E214: Mental Health and emotional well-being for entrepreneurs with Mike Young | Mental Health Podcast

Michael: Hey! What's up, Unbroken Nation! Hope that you're having an amazing day wherever you are in the world. Today we are joined by Mike Young who is the founder and president of the association of mental health and well-being for entrepreneurs and the host of the made over podcast. Mike, how are you, my friend? What is going on?

Mike: Michael, thanks for having me on man, it's good to see you again and I'm so grateful to be here.

Michael: Yeah, I'm grateful for you to be here – myself, man. I love the energy you bring; I love the conversation that you're having about mental well-being. You know, as many of the listeners of The Unbroken Nation know I am an entrepreneur have been pretty much since I was a young boy, I think ultimately it's like the best part about being a human being as kind of get a live life on your own terms. I've also worked for Corporate America and I've done the whole nine, right? But entrepreneur and mental well-being, is not synonymous right now, and I really love that you're talking about this. A huge part of my journey and my mental health has been to be able to be aware, especially as an entrepreneur about what's going on with me. But before we dive in Mike, can you tell everybody a little bit about you, a little bit about your background and ultimately how you kind of got to where you are today?

Mike: Yeah, man. You know, I spent the first twenty-three years of my life thinking I was going to play pro baseball, I really didn't have a plan B. School was just a means to keep playing baseball for me, and then I found myself in my senior year waking up and realizing that dream wasn't going to happen. I ended up tearing a ligament, my elbow and my freshman year and so I kind of found myself in that place of okay, what the heck, am I going to do with my life? I had a friend in the mortgage industry at the time, I ended up getting into the mortgage industry, we built a company from scratch over a period of five years between 2003 and 2008 from like, six people to 250 employees and that collapsed in 2008. So I went from liquid millionaire to two hundred thousand dollars in debt in less than six months and it really was you know, I think it was a loss of identity, you know, for me at that point it's just when everything gets stripped away and you're left with with nothing you really begin to question your decision, making your actions; what did I do wrong? All those things. And I knew I wanted to become my own entrepreneur and build something from scratch that was simpler because at the end of the mortgage business, I was getting 400 emails a day, I was working 16-18 hour days, always in the office and I just knew that I wanted more freedom than that, I didn't know. I actually thought I was a bit delusional at the time, I thought it was going to be quick and easy because I built this beast of a business, I thought, well, to do it on my own, with a small teams clearly going to be fast and easy for me. And next thing I knew I was a decade into my journey still struggling, still couldn't figure it out and very frustrated frustrated as hell I would say. And it took a lot of failure, took a lot of taking action before I kind of found my lane and found my space in the entrepreneurial journey.

Michael: Yeah. Unfortunately, failure is a part of life and I look at it I leverage the data point. But what I'm really curious about thinking about an understanding what happened during the crash, it wiped me out as well, it was just a part of. I've been working with corporate job, I was also starting a side hustle, you know, at that point this other business I was working on and I just kind of watched everything I had built and say for the last few years just like go down and I just watched and watching and it was like this spiral out of control. And a lot of people that was kind of the end for them not like in a literal way but in like motivations gone, they're never going to do anything again, we hit these rock bottom moments Mike and sometimes there are moments that we create an initiate, I definitely take guilt on that for myself, for a lot of my experiences of my life but sometimes there are part of the human experience. How do you like navigate that to now, put yourself in this position where you kind of leading the path for mental health awareness and entrepreneurship?

Mike: Yeah. There's actually a book I read and this is around 2014-2015 and it was called Fooled by Randomness. And that was a really impactful book for me, at the time, it was something that Tim Ferriss had recommended on his podcast and it made me realize that this this path of destruction so to speak, you know, I had lived what I was told growing up was the dream, you know, you go to high school, you go to college, you get a job, you build your own company, you get a wife and two kids in the big house and you're going to be happy yet I done all that and I was miserable and I had taken on I'm a big responsibility guys. So I believe that you're in control of your own destiny. I don't make excuses for a lot of things but having that personality type also when things don't go well I beat myself up, I beat myself up for almost eight and a half years that it's all my fault, I'm an idiot, I'm stupid so, I had a lot of negative self talk for a very long period of time. And that book just made me realize there are many-many things that are out of your control. The market is one of them and when the market decided to tank like that, it wasn't my fault, it wasn't anything that I did or didn't do, maybe I could have protected myself and my business differently, but at the end of the day, there was no reason to spend eight and a half years beating myself up over it and I look back and I just think that's it was just such a waste of time. And for me the transition point was I finally got out of my own stubborn ways and ask for help, I asked for for help on my mindset, I ask for help on my business and was able to turn everything around in an 18-month period between 2015 and 2017.

Michael: Yeah. I'm such a big proponent of asking for help. I think that is really one of the baseline core competencies that we actually are not instilled within our youth. And especially as men and I can only speak as a man, but I understand now, I see it happening with women all the time as well and everyone in general we're asking for help has become kind of this this Unsure of weakness and I think it's the most profound and incredibly strong thing that we can do, you know, especially when you're in this place, where you do hit this rock bottom, where you are, like – what do I do from here? What's been your process of kind of stepping into not necessarily only awareness in it, but giving yourself the grace and dare I say vulnerability to be able to say I actually do need help right now?

Mike: Yeah. I mean, I think now it's easier for me to look back and process it all. At the time it was I felt like the world was collapsing in on me and when you feel like the world's collapsing on you, you become very reactionary you know, you're thinking about survival really, your body is freezing or it's fighting or you're running away from something. And so now it's like – when I look back it, anytime you start something new, you're gonna kind of suck at it; it doesn't matter what it is. And I wish somebody had sat me down in the beginning and said, look, these are the statistics of Entrepreneurship, these are the statistics of starting a new business, especially if you're creative and you're trying to start your own thing because this is the stats, I would just say, littered with failure, the odds of you actually making a product that's creative from new from scratch, then figuring out how to market it, and promote it, and actually sell it in the marketplace, you’re odds stacked against you but I didn't have that mindset going in. I thought it was going to be easy and so I kept beating myself up every time I failed or every time something didn't work. And if I had kind of taken that mentality to use the baseball analogy, if I knew that I was going to strike out, seven out of ten times going in, I would have been a little bit more gentle on myself.

I just think, life is too short, man. It's like – it's too short to focus on the past, it's too short to get hung up on what you're doing in the future and if you can kind of stay in that present moment and just realized like these are the things I want to do with my life, these are the aims I've got whether it's health, whether it's mental well-being, whether it's your business, whatever it is and just make continual incremental progress towards those things, that's when the happiness becomes the byproduct when you can see yourself making progress towards something that you value.

Michael: Yeah, I love that, I appreciate that a lot too because, you know, my measurement for success is not the destination it used to be and I'd be like, oh, I'm only going to be happy when that thing happens. And now, I look at it as like, can I celebrate micro winds? Can I look at little things in my life that I can attribute to progress? Its small granular microscopic incremental, change that on a long enough period of time actually starts to help us go in the direction that we want. And Mike, I know that you're an entrepreneur, I am too but a lot of people listening are not and I think that a lot of the practical concepts and understandings about entrepreneurship actually carry over, you know, I think that's why I'm so attracted to it and then have done it for so long because I look at this I go we're always going to be hit with adversity in life, we're always going to be in this position where it'll be the next pandemic or the next death or the next the global catastrophe like I think unfortunately that's just been a part of the Human Experience since we were humans.

Mike: And then it's such a good point because that's the actual game. The game is falling in love with the process of everything falling apart on you and you putting it back together in a transformed way like that's the game that you need to fall in love with, it doesn't matter if it's sports or entrepreneurship or relationships. If you can realize that there are going to become moments in your life that things will fall apart and your job is to kind of pick up the pieces, put it together and keep moving forward. And I just got fascinated at understanding because I found myself during four different times in my entrepreneurial journey, where I found myself wondering, why is this happening to me? What's wrong with me? All those, negative questions and so I went very heavy into Psychology and Neuroscience and just started studying like what's going on in my actual brain and my body? Why do I feel this way? And one of the things that you touched on is we have two types of reward systems in our brain. We have consummatory rewards, which are I arrived or achieved my destination, but the problem with that and the second type of reward is incentive rewards. The problem with consummatory rewards or soon as you achieve, your destination, I'm hungry. Let's say I eat a sandwich, then it squashes the previous frame that you're dealing from and you're kind of left with this success crisis, you're like I achieved my thing, what the hell do I do next?

And people can relate to that when they graduate high school, when they graduate college, when they get married, when they have their first child it's like I did the thing and you find yourself in this moment of crisis. What the hell do I do next? And just physiologically and psychologically, it's much better if you're always incentivizing yourself through incentive rewards, which are making progress and daily progress towards something knowing that there is no arrival because their arrival just an illusion, you know.

Michael: Yeah, it truly is and that's why you see so often professional athletes which are a great marker for this; win a championship and they're like, I don't know what to do with my life. You see it happen with Olympic athletes too. I don't know what's next, you know, I even have that experience early on, in my speaking career, I would get on stage and I'll get off like I did such a good job, and then it was to be fill blank for lack of a better term and then I understood something and that was like that was only just a marker as I'm moving towards this larger goal, which for me is huge, it's in generational trauma in my lifetime. I'm not saying you have to have this huge grandiose goal, but I'm saying maybe it does help but Mike, one of the things I'm curious about, is you coming back to that baseball mentality you would have thought through beating yourself up differently if you knew you're going to strikeouts seven out of ten times, I think very often what happens though, is the moment people here, I'm going to strike out, seven out of ten times they're too afraid to even start in step into the arena. So, how do you like, mitigate that? Because my mentality is very much like, face your fear, commit, do it anyway, see what happens, understand that failure is inevitable whether you like it or not, but I know for some people that's a really hard concept to understand. So especially when thinking about as you want to pursue endeavors in your life and the possibility of failure is there? How do you not freeze in that but continue to move towards it?

Mike: Yeah, I would say I mean like when it comes to entrepreneurship if that scares you and you feel like you need motivation and stuff, maybe entrepreneurships not for you that and that's okay. There are different personality types and some people are able to take on more stress there more able to handle the fear and even rejection a little bit better and that's not for everybody, so, that's the first thing. I think, one of the big problems is when I was a kid and watching baseball I saw guys, failing all the time, I just saw real world like hey these guy’s strikeout, they make mistakes, they make errors, but in the entrepreneurial world were filled with social media where everybody's filling up their fees with their highlight reel. So you see the opposite, you think everybody's successful, you think everybody's marketing is working and you're wondering why your stuff is not working because you're just seeing the highlight reel. And so just realize that that's an allusion to that 96% of the things that you're seeing there struggling just like you are. And I think when it comes down to how to get over the fear, I just kind of always come back to the fact that life is short, you're going to die you never know when that moment is going to be for you and it comes down to like one life, when do you want to go after what you want and stop making excuses. And if you can get something like a underlying motivation, that really, really means something to you and I believe business owner should have to, because it's kind of like, if you've heard that old quote, like if you have a big enough, why you can get through anyhow, but if you have these underlying motivations that mean something to you, it will help you get past your fear. And for me, that you were, I wanted to show my kids what it looked like to go after your dreams and never give up because I listened to weird things that I hold onto, I listened to an interview with the Dalai Lama, and somebody had asked him, what do I do to show my kids how to act and he says it, or what do I say in the Dalai Lama said that doesn't matter what you say it only matters what you do because your kids will model your behavior and that just stuck with me. So for me as I was progressing towards my own version of entrepreneurial success I knew that if I quit it showed my kids, what it looked like to set a goal, and then give up because of fear, because of rejection, because of whatever and that was more painful to me than quitting itself. And the second while I was in 2015, my brother-in-law took his own life and I knew how that devastated the family and how painful that was and I knew that there were other entrepreneurs out there, just like me that were, maybe three feet from gold, they needed a little bit of help, they need a little guidance, whatever it was, you know, maybe three seconds from giving up on their business or giving up on life in general and that became my other mission, that's why I get up, that's why I go speak, that's why I do what I do is because I know there are people out there that are really close they just need that little, you know, piece of advice or tips or maybe that aha moment to help tip them over to the edge to success.

Michael: Yeah, I love that. And I think that first off and I love that you're able to hold on to what the Dalai Lama said. I believe in action over everything, right? You hear this all the time, you're like action speaks louder than words and that's true because it does. Without action nothing in your life is going to happen. Like – I think about this every single day, I can think about having a handful of gummy bears in my hand right now, as much as I want, but until I make the effort to put them there, they're not ever going to be there that's also because I love gummy bears, just for transparency, but my point being this like, you do have to put in the work, excuses are such a big part of the Western nomenclature, you see it all the time, you see it in entrepreneurship, you see it in life and sports and everything it feels like, there's always this space to be able to leverage excuses, to kind of tap into this idea that it's all right, to give up and quit on yourself and I will be the first person to admit. I haven't done that so many times in my life that eventually when I hit my rock bottom and I said, what am I willing to do to have the life that I want to have the words; No excuses, just result became the precursor for everything and that makes a huge difference of personal responsibility. So what was that like for you to come to that realization Mike?

Mike: Yeah, man. I mean, I think that's the secret that nobody tells you right up front is that everybody's looking for the strategy or the plan or the tool, or the tactic that's going to get them, you know, the quote unquote, their version of success, but nobody tells you that the strategy and the plan actually emerges through the actions because you need that feedback loop, you need to kind of make your best educated guess and say, I have a goal that I value, I have an underlying emotion or story that I'm telling myself of why I'm not going to quit no matter what? And when I take the action, your emotions are telling you that it worked and you're making progress if your positive emotions are kicking off, you feel good it's telling you that you're doing, things that are making progress towards your goals. And when your negative emotions kick in you feel angry, you feel frustrated, you get sad, those are telling you that you're not making progress towards your goal. So you want to get into fall in love with this process of action, monitor my emotion and course correction and eventually, if you don't give up, you'll get there, that's hundred percent. I've never seen anybody that set their mind to something, believe they could get there and didn't give up that didn't achieve it. I mean, there I'm sure there's examples of millions of people out there that don't achieve their goals, but that's why we have satellites, that's why we have trips to the moon, that's why we have trips to Mars planned it's like somebody had that idea and just didn't give up and figured it out. Richard Branson you know who just flew in space? He said it took him 17 years; 17 years with a dedicated team of figuring out all the things they had to figure out before they actually did it.

Michael: And that speaks so, highly to patients. Everyone that I coach, everyone who comes into my programs, everyone who does anything with me knows that the number one word that they have to learn is patience. Because it's gonna take time, like, you're not going to be able to create the life that you want to have overnight, but doesn't mean you're not going to be able to create it and I think that when you really leverage, this understanding that on a long enough time line, you can have anything that you want to have like that is powerful.

Mike: Well, I think the other thing too, to speak into that as we don't like to be judged because really, it comes down to recognizing that we're in organism and we really care about two things like that are hard wired into us, we care about survival and we care about reproduction, because that's one way that we can survive past our existing life is by producing children, you know, and we are heavily wired to recognize. We actually have a part of our brain that counts status against, we're always judging and comparing ourselves to other people. We don't like to be judged because that may impact the chances that I might find a suitable mate and reproduce. And so, if you can understand that like we don't like to be judged, that's why people set these goals and don't achieve them because they give up, they don't like to be judged negatively, they say, hey, it's New Year's Day, I'm going to be in the gym every day this year and by January 5th, we give up, because as soon as we don't hit the goals that we publicly project we now have a judge that the world is watching us, your family and friends are like, hey, how's that work at going? It's January 6, I haven't seen you do it yet and then as soon as that happens, we don't like that feeling and so we give up and we quit. So you if you can just kind of get over that fear of being judged, what anybody else thinks about, you really pick something that means something to you to go after and just it's like no matter what I'm going to achieve this, no matter what anybody else thinks and fall in love with that process and when you do get judged, be able to kind of take it on and brush it off your shoulders, you'll get there. I promise.

Michael: And Mike I've come to the conclusion which has been super beneficial in my life that I'm being judged anyway, and so I just think like what does that have to do with me, you know, what does other people judgment have to do with me? And the truth is nothing, but we carry a lot of shame, we carry a lot of guilt, we carry a lot of fear sometimes were even afraid to talk about the thing that we want to create because we're so stifled by this idea that people might think we're a farce or different or whatever that is. And I have found the only real way to actually step into that is by stepping into it, right? Action is everything.

Mike: On the fire doing that, like our podcast and stuff over doing by putting yourself as the face of the brand out into the public it's like one of the hardest, most courageous things you can do but we don't realize it when you start, you're just like, I'm going to start a podcast, you don't know what you're doing, you're fumbling around, you're making mistakes. But if you just get comfortable with the fact that that's not the point; the point is that I make daily progress on this podcast or daily progress it's like, I don't know, it's people want to go to the gym and five thousand sit-ups tomorrow and have six pack abs and that's just not how it works. It's like if you did one sit-up today, two sit-ups tomorrow, three sit-ups the next day and you keep making progress, you know, I guarantee you a year from now, you'll be ripped.

 Michael: Yeah, and it has progression. But how do you not quit on yourself in the middle of this, right? You started, let's say, you made it to January 6, you're going for it, you're in the gym, you're doing the things, but the pressures of the world, the weight of family, community relationships, negative self talk; like how do you not quit on yourself?

Mike: You need to create a story in your head that's more painful than quitting itself. And when I thought about quitting on my entrepreneurial dreams, which I thought about it a ton of times because it wasn't working for almost a decade. I remembered okay, if I quit what does that show my kids? And it showed my kids what it looks like to say you're going to do something and not follow through? And that was just more emotional and more painful to be quitting itself. So if you can find a story, that's more painful than quitting itself, you'll see yourself through all the dark days.

Michael: Yeah, and I do think that you have to leverage that. And my story Mike has become my biggest fear, is that, I'll be on my deathbed with regret, nothing terrifies me more than the idea that I didn't do everything in my power to have the life that I want to have. And so much of this is reframing those stories, but we face adversity, right? So much of it and we just let ourselves down even though and somebody listening right now, they're going to – great! Mike, thanks for all the advice, Mike. Like, what do I do when my back is really against the wall? What is it that you're tapping into? Because people say this thing about the story all the time, but if you were to name it, what are you tapping into that is giving you the drive to propel you through that moment when you're like, I just want to quit?

Mike: A lot of times, it's actually the opposite of what you want to do. Sometimes, you just need to take a break because the thing about entrepreneurship that I didn't realize in the beginning, is there is no separation from how I treat my health, how I treat my mental health, how I treat my business, my family, my kids, my community, my parents, you know that it's all this blend together and its really entrepreneurship is life, it's like you're going to face adversity, you're going to face things that you didn't see coming and and how I explain it to my clients like, when I go speak at events and stuff. I explained it like your brain is almost like a retractable stadium roof on the top of your head, it opens and closes, and when you open it wide, you're accepting the club complexity of the world, you're thinking about, can I pay my bills? Can I pay my team? Is a meteor going to hit the earth? What's going on with covid? You know, that you're accepting complexity into your brain when you too accept too much complexity you kind of need to close the roof back up a little bit. And so when you feel the adversities too much and the complexity of the game has become too much you need to kind of go back and focus on the basics. Am I breathing? Am I sleeping properly? Am I sleeping consistently? What am I putting in my body? Am I drinking enough water? Because it's amazing and I wish I would have known this, you know, 15 years ago, but most of those overwhelming feelings and adversity, becoming too much are solved by just getting a good night's sleep, starting to take care of your health, exercise a little bit, put good nutrition in your body and what you're doing is you're kind of closing that complexity backup for your brain. So that you can kind of reset and I mean, how many times have you like just said, you know what, I'm not going to deal with this right now I'm going to go to sleep and then you wake up and you're like, what was I so stressed out about yesterday? And that's is a huge one, you know, like when people aren't sleeping properly and they're not sleeping consistently it really messes us humans up.

Michael: Yeah, it does. You know, it's funny because sometimes I'll go to these conferences around the country, around the world, different time zones, you're up all night, you're talking to people in the hallway till 5:00 in the morning and then you do that for a couple of days and then you're like, oh man, this is worse than torture. So it's really funny because I've made sleep a priority in my life in a way where only on the rare occasion do I even allow that to happen. And one of the things I think about a lot is, there is a lot of nomenclature on this idea of just push through, push through, push through, push through and this applies, not just entrepreneurship, but to life where people are, like you just got to keep going, yeah, it sucks and it's hard and I am such a proponent of take the break and I want you to talk about that more because I don't think that people heard it because you move through it kind of quickly. Can you talk about why you take that break, why it matters? Why you should listen to your intuition on it and the results of doing so?

Mike: Yeah. I mean, I want to play a game that I can. Number one, I don't believe that there's a destination to. So, I have these incentive rewards on seeing progress towards daily goals or weekly goals or monthly goals, but I want to play a big enough game, but then I want to break it down to my habits and patterns so that I can sustain that game like to use that gym analogy, if I did go to the gym tomorrow and bench, press five thousand times I'd be so wrecked, I couldn't play the game for another month, I'd have to spend time in the hospital. So it's like you need to find that perfect rhythm for yourself and the perfect rhythm involves taking breaks. You know, it's like – I kind of have two chunks during my day, I can work really hard on high IQ activities in the morning for about 90 minutes and then I got to take about a 60 minute break and I have another 90-minute chunk and sometimes I come back for us 90-minute chunk, but it's like I'm trying to find that perfect Rhythm for myself. And when I start to feel overwhelmed, I stopped and I think the process is more about expanding your mind, but narrowing your focus like what are the what are the narrow things that I choose to focus on and control and I have to let everything else go? You hear that all the time these things about you've got it allow, you've got to let go but they seem kind of woo-woo and like yeah, that's great, what's that actually mean? It means that you're not going to focus on it, it almost becomes frustrating to your family and friends because like my parents will say something to me or my wife will say something to me and I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to spend any time on that. I'm not going to spend any time energy or mental focus on that because it's not important to me and what I say, I'm trying to accomplish with my life. And so in the beginning you just have to decide, you just have to say, this is what I think I want to accomplish and allow that action that you talked about, to give you the market feedback, and sometimes your goals and your dreams, and your vision will shift, and sometimes they won't, sometimes it just becomes more and more narrow, which means you're letting go of trying to control anything else outside of that narrow view.

Michael: I like that a lot, and I think about that'll all of the time, I accept what I cannot control, and because that it's given me such a beautiful way to think about life and there's a sense of freedom in it. There's something about it that allows me to move about the world without the same pressures that I used to feel because I just go, what are you going to do, I don't get to control it? Like, it doesn't matter.

Mike: Yeah, you'll drive yourself mad, right? Like well, what is this person thinking of me and isn't meteor going to hit like if you take it, take those kind of all the things that you can't control. I mean, literally a plane, could potentially hit my house right now while we're talking I could die but does it do me any good to waste any mental energy on that. Does that help any entrepreneurs in the world? Does that help me accomplish my goals in anyway? And if the answer is no, you just need to let it go and stop thinking about that stuff.

Michael: Yeah, absolutely, that applies to life, career, relationship, health, everything. The the fear that we can carry with us just by having these outside the norm thoughts. And a lot of it can be informed, because of the traumatic experiences that we have were hyper-vigilant, there's a lot of rhyme and reason to how that can happen but if you just start thinking about this idea of letting it go, man, it's going to play such an important role in your future. Mike, I want to ask you a little bit about the association, can you talk a little bit more about the association of mental health and all being for entrepreneurs?

Mike: Yeah. You know, this is actually after I mentioned, I had four distinct moments in my career where I crashed I would say that the world felt so overwhelming, I was thinking about quitting, I didn't want to be there, I was trying to drink it away, you know, like his alcohol is a very good drug for trying to escape responsibility and reality of things. And I woke up and I just said, you know, there's so many other people that I know, so many of my clients, so many of my friends that behind-the-scenes, everybody's projecting this perfect life, and pictures on boats and in front of the Lamborghinis and yet, I talked to that guy last week and I know that he's struggling with his marketing struggling with his relationship, whatever it is, and I just woke up and I said I'm going to do something about it, I'm going to have the courage to take action and do something to help support entrepreneurs because those moments suck, those moments really, really suck when you crash. And what we're working on right now it's very new, I woke up, I had the vision and I knew that I was going to take action and make progress on it and it's going to develop as it develops. So what we're doing right now is we're putting together a 24/7, 365 entrepreneurial hotlines, I don't know how that's exactly going to play out yet, I've got a board of directors that is helping me make some early decisions, we're going to hire a CEO to run the organization, but the bottom line is we want to give entrepreneurs a space, a community where they can reach out to somebody in those times when it's not working and so many people are worried about what others think online or or hurting their business they don't want to do a public post and say, hey you guys, I'm really struggling right now because who wants to buy from a business that's really struggling right now. So it's like this weird game entrepreneurial dance, we play and we give entrepreneurs a space where they have an outlet that can get a release because if he kind of don't, you know, reminds me of the old, I don't know if you ever watch Seinfeld but there was an episode very Kramer, it's called serenity now and it's like if you don't kind of release it once in a while, next thing you know, you're making rash decisions you know, if you don't let off some steam once in a while and have the conversation things, build up and they manifest and they multiply and so it's like conflict delayed is conflict multiplied. You have to kind of have the discussion face and deal what you're dealing with so that you can move past it.

Michael: Yeah, and we need support in that space. Statistically entrepreneurs are the highest suicide rate outside of military in the world and we really have to start changing the conversation around it. It's heartbreaking that we live in a society where we can't honor that. And you're right, I mean, who's going to buy something from someone who's like, I'm sad, my life sucks, I'm in pain, I'm suffering right now and that's weird to me because I'm like – isn't that why I should buy from them, let's support them with support entrepreneurship, let support each other's dreams, goals, hopes and ambitions and all the things that were able to do as a communal species, it drives me fucking crazy Mike and I'm so happy that you're doing this. You have a proponent in me, anytime anywhere I got your back, you tell me what you do. Once you get this up and running obviously will make sure to put annotations on the show notes and all of those things so that we can support your mission in journey. As an entrepreneur, someone who has had a suicide attempt in the past I can tell you that this is much, much, much needed in the world. Mike my friend, before I ask you my last question, can you tell everybody where they can find you?

Mike: Yeah, people can find me on my website, I'm on Facebook, Instagram LinkedIn, I try not to spend as much time on social media as I can because it's detrimental to my own mental health, which is brings me to a great Book by the way, Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport on just kind of start to separate yourself from the social media because it's a trap, I would say that. So people can find me on my website, they can find me online. And I think, if your viewers want to get involved with the association for mental health, it's a weird website, it's am amhwbe.org. And so you put that in the show notes or something and they can get involved by just getting on our list.

Michael: Yeah, absolutely Mike, we will definitely do that. And my last question for you my friend is what does it mean to you to be unbroken?

Mike: I think, for me to be unbroken means that you are so focused on what your mission and your meaning is that you don't let anything else phase you that's outside of that. You're able to kind of quickly delineate, this matters to me or this doesn't and you don't have any regret about letting go, all the things that don't matter to you and your mission.

Michael: Powerful and poignant, my friend, I did not expect anything less.

Thank you so much for being here.

Unbroken Nation.

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My friends, Be Unbroken.

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