Joe Rouse 0:00

A lot of things have to fall into place perfectly for us as entrepreneurs to ever feel like business is going great. Um, and I would argue that what I've learned over 12 years, now almost 13 years as a business owner, is that it's never, it's never like this, right? It's always this. Just highs and lows, highs and lows, and learning to stay as straight or as level as possible during those highs and lows. You and I have both learned some great lessons as far as like having multiple locations, having two sets of staffs, two managers closing a location and dealing with all the anger from the members that comes from that at you if you close a second location. Uh, and the worry about future stressful situations or anxiety. Sometimes I think if you're not careful, if you don't have the right thing to call on to help you with ang to help you with dealing with future stressors, it can really wrap you up and weigh on you. And it can lead to other unhealthy habits like excessive drinking, drugs, all that stuff.

Trev Warnke 1:01

Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of Brotherhood Beyond Business, where me and Joe today are gonna talk about anxiety in business, but also in life. We're just gonna go through the the anxious part of life, which any, I would say this relates to every single person in the world. Anyone that says they don't have anxiety really either one isn't old enough to realize what anxiety is, or two, just it kind of pushes it off. But we all have anxiety. And today we're gonna dive into those different components. And again, each of us at different times in our life have different anxieties in different ways, and all of us handle things differently. Some people, money is anxious for them, some other people just doesn't bother them at all. Um, some people get anxious about the growth of their business, other people just like, hey, I'm just happy with having a business. So there's different ways that people deal with things, and just because we struggle with anxiety in one way doesn't mean that's a way that you might struggle with anxiety, but you might have it in a different way. Example is my wife, she's uh always struggled with anxiety. She's a teacher. Her anxiety is just like, will the kids behave today? Like that's the anxiety I don't have at all, you know? So it's just like we have different things that we're anxious about every day. And it's just how how do you deal with those? And we're gonna talk about one, the anxieties we might have in everyday life, but also how we deal with those things and keep moving forward. Joe, kind of bounce off some of the ideas that you have on that. Man, so I had to look up, I wanted to look up the exact definition of anxiety, and I love this is this is from Google. It says the body's natural, future-oriented response to stress, manifesting as feelings of fear, dread, and apprehension. And while it can serve as a helpful short-term motivator for challenging situations, it becomes an anxiety disorder when symptoms are excessive, persistent, and interfere with daily life, causing physical sensations like racing heart, sweatiness, and tension. So, as business owners, I would say the most consistent thing in our life is going to be some sort of future-oriented response to stress. And I don't know that people understand that because they see, like, oh, not I didn't do this, but they might see Joe got a new car. Business must be great. You know, they're hiring a new staff member. Business must be great. Like a lot of things have to fall into place perfectly for us as entrepreneurs to ever feel like business is going great. Um, and I would argue that what I've learned over 12 years, now almost 13 years as a business owner, is that it's never, it's never like this, right? It's always this. It's just highs and lows, highs and lows, and learning to stay as straight or as level as possible during those highs and lows. And you and I have both learned some great lessons as far as like having multiple locations, having two sets of staffs, two managers closing a location and dealing with all the anger from the members that comes from that at you if you close a second location. Uh, and the worry about future stressful situations or anxiety. Sometimes I think if you're not careful, if you don't have the right thing to call on to help you with ang to help you with dealing with future stressors, it can really wrap you up and weigh on you. And it can lead to other unhealthy habits like excessive drinking, drugs, all that stuff. But when you learn that it's literally a part of life, and I'm not saying everybody can do this, I'm not a psychologist, I don't know, but the best thing, the most helpful thing for me that I've learned is that it's a literal part of life. There's always going to be future stressors that I have or could choose to think about. What I have control over is how I deal with my life or how I deal with those future stressors whenever I'm actually thinking about them, whenever I'm having anxiety issues. Like, you know, you always you got that that feeling right there in the middle of your chest that you just can't shake. For me, there's as as a man, all I want to do is internalize it. Like I'll go stare at a fire and just think about things. But I also know that what we're called to do as Christian men is to give give it to the Lord, like literally, physically, and to take on his yoke because his is easier to handle. And not to mention we need to focus on right now. It doesn't mean we can't plan for the future. But we have to worry about today because today has enough to worry about. And if we don't physically give it to Jesus, give it to God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit to take that on, then it's always going to be sitting right here. And and that's where the devil will creep in. Feelings of doubt, feelings of imposter syndrome, things like that will start to come in regularly all the time. And the only way that I know and that I've found that helps me to actually give it to God, because He's He's unseen. I can't say I've seen him like, hey, here you go, right? Is to you pray without ceasing. So always praying. And I'm not saying I do that all the time, not trying to claim any kind of high hat or anything, but that's the only thing that helps me is doing what God tells me to do and staying in his word and praying without ceasing. And when I'm going through really tough times as far as anxiety goes, like worrying about future stressors, I hate to say I have anxiety because I don't think it I don't identify as like somebody with anxiety, like it's just something you have, it's a part of life, thinking about future stressors. But that's the way that I physically give it to God. I just to go right into it is I I have to pray without ceasing, which keeps me connected to God. And that that's one thing that helps me really get through it.

Joe Rouse 6:22

Yeah, I uh I mean I I've never until I met my wife, did I ever associate anxiety with anything I was going through? And she deals with so when you were describing the um anxiety, like what it is, she she's more of a chronic anxiety, like it's like she's on medication for that kind of level. I've never been to that level, but it really hit me that hey, I do have daily anxiety, but it's not something that like stops me from doing anything, stops me in my track. It's just one of those things where I was like, oh man, I'm I'm not really aware that I actually am going through these things. And so in my history, I have a history of binge eating, and the binge eating is really replacing anxiety, is what it is. When I would get too anxious on these things, I would use that as a coping medicine. And I've luckily have really come overcome my binge eating over the last year. There's multiple things I've helped with that. Using a GLP one has helped a lot because it's decreased hunger. But the other thing, probably, I'd probably say four or five months ago, exactly what you're talking about. I saw a video from a guy on, I don't know if it's YouTube or it was, but he had said, um, give your give your burdens to the Lord, right? And he's like, the problem is most people when they say that they pray, they give it, they say they're giving it to the Lord, but then they kind of hold on to it still, right? They're just they kind of keep oh, but I'm gonna only gonna give you like 80% of this or even 50% of this. And they don't really let it go. And I remember hearing that and being like, man, that's so true. And in the moment I wasn't praying consistently to the Lord. Um, and so, you know, so that in that moment I started to be like, hey, whenever I'm truly feeling what I would consider an anxious moments, I need to just stop in that moment, pray, ask God to take that burden from me in the moment, and then from there figure out what to do after that. And so my process, and that has instantly it just takes that edge off. That instant edge off. Yeah, exactly. Yep, it takes that.

Trev Warnke 8:05

It's his yoke is light.

Joe Rouse 8:06

Yeah, and it's so so much that that instantly in the second part of it is then I'm able to take that weight off where now I can think through what am I really anxious about, right? And so, like uh the other day we had a client put their account on pause, and it's a pretty decent sized client. And so they put their account on pause for a couple months, and I was like, okay, well, that caused some anxious moment in the second in that moment, like, man, that now we've got to figure out like, do we grow? What do we do? We're trying to grow the brotherhood, so I don't want to have to put a lot more marketing in to level up. So just kind of going through this process, and I gave that to the Lord. And then from there I just wrote down notes about okay, what are the things that I'm really anxious about? Oh, am I anxious about the fact do I need to get another client? Where are we at financially? So I just kind of went through, okay, here's some of the things that could take can relieve that anxiousness. And within like 30 minutes, all that, like I haven't even thought about it since that moment, right? It's just like, okay, now that's gone. Now I can move on to the next thing. But they started with the prayer and it started like giving God that burden, like, hey, take this burden from me. And then from there gave me the reduced the weight enough for me to write down and think through it clearly instead of like, you know, usually what we do as entrepreneurs is when that moment happens, then we break everything in front of us trying to fix that instant solution instead of being like, maybe I actually have stuff that that can handle this. Maybe it's not that big a deal. And for me, all it was is like I had some sales opportunities coming up over the next couple of weeks and be like, okay, like I need to just convert on those sales opportunities. So I already have money in the pipe, ability in the pipeline to replace that. And then two, we're working on the brotherhood right now. And when the brotherhood gets to a certain point, it's going to be a great, you know, model for us to grow overall. So it's like I don't want to divert my attention from the real goal just because this one little thing came in the way. And it just created an anxious moment. And I think for like you were talking about, for most of us entrepreneurs, it's really an anxious moment than true anxiety that we deal with all the time, where it's like, oh man, I'm always just, I can never stop thinking. It's more like these anxious moments pops up, and we need to find ways to be able to like handle that anxiety in the moment.

Trev Warnke 9:55

Yeah, we want to solve it immediately. I mean, this this whole conversation, us hopping on this podcast this morning is a godsend for me because like we were discussing it, how I how I was how I was frustrated with some things as I'm talking about um just some things with uh with breakaway. And I had not I had one thought this morning to because I didn't have to get up super early. I had one thought this morning to start my day by um by grabbing my my Bible, which sits like right here beside me. My dad gave me this when I was really young. But I didn't because I wanted to get to work, because I wasn't at physically at the facility because of the weather, because of the snow. And uh I wanted to get to work because I was frustrated, I was anxious about some numbers that I'm not happy with. So I immediately think I've got I have to solve this problem and you know, use my brain to solve this problem, to protect and to provide. So immediately I'm like, well, let me schedule a call, my GM. We need to go through lost clients, let me see when the last time was I reached out to these leads, let me see how my ads are doing, see if I need to tweak those, let me see, you know, just going through the checklist of all that stuff, which is uh can be helpful, but it doesn't lower your the anxiety that you're dealing with. This the future stressor is still there. And I literally God told me to read the start with the Bible today, get in my word. When you're in his word constantly, you'll know your will, his will for your life. You can't know it if you're not in his word. And I decided not to. So this conversation, even even we're talking about this, putting this out there to the world, right? Hoping somebody listens to it, just having this conversation, reminding me to reprioritize, to pray without ceasing, is gonna be very helpful for me with anxious type feelings just today, immediately. Like right now, in this second.

Joe Rouse 11:43

Well, the interesting thing about anxious moments is it throws you out of your routine. And so there's three things in my life that are built in as I'd call anxiety busters, but they're they're not meant to be truly. But when I think about them, these are things that help me reduce my anxiety without even realizing it. But the first one is pray in the morning while I'm in my infrared sauna. Like I usually do my prayer in that every morning, I do that. Two is I do a midday lift, and then three, I do uh evening walk. But when I'm feeling anxious, the amount of times I skip those things is quite often. I have these built-in things, but I skip them when I'm feeling anxious because I want to outwork this problem. When realistically it's not outworking this problem, it's actually okay, keep you have these things built in place. You just need to reduce that. And then you can fix as entrepreneurs, our best skill set is we are great at fixing problems. That's probably the thing we're the we're we're the best at fixing the problem. And so it's like we just need to put ourselves in environments where we can work through the problems. So start off making sure we pray. Two is getting the other things in that get let our mind be free from business and these things so we can just kind of relax a little bit and okay, now we're gonna solve this problem. But it is interesting when we get anxious, when I get anxious, I skip the things that probably help. And even another thing for me in the past was eating bad. I would eat bad when I felt anxious, and that instantly drops my energy and drops my drops like how I feel. So all those that we confound that issue. And it's one of those things where it's like we actually probably have these things in place, but we let it go because of that. But I do think the biggest change for me was like whenever that moment happens, as soon as I get into prayer, I'm I now it's like almost instantly when I truly feel like go right into prayer, and then it's like, okay, now I can get back onto like my life again, like back onto my routine. It's doesn't mean I'm gonna ignore what just happened. I do probably have something maybe I need to fix about this. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes it's just like, man, I'm just overthinking something. Um, and then the other other times it's like, man, maybe I do need to find a solution. Like when somebody suspends their account, we're gonna get them back again, but I need to come up with that $700 we lost. And so it's like, how do I recover that $700? Okay, I have things already in place. I've just got to like not stress in this moment and just keep working the plan. The plan's in place, just keep working the plan.

Trev Warnke 13:49

Yeah, stick to those foundational things that we talk about, like keep keep working, check the boxes of the most important things, get those done, and don't let these anxieties and stressors throw us off from what our normal routine is.

Joe Rouse 14:00

Yeah, and and I was meeting with my brotherhood group on Friday, and it's not uh this isn't probably an anxious moment for one of the members. Um, his name's Kai, but he um he wants to add, they have a space opening up right next to him, and they've talked about growth and and getting into a bigger location and the one right next to him. So we're talking about that kind of stuff. And we're going through like how do you, you know, cover that new rent and that kind of stuff. And just talking through that with him by the end of it, it's like, you know, he actually could cover the rent right now. Like that's just how much the rent's not overly expensive in space, but the pop the opportunity that he has to be able to explode his business from that point is so great. And his biggest thing is he doesn't do any marketing, his business is built completely on word of mouth. So we could, if we could just uptake his marketing to cover the $1,200 a month rent, well, we could cover, we could fix that like almost instantly just by putting some marketing towards it. But just going through that conversation, have that conversation with him, he just at the end of it just felt so good because he's like, oh man, like these are easy, you know. Realistically, the thing that I've been like trying to figure out is like we solved in like 30 minutes, you know, because it's just you need somebody to talk through those things with you a little bit too. So sometimes as entrepreneurs, that loneliness is also like you you talked about you and me talking this morning before this call or before this podcast. Was that an anxiety reducer for us? We were able to have we wouldn't we weren't feeling lonely at the top. We could have those deep conversations with somebody else that allows us, okay, like to talk to somebody else that understands in this kind of equation that I'm I'm struggling with.

Trev Warnke 15:27

Yeah, somebody else who understands, who's in a similar, not necessarily the same situation, but just has experienced similar stressors or for similar reasons. They got the same stakes, the same things on the line. And they have to work through those things. It it's that would be the next thing I would say. I would almost argue that having you guys in my life and having the brotherhood is is a godsend because that gives me another outlet to speak to, right? Like I prioritize where I spend time with God first, and then we get into tactical things and into practical things when I when I talk to you guys and other business owners.

Joe Rouse 16:02

Yeah, and it's just having somebody to bounce stuff off of, even like somebody that just knows you well enough. So just like last week you had talked about making your own podcast, which I'm super proud that you enjoy that side. But my biggest thing was, hey, let me just come to you and just say, hey, here's the things that you need to think about to be able to like how much time goes into like publishing the podcast and putting out the reels and all that kind of stuff. And for you, it's like, oh yeah, that's like maybe I don't have the time for that. But just think thinking through having somebody like question you a little bit, like, okay, that's an awesome idea. However, did you think through these things? And if you thought through all these components and it's still a yes, great, but we just need the ability to bounce these things off of other people because as entrepreneurs, we're naturally going to run towards opportunities because that's just who we are. I mean, we all do it. I do it like every single day. I have to be like, oh, I need to say no because I don't know I can't, you know, do what I need to do to the capacity I need to without negatively impacting another part of my life. Um but we always need we need people to be able to like help us like the thing that kind of brought this to mind for me was if you go to a marketing company, they're always going to just sell you on something to market more, right? But they don't tell you the opportunity cost that comes along with that. Meaning like Facebook ads. If you go to a face, like, oh man, I have this issue, I need to grow more. You go to a Facebook ads company and all of a sudden like, oh yeah, just you add us, you know, we're $1,200 a month or $1,500 a month, then you know, $3,000 ad spends, no big deal. You'll recover that really quickly. But now you're sitting there with that burden of I have to find $4,500 now extra just to market my business. Even for them, it's just like, yeah, oh, we can sell that, we can get you this many leads, but they don't tell you how many sales you're gonna get from that. So it's just the idea that, like, but when it's you and me, we're gonna have an honest conversation like Joe, I think that could be a good idea for you. Like, you definitely need to grow, but it's like maybe that's too expensive. Two, like, you do Facebook ads work for your industry, right? And so it's like having somebody that's honest with you that's gonna like give you a little bit like, hey, in a moment, these sales, all these companies out there are good at selling, and that's what they're they're experts at. They're they're selling, even if it's not the right product for you, they're still gonna sell it to you. And so it's like, well, you need this group of people to help you be able to like take that anxiety away a little bit of like, man, should I be doing this or should I'm falling behind because I'm not spending $4,500 on Facebook ads. Like, oh no, no, no, no. There's maybe a cheaper way to market your business. And two, maybe you're just not like following up to your current leads. Do you need more leads or do you have enough leads?

Trev Warnke 18:18

Or they tell you, hey, you'll make this back up with one client long term.

Joe Rouse 18:22

Yeah. You sign them for a few year contract, you can pay for this one person a month. It's like, yeah, but if I don't hit on one person a month, now I'm going negatives.

Trev Warnke 18:30

That doesn't affect your cash. I mean, that it doesn't talk about cash flow either.

Joe Rouse 18:34

Exactly. Yep. It's just interesting that the perspective that you get on that one-on-one conversation with somebody. And sometimes even business coaches are great for that too, where they can give you honest feedback, like, maybe that's not the best direction to go.

Trev Warnke 18:47

Yeah, and having somebody in your life that you this trying to think the best way to say this, like sometimes when you pay people to have those conversations, this is going to sound like a plug for us because this is a service that we offer with the Brotherhood. We don't start out charging people, but there's a point where there's there's aspects of it that have to be paid for. When you pay for it, you're much more likely to take that advice on. Unless it's a terrible experience and you don't respect the person saying it. But like in in your case, like I was talking about, I really enjoy interviewing people. I love learning people's stories and listening to them and potentially starting my own podcast just for that purpose. And you gave me some good advice and things to think about. And because I respect you and your, you know, your advice uh and your insight that slowed me down a little bit, right? Just made me, wait a second, let me think about this a little bit more. And uh that can be a very valuable thing to have in your life. Very, very valuable. And I'm appreciative for it too. Well that and that's a big thing that these that this serves.

Joe Rouse 19:50

Yeah, I mean, on the brotherhood side of things, it is when people ask me, like, why do I have to pay for the brotherhood? Well, one, you're paying for somebody to keep the group tight to keep the right people in the group. And two, you're paying, honestly, for other people to be give you transparency. Because if you just go out, you just randomly go out and hang out with three other guys, you know a little bit, but don't know that well, maybe they're all entrepreneurs. You guys are gonna get in a conversation, but you're probably you're gonna hold back. Really, you're gonna hold back because you're not gonna like want to ruin this friendship or whatever this is. Well, when you're in something that's that's more than that, where it's like this is an expectation of what we're doing, like, then you're getting people's true transparency. But there's also a side where we're we're also guiding the group and coaching them up on how to help each other too. What I mean by that is we we believe in the idea of be kind, not nice, right? So the idea of kind means I'm gonna give you honest truth, but I'm not gonna be a dick about it. I'm gonna be honest and I'm gonna give it to you in a way that you need to hear it, Joe. But I'm not just gonna tell you what you need to hear, I'm not just gonna tell you what you want to hear and be like, oh, that's such a great idea, go do it. And then six months later, you're like, that was a bad idea. My idea, my goal is to be kind, and we learned this from Nick Berry, be kind, not nice. And so we really focus on that. And that's you have to coach people up to learn how to like be kind. Because my natural instinct, I think my natural instinct is kind, but sometimes when I especially first started off in masterminds, I could definitely be more on the dick side of things where I'd just be like, I'd hit a little bit harder and I didn't really know the people. Like for you and me, Joe, I can kind of tell you anything, but we have such a strong relationship, but I never come at you to be like, I'm trying to be a dick about this. I'm just trying to be like, hey, that's probably not this is why I'm being completely honest about it. There's no negative side to why I would tell you this. I would just tell you this because you're my friend. Um, and part of the brotherhood component for us is the fact that we we need to guide people along that path because sometimes the hardest truths are not easy to hear, and you've got to hear it from somebody that really cares about you.

Trev Warnke 21:41

Yeah, I'd something I've learned with that that's helped me because I'm very quick to be like, well, that doesn't make sense. Why would you do that? You have to learn how to speak to people, right? When we're offering advice and and the way that that caters to me and has been consistent now that I've researched it, is asking. Not offering advice, but but helping people out of curiosity. So it really just leads to me asking questions rather than just telling them exactly how to do something all the time. And there's there's that's more towards the coaching side, right, than the managing side. And there's there's times where you got to manage people, but in in this, it's usually it's a coaching situation. And and being allowing myself to truly be curious about where they're coming from and why they're doing it allows me to understand it better so that I can coach people in a better way or a more effective way, just asking questions and it helps me learn, which is something I enjoy doing about people. And I think curiosity, when you come at something with curiosity, it it can disarm people too. They're they're much less likely to be defensive. Just something as simple as saying, hey, out of curiosity, this. And I know that's a very literal example, but it it definitely disarms things and helps us understand, are you aware of this potential problem that you might deal with to create that awareness in them, help them realize it on their own? That's that's been a big, a big helper for me when coaching people.

Joe Rouse 23:05

Yeah, and it's even like so we start this conversation with anxiety is like being able to be relatable to the other people that are struggling in the group. When you have like seven or eight other people that are like, let's use anxiety as an example, you know, you start to have that conversation, other people can be related, like, yeah, I definitely know I had this issue, we had our finances, we got hit big from tax season. And man, in that moment, my heart was just pounding. I had no idea how to find this money, you know, or somebody else is like, Man, we just got like we just got sued, you know. Like I know this company in um where we're at and they got sued once. He was telling a story, got sued once, nothing their fault, but they got sued. Well, they then had to go file for bankruptcy to cover the lawsuit until the lawsuit got proven wrong, and then they were able to like, you know, not have to file, you know, reduce the how are you?

Trev Warnke 23:47

What an experience that is.

Joe Rouse 23:48

Yeah. And telling that story and him telling that story just being like, holy smokes, I've never even thought about how to even like when you think about bankruptcy, you just think somebody couldn't pay their bills. But realistically, they got a lawsuit against them, somebody that had a false claim against them, and the lawsuit came back that they that that company was wrong, and then they were able to take their bank, they didn't have to, but they had to file for bankruptcy. Imagine going through that process and have others to be able to be like, hey, I've run into situations you may even thought I have never thought about before. And my anxiety level, when I think about what they had to go through for that and me worrying about a $700 a month client, like, oh, okay, well, my life's pretty easy. You know, in certain ways we think about the stuff like that. But it does help having others that have like, man, I've gone through something like that, or maybe I haven't experienced that, but I know somebody that's experienced that. The relatability between a group of men is just um, it just changes your world and your world perspective.

Trev Warnke 24:35

Especially when you can talk to them about things that are actually a really big deal and they've been through it and they can say, Look, I understand how that feels right now. Like I know your heart feels like it's gonna beat out of your chest, like you're gonna break your ribs any second. But I can promise you there is another side to this that you'll come out on. Every, every situation is like that. Every situation, every single situation, no matter how serious it feels, no matter how financially heavy it might be, because I think we're all gonna look at the cost of something financially is like usually what probably brings the most stress. There's always a couple weeks from now. There's always a month from now where even if the problem isn't solved, you'll be able to think more clearly about it simply because it's a little bit further in the past. And when you're going through something, I mean imagine that. Imagine going through getting sued, having to declare bankruptcy to handle it while it's going on. So you're dealing with this every single day, bankruptcy, which comes with its own labels and you know, like societal pressures and assumptions, but knowing that there's there's still another side to it, you're still gonna come out, you could you can still come out very successful on the other side of it. And talking to somebody who's actually been through that, they're like, no, this is actually common, this happens in these situations, and everything's gonna be okay. But it's I know right now it's horrible and it sucks because you're dealing with this from every single angle. Yeah, having it's having that group of people to go through that with is massive. I think it took me years to understand how important that was to be able to talk to people that I trust like you and like Danny and like Mark and not just talk to them to like get it out, but to help them understand that when we're guiding each other to keep each other grounded and level during, you know, all of this stuff during business, that it that it's a real thing, it's real experience that they're sharing. It's not just, well, you experienced it this way, but I'm experiencing it differently. It's like, no, this is actually what's going to happen. You're gonna feel this way for some type of time, and then you're going to have some clarity. Uh, if you lean on God, if you pray, if you pray without ceasing, you might get there a little bit faster, you might not, but you're gonna come out okay. You'll there they're you you have the support in place, you'll find a way, everything will be okay. So let's let's focus on what we can control right now because somebody's been through this. It took me a long time to realize that that was real advice and not just somebody comforting you. You know, like you grow up as a kid and your mom holds you and it might rub your back or something like that to comfort you in the moment. But as you grow up and you become a man and you get business advice for going through things that suck, it's not the same thing. It's actual, like, dude, seriously, I promise you, this is horrible right now. Like, let's just talk about how horrible it is. But it's not gonna be soon. It'll get a little bit better every day. That's that's something I've learned probably over the last, I would say, since 2020. And I don't know, and that's it. That's that sounds like COVID. I would say 2022, probably more than anything, enclosing that second location and learning that just about every situation is gonna get better.

Joe Rouse 27:41

Well, one thing when you're saying that, I was thinking about is like it probably took us the first three years of being in our mastermind group because we're just we were all so young that we're in our group at the time, and we're so like just focused on growth and getting bigger and like that kind of thing, that we really didn't have deep as deep a conversation as we think we did. We had really good like business tactical conversations, but it took us a while to grow, grow up really, because we were early 30s, right? So we were like it took us a while to grow up to realize that like our conversations got deeper over time and they became real conversations more than just business conversations. And I think that's when that that's when the magic of the group of the group of men really come in when it's no longer tactical. And I know like as a brotherhood group start to grow, I know early on they're gonna be very tactical conversations and people because people come in thinking they're just doing business. It's gonna take them six months, probably at least, to be able to really start to, I would say, open up to a level that like we talk about. It's gonna take them years of knowing each other to open up to the level that we think that we've seen as like how impactful and life-changing this has been because we've known each each other so well. But it takes a while for people to really truly become transparent. We're even talking before this call that like even people we've known for a long time, there's certain areas where they're transparent when after the fact, but during the time they're going through it, we're not as transparent during the time we're going through things. And so it just takes time to build to be able to open those things up, and that just happens as you start to build those relationships. So that's why you need to, you know, get in groups and build those relationships early because it's gonna take you a while before you become past the tactical side of things and become like truly transparent with each other where you can be honest about what's happening in the moment.

Trev Warnke 29:14

Yeah, if you're with the right group long enough, the value only increases over time.

Joe Rouse 29:20

Yeah.

Trev Warnke 29:22

As you mature and go through.

Joe Rouse 29:23

And when you start to realize I don't need to take tactical things from this to have it be a valuable meeting. And that's where I think forever there have been people in our groups over the years that you could you know that once they stopped getting the business advice they wanted, they bailed. They just jumped ship because they weren't there for the same reasons everybody else was. And that's okay for them, but that just tells them that they weren't in the right room, or they got the in a sense for them, they maximized the room to the maximum of their capacity. Tactical is just one part of the equation that you need in in groups. And so it does take, you know, over time it takes people to realize what they're why they're in the right room. And once you start to have real conversations, people that aren't really willing to have real conversations, they pop out of the room.

Trev Warnke 30:05

Yep. Yeah. And that's not the people we're looking for.

unknown 30:08

Yeah.

Joe Rouse 30:08

I guess we're gonna go ahead and wrap up this podcast for the day. So we started off the conversation talking about anxiety and how we all struggle with it, and it's something that you're never gonna get away from. And for me and Joe, one of our best tips, and I've even thought about this in the brotherhood at the end of our meetings, like having a specific prayer for people that are what they're going through, because it's like, hey, we want to put these burdens, we want to let these burdens go to God, right? And so for me and Joe, being able to do this like in our everyday life is something that's helped us to go forward. So if you're a strong Christian, you're somebody that really wants to get deeper into your prayer, pray to God about the things you're going through. Give him the burdens because he's willing to take them, he's there for you every single day. And so, and just know that as an entrepreneur, you're never gonna get away from the burdens. Like that's what you signed up for. That's part of what we signed up for, is not an easy life. We signed up for the harder life, but the harder life gives us a challenge every single day. And life being challenged, you don't want life to be too challenging where it's like it's hard to wake up in the day. But the everyday challenge that we have at entrepreneurship, that's the fun in it. It's the game for us, it's the competition that we didn't we don't have anymore now that we're not in sports. So so just know that every there's everybody deals with anxiety. You're gonna go through it every single day, find ways to relieve that anxiety, and just know that there are groups of men out there like us, the Brotherhood, that are there to be able to support each other. And it might not be in the moment, it might not be in the moment that you're gonna be able to get that exact relief, but being able to bounce that idea off somebody just makes life a lot easier. Hit subscribe, turn on notifications, and stay locked in. Brotherhood is more than business. It's about leading from the front, leveling up in every domain, and becoming the CEO of your own life. Step up, execute, and we'll see you in the next one.