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"We should do an episode about rest, but it would be three minutes long. It would be more of a cry for help, actually. 'Please help us. We don't know how to do it.'" — Liz Moorehead (That's me!)
This week is a different kind of episode. George was hospitalized for almost a week last week unexpectedly due to an inflammation issue with his heart. He's home, healthy, happy, and on the road to recovery with a renewed outlook how he wants to approach life.
But we knew that, this week, we needed to throw out our planned outline for a candid conversation about what he went through, and how many of the topics we've been discussing on Beyond Your Default fortuitously came barreling to the forefront of his experience while he was in the hospital.
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Our conversation, of course, immediately drilled into the topic of rest and how important it is. George went on to share the lessons he learned around self-care — a topic he was previously resistant to — and relinquishing control.
He also discussed the importance of creating space in his life for the things he enjoys and taking control of his own healthcare. George also explored the previously held beliefs he had that were challenged during his hospital stay, such as feeling like he had no space and relying too heavily on medication.
⚡ Go Deeper: How to embrace an owner's mentality in your own life
But he focused on more than just his health and personal aspects of this journey. We also talked about the impact his hospitalization had on his role as a business owner of Sidekick Strategies, and the trust he had in his team to handle things in his absence.
We also discussed the lessons he hopes our listeners can learn proactively from his experience without having to go through it themselves. While these types of life events can be crystallizing in terms of helping us pivot our mindsets and beliefs in healthy ways, think about how much more you could achieve if you didn't wait for life to stop you in your tracks to see how you need to alter your path.
Topics We Cover
rest, self-care, hospitalization, relinquishing control, trust, business, self-care, health, hospital, inflammation, space, medication, active participant, non-negotiables, reflection
Takeaways + Highlights
- Taking time for rest and self-care is essential for avoiding burnout
- It's important to listen to your body and seek medical help when needed
- Relinquishing control and trusting your team can lead to a sense of peace and allow for personal and professional growth Create space in your life for the things you enjoy and prioritize your own well-being.
- Be an active participant in your own healthcare and make self-care and healthcare non-negotiables.
- Reflect on previously held beliefs and be open to challenging and changing them.
- Ask yourself important questions about your health and well-being before a crisis occurs.
Creators and Guests
What is Beyond Your Default?
What Is Beyond Your Default? "Everyone keeps telling me I should be happy, but I'm not." “I feel stuck.” “I have a calling, but where do I start?"
Right now, you have a choice. You can continue living within your default norms, playing it safe, clocking in and out every day, and scraping by to achieve what's supposed to make you happy hopefully. Or you can choose to accept the challenge of living beyond your default. Stop wishing to live your "best life” and start living your best life. Success leaves clues. And they're waiting for you to discover them.
Just this idea of creating the space. I mean, listen, we're on a podcast about beyond your default. Right? If I don't have space to rest, if I've put my body in a place where I can't even breathe, if I am living a life with pain, whether it be emotional, physical, spiritual, it's gonna be impossible to climb that mountain or reach that destination. And so for me, it's like how do I re envision this where I'm changing the tires checking the oil and making sure that there's enough coolant before we blow up the engine.
Liz Moorehead:Welcome back to beyond your default. I'm your host, Liz Morehead. And as always, I'm joined by the one, the only George b Thomas. Good to have you back, bud.
George B. Thomas:Hey. It's good to be back. I'm happy to be hitting the record button this morning for sure.
Liz Moorehead:Oh my gosh. You know what? We're gonna get into why we're so excited about that in just a minute. Although, I'm very curious to see what your answer is to this question because we always start with what were your highlights and your lowlights from the weekend? So do you wanna go first or should I?
George B. Thomas:Go ahead and go first.
Liz Moorehead:Highlight from this past weekend was on Saturday for the first time in I can't remember how long. I did not have somewhere to be. No move or house sitting that I needed to coordinate. There were no boxes to unpack. I didn't have to be anywhere.
Liz Moorehead:And so I spent part of Saturday at a bookstore local here in Annapolis called Old Fox Books. And they have these big cushy leather chairs scattered throughout the store. It has creaky old wood flooring, and everything's perfectly displayed. New books, old books, and it was fantastic. But would you like to know what my low light was?
George B. Thomas:Uh-oh.
Liz Moorehead:On Saturday, I had nothing to do for the first time in months. And I went to a bookstore and I sat down and I read for a few hours. And while it was simultaneously my highlight, it was also my low light because, George, I have never felt so much anxiety in my life.
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Liz Moorehead:I'm sure that is a hyperbolic statement. But I've never felt so anxious in such a long time, and it made me reflect on the fact that if I'm feeling anxious when I have just a few hours of rest to myself, that means I'm not resting. Which makes me wonder how close am I to burnout? What are my boundaries doing? Where are they?
Liz Moorehead:Do they even exist? And it was just this whole feeling of, you know, it's a low light that illuminated something for me that I needed to know. But oh my gosh. I felt guilty. Then I started panicking.
Liz Moorehead:Oh my god. Did I forget something? What if George texts me and I've forgotten something? And just all of a sudden, I had this freeze moment where I had to meditate my way out of it.
George B. Thomas:By the way, I wasn't gonna text you anything.
Liz Moorehead:No. I know that. That's just what panicking Liz thinks on. I know that. You you are not the guy whoever does those texts.
Liz Moorehead:You know what I mean? Yeah. So it was just one of those moments there where I'm like, who am I letting down? What am I letting down? There's no possible way I have time to rest.
Liz Moorehead:And I just thought that was something I needed to observe, and it's something I am still unpacking. It also made me think, oh, we should do an episode about rest. But you know?
George B. Thomas:That that'd probably be a good episode.
Liz Moorehead:It would be 3 minutes long. Please help us. We don't know how to do it.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. We're gonna do an episode on rest. So for the next 45 minutes, we're gonna take a nap. Yep. So just listen to this calming music.
Liz Moorehead:So, George, I light and low light from the weekend. Talk to me.
George B. Thomas:I I mean, listen. I had an extended weekend, I guess, you could call it because all of last week and this will be my my low light. All of last week, I was basically well, Monday through Thursday, I was in the hospital. So that kinda threw me for a loop for a couple different reasons. I I think there's some psychological things that were going on, emotional things for sure going on.
George B. Thomas:And then, you know, you're a business owner. You've got all these meetings. You've got these, you know, massive training that you're in the middle of doing with folks, and you've got a team that's gotta send out a bunch of emails and cancel things, and you've got leads in the pipeline that now, you know, you're gonna have meetings with and maybe close some deals, and those all have to get pushed off. So, again, just emotional, psychological, and then you're in the hospital because of physical stuff that's going on that you have zero control over, which we could probably do an episode on lack of control or thinking we're in control, by the way, in the future.
Liz Moorehead:As if we're not talking about that today. Nice try.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. That would be the low light. Although out of that, I forced myself to try to chill out a little bit over the weekend to give my body time to rest. I did do, you know, a couple HubSpot certifications. 1 might not call that rest, but I enjoy watching the videos, and and so I did a couple certification.
George B. Thomas:But
Liz Moorehead:You saw my comment to you. Day 2 out of the hospital, you're getting
George B. Thomas:recliner, eating very mild foods, and binge watching Reacher because that is just such a good show. I love that show. And so I started over, and I watched season 1 and season 2 over the weekend and just kind of let my body chill, relax, and get ready for this week to be able to just kinda get back to normal, put the hammer down, and go for it.
Liz Moorehead:You know what? I gotta say this. One of the things I love about our show is that you and I, I would consider us progressive folks, and we try to keep things inclusive us leading into gendered stereotype norms for this
George B. Thomas:My daughters are watching that right now. They're like, you'll like it. And I'm like
Liz Moorehead:No. You won't. You will not like that. George, You will want to leave the room. You will ask for an adult.
George B. Thomas:You do not want to watch it. Episode.
Liz Moorehead:Good. You made through one episode, which is usually where nothing happens. So, like, leave it. Watch more Reacher.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. They need to release some more. I'd be happy with that.
Liz Moorehead:So this week, we're gonna be doing something a little bit different in light of the fact that last week, you were doing something a little bit different.
George B. Thomas:Just a little.
Liz Moorehead:And for the folks at home who have not figured it out by listening to these episodes, I mean, like most podcasts, we always prepare in advance. We have organic conversations in that I don't know what his answers are going to be or where the follow-up questions are going to go. But for every episode, George and I sit down and he gets a preview of some of the questions that are gonna be asked. He and I discuss the scope of things that we want to be talking about, but we're not doing that this episode. In fact, I asked you if you wanted questions in advance.
Liz Moorehead:Yeah. And you said No. So this is one of the reasons also why I love this show is that sometimes we're gonna take a break from our regular scheduled programming, and we're gonna take a detour into an actual beyond your default journey blip. Yeah. So, George, take us back to the beginning.
Liz Moorehead:Set the stage. What happened?
George B. Thomas:Yeah. So it was Thursday night, Friday morning. All of a sudden, I started having a lower left, stomach pain. When I say stomach pain, I felt like somebody was stabbing me. I tried to you know, when you're sleeping, you try to roll over
Liz Moorehead:to your left, try to roll over to your right, you try to lay
George B. Thomas:on your back, you try to get comfortable. And, man, I just couldn't get comfortable. It's just a it's just a stabbing feeling, and I was like, what's going on? So I woke up Friday morning, and I had to go to a rheumatoid arthritis appointment anyway. So I got up, got dressed, drove to my appointment.
George B. Thomas:The whole time I'm driving, I'm like, oh, man. This is like like, this hurts. Me and my infinite wisdom, I'm like, do I have to poop? Like, am I constipated? And so
Liz Moorehead:If only it were poop.
George B. Thomas:I'm just telling you. And so I stopped by the drugstore on the way back from my appointment, and I got some of that, like, liquid stuff you can drink. You know, I got a couple bottles of that. I said, hey, let's try that. And so took a bottle of that, and I worked through about half of the day, Friday.
George B. Thomas:Got to about 2 o'clock, finished a meeting, canceled the rest of my meetings, looked to my wife, which by the way, I never do this. I canceled half of my day's meetings, looked at my wife, and I said I'm going to bed.
Liz Moorehead:Okay. Actually, let's be realistic here. One of those meetings you canceled was another podcast recording, but Yeah. I'm gonna call you out here and say, I was, like, how are you doing? I feel like crap, and I had to cancel.
George B. Thomas:You
Liz Moorehead:do not need to record.
George B. Thomas:And and it was those words that I actually canceled the rest of my day. I went and laid down. So got to Friday night, Saturday morning, and all of a sudden, I had this massive pain in my chest. I would try to take a deep breath. I really couldn't take a deep breath.
George B. Thomas:It would just be excruciating pain. So now I have the abdominal pain, which by at this point, I'm on bottle number 2 of the do I need to poop? Like, I'm on bottle number 2 of that. I've got this chest pain going on, and I'm like, boy. What's going on?
George B. Thomas:And so I'm taking these short breaths just so I can get enough kind of air going on, and I lay in bed the entire day. And my wife is like, are you okay? And my daughter's like, do we need to take you to the hospital? I'm like, no. Let me rub some dirt on it and walk it off.
George B. Thomas:It'll be okay. Just give me a second. So then we get to the next day, and it's Mother's Day. I'm not gonna ruin Mother's Day. So I hop up.
George B. Thomas:I act like I'm fine. Everybody's like, are you are, you know, are you good? I'm like, doing good. And we take Kelly out for mother's day and do top golf and all sorts of fun stuff. And, man, I'm feeling like crap.
Liz Moorehead:You tried to top golf your way through this?
George B. Thomas:I didn't try anything. I did it. I went and I did top golf, but I was feeling like crap. And so as soon as we got home from Topgolf, which was, you know, in the evening, back upstairs, went to bed. I was like, oh, I don't know how much more of this I can take.
George B. Thomas:So I wake up Monday morning, and I'm like, okay. It's new week. Let's give this a try. I drive to smoothie King to get a smoothie and I realize with getting ready for the morning, getting dressed and driving the smoothie King, I'm exhausted. I'm literally spent and and my chest still hurts.
George B. Thomas:My stomach is feeling a little bit better, but still pretty painful. And so I'm literally, like, waiting for a smoothie, and I text my wife, are you awake yet? And she the text comes, I love these texts. I am now. And I said, great.
George B. Thomas:I'm getting a smoothie. When I get home, I want you to take me to the hospital. So I get home. We actually call my primary care physician first. They can't get me until 11:45.
George B. Thomas:My wife looks at me. She can tell I'm just like, I'm in pain. And, she goes, do you wanna wait to for your appointment? I go, not really. And so we go to the hospital, and the journey begins.
Liz Moorehead:So I wanna start off this conversation by asking you a question. A question that you ask me all the time, usually about marketing topics, Usually, about safe things. Yeah. So you finally get in your hospital bed. You're laying there.
Liz Moorehead:All the text messages have gone out. Jorge and I have been activated. We're dropping everything. We're making sure all the clients are taken care of. You're at the beginning of your care cycle, where you've had to relinquish control of everything.
Liz Moorehead:You're looking at the ceiling. You're thinking. Where does your brain go?
George B. Thomas:I think there's a lesson before that, actually. So hold on to that question. Because when we got to the hospital, they took my blood pressure. I have high blood pressure. I take high blood pressure medicine.
George B. Thomas:They took my blood pressure, and it was a 100 over 61. In other words, way low blood pressure. I'm like, this is not normal, ladies and gentlemen. So all of a sudden, there's like a we have cardiac blah blah blah in blah blah blah 1. So, like, people are coming and they're hooking me up to these things and pulling me in the back and they're checking me out.
George B. Thomas:And the lady says, well, we're probably gonna have to admit you at least overnight. And I'm not an overly emotional guy, but I kinda got teary eyed and I got emotional. And I looked at my wife and I said, I guess I shoulda came on Saturday. And I realized that there was this part of me that had done the man up, throw some dirt on it, work through it. You probably just have to poop, And I felt just so stupid for not just making the immediate decision for my self care through health care and to just go get checked out.
George B. Thomas:And every time that I told my wife and my daughters that I was fine and I just needed a minute, like, came flooding back to me emotionally of, like, dude, why were you being an idiot?
Liz Moorehead:Okay. I wanna interject here because I think first of all, I love how you bury parts of your story. Because the other thing I will say, ladies and gentlemen, I'm hearing this story for the first time. I've known tangentially about what happened from updates from your beautiful and wonderful wife, Kelly. Yeah.
Liz Moorehead:You gave me a little bit of flavor of what actually happened when you came back. But this is something where there is a both and. And you know me. I'm a both and kinda girly. Like, I criminally will always both and every situation.
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Liz Moorehead:I agree that I think, historically, you have had challenges just maybe, just maybe, if you've listened to previous episodes, you've heard the story about George talking to his wife while going to an ambulance. So I need to get on that meeting. How are we going to make that happen? So there's that piece of it, and I can understand that. But I also think we have this tendency to Monday morning quarterback ourselves when we have complete information at a time where quite frankly I mean, I didn't think this was going to be a pro poop episode, but let's be frank here.
Liz Moorehead:We've all had those days where it's like the call is coming from inside the house Yeah. In a very specific part of the house, and this is big bad. I want to remove the bottom half of my body. Because at that time, there's no way you could have known what was to come. And the point is is that eventually you did listen to your body, and you said when I get back, we're going to the hospital.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. But still, like, even because you kinda told that story, like, I think the reason I got so emotional is to me, it was almost like, did I not learn my lesson from last time? Did I not learn my lesson from last time? Why did I just not say, hey. Let's go get checked out to make sure versus struggling through the pain and agony for, you know, 2, almost 3 days before even being able to get started on getting the help that I needed.
Liz Moorehead:Alright. Then let's play devil's advocate here. George, why didn't you learn that lesson?
George B. Thomas:I don't know. Because I'm hard headed. It's funny because you know and I know how much of a issue I had with our self care episode.
Liz Moorehead:To the point where you did not even want to do it. Yes. Yeah. I remember.
George B. Thomas:And listen. Don't get me wrong. Like, I love myself. I like myself, but I've just been historically bad at taking care of myself. And I think that this is maybe all part of the journey of understanding that, like, look.
George B. Thomas:You have to take care of yourself, and especially the older I get. Like, I'm sitting here at 52, and I'm on the first few steps of what is gonna be a dramatic life change to the way that I act, eat, think because of the 4 days in the hospital over the past week and having time to research and think and pray and just understand because we'll get to this. We'll get to what it actually was that was doing this and connect some dots, but I have to take care of myself. Self care, especially self care through health care, has to be a thing that I pay attention to moving forward.
Liz Moorehead:You know, you and I were talking right before we hit record today, and I was telling you about a personal story about a friend of mine who just had a great impact on a lot of people. And and I used your quote, and I said, you know, he was you always talk about you wanna be able to see the ripples and the impact of your life. There's a very fine line you have to walk with that, George. You know, at some point, are you just a ripple factory? Are you just an achievement machine?
Liz Moorehead:Or do you actually consider yourself it's the other side of being a whole ass human. Do you acknowledge your humanity?
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Liz Moorehead:So let's go back to my question then. You've gotten in. You've gotten admitted. You've already started answering, actually, where does your brain go? In a little zippy twist of fate, you started telling me exactly where your brain went to regret, to remorse, to I wish I had done something different.
Liz Moorehead:But take me to that moment when you were first alone.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. It's interesting because I was sitting there, and you're right. There was remorse. There was regret. There was frustration, maybe even a little bit of anger of, like, why is my body doing this?
George B. Thomas:There was a little bit of fear of, like, oh, man. Like, how am I gonna make it through this? Are my clients gonna get upset? You know? Is the team gonna be able to cover?
George B. Thomas:Shoot. Nobody really knows what's going on. I can't tell anybody what's going on because I don't know what's going on. How long am I gonna be here? This is an inconvenience.
George B. Thomas:And then I settled into, dude, shut the f up. Like, you are in the hospital. Your body needs help. People are trying to figure out what's going on. How about you just silence all the noise and sit here and take it for what it is and get it figured out and then make the decisions that you're gonna have to make.
George B. Thomas:And so then, Liz, what's really interesting is once I flip the switch of knowing that I was no longer in control and flipped the switch of knowing that I was in a place where if anything was gonna happen, there were people that could take care of me, flip the switch of, like, nothing else right now really matters. It actually got really peaceful, and it got really calm, And I was able to just kind of sit there and go through the process and try to figure out what was happening with my body. And so it was actually ended up being something that was highly stressful at the beginning, but actually really relaxing towards the middle to end of my hospital stay. And that sounds weird to be relaxed and at peace in the hospital. Morphine might have been helping.
George B. Thomas:Okay. Let's be honest. But
Liz Moorehead:Hell of a drug.
George B. Thomas:This thing kept coming to my brain of, like, it's all part of the puzzle. You'll understand. Like, everything happens for a reason. And so I just sat there and went along for the ride and tried to be the best version of me that I could be in the situation that I was in.
Liz Moorehead:Let's talk about the business side of it for a moment. Because as you're going through this journey on the personal side of George, where you're acknowledging your limitations, realizing self care needs to be more of a priority. All of these different elements, finding peace. I'd be curious to hear on the business side, how did it feel to relinquish control and have trust that the lights would stay on at the house?
George B. Thomas:I felt great.
Liz Moorehead:So to speak. Yeah?
George B. Thomas:It it felt great. Like, watching my wife and daughter handle the cancellation of meetings, and we did it basically by the day before it needed to be done in case I got out and could actually do the work or the meetings. And so watching them handle that was, they just I was like, okay, man. People people got my back. It it was almost like I would correlate it to a sense of love.
George B. Thomas:Like, I I I don't know other than, like, I felt like I was loved because things were being handled. And I sat back. I never reached out to you or Jorge either or Derek, another friend that helps us. And I never said, hey. This is what's going on, and I need help.
George B. Thomas:But I just could tell in emails that my wife was reading to me, by the way, at first, because for the first two days, I didn't have a computer. I did have my phone, but I tried to ignore it because I needed to be there in the moment with what was happening. But I could tell that people were being taken care of. What's fun is people are being taken care of past my expectations. And what's really weird is people were being taken care of past what I thought even people had the understanding of doing.
George B. Thomas:And so it really was an eye opening experience of like, wow. Okay. So I can definitely see a future where I could have a business and completely trust the employees, contractors to, like, do what they need to do. And I don't have to be in the hospital for this. I'm learning the lesson in the hospital, but realizing I wouldn't necessarily have to be in the hospital, but this could happen just on a regular basis.
George B. Thomas:Now would I expect anybody to extend themselves to the amount that they did in the need and necessity of me being gone? No. But there were still some very interesting future business lessons that were happening in my brain of enabling the right humans to interact and, deploy themselves in the right way.
Liz Moorehead:Did that surprise you? How little stress you felt about that?
George B. Thomas:It was quite shocking. And I think there's two sides of this coin. Right? Because we, as humans, we wanna believe that we're the ones that can do it the best or that we're the only ones that can do it that way, air quotes. Not really.
George B. Thomas:Which is both are, like, oh, shit moment and a sigh of relief almost simultaneously if you really think about it. And so I was a little bit shocked at how easy it was for me to just, like, let go. And what's funny because a lot of times in my life, I'll be like, let go and let god, but this was more of a sure. From the health care part of it, let go, let god. But from the owning a business side, it was like, let go, let humans.
George B. Thomas:Just let humans do what humans are gonna do and let the humans try to do and be the best they can be. And at the end of the day, when you get out of here, you'll sort it out, figure out, and go from there. And that that didn't suck. That just didn't suck to be able to be in that mental space.
Liz Moorehead:No. It was it was, on the other side of it, it was it felt good, I think, for both Jorge and I to know that, George trusts us. We've got this. We can do this. And I remember when I hopped on with one of our clients at the very beginning of the week, I'm like, guess what, guys?
Liz Moorehead:You're with me all week. We're gonna cram as many interviews into this week as humanly possible.
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Liz Moorehead:It is going to be a big old content party, and everybody had a good time. You know? So it was the circumstances clearly were less than ideal, would have preferred the opposite for obvious reasons, but it felt good because I know you pretty well. If you're not trusting a situation, you're finding a way to text people.
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Liz Moorehead:And by around, like, Wednesday morning, I remember Jorge and I were talking, and and I just remember feeling like, man, George can actually be away.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. I didn't Slack. I didn't text. Like, I was probably the most silent I have been for years. And what's really interesting too, here's another thing that happened, Liz, that I was like, because you realize people are thinking in ways that they need to think.
George B. Thomas:My one daughter well, both my daughters came to visit me. My wife came to visit me too, but I'm just saying. My daughters come to visit me, and my one daughter says, hey. By the way, I haven't published anything on social because I thought it would be weird to just continue like normal considering you're sitting in the hospital.
Liz Moorehead:Yes.
George B. Thomas:And I thought, that's some smart shit right there. I said, yes. Absolutely. Great job. Thank you.
George B. Thomas:That totally makes sense. The reason that, to me, that was important is because part of this journey has been creating the theme, the family team. Part of this journey has been trying to grow them into who they can be and how they can think and the way that business works. And to realize that her thinking without me interjecting anything, texting, slacking, mentioning, her thinking went in a direction that was a true human centric way to use or not use social media in the moment of a life change. To me was like a magical proud papa moment, but it was like a proud boss moment too.
Liz Moorehead:Yeah. Because she and I didn't coordinate on that. I only published one thing last week under my name because I had the same feeling of whether you know you're in the hospital or not. You know? And I think this is something that I want our audience to think about.
Liz Moorehead:Right? Whether you're a team leader or a company leader, when you need to be absent, what kind of culture and structure have you set in place where people understand this is how you need to act? Because what's fascinating about it is that you actually don't have an explicit set of rules for when Georgia goes in the hospital. No. But Maddie, Jorge, and I, all at different points this past week, were challenged to think, well, our tagline is it's all about the humans.
Liz Moorehead:So what's the most human thing we can do right now?
George B. Thomas:Absolutely.
Liz Moorehead:So let's step away from the business for a moment.
George B. Thomas:Talk
Liz Moorehead:to me about when you found out what actually happened.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Again, once I got past the well, dude, you didn't have to poop, so that was stupid. When I got past that and they started telling me what was going on, I actually kind of giggled a little bit and then realized that I had been given back some control, a little bit of control. So here's the deal. Here's what was going on.
George B. Thomas:I give you a little backstory. For the last 4 or 5 shoot, maybe almost 6 years, but probably 5 years. 5 years ago, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. Affects your joints. You know, it's painful.
George B. Thomas:I'm on Humira for it, and it has everything to do with inflammation. That's that's what happens is your your body's kind of attacking itself, and you get inflamed, and it's painful. So come to find out what had happened is that there's these flaps in your colon and they had inflammation. They were inflamed. And so that's what was causing the pain was they were just not feeling well.
George B. Thomas:Literally, what happens in my joints was happening in my colon. And the chest pain of me not being able to take deep breaths is that there's this sack of fluid around your heart and lungs. I'm not a doctor. I don't play 1 on TV. I'm just telling you what they told me.
George B. Thomas:There's the sack of fluid, and it was filled with inflammation. And so, it was hard for me to breathe because of this inflammation. So the thing that has been attacking my joints in my body for 5 years decided to just head in different areas. Now here's why I giggled a little bit because I had already been equipping myself with the knowledge of how I should be eating and what I should be doing for my rheumatoid arthritis. But over the last year or so, I had backslidden away from that and been absolutely loving burgers and pizza and things that I shouldn't be eating that cause inflammation that caused me to actually like sure.
George B. Thomas:The medication's there, and the medication makes it so I don't feel that much pain, but these are things that I shouldn't be putting in my diet. And so I immediately knew the road to success that if inflammation is going to attack different parts of my body instead of just my joints, if it's gonna cause me discomfort like it was over the past at this point week, then I need to double down on the knowledge that I have, gain more knowledge, and start to live a life where I'm putting things in my body that are not creating inflammation, but helping to remove any inflammation. I need to start to pay attention to parts of my body that matter like gut health and probiotics And so, again, while I'm sitting there, I start to do you know me. I'm a freaking nerd. I start to do research.
Liz Moorehead:Something new to learn. Can I be certified in gut health?
George B. Thomas:Can I get a gut health certification? Exactly. And so I just start, like, nerding out on, you know, inflammation suppressing diets and gut health and probiotics, and I just start like, okay. This is a thing that has to become and I'm learning about fermented, you know, foods and the the benefits of them for your body and
Liz Moorehead:Kombucha. Hello.
George B. Thomas:There you go. And so I I just am again, now I'm sitting here. I'm on a couple different medications to, like, over the next couple of months to, like, get it down and get it fixed and be able to, like, manage through the pain and stuff like that. But knowing with that, I'm arming myself with the knowledge of I do have some control of what I actually put in my mouth that will cause my body to not react to those kinds of things. And so, you know, again, I'm on a journey.
George B. Thomas:There's a new book that I'm listening to, so I can kinda put some more information in there. But the good part is I had some fear because of my historical high blood pressure is this my ticker right like is is this a heart thing And so some fear of that was able to go away because now I knew it was inflammation. You know, I was sitting there worried if I don't have to poop as like an like, twisted. That fear went away. No.
George B. Thomas:Everything's fine there. Like, it should work properly. It's just this inflammation. I'm not saying just inflammation, but knowing what it is then created a plan of attack for how to treat, engage and manage it moving forward. And so now you know talk about self care and health care.
George B. Thomas:I've got like 3 follow-up appointments with different doctors so I can let them know what happens so that they can tell me what to do not do. I literally one of my doctors. I'm gonna talk to them about this book that I'm reading and the diet changes that I'm gonna be making and what that might mean to my medications over the next 1, 2, 3, 6 months so that they're in line with where I'm going, what I'm trying to do. And so, again, we we get past the fear, we get past the pain. We learn the lessons that we can learn out of it and now I really feel like I'm sitting here in a let the body heal and let's start to move forward on this kind of new path based on the processes, pain, and stuff that we just went through.
Liz Moorehead:So talk to me for a moment here. You know, whenever you do go through these situations historically throughout your life, you've always talked about the fact that there is a distinct before and after difference in your mindset because usually previously challenged or previously held beliefs were challenged. So I'd be curious to hear from you as you think about the George who went in before versus the George who came out after who's sitting here with me right now on the mic. What were the previously held beliefs that have been challenged if not outright reversed?
George B. Thomas:I think there's a couple of things. The biggest one I'll mention is I really was in a place of feeling like I had no space. And I've mentioned this on the podcast a couple times of, like, I'm not doing the education that I like to do. You know, I'm I'm not doing the walking that I like to do. I'm I'm kind of running the business.
George B. Thomas:I was in this place of, like, I had this freedom by being a business owner, but had this very much feel of lack of space to do things that and by the way, I enjoy everything that I do for all the clients that we do. But, like, there's these education pieces and walking pieces and, like, everything just felt kind of, like, tight. That's the only way I know how to, to put it. Coming out of the hospital, I'm like, I need to make space. I need to make space in my life.
George B. Thomas:Like, I need to make space for the things that I enjoy. I need to make space for the things that I know that will help me. There's this big pivot of, like, create the space. I literally have it on my whiteboard, by the way. It's like, build the life you wanna live.
George B. Thomas:And in building the life that I wanted to live, I extracted some things that I enjoy out of life. So now I need to build a life that I wanna live but leave the space for the things that I still enjoy. Hopefully, that'll make sense to somebody out there. For me, that's a piece of it. But the other part that I know a big piece was, like, I had fallen prey to modern medicine.
George B. Thomas:Meaning, when I first got diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, I was, like, out walking. I was watching what I was eating. Sure. I got put on medications, but I almost ignored the fact that I was on medications because I was hell bent to, like, do this the right way. And as I just kinda got a little bit lazy and relied on the medications to keep me out of pain, I quit doing the walk in.
George B. Thomas:I quit watching what I was eating. And so if I wouldn't have stopped that, I don't know if I would have ended up here. And so, you know, there's this piece where moving forward, I know that those almost need to become like not no. Not almost. That's weak ass language.
George B. Thomas:It needs to be nonnegotiables. You are gonna watch what you put in your mouth because you do have this thing that is called inflammation that likes to just attack now different parts of your body. Because I'm not excited to find out, like, what other pain feels like if another pain got inflamed or a piece of my body. I don't I don't need to know that. It's
Liz Moorehead:You don't need to experiment. You've done that.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. I don't need to experiment. And it needs to be a nonnegotiable of, like, you're just gonna go for a walk because, a, it's gonna help you breathe better. It's gonna help you lose weight. It's gonna help you be active.
George B. Thomas:It's gonna help your mental state. And so these things that I was like hell bent to do previously, there's like a resurgence of importance for that to just be like a long lasting piece that we're paying attention to as I move forward, which again goes back to the first thing I mentioned is that it's creating the space be able to do that part of being able to create that space and make those non negotiables is also leaning into a little piece that we talked about before of realizing the humans that I have surrounded myself with have my back. And I need to lean into them a little bit more to do the things that they can do to allow me the freedom to have these nonnegotiables and to have this space in my life.
Liz Moorehead:What time is your nonnegotiable walk today?
George B. Thomas:So we may be moving the time in which we record these, by the way, on Mondays.
Liz Moorehead:About that.
George B. Thomas:Because I had a buddy reach out to me. Here was another very it's real interesting to me. The people who reach out and can can you to have conversations, and the people who reach out continue to have conversations and then have follow-up action items in your life when you're going through this. Because I had good amount of people that reached out. I had a fair amount of people who reached out and then also carried on the conversation while I was in the hospital.
George B. Thomas:How you doing, bro? How you doing? Like, every day, still people are reaching out. Hey, how are you feeling today? But I've got a buddy who was like how are you doing checking in on me and he goes, hey, by the way I get back Tuesday morning.
George B. Thomas:Let's start walking every morning. And I was like, yes. Let's do that accountability. And so it'll probably end up being, like, a 7 AM in the morning or 7:30 AM in the morning walk for probably 45 minutes to an hour, Monday through Friday for sure, and then I'll probably do something on my own Saturday Sunday. But, again, leaving myself the space to actually have a weekend.
George B. Thomas:Not everybody knows how important that statement is for me, but allowing myself to have a weekend or maybe it's sometimes have a weekend day and maybe sometimes it's actually have a weekend where I just don't do.
Liz Moorehead:Yeah. Because I was thinking about this as I was reflecting on my low light this past weekend. Yeah. I was suddenly thinking about, like, wow, George and I really enable each other. Because how many weekends in a row since March have you and I said, oh, and I'll be around this weekend if you need anything.
Liz Moorehead:Oh, I'll be up. I'll be back. I'll be this. I'll be we have somehow transformed into people who are working at least in some part 7 days a week.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. And there's there's goods to that, but there's bads to that.
Liz Moorehead:Yeah.
George B. Thomas:And and again, it it gets real funny when you know how much you love what you do, but still there's this layer of and I think I learned this for 4 days. There's this layer of it's interesting. I really didn't think about this before. 4 days in the hospital kind of taught me how to be comfortable not doing anything. I didn't have a choice, by the way.
George B. Thomas:And I just I think that, sure, there's work to be done, but there's also 5 days to do it. I think that we do have to, again, self care take that time on the weekends to allow ourself to breathe, live, relax. So there'll be some level of, like, what does that look like for me in the future? I'm sure there'll still be some work happening or some playing happening. But for me, it really is just this idea of creating the space.
George B. Thomas:I mean, listen. We're on a podcast about beyond your default. Right? If I don't have space to rest, if I've put my body in a place where I can't even breathe, if I am living a life with excruciating pain, whether it be emotional physical spiritual, it's gonna be impossible to climb that mountain or reach that destination and so for me, it's like how do I re envision this where I'm changing the tires checking the oil and making sure that there's enough coolant before we blow up the engine.
Liz Moorehead:I want you to finish this sentence for me.
George B. Thomas:Oh, boy.
Liz Moorehead:It doesn't matter how much you plan.
George B. Thomas:Oh, that's interesting. It's funny. There's a couple of things that immediately come to my brain, and I don't know why. And I maybe it's because of my previous car analogy, but, like, I would say it doesn't matter how much you plan if you're broke down on the side of the road because, like, you're done. Got a flat tire.
George B. Thomas:You blew your transmission, your engine, whatever. Like, you could have planned to have the greatest of journeys, the greatest of days, but if you're broke down on the road, ain't nothing happening. You ain't heading in no no direction. Second thing that that came to my mind when you said that is, and I think it's a Mike Tyson quote maybe, like, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.
Liz Moorehead:I've I've never heard that.
George B. Thomas:And so for me, like, Monday morning was that punch in the face. Because I had a whole week planned out, by the way. I had meetings and, no kidding, had 2 different sales calls for, you know, potential new clients. And my whole week was planned out, like, hey. Okay.
George B. Thomas:Let's rock and roll. Punched in the face, broke down on the side of the road, whatever analogy you wanna use, none of that shit mattered. Immediately, none of it mattered. I had no control on what happened next. As soon as I heard the words, we're gonna admit you overnight.
George B. Thomas:Uh-oh. Houston, we have a problem. The next 5 days that I thought was gonna be, I have no clue if they're gonna be. And so, like, you can plan all you want, but if you don't put in the safeguards, if you don't make sure that you, the human, are giving yourself the love, the self care, the exercise, the whatever it is for you to make sure that you can mobilize that plan. If you're not watching out for the potholes that are gonna be in the way, which by the way, sometimes you just can't see them Mhmm.
George B. Thomas:Then your plan's gonna go to shit. By the way, when that happens, guess what? It's just time to make a new plan. Alright. Let's make a new plan from where we're at right now.
George B. Thomas:I think that's where iterating from where you're at in life becomes a superpower.
Liz Moorehead:So this is your first day back?
George B. Thomas:Technically. Yeah.
Liz Moorehead:Technically and fully, you did make a small guest appearance on Friday afternoon, but we're not gonna count that.
George B. Thomas:I wasn't missing that podcast.
Liz Moorehead:It was so funny. Before you said, you were coming back, I'm like, okay. I've got 3 different outlines here. By the way, we now have 3 emergency pod outlines if we ever need them. Let's count today.
Liz Moorehead:It's your first full day back. Back.
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Liz Moorehead:It's the beginning of a fresh week.
George B. Thomas:Yep.
Liz Moorehead:What mindset are you going in with today? Because and the reason I ask this question is this with a little context. Last year, what was it? Over the summer, it was a different health scare, but I collapsed over the summer. I had to take time off.
Liz Moorehead:And I remember that first Monday I came back, I'll be honest, I didn't handle it well. I was stressed out of my mind. I had missed an entire week. I mean, if you've been listening to podcast for any length of time, we know this year, Liz, is a bit different from last year, Liz. But when I think about the way you might be mentally coming back, you know, you are sitting here reevaluating your relationship with self care.
Liz Moorehead:You are sitting here thinking about we talked about boundaries in our most recent work in progress check-in. In. Like, you're reevaluating your boundaries. So how are you coming back today? What is the mindset, the mentality of this first day back where you could theoretically say, well, I'm a week behind.
Liz Moorehead:I gotta go. Go. Go. Go. Go.
Liz Moorehead:Go. Go. You know?
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Well, I know 2 things to be true. 1, after we stop recording this, I'm gonna walk my happy butt outside of my front door, and I'm gonna go for, like, a 30 minute walk because I just need to go for a 30 minute walk, and I'm gonna get some fresh air, and I'm gonna just get my wits about me. I also know at some point today, I'm gonna drive down the road, and I'm gonna go get me some pickled mushrooms because I want some pickled mushrooms. They're yummy and they're a fermented and I just want some and I'm also gonna get some aquarium water so I already know that there's some things that I'm focused on that aren't work related Now with that said, I know that I have a little bit of catch up to do, but I'm going at this catch up in a mindset of I can only get done what I can get done, and so I'm gonna try to just chop off as much as I can in the time that I have allotted.
George B. Thomas:And I'm gonna do it with some nice music playing. I'm gonna do it at what I would call a decent pace. Like, I don't wanna get in the, oh, okay. Let's go. Let's get it done.
George B. Thomas:Like, nope. I already know that I can get a lot of things that I get done done quicker than most mere mortal humans. So I'm just gonna get in the paces, and I'm gonna start to do the work that I need to do. And the good thing is I have a lot of hours today that I don't have meetings. And so I look at today and I go, not a lot of meetings, good amount of time for work, good amount of time to keep me being me and who I wanna be moving forward.
George B. Thomas:So there's no real, like, stress right now or frustration in the day ahead of me. It's just again, it's kind of that new plan iterated based on where I'm at. It's let's make sure I'm taking care of the humans. Let's make sure people know that I'm back. Let's make sure that I'm setting the team up for success and, like, asking where we're at or what do they need or things like that, and and just going from there.
Liz Moorehead:Okay. Last question.
George B. Thomas:Oh, boy.
Liz Moorehead:What are the questions you found yourself asking yourself during this experience that you want our listeners to ask themselves?
George B. Thomas:Now you have to remember. I wouldn't want any of the listeners to be as hard on themselves as I potentially may be on myself. So you can re, verse engineer these questions to work best for you. One of the major questions that I was asking myself at the beginning of this journey was, why am I so hard headed? Why am I so stubborn?
George B. Thomas:Part of also what was in my brain, and I guess this is less a question more of a statement, is I kept telling myself you're smarter than this. You're smarter than this and so if I go into why was I telling myself that it's like I would ask myself and I would want the listeners to ask themselves. Why do you continually ignore what is right in front of your face? Why do you expect it to just be okay when you're not actively doing something to make it better? If you have the knowledge, why don't you have a plan?
George B. Thomas:And if you have a plan, why aren't you executing it? You know what I mean by that? Because by the way, I have the knowledge. This isn't my first rodeo with inflammation. Heck, I had a plan, and I was executing it.
George B. Thomas:But I still have the plan, but I wasn't executing it. You have to, like, start to dive in to ask, like, why is it not important enough? And how can you actually juke your brain to make it important enough before it does end up in the hospital, which, by the way, we're talking about hospital. This for you could be drinking and a DUI. This for you could be a spouse and a divorce.
George B. Thomas:This for you could be bankruptcy and finances. How do you have the education, the plan, and the execution, and the self awareness of the thing that is right in front of your face before you get to the precipice of falling down into what might be this canyon for me 4 days in the hospital. And the big question that's come into my mind right now is why don't you think you're worth all of that? And I don't have an answer for that. And that actually kinda scares me right now.
George B. Thomas:Like, why didn't I think for the last year to 2 years that I wasn't worth the plan, that I wasn't worth the education, and more importantly, that I wasn't worth the execution to keep me potentially away from having the last week that I just had. Why don't you think you're worth it? Because you are. If you're listening to this podcast and you're on this journey and you're trying to become 1% better each and every day, if you're trying to be a good human along the way, if you're one of those folks that wants to see the ripples and you think about leaving a legacy, then just realize you're worth it. You're worth every piece of education, every plan, every execution on this journey for a life beyond your default.