56 - Heavy Is the Crown | The Emotional Cost of Leadership No One Talks About

Welcome to the Impact Podcast. I'm Eddie Wilson, here to help you visualize what others cannot see, create opportunities where others have failed, and push you to build empires where once there was empty space. Let's embark on this journey together and make a difference in this world. Welcome to the Impact Podcast with Eddie Wilson. Today we're going to tackle the topic, and it's this topic that you've heard talked about so many times. You've heard people say it, it's in songs, whether it's a rap song or a rock song, and it is, heavy is the head that wears the crown. We're going to talk about the emotional cost of leadership today. I think it's the one thing that most people do not talk about, and they don't reference when it comes to leadership. They typically talk about the weight of growth, or the weight of scale, or the weight of people, but I'm going to talk about the emotional cost of leadership today. As a leader of your company, or your family, or whatever it is, whatever leadership position you hold today, I want you to think through this, because I think much of what I'm going to say is going to resonate, and I'm going to give you some relief from that emotional weight that you feel. I'm going to give it a name, I'm going to give it some feelings, I want to actually bring it out, and give it some characteristics, so that we can identify it and understand it. Then I want to position it in a way that helps you deal with it more properly. Today, the theme is, is everyone wants the crown, right? Everyone wants that position of leadership. We've talked about that so much in the podcast about everyone wants the position, everyone wants the pay, everyone wants the accolades, but very few people actually want to carry the weight of what it means to be a leader, and that's so true. Everyone wants the crown, but very few people are prepared for the weight of it, for the weight of it. Today, we're going to talk about the emotional burden of leadership, the loneliness of responsibility, the quiet cost of success, and ultimately why a lot of leaders struggle after they win when they've gotten to the top, when they now have the position of influence or authority, or they have the employees, or they have the paycheck, right? Why do they struggle afterwards? So our historical figure today, which I've talked about so many times, is Marcus Aurelius. I love Marcus Aurelius. His meditations are oftentimes something I go to. I don't know about you, but I go through periods of time where I struggle with sleep. There are times that I sleep amazing. This is not a time frame right now that I'm in where I am sleeping well. I am not sleeping at all. And I think that many of you that are driven go through these phases of life. And so oftentimes when I am sleepless at night, I spend time in prayer and meditation, but I also find myself grabbing books and things that soothe the mental anguish that we go through as entrepreneurs, as driven people. And one of those is Marcus Aurelius' meditations, because Marcus is constantly dealing with the weight of the internal versus the external. He had absolute power, and in this power, he wrote journal entries, and these journal entries are called his meditations. And they're filled with doubt and pressure and discipline and emotional restraint. And he gives us just a really good insight. As much as I think that I've got pressure in my life, I can't imagine the pressure of the power of the position he had in essentially ruling the greatest empire on the earth and at its zenith, at its pinnacle. He was the most powerful man in the world, and every day he reminded himself how to stay grounded. Every day he would remind himself of this internal struggle, this internal war. So let's jump into it. As way of introduction, the thing that no one talks about is not growth, scale, winning success. That's what everyone talks about. And oftentimes when somebody says, heavy's the head that wears the crown, that's what they're talking about. It's like the weight of success, the weight of scaling, the weight of the financial, the weight of winning or losing. And the thing that no one talks about is the emotional cost. The responsibility that comes with leadership, the pressure that just refuses to turn off. When so many of your employees get to go home and they get to put it away for a little while, they get to have time with their family, you sit there when you're with your family working so hard to try to turn it off just for a few minutes or trying to gain some sleep, but yet you can't get relief from it. And that emotional pressure that just never turns off. And the higher you go, the quieter it gets, but the heavier it feels. And so going back to this person of Marcus Aurelius, Marcus had both power and pressure. He was the emperor of Rome. He had wars on multiple fronts. He laid in his bed at nighttime. He didn't just have one army out. He had multiple armies out. He's got wars on multiple fronts. He's got massive political tension. He's got the Senate that is oftentimes fickle. He's got internal betrayal inside of his own internal cabinet and people. One thing that's rarely talked about are the plagues that are actually sweeping the empire. Marcus would oftentimes have to quiet his own personal anxieties down just over the plagues, like being afraid of catching this plague that was ravaging the empire. There were fires. They were, I mean, like he went through it in so many different layers. It wasn't just like one layer. It was multiple, multiple layers. And yet in all of that, emperor wars, political tension, betrayal, plagues, fires, he writes this to himself. He says, you have power over your mind, not the outside events. He said this, one of my favorite quotes. He said, waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Just be one. Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one. The key insight that I find in reading the meditations of Marcus and thinking through this emotional cost of leadership is that even at the highest level, he was managing his inner world way more than he was managing his outer world. When you read his meditations, he's not talking about the external. He's always talking about managing the internal leadership doesn't remove pressure. It often multiplies it. And how we deal with that internal pressure really dictates what type of leader we are. Marcus Aurelius is a great leader, not because he was winning at wars or not because the Roman Empire remembered him as such. It was because he managed that internal war. So here's the emotional reality of leadership. We can look at a Marcus Aurelius, we can gain strength from his insights, we can try to understand who he is. But the fact of the matter is, is it's also a distant, it's a distant reading, it's a distant historical reference point. But what about you right now? Loneliness increases with responsibility. Oftentimes, I find myself in this place of being alone. Fewer people actually understand my decisions. Fewer people understand the cuts that you have to make. Fewer understand the choices of why this over that. Fewer people understand the choices of your time or your position or what you're choosing to do. And you can't share everything. One of the most difficult things about leadership is the management of the communication and management of information. Understanding that if you share certain pieces of information of which you want to, because you want to unload it off of your shoulders, it can only undermine the very position and place that you're trying to take your company or your people or your family. You carry all these things that others do not see. You're surrounded but alone. It's the weirdest irony in leadership where you feel like the masses are around you. The people are around you but yet you feel isolated and you feel alone. There have been many times as we built the Aspire Tour where I've had the weight of, we've got a newer company and so you always have weight when you're building something. I've had the weight of maybe some personal issues or the weight of some health issues, the weight of building a company, the weight of the financial issues. And it's the greatest irony because I go to the Aspire Tour and there's thousands of people and they are excited to hear what you have to say and you might teach something and they're asking you and they're surrounding you with questions. Yet you're the only person in the world that knows the weight that you're dealing with. And it's the weirdest feeling of being surrounded but yet extremely alone. So loneliness increases with responsibility and clarity number two comes with cost. Every decision eliminates options. It's like you have a finite amount of capital, a finite amount of time but ultimately a finite amount of resources and decisions. And so every decision you make eliminates options. And every yes doesn't open doors, every yes closes another door because the higher you rise in leadership the less availability you have to make choices. And so I find that it's like you take the president of the United States and you think like well somebody who has that level of leadership or opportunity must have a million choices and the fact of the matter is they don't. The higher you go the less choices you have. Think about every celebrity, the higher they rise in notoriety the less they can go out into public, the less they can just choose to do what they want. Oftentimes the person who has the least amount of leadership has the most amount of options. Every decision eliminates options, every yes closes a door, doesn't open it. And every move affects someone's life. Every choice that I make, think about every choice you make, it's not a choice that just affects my own life. It's a choice that affects the livelihood of others, it affects the options of others, it affects the ability for others to make choices and have autonomy in their own life. Leadership is about choices and knowing that oftentimes every choice I make is life to something and death to something else. Every time I choose to give my time to something it essentially eliminates time for something else. Every time I give a resource to someone it typically eliminates a resource to someone else. So loneliness increases with responsibility. Clarity always comes with some level of cost and you never get to turn it off. You never get to turn it off. This is the emotional reality of leadership. You don't get to turn off, the business follows you home, the weight follows you into your quiet spaces. Even rest requires extreme discipline. I find that when I'm not sleeping the only way to find more sleep is to actually find more discipline. It's my diet. It's the time spent watching a screen. It's allowing myself to process mentally past a certain point specific to a business or a problem. It becomes discipline just to get the rest that I need. How many of you feel that weight I'm talking about right now? You feel that weight, you feel like a weight on your shoulders. It's that emotional reality of leadership where there's loneliness and there's cost involved and you don't ever get to turn it off. So the emotional reality of leadership is that. There's also what I call the internal war. I'm going to bring this to a place where you can actually bear this a little bit better here in just a minute. But there's the internal war. Just like Marcus Aurelius, he's constantly talking about managing his ego, managing his fear, managing frustration, staying grounded in the truth, not allowing people to inflate ideas or inflate opportunities, but staying grounded in truth. So in order for you to constantly manage the internal war, you must ask yourself, who am I when no one is watching? Don't let the accolades or the applause of others around you dictate who you are. What voice is leading me internally? Where is my center? Where is that truth? What is guiding me? Am I being guided by my ego or am I being guided and led by truth and my calling? Am I reacting or am I responding? If you lose control of yourself, this is the internal war, if you lose control of yourself, you'll eventually lose control of what you've built. If you lose control of yourself, you'll ultimately and eventually lose control of what you've built. So here's the here's the invitation. Here's how I get past all of that, right? I want to give you a pressure valve that you can release because so many of you as I've talked with you and I've met with you and I get DMs from you, talked to me about the pressure of leadership, the pressure of trying to produce. I got an email from a lady who literally said just this past week, I'm in desperation mode. She's like, I listened to your podcast and I'm in desperation mode. I'm on my last, I'm kind of in my last, you know, phase, I'm on my last breath, I'm doing everything I can, but it's either survival or failure now. It's not like I just get to coast through life. She's like, the business choice that I've made has led me to the very point where it's either make it or it's break it. It's life or it's death. She was like, that's where I'm at. How do you cope with that? That was her, that was her question to me. I literally got a DM from somebody who said, if I don't raise this capital on this deal, not only am I going to lose my own investment, which is my family's livelihood, but I'm also going to lose the investment of all the investors that have trusted me. Right? Think about the pressure and I get these emails and DMs every week and not just one or two, but it's six or eight or 10. It's people that are just reaching out with this weight of leadership. So let me reframe it for you. Let me share with you the secret of how to reframe and the actual skill and the process that I use in order to carry this weight more effectively. Here's the invitation. This is where it gets powerful and it gets very intense because this is the framing that changes everything. Listen to these words as I pinned them the other day as I was speaking to myself and I was speaking to that lady who said life or death. This is what I wrote back to her. I said, maybe the weight that you feel isn't a sign that you're doing it wrong. Maybe it's proof you're carrying something that matters. Listen to that one more time because the reframing is so important because oftentimes you're sitting there thinking what the weight on your shoulders is this life or death. Is it pass or fail? Is it success or is it failure? Maybe the weight you feel isn't a sign you're doing it wrong. Maybe it's proof you're carrying something that matters. You're carrying something that has massive value. If you can reframe all of this from pressure to responsibility, from weight to trust, from burden to assignment, you can begin to now point towards purpose and infuse passion and find calling inside of what you're doing. What I find is that oftentimes if I can reframe, even in the middle of the night when I'm struggling with the weight of the decisions I've made or the decisions that I still have to be made or yet to be made, if I can switch that framing to, this pressure is just responsibility. I've been given a weight of something that matters, something that has real value. This weight that I carry is really just trust and this burden that I'm shouldering is really just an assignment. You've heard me talk so much about faith and my belief system and what I oftentimes will reframe is this, is that if I am carrying a burden, I believe in the sovereignty of God. I believe in a Creator God. I believe in the sovereignty of God and oftentimes the weight or the burden that I feel, I can transfer that to assignment. If I'm feeling weight or burden, therefore I must be worthy of being bestowed that assignment that now I just have the responsibility of carrying. But I believe in the sovereignty of God. I believe that I'm not ever given something that I can't handle. I'm given something that I was prepared for, that I was created for, and that I was assigned to. That changes the entire framing of how I carry that weight. I don't believe that I need to escape the weight and I don't believe that you need to escape the weight either. I need to grow strong enough to carry it. Whatever you're carrying today, it doesn't matter if it's health related, financial related, business related, if it's relationships, whatever it is. I remember these, if you've had a child, I remember the very, very first days of bringing home a baby. I remember my 24-year-old son now, Skyler. I remember bringing him home. I remember the immense weight of thinking, oh my gosh, I have to care for this human's life who can't take care of themselves. It was a huge weight. I remember putting him in the car on the way home and I was terrified. You just have this weight of like, oh, another human depends on me. The thing is, is you didn't escape the weight. Think about, for some of you, now you have a little bit older children. You didn't need to escape the weight. You just needed to grow strong enough to carry it. You need to get into the rhythm of, this human depends on me and I'm capable of taking care of this human. I'm capable of providing for this human. I'm capable of providing a good life and a safe environment. The role of a father wasn't to try to pass the burden. The role was to grow into a person who was capable of carrying that weight. That's everything in your life. It's not about getting rid of the weight. It's about growing into the ability to carry it. It's about shouldering it long enough that now the muscles and the strength are enough to shoulder that burden. The last line I want to give you, for those of you that are carrying this emotional weight of that heavy crown of leadership is this. I want you to think about it. This is something, I wrote it down and gave it to one of the people that reached out the other day and I want to give it to you. This is something that if I were you and you're feeling what I'm saying right now, and not all of you do, some of you carry this weight of leadership very easily and it's not a big deal and you get it naturally. Some of us struggle a little bit more with that and some of us feel that weight and that weight is a lot. I want you to write this down. This is something that's worthy of a sticky note on your mirror in the morning or whatever it is that you do to remind yourself, to bring into remembrance. I do a lot of things that just bring into remembrance these things that I want to live inside of. The space I want to live inside of. I want to create the space and live inside of it. This is the space. The crown isn't heavy because it's wrong for you. It's heavy because it was never meant to be carried lightly. Whatever you're experiencing today, if it feels heavy, it's because it's important. It's because you're doing something that matters. It's because you're moving into a space that you've never been before. It's about building something that hasn't been built or it's about carrying a weight you've never carried and one more time the crown isn't heavy because it's wrong for you. It's heavy because it was never meant to be carried lightly. This is something that if you are constantly carrying the weight of leadership, I'd write it down. I'd memorize that phrase and I'd live inside of that space because when you believe that you're called to something, when you believe that it was an assignment for you, it changes. One last thought and that's this. I don't know if you have ever been, if you can remember, go back into your middle school days. My middle school days, I know a lot of people, that's where the wheels came off of a lot of the issues that they deal with today. For me, it wasn't and the reason it wasn't is because I had a teacher that believed in me and my sixth grade year, I had a teacher that believed in me. She was my English teacher and she took me aside and she said, Eddie, I want to speak to you about something. I said, okay, I thought I was in trouble. I got in trouble a lot as a kid so I just assumed that I was in trouble and I thought that I didn't know what it was but I got in trouble mainly because I was an instigator. I love to have a good time. I push the boundaries of everything and so therefore the principal office was a consistent place for me, especially in grade school. She took me aside and she said, her name was Mrs. Black and she took me aside and she said, Eddie, I just want to recognize something in you and I said, okay. She said, I just want to recognize that you are a leader and she said and leadership comes with responsibility. She said, you wheeled it for good sometimes and you wheeled it for bad sometimes. She said, you can take the entire class down a path of disrespect, a path of not learning. She was like, you can be the most disruptive person in my entire classroom. She said, or the days that you're engaged, she said, you bring the entire classroom to life. She said, could we partner together this year, you being the leader of this class, and she said, and I want you to show the responsibility of all the people in this class being a group of people that either moves forward or is constantly in resistance to the things that need to be taught this year. I had never been called a leader before. I didn't realize that all those feelings that I had and I sensed that I could carry the weight of the class with me. I sensed that I could be disruptive. I sensed that sometimes I could be the class clown. At the first time, I realized there was a mission. There was a wait. There was an assignment and when it was pointed in that direction, all I wanted to do was now make sure that everyone around me was cared for and we all went in the right direction. Think about the power that that teacher bestowed upon me, but the weight and the direction that it gave me. I think honestly, I'm a leader today because of moments like that where Ms. Black, she didn't say, hey Eddie or Mrs. Black, I said, where she said, hey Eddie, stop, you know, being disruptive. Stop, you know, like she could have called me out and she probably did a lot and her husband also was a teacher and he hated me. I mean, like hated me with a passion and let me know it and took me to the principal's office, but it was a husband and wife teacher and he did not like me and she for the first time helped me identify that framing and that framing changed everything for me. It became one of the greatest years that I remember in my young life, that sixth grade year. I've talked to so many people where they're like sixth grade was the worst year of my life, you know, it was where, you know, middle school and I got picked on and I was bullied and all that stuff, right? Sixth grade for me was the very first time I remember intentionally leading, right? And what I want to do for you today is just reframe, right? Like what if all the weight you feel is just an assignment? What if it's just you as a sixth grader being told, look, all that you have done up to this point is preparation for what is next and what you get to do with this assignment is take a bunch of people on a journey with you, that their lives become better, they accomplish more things, the world around you becomes a better place, right? And that's what I want you to think of when you feel that weight, that emotional weight of leadership. Yes, heavy is the head that wears the crown, but it's also one of the greatest privileges you're ever going to be given in life. Thanks so much for being a part of the podcast and for listening today. Love to connect with you further and you can connect with me on social media at Eddie Wilson official on any of the social media channels.