Ep. 026 - Breaking Through Self-Imposed Barriers & Discomfort with Coach Jay Rush
Jul 26, 2023SHOW NOTES
Ever felt trapped by overwhelm? Coach Jay Rush, has crafted the tools to help you dismantle these walls, bringing to us an enlightening exploration of life coaching in the latest podcast episode of Man in the Arena.
Jay introduces us to his unique coaching program – Elements of Reinvention, designed to make his coaching more accessible as he focuses on helping individuals step out of their own way.
With a primary focus on coaching men, Jay delves into the distinctive challenges they face and his straightforward approach to surmount them.
Dig a little deeper and you'll see - emotions aren't always what they seem. They are, in fact, a superpower, waiting to be harnessed. Jay and I journey into the realm of emotions and their remarkable potential in the second segment of our discussion.
From the societal norms that influence emotion handling, this discussion shines a light on the coping mechanisms we resort to, like over-exercising, binge-eating, or drinking. Embrace discomfort, face your fears, and allow yourself to feel; Jay's profound insights could just be the catalyst for your transformation.
If you're ready to embark on a journey of self-discovery, then this episode is your starting point.
TRANSCRIPT
Craig Spear:
Sometimes we need an assist, and today I get one from fellow coach, jay Rush, who joins us in the arena to serve up some dimes about overwhelm and discomfort. Welcome to man in the Arena. Go to podcasts for all things related to health and weight loss for men over 40. Here we discuss strategies that will get you off the sidelines and into the game so you can achieve your optimal health. It's time to lead a legacy of longevity. My guest today is Jay Rush, who's a dynamic speaker, a certified lead coach and host of reinventing everything podcast. He's also launching a new offer called Elements of Reinvention, which I'm really interested in, and, jay, before we dive into the content, I want to learn a little bit more about this. So can you tell us what that's all about? Sure?
Jay Rush:
I mean the pressure's on dynamic speaker. You give me a large mantle. That being said, the Elements of Reinvention at its most basic, it's the distilled work of hundreds of hours of individual coaching and recognition of the same themes that came up over and over and over again. And it was my way of saying how can I hand this to somebody that isn't prepared or comfortable with either the financial commitment or the time commitment to a full one-on-one coaching program? So the desire was to give somebody something that was palatable, that had some easy to understand basics of sort of coaching principles and self-coaching and sort of familiar with it and a foundation that they can move forward from, either without me or if they want to continue coaching with me or somebody else. They at least have that language.
Craig Spear:
Nice. So you're just making this way more accessible, the one-to-one coaching stuff that you have, more accessible to people who want to learn from you and apply this in their own life. That's awesome.
Jay Rush:
Yeah, and you know by virtue of your own coaching, sometimes coaching can be a long roundabout path and we let people tell stories for a very long time before we kind of get to the heart of it. And this is the way I started saying okay, you want to go catch a fish? Here's the fishing rod and I can teach you how to use it better later. Nice, nice.
Craig Spear:
Well, one of the things I wanted to talk about is just the value of coaching. You know, obviously, as a coach, I love coaching. I believe in coaching. I know you're a coach, you believe in coaching, and so you know, one of the things that I think is important for the listeners of this podcast to hear is just how beneficial coaching is, and I'll never forget when I was in university, I played university football and our head football coach actually taught a class that I was part of and basically you know the art of coaching. Right Now it's different contexts, obviously, coaching athletes, coaching sports and that sort of thing. But one of the things that he spoke on which I really loved, which was, like every coach should have a philosophy. You know, as I talk to you, a fellow coach, I'm really interested to learn, like, what is your coaching philosophy?
Jay Rush:
Yeah, what a great question. When I saw it written down I was like, oh shit, he's going to ask me this. I think my coaching philosophy it's almost like I can define it by hindsight in the way I coach, I tend to be very direct. I think that's the beauty of coaching as I see it is that you can exercise all the fluff and all the stories and all the subjective criticisms and opinionation about the world around you and just get to the heart of the future. As a coach, I feel like my job is to help people get out of their own way, and quickly. I think there might be an underlying philosophy that this life that we have in human form and on this planet, in this place and time, is very unique and it's also very fleeting. The time we spend wasting time and energy chasing the wrong thing, because they're trying to seek validation from the wrong things, they're trying to chase down happiness from things that don't deliver happiness, then it's a wasted effort. My philosophy is to just get to the heart of the matter. Do it quickly. You might ruffle some feathers, you might make people uncomfortable, but that's the job.
Craig Spear:
Yeah, and you coach men, right? Do you also coach women as well?
Jay Rush:
I have a couple of female clients, but yeah, most of them are guys.
Craig Spear:
And so do you find that some of them they're blindsided by that. Are they prepared for that? Do you make that known, or is it just like getting right to the heart of it?
Jay Rush:
Yeah, I think it's half and half. I think some people we get to talking and it's fairly evident who both people are and they're attracted to that naturally. I think I have blindsided some people. I've started to be very careful about introducing like hey, we're hitting it off now, but Medjadob is not really to be your buddy, it's to get you there. But I would say that it's almost like without the shock factor. Sometimes the message doesn't hit home and you also never know when you're going to shock somebody. Anyway, like the things that we know as coaches, the insights that we have are so second nature that sometimes when we say something to somebody it's like a punch in the face until they have time to think about it. So I think there's value in that. I should say that I'm not out to hurt anybody's feelings or to pitting somebody in a corner. It's always very compassionate.
Craig Spear:
Yeah, there's intention there to help them. Yeah, and, like you said, help them get out of their own way, but you need to be direct in order to get there.
Jay Rush:
You do, and most times they're paying you a significant amount of money to do that, and so it's not a serve them if you're sort of beating around the bush, totally.
Craig Spear:
I love that. So one of the reasons I wanted to have you on today is to speak about common challenges, because I also coach guys as well, so I'm sure there's some similarities there and whatnot. But one of the reasons I wanted to have you on is you have some really great tools that you teach, and the first thing that kind of came up I was listening to your podcast was your perspective on overwhelm, and so I was coaching a client the other day and he was talking about how crazy his work is and he's got a family situation going on, he's putting his house on the market, so he's got all these different things going on in his life. He's feeling really overwhelmed, and I think we can all relate to having this kind of experience at some point of our lives. So I'm curious how do you deal with overwhelm? And then how do you coach your clients when they're dealing with overwhelm?
Jay Rush:
Yeah, I'm a great question because they do lead to each other. First of all, I mean the way I coach my clients is the way I coach myself, which is fairly apt description. Enthom, for me, is it's the hamster wheel inside the head. It's indicative of someone that is not an action but is instead in thought, and so overwhelm is the compounding of the perception of a lot of problems that need to be solved. And we're trying to do it in our head, and our head is wildly inefficient at problem solving, and so what I advise people to do is to compartmentalize first, and the best way to do that is get it on paper, write it all down, and we do that. I'm sure you use a tool similar to a thought download or something like that, and it's so important because our thoughts get crowded and priorities start to mingle and they start to bleed and they start to confuse us, and that's the nature of overwhelm. And once you can compartmentalize, like literally write down your tin top problems and then write down the action plan to solve those problems, and by the time you've done that, the overwhelm is subsiding significantly. If there are other issues that are informing you overwhelm, like fear and scarcity, then you can coach on those. But the action plan is essential, and it's the same thing I do for myself and oftentimes so. I start with compartmentalization, I create the action plan and then what I advise is be present for each action. We live a really hurried life, and that also creates the context for overwhelm. This has to be done now. This is just as important as this. These are all lies when we tell ourselves to get things done, to feel more efficient, to feel productive, to feel like we're valuable, and so if we can say to ourselves you listen, not everything has to be done right now. But here's one thing I can tell you is I can't do everything at once, until when I'm doing a thing, I want to be present for that thing, and by virtue of doing that and being present, we put ourselves in a mindset where it doesn't feel like everything is happening at once, and what often happens is the priority that we assign to the other tasks tends to seep away a little bit and we start to see the layers. The layers are flattened before everything's happening at once, and so, after I've done that, I advise people just stop, observe and listen for a minute, see how the landscape has changed. You had 10 priorities before, or maybe you only have six now. You got one done, maybe two of them are only critically important. How do you feel? So? It seems fairly simple, fairly didactic for a mechanical, but the alternative is to stay and overwhelm in your head. Once you know that there's a strategy, then you're choosing to be overwhelmed and for the most part, I can't abide by that for my own life.
Craig Spear:
And I think it's important to not confuse simplicity with effectiveness. I think that's where it becomes really effective is you simplify what you are overwhelmed by and you prioritize and you create daylight and space between all these different tasks, and so now you can kind of attack each one right and through taking action, you start to execute, and that's what you're saying. Then that overwhelm starts to loosen and you start to feel this momentum, and I think that's where we want to get to ultimately, and something as simple as writing things down, as simple as it might seem, is the most effective approach. So I love that and I love how you've kind of, in a way, compartmentalized it. You've given people steps that they can take, and I think that's the biggest takeaway ultimately.
Jay Rush:
Yeah, I had a client say to me once she was like I believe that writing things down is an action, and I was like, yeah, it's an action. Once you're in action, you're present. When you're not in action, you're living in the past and the future.
Craig Spear:
Yeah, so shifting gears here. I was listening to another episode of your podcast. It was all about embracing discomfort, and this is a central theme that shows up a lot in my coaching, and one of the things you said which really stuck with me was we can't cheat our way to personal evolution, and if we do, we miss out on the challenges that force us to rise to the occasion, we miss out on opportunities to grow, and I think this is such a great mindset that when we skip over these challenges, we're missing out on something. So my question to you is what are some examples you see of how guys avoid discomfort?
Jay Rush:
Well, one of the ones that I assigned to sort of like an aggressive kind of masculinity that we have in our culture is the idea of blaming our circumstances. I think blaming is a buffering or avoidant strategy that gets used all the time, and it's not just men, but men are very good at it. And men are good at it because we've been trained to avoid the experience of shame or guilt, and so we blame it instead. I think blame, I think workaholism, I think exercise it's funny because work and exercise have very positive connotations in our culture but they can be used to drown out the noise. The noise is always the unresolved issue inside. Blame is usually the reflex to sensing the discomfort. It's the wolf at the door right, and then blame is saying if I let the wolf in, then I can make friends with the wolf. Blame is the rejection about it. I'm going to leave the wolf outside and I'm going to make it the problem and I'm not going to be able to sleep at night.
Craig Spear:
Yeah, yeah, it makes me think of so. There's a guy following him, terry Reel. He's like a psychotherapist in the northeast of the US. He was talking about how, when we have emotions, it's this authentic connection to ourselves. That's what emotions are. This is how we're showing up, is where we're authentically feeling. He said that girls get knocked out of authentic connections. In other words, they start to buffer. They start to learn to not feel their emotions at the edge of adolescence, probably later in life, whereas boys get knocked out of authentic connection at four years old yeah, before they've even gotten to kindergarten, they're taught to keep their mouth shut. Boys don't cry. Boys don't cry. I'll give you something to cry about. Obviously, things are shifting. We're becoming more aware of this and future generations, hopefully, will not experience the same level of emotional suppression as past generations. That's where this discomfort comes from, is we're not taught how to feel our emotions and express emotions. We're taught to push them down. We see it show up all over the place overeating or drinking, like you said, even seemingly positive things like overworking or over-exercising. This is something that I think is so powerful in the coaching that we're doing is we're bringing attention to it and we're showing that there's an alternative way to live an experienced life. I'm so happy that this work is now showing up, because it didn't in previous generations.
Jay Rush:
Yeah, I think we've started to guess that something's missing in the dynamic, because you have men that are terribly desperate and lonely and they're killing people and they're hurting people and they're dying in vast numbers and they're succumbing to alcoholism and drug addiction and things like that. The idea that this is a theme that comes up quite a bit when I'm coaching men, especially the Alpha's, is there is this subconscious belief that feelings are inefficient, feelings don't get us to a solution to the problem. I hear it said over and over again, and it mostly relates to how men relate to their spouses and their wives and partners. Can't we just get to the problem? Why do you keep talking about the way you feel? Whenever I hear that, I think my clients expect me to commiserate and say yeah, you're right, boy, that's a super rash panel. Every time I'm like where do you see the value in that? It just stops. In short, every time I can tell they want to throw something when I say it. The whole point is maybe what we need to start thinking about emotions is that it's actually a superpower and that maybe the place that we want to reach the next level is only accessible through emotion and through hardening those and partnering with them and seeing them and feeling them authentically, because we're repressing them and ignoring them has gotten us to this point, and we're not in a very good place.
Craig Spear:
Yeah, exactly, the proof is in the pudding. And how happy are you and what do you do? Where do you go to feel happier in the moment? Usually, it's not a positive experience, ultimately. So what words of wisdom, as we close out here, do you want to share with people who are listening to this? A golden nugget, if you will, something that they can take away and sort of ponder as they go throughout the rest of their day.
Jay Rush:
I think that if I had to boil it down to just one thing, it's that happiness is a false bill of goods. Fulfillment is the goal, and fulfillment only comes from diving in to discomfort and fear and uncertainty and recognizing those things as the opportunities for growth that they are I love that we're on the same wave like Ben.
Craig Spear:
That is gold. I cannot thank you enough for being on this podcast today, Jay. Where can people find you? How can they connect with you and learn more about what you're doing?
Jay Rush:
Yeah, thanks, craig. I really appreciate the opportunity to you and it's always nice talking to you and talking to you. We are on a men's group together on Tuesday mornings too, and we talk quite a bit there. People can find me on Instagram at JayRushCoaching. They can find me on my website, jayrushcoachingcom. The group program starting in June is called the Elements of Reinvention and that's under Elements Program on my website. And then, finally, my podcast is called Reinventing Everything and that's available on Apple or wherever else you can find podcasts.
Craig Spear:
Good stuff, man. We'll thank you again, and yeah appreciate it.
Jay Rush:
Yeah, thank you, Craig. Talk to you soon, man.
Craig Spear:
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