By Allen Haynes • September 16, 2024 Listen to the podcast. Andy Stanley (00:02): Hey everybody. Welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast, a conversation designed to help leaders go further faster. I’m Andy Stanley and I’m so excited about this month because I have my good friend, Carey Nieuwhof in the studio with me. Welcome, Carey. Carey Nieuwhof (00:18): Hey, it’s such a joy to be with you, Andy. Thanks for having me. Andy Stanley (00:21): Yeah, well, usually, well, you’ve interviewed me a couple of times about things, and so we’re kind of going back and forth today. This is, I’m so excited about this because it’s super relevant, well to every leader, but I think Carey and you would agree in different seasons of life, what we’re going to talk about today becomes even more relevant because we’re going to talk about how to improve productivity by working when we are at our best. And as you know, every person on the other end of this podcast can tell us immediately, or they know immediately when they are at their best. But unfortunately, organizational life is not always in sync with our personal best. So this is going to be a super helpful conversation, and specifically we’re going to talk about finding our thrive cycle, and I’ll let you talk about that in just a minute. For those of you who don’t know, Carey, you’ve been missing out. He’s a bestselling leadership author, speaker, podcaster, a former attorney, which sounds like a book. I was former, I was an attorney in my former life. Carey Nieuwhof (01:19): Maybe actually write a book, Andy, I don’t know. Andy Stanley (01:20): Yeah, yeah. He hosts actually one of today’s most influential leadership podcast, the Carey NH Leadership Podcast, his podcast blog, his online content or access, gosh, over a million, like a million and a half times every month. So Carey’s a big deal, and he’s a big deal because he has a lot to say and a lot of important things to say specifically to leaders. And a few years ago, he made a bold move and decided to pull out of some other things he was doing to focus on pouring into leaders, which makes us all better. And he speaks to leaders literally all around the world about leadership change, personal growth. And his newest book is entitled At Your Best, how to Get Time, energy, and Priorities Working in Your Favor. So today we’re going to talk a lot about that, and Carey, I don’t know what you want to talk about first, but I would like to talk about something that you talk about in the book that intersects with all of our lives, and you call it the stress Spiral. So I don’t know if this is a great launching point, but I think it’s a great launching point because it is certainly relevant. What is the stress spiral? What does it do to us? And then we’ll talk about what to do about it. Carey Nieuwhof (02:24): Yeah, the stress spiral is something unfortunately I think a lot of us are familiar with, and it’s probably so familiar, Andy, we don’t even realize we’re in it. And I define it this way. I try to put a label on how I was feeling when I’m not at my best, and there’s basically you’re overwhelmed. I got way too much to do. I don’t have time to do it. You’re over committed. I said yes too many times to too many people. And I’m looking back on that now thinking, what was I thinking? And this is about life too. It’s like at work, I said yes too often, but we got little league on Tuesday nights and dance on Wednesday and church on Sunday, and we got this happening on Monday night. We just overcommitted and then overworked. It’s like you used to go to the office, but now the office goes to you. (03:10): I mean, there was a time, Andy, and you remember this, and I remember this because of the stage of life we’re at, but it was hard to do work at home. I mean, I guess you could always write a sermon or you could always write a talk or something like that, but you got a device. Now I’ve got a device now for the last decade plus that follows me everywhere I go. And we haven’t figured out the boundaries to that. So almost everybody I talk to is busy, overwhelmed, tired, fatigued. And that combination of overwhelmed, overworked and overcommitted is what I call the stress spiral. And then when you deal with leaders, it gets worse because we’re all a little bit ambitious or we have dreams and desires, and what you hope for is more responsibility. And as your responsibility increases, you don’t get more time. So now you’ve got to squeeze in, you thought you were busy in college, Andy Stanley (03:58): What? You don’t get more time with more responsibility. It doesn’t come with, oh, and by the way, here’s some more time to go with all that new responsibility. Carey Nieuwhof (04:05): Unfortunately, it Andy Stanley (04:06): Doesn’t work Carey Nieuwhof (04:06): That way. Andy Stanley (04:07): And we say yes anyway, right? Yeah. So yeah, then somebody says, here’s some more responsibility without any more time, and oftentimes no more pay. And we’re like, yes, yes, yes. Because leaders love progress. It’s very difficult for us to say no to something that even looks a little bit like an opportunity. So yeah, so the stress spiral, that’s the stress spiral, and everybody knows exactly what you’re talking about. So in the book, and what we’re going to talk about for most of our time today is what you contrast it with, which is the thrive cycle. So the stress spiral, we all know what that’s like, the Thrive cycle. Before you define that though, when you think about the stress spiral, when I was reading about what you said about that, I immediately thought about my personal response to stress. And it’s not the same for everybody. It’s not the same for everybody. So we both have pastoral backgrounds and so much of our conversations with people, especially leaders, business leaders, oftentimes they get in trouble because of where they go with their or in their stress spiral because they don’t just go to, I’m going to get it done, I’m going to get it done. When it’s overwhelming, we go to unhealthy places. Has that been your experience? Not personally or maybe personally? Carey Nieuwhof (05:21): No. I’ll tell you what I do. What do you do? I learned about this in the pandemic. I learned it from Mutual, well, two mutual friends, Henry Cloud and Ian Morgan Kron them both well, and I had conversations with them and we were trying to unpack how everybody reacted to Covid. And I’m an eight, I’m an Enneagram eight. So what I did was I worked more and I tried to get control over a world that was spiraling out of control in an economy that was spiraling out of control. And I ended up, I remember telling Henry Cloud one day, I said, you know what I did is I reorganized my bookshelf and I made sure everything was color coded. And he said, well, that was super healthy. But I also realized, okay, I have to declare a finish line at some point. I’m just going to commandeer this thing until I’m, and it’s like work is good, but overworking is not good. So I kind of push myself back into the stress spiral, and I think that’s what I do because I’m a control freak. Eight is control if you follow the Enneagram. So I will try to control things and I’ll try to work until the problem is fixed. Andy Stanley (06:24): You know what else I learned about eights recently that helped me, and this is weird talking to you about this, and it’s not even the topic, but in Ian’s book, I work with a lot of eights, like a lot, and I like eights because you guys get stuff done. Don’t, I’m a one, I just want to make things better, even if it means making ’em smaller. But anyway, I learned that eights when they’re confronting you and they’re kind of in their eight mode and they’re arguing and pushing hard, that for them, that’s intimacy. So it’s so helpful because when a get in my face, I’m thinking, oh, we’re having intimacy, which is odd. Carey Nieuwhof (07:01): I’d love to know where you go in your stress, Andy, because I mean, having followed your leadership for decades now, you tend to think, oh, Andy doesn’t get stressed, but you probably do. Where does your stress go? Andy Stanley (07:10): So where I go, and this is a confession, I don’t know that I’ve ever told anyone this, but I tell myself, I can just quit. I don’t have to do any of this stuff. I mean, here comes Sunday, I can just say, I’m not coming. Hey, I’ve got this project due or this manuscript do. Hey, I can just call ’em and say, sorry, you’re not going to get it. In my mind, the escape hatches, nobody can make me do any of this stuff and I can just quit. And when I realize, wait a minute, I’m kind of doing this to myself, there is nobody making me do any of this stuff. It’s like, huh, well, I’m just going to do what I can do. And if they don’t like it, I’ll just quit. Now. I’ve never quit anything. I don’t think I’ve quit anything since I dropped two classes in college and I felt like such a loser. I’ve never quit anything. But again, the point is we all have some sort of mental game we play, and sometimes the escape from stress is healthy, sometimes it’s not healthy. But to the point of your book, there is a better way the thrive cycle. What is the thrive cycle? Carey Nieuwhof (08:18): Well, first of all, can I just say thank you? Thanks for being so honest. That was so helpful to hear. And I’ve thought about quitting too, and you raised something about the stress spiral I want to touch on and then talk about the Thrive Cycle. We didn’t get into it in the first answer, but one of the symptoms that you are in the stress spiral is you’re constantly thinking of an escape. You always want to build a life that you want to escape from. So when I was burned out 15 years ago, my fantasy was I wanted to go stack boxes in a warehouse. Leadership’s hard and people don’t do what you tell ’em to do, and organizations don’t respond to cause and effect. So I’m like, if I stack boxes at a warehouse, the pile was over here in the morning, in the afternoon, the pile’s over there. (09:00): That’s why I like mowing my lawn. But you get into these escapist things. For some people it could be, I’m just going to go live on the beach or I’m going to go make lattes all day at a coffee shop. And that is not healthy because then you’re trying to escape stress, but you’re just going to bring your stress with us, which gets us to the thrive cycle. So the stress spiral, overwhelmed over, committed overwork happens when your time is unfocused. Your energy, your energy level, we’ll talk about that is unleveraged. And your priorities keep getting hijacked by other people. And the Thrive cycle is kind of the opposite. So I stumbled on the Thrive Cycle. It was completely, it was intentional but accidental. I had an intense period of burnout back in 2006 where I kind of thought it was over. I had lost all my passion. I was still going to work every day getting up out of bed, but it was game over. My body kind of declared a finish line and said, you are running too hard. And it was terrifying. And anybody who’s been through burnout can identify with how scary it is. And so I tried to figure out Andy, okay, if that’s normal, I wanted to get back to normal, but I’m like, normal got me hit by a truck, (10:08): So how do I get to the point where I can live better? And I started to experiment with some really good therapy, some great coaching, leadership coaching actually partly provided through NorthPoint, through some of the coaching you guys were doing at the time. Over a few years, I sort of discovered, okay, I’m only at my best about three to five hours a day. And subsequent research has confirmed that. So very short window where you’re really at your best, and we can define that in a minute if you want. And what the Thrive Cycle does is it teaches you to do what you’re best at when you’re at your best and you start to focus your time on those pivotal hours when you’re really, you’re sharp, you’re clear, you’re bright, you’re thinking, you’re in the flow, you’re working for some people that’s in the morning for summit. It’s the afternoon for summit, it’s in the evening. And this works really well with knowledge workers where we have a little bit of control over our calendar and when we do our work and when we answer email and that kind of thing. And then you leverage your energy. So that’s focusing your time on those hours, then you leverage your energy instead of fighting it. We’ve all been at those 3 34 o’clock meetings where you pretty much need a constant drip of caffeine to stay awake. (11:19): So you start programming your life around that. You’re try not to do your most important work. So you’re leveraging your energy, you’re cooperating with it, not competing with it, and then you’re realizing your priorities by learning the strategies to have other people not hijack them. And again, like I said with our phones, I mean you’re being hijacked every 30 seconds in some cases as your phone dings and vibrates and chirps and rings and notifications come in. So the Thrive Cycle, basically, if I wanted to boil it down, it’s doing what you’re best at when you’re at your best. And this is the line, learn how to live in a way today that will help you thrive tomorrow. And if you really look what’s under the stress spiral, people are living in a way today as they’re listening to this, that’s going to make ’em struggle tomorrow. (12:02): That’s going to make tomorrow harder. You’re going to work too many hours, you’re going to say yes to too many things. So the Thrive Cycle is built around, no, I’m going to focus my time, going to leverage my energy, going to realize my priorities, and I’m going to live in a way today that will help me thrive tomorrow. And I break that down into five categories. So as a person of faith, spiritually, what do I need to do to make sure that I’m good in the spiritual compartment? Emotionally, I spent my thirties pretty much ignoring my emotions, which led to my burnout emotionally, am I healthy? I’m married, my wife and I, good, my kids and I, my team and I, my friendship’s good relationally. How am I doing relationally? A lot of leaders in our giving position, we just give all day long, but we don’t receive well. Andy Stanley (12:46): So Carey Nieuwhof (12:46): There’s relationally and then financially and physically, physical fitness and then having margin. It’s not about how much you make. It’s what you do with what you make. And if you’ve got margin in those five categories, then you’re living in a way today that will help you thrive tomorrow. Andy Stanley (13:00): So here’s not pushback, but here’s like, Hey, that’s great, thank you. But then I have my life. So because all those things you just said, no, I don’t think anybody would argue that they’re important, but the assumption is somehow you are guarding those things or they don’t happen. Otherwise, I’m just backing the stress cycle and I’m doing what’s urgent as opposed to what’s important. I never sharpen the saw you Steven Covey’s analogy. So I don’t know if you want to talk about this part or not. So many other things I want to get to, but guarding those things, I mean, it’s one thing to decide it. Like I said, nobody’s going to argue with, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that means saying no. It means taking on less. So what did you do? I mean you realize, Hey, I got to get out of this thing and I’ve got to find my thrive cycle. But practically, what did you do? And then we’ll get to some more of the stuff in the book. Carey Nieuwhof (13:50): So very practically, yeah, this is all in the book, but very practically, to answer your question directly, what I started to do was guard my green zone. So let’s go through the zones really quickly. Green zone those 3, 4, 5 hours a day where you really are sharp. If you’re a writer, your ideas are flowing. If you’re a manager, your meetings are great. If you are into strategy, like man, your best ideas are flowing. If you’re into spreadsheets, you’re actually doing some beautiful pivot tables and it’s pretty amazing. You’re in the flow. So you’re three to five hours a day, block that out. And then take your most important work to reference Covey, not what is urgent, but what is important. Occasionally you’re going to have something that really is like five alarm fire, you got to deal with it. But most days that’s not the case. (14:34): It’s just your inbound determines your workflow. This is where you decide, no, this is really important. And I’ve got a scheme in the book to help you figure this out. But the thumbnail version is simply what is the highest value activity that you bring to your current role? So what is most important? When I was a pastor, when I was a lawyer, it’s like preparing for court. I got a court tomorrow morning at 10:00 AM the judge isn’t going to wait. Do I know the facts of the case? I got to prepare for that. And a lot of lawyers, attorneys are notorious for winging it. They’re reading the file in the cab, ride over to the courthouse and they’re missing it. And so I got a prep when I was a preacher. This Andy, it’s that Sunday morning message. If you don’t get that right and if you don’t get it done when you’re at your best, it’s not going to be great. (15:21): And then because you’re gifted at it, here’s what we do because we all have an area of gifting, whether that’s communication or spreadsheet. Andy, I know you well enough to know if you had to give a talk at a national leadership conference, you could literally write it on the plane ride over or Thursday night at six o’clock and deliver it Friday morning at 9:00 AM And you know what? It would be good. It would probably be great, but I call that cheating your gift because you’re cheating your gift, but you’re never developing it. You’re not sharpening your saw. So if you want to be a better communicator, if you want to be a better leader, take those three to five hours, protect them at all costs and do your best work. So that’s the key. Now, what that does, that’s like a lever that just kind of pushes everything else in your life. Because as you know, if that strategic retreat is all planned and ready to go and your talk’s finished and your message is done, you could go home at 11 o’clock and you’re like, I think I accomplished everything I set out today. Now the reason you don’t go home at 11 o’clock, you got other stuff to do. You get paid for more than three or four hours a day, but your big rocks are moving, Andy Stanley (16:24): But you’ve addressed the pressure point, you’ve addressed the Carey Nieuwhof (16:26): Pressure Andy Stanley (16:26): Point. And for me, that’s it. If I can address the pressure point Carey Nieuwhof (16:30): Because you’re sitting in that Andy Stanley (16:31): Meeting, everything else is easy. Carey Nieuwhof (16:32): It is easy. Andy Stanley (16:33): But if that’s hanging over me all day, I’m distracted by everything and I’m not working in my green zone. To your point, for most leaders, we find our green zone is in the morning. Not everybody, but that’s what I hear more often than not. Carey Nieuwhof (16:46): I hear it anecdotally as in the morning, and I become a morning person, particularly since we had kids, Daniel Pink’s research on that shows it’s a little more divided than I would’ve thought. I found out from my team, I should have known this, I wrote the book and everything. It was at the publisher, found out half my team is afternoon people. Now I have a pretty young staff, so some of them are pre-kids, but they really love the afternoon. And then you have the odd night owl. But the fun part about the dangerous part of knowledge work is you can start working at 6:00 AM if you want to, and you can keep going till 11. But the fun part, if it’s healthy is yeah, you can start at 6:00 AM and I’m like seven to 11:00 AM That’s the peak of my green zone. Andy Stanley (17:23): Wow. Carey Nieuwhof (17:23): That’s when I’m going to produce the best content. Are you morning, Andy? Andy Stanley (17:26): Definitely Carey Nieuwhof (17:26): More than Andy Stanley (17:27): Anything. But again, I’m sitting in front of a laptop creating content, so I’ve got to be by myself and I protect, as you know, we’ve talked about this, I protect and my assistant helps me protect that time. I just have to have it or I’m in a bad mood because it’s stress. Here comes Sunday or here comes the event. So that’s the green zone. Talk a little bit about red and yellow. Carey Nieuwhof (17:51): So red zone’s easy. The opposite of green zone. That is when you’ve got toothpicks in your eyelids to stay awake for the meeting, that’s when you’re falling asleep at your desk when you’re like, how do I get out of here? And again, if you’re in burnout, you’re going to feel like that all the time, but all of us have one or two hours. You’re watching the movie at night. If you’re married with your spouse or with your girlfriend, your partner, whatever, and you’re falling asleep during the movie, okay, that’s probably your red zone. You either need to take a nap or you need to go for a run or something like that. Or choose a different Andy Stanley (18:19): Movie too. There’s always that Carey Nieuwhof (18:21): Get a different movie. But Andy, it’s one of those things where I used to push through those, but you’re not, and sometimes you have to, but it’s like pick your lowest task to reply to a little bit of email during your red zone. There’s not a whole lot at stake. You just got to get your inbox clear, just get it clear or fill out that expense report or whatever you need to do. That isn’t high task. And your yellow zone is everything in between. You’re not at your best, you’re not at your worst. That’s when I do a lot of my meetings. You are actually pretty good. You can do meetings well. I do a lot of my podcast interviews in my yellow zone rather than my green zone. I do the prep in the green zone, but I do the execution in the yellow zone, like 80, 90% there. And that’s good enough. But again, you’ve got to devise this according to whatever responsibilities you’re tasked with in your organization and figure it out. But all of us can pretty much intuitively go, oh, that’s green zone. That’s green zone relationship, green zone work, green zone writing, green zone strategy. Yeah, that’s definitely red zone. And then everything else is sort of in between. Andy Stanley (19:22): And then giving ourselves permission to schedule in that direction. Because my biggest challenge with this concept early on is I felt like, no, I’m the leader. That means I need to bend to everyone else’s schedule and where their energy is because I’m the leader. I want to go first. I want to serve. And that’s true, but I was not a very good leader to the point of this discussion. We know when we are most prepared or best set up to bring our energy to our team. And if I’m in my green zone and I’m meeting with the team and they’re more in yellow to red, it is still better to be in a meeting with me when I am able to bring my best energy than to show up when they’re at their best and I’m not at my best. So again, these are kind of a permission giving. There’s some permission giving involved with this. Would you Carey Nieuwhof (20:11): Agree? A hundred percent. And I think if you’re carrying the weight in that meeting, you should be at least green or yellow. I’ll give you a really quick anecdote. Andy, you probably don’t know this. There’s no reason you would, but I went to one of your campuses a few years ago when I was developing this material and I taught it before I wrote the book. And when we went there, we kind of did an implementation. It’s a large location. You lead a very large organization. They probably had four to 6,000 attending on the weekends at the time. And they had a staff of maybe 80 and their leadership team went back and discovered that the reason they all didn’t like their leadership team meeting is everyone was in their yellow or red zone, but they didn’t know that. And so all they did was they moved it on the calendar to, I don’t know, 11:00 AM or noon or two or pick a time. (20:55): And suddenly the meeting had energy. Everybody enjoyed it. They did a lot better. And it’s not a question of Friday at four o’clock we’re going to have a leadership team meeting because no one likes that meeting. This is Monday to Friday workday. It’s adjustments like that. And then the other thing you can do, and I think you hinted at this, is an important takeaway for all the leaders is you need to do a push pull with your organization to try to figure out, okay, yeah, if you’re the principal, if you’re the founder, the ceo, the senior pastor, whatever you are, yeah, your green zone matters. But then if you want to get the best out of your small groups person, your marketing person, your sales director, you’ve got to make sure that they are optimizing their green zone as well. So it’s a little bit of fluidity that you have to work through. (21:38): And the heart of it to your earlier question is how do you make sure this happens? I have a calendar called the Thrive Calendar. We’re making it available for everyone. We can give the link if that’s helpful, but you can actually calendar these priorities in so your entire team knows, oh, Andy is not available Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday morning from 7:00 AM to 11:00 AM Your team knows you’re kind of, all the notifications are off on your phone, you’re doing your important work. Or it could be Tuesday from two to four, you’re not available, but you begin to function as an organization this way. And here’s what happens. You get more done and less time people work fewer hours, priorities get realized. You’re not letting the world dictate what happens and suddenly you’re making progress. Andy Stanley (22:22): I’d like to close with this, Carey, we’ve said this. I’m sure you’ve said it. I know I’ve said it and we hear it all the time. I just need a vacation. I just need a vacation. And it doesn’t help. I mean, I love vacation, but a vacation, there’s not like a battery that I can charge on my vacation. Then when I get back, I’ve got all this extra energy because I went on a vacation. And vacations are very important, but they do not address what we’re talking about. I don’t think. So what’s the relationship between I need a vacation and prioritizing what you do and when you do it, what’s the connection? Carey Nieuwhof (22:59): It’s such a good insight, Andy, because it mischaracterizes the problem. See, the problem is not how we spend our time off. If you’re cheating and doing email during your vacation, shame on you don’t do that. But we’ve all taken real breaks sometimes two weeks, three weeks, a month, and we’re like, okay, we’re back. And then first Monday back at 11:00 AM you get punched in the face by life and you’re exhausted and you want another vacation. What is that? Here’s the challenge. The challenge time off will not heal you when the problem is how you spend your time on. Andy Stanley (23:32): Say that again. Time off is Carey Nieuwhof (23:35): Won’t heal you when the problem is how you spend your time on. Andy Stanley (23:39): Wait, Carey, that’s amazing. Time off won’t heal you when the problem is how you spend time on that may have been worth listening to this entire podcast for that one statement. That’s amazing. Time off won’t heal you when the problem is how you spend time on. Carey Nieuwhof (23:58): Yeah, and that’s our problem, right? Because you can take six weeks off, and that’s what you and I have talked about this before, offline. I don’t think you’ve done a sabbatical. I haven’t done a full sabbatical. And I always thought in the back of my mind, sabbaticals don’t work. And when I was researching and writing the book, finally the penny dropped. Most of the people we know take a sabbatical because they’re burned out and exhausted. They go on some retreat, they take three months off, six months off, and then they’re like, oh, I’m all better. I’m all healed. Then they come back and bam, they get punched in the face and then they’re gone. They quit their job, they switch careers, they do something six months to a year later. They can’t take it because what they address, maybe they took care of their soul or their life or their relationships or their money or whatever it was, but they didn’t take care of their schedule. And life is a meat grinder unless you take control of it. So if you have an unsustainable pace, a vacation is not an answer for an unsustainable pace. Feels like an interruption, a sustainable pace is the answer. Yeah. Andy Stanley (24:57): Alright, well, hey, that’s all we have time for today. So to all of our listeners, we want to thank you for joining us and I would invite you to check out Carey’s new book at your best, how to Get Time, energy, and Priorities working in your Favor, and you can find that book wherever books are sold. And be sure to visit andy stanley.com and you’ll be able to download the Leadership podcast application guide that actually includes a summary of our discussion today with some questions for reflection. And if you’re leading your team or a small group through this content, that download will help you with that as well. And be sure to join us next month on the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast. We’ll see you next month. Comments are closed.