How Ben Catley Defies Burnout Science with the Five Gates of Growth

[00:00:03] Hector: Hello and welcome to another episode of the how to scale a business podcast. My name is Hector Santi Esteban and I am your host. Our special guest today is Mr. Ben Catley Richardson. He is the world's only accountability Viking and outdone me today. He's got , his axe behind him and his, body armor on.

[00:00:22] Hector: So Ben, welcome to the show.

[00:00:24] Ben: Thank you so much for having me. Hector is really good, really good to be here.

[00:00:28] Hector: guest to have, medieval ish, weaponry and defense, armor on during the recording. So that is the first and also a friend of, our mutual friend Kuba over at, ZenPilot. So go back and check that episode with Kuba. Give us your story because people, what, what does that even mean?

[00:00:48] Hector: Right. And the, an accountability Viking, those are not two things that are commonly associated with each other. So take us into the world. How does one get here and, and catch us up a little bit about what you do with, the people you work with today?

[00:01:01] Ben: Oh yeah. I mean, I think first of all, apologies. It's probably, if I give you the story, it's probably going to be all over the place because ultimately that's where. Things have kind of developed. And I think that's where a lot of us are. you say, have you, what's your story? What's your story? And often we can put two final line on, Oh, I did this.

[00:01:19] Ben: And then I thought this, and then it's never really genuine. So to go for the genuine story, it's been a sort of a falling through different options and ideas for the past eight years. So I've been self employed for about eight years and none of it's really been particularly successful. So I started off many years ago, right back at the beginning.

[00:01:40] Ben: I was doing copywriting and my background is in, marketing, community building, stakeholder management. And so I came from a kind of having always written basis looking for something to do. On a self employed basis fell into copywriting back then. If I called it ghostwriting is it's called now, I think I would have got a lot further.

[00:02:00] Ben: And what that really tells you is that so much of what we're doing when we're trying to scale a business or even just keep it going is trying to find the demand. Rather than what we actually want to do, trying to find what people want and what is actually out there that people really need. And I started my journey much like, many of us may have started, which is thinking, what do I want to do?

[00:02:24] Ben: What can I do? And I was at the wrong end of it. And so it's been a few years in the wilderness, trying different things out, thinking I came up with a plan and then discovering, as Mike Tyson will say. everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. It's just, you go out there with this idea of how you want it to turn out, but then the world kind of has a hand in it.

[00:02:45] Ben: The world has a play to make. And so it was about two or three years ago, and I tried one thing with charities, trying to help them build communities and stuff like this. And what I was trying to do Was apply the learning that I'd picked up while I was doing a marketing course with a really interesting marketing coach called Louie Gronje.

[00:03:07] Ben: Now the course is called, and forgive the language, the course is called stand the fuck out. And if there was anyone who was teaching me at that point, how to find that demand and talk about it in a way that people actually talked about it down the pub or to one another. It was Louie. And so doing this course really solidified in my head the idea of trying to find The right market, the right demand and talk about it in the way that people talked about it.

[00:03:35] Ben: So you don't say what I'd really like to do is understand exactly what my market is looking for so that when they go for a search or look at an advert, what they see is something that comes out of the page. You say, I just want to stand the fuck out, right? So he kind of made me think like this. And I was trying to do it in the charity world, but it just didn't work out.

[00:03:56] Ben: And then he invited me to be a guest coach on his course. So he was running another cohort and he brought me in. And we were thinking about like, what's the point of this? Like, what am I going to do? Well, I'm going to do accountability. And that went so well. I enjoyed it so much. And we had a blast and I made so many connections through it with the people who were on the course.

[00:04:15] Ben: And all they were saying at the end was accountability. I've got to hold myself to account. Now I've got to apply it. Yeah. And I was stood there, to be honest, thinking, yeah, I did this course 18 months ago, and I have struggled to keep myself accountable all the time. How do I maintain it? So I then started talking around to a lot of people.

[00:04:34] Ben: I was sick and tired of just trying to do stuff and see if it worked. So I went out there end of 2022 and just talk to as many people as I could to listen to what they were saying. What are they struggling with? What are they trying to do? Most of these solo entrepreneurs, small business owners, and that word accountability came up and up and up and up and up.

[00:04:54] Ben: Now, wind back quite a few years. Way before the pandemic, I tried once to be a performance poet and my style of poetry is, pretty unusual. And so I would go up and I never looked like this. But I would go up on stage, I had quite curly hair, I looked a bit like Sideshow Bob. So you can imagine, Sideshow Bob had an open mic night, stood up there, in quite preppy clothes at the time, and I would sing a cappella, my poetry, which is very kind of like Beowulf or sort of epic storytelling.

[00:05:33] Ben: And people would sit there for the first minute going, what in the hell is this? So they just had no clue what to expect, and that threw them. And And as I went on and on and on and explored what I was doing and wrote new things, I got obsessed with Vikings and their way of doing things because there's a lot of seemingly tradition of storytelling by an oral tradition with the Vikings, they didn't write anything down.

[00:05:58] Ben: If they did, it was, I can reach this high, right? It was just graffiti. So it was all oral tradition, but they also had a scolded tradition, which their poets and they were very much about performance and heroic tales. So I really lent into that and what I discovered Was that when I walked out on stage with the hair and the tattoos and the beard, and then I launched into this poetry, people went, yeah, that's kind of what I expected.

[00:06:27] Ben: And I didn't use the word then, but I've since picked up from people like Mark Ritson, who's a fantastic,marketing kind of guru, he'd hate that word, but let's just call him that, is a word called congruence. And that word really made a lot of sense to me once I started playing around with the idea, like I said.

[00:06:44] Ben: Accountability, what am I going to try and do? Nobody wants to talk about it, but everybody wants it as well, which often we find that people want something, but they also, they won't necessarily invest in it or they're not necessarily talking about it. They're talking about what it means to them, the problems that it creates for them.

[00:07:00] Ben: So the beginning of last year, I had been casting around trying to do something with accountability. What am I going to do with it? And I was talking to Louie. And he was like, cause he knew my background. He's like, why have you not done anything with the Viking? It's sat there. It's you. You've lived it.

[00:07:17] Ben: You've done all that stuff. Why have you never done anything with it? And suddenly I didn't have an excuse, to, not use a part of me that was, I was excited about and that could add something exciting to this fairly rudimentary word accountability. And I'd love to tell you that I sat for hours and planned and thought, but I didn't.

[00:07:38] Ben: All that happened was I went. Hmm. Accountability. Viking accountability. The accountability Viking. It's got a nice ring to it. And then about a week later, I was on a walk and I was in the woods and I was a bit pent up. I was a bit, oh, I want to do something. I want to make something happen. And I just shouted Hector.

[00:07:58] Ben: I just shouted into the woods. And at the end of the shout came a howl. A wolf's howl. God knows, where it came from. I've been watching The Northman and stuff like this, and there's all these, like, berserkers doing this kind of noise. But that was when the Viking kind of came out of me. So up until that point, it'd been like, this is kind of cool.

[00:08:17] Ben: And then after that point, it was like, no, this is This, this is something, this is it. And so then I was just like, well, I'm just going to lean into it. I'm just going to do everything. And I happened to be in the middle of a physical coaching program with a coach that I had. And we were going to have a photo shoot and it was going to be before and after for his sort of business.

[00:08:37] Ben: And I was like, do you mind if I dress as a Viking at the end of it? And he was like, no, that'd be amazing. And then the photographer was like, yeah, that'd be, he got dry ice out and all these lights and stuff like that. And so I got all these photos done and then I just leapt out and I just shoved it out there.

[00:08:53] Ben: And I was like, let's just see what happens. And people started to react to it. And I think for me, the biggest thing, that's a long kind of meandering way of answering your question. But what it came back to is something that I always wanted anyway. And when I started working for myself, I always wanted when I was working for other people, I always missed. It was just, I wanted to have fun.I don't, I don't believe in retirement or, I'm Daniel Priestley. We'll talk about this at length as well in his book, the entrepreneur's revolution. The idea of retiring is kind of, it's not really going to happen for most of us nowadays. those days are gone.

[00:09:28] Ben: The idea of financial security in later life, those days are gone. So really we've got to find something that you can keep doing for the rest of your life. And I've always felt like that anyway. I just want to do something that I can really, really love doing. But that is really, really valuable in the world and that I have an excuse to just keep doing it.

[00:09:46] Ben: And once I find the Viking, and once I've learned that people were struggling with this idea of accountability, it's just been an adaptation of how do I keep talking about that? How do I keep bringing the Viking out? And one of the reasons that I'm probably in a bit of a, not a low mood, but kind of an opener, more open mood right now is I've just come off the back of another photo shoot.

[00:10:08] Ben: And that has involved quite a hefty, intense period of calorie control, weight loss, and then what's called a peak week. When you do bodybuilding or any kind of physique work, you have a peak week towards the end of it when you're getting ready for the photo shoot. And it's incredibly controlled. You've got specific calorie targets to hit, water targets to hit, denying yourself this, doing this, working out in this particular way.

[00:10:32] Ben: So I am just pooped and my, my kids are on holiday. This is the first week they're fully on holiday. But what I think is great is that I can still, I was so looking forward to this conversation because getting the armor on. And it's a bit silly, right? But as soon as I start doing it, it's just fun. And I love it.

[00:10:50] Ben: And one of the things I keep reminding myself, I wear this to networking groups. So I'll like go to an event or I'll do a workshop and I'll wear it and sometimes I'll be walking through a town center to get to where I'm doing it and you're going this is kind of silly but then you have to keep reminding yourself that everything silly is pretty much fun.

[00:11:08] Ben: Everything fun is pretty much silly and the only thing, and this is where accountability comes into it, the only thing for me is that if you're going to do something like this, if you're going to put yourself out there, have axes on the wall and wear armor, you've also really got to live up to it. And you've got to be like, yeah, I'm not doing this just because it is silly just for no other reason.

[00:11:28] Ben: I'm doing it because I love it and it makes me feel good. And that's going to mean I'm going to bring everything to what I do. And that's what accountability is really about is finding a way to bring everything you have. To whatever you do and maintaining that and yeah, that is my odyssey now laid out for you.

[00:11:51] Hector: Yeah, it's really interesting. My introduction to accountability was, a coach or, or at least like when you think about it in this personal development sort of world, right, it was like a coach or accountability, or it was , this some kind of outside sort of thing.

[00:12:05] Hector: And for some reason, I always resisted that. And I'm curious for you, what you see is like the resistance. Cause on the other side of it, , when I have. A coach. And I have people that I'm accountable to things work. I mean, things work so much better. So I'm curious why you think that there's so much resistance to that.

[00:12:22] Hector: And, and if you found, an antidote or, or a way past that person, past that for that person who's going, I don't, I don't, yeah, accountability. I'm good.

[00:12:32] Ben: Yeah, I mean, it's, it's one of those words that, like I said, people talk about, I wish I could hold myself accountable. What they really mean is I'm just not doing the things that I know I should or that I know I want to do.it's motivation, it's momentum, willpower, whatever you want to call it.

[00:12:52] Ben: And I think ultimately, you can answer that question in sort of two ways. The first way is to say that we as just people have, especially in the West, and maybe is more specifically the West. But we're brought up in a society that for 200 years, maybe since the agriculture of industry was so important, and then it became industry and in factories was so important.

[00:13:19] Ben: So, the industrial revolution replaced. The whole agriculture side of society. Now, when that happened, what also happened is the people who own factories and own businesses like that knew that they had to get people to turn up and just do the same thing again and again and again. That's how a factory works, right?

[00:13:37] Ben: You turn up, you have a cog in the machine and it just keeps going. It's either part of the machine or it's a person turning the machine. And so we've been brought up in a system, told us several things. Like first of all, it said you are. A tool you have a use you have a value you can be put to use in a certain way and you need to find out what that is so it's like you have a place that you fit in the machine that is the world so we're kind of sold this vision that we're just going to find this place to fit what that immediately tells you the second thing is that therefore there's an external thing that you ought to be trying to fit into and that's going to come with.

[00:14:23] Ben: Approval, judgment, oversight, because if you're going to fit into the machine, then that means there must be other parts of the machine. And it must be, there must be something bigger than the machine. So you're sort of getting this sense of you're just being told to find your place. You are a tool.

[00:14:39] Ben: You have one purpose or one use or one value. And once you're in that place, you will then also be told what to do. And that's the third thing that you will just be told what to do. And we're told that our entire lives, we're raised that way in school, school is essentially without getting too much on my soapbox about it, school is essentially a factory for factory workers.

[00:15:03] Ben: So it was set up by factory owners. That's where the school system comes from. And everything, even now, everything that you're taught at school is essentially. To make it more easy, more straightforward for you to become an employee. So I've been, I mean, I've worked in many different places, but I've worked in institutions and seen people go through applications.

[00:15:24] Ben: You've got a hundred applications for a job, so they need a way to thin the herd. So they have a checklist. Has he got this? Has she got that? Have they done this?do they have a degree? Yes. No. And then you basically just writing people off. And so we're trained through this whole system to gather features together to be a tool with purpose.

[00:15:48] Ben: And then what does a tool get? You know what happens with a tool? It gets used. So we're basically trained to be used when you then try and do something yourself. So when you're trying to do your own business, there's no division between you and the thing that you are trying to use, which is you. And so.

[00:16:08] Ben: You often find that all of my clients, I find this with them, they're over promising because they're really keen to be a value. They want to do good work. They're over delivering because often, even if what they do is of high quality, they devalue it and they want to make sure that the other person feels like there's loads of value.

[00:16:27] Ben: So they're over delivering and then all of their stuff, their life development, their goals, their career development, it gets shoved to the bottom of the pile. Because like you say, there's no externalized force telling you, what to do. And often we find people struggle with getting work done without deadlines.

[00:16:49] Ben: Or without threats or without a stick, if something kind of holding onto them and ultimately that's the point, right, is why do we struggle with accountability? Why would somebody say, no, I don't need accountability because they're either rebelling against that being told what to do. And let's face it, if we went and started our own business, we didn't want to be told what to do.

[00:17:08] Ben: We didn't want to work for somebody else's game. We want to make it for ourselves. So we don't want to be told what to do. So there's that resistance. And then on the other side, we can't get away from the fact we've been programmed to always put externalized deadlines and requests above our own self.

[00:17:26] Ben: Because, well, we're a tool. We need to find our place. And there's a pretty much a Viking secret that I like to talk about, which will explain a different way to do that. And I'll go into that in a sec. Well, I've taken a breath

[00:17:39] Hector: Well, it's a perfect segue. We're gonna, we're gonna take a quick break. When we get back from that, I'd love for you to share that and also talk about the connection between accountability and burnout or the opposite of burnout, of sustaining and scaling, right?

[00:17:52] Hector: Because I think that that's where a lot of founders and business leaders at this point, they go because they see things are going up and we're growing, growing, growing. And it's at the expense of themselves often. So we're gonna get into that right after this quick break.

[00:18:07] Hector: Hey, y'all. Today's episode is brought to you by Amplify Media, and we are a podcast and content production company. Well, we like to think of ourselves as maybe a fractional media company because chances are you probably have a product, a passion, a mission and message, something that you're trying to get out to the world, but you might not have the time, the team or the tech skills to be able to do it.

[00:18:23] Hector: Well, if that's the case, we could help. Go to amplify media. com. That's a M P L a F Y media. com. You can also check the show notes for the link. And with that, let's get back to Ben. So Ben, you kind of started off the conversation mentioning that , you guys are on holiday for us.

[00:18:39] Hector: Americans, , you're on vacation, you're on, you're turning it off a little bit. And for a lot of entrepreneurs and founders, I mean, that the concept of that, there is no concept that they just go, go, go, go until like they drop. How do you look at the, going back to our conversation before, , how do you merge the worlds of accountability and burnout or merge the worlds of accountability and really sustaining, one's energy and motivation and everything they need to continue driving the business forward?

[00:19:08] Ben: Yeah, I mean, it's a real problem, isn't it? And I'm going to talk to you in a minute about, a scientific concept I've been introduced to by a neuroscientist friend of mine, the huggable neuroscientist, I like to call him Dr. John B. Mollador. But before I do that, I think there's a level of caveating here, which is, yeah, I'm on holiday.

[00:19:27] Ben: My kids are in the other room at the moment. I've had a bit of a day juggling childcare and family commitments and all that kind of stuff. I've also just come off the back of quite an intense period of, preparation as I think I was talking about for a photo shoot and all this kind of stuff. So I'm, I'm like, all over the place at the moment. And What often happens when you find coaches who, promise things. So my big promise is guilt free downtime, cause that's what you get if you work through accountability with me. That's what we work towards. But what you often find as well with coaches is that they are promising something, but probably they're promising it because they work on it all the time for themselves as well.

[00:20:07] Ben: So right now I am feeling guilty about a number of different things. But one of the things that's important to me, and this is where it plays into what you just asked. Is that ultimately what I have been fortunate enough to be introduced to is that there is a system where you can recognize where you're at and where you might be at risk of burnout or at risk of pushing too hard and it all comes down to how the brain actually works.

[00:20:36] Ben: So to just wind back a little bit to when,a bit of my story again, when I was about 10 or 12, I discovered my first, what you might call a brain hack. I didn't. Call it that at the time. And it was something very simple. It was just flipping a coin. It was a Saturday morning. I couldn't decide whether I should go out, see some friends, or I was exhausted, stay home, been a long day at school or whatever.

[00:20:58] Ben: You don't know you're exhausted when you're that age, but you know, you feel like it. I just couldn't decide. And I was terrible, indecisive child at the time, I was notorious for it. And I just had a coin. I flipped it and I got the coin and it told me to stay indoors. And the funny thing was, It wasn't that the coin made the decision, it was that the coin took away everything.

[00:21:21] Ben: It got me out of the way. All of my, maybe I should do this, maybe it's that, got all of that out of the way. And it just told me exactly what I wanted. Because as soon as the coin told me to stay indoors, I was like, actually, yeah, that's, that's really what I wanted. And I know that if the coin had told me to go outside, I would have gone, you know what, maybe not.

[00:21:40] Ben: But it would have told me what I wanted. And so this kind of just bang, in my head, it was this idea of, I can now make a decision. I used to carry a coin around with me. And, I'd hit that point when I remembered it, I do the core, but obviously it only works in binary situations.

[00:21:56] Ben: It's only yes or no, it's only two decisions and it can't address things like procrastination or fear or anything like that. And so I was on the lookout for something that was in, Exciting a tool that was as interesting as that. And then I found it when I was introduced to dr john B. Molitor, and he talked me through what he called the five gates of growth or of learning. And now this is going to be quite a lot of just dump on you. So I'm more than happy to go back and talk about each individual part. But the first thing to talk about is that when we say gates, that's the important word. Because there are five of them, and them being gates means you can't go from one to five, and you can't miss out three.

[00:22:40] Ben: You have to go through each and every one. And what I discovered when he taught me through it was that the first three of these gates are what we usually focus on when we're trying to get stuff done. So it's awareness, agitation, and attention. Now, those are the terms that him and his, kind of neuroscience, community, if you like, call it, it's difficult for me to kind of just jump in and pass it for the people.

[00:23:04] Ben: I mean, Dr. John got his PhD the year before I was born. So he's been in that world. He knows it. So I'm trusting what he's telling me. And I'm like, wow. Okay, john, tell me, like, what does this mean? And what does that mean? And he taught me through the fact that basically awareness is when, there's something missing, or, there's a problem you've got to do.

[00:23:21] Ben: And we can get unstuck here. Like a lot of people can get unstuck here because they get so focused on their goals. That they're just thinking about that when actually what's a good plan is to focus on what's missing, right? The problem. Cause then you can think about how to do something about it is like, okay, then agitation is the trigger.

[00:23:39] Ben: Agitation is what gets you moving. It's the motivation. then we get closer to this idea where we're talking, how do you get on with things and how do you make it valuable to you? And there's a lot in James Clear's book, Atomic Habits, about environment design, which is probably the best way to make this happen, which is just to create the environment that makes whatever you want to happen natural.

[00:24:03] Ben: So put your running shoes out right by the door so you don't have to go finding them. Put your gym clothes on as soon as you get home so that basically you're ready to go. So there's all this kind of stuff going on. It's essentially about making you move. And then the third stage is attention. And this is where a lot of people really struggle.

[00:24:22] Ben: This is where you need to focus, get rid of all the irrelevant stuff. And this is where I really help people to prioritize instead of look at priorities. Now, I tell you all of that because most of it will be familiar to people or at least familiar to some, which is the idea it's doing, right? It's what, what should I be doing?

[00:24:42] Ben: Why should I be doing it? And now I'm doing it. How do I focus on? It's pretty similar to what we might know, but the last two gates, and this is where burnout happens. The last two gates are the hardest and they're the hardest because again, to go back to how we were taught. We're taught to be tools, we're taught to be a value, we're taught to be always adding something. The fourth gate is reward. And immediately reward is like this externalized thing, right? You've got to wait for the accolades, the awards, the success, the attention. You've got to wait for somebody to tell you that you've done something good, or you've got to wait for an output, output from what you've done to tell you that you've done something good.

[00:25:24] Ben: And burnout happens a lot at this stage because you're working so hard. And you're just going, I'll just keep going until it works. I'll just keep going until I get that award. I'll keep doing the 60 hour weeks until I have 10 clients, 20 clients, 30 clients. You're always waiting for the externalized kind of permission to go to the next gate.

[00:25:49] Ben: And what we need to do, and this is one of the ways to get out of burnout and why accountability really helps with burnout is because accountability is also a lot to do with. Recognizing your progress, celebrating what you've got to looking at process goals, not outcome goals. And a lot of that is taking responsibility for what you've been doing for the week.

[00:26:11] Ben: What did you get done? What did you achieve? Even if it was only a little bit. And what Dr. John's explained to me is that even if you give yourself just a little fist pump or a pat on the back, or as again, in James Clear's book, you just use like tally charts or stones from one thing to the other. So it's not about the scale of the reward. that you just need to feel there was a reward of some kind, because that tells you that everything you've done up to that point was for a good reason and you're going to do it again. And the reason we burn out, like I say, is because we're waiting for that permission to celebrate. We're waiting for that moment to say we've truly arrived.

[00:26:50] Ben: And as somebody I was working with the other day said, when you own your own business, there's no such thing as done. The task list is always going to get longer. There's always something else to do. So if you are always waiting for a milestone to come along and kick you in the teeth and tell you you've arrived, you've celebrated, it's time to celebrate, you're going to be waiting forever.

[00:27:11] Ben: You've got to take control of it. I make a big fuss about this with people. I've got, a co founder pilot that I'm running at the moment to help co founders align better. And this one, this one group that I'm, I'm working with on the pilot, they just successfully managed to get through a big blocker and to get six months down the line of their new style of of working.

[00:27:32] Ben: And I'm just like every week at the moment for three weeks, celebrate it, celebrate it. And there's a reason for that. And the reason is exactly why I went away this past weekend and celebrated hitting the photo shoot goal that I had hitting the end of this, this process, because the fifth gate is potentially the most important game and that's process or to put it in a better term, that's rest, reflection, and recovery. If you look at a book by Dr. Matthew Walker called Why We Sleep, it'll tell you that we used to think that you got better at something Transcribed By continuing to do it. So you got better at playing the piano by playing the piano in the minute of playing the piano. Or we're talking about scaling to bring it right back to scaling a business.

[00:28:21] Ben: When you scale a business, you've got to do something different to what you were doing before. It's got to be beyond where you were before. What you did before got you here, but it will never get you where you want to get to. So you're going to have to do new things. You're going to have to take risks, you're going to have to learn. If you don't celebrate where you've got to on that journey, you'll never be able to get through to this fifth gate, the process gate. And if you don't go through the fifth gate, if you don't get the rest and the recovery, what it turns out is that all of the hard work you've done will get lost. You'll lose the progress you've made, you'll lose what you've learned, you'll lose the habits that you've built if you don't get that rest because it's in rest, it's in sleep.

[00:29:07] Ben: And actually the book is terrifying for anybody who reckons they can get by on six hours sleep. The book explains that essentially, and I'm going to butcher the science here, but Everything you've done and thought about and worked on and practiced, it's all stored in a more delicate area of the brain, a more surface area of the brain until you rest.

[00:29:28] Ben: And then when you rest, it can be embedded. You're basically banking all of the progress and learning and growth that you've made up to that point. So why do we burn out? Because we, we are stuck in those Activity gates, we're trying to work really hard. We're also spinning so many plates that actually it's difficult for us to put attention into one thing and really make progress so we never feel like we're getting anywhere.

[00:29:55] Ben: We never celebrate. We never really look at our achievements and the progress we've made, and then, you're pushing yourself to just get over that boundary, but you're working 60 hour weeks for the foreseeable. You're taking a laptop on holiday, you're answering your phone call 1 o'clock in the morning because you've got business all around the world because now we can work remotely and you're just never having that ability to take stock and rest. And what's great about that, and it's where I'm at now, is it can leave you a little bit blah, bit cross eyed because you've just been through all this stuff, but you then get back to the first stage, you get back to awareness, you get back to the bigger picture. And what I often find when people talk about burnout, it's because they're in the day to day, right?

[00:30:40] Ben: They're so trapped in what they're doing, they can't get their head up, they can't, they're drowning. They feel like they're drowning. They just can't lift their head above water, but when you go through those last gates, you go through that natural process. You get out the other end, you take a step back, and you can look up, look at the bigger picture, and then you can get back to work.

[00:31:02] Hector: And we've just got to realize the Viking secret, right, that I teased before the break. The Viking secret is that if you were born Viking, you would have been taught. That the world and everything in it, that's the tool and you can use it to get what you want. like I said, instead, we were taught that we are the tool that we have got to be of use. And until you can get out of that mindset and start seeing things like rest, like celebration, or like your business as a tool that you actually put to use. You're always going to be trying to be of use or just being used and that is exhausting and it gets, Great stuff here, Ben. This is, man, we, we're going to need to bring you back or something to, multiple sessions here. because there's a lot more to go into. If people want to go deeper in your world, though, and find out about what you're up to, where's the best place to go?

[00:32:04] Ben: the best place is linkedin. So if you search linkedin, accountability biking, or I think now just accountability biking on, on google, you should eventually find me. I think I pop up there, but you can just go to the linkedin and, Ben Katli Richardson. and I'm on there and I just, everything's there at the moment.

[00:32:23] Ben: I'll be honest with you. I've got a website, but it's not a priority for me at the moment, but if you want to go and check it out, it's get shit done dot fun, and there is, other information in there as well.

[00:32:35] Hector: Love it. We'll link all that up in the show notes as well. I want to thank all of you for sticking around with us today. It's a honor to be with you on your journey. We would be forever grateful for a rating or review wherever you get your podcast. And if you know someone who needs to hear this, maybe someone who needs a little more accountability in their life or, or perhaps they're experiencing the,the dark side of that burnout, hit the share button and, let them know that you were thinking about them and thought this episode might help.

[00:33:01] Hector: But it's always a pleasure to hang out with you and be a part of the tribe. We'll see you on the next one. Later y'all.