and my purpose that I truly believe I'm called and present on this earth to fulfill. And it was being held back, not by my effort, because I felt like I was working as hard as I'd ever worked. My mission was being held back because there were these unhealthy patterns and negative situations that were draining the capacity to carry what I know that I'm called to give. And here's what made this really hard. It felt like blaming others for my lack of success. It felt like I was pointing fingers, and in a sense I was, but here's what I had to learn. It's not fault to step back and see where negative behaviors from all parties, including myself, are blocking forward movement. This process had to start with me at the center. Gandhi said, be the change you wish to see in the world. And yet, part of me, part of my center was my reactions around other people, even loved ones, how they were influencing me, how I was reacting to their behaviors. And today's episode is as much a lesson on personal boundaries as it is on agency. My calling is to be a constant source of encouragement and guidance for isolated leaders who feel trapped by naysayers. The light that other people see that belongs to me, but it's not mine. It actually belongs to the mission that's working through me. And that light was dimming because the environment that I was in was actively training it. Back in episode 10, general Doug Slocum taught us about the continuum of harm. He asked his organization a powerful question, where on this continuum from off-color jokes all the way to sexual assault, is this behavior acceptable? And the answer had to be absolutely zero. Some behaviors simply cannot coexist with purpose-driven success, whether it's a fighter jet, a marriage, or a healthy team environment, zero tolerance isn't harsh, it's strategic. Ambitious leaders like us can't coach clean living when our home environment is contradicting it. We can't teach excellence when behavior patterns are undermining the message. Have you ever gone to the doctor and your doctor is a very overweight person and they're supposed to be the champion for your message of health? We can't teach excellence when behavior patterns undermine the message. Now the calling for me was being held back, not by my effort, but by my environment. To set up today's discussion, let's talk about the difference between prevention and protection. This really is the big idea that we are talking about today. Here's where languaging matters. The mental health field is shifting from suicide prevention to suicide protection. You see, prevention assumes that there is an inevitable outcome, like you're just delaying a disaster, whereas protection recognizes life as a gift worth defending from real identifiable threats. Protect your joy, meant that joy is a gift. The darkness of this world will threaten your joy. Business, chaos, relational toxicity, organizational dysfunction, but joy's destruction is not inevitable. It requires your complicity or your neglect. Protection requires what I call agency of thought. It's recognizing that you have power to defend what matters most. And this is the big idea that we're talking about today. Sometimes protection requires the hardest choice, removing yourself or others from situations that threaten what you're called to protect. Here's a real world example for us, in October of 2024, Olympus Corporation, CEO, Stefan Kaufman. Resigned after an internal investigation revealed behaviors that were inconsistent with organizational standards. Now he chose to step aside rather than to compromise the company's mission and values. I know there's a lot that goes into these types of examples, but what I'm wanting to get at here is that sometimes protection requires the hardest choice, and that can be removing yourself or others from situations that threaten what you're called to protect. But here's what people don't really tell us about protection and what I learned the hard way in 2025. The demons don't die easily. You see, cleaning house isn't a quick fix. It's not permanent. It's actually ongoing. The ghosts of conflict haunt you with third and fourth order effects, even consequences that show up years down the road. Here's a real life example. I've been divorced since 2014. My ex-husband is currently deployed to the Middle East, and I'm still expected in court at the end of this month. For an unfounded custody complaint. Well, what about that contractor that we fired earlier this year, or maybe one that you're looking at letting go right now? Well, that contractor might hold a grudge for years to come, and they might even take it to social media from a slandering point of view or your overdue bill, right? You're, you're absolutely sure that your insurance company paid it well, what if it goes to collections? Anyway, that happened to us. You might receive phone calls for years from creditors over payments that you knew were covered at one point. This is just the cost of protection, and yet it's still worth it

Because cleaning house isn't a quick or permanent solution. It's an ongoing process and it's something that has to be grounded in bigger than just this momentary frustration of I have to get out, I have to leave, I have to let them go. Protect your joy isn't about avoiding hard things. It's about enduring the ongoing hard things for mission critical reasons. When the demons circle back and they will, you need to know why you're still holding the line. So here's what protecting the mission required when the threat came from inside the house, my house, and what it still requires today. Let me ground this in the framework that we've been building all year. Mission protection requires zero tolerance standards. When the majority of parties in your environment are healthy, physically and mentally, the exponential mission impact becomes possible. And what I mean by that is you can accomplish so much more around those who are physically and mentally healthy because when key parties are unhealthy. That mission is capped. It's limited. You get held back. So protection isn't about personal preference. We have to get over that. It's actually about removing obstacles to purpose driven impact. For me, this meant a home redesign, and I'm talking over a couple decades here. This meant establishing zero tolerance policies in my home for my immediate family. The use of cussing in swear words, well now it's banned using sarcasm at others' expense. That's also banned and making fun of people. Sometimes it's really easy to do, but it's also banned as a general way of how we speak because we set a new standard. In this house, we speak well of others. We challenge ethical and moral issues, absolutely, but we do it with genuine compassion. Instead of mockery my home environment, it has to align with what I'm called to teach because when that environment aligns with the message, what others see isn't performance for show. It's the genuine fulfillment of purpose when you, my ambitious leader, are living in integrity. There's no mask to maintain. There's a calmness that exists deep inside of you because you're simply performing your calling with excellence. Now, let's shift into the hardcore and Addie's framework, because this all connects to that shooting target that we've been exploring this entire year. Your mission is your bullseye. It's your tactical center. Everything in your life either serves that bullseye or it sabotages it. Over this past year, I learned seven times when protecting the mission required removing threats. Every single one of these lessons came with ongoing costs that I'm still paying. So grab your coffee or chai latte, or maybe crank up that incline on your treadmill and settle in here as we're gonna go through the seven lessons from Living Protect your Joy as mission Stewardship. Lesson one: mission protected means starting despite imperfect conditions. Eight years waiting for perfect circumstances, really waiting for my home life to stabilize. So what was the threat to my mission here? Eight years it took me to launch this podcast. Well, the threat to the mission was perfectionism disguised as preparation, and the agency that I exercised was launching anyway this past July. I made the podcast essential to my business model. This is not an optional project that I tackle. During the Good Seasons, the Protection Action was refusing to let personal chaos prevent mission work. And here's the proof. We hit the top 1% of podcasts globally in the first six months while my life at home. Still kind of felt like it was having some loose ends, not falling apart on a really good path, but definitely some things that needed to be tightened up. Here's the truth that I want you to hear. Mission work doesn't require perfect conditions. It requires protecting what you can control. The ongoing cost is that I'm still managing personal chaos while producing every week, but the mission is absolutely moving forward and that fuel indicator of my joy, it's only been climbing. So your question about this lesson, what mission critical work are you delaying until things settle down? Lesson number two, mission protected means revenue must serve capacity. Revenue must serve capacity. The woman veteran strong program that we run, it was profitable, it was generating income, and it was exhausting me while I was trying to manage the personal chaos. The threat to the program was that revenue was being drained and it was draining more capacity than it generated. So I exercised agency through marketplace research. It was time to figure out how to do this thing, right? Because the mission mattered. I discovered five distinct program types that exist in the veteran space. I chose to rebrand the entire program instead of just taking easy money and doing check the box type of work. The protection action that we put in place was firing our business model. We fired the business model that worked financially, but it depleted mission capacity and the proof. Every month of misalignment that we were running was costing more mission impact than it generated in revenue. Our ongoing cost now that we're shifting is that I am having to rebuild revenue streams while maintaining the standards that protect that mission capacity. This is not a one-time fix that we're able to handle. This is an ongoing recalibration over the next five years. So thinking about this lesson, which revenue stream assumes that you have mission capacity, which you actually don't have. So think about how this applies to your business venture, which revenue stream is assuming that you have mission capacity, but you actually don't have it. Onto the third lesson. Mission protected means partnerships must align with standards. I had a contractor who was absolutely qualified. She hit all the bullets that we set out, but how she operated was misaligned with how we operate as a company. Working with someone like this, I could notice a friction, and that friction was actually a threat because it was about wanting to tolerate in my business what I was learning not to tolerate in my personal life, right? So unhealthy behaviors that I was starting to learn not to tolerate in my personal life. I was starting to see this play out in my business as well through contractors. So I exercised agency by making the hard call. I had to end their contract. We had to stop working together, and I protected the mission by. Taking steps to uphold the standards instead of accommodating this misalignment, even though it felt more convenient for everyone. Um, I'm talking about the standard of being on time for meetings, right? The standard of, you know, when reports are due, make sure that your reports are in. These standards might seem like small things, but when they are applied in a professional capacity, they're what drives the mission. Now, this lesson was absolutely necessary to apply in our business because keeping an unhealthy contractor would've meant that I was replicating some of this personal life dysfunction in my professional space. You can see how that just really. Was starting to feel more like mission work or mental health service care instead of operational expense and and overhead of how we do the work. I had a contractor that needed the work but wasn't prepared to give the work, so how can I keep paying her to give the work? We had to make that hard decision to let her go, and we have not seen any ongoing cost as of yet. There's always that risk that someone can slander you on social media or, you know, talk negative about your program in the community. We haven't seen that play out with any of the contractors that we've worked with over the years. But if that does happen to you, you should know that it's not hypothetical. It's just the reality of having to make these really tough protection decisions. These demons don't lie easily, and I think the threat of this lesson is particularly we have a woman that would significantly benefit from peer support for her mental wellness. That's what she needed and that's what she was getting. Unfortunately, when we decided to cut her from the program from a vocation standpoint, she decided to leave the program entirely. I can totally understand why she would do that, and our hope now is that she's able to find that healthy peer support from another provider. So let's bring this back to you and ask yourself this question. What's something that you feel like you are tolerating professionally? That, you know, undermines the mission personally. Onto lesson four out of seven, and this one is a family lesson. Mission protected means zero tolerance for environment misalignment. I mentioned before that my home had swear words in it. At one point, a lot of them extremely colorful jokes. Sarcasm was the general flow of conversation, whether it was between the parents, between the parents and the children. There was a lot of mockery of other people. Um. Coworkers were getting made fun of, even though the other spouse had never even met the coworker. So these just weren't bad habits. I mean, this was consistent day-to-day communication style, and they directly contradicted what I knew. I was teaching mission-driven leaders. The threat to the mission was my own home environment because it undermined. Message credibility. So I exercised agency by eventually working towards a zero tolerance policy in my home. Now we've banned the behaviors that contradict our mission message. So when you hear me talking about minimal alcohol or recreational drug use, things like that, know that these are zero tolerance policy behaviors that we have in our home, not just in our business. I also added other zero tolerance policies like no earbuds at the table, right? We have a teenager, no hoods up indoors. Small things that can contribute to the overall environment. And yes, my teenager absolutely rolls his eyes when I tell him to pull down his hood and take out his earbud, but I remind him, and in doing so, I remind myself. That your house is your sanctuary. It is your safe space, and if you as a parent or as the leader of that space, then it's your responsibility to uphold and enforce your policies even when people don't like it or choose to eye roll. The protection action that we're doing here is speaking well of others. We challenge issues with compassion and we model what we teach and we're seeing this. Played out because we know that when our home aligns with our message, the mission capacity becomes exponential. Our workers love working out of our home studio. We have more visitors over the last few years in this decade, my doorbell is ringing constantly. I can look back to a past decade in a, what feels like a previous life. When my doorbell never rang, and then when it did, I was scared to death to open it, and this transition has been absolutely beautiful, but there is an ongoing cost. I do find myself being constantly vigilant to maintaining these new standards. It's never done whenever I hear a cuss word under the breath, right? Whether they're playing a video game or they dropped something in the kitchen, you have to watch it and you have to catch it. Because this work is never done every single day, we are reinforcing boundaries to protect what matters to us. So think of this lesson in your own life. What home pattern is actively undermining your mission? Credibility. And we're onto lesson number five. Mission protected means intentional quality of life standards. This lesson is not about past relationships or decisions that others have made. It's about today. It's about right now, the current living standards that I intentionally maintain. The threat to our mission is that ambitious leaders like us, we can't coach peak performance from a depleted and chaotic state. Do you feel that way in your life right now? Do you feel like you're in a depleted and chaotic state? Or are you feeling like it's time to climb outta that hole and. We do that by exercising agency. So which agency am I doing to climb out and stay outta that hole? I have a gym membership. Maybe you're not a gym person, but do you have a physical habit or hobby that keeps you active and healthy? Are you walking your neighborhood every day? Are you out there horseback riding? Are you a golfer? By all means, go out and play the golf course and when it's winter, are you. Better have a wintertime membership somewhere that lets you keep your game up, exercise that agency of keeping your body healthy. I'm bringing healthy food into my home. I'm intentionally cooking and meal prepping. It's become very important for us to have an intentional quality of life. A habit that we started this past year is whenever we gather as a family, whether it's the end of a vacation or a holiday meal, maybe we're at the end of a concert that we went to, we go around and we ask every family member to share a favorite memory, and what that does is it reframes that togetherness in a positive way that everyone can walk away with. Intentional quality of life can be seen in other ways. Like our everyday meals. We choose for our everyday meals to be served on bone China. This is Wedgewood Porcelain. Um, it's imported from England if you're not familiar with the brand Wedgewood. But we eat on beautiful white bone China plates because we want the reverence of the meal. Rain over the chaos that we might be feeling in whatever moment. Even if we're eating Taco Bell, you still take it out of the bag and you put it on the beautiful dish and you serve it to yourself sometimes, but the atmosphere changes when you do that, and in the moment of the meal becomes more meaningful when it's presented on this beautiful dish. These are all daily choices that align my body, my home, and my personal relationships with our overall mission requirements. And we know that this is a positive thing to do because sustainable mission capacity requires sustainable daily practices, and you can't just set it and forget it, right? There's daily discipline that has to happen regardless of external chaos. Going to the gym. It has to be done on the regular. Sometimes it's one day a week, sometimes it's five, but there's still a daily discipline to that. The demons of those old habits, they circle back constantly. They're always gonna check in on you. So your question as you think about this lesson. What daily standard would protect your mission excellence? Not just talking about it, but what is a daily act that you can bring to your home, to your body, to your mealtime? What's a daily standard that would protect your mission excellence? We're rounding the corner towards the end of today's episode, lesson six out of seven, lesson six. Mission protected means recognizing it shouldn't be this way, but it is. You see, sometimes the person that you need to love from a distance can be your spouse or your parent, or a really close friend or your bestie coworker. And I agree with you, it shouldn't be that way, and yet sometimes it is the threat of not following this lesson is staying in a situation that is capping mission potential. I'll say that again. The threat of staying in this situation is that you are capping, you're putting a limit on your calling. Now, I personally have had to exercise a lot of agency in this area by first recognizing and then accepting that that dysfunction existed before any possible change could happen. Because you can't fix what you don't acknowledge, and it doesn't feel good. It feels like finger pointing. It feels like blaming other people. But recognizing where these negative behaviors exist from all parties, it is necessary before we can do forward movement. So the action that I took in this lesson is to choose the mission over this comfortable form of dysfunction. Leaning into my purpose and my calling the mission instead of allowing dysfunction to continue just because it's comfortable. The negative behaviors, yes, a lot of them are mine, but a lot of them are not mine. And when you combine everyone's negative behaviors, are you stepping back and thinking to yourself, man. This is really limiting my impact. I feel like this is why I can't move forward. I would love to X, Y, Z, but I can't go to the networking meeting because I don't have a reliable caregiver for my child. I would so love to go to that conference because it would challenge me on so many levels, but I can't because X, Y, Z. You see, there's, there's a decision of agency that has to happen here where you have to get a little bit uncomfortable and really recognize this statement. It shouldn't be this way, but sometimes it's, once you recognize that you can intentionally choose your calling and your purpose over just staying comfortable. Now, this lesson over the last year, um. It definitely has an ongoing cost. My court dates, they did not end with the divorce papers that happened in 2014. Here we are in 2025, still battling over ridiculous, unfounded complaints. The demons do not lie easily. So the question that I want you to ask yourself on this lesson, who do you need to love from a distance in order to protect your calling? Even though it shouldn't be this way, and our final lesson for today's episode is that a performance ready environment is not an option if you want to protect your mission. A performance ready environment is required for you to have peak performance. For years, I thought that I wasn't able to reach higher levels of mission impact because of my own personal challenges in my home life. I knew that I felt that deep down inside. It was tough to say out loud, but I knew that that was the case because when your household isn't healthy, your mission potential is absolutely capped. I love taking a moment today to celebrate that I was able to exercise agency just by recognizing that when the majority of parties are healthy, physically and mentally healthy, then exponential impact really becomes possible. And so we built an environment intentionally where everyone is committed to health. So that the mission has the capacity that it needs. This means no more pizza parties and bringing in chicken in quinoa. It, it doesn't have to be complicated. It just has to be proof of your mission, and you can see that this is working through me, right? I have this light that draws isolated leaders out and they want to come to me. They want to talk to me. This work requires fuel. If I don't take protections to keep my joy, then that light is going to slowly dim these toxic relationships that we can very easily find ourselves in and around. They drain that fuel faster than we can replenish it. The ongoing cost of just building and maintaining a healthy environment. It is never finished. You're never done with your marriage. You're never done raising your children. It's, we were talking about this in the veteran care space. When you're 50 years old and you've had a child, are you still a mother? Yes. You're still a mother, so when you're out of the military, why would you just stop being a military type of person? There's something inside of us that is never finished. This is the idea of ongoing stewardship to who we are. The demons of the old patterns are always going to be creeping back in telling you to stay in bed, telling you not to do that trip to the grocery store, telling you it's okay to let that report date slide a little bit. Those demons of old patterns are gonna keep trying to creep back in. So ask yourself. What would exponential mission impact require for you to protect or even remove from your life? That's your seven lessons, and let's look at what 2025 revealed to us. All seven lessons were about recognizing threats to the calling, not threats to Shelly's comfort. All seven lessons for us required uncomfortable agency choices that have cost me relationships, choices that have cost me revenue and convenience. All seven of these lessons required, choosing my calling over my personal preference. All seven lessons came with ongoing costs that I am still paying. Because protection isn't about maintenance. It's the liberation of mission potential. And if you are a dedicated, ambitious leader, then you have the opportunity to get out of your own way and liberate that mission potential. And here's what I discovered in December. Defense is necessary, but it's also not sufficient. In 2025, I protected that capacity to carry the mission. I was very intentional about that. I defended myself against threats, and I held the line that was protect your joy, but defense isn't the end goal for me. Protection creates this beautiful space, but space for what? Once you've removed. What dims the light? The question becomes what single thing deserves the full force of your protected capacity? 2025 was protect your joy defending mission capacity from threats 2026. Build the one thing. My one thing is leaning into healthy, platonic female friendships. I am tired of watching beautiful, capable women doubting themselves and slipping into negative behaviors. So we're going full focus in 2026 on how healthy friendship can catapult people into lives of prosperity. Because the incredible women that I know shouldn't feel trapped in lives of doubt and loneliness. Next Tuesday in episode 30, I have a guest joining us who embodies this exact principle, and then the following week, I'm revealing the full 2026 blueprint for building your one thing. But I'll give you this to think about until then. What if the reason you're exhausted isn't because you're doing the wrong things, it's because you're doing too many right things. And what if protection was just step one and focus is step two. Today, I wanna recommend the one thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. This book will fundamentally change like it did for me. How you think about focus, priority, and impact. Keller asks one question that cuts through the noise. What's the one thing you can do such by doing it? Everything else will be easier or unnecessary. That's my question for 2026. If you protected your capacity in 2025 like I did. This book is gonna show us how to focus it in 2026, and there's a link to that book in the show note. All right, my ambitious friend, we are officially saying farewell to 2025 and kicking dysfunction to the curb. If you spent the last year watching your calling being held back by patterns that you've been tolerating. Mm, I hope you got something outta this episode, and if you're ready to stop protecting. And start building with focused intention. Then I want you to join us. Join others over self. You can reach out to me there because we all need help identifying this one thing in 2026 that deserves your full protected capacity. That's all for now. I'll see you next Tuesday. I am host Shelly Rood, and you can count on me every week with powerful conversation about mission-driven momentum. Until then, stay hardcore, be at ease and trust the process.

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