Wednesdays Off

In this episode of the Wednesdays Off Podcast, Stavros sits down with Dr. Carlos Garcia, a clinical psychologist and leadership coach who works closely with entrepreneurs and organizations.

Dr. Garcia shares insights from his professional work and personal experiences, including his journey from the United States Marine Corps to working as a firefighter, paramedic, and eventually becoming a psychologist.

The conversation explores the psychology behind entrepreneurship, including how internal narratives, childhood experiences, and identity shape the way founders lead and build businesses.

They also discuss the cultural pressures within entrepreneurship that glorify overwork and suffering, and how these mindsets can contribute to burnout, depression, and anxiety.

Dr. Garcia explains why developing self-knowledge is essential for authentic leadership and long-term success.

If you're interested in entrepreneurship, psychology, mental health, and leadership development, this conversation provides valuable insights into the inner world of founders and leaders.

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#entrepreneurship
#mentalhealth
#selfknowledge
#leadership
#authenticleadership
#depression
#anxiety
#burnout
#psychology
#personaldevelopment
#businesspsychology
#drCarlosGarcia
#wednesdaysoffpodcast
#entrepreneurmindset

Creators and Guests

Host
Stavros Michailidis
Stavros Michailidis is a freedom-driven entrepreneur dedicated to helping others escape the grind and build lives of clarity, autonomy, and impact. He’s the creator of Routine Rebel, a movement for entrepreneurs who want to design businesses that serve their lives—not the other way around. Known for his grounded approach and rebellious spirit, Stavros brings real-world experience, deep curiosity, and a bias toward action to every conversation. Wednesdays Off is his latest practice: a weekly invitation to rethink work, freedom, and what really matters.

What is Wednesdays Off?

Wednesdays Off is the freedom podcast from Routine Rebel.

It’s for the leaders who are done being consumed by the very businesses they are building. Through raw conversations, personal insights, and behind-the-scenes stories, we explore what it really means to reclaim your time, energy, and joy—without sacrificing success.

This isn't a hustle podcast.

It’s a call to adventure—to practice freedom in real time, to simplify what matters, to build systems that get you out of the weeds, and to connect with others doing the same.

Each episode helps you challenge old patterns, reconnect with what matters, and build a life that’s spacious, meaningful, and yours.

Because freedom isn’t the reward. It’s the requirement.

Dr. Carlos:

And then the other big part is the emotions part. I feel really at this point in my career that a lot of anxiety and depression is us not wanting to deal with the emotions that are trying to come up for us. The grief, the shame, the typical hard emotions. Because a lot of us, you know, like you said, we grew up in generations that didn't understand that emotions are an intricate part of who we are.

Stavros:

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Wednesdays Off podcast. Today's guest is doctor Carlos Garcia, a clinical psychologist, coach, and speaker. Doctor. Carlos is dedicated to helping individuals and organizations grow and thrive through self knowledge and authentic leadership. Tell us a little bit about what that means to you, Carlos.

Stavros:

What does authentic leadership mean?

Dr. Carlos:

Actually, I'll start off with the self knowledge piece first. After years of working sort of one on one with folks as a clinical psychologist, I started to really get a deeper sense of a lot of the patterns, especially when it comes to mindset and sort of human behavior that gets in the ways of us being the best versions of ourselves, right, of us achieving success in whatever sort of way that we're looking to achieve that in our lives. I started to recognize like, wow, the more you help people develop insight about themselves, about the ways that they are wired, you really set them free to take on new information that they can sort of have at the ready to change. I sort of had this passion of wanting to bring that outside of the therapy office into organizations and teams. I also started to find, you know, when we talk about authentic leadership, the second portion there, and maybe we can get into a conversation about this here today, there are versions of us that just don't show up every day, right, in our day to day interactions, whether that's with family, friends, or colleagues.

Dr. Carlos:

But there is a way in which we want parts of us to show up for those conversations. That's what the authenticity is about. That came through a lot of my own self work and recognizing that more I knew myself, the more authentic I could be for others, and the more authentic I could be for others, the better I could lead them.

Stavros:

Yeah, I mean, I would probably say that the story of my life's journey, and probably many other thoughtful people I know, is just getting to know yourself better, right? Like, what happens over the years, you just get to know yourself better. I remember reading a book. It was a marriage counseling book, and I read it after I had been engaged, and the engagement didn't end well. And I read the book after, and I was like, Well, I really should have read this book before, right?

Stavros:

One of the things highlighted in the book was the concept of psychodramas, and how we intentionally choose people, mates, in our life that help us kind of re confront issues and help us become the person we want to be in its healthiest format, help us become the person we want to become. I've been thinking for a while now that I think we, as entrepreneurs, choose the businesses we want to work on, or whatever the life's work we choose, in the same way to find our self identity, and to really kind of be confronted with difficult things. And so even though sometimes it feels like we're in a prison, we've created this reality that we're like, why did I build this business? It's driving me crazy. It's sucking up all my time.

Stavros:

You did it for a reason. There was a reason you did it.

Dr. Carlos:

Yeah. I mean, that feels really spot on, not only in my own life as I've navigated sort of being an entrepreneur, but with a

Stavros:

Yeah.

Dr. Carlos:

A lot of the folks that I've know, as I came out of sort of moving away from doing some of the psycho therapy into more coaching, I started finding myself working with more CEOs and executives, and that is a pattern that we see often. A lot of folks that come to me, you know, there is a part of my work that still very sort of feels like therapy, which is like, we're going to explore your early sort of environment. We're going to explore your attachment figures, we're going to explore all of that. And a lot of folks that are used to typical coaching are like, why are we exploring all of this stuff? Why does it matter?

Dr. Carlos:

And when you start to draw the parallels for them, it's like, oh, right, makes sense.

Stavros:

So let me ask you about your early life and what led you to be who you are. So tell us, where'd you grow up? What was that like? Did you have siblings? And how did you go from child to entrepreneur?

Dr. Carlos:

So I was actually born in Cuba, and my family fled to The United States in 1980, sort of, escaping the the grips of communism and Fidel Castro. And so we we landed in Miami, which is where I grew up. I was a bit of a wild child from what I understand, very early on in my life, just kind of one of these people that had a lot of curiosity, a lot of energy.

Stavros:

And Did you get in trouble at school a lot, or or was this mostly outside of?

Dr. Carlos:

The version that I have in my mind is that I didn't. But if I really start to get into the details, I remember getting sent home one day for pulling a chair out from underneath the kids because he was sitting in my chair, and I chipped one of his teeth. And apparently, a couple years later, I saw that that worked. I did it to a young girl and she hurt her chin. So, yeah, it probably wasn't the best behaved.

Dr. Carlos:

I didn't love school, I'll be honest. I do it and I did it well if I found myself being able to sit down for a moment and to actually focus. But I think a big part of that too is I didn't have a lot of support around schooling, meaning my parents were immigrants. They sort of had to take jobs to put food on the table. I didn't have a lot of guidance around school and even my behavior.

Dr. Carlos:

Mean, I wasn't out of control. I knew that I had the kind of dad that was going to put me in check if I didn't keep myself in check. But yeah, I was a bit wild. I always wanted to do my things. I was always going against the grain.

Dr. Carlos:

I was the sort of middle child, so I was the black sheep, if you will, the middle child syndrome, all of the stuff that came along

Stavros:

with it. So you grow up a little bit of a troublemaker. What happens next?

Dr. Carlos:

Turns out that as high school graduation is coming up, a lot of my friends are getting ready to apply for going to college and becoming lawyers and doctors and all of these other things. And I really hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to do with my life other than my brother, who was eight years older than me, had become a cop. I thought, you know, that sounds like a cool job, pretty rewarding thing to do. But there was also another part of me that wanted to sort of pay back the country for the freedom that it gave my family and the opportunities that it gave my family that we wouldn't have had in our own country. About six months into my senior year, I decided that I wanted to go into the military.

Dr. Carlos:

Not only did I want to go into the military, but if I was going to go into the military, was going to go into the toughest branch. So I ended up going into the Marine Corps two weeks right after I graduated. That was a very awakening experience to find yourself as as a sort of, you know, young man in this very sort of structured and and very tough environment away from home, away from everything you knew and sort of understood, sort of like getting thrown into into manhood in a way.

Stavros:

You talked about having a dad earlier that was kind of tough on you, and I think we're all of a generation where our parents were stricter on us. I don't know that they're stricter. They maybe had less time for us. They were more abrupt with us, is probably the better phrasing. But did you see a parallel there with the military?

Stavros:

Did it provide that kind of environment? Was it worse? Was it better?

Dr. Carlos:

Thank you for sort of bringing that up, because I think it's relevant to my story later about the environments I grew up in. I mean, it was I think a lot of us that grew up in that generation don't see it this way or might not describe it this way, but it was a very physically abusive and emotionally abusive environment. My dad was was very angry and just someone with a very low tolerance for mistakes and nonsense. And so I also had an older brother that sort of adopted that same mentality. So it's almost like I had two really strong dads that were constantly coming down on me.

Dr. Carlos:

So that was that was really tough part and it'll later on in my life. But in addition to that, I think if we look at the psychology of one of the reasons why I went into the military, in some ways, I was trying to escape home. And so I grew up in a really sort of toxic home environment. My parents didn't get along very well. My dad drank sometimes.

Dr. Carlos:

My mom was this very sort of overly emotional. They were always bickering, always fighting. And so I think I just needed something to get me out of there as soon as possible. I had no idea at the time, 18 years old, how this had impacted me emotionally and psychologically. It wasn't until years later that I went into my own therapy that I figured some of that out.

Dr. Carlos:

But I think around that time, I was looking for something that had more structure than what I had in my house in terms of connection and things of that nature.

Stavros:

Had entrepreneurship come into your mind at this point? Did you know from a young age that you had the bug to be your own boss and have your own business, or is this something that you discovered later?

Dr. Carlos:

If there was an inkling of it, it was probably being, somewhere between the ages of seven or eight. On any given weekend, would put a table out in the front of my house and line up all my little cars and toys and try to sell them. Right? So that was probably the early bug. But I'll be honest with you, Stavros, I don't think I'm one of those entrepreneurs that knew early on that this is the thing that I wanted to do.

Dr. Carlos:

I think entrepreneurship came for me as a result of having been in a lot of very structured, organized environments where I realized that the typical or old way of doing things, way leadership was sort of panning out or unfolding, like it just didn't agree with this sort of visionary person in me with that that person that has always gone against gone against the grain, has always wanted to do it my way. It probably fed into that aspect of me more, Of thinking like I can create an organization or I can create an idea that is different than everything else that's out there. I coming into entrepreneurship was just like the military was great for me. After a handful of years of being in there, I was just like this. This makes there's so much shit here that doesn't make sense.

Dr. Carlos:

And I think I could do it better and sort of kind of the same thing in the fire department, which is sort of where I moved into after my time in the military.

Stavros:

So Marines Fire Department, how do you end up coaching? How do you end up speaking? How do you end up as a clinical psychologist?

Dr. Carlos:

Yeah. So this is sort of the tie in here was through most of my twenties, probably well into my 30s, I struggled quite a bit with depression and anxiety, even some PTSD. And for years, I dealt with trying to work through it on my own. We're at a day and age where the stigma has softened quite a bit. But back, twenty years ago, here I was struggling with all of these emotions that I couldn't understand, and it went against the narrative of who I was supposed to be as a man, and that weak.

Dr. Carlos:

So I didn't get help for a lot of years. Eventually, the struggle became so much that the depression episodes got more depressing and the hopelessness got more hopeless. And eventually I had to go to therapy. Eventually I sort of figured out that there were some things about me that were not functioning right. Therapy changed my life.

Dr. Carlos:

It was the thing that helped me change a lot of my sort of ingrained unhelpful narratives about myself and the world, about other people. It challenged me in ways both mentally and emotionally that I had never been challenged. And it set me free in that, like, as I learned about myself and deepened my understanding of wired the way that I was wired, I now had access to this other version of me that was more confident, that was more motivated, that could really get through hard and challenging things. And I remember as I started to get better, I said, If there's any opportunity, if there's any way in the world that I can do, that's what I'm meant to do.

Stavros:

And I know your practice for a while centered around entrepreneurs, around small business owners. How did that niche, how did that focus emerge?

Dr. Carlos:

Well, it actually started with me working as as a generalist. I was working with people with depression and anxiety and trauma. That's what made sense to me. Helping guide people through the process I went through was understanding my early childhood development, understanding the things that I went through, understanding the messages that I was often exposed to, it actually started there. And it was later that I started to realize this is less about the symptoms that people are having.

Dr. Carlos:

And it's more about the ways that any of us struggle with the human condition. So it isn't about the person with depression. It's about the nurse or the doctor or the CEO or the new mom or the father that's transitioning a divorce. Right? Like, I just kept working with people and saw that there was more of what was going on that was what we had in common than what we had different, that we all had this story about our past, that we all had these adverse experiences that we were going to go through, that we all had these critical moments, whether it was being bullied or having lost a loved one early on in our lives.

Dr. Carlos:

Right. Because we hadn't had the spaces to navigate through these things, they had sort of gotten stuck somewhere in our mind or in our hearts. And that through the process of psychotherapy or guiding people through that experience, that people got better, that they started to believe in themselves more, that they started to trust their sort of inner voice, gut, their instinct, that they started to let go of old programming and old stories that were keeping them small. And then it was 2018 when I sort of came across some articles about depression and suicide in entrepreneurs, and something felt very familiar. It felt familiar in the environments I had been in as a military and veteran.

Dr. Carlos:

It felt familiar in the environments as a first responder and a fireman. The overlaps were the narratives, right? The cultural narratives of the suck it up mentality of not showing any weakness of the right, like no room for emotions of the ways in which we adopted a way of being that said that only one version of us was acceptable and allowable. Right. That was the grit and the tough and the motivated and the waking up at four in the morning, and that anything short of that didn't exist and wasn't real or meant that you were failing.

Dr. Carlos:

And so because there was this powerful overlap, I said, Wait a second, I know this. Not only have I experienced it, but I've worked. I've helped so many people come through it. So I went down to there's a place here in Tampa called the Entrepreneur Collaborative Center, out of which they have an event every Wednesday that's called One Million Cups. And One Million Cups, for those that don't know, it's an opportunity for young business owners or up and coming business owners to go and pitch sort of like you would at Shark Tank for eight minutes in front of a bunch of business owners and get some feedback about your business model, all of that stuff.

Dr. Carlos:

Well, I went there to talk about depression and entrepreneurs. So people are like, okay, so what's your business? I was like, oh, I'm not here to talk about my business. Yeah, I just want to talk with you all. Is this a conversation we need to be having?

Dr. Carlos:

And from that, I met a gentleman there who ran some of the programs and the workshops, and he's like, Hey, how would you like to put together a talk that shares some of this stuff? And I said, I'd love to. And the talk that I put was the psychology of being an entrepreneur. And I talked about mindset and I talked about how we struggle sometimes with different things that show up in our lives. And I really started seeing people open to having these discussions, the sort of raw like, yeah, what happens when you're going through a divorce?

Dr. Carlos:

What happens when you lose a child? What happens when you're struggling with self doubt and fear as an entrepreneur? And I was like, oh man. And from that, people are like, hey, can I come to see you? Can you coach me?

Dr. Carlos:

And I was like, well, yeah.

Stavros:

It's amazing to me how much pride that people take and how much they can suffer. And it's kinda like you one up each other. You're like, oh, you suffered this much? I suffered more. And it's I was guilty of it for many, many years.

Stavros:

I probably still subconsciously succumb to it every so. I'm probably egging my son and my daughter to do the same thing. You know what I mean? In my own kind of twisted, unintentional way. But really, I mean, it's such a weird thing to be proud of.

Stavros:

At the same time, it has its merits, right? Like, we do have to sacrifice in the present for the future. So like most things, it's trade off and balance, but it gets unhealthy very, very quickly for a lot of people.

Dr. Carlos:

I think I want to share something here that's powerful and that I find in these communities often. Right. That speaks to what you're saying here, Stavros. I used a couple of sort of illustrations to to point this out, because I think one of the things that I started to notice is that the ways that we push ourselves become the barrier to us becoming the best versions of ourselves, the ways that we push ourselves. And by push ourselves here, I mean the pushing yourself to suffer more, pushing yourself to suck it up, the pushing yourself to the ways that we can get judgmental and critical about ourselves, and sometimes even kind of nasty that version of it.

Dr. Carlos:

And here's what I mean by this: if you sort of were a scientist, and for the first year or two of a child's life, you just sort of sat back and observed their behavior. For example, around the time that a child's turning one year old and they're learning how to walk, and you watch this child and they fall over and they get back up. They dust themselves off and they keep learning how to walk and they'll fall a million times and they'll keep getting back up. Now, at the point a child is learning this, they're not continually pushing themselves for your love or validation. They're not doing that because their inner critic is saying like, Come on, you got to keep pushing yourself.

Dr. Carlos:

They're doing it because it's wired into their DNA to learn. But here's what happened for many of sometimes consciously, oftentimes unconsciously, was that that drive became very associated with validation or with some sense of association to our sense of self worth. It doesn't mean anything about my ability to maybe continue to work on this thing and eventually succeed and achieve. This has something to do with my self worth. And because a lot of us sort of develop our egos in those early sort of years, it's a very sensitive time where we adopt a way, a framework, a belief system that says, If I'm failing, that's a failure of me, not of the thing that I'm doing.

Dr. Carlos:

And that becomes so delicate and fragile that we don't want to encounter the shame that comes with failure. So we stop taking risks. We stop being bold. We stop being courageous.

Stavros:

I have a question for you. It's maybe a little off topic, but I think it'll circle back in. I was talking to another psychologist, and he said, Oh, I can't treat depression. He's like, I don't have like, it's not my strength to treat depression. He's like, I treat anxiety fine, but I really depression doesn't do well for me.

Stavros:

And so he he drew this parallel because when I think about entrepreneurs, anxiety comes to mind. At some point, depression comes to mind depending on where the entrepreneur is. But how are those different in your experience? And I guess my question is more, how is treating them different? Like, what is the thing that needs to get through to someone who's depressed versus someone who's anxious?

Dr. Carlos:

Without getting into a whole discussion about my sentiments about the field, The longer I do this work, the more I find myself having some very different opinions here. The depression often is rooted in a set of stories or narratives that we have about ourselves that are outdated. You know, it can be something as I say as light because if you were to put it on a spectrum, that's self deprecating towards, you know, as far as someone that feels inadequate, like people that might have grown up again in an environment that constantly told them they weren't enough, whether that was at school, at church, at home, in society, they have this deep, like, belief about themselves that there's only one way that they have value, and that's always if they're winning, achieving, becoming better. Right? And the problem with that is that no matter how much they achieve, it's a very fleeting feeling of of worth and find themselves feeling inadequate again.

Dr. Carlos:

And so think about it. This is sort of what happened to me here. I had become a United States Marine. I should take great pride in that. Top of my class in fire school, top of my class in paramedic school, still wasn't enough.

Dr. Carlos:

I needed to go and become a doctor. And I was halfway through grad school when I recognized like, oh, I'm about to graduate with this degree and this degree isn't going to fill that thing in me either. And if that's the case, then, like, this might be a problem with some internal system and not the system of continually achieving. Right? Being on this hamster wheel.

Dr. Carlos:

So that was the moment of clarity for me where it's like, oh, this is this is a belief that I'm holding about myself. I need to change what's going on in here. So I think people with depression are in this constant state of achieving, achieving or trying to become better. And there's a hopelessness that arrives with it because it's like, matter how much I do, I still feel worthless. I still feel inadequate.

Dr. Carlos:

I still don't feel like I'm enough. And being met with that, I think enough times in life, whether it's right, because that shows up in your relationships, in who you are as an entrepreneur, in how you write, like how you pursue your wealth, your health, everything, because it's it's the mindset. So I think that's really what drives depression. I would say anxiety is more driven by a constant need for assurance certainty in a world where it doesn't always exist. And so the mind moves into this place of trying to account for all of the places where the mind wants to have control and you want to have control and you just don't find it.

Dr. Carlos:

Right. And there's a panic that eventually takes over because your mind is just racing, trying to control all of these things. And I'll just sort of add an additional layer here. And this has really something that I've come to understand the sort of latter part of my career. The way I treat it is the same.

Dr. Carlos:

You adopted those models of thinking, either your need for certainty or your sense of inadequacy, somewhere in your life, in your early on development. You didn't come into the world with those ways of thinking. Those were conditioned into you by your environment. So if I can help people develop the insight about when and where those models that they adopted, because they're not ours, they were again conditioned. It helps people start to get distance from it.

Dr. Carlos:

And then the other big part is the emotions part. I feel really at this point in my career that a lot of anxiety and depression is us not wanting to deal with the emotions that are trying to come up for us. Sadness, the grief, the shame, the typical hard emotions, because a lot of us, you know, like you said, we grew up in generations or with parents from generations that didn't understand that emotions are an intricate part of who we are. And so many of us grew up in environments that when we were feeling sad or disappointed or, you know, we were crying, we were told to suck it up, that we were being weak. And so we we learned to push all of that stuff down and feel a ton of shame around.

Dr. Carlos:

So this mentality of, like, make yourself suffer and make yourself work harder and push yourself. As I was saying earlier, it's like, let me push all of this stuff that's coming up down and not deal with it. Like what we know now from the research is that stuff is going to find a place to live in your mind as overthinking, overanalyzing perfectionism, any of these other sort of unhealthy ways that we approach them.

Stavros:

If I think about my own journey a little bit, I've definitely had experiences of depression in my life. I've definitely had experiences of anxiety. I think most people have if they open themselves up. The feeling that I remember the most around the depression component was feeling sorry for myself, like feeling a sense of, I don't deserve this, or why is it so hard? And it was my dad in his tough love kind of way.

Stavros:

And my dad passed away, but I had a wonderful dad. He he was a good philosopher. He was a good role model. He was very charismatic. I don't think I ever discussed my emotions much with my dad.

Stavros:

He was just honest with me at some point. He's like, I can't do anything about you feeling sorry for yourself. He's like, you just gotta stop feeling sorry for yourself. He's like, I don't know how to coach you through it. I mean, think I dealt with it in the moment through just kinda suppressing the feelings and just kinda go, no.

Stavros:

Have nothing to feel sorry. I have

Dr. Carlos:

to work harder. I have

Stavros:

to get through this. But later in life, I found true and deep gratitude for everything that was provided around me by the world. And that gratitude completely filled any void. You know, I can't like, if I ever think about feeling sorry for myself, I'm just like, are you serious? It goes right out the window.

Stavros:

Right? It's not true. And so if it's not true, how can I hold on to it as a belief? I had asked you before the show, and you said that the core lie is that hustle and struggle will lead you to an eventual place of happiness. Like, the hard work you do gets you to a place of happiness.

Stavros:

And really, that's not where that happiness lies. So can you tell us a little bit more about this core truth and what you hope you can convince people of?

Dr. Carlos:

Yeah, I think it comes from, again, my personal experience. I think from a very early age, Stavros, I might not have known who I was gonna be in the world. I might not have known what I was gonna do, right, professionally, career wise. But I know that I wanted to be happy. I can sense that from a very early age.

Dr. Carlos:

Like, I wanted to be content. Like like, there was a way in which I knew that there was something about life that was, like, important and critical. Right? Like, I've I've always been a a deep sort of thinker, and I knew, like, somehow when I get to the end or towards the latter part, I want to be happy and I don't wanna be filled with regret. I don't wanna look back and say, like, I should have done that.

Dr. Carlos:

So I think when you start from that place, much of your life is driven from, like, what do I need to go out there and seek to attain that happiness? And my experience was and that of many people that come to see me is that there was a perpetual seeking, a perpetual accomplishing, and yet the happiness was fleeting. Eventually, when you sort of keep finding yourself at the same detour, you realize, well, maybe I need to look somewhere differently. And what happened for me was I stopped looking externally and I started looking internally. And that sort of led me to mindfulness and meditation and Buddhism and religion and sort of psychotherapy going inward.

Dr. Carlos:

Like, how do I better understand the self? And then like starting to one through the things I was learning, whether through wisdom or scripture or or just sitting with myself and listening to my, intuition, that I was starting to find more moments of peace, more moments of not just happiness, but of actual contentment of, like, equanimity. Right? That that I can find contentment regardless of what was happening in the world outside of. And, you know, the truth is, I mean, I just had a client, new client, came in here, you know, the other day, just story after story of how successful he was for thirty years in business and how much money he made and the family that he built.

Dr. Carlos:

And, you know, he recently sold his business and retired. He's like, I can't stop. Like, the anxiety doesn't stop. Like, the way I approach my golf game is the way I used to approach sales calls. Like, can't shut it off.

Dr. Carlos:

And I think that that's part of the conditioning that a lot of us have had that it's this like, whether it's in our work or in how much money we're going to make, or in what we're going to create, in the keeping up with the Joneses, the lie that we've been told is that the happiness is going to lie there.

Stavros:

That resonates with my own experience. At some point, sitting with myself and asking myself, Can I feel joy? Is it actually possible for me to feel joy? Everything seems to be like, Hey, we got there, we got it done, and my mind's already on the next thing. And again, it was gratitude.

Stavros:

Gratitude did a lot for me. I think gratitude is a wonderful place to start to just kind of take some time and say, you know what, I can probably count on two hands the number of things I have anxiety about right now, but it would take a million hands to count all the blessings that actually I'm surrounded with. Right? That question of how do I find joy? And I remember having a cup of coffee, listening to the birds sing, just in my backyard, nothing quote unquote special, but just for the first time in many, many years, just feeling like there was no to do list that I needed to check anything off of and that these birds were serenading me.

Stavros:

You know, they were just kind of going about their lives, I got the chance to listen in on them. I was enjoying this cup of coffee, maybe it would last five more minutes, or maybe it would last twenty, whatever, but that was it. And so wasting time became almost the best use of time, just fully in it in the moment. And I had not felt joy like that in any of my entrepreneurial successes, in any of my worldly accomplishments. Right?

Stavros:

It was fascinating. And I hope more people can find that. It's really hard, very, very hard to connect there and even I, I find it from time to time and I'm grateful for it, but I lose it very often too. I get right back caught up.

Dr. Carlos:

Yeah, we get caught up in the human experience, right? And the planning and the wanting to know and the process of attaining and achieving and becoming and going. It's not until we learn how to slow down, how to start to deprogram the conditioning that we've been in that we can find those moments of gratitude to hear the birds, to sip the coffee. Right. But, like, if we're just on that hamster wheel, it's so hard to do that.

Stavros:

I mean, in thinking about that too, I have a message for those like your client who have recently sold a business. I realized that for me, there's a period of grieving. I needed to grieve the person who I was in order to become the new person that I wanted to be. And that that was not obvious. Like that was a 100% not obvious until I found myself going, oh my God, I'm grieving.

Stavros:

Like that's and then it became okay. Because since I knew I was grieving, it became okay to just grieve. In due course, it transformed.

Dr. Carlos:

And I think there's such a power to that, Stavros, the acknowledgement of the thing that we're going through. Sometimes that's all we need. I talk about this idea of like, sometimes we just need to be heard in our pain and in our struggle before we're ready to move on. To just be with it, to understand it, to acknowledge it. And one of the reasons why, like again, going back to the anxiety and the depression, like I think sometimes what happens in this office is nothing other than, right?

Dr. Carlos:

Like people heal and get better. And all I'm doing is just holding space to acknowledge the thing that has been hard, that was hard, that they haven't acknowledged themselves or that they're going through at the moment. And it's like when you provide a space for that, there's almost like this way in which we're ready to let it go, put it aside and move on, and to pull at our agency and at our courage to then move forward with a greater sense of purpose.

Stavros:

I think the Buddhists call it naming, right? Just naming the emotion or the experience, whatever it is. But that moment of clarity where you just know what's wrong, or you just know what you've there's so much liberation in just that knowledge. I do a lot, and I've tried to get other people to do it, and a lot of people are very resistant, is that I journal. I don't journal all the time, but especially when I feel that something's welling up and I don't quite know what it is, my default is to go and journal.

Stavros:

And I'll just do a stream of consciousness style. I mean, I just sit down with a pencil, just start writing. I don't know what's gonna come out. And my only rule is the pencil can't come off the paper for ten minutes or fifteen minutes. Eventually, that process of digging helps me find what's there, right?

Stavros:

It helps me kind of uncover what it is that that I'm working around. I feel so much relief after that. I once mentioned with you as a practice, I said, hey, one of the practices I have is I talk to myself. It is a practice. And you said a lot of people aren't good at talking to themselves.

Stavros:

So can you tell us a little bit about that and maybe what tips and tricks people can use to become better at talking to themselves?

Dr. Carlos:

Yeah. I I think the reason people aren't good at it, sometimes a missing recognition about the version that's talking to them. They're fine at talking to themselves. It's just how nasty they talk to themselves. Right?

Dr. Carlos:

There's not a lot of kindness there. There's not a lot of compassion. There's not a lot of empathy. And that comes back to what I had said earlier about the inner critic, which, again, is a conditioned person that lives in our head that's always telling us, you know, we're not enough or falling short, just constantly criticizing us and and doubting us. A lot of people don't recognize, or they recognize that voice as their own, so they believe it to be true.

Dr. Carlos:

There's a quick little story I like to share so people can get a sense of how these inner critics develop. Right? And you probably heard me say this story, so you're going to have to hear it again. But it's it's about the child that goes out to eat with their parents. Right?

Dr. Carlos:

And on this particular day, the parents allow the child to grab whatever they want from the menu and eat that. So the child gets all excited, gets to the restaurant, opens the menu, sees this yummy pizza and says, I want the pizza. To which the mother says, honey, are you sure? Why don't you get the burger? That's what you normally get.

Dr. Carlos:

So the child stops and thinks about it for a moment. Oh, that's kinda true. But sticks to their decision. No. The pizza.

Dr. Carlos:

To which, you know, just mom being loving mom sort of follows up and, like, honey, what if you don't like the pizza? You know that the burger's the safe bet. So the child stops, thinks about it again, but he sticks to his guns. Right in that moment, the other parent chimes in, we're not getting the pizzas too big. You're not gonna eat it.

Dr. Carlos:

It's gonna be a waste of money. So the child says, okay. I'll get the burger. Now in the grand scheme of things, most of us can reflect back on an interaction like that with our parents. No big deal.

Dr. Carlos:

One of the things we know about parenting from psychology is that it's pretty consistent over time. So in that moment, what do you believe that child thinks about their ability to make choices? And because parenting is pretty consistent over time, they probably heard a similar message about the way they dress, their academics, sports, right? Like all the things, probably from the age of three to let's say they left home at the age of 18. That's fifteen years of subtle program.

Dr. Carlos:

So the question I next ask people is like, do you think this child, after a while, is gonna start to develop a way which he second guesses his thoughts, feelings, opinions? You know? Do you think this is a little girl that that maybe starts to impact her self esteem? The kinds of risks that we take and don't take, the kinds of friends that we gravitate to, the kind of partners we choose? Because a lot of us grew up in environments where achieving and doing our best was so highlighted, it was just the like version of us that needed to show up.

Dr. Carlos:

The inner critic that we have is just the critical voice of a teacher or parent that we adopted, but we believe it to be our own. So when I say people don't talk to themselves well, it's because they're often talking to themselves from that inner critic and not from their gut or their instinct, which they've learned to not trust during the course of this kind of development.

Stavros:

I definitely think that you would never talk to a friend the way that you sometimes talk to yourself in your own head. There was a time in my life where I realized I was being really, really hard on the people who were closest to me. I think that stems from the same place, right? The same place that told me to be really hard on myself was the same place that would come out when I would talk to the people who were closest to me, who I loved the most. I would be the hardest.

Stavros:

This really weird pitfall, this really weird pattern that repeats and then kinda gets passed on to other people and to and of of all people, the people you love most. Right? You you have this negative effect

Dr. Carlos:

Would you be surprised if I told you that's the CEO that goes and treats his employees that way? Lands there too.

Stavros:

Absolutely. Maybe there's a lot of people listening right now who can kind of see bits and pieces of what we've talked about. They're probably not happy about it. They also probably know that in some ways that suffering has served them. It's gotten them to where they've gotten, right?

Stavros:

So what do they need to do differently? How do they give themselves permission to change?

Dr. Carlos:

Yeah, look, I mean, I ultimately believe that all of the things that we've been through, or bad, like, it's it's it's less about how we label them and more about the culmination of all of those things made who's sitting here today, or watching. And there's a lot of good in that. There's a lot of good in us as human beings. And I would venture to say that there are probably ways in which your assessment of yourself there there are some places where you feel you fall short. Start there.

Dr. Carlos:

Right? Try to understand, like, why is this pattern of thinking or why is this pattern of behavior keep showing up in your life? For me, it's all about curiosity and awareness. Right? Allow that to be the thing that makes you look inward and go go find some answers.

Dr. Carlos:

Maybe that's in a book. Maybe that's finding yourself a coach that can help you maneuver through some of these things. Maybe it's going to therapy. Maybe it's starting to journal. Maybe it's spending a little bit more time just sitting in quiet thought, reflecting.

Dr. Carlos:

Right? We live such busy lives. A lot of us don't spend five minutes in the day to just kind of decompress from, like, all of the stuff that's happening in the mind. Like, just start there. Start there and trust that that will lead you to the next sort of acknowledgment that you need or the next thing you're gonna stumble upon about yourself that you want to explore and research.

Stavros:

Do you think people are scared to confront that side of themselves?

Dr. Carlos:

Absolutely. And you should be. And here's the reason I say that. Just between yesterday and today, I find myself coming out of a period of depression that lasted about two weeks. And here's why this is relevant.

Dr. Carlos:

I hadn't experienced a depression like this in a long time. I don't even need to label it depression, but I'll sort of label what was going on for me, which was like feeling like I wasn't living my purpose, feeling like I was disconnected from people. My empathy and compassion towards others, which usually is just something that blows out of me, running really, really low. Just kind of like, fuck people, fuck the world. Like, why am I struggling?

Dr. Carlos:

Motivation gone, energy gone. I had been running and just gotten back into the gym and spent the weekend just laying in bed. And yesterday, as I was getting ready for my day and just having a hard time, right, just, like, going through it, I thought to myself, this is the first depression episode that I've been through that I haven't been trying to claw my way out, that I haven't been trying to avoid or run from, that I've actually taken the time to just be with, to notice, to witness. And right, not not even asking why, why is this happening? Right?

Dr. Carlos:

Because there was a part of me that's like, one, I know this will pass. It always does. And two, I know that there's something here that I was supposed to learn or that I am learning. And I think what that speaks to is that all life experiences have something for us, good ones and the bad ones. And that actually when we stop trying to decipher between good and bad, we recognize that they're all just life experiences.

Dr. Carlos:

And that what I'm now starting to get the clarity about that I couldn't have last week or the week before that, this depression needed to slow me down so that I can see things that were happening that I couldn't see otherwise, that I can go deep inwardly and reflect in a way that I don't when things are going well, that I can be honest and truthful and vulnerable with myself and the people around me in a way that I don't when things are going well or when I'm happy, that I could experience the joy of my heart breaking. Because in that space, I can find, oh, now I see why I have so much compassion for the human condition and people going through hard things because I feel it. Like, I know what it's like. And, oh, this too is a part of life. This sits right next to sitting with a cup of coffee listening to the words.

Dr. Carlos:

This pain that I'm in right now, these tears that I'm experiencing, this regret, this shame, whatever the thing is that's arising in that moment. I don't have to fight it off with a stick. I don't have to make it a reflection of my adequacy or inadequacy. I can just respect and honor. This is part of the roller coaster of life.

Dr. Carlos:

And when I let it breathe and I let it do what it came to do, I come out stronger and with so much more wisdom and such a fucking better person for

Stavros:

There was a company that I started earlier in my career, and I I had really failed as a leader. Like, the bottom line is it was probably the biggest failure of my life and probably one that I learned a lot from. And I was home, and I had a million and one feelings. I felt angry. I felt sad.

Stavros:

I felt tired. I felt guilty. I felt shameful. You know, all of those feelings. And I don't know why, but I clearly remember having a conversation with myself saying, these are too many feelings.

Stavros:

I can't feel them all at the same time. Which one is rising to the top? And the one that rose to the top for me was tired. I was like, honestly, I just want to sit in my bed, eat junk food, and watch TV. It's all I want to do.

Stavros:

And I gave myself the best gift anybody could have given me at that point in time. And I said, Okay, do that. Don't bother feeling guilty. Don't bother feeling angry. Just feel tired, sit in bed.

Stavros:

And honestly, it took about three weeks. I mean, I had been working seventy, eighty hours a week for two and a half years or whatever it was, right? So it took about three weeks. I just remember waking up one day and going, I don't want to sit in bed and eat junk food today. I'm done with that.

Stavros:

Like, I processed it. But it was such a gift to be able to just deal with that one emotion and satisfy it, and then move to the next, and then move to the next. And I think you unearthed another lie in what you were saying, which is the lie that happiness is happy or contentment is always happy, right? And it's it's it's not there are going to be periods of joy, great joy. There are going to be periods of great connection and fulfillment.

Stavros:

And there will also be periods of of lower emotions or different emotions. I don't even know if it's fair to call them lower, but those are just as good teachers. And, and for me, it's become about being okay. And I am not, I am not a very woo woo person. You know me, like I'm not, I'm not very new agey.

Stavros:

I'm not into that. But I have learned to trust my gut. When I'm not feeling well, I have learned to basically say, Okay, like something's up here. Let's just sit with it and see what happens. Or, My gut's telling me to do this, or, My instinct is Whatever it is, just listening more to my body and realizing I live in my head a lot, but realizing how much of it is actually in the body and how much of it is somatic, as opposed to something you can analyze and understand in your head.

Stavros:

And I've found lately that you can kind of resolve something in the body and then the head kind of follows, sometimes.

Dr. Carlos:

Yeah, and vice versa. But I want to come back to the thing that you asked about the fear. Like the fear is real. I was just talking to one of my young therapists yesterday and she had mentioned that a dear friend of hers who's going through a really hard time asked her this question and said, What if it never gets better? And she said that she sort of tapped into her inner Doctor.

Dr. Carlos:

Carlos and asked the question instead of trying to say, No, it does. What is the fear then? That's the thing, right? A lot of us, because at an early age, we didn't get to open environments that allowed us to understand how to navigate shame and guilt and sadness and grief, We learned to like put those behind a closet, right? And they became these big monsters.

Dr. Carlos:

Feelings became these really big monsters that most of us, not only mentally but on a nervous system level, are terrified of feeling. Most people don't want to feel sadness because they will say to you something like, It will consume me. I will never come out of it. It will be too much. And you can hear the storyline that's been conditioned over time.

Dr. Carlos:

Because what I have found both in my own life and helping people navigate emotions is when we go in a little bit at a time, you dip your toe in, right, you come up to the edge of, you sit with, maybe not the grief, but the tiredness, right? Maybe not the shame, but like boredom. What does it feel like to just sit with boredom for five or ten minutes, Right? We start to develop capacity. We open our window of tolerance for the emotions that we have consciously and unconsciously been pushing away, and we come we become better and better able to let those move through and to flow and to just be with them.

Dr. Carlos:

That that is the greatest, like, greatest tool that's ever been bestowed on me is to learn how to navigate those emotions with less fear.

Stavros:

We have these feelings for a reason. We have them. Right? So if we have them as a society and all of us have them, they must exist for a reason. And we spend so much of our time trying to avoid them.

Stavros:

And maybe that's the real lie of this episode is telling people, Hey, give yourself permission to feel even those negative feelings. Just feel them. Let them go through you. Let them process. You know what I mean?

Stavros:

Rather than avoiding them, repressing them, saying, I don't have time for that right now. I need to go work, and I can't be in that state of mind if I'm going to go work. Maybe that's true. But then find that time to go back and visit that, right? Because if you're always putting it off and always burying it down deeper, you're never resolving it.

Stavros:

It's ultimately getting in your way.

Dr. Carlos:

Absolutely. And that to me goes back to where we started, which is the struggle. That is the struggle. And when you give people permission to stop struggling in that way, they feel better, get better, move into a space of, again, purposeful, feeling driven, feeling like they want to get back out there in the world to live their lives.

Stavros:

It's letting the feelings flow through you rather than letting them define you, right, in any given way, positive or negative. Very powerful, very powerful. There's another guest on this podcast. Her name is Stephanie. She and I were chatting and a concept kind of came up, which was what is burnout?

Stavros:

What I think she defined burnout at, which I really liked was, she said burnout is when your work is not aligned with who you are. When you need to show up to your job and be in a way that's not aligned with who you want to be anymore, who you are. She's a fascinating story. That episode will cover that, I'm sure. But that hit home for me.

Stavros:

I was like, that that sounds like burnout where I'm like showing up and I'm like, I don't wanna this person anymore. But that's who I need to be eight, ten hours a day. And in my story, I even started cutting down the number of hours I needed to be that person. Right? I was able to kind of delegate to other people.

Stavros:

I was able to kind of put systems in place. And so now I only had to be that person three days a week, six hours at a time, and I was still miserable. I was still burnt out

Dr. Carlos:

because I wasn't living with who I wanted to be. That feels really powerful and relevant. Think that there's a lot of truth to that. I think that when we finally do the work to quiet that inner critic, and we do the work to really understand the nature of who we are, because I think when we strip away all of who we're not that we've been conditioned to believe, there's a part of us that starts to, Oh, this is the version. This is who I am.

Dr. Carlos:

And that person has always been in us and in some ways guiding us. It's the intuition or the gut or your heart. Right? There's different ways of describing it. And I think that person when that person is guiding us and we're not living out our lives the way that we know that we should be, we start to develop a a great deal of inner tension.

Dr. Carlos:

And if we're not listening, I think that tension, the forces that be the universe, call it what you will, the tension just gets greater and greater and greater until you're either willing to let go and and sort of redefine who you are, what it is that you need to do, or you push through enough to get to where you need to get. When we spend enough time not listening to that voice, we start to feel burnt out. We're we're we're done because we know we're not living in alignment, like you said.

Stavros:

Let me put on my skeptic hat. Right? Because I know if I was on the other end of this listening and it was me four or five years ago, I'd be like, yeah. But if I'm not that person who I don't wanna be, nothing will get done. Everything I've built until today will all fall apart.

Stavros:

It will all kinda go by the wayside or people will screw it up or, you know and you keep being that person because you feel that the world you've built around you will fall apart if you stop being Atlas. Right? If you stop being the person holding that world up. I'd be much more curious for your opinion than mine, but maybe that world's not worth it. Maybe there's a different, better world, you know, equally successful, valuable, more valuable, more successful, but you can't get there from here.

Stavros:

You can't take the world you have now where you're that person you don't want to be. So you kind of have to take steps backwards in order to kind of go sideways and then go forward from a new place.

Dr. Carlos:

I'll take the part, the mental part, and sort of deconstruct that for a moment. Part of what you said there is that the reason the person keeps sort of grinding it out, if you will, is because of a mental model that is based in fear. That if I don't do this, then I won't get the thing that I want. But that's just more conditioning. And here's the thing about doing inner work.

Dr. Carlos:

Yeah. Initially, it was to better understand my anxiety and understand depression and understand my limiting beliefs. But you do this work long enough and you start to question everything. Like the ways I question the field of mental health in this country. Everything is a disorder.

Dr. Carlos:

You know, you sleep too much. You have a disorder. You sleep too little. You have a disorder. You eat too much.

Dr. Carlos:

You have a disorder. You eat too little. You have a dis like everything is a disorder. You're feeling grief and sadness, like we said, where everyone goes through. Now you have anxiety.

Dr. Carlos:

We overpathologize them. I think when you get into this place of really starting to question all of your beliefs, you make room for something so different and powerful. You start looking at yourself differently. You start feeling differently about yourself and what you're capable of. And, like, I've heard that.

Dr. Carlos:

Right? I've heard a lot of people come in and say that. This is what I need to do. This is how I need to push myself. That's based in fear, in fear that if you stop that kind of programming, you won't then be able to pull at the part of you that we talked about earlier, which is that thing that we were born with.

Dr. Carlos:

People are deathly afraid of not kicking themselves in the ass. Right? Like, I hear this in every, like, every talk that I give. And what I've come to see is that it's rooted in fear. It's rooted in the fear that you won't get to where you're wanting to get any other way, because you don't think anything else is possible, because you haven't seen it be possible in any way.

Dr. Carlos:

So of course I understand why people have that doubt. Like, of course I get it.

Stavros:

What gets me to is that we're talking about some of the most courageous people I know, right? When I think about entrepreneurs, they have so much courage to go out there and chart a path, for themselves, only for their families, for their employees. They're out there in the world literally machete in hand through the bush, right? And yet there's so much fear keeping them from a whole other jungle that they don't want to face. And it's been interesting for me doing this work around the podcast and about Routine Rebel is I built a lot of companies.

Stavros:

I've never felt impostor syndrome. Never in my life, I would just kind of go out. And then doing this, I am plagued with constant self doubt. And it's because for the first time, what's on the line is me, right? Because before what was on the line was the business idea, this, you know, business model, was whatever the product was.

Stavros:

Now what's on the line is my thoughts, my feelings, how I look at the world, how I hope other people might look at the world. And is that worth anything? And it's an entirely different feeling. It's one where I'm like, wow, am I good enough? Am I And all of those things that you were talking about just kind of show up in droves.

Stavros:

And the only anecdote I found, I was just feel them. Like, that's fine. It's fine for me to doubt myself. That's part of the process, and it's fine for me to have the courage to proceed regardless.

Dr. Carlos:

But I think people that are tuning in can sort of maybe hear the difference in themselves. I'm not saying that when we do this work, inner critic, as I define it, is that sort of harsh voice. That doesn't mean the doubt goes away. It doesn't mean the fear goes away. It doesn't mean that this I call it a force, this thing that lives in you that wants to push for more and for better, whether it's for yourself, for your family, for the world.

Dr. Carlos:

Like, that doesn't go away. There's a natural drive in us all. And because that drive exists, it means that we're going to constantly be putting ourselves in places and situations that are novel and new because that is expansion. That is learning. And by the very product of new experiences and new places, we're going to be met with things like doubt and fear and uncertainty.

Dr. Carlos:

They're not bad. They're just a they're a byproduct. Right? They're a part of the path.

Stavros:

Yeah. What what you said about that inner critic and that voice, right? It's not that there's a difference between you saying, I feel self doubt, and then the other voice going, Man, you should. You suck. Hide.

Stavros:

Go somewhere else, right? As opposed to a voice that's saying, It's okay to have self doubt, but look back. Look at everything you've accomplished. You also have some evidence that you should keep going, right? And so that is a positive self talk interaction.

Stavros:

There was an entrepreneur once who pitched me an idea, and I did not invest in this idea. I thought it was brilliant, but I also thought it wasn't marketable, if that makes sense. It was basically an idea for an app where he goes, well, it's a self therapy app. You hit the record button and you talk into it. You say like, I'm feeling blank.

Stavros:

And then you pause and then it plays it back to you and you just hear yourself and then you hit record again and you reply as if you're replying to your best friend. It's actually what we need to practice and what we're good at. I didn't think anybody would use it, but it's brilliant in its implementation.

Dr. Carlos:

I love it, and it's brilliant. And let me tell you why it wouldn't work as a psychologist. And this just came up with a client that I had earlier today, and we always get into this discussion. And the discussion was, he's like, Oh yeah, the last couple of weeks I've been feeling so doubtful and just kind of worried about this, that and the other. And then all of it sort of resolved itself and now I'm feeling better.

Dr. Carlos:

I'm thinking like, God, you're so stupid. Why were you worrying about? And I think all of us can sort of relate in some way, right? We were feeling anxious or worried about something. Then the truth about doubt is that clarity doesn't live there.

Dr. Carlos:

And the truth about clarity is that doubt doesn't live there. So why I think that idea would be great is because the whole purpose is to replay it back to yourself in a moment where you're feeling doubtful. But the thing about doubt is like it needs to be full of you don't believe in yourself there. That's the stickiness. That's the sandpaper.

Dr. Carlos:

That's the resistance that you need in that space to arrive to where you're going next. I can sit here in full clarity today being like, oh, I'm out of this depressive episode and now I get everything and it all makes sense. Yeah. But four days ago, I was also telling myself that and I was like, oh, that's nonsense. I can only be with you now.

Dr. Carlos:

Right? You honor what's happening in that moment because there's relevance to it. There's goodness.

Stavros:

To it. I wonder if we could give listeners some practical tips. I'm imagining a couple of different listeners. Maybe there's somebody out there who's, just starting out on their entrepreneurial journey and they're going, man, I don't want to burn out. I don't want to fall into the same pattern that I see.

Stavros:

Maybe a family member, especially if we're talking about family businesses, you see a father or a mother kind of working to the bone. You're getting into the family business, you don't want to become that person. Or maybe it's somebody who's just really successful but stuck. Their business is booming on paper, but they're not the spouse they want to be. They're not the parent they want to be.

Stavros:

They're not as healthy as they want to be, or somebody who's exited, who's out and they're struggling with how do I stop being this previous version of me? What can they do practically? What are some tips, tricks, thoughts that

Dr. Carlos:

I mean, obviously, I'm super biased here, but go to therapy. Find yourself a good therapist. What I mean by that is not necessarily someone that's going to guide you in the right direction. A good therapist for me is someone that can hear my patterns, can see where I get stuck, and through a line of questioning and inquiry, help me understand why those patterns exist, where I'm getting caught, and how I might start to make my way out of it. Now, you might find a good coach that does that.

Dr. Carlos:

I think the thing for me is like, if somebody's giving you too much guidance, that's gonna feel it might be counterproductive because it's not letting you tune into what your gut is telling you you need to do there. Right? But I also don't think it needs to be that involved, right? Like if you're struggling with procrastination, pick up a book on procrastination. Start to learn, like, what are the habits there?

Dr. Carlos:

Why does that happen? What are some tools to to get out of it? If you're struggling with, you know, habits, Atomic Habits is a James Clear is a great book. I think journaling is an absolutely powerful practice because it takes all of these sort of storylines and ideas and thoughts that we're having in the mind, and we're having to commit it to paper. There's great workshops and seminars out there that can help you sort of understand yourself better.

Stavros:

There's a million and one masterminds too coming together. Men's group, women's groups, father's group, others group.

Dr. Carlos:

All of that stuff is really, really powerful. And I think that there's a tendency, or at least this has been my experience whenever I have felt stuck, to feel overwhelmed by the like, where do I start? And I'll tell you that what all of these tools are, they're all essentially turning you back to yourself. Meaning eventually you go to enough of these, you do enough therapy, you read enough books, you recognize that the whole thing it's asking you to do is to go inward and find like, get more dialed into your intuition, your gut, your emotions. Right?

Dr. Carlos:

And so, like, maybe you start now by, like, dialing into, like, what's the thing I need? Right? I just need to reach out to a friend and be like, hey. I've been struggling. Like, maybe that's the first step.

Dr. Carlos:

But I I trust, man. I trust from from my own journey and from guiding others on their journey. Just start and just take the first step on that path and trust that, like, along the way, the people, the books, the things that need that you're looking for are also looking for you in a way, right? That guidance is gonna come and and just, like, commit to doing the work. That's the the one thing.

Dr. Carlos:

Just commit to endless work on the self.

Stavros:

I wanna ask you a question about how to find a good therapist or coach, which you start off. But I wanna touch before that on this podcast, right? The name of this podcast is Wednesdays Off. And the inspiration behind this is a ritual that I started a long time ago, which was to take the day of Wednesday off. And really what I mean by that is Wednesday was the one day a week that I became proactive, and I filled it with whatever was missing in my life.

Stavros:

Sometimes what was missing was getting to know myself better. Sometimes what was missing was love and connection and time with my wife. Sometimes it was just me going to the gym because what was missing from my life was just health. And sometimes I was just tired, and it was just filled with me resting. Right?

Stavros:

But that ritual of taking Wednesdays off was the inspiration for this podcast. But really, the ritual is about being proactive and making space. And I think, unfortunately, that's the biggest barrier is I think people don't make the space in order to be proactive about the life that they want to create and fulfillment they want to have. And they think that the space is going to come at the end. They think the space is when I when I'm finally successful, I'll be free.

Stavros:

And freedom isn't earned. It's claimed. And that for me, it's Wednesday. That's the day that I claim it. This podcast comes out on Wednesdays for that reason.

Stavros:

You know what I mean? And so I hope the audience embraces that. And maybe they have a different day or whatever they do. That's the ritual. Embrace it as much as you want.

Stavros:

But that purpose of making space that you're saying is exactly what I think people need to do.

Dr. Carlos:

Let let me share just an an additional piece here, because I think the most powerful tool that has helped me has been meditation. And that's just creating space in my daily practice, whether that's ten-fifteen minutes in the morning, you know, whatever, twenty-thirty minutes at night, but it's a great start. I think what we're saying here is like intentional time for inner reflection.

Stavros:

Naval has a great definition. It's not his. He shared the story of how somebody told him of meditation. He said, Just sit in a chair and let your brain talk to you and sit there for at least, I mean, he said an hour. Don't know.

Stavros:

That's a long time to sit in a chair. I've been there and let your brain talk to you. And then the next show up and sit there and let your brain talk to you. Then the next day, sit there and let your brain. He goes, Eventually, your brain will run out of things to tell I've always struggled with meditation.

Stavros:

It has always been hard for me to just sit and meditate. Even breath work, which is a sit and breathe, which I know is something that, that a lot of people do and is very relaxing. For me, I've always struggled with that. Journaling has been that thing that required just enough of a cognitive load where I could do it, and I still got into that meditative state, but it helped me kind of stay in the moment and just kind of scribble things down. So I think maybe just helping people broaden the definition of what meditation even is, if that's what they're going to do to get started?

Dr. Carlos:

Where most people feel that they're failing is because they've been taught meditation in way that hasn't been helpful, where most people assume that they need to sit there and quiet all their thoughts. If you've been doing it ten, fifteen years, and you've been living in a monastery, maybe. But like for us, the normal sort of folks, if you will, the general population, the thoughts are actually what you need. Right? So I equate it to, you know, when you go to the gym and you lift weights, the weights act as the resistance that help your muscle grow.

Dr. Carlos:

Well, in meditation, the thoughts are the resistance that your mind needs to bring it back to a quiet center. So that if you had a lot of thoughts and it feels hard, good. That's exactly what you need. I'll say something about, you know, when things feel hard. I think this is interesting, especially with the populations that I've worked with.

Dr. Carlos:

People always say to me, meditation is so hard, I can't do it. And these are like Navy SEALs or people that have run like major companies. People that do hard shit and you're like, okay, I hear that. You're just sitting there with your thoughts, right? One of the other things that's been a real tool for me has been yoga.

Dr. Carlos:

And I don't mean just like yoga postures in the yoga class, the philosophy of yoga, which is one that says essentially whatever is feeling like resistance in your life, that's where you need to go and look. That's where you need to lean in. That's where you're going to derive. Meditation feels impossible for me for most days. And because I go meet with that resistance, it shows me so much of who I am, so much of my patterns, so much of how I shut down when things are feeling hard.

Dr. Carlos:

It gives me all of the wisdom I need. It's hard, and that's exactly what we need to grow.

Stavros:

I went to do a training earlier this year on public speaking, and it was delivered by a wonderful company called Speaker Labs, and it was through EIO Entrepreneur's Organization. They laid out this framework, they laid out all these things, and they made this distinction. They said public speaking is made up of these things. These things are not hard. They may be scary, they may be uncomfortable, but they're not hard.

Stavros:

You already do them all the time, right? So I think the same thing applies to what you just said about meditation. I think it's not actually hard. Like, just sit there. Like, you were talking about Navy SEALs.

Stavros:

Oh my God, what haven't they done? Right? But sitting there is somehow hard. It's not hard. It may be uncomfortable.

Stavros:

It may be scary. It may be one of those things, but it's actually not difficult. That distinction helps me with public speaking, but maybe it'll help somebody when it comes to medical. Doctor. Carlos, I hope we've given people a little bit of permission today to take the time to get to know themselves and create the space in their life to really look inward and find who they are and how they're feeling and let themselves feel that way and trust that that transformation of the self, that knowledge, that pursuit of the self ultimately leads to joy and happiness and contentment in a way that no matter how many success boxes they check or to do list they complete, we'll give them.

Stavros:

So thank you very much for being on the show today. I really appreciate it. And I hope the listeners did as well.