HIP E81 Mike Messeroff - Stop Deferring Your Joy

You've spent years chasing the deal, the portfolio, the number. But nobody warns you what happens when you get there and you're still not happy. Today's guest coaches some of the most successful leaders in hospitality. And what he's found is that the biggest threat to your business, your team, and your returns isn't the market. It's you. Today, we get into the exact practices he uses with top executives to get their head straight, lead better, and actually enjoy the ride. Let's get into it. The hotel investor playbook, your guide to building wealth and freedom through hotel and hospitality ownership. Welcome back to the hotel investor playbook. I am Michael Russell, founder of Miloma Capital and your host. My guest today is Mike Messeroff. He is a personal freedom coach working with hospitality leaders. Mike, welcome to the show. Thanks, Michael. Honored to be here. Thank you. Yeah. Mike, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you do and why it's important for hospitality leaders? Oh, yeah. I mean, I love what I do. I help people enjoy their lives. I mean, that's really what it comes down to. I work with top leaders in the industry. These are typically CEOs, founders, see suite levels who have every reason to be happy from a materialistic external standpoint, but they're really suffering on the inside. And they don't know why they've ticked all the boxes. They are following what they think is a great plan for their life. And typically it kind of takes getting to that top run of the corporate ladder. You start asking questions because until you get to the top, you could always defer it for the next run or the next promotion. And the leaders I work with, they're at the top and they're usually pretty confused because they work their whole lives to reach the end of the rainbow. They get there, they open the treasure chest and it's empty. So that's where I come in and I help them just realize not hard stuff, but it takes some conscious attention on living in the present moment and bringing joy into your life, to enjoy your life. Why is it that you focus specifically on hospitality leaders? Well, it's my industry. I mean, I've been in the industry for my entire life, 30 years from restaurants to corporate. I started my own business, a marketing business, serving hotels. And I love the industry. I love the people in it. I really feel like people get into this industry because they have huge hearts. They love serving others. They like to have fun and somewhere along the line, they forgot how to take care of their best guest, the one that they see in the mirror. The one person who's there for your first breath and your last breath. And we get so good at serving others that we literally just couldn't forget about ourselves. And you're an investor, you know, a lot of your podcast focuses on the financials and it's kind of like basic financial economics you want to accumulate savings. You have to pay yourself first. We just don't look at it like that for our own happiness. We say that I'll do the things that make me happy after X, Y and Z when I finish this project, when I get that next promotion or when I retire, which is an absolute killer. I mean, it steals people's lives working for in the end instead of enjoying the journey. So yeah, it's too fault. It's, you know, I'm a hospitality guy and I know that hospitality people love giving great service to everyone except themselves. That's why everything I teach is called self hospitality, treating yourself like your best guest. Yeah. I think that it's really relevant that most of this podcast that we do talk about the financial side of the business and two degree, the operational side, but at the end of the day, ultimately the outcome that I think all of us are trying to achieve is happiness and well-being. But the exercise of creating wealth is the vehicle for delivering happiness. And it's interesting to hear you say that you interact with all these folks that have reached perhaps the top of the pinnacle and they're still unhappy. What do you think? Is there a common denominator? Like what do you think's leading to this unhappiness that you could relate that maybe to people that aren't just at the top? Is there something just in human nature that everyone is going through that you've identified with working with these people that regardless of where they are in the latter, something that they should focus on that maybe they're not even consciously aware of, but that they could start doing to maybe feel more happy and take stock of where they are and really kind of fill up their own personal battery, so to speak. Yeah. No, it's a great question. I think it comes from knowing that you're not happy or you're not fulfilled or you're not content or joyful in your life. It takes that to say why and to get curious instead of drowning it out, numbing it out, drinking it away, whatever we do, taking the next vacation, buying the new thing, which just kind of we ignore it instead of actually addressing it. And you know, you said something really interesting, which is that wealth is the vehicle to happiness. And I think that's a huge misconception. I do believe that money has the ability to give you freedom, but there's plenty of people that have no money and are very happy. And there's plenty of people that have tons of money and every reason to be happy, but aren't. So I just think if we can kind of separate and say it's not money's not going to make me happy. It's going to amplify what and who I already am. Are you a good person? Are you a generous person? Are you someone who enjoys their life? Money's going to bring you more of that. If you're depressed, if you're angry, impatient, not living in the present moment, it's just going to amplify that. It's an amplifier. It's energy. So it's not just for leaders. I just love working with leaders because one, they have the ripple effect throughout their organizations to make significant change and within their families and everyone that they touch. But it's because they don't have the illusion, as I mentioned, that it's all their problems are going to be solved with the next promotion. They kind of know that and that's the wake up call for them. So I would say anyone at any level in an organization has to just be honest with themself and say, am I deferring my joy because we get really good at what we practice. If you practice your entire life, deferring joy until later, you get really good at deferring joy until later. If you're someone who practices it every day and you know, you kind of ask for some tangible stuff and I'm happy to talk more about that. But if you practice it every day, then you become a joyful person every day and it actually gets easier and you get better at it. It's a skill. It's a muscle that you're training. So it's the whole kind of concept that someday I'm going to take care of me. It'll never happen. Some day never comes. You can't be present tomorrow. So at a certain point, you just have like I said, you have to kind of know, I'm not really happy. I'm not really fulfilled. I feel like my life's passing me by. I'm not very present to then say, okay, now, now what do I do about it? And that's where we can get into some some tangible. If you like, yeah, I mean, I think this is really important because the gene or whatever personality tree drives someone to want to reach that level of success. That engine, right, it's hard to shut off. It is designed to race and to get there and to produce. It is a workhorse, so to speak. And it's tough, I think, for some folks to turn off. And so if someone has those ambitions, how do they countermeasure against just simply working hard all the time, the ambition? How do they introduce real tactical strategies or implement real things that they can do to not necessarily give up on those aspirations, but to balance them and so that they can enjoy simultaneously working hard and being present or enjoying their current status in life without constantly feeling underwhelmed. Or they're not performing high enough. I know that's a lot to unpack, but I'm kind of hoping to understand the perspective of what you do, even if it's not someone who's at the CEO level. Well, I think the fact that it is someone who's at the CEO level proves that this stuff works and it's not about slowing down your success. It's not. It's about actually enjoying it. It's not about losing your age. It's about losing your edginess so that you could enjoy the journey. You could enjoy the businesses that you're building. That's kind of the main thing is realizing kind of why are you doing what you're doing? Do you really want to be the next Steve Jobs? Do you really want to be even much? I'm not. I don't want to answer that for you. I mean, do you know anything about their personal lives? Are they happy people? I mean, Steve Jobs has been dead for a while, but are they joyful people? He had a lot of regret about about how he lived his. I think Steve Jobs is a great example because he did die right to your point. It's a wake up call that, hey, we're not immortal. So if we have limited time on this planet, how do we want to spend it? Literally all we all do and you just have to kind of be careful about who you're looking up to. And it's not to say they can't be successful business people, but success without fulfillment is that really success. I mean, really is that enough if you're like, I made X amount I grew this business. I did it all, but I didn't really enjoy my life is that a successful life. So I think it's a little bit of a reorientation around our societal metrics of success. What does success actually mean? But also I never even mentioned positive self-talk. I mean, I think affirmations are very important. I think the way you speak to yourself is very important, but it's not really, you know, to start there. The way that I like to kind of explain this work is imagine you're trying to start a campfire out in the forest and it's really, really windy. I don't know if you've ever been camping and lit a fire, but if it's super windy, it's really hard to light that fire. So the first thing that I do with my clients is I slow everything down. I calm down like the shit storm of life where it's like, I don't have time to think I have this huge to do list. Everything's moving so fast. That has to slow down. That's the first thing and it really comes down to one practice, which is meditation. You might. think that that sounds will, but there's nothing that's older or more proven, even scientifically, to reduce stress, to bring you into the present moment, reduce cortisol levels, give you clarity, bring you more connection. I mean, it just goes on and on, scientifically proven benefits of meditation. And I'm talking two, three minutes every morning, not going to the Himalayas and sitting in a cave for a week. A couple of minutes, because it's a really, really noisy world, everyone, I think right now can agree to that. But it's sometimes even worse in between our own ears. And so if you don't have a break from the noisy world and the noise in your mind, how are you ever going to know peace? Like I said a few minutes ago, you get good at what you practice. So if you're practicing being busy and distracted and impatient and angry all the time, then that's just who you are. But if you practice peace, even for a few minutes every morning, you're going to slowly start to get better at being peaceful, which means what? It means being more patient, being more responsive, less reactive. It's just looking for the silver lining for opportunities to grow and learn and take things that seem like the worst things in the world and learn from them, because that's always how we learn is through hardships and setbacks. So now that the wind is down, it's about lighting that fire and getting it burning bright. And part of it is realizing just how programmed we are. And I kind of alluded to that with who are we looking up to? What's our benchmark for success? Is it someone who's enjoying their life or someone who's enjoying their life and made a lot of money? Or is it someone who just made a lot of money? It's like you need to just know that for yourself. Why do you look up to someone? Do you actually want their life? So it's being clear about who you're looking up to, but also not really caring what other people think. And that's something that's huge in our society, whether it's through social media or just keeping up facades or caring about what your neighbors think of you, you never going to be joyful if you're not living for yourself. If you're just trying to make other people impressed with how your life looks on paper, which is a lot of my personal story. My life was looked amazing and I was at the lowest point in my life, which kind of is what put me into this work. I'm happy to share more about that story. But once you kind of start meditating, you slow things down, you start to realize how programmed and conditioned you are to always want more. Always need the next thing to never be content with with enough. It's always got to be more. And then once that kind of happens, then you can kind of get the fire burning bright, which is getting really clear on what you want and why you want it. I always say that you need a North Star, but it's not so you can reach it. We have all these business goals and things that we want to do, which is great. But the real point of having those goals and the vision, the North Star is so that you can wake up every day and know that right now, right here, life is great. I'm on track. I could enjoy this day because I'm pointing in the direction to feels good. I'm working towards a goal that feels good. I can kind of set it and forget it and live in the present moment. So that's getting clarity. So first it's presence, then it's clarity. And then it's like, let's get this fire burning as bright as you can. So bright that it lights other fires. And that's really where the work of embodiment comes in. Once you know who you want to be and what you want, you just start living that way. You start utilizing the law of attraction, which it's not woo. It's literally just as I think, as I act, things I write, what I put out there into the universe is what I get back. And I mean, you tell me I'm sure you've had days where you woke up, you're in terrible mood, shitty weather, and everything goes wrong that day. Hey guys, if you're getting value out of this conversation, do me a favor and take 30 seconds right now and leave me a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It literally takes half a minute, but it makes a huge difference in helping other hotel investors find the show. Okay. Now back to the episode. Well, I mean, coincidentally, I woke up this morning and I looked at my previous evenings end of day report from my leadership group and I blew up. I'm in bed checking my email first thing in the morning and my wife tells me to not do this, but I struggle with this and I just see this really poorly executed response to a guest situation and I'm just I'm losing, I'm crawling out of my skin and thankfully for AI, I wrote up right a response and I asked AI and I prompted to say, make me sound less confrontational. Regardless of how the communication like went out, I was still burning inside. And so you mentioned like, hey, you've got all this stuff that we're dealing with and everything seems important all at once and then we get overwhelmed and then we get stressed and we have all this anxiety and that's what I experienced this morning, right? Because I've got a ton to do and now I'm thinking why the actor I got to step in and give direction on something that they should just know how to do, right? I guess what I'm wondering is you work with hospitality leaders and what are some of the real effects that you see trickle down to the rest of the organization? When at the top, the leader is in that state of presence and has the clarity and then like I think you said the last step is like, is it able to go and like burn the fire? Like, how does this affect the business as a whole if the leader isn't a good state of mind? I mean, it affects everything from the morale of the staff to the bottom line. I mean, I've just seen it happen too many times with the leaders that I work with that it ripples out, it trickles down and it's sometimes it's it's almost like it seems too simplistic or like innocuous like, oh, that couldn't be that big of a deal. Something like a leader taking five minutes before a meeting to meditate in his office, but it changes it changes everything it changes how they show up and I think one of the most tangible things that I see is that not every problem is a huge problem not every fire to put out is like a forest fire it's also not always the most important thing in the world, you know, it's like you get better at having a 30,000 foot view of things because you're not in it. You take a step back when you live this way, when you're more present and peaceful and calm, you start to realize I'm here to address problems. I'm here to put our fires or at least make sure that my team is equipped and prepared to do that. So that way when all these things happen, it's not like goddamn it again. I just worked on that yesterday or we're dealing with this again. It's like, it's just part of the job. Let's just make a little take it a little less seriously and we'll get through it. And it also helps people realize that, you know what, we can make mistakes because our leader is not going to lose his mind or her mind. Every time we slip up, they're going to be there, they're going to support us. It's a much more collaborative, cohesive, harmonious environment when you don't have a reactive boss. So there's more trust, there's more risk in a good way like let's try new things, let's experiment, let's have better communication across the board. It's just there's no question. It's a present, peaceful, joyful leader will be leading a different organization than someone who's stressed out all the time. It also, it sends a crazy message. I always see this too, where if the leader of a company is not enjoying the journey, then who is? And then what's the point of the business? It can't just be to make money. That has to be a part of it to have a viable business and to grow and to pay bills and to pay salaries, but the leader has to be enjoying their life or else what message does that send to the team? It's like even the guy at the top is stressed out all the time. He seems kind of angry pissed off. Why am I here? What am I doing? What kind of career am I building? Am I trying to get this next promotion just to take on more stress? Have less time with my family? What message are you sending? Yeah, well, ideally, if you're in hospitality, the goal is more than just profit motivated. It's you find fulfillment in improving people's lives and offering them an experience that they'll remember. And so for the front line staff to feel that energy and transfer that energy, they also need some semblance, some example. And so it can resonate with that. I think it's important to separate how you may be feeling about situations. And then it's almost like a performance when you go on stage with your team that you want to influence them. That energy is contagious. It'll transfer. So it is important to not just be positive but be influential in positivity. The part though that I really want to dig into is look, you offer coaching on a continuous basis. I think you may have workshops and we can get into that. But the idea is this is more than just, hey, let's teach people to meditate for five minutes. Like what I want to really unpack is where are people really struggling to implement this presence of mind and the calmness like with your mentees or the people that you're coaching, where do they typically struggle in terms of implementing the practices that you're teaching them? I mean, it's going to sound kind of crazy but they really don't. They don't. The level of of my clients where they're at and the level of commitment to do the work is intentionally designs so that I know that they're ready for it and I know that they're committed to it. And I've worked with enough people where I could confidently say that if someone does X, Y, and Z consistently repetitive, a lot of this is repetition because whether you're 40, 50, 60 years old, that's probably about how long you've been living a certain way and you just kind of get stuck in patterns. So you take a few weeks or a few months to start living differently and it's just about doing it every day. Little things, little meditation, a little bit of gratitude practice and that also might seem like how the hell is that going to change anything? I have more important things to do. I don't want to sit here and write down what I'm grateful for. Don't do it. Keep being miserable or give it a shot and just see after seven days, maybe two weeks, you start to feel differently because your brain is making new connections where I mean, the example that resonates with me is this kind of combines being present and grateful. It's right after I started meditating and I started feeling different after just a few day. and meditating. When I was at the lowest point in my life, I remember taking out dishes from the dishwasher and it had just finished running so the dishes were kind of hot and wet and I took out this glass tub of air and it slipped and it cracked on the floor and I remember just looking at it and being like, "Huh, I guess I'll go clean it up." Whereas a few days ago, I would have lost my fucking mind. I would have lost my mind. I would have said, "Who packed the dishwasher like this? Why does this always happen to me? Now my day is ruined. I can't believe we lost another amazing glass tub of air. I would have found every reason to complain, blame, have a horrible day, spread that negativity to anywhere. Instead, it's just like, "Oh, let's clean it up and how cool is it that it's not a big deal? I'll get a new one. I have a dishwasher. I have things in my life that bring me joy." It's like, it just changed these things that normally could have literally ruined your entire day and probably, it would have ruined my wife's day, it would have ruined my friends, whoever I would have seen that day, I could just stop and immediately respond to the situation differently. It changes your brain chemistry from a scientific perspective, but you'll just feel differently. You won't take things so seriously. You won't take things so personally. Not everything is the end of the world. You just catch that nagging voice in our head and we all have it. You just don't take it as seriously. What I always realized is when I started meditating, it was like I was looking down at myself from a different perspective. I could almost look at my thoughts as separate things. I used to be my thoughts. If I was thinking of thought, then it was me and it was real. Now I could think of thought to be like, "Oh, that's just a crazy thought. I'm not going to entertain that. I'm not going to follow that thought because it doesn't feel good." How important is it to take breaks from work, to kind of maintain that level of presence and being grateful and these things that you're suggesting? It's interesting because the more you do this work, the more the lines between work and play dissolve. And I always say there's no such thing as work-life balance. It's all life. That being said, there's nothing more important than this work. And it has to come first. It can't be, I'm going to get to the end of this busy work day or this busy work week and then I'll spend a few minutes on myself. That's the old way. You do it first, you fill up your cup, and then you give and you serve from a place of overflow, which is literally what the word abundance means. I mean, everyone watching this, I'm sure wants to live an abundant life. The word abundance literally means overflow. So if you're waking up in a shitty mood, check an email right away getting right into your day, feeling empty, feeling pissed off, feeling behind the April already. I don't have to tell you, you could feel that. It feels terrible. And that's what you're spreading to your teams, to your wife, to your kids, instead of selfishly doing it for you, but really you're doing it for them. You said you want to be an inspiring, influential leader, so don't do it for you. Do it for them. Take five minutes every morning to meditate, to say, or feel something that you're grateful for. And just say, even if you can't get over it, like I have too much to do, just say, I'm doing this for them. I cannot show up for the people I care about. If I'm not feeling good, I can't fake it. And that's the problem with leaders. It's that we kind of have to put on a happy face. And we have to tell our teams to be excited about whatever's happening. But usually it's it's fake. Like we slap on that happy face and we kind of trudged through it, but just imagine it wasn't fake. Yeah. Even if you're delivering bad news, if you're like, hey, I got to tell you some shitty things, but we're going to be fine. We've gotten through stuff like this before. This isn't the end of the world. Change is happening. Well, I know that you've got this wanderlust, this affinity for travel. And you know, so do I. And so sometimes me, I think about my outlet as being, I'm working so hard that I need to take a break. I need to take a sabbatical. I need just more time away from work. And I don't hear you saying that. I kind of tried to teed up because I thought your answer would be executives need to stop grinding so hard and just take time and be present and joy life. But what you're saying is actually, I don't want to put words in your mouth. I want to clarify, but it sounds like you're saying that you don't need to pause the ambition and the work. You just need to implement techniques that makes the situation more enjoyable for you while you're working hard. Is that correct? Absolutely. I mean, really, really well said, almost none of my clients quit their jobs, almost none. That's not to say I haven't had clients quit, but most don't. They just remember why they got into it in the first place. They bring joy back into every day. So then every day becomes joyful. They're not working for the vacation anymore. They're not working for the weekend or the drink at the end of the day. And it's not like that's a bad thing to have a drink at the end of the day. But that's why you're working. You're missing a big chunk of your life. So a lot of the work that I do with my clients is help them realize, again, that it's all life. It's not ears work, ears life, ears work, ears play. I got to get through this thing because I'm doing it to make the money so that I can go play. It's just backwards. It doesn't work. It's not a joyful existence. It's not a joyful journey. So it's a reframe that if you don't bring joy into every day and it's not hard, it's not hard. There are people in your organization that want more responsibility. They want you to delegate. They want you to trust them. They want to feel comfortable making mistakes and trying new things. They want you to take some time off because they just do. They want a joyful leader. They want someone who comes in refreshed and ready to, ready to lead. But you can't lead from behind. So you have to really, it's self-leadership, it's self-hospitality. It's doing these things so that work becomes enjoyable. There's nothing wrong with taking time off. I mean, I think it's great to take a sabbatical. I do. I think it proves that your organization can run without you, which is actually a great way to run an organization. That requires taking your ego out of it, which a lot of the leaders I work with, they like being needed. They want to be, maybe they might not say I want to be the bottleneck, but they want to have decisions coming through them or they want to be on every email. And I help them realize that that's not helping anyone. Not helping their teams develop the skills they need to elevate themselves into leadership positions. It's not helping their clients receive the best service. It's not helping their guests. It helps no one. And of course, it doesn't help them because they want to spend more time with their kids and their wife and out in nature and maybe not behind a screen all the time. So it's one thing to say this. It's just when you start doing that kind of work and things just start slowing down. The external world is still going to happen. There's still going to be traffic. There's still going to be tariffs. There's still going to be regulatory nonsense. There's going to be government stuff. There's going to be all that stuff. But you've realized like, "Oh, my job was never to control all of that. I have one job. It's to control how I show up in my world, at my work, in my home. And if I focus all my energy on how I show up, everything else takes care of itself. It's literally like the one domino is show up with a full heart, with a present body, and with a calm mind. And everything will take care of itself. It does." Damn, Mike. You're making me feel like I definitely need to make a phone call this afternoon and I had touch base with the staff that I unloaded on. I think that's really relevant that in the moment we can be very reactive, which I definitely displayed that today. So you've talked about meditation. You've talked about gratitude. So I assume that's documenting and eternal things that you're grateful for. What other techniques or strategies do you typically coach for folks to implement? I mean, I mentioned most of the pillars already. Meditation is non-negotiable. It's just that important. I highly recommend the headspace app. Give it a shot. I think they give free 10 days or something. Just try it out. Gratitude, again, it changes your brain. You start to look for the silver lining. You look for the lessons and life becomes just this a more joyful experience where things don't knock you off-kilter so much. I've already mentioned need and clarity. Like, just you need to know why you're doing what you're doing and it can't be to amass a huge pile of money. So many leaders I work with, they just say, "Well, I just want to make my pile a little bit bigger and then I'll feel comfortable." No, you won't. Because you don't even know how big that pile needs to get. You don't know how much you need to live the life that you want. You've never done the simple math. It's just more. When I have more, then I'll be happy and it's not true. It's like saying that tomorrow I'll be present. You won't. You'll make plans for the future. You'll get to the future and then your mind is going to be off in another future because you never practice being present. Just like you never practice the concept that enough is better than more. That's contentment. Contentment is saying, "I have enough." And that is a game-changer. It doesn't mean you won't get more. It doesn't mean you can't want more. It just means that you don't need it for your baseline contentment and joy in life. And then the last thing is kind of all encompassing, which is just the art of self-hospitality, the art of treating yourself like your best guest, hinges on you needing to care about how you feel. That's it. Like if you're like my life sucks or work sucks or I'm really not happy most of the time, you just have to care enough to be like, "That's not okay. I'm not going to just bury my head and work and dig deeper," which is what almost everyone does. It's like this kind of sucks. It's not fun. But if I could turn that 10-year plan into a seven-year plan, then it'll only suck for seven years. I just say, "Fuck that." Like you're literally wasting your life for a really vague goal in a future that's not guaranteed. All you have is the present moment. So if you could say, "I care about how I feel." And when I check email first thing in the morning, it doesn't feel good, then you might have the self-discipline to say, "I don't check emails till after breakfast, until after I've meditated, walked the dog, spent some time with my wife and kid, and got into the right headspace to respond to emails." And that's another one of those weird things where it's like you're really doing it for them. You are. How many times do you respond hastily to an email and you're like, ah, if I just let that sit, it would have been, you just kind of mentioned it with your team, where it's like it would have been more thought out, it would have been calmer, it would have been friendlier, it would have been more genuine. But because you felt this pressure of, I got to get back to it right away, you did yourself a disservice and you did them a disservice. I mean, it doesn't even have to be professional. It's like sometimes my mom will call me and I'll just say, nope, and it's not because I don't really want to talk to my mom, but it's because it's not the right time. Maybe I'm started, I have a call with a client in five minutes so it's going to be rushed or maybe I'm just hungry or maybe I just don't feel like at that moment to talk to her, it's actually for her. And you could look at every email, every text, every DM, every Slack, everything that comes to you, is it in their best interests for me to respond right now? - Changes things. - So does, that's really an important distinction because I sent that email from my perspective. What was important to me? Was important for me. - From your heated. - Yeah. - Overd. - Perspective. - Yes, 'cause I was upset. And so for me, it was important that they heard why I was upset. But to your point, if I took the perspective of what they need, they need to be empowered to make better decisions, to feel like they're not going to be reprimanded for making the wrong decision. I'm aware of these things, but it does. - You can't will this. - You can't, you know, you used to word will, you can't will peace. - You can't will presence, you can't will responsiveness over reactivity. You can't, you just start practicing it and you get better at it. It's like, I mean, I love this analogy. If you're like, I really want to get in shape, but I'm going to wait until I get in shape to go to the gym. That's insane. Go to the gym to get in shape. So it's like, well, I don't have enough time to meditate. I'm too stressed out to meditate, but when I have more time and I'm less stressed, then I'll start bringing these practices into my life. - Well, what I like about we're really backwards. I want to just, you know, bring this home a little bit because look, you work with CEOs, you work with executives, you work with people at the top of the chain, but the reality is what you're describing here, I think anyone can take away from this with a quick to-do list when they could start doing like immediately. Like this week, they could start meditating. They could start journaling about what they're grateful for. They can start recognizing when they're being reactive in the moment. So everything that you've said so far to me at least, I feel like has been really important. I've needed this. So like, I feel like you're speaking directly to me, but I'm sure there's a lot of folks listening to this under the same boat that will benefit from this regardless of where they are. And I really, I got to say again, I'm going to reiterate the idea that you can be working hard while simultaneously be mentally healthy. That is a very important distinction that I feel like I needed to hear. And so for that, I appreciate you. I know that you've got a coaching program, maybe just real quick before we wrap up. Walk me through what you offer and kind of how it works if someone wanted to participate. What would they get? - Yeah, thanks for asking. I love the work that I do. It really changes lives in a powerful way. I'm moving away from the one-on-one coaching, actually, as I launch a private circle, which will be a deep, very curated group of leaders who want to do this work, who also want that proximity to other leaders in the industry who are committed to living a new way. They realize that the old way doesn't work. So that private circle is called the extraordinary. And it's a rolling basis. We're kind of accepting applications. So if you're interested in that, you just go to my website, micmezoroff.com/apply. And that takes you to that page as a video you could learn more about the program. Again, that's really geared towards top leaders who want to be in the company of other top leaders doing this work. Aside from that, I just encourage everyone to follow along on LinkedIn. I share a lot there. And I also write on Substack at thecircleoffreethinkers.com. So if anyone wants to smoke my words, I love writing poetry and short stories, just to help people get into this work from any angle that feels right for them. And so much of your work is focused on investments. And it's like we have all these metrics around profits but not presence. We have productivity but not joy. So it's just like, what are you investing in? Because what you put your attention on today is what you get more of tomorrow. Whether or not someone's ready to go deeper into the work, like I said, contact me. I'm happy to have a conversation with anyone. I love talking about this. But at the very least, commit to pick something from today, whether it's meditation or get a journal and start a gratitude journal, pick something and just try it. The words don't teach. I love talking about this stuff. But the best thing is when I see someone doing it and they feel a visceral shift, then I know that something has switched within them. And they're going to bring it to their lives. They're going to bring it to their teams. They're going to bring it to everyone that care about. Because again, everyone in this industry has a huge heart. We just forget to take care of ourselves. We forget to take care of our most important guests. That's what this works all about. Absolutely. Yeah. And similarly, if you're listening to this and there's someone in your life that could benefit from hearing these words, then I encourage you share this episode with them. It's not only beneficial for them, but it's also one of the ways that we're able to continue to grow this podcast. So as always, listeners, appreciate you. This has been another excellent episode of the Hotel Investor Playbook. And Michael Russell, he is Mike Messeroff. And we will catch you again next week. Loja. [MUSIC PLAYING]