[Music] john it's so good to have you on the podcast welcome you are the best thank you for being so hospitable man i'm great i'm so happy to be here so just before we hit record you told me about a little more about your background your dad was a pastor but after he what yeah so when i was born when i was born my dad was a homicide detective and a swat hostage negotiator in for the houston police department he was he was a bad dude and then about halfway through my childhood um he always volunteered with the youth at various things in the community and at the big church we went to and the church called them in one weekend and said hey the youth minister is leaving and we'd love to offer you this job and he took it over a weekend and so yeah the next 20 years 17 18 or something like that it seemed like forever but then he became a youth minister of a giant church there in houston and hundreds of kids and that and it's very similar to his detective work let's be honest um for most pastors but um the parents would have to take right find out what my son is really up to yeah yeah i mean yeah and so uh it was a wild childhood i had a cop and a my therapist loves me because i had a cop and a pastor for a parent right that's that's crazy i mean obviously that's your dad's story not yours but that's a really big pivot from homicide detective to pastor yeah here's where it's been one of the greatest blessings of my life my mom also was raised in a household um and again this is i don't want to speak negatively but the the women didn't need to go to college you had a role in a job and this is what was going to be when you get out and at the age of 41 or 42 she took her first community college class my dad was always saying hey hey it's okay like let's do this let's do this and she just never like i don't know she took her first community college class at 42 and then took another one and then took another one she graduated at 57 with her phd and she's been a department head at an english department at a fancy faith-based university and she's 72 now and so she had this wild second life and so i had these two pictures of these two folks who say this is what i'm put on earth to do this one would be about oh but i'm going to go this way i'm going to follow this wild call to the left or to the right i'm just going to take a wild turn here and then all of a sudden i found myself in my early 40s with i run into dave ramsey's executive vp at a college event and she's like you're coming to work for us and i was like okay i'm gonna be a youtuber and here i am man here i am so i had this beautiful picture of do the next fun right scary thing in front of you yeah so that's interesting i was i was asking how you got connected at ramsay so again like so many people i talked to everybody started something in february of march or february or march of 2020. it's like you know great time for a career change so you moved from texas to nashville and uh tell us about your first two decades well you were in higher education as well so i graduated college and i wanted to be a movie star and that you could see you can see my face i didn't work out and i became a high school teacher and i was a high school teacher and a basketball and track coach for a few years and then i taught k through five for one year at a small private school there in houston and then i ended up working at my alma mater as at the university as a associate dean of students and that began a almost two decade career working behind closed doors as a with students and their families when things were just falling apart and with my fellow administrators and professors and um and then i just kept moving along and moving along um i want to be a college president someday that was kind of the trajectory i was on and i got a my fancy pants doctorate degree and there's nothing worse carrie than someone who just graduates with their graduate degree the worst how so it's on everybody's email signature they tell everybody it's just so like come on man yeah comma no the worst is comma masters degree comma p whatever so the more calm is yeah it's just it's a directly proportional to your to your self-esteem but that was me i was super that guy and then um man i had a fancy job at a faith-based university my wife was a professor we had a little kid and i was really crushing it to be honest with you i was the business of deloney was good and i come from a family we didn't make a lot of money we didn't have money growing up weird my wife and i were making more money than my parents could ever wrap their head around and i was fancy pants fancy pants trying to earn and achieve and then all sudden my body fell apart yeah and um like i found myself experiencing things that i had never heard i'd heard of them but they were for other people like anxiety and like i can't get out of bed and like i don't even want to be doing this anymore and would people be better if i wasn't you know i mean i started really getting down the path there and so the next decade was about i went i took another job we transitioned out how old were you when that happened when things started to fall apart john was between 33 35 somewhere around there uh can you break that down i want the rest of the narrative but i'd love to yeah i mean you open your book with that a little bit was that around the time where you're crawling outside in the rain looking for your house yeah that's that's about that time so my job was showing up and the wheels had fallen off everybody else's life yeah and you say basically dean you're a cop like you're you're just there because things fell apart right for well you're both a cop and an ambulance and a counselor and a but you're not trained in any of those things and so you're you know you're kind of just directing traffic and your presence and um but yeah i spent my whole life was spent in other people's trauma and so i was at hospitals a couple of nights a week i wasn't sleeping at all and most importantly is i was running from i didn't know how to be a new dad i wasn't a bad husband but i wasn't good at it and i didn't know any other path other than just keep going harder and keep running and so when they're like hey we need someone to teach sunday school i was like i got that and hey the the college ministries i'm on that and can someone leave this big convocation program every week i'll do that too hey we need a professor would you mind teaching grad school this year i got that too so my life became about ribbons and stars and trophies and accomplishments and achievements and the one thing that i kept feeling along the way was my body saying hey you got to stop you can't there's not enough money to earn here there's i mean you're using these ministerial platforms to try to make yourself to prop up yourself and it's going to fall down on you and those people that you're trying to walk alongside and ultimately the i mean i wish this sounds such a hollywood ending this is how it happened i was i had sold my house i thought i'd predicted the next housing collapse i sold my house moved my wife and kid i was like the beautiful mind dude i was i was mad and here's the thing can i tell you this gary yeah yeah i i was bonkers and i still showed up to work every day i was still doing good work i was a i was electrified people didn't like being around me a lot but i was fun to be around what does it have electrified people didn't like that that means i was always the guy in the meeting going oh yeah but what about this i was always the guy in the meeting being like oh well i read this study this i it i got my self-esteem by can i be the smartest person in this room and if you're working at a university you'll never be the smartest person in the like right it's so i was always trying to out if i couldn't outsmart then i'd undercut if i couldn't undercut i'd go around i was always trying to what about this what about this i could never just be present so my wife tells me in her gentle way you were a lot you were a lot um and the men the young ministers that i've mentored and been around since then i see that a lot there's this sense of i can't say the words i don't know let me find out and so i find myself down these theological rabbit holes where i find myself down these leadership rabbit holes or i listen to a podcast and watch a ted talk and call myself an expert and i find myself way out over my skis when i'm trying to help a young mom who's just lost her child i don't know how to do that um a friend of mine just gave me this line and it's taunted me uh he was a professor in an mdiv program somewhere in the country and he said if somebody hires one of our mdiv graduates this is his words and i love it and it's haunting they're committing theological malpractice whoa because i've trained somebody to take apart texts and i've trained somebody to give an argument i've not trained somebody on how to care for people who are hurting and that was a heavy like just right and so that was that was me in that season that was me that was me that was me just running and proving improving and running and arguments and this what about that and finally man my body just said i'm out i'm out i'm done and p we can call that burnout we can call that anxiety we can call it exactly i don't care what word we use my body just said i'm out i'm done so i want to get to that but um i do like coming back to the subject on this podcast but drive because you know podcasts are listened to disproportionately by driven people we have a lot of leaders here when you look back on your life now knowing what you know now where did that drive come from and what parts of it were healthy and what was unhealthy oh i love that you brought that up because there's a there's an elegant beautiful tension between that um and yeah let's let's put a pin in the in the tension there um i think my drive if if i'm honest it goes back to just childhood i think most of us get a model and picture of what childhood's supposed to look like and i the the picture i picked up when i was a kid was you're not enough but you can outrun it and i was a i was a good athlete and i was not my sister was wicked smart my brother missed like two my younger brother missed like two questions on the act smart he was so i wasn't like that but i could get by and um i was able to get i was funny i was loud right so i could just kind of wing it through life with this underlying sense of you are phoning it in and the moment they catch you dude it's all up and so i lied a lot as a kid yeah i lied a lot i exaggerated all the time and i steal stuff i mean i was always about the rules don't apply how quickly can i get through this thing how can i cut corners here how can i make sure that i'm the biggest firework in the display bin all right and it was just an exhausting track need of a life did you know you were tired no goodness no i i interpreted that fatigue as cowardice or weakness or um you should probably get another book you read another go get another degree that'll help it right um yeah it just was hollow man if you don't look back the the shadow won't catch you and you just run and run and run and run i didn't understand how heavy carrying a kid would be i didn't understand how how heavy trying to be a good married person would be i did a lot of work realize how heavy leadership was when you have a team of people who look at you and say where are we going um yeah or thousands of students that parents drop off with a massive bill like they're they're mortgaging their souls to you literally saying please take care of my kid i didn't realize how heavy that stuff was you can't outrun the shadows man when you're carrying that that type of existential weight what is your doctorate in i have one in education and one in counseling okay and why which came first the education one okay so the joke the joke is always this is how how dumb i was um it was all about the credential i didn't really care to learn anything i just needed that certificate on my wall so that i could say doctor in front of my name so then i could finally feel valued around my peers and i just need to be able to say doctor whatever and so let's get the let's get the what's the first thing i can get a degree in that i can work full-time it was not about learning the counseling one came because i broke i was in ash and i wanted to know what happened to me was happening to my family to my friends in my community that was a much richer deeper experience for me because it was out of desperation that was i got to know what's going on here so you're in maybe your early 30s locate it for me if i've got it wrong um you're convinced your house is going to crack you're in texas do you want to pick up the story that was a really interesting story yeah so i i latched into a thing and the thing was huh i've never noticed that that little crack settling crack above that door over there i look over to there's one over there there's one over there if i back up a little bit my wife and i owed six figures in student loan debt from our big fancy degrees my body was telling me you're not safe you have no business buying a house you all just bought two new cars like ding dongs you we are not safe because if we get fired tomorrow the bank comes for all of us right i mean it was it was that kind of my body's trying to get my attention i did a lot i just kept moving i had a ton of debt um i had now passed i was um i'm saying this with all respect my father's one of the most extraordinary men he never ran organizations and so what i found myself was i found myself leading a couple of hundred people making a big chunk of money and i didn't have anyone to turn to for wisdom i hadn't cultivated that and normally i could ask my dad how do i fix the car how do i mow the lawn hey there's a police officer here what do i say my dad was brilliant for that but once i got outside the scope of that relationship i was on my own so then i tried to to fake it i tried to read enough books i didn't have those relationships that someone would walk alongside me and say hey what i do now what's what comes next and so i just found myself out on an island and instead of swimming back to shore saying whoa i found myself all by myself out there i just said this is my island this is how this is going to be and then in the midst of that um and again i anxiety depression ocd all the adh those are our bodies just trying to get our attention when things aren't okay and i ignored all that stuff and there's a world now that just i mean just sells distraction that's just the world we're in and so we can wallpaper over and we can take those alarms that are ringing and duct tape over the alarms in our kitchen and we can just go about our day because we don't hear the alarm anymore but they're still ringing man and then i bought a house and the house was the straw that broke the camel's back it was the three bedroom two bath dream that my body said we can't do this anymore and that's when i started saying hey i there's a crack there there's one there oh this thing's falling apart and for some reason my body latched on to that story and i had contractors come over i had friends come over i'd walk them through i'd show them the cracks in the grout i show them the crack and dude this is texas it's a brand new house everything settles everything was great the house was great i've driven i drove by it a few years ago it's perfect man it's wonderful but the story in my head and if i fast forward now look around when i look at this political party this group of people this is the next big threat to the church or the leadership or to what we've just there's somebody that's going to sell us a story about why we feel the way we do and mine was that all of the earth's finances were going to fall down apart and turn to ash and we were all going to be shooting our neighbor for water and eating our dogs whatever i mean i just created these caustic stories but it all came from this house and this as the story goes i was i'm crawling around on my hands and knees behind some bushes looking for cracks in the foundation one night when it was raining because i was convinced that when it rained it was going to flood through these cracks and i was crawling around on my hands and knees at 2am i was in my underwear i had like a flashlight in my mouth and again i wasn't crazy that's the thing i wasn't i didn't need to go to cycle i just was fully in on this and i remember sitting there and in the rain and i just started laughing and crying at the same time because of my thought was oh [Music] this is when they would call me and tell me to come sit with somebody right i was like oh no and so the next morning um i reached out to a couple friends there at the university i worked at who are i still love and i cherish to this day and um and then i got in my car one morning walking to work we sold the house and then one day i got my car and drove to another city and sat down with my buddy he was a doctor and said i need some help man and that was that started the journey back so yeah you became fixated with any crack or flaw you saw in the house convinced it was going to fall apart you're out in the pouring rain thinking that's it my whole house is going to get flooded away and it finally dawns on you that all the friends all the experts all the contractors were right there's nothing wrong with your house and it was just something so there wasn't this i'll tell you this i what i realized was in that moment and um it's hard to articulate this in a book i wasn't fully there okay but i realized enough to know i might be the problem here oh that was the that was the crack in this that was that that first somebody moved the curtain just a little bit to let that little bit of ray of sunshine in maybe it's me and i kept thinking it's ever the contractors are idiots my friends don't know what they're talking about all these people are more i've got this figured out how can you not see what i see here and that was the first day i thought oh it may be me maybe it's me so definitely not a psychologist not trained the way you are but we i often see and i think i'm seeing frequent more frequent examples of people who zero in on an issue so you've got someone if you click on their profile they leave basically the same comment on everyone's instagram or twitter or facebook it's like they've got one issue and they're just like you know away attacking people or they get really narrowed in on something and they can't let it go is that a sign that something's wrong like what is that if you've got that like obsession with somebody one thousand percent anytime you find yourself saying the words if they would just i don't care who they is and i don't care what the justice anytime you find yourself like if they would just the problem is probably in the mirror it's probably not them because the world's too complex there's too much things are too stacked on each other right now everything's anti-fresh so every i mean everything's fragile right now it's all so to just point at one thing if this family would just leave the congregation we'd be okay it wouldn't you know why because you'd still be there if this one if the bass player would just pick it up nope it wouldn't because you'd find something on the keyboard so anytime you find yourself saying that it's probably you and you know the worst are is the nutrition warriors and political i mean there's a few things that man it doesn't matter what anybody posts they gotta lob that grenade in there and it's just oh it's just a few groups man right right you can talk about this offline someday you would only if you would only cut out carbs if you would only you know if you really understand this understanding of god blah blah blah whatever that is yes if you just went to this church or if you just read this scripture the right way or if you just got degree at this point then all this would okay thanks man have a good day that is really interesting do you think that this is a bigger issue now where people get tripped up over the one thing or or the other thing you know there's sort of a meme going around that all the people who were epidemiologists for the last two years are now experts on war are now experts on right but there's that okay i'm gonna move my issue but like i have to deliver to my platform expert opinion on stuff i pretty much know nothing about so when when our bodies go to fight or flight and you may have heard this you may have had people on your podcast with this yeah one of the beautiful things when our brains go to fight or flight so why do we have fighter flight it's designed for uh we're sleeping in a cave and a bear shows up at the front right and it's designed to instantly pick up a stick and go to war against that thing or to sprint out the back door and if it can't do one of those two things right then it freezes and there's a couple other things but that's the main thing and it freezes so that that bear will bite off one of our legs drag us out and hide us under a pile of leaves and maybe we can survive and live to fight another day tomorrow right when our brains move to fight or flight it literally unhooks and again i hate these mechanistic metaphors but here's where we are it unhooks your logical thinking brain it does your brain doesn't want you looking at the bear and going huh i wonder if that's a nice bear or if that's the hugging bear i heard there's a hugging bear around here because if it you're wrong it eats you and so it unhooks that and that's how a kid carrying a cell phone in the middle of the night in a dark alley gets shot because somebody has told that police officer somebody's got a gun and they're armed and dangerous and scary and that police officer's heart is beating fast and then a kid pops up and pulls their phone out and their brain goes close enough we're going home right and so it trades it trades accuracy for speed and so here's where we are we're all in fight or flight 24 7 we're not sleeping we're just pumping the stuff in our heads over and over and over again all day all day all day we are living lives that are a hundred percent visible all the time because we've built glass houses for ourselves with social media yeah and we just stand in front of them and and then our bodies are going you're exposed you're exposed you're exposed and it stays in fight or flight all the time and when we do that we lose the ability to take perspective and we latch on to a fear and our depending on our experiences and our genetics our body goes that's a fear and what's beautiful in my life is i traced the economic obsession back to my childhood and we had some major financial issues when i was a kid that caused fights and i scared me when i was a kid and here my body was replaying this story 25 years later um oh we know what happens when there's money fights everything falls apart everybody gets angry but like we got to watch out for this one right so my body remembered the story it just found a new avenue to to write it down right to tell that story again and we all do this we are learning an awful lot about um the body and how it's related to the mind and i really appreciate those conversations um you talk about trauma in your book and you talk to a lot of people about trauma probably back to the university now with dave ramsey on the show etc etc leaders have been through so much in the last two years plus they've got their childhoods to unpack can you explain to our listeners how trauma is like it's not a question of if trauma is impacting them it's a question of how is trauma impacting them agree or disagree and then what does that look like and how do you recognize it oh man that's such a great question so i me let me do a couple things so all trauma is to distill it down is when something is going on that exceeds our body's built-in systems to handle it okay and that's it's just when our systems are like here is a threat and it exceeds our body's abilities to handle that threat are over overrun most trauma most of the time is not the thing that happened it's our body remembering in the present what happened the story it has told itself about what happened memories about traumatic events are notoriously off and i've heard that weaponized i probably didn't even i don't care the fact is i'm looking at somebody in front of me right now who is in deep distress and they deserve peace they deserve healing so let's be here now right um and so i thought trauma was always acute i thought it was these huge grenades that went off the big divorce the big infidelity the death of mom whatever happened the abuse something that happened though yeah from the matter in the systemic abuse the yeah the sexual abuse the all those i thought that was the trauma and um i've had my personal experiences with that stuff i've walked alongside people the the the big shift for me was my friend her name is dr lynn jennings and she's a trauma researcher um but she researches a special niche that i didn't know existed she called it secondary trauma secondary traumatic stress and the word she gave me i'll never forget being in class with her and my light bulb went off she said trauma is both acute and it's cumulative it adds up on you and it's about the final weight so the way i describe that is trauma can be somebody throwing a cinder block at you or it can be with a backpack on and every day you just go downstairs and your mom's just scrolling that phone and you're just saying hey mom look at this picture and she goes uh-huh uh-huh beautiful and that little six-year-old girl's body is wondering why won't my mom look at me why is my dad why is it my job to make sure daddy doesn't yell i'll try i it's my job to make sure daddy doesn't get angry and that body wear gets a pebble in the bag a pebble and over over a lifetime the weight of that trauma those cinder blocks versus those pebbles the weight is the same and so then you're 32 and you're running a church and every day you get 11 emails telling you what a lame job you're doing or you misinterpreted this or you should watch this youtube clip because this is the real truth or have you heard about the great reset pastor and oh my gosh did you hear so and so voted for whatever's happening and you get this all day every day and it's a pebble and it's a pebble and then you're going to church and then you're preparing your sermon knowing that that one family is going to side on you the whole time then you got to visit so and so in the hospital but you can't because they want you to wear a mask and your church said whatever the thing is and then your body just eventually leans over and says i can't carry this anymore and it comes out in a bunch of different ways right that's that's the the cumulative nature of trauma is what i want especially pastors who are listening that's what i that's what i see most often is they're carrying around everybody else's stuff it's such a helpful definition because you're right that's something we've all dealt with i would love to talk about how the body reacts almost every leader i talked to um it's increasingly common to have panic attacks sleep disorders um i did a little poll with a group i was coaching and i'm like just i don't know it got really intimate and it's like how many people need something to sleep at night and almost every hand in the group went up and you know it's like whoa and i learned that the hard way when i was 41 i burned out and it's like i wasn't gonna stop my brain was going my heart was going but my body's like okay we we're done here you're an idiot yeah you're running way too hard we quit and i went through six months of burnout i won't go into the long story a lot of listeners have heard it too many times but it changed i mean you got six years faster than me i mean i was six years longer than i did you're wasting you're stronger than me man there you go you hit it around 35 right so but what were the what were the physical symptoms just so and what what were yours and then what are typical symptoms for people who are are struggling with with trauma um gotta be pretty direct on this podcast yeah 100 is that cool um these are all directional signals that someone's not okay okay um when again there's medical diagnostics there's all kinds of things going on the human body these days but directionally speaking there's a couple of core things our bodies are designed to do they're even on protected circuits if you will if you're taking medication to go to the bathroom if you're taking medication to have to be intimate with your spouse if you're taking medication to sleep that's a sign that there may be something going on psychosomatic there may be something going on in your heart or your mind or your body that you need to go sit down and say hey what's going on what is the ecosystem i've created here if you can't be present with your kids for more than 10 minutes if you find yourself driving down the road and you somebody gets in front of you a little bit and you find yourself so raged out right here's a good one if you are at a little league game and you find yourself angry at the high school ref that's a you problem if you're at a dance recital and you find yourself swearing under your breath at the person who held up the 7.9 and it should have been a 9.1 what that's you that's not them that's you if you find yourself on your fourth netflix series this month that's you if you find yourself reaching for another drink and another drink or another piece of pizza if you find yourself choosing netflix over intimacy with your spouse when somebody's the one i hear a lot is people have stopped being intimate they stopped having sex yeah married couples are just stopped um why is this stop let's let's uh let's talk about that i think two things one i think we've become great co-managers of our homes and we have become yeah we're just co-workers now like you got this i got this you do this i'm going to block this guy i'm you pass the ball here i'll be wide open over here i'm going to run this route i mean we've just we've diagrammed our houses and we have to because we feel that's so full of nonsense so full of business and insanity that we have to run it like a company now um and so there's no room for intimacy i think the bigger issue is this this is a 50-year problem all up until human history before 50 years ago and again i'm speaking loosely here you got married for two reasons one because your parents wanted to expand their empire with some political connection and so they pawned you off somehow for many goats or whatever or you married somebody because you were gonna die young they were gonna die young and we can get through this thing miserable awful brutus short life together and we'll make some kids and we'll grow some turnips right and then 50 it over my grandparents celebrated 72 years of marriage for they passed away unbelievable they became each other's arms and legs right they became the same set of lungs they became soul mates after 70 years together and suddenly 50 years ago we tried to reverse engineer that process and say we need soul mates first everything else afterwards and what we've done by doing that is we've said you have to be spouse my security my safety my co-owner my co-helper around the house oh by the way you got to stay hot and it's super attractive and do weird sex stuff until you're 84 because now we're gonna have sex forever you gotta do all of this stuff and we've saddled our spouses with a weight they cannot carry we've dumped everything we've abandoned our um our same gendered friends like we don't have guys night out anymore it's once a year now or we churches have to throw a program for it um there's not we we've just sucked some of that stuff out and then we've outsourced our identities to our kids right like they're a proxy for how good of a parent we are if they're fast on the track or good at little league or make good grades then we feel good about our performance as parents and man when i'm working that hard i don't there's no room for intimacy or desire and so now we're in a weird world where our church used to give us safety our community our tribe used to give us safety and now i get that existential safety from my spouse safety and desire this is from s dare pro safety and desire don't work well together and so now instead of practicing desire i got to practice safety so think about this you date somebody you see them and i saw my wife like she's pretty i want to go out with her desire is wired into that i'm going to practice safety is she going to show up on time is she going to text me back is she going to get mad at me if we have different political opinions we're practicing safety then when we say i do we both say all right we just handcuffed ourselves to each other now for the rest of our lives we have to be about practicing desire and we have no models for doing that i got to practice intimacy i got to practice leaning into this and no one's taught us how to do that except for pornography and that's become the blueprint for everybody and created all kinds of problems in our lives wow okay you could and i don't think you're going down this road at all but you could almost say what you just said is an argument against marriage right that marriage can't debate that but that can't handle that but that's not where you're going i would say i would say the opposite tell me more i think marriage has been elevated in to its most extraordinary place both in our homes and in our society and our communities what i'm advocating for so let's let's use a an analogy here just because now we have solar roofs and air conditioning systems that are very um that take very little energy and we have really fascinating hot water systems doesn't mean that we go ah forget that man i'm just gonna go back to a straw hut no what i need now is some expertise and a new set of tools to utilize this where we are now that's it and so now what we need is a and this is my my chief critique of this church in this season is we have abandoned issues that people are desperate for literally just they're dying for them like loneliness like how to make friends like how to um re-engage sexually with your spouse like these things that our our people are dying for we've traded that for platitudes and political mumbo-jumbo and i think people are literally drowning uh i mean they're not drowning they're starving to death they are desperate for different for actual tips and tools on how to live good lives not more rah-rah speeches and so we need churches that are going to speak honestly into people's lives today but no i am opposite i am as high you are not going to find somebody more high on marriage than i am and i've almost blown mine up three or four times but i am i am high on it yeah yeah as am i i mean three decades into mine i we seem to be falling in love more and more every year and yet i heard tim keller years ago and i think he was quoting a jewish theologian say that with the death of god in the 19th century right niche et cetera et cetera that people used to put a lot of expectations on god and now they put them on their spouse and hence you fast forward a century you get the instagram wedding everything has to be perfect you know you fulfill me you complete me you're my everything i i yeah exactly and god is a nice also had like we're glad to have you around the traditional family families used to live in units right multi-generational units so now it's just me and the 1.2 kids or whatever that happens to be and we kind of have everything that our parents had to wait like you have in your 20s now what people waited in their 40s to get whether you got that through debt or whether it was just you know lifestyle has increased and yet people arguably are not happier they're more miserable than they were so what is the antidote like if if you've lost that desire i think that's really fascinating with esther perel about the difference between safety and desire that they're mutually incompatible if i got that right so what are what are some remedies to rekindling romance to getting out of that crazy thing where you're triggered all the time whatever you do you can't pay attention to your kid like let's start to start to point us in a better direction john well when it comes to the desire when it comes to romance if we can take our egos and just set them down for a second i can't think of a funner thing that i have to practice for the rest of my life than sex and desire are you freaking kidding me that's that's what we're all complaining about yeah but the problem is is we've turned every sexual encounter every romantic evening into the super bowl and we've stopped using the word practice and if we have a weird night an off night or dude we are going to rock it to the wheels fall off tonight we're going to go out to dinner first and then somebody gets gas and then the night goes sideways we turn every one of those moments carrie into the super bowl we got nowhere to go from there instead of going oh man and then we're back at it the next day uh-huh and or hey i've got this thing that i've always wanted to tell you that i'm kind of into and i've never been able to tell dude i i know couples that i've been together multiple decades and they still don't haven't fully been honest with each other about stuff and so if you are holding on to secrets secrets eat intimacy it destroys intimacy shame eats secrets right that's what the great rene brown said like shane eats secrets for breakfast you cannot be intimate if you're holding secrets and yet we try to balance this intimacy and the sexuality and this romance with our partners we've been with for two years five years 10 years 20 years and i'm i'm celebrating two decades this summer if you had told me you know what old people did they told me you think you're in love when you're married you have no idea wait 10 years wait 20 years and i used to be like you are this you're gross you're wrinkled you're gross and i wish i could describe it man but it's true my marriage is a thousand times better after two near nuclear disasters and and right and our how my idiotic young first two years of marriage so it happens but it's something you practice man we gotta take the pressure off start being honest with each other here's the i i said this for a joke on a live event it's been the number one thing that someone has reached out to and said hey can i can i buy this it's called the john dalone erotic envelope system here's what it is go to walgreens and get 10 white envelopes for a nickel and then you write five things in them that you are interested in trying and it could be i just want to hold hands and watch a show with you for a couple of hours it could be something you've had in your head that you're like i don't know i just want to kind of try this whatever it is and then both of you commit to a being curious if you open the envelope and you're like all right we're going to we're going to try this or if you open it you're like i don't know how that's physiologically possible instead of being like what's wrong with you i'm going to say tell me tell me about this and we're going to talk about it and the discussion is intimate right we've just lost play we've lost joy in one another and we've just turned each other into this transaction going back to because we're co-managers now your job is to make sure i'm satisfied my job is to make sure you're satisfied just like i turn in my weekly report here at the office every week and i'm going about my day and we end up two inches apart and 2 000 miles away from each other on the couch me on my ipad you on your phone and we are so close and so far away from each other man and so bring the play the intimacy the all right i'll try that sounds super weird man but i'll i mean okay i'll try it or or my wife did this like i just won a french kiss and i was like oh really okay she's like yeah i miss that we used to hold hands and just kiss and then go home i was like oh man okay so anyway i wasn't what i was thinking was going to be in there but that's what it was it was we had a blast and we laughed we were poking fun and played silly music whatever so have some play going back to um the other question about what happens when you feel the wheels falling off your heart rate takes off on you you can't sleep you start choosing netflix over intimacy some of these things that are you you can't look at your emails from the at the office because you know oh gosh senior pastor probably emailed me when you find yourself there there is no none zero there is no long-term behavior change there is no long-term life change that doesn't happen in the presence of other people period full stop you can white knuckle yourself to lose 50 pounds that weight will find its way back on your body or it will find its way out another addiction sure you can get another degree and another degree and another degree and get that fancy job you will go with you you will still show up that first day on that new job the only way to truly transform your life is to start with connection and so those conversations i had with people who loved me and cared about me when i said okay i'm not okay that's when healing starts that's when your body can go oh okay the tribe's back now we don't have to be on 360 defense 24 7 365. now i can sleep right and then now we're off to the races i wonder if the problem got worse over the last couple of years because our social support systems kind of broke down we weren't allowed to meet with each other yeah they vanished and then the church we knew or the company we knew between the great resignation and the great migration out of church where lots of people quit it's like okay we had a stable social network that maybe needed a lot of work prior to 2020 and then that blew apart and we're kind of in the ashes going you know relationally we're just falling apart and a lot of us probably have gotten more comfortable being isolated than we were two years ago can you talk about so yeah talk go ahead go ahead no no no it's it i'm interviewing you i want to hear what you what you're thinking about that oh man i got asked on an interview the other day um did i think that what happened the last two years was as bad as 9 11. and i hadn't thought about this in my it came out my instant response was this is way worse and here's why after 9 11 whether it was real or not we had a perceived common enemy it was us versus them same team what happened the last two years is that i was told that my neighbor walking her dog might kill me those the the preschool kids at my sunday school class might be carrying some disease that will kill us all so the thing that keeps us whole is other people relationships that's why we are in church that's why the thing is jesus got 12 people to walk with him plus all the others right we have to have other people and that's what became the weapon was other people and so the very thing that keeps us alive it's like becoming allergic to water overnight you only got four or five days after that and i don't think we've got comfortable i think if you take all of that those feelings and emotions and pain and screaming and yelling and you press it down you compress it the other word for compress is to depress i think our bodies have gone into freeze and just said we're out i can't keep screaming and running and setting the alarms between the election and between covet and mass on and vaccine he's on and off and i'm out bodies have checked out on us and i think i said this earlier but man netflix is happy to say you'll like this and amazon will say this this will help and it just keeps a steady it's like a it's like a it's like a vernon shirley like little little line of just deep deep keeping me propped up with the next article and the next thing and the next thing and yeah i'm out i'm just out and that's when we have to wait out into the wilderness now man now's the season for courage and bravery well and the other thing that made it interesting too is even if you kind of got past the okay this person could infect me and you had your bubble for a while and a lot of people weren't in lockdown for the whole two years but then somebody that you might say is medically safe we're gonna hang out with this person turns out to be on the other side of the aisle from you politically or has these other wacko views that you've now seen on social and you're like i don't know whether we can hang out anymore right so it just seems to it became it became ideological safety too it did yeah ideologically i don't know you anymore i don't know and how many i mean i know you've experienced this how many couples have you talked to over the last two years that are just staring at their spouse going i don't know who you are you know what i mean like what happened to you and it's like i've always been like this like i or vice ver like whatever happened like what do you mean we're not gonna do whatever or what do you mean you're putting a mask on our kid whatever the argument was i just have heard over and over like i don't know you like what happened and we lost we just became untethered and then once we became untethered man we're just amoebas running around all over the place just wagging the tails man can you since we kind of went there and went deep uh if you're comfortable can you talk about how you blew up your marriage you can talk about both times one time but we've all been there before i almost blew up my marriage and uh so did my wife at one point so i'd love to know what happened to you yeah for me it was it's about a couple of things one it's about creating um a solo universe these are my plans in my world and what are you doing to contribute to my world and whenever you do that in a marriage you force your partner to do the same thing to survive they have to create their own world so i don't think i want to go to this church anymore to my partner to my wife meant oh i'm gonna have to lose all my friends and now her alarms are off to the races and i don't like the way this church is treating whatever and again i was that idiot i was always finding theological issues with this and that and that and that um in fact that we can we can put a pin in that one i have a dark moment that was important for me on that but okay i kept hopping from church to thing to theological issue to whatever it was um because again my identity was being the smart guy in the room not being the most safe or loving or gentle person it was i'll be the smartest i'll show you guys and so i created a world that was unsafe for my wife to exist in which meant she had to get friends that i didn't know about she had to not lie to me but not tell me where she was like i'm gonna go get coffee with and then what happens in that gap is that my body begins to feel the gap i know that we're we're not aligned i know that there's an intimacy gap here but i don't know how to bridge it and so instead of trying to i don't have the language i don't i don't know what to say hey i feel like we're separate here we've gotten off course somewhere i don't know what to do so what do i do in the in the gap i blame her for it kids blame themselves adults blame other people so i blamed her for oh man my wife she don't even coming home until seven o'clock tonight it's ridiculous cause she don't want to listen to me for two hours drone on about how the world's coming to an end and about how our church is terrible and everything i should no she want to hang out with her three girlfriends and have an actual laugh every once in a while right so in that gap i become top the top it spins tighter and tighter and tight my world becomes tighter and tighter and tighter and that's when you find yourself responding to that text that you shouldn't respond to that's when you the what the words i used was i begin to outsource um laughter to other people i begin to outsource oh she thinks i'm smart at work and let me be clear i never cheated on my wife and nothing like that but i know enough to know that i wanted to tell this woman at work my joke because she's gonna think it's funny and i start thinking oh oh i'm gonna show her this book right not here not here and i'm pointing to where my wife was sitting and so that tiny little gap gets wider and wider and it's all innocent it's all silly until you go whoa whoa whoa whoa i'm going way this car has no brakes on it right and you have to uh for me it was there was a couple of just throwing the car in the park on the highway while we're going down the road and we all smash up against the dashboard otherwise we're gonna end up going off a cliff here right and so that's where it was for me everything started little everything started small but it was me outsourcing different parts of my of who i was um my wife doesn't like my music but this guy at work likes my music so we're gonna go hang out over there or my wife doesn't ever wanna come meet me for lunch because she had another job by the way arrogant idiot but um so these three women from work we'll all go to lunch together and suddenly i'm telling them about is that you hear i'm saying so it just happened super organically and just moves this way and this way in this way and you just find yourself on an island somewhere so i got i got fortunate that we never crossed any lines we couldn't get back from anything like that but it was very gentle very very like huh and all because and i'm 100 i created a world that was unsafe for my wife to live in and so then i reacted to her trying to stay alive we put a pin in something and i want to come back to it was it the sort of anger and views on everything and my church was bad and like political views like what what was that you wanted to unpack i don't want to let that go so i have always prided myself on theological gymnastics okay i love them they're a sport for me right i love it i've and i've given last 20 years 15 of which were with faith-based universities with great world-class mdiv professors and then national conferences the whole i love playing playing sparring and getting in the ring with theological discussion discussions i love it and as a professor my job is always to make sure my students are unstable stable i like this is the way this is oh yeah what about this my mom is a mythologist so um i got a dad mythologist yes okay my th so i was i remember going to her office and being like hey how come i was a kid you didn't tell me there was 20 000 flood narratives throughout history you all left that one off the flannel graph when i was a kid and she's like you want to have this conversation so i i love that and then i brought that home and so the analogy i use is mixed martial arts fighters or professional boxers take mike tyson when he went to the gym he put his gloves on he put his mouthpiece in and he hit other grown men for for a living and then when the when his practice was over he took the gloves off took the mouthpiece out and he could not go hit the woman at the grocery store when she didn't have the right peanut butter i never took the gloves off and so i took those theological sparring things with me to every church i went to to every sunday poor sunday school teaching volunteer that i was like oh this guy's outgunned i'm coming for him oh i did it to my i did it to my wife i did it to my family and here's what happened here was my my the bell ringing moment when i was a kid we my parents taught me you stick it out with a church when you say we're in you're in my the great richard beck who's a great friend and mentor of mine said what if we lived our lives especially when it comes to neighborhoods and churches as though we could never move what conversations would we have that would be different what meals would we have what things would we just get over instead of running all the time so when i was a kid we stayed at the same place over and year after year the big fights the church splits all the drama we stayed and we stayed and we stayed and we stayed and then when we had my wife and i experienced a bunch of miscarriage it was a mess right and then my daughter comes out of nowhere four years later like we have my son and my daughter shows up i called a couple of men who were in their 70s maybe even their 80s that had been with me when i was a child at that church back in houston and i called him and said i just need you to know some of the lessons you passed along 30 years ago to me i'm staring at my baby girl now and i'm gonna treat her differently because of you you have impacted my family tree and here was the moment i remember thinking oh no my intellectual arrogance my decision to monopolize theological drama over who's allowed in this building and oh yeah you hate that group well i love that group in the bib i have robbed my son of those relationships because he's never been at a church more than three years we move every three years and that's when we moved to nashville four years ago i took a job at belmont university here when i moved to nashville to take that job i looked at my wife and said you pick any box i don't care what box it is i want to be around great people and we're going to love this community and this is going to be where we go to church until our kids are out of here no more i'm not no more drama and it's been great and it's been hard and it's been fun but my attitude was been totally different a thousand percent different it's about relationships not right and wrong and i tell you what i don't agree with a lot of my fellow members and we have lots of hot dogs together and we sit by lots of fires together and we have lots of times their kids playing together because that's what's important not the nonsense man so one of the things i've noticed and you've hinted at this and i'm not saying that's part of your story but i've picked up so much anger online anger about politics anger about theology like just people who enjoy lacerating other people tearing people down and it seems to have accelerated and underneath that is a a quasi-militaristic almost like you know i am so jacked i got my weapons ready to go if anybody messes with me i'm going to blow them away kind of thing i see that testosterone culture really particularly strong in people leaders who are 30 and under do you see that and what is driving that oh yeah oh man i think there's a couple of things one i think the lowest hanging fruit and you're gonna get some mean uh internet comments about this what i'm about to say so point in my direction it's fine is um we're what seven eight nine ten years into the fortnight generation we've got a group of people who won't who've grown up in a first-person shooter game my dad's got some studies that he showed me about it alters your brain chemistry these first-person shooter games are simply different now um because you are in it and there is an action and then you move that towards access to um it used to be i don't say it's less than noble because i think what many of these men and women are doing is incredibly noble but if i was going to apply to fbi and the cia right out of college it suggested do not tell people you are applying this is between you and your government this is you are entering into service the moment you didn't send on this application you joined the navy seals this is for you and your team and your government now it is uh my granddad joined the service to serve his country now we joined the service to get um four years of college paid for and so our the way we do the way we go into the military the way we do this is about these platforms now and so you've got much more many i mean i didn't know a navy seal growing up now there's 500 of them with a podcast and a story and a t-shirt line right so um and again oh my gosh those guys are incredible there's so much we can learn from them but there's a this brings me to the third thing so we've got a picture of what this looks like that we haven't had before we've got a generation of kids growing up on fortnite playing army every single night of the week for hours and hours and hours and then underneath it all we have no models of what a true man actually looks like we have no picture of that and so when in and there's a generation of men who have been told you will shut your mouth anything that comes out of your mouth is wrong or broken or deceitful or meant to hurt you be quiet we're going to medicate you we're going to settle you down we're going to put you in this box over here stop you are what's wrong with everything and then somebody comes along and says oh yeah let me show you what else is awesome and it's such an appealing appetizing alternative to take your ritalin be quiet you shut your mouth nobody cares what you think anymore you're the part of the problem to shoot this and watch what happens right it's a great counter argument to that i hadn't thought about that i'll have to take some time to unpack that and what do you think man i just rattled off top of my head what do you think no you know what like you know i've got a and my kids haven't to my knowledge shown particularly violent tendencies but they grew up playing video games you know call of duty that kind of thing as well and we worried about that as parents like very much worried about that and i'm also canadian so there's a certain point in which canadians exactly john like we don't understand i'm texan you're texas i'm texas so you're texas and tennessee that's about as hard of gun culture as you can get so i mean but here's what's funny about it that i don't know who talks about guns and you know he talks about guns in in in texas not nobody really nobody does because everybody has no yeah it's i mean it's just like a like that i expect that i i that grandmother's got one in her per like it just is an is and i had a great professor she was from chicago and she said the problem with the gun conversation is we talked past each other because in chicago the only people i knew with guns were bad people and so when somebody says i want to give guns to everybody i'm thinking what are you all crazy and in texas my grandmother has one and so when you say everybody with a gun's evil i'm thinking my grandma's not and so we just talk past each other um but i there is a um there's an alt narrative which is you're in fact you're not the problem you're the solution and here's how you are a part of the solution and then you pump that message into somebody's head over and over yeah and i wonder if it does get down to powerlessness to a certain extent that this is how i express myself it's just it's really interesting i speak a lot in texas so i'm sure the next time the plane lands i'm going to get a lot of opinions on what i just said so just know i don't think i don't think so at all i'm trying to understand i'm trying to understand so let's let's work on this to get us to a place of solution sex is dying in marriage anxiety is increasing your body is keeping score you've got accumulated trauma secondary trauma is that what it was called secondary trauma um and you're trying to lead and you're trying to lead a divided people that don't like each other whose community has died for about 10 different reasons what is the path out like how do you begin to undo this meth mess and find yourself if there's meth too we can talk about that some other day i don't know this mess that's a great way to start man yeah that's a great way just opening question on the next episode um what about math no i meant you get a lot done in that first week that's funny um how do you begin to to trace that out and like you've obviously found a different operating system you've found a different way to live and i'm sure that's going to continue to evolve right like you're going to you're going to be different at 50 than you are in your 40s but but how do we begin to to extract ourselves from this nightmare that a lot of us are living i think you've these steps kind of go in a loop and man i'll tell you the thing i hate more than anything is like being up at 2 am and there's like seven steps to becoming a better pom-pom thrower like nine steps to losing 40 pound like man if that's so reductive i can't stand those things so this these paths i'm going to these things i'm going to lay out here are not um they're not like do these seven things and then all sudden that's not how life works man because the moment you get your head screwed on straight you're gonna get a call and you're gonna step out and mom's gonna tell you she's got cancer or your buddy's gonna say hey my wife just left me i need you and so life just works that way what these what i'm gonna give you is a set of principles okay um that you go back to over and over and over again um and let me let's i just want to stop there for a second i think it's the great rich mullins that said the worst part about being a christian is that it's every single day that there's not a there's not a there's not like i can't memorize all the great abraham books and then like wake up the next day and like be good to go i gotta go back and go again i gotta go again or there's no workout you can do on monday that you never have to work out again for the rest of the month it's just not working amazing yeah it wouldn't it be awesome so the way towards wellness is from the the nagoski sisters wellness is a way of being it's not a state it's not a place you get to it's a thing you do and so i think first and foremost is you have to go to the mirror and you have to acknowledge these stories that are just going on and that are on loop i'm not okay i gotta say that out loud i am over my head i am exhausted i want to have sex again and i'm part of that problem i don't like that i've put on 72 pounds i'd whatever the thing you are wrestling with or things for most of us you have to look in the mirror and have courage and say i gotta own this story um and then you gotta own reality man and that's the like i wanted this life and here's where i am and most of us can't do that that's a hard hard thing to do what do you actually want how many people got into that question yeah that's you know what of all the questions sitting with with my research with fancy pantses on on fancy pants mental health towards i'm holding a single mom in the middle of the night because her son just took his life and i'm with the police officers and she can't breathe nobody has been able to answer that question over the last 20 years what do you want and we find ourselves i just want to be a youth minister because that was an easier job and i liked my youth ministry he meant a lot to me and suddenly i'm an executive pastor at a 800-person church because it paid what am i doing and you know i mean i don't even like this job i like the house and the car but what and so anyway what do you want you got to acknowledge reality i wanted something else and here's where i'm at oh i really wanted this and i'm not there yet and then the most important thing is you got to get that's when you got to reach out and get connected and for some of us that's a professional for some of us that's reaching out to carrie and your your coaching groups and saying i don't even know how to do friendship anymore it's not safe and here's where my experience working with pastors they get completely blown up is they're given two people that are their quote-unquote go-to guys or their accountability guys or they're whatever and they're also elder they're their boss too and so i think about that in the in the in the public sector like if my boss came all right you tell me all the things you're struggling with what you're screwing up with the things that are making you not great at your job just tell me no you're the last person on earth i'm gonna talk because i'm the guy who decides whether you get a raise or whether you stay at this company or church or not right like that's exactly right or who gets edged out when we do the next building campaign or whatever um and so or i really i really don't think that this political party i don't think they're right on this topic huh i don't i don't i don't hate that group of people am i supposed to hate them because i don't in fact i read this ah so there's nowhere to go and what pastors do a lot is they just swallow it they just sit on it and that trauma's cumulative right it adds up it adds up it adds up and so you gotta find people that you can be fully known fully loved can i tell the good stuff and the bad stuff and the dark stuff can i sh people who will show up for me at two am i gotta have those people and then and only then will our brains go all right now we can do the other stuff like lose weight or start sleeping we can start doing the other stuff now because we got our tribe back and that's how healing goes and then you're about changing your thoughts and changing your actions but i really believe everything comes down with owning your stories and then getting connected that's what that's when you look back on the last decade of your life you know from that sort of crisis you hit in your mid-30s what were one or two inflection points because you're right that's a lot of work and for the last 16 years i've been doing a lot of work in my life and you know there are people who are like well that's great i don't have 16 years so if if there's like an archimedes lever if there's one or two things that you say hey if you want to start like start here it's a long journey you didn't get this way overnight you're not going to get out of it overnight it is a journey but if there's one or two things you should pay attention to now to get some love back in your marriage the anxiety out of your body the polarization demonization that you're doing all the time online out of your system to quit these habits what what are one or two things where people could get started today or tomorrow on that i'll give you three okay and they're quick number one call somebody go visit somebody in person that's that's that's above all and say the words hey man i'm not okay wow i'm not okay in person i drove three hours i was so paranoid i thought people were listening to my calls turns out they were but that's that's that's for a later story but i thought i was so paranoid i was i was out of my mind carrie and um i got in my car and drove three hours and i walked into my buddy um it's one of those greatest blessings in my life he happened to be an md i've got another buddy who's like an assistant manager at napa auto parts i could have gone to see that my life would be way different if i'd gone to see him but i went to see my buddy who's an md and i walked in his office and hey when i showed up everywhere i was always a loud mouth like hey i always wanted the party to get going and so i walked in i didn't have an appointment and i and he said delony what are you doing and he says he still gets a goosebumps when he thinks about it i pointed at him and said hey brother i'm not okay and he said something was so chilling about the way you said that he said sit i didn't tell my wife i went i didn't tell my boss i didn't tell anybody i just got a car and drove and he sat with me for two and a half hours and it was one of the that was the moment so number one go to somebody if at all possible it could be a therapist it could be a pastor that's not a ding-dong that you trust go to a human and say i'm not okay the second thing is this is a courageous step because some spouses won't take it but tell your spouse these magic words i have made this home unsafe and i'm sorry i'm going to work on healing and i made my house unsafe not because i was waving guns around or throwing knives but because i was radioactive i was um a sleeping bear i was reading internet all day conspiracy theorying and lecturing and giving my thoughts on everything i made a world where my wife was not safe to say i don't like that or i don't want to eat that or i don't want to watch that movie she couldn't say those words not because i was mean or yell or whatever i just made it unsafe so i've made this place unsafe and i want to heal often people will go to their spouse and say i'm not okay and they dump that burden onto their spouse it's my wife's job to make me okay it's not they cannot carry that that's your job they can walk with you they can hold your arms up in the desert but they can't fix you so instead of saying hey i'm not okay say i've made this place unsafe and i'm sorry i'm gonna get well and then the third one is uh what is the third one i forgot the third one it was gonna be the best i'm sure the first one is fantastic oh oh here it is ready yeah this is awesome thing i didn't know about this until just a few months ago all of our devices like iphones ipads computers did you know they have this awesome thing on the side of them called an off button and you can just push it and they just shut off it just shuts off it just turns off it's amazing and just turn it off turn it all off turn it off and then you're gonna find yourself my buddy called he was the cio of a fancy pants company and he calls me he's like all right deloney i turned off all my devices and now i'm staring at my daughters what i do now and i was like well this here's where we are let's start from there right and like we're going to start having conversations and can i tell you the magic carrie here's the magic the other night i was here doing media until real late at the office i think i left here like eight o'clock and i got home at 8 30. my kids go to bed super early because we're psychopaths about sleep in my house and i go by and i i like to pray over my kid's door or i want to whisper into their rooms good night my daughter who's six her light was still on so i opened her door gently to see if she'd just fallen asleep with the light on she's reading a book she's not really reading she's just looking at the pictures and she said daddy and i looked at her and in a split second i said i challenge you right now if you dare to a game of air hockey down in our basement i said do you want to get demolished and her eyes got as big as silver dollars and she hopped up and goes you're dead and she i walked over to the bed she got on my shoulders i carried her down dude we played for seven minutes we talked trash she was like oh how do you like i mean my six-year-old daughter was letting the fly it was incredible and she beat me and then she got back on my shoulders we went back up in i tucked her in she'll remember that story for the rest of her life and more importantly i will too and there was no movie night no go-kart night there was seven minutes of something special between a dad and his daughter and that's what that's what we need man turn the things off and connect with those who love us right there in our world that's so good you know i don't know whether and i don't know it's a good thing that i'm watching this or not but i'm one of the billions of people watching yellowstone right now we're slowly working our way through that series and it's incredible it is and i'll tell you you know what you know what gets me is when you see john dutton just looking at the sunrise or the sunset no device nothing and he's just there for a half hour an hour or two hours watching things and i'm like oh i need more of that in my life i just need to go watch sunrise or watch sunset or just stare at some trees or the sky or something and and again you know unplugged i think that's so good john this feels like a round one to me i'd love to have you back at some point this has been fascinating we got to a couple of the questions that i had intended uh to do that so tell us about your book and then tell us about where people can find you online these days i mean i think the it's it's a deep dive into some of the stuff we've talked about um if i had to describe the book in one way i would say this we've been given really two paths forward one is you are your feelings and you are your emotions and you invent truth along the way it's unfolding before you as you see it and perceive it and if you feel uncomfortable then that means whatever is in front of you is wrong and it needs to change the other path we've been given is forget your feelings in fact feelings and emotions are a character flaw it's a sign of weakness grind it kill it crush it go get it drag it home that's life go get what's yours and both of those things are pathological they're both insane and so this book is really the new third way it's you have to take grasp of what has happened to you what you've done the things that you've been told the stories that have been laid out before you the fact that people treated you differently just because of the color of your skin the abuse whatever you have to deal with that and where the story stops for us most in this culture is you got to wake up the next morning and say now what what comes next and so the book is this the back half of the book is so what do we do now what does healing look like and walk people step by step i've worked with academics my whole career and one of the most humbling things coming to work for dave ramsey is i've just spoke with just talked back and forth with theorists and brilliant people who love love love people and coming here dave's mission is i want to talk to the over road trucker and i'm going to talk to that guy that runs a steel plant i want to talk to that single mom with three kids just trying to figure out what to do and i realized over the last 20 years i've been speaking over people and so this book is my attempt to really distill down mental health and relationships into something that everybody can understand starting with myself this book's a love letter to myself really um and so that's that's that's what the book is and um it's about 10 years in the making so i'm excited to get it out there and they can just go to johndaloney.com okay so to pick it up the book is called own your past change your future dr john deloney thanks so much for being on the podcast today hey can i tell you before we go 100 thank you for putting for putting good stuff out into the world like i'm um there's a lot of people who do these podcasts to sort of take someone else's light and make sure it shines on them and you're not that guy you're trying to help people and i'm so so we need more voices like you in the world so i'm grateful thank you that's very humbling and um it's a privilege to be able to do this and you know and i think we've all been down that road we all have versions of the same story and i'm really interested in redemption really interested in changing the narrative really interested in trying to help people find their way back and i think hearing other people's stories and getting behind the scenes and you're right i mean a lot of what we talked about you cover in your book but you went deep and you went personal and you went transparent and i'm really excited to see you as part of the ramsey team and excited to learn from you not only today but in the future john thank you thank you my brother thank you for watching the carey newhop leadership podcast on youtube i hope it's helped you thrive in life and leadership and if you haven't yet checked out the art of leadership academy inside you'll find everything you need to lead grow and run a church and now a word from our sponsor belay if you've ever struggled with bookkeeping watch this video because not only is it going to increase your peace of mind but you're going to wonder why you waited so long [Music] then it's tax season i still need all of your vendors w-9 forms from last year here that's nice sweetheart but i'm not thirsty a belay bookkeeper really is that where we are now i took care of the forms for dan this morning they are already in your inbox so okay let's go let them enjoy their day never miss a moment modern staffing from belay please you know there's not even any realty in there but while she's a young girl let her have fun have fun today sweetie get out go you are being ridiculous