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Manhood often feels like navigating through uncharted territory, but you don't have to walk alone. Join us as we guide a conversation about how to live intentionally so that we can join God in reclaiming the masculine restorative presence he designed us to live out. Laugh, cry, and wonder with us as we explore the ins and outs of manhood together.
Anti-Burnout with Alan Briggs - Part 1
00:00
Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast. We are excited for the conversation ahead with our good friend, Alan Briggs, but I've also got my other good friend, Jesse French, cohost of the podcast here today. Welcome both of you. Thanks Chris. Alan welcome. Are we gonna grapple? Like if we were in the same room, I feel like we need to grapple a little bit and we need to throw some banter around, but we're not. I feel like we could do that at a distance though. I feel like we could Alan, you know, we always love a good little banter. You can start things off well.
00:29
I'm going to actually do the opposite of banter and like tearing one another down. I'm going to build up Jesse right here who I was feeling good about me being a dad that I was taking my son out to Chipotle every week. And Jesse's like, cool. So I handcrafted a fly rod for my son and gave it to him. That's really kind, Alan. I bought Chipotle with points that I had saved up for my son. So I'm just saying I enter this. I'm just...
00:55
being honest, I entered this with a little bit of fear and trepidation that Jesse's going to be like, yeah, I just redid a car for my son. No, dude. It's an antique because he's turning 16. So you know, I did make a fly rod for him and this past weekend we went out and used it. And he probably casted for like two minutes and then was like, cool, dad, I'm going to go throw rocks over here. So my sweet, well laid plans are all blown up. So just, you know, that's the rest of the story.
01:23
If you need a vent to Chris, he can support you. Okay. I appreciate that. I'm here for you, my friend. I'm here for you. Thank you. Yes. Oh, well, obviously listeners, you can tell that we're good friends with Alan. Alan, tell them a little bit about who you are and what you do. Yeah. I'm an adventurist, always have been. And I do that by way of the wilderness. I live in Colorado. Like you guys love getting into the foothills. I even more love getting into
01:51
11,000 feet or beyond. Love fly fishing, love adventure, and yet physical adventure for me is not the only space I really get to enter the adventure of leaders lives with them. Specifically, mostly they're men of influence that are carrying the weight and the burden, and also the joy of walking alongside with people. And so I get to kind of normalize people's pain and challenge in the midst of that and also help them see what could be an alternate path here.
02:20
So much of what I do is juxtaposing the heaviness of our world and of leadership and weight and fatherhood and parenting with what could be this lighter way that Jesus talks about. For whatever reason, God's given me a really practical brain. So I think what's one little thing you could do? What's your next right step? And that's what I love helping leaders is actually heading on that. I call myself a mountain guide for the leadership journey. It's hard.
02:47
It's dangerous. It's no joke. You're going to sweat. You're going to bleed. But there is a way actually to navigate that peak that the father has invited us to. And I get to live on that adventure each week. Yeah. Well, Alan, super excited to have you. And one of restoration project is benefiting from your practical mind because actually, like Jesse, what is happening here with Alan? And you? Yeah. I'm super fortunate to be able to
03:15
to work with Alan and have him coach me. And so like just tremendous, really have done that for a few months now and just have just benefited tremendously from Alan's presence and his insight and his wisdom. And so, yeah, it's really on that level, Alan, like, yeah, deeply grateful for what you've poured into me and the organization. So, yeah, thanks man. It really is an honor. And I'll just say this, like for selection sake,
03:44
I don't coach anybody that I don't respect. And I really like to work with organizations that I just really like. Like I really love what you guys do. I've experienced it myself, Man Maker Project for me and Sage and the experiences of, you know, bawling my eyes out as I affirm my son, who I had the hardest time connecting with, by the way, of all my four kids. And that's the moment. We got to catch fish together. We got to play together with other men. And it was just a beautiful experience. So,
04:13
I'm a big fan of what you guys do and deeply respect you, Jesse. And to get to walk alongside of leaders like yourself is absolutely a dream. Yeah. Oh, well, and thank you both for being a part of that because I get to benefit because the two of you are working together and I don't know how many times Alan that Jesse will come to a conversation with me and he's like, so I was talking with Alan and you know, and here's what we're going to do next. And I'm like,
04:41
Great, great, great. Well, Alan, there is something pretty significant that has happened in your world recently that we want to talk about here on the podcast, and that is the birth of a new resource that you have brought into the world. So tell us a little bit about your new book. All right. So first of all, I don't talk about like a book baby anymore. Women have been like, you don't know what that's like to give birth to a baby.
05:10
to any women listening, I say it's something I was able to bring forth into the world. It's a pregnancy that I bring into other people. It's a fly rod perhaps that I've crafted for my son. But I don't know what it's like to birth a baby. But honestly, it's struggle. It's born in the private and then one day it just weirdly becomes public. And almost by the end of it, you're like, Oh, does this even matter anymore?
05:32
And it just kind of beats the life out of you before it can give life to other people. So there's almost like a theology of creativity in there, but it's no small task. But I would say this, Chris, it's been the longest and the shortest it's ever taken me to write a book. And one could argue it takes your whole life, right? You're storing these things up. But really, it's been 13 years of specifically walking with leaders for contending with them for their health before their impact. 13 years, I've coached in some sense. The last five have been full-time, very focused on that.
06:01
where I've kind of been in the creative cave with people. Nobody would know if Jesse and I had a session or anybody else. I don't go share that with the world. It's very private, it's very confidential. And so this right here, I'm holding like the rough copy. I probably should have got the real copy here, but this right here is stories, tools, frameworks. But really it's my heart put on pages over the last five years full-time of diving and say like, we have an issue, we have a problem, that work.
06:30
is set up for way more than it was meant to bring us. And so we have either undervalued or overvalued work. And many times we've overvalued or undervalued rest and especially working with leaders or high producers. And I've just been burdened by the burnout epidemic that we're in right now. Chris, I'm sure you have a lot to say on the therapy side of that. But a lot of it's just an identity issue. And I've been at the edge of it before. Luckily, I've never had a full-fledged burnout.
06:58
and I'm so grateful for that because it is painful and it takes leaders out for a season. But I've just been burned out, or I've been burdened, excuse me, by the burnout epidemic. And one of the words for burnout that just blows my mind is voluntary self-exploitation. Just like, oh man, voluntary self-exploitation that nobody's standing above us like, you have to work 90 hours a week, you have to keep going, you have to check your email before bed, you have to, we're somehow,
07:27
voluntarily exploiting ourselves and believing an identity lie at the heart of it. That's literally what's at the heart of it. So the best practices in the world you could have, the best therapist, the best coach, the best whatever from this book, you could apply everything. But if our identity is warped and we need work to tell us we are valuable, we are going to drift back toward burnout. So that's literally been my heart on a platter for the last five years. And just to be clear, your book is called Anti-Burnout, right? Yes.
07:56
This is all about, go ahead. Yeah, a lighter way to live and lead in a heavy world. Yeah. And so that's like the, we start, I mean, honestly, it's like a punch to the gut. It's a pretty negative first two chapters, I'll be honest. Here is a problem, like it is heavy. These are hard times and you're like, this guy's a bummer. So yeah, we start with the heaviness. Yeah, well, so.
08:18
What we want to talk about here, Alan, is some of the original context of you've mentioned some things. I think that whole statement that you made about voluntary self-exploitation, that is, that is the world that we live in. And so tell us a little bit about the greater context, the greater kind of socio-communal mindset that we have that leads to that voluntary self-exploitation and why you've...
08:47
of come to this recognition that burnout is a problem. Well, let's talk about change first. I mean, we don't realize how fast in recent years, even things like communication, for example, like having this high powered computer known as a phone in our pockets, how much that's accelerated change. We think about AI, we think about bots, we think about fake news. All these things are relatively new. And we have not known how to cope with them. I think about my parents,
09:16
And other people who are like 60 and beyond saying, I would not want to parent kids right now because of the challenges with technology and these kinds of things. And so, and I'm not one of those that, you know, the world is all falling apart, but like we live in a heavy time. We have to start, I think, with that. So change right now is high. Work is so unique and that we can work from anywhere, which means we can work everywhere with our toes in the sand. And so we are not tethered to offices anymore. And
09:44
communication outlets is something as well of like in our phone, somebody can hit us up with a work question. Somebody could encourage us, somebody could send us a video. We could be watching something fun on YouTube with our kids. We could be listening to a nourishing podcast. We could be watching the course educationally, all of that through the same device. And it really is like kind of scrambling our brain and our expectations a lot. And so I just think we don't even realize the mental load that we are taking on.
10:14
is death by a thousand paper cuts in that burnout is slow, burnout is stealthy. And sometimes then when it hits, you realize, man, I was the last person to see it, which is scary. I don't want to be that guy that everybody else sees, Alan's not doing well until I'm at that spot. And so I think some of those factors are making the cultural context of burnout huge as well as knowledge working, working now with our brains less than our bodies.
10:44
frankly is just inviting us back to Sabbath more and more as just literally something to save our lives than it ever has been before. Ellen, would you say that there is an epidemic of burnout? Is this like across the board more people are burned out than ever before? Absolutely. I was just on a call with somebody that works with Christian Camps across the country. They're concerned about their directors.
11:12
It started with medical field, educational field, especially during COVID. And it started and then hearing more of entrepreneurs and solopreneurs. But it's like the more the message gets out there, the more people are like, oh my gosh, I need that. And so I've probably had three or four friends. I just texted, hey, my book's out. I'd love for you to read it. Oh my gosh, I'm burnt out right now. Community development spaces and nonprofits and with the economy being squeezed is another one right now. There are lots of different challenges. So absolutely, it's an epidemic.
11:41
And we're talking about it in all kinds of different fields. And so I needed actually to speed this book up a little bit. So before the election season, frankly, the division coming up is another one. I just think it's incredibly timely that we're about to be disappointed in hopefully other people's behaviors, not our own, but disappointed in the way people behave in the cultural division. And I don't know about you, I just grieve four years ago was like, and eight years ago was like, and it's just sad to see people divided in a time when...
12:09
Many of us work to unite people on a regular basis. And so that's another one. I think just like it's just waging war on our souls and we don't realize the level of resistance we need each week to stay grounded and stay healthy. Yeah. Alan, I'm curious, you said the phrase, kind of this naming of our identity, right? And this placing of our identity into the place of work kind of in an over-mortgaged way.
12:34
Can you unpack a little bit of the technology, the developments on that side of that makes total sense. That identity piece, I think, makes a ton of sense. Explore that a little bit and how we've come to this place where it is so easy to put our identity in what we're able to produce. Yeah, the scary thing, Jesse, is we don't even realize it. And then I can even go on to a podcast with two of you guys that we can just have a regular conversation with and think at the end of the day, oh, I need to earn or I need to win, as opposed to...
13:03
What a cool opportunity to have a conversation with you guys and anybody else that listens later. And so a lot of it isn't even the context of it. A lot of it is literally the neediness of our hearts and just starting there. And to realize if we are treating work as something that's going to affirm who I am, we've got it all backwards. And to be able to start with who you are matters more than what you do. And that's just a phrase I love saying to leaders.
13:31
that leaders, me, honestly, some day struggle to believe that. And when it's up and to the right, it's like, maybe I'm amazing, it turns out. And then when we're down and to the left, it's like, well, I guess I do suck. And the reality is that we are loved so deeply. And so at the heart of this is identity of saying, like, who I am, like I'm God's kid, and I am a dad, what a cool privilege. And even in the beginning, like I probably didn't even mention that I have four kids.
14:01
And we've been even programmed to present ourselves professionally in that. And so we wrestle with that each week to go like, actually, that defines me more than what I get to do is that I have a 20-year-old that I deeply love and a 15-year-old and a 12-year-old and a 10-year-old. I'm like a bus driver most of my week, just driving kids around and keeping up with the activities there. And so for me, Jesse, it's an act of resistance to actually leave my laptop right here on my desk, close it.
14:29
go home and say, you know what? I've got more work to do tomorrow. And I've got really valuable work to do with my kids. And I've got really valuable work to do with my soul. And I actually need to like exercise and feed myself. And I'm not a brain on a stick. And so that's something that I have to remind myself on a regular basis of, and that earning and winning, it's so easy to see in numbers. Earning this contract, getting these numbers, but we need to do the hard work of measuring other things. What gets celebrated gets done.
14:57
And I think that's so crucial what you guys do, get an environment with men who celebrate the things that are deeply important, not just the things that are easily measurable. And that is vital, because we can't do identity work alone as you guys do so well at RP. Well, thank you for that endorsement. And it's really coming out of so much of what you're identifying here, or I don't even want to use the word identifying because I'm going to use it again. You're identifying our lack of identity.
15:26
Right? This whole idea. If you could give a definition of burnout, what would it be? Yeah. My favorite definitions in here. I'm actually going to read them to you. Go for it. I asked people who had burned out before and I went, Oh my goodness. Those are actually better than the clinical definitions here. So I shared voluntary self-exploitation. I think that voluntary piece is key. Some use compassion fatigue in that, especially in spaces where we are responsible for people and results.
15:55
Think about that, we're responsible for people and results. That burnout tends to come from people. But folks who had experienced burnout said this, emptier than empty, running at 8,000 RPMs with no true sense of any measurable progress, freezer burn, full yet completely empty, ice skating uphill, a complete lack of care that I no longer really care. I'm only laughing because it's sad. Drowning, the pain of knowing you will never be able to get ahead.
16:24
And I just like, that stuff's more valuable than the experts. Like, man, brutal. So that's what I would say is all of those things and that internal feeling of more simply will not be enough. And it's often accompanied by cynicism as well. Yeah. Oh, I can feel that inside of me. The cynicism of it's just never going to change. No one even cares. No matter how much I can do, What does it matter? What is it? Yeah. All of the.
16:52
The cynicism that then tips over into apathy, but that lasts for five minutes because the next thing needs to get done. And so, wow. Wow.