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Begin Again is for people in the second half of life who sense that the identity they've been carrying no longer fits. Host Winston Faircloth — spiritual director, daily poet, and fellow traveler — brings honest conversation, personal story, and original poetry to the journey of remembering, releasing, and returning to who God created you to be. Visit www.myreuniontour.com for more resources.
Hey there. It's Winston Faircloth, and welcome back to episode 57 of the Begin Again Leadership Podcast. This has been a a several part series that we are doing to share my experience with ReFIREment. Now that's my term I've used to help me come back from a season of where I hit the wall totally exhausted, burned out and fried. If 2020 is any indication, there's a lot of people out there who use the word overwhelmed, exhausted, tired, frazzled.
Winston Faircloth:You know, there are so many of these different ways that we feel right now. This process was my way of coming out of that dark season and becoming back to feeling more like myself. Just to recap for those of you who are joining now into this conversation, Refirement is my term that talks about how we restore the flame that's within us and get back to feeling more centered and more like ourselves. This has been a four step process and we've been going over this over the last few episodes of the podcast, the Begin Again Leadership Podcast. The four steps are unplug, unlearn, rest, and relearn.
Winston Faircloth:Let's just recap those, the ones we've covered so far. Unplug is a process of curating our connections, our content, and our communities. These can be things that work for us that we love, enjoy, and look forward to, but they can also be some things that aren't working for us. In that episode, we talked a lot about how social media can distract us from our purpose and a feeling of peace. So this season of Unplugged, the very first step in the process is to really be intentional about those pieces of content we're going to let into our lives.
Winston Faircloth:For a season, maybe thirty days, maybe sixty days in my case is what it took, I made conscious decision to unplug from things that were very worthwhile but that weren't helping me begin to tune in to the voice inside. The second stage is we talked about this last week, last time was the season of unlearn. This is where we challenge, begin to look at and suspend temporarily our existing beliefs and ideas that may not be serving us. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and expecting different results. Sometimes we have to take an intentional step of unlearning so that we become open to that insight.
Winston Faircloth:Sometimes we just get so caught in the echo chamber or a certain way of thinking that we really can't even begin to think and consider alternative ideas. Last time I gave you a series of considerations and steps you could take to help you begin to unlearn. The example I used most recently in my own health journey was beginning to just unlearn everything that I think I knew or thought I knew about health and diet and exercise, for example, in terms of my own health journey. Those of us who have strongly held beliefs and experiences is because we've held on to them for a long time or we've tried everything and we don't really know what's going to work, and so sometimes we have to be willing to temporarily set aside what we think we know so that we can take in new content. Then today, we're going to talk about this third stage and for me, this is a really important stage in terms of my own recovery and coming back and finding that fire, restoring that fire from within.
Winston Faircloth:Rest is critical. How I defined rest for our purposes today is finding ways of restoration with sleep and stillness. We live in a go go culture. The ruthless elimination of hurry talks about how our society has accelerated in terms of pace and distractions and things that are calling for our attention. It's only gotten faster and faster, especially over the last five to ten years.
Winston Faircloth:How do we create a haven of rest, restoration, sleep and stillness? Here's a litmus test for you to consider whether you are getting enough rest in your life. Recall the last time that you woke up without an alarm. You were totally refreshed and you didn't need to go get your morning caffeine. That you felt this peace, this centeredness, just relaxation that you felt completely filled and rested.
Winston Faircloth:For many of us, especially as I was coming out of a season of significant corporate travel where I was on the road one hundred and fifty days a year and I'm a homebody by nature. I love variety but it can be really challenging to be in that kind of environment. I was coming off of that three year season totally wiped out. Coming into this season of refinement when I'd hit the wall, I couldn't answer this question of when was the last time I woke up without an alarm, totally refreshed and not needing caffeine. If that's the case, if you can't remember that, can't recall that within the last few days or last week, you may be at risk.
Winston Faircloth:I love this book by Matthew Walker, PhD, Why We Sleep. This book has been life changing to me in terms of understanding the science behind it. So many of us are hustlers by nature. We love what we do. We love our family.
Winston Faircloth:We love the people we're with, and sleep seems more like a luxury than a necessity. But here's the key. One of the things in my unlearning season that my coach really brought to my attention you know how they say you can't out exercise your refrigerator in terms of how important a good well balanced diet with the right kind of quantities are, I would go one step further. You can't out exercise. You can't outdo sleep.
Winston Faircloth:Sleep is the absolute foundation. This book has so many different examples of the challenges to our bodies our physical body, our mental health, our ability to respond in our culture without sleep. Here's a couple of there's so many I could pick a dozen of them. If you average less than six hours or less per night of sleep, you have a 200x, 200 times greater chance of having a heart attack or stroke in the next seven years. Think about that.
Winston Faircloth:Isn't that incredible? We talk about diet and exercise as preventative measures to guard against heart attacks and stroke, but yet sleep gives you a lack of sleep gives you a 200x chance of having a heart attack or stroke. How about this one? We think about impaired driving, drunk driving, mothers against drunk drivers, etc. And how as a society we rallied against that.
Winston Faircloth:But every thirty seconds in our culture here in The US, we know about distracted driving, but how about this? Every thirty seconds there's an accident in The US from drowsy driving, sleep deprived driving. That just kind of blows my mind. Now, they go on in the book to share that if you get up at seven a. M.
Winston Faircloth:This morning and you decide to go hang this is pre COVID when we could do this, right? You decide to go out to dinner with some friends and go listen to some music and just socialize and have a wonderful day, and at 02:00 in the morning you decide to go home and you've not had a drop of alcohol, you are the equivalent your attention, your ability to respond is the equivalent as if you had been a drunk driver. You would meet the legal standard of drunk driving if you stay up that long in a row. So it really got my attention as I started to do the research as to how critical sleep was. I will say that for me, this has been foundational to my recovery, my rejuvenation, this refiring and restoring the flame from within.
Winston Faircloth:But let's go one step further. This isn't just about sleep. It's about stillness. One of my mentors is Dan Sullivan. He is a strong advocate for the concept of a free day.
Winston Faircloth:I'm going to call it unplug plus here to take the concept of unplugging from even worthwhile pursuits. The concept Dan talks about is a free day and that's defined as midnight to midnight without any thoughts of work. Now a lot of us for relaxation like to read. Read books, we're just not on screens, we're going to quote get away from work, but we're going to read a book that's relevant to work. We're going to be thinking about work all unplugging.
Winston Faircloth:That's not stillness. That's not a Sabbath from a faith perspective. Yet in our culture, we never rarely many of us, even those who profess a strong faith tradition, probably don't take this opportunity. Dan Sullivan teaches take a free day. He challenged us.
Winston Faircloth:When I first joined his program, he challenged us to try to do that once a month. He knows the entrepreneurs that he works with never kind of turn it off, never stop thinking about work, never replace that work with something more fruitful and worthwhile like family time or exercise in nature or reading a good book for fiction and just pure enjoyment, preparing food, this stillness is another way of gaining tremendous rest. Now going back for a moment to this drowsy driving scenario, I was on the receiving end of this this past week where I do walks. Many of you guys know with Walks with Winston, I do a lot of walking in the morning and I had reflectors on my legs and a flashlight in my hand. It was dark before the time change and I was walking on the sidewalk about a mile and a half from my home, so three quarters of the way on my walk home and over my shoulder I could see a car approaching on the road next to me.
Winston Faircloth:I was crossing the driveway of this particular office building and I'm crossing. I got the reflectors on, got the flashlight on, and I could see in the corner of my eye that there was a car approaching. I'm thinking surely this car, the driver sees me. They understand I'm here. This is about six ish in the morning.
Winston Faircloth:I'm halfway through the driveway and I recognize all of a sudden that this driver does not see me. Fortunately, I've been training enough that I could actually kind of take a hop out of the driveway, but the driver comes within inches of hitting me. The driver was accelerating into the driveway and there I was, and by the time they saw me, I actually had to kind of leap out of the way. It was one of those slow motion moments that you go, Oh my goodness, they don't see me. I better get out of the way.
Winston Faircloth:I kind of got up. I was prepared to kind of get on the hood of the car because I didn't want my legs to be in one place that would cause even greater injuries. They missed me. The driver rolls down the window and is just shaking and I have the presence of mind to say I know it's not your fault, you didn't see me, you think about lots of other things, maybe you haven't had your coffee. Well I was almost one of these statistics of being in a US accident caused by drowsy driving every thirty seconds.
Winston Faircloth:My goodness, it is real and it's an opportunity that we all have an opportunity and responsibility to take a look at. So what do I do with sleep and what am I doing about my rest? Well, I've been on this journey now for a few weeks, a couple months. There's so many different things you could consider, but what I found to be the most effective metric, my go to metric is the amount of deep sleep that I get in a night. Now how much sleep I get, but what's the quality of the sleep that I get?
Winston Faircloth:Fortunately, with Apple Watch and some of the new enhancements they've just made to their ecosystem, this is a data point that's available to me as I wear my Apple Watch at night and I can get a readout about how much deep sleep I get per night. I was shocked how little I was getting as I began this journey, but now gradually I'm getting it to over two hours a night Now I can tell I'm becoming super sensitive to the quality of sleep that I get in a night. Whenever I get two hours, my walks are so much faster, so much more joyful. My days are so much more fun and fulfilling, and I can tell I can predict the trajectory of my day by the amount of deep sleep that I'm getting per night. So what have I been doing?
Winston Faircloth:Well, this has been like a real experiment for me. I've had really good morning rituals for a long, long time, but what I've not been as great at is coming up with some evening rituals. I have begun to prioritize this one dimension of my health more than anything else. While I have blue blocker glasses and things like that, what I notice about the nights that I detach from screens earlier, there's a direct correlation to the amount of deep sleep that I get that night. When I pay attention to my consumption of my last meal of the day and how close that is to bedtime.
Winston Faircloth:Or for me, this is something that I've recently come to understand. The evenings that I have alcohol, I get zero deep sleep. Now people think about alcohol as having a sedative effect, and I think that's true. It does put you to sleep, but it does not give me a restful sleep. Then the third thing is creating great routines around that evening.
Winston Faircloth:The other thing I've done is there's no electronics in my bedroom anymore. Used to be I used my phone for an alarm. I used the watch for the alarm and again with what Apple has recently done in terms of dimming that screen on the watch at night, it's been a game changer for me in terms of using that as my alarm. But I read real books. I don't read books off of screens when I go to bed.
Winston Faircloth:So those are three things. I've just been on this quest experimenting to find out what works and doesn't work. So let me know some of your tips and tricks for finding the best restful night's sleep. I'd invite you guys to reply back, text me at this number. This is not a bot or an autoresponder.
Winston Faircloth:This is my text number (754) 800-9461. That's in The US 50461. Text me there, give me your tips and tricks. I'd love to share it with our greater community. And all of this leads to the next step in the ReFIREment process, which is relearning.
Winston Faircloth:So once you've unplugged and you've begun the process of unlearning, you need a rested and rejuvenated mind, which only comes from a dedication to finding rest. And then once you've had that season of rest, now you're prepared with a clear mind and a desire to learn new things. This is when you can introduce the concept of relearning. So these are our final few episodes of season number one of the Begin Again Leadership Podcast. And beginning with episode 60, we've got a special surprise for you that we've been hinting about for some weeks now.
Winston Faircloth:A change of focus to the multiplier of your mission, something that every business owner either wants or needs, which is sourcing, building and growing a team that you love. And we have a wonderful interview, will be kicking off season two of the podcast with a CEO who embodies the spirit of For Love of Team as our very first guests. Season two is coming up on episode 60 in just a couple weeks. Download our next episode again next Monday morning. And to make sure you make sure to subscribe an Apple Podcast or any of your favorite podcast players so you don't miss a single episode.
Winston Faircloth:And check out the show notes for a special thank you when you leave a heartfelt review. And as we share on every episode, remember, the biggest breakthroughs in life and business occur the moment you decide to begin again. I'll catch you on the next episode.