Transcription
[Music] All right, let's go out to Montgomery, Alabama, and talk to Help Me Rhonda. Help, help me Rhonda. What's up?
Hey, Dr. John. How are you? Good. I'm pretty much over-caffeinated this morning. I'm a little bit, uh, I can, I can tell a little bit. I was snorting it off my counter. So, what's up?
Nice. Well, um, I'm totally fangirling right now, first of all, because I have so much respect for you. So when I thought I needed to talk to somebody about this topic, you are the first person that came to my mind.
Well, that makes me feel, that makes it feel good. Thank you.
You're welcome. Um, so my husband is in a job that, um, the job is, um, very fulfilling for him, but the management is horrible, and therefore, it makes him in a horrible mood. Um, and it's literally started starting to affect our marriage, and I don't know what to do to help.
Ooh, okay. Can I blow up this whole paradigm?
Sure.
All right. Um, are you comfortable saying what his job is?
Um, he is a maintenance supervisor for a large religious organization.
Oh, he works for Jesus. That gets dicey. All right. Okay. So, and you should know, preacher kid too. This might play into what your—
100%. It does. Yeah.
Oh, that makes it even easier. So here's what we're going to do. There are, I'm just going to say men, but I know there's men and women, okay? But for this case, I'm just going to use the word men. So everybody just take 30, 40% off, okay? Men go to war. Men clean sewers. Men clean body parts off of walls. Men, um, are proctologists. Men give colonoscopies. Um, right? They do all sorts of things. And I know women do all those things too, okay? But in this case, we're talking about your husband. The problem is not doing the job. It's not even the management of his job. I don't want to blame the job or his boss for how he chooses to treat his family and how he chooses to treat himself.
Now, here's where that gets really uncomfortable inside a home. It's actually, I'm already uncomfortable. I know. You know why? Because it's easier for you. You can sleep better at night blaming his boss. But it's real tough to sleep when you go, "Oh, wait a minute. You're making this choice." And so I think we have had this collective whacko, woo-woo, um, idea over the last decade, last 15 years, simply because we've had some wild economic, um, like, uh, windfalls, right? Just we've created wealth over the last, well, we've borrowed it, actually. But we've created wealth over the last 10, 15 years. It never existed in the world, right? And so because of that, we've started blaming all of our uncomfortable moments on the job. How hard it is. It's to the boss. Bosses have always been mean. What suddenly changed is people stopped doing the things that they needed to do to be well when they walked in that front door. See what I'm saying?
Oh, yeah.
So if you go, the problem is not how hard his job is. The problem is not how much of a jerk his boss is. I'll get to the jerk bosses in a minute, okay? Because that is a problem. I don't want to blow over that. But I want to put the way he treats his family and ultimately his bad mood, that's his to own. And that's terrifying for you. I do not want that to be true, but it is true. His boss is not walking in the front door and slamming things and screaming at you and cracking open a beer and saying, "Hey, I don't even care." That's not his boss. That's your husband.
Now, in all fairness, he does not do that. He's just super grumpy. I'm just, I'm just, I'm just making it up. It'd probably be better if he did have a beer, right? He might be less grumpy all the time, maybe.
So my question is, what is grumpy protecting him from? And the sad, hard part about this call is you can't answer that. Only he can.
You're correct. Well, I don't know. I wouldn't know how to answer that, right? And it probably goes back to he's seeing how the sausage is made at a, at a religious organization his whole life. Mmm. And if you work back there for a long time and you, um, don't do things to protect your soul, it can get real gnarly. Uh-huh. Right? It can, it can wear you down. Here's whose fault that is not his wife. He does not get a pass on treating his wife with disrespect or being grumpy, period. Period. He doesn't. And here's more important, he doesn't get to create a home that his kids don't want to come home to. Simply, um, neers.
Well, so they're not coming back, are they?
No. That's right. No, that's right. One of my chief transitions as an adult, one of the things that I did a control-alt-delete on was, I want to create a home full of warmth and laughter and memories so that my kids always want to come back. Mmm. And that means, and, and by the way, I work in a really difficult job. I play it off and laugh a lot, um, but my job's hard. And it's got tons of travel and tons of midnight meet and greets and 6:00 AM meet and greets after, like, it's hard. It's a tough job. Plus, hey, write a book in the H. It's tough. And that means it's my job to make sure I'm seeing a counselor, to make sure I'm exercising, I'm eating right, I sleep. Which means I can't eat certain things because if I eat certain things, I don't sleep. Last night I was exhausted and I went with my buddy Michael and George Camel and a couple others. We went to a comedy show. I actually wanted to go to bed, but I knew my body needed to hang out with my friends and laugh really hard with some great guys, right? I got to do those things. So I walk in my front door and end up with a morning like I had this morning. I was very, very tired. But me and my daughter played the funniest spin around the— You see what I'm saying?
Mhm.
I do those things so that I'm not grumpy. It's not my boss's fault. It's not my job's fault. It's mine.
So may I ask a follow-up question?
You got it.
Um, so this is my third marriage. Okay. We've been married eight years. Um, I, we were both in long-term marriages. Like, I had a practice one that lasted a short while, and then we both had long marriages, and now we're married each other for eight years, okay? And I can't help but feel that his mood is directed toward me, even though rationally I know that it's not. So what can I do for myself?
So I'm going to ask you hard questions. Is that okay?
Yeah.
What kind of environment have you created for him to come home to? Loving, I hope.
Well, let's put loving aside. I want to talk about feelings. When he opens that door, does the house feel hilarious and fun and, "Oh my gosh, I'm so glad you're here"? Or is it a loving house? He opens the door and it's like, "Hey, put, don't put your shoes inside this house. Do not bring that bag in here. Gross. Get that out."
Um, so I'm not, listen, I'm not saying that he needs, he, he should bring his shoes in, right? I, I see what you're saying. Um, probably a little bit of both. I am super happy to see him, but then it's, you know, I got to get dinner done. Needs to come in the house the right way, right?
Yeah. I need him to, I need him to behave so I don't have to worry about that in addition to everything else. And nothing makes me more grumpy than when my mom starts lecturing me.
I knew you were gonna say that. I knew you were gonna say that. Quit being his mom. Quit being his mom.
What does that mean?
Hey, that doesn't mean that he just stomps mud through the house. Mmm. Mmm. What that means is you take him out for breakfast and you say, "Hey, we're eight years in. I want this to be my ride or die. You are my ride or die." And he is. "I know when you bring mud in the house, like when that, when the house is unclean, I feel unsafe. I feel like I'm failing you. I feel like I'm failing our marriage. I feel like I got one job and I'm not doing it right." It honors me when that's different than "I told you." Right? Or even if you didn't say the words, "I told you," he can feel that tone all over your body language when you go pick up his shoes and throw them out on the front porch. And again, I'm just making stuff up, right?
Yes. It also is, if you tell him that, and this is a common thing that again, I'm totally generalizing here. Please, people who listen to this, don't blow me up in the comments. I know it goes both ways. I know. But often a wife may go after her husband's job, which in a strange way goes after his identity. And he has to either shut the conversation down or defend himself. Because he might, might be even more true with the preacher's kids. That's right. He might see himself working a job under a tyrant because he works unto God. And part of his calling since he was zero years old is to have a miserable life on behalf of something bigger than himself so that everybody else can worship it, right?
Wow. Uh-huh.
And so there's a different thing if you sit down and go, "Your job is killing you, yada, yada." That's different than, "I love you, and I can't tell you when I just think about your life, how proud I am of you that you've given up every Sunday for your entire life to serve other people so they can have an an experience of meeting God. And I don't want you to die young. I don't want you to have a heart attack. I want you to walk in this house and be so happy and joyful to walk in here. Can we create that world?" That's a very different. He doesn't, that's an invitation. It's not, he doesn't have to defend himself. And when you say, "You're just being grumpy," that's really vague language. I want you to be very, very specific. "When you yell, it scares me to death. When I get the sense from your body that you don't want me near you, I always want you near me." That's F right there. That's what I'm talking about. You see what I'm saying?
The way, exactly the way my wife put it was, "John, you have a nuclear reactor in your chest, and I can, a whole house can feel it. And we all want to come closer to you, but your body's telling us to get away." And I had to go deal with that. I had to go sit with the counselor and say some hard, hard, hard stuff. And like happened this morning, I'm starting to say a new sentence that I haven't said ever. And that was to my daughter, Josephine, "Get off me. I gotta go to work." Because she can't stop being around me now because that reactor's disassembled. I still get mad. I still get frustrated. Good grief. I'm not a robot. But man, that sense of peace, calm radiates out of my body. Not that sense of, "Get away from me." But if he's going to a boss that belittles him, and he has parents that he's still trying to live up to, and he's been a preacher's kid his whole life, so every time he goes to the bathroom, he has to do it just right or somebody's going to comment on it. And then he comes home to more criticism. Man, that's a tough road. Is that fair?
Yeah. That, yeah, it is. Um, it kind of turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy because he's a fan of yours as well. And when I told him that you and I had an appointment to talk, his demeanor changed. So I think he saw that it was serious enough to me that I needed help. Yeah. And because he loves me, he's making a greater effort.
Um, this last, but let's don't make him do an effort over and above your criticism and your disdain and you're patting him on the head as my gross little boy that just needs to do it right.
I don't like to think that that's what I do. You might not. You might not. But ask him, "Do you feel like I belittle you? Do you feel like when you come home, you have yet another boss that you can't make happy?" Because if so, I'm so sorry. I'm trying to—
That's a good question. I'm trying. Here's the, I've talked about this, uh, more recently, um, publicly for the first time. Here's the question that changed my marriage. "How do me and my wife want our home to feel like when we walk in the front door?" For her, here's a couple of things that she asked me to do through tears. We live way out in the country. She said, "When you get home before me, and it's dark, will you turn the porch lights on so I can see it?" For we have like a mile-long driveway, a quarter-mile-long driveway. "Can you turn the porch lights on? It makes me feel like the home is, our house is, welcome me home." "Will you clean up all these piles everywhere? Because I walk home and there's piles everywhere, and I inhale real sharply versus exhaling and dropping my shoulders." Now, a clean house isn't a mom scolding a little boy. For me, a clean house is me telling my wife I love you. And for her, I asked, "When I come home, I need 10 or 15 minutes before you start asking questions about, 'Hey, what do we do? And what about this? And did you get this paid?'" And I just need meant to come in and my preference would be if we could just hug right when I walk in the door. Mmm. And dude, she is amazing. And I love hearing my kids run around yelling. Like, see, see what I'm saying? We created the house that we wanted to feel. And then we had to reverse engineer what does that mean? Right? And that might mean, "Honey, when you get home, I want the house to feel, I, I want you to walk in that door so bad. And if you're tense from your last meeting when you walk in, it's my, it scares my body. My body goes into protection, not into invitation." And he can say, "All right, I'll get off of work and I'll go to the gym for 30 minutes and just walk on a treadmill. I'll go walk around the park. I'll exhale. I'll pray. I'll listen to a podcast. I'll do whatever I need to do so that I walk in and my shoulders are dropped, right?" That's a totally different world we're talking about. And by the way, I don't think either of you are bad. I don't. I know this. This is not the job's fault. Real quick, before I, I get off the call here. Toxic. I hate the word toxic now. It's just so beat down. Bad bosses ruin people, destroy people. Makes it very hard to stay above water. And so, um, I'm calling on bosses all over the country to stop sucking. Stop. Start loving the people that you work with. And by the way, if you love the people who work for you and who are trying to help people out of the marketplace, and you love them back, and instead of saying, "I told you," but instead you say, "Hey man, how can I serve you and get this done?" We have deadlines. You got to show up and work. You got to go full tilt. How can I support you? And how can I love you in this position? You will serve more customers and you'll make more customers happy. You will help them in their day-to-day lives, which is what business should be about. And you'll make more money. But bad leaders, man, if you use your arrogance and your strength and your position of power to beat up on people, shame on you, dude. You're going to collapse your business because you create a business of people who don't want to make mistakes, not a business of people who want to love customers well. Bad bosses choose. As for me in my house, we're going to choose to love people and take care of them and demand excellence. And we're going to go help people. Make that how you practice too. Thanks for the call. Ron, you're awesome.