Stefan Underwood | Exos

Dr. Kevin Rindal | Vimocity

Welcome back to the WorkReady Podcast. Last week, we started a conversation with Stephan Underwood about how longevity isn't an accident, it's a strategy. So today, we're gonna pick up right where we left off. If you haven't heard part one yet, go back and start there, and by the end of this, you'll walk away with something that you can put to work immediately.

Now, let's get into it.

How do people start a habit and keep that habit up so that consistency sticks? And what are some best practices? How can people take a small bite off and create those habits? So when we're talking about making habits stick and small things we gotta start by admitting that knowledge is not behavior.

If knowing what to do was simply enough, we'd all have six-packs and perfect sleep, right? So the reason change is so hard is that your brain is that prediction machine. It's designed for efficiency, not necessarily long-term health. So habits are literally neural pathways. Habits are these ingrained highways in our brain, right?

Literal physical grooves in your brain. So changing a habit is not easy. It's like trying to drive a truck out of deep, muddy ruts sometimes, right? So it takes more than just willpower to steer you out of those ruts. It takes a strategy that accounts for how the brain actually learns. This is a learning game.

We're in a learning game. And so if I were to give you three things to think through, I would start by talking about identity-based habits, okay? So identity-based habits are really trying to take on the identity of who you are trying to become, and this habit is in support of that, meaning-- and this, this is the most powerful research out there that is into this idea of identity-based habits, right?

Is this idea that, say, most people focus on the outcome. "I wanna lose 10 pounds," right? But as researchers like James Clear, who's a name that you gotta bring up if we're talking about habit formation, I feel like and others have noted, true behavior change is actually identity change. So when you say, "I'm trying to be a person who recovers," or, "I'm trying to be a person who does anything," you're still an outsider looking in, right?

But when you shift to, "I'm a workforce athlete," or whatever identity you wanna put onto it, every choice becomes a vote for that identity. You're not going to bed early because you have to or 'cause someone told you it was healthy. You're doing it because that's what a professional operator does to stay sharp, right?

We stick to the habits that reinforce who we believe we are. If anyone, by the way, runs sometimes for fitness but doesn't think of themselves as a runner knows how easy it is to skip a run on a morning. And then we've also probably all got that one annoying friend who's a runner, like, where it's part of their identity, and they will not miss their run, right?

And I say this jokingly 'cause one of my best friends is a runner . I think I was like, "God, you're so annoying." The dude just doesn't miss. But it's because it's literally part of his identity. It's who he is. So that's one thing. The second thing is-- I'll give you three. The second thing is reducing friction.

So you gotta like-- I talked about the brain wants the path of least resistance. If we want the habit to stick, we gotta create an environment that is conducive to that, right? Because neurologically, the brain will always choose the path of least friction. It's why the willpower fails when you're tired at hour 10, on a shift.

So if you want a habit to stick, you gotta design the environment so the right choice is the easiest one. If you wanna hydrate better on the job, don't rely on remembering to drink water, right? Put the water bottle In the truck the night before and make it a big one so you, like a ma- one of those massive jugs so that it doesn't run out through the day.

Because if it runs out, you're like, "Ah, I know I need to drink more, but now I gotta find somewhere to refill my water bottle, and I forgot. It's inconvenient," or, "Ah it's all the way over there. I don't wanna go get it." The first little excuse, you lose it, as silly as that sounds. Whereas if there's just this giant, keg of water next to me in my truck all day maybe I drink it, right?

If it's hard, you'll find an excuse. If it's easy, you'll find a way. So that'd be second. And then the last is to look for those small wins. It's why I actually like you talking about picking one small thing, doing it well, as we think of that dopamine loop, right? So the brain needs a win to lock in the new pathway, right?

So this is the idea of tiny habits. There's a researcher named BJ Fogg that talks about that a lot. And it's this idea that if you set a goal that's too big, right? "I'm gonna work out for an hour every day when right now I don't work out at all." You miss a day, your brain registers failure, right?

Dopamine drops, the habit dies, so to speak. But if you set a goal to do, like we talked about at the top of the show, right? 10 minutes of stretching, and then you do it, and you hit a whole week, your brain registers success, and that small hit of dopamine reinforces that loop. So you arguably actually are better off to try and make small changes than big, massive overhauls, right?

You gotta start so small that it's almost impossible to fail, and y- go from there. So I'd say those three things, work the dopamine loops w- with the small wins reduce friction make the environment conducive to what you're trying to do and find a way to tie it into who you are, your identity.

Every decision you make is a vote in favor of the person you wanna be. That was so good. Thank you for sharing that framework. Can you expand on locus of control? You talked about that was something that you found is really critical when it comes to people making habits and just encountering tough circumstances and being able to navigate that.

Absolutely. I told you this is one of my favorite topics. I'm eager to dive into this. When I did my master's degree I really enjoyed the conversations around locus of control. I think it resonated with me due to my upbringing. My grandfather, who was a huge figure in my life, was a World War II fighter pilot.

Incredible stories that somehow made the World War II sound fun, Yeah. ... and exciting and largely was perhaps in part because it also turns out he was an alcoholic. Your typical sort of quote unquote flyboy. And after the war to my grandmother's credit, she, at a time when a lot of women didn't leave husbands, she was like, "I'm taking these kids and I'm out of here if you don't get sober."

And to his credit, he never drank again. So my mom, who is clearly one of the biggest influences in my life, grew up in an AA household. And therefore, even though I do not have parents who are alcoholics, I by proxy grew up in an AA household 'cause those were all the lessons from my mom. So I grew up in this household of hearing things all the time, like just for today, like the whole one day at a time, just for today, I'm gonna choose to be happy Right?

It's a choice to be happy that has nothing to do with what's going on around you. The Serenity Prayer, "Accept the things I cannot change," right? Keep your side of the street clean is focus on your own behavior. I grew up with all these isms, and as an adult, when I found locus of control, that all really speaks to this idea of locus of control.

So the term locus of control came from social learning theory specifically developed by a guy named Julian Rotter in ni- in the 1960s. At its core, locus of control is a psychological construct that measures the degree to which you believe, mindset, right? You believe you have power over the outcomes of your life.

So think of a continuum between two poles. On one end, you have an external locus of control. This is belief that your life is dictated by outside forces: fate, luck, the company's schedule, your boss, right? If you're at that pole, you're a passenger. Things happen to you. It can start getting a little bit that victim mindset, right?

These things are happening to me. Why is this happening to me? The other end, you have internal locus of control. That's a belief that your own actions, choices, behaviors are the primary drivers of your results. So even when the environment is chaotic, you believe you still have agency, right? So that's what locus of control is, and it really matters for performance, in m- in my opinion, and I guess the research would support it as well.

The reason it matters so much on the job site or in elite sports for that point is that your locus of control determines your stress response. If you have an external locus of control, you see a 12-hour shift or a storm call as a threat you can't escape, right? This thing happening to you. It leads to learned helplessness, right?

Which spikes cortisol, accelerates burnout. You feel powerless in it. If you have an internal locus of control, you look at the same 12-hour shift, and you identify the micro choices you still own, right? There's things you can't control, but what can I control? What can I choose? And you might can say, "I can't control the weather.

I can't control the workload, but I can control exactly how I hydrate, how I breathe when things get tense, how I prioritize my first hour of sleep when I get home," right? There's always a choice you can make. It really turns into this almost you could say performance edge, this idea of agency.

And remember, it's not a light switch. You aren't one or the other. It's a continuum. But as you shift toward that internal pull, the more agency you're able to claim, the better. In high-performance environments, the person with an internal locus of control is more durable, right? Why? Because they don't wait for the system to fix their problems.

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This is just an observation, but it seems like our society doesn't necessarily promote that you have an internal locus con- ... of control. It seems like most of the narratives when you watch the news are all these bad things that are happening around us, and, you're a victim. How does that impact us, and how do people overcome that mindset that's so prevalent in society?

Oh, it's hard not to get on a soapbox here. Bad things have always happened in the world. We just now have social media and 24-hour news cycle that, quite frankly, is trying to make you feel that way so they can make more money, because it is a powerful hook for them. So I th- so I knew we would talk about locus of control, and I got...

I wanna read a section. I got a book here that is- Please do, yeah ... foreign book I've read, and it's a book by a guy named Viktor Frankl, and it's a very small book. I'm not a big reader, so you can see it's an easy read, right? Even for me. Can you give a little context of who Viktor Frankl is too?

Absolutely. Because he's a powerful voice. He is. So Viktor Frankl was a psychiatrist that in World War II found his- himself in Auschwitz in concentration camps, Death all around him. The mo-- Like when I said bad things have always happened through history, just like now we've got the 24-hour news cycle he was in a situation that I think...

I'm not one to compare hard. Like I don't like saying this is harder than that." Like your hard is your hard, my hard is my hard, and we don't need to compare who's got it harder. But I think we can all agree, like it doesn't get any worse than a concentration camp in World War II for a Jewish man, right?

Like I think we can all agree that's pretty drastic. And he was a psychiatrist. This was before the concept of locus of control was created, but he was a psychiatrist, and he almost kept himself sane through all of this by like all of his possessions were taken and burned, his life's work was ruined, but he just kept it all right here.

But he really kept hold of what's the agency I hold and what are the choices I can still make day by day. And so I-I've got this highlighted on my bookstand. I can't tell you how many times I pull it out and read a section to my kid when one of my kids is acting up. But Viktor Frankl says, "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.

They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. And there were always choices to make. Every day, every hour offered the opportunity to make a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to the powers which threatened to rob you of your very self."

If that's not locus of control, I don't know what is, right? And he has this other famous quote. This is where most people, if you Google Viktor Frankl, the first thing that probably pops up is this idea between stimulus and response, there's a pause, and in that pause lies our greatest freedom and creativity.

Something to that. I might have paraphrased a little bit. But that really gets to like that crappy thing happens, and you can either choose to respond, take a pause, make an intentional choice of how you wanna respond, claim your agency, or you can react, be a victim to it. And that reaction usually isn't the best choice, right?

Reaction is usually the one where you act like a bit of a fool and you damage relationships, right? So that's where I bring up Viktor Frankl anytime we're talking about locus of control is a man in a concentration camp wrote a book about the choices he got to make on a daily basis in an environment where many would say every choice had been stripped away.

Thanks so much for bringing that concept to us. I wanna bring it back to the, a job site. One of the things that w-we see happening currently in the trades is that there's more work than there are people to do the work, and people are leaving through retirement faster than they're coming in. And so what, what-- the dynamic that's happening is a lot of people are being promoted to foreman level, or they're leading other people, but they haven't necessarily been taught, leadership skills on how do I manage people?

How do I communicate? So if somebody's in that position, they're going from working on the tools to leading team, leading people, what are some takeaways that they can have in terms of how they can read up on locus of control or maybe bring some of these concepts to their team, or maybe even just nurture an environment that supports more of that internal locus of control mindset with their crews?

Because it's so important for safety and, high-performing outcomes. Yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more that we see, at times people pushed into leadership positions without getting sufficient leadership training, right? But the reality is leadership really matters a lot.

There's a huge responsibility there. And leadership isn't about micromanaging or controlling, so you're not trying to take away people's choices. A lot of people when they-- if they get thrown into a leadership role quickly, it's I'm gonna tell you what to do." And this ability to say, "Hang on, if I'm telling people what to do, if I am micromanaging or controlling, I am robbing them of their agency or their autonomy."

Right? Which beyond mindset and locus of control robs them of one of the key things that motivates them. If I want motivated employees there's another psychological construct called self-determination theory, but autonomy is one of the key things that leads to motivation in humans. No one likes being micromanaged or controlled.

Not-- no one, so if you look at everything we talked about, tiny habits, how the environment helps the habit, part of your identity, I think leaders reflecting on what is their identity as a leader, and what does it mean to be a leader, and how do they support people, and really like reading up on beyond locus of control, but like servant leadership, and the idea of the importance of mirroring, right?

Be the change you wanna see. Be about it. Don't just tell other people to do it, right? Lead by example. You want a culture of recovery, you want a culture of agency and autonomy, you want a culture... Whatever you want your culture to be, you've got to, act on it, and show it, and mirror what you expect to see.

And I think other than saying that leaders have a huge responsibility and they owe it to their people that they're leading to try and read up on all this or to try and learn about it. Other than saying that there's not necessarily one right way to go but it's critical.

Just start doing a little bit of self-reflection. So I'll ask a few questions. Think of the best leader you ever had. Leader can be different things. That can be a coach growing up playing sports. That can be a teacher you had in, in school. It can be a mentor that you had on the job site. But think of a leader you liked, and just write down one night.

Take five minutes to write down to really reflect on why you liked them. What attributes did they have that you respected the most? How did they make you feel? And by just taking five minutes to be intentional and think about that, you don't need to go read a leadership book. You just gave yourself the manual of the type of leader you respect and the type of leader you probably wanna be.

You took five minutes of reflection to be a little bit intentional what you wanna do. Then, going back to the tiny habits, start identifying the tiny habits of things you wanna do to take steps, that are votes in favor of you being that leader. So there's simple ways to be intentional in developing who you are as a leader, but it starts with recognizing that you've got a massive responsibility, and nobody likes to be micromanaged or controlled.

Awesome. Let's move to the myth-busting part of this episode. Yeah. So myth number one: recovery means weakness. Why do the best performers in the world treat recovery like a part of training, not a break from it? I go back to we talked about it's when we adapt, so we've already talked about that.

But the other one where I'll talk about why it's not a weakness, we haven't talked about micro breaks, and I wanna take a minute to talk about micro breaks. There's huge research on micro breaks. Micro breaks are like these short two to 10-minute breaks, and you can have profound impact on your energy levels, on your mental state, on your cognitive load with just having these intentional short breaks, okay?

So that helps you then show up better. So I'm gonna give you an example here. If you take your cellphone and you run it, deplete it all day long, at the end of the day, the battery is flat. It has no capacity for anything else, and also it takes a lot more to recharge it back to full.

Where if through the day I plugged in my phone five minutes here, five minutes here, five minutes here, at the end of the day, it isn't as depleted, which means not only is there more reserve in that battery, it doesn't take as big a charge to get back to full. So recovery is not weakness. Recovery is literally your strategy for sustained performance.

And when I talk about micro breaks, what you can do in those five to 10 minutes, like breathwork, is amazing. You're feeling stressed out, pissed off, you're ready to you're ready to react. You can do something called a physiological sigh, and it literally just takes a few breath cycles, but our breath controls our nervous system.

It's one of the things that controls our nervous system. So physiological sigh is you breathe in all the way, then you breathe a little bit more, and then you breathe out as slow as you can And I just exaggerated it for the sake of this recording. But like it doesn't have to be that big. So I'll literally be on calls and s- I feel myself getting frustrated.

I feel like I'm gonna react and I'll just

It calms you down. Try a few of them. Like literally when you're done listening to this podcast, do three to five cycles of that inhale all the way, a little bit more, and fully exhale. It'll take 90 seconds, if that, and you'll feel calmer. You'll feel lighter. You'll feel a shift inside you, right?

That helps you then show up. You get back out into the day and you haven't reacted. You've responded. You perform your highest. So recovery, taking 90 seconds like that's recovery too, that 90 seconds there, that micro break. It's not weakness. It's you being intentional in how you walk through the day.

Love it. Myth number two, stress is only a problem once you feel overwhelmed. What are the early warning signs most people miss? Okay, so a couple myths I wanna bust. One is that even stress is only a problem once you feel over... I don't wanna make it sound like stress is always a problem. We talked about that at the top end.

Let's reframe stress. We need stress to adapt to it. But chronic stress can become problematic, and you are right that it becomes problematic before feeling fully overwhelmed. So early warning signs you can look for. We talked about wearables. If you are a wearable person, if you've ventured into that world we talked about heart rate variability, resting heart rate as really good indicators of what your nervous system is doing, the stress that you're carrying.

So if you picture like you're watching an episode of ER back in the day, and there's a machine here, boop, right? Boop. You've got these spikes. It's called the QRS complex, but you got these spikes every time your heart beats. You can measure between those. And what's interesting is our heartbeat is not actually meant to be like a metronome.

So if I have a heart rate of 60 beats per minute, it doesn't mean that like a metronome, it's one beat per second. Some beats are faster, beat, beat, beat, then it's beat, beat, slower. There's variance tied to our breath. Put your fingers for your pulse, and once you got your pulse, breathe in And then breathe out slow.

And you'll feel changes in the timing. You'll be like, "Oh my gosh, that's not like a metronome. My heart rate is changing," right? When we are not stressed out, when we're relaxed, there's more variance between the beeps. It's like our system is less automated. So a higher heart rate variability, a bigger number is better because there's more variance between your heart rate, you're less stressed.

A lower heart rate variability means getting closer to zero var-variability, meaning more like a metronome, means you're just in this chronically stressed state. You're more stressed out because you are more like a metronome, because when all of a sudden I do have a stress response, holy crap, there's a lion right there, my body tries to automate as much as it can, and all of a sudden the heartbeat becomes more like a metronome.

So heart rate variability is a really good indicator for us of our overall sort of resting state of stress. Resting heart rate's another one. Outside wearables though, other early warning signs I'd say the wired but tired state. So you're exhausted, but find yourself scrolling on your phone for two hours 'cause your brain has lost the ability to downshift into sleep.

I would talk about the loss of micro-joy, things that usually make you laugh or relax start to feel like a chore. Your emotional bandwidth sort of narrows to just surviving the shift. And then physically I went to school in Australia, we called it the niggles, right? Like physical niggles, right?

So it's not an injury, but that random tight jaw, that slight change in digestion, the tension headache that you started treating as just part of the job. Like those are all like the body's early check engine lights of "Hey man, you're carrying some tension here," right? So I'd say those are all early warning signs before you're feeling totally overwhelmed.

Myth number three: high performers should always push through fatigue Yeah, I, look I think it's about self-awareness of where you are, how fatigued you are, and what you can and can't do. So there are times-- I think the one that makes this a myth for me is the word always, right? There are times where you can push through certain levels of fatigue.

Just be-- I wanna be clear, when I talk about sleep and things like that, like it's a number one driver of performance, but it doesn't mean that you can't perform well in a less than ideal state. World records have been won, set when people are-- have poor sleep. My son plays soccer, and we flew home from a trip earlier this year in Australia, and he happened to have a game the day after we got back from Australia.

So he's a 13-year-old kid playing goalkeeper in a soccer game in what was 2:00 a.m. local time zone for him, right? And when he woke up, I looked him straight in the eye. I was like, "I don't wanna hear any excuses of you being tired today. Just because you're tired today does not mean you cannot perform."

So there is a side to when you can reasonably push, but I think you gotta start weighing risk. And it's-- it becomes like an ongoing risk analysis. And the word always for me, high performers should always push through fatigue, that becomes the myth. Toughness works against you the moment it stops being a tool for performance and starts being a tool for denial.

There's a massive difference between pushing through a difficult moment and ignoring the physiological signals of breakdown. When you push through chronic fatigue, you aren't showing grit. You're just increasing your error rate, right? In a high-hazard environment, toughing it out while cognitively impaired is a liability, not a badge of honor.

So true high performance is knowing when to downshift so you don't seize the engine. So to me, true high performance is knowing when it's okay to push, and safe to push, and worthy to push, and when you shouldn't Myth number four: you need the perfect routine or it doesn't count. We talked about this a little bit and you know that I don't like perfectionism.

I'd say perfectionism to me is a fancy way of being fragile. It's a fancy word for fragile. If your routine requires a 65-degree room, a specific supplement, 90 minutes of silence to, to count, like all the, the-- If everything has to be perfect, then your routine will fail the moment life gets messy, which is a reality.

We call that- And you've never experienced those athletes before, have you? Oh, ex-exactly. I'll tell, I will tell you a quick story about a a special operations guy, and I had a whole team, it was a SEAL team, and I got a whole team of guys in, and we're talking about-- And he was a guy that was, perfect.

This guy was a specimen, and in full compliment, like one of the most impressive human beings I've ever met. When we're talking about his diet, he was perfect. He did not step out of line on his diet ever. He was textbook. And I remember asking him, I was like, "What's it like your first week when you get to Afghanistan and you have to eat the food that's there?"

And all of his teammates started laughing, and they're like, "Man the first week in country, he's on the john nonstop." His system was fragile. It couldn't handle that. Because he had such perfection, his system couldn't handle it. I don't think we need perfection. So not only will I say that if you-- Is, the myth was you need the perfect routine or it does not count.

I'd go a step further of saying I actually think that chasing perfectionism is a negative. I think it swings the other way. Let's now move to the rapid fire. Yeah. So number one, the most underrated recovery habit. I'm so boring. It's sleep. Sleep and your circadian rhythm influence every single cell and system in your body.

There's not a single thing you seek to do as a human that I can't tie back to how sleep helps it be better. I'm talking everything from body composition to mental clarity to literally say anything you want, power, strength, speed, sex drive. Literally take anything that is part of the human experience, sleep improves it.

And yet, for whatever reason, in society, it's the first thing that we sacrifice when we get busy. So if you're looking for performance gains, protecting your sleep, most underrated recovery habit, and I know that's a really boring answer. I want to expand on that. So why do you think we give people a badge of honor for how little sleep they have, or we say stuff like, "I can sleep when I die"?

I think we say that because it's what we heard from our parents' generation, perhaps before there was the degree of sleep research that there is now. I can tell you working with Fortune 500 executives you back up 10, 15 years ago, there was still a lot of that, and now I find a lot of executives that are acting like pro athletes, and they wear WHOOP bands, and they prioritize their sleep because the research is undeniable.

It's not one of those things that's up for debate. I'm always like, "Yeah, there's, this side and that side. It's up for debate," and this is one where it's like that's not a debate you can win if you're trying to tell me that, performance happens with short sleep.

And what's even funnier is there's even research that shows the less sleep we get, the more confident we become in our decision-making, so you don't even... it's like the drunker you get, the less you realize how drunk you are. It's like the less you sleep, the less you realize it. So what's funny is if I was debating a person who has short sleep, they would even be mega confident in their response to me that they can operate really well on short sleep, and it's yep, the research disproves that as well, but supports your confidence.

It's, So I don't know culturally why we say that, but what I can say is I'm, I think I'm seeing a cultural shift. What's one thing a worker can do this week to perform better? Going back to your performance is personal, I don't wanna give one thing. I wanna say the one thing a worker can do this week to perform better is whichever thing we talked about that resonated, and then things that we haven't talked about you've been thinking.

Look, if your one thing this week was, "I'm gonna try and protect my sleep," do it. If your one thing this week is, "I'm gonna hydrate better and keep that keg of water in my truck," do it. If your one thing was, "I'm gonna try that breathing that he did, that physiological sigh, and when I get super heated, I'm gonna do that for two minutes and take micro breaks," do that.

If your one thing is finally quit smoking, do that. If your one thing is finally quit drinking or reduce drinking, do that. Whatever it is that resonates for you at this stage of life the one thing that you can do to perform better is the thing that resonated with you because you got a better chance of it sticking.

What's the most overlooked factor in workplace safety? Operating in a state of fatigue. Which by the way we didn't even talk about this, but there's a whole host of stats on the dollarization of operating in a state of fatigue, right? You're 23% more likely to take a sick day when you're short sleep.

That has a cost to the company. Short sleep costs the US economy two and a half percent of GDP every year. It's hundreds of billions of dollars are attributed to insufficient sleep in the US economy. There's... There was a m- meta-analysis done on 27 different studies back about 10 years ago for frontline workers a- and for this population.

And it-- what it found was consistently around 13% of all workplace injuries can be attributed to sleep alone, so if we think of like workers' compensation board claims. And so while we shouldn't have to talk about finances to get a company to listen and care as an organization, it would be nice to be like no.

We're gonna institute a culture of recovery and help our people feel good because we care about our people," we're be- we'd be naive to think that. But if anyone does happen to be listening who's in a role of leadership and has a direct path to the CFO, you wanna decrease WCB claims by 13%, or you wanna decrease sick days used by 23%, or you wanna, put more to your bottom line, create an environment where people can recover.

Yeah. Between sleep and pain, those are two of the biggest levers that companies have to optimize the performance of their workforce, minimize lost productivity, and yeah. And they're related. I told you sleep affects everything. Good sleep desensitizes you to pain. Poor sleep sensitizes you to pain. If you're battling a bad back, this is just another example how, going back to how sleep af- it affects everything, your back will hurt more on a night where you didn't sleep as much

What is the best leadership trait for long-term team performance? I gotta go with the one I mentioned in the show of mirroring the behavior that you wanna see. Be about it, lead by example. We probably all grew up hearing, at least I did, I hear my dad's voice in my head right now, "Actions speak louder than words."

I believe that to be true And for the exhausted worker listening right now, what do you want them to hear? For the person sitting in their truck right now, star- staring at the steering wheel wondering how they're gonna do this for another 20 years you're more than a pair of hands for a company.

We, we've all been conditioned to believe that exhaustion is the price of being a provider, but you can't pour from an empty cup. So if you keep treating your body like it's a machine that doesn't need maintenance, eventually the machine will stop. It'll seize. So don't go home and try to overhaul your entire life tonight, but, you simply don't have energy for that, right?

But I've already said it a bunch of times, so I'll say it again. Just reclaim one thing. Take back five minutes for a walk One hour of sleep, one intentional breath. Be intentional with your drive home so that you show up in a different state. If you have a long day that gets you frustrated or rattled, don't take that home and let it negatively impact the relationships at home that matter most to you, with your spouse or your kids.

Have a practice for what that 20-minute drive home looks like in your truck so that you show up in a different functional state, right? The goal isn't just to be the best worker on the site. The goal is to be the person who still has enough left in the tank to be the parent, the partner, the human being that you wanna be when you get home.

So your performance is personal. Start taking it personally. That's what I want them to leave with. That's recapping everything we've talked about. Take care of the equipment, 'cause you're the only version of it that you've got. But I will also say to just re- recognize how hard things can be in life, like just the current state of the world, you mentioned it, Ka- like I get it.

I fully do. I'm living in it as well. And while I was preparing for this, I reached out to one of my best friends since I was in high school, who works specifically in, largely in construction in HR. So she has wonderful relationships with all these frontline workers and individuals in construction.

She's done that for her career. And I asked her, and she talked about when things fall apart in life, people's resilience is low in those circumstances. It's really easy to sit here for you and I to talk on a podcast and make it seem like it's as simple as taking a breath in a five-minute break.

It's not, right? And so what that leads to is at work, she says they make a small mistake at work and it feels catastrophic, right? Someone is a little rude to them and it feels catastrophic, right? She said our number one thing is to ask for help. Most companies offer EAPs, right? And there's a ton of opportunities within those for help.

If people can take one worry or one habit or one thing off their plate, their entire lives open up. She told me a story about a guy who wasn't doing his safety paperwork and his performance was failing. His crews were stressed, like everything was showing up around him, and he was normally a great employee with no issues.

So they reach... She reached out to him, found out he was drowning in debt. Collections were after him. He wasn't sleeping. He wasn't eating. He was beyond capacity, right? So he connected with that EAP and got debt relief, and instantly his performance turns around. His crew's doing better. He's no longer the shell of the person he was.

So all of that to say I thought I'd actually end on that of her words, not mine, 'cause she works in this day to day, and I really appreciate that. She said her number one thing is ask for help Stefan, that was such a great way to end this conversation, and we covered so many important topics, and I'm just really grateful for you being able to translate your 20 years in high performance and bring that back to the workforce and just speak so plainly about how people can implement just simple things in their life that really do change the trajectory.

And, over the course of 20, 30, 40 years, one or two degrees off can send you in a direction that's, maybe not as good of an outcome as calibrating that earlier on in the career. But I think the other thing too is that there's no bad time to make a change. You might be-- you're 35 in your career, and you're like, "I've been off course for, the last 35 years."

But people can always make that difference and you brought t-to light, I think, some really practical things that apply to every single person who listens to this show. Oh, thanks, Kevin. Yeah it's funny. It's that old adage of "When's the best time to plant a tree? 20 years ago. The second best time?

Today." And the number of people I've talked to that like they finally make the change they wanna make, and they realize it wasn't as overwhelming or big a deal as they thought, and they're in a completely different place a year later, and they go, "I just wish I would've made that choice 10 years ago." So genuinely, I mean it from a place of-- I started off by saying performance is personal, means for me coming from a place of no judgment.

We all have our own crap we're dealing with. Everyone has a different circumstance, so genuine place of no judgment. Just know that there are strategies that can be employed to help your biology get on board, to help you show up in a more sustainable way to the betterment of yourself and everyone around you and that can be different for everyone.

But just do one thing. Just take that step and plant the tree today. And Stefan, where can people connect with you, learn more about you, or even find out more about EXOS and how they might be able to take some of these high-performing principles and apply them to their life? Yeah, absolutely. I'm the world's worst at connection.

I live in a-- I like to live in a cave under a rock. I do have LinkedIn. I'm not active on it, but it's just Stefan Underwood on LinkedIn, and please connect to say hi. If you've listened to this feel free. I do respond to any questions. So if you shoot me a message, and if you have a question, I will respond, I promise.

That's really the best place to hit me as an individual because I don't have a single other form of social media because the world is just a burning dumpster fire. And so I make my intentional choices to to, to not en-engage in that. But outside of that, I'd point people to EXOS more than me.

EXOS has always been about a collective of people, not one person. I'm honored to work for the company. I have for fifteen years, and I feel grateful to be one person who, in this circumstance, is representing EXOS. But hit us at teamexos.com, and you can see all the different stuff that we have going on.

And Team EXOS does have all sorts of socials. So you can get on-- whether you're on Instagram, whether you're on LinkedIn, whatever it is, just connect with Team EXOS and we'd love to support any way we can. Thanks so much, Stefan. And if this episode resonated with you, make sure to share it with someone on your crew.

We never know who that person is who can benefit from hearing these, these conversations. I'd also encourage you to subscribe to the WorkReady Podcast. We drop new episodes every Tuesday, and it just ensures that you don't miss an episode. And until next time, take care of yourself, take care of your people, and stay work ready.