Life Reboot: Embracing Vulnerability and Setting Boundaries

0:00 Are you just not satisfied or are you despondent? Identify how you're feelings. That's the thing that you can respond to. If you don't understand how you're feeling and you don't understand what's important to you, all the actions that you're going to be taking are for someone else or just shots in the dark. Oh, and welcome to Real and Feel. I'm your host, Andy Grant. Today I'm talking with Lauren Silverman. Lauren is a coach who helps overwhelmed and burned out people, especially the ones who seem to have it all together on the outside but are quietly running on fumes inside. His work focuses on helping people set healthier boundaries, get clear on what actually matters, and build the lives that feel more steady and less chaotic. He also created Life Reboot Nerd Edition, a practical and gamified 90 day framework for rebuilding your life with more clarity and consistency.

0:51 Sounds like fun? Let's do it. Hello Lauren, and welcome to REAL Men Feel. Hey, thanks for having me. Happy to be here. Now I know that you work with people that on the outside look like they've got it all figured out, but inside perhaps are running on fumes. What drew you to that kind of coaching? Experience. I have a sign on my wall that says I'm the coach I once needed. So I experienced the burnout. I experienced the high pressure job, I experienced the over performing as or high performing as a coping mechanism for for progress, but it just I just got totally burnt out. Was there a particular moment that you realized I can't keep living like this? Yeah, there was.

1:38 Actually, it was in 2022, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine. And I was working in technology for enterprise clients and our entire development team was Ukrainian. So I saw their kind of, I saw their lives just get completely turned upside down overnight. And then the people that I was working for were afraid that the instability in the region would affect delivering, so went and started looking for other team members to hire that were maybe on shore or near shore basically. So not only did the Ukrainian development team basically have their entire world turned upside down overnight by this other country invading them, they started losing work because the companies that I was working for, these enterprise organizations weren't were afraid that they wouldn't have that they wouldn't be able to continue service.

2:37 So that was really upsetting to me and had me rethinking what I was doing for my life and career. And I can't explain it other than to say that I was moved because I was moved to do something. Started Google searching how Americans can help Ukrainians. And I was on a plane in two weeks to Krakow. And I drove from Krakow to the Ukraine Poland border, hooked up with Auk transportation company and started helping transport refugees from the border who had crossed over from Ukraine into Poland to safe houses, to family members houses, to doctor's appointments. I drove a British marine 4 hours to a Warsaw so that he could get a a flight home back to London.

3:25 It's probably the first time that the guy slept in in weeks in my car on that 4 hour trip. I just realized that this is how I wanted to be in the world. This is how I wanted to serve people, humanity. I don't know. That sounds super, super grandiose, but it really is. I just realized that all of the love I had for the work that I was been, that I was doing, had everything to do with the people that I was working with and watching them grow. I'd loved seeing people that were reporting to me or that I trained as their first job become VPS or start their own businesses. So yeah, that's what led me to coaching. I didn't want to continue to work for these huge enterprise organizations that had no soul, and I wanted to help prevent other people that might find themselves in the situation that I found myself in.

4:15 I wanted to help them avoid that burnout and avoid that same kind of crash and burn routine that I had been in for 20 years, basically so. How long did you stay in Europe? I was in, I was in Poland for about two weeks. OK, so just a short term trip. Yeah, I it was just an incredibly moving experience bringing families to safe houses and seeing like this basically a huge house that someone had that they were just providing for refugees to stay 18 bedroom home, some giant mansion in in the Poland countryside and someone just volunteering to give their home over to help people in The Who walk into the house.

4:57 And on the side, just the Baker's racks of children's shoes. Either children that didn't have shoes can take them off the rack or people that have extra shoes put them on the rack. But that was just, I'll never forget that visual of just seeing kids shoes and jackets and stuff just all lined up in this foyer. Well, it sounds like an incredibly transformative experience. What was burnout looking like for you before that trip? Just going through the day like a robot and just trying to perform and just feeling completely overwhelmed with what was on my plate. No passion anymore in the work that I was doing, you know, struggling to make sense or meaning of why we are here.

5:45 Each existential crisis complete like existential crisis. It it looked like getting up every morning, just feeling so fatigued, not being able to rest, not being able to get into any kind of flow state or feeling like you're just doing the thing that you're supposed to do. It's just always a grind, always for someone else not aligned with my values or a mission or how I want to contribute. Yeah, just imagine waking up every morning just being like another day, just like totally deflating. Yeah, yeah. I don't need to imagine that. I've lived that as well. You've been there. A lot of men are taught to just push through that. That's what life is. So do you see that mindset serving men in some way and how does it hurt them long term?

6:33 Yeah, everything that I've experienced has gotten to me where I've to where I've been today. I don't take any of my experiences and look back on them with any kind of regret or self judgement. I always tell my clients feedback out outweighs self judgement every day of the week. Right? Take the feedback in, don't beat yourself up over it. Just learn what you did well, what you didn't do well, and where you can improve. For me, the scenario that you're describing, it just looked like if I could just keep my head down and keep performing at this high level where everyone on the outsides, wow, that guy's got a really good successful career, keeps moving up in companies and keeps earning good salaries.

7:20 But what people don't see is just the stark unhappiness and the lack of direction. Really, one of the first things I do with my clients is a value to voice exercise. So before we can start taking action or even understand how we got where we are today, let's talk about what's important to you. Let's list your values, decompose those and see how you put them into action today. And a lot of people will find out if they're facing burnout or overwhelm, that their actions are not aligned with their values. And that's the friction point. So how do you help someone realize the difference between what they truly value and what they've been trained or taught to value? So the first step is just recognition. Recognition that you're grinding and not happy you like you. People will know that.

8:12 They'll know whether they want to face it or not. People can wake up in the morning and tell, am I happy about today or am I fearful about today? Am I worried about what today will bring? So that awareness that's slowing down and that self-awareness is key. And that's one of the things that really was transformative for me. Just giving myself a chance to pause the intensive work that I did in self discovery and then further in training to be a coach. My tagline on my Life Reboot Nerd addition program is pause, Reboot and grow. So it's like that old technology trove. Have you tried turning it off and on again? So that's basically what I did. I turned myself off, did some deep work, a lot of exploration, a lot of self discovery, rebooted, turn myself back on again, ready for that growth.

9:02 Did you mention that clarity is more important than trying harder? Can you expand on that? Yeah, effort against the thing that you're not aligned with. It's not only it's not only a wasted effort, it's such effort that goes against really what your goals might be. So understanding, taking that moment to pause and it and there's all kinds of aids and things. When I first started doing work on myself, I didn't even know how I felt. And it required me to look at a chart of 60 feeling words and trying to find the one that fit.

9:45 You know how I felt? You don't have the words for it. I didn't have the words. I didn't have the understanding of what I was feeling. So that's where I started. Just how do you feel? Describe that. Where do you feel it in your body? What's that? What mental capacity is that taking up? When you get that clarity and understand who you are at a foundational level and have that strong sense of self and that strong foundation, then you can align your actions to those values and you just see how much easy, easier life feels. Life just becomes so much smoother when you're doing the things that are important to you. If you're not doing something that's important to you and if you don't know what's important to you, I hope people figure that out and then align their actions to those things. And the satisfaction that comes out of that is just, it's natural.

10:37 You're not fighting against something that you don't believe in, or you're not doing work Whose effort doesn't forward some goal of yours, right? When you're aligned with your values and your passions, then you know high achieving comes naturally. It's not a forced act. Yeah, it's not a forced act that comes naturally and you just people just have a a natural sense of satisfaction when they're doing something or taking action against something that's important to them. If you don't know what's important to you, that's the first step. So you mentioned the life reboot, so tell me what is the life reboot Nerd edition? Yeah, so Life Reboot Nerd Edition, it's a 12 week gamified coaching program that I created.

11:27 It's my signature program that Ioffer my my clients. Basically it's a mash up of Dungeons and Dragons meets coaching. So at the beginning of the of the coaching experience, you create your character. So I've designed a character sheet where I've related life attributes such as strength or such as the boundaries energy mastery 2 dungeons and Dragons role-playing game statistics. So constitution is like your boundaries. How well do you hold the boundaries that protect your time and energy and help you avoid that burnout?

12:11 So I've related these that human values, human attributes to Dungeons and Dragons tropes. You create your character based on discussion with your coach and what you feel like your mastery or your level is in these different in these six different areas. Once you create your character, we start doing some exercises and give you tools to understand what your values are, tools to understand how you want to show up as a human being in this world, how you want others to see you, and how you want to represent yourself. And over the course of the 90 days, you basically watch your character, which is you. You are the character.

12:52 I always say you're the hero of your own story. You watch your character level up in real life over time as if you're playing a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. So you get to add, oh, I worked on boundaries this week and feel like I really levelled up and was able to set some good boundaries. I'm going to up my constitution and now I see that my character started out as a four and now it's a 5 and by the end of the program I'll hit my goals and I'll be an 8. Why can gamifying help make more progress than perhaps traditional self help does? Because it's fun. People like to have fun. That's what it boils down to it. Everything works differently for everyone. You've met one person in your life. You've met one person in your life, you can say. You can try to group people by some commonalities or make some generalizations, but every person is unique. And finding out what lights you up and what makes you tick and what helps you have the energy to get out of bed in the morning and be excited about the day.

13:59 Is is the work that I try to focus on beautiful? And I believe you do a lot of boundary work as well if there's a man who hears boundaries. And just what does it even mean? How would you define boundaries? Boundaries I define as what tools or resources or activities do you regularly use to protect your time and energy? Those are boundaries. So if it's important for you to finish project A, but you constantly are getting interrupted by either a boss that having you focus on Project B or by a partner that wants you to do project C, the project A is your priority.

14:43 And what's most important to you. Being able to communicate that and say I understand project C is super important to you partner and I'm there with you. It's important to me too. And I have this other thing that takes priority right now. So I'm going to do this, but I will get back to you to work on that together at X time, on X date, you know, protecting your time and energy because as high performers and high achievers, we'd love to say yes, we'd love to take on that responsibility and add more because when we can complete those things, it's a false sense of progression, but it is something that we that's the dopamine response we're looking for. Hey, completed, check that box off. I did it.

15:31 I performed more than people expected me to. But if it doesn't come with a value proposition for yourself, then great. I just handed you something really good that I don't care about, so why am I excited to do it? In your own lived experience or in the men that you work with, do you see a most common boundary that guys really need but ignore setting the most? I don't know that there's any particular most common boundary. I think the most common thing that my clients and that I myself experienced is just taking on too much, saying yes without really thinking about the impact of that.

16:17 So when you say yes and you agree to a thing that you're going to do and you're a person of integrity, you want to follow through and do that. If it's not exciting to you and not aligned with who you are as a human being, what you value, what's important to you, it's just going to feel like a grind if you find those things that are important to you. So don't just say yes right away. If someone wants to help with something and you're someone that likes to help people, great. You want to help people to the best of your capability and the best of your capacity. If you're just saying yes to everything that comes your way, everyone's going to get 20% of your best rather than yes. And I'm going to focus on this first and put my energy into this thing that's super important to me, that takes priority over these other things. And that's where I'm going to find the most satisfaction, most happiness, and most ease in my life, really. It sounds like perhaps the that main boundary needed is one that sets your own space, that your values matter. Yeah, protects your time and energy. I've also heard you talk about the need for cleaner conversations.

17:29 So what is a clean conversation? Have an exercise that I give people. It's another tool in the toolbox. I call it a Co-op request or a Co-op mission in life reboot Nerd edition. so-called mission is something that is of value to you and important to you. Sharing that with someone. That's the Co-op part that comes in and then you have you have a partner in in helping support the things that are important to you and the values that you're wanting to work on in terms of the if there's one single most like time suck that high achievers that don't exercise good boundaries do it's they just say yes, can you help me with this? Yes.

18:16 Can you help me with this? Yes. Will you do this? Yes. They don't ever stop to consider the quality of the work that that yes is going to yield. If it's not boxed into an appropriate like action plan that aligns with who you are, then whatever you just said yes to is going to get less effort than it deserves because it's not something that's important to you. If you're doing something like why do we remember to do certain things and other things we like it, we forget about because it's important.

18:58 If someone told you'd be here on this at this time on this day and I'll hand you a bag of cash with 1,000,000 bucks in it, you would do everything in your power to be at that place on that time and that day. Yet when someone invites us to a party, we can be 1/2 hour late and what does that say about us and our relationship with that person? If we're saying it's OK for me to be late to your event, how does that communicate how you feel or the importance of that person or that event? If you want to make sure that what you're saying yes to can in fact, you can in fact give the time and energy to that yes fully and in a way that also satisfies you. Earlier you had mentioned that before you started doing your own work, you weren't even sure how you felt. Yeah, for a man who is, or at least thinks he's disconnected from his emotions, where do you even begin? For me, it was a chart I had to look at 60 words on a feelings wheel started with some bass ones in the center, angry, happy, sad.

20:11 And then you expand those out on those different color spectrums to all right, what is, let's breakdown sad. There's many different ways to express sadness. Are you just not satisfied or are you despondent? Identify how you're feelings. That's the thing that you can respond to. If you don't understand how you're feeling and you don't understand what's important to you, all the actions that you're going to be taking are for someone else or just shots in the dark. Yeah, I actually, I give those to all new clients as well. I had discovered those Once Upon a time. I was a screenwriter, OK? We're allowed in that wheel to have different character traits and different depth of people.

20:53 And oh, they work for actual humans, too. Yeah. Totally. What does real progress look like for someone doing the work, working with a couch, or perhaps life reboot? How do they know? What are the signs of it coming out of this stage of burnout? Yeah, at the beginning of any kind of coaching experience, it's really important to have a goal. So whatever that goal is, I want more time with my family. I want to feel more satisfied at the end of the day. I want to feel accomplished. Whatever your goal is, having setting that goal and having that in mind and then tracking progress towards that goal. So if you're someone that you know, wants to have more excitement when you wake up, what's your level of excitement today? Let's measure that.

21:38 You know, on a scale of 1 to 10, how excited are you to get up out of bed? I'm at a four right now. All right, let's reassess that in a month after we do some of these exercises. Protect your boundaries, do some fun things, gamify your life a little bit. What's your level of satisfaction at now? You know, so you just measure things. Or did you accomplish the thing that you set out to accomplish? Yes. All right, That's progress. I know from the the first time we spoke I learned that you're a competitive pinballer. Yes. There's a couple pinball machines in my life as well, and I wonder, has pinball taught you anything about pressure, patience, adapting to chaos that that corresponds over to life?

22:21 For sure. The first thing I'll say about the pinball community that I've found, and it seems to be pretty consistent around the country and around the world, the pinball community is a very open, welcoming, amazing place. People from all walks of life, all religious beliefs, political backgrounds. They just set that aside for a few hours, flip a steel ball and try to bash it against some things on a playfield that make beeps and whizzes and fun sounds. So they put all of that stuff aside. It's just a great supportive community interacting with people. Everyone is whatever. Most people when you're playing in these tournaments, even though they're competitive tournaments, when you're not playing and you want to talk about the game, people will tell you all the tips and tricks, even if they're competing against you, they'll tell you the rules of the game. They want you to just play well and they want you to do well and want to match their skill against yours. And if you don't know how something works, it's not really a true test of skill.

23:22 It's, I know something about the game that you don't. So I'm going to excel and you're going to be sitting there. How that happen. I'd rather share that with you and enjoy the experience of watching you grow and watching you learn and watching you experience the game to its fullest capacity. But definitely patience. So in pinball, there's a thing called a dead bounce and people are watching this and they don't understand what that is. When you're watching someone play pinball and the ball is coming right at them, most people's instinct when they're first starting or when they're when they're playing for a little while is you want to get that ball away. The whole idea is to hit the ball with this flipper, this paddle, and send it as fast as you can bashing into something or as fast as you can up this ramp.

24:06 If you allow the ball to hit the flipper, it'll bounce to the other flipper, maybe bounce back to you, get the sense of where the ball's going to go. And if you have that patience to allow for that dead bounce, then you might even be able to trap the ball, hold that ball against the flipper with the flipper up, and plan your next shot. So if you have that patience to not be so reactive and to let the thing come at you and see where it goes so that you can react with an appropriate amount of measure against this activity or against this goal, it becomes so much easier when you have some control. So allowing for that dead bounce in pinball, allow for that dead bounce in life. Let the thing land and see where it comes before you just try to swat it away.

24:56 Lauren, what is the best way for people to connect with you and learn more? Yeah, you can go to silvermancoach.com. That's my website and there's a whole bunch of information about what I do and how I do it on there. If you're ready to get to work, you can just go right to silverman.coachfromsilversilvermancoach.com. You just go to Silverman dot coach and you can schedule a free 30 minute call with me. It's a strategy session. During that call we'll figure out like what it is that you want to work on. Is it something that I have skill and can help you with? We'll do a real coaching session well, you'll get some clarity on the idea or subject that you're trying to grow in, and you'll get at least one action that you can leave to move forward with that goal.

25:44 If it seems like a fit, we'll talk about what working together looks like moving beyond that. And if it's not, you at least have a little bit more clarity and an action that you can take to help you move forward. And finally, what is one thing that you wish more men knew? I'm. Going to take a little time with that one. I'm very fortunate. I have a really great group of friends from since I was in elementary school. I have some friends that I've known that long and a new community that I've grown out here in Arizona. I've been here for five years, men, male friends. We hug each other. We say I love you before we leave the party or the pinball tournament or whatever it is we're we're engaging in. Having intimacy with men is not a weakness at all. There's the old trope of macho man and being like that hard, true American, whatever it that that is old news. That's old news.

26:50 I love to hug my men friends. I love to kiss him on the cheek. I love to tell him I love you. And then I'm excited to see him again. I have just a very close relationship with these friends that I have. So men, if you're out there today, embrace those vulnerability. It'll come back to you tenfold. Yeah, that's one of my favorite answers ever. Cool. So yeah, Lauren, thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks for sharing just a bit about your work and yourself. I'm glad you are through the that whole nonsense of burnout. And unfortunately, there's plenty of eyes to keep helping to get out of it, avoid it, heal it, never do it again. Lauren, thanks again so much for joining us today, sharing your story, your insights, and such a practical wisdom for everyone listening.

27:40 If this conversation spoke to you, share this episode with another man who needs it. If you're ready for deeper connection, honest conversations, and a place where men are allowed to just show up as they really are, join us in the Authentic AF community. Visit realmenfeel.org/group and until next time, be good to yourself.