Caller: “I’m Paranoid of Going Broke”

I'm a financial advisor, so I see every day for the last seven years, people who were doing everything right, and then something went wrong. There's no number in the bank account that has really brought any piece of mine that if something happens to me, I want my wife and daughter to continue to have a good life. What's going on? What's going on? This is John with the Dr. John Delodie Show, common to you from National Tennessee, taking your calls, real calls from real people, experiencing just the daily grind of life with their marriages, their relationships, their money, their jobs, their kids. Whatever you got going on in your life, pull up a seat and we're going to figure out what your next right move. If you want to be on this show, click the link in the show notes and two housekeeping things. Download the together app. It's the best marriage app out on the planet. We've been working on it for over a year and it keeps getting better and better and better and better. So many exciting new features on it. It is available in the app store right now. Go check it out and hit the, not the delete. Don't delete. Hit the subscribe. Hit the subscribe and like and share. You're doing a good enough job of getting us deleted. I don't need the listeners to do the same. Correct. That's my job is to get us deleted. Your job is to hit the subscribes and shares and internet. He buttons. Let's go out to Tampa, Florida and talk to John. Hey, John, what's up, dude? Hey, John. Good name, by the way. It's the best name. It's perfect. Well, hey, if anyone wants a quick testimony of my wife and I downloaded the together app about six months ago and it has changed everything in our marriage, that's awesome. I'm going to download it. Dude, high five for you, brother. Appreciate you, man. Yeah, absolutely. Well, hey, I appreciate your time and thank you guys for everything that you guys do. Even Kelly. Dude, this is my favorite color of the month so far. All right. So what you got going on, brother? Yeah. I don't know. Simple, maybe simple. See how it goes. Shortest way is how do I get over what I would call an irrational fear of financial insecurity? Whew. Okay. So I'm going to frame it up for you and then I want you to walk through it with me. Okay. Yep. We're not going to get over this. We're going to go right through it. Okay. Okay. So going over it suggests there is something in the road that we need to avoid and instead of doing that, I want us to say, no, this is a real thing and it may have some merit. It may not. We're going to walk right through the middle of it. Cool. Okay. So tell me what you're going on, what you're experiencing, what you're going through, what's your financial situation? Yeah. I mean, I would say when it started, my wife and I had our first child a little under two years ago. So she's coming up on our second birthday. And when our daughter was born, we made the decision. My wife always wanted to be a stay at home mom. And thankfully, you know, we were in a financial position to do it. And technically speaking, I mean, things could not have gone better. We are in a good financial position on paper. I think it's, I guess a short bit of context. I'm a financial advisor for work. Gotcha. So I see every day for the last seven years, people who were doing everything right. And then something went wrong. Give me an example. Losser job got sick. Someone died. They became disabled. I live in Florida. Hurricane came. I mean, any, any number of things. And it seems like I've met so many people where everything was good. And a couple of things went wrong or they got a little off track or they, you know, started spending a little bit more thinking it wasn't going to be an issue. And 20 years later, they're, they're not relying on a social security payment. And, you know, they're struggling for their medications. So I have taken every logical step to put ourselves in a position and my wife and I have together to put ourselves in a position to not be there. And I think we've done a good job with it. But there's no number in the bank account or amount of insurance policies or a savings rate or anything that has really brought any piece of mind that if something happens to me, I want my wife and daughter to, you know, continue to have a, a good life and not have to worry about money. Yeah. Where else in your life throughout, if you look back over the course of your life, where else has this sentiment popped up? Great. I'm not going to find somebody to marry athletic performance. Where else has this shown up? I think probably if I had to go to childhood, like my parents always had, I have one sibling. And if he got a C, he got a pat on his back. If I got a B, I got in trouble. So, you know, I was always held to whether it's sports, whether it's academics, whether it was college, whether it's career, you know, he's older than me. And, and, you know, I'm thankful my parents did this, but they still helped him out financially and any sort of financial help from my parents into the day I graduated from college. They said, hey, you can go do this. So, maybe I guess going back a little bit to that. So, and again, you and I could talk for a few hours on just kind of unpacking all of what you just said. But let's pretend for a moment that one of the stories buried deep inside your chest is the following. I'm only as good as my performance. And I'm essentially on my own. And then all the sudden you get married. Then I'll send you a kid. And those two stories, those two people are anchored into you. And those two stories still play prominent in your, the way you see the world. There's still the glasses that you wear when you view the world. And so now you're a guy walking around. I'm, I will only be worth being loved. My wife and daughter will never be able to be okay unless I show up. And I'm only as good as my performance. And B, there's nobody coming for me. And if this thing goes down, I'm out. I'm dead. And now there's two other people in the car riding with me. That's a heavy, heavy burden to bear. And there's some semblance of truth in it. Both are true, right? Yeah. And layer on top of, actually not on top of it underneath it. I think this is dramatically under-talked about. And I know it is because of the people I sit with in my private life behind closed doors. It's a significant number of them are financial advisors, people who deal in the wealth of other people. And I've come to believe that y'all are first responders too. Right? And so if you're a first responder, and most of your day is in an ER, or most of your day, like nobody calls the police when they're having a great day, nobody calls a fireman when they're having an awesome day. Nobody goes to the emergency room when they're having a great day. And when you live in those worlds, it's easy to come to believe, nobody calls a lawyer when they're having a great day, right? So it's easy to come to, like that becomes your world that things are bad, things could go wrong, things could go wrong. In an essence, you have you get to peer over the edge of what could go wrong, but it becomes your every day, day in, day out, all the time. And not to mention, you're not just talking about the clients you see, you're also talking about your colleague's stories, you're also talking about no financial advisor can predict, could predict seven years ago where we'd be now, and especially no advisor can pick what we're going to look like seven years from now, right? And so there's a lot of risk and a lot of unknown. And so the challenge for you is going to be threefold. One in two is unhooking from these other stories. I'm worth being loved, even if our net worth goes down. I'm worth being loved. My wife will still love me. I'll still be a good dad, even if we have to sell our house and move to a better apartment. Even I can be a great dad and not be good at this job. Oh, right. And especially looking forward, I'm extrapolating out five years, ten years. I have no insider knowledge. I'm making this up. Okay. There has to be an existential angst underneath this, too, that, hey, I'm going to take a big part of my job. Who will I be? What will I do? And that fear can paralyze you or that fear can spur you to what are other things in this realm in this world that I can do to provide value, to put food on our table, to begin to expand the horizon of what I'm able to do to take care of myself and my family. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And so it can be a thorn that that that freezes you or it can be a thorn that it spurs you forward. But you can't change the fact that it's a thorn. The third thing you have to do is to have. I'll give you the same recommendation. I give the other folks that I talked to privately and that I tell every first responder. You have to have a group of friends that don't do what you do. You have to have a regular practice. That's one of my friends is in finance. I know they are. I know they are. It's the same ways every policeman has friends that are policemen. Every military guy is surrounds themselves with military folks. It's everyone in my world and podcasting world. Those worlds get so small. That's all you talk about. And you end up just talking about shares and YouTube clips and what about this and what you're. And you lose the zeal for why you got into the thing in the first place. And so having friends that are outside of this thing that have different worries, different joys, different laughter, it lets your body self-regulate. You go whom? Right? Yeah. Regularly. I will say. Go ahead. Sorry to cut you off. I mean, the other thing. Because I do actually have some friends who are not in the world of finance, but honestly, it's such a prevalent topic, especially in today's world of everyone talking about their houses and their debts and their mortgages or their rent or their car payments or whatever. And I find myself becoming incredibly anxious hearing about. I mean, all friends would be like, "Oh yeah, I financed this camera that I bought over 72 months in it, like hearing other people's financial decisions because I think. And I try to be there to help, but I don't offer unsolicited advice to people who don't want it." But hearing whether it's siblings or whether it's friends or it's people that I see making so many poor financial decisions, right? I mean, the average person is the person that calls into the Ramsey show, right? And it's. I want to be able to disconnect from those and just be like, "Hey, this is their life, and I'm not going to agree with most of the financial decisions that other people make, but beyond my own anxiety around my own situation, and I find myself finding a lot of anxiety around other people's financial situations as well, especially when they're people I care about, because I know what that's going to lead to. I mean, I've even seen it with my parents, and I'm not going to tell my parents what to do when they come to me for advice. Great, but I look at my dad and I'm seeing him, he's going to spend through everything, and he's going to have nothing left. And that, I have a lot of fear for the people I care about in their financial situations as well." And so there's a difference between fear and anxiety. Fear is right. You should be worried about your parents. If they're making unwise financial decisions and you have sat down with enough people to see the train ret coming that is their life, your right to be scared. Anxiety is trying to go 20 years into the future and drag that problem home today and solve it for them, which you can't do. It can be a matter of you and your wife sitting down saying, "Hey, here's the reality. I see before me and my families. We're going to have to put a little bit extra money aside because there's a strong possibility one or two or four of our parents are living with us someday." Cool. That is a thing I can do in the present to begin stacking bricks for a future flood. But once I make that, like, I'm going to stack two bricks a month, that's what I can do right now. Then the next thing is sitting in the grief. It's a bummer. When you see everybody making financial mistakes, like you say, you said when you first called, "I see people doing all the right things." If you're honest, a lot of people aren't doing the right things. You know what I mean? There is a collective. It's like being on the Titanic and watching people shoot holes in the bottom of the boat. At some point, all of these decisions affect all of us. If everybody just collectively, one Monday decided to not pay their student loans back, that domino would be extraordinary. Or if there's one tiny correction in this circular AI funding thing going on, we're all one for a ride. So I have to recognize my fear, my frustration, all that is real. Then I have to go back to what can I do right now with the limited power and scope I have. I can love really well. I can make sure that I'm in service to myself so that I can show up and do these really hard jobs. I can be sober and honest about the future. Then I'm going to bring you back to a buddy of mine, who's a finance guy. This one sentence changed my life. It may not change yours at all. But this is years ago, and I was in the throes of anxiety. I was right actually the age you were. I had a young kid. I was married. I was starting to feel this. The squat bar of life just started getting piled up with weight that I didn't think I was strong enough to hold. I was just berating him. What if this happens and what if the dollar does this and what if crypto does this and what if this moves and this spain defaults here and it rolls over to Argentina over here and Brazil's oil exports dry up here. And he finally looked at me and said, Hey, John, I don't have a meteorite plan. And that he said, if a meteorite hits the the world, which is what you're describing, I'll deal with that then. And for whatever reason, that sentence freed me because this guy said, I mean, what he's not a ramesy guy at all. He's a banker. So he his job is debt and he writes checks for his cars. He has no car payment. I mean, no home payment. They bought a smaller house than him. His wife could have, I mean, they could have bought a 5x house than they live in now. And it's a really nice place to have now. And he paid it off. He paid it off with the 2.8 or whatever percent APR because he was saying, I am just clearing my side of the risk profile so that all of the best case of the meteorite hits, but I'm not going to spend my days worrying about what happens if a meteorite hits because the world will be so different when it does hit that any of my pre-planning is going to be futile. Unless I have a billion dollars and I can build one of these bunkers that supposedly people build. Right. And even then they'll run out of food and electricity. And if somebody knows where your bunker is, that's where a million people are going to hit. Right. So it is just what it is. But that line of, I don't have a meteorite plan for whatever reason, it's set me free. Yeah. Well, I mean, and I've never I guess thought about it myself. One of my most common things I tell my clients is we can't plan for Armageddon. There you go. There you go. Basically the same exact thing. But, um, so if you kept a journal, if you kept a journal of the things that make you uncomfortable, make you nervous, that's right. And then if you had a thing that said Armageddon, and you're like, yeah, I can't, if that happens, I can't deal with that. And here's a couple of other tips and tricks that I do myself and that I give the first responders. If you have somebody that you're sitting down with and their dad sports gambled all their money away, or fell in love with some cat fishing scheme and sent away all his stuff or got dementia and all of a sudden they didn't have a will and yadda yadda yadda. Take the time at the end of your day to write that person a letter that you'll never send. Grieve with them. Be sad with them. But what you're doing with their story is you're getting it out of your body and putting it on paper. You're distancing yourself from their story. Because at the end of the day, whatever happens in their life is happening to them, not to you, not to your wife, not to your daughter. But it's a way for your body to put a period that's in of their sentence. It makes a lot of sense, right? But it's a practice. It's a, it's a health and wellness practice for first responders. Okay. And not, you know, internalizing and taking everything that happens out there and picturing it happening in my own life. Correct. And also, I'm going to send you a copy of building a non anxious life. And thank you for honoring yourself and all of us by going behind closed doors and helping calm the fears of a world spun out of control in the financial world. You're a good man, dude. We come back. A man asks how to protect his peace while fighting to protect his kids and a high conflict custody battle. Alex, we'll be right back. Hey, it's still only no matter what you do, your personal information is everywhere. You have to supply your information to do anything online, your home address, your phone number, your email address. This is why I use and recommend to leave me almost for nobody thinks about what's being done with your information after you just give it away. Last night, me and my family went to the movies and we had to pay to park. We had to give all of our information to all these different companies just to go to the movie theater. There are hundreds of data broker websites collecting, posting and selling your personal information and my personal information. just like the info I gave away last night, without our permission. And most of us don't even know that it's happening. Delete me, find your personal information on those data broker websites, and their privacy experts get it removed for you, making you less vulnerable to personalized scams and spam. Delete me, keep monitoring and removing your information throughout the year, and they send you reports showing you exactly what they found and what they've removed. They've saved me hundreds of hours if I had tried to do this on my own, and by the way, I wouldn't even have known where to start. Giving your info away is sometimes unavoidable, but delete me helps you take back control. Go to joindeleteme.com/delonying and get 20% off an annual plan. That's joindeleteme.com/delonying. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. All right, so the folks at BetterHelp just released their annual state of stigma report. It's full of all sorts of data about why so many people avoid getting help for their mental and emotional health challenges. Here's a data point that stood out to me that kind of shook me. More than three out of four Americans, three out of four reported anxiety or depression symptoms over the last two weeks. If that's you and you're carrying stress, anxiety or depression symptoms, talking to someone can help you more than you could ever imagine. I want you to reach out to BetterHelp. BetterHelp is an online therapy platform that matches you with one of their 30,000 plus licensed therapists based on your goals and preferences. It's easy and it's convenient and you can message your therapist and schedule sessions right in the platform. And if the first therapist you're matched with isn't the right fit, you can switch it any time for no extra cost. Don't let stigma stand in the way of you getting the help that you need. Visit BetterHelp.com/delonying and get 10% off. That's BetterHelp, aglp.com/delonying. All right, let's go out to Calgary, Alberta, and talk to Lehre, Lehre. What's up, Larry? Hello, Dr. John, how are you? I'm excellent, brother, how are you? Oh, living the dream just waiting to wake up. I was gonna say, anyone who says "Live in the Dream" is not doing great. Yeah, that's about right. Well, it's pretty accurate. Let's see what's going on, man. So I'm in a high-conflict custody battle and divorce. It's been going on for, since February of last year. Oh, my gosh. But it was a result of an affair for five years that I've known for the last five years trying to fight for the marriage. The issue that I'm constantly coming across right now is my ex-life's partner is encouraging my children who are eight and five to call him dad. And by reaching out to this partner's daughters on the advice of my lawyer with all the stuff that we found, I'm constantly finding evidence. I'm trying to protect the kids and I'm just trying to, it just seems like I'm always buried on the phone, trying to find the next thing on this guy, trying to find how I can protect my kids in the court system right now. And-- Okay, hold on, hold on, brother. Stay with me, okay. Yeah. You're at war with somebody who for five years showed you their dishonest, they have no integrity, they don't care about you. So you're trying to keep the honorable rules of engagement while fighting somebody who has no scruples. And that person's hired mercenaries on their behalf who also have no scruples, who are weaponizing kids. And so I'm telling you that to tell you, you're an unwinnable fight and the smart thing to do when you're an unwinnable fight is to back out of a fight. Okay. Oh, good. You're burying yourself financially, you're burying yourself emotionally, you're burying yourself spiritually. And the very thing you're scared of is about to come to fruition, which is when you're with your kids, they see an exhausted, panicked, burned out dad. And this other dude holding the lollipops for a child's nervous system is gonna start to feel more appealing in the short term. I'm not gonna give him that. You-- I don't think there's any law that says he can't say what he wants to be called in his own house. He's gross as that is. - Well, so this is where at first, if you would have asked me literally probably a year ago, I, this wouldn't be even a question. But what happened is this guy started acting as a legal guardian and-- - Does he have legal custody of your kids? - Nope, there's no court order, there's no nothing. We're still in the early stages still. - How are we still in the early stages of divorce after February? - Oh, this system had an overhaul in Canada as of January 1st or January 2nd of this year. We were trying to do it all through mediation and for-way meetings and it didn't go successful. Now we're starting the next step. There's a whole process now with this new family law in Canada that we have to follow. - I'm sorry. - So it's been a nightmare and even all lawyers agree that this new system is horrible but it's what we're dealt with right now. So-- - Is there a way to call the police and say that somebody illegally signed their name to your kid's stuff? - We dealt with that to the lawyers there so they made it clear. - No, I'm talking about the legal system. - Yeah, see because my ex-life granted that permission essentially so on her behalf, she was allowed to do this technically but not in a court system. Like this is definitely a strike on there from my understanding. And to them it was a one time incident at this moment. There's been two other times that this has happened now and we're pursuing it unfortunately through family law. It's just a little slow process. We're hoping in the next couple of months we'll be in court in front of a judge. - Okay, so let me ask you this. Now that you filed it and now that you figured it out, is constantly going back for more helping you show up as the man you wanna be? - I don't know if it's that or if it's just, I have nothing better to do during the week like I'm going to play for 50/50 custody, and knowing that, knowing what I know, it's hard to just stand by as a father. - You're not standing by, you've done what you can. You've sent the orders to your mercenaries, your attorneys. And they're in a gut-wrenching, heartbreaking mess of a legal system. But I think you nailed it on the head. What must be true in your own life? Knowing this is floating out there and knowing you've done everything you can up into this point and knowing it might be two or three months before you sit in front of a judge and can tell your story and know that the fate of your kids while being rests on this judge's shoulders, not on justice. And it sounds like it's a new system so even your own lawyers are like, "Dude, you're one of the guinea pigs here. "We're trying to figure this out." Knowing all of that, and that's real, and that's big, and that's a hovering shadow over your life. No question. But what that doesn't do is give you permission to not do the other things that keep you well and whole, so that in three months you show up as the best version of yourself in front of that judge, so that on the day and day interactions you have with your kids, they see you're delight in them. - Yeah, I know on whenever I get them on the three weekends a month that I get them, it's definitely a relief in that, and I could definitely feel a lot different whenever I'm with them at peace. So I don't know if it's rubbing off that way or if they know exactly how do your kids roll? So they're eight and five. - Okay, you're playing a 10 to 15 year game now. The situation you're in right this second is, I wanna give them my full presence, my full love, all I've got when they're here. And when they're 18 and 21 and 25, I want them to have a felt lived experience that there was one adult on our team always. And it was dad. - Yeah. - Right? You're not gonna get short-term validation, short-term win, short-term whatever. In fact, it's gonna go the opposite. 'Cause my guess is, This person that you created these kids with is not a person of integrity. They care about themselves and only themselves. Even to the point that they will not do what's in the best interest of their kids so that they can prop up an image of themselves and they can hurt you. And the war is not, with the legal system, the war is not with the, what it's the war is inside your own chest, which is I'm not going to give them me. And for them to not get you, you're going to have to spend an in-ordinate amount of time seeking light, seeking laughter, seeking joy, seeking exercise, seeking things that bring you fulfillment from the inside out because you're not going to get it from the outside in. Do you know what I'm saying? This is hard what I'm saying. And you're going to have to let go of the shame of I shouldn't have fought for this for five years. You're going to have to let go of the, I should have, I should have, I could have. All those things, all those stories have periods of the end of the sentence. The only thing that doesn't is whatever story you're right starting today. If you don't show up to court, if you don't file the papers, then you're not fighting. But you've done those things. Yeah. Impacing the house and stirring up and being angry and frustrated when your kids aren't with you. Man, I get it, but it's not in service to you. It's you drinking poison all day hoping that your ex-wife gets sick. Yeah, you're right. And your kids need their dad, man. They've had everything else taken away from them. And the day will come when they're old enough for you to sit down and they say, dad, why did why did you do this and why didn't you do that? And you can say, I did the best I could with what I knew. Your mom hurt me real bad and I tried to love her as well as possible. All right, but that day's not today. They're eight and five. Yeah. I know they keep asking me why I made the wrong decision to leave. That's always a tough one to try and yeah. And eight and a five-year-old can't wrap their heads around reality. No. And so it's weathering those hard conversations, those hard statements and you know what they're getting pumped full of on the other side of the steal. Yeah. So then my thing is how do I know the difference of protecting the kids when to call it quits and- Let me rephrase what I said. I'm not saying call it quits. I'm saying the hardest like for the folks I know that work with high-end athletes, they always tell me the hardest thing for them is to get these athletes to rest. They've put in the workout that day. They've pushed their body to the limit and they come home and they take a nap and they drink some electrolytes and then they want to go to do another workout. They want to do another stretching exercise or another functional move and they're like you need to just play video games. Your body's had enough today and that's what I'm telling you. You've been fighting man and I want you to keep fighting but also want you to know when the fighting is actually wearing you out more than it's helping anything else. It sounds like you've made your cases. You've found when this guy violated the law. You've handed that over to your attorneys. They're waiting for their moment in court. You're waiting for your moment in court. So you've done your really brutal hard workout. Let's rest. And if something pops up tomorrow or you got a spring to action, you'll be ready to rock and roll man. If they say we need more paperwork, we need more of this. We need another example of got it. I'm in. But if your attorneys are regularly telling you we've got what we need. We're just waiting on this ridiculous new system. Actually, it's backwards. He's just wanted to. He actually he says I should be in them in the wrong line of work here. I should be a private investigator quite impressed with everything I've gotten. Dude, you any parent messed with my kids and you'll find out what I'm made of, right? But you've got your photos using your your private detective. You got your photos. You got the smoking gun emails sitting out in front of that apartment for more hours. Eating peanut butter sandwiches trying to get more photo like at what point is that helping you anymore? Yeah. Or if you came home and you just felt the emptiness and the silence in your home and you let it wash over you and you pull out some pencils and some paper and you drew your five year old silly pictures and you wrote your eight year old an age appropriate note and you folded it and it envelopes. So every time they come see you they leave with 15 pictures and letters from dad. Hey, that would give them I would give you something to do with your energy and direct it towards where your heart's really broken, which is those kids are not in your life. It would help you begin to restore some of your own dignity. I keep my promises to myself. I write my kids a letter every day and I'm just making that up. Dude, it could be every other day. I don't want to put something on you. But and also those kids would leave with a stack of stuff. And maybe their new step parent or your wife your ex-wife throws them away. But man, they keep showing up and they get a stack every time. You all read them together. You go through them together. Whatever. But they'll remember the stacks and eventually it will dawn on them. Hey, mom, you keep throwing away my letters to dad like from dad. Right? Yeah, it's a good idea. It's a long, long, long game. Yeah. And I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. I'm sorry we're working through it, brother. If you haven't already, I think you're I think you're it's time to go sit down on the professional. A counselor just where you can be completely vulnerable and completely open. Because I'm just hurting. I'm a dad who's had his kids ripped away. I'm a dad who's I'm a husband whose heart got ripped out of his chest for five straight years. I'm a citizen trying to do the next right thing in the system. I'm watching my kids with her in front of me and the system won't help. The system designed to help me isn't helping. It's making it worse. Just having a place where you can share that. Some other men in your life that you can sit down and talk with. And share this grief with an exercise plan going to a movie once a week, a book club going out and doing things, starting, I don't know, join an improv group, go to a local church, starting things that I'm going to go be a part of because they inject life into me and to an otherwise lifeless body right now because my kids aren't here. It's doing those small things, man. And fight when you got to. But knowing when it's okay, it's up for me to put my gloves down. The round is over. So I can be ready to rock and roll the next time. Sorry, my brother. I'm heartbroken with you, dude. Geez, man. Calls back in a few months when you get to go to court. I'm kind of invested in this now. I want to see how it goes out. My hope is the judges 100% on your size sees this madness for what it is. Unless a father who loves his kids actually love him. Thank you for the call, brother. We come back. A woman asks how to handle negative student evals without letting them define her. We'll be right back. It's Deloney for Hello. What could you accomplish in 90 days? Right about three months. What could you start doing right now that would transform your life? You could start getting in shape, exercising. You could start losing that weight that's been bothering you forever. You could transform your marriage by just being kinder to each other on a daily basis, right? You could play games with your kids and change your relationship with them. You can do so much in 90 days that will transform your life. And this is why I want you to try Hello for free for 90 days. Hello is the number one Christian Prayer and Meditation App in the world and it's one of the most It's important things I do to start almost every single day. Hollow helps me anchor myself in a faith practice that helps me slow down and prioritize what actually matters in my life before the world comes at me a billion miles an hour. Hollow is going to give you this app for 90 days, for free, for you to do the same, helping you to build a habit of reflection and prayer. Hollow is simple and it's guided and it meets you wherever you are to help you anchor your faith practice with daily reflections, scripture, music, special series. I want you to ask yourself, who do you want to be 90 days from now? If you want more peace, if you want to be more grounded in your faith, I want you to give Hollow a try. You can try Hollow for free for 90 days at Hollow.com/Deloney. That's three months for free at Hollow.com/Deloney. Let's go out to Boise, Idaho and talk to Nicole. Hey Nicole, what's going on, lady? Hey, great, thank you for this opportunity. Thank you. What's going on? I first have to say that your ability to see and get people over the phone is a gift. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'm grateful for that. Appreciate you. Okay. So I started teaching at a local community college about three years ago. Started as an instructor, recently got promoted to assistant professors, so that's exciting. Congratulations. Thanks, but every semester, as you probably know, I think you said you taught in the colleges, we get student evaluations and I tend to, well, I do hide from those. I read a few at the insistence of some friends over the phone with them and anyway, I just keep hiding from them. I don't want to read them. I'm too afraid of what they're going to say and I have in the past read a couple that were negative and they sort of stuck with me forever, so I just want to know how to approach those. I've had some people tell me, Hey, you don't need to read them and other people say you should. So I just wondered what you had to say. Man, there's a lot there and I think this is instructive. So I appreciate you calling it backing out. I had somebody the other day at church just lean over and say, Hey, how do you handle the mean comments, right, or you know, physicians who are racing into save somebody's life, how do you handle now that they all have a customer service scores, right? And all of us are surrounded by metrics that try to sum up the complexity of human interaction into a number, right? And it becomes the, if we let those metrics, there's a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant book. My buddy, Michael Easter pointed it to me, brilliant book by the author's last name is when in YGUE and I think, and it's called the score, I highly recommend you read it, okay? Because it talks about, he's a philosophy professor who studies games and how games are bounded, right? Maybe what to care about and then they give you the score of how to win that interaction, right? So on its face, basketball is kind of stupid. It doesn't make any sense in the practical sense of, I need to get this ball 10 feet off the ground into a basket, right? But the game binds it and then gives us the rules for how we can get that ball in that basket. And then we all suddenly care about it, right? The problem is we've taken that same gaming scoring system and we've tried to metric everything or you hear it, like if you can't score it, it does, if you can't measure, it does, it's not real, right? And we've tried to turn every human interaction to a series of, like biological interactions, yeah, I'll have to say this. You have to ask yourself what game you want to be playing, number one. Are you into teaching to make everybody happy? I thought I was, but yeah, not anymore, okay. And the second thing I want you to ask yourself is, or any teacher is their job is to be the iron that other iron rubs up against to help sharpen that iron, right? You're the wetstone and your students are dull blades, that's what teachers do. And that means by necessity, that friction is uncomfortable, right? And we have a culture that's allergic to discomfort. They think everything should be frictionless. And so by its nature, teaching evals are going to try to distill down a relationship between a teacher and a student into a customer service evil, right? And you've heard this for professors, there's become this implicit unspoken contract. I'll give you an easy ride, you give me a good teaching evil, and we all move on about our lives. You get your A or your B, I get my good score, and we have five each other move on. And what we've done by making that contract over the last 25, 30 years is we've ended education. Right? Because by nature, this relationship should be uncomfortable. For both, both the teacher and the student. So I tell you that to tell you this, ask yourself if that's the game you want to play. Because you know how to play that game, you can get good teaching, you valve, it's pretty easy. Right? Or do I want to be a teacher whose students look back and say that teacher pushed me. And I'm a better fill in the blank because I had that person in my life. That's a long game and it comes at a short-term cost. And then let me ask you the complete opposite, okay? The teaching evals that you've read that have stuck with you, were they right? Yeah, actually when I first started, I was new to the material. I mean, I was in my degree field but I hadn't taught in a long time and they were said something like, you know, just reads off the slides, does another material, no point coming to class. And in some ways, that was true. I mean, I did rely heavily on the slides. Okay, go ahead and sit in there for a second. Yeah. Their feedback was right. Mm-hmm. And that hurts. That stinks. Yeah. They were asked to teach a course that you weren't ready for, which happens to all, especially community college professors, like, but all professors, like, hey, I need you to teach this class. You got to teach this when you got to teach it. And you're like, man, I haven't had that class since grad school. And I was eight years ago, but I got to figure it out and you're kind of learning it real time and trying to, that feedback's right. And so the question I have for you is since that, you got that feedback and you metabolized it and you're like, man, there was something to it. You get the score, just the notes, right? Is that right? And what have I done since then to make sure I address that? True, yeah. So for me, teaching evals were, I always read them and I know that I'm extra sensitive and I want teachers who are sensitive. So the challenge for you is to not be so hard like your colleagues that have just said, I don't even read that crap anymore. And but to also begin over time to have some toughening of your skin that is, there's always going to be one or two grenade throwers in every room. And also, I have to put aside the other side of the bell curve, which is there's always going to be a couple of flower giveers in every room too, right? What's the core sentiment of what they said? This was a good experience for me, thank you. But my deeper question for you is how have you outsourced yourself worth? Because this is deeper than instructive feedback or like, this has become a part of you. What is it about you as a teacher, as a professor, where you feel the need to outsource yourself worth to this group of, this new crop of strangers every semester? Yeah, that's a good question. I've always, even in, I work in industry for a while and I even would be afraid of my bosses evaluation, even though, you know, was positive, it was always like, I just couldn't handle any kind of feedback that was criticism, it was hard. So let's, let's, let's rephrase that criticism causes a disproportionate response in my body. So first thing we're going to do is we're going to think our body for trying to protect us. And we're not going to use words like, can't, we're going to use words like, man, my body's, we're going to use curiosity words, not, not declarative statements. Why does my body try to protect me so much in these situations? And then get underneath that. What am I scared of? What story have I been given throughout my life that I'm always waiting for the other shooter job? Because in it turns your body not into an opponent, but it turns your body into a friend, a supporter, somebody trying to keep you safe. And then we're going to deal with, oh, that, I used to not be safe. I used to work in a job that any Friday, given Friday, I could randomly be fired. I used to have parents who were very chaotic and I had to, it was a dice roll, whether I was gonna get a f***ing. action and have my needs met, but now I'm an adult and now it's not the case anymore. Now I'm in a safe place. Is that resonating? Yeah, definitely. You got required on me. Tell me what you're feeling and what you're thinking. Just crying a little bit. Yeah. Oh, I don't want to make you cry. I'm sorry. No, no, no, it's good. I've had a lot of transition recently and stuff like that. And I've just started listening to Dave Ramsey, June 28th, and I got my finances in order. And I've actually gotten a lot more confidence, but I still think about evaluations and I go get a little bit of pit in my stomach and go, "Can I read those?" But I do think I can. I just need to do what you're saying. It's not telling me about my worth, it just gives me some feedback. And surprisingly, I have, usually have every semester a couple students that will thank me in an email for whatever. And so I know that there's a majority of them are positive. It's just that, yeah, I'm just learning to handle any kind of criticism and be able to push past it. In my world, my line of work we call it, "Speakers math," where I can go speak to a thousand people and 999 of them can tell me that was the greatest thing I changed my life. I'm going to have a better relationship with my kids and my ears, yada, yada, yada. And one person can go, "Eh, kind of sucked." And I won't sleep really. Part of that is, if you're good at communicating and building relationships with people, that means you have an openness. That means you have a relational vulnerability as a part of you. And that means, for folks like us to do this work, we also have to accept some people are going to come at us sometimes. And then I get to choose what I do with that information. And it's not always pretty. I don't read most of the comments on my stuff. A, I have a team, and Kelly will tell me, "Hey, this particular thing has really surfaced and bubbled up." We need to address this. Or I can't tell the difference between bots and real people. Who knows? I just don't know, right? And so I do read direct messages often on my, I don't read the big long, like handing some help with these things, but I do read, I mean, people reach out to me directly. And some of that I can do something about, some of it I can't. And if I hear several things on a particular call that I, that I think I blew it on, I usually know it, you know what I mean? And I take that feedback and say I could do something better, and I have a group of people that I trust. For, for, for you, the exposure part of this is less about, all right, I'm just going to turn the fire hose on. It might be you sending them to a colleague who agrees to bucket them for you. Here's the overly negative, here's the overly flowery, and here's kind of the general sentiment. Or I'm going to read four of them today, or five of them today, or I'm going to block off half a day and read all these evals, and I'm going to keep a note of, agree, disagree, needs improvement, crushed it. I'm going to take like a qualitative coding approach to that. Okay. But it's you, it's you doing something with that feedback, right? Yeah. But I think the bigger issue is feeling that pit, if you're stomach, like feeling it, and then asking yourself, is this true? Am I going to lose my job? No. Have I evidently done a good enough job that I got promoted, yes? But I feel good about how I handled the material, how I did this job this semester. Yes. Are there always going to be people that just like everybody? Yep. There are always people who just hate everybody, yep. But the attention is the pathway here, so it's like the discomfort. I'm going to head into it. Knowledgeable. Yeah. And what does that mean for you? That means don't read these at 10 o'clock at night after two glasses of wine on a Friday. Right. Don't read these at the end of a long, long, long day when you're already frustrated and exhausted. Set up a time to read them with two other colleagues at 9 a.m., when you'll all go through them together. Okay. Have a review party at your house. Where two other colleagues show up and bring coffee and pastries or whatever, and you'll get your laptops out and each read your own reviews to each other. And use it as an iron sharpened, iron thing, like go back and forth with each other. At some events that I speak at, they're speaker scores, they get, you get like, the whole talk gets to still done into a number that I like it better than this person's. And that person may be more entertaining, this person may be more emotional, everybody's crying in the audience, this person may have way better information, but it wasn't delivered in like a compelling way. Those scores are fine and they're helpful and instructive, but what's more instructive is to then circle back around with the folks in that room and say, all right, given the event, given how you did, given the score, how do we think this went and what can we do better next time and what was perfect we need to keep for next time. That's all helpful. And it doesn't always feel good. Sometimes it feels awful. But it's serving a purpose for what am I going to do next. So hopefully that helps Nicole. I've been right where you are to have been there. And this is for everybody, not just teachers. This is anybody whose entire job has been to still done into a particular metric. And I got this from when and it's a great question to ask, is this the game I want to be playing? Because you get to often answer that question. How you best want to answer it will be right back. Hey, it's Deloney. 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If you get a post purchase survey, toe cozy earth, you heard about their amazing gear right here on the Dr. John Deloney show, make home the best part of your life. All right, Kelly, I'm I the problem. All right. So this is from Kylie in Logan, Ohio and she writes, my whole family is going on a beach vacation, including my younger adult siblings. My 25 year old sister tends to wear next to nothing when she goes to the beach or the pool. Some suits are revealing anyways, but I'm talking barely covering the important parts and everything is hanging out. I know she will probably take it really personally when I confront her about it, but I think for a family vacation where she will be around kids that a slightly more modest swimsuit choice would be better. Am I the problem? You're welcome. No, I mean, I, there's so much unspoken here. So I guess what I would say is if you're going on a family vacation and you're bringing your kids along and you have a family member that's doing anything that you think will be a net negative to your kids to the point that you want to have that conversation, then have a conversation. You can't control how your 25 year old sister responds. You can't control like all you can control is you. Do I think you're the problem for wanting modesty around your kids on a family vacation? No. And do I think it's strange for a 25 year old to flaunt their goods on a family vacation? Yes. That just seems strange to me. So have the conversation. Not a good problem. What do you think, Kelly? I agree. I mean, first of all, the 25 year old is old enough to have a little bit of awareness to be like, come on. There's kids. There's kids. And also family vacation, like your siblings and your parents might be there. Come on. Ew. But no, just have the conversation, be like, come on, put something. Yes. Can you wear something a little more covering? Yeah. Yeah. And some of that is just about, it's even beyond modesty. It's about wisdom. It's about dignity, right? It's like, if you want to never mind, I'm going to get myself canceled. No. You're not the problem. Your 25 year old immature sister is. And yes, have that conversation. You can't control how she responds. You can't control her temper tantrums. But you can't control how you show up. Love you guys. Bye. (upbeat music)