You’re Still Not Right! (PG13)

You’re Still Not Right! (PG13 - Enter at Your Own Risk) (Beware of Potty Talk)

Well, the neck tumor was out and I was healing well.  No massive bulge in my neck when I strain lifting anymore, and if I flex my neck (yes, that’s a thing) I only have veins and muscles on one side!  So, that is almost as cool and I was a little excited I still had a party trick! My neck is numb on that side, so shaving sucks and I don’t really know what I am doing unless I am looking in a mirror.  So there is a fear that I might accidentally cut my throat and not even feel it.  But overall I feel good, and getting back to normal, except I am still not right…

About the same time I was getting my neck diagnosed and treated, I was also dealing with sleep issues related to having to get up and urinate 6-10 times a night. I was barely getting any sleep at all. This had been going on for well over a year and was definitely wearing on me in ways I didn’t even realize.  I understand why sleep deprivation is used for interrogation purposes because I would have told you anything you wanted to know if you promised me I could sleep. Granted I drink about 1 to 1.5 gallons of water per day but most of that is before noon.  The longer this went on the longer my bathroom breaks would take as well and the “Flow got Slow.”  There was a hope that “MAYBE” my tumor had been pushing on some nerve that was affecting my bladder, or at least the neurological relay that said “dude, you ‘got’s’ to go man!”  This was a slim hope and unfortunately one that did not hold true.  So after the neck surgery it was time to figure out what was going on below the Equator, South of the Mason Dixon line, way down South in Dixie (anatomically speaking).

My family doctor referred me to a urologist.  Again, I don’t do doctors.  Not because I don’t like them, but because I never needed them, so now another specialist to add to the list!  I think I knew a couple jokes about Urologists when I was in Elementary School?  Maybe that was the planet Uranus? I don’t really remember, but somebody has to be the butt of the joke!  My frustration was starting to build and I wanted to know, “When was this medical stuff going to end?” NOT ANYTIME SOON!  I got my referral to go see a urologist and waited about 2-3 weeks to get in.  I show up for my appointment and I was the youngest one there by 30 years. I didn’t know if this should concern me or if the staff would like me more because they didn’t have to deal with a really really old dude (just an old one). 

I am not really shy, and not much embarrasses me, but this was new territory.  Why am I here?  Well, (in a really quiet voice I explained) I have been peeing 6-11 times a night and can’t sleep, and my “flow won’t go” (this became one of my rapping tag lines).  It has been happening for nearly a year now and thought I ought to have it looked at.  Little did I know they were going to do a whole lot more than look.  

The nurse took me back, “Hey Brice, didn’t think I would see you here.” Not for sure what that means?  Is it a compliment?  “Well, I didn’t think I would know everyone who works here, so that makes us even”.  She asked me more questions than a four-year-old trying to figure out the purpose of life.  She moved me from the interrogation room to the waiting room for the doctor.  His room was different.  There were new instruments out that I had never see before so I was excited to have things to touch and play with while I waited.  Don’t worry I didn’t blow up the plastic glove to look like a giant turkey (although I have gotten in trouble for that in the past).  Eventually, the doctor came in with a new nurse and I told him my entire story again.  He asked some questions like:  does it hurt when you pee, is there blood, do you leak during the day?  Seriously, this was getting weird now.  No, no, no.  I just go to the bathroom a lot and can’t sleep and now my “flow won’t go.” 

He wanted me to do a pee test in the corner of his office in a bucket that had a plastic cone around it.  Kind of like the “cone of shame” a dog wears to keep it from biting or licking itself after a surgery.  It really kind of made me feel the same as what a dog must, I thought to myself.  He was working on the computer and the nurse was laying some things out for the second part of this party and here I was in the corner trying to pee.  Seriously, this is a lot of pressure.  Supposedly it was like a radar gun in there and it was going to measure the speed and forcefulness my pee. I felt like I was a being scouted to be called up to the major leagues as a pitcher.  I wondered if I could break 100 miles per hour?  I wondered what the world record was for this contraption? Whatever, I just wanted to get this done.  I had hoped that (I thought very naively) they can tell me what is wrong after this and I could go home and take a magic pill and go back to my awesome self.  I stood there and stared down the cone of shame until I couldn’t hold back any more, but I barely set the pee meter off. Talk about embarrassing.  The doctor looked at me and said my stream was horrible and I should be able to pee a hole in the wall.  That sounded pretty cool but gross at the same time. It recorded my pee failure on a piece of paper like it was an earthquake machine recording the seismic shift, except mine looked like a baby after shock.  Just to make it worse the doctor told me what his score was and mine was pathetic. Really, you want to have a pissing contest?  I thought that is just something people said to prove a point! So, I told him I could beat him in an arm wrestling competition, which seemed more important in my mind.  I really expected my name to be printed on a wall of shame in the lobby the next time I came to an appointment.  And to think I was paying for this. 

Just when you don’t think it was weird enough, the doctor wanted to do an ultrasound to see my bladder up-close and personal. Warm jelly (check). Black and white computer screen (check).  Long wand thingy they are going to push on my bladder area (check).  Paper sheets to lay back on to relax. (check).  Awkward request for me to drop my pants and lay back with the nurse and himself waiting (check).  Well, my bladder was still half full.  He measured my bladder wall which was about 4 times thicker than it should be, so I reminded him I worked out which did not seem to impress him. How they had to check my prostate. No issue there thankfully. After all that was over, he said he wanted to give me a pill!  Seriously, are you FREAKING KIDDING ME!  A PILL, NOW? Couldn’t you lead with that and if it didn’t work go to the next stage.  “You need to take Flomax and this should fix you up.” Great! A Pill! That is exactly what I wanted.  I went home to take a shower, call my therapist to talk through what just happened, and then go get my pills so that I could be alright and my “flow would go,” but little did I know we were just starting in on a journey that would nearly kill me. 

Easy answers are not always the best answers. Take a pill! If life were as easy as 2+2=4 we would all be able to solve the problems of life.  All I wanted was a pill and they gave it to me, but here is the problem—it did not work!  Most of the time in life (not necessarily medicine) if you just take a pill everything will NOT be okay.  If I just do the right thing, then everything will work out okay!  Nope! If I just love my spouse, they will love me back!  Nope! If I move forward and focus on my future my past will go away! NOPE! If I work out and eat right, I will be healthy medically!  Definitely NOPE! If I go to work each day and go above and beyond and become a transparent leader, then I will be noticed and get that big promotion!  I hope so, but possibly NOPE! And the easy answers and the pills of life can keep being handed out but there is no guarantee everything is going to be okay. 

What I have found is in my life for over 20 years is if I kept taking the pills that culture offered, to try to find the easy answers to make everything okay, but the longer I went in life and the more cultural pills I took, the less they worked. Alcohol repressed my past for several years, but its effects continued to wear off and left lasting effects on my long term memory.  Inappropriate relationships seemed like a pretty good tasting pill at the time, but left images in my mind and more pain in my heart.  Drugs?  Education?  Overachieving? Travel? Going to church every time the doors opened?  Serving in my community?  All pills I tried but none seemed to work. All were like Band-Aid’s put over cancer.  I looked okay on the surface but the disease continued to spread underneath eating at every part of me.  I tried everything I could but still didn’t get better. 

All of us have things that need to be treated and I think our “go to” is to just take a pill, the easy way.  Short cuts when we are driving can be great if we know they are tried and true, but if we don’t we can go down roads into places that are hard to get out of and that we did not attend to go to.   I remember driving through the back roads of Arkansas and saw a ferry on the map that would take you across a river instead of having to drive all the way around the river and lake.  It would be a fun experience to drive my car onto a ferry and to float along and save time.  I took the short cut!  I drove to the end of the road where the ferry loaded but here was the problem.  There was no ferry.  No line.  No pill.  Upon further investigation there was a sign at the water’s edge where the road literally ended at. The sign stated, “Sorry for the inconvenience but the ferry no longer runs.”  What?  This was my short cut and it was on the map!  Why would it be on the map if it didn’t exist?  No ferry?  No shortcut?  No pill?  My shortcut added 45 minutes to my trip. 

It’s a lesson that I remember in life that short cuts are just that—shortcuts.  They cut short your learning.  They cut short your experiences.  They cut short your ability to grow and change.  They cut short your relationships.  They cut short (at least in my life) your deeper healing. They cut short a deeper foundation.  Shortcuts do what they are supposed to do, they cut short.  Don’t get me wrong I love saving time but not at the expense of adding in pain and problems.  In life shortcuts usually mean we are exchanging an easy way that is temporary for something later that will be harder because we didn’t spend the time at the beginning laying the right foundation.  I had one friend say it this way to me, “Brice you can play now and pay later or pay now and play later.” 

As I went to graduate school I didn’t make the time to read every book, so I read the reviews of the books that I was supposed to read.  It was a shortcut that cut short the depth of my education.  In college I couldn’t stand American Literature class so I listened to people talk about all the stories and sat in on their study halls, but I did not read the stories.  Another short cut that cut short my collegiate experience.  I could go on and on with short cuts I took in life. If only I could just take a pill!  Wanna lose weight? Just take this pill! But, it would take years and even decades to finally figure out that I was still not right. 

It would take total failure, and my life falling apart, for me to look for the deeper issues. It would take the collapse of a marriage, the loss of more friends that I care to think about, the loss of employment because I would quit my jobs and move on because it got too personal, the loss of some of the best years of my life, the loss of wealth and personal growth, and the list could go on and on.  I found that there would be no short cuts to healing. Dealing with the cracks of my character, integrity, and the person I had become and in many ways still am and fight against every day of my life.  It was not only going to take avoiding the short cuts of life, but it appeared that I was going to have to take the longest way there, pull over at every rest area, go below the speed limit, and then stop and talk to people along the way to be sure I was still on the right track. In other words, a pill was not going to fix it, it was going to require pretty evasive surgery.  If I am honest with you I would prefer to take a shortcut, until I find out it’s just a dead end.  Even though the doctor did some weird stuff to me, I still left happy that I only had to take a pill.  Or at least that is what I thought, but medically—just like in life, I was getting ready to find out that I still was not right. 

As a Transparent Leader we are called to stop taking short cuts because all they do is cut short our influence on the people we are leading.  If I only share 50% of who I am with you in these pages then that is all you will see.  The same is true in our marriages, workplace, friendships, etc.  I am the poster child of sharing “just enough” to get you to shut up and stop asking questions. But I have found that my influence and growth stop where I stop.  Of course I have to learn when and what to share in an appropriate manner.  This chapter is proof of that.  This is the extremely edited version of my doctor’s room experience, but you know 100% of what happened in that torture chamber.  We all have to choose how we say things, where we say them at, and who we say them to—that called “wisdom.”  Something, I don’t always have (just ask around). 

My hope for each of us is we can get real and stop just taking the pill, the short cut and start looking for deeper ways that we can invest in those that we are leading.  I know it’s hard!  But I have come to learn that if it is hard for us who are developing in our leadership, then how much harder is it for those you are leading.  Be a conduit of change for those around you and let’s show them that there is something better.  Lets’ show them that they can be Transparent Leaders who show others who they really are!

Word for 2020?

Word for 2020?

What is your word for the year? Over the past years a growing trend is to “pick” a word that you are going to try to live into during the upcoming year. One word! One thought! I love the simplicity of this, but it is not an easy exercise unless you google, “Best words that people have used to be their word for the year.”  Or at least something like that.  It is a fun exercise because it forces you boil everything down to one thought, one approach, one word.   That is a BIG word. Not necessarily a long word, but a BIG one. What is your word?

I have 2 this year!  I know, that is not the game, but once you hear them you will understand how they go together like peanut butter and jelly!  Some of you hyper-type A personalities are thinking that I should not be allowed to play the game if I can’t follow the rules.  I get it and that is ok. Relax!  It’s a new year!  In fact, that would be a great word for you—RELAX!

My first word is “Willing”!  In 2020 I want to be willing to do whatever it takes.  I am WILLING to go the extra mile.  I am WILLING to learn something new to make me a better person.  I am WILLING to get up a little bit earlier or stay up a little bit later so I can write another chapter for a book.  I am WILLING to make new friends.  I am WILLING to look at every aspect of my life no matter how difficult and see how I can make it better.  I am WILLING to love.  I am WILLING to lose.  I am WILLING to compromise.  I am WILLING to hurt.  I am WILLING to risk.  I am WILLING!   This is different from “trying”.  Trying is a suggestion while willing is a command. If you want to “try” to risk, “try” to love, “try” to be a better person, I will promise you mediocre results at the best and I promise you won’t have to “try” to fail—it “will” happen naturally.  But it you “WILL” yourself to risk, love, hurt, compromise, etc.  there is resolve and different level of commitment.  I am willing to love or I will love COMPARED to am trying to love or I will try to love.  Do you see the difference?  So this year I am willing!  Or I will! 

As I thought about my “word” of the year I also thought that there were things that I should probably be “unwilling” to do, so that is my second word.  I hope you can see how they go together now (Type A friends).  I am “unwilling” to settle for mediocrity!  I am “unwilling” to keep toxic relationships in my life!  I am “unwilling” to settle for failure (I am willing to fail, but unwilling to stay there)!  I am “unwilling” to not be happy! 

What is your WORD/WORDS for 2020!  And encourage and inspire others! 

Stop Making Excuses!

Stop Making Excuses

If you are a parent, you probably tell your kids this (or at least I hope you do) more than you want to! If you watch the news (fake or real), you have seen old newscasters criticize the younger generations for not taking responsibility and MAKING EXCUSES!  If you think about it, we all make excuses.  In fact, we are really good at it.  Some of us are professionals!  I know I am. 

I go to the gym almost every morning at 3:30 or 4:00 a.m. I know, most of you don’t even have those numbers on your clock.  I started a little over two years ago doing this nearly every day of the year.  In fact, last year one of my New Year’s resolutions was to only miss 21 days in the gym. I know… a little obsessive and weird. Why? I got sick of my excuses. I wanted to get healthy. The gym is my daily therapy to clear my head. I already get up early and I always try to figure out what to do not to wake up my family. And I set some goals for “gainz”—to be in the best shape of my life.  I achieved every one of my goals even forcing myself to miss 21 days (although that was hard).  I appreciate people who held me accountable, encouraged me, made fun of me for going, which only made me more determined (I know I am not right), and random strangers asking what I am doing to take care of myself.  All of these helped me to overcome my excuses. 

Many mornings I woke up and could not to go back to sleep, but definitely didn’t want to go to the gym, but I reminded myself--NO EXCUSES.  When you go to the gym and see the same people every morning that you have created some awkward gym friendships with, where we all greet each other with nods and hellos in what most people would call “the middle of the night” actually encouraged me in some weird way.  If they “skipped” a few days or were on vacation, the next time I saw them I would provide accountability by asking where they had been.  And they definitely did the same thing for me.  After explaining I had to at least skip 21 days they looked at me like I was a freak and walked off (personally, I think they were jealous). 

There are many people at the gym who have encouraged and inspired me, but Jim and Margret (in the picture above with me) have been the ultimate inspiration.  They are at the gym 5 days a week at 4:30 a.m. like clockwork.  Jim is in his 80s and Margret in her 70s (You go, Jim!) and they work out and do cardio like they are training for the “Senior Classic” body building show.  Jim goes from station to station with his walker and Margret has a trainer to help encourage her and probably (although I am not for sure) take away some of the excuses. 

Every time I start thinking about skipping a day (except for my 21 FREE skip days), I think of Jim and Margret.  “If they can do it, so can I.” We all need people like Jim and Margret in our lives that spur us on towards excellence, to finish the race, to give our best, to help us finish well.  However, it is interesting how willing we are to ask people or even hire people to do that in our lives for our physical fitness or for dietary needs or even someone to come alongside of us to train us corporately. We might follow a blog for parenting or maybe have a daily reading plan in our app to read the Bible, but when it comes to allowing people to come alongside of us emotionally in our lives, we are pretty reluctant.  It took me over 20 years after the child abuse in my life before I crawled kicking and screaming into a counselor’s office to admit I could not do it by myself.  This was after destroying several areas of my life and trying to figure out how I could screw up a few more.  It would be years later that I would ever DARE to SHARE my pain and brokenness with a “regular” person and not a professional who I was paying to keep my secret.   

Years later I still need help and get this—I always will! Why?  Because I am awesome at making excuses!  I act this way because…  I did that because… Oh, that part of my personality that is whack, that is because…  EXCUSES, every damn one of them.  Sorry if the word DAMN offends you but my excuses and lack of discipline continue to piss me off. I hate this about myself and I am glad I hate it!  How bad does it have to feel before you change? I hope you can feel my frustration; in fact, I might have broken my keyboard I am typing so hard right now.  Seems like every time I take one step forward in my life in these areas, I will turn around and take three steps back. Most of the time I try really hard, but at times (several of them lately) I honestly get SICK of trying. I want to quit! Throw in the towel!  Just settle for whoever I am! So guess what I do? You already know!  Say it! Or at least say it while you read it—I MAKE FREAKING EXCUSES. I need a Jim and Margret in this area of my life. I hired help to help me in the gym. I hired a nutritionist to help me trick my metabolism to get better results. I go to conferences, webinars, etc. to be better at my trade (jury’s still out on whether it is working).  Why, why, why can’t I/we put people in our lives that will walk with us through life that we can receive and allow honesty from as they speak into our lives?  Why (especially in America) do we feel weakness is remaining silent and therefore staying broken?  Why do I continue to make excuse after excuse in critical areas of my life that affect so many others?  Fear? Insecurities? Pride? Laziness? Exhaustion?  I honestly don’t know most days, but I do know I am not alone!

I hope that in EVERY area of my life I can grow and get the ‘Gainz’ that will help me be strong emotionally, physically, mentally, and spiritually strong.  I do know the only way it will ever happen for me is to STOP MAKING EXCUSES! To drive another stake in the ground (I have dozens of them that I have placed in my life for dozens of issues) saying enough is enough. In fact, one of my favorite movies of recent was “The Greatest Showman” (let the jokes incur) and one of my favorite songs of that movie was “From Now On.”  The opening verse and chorus are: 

I saw the sun begin to dim

And felt that winter wind

Blow cold

A man learns who is there for him

When the glitter fades and the walls won't hold

Cause from then, rubble

One remains

Can only be what's true

If all was lost

Is more I gain

‘Cause it led me back

To you

From now on

These eyes will not be blinded by the lights

From now on

What's waited till tomorrow starts tonight

Tonight

Let this promise in me start

Like an anthem in my heart

From now on

From now on

FROM NOW ON, NO MORE EXCUSES!  Start today!  Don’t go back!  Move forward!

If you struggle with this, know that you are not alone and let me encourage you to take a risk, trust someone to share it with. Be transparent so other people can know the real you! And if I can help you or your team in this area I would love to and share the successes and failures and difference this can make in your team and most importantly YOU!