Learn how to boost productivity with Alan Stein Jr. Tune in and overcome burnout, stress, and stagnation.
Alan Stein Jr., former performance coach for NBA players turned author, joins us on the podcast this week. Everyone always wants to know how to improve their productivity and efficiency when it comes to working or just living life. Alan and I discuss ways to avoid burnout, beat stagnation, and manage your stress that will ultimately lead to you becoming a more productive version of yourself. Follow what Alan says and I am 100% positive that you will find yourself reaching your peak performance!
Alan Stein, Jr. is an experienced keynote speaker and author. At his core, he’s a performance coach with a passion for helping others change behaviors. He spent 15+ years working with the highest performing basketball players on the planet (including NBA superstars Kevin Durant, Steph Curry, and Kobe Bryant). Through his customized programs, he transfers his unique expertise to maximize both individual and organizational performance. Alan is a dynamic storyteller who delivers practical, actionable lessons that can be implemented immediately. He teaches proven principles on how to utilize the same approaches in business that elite athletes use to perform at a world-class level. His previous clients include American Express, Pepsi, Sabra, Starbucks, Charles Schwab, and Penn State Football, and many more. The strategies from Alan’s book, Raise Your Game: High Performance Secrets from the Best of the Best, are implemented by both corporate and sports teams around world.
ALAN'S BOOK - https://strongerteam.com/raiseyourgame/
ALAN'S BLOG - https://alansteinjr.com/blog/
ALAN'S WEBSITE - https://strongerteam.com/
ALAN'S COACHING - https://strongerteam.com/coaching/
ALAN's SOCIALS
LINKED IN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-stein-jr/
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/AlanSteinJr
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/alansteinjr/
YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/c/AlanSteinJr
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Everyone always wants to know how to improve their productivity and efficiency when it comes to working or just living life. Alan Stein Jr. and I discuss ways to avoid burnout, beat stagnation, and manage your stress that will ultimately lead to you becoming a more productive version of yourself. Follow what Alan says and I am 100% positive that you will find yourself reaching your peak performance!
I am excited for this episode. I have a returning guest, Alan Stein Jr., with me. He is back by popular demand. He was on Episode 54. At that time, he wrote a book called Raise Your Game. He was a high-performance coach for a lot of the NBA superstars like Kobe Bryant, Stephen Curry, and Kevin Durant. He talked about how to reach peak performance in Episode 54.
He has written a new book called Sustain Your Game: High-Performance Keys to Manage Stress, Avoid Stagnation, and Beat Burnout. We are going to dive into how to manage stress, avoid stagnation, and beat burnout. If you have reached any level of achievement, you could be in one of these areas. You might have stress day to day in your life. You are on this plateau or stagnation in your life, or maybe you are completely burned out and don't know why. We are going to dive into those with Alan Stein Jr.
Before I do that, make sure you guys go over to YouTube, subscribe to our Iron Deep Channel, and go over to the website IronDeep.com. If you are still interested, we still have a couple more signups available for the Men's Awakening Retreat on September 25th, 2023. It's in the Rocky Mountains, 26,000 square foot log cabin, rented out by 30 max guys, business owners. We are all getting together. We are all talking about our identity, purpose, and legacy. We are digging into our faith in Jesus Christ. That's what we are going to be doing there. I want to introduce you to the one and only Alan Stein Jr. What's going on, Alan?
Not much. It's great to be with you again.
I’m excited. If you are reading this, check out Episode 54 of the show. I interviewed Alan about his first book called Raise Your Game. We talked about how to reach peak performance. Alan has been working with top basketball superstars in the world, like Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, and Kobe Bryant, and how they practice their self-discipline.
He talked about the unseen hours. He talked about how we see their superstar doing all these crazy basketball things on the TV or live, but it's the unseen hours that get them to be these superstars. I love your story about Kobe Bryant. He never gets bored with the basics. If you want to read how to reach peak performance, check out Episode 54.
Alan got a new book. We are going to talk about it now. This is called Sustain Your Game. This is interesting for me because I work with a lot of successful people, people who have reached a certain level of success in the business world, but a lot of them end up in a spot or in a season where something is going on. They are lethargic and have lost some of their edge. They are not as hungry. They experience burnout. That's what we are going to talk about in your new book, Sustain Your Game: High-Performance Keys to Manage Stress, Avoid Stagnation, And Beat Burnout. Let's get us started. Why did you write this book? Start us there.
I'm always writing a book that mirrors what I'm going through in my own life. In essence, I'm writing the book I need to read myself. I find it liberating and therapeutic to write, research, and formulate ideas around the things I'm struggling with. The first disclaimer I want to make is whatever I share on the page in Raise Your Game or Sustain Your Game and whatever I share on stage doing keynotes and workshops. These aren't things I have mastered.
I'm still a student. These are things that I still am challenged by. I have found some strategies, lessons, and approaches that have allowed me to make progress. I'm proud of the path I'm on, but I want to make sure that everybody knows that I haven't mastered this stuff yet. What I found from the Raise Your Game analogy is being on that climb to reach the proverbial mountaintop.
I believe I will be on that climb for the rest of my life. However, I started realizing over the last couple of years that there are some nuanced differences between what you need to do to reach the proverbial mountaintop and what you need to do to stay there and still have high levels of joy and fulfillment to sustain excellence and high performance.
It became clear to me that the three traits that undermine that are stress, stagnation, and burnout. I'm no stranger to those three. I have experienced different levels of those periodically throughout my life. As I said before, they are not things I have mastered. I would never sit here and tell you that I never get stressed, but I now have a framework and a mindset that allow me to lower my stress and feel stress less consistently and less frequently than at any other time previously in my life. I feel like I'm going in the right direction. That's the reason for the book to hopefully set others on the path and put them in the right direction.
This is such a great book because I have been in that season of high stress. I went through a lot of these feelings that you were talking about burnout, losing the hunger, losing the edge, feeling the anxiety, and the worry of all these different things. Let's dive in. Let's start with stress. What do you do to manage and battle your day-to-day stress? You dove into a lot of different things. I can bring up some of those things. Let's start managing your day-to-day stress. You talked about how you have come up with a strategy and a system when you feel stress coming on. What did you see in yourself and other high performers in your life?
When I look back on my several years of life experience and existence, I can think of a handful of these lightning bolt a-ha moments when someone said something to me or I read, watched, or listened to something that immediately changed my perspective and put me on a different path. One of those was when I was listening to a podcast interview with a gentleman named Eckhart Tolle, who is a modern-day philosopher. I don't know that you can categorize him as any one thing, but I'm a huge fan of Eckhart's work.
He said something that hit me like a ton of bricks. He said, “Stress is our desire for things to be different than they are in the present moment.” For whatever reason, that resonated with me at that moment in time when I heard that because the unconscious message underlying what he was saying was that stress is a choice. We are choosing to be stressed because we wish things were different than they were. In essence, we are pushing against reality and fighting against what is.
That completely changed my framework of how I was viewing stress, because previously, like many people, I was viewing circumstances, events, and what people say and do as the causes of my stress. When I was feeling stressed, it was because the outside world was imposing itself on me. I hear Eckhart saying, “No, it's not these forces that are causing you stress, circumstances, and events. It's your resistance to them that is causing the stress.”
The first step to me learning how to manage and lower my stress is having a level of acceptance and saying, “These things that are going on are going on. They might not be to my liking or choosing. They certainly might not be my preference, but they are what's happening and me pushing against, resisting, or fighting that is futile.”
Anytime you try to fight against reality, that is a fight you will lose 100% of the time. Learning how to accept, and instead of putting your energy into fighting against these outside forces, you put them into intentional, thoughtful responses that will allow you to move forward and improve your situation. It's an absolute game-changer.
The muscle I have been working on these last couple of years is when things happen that used to stress me out. I learned to have a certain level of surrender and acceptance and choose a response that will move me forward. These things happen as frequently and often as they used to under the previous paradigm. I no longer give them the power and control to stress me out. I choose not to push against that. That has been an absolute game-changer. I don't know any other way to describe it.
We all know that we can't control some of the outside circumstances of our lives. We can only control our response and how we respond to those outside circumstances. You talk about that in your book, “You can only control some of the controllables.” What you start to focus on is what you can control, and you can control your response. I know Eckhart Tolle wrote a book. I forget what it was called. It was about being present, the power of the moment, or something like that.
It’s The Power of Now.
I read that as well. You talk about this in your book. How powerful was it for you to take a step back and reflect to center yourself to be more in the moment and present, even on this show? We are on our game in this type of setting because I have to be. I have to be on my game, but other times, my mind's thinking about 4 or 5 different things. I have trouble being in the moment. You talk about this in your book. Any strategy or tips on what you do to refocus yourself to be in that present moment?
That is one of my biggest challenges still to date, even though this is something I have been aware of for years now, even during the writing of Raise Your Game, was the importance of being in the present moment. There are still times when my mind is squirrel-like. I'm trying to think of several different things. I have tried to get better at reducing the times when I'm trying to multitask and give several things my attention at the same time. I'm making progress. That's what's always most important.
I was wise enough to throw out the ideal of perfection several years ago. I don't believe perfection is attainable. Even if it is momentarily, it's certainly not sustainable. For me, I'm much more inspired by progress. I don't mean to keep patting myself on the back, but I am consistently present more often now than I have ever been at any other time in my life. I consistently manage stress better now than at any time in my life. I'm not sticking a fork in the ground and saying, “I'm done.” I hope that if you have me on your show 2 or 20 years from now, I will be able to make the same claim then that in that time, I will be handling stress better and I will be present more consistently than I am now because it's a constant evolution.
The key is awareness. Awareness is always the first step because you will never fix something you are oblivious to, and you will never improve something you are unaware of. The first step to becoming present is having an awareness of when you are not present, your mind wanders, distracted, or when you should be paying attention to the person in front of you, but you are distracted by your phone, or you are thinking about something that you have to do later that day.
Having the awareness and practicing the skill of being aware of when you are not present is what will allow you to course-correct, dial back in, and get present. For context, I believe in learning from the past and preparing for the future. I don't believe in living in either one of those spaces and spending too much time or emotional currency in either space. In most of my faculties, I want to be in the present moment.
During a conversation like this, I want to block everything else out. You and I can be fully present together to deliver as much value to your readers as possible. As soon as this call is over, whatever is next on my agenda, I want to give that my full, undivided attention. Whether it's creating a video or writing a social post, it's another call, picking my kids up and taking them out to lunch, or whatever's next on my agenda, I want to be all in and all there at that moment. That takes practice and constant recalibration. There are many times throughout the day that I catch myself being not present and try to refocus that lens.
Sometimes, we pick and choose what those present moments are like. This is easy. We know people are reading, but when you pick your kids up from school, sometimes that's when we drift into the not-present. We are thinking about all these different things. You talk about preparing for the future. How important is it for you to prepare yourself to be focused and present? How much does that play in your life? What does your life look like when you are preparing to be present? That plays a huge part. If we go and coast, we are not present. What do you do to prepare yourself to be present in the moment?
I often speak in quotes because, for whatever reason, the way certain people arrange certain words resonates strongly with me. A previous mentor who's still a friend to this day said something a long time ago that's always stuck with me. He said, “You need to make preparation your separation. Make your ability to prepare one of the things that give you a competitive advantage and one of the things that adds value to your life.” I take that whole seriously.
As a keynote speaker, I do a tremendous amount of due diligence and preparation to customize every keynote or workshop for every client I work with, from doing my due diligence on the actual attendees and the industry and getting down terminology to the preparation of rehearsing the customized program. I do that all of the time. I want to have the same preparation for each area of my life.
What's fascinating about the future, and we all know this intuitively, is it's important we bring it to a conscious and intellectual level and remember that the future doesn't exist outside of our minds and language. We can use future-based language, and all of us can have mental imagery, visualize, and predict what we believe the future will look like. If we are all being honest with ourselves, none of us can predict the future. Neither you, me, nor any one of your readers can even accurately say what's going to happen later now, much less next week, next month, or next year.
That also provides a certain level of uncertainty. As human beings, we crave certainty as a protection mechanism. We like to think we can predict the future. On some level, similar to my surrender of letting go of what's going on in the outside world, I'm learning to let go of this constant need to know what's going to happen and what the future's going to look like. That is unsettling and challenging.
That’s another one of the things we can add to the list that challenges me to this day acknowledging when it comes to the future. I don't know what's going to happen. However, I can still take steps now to position myself and life to work out rather favorably in the future. I try to make decisions that are in alignment with the person that I'm hoping to become.
For me, it's important, whether you are talking about the 46-year-old Alan, the 56-year-old Alan, or even the 86-year-old Alan, I want him to be physically, mentally, and emotionally fit. I want him to be doing work he considers meaningful and in service to other people. I want him to have a strong, deep, loving connection with his children, family, and friends.
If that's the person I want to be in the future, I need to make decisions in the present moment that are in alignment with that. Every decision I make in my life, from what I'm going to eat for lunch to who I follow on Instagram to what I watch on Netflix, I ask myself, “Is this in alignment with becoming that person?” The beautiful part is it lays the foundation and bricks for that future Alan, but it does so in the present time.
There's a reason that I'm physically, mentally, and emotionally fit. Relatively speaking, there's a reason now, in the present day time, I'm doing work I consider meaningful and in service to others. There's a reason present-day Alan has a great relationship with his children, family, and friends. It's because those are the decisions I make on a daily basis.
The way we create our future, even though we can't predict it, is by the decisions we make in the present day. That's my goal. Every single day of my life is to consistently make good decisions, and on the times when I don't because I'm human and fallible. When I have a lapse in judgment or make a boneheaded decision, I say or do something I wish I had a mulligan on. I have also learned to give myself some grace and permission to be human, make mistakes, and learn to move to the next play. I'm not looking to live a perfect day. I'm looking to consistently make good decisions as often as I can.
You are diving into many things to hit home with me. You talk about in your book that you go into energy management. I want to talk about that a little bit again. Energy management is something that can help our stress levels. You talked about a story about someone who was giving a presentation on a color-coded life. I heard about this one time and thought it was cool. You saw someone's schedule and calendar. They had these different colors on their schedule, coded in different ways and fashions. Can you talk about that? Have you done that in your own life? Drive that story a little bit.
That was Coach Buzz Williams, a tremendous college basketball coach. He’s somebody I have respected and revered for a lot of years. I have had a chance to interact with him on a few occasions. He’s a great guy. He is meticulous down to the minute in how he allocates every single day. I was fascinated by that. I saw value in that approach.
One of the things that is important for anybody in this self-development, self-care, personal development world that we all live in. My job title is Corporate Keynote Speaker. My clients are businesses that bring me in to help individual and organizational performance. However, from a consumption standpoint, Alan Stein Jr., I'm always consuming stuff in the self-care, self-development, and personal development space.
Before we hit record, you and I were talking about the Ed Myllet Show, which is a pool that he swims in quite often. Sometimes, to the detriment of that space, people often imply that there's only one way to do things. People often have this attitude like, “I color code every single minute of my day. You should, too. I get up at 4:30 every morning to lift weights, meditate, and drink a green smoothie. You should, too.”
I certainly hope that nothing in my work makes that implication because I don't believe that there's one way for any of this. What I like doing is researching, learning, and exposing myself to as many different tools, paradigms, perspectives, and ways of doing things as possible. I run it through my filter. I figure out what works well for me.
The Buzz Williams approach of color coding every minute of your day, I found fascinating. It works tremendously well for Coach Williams and maybe some others, but I'm not that granular in my day. I work better in some block frameworks. Here's a framework of how I'd like to spend the first hour of my day tomorrow. Here's some time blocked off to do some things work-related, calls and podcasts. Here's how I want to wind down at the end of the day, but I don't have these things measured out to the minute.
His framework works great for him. Mine works well for me. Yours might be something in between the two of us. Who knows where all of your readers are? They could be anywhere on that spectrum. What's most important is not clinging to our approaches but being open to learning from others, potentially even trying other ways of doing things, and seeing what works. If getting up at 4:30 in the morning, meditating, drinking green smoothies, and lifting weights work for you, it is wonderful. Do it. If it doesn't, you find a different approach. To me, that's what's most important.
To answer your original question, all of this falls under the umbrella of both time and energy management. Time is something arguably our most precious resource because it's not renewable. I can't get any of the many years back that I have already lived. Energy, on the other hand, can constantly be rejuvenated and replenished on a daily basis if we are willing to dedicate time to self-care. Since I can't get time back, I spend most of my focus on making sure I can be high energy as consistently as possible.
I love what you said about the color-coded life. Even looking at granular to color code every minute of my life gives me stress. I love the block schedule and what works for you. There are a lot of great ideas, but you have to find your own thing that works for you. You talk about routine, which there are many different things out there, the morning routine, and how important that is about saving time and energy.
One thing I found interesting was you put in your preparation of your evening routine, which I want you to talk about because we heard about the morning routine, wake up at 4:30, drink your green smoothie, workout, get moving, and meditate. A lot of times, in the evening, we drift away, and whatever happens happens. Talk about your evening routine. How has it been important to you to have a routine for your evenings?
I'm glad you went in that direction because morning routines get all of the headlines. Morning routines are what everybody talks and tweets about. That's what's sexy. I always joke because it's like the chicken and the egg. What comes before your morning routine? It's the previous night's evening routine or nighttime routine. It's this circular fashion.
I understand and have long known, as an athlete and as a performance coach, the importance of sleep. Sleep isn't sexy, doesn't sell a lot of books, and is hard to monetize, but it's arguably one of the most important pillars of our vitality, longevity, and overall health and well-being. Every single function in your body decreases significantly with lack of sleep, mental acuity, ability to focus, physical energy, and enthusiasm. When we lack sleep, most people will agree, you become irritable, you are a little cranky, and you have a higher tendency to snap at people. Lowering your sleep will deteriorate and undermine relationships if that's the way that you are behaving.
Sleep is vital. We need to try and create some wind-down evening routine that prepares us to get the best night's sleep possible. Similar to the morning routine, this will vary significantly for people based on whether you are single or married, whether you have children, and whether you are more of a morning bird or more of an evening owl. When you go to sleep, all of these things are going to make things somewhat different from person to person. The key is creating some system and valuing sleep because that's what will allow you to feel well-rested. The next morning, you can hit that morning routine, whatever it may be, hit the ground running, and feel prepared and ready to go.
People are heavily surprised by this. I watch a fairly significant amount of TV. You usually don't hear people in the self-development space, or certainly not a motivational speaker, admitting to that because most people say that's a cardinal sin. I enjoy a show or a movie that inspires me, piques my interest, or educates me. I'm personally fascinated by acting, directing, and cinematography.
When I can unwind, turn my brain off, and watch something sometimes mindless and humorous, sometimes a little bit more dramatic and thrilling, sometimes educational or inspirational, but when I can unplug and let that show consume me, it puts me in a state of feeling restful to go to bed. For others, that might not work. Maybe you have a different routine. Maybe it's reading or doing something else. Everyone's got to figure that out, but the point is everyone should have some semblance of structure to their morning and evening and not leave those things up to chance.
There are two things about me that I know intuitively that helped me with this. One is I'm pretty heavily introverted. I need alone time and solitude to recharge my battery. Two is that ever since I was young, I have loved structure and routine. Not to the degree of Buzz Williams, but I like consistency and structure. I also recognize not everyone's built that way.
To some people, that would be suffocating. It would be claustrophobic for them to have this morning and evening routine. They like some spontaneity. That's fine. At the end of the day, you need to ask yourself, “What am I going to do to prepare myself to get restful sleep tonight? Tomorrow, when I wake up, what am I going to do to lay the foundation for now to be as productive, meaningful, and memorable as possible?” Those are two important questions that everybody needs to answer.
I find it fascinating that you watched a significant amount of TV. The other night, I was like, “I wanted to laugh.” Me and my wife were talking about it. I want to laugh. We started to look up the funniest sitcoms of our age, like Seinfeld, FRIENDS, or whatever. We watched the funniest ones. It was fun laughing together.
We have talked a lot about stress management. We are going to dive in quickly into these other two that you talked about in your book. Part two was about avoiding stagnation. This happens to us. We are hungry. We started this business. We are doing this sport and getting all hyped up. We finally get to a certain level of success. We plateau a little bit and get stagnant. I want to dive into that a little bit.
You dive in a lot about habits. You talk about James Clear, who is a great author of Atomic Habits. He’s a good friend of yours. He talks about you. He says, “You are either driving your habits or being driven by them.” You talk about that and avoiding stagnation, which is important. You also talk about reinventing yourself. You can talk about anything you want to on how someone can avoid this plateau and stagnation. They are in a rut. Talk about that.
Stagnation is a fascinating one. In stress, we feel right at the moment. We can feel when we are stressed, and burnout without being overdramatic often can feel like we have hit this dead end, a brick wall, or even that proverbial rock bottom. Both of which, on either end of the spectrum, create a visceral feeling or a visceral response.
Stagnation is a little bit tricky because it's in the middle. It's often hidden because it's this numb feeling. It's when you are toeing the line of mediocrity. Some acronyms are being on the hedonic treadmill where you are running, but you are not going anywhere. If you are in a pool, you are treading water. You are not making any progress, you are not going anywhere, but you are doing everything you can to stay afloat.
That can often happen when, as you said perfectly, we hit a certain level o of performance or achievement. Things are going well, and we default to putting on the mental cruise control. We start living a life of saying, “This is good enough.” This is good enough to prevent you from making progress and reaching out to something great.
It's been my experience, both personal and observational. When we talk about stagnating, we are usually talking about stagnating our outputs, results, achievements, and what we are doing. In order to change up our outputs, we have to change up our inputs because those two things are inextricably connected. What we read, watch, and listen to, and who we invest our time with, those are our inputs. Those things have a huge impact on our outputs.
If you want to level up your outputs, results, performance, and what you are contributing to the world, you have to level up the other side of the equation. You have to level up your inputs. You need to start reading, watching, and listening to a higher level of content or something that challenges you. You may need to recruit a new inner circle and people that you are investing your time with, people that might challenge you to a higher degree, or people that maybe have accomplished more than you have at present and are a bit more refined in certain areas and are going to help challenge you to push you forward. The outputs are always directly related to the input. Anytime I feel I'm stagnating, the first thing I do is shake up the content I consume and the people I invest my time with.
I had an episode, and it was funny because I was feeling a little stagnant and tiptoeing mediocrity on my day and having a conversation with you or another conversation. After that conversation, I was on fire. I got so much out of it. I felt alive and consumed. Nothing else changed. All my circumstances were the same, but the inspiration I got from that conversation.
You talk about reinventing yourself. I turned 40 a couple of years ago. This was a season of my life. I stepped out of the real estate business. I went through this period of being like, “Who am I now? What do I do now?” I'm trying to reinvent myself. I'm sure you went through that. Was there a process in your own life about reinventing yourself? Maybe you can talk about somebody else's life, the story you have going through that process.
Another quote that stands out to me, and I saw this on a Facebook meme originally. It says something to the effect of, “If you are the same man at 40 as you were at 20, then you wasted 20 years of your life.” That is this constant reminder that we need to keep working towards self-actualization, embrace the ability to evolve and learn all these different areas of our life. Be focused on incremental progress.
Sometimes, that is the daily incremental progress, but sometimes, it takes a little more of a reinvention of saying, “I have been going down this path. I feel like it might start heading towards a dead end. I need to reinvent myself and start going in another direction.” Those things can be small reinventions. Sometimes, they can be bigger reinventions.
For me, one of the bigger ones was several years ago, when I decided to leave the basketball training space entirely and jump into the corporate keynote speaking and writing space. There were some certain parallels there. I still consider myself a performance coach. I have a new audience now. That was a massive reinvention to leap from one vocation I had dedicated several years to do something completely different that requires different skillsets, branding, clientele, and approaches.
That was what I needed at that time. I was starting to stagnate in the basketball training space. I was approaching burnout. The reinvention for me was the right place and right time. It was the step I needed to take. That doesn't mean everyone reading this needs to rip the massive Band-Aid off and make a giant career change or jump. Sometimes, reinventions can be much smaller. It could be picking up a new hobby, trying something different, or joining a new club or something else in your community. Anything that switches up the status quo and will break you out of this stagnant funk, I would consider a reinvention.
How important do you think is going back to challenging yourself, trying something new, taking a little bit of a risk, getting out of your comfort zone, and doing something more challenging, whether a hobby like playing a guitar or skiing? How important do you think it is to continually challenge to grow?
It's vital. It should be a non-negotiable now. The shape it takes can be different for everyone. This is a personal preference. I love to always have something on my calendar. It could be 2, 3, or 6 months away. That gives me 1) Something to look forward to, and 2) Something to train and prepare for. The vast majority of things I choose to put on my calendar are fitness-related events.
In the last couple of years alone, I hiked rim to rim of the Grand Canyon. I did a Spartan race. I ran an ultra marathon. I did a 26-hour Navy Seal experience. I have got a few things coming up on my calendar. One of which is not going to require physical preparation but is going to require some mental and emotional preparation. I'm going to try some stand-up comedy. I'm going to do some open mic nights here in the DC area and give it a try to that. I will talk about something that will take me out of my comfort zone.
I'm comfortable being on stage. I'm comfortable with a microphone and being in front of people, but that comfort lies in what I share from a corporate keynote standpoint. I can talk about individual and organizational performance for days on end and never even take a breath, but having to switch that up and intentionally be funny and humorous, even for four minutes, because that's all an open mic requires, is going to be challenging for me. I'm excited about it and looking forward to it.
Standup comedy is something I have been a huge fan of for a long time. It's something that I study religiously to hopefully improve my ability to be a corporate keynote speaker, but you better believe this will be something new for me. I lean into that unsettling excitement. I will have some butterflies. My armpits and palms will be sweating when I get up on that stage, but I'm looking forward to that. It will be a new challenge, and we will see what happens.
For me, that framework works well. It is always having something on the calendar to look forward to and prepare for. One thing I know, and this is through firsthand experience and observation, is most people tend to feel happiest and most fulfilled when they are growing and learning something new. Think how you feel when you read a new book with some new ideas. You are excited to put them into practice. You are looking forward to talking to your friends, spouse, or children later that day and sharing with them what you learned. You can't wait to tweet about it. You want to tell the world. Now you have this unbridled optimism and excitement because you are growing. My goal is I want to keep growing steadily until my time on this planet is up.
I want to see your standup comedy act because I know what it's like. I enjoy speaking, doing things like that, and making people laugh when I speak. It's a lot different, given in the keynote speech. When people are not expecting to laugh, and you make them laugh, you are like, “That was awesome.” Having that expectation for them to laugh is a little bit different.
What I'm excited about is the difference in craft. It's a completely different goal. My goal when I'm on stage as a keynote speaker is to deliver massive value and give practical, actionable takeaways like things that people could put in place that night. It's different goals in standup comedy. The goal is to make them laugh right there in the moment.
When you get to like a Dave Chappelle level, and you are a borderline philosopher as well as a comedian, you are also making people think. You are talking about societal change. That's why Dave Chappelle, in my opinion, is one of the best to ever do it. For me, at an open mic, can I get people to chuckle, laugh, and smile about every 10 to 15 seconds for four minutes? That's going to be hard to do.
The reason I love it is the audience is the judge and jury. Their feedback is immediate, and there's something fascinating about that. If they laughed, whatever I said was funny to them at that moment, and it resonated. If they don't laugh, as uncomfortable as that will be and as awkward as that silence will be, it's still feedback.
This isn't going to be a one-time thing for me. This isn't I'm going to do one open mic and check it off the list. I already plan on signing up for 5 or 6 open mics in the first couple of weeks. I can try that routine or set out a few different times and start to tin tinker with stuff and go, “I have done this 4 or 5 times now. This joke lands every time. This joke, for whatever reason, sometimes gets a laugh. Sometimes it doesn't. I need to workshop this a little bit. Maybe this joke I do at the end, I need to move that to the beginning.”
I enjoy both the science and the art of tinkering with it and trying to figure that out. It will also help build some resilience and muscle when you try to say something you think is funny and it ends up getting crickets. That's an uncomfortable feeling, but I want to learn how to grow thicker skin and inoculate myself from that type of feeling.
I love what you are doing because a lot of times you talked about you being 46 years old, and I'm 42 years old. We reach this season. We stop trying new things and being curious about these things and doing this. We could go on and on about this, but that's awesome. I love what you are doing. Let's talk about burnout. The thing I want to hit on is you say that burnout is the long-term effect of misalignment. What do you mean by that? Dig into that. When someone gets burned out, what does that mean for the long-term effect of having a misalignment somewhere?
At large, society tends to think burnout is simply from working long hours and making a lot of sacrifices. That is partially true. It's incomplete. That's only one-half of the equation. The other half of the equation is when you are working long hours and making sacrifices, but you don't find meaning and purpose in your work. You are no longer fascinated by your work. Your work is no longer in alignment with your core values. You no longer enjoy the people you work with or the culture created at your organization.
When you no longer think that your work is making a meaningful contribution to something bigger than yourself, that's when burnout starts. It's when those two things splinter in different directions. We all know people and have most likely been at some point in our lives where we are logging a ton of hours. We are burning the midnight oil. We are making a lot of sacrifices, but we find meaning and fulfillment in what we are doing. We are not at risk of burnout. I would still recommend we put some self-care practices in place because that's not sustainable either. You are not at risk of burnout when you find meaning in your work. It's when that starts to splinter that we have a problem.
A lot of times, we think of overworking, grinding, and burning the candle at both ends. You talk about this in the last section of the book to rest and play. Sometimes, people get this stigma of this high performance. You talk about these superstar athletes. In my mind, I'm like, “This is all they do.” They don't have any room to rest or to play. They don't have any balance in their life. Do you think that's true? Is there a different coin or side of that?
Similar to what we said before, it's not a one-size-fits-all model. Here are two examples that, hopefully, most of your readers are familiar with. One is the late great Kobe Bryant, who admittedly was nothing short of obsessed during his playing career. He put in a lot of hours and made massive sacrifices personally to be in the gym all of the time because his goal was to be the greatest that ever played.
That framework doesn't bring enjoyment to me personally. I don't want to be obsessed. I don't want to be working as much as he was working. For him, he enjoyed that. If you asked Kobe if he was happy, he would say, “Yes.” That was what he wanted to be doing. It's not necessarily the way I want to live my life, but it worked well for him.
Another one is somebody I have an equal amount of respect and reverence for. That's Gary Vaynerchuk. He is affectionately known as Gary Vee in social circles, marketing, and social media. Gary is another one who enjoys working 16 to 18-hour days, 6 to 7 days per week. He enjoys not taking many vacations because they don't bring him joy or happiness. Gary does a beautiful job.
One of the reasons I enjoy and respect him is he never tells people that's what they should be doing. He simply has the awareness to know that's what he enjoys. That's where he operates best. He is a practitioner. He loves building businesses and being an operator. He loves being on the grind for 16 to 18 hours a day. That doesn't work for me. What works for Gary and brings him happiness and fulfillment is different than what brings me happiness and fulfillment. There is no right answer. Neither one of those paradigms is right or wrong or good or bad. It's all about what fits us. That's what's most important with all of the things we have discussed. Hopefully, this puts a nice big red bow tie on it.
We all need to be aware of the potential for stress, stagnation, and burnout. We all need to develop a paradigm, framework, perspective, and approach that allows us to manage and beat those different qualities over the long term so we can sustain excellence. Each of our morning routine and evening routine, each of the way we approach these things, the hours we work, all of that stuff is going to be different for everybody.
The key is not playing the comparison game and not trying to run anybody else's race but figuring out what works well for you. One of the ways you figure out what works well for you is to figure out what doesn't work well for you. You try some things and say, “That hat doesn't fit well. I'm going to try another one.” Life should be a constant trial and error of getting in different reps in different ways and seeing what works. The oldest adage in the book that leads to both high performance and success is to do more of what works and do less of what doesn't.
I appreciate you being on the show. Check out Alan's first book, Raise Your Game, which talks about how to reach peak performance, and his newest book, Sustain Your Game: High-Performance Keys to Manage Stress, Avoid Stagnation and Beat Burnout. It's been a pleasure. Alan Stein Jr. is on the show. Thanks so much. It's awesome having you.
It is always my pleasure. Thank you.
