This Mental Health Incentive Problem Could Hurt Your Business!

[0:00]  it it's interesting I think the conversation around social media's negative impact on Mental Health has been in one way beat up to adium on the second half nothing has been done about it so I I I I would argue maybe we're not beating it up the right way or to the right people but like it almost is becoming cliche when people say yeah social media is bad for kids and oh my gosh I'm so I'm so blessed I was raised without it what am I going to do with my own four kids and their social media but um it's not I don't think there's any more parameters now than there were 5 years ago and there is now starting to become better data to show yeah this is actually pretty pretty toxic um now there's beautiful things I would I wouldn't know you I wouldn't know a lot of people I wouldn't be able to stay connected man there's some really beautiful things

[0:46]  about it but like all things if they're brought to their extreme point it can get corrupted and get toxic all right guys welcome back to a brand new episode of the heart and hustle podcast now today is going to be an incredibly important conversation because I'm sitting across this digital table if you will with Matt Simon the COO of New Hope today's conversation is going to be talking about not only new Hope's Mission combating youth Mental Health crisis and the contributing factors we're going to talk about mental health advocacy we're going to talk about leadership and so much more man Matt welcome to the show Kenan good to

[1:34]  see you man thank you absolutely so in our previous conversation Matt you said something very succinct to me you said I've always been called to supporting family and children who are on the margins why are you called to serve that specific population of people o um I have no idea why I have no idea why but I think it's because I find it uh incredibly fun and exhilarating and I think if you find something fun that other people would find terrible that's probably like your calling um and I as from a young age I just the only thing I think I was good at that also filled me up I think there was things I was good at that didn't fill me up but the thing I was good at that filled me up simultaneously was just working with people and working with kids and working with families I

[2:21]  came up through the young life system I'm not sure if you're familiar with that but that played a it's kind of a a high school Outreach um nonprofit and there's a time in my life where I was probably going to kind of turn left and had somebody help me not turn left and stay straight and that just revealed to me that like man relationships are powerful at certain times particularly again adult relationships with young people at critical times just is everything and that person I still um know him he's he's such a huge part of my story and he wasn't the coolest or the funniest or the smartest or the most most athletic he just like cared about me and I was like okay if that's the price of admission for doing something awesome I could probably do that do you remember the first time where you

[3:09]  figured out that working with people and investing your time and energy into helping people become the best version of themselves was that thing that filled you up was there like an aha moment that you had um you know I mean I was like a senior in high school when I started to bring I started like Mentor some freshman and sophomores and um that was incredibly rewarding and then I was able to get some opportunities to um actually lead some mission trips overseas like to Romania and things like that and I I look back on that I was probably doing that when I was like 19 and I was leading groups of like 30 people and and I had no business doing that like clearly that church had no legal arm because that was a really bad bad call but um so some of that just like you know leading people and galvanizing

[3:57]  people and getting people accept that that has felt right from a very young age and then when I got kind of serendipitously turned into the therapy world as opposed to kind of the ministry World um that instantly felt right and when somebody um exposed to me kind of some of the theories and some kind of like the actual psychology behind family systems work and why working with the whole family like that just clicked so instantly it was kind of like oh I've been searching for this all along I didn't even know I was looking for it that so there was a there was a conversation that was like a lights on kind of moment and it was about it's really about family therapy and the importance of if you want to intervene in a kid's life you also have to intervene in a family's life and that seems simple but um in a lot of areas it's still kind of um uh not the norm

[4:49]  unfortunately I mean that's something I experienced quite early in my life I had those moments of realization where when I look back on some of the behavior of my family two sides my father's black my mother's white both from Eastern Washington I saw how the different sides of the fence if you will handled things like conversations about mental Wellness mental health family addiction XYZ completely different and as I got a little bit older I started to recognize that we often are systems and products of our family system and if we don't have a solid household we're not going to have a solid foundation in which we can build relationships navigate troubling times and things like that was your early life pretty stable from that perspective yeah you know you know it's interesting I mean a lot of people that get into like the helping profession or and a lot of my my peers who are some of

[5:35]  the best you know therapists and they're they're kind of helpers because they they can personally attest to like the hurt and and some of that stuff and they wanted to go on and be a help I I I you know I really don't have that kind of story although I think my story still has allowed me to have a really powerful impact in a different way but yeah I was incredibly blessed incredibly lucky incredibly fortunate incredibly like whatever the word is my parents were awesome I had a safe and stable home I had the again I always say like I'm of the generation that we like the last generation to know like what dialup internet was and so life was just a still you know I'm not old I'm not young but like life was still a little bit slow enough we could go out in the neighborhood and stay out until dark and so I was very very lucky there um very

[6:23]  sheltered in a lot of ways though and and that you know some some of those bubbles got popped at different times in my life um but you know I mean some of the things that I I I I truly believe is there is a true Universal Human Experience that we all that we all go through and I think there's there's Universal human kind of yearnings and longings particularly in young people and that it doesn't matter if you're from Washington or Iran I do think there's a universality to that um and even and the things that I have had in my life both the trials and the tribulations I think through those I can relate to anybody I can't necessarily say I've walked your exact shoes but I know what loss is you know and I know what hardship is and I know what it

[7:10]  feels like to um want something and not get it I know what it feels like to want somebody's affection and not get you know um so yeah it's interesting so on paper I had a incredibly blessed life um but life is still everybody's life is full of curveballs um and I think if you're naturally kind of like like an empathetic person it's not that hard to I I've never felt like I needed to go through something exactly to serve that person and some kind of a helping context it's interesting when we have a heart for helping others and we also recognize the spaces that we participate in from a professional World perspective right let's get a little business tactical the total addressable Market in a space like mental Behavioral Health Community Services the helping fields are growing every single year why do you

[7:58]  think we're seeing such a c in this space growing although that might not be the best thing for our society yeah man that's I don't know how long we have that that's a six day that's a Joe Rogan podcast like right there because I do you know and again some of these you know and I'd love if I say anything on here that somebody's like man I want to challenge that I'd love to talk to that person because again I I love to engage and I love to be wrong I'm wrong often but you know as a mental health person um as a mental health professional as somebody who spent a good part of my career and I and I work kind of in the Bible Belt South and so a lot of the clients I worked with when I was doing a lot of direct therapy were from backgrounds that were you know very religious as predominantly African-American um families in kind of urban area Charlotte and so there was a

[8:47]  lot of like having to break through stigma and shame and what does this mean for my family story and what does it mean if my great uncle sexually abused me but I still need to respect my elders like all of those layers were navigated and so I spent a lot of time like feeling proud when people would be okay with their mental health for the first like 10 years of my career and now the last like few years I've struggled with some of the um societal kind of shifts where now it's like everybody has to have a diagnosis and we're almost it feels a little like we're trying to one upspin ship each other on some of this stuff and then I do think there's a capital um commer agenda that then gets mapped on to that in ways that just feel uncomfortable I don't know I don't quite

[9:36]  know how to explain I me I think it works on individual community and like Society levels I I think it's and I think it's too early to know if it's a net positive or a net negative like the postco mental health boom which is it really more mental health or is it that we're talking about it more is it kind this chicken and egg conversation smarter people probably can debate that more than me I get a little worried it could be a net negative though overall especially when it comes to kids especially when it comes to pathologizing kids at a younger and younger age for things that I think are kind of just human experiences and and most of our diagnosis should just be kind of a messed up but pretty good human who's get who's making their way through like if there was a diagnosis there I would have probably given 90% of my clients that but um insurance doesn't

[10:26]  pay for that diagnosis and sometimes treatment doesn't get had unless they have a diagnosis so there's a lot of there's a lot of tricky things in there it really is tough because yes we are having the conversation more so ever now than ever yeah which is a beautiful thing but the other thing is is like the the experience that we all went through during the pandemic of EXT experiencing extreme feelings of grief and loss in our personal lives by losing family members but also the grief and loss from our professional lives the sense of normaly the routine the community the office setting so much of our identity was tied up in that and then it was taken away from us and it seems like we're still dealing with those feelings of grief and loss and although you and I came from a slower time right when we had dial up internet and there wasn't as much pressure now there are so many different catalysts and so many

[11:13]  different I would say elements that are being thrust into people's lives by these little devices by the connectivity that we have to everywhere that compounds this conversation which has to be an incredibly difficult spot for you guys to sit in as mental health professionals serving the community yeah I mean things are moving so fast phenomenons are happening so fast particularly amongst teenagers you know fat like U it's it's really hard to know what is a fad versus what is a true developmental phenomenon versus what's Just A coping skill versus what's a this and what's of that and again all you know I think this has been beat up at it's interesting I think the conversation around social media's negative impact on Mental Health has been in one way beat up to ad nauseum on the second half nothing has been done

[12:01]  about it so I I I I would argue maybe we're not beating it up the right way or to the right people but like it almost is becoming cliche when people say yeah social media is bad for kids and oh my gosh I'm so I'm so blessed I was raised without it what am I going to do with my own four kids and their social media but um it's not gotten I don't think there's any more parameters now than there were five years ago and there is now starting to become better data to show yeah this is actually pretty pretty toxic um um now there's beautiful things I would I wouldn't know you I wouldn't know a lot of people I wouldn't be able to stay connected man there's some really beautiful things about it but like all things if they're brought to their extreme point it can get corrupted and get toxic and then obviously kids just naturally mess things up they they naturally kind of abuse things because

[12:50]  they don't have they don't have breaks yet they're just driving 100 miles an hour in whatever Direction They development they don't have brakes yet so yeah it's we we deal with that a lot um you know we can unpack that but yeah we are at the intersection of a lot I would say we are at the intersection a lot of these kind of societal things and New Hope is kind of right at that intersection um and it's good in some ways it's like okay well let's meet this moment and this is why we're here and this is what maybe why I was called to do this and on the second half I'm trying to figure out well how do we make any of this better on a macro level because um New Hope growing in some ways is like a a symptom of something going wrong somewhere Upstream exactly yeah and that's what's interesting about these spaces is we continue to see them explode like you

[13:37]  said there are societal factors and economic injections so we can help these spaces grow to be able to meet the demand but when we have the incentives that are tied to diagnosis means that we have a reimbursement CPT code that we can then push through the books to be reimbursed from Medicaid or Medicare or private insurance it creates a system a feedback loop that often isn't the best for our society it's like we change the incentives we changed the outcome and it seems like we're just kind of caught in a weird space in time right now yes no we we we definitely are and we're always we're always late you know we're always behind I mean that's one of the tricky things with things moving so fast and our attention span getting so slow is like we don't even have time to study stuff before the next you know we didn't study we didn't get done studying the last thing before the next thing is right in front of our face and you can't just bury your head like at least in a

[14:25]  place like New Hope We Can't bury our sand our head in the sand of like Academia and say well let me study this before I take this next kid it's like we have kids banging down our door and if they don't come to us they're going to be sleeping that night in a hospital or in a shelter and I know we're better than that I know we're better than that set so there's a lot of times where I'll tell my team you know I and I have to wear both kind of a clinical hat and a COO hat um but I do say listen like we're going to do the best we can with what we got you know and we're going to inject a whole bunch of Common Sense and a whole bunch of trauma-informed care and a whole bunch of just Let's help this kid have a good day and somewhere in that maybe we'll get to a good outcome even if it's not um one that would stand up to academic rigor or something it's it's interesting because I often think about you know my

[15:13]  generation I'm going to kind of segue here a little bit I was born in 90 uh I came up and a lot of the Flack that I got as being a teenager young younger individual was you guys are part of the eighth place trophy generation the participation trophy generation right and my question to that is I got a little bit older and had a little bit more awareness was hold on we've been getting a whole bunch of flack for being that generation but who was the one who bought us the participation trophies it wasn't me who went to the trophy store and said we need a seventh and eighth place trophy so how much of the accountability for problems like we're facing right now go back to the the responsibility of the home and for Mom and Dad to be able to have honest true often tough conversations with their kids about the role of social media and mental health and everything else that comes along with that yeah you know I think one of the best books that anybody can read in 20 from 2020 to 2024 that's

[16:03]  been out literally of all the books published one of the best books Bar None is the cuddling of the American mind um by Jonathan height I'm not sure if you read that but I have not it he's he's um I don't want to butcher it but he's kind of a you know sociologist and like an Anthropologist of of of culture and movements and and people and you know just that title basically says like what is this kind of softening why are and it's really about like what's the anxiety boom so much about why are so many people being like how Are we more anxious in 2024 than people living in like Rome Rome seemed like a pretty anx like I would have been pretty anxious to live in Rome if I could get thrown in the Coliseum here I I have more anxiety about my iPhone update than and like statistically we it's it's not perceived anxiety it's like real anxiety and so something is

[16:50]  happening We are Becoming um less resilient not more and he ties a lot of that back to shifts in parenting which does tie back a little bit though to shifts in you know and this is nothing I really say is political because I'm not smart enough to be political but even shifts in we were having a conversation on on our podcast with um like a 25 year veteran of a child welfare system in Charlotte and he was and he came from I think Maryland and they came down to Charlotte he was talking about again the change in neighborhoods like how neighborhoods used to be structured and they went from kind of blocks and grids where everybody looked after each other to these silos where it's just a bunch of islands where now literally you can't walk anywhere you know like nobody even takes the bus to school um and these things

[17:38]  are creating these tiny the these little um you know little kind of like bubbles amongst bubbles amongst Bubbles and so like the family's in a bubble and then you got a neighborhood in a bubble you have no Community anymore people drive straight into their you know I wonder how much of this is tied to garage doors being able to have have an automatic beeper because as people come home they are going in they're not even saying hi to their neighbors anymore whereas we used have to get out and maybe like lug that thing up and say hi to Johnny down the street all of that stuff I think does add up to um a lack of resilience and kind of a softening of everybody because it's not that the world is actually getting harder there's really no data to show that the world is getting harder and more dangerous

[18:24]  actually all the data is showing that it's going in the opposite direction and yet we're kind of like internally suffering more so he has some really interesting stuff in there about societal shifts that led to that and then parental shifts and then again I think the social media influence on the parent generation that just got into the the Facebook world in the early 2000s and again I don't want to pick on moms but I think the Facebook mom Generation Um where you are only posting the good you're not allowed to post the bad you're only posting the positive images creates and then there's a competition level to that it creates a lot it does create a lot of anxiety and I think anxiety absolutely flows Downstream um so yeah no there's a lot of at some point some generation of

[19:13]  parents has to collectively agree my wife and I talk about this all the time no we're not going to do that anymore we are not going to do that even though it's the easier thing to do we do do it a lot like but you you just catch yourself doing stuff then her and I will be like do you think our parents would have ever you know put um our kids plate back in the sink for them and again you know these aren't like I wasn't raised in the 60s this is like the 90 you know this is the 90 and again we we it's just if it's become some of a default I think it's we move so fast there's probably 50 reasons for it but the um the the result kids are getting more entitled less resilient more anxious and I think less ready to handle the world which that's a that's a

[20:03]  parent only job get your your kid ready to handle the world um the last thing I'll say on that coddling of the American mind the best quote I have from him that I just think summarizes the whole book and he said that the worst thing you can do for an anxious child is to prepare the road for the child what a parent should do is prepare the child for the road and that's like that's money I mean I try to just remember that every day when my kid complaining about things I'm trying to prepare you for the road versus the I'm trying to just like cater this road to you have you ever heard the saying Hard Times create strong men strong men create good times good times create weak men and weak men create Hard Times sure oh interesting yeah sure it seems like we're kind of like stuck somewhere in that cycle you know what I mean um because when times

[20:52]  are great like we're talking about literally people are living longer today you have less threats to your actual human existence rather than the psychological threats that we see from these devices every single day that often I feel like we have so much extra time to be exposed to these images that are outside of our human ability to be able to comprehend threat because back in the day before Facebook and things popped up we lived in global communities I me I'm sorry we lived in local communities local communities where your neighborhood the people here people who you saw at the store then the Advent of social media occurred we start seeing things from all over the world every single day it's very difficult for our mind to comprehend that Global systematic impact of the community that we live in although it's not even a threat to us because we're thousands and thousands of miles from some of these

[21:39]  things that we see sure and again that's you know when you're just talk if you just um kind of carve out anxiety you know anxiety is usually kind of anticipatory fear of a perceived threat or something or yeah I think one of the main reasons that that is up is because people are being exposed to so you know I think humans we only supposed to be probably in community with like 12 to 15 people Max I think that's all we can handle and so um yeah but now that I'm now my daughter is also having to shoulder what's happening in Iraq and Iran which again there's a balance there right it's probably not great that I didn't even know that was a country until I was eight like that might not be good but for her to feel some kind of ownership over that on a psychological level I would say that's a net negative

[22:26]  um and to your point you know this is where parents um once they get Expo once kids are exposed to the social media we are no longer in between the social media and them we're only between the device and them once they have that device that is just unfettered just machine gun um and that is going to be absorbed into their brain through their individual temperament and psyche and style and their own maybe stuff and Trauma and you know my youngest daughter a lot of stuff would kind of Bounce right off of her from an anxiety perspective she's just like whatever and my oldest daughter is just nothing but impath so if she if she watched 8 minutes of CNN I think she would have a nervous breakdown just because she'd empathized with every flood victim every hurricane she talks about the Hurricanes I'm like honey you

[23:13]  just need to worry about um you have dance this afternoon and you have a little bit of homework to do tonight like I I I try to localize that a little bit good B and different but it just that feels like the better Instinct and often there's the ation as well my girlfriend um the most empathetic person I've ever come across in my life and part of our early discussions about her experience and growing up is she was always told that she was too emotional she experienced things she had too many feelings and she started to kind of push those feelings down and one of the things that I said to her was you know your superpower is being able to experience your emotions and as we get into this world where we say you know we're exposed to everything but you should still have a a level head about what's happening you shouldn't empathize for the stuff that's happening in the the hurricane I feel like even that is

[24:00]  going the opposite direction because we need more empathetic people in our world today but often they're shut down because of the hyperex that they have to all the things that are happening Yeah It's Tricky again like I would never tell like I you know my daughter my oldest daughter being an impath is the best and I and I tell her again I love and I love that she's a big feeler it comes out in her art it comes out in her dance it comes out in her like goofiness it there's no doubt in my mind that she's going to do something with that with that gift you know I think with anything it's like at what point does something control you versus you are harnessing it um and what point is something debilitating and then I do think one of the things that we are this feels a little bit like old man on the porch stuff but I think it I do think

[24:47]  we're lacking a little bit of perspective you know this is where I think the kid kids sometimes and especially in a modern privileged era and again not all kids in 2024 are privileged by but um everybody should have some perspect you know we lose some historical perspective on on how well so many of us do have it um and I don't think that is good so I think sometimes again so it's not you know I was I don't want to minimize somebody's fear and anxiety but as a therapist you know one of the things I think that the therapy world has lost is like I'm not paid to be somebody's friend actually most of the time I am paid to tell them the truth that their friends won't tell them which sometimes that that truth is listen you actually need to be more worried about this thing than you think you do your trauma or

[25:33]  your story is actually making you minimize the danger that this man has in your life or you're minimizing domestic violence we need to talk about that but also I I sometimes we have clients where it's hey you're maximizing this you are catastrophizing this and those are those are real conversations too for different people at different times for different reasons it's not a global blanket thing um but I think there's one of those that we as a society are way more comfortable having um than the other I do think right now we're kind of not allowed to tell anybody that their feelings are a little bit over exaggerated because again we're worried that that's how that's going to be perceived but um no feelings are the best I mean I I get I tell my you know I

[26:20]  think my daughter got that from me I mean I'm a therapist and I'm I'll watch a commercial and I will be moved to tears like I am easily moved I'm an easily moved person but um but I don't love fear I don't love anxiety I don't think those things are always great if they are you know maximize all the time what do you think about the perspective of some people who often give a little bit of I would say criticism of spaces like mental health and therapy often talk about therapists are often using their patient or their client base is kind of an annuity right going to keep you coming back for months and months and months and months and months and months and months there's no UND diagnosis plan here it's just keep on coming keep paying for your sessions and we're not really going to make a lot of progress here what do you say to those type of people um they are my least

[27:08]  favorite people professionally and personally probably in the world you know and it's it's I think it's because I am I am in the work that you know it's kind of like if you're um I know good if you're a plumber and you see a plumber doing just a terrible job you're like you're more pissed off about that cuz hey you represent all plumbers what the heck are you doing I feel so strongly about what you just said um because again I I I do feel like we all represent our team our thing whe whatever profession you know if you're in media podcast what like you like it or not you're representing the thing and if you you're either the best of that thing or the worst of that thing and you're and everything has a narrative around it both a positive and a negative and you're either leaning one way or the

[27:54]  other and I think unfortunately that is a fair critique I think most of the time people get the motivations wrong I don't think the motivation is usually just like pure greed um actually don't find a lot of greedy Human Services people um I think it's more incompetence and lack of training and lack of confidence to know and then a little bit of that um buying into what these parents bought into when they give their kid The Ninth Place trophy which is like oh you can't actually do this without me and now it's becoming bordering on a little of an an ego thing and also what are you trying to say about your client and what are you trying to say about you and like if I tried to UNP like so when when I did supervision of other therapists that's something I would I would hit on in a

[28:42]  big way it's like hey are you fostering dependence cuz you better not be fostering dependence like and whether it's um you know consciously or subconsciously that's one of the absolute I I I think that is a cardinal sin of our work and when I'd have some clients who felt like they were coming just to chat I would say seems like our time's up this is like this is awesome and again I understand why that's hard for clients because they would they would sometimes say oh well actually last week I had this happen I'd say awesome sounds like a Tuesday you know call me when something real happens and I guarantee you'll be able to handle like just you got to push them away you know my my oldest actually um had a had a counselor that had some of that and I really challenged that counselor say hey what what is our goal here what is the

[29:30]  goal again you always hate to be that therapist who goes to another therapist just like if you're a teacher who shows up to a parent teacher conference but I needed to know like what is the goal of this the goal is not a 12 year long treatment plan um and the goal is not that my daughter thinks she needs to reach out to a professional for a little bit of a friend issue because like that's just that's just life stuff that's stuff that we as a family we as a community we as you know her grandparents her church so yeah man I get fired up about that but I do think it's I don't think it's a profit motive there's way easier ways to make profit I think it's a a little bit of just um lack of good training and then a little bit of an overinflated ego and kind of a misplaced fear that oh my God what if something terrible happens and and I'm

[30:17]  not there it's like well this person lived a long life before they came to you they're going to live a long life after if every therapist doesn't realize we are a temporary stop on this person's Journey then they probably need do a lot more work on themselves I was having a conversation on the podcast with a brain surgeon with a PhD in neuroscience and I asked him what is the most important skill set a human being today can develop in themselves and he said emotional regulation because when we can't control our emotions we can't control how we perceive a situation information that comes to us and our behavior in that moment is not going to be as grounded as it should be what do you think about that skill set on the hierarchy if you will of emotional regulation how important do you think that is for a person oh I think that's huge I usually call it like emotional intelligence I

[31:04]  think it's a similar in in a similar field where it's just like yeah we're we're you know life is nothing but unpredictable life is nothing but a series of curveballs and yeah maybe our curveballs now are smaller than they used to be but they're still curveballs um again I'll take my daughter you she's in fourth grade and you know when you're in fourth grade and it was funny I remember like a year ago when I really realized oh man she's like a real person now she used the word betrayed she's like one of my friends betrayed me and I'm like holy moly that is a word are you okay we're now entering this phase of Life using betay yeah Consciousness like this is heavy we're Shakespearean Netflix series level stuff um and so yeah I mean life is just a constant series of ups and downs and

[31:52]  challenges and yeah how does that make you feel as a as a dad though Matt you know what I'm saying a fourth grader is coming home and saying you know Dad someone betrayed me today do you have a little bit of a natural reaction to say like you're still a kid don't get into this so quick oh yeah I me I think there's a protection side of me there's part of me that kind of laughs because I'm probably um a little histrionic sometimes and I use tramatic language sometime and so I'm like oh crap I think she's my kid like so there's a little bit of ownership there I probably did I probably did some of that when I was a kid um but yeah you know again it's so that's a strong initial feeling that she had uh the skill is all right you still got to go knock out that test later you still got to go and eat a good dinner so you know what I watch for her and amongst my kids and friends and even again people I work with is how how what

[32:41]  is your ability to Pivot what's your ability to you know I think compartmentalize is usually framed as a negative I don't necess view that as a negative I view it as like your ability to take something put it on a shelf and then grab it back when you want to grab it back I think is a superpower um because otherwise if you've got 50 jugs that are just spilling and smashing and that's just life is chaos and that person there's no way that person can be a great father wife husband worker leader if if just that's how your feelings are washing over you so I do now again people who put it on the shelf and don't talk about it for 10 years I think that's called suppression but people who are able to you know again in that moment hey it's

[33:28]  4:00 I got to get on with Keenan and talk to him for a little bit I'm going to put this up here and I'm going to pick that back up in an hour and a half I do think that's a I think anybody who's achieved any kind of success has probably mastered that to some degree I agree I just know it's incredibly difficult there's a really good book that I read um maybe early 2021 called indistractable now it's a book about the the author his guy name is near I believe I can't I don't remember what his last name is but he was a engagement specialist for social media platforms like Facebook meta Instagram this type of stuff and then he realized what he was doing and helping them gamify engagement was he was also having a super negative effect on people's ability to emotionally regulate themselves and this is the analogy that he gave he said what next time you go out into society try and be an observer

[34:17]  if you see anybody who has a moment of discomfort awkwardness uncomfortability standing in line doesn't know what to do with themselves what do they do they naturally pull out their device and we've anchored this escapism of not wanting to deal with that emotion by going to our device hundreds of thousands if yet millions of times and so anytime when we feel like we need to get away we automatically grab out our device and he said let's think about the long-term effects of this Behavior being normalized what's going to happen to the future of our society when everybody doesn't know how to deal with the emotion they want to run away from everything in the instant pulling out their phone and going into that Digital World yep yeah and again I think the difference you know what I always try to remind folks is again I I don't think our instincts have changed that much even over you know centuries I think our

[35:06]  tools have changed and again the speed has changed but I bet people who um were living through ancient Rome also wanted to escape feeling you know and they had their ways and they had their you know drinking wine at 700 in the morning and but you know like they had their ways of coping and their good coping skills and their bad coping skills and their escapism we just certainly have so much more than we've ever had and I do think um there's something again with the eyes to the eyes looking into this thing like the eyes are kind of the window to the soul and intimacy there's something there but that Genie is so far out of the bottle that we really truly do now have to just learn how to integrate it I think people who um purely fight against it I respect them I respect the hell out of it like if somebody can raise a

[35:53]  modern family and they just they had five kids born in 2020 and those kids somehow don't have a phone until they're 25 like I I that's probably somebody I would just love to hang out with but I I don't think that's the mass I I don't think that's NE and again now it's also are those kids prepared for the modern tools or are they going to go out and you know it's like there was a day where people didn't drive and then at some point people had to start preparing their kids for this giant death mobile that they had to learn how to Har you know you had to learn how to harness this thing somehow we've harnessed cars pretty well um better than we used to right I mean there's less accidents probably from a percentage standpoint than we were driving around model T's I'm hoping something like I'm always an optimist I'm hoping something like that evolves with the social media where we actually

[36:40]  learn how to harness this thing better but we are we are in the middle of it and I'm hope we're at hopefully like the top of that bell curve of unhealthiness and maybe it kind of in you're and I in you're in my lifetime it better come back down otherwise we definitely lost I mean I think we're kind of starting to see that you know we see younger Generations me specifically I recognize the personal pressures that I was having put on me by things that were outside of my control so I don't have Instagram Tik Tok or any social media on my phone and I'll tell you what it's given me a lot more Focus back to focus on the important stuff you know one of the things that I love talking about in the podcast as well Matt is kind of our development in leadership so I know you being a mental health professional often does not translate into being a CEO of an organization that's doing tens of millions of dollars a year how have you kind of grown into this role to be the

[37:28]  leader not the person who's giving face-to-face services to the clients how has that been for you um you know it it took a while I always tell people I think I was a leader for about seven years before I became a leader like a like I think before I really pivoted to acting like a leader I think I was I think I had a leadership title for seven years before I became a leader um I had some interesting early exposure like I said kind of in my youth ministry and Young Life days where people are like hey lead this random group of adults out to Romania I wouldn't have called that leadership I was just calling that like a sweet free ride to Romania but when I look back that was truly that's my first test of of leading people and managing emotions and managing expectations and stuff so you know I think my my skills in um assessing people's needs analyzing how they're feeling analyzing how

[38:16]  they're doing analyzing where they can be pushed more than they think they can um my comfort level with discomfort and tough conversations all of that stuff that a good therapist a th% informs my leadership I did have to and then again I think some even just my my um analysis of systems you know my my my ability to map on to like what's happening in this family system that's dysfunctional has helped me analyze what's happening in like a child welfare system or like I I can kind of quickly piece together okay these five things are driving these four things and these three solutions might stop the and that's a very similar process to like treatment planning as a therapist so some of those things I don't know why I I think the main reason why people

[39:03]  struggle to make that jump is actually just the discomfort with conflict and the discomfort with um I think in our field in the mental health field we do a disservice by creating a dichotomy between business and heart and like making things there like they are mutually exclusive things or success and Mission or success I just hate all of that stuff I hate all those either or things and so I do think we kind of subconsciously train people that well you have to choose one of those paths or the other um and I had a couple leaders in my life that showed me that that's not that's not the case or it's like hey you can both you can be like a a badass successful person provide for your family um and do the thing that I think you were put on this Earth to do for

[39:51]  people and even flipping that more is like hey actually the people leaders of this world World should lean into that more like there's kind of U I think there's this is probably sloppy language but I identified this early that again in our field we kind of have this like obsession with Martyrs and martyrdom stuff where it's like um we reward the person who looks like the most like bruised and broken Warrior like the social worker who works the longest hours gets the gets the most high fives and it's like I don't think that's great I don't think that's necessarily you know it's like hey and and it's almost like they wear it as a badge of honor of like I worked 90 hours and I made 30k it's like dude we need to talk about that we need to talk about those 90 hours and that 30k now again I love what you're doing but let's not do a badge of

[40:39]  honor something is either broken systematically um because this is not good and I think we've Al we've kind of rewarded that and then we've scoffed at people who look like they're having business success or companies that are having business success and and automatically assume they are less heart some of that's messy and I I I try whatever I can I try to blow all that up because I think it's all bull crap what about if we were to go back to a younger version of Matt who was going to go down this leadership journey and impacting as many lives as he had and he as he has and if you could spend five private minutes with that younger version of yourself what advice would you give to that younger version of you to navigate to get to where we're at here today oh yeah um well again I I absolutely did not plan on going into leadership I I really thought

[41:28]  my career I I I was convinced my career was going to be Goodwill Hunting and I was going to be a therapist with a sweater and rocking a Robin Williams kind of haircut thing and then work teaching at a community college like that looked that felt like it deep into my 80s that was going to be so because I really did love doing the work and I actually loved teaching for a little bit so like I was like that's what my life's going to be and that's going to be an awesome life and I got kind of thrust into leadership stuff um just one day I showed up at one of my first first jobs and our boss had disappeared and our regional director came and said hey Matt you seem enthusiastic do you mind taking over and I said yeah as long as you don't mind I don't know what I'm doing I will be happy to do it and I just kind of you know the rest is just rocking and rolling but again for those first 5 to seven years I thought that the thing

[42:16]  that made me a great individual contributor would make me a great leader and it's a it is a completely different skill set um that I didn't master I thought that just through enthusiasm and energy and role modeling that people would follow me and people followed me but they didn't charge up the hill with me they they they went as far as I would go but there's a couple companies where there's one where I left and then I think things went South pretty quick and I looked back at that with a lot of regret and say oh you know what I don't think I prepared a single person to be better than they were before I got there I kind of just tried to like individually push this boulder up the hill um because my I probably was bad with conflict I didn't want to ask

[43:05]  people to do more I didn't want to delegate I I would have I would have saved five years of life and energy and maybe even some companies if I could go back and say Hey listen your job is no longer to just be you your job is to just get the most out of your team that's all this is about and and that would have been a a shock to me um but it would have helped me a lot there's an amazing quote I like to bring into these conversations sometimes by an author named Kevin Kelly he says you lead by letting others know what you expect of them which may exceed what they expect of themselves provide them a reputation they can live up to oh nice I love that yeah one of my um leaders did an exercise that it's it's cheesy but it sticks out and I've mentioned it a few times recently is he was in a room as a

[43:53]  bunch of us he was our CEO and he said hey I want everybody to raise your hand as high as you can and everybody raises their hand he goes now everybody raised your hand just a little bit higher and then everybody did and he's like so what the hell just happened there and we like dang okay you know and he's like listen just naturally you think as Leaders especially heart leaders that all your people are giving everything that they got nobody is giving everything that they got by default like that is so exceptionally rare and again your job is to actually pull that extra 10 15 20% know where that balance is um and again I think it's just such a simple exercise where he he literally said raise it as high he goes I did say raise it high as I can right and now I just asked you to do more everybody was capable of doing more I was like I'll remember that that's a good that's not bad I'm going

[44:40]  to save that one that that's not bad so last thing I want to kind of talk about here is kind of you know big baseball guy Babe Ruth of classic I like to use the analogy standing at the plate calling his shot what is the shot that you're going to call over the next couple years Matt how are we going to contribute to the community what are we hoping for out there oh it's a good are you a Ken Griffey Jr guy absolutely man Lefty all right um you know I think I have seen a shift and this is a little bit specific to New Hope but I think it's actually broader than just what we do but I've seen a shift again my my world is adolescent child mental health right I mean so this is and this is the world I think I'm going to be in until it's over is we' have seen a shift in recognizing that family is everything that family even like insurance companies are starting to

[45:28]  pay for family interventions and family services that even 10 years ago they would have never done CU they and and we're actually there are Services now that insurance will pay for for kids as young as one or two and you don't have to have a kid that's got a diagnosis so again we're moving away from like let's we're not pathologizing the kid but we are recognizing that this family is probably more at risk because of 50 different factors that we can measure and so let's get in as early so I think we are shifting earlier and more family centered and I think a lot of it like a lot of people in like the private world that doesn't have to deal with insurance has been doing that for a long time because we can do whatever we want but if if we don't get the insurance industry and the payers and the whole apparatus on board um then systems don't change and they're starting to get on

[46:15]  board because they're seeing better returns for that they're saying oh okay if I pay for family therapy for $90 versus individual therapy for 70 the 90 is actually getting me a better return on investment because they only need six sessions as opposed to the 20 individual sessions and so I think um that is going I think in 20 years that'll be the norm and we will look back at this period from the '90s to the early 2020s where there's a mental health boom but especially with kids it was still focused on just working with the kid and we were like why would we waste so much of our time and why did we actually in some ways kind of be anti-parent in a lot of cases and I think there's a lot of therapists that look back and say you know what I did I spent a lot of time building relationships with kids as opposed to rebuilding relationships amongst

[47:02]  families and that was a Miss um I think that's going to be a Great Awakening though I think that's going to be a really good thing that we won't I don't see that reversing I think once we get over that hump we're not going to all of a sudden go back to you know like certain medical Evolutions we're not going back to certain things from the 1910s you know like with medically like once you once you reach a new Plateau it's like okay we're here now and we're moving forward I think in my space family therapy and early intervention are going to become the norm and we'll see some we'll see some better outcomes because of it yeah I mean we're getting back to First principles here right treating the cause not the symptom which is really important so you know one of the traditions we have here on the podcast Matt as we put the the wheels down to land this thing is our previous guest wanted to ask you a blind question and

[47:49]  we talked a little bit I love this man this is a sweet idea yeah so this the question that came from our last guest was what is the ROI on being a heart centered leader oh um that's a great way to frame that um I don't think I used the word the acronym Roi until like three years ago so I I think you know again this would be corny but you know I life is short I believe you only get one of them I think life should be lived to the Max and that I I get really sad when I see people who feel like they have to go and do a job that they hate and then have fun on the weekends or enjoy something for like a fleeting hour on a Thursday night it's like I love every minute of my exp now again life is not always perfect but because I get to

[48:37]  lead I'm the same person at work that I am at home because I'm living in a place that just lets me leave in my heart and my excitement my enthusiasm and my ability to be moved by people and constantly impressed by the resilience of you it just makes life so much better man the ROI is that like I had the same amount of fun at 11:00 a.m. in a staff meeting on Thursday then I do Saturday night at a Hornets game in a lot of cases maybe more fun because the Hornets are terrible but like just actually like just generally because I just don't know how you could how you could do it like back to I wouldn't want to compartmentalize that I wouldn't want to compartmentalize 40 hours of my week as something that isn't meaningful or purposeful and you don't have to be in this space to find meaning and purpose I just hope everybody finds meaning and purpose in whatever the heck they're

[49:23]  choosing to do for that much time of their life well man I think that's a beautiful place for us to be able to put a bow on this I just want to say thank you for everybody who's tuning in watching and listening today Matt you are the definition of heart and hustle and I'm so glad you're able to join us on the show man I really appreciate it oh dude Ken this was awesome thanks for the opportunity and I love the conversations you're having so keep doing it and that's a wrap guys we'll catch you in the next one