Episode #977
Are you coming home feeling anxious, short-tempered, or just plain drained?
Does it feel like the pressure from work, your relationship, and everything else is piling on at once?
In this episode, I sit down with Master Coach Mark Smith to tackle stress, anxiety, and overwhelm—the stuff that sneaks up on every man, especially those trying to lead at home and at work.
We talk about what causes this state, how it shows up in your daily life, and most importantly, how to get back in control.
It’s not about perfection—it’s about learning how to reset quickly and show up powerfully.
Mark and I share real-life examples from our own lives and coaching experience, including:
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Why overwhelm makes you a weaker husband, father, and leader
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How to stop bringing that chaotic energy into your home
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A simple decompression routine that your wife will support
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The 5 go-to tools for turning stress into strength
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What to do when guilt makes you feel like you’re always failing
In this episode, you’ll learn how to create space for yourself, own your energy, and shift out of reaction mode so you can lead with clarity and confidence.
This one’s real, raw, and packed with tools you can use today.
Struggling in your marriage?
If the stress is piling up and the connection with your wife is fading, I’ve got something for you.
I want to buy you a copy of my book, A Man’s Guide to Saving Your Marriage Without Talking About It.
No fluff. Just real, proven steps to bring back the love and respect.
You cover shipping—I’ll cover the book.
Not sure how bad things really are at home?
If stress and overwhelm are creeping into your marriage, take 2 minutes to find out where you really stand.
👉 Take the FREE 5-Question Assessment and see if you’re on track… or headed for trouble.
It’s quick, it’s eye-opening—and it might be the wake-up call you need.
.
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Head over to our BONUS page for special access to some of the deeper tactics and techniques we’ve developed at The Powerful Man.
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Transcription
Doug Holt 0:00
Sit down with your wife, yeah, talk to her, yeah, and say, “Babe, I want to be the best husband and the best father I can possibly be. And I’ve noticed that I come home, I’m stressed, I’m anxious, and that’s carrying over to the family. That’s not what I want. So what I’d like to do is stop by the park, take a 15–20 minute stroll, get my mind clear, so I can come back and be here and be present for you and the kids.”
You’d be hard-pressed to find a woman that’s not going to want that, yeah—you know, and desire it, yeah? But either way, as the leader of the house, you just—you got to take it.
Do you ever have those moments in life where you just feel overwhelmed, stressed out, or like anxiety just takes over?
Well, we all have. And if that happens to you, well, you’re in luck, because today, I have master coach Mark Smith with us, and we’re going to talk just about that.
First, we’re going to talk about: hey, why does this happen to us?
And then secondly, we’re going to talk about: how do we get ourselves out of that so we can maintain that powerful state—that grounded state. You know, when we say The Powerful Man, we’re talking about a man that’s powerful from the inside. He’s grounded. He has control.
Is he perfect? No. But he knows how to get back on track on a regular basis. So if you’re interested, then stay tuned. Mark, thanks for being here, bud.
Mark 1:24
Thank you very much for having me.
Doug Holt 1:26
I’m excited. So right now, we are at the The Ranch, for the people listening to this, and we are running the Alpha Rising. So Alpha Rising, for those that don’t know: if you go throughThe Activation Method or one of our other introductory programs, you have the opportunity of going into a one-year mastermind that we call The Brotherhood or The Inner Circle, depending on where you want to go.
And in that second year, there is a life-changing event called The Alpha Rising, and that event is happening right now at the The Ranch. And I was able to pull you literally aside quickly to get this recorded, so I appreciate all you’re doing here for the men. I know from the feedback that I’ve gotten from the volunteers—men that have actually been through the program—they’re telling me it’s a fantastic group and that you and the other coaches are doing an amazing job. So thank you.
Mark 2:15
I appreciate that acknowledgement, Doug, and it is really important. And I think it ties into the topic today—we’ll weave it in.
Doug Holt 2:24
We’ll find a way. Well, all of us have those moments, right, where things just seem to be caving in on us. We’ve got overwhelm, our to-do list is too long. We have demands from our company, our work that we do. We have demands from our family. Demands maybe from our community or volunteer positions—and then, of course, demands from ourselves. And they all seem to pile on at once. And it’s how we react to those that really allows us to decide: is this going to be overwhelm or something else?
Mark 2:52
Well, as I said, we’d weave it in—and here we go. So, working with the Alpha Rising—four coaches, two volunteers—there’s a lot going on: a lot of perspectives, points of view, opinions, different ways of thinking, different priorities. And it’s very easy to allow that to cloud our minds. I was speaking to some guys on a Pack call in the Brotherhood earlier on—we get to choose the space that we occupy and how others occupy our space. So I think that’s a primary premise to consider, as opposed to just allowing everything to come at us and feel like we’re powerless.
Doug Holt 3:30
Yeah, I think that’s the key, right? Everybody experiences overwhelm or has experienced it. Everybody has probably experienced anxiety and stress. Those are natural things. And what I’ve learned—being a business owner in my early 20s, starting a company, and then, you know, no shock that I’m not in my 20s anymore, having done so many, many times over—yeah, overwhelm happens a lot, right? The to-do list never goes down. In business, you’ll have sales drop. You’ll have leads have an issue. Maybe operations or delivery or fulfillment is an issue. Legal—people suing you. All of these things can come at you. And Murphy’s Law, right? They come at you all at the same time.
And over the years, I’ve learned to look at overwhelm much differently, and that’s made all the difference in the world. I’m curious for you, Mark: One is—do you experience those things, being the Jedi Master that you are? Two is—what are you seeing from the men? How is this manifesting in their reality?
Mark 4:32
Yeah—firstly, Jedi Master is something that I’m… mastery is something that I’m working towards. And as I was saying, dealing with egos, dealing with complexity, dealing with multiple demands is something that I think overwhelms most of us at some point. I’ve just recently had an experience where I’ve been tested hugely around administration and forms and sharing and signing and scanning and emailing documents—and repetitively so. So I know that feeling, yeah, right?
So there are a few things that have been happening in my life that I’ve chosen to create. And yeah, the overwhelm is something that’s very easy to submit to and allow it to wash over us and pull us out of balance. So something that we often speak about in TPM is masculine energy. And Colton and I were just speaking about that, funnily enough. The masculine energy aspect allows us to create and set boundaries. And the perception that I have is that it’s about space—so the space around me.
And overwhelm for me looks like something washing over me. And that means that I’m not taking ownership of my space, and I’m not taking ownership of how I manage or command my space, or ask for my space to be respected. And so that, for me, is an important aspect, because if we’re unconscious in that area, then people will take advantage. My wife would just send demands as soon as I walk in the house. And so one of the examples of creating space is that I made an agreement with her: give me 15 minutes. That’s all I need—to wash my face, to put down my stuff, to take a breath, to potentially take a cold shower, and then reset myself and choose how I’m going to enter the family environment.
Doug Holt 6:39
I like that. When I think of overwhelm—you said “washing over you”—when someone’s overwhelmed, they’re on their heels. They’re on their back foot, right? They’re in reaction mode, is what comes up for me when I think of overwhelm. You’re reacting to things—same thing with anxiety, a lot of times. And a lot of times those reactions are to external forces, right? Not ones inside.
And so men—and all people, women do too, but we’ll use men in this context—men can find themselves focusing on that outside, just consistently reacting. And I’ve found one way to overcome that is to attack it, right? Head on. Get on the balls of your feet and go for it. And that momentum starts to pick up. And then overwhelm starts to become opportunity.
Which sounds cliché, right? Just to hear somebody say it, yeah. And I can imagine someone listening to this that’s overwhelmed going, “No, Doug, you don’t get it. I’ve got all these things going on.” You do have all these things going on. It’s the choice, right? It’s the choice of how you want to look at those. And, you know, the kind of old analogy or metaphor is— How do you eat an elephant? Right? One bite at a time.
Mark 7:53
I think that there’s a number of things that happen in terms of overwhelm. And one is—it affects our nervous system. So before we know it, we’ve been triggered. My personal example is around plumbing. So plumbing happens—dirty water, the pipe leaks, whatever it is—would immediately send me into feeling like I’m out of control, yeah. And then I’d end up throwing wrenches and using expletives—
Doug Holt
There’d be a few curse words.
Mark
Yeah. And so I think that the challenge with overwhelm and anxiety is that we tend to look for a quick fix or an out. And that can be yelling. It can be, as I just shared. It can be medication. It can be numbing. There are all sorts of things. So we look for a fast out, yeah, as opposed to what you said, which is: face it. Head on. And I’ve found—and I work with a lot of guys, as you know—and I’ve found that when the guys turn to face what it is they’re challenged with, slaying the dragon becomes possible. And then on the other side, there is peace, and there is possibility, and there can be greater perspective.
Doug Holt 9:06
Yeah, we just finished tax season here in the US—well, by the time this comes out. And a lot of guys get overwhelmed with that, right? Because they’ve created the monster in their head. You used the dragon example—yeah. A lot of times the anxiety especially comes from the fear of what’s going to happen, the fear of the unknown. So there can be anxiety and overwhelm in relationships, yeah? Do I have that conversation with my wife? Do I talk to my business partner or the person I’m trying to get a contract from? And then they create this story in their head of all that’s going to happen, and as a result, those things are—again—external of themselves, right? That flows back to them as overwhelm. That overwhelm turns to fear, anxiety, some people anger—depending on how they want to react to it. And for a lot of people—we talked about this off camera, this is a good time to bring it up, I think—for a lot of people, that overwhelm sucks their energy.
Mark 10:05
Oh, yeah.
Doug Holt
And then they’re drained, and then they don’t have the energy to do the thing that’s causing the overwhelm.
Mark
And that’s when relationships and businesses get fractured—because of the reactivity and the prickliness, right? And I recognize that in myself. When I’ve had overwhelm, I become a stickler, right? Things… because I want to get things back into control—within the frame. So I become very pedantic around things: they’ve got to be like this, or I don’t have control.
And so, you know, a lot of it is—for me—the illusion of control, right? We think we have control. And being willing to accept—this is something that I’ve… and take ownership, right? This is something I’ve created. Okay, my bad. I did this to myself, totally.
How am I going to respond to it? What help do I need? What resources do I have? And what’s the clear outcome that I’m looking for, and what’s the pathway to that outcome? If we can give ourselves—again—the space to consider all of those things, and we take charge as men, as leaders, as business owners—take charge of the environment that we’ve created and the relationships or the situations—it gives it a whole new picture. Because we no longer become victims.
Doug Holt 11:23
I love that. There are two key points that I want the guys to get out of what you just said:
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, anxiety, stress—any of those emotions, really any negative emotion—
- Take a step back and give yourself space to look at the landscape in front of you.
- And the second thing you said, Mark, which I think is so important: take ownership.
Yeah, ownership of what’s going on—but also ownership of what you’re making it mean, right? Because yes, that’s a key thing. I had a funny thing today on Slack actually—which we use for internal communication, as you’re aware. There were two gentlemen who I won’t name. I had asked them to take a course. So they obtained the course this morning and said, “Hey Doug, we got the course.”
I said, “Awesome.” I go, “I think I can get through this course in two days. How long are you guys gonna take?” And they’re like, “Oh, you must have all the time in the world.” And I just replied with a Giphy—because that’s how I like to reply to people, you know, one of those pictures. But I’m like, “We must rearrange priorities.”
And you said this off camera again, which I thought was so beautiful, Mark: it’s about priorities. It’s energy, right? What are we choosing to focus on? We all have 24 hours in a day, seven days a week. Then why do some people seem to get done in a day what others seem to get done in a month?
Mark 12:41
Right. Priorities. Priorities are the antidote to distractions. And one of the things that I’m very capable of doing is distracting myself. I can give you many examples. There’ll be things that I know I need to do, and I can do—and my wife always says I try and fit two hours into one.
So I create my own pressure. And then the thing becomes, “Do I take care of this, do I…?” So I’ll give you an example. I didn’t bring my driver’s license with me to the US. So I’ve got a digital copy, which I can then laminate, and I could present to somebody—and it’ll be my driver’s license.
But I’ve got other things that are much more of a priority. That’s only in case I need to drive somebody’s vehicle and, you know, so forth. But the fact is that I’ve got this thing that I can solve really quickly, so I think, “I’ll just get it done now.” And what happens is that those small things just get crammed into a space where—if I was to be conscious and strategic—I’d put those things aside, put the bigger things in place, the big rocks, right?
We speak about big rocks because we work with EOS—and prioritize those. And then those small things—either we can do it, don’t do it, or delegate it, right? We can give them to somebody else, or we can take care of it at a time when it’s appropriate or it’s not important.
Doug Holt 14:09
Well, I think that’s the key. So one strategy that I use, and we teach the men, is before bed or before the end of your workday, whichever you choose, is write down the top—I do three—the top three things that I need to get done, and then I attack those first, first thing in the morning when your energy is the highest. Yeah, because those little things do creep in. And we’re all like that, Mark, where we—yeah, I’ll just do this little thing real quick. I’ll just check Slack real quick. And we task switch. Yeah, we lose so much time in that task switching that creates the overwhelm.
And then there’s that thing that you wanted to get done. You don’t get it done, so you get down on yourself. You beat yourself up. Well, I beat myself up, I should say. Yeah. And then upon that, we also get to the point where I think all of us—you know, you don’t get the thing done, so you feel bad. Now you’re overwhelmed and stressed because you had something else planned the next day that this thing’s creeping into, right?
Mark 15:03
And the other thing you said earlier on was that it’s external, right? So we often feel we don’t have control because it comes from an external source. It could be, you know, a legal requirement or whatever it happens to be. And going back to the priorities—you know, if it is a priority, then we get to make time for it and prioritize it and put it in a place and a space which is going to be possible for us in our calendars and our schedule.
The challenge with that is that when we make agreements with ourselves, we often—you know, I’ll just move it a little bit later. And so a top tip for me is to keep our agreements with ourselves. If I put a meeting in myself to handle a particular item, instead of task switching or pushing it and creating chaos, to just handle it. Right? Take it head-on.
Doug Holt 15:56
Yeah, I think it’s critical. One thing that happens—I’ll talk about two things—but one thing that happens to men, or anybody really, again, is when they’re feeling stressed and overwhelmed, their breath becomes shallow and they don’t breathe as fluidly. And I’m saying that to the guys, because you can catch yourself doing this. Yeah.
But also there’s an antidote. So if you find yourself with anxiety, you find yourself stressed, you find yourself too overwhelmed—to your previous point—take a step back, right? Own your space. But also do some breath work. Yeah, right? Do some basic box breathing, do fire breath, whatever kind of breath work you want. The key is to get deep, diaphragmic breaths coming in, and that’ll allow you that relaxation state, and you can actually see the picture much better—the playing field.
Mark 16:47
Yeah. Because if you’re not breathing, you’re not thinking. No, your brain is not working optimally. If you’re not supplying it with oxygen, your heart rate’s up, and we’re in fight or flight.
Doug Holt 16:58
100%. So, and I think what guys get to understand—because a lot of men that listen to this show or watch this pod, a lot of them are married businessmen—yeah. And guys get to understand, I know this was for me, Erin complained about this a lot for me. So it was one time in Santa Barbara, I owned three companies that I was trying to run, which, you know, wasn’t a good idea, but I did it. I’ve done it a few times. Yeah, slow learner, Mark. Me too.
And so when I’d be overwhelmed and stressed, I would bring that energy home. And come to find out, for a woman, it is the least sexy energy. Not the least—I think being a victim, yeah, is the least—but it’s a hard energy for women. It’s not a sexy energy. No. So here I come as this guy conquering business, I’m playing sports, I feel really good about all the checkboxes, but I’m stressed and overwhelmed. Come home, I want to pour a drink, you know, sit on the couch or relax with her, go for a walk or something.
But until I release that energy—hence us having the Alpha Decompression. Yeah. And gentlemen, if you’re in the program, do your Alpha Decompression—I brought that energy home, and my wife would say, “Oh yeah, I could tell before you opened the door. I could feel that energy coming off of you, and it stressed me out. Made me anxious.” Yeah? And as you can imagine, you have two anxious or stressed people—that’s not a recipe for great sex.
Mark 18:24
It’s not the recipe for anything great. So yeah, speaking from the energetic point of view, you know, we always say that your energy walks into the room before you. Yep. And so people do feel that. We are magnetic kind of creatures, so we feel the attraction or the repulsion. And the repulsion comes from that kind of energy. And if—think of a toddler—you’ve got young children. Yeah. You know, a three- or four-year-old in play is a beautiful thing. And a three- or four-year-old in chaos is like a Tasmanian devil—can be really difficult to deal with.
Doug Holt 19:09
I dealt with it last night. So, okay, so it’s fresh. I want to buy you a gift. Look, if your marriage is struggling—and let’s be real, every marriage struggles at some point—but yours is struggling where you’ve lost that love, admiration, respect, I want to help you. I want to buy you a copy of the book that I wrote, A Man’s Guide on How to Save Your Marriage Without Talking About It.
In here, I’ve distilled over eight years of programs that we’ve developed at TPM to help men just like you save their marriages without talking about it. There’s no fluff, no BS. It’s an action plan that you can start using today to actually save your marriage and bring that love and respect back into your family, back into your house.
You deserve it. Look, all I ask is you pay the postage. You pay the shipping. I’ll buy the book for you. That way, you can take massive action today. Click the link or find it in the bio and get your copy now.
Mark 20:05
I’ve got a granddaughter, so—and I experience her. And so it’s really, really easy, even though there’s a huge amount of love for the person, or whatever it is—you know, or respect for the person, if it’s business, etc.—it’s really easy to get caught up in the chaos and the reaction to the energy.
And yeah, that is something which trips many, many guys up because they’re not taking ownership, going back to the original point. And so decompression, for me, is vital. Saltwater in the ocean is one of my keys. As you know, riding on two wheels, whether it be a mountain bike or a motorcycle, you know that that’s important—moving our bodies, getting grounded in the earth.
A lot of guys say to me, I haven’t got time for a decompression. You know, I’ve got a—sick, a guy said on the call today, I’ve got a six-minute drive from work to home, and I walk into five kids and this, that, and the other. How do I decompress? Well, you’re choosing the drive being six minutes.
Doug Holt 21:10
I’ve had this conversation with guys before too, yeah.
Mark 21:14
Yeah. And I remember conversations going way back to years ago where guys have said to me, that changed everything—when I decided that actually I can stop on the way home from work. I can go for a walk in a park. I can go and do a meditation by a lake or whatever and just center myself and then enter the next space—or the family, etc. It makes a huge difference.
Doug Holt 21:36
I know because I’ve had this conversation 100 times with men. Yeah, but you know, my wife is home alone with the kids, and you know she’s not gonna want me—she wants me home as soon as possible to relieve her. Mark, what would you say? What do you say to that?
Mark 21:49
Well, “as soon as possible” is up to you.
Doug Holt 21:51
Yes. Also, you know what I tell the guys is, look, sit down with your wife. Yeah, talk to her. Yeah. And say, “Babe, I want to be the best husband and the best father I can possibly be. And I’ve noticed that I come home, I’m stressed, I’m anxious, and that’s carrying over to the family. That’s not what I want.
So what I’d like to do is stop by the park, take a 15-20 minute stroll, get my mind clear so I can come back and be here and be present for you and the kids.”
Yeah, it’d be hard-pressed to find a woman that’s not going to want that, yeah, you know, and desire it. Yeah.
But either way, as the leader of the house, you just—you got to take it, right? Yeah. Ideally, it’s a cooperative, mutually agreed upon thing. Yeah. And there’s just times, sometimes you got to say, “Hey, this is what I’m doing.” Yeah, I’m a human being and living my life.
Mark 22:42
and there are things that that maybe she wouldn’t even notice, and it’s in our heads, you know, she needs me, and I’m in reaction mode because I want to rescue or I want to show up or whatever it is, and she won’t notice if you leave work five minutes early and you take an extra 10 minutes or whatever to to compose yourself. And as you said, the energy that you bring in affects her. Yeah, she knows it, and she doesn’t like it, and you’re not getting intimacy from her as a result of bringing that frenetic or chaotic or overwhelmed energy in. So she may not agree. She may say, Well, how dare you Well, let’s try it out. Let’s see what happens. What’s different if I do this for 10 days, or I’m going to do a 30 day stretch of making sure, and then you tell me whether you prefer this or you want you prefer me being home earlier?
Doug Holt 23:41
Yeah. Well, I think also there becomes a point where it’s a need, right? Like, you don’t ask your wife for permission to go to the bathroom, right? You need to go. And it’s like, we all may I please eat, like, right? So this to me, we look at stress, overwhelming anxiety that kills people, yeah? So it becomes a need, like, I need to do this, yeah, and obviously have communication, because if you’ve been coming home for 10 years at whatever 5pm whatever time, and all of a sudden you’re coming home at 6pm you know, there might be some disruption of expectations. So you want to communicate those expectations, yeah, and see what’s happening. I know for me, what, what this still comes up. I still battle it is a feeling of guilt, right? I need every free moment I have because I travel so much and do the work that we do. I should be with my family, so the moment I can be up there with the kids playing, you know, savor every moment. Then I gotta have a conversation with myself about that guilt. Where did that guilt come from? You know, working through that, but also going, okay, I get to recharge Doug. I get to recharge my batteries so that I can spill in and pour into the rest of the family.
Mark 24:48
I have a piece of wisdom I learned many years ago. Guilt is a useless emotion. It really is. Doesn’t serve you, doesn’t serve your kids, doesn’t serve anybody. Nope, right? 100% i. Cognitively,
Doug Holt 25:00
get it, yeah? But that is the overwhelming emotion that comes up for me, yeah. So when I’m working long hours or doing something, I got a gentleman that wants to get on a call with me, which I want to do, yeah? But then I also have kids, baseball. I’ve got swimming. I got a birthday party coming up for kids, yeah? So there’s those, again, we come back to priorities. Yeah, it can feel overwhelming, because there’s so many options for us as coaches. We’ve got 100 men that would love to talk to us at any given moment or more, which is a beautiful blessing, beautiful blessing. Yeah, and we also got to walk the walk by being great husbands, great fathers, great partners and doing our stuff as well.
Mark 25:43
Yeah. There are options and probabilities, right as well. So when we give ourselves too many options, that that also creates overwhelm, yeah? So when it comes to to selecting, you know what’s coming forward, when you when you’re going on vacation, you choose where, you’re going to go, how many nights, how you’re going to travel there, all of those kinds of things. And yet we feel somehow in life that we don’t have the choices to to plan and prepare and set out those whatever you know, whether it’s a dinner, whether it’s be time with the family, whatever it is, we don’t necessarily think about it in the same terms, and yet we do for vacation. So why not set, you know, the the intention and the obligation potentially, or you know, the the expectation set, make it clear, explicit, and then make agreements around, you know when I can show up and when I will be available. And you were speaking about children, the children will remember the quality of the time, not the quantity of the time that we spend with them. Yep, 100% so we don’t have to feel guilty, because when we’re with them, if we’re completely dialed in, they’re loving it, and that’s what they’ll that’s what they’ll remember in their lives.
Doug Holt 27:00
This is totally tangential, but it reminds me of a video clip someone shared with me, and it was a dad who was a great golfer. He may have been a pro, but his son was a young pro, right? And the question was, how do I get my kids interested in golf? And the dad said, well, take your kids out golfing. Make it really fun, make it light. And when they’re at the peak of having their fun, then you leave, yeah, so they still want more, but this is what he said, that that was okay. What he said was great. So then you take your kids to the clubhouse, and then you have a soda with them, get a treat, and have some really good bonding time. They won’t remember the golf, but for the rest of their life, they’ll remember that time with dad in the clubhouse? Yeah? And I thought that was such a great valid point about quality and being present, which is the antithesis of what we’re talking about overwhelm, anxiety and stress is really having that. And every dad wants those moments, right? You get kind of emotional thinking about doing that with your kids. Yeah. But if you’re stressed, overwhelmed and anxious, you can’t it’s impossible
Mark 28:03
been there, done that. Doug, oh yeah, confession right here, yeah,
Doug Holt 28:07
we all have, right? I feel very comfortable speaking for all men, to what level is different. And I think you and I can attest that we’re, I hope we’re better than we used to be at getting out of those things. So I want to end this mark with just giving the guys five things, maybe random number, that they can do to help themselves get out of stress. We’ve we’ve listed more than five. Yeah, let’s end this with five things that can help them get out of that state so they can be the dad in the clubhouse or anywhere else, having the soda and creating those, those magic moments, those memories for lives with their family.
Mark 28:44
The first one for me, Doug is anxiety and stress comes from wanting to predict the future state or the future, you know, living in the in the future. So where am i right now? Right? Do I have any challenges or problems in this very moment. Do you have a problem right now?
Doug Holt 29:02
Not until you mentioned it.
Mark 29:06
Well, I don’t have a problem here, sitting here right now. So because I’m here in the present moment, speaking with you, of course, there are other things that I’ve got to deal with, but being in the moment is extremely key for me, and that’s really helped me to go, Okay, where am I at? You know? How do I feel right now in this particular moment? Have, you know? Have I got anything that I need to take charge of right this very second? And that gives me the opportunity to then do the next thing, which is to take a breath, as you said, and step back and get perspective.
Doug Holt 29:37
Yep, that’s what I was going to say. Is number two. You took that from me. Okay, what’s number three? Number two, just say, go back to breath. When I find myself future casting, or I find myself worrying about something, yeah, we have a big event here. It’s very important to us the work that we do. So there’s a lot of moving parts coming through. What I do is I go back to my breath. Yeah. That allows me to go what that does for me is allows me to go into my body right. And now, going into my body allows me to be grounded and present. I think that’s a lot of people have this idea, like, yeah, okay, I be present. I get it. But how do I become present? And to me, it’s Breath. Breath is an easy way. So I like to give the guys just a simple those guys that haven’t done breath work, and we have lots available, gentlemen, but box breathing is just an easy one for people to understand. So think of a box guys. Each side of the box is four seconds. So four second inhale, four second hold, four second exhale, four second hold, and repeat that process. And if you do that for a couple minutes, it doesn’t have to be long. Could be two minutes, or it could be even one minute, doing box breathing, your central nervous system is going to calm down, cortisol levels are going to go down, and now you have command of the situation,
Mark 30:53
yeah, exactly which. Which allows me to take charge and take ownership, and that’s for me. The third point is, as a result, it’s, it’s my choice, right? So I can choose my space, I can choose my priorities, etc, from this place.
Doug Holt 31:10
So number four, for me would be decompress. And what I mean by that is create rituals around your situations. So for for me, I talk about this really rare where we live, but we have a basement, a 1300 square foot it’s my man cave, where I have a lock on it. I love it, but I always have a garage. Yeah, there you go. I have a sign as I go through the door into the house that says, change of priorities ahead. It’s a metal sign made like Etsy or something. I tap that sign like a lot of athletes do coming out of a tunnel or going into a sporting event to change my mental state. So I’ve taught my body to react in a completely different way. Yeah, the guy driving six minutes can do the same thing. I have a guy that I work with and he he’s choosing not to stop at the park. So say, okay, great, this is what we’re going to do. You’re going to pick a song that that’s going to remind you of the man you want to be when you walk through that door. Yeah? And we’re going to have some hand gestures. We’re going to put anchors in place so that you can do this each and every time. So when you touch the doorknob, everything shifts for you, yeah? And it works brilliantly. So you got to have those rituals, those anchors, to get you into the frame that you want to be in which will allow you to release overwhelm stress and anxiety.
Mark 32:25
Yeah, are we on five?
Doug Holt 32:27
we’re on five, but you start us off, send us home.
Mark 32:31
So for me, it leads from what you were just saying around putting a song on, and that is, change our energy, right? We can change the the energy from stagnant to dynamic. For example, with a song, I could be seen driving along a highway singing to Bohemian Rhapsody at the top of my voice. And I’ve got a terrible voice, but I’ll rock out one of my favorite decompressions. My Friday decompression is I have a Friday playlist starts off with Metallica and goes into Thunder by ACDC and so forth. And yeah, so I’ll literally kick my chair back, step up from my desk, put the music on full blast, and rock out, and change the energy. I move my body, I jump around, do all of those sorts of crazy things. And there’ll be some guys who are much more serious than me who will probably be thinking, you know, that’s not for me. Well, then listen to Rachmaninoff. I don’t care what you do, but music is a great thing to to take ownership of and shift and change your energy, whether it be I need flow, or I need some vitality, or whatever it is and and that makes a massive difference to to how we’re received.
Doug Holt 33:46
I love it. Use music as an anchor, right? Yeah, and check. I use it all the time, like me, too. My workout music’s different than my gets shit done. Music, you know, like that. You sit at my desk and focus music, yeah? Awesome tips, as always, man, as I said, thanks for everything you do, for the movement, for the men, everything you’re doing here at the The Ranch, for these, these into these men that flew from all over the world to be here, including yourself. Yeah, it’s it’s no small ask. And what you’re doing, you’re changing lives, you’re saving marriages, but you’re also saving men. So thank you
Mark 34:17
living my purpose and mission. It’s a privilege.
Doug Holt 34:21
No doubt you are but thank you. No doubt Jim, as I always say, in the moment of insight, take massive action, go back and write those five things down, and I invite you to re listen to this or even bookmark it so you have something to go to reference mark. And I didn’t learn this overnight, right? These are things that we put in practice over years and decades of work and study, studying from other people, but also learning in the trenches ourselves, so that we can change our states. And it doesn’t happen all the time, but I can guarantee that I can speak from Mark, that we’re able to change our states much more readily than we did previously, and that allows us more enjoyable moments with the people we love, but also with ourselves. And that’s what we want for you guys. We want you to get the most out of this life, because you meant more. You are meant more than for average. You guys are not meant to be here for average. Stop settling, make some changes, and we’ll see you next time on the The Powerful Man Show.
