Carrying the weight without losing yourself

Show Notes

In this episode of the Grounded Man Podcast, host John Douglas explores the relationship between responsibility and pressure for hardworking men building businesses and providing for their families.

John explains that pressure doesn’t come from responsibility itself, but from how we carry it.

He breaks responsibility into three categories: what you control (thoughts, actions, mindset), what you influence but don’t control (family, team, business), and what’s entirely outside your control (others’ reactions, outcomes).

By focusing your energy on what you can control and trusting yourself and the process, you can carry responsibility more effectively and experience greater freedom.

For more on the Deru approach to leadership from the inside out, visit www.derunation.com

Timestamps

00:01:21 — Analogy: Manual Labor and Carrying Weight

00:02:16 — Redefining Responsibility and Pressure

00:03:19 — Energy, Cause and Effect

00:04:26 — Focus on What You Can Control

00:05:28 — Building Site Analogy

00:07:33 — The Role of Trust

00:08:32 — Three Categories of Responsibility

00:13:01 — Letting Go of the Uncontrollable

00:13:51 — Trusting the Process and Sharing the Load

00:16:01 — Building a Strong Relationship with Yourself

00:17:03 — Conclusion and Call to Action 

Sequence of Topics Covered

Introduction & Context

• Responsibility vs. pressure
• Pressure comes from how it’s carried

Analogy: Carrying Weight

• Manual labor analogy
• Carrying properly vs. poorly

Redefining Responsibility

• Responsibility is ownership, not stress
• Separating pressure from responsibility

Control vs. Outcomes

• Focus on actions, not results
• Let go of trying to control everything

The Role of Trust

• Lack of trust creates pressure
• Overcontrol leads to burnout

Three Categories of Responsibility

• What you control
• What you influence
• What you can’t control

Letting Go & Trusting the Process

• Shift focus to inputs
• Share responsibility with others

Self-Leadership & Application

• Build self-trust and awareness
• Lead without pressure

Conclusion

• Reflect and apply
• Share the message

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Why does that pressure exist? Well, it comes from trying to control outcomes. Try to people please. Try to prove yourself. Trying to walk on eggshells around a particularly toxic person. That is what causes the pressure, not the actual responsibility itself. Welcome to the Grounded Man podcast by Deru. I am your host, John Douglas, and founder of Deru, and this space is for hardworking men building businesses, carrying responsibility, and providing for their families who feel they should be freer. You see, the world has changed, and leading through hard work and long hours now limits a man's influence. The new way is mastering the inner game of leadership so you can carry it well, enjoy what you're building, and still feel free. Deru is leadership for the 21st century. This episode I want to share with you all about how to carry it better. And I've got to start with saying that actually it's not the responsibility that holds the weight, it's actually how you carry it that determines the weight. You've probably grown up in a similar background to me, you know, surrounded by hardworking men. That's why you're a hardworking man today. And so I grew up on a farm where you're constantly lifting things, dragging things, pulling things, everything that you probably shouldn't do in a manual handling uh you know certificate. And you learn a thing or two about manual labor, you learn a thing or two about weight and engineering and distributing weight and leverage when you're carrying and lifting and working. And if you carry something that's awkward, it can be a lightweight, but it can be awkward, and it can feel like really unbalanced, and it can feel like there's a lot of weight in it, even when it's not. And then you can carry something heavy, like a you know, a sledgehammer, but you carry it in close to your body, and uh you can actually carry it for a good while and it doesn't even feel that heavy because of how you're carrying it. And so there's a simple analogy of what this episode really is about. It's about it's not about the weight we're carrying, it's actually more about how we carry that responsibility that's important. Because if you talk about responsibility meaning pressure, and that's what most men think, most men think that, and most people think in general, think that responsibility equals pressure. And as I've said in previous episodes, this is about changing people's mindsets around this, and first your own mindset that responsibility does not equal pressure, that pressure is coming from something internal, some friction or some resistance to the events that are going on and not from the actual responsibility itself. Because let's go back to basics. What is responsibility? Responsibility really is they're the things that are most important to you in your life. Like you might take responsibility for your family, take responsibility for your business, take responsibility for your health, for your eating, for whatever it might be. So they're things that are important to you and they help you focus and they help you set priorities and help you set goals because you always set goals around things that are the most important, the things that you are most responsible to. And so if we go back to some simple definitions, what responsibility really means is ownership. I'm owning something, I'm answerable to something or someone. It can also mean that we're responding to something. So that word response and responsibility come from the same root. So when you're responding to something, it's usually to something that's important, something you're being responsible for. And I'm going to go through a couple of different categories of responsibility shortly. What a lot of men think responsibility, as I said, is the pressure. And why does that pressure exist? Well, it comes from trying to control outcomes. Try to people please, try to prove yourself. Trying to walk on eggshells around a particularly toxic person, that is what causes the pressure, not the actual responsibility itself. And if we were to look at this from energy basis, one of the laws of energy is that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it simply moves from one form to another. And so in moving from one form to another, it does this through vibration and frequency. So things of a similar frequency attract together and things that are not of a similar frequency repel. So it's kind of like you you become a magnet for success or a magnet for failure. And another one of these laws is cause and effect. And so cause and effect means that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So all these laws are basically saying the same thing, you're saying them in a slightly different way. And so when you are taking action, that's when you're taking responsibility. But the reaction, the reaction is not up to you. You only control the cause, and you are the cause of your life. You're the sum total of all your experiences and beliefs of your experiences. And so you're the cause. Where the pressure comes in is when you start trying to control the reaction, the reaction of others, the reaction of life. And so you try to manage your actions in perception and what you anticipate, another person's gonna how they're gonna react or how life will react to this thing. And that just drains your energy because now you're you don't own it, your energy. You're basing your actions on your own perception of somebody else's anticipation. And so when you start to think about this, it's nonsensical. It doesn't make any sense. So you need to put your time and energy into an area that can actually give a really good impact, that can actually build your energy back up, build the enjoyment back up, build your freedom back up. And the best way to do that is put energy into what you can control, put energy into the present moment and not the future, and put energy into you know, a positive faith, trusting the process rather than mistrusting it. So let's think of a building site for a moment. On a building site, there's obviously lots of things going on. There's cranes in action, there's trucks in action, there's buildings being built. And so if the engineer gets it wrong or the architect gets it wrong at the start, they they start to build a building that's top-heavy. They start to build a building without a with a weak foundation. And we all know about you know building buildings and skyscrapers, that it has to be in proportion, that there has to be enough balance beneath the ground to match what's coming above the ground and support it in that way. And so as these cranes are building these buildings, if the building's off balance, obviously it's at risk of collapse. But also if the cranes are lifting a weight that's too heavy, and you know, obviously, as the crane puts the weight and it goes further from the center of gravity of the crane and it goes out towards the edges, you know, it's a bigger risk, especially if it's a heavy weight. Or like if you fill a truck up, you know, and it's all the weights on one side and then they go up the hillside and it's it's uh falling in the wrong direction, like a truck could topple over with weight. So all of these things, it's not that the truck or the crane or the building can't support the weight, it can. But when we carry it or when it's built or when it's positioned in such a way that all the weight is on one side, it's all stacked in one area, well, then it starts to take its toll and the risk of collapse is much, much greater. And we do this similarly when we take all the responsibility for everything. So not just for taking responsibility for the cause, but also trying to take responsibility for the things we can't control, which is the effects of our actions. And so why do we carry it all? Why do we do that to ourselves? Why do we feel like we're the only ones that can carry it? Well, it's because we don't trust. We don't trust ourselves, we don't trust others, or we don't trust the process, we don't trust life. But ultimately, this all comes back to yourself. And it's your relationship with yourself which determines whether you trust others or whether you trust life. Because if there's some internal separation or division inside, that is when you don't believe yourself competent or capable enough to do something. And you don't trust the outcome of it, or you don't trust the timing of it. So you therefore don't trust yourself in this situation. You might feel it's possible for others, but you can't see how you're going to do it. All because maybe you haven't experienced that level of achievement or capability or success before, so you've never done something, or it's never happened a certain way, you haven't been able to influence it in the past the way you want it, so you lose trust. You lose belief in yourself, you lose faith in yourself, and then you lose faith in the process and faith in the system. So when I'm working with men and groups and teams, I'm always just trying to increase our self-belief. Because the more we believe in ourselves, we overcome the fear and the doubt and the worry, and we actually carry the weight a lot cleaner. So we we carry it all because we don't trust. And so therefore, the way to carry it differently is to start trusting. But before I get into that, I want to go through what the three categories of responsibility are. And this will help you trust things more. So the first category of responsibility is what you are actually responsible for. This is what you can control. And this is where a lot of conscious energy and focus should go into because the more conscious energy and focus you put into things you can't control, uh, you start to build new habits in your body so that your body will naturally react in a certain way that it's focusing on what it can control. You're basically training your body and your mind to focus on the things you can't control. And so that's why conscious effort has to go into this first before it becomes unconscious and habitual. So, what is what are you actually responsible for? The things you're responsible for is your thinking, how you're feeling, your emotional state, your standards you set for yourself, the decisions you make, your attitude, your actions, your behavior. Basically, you all you can control is yourself. And probably probably by not putting energy into controlling yourself, like accessing your willpower to hold yourself to a higher standard or to live aligned with yourself. Remember, all of this energy work and uh influencing other people and creating freedom for ourselves comes from acting true to ourselves, which is means aligning with ourselves. And so when we're controlling our what we can do, we're more conscious of who we are and aligning with that as we do it. And that's why it's so, so powerful. So that's the first category. Now notice I didn't say anything about your business in that, I didn't say anything about other people in that, I didn't say anything about outcomes in that, because you're not responsible for those things. So the next category is what you're responsible to, and you are responsible to your family, you're responsible to your wife, you're responsible to your team, to your business, to lead it, you're responsible to setting the vision, to setting the standards, to building the culture, and you're responsible to all these things. And responsible to means that you influence it, but you don't control it. So you're almost like think of driving a car and you're in the driver's seat, but you influence like obviously strongly where you're going to get to, but there's also you know the traffic, there's other drivers on the road, there's conditions, there's the weather, there's all these other things at play as well, and that we have to account for. But trying to control everything in the on that journey just leads to frustration because we can't. And lastly, the last category of responsibility is what you are not responsible for, and this is the uncontrollables. These are things you cannot control, you barely influence them. Yet, if you had to be honest with yourself, you'd probably say, I put too much time and energy into these things. And so, what are they? These are what other people think, how other people respond, how other people behave. These are the outcomes we control the direction of our lives. I'm a big believer in that that you know, setting our vision, having a clear identity, living true to ourselves that we will control whether we move towards abundance and success or and health, or whether we move towards uh pressure, stress, and burnout, right? But each specific timing and outcome and unfoldment, we don't control those things. And life would be pretty boring if we did. So we have to accept these things. We have to learn to surrender to these effects, if you remember. So remember, there's cause and effect, these are the effects. We have to learn to surrender to these and accept them for what they are. And sometimes accept accepting them for what they are means that you have to kind of be okay with not maybe meeting your standard every single day. If you set a standard that I want to be home for my family at 6 p.m., but something's happened in work that you need to tend to, obviously you could feel a lot of guilt by not being home at six if you had to stay late, but you have to be okay with that. And it's because the more conscious you are that I'm going to be present when I go home and I'm going to spend an extra hour at the weekend, you can kind of align truly with yourself as this is unfolding. And it's supposed the alternative to this is you just react, you go into a blind rage, you get frustrated, you don't know why, you're angry when you go home, you're snapping at people in your team, and so obviously everyone feeds off that negativity in a negative way. So there are things you're not responsible for. So in a nutshell, where we are responsible for the inputs, for the causes, but not for the what the outcomes are. And so if you don't remember anything else from this episode, remember that stop trying to control the uncontrollables. Look at what is it that I'm trying to control that I'm not r not if actually I actually can't control it. I should I'm not responsible for it, but I'm trying to control it. And what's and what is this draining my energy then because of that? So, in a nutshell, a lot of this comes back to just focusing on the inputs, on the cause, and letting go of the outcomes, letting go of the effects. Stop trying to control the uncontrollables. So when you kind of strip this back a layer again, going back to the earlier analogy of the building site, when you don't trust the numbers, or you don't trust the system, or you don't trust the process, you grip tighter. You hold on, you try and choke it too tight. And doing so, you actually repel what you're trying to attract. When you trust it more, you're able to share the weight. You let life carry the load. You let others help you. And the only way you have a strong relationship with anything is that you understand it very well. All you have to do is think of people you have a good relationship with. You have a very clear understanding, and it's a very win-win relationship, it's a very win-win situation. So you need to kind of develop that internally. So you do that by trusting yourself more, letting go of the doubt, letting go of the worry, letting go of the stress of the outcomes of the things you can't control, and focusing on what you can't control. And when you do that, you grip less. So there's less energy going in to try and grip something and try to control what can't be controlled, and there's a lot more energy to actually focus on what's next, focus on the present, what are the opportunities at hand? And you do this through clearer decisions, clearer thinking, better responses. And you actually have energy to enjoy the process, to enjoy today, to enjoy more time with family. So just reflect on that for for this week is where am I putting energy into that I can't control? What do I need to release and let go of? And where do I need to focus that energy instead? This is how we carry responsibility better. We trust ourselves and trust process. So in all this, we need to develop a deeper relationship with ourselves, a deeper understanding with ourselves. Because we all have a relationship with ourselves. And if we have a strong relationship with ourselves and we understand ourselves well, we understand our potential, we understand our presence and our power and how to access that. Well, then we can trust ourselves more. We can trust our own energy, we can trust our own mindset, we can trust our own actions that they are enough to move us in the right direction, and we won't sweat the small stuff. So I'll leave you with this episode to just reflect on where is it that I'm trying to control that I can't, and where is it that I could actually take more control put you know in terms of my thinking and emotional state this week, so that I'm in the best energy, I'm emitting the best kind of cause, putting in the best inputs for others to respond to. Thank you so much for listening today. I really enjoy sharing this wisdom because it doesn't come from me, it comes through me from the work I do with men like you that I serve. So if the idea shared today resonated, be sure to like and follow the show. And if another man would value it, share this episode with him. Because the more men who hear this, the more of us can break free from pressure and enjoy what we're building. So let's enjoy the build together. Thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.