Video Transcript: Limits

Welcome back to mental health integration week eight, part three. Now we get  to talk about limits. Now we just spent some time talking about how there can be this benefit from the habits that we build in mental health issues, that we can  create this forward momentum that keeps things moving. But a second thing  that it does is it can also put boundaries around what we can do and create a  little more sense of sanity. So I want to bring this in. We've had this thought of  paradox mental illness as a gift a couple times, and we're going to bring it in a  little bit differently now, because a gift doesn't necessarily mean you do more,  sometimes it means you do less. I want to start with a quote from an  entrepreneur about the entrepreneurial grind, entrepreneur and New York Times best selling author, Grant Cardone was deep in debt before building his  business into a multi million dollar fortune. What sets this self made millionaire  apart from the rest of the population, he says is how much he works. Most  people work nine to five. I work 95 hours per week. If you ever want to be a  millionaire, you need to stop doing the nine to five and start doing 95 that comes out to about 14 hours of work a day. Now I put this up because in the era of  Shark Tank and the profit and all of these shows glamorizing the entrepreneur,  there is this drive to be more, do more. There's this drive to move up the  corporate ladder and constantly be progressing. But one of the things that  mental illness does is it has to put a cap on something. How can this space exist and you keep your sanity? Or even just as we talked about earlier, how does  this work life balance thing work with the Sabbath? It. How are you supposed to  stop if you're supposed to work 95 hours a week, how are you supposed to have time? Where's your margin? How are you supposed to take care of your family?  And it begs another question, when how much is too? Much? We've talked a lot  about hint, how integration is experience and faith, how they intersect  harmoniously. We've talked a lot about the gift of reorientation, and what are  your priorities. But now we need to talk a little bit about how this can be a gift.  Now, a little back story on me. I was still in seminary when I founded my quiet  cave to help churches work with mental illnesses, and that was the first real  business that I had started so jumping into that there's this expectation that you  just need to do everything because you're the only person on the staff, right?  We didn't have salaries. We didn't have anything. We didn't know how to  fundraise. We didn't even have a plan. What we did know is that we could work,  and that if something needed to get done, it needed to get done by us. So we  jumped into the work and doing things over and over and over again. And I  remember seeing other organizations and talking to other entrepreneurs, and  there was just this insane work ethic. People would get started at six o'clock,  seven o'clock in the morning. They would go all day. They would pick their kids  up, hang out with their kids for a couple hours, and then work again in the night  and then repeat. Seemed like their whole life was consumed by work, except for maybe a 30 minute workout to try and make sure they were more effective at 

work and their time with their family, and there just came this realistic  expectation for me that I can't do that. I realized pretty quickly with my quiet  cave that I could work 50 hours a week, but if I was going to work more than  that, the quality of my work and the quality of what I was doing and my own  mental health immediately started tanking. So I had to put limits on what I did  and how much I could work and how much I could do now, when we started my  quiet cave, we started with three of us, and after about a year and a half, we  were down two of us, and we built these programs. We didn't fundraise, so we  burned ourselves up. So after about two and a half years, or three years, we  were down to one of us, which meant it was just me trying to carry the  organization. It was built for three people worth of programs, and had no people  worth of fundraising, and we were trying to carry this thing and move it me and  my board of directors, and no one knew what to do, because it was way too  much work for one person. And in that space, our fundraising moved really  slowly, in large part because I had to put limits on how much work I could do,  and the programs had to stay afloat. And what that meant was there was  naturally this constriction around how much I could manage, and where the  normal, you know, the Cardone attitude, might be worth 95 just get it done. You  have a whole extra work week every week, if you just work it. I couldn't. There  was this expectation from the entrepreneurial world to do something that I could  not physically do. I was physically capable of working 10, 15, 20 hours of  overtime if I desperately needed to, but oftentimes, if I worked 60 or 65 hours a  week, I would end up having to take a day off the next week to recover because  I was so exhausted, because my bipolar disorder was acting up, or Because I  couldn't manage the stress. So there's this disconnect between the world that is  glorified by culture of entrepreneur and my own position that I had even as  entrepreneur, and they were incongruent. After four more years, we hired  another employee, and then another year or two after that, we were up to a staff  of four, and the organization was growing and developing, but that was a slog,  because for those Three four years, I was always up against my own limitations, and because of that, I want you to ask some questions, because you have  limitations too, I want you to Ask, what are your priorities in regards to your time, because you are able and capable of doing a lot, but your mental health issue,  or the people of the mental health issues around you just this realistic  expectation, it will put caps on things we talked about, our capacity shrinking.  Well, that means that you need to cut some things out. So what are your  priorities? What are the most important things? And then the second question  here is, what are you in relation to your values? The reason these are important  questions, what are you in relation to your values? Your time priorities will be  dictated by your values, but a lot of the time you'll have things that are time  priorities, that feel like things you ought or have to do that don't necessarily  mesh with your value system. And one of the gifts of being disoriented and 

reoriented is you have the opportunity to reevaluate what is really important with your time, because if your time doesn't match your values, you need to go back  and find out why not, and reevaluate and figure out what you need to do to  change that. So you have the gift of disorientation even in how you manage  yourself, even how you manage your work, even how you manage your time,  some things you can never get out of when I was running a nonprofit, there were things that I had to do. I had to do my work to make sure I was in in accordance  with the government stipulations. No way around that. If I didn't we lose we'd  lose our 501c3, and that was not an option. I had to make sure that we were  doing fundraising and that we were making sure we got getting receipts out. I  had to make sure the programs, in some way, shape or form, kept going. And I  had to make sure that I was still on track in order to make sure that the nonprofit was staying afloat. There were some things you just had to do, but there were  other questions, like, do I really need to take this meeting, or do I really need to  keep this ongoing obligation, or do we really need to start this other program  right now that. I failed to ask until it was too late, and then I got to ask later and  reevaluate and pull back so that I could manage to flourish as an individual and  the organization could move forward. Because my general tendency was to  build it, make it keep going, even when we didn't actually have the resources,  manpower, anything to make that happen. The second thing I want you to look  at is, who is God and why does that matter in the context of limits? Sometimes it feels like we need to grow and grow and grow and grow and grow. Sometimes it feels like we talked about Job in the previous section, that Job had this massive, massive farm, and then somehow we need to work hard to make sure it grows  twice as big. But that's not who God is. It said that God blessed Job, not that  Job. Worked his tail off and it grew. So we need to reevaluate and see God  differently, and then reevaluate and say, Okay, well, what can I do? And how can I do what I can and allow God to do the rest. How do my limits not be  incongruent with what God can do, but can be congruent with what God can do  because he knows who I am. He knows what he's working with. He is in no way  surprised that I can't do something. He is only he is not even surprised that I  don't know I can't do something. He is just present. And he is just fully knowing  exactly what needs to go on next. What are you capable of, and what limits do  you need to put in place? I had to put limits around what I could do. We've  already established that I also had to put some things in place, like I had to  exercise three or four times a week to make sure that I could be effective at  work. That takes away from work time, but it means that I'm actually effective. I  had to do some other things, like say I am not going to work on Sundays, or I'm  not going to work on weekends. I am not going to work in evenings, after I get  home from work, I can start early in the morning, but I can't start during certain  early times. All of these things created restrictions, and I had to put those limits  in place to make sure that I could be healthy enough to keep the organization 

going. We'd already lost two employees to burn out. We didn't need to lose the  last one. And also, what are you capable of? There is a realistic expectation that  as much as I looked at my friends and went, Wow, I wish I could build an  organization like they can. I couldn't, and God knew that when he called me to  start the organization I started. So know that you're what you're capable of. God  knows your capacity, and that is just fine. He's not going to call you to do more  than that. He's going to call you to be you. I love this quote. This is from Peter  Scazzero, from the Emotionally Healthy Leader. We lead more of who we are  than out of what we do, strategic or otherwise. If we fail to recognize that who  we are on the inside informs every aspect of our leadership, we will do damage  to ourselves and to those who you lead. Your job as a faith leader, in many  ways, is to be the best you you can possibly be. That means taking care of  yourself. It means investing in how you see God. It means taking time away to  abide with God and be personal with God, so that you can grow in your  relationship, and it creates space for you to share who God is out of your  personal experience. And you're not sharing knowledge, you're sharing yourself. This changes how you lead, and whether this is mental health or whether this is  anything, we have these opportunities to parse down what we do in order to  make sure that we do something. Well, in this case, we do something as God  would have us do it, instead of just doing the way that we want to do it. This is  critically important. So with that said, do the good thing. You don't need to be  able to do everything. You don't need to be able to do all the things put limits  around the right thing to do, and then do it really, really, really well, because God called you to do that one thing, just pour it and just go for it. This was a much  shorter segment. We're going to be back to talking more about integrations and  kind of these bigger topics next time. But I wanted to make sure that you saw  these opportunities as fully what they are, as as these profound chances to  actually create momentum and growth, to parse down things so that you can be  yourself and to enjoy the benefits of having a disorienting opportunity, like a  mental illness.Thanks.