63. Less Stress, More Calm for Busy Parents

Adam: [00:00:00] Welcome, Mr. Doug Richens, my friend, to the Revolutionary Freedom audience. The reason I wanted to bring you in front of them is because you have ninja level perspectives on helping us through the power of, and I don't think it's radical compassion, but you're gonna help me.

But the power of compassion and hearing you and spending some hours with you on end, unedited and un unfiltered. It was awesome because I you gave me some mindset shifts that I had never considered before and if anybody knows me They know that I this is my world, right? I like to dive in and make this my hobby.

So when something fresh comes up got to tell other people about it But anyway, welcome my

Doug: thank you. So good to be with you. And we did have I had that last visit, all those hours to drive, to talk, to sit at a beautiful cabin and hash things out, and it was a treat on my end, so thank you.

Adam: Yeah, what I'd like you to do is get into [00:01:00] Exactly what you're doing around compassion.

You can include some of your background, give some of your street cred. We want to know, I want to know, Who are you? What are you doing?

Give some of your backstory that lends to your proficiency in these matters.

Doug: I appreciate that. For 25 years I worked for an enormous global organization, faith based organization, and I was striving and working towards greater inclusion. was striving to get the organization to understand the needs of those impacted by suicide, abuse, mental illness. Um, as senior director within that organization about these subjects, we created resources that, spanned the globe and we traveled and we met with people to understand how all of these deeply intimate personal Traumas and difficulties, how that plays out in different corners of the world. Gave me an opportunity to meet with the leading experts in the world.

To [00:02:00] bring them in on one, to learn from them how the brain works, how, certain modalities of mental health recovery works, trauma works, right? And in that it was a journey of learning and discovery and then producing. Proven and practical resources that, that really help families. And I loved it, and it was exhausting. It was an incredibly demanding experience. And in this journey, Adam, I was getting the, I had the language of like, how I was raised around compassion, right? Parents that modeled kindness, very very fortunate. I had the language of my faith. And the overlay of that inside of this idea of compassion and kindness, all of which served me really well. Then as I met with experts I learned this other language of compassion, which was the healing language, inside of a a mental health counseling session [00:03:00] or, you know, some of the other modalities. And I was learning more about how the brain creates that sense of compassion. Law school the same.

It was a new language. It was an experience to come in and say, what does mercy mean? We got justice, and then this other essential part of the law, of criminal code, civil code, and it was the language of how we reach compassion as a society, which I loved. And then it came to

And studying the neuroscience of compassion at Stanford was Yeah, we're all locked in a deep dive into how the brain works neurologically.

What is compassion? Because I knew, I know what it looks like on the street, as do you. I know what it feels like to give, to receive, to observe, right? We've all cried watching some tender commercial or some ad, right? And that's a swell, but to live in a state of activated [00:04:00] compassion, that counteracts all the depression, all the anxiety. That's where the phenomenal work at Stanford and so many other amazing universities and institutions, what they're studying around this subject. And I was able to sit at their feet and glean and learn. And for me, it just was an explosion. It just locked in the fragments of what I had learned through all the years.

And After some years after that experience, it was time to go out on my own. And and exited the leadership role in that organization, and said farewell, and we started our own firm, and it's called Gray Space Experts. And gray space is a call out to the brain, right? The gray matter. But we're really helping people who are living in a gray space. Where things have gone dull. And there's trauma, there's depression, there's [00:05:00] divorce, there's relationship strife, there's, all the realities of parenting that can be frustrating and overwhelming.

And we're trying to bring the color back into people's lives. And so we are hiring and have hired phenomenal experts around the country, even one Canadian who we love dearly. Who you met, our dear friend Richard. Just... It's just beautiful experts who have decades of learning and expertise so that when someone comes into our care, they get their primary coach, and they can march forward with that coach, but then we can, include it as they can go over and have a session with Jeannie or a session with, April or whomever for those touch points on some very specialized needs.

And,

It's nutrition, it's fitness it's whole body. But it's all driving back to understanding what's happening in the brain.

Adam: The thing that caught my attention that I wanted to ask you to dig into a little [00:06:00] bit, is this idea of getting into the state of activated compassion. I'm gonna bring this real concrete mom is in her minivan with her Stanley stainless mug and all her baggage of her tricks and her sidearm purses.

And she's got two kids in the seats in the back and one next to her in the car line, she's hustling and bustling from school to work to the kids' sports. She's trying to get more aligned internally. She's trying to get rid of some of this frustration and

Now, what is an example to help me understand like I'm eight years old. Because when you talk about neuroscience of compassion, it can get real heady, real fast.

Can you give us a practical walkthrough

Doug: you bet. Let's talk about first what's going on.

 In that moment so inside the brain we have, different regions of the brain that, that have, Dominant functions, right? Different roles. And each of those has a voice. Each of those has, is calling out for attention to fulfill [00:07:00] its responsibility.

We have an emotional center of the brain. We have a part of the brain that handles all the automatic stuff in our life. The heartbeat and digestion and those kind of things. We have a nervous system. We have this emotional center. And then the big battle comes between the emotional centers of our brain.

What we've locked in our long term memory, how we, what we believe about the world around us, and the prefrontal cortex, which is the here and now, and the logic, and the driving the car, and making good decisions and we,

all of us, all day long, are in the battle between what we feel, and what we know we need to do. What I feel like I want to eat and what I know I should eat. What I feel like I want to say to the kids when they're screaming in the back of the van and I'm tired. And what I know I should say to the kids.

And that battle is all managed in a little tiny sliver of the brain and it sits right behind the [00:08:00] prefrontal cortex. It's called the anterior cingulate cortex. And it's tiny. And it manages emotional regulation. It manages sex drive, it manages decisions, it brokers between our emotional demands, our emotional desires, and the logical side coming from our prefrontal. So for

that,

Adam: Does combat affect that?

Doug: This is Exactly where we work with PTSD, with trauma, with chronic fatigue

Adam: For the record, I've never heard you mention that. We've never discussed this topic. I want to make sure that it is clear that this is an organic reaction out of me. Because I'm like, oh, I connect with what that is.

Doug: In the simplest terms, we call this part of the brain, I can give you a million definitions of what it does, but essentially it's the willpower center.

 Let's talk to this mom that's driving the van, okay?

Adam: Yes.

Doug: Imagine, and let's just. [00:09:00] Just imagine your cell phone only had a 15 minute battery life. And imagine how different your day would be if your phone only had a 15 minute battery life. You would be careful. You would be recharging it. You would manage that energy with great intention.

That's what we're dealing with this part of the brain.

It fatigues very quickly, and when it's in a state of fatigue, or even worse, under trauma, PTSD chronic fatigue, but when it fatigues, we're prone to make wrong decisions. Things come out of our mouth, emotions are felt and we make a lot of mistakes in that state of decision fatigue.

The second part of this is how this part of the brain protects us.

So inside this little cortex of the brain, there are, [00:10:00] it's really the center where all the dopamine receptors reside. Your body releases dopamine. You don't feel pleasure or joy or anything until that dopamine connects with one of these receptors and crosses the membrane and then activates the sense of joy, pleasure, results, right?

When you're in chronic stress, trauma, fatigue, or somebody is upping the demands on their, what they're driving into, what they're, the excitement they're seeking, the brain down regulates the dopamine receptors to keep us safe, to actually, to protect us. As the brain down regulates the dopamine receptors, then we are, less able.

Not because a character flaw, not because it's a moral issue, but because the... The actual function of the [00:11:00] brain, we're less able to feel the joy and the batteries are fatiguing faster down regulation can be reversed. That's what we do.

That,

Adam: say for, to understand downregulation, is this... Because even in my 10 years as an RN, I never, I didn't, this isn't language that I dealt with. The idea of downregulation of different hormones and chemicals. So with that, would it be safe to say, maybe a crude example, if you could, the healthy state would be if you had 100 cups to fill up for capacity of holding water, downregulation would be removing 50 of them, removing 80, removing 20, you're just removing capacity to be able to store. The dopamine, in this case.

Doug: yeah, to try and to have the dopamine do what it's designed to do, which is to create that sense of pleasure. And in that state, that we're activating the a compassion response, right? We strive for connection. We feel calm. We feel more [00:12:00] creative, and when those, that dopamine down regulates someone's gonna come in and they're like, they're gonna say, I just feel depressed all the time.

I feel a lot of anxiety. I'm always worried. The trauma of war, of life, of abuse, can, the brain is protecting you. So it's gonna down regulate those receptors so that you're out of pain. To keep you mellow, to keep you safe. But then, life is there and you want to be happy, right? You want to get out there and manage things.

So the art of activating compassion revolves around a couple centers of the brain. But one of those big ones is we engineer a way to protect that energy of the day, manage nutrition, manage intake, and up regulate the dopamine and other receptors inside of this little tiny cortex.

When we accomplish that over some weeks, but very quickly... We [00:13:00] feel happier, right? And the practices that bring mindfulness, they are supportive of this. The practices, of change interaction with the kids. It's okay to get angry, but you won't stay angry. okay to feel stressed, but you won't stay stressed. And the coaching, the therapy 15 minute... battery life of your core decision making power.

So then mom gets up in the morning and she is living a life that strengthens this decision power, her willpower. And then she's in the course of a busy day. She knows this is a little heavier day and she's got it in the tank. She can push through. She can manage the kids and at six o'clock at night she isn't gonna say, oh screw it, let's just go grab pizza and eat [00:14:00] unhealthy and I'm tired to make decisions, right? She'll have it in reserve,

Adam: what I do.

Doug: right? We all do. And, but if we power nap, if we notice what's happening in the day, and if we decrease the number of decisions we need to make

here's one of the silliest things ever, Adam, and it's so powerful. When we plan out what we're gonna eat the day before, we put reserve power back into this part of the brain.

We, we make over 250 food decisions every day. We open the refrigerator and we think about this, no, yes, no yes, all of that decision making creates fatigue and burns this battery. And so if you have your meals ready, it's a stupid thing,

but in your business life knowing what you're doing tomorrow, if if you've already pre decided how you'll handle certain kinds of things the kids say and do, then you don't have to burn energy on it.

So it's a life regulation [00:15:00] experience. Super powerful, effective. And as people come in and they learn about what's happening in their head and not, they don't have to go level 10 with this, but they get a little bit of an understanding like we're talking about here, oh my gosh, it's like they're in control again

Adam: is this why you see these super billionaires always wearing jeans and a black t shirt?

Is this decision fatigue? They're avoiding decisions?

Doug: wear the exact same shirts and pants every day. I wear a black t shirt and jeans and leather shoes to work and then I have two or three tops I throw on just for, depending on the client or, I just, whatever I can do to eliminate those extra decisions

because there are plenty of moments in the day where something comes at us that we weren't expecting, that we, we have to think through.

We live in a... An intensely dramatic, busy life.[00:16:00] There is a belief, there is a fixation on anxiety that we are, we're buying into, that we're believing that we are, yes we are hardwired for fight and flight, but it's not what the brain really uses as its primary mechanism to keep us safe, to lead us to good companions. Activation of anxiety in fight or flight we're buying into. We're allowing it to just roll over

us.

Adam: Yeah. Yeah.

Doug: In truth, we are hardwired for compassion. Compassion has saved your life a thousand times to one over fight or flight. In those moments when you're driving and someone kinda cuts you off and you have that I'm good, like Just this love for that person, and you notice that you're good and, you're a good citizen, and you just pull back, and you don't get angry. Now maybe in that moment, [00:17:00] nothing would have happened, but if you get angry, and you go into panic, and you go into anxiety, you're not gonna drive well. Your kids aren't as safe. Fifteen minutes from now, you're in a car accident, and you push your mind back, and you're like, it's because I got angry earlier today about something.

So by noticing our emotions and a couple of very simple conversations and ways to manage that in your head, just in the flow of the day, we stay in a state of compassion. And the anxiety drifts away, it's less frequent.

Now, if the house is on fire, you want fight or flight to kick in. We need that adrenaline rush to, to, in the moment to save us. But we don't need it when we're in the grocery store trying to pick out vegetables and we, should I buy this or this and someone gets all worked up? No. And so we are, we're training people to rethink [00:18:00] the compassion element to themselves, to their inner family, to their community. And in doing so, some weeks go by and they come back in and they're like, I don't feel depressed. I don't feel anxiety. The medicines that we take, Antidepressants all have value, all have a place, they can also be part of the problem. We allow for conversations and we encourage some discovery in that space.

Our food, the movement in our life, our exercise, our sleep. And We just move through some of these things with our clients and it just changes everything.

Adam: This is a two parter, but the first part sets up your, the main body of the meat of your answer.

Number one, I'd like you to define compassion. As you, as we're discussing it in this context right now, so that everybody's on the same page and not using their own conditioning, because I guarantee you there are [00:19:00] men hearing this right now who think that it's weakness.

Doug: Yeah.

Adam: Guarantee it. So that being said, and I, 12 years in the army, combat tour, I can attest to that. Number two, in that vein of understanding what compassion is. I'd like you to discuss the idea of us showing ourselves compassion rather than the I've been a long-term believer, a practitioner of tough love on myself, and I'm trying to do less of that in a healthy way without letting myself off the hook,

there's no need to sit there and beat ourselves up about things, but I don't know if that's the only thing having compassion with ourselves mean, so I'd like you to discuss that, because I think a lot more of us need emotional permission to relax. Especially on ourselves, and how that affects the household and the people around us.

Doug: The root of the word [00:20:00] compassion is with passion, with suffering, or to suffer with someone, and I love that definition. I think it's beauty, but it's also not very helpful for the type of compassion we're talking about. Yes, we do sit with those in need, and that is a layer of defining compassion, but what we're talking about is a state of mind where you feel clarity, where you feel like you want to connect with people, you don't want to isolate, where you're calm, you're creative.

This is a complex swing of a, of chemicals in the brain, in the gut, in the heart across our body, that's changing our state of mind, our mood, and our decision making power. It heals us.

Adam: You're talking about potentially two different people,

Doug: yeah, and in this state, [00:21:00] now we don't drift into this state and stay there in some Zen fashion like all day long. But we live more of our life in this state of mind. We're very mindful and intentional in our day. It is a sense of, taking the edge off of the hardness of life. That works, right? But it's not about being passive and submissive and just gentle in the way that we get stomped on. The power that comes in this state of mind, for those who know it and can recognize it, they're the ones that get it all done.

It becomes our natural self again, as it should be. and then in that state, we can be busy. We can be you Persistent and consistent across our work, and message hard, and sell, and enjoy family, and live life. We're just in a state of mind that we're understanding, really, who we are, and all that we want to accomplish.

There's points of [00:22:00] poison in this, right? It can go to an extreme. Going and helping someone to a degree that you injure yourself or drain your energy in their service for a season, maybe a caregiver role, so beautiful. But there's also a way to do that and protect yourself and keep yourself in a state of energy, calm, collect, creative, all of those things. Before I get into the self care, let me pull up

Adam: Yep.

Doug: a reference a lot of people are familiar with, right?

Adam: Sure.

Doug: In the ancient scripture there's a story where Jesus tells people to turn the other cheek. And, um, and I think most of your listeners, whatever their faith tradition is, would be familiar with this idea of when someone offends you, turn the other cheek. Let me share something really [00:23:00] powerful about that. In the ancient world, when Jesus spoke if any, he said, if any man strike you on the on the left cheek, turn to him the right also. If a Roman were to come in and to slap you as an inferior person, they would slap you with the back of their hand like a slave, right?

They'd just get out of my way. And they would be denigrating you, not just through the hit, but the way that they hit you. And that's where, in this story is so powerful. He's saying if you get hit in a way... That is putting you down as a human, that's, if you get told something in a way that denigrates you in your core existence as a man, a woman, an individual, then his message is turn the other cheek.

If you're gonna get hit, you take it like an equal. You make that person hit you with the palm of the hand as an equal. [00:24:00] You're not less. You're not inferior. Troubles come, and you're equal to the challenge, and you're equal to everyone that's in the scenario. Turn the other cheek isn't about being submissive and just taking abuse. It's about rising up, advocating for yourself and say, I'm equal. When you believe you're equal with everyone you know, everyone you meet, boy, you are activating the most powerful, ruthless compassion you will ever feel.

And it happened in, in relationships,

Our work, a million places.

Adam: I've noticed, since insecurity of my youth fell off, and more and more confidence as my own man, and I would have to say, without being perfect, It's along these lines [00:25:00] that you're talking about, being in these states, managing decision fatigue, setting up my morning. I got this thing called the sunrise system.

And it it's just a combination of all the different things that have ended up working for me. And I get into that place, and then more actual confidence comes about me. There's I can tell an accompanying humility is there, and there's no arrogance involved there, and yet when I walk into the room, If I'm in a t shirt and jeans walking into a room full of lawyers where it's very easy to feel smaller for the younger me because look at the suits and look at the leather briefcases and look at how clean shaven they are.

And there's an intimidation factor because of corporate America and all this. Anyway, that has gone away. I sit in there and smile, shuck and jive. I've had a few of these opportunities and it caught my attention that I was in that way. And there was no, I don't think I'm above them because I've walked into rooms, in my former sales career with doctors thinking, okay, this dude's a turd and I [00:26:00] feel better than him and I'm gonna, I'm gonna be, I'm the sales guy, but let me show him how I can peacock up here.

And that's not healthy either. But, finding the balance. There's a lot of overcorrection in

Doug: And it, it resolves the challenge of judging because moving to a place of inclusion of diversity, moving to a place of equality about who we are and others it's a powerful starting place in the activation of compassion the,

it's also a beautiful way to bring the mindfulness practices into the living world, right?

Because,

Adam: I was gonna ask if you could give us a practical example or two of that.

Doug: Yeah, you have your morning routine, and you start your day, and you set your intention for the day, and you design who you want to be, and you're in a state of mind that you want to be in. And, as something happens through the day, it can derail you. Okay, that's normal. But if the reserves are there, [00:27:00] if you're practicing these things, I'm going to go over here in a second, and you're viewing all humans in equality, and we're all flawed, and we're all amazing and if you have to advocate for yourself, you do. And you can have candid, difficult conversations when you need them. It's an inner strength. It's a confidence. Okay? All of this is adding to what we're describing as the state of compassion and this activation of this across the brain. Compassion is the big umbrella for all of these other, manifestations.

Confidence, creative, striving for connection, feeling calm.

Here's a simple acronym for your listeners,

nerdy

I just invite people to be nerdy, right?

nerdy

We're all a little bit nerdy.

The N is our nutrition and [00:28:00] simple, consistent, healthy, no sugars, no, avoid the refined flours. some, some regulation around our nutrition. It's so simple.

The E in NERDY is our exercise. Moderate, but consistent. If you want a power lift, awesome. As long as it's what you do consistently.

The R is all about our rest. And we could talk for hours about what has, what happens during sleep in the brain and how powerful a healthy, non medicated, non intoxicated sleep is for brain health.

And then the D and the Y really surprise people. So we've got nutrition, exercise, and rest. And if you want to come back to rest, we can.

And then the D of nerdy and the Y, the D is what we help people practice, which is delayed gratification.

In the smallest things that we [00:29:00] can do, as we delay gratification, we're allowing the brain to up regulate the pleasure centers of the brain. So it takes less stimulus to give us an amazing sense of fulfillment.

And so here's a fun story. My family and I, we were out at the, we were out at the Grand Canyon. And kids were running around on the, in the rocks up around. And it was just a fun, fun time. And I like to paint, so I pulled out my paint set. And I took a few minutes, I set up real quick.

And I started to do some sketching and some watercolor painting of the cliffs and the canyon. Slows me down. I notice things about the canyon I wouldn't have noticed otherwise. And a sunset was coming, and we just allowed ourselves to be there. Not to say what's next, not to jump in the van and race back to the you the cabin and we had it was so fun to watch my [00:30:00] family watch this sunset. And the reason we enjoyed that sunset, is because we practice delayed gratification. We try not to do, I want it, I get it now. The kids work for things, they save for things, we budget and it's not about not having the resources to do it right now, it's about we just want their brains to not up regulate and not get the joy out of what they're doing.

If you can't hold a little newborn baby and be flooded with love, you've down regulated,

Adam: Yeah.

Doug: It's just that gentle thing, that moment of holding a puppy or something amazing that should has the power to just, not like should, like shaming you, but has the power to just wham, hits you with this satisfaction and this joy. And we can get busy. We can get [00:31:00] watching shows. We can get on our social media, scroll hit, hit, image video. And all we're doing is we're down regulating. And so delayed gratification. Might be this I do want to check my social media feed. I'm going to do it from 8 to 8. 15 at night.

And I'm going to do it from 2 to 2. 15 in the afternoon. That's it.

Delayed gratification can revolve around food, relationships, intimacy, a lot of spaces.

And then the why of Nerdy is we help clients really define what's on their yes list. Activating compassion isn't about saying no to things. It's about knowing what we want and saying yes to those things.

And so we, we have discovery conversations around what's on their yes list. What do they give themselves? What do they allow? What do they [00:32:00] desire? How do they create a yes list with their children and say yes as much as possible in the measured way that we're not You know, over stimulating and down regulating, and just making a good situation potentially toxic.

And credit to To my sweet wife.

She has the most healthy brain. on the planet, and she is so powerful in self regulation and in managing um, those moments with family. And it's about what we do the weeks before, right? It's the patterns of the day that can create, Those exceptionally beautiful moments. So we, we have boundaries and leverage the technology in a way that is, is creating healthy people, but...

Adam: In terms of REST, we talked, you mentioned how delayed gratification allows for upregulation and for the person listening... Remember, this [00:33:00] upregulation, you're putting cups back on the table. If we started with a hundred and downregulation is removing cups off the table with my crude example of understanding, and it allows us for a smaller capacity, especially when it comes to making wise decisions, what, if we put more cups back on the table, we can hold more, stay calm longer, make better decisions later into the night, especially in the pantries and the refrigerators, freezers for some of us with ice cream, but with rest specifically, a practical tip or two that we can do today, right now in the moment maybe, to work toward that upregulation, work toward that calmer, more beautiful state, especially being patient with ourselves. We're not calling ourselves idiots as often. We're calmer with the kids, the spouse, the friend, the boss. The traffic.

Man, when you can be calmer toward traffic.

Doug: Oh yeah. Yeah. That's a no brainer.

Adam: You're getting there. You're on your way.

Doug: First of all, for your,

Adam: practice. Something, yeah.

Doug: yeah, for your listeners, this is a [00:34:00] journey, so no shame, no guilt allowed here. Let's just learn and pick up some ideas. Upregulation is boring. Success is boring. Great parenting is really boring. Loving ourselves sometimes has a lot of routines and things that others might find boring and, but regarding rest,

a good night's sleep absolutely starts when you wake up at 5 or 6 in the morning.

Getting the right sunlight on your skin and allowing the chemical processes of morning and alertness and waking up to do what they need to do.

If you wake up a little bit later and you force this through caffeine, you've cheated yourself. of an enormous superpower of this whole biological clock that then creates the great sleep at night. So [00:35:00] that morning routine to get up, use the restroom, drink a big glass of water, and get sunlight on your skin.

This idea of how we start our day is really powerful.

Energy management through the day, making pre loading decisions. When someone calls, it's okay to say, I love what you're asking of me, but I have an unbreakable commitment to my family, and I just can't. Learning to say no. Being flexible when flexible is needed, but allowing set times to be part of our schedule.

As we get through the afternoon, a 15 20 minute power nap just works.

Everyone, all of my staff here at the office, they're going to look at my calendar, it's going to say power nap, it's just a little reset. I'm not on my phone during it.

If you eat better and you exercise, your sleep will be better. And then you have more super power to then practice delayed gratification. And then when you get to your yes list, it brings [00:36:00] more joy because you're in a state of mind to say, I get this right now, it's my time and I'm gonna, I want to be able to use my time this way and it's beautiful.

Adam: What is the simplest, easiest form of entry into a healthy bedtime discipline?

When you're a person who likes to, not likes, you're a person who binges streaming shows. How do we break that habit? Because a lot of that's related to the emotion, the emotional need that we feel, that we want to unwind, and sometimes it lasts too long. But if that's a habit, do you have a magic...

Doug: Here's the magic. No. Everyone has a... Yeah. If you're like this, Adam, one of the conversations that we have with an individual kind of measures their susceptibility to behavioral addiction.

So let's pick on food for a minute. Some people have a very high [00:37:00] susceptibility to food cravings. They get taking sugar, they gotta have sugar and it's a hard cycle to break. For other people, their susceptibility to that kind of sugar craving is very low. Biologically, they're just not wired to crave that as much, and so they can have a piece of cake and then go three or four days without any sugar, and they're just...

It's not a battle for them. So the first step is to talk to someone and find out where they're at with the susceptibility towards behavioral compulsions. And if they're high,

Is cold turkey. The answer is some discipline. The answer is accountability with a coach to break some cycles. If they're low on that susceptibility... They can bin watch on Tuesday nights because they don't have meetings on Wednesday, but the other nights they can't because what they know what they have to do the next morning is matters more. And so [00:38:00] it's a little nuanced in making sure we understand where, who we're dealing with, how they're wired.

The reason for the binge watching is very interesting, especially in a relationship setting. What are the needs of both partners? Where, what is the, what's intimacy look like?

What are the patterns around that? What are the patterns around, how overstressed did we get today and so we're just in collapse mode?

If the willpower is gone, then we just fall into shows

Adam: yep.

Doug: Did that help you?

Adam: Man, I, it's super helpful, and I want to keep going because I want, I wanted to touch on a couple things about parenting because a large portion of the audience are parents and I'm a parent times four. I know you're a parent times a bunch and so maybe we could do this again right down the road just a little bit and but for today what I'd like to do is besides the show notes where people are gonna be able to find you if you want to mention We're gonna, I have one more question for you, but if you wanted to [00:39:00] mention the best place to catch up with you, do you want him to find gray space, do you want him to follow you and your crazy TikTok dad, TikTok reels?

How do you want to be followed by the audience today? How do you want them to connect?

Doug: Yeah they can go to DougRichens. com, they'll find me. They can go to Gray Space Experts. And when you hit Grayspace, you'll see the full scope of our services, all the companies that we own and manage that are part of this helping you move forward. All the contact information for speaking events and hiring our experts for your, for keynotes or workshops and trainings.

It's all under Grayspace Experts, and it's quite literally, it just launched, this revised site, it's brand new, so it's and then just call, give us a call and get on the calendar and let's just have a conversation and we'll talk for 30 minutes an hour and just visit and see where you're at and whatever we can do to help. [00:40:00] Very gentle, very effective.

Adam: As I'm hearing that, you touched on what was coming to my mind. So if someone's out there listening, and you have some of these professional service chops, if what you're saying, the mission, it draws them in, and it's attractive to them, and it's resonating with them, and they wanted to be a potential service providing vendor within the system of the Grayspace Expert Umbrella, Would you say that's an appropriate person to maybe get a hold of you

Doug: absolutely, we get contacted daily from amazing, talented therapists, specialists. And they've been working under the umbrella of an insurance company or an HMO and they just feel shackled and they have this creative energy, they want to do this thing. We got contacted by a woman yesterday.

I wanna work with you and be able to do the front line work with individuals and families I wanna do. And I was like, let's figure it out, and yeah, there's,

there are a lot of people who... And we don't have a lock on [00:41:00] this. Our system is about an elevated way of getting the help and the full care that you need. So yeah, we'd love to talk to anyone that's interested

Adam: On our way out the door here, I ask everybody this question on the spot part Three words that come from your gut instinctually, or maybe in your spirit, that you're driven by on a daily basis to do the work that you do as a family man and a businessman, a professional three words that drive you.

Doug: Indifference would be the first one. A big part of my mission is to get people to a state where they don't live indifferent to others and society. Indifference is the devil. Indifference to people's needs. Just depletes us as a people, as a society, as a global community. Indifference is what's behind slavery.

Indifference is what's behind the abominations of [00:42:00] human trafficking. And we all have

As, a big part of our work in activating compassion and other things, people find that they become less indifferent to others needs and more understanding.

The second one is really about a moment. It's a, it's an image in my mind with my family we travel and we've done some beautiful things together, but there's a couple of memories locked in my mind that are so sweet and we're just so fortunate and I think about those, and I want those kinds of memories to be in our future.

I want those kinds of experiences, so I'm very driven for my family and to, for those... There's the everyday fun stuff in the kitchen and turning on music and making dinner or whatever, but like something else about those special moments.

The last one would be healing. I've been able to [00:43:00] see so many miracles um, and transformations that are salvaging people's futures. As they heal from trauma, as they reimagine themselves, they are, there's a rescue component of this. We're very driven for the results of healing that, and big change that takes place.

And, it doesn't manifest necessarily as in any specific way, right? But it's in these beautiful, subtle ways where they're just more at peace and they're, they are better in their workplace, they are better across all areas of their life. And it's. the rescue

Adam: doug Richens. I was trying to think of a different word other than how rich of an experience this has been, because I did not want to be so bad with the pun. But this has been an incredibly rich experience.

I appreciate this so much. [00:44:00] Revolutionary Freedom. I hope to see Doug again, if you guys want him. Let us know. Leave some comments. Let us know where you're at, what this has done for you, and We'll see you next time.

Doug, this is awesome.

Doug: That helpful for you?

Adam: Really good stuff.

Doug: I'm so glad.