Podcast Transcript: Power Bite - Hugh Power

Hugh Power
Yeah, it's a fantastic question because I was discussing this only yesterday afternoon with my psychologist, but I think it's important conversation for me to put out there because we don't talk about this enough. I have felt enormous pressure, and I think people in corporate world feel this pressure to be OK all the time, like, to be seen to be totally on top of everything thing. The irony there is that we're not a lot of the time. And the irony of that is that pretending that you're okay and not being honest with how you're traveling often leads you to being even more not okay. So with my psychologist yesterday first question, she said, how are you going? I said, you know what? I'm going amazingly well. And then I talked to her through the last couple of months of my life. I haven't chatted with her for a while. And it involved saying to the CEO of the Resilience Project, man I'm not okay at the moment. I'm really battling with work-life balance, with burnout professionally, and I'm feeling pressure that I have to be okay because I'm the resilience guy. So if I'm not okay, does that mean that, you know, I'm just a fraud?

Hugh Power
And then saying to my wife, she said to me, you're okay? What's going on? Use your gun. Fine. What's wrong? And get a little bit shitty at that question. But I said, no, I don't think I am okay at the moment. I'm so bummed out at work, and I meant to recover at home, but I actually find work at home more difficult than work at the moment because there's a one and a half year old who doesn't sleep. There's a four and a half year old who's having a lot of issues. I can't recover anywhere. I'm exhausted emotionally, I'm exhausted mentally. And I admitted that to two people who I really care about, who I've pretended to be okay in front of for a long time. So I felt like they needed me to be okay. And I sit here now, a month later, and I am in such a good place right now. And my psychologist said, you're okay now because you tell people that you weren't okay a month ago. She said, if you kept pretending that you're okay, I can't even begin to imagine what state you'd be in right now.

Jenelle McMaster
How did it feel for you when you said those words to you out loud to your wife and to your psychologist? How did it feel at the time?

Hugh Power
I love both of them dealing, in very different ways, obviously. I've known him for a long time, and the Resonance Project is I mean, I get a lot of credit for it. That is Martin Are, the presenter, but it's successful in most part because of him. He's an extraordinary individual that he went straight to Operation Mode. He was like, okay, so we need to shift this. We need to move this. We need to cancel that at the time, like, oh, gosh. But then I went home and told Penny, and she said, okay, so I need to do I need to do this, I need to fix that, I need to do this. And neither of them really sat in that emotion with me. I think it was a bit confronting to have me saying I'm not okay. So I never said that before. And they were both so desperate to help that they went straight to, okay, let's problem solve. And funnily enough, we interviewed Dr. Billy Garvey, a pediatrician on our podcast. He was talking about how you deal with a child who's got a problem. And he said the first thing you do that, you sit in the emotion with them and you validate it.

Hugh Power
Then you identify that as an opportunity. Then you give them some space and then lay your problem solved. And I was listening, thinking, that's not just kids. That's us as adults as well. Yes, you validate it. You say, I can see you're feeling this, and I understand why you'd feel like that. That makes sense to me. And then in your head, you think, here's an opportunity for us to grow our relationship or to us to grow this situation or this team or whatever you're going through. And then you give a little bit of space. You don't try and problem solve straight away, and then you come back to it a day or two later, and you say, what can we do here? But I experienced that first hand with this with my wife finally, who did it the other way the next day. She said, I totally understand why you feel like that must be. You've been doing this for ten years nonstop. You haven't taken a breath in ten years. And then the CEO, Ben, I chatted to him two days after that. He said to me, I'm really worried about you. I get why you feel like that.

Hugh Power
And so the both of them did. It should have been reversed. And it was funny having lived it. Don't get wrong I'm not having a go at either one of them. They're two of the most special people in my life. But both of them went solved the problem first. So to answer your question, how did I feel? I felt much better the second time we chatted when they just validated how I was feeling. That's all I needed. That's what I really needed. And the problem solving part, yeah, that was going to be part of it, but I didn't need it straight away. I just needed to be validated for the way I was feeling, because I felt really vulnerable when I told him I wasn't going. Okay. I mean, my psychologist said to me yesterday, I know you feel pressured to be okay as a resilience guy, but she said, this is the most resilient I've ever seen you in two years. You're showing up today living and breathing resilience because you've said you're not okay and you're curious as to what you can do to get better. She said that's more resilient than putting on a performance around gratitude in my opinion.