[00:00:00] Lucas Root: Welcome to Elements of Community Podcasts about discovering and exploring the elements of community. I am Lucas Root and each week we talk with a community leader about what makes their community thrive and bring value to both the leaders and the members. Join me as we unpack the magic of the elements of community.

[00:00:36] And we have with us today one of my absolute best friends an an absolutely fantastic, truly top of the world. Like, awesome person, amazing human being, and someone with whom I’ve personally done business. So I can say he’s amazing on a personal level and on a business level as a friend and as a business partner.

[00:00:57] So welcome Dr. Chris Lee. Would you like tell?

[00:01:00] Dr. Chris Lee: Very excited to be here.

[00:01:02] Lucas Root: Don’t lie. Don’t start off with no, no.

[00:01:04] Dr. Chris Lee: Yeah, I was gonna say like, alright, did you get that Venmo that I sent you to like, say those nice things? Was it enough?

[00:01:10] Lucas Root: Hold on. I, I hear a cling. I think it just came in.

[00:01:13] Dr. Chris Lee: There it is. That’s what matters. Yeah.

[00:01:16] Lucas Root: Would you like to tell our audience a little bit about yourself?

[00:01:19] Dr. Chris Lee: I’d love to. So it’s nice to meet everybody. If you’re here, you’ve obviously been extremely lost. I say that as a joke. Lucas is one of the people that I am so blessed that our pathways ran together. It is a challenge to find authenticity that goes through and through a person and say this in the most loving way.

[00:01:39] Lucas is one of the most principle value driven people to a fault that I’ve ever met in my life. And he holds those values and the standards of himself up to me as a friend, as a colleague, as a business owner. And it has made me such a better person. So I appreciate you as a person for that. So my professional career has been inside of corporate culture and helping to bridge stress management to build stronger, more resilient teams.

[00:02:07] I’ve been studying neuroscience for the past six years and I’ve been taking you skills and strategies.

[00:02:12] Lucas Root: Are you bored?

[00:02:12] Dr. Chris Lee: Constantly. Yeah. It’s just, I had no idea what I’m doing.

[00:02:15] Lucas Root: Don’t you wanna study something else? Like seriously, six years?

[00:02:17] Dr. Chris Lee: Yeah. Neuroscience, you have no idea. It’s just, I don’t even know. But that’s the reason that I end up going down that pathway.

[00:02:22] So neuroscience kind of picked me in a weird and squirly way with my own challenges that had come up and Lucas knows this story. I am not a great student at all. And it wasn’t until I found neuroscience that I realized that I was just kind of bored and that I wanted something that I was really curious about that actually was gonna push me.

[00:02:42] So I ended up studying functional neurology through the Kerick Institute, and that really lit the flame for me to better understanding that everything I do is orchestrated and coordinated by a stress response and the three pounds of meatloaf that we call the brain. And I just fell in love it, to help better understand why I do things, why I don’t do things and to help bridge that understanding for other people too.

[00:03:02] So the big takeaway for what I do is I make the big scaries seem not so big and scary and help you take better, more aligned action towards the things that you want to do using science-based tools.

[00:03:14] Lucas Root: I’m gonna add to that. That was beautiful, but I’m gonna add to that. I think people need to hear a little bit more than just that.

[00:03:20] You don’t just take the big scary and make it seem not so scary. You take really complicated science and you reformulate really complicated science into a story that people can actually understand.

[00:03:37] Dr. Chris Lee: Yeah, I appreciate that. So a part of my story that helped me get to that point was a series of events that kind of like derailed what I thought I was going to have to get me back on track with the life that I was born to have.

[00:03:53] And Lucas knows this story exceptionally well. And I’ll give you guys kind of like the 30,000 foot view on that. I originally started my education in biology, chemistry, and environmental science, and after that I wanted to help make the world a better place using wellness. And I ended up heading off to chiropractic school to go get my doctorate and instead of chiropractic school, my game plan was to graduate before I was 25.

[00:04:18] Have a nine to five practice that was hopefully doing multiple six figures, hopefully seven figures have like 2.5 dogs. 2.3 kids, a happy wife, white picket fence, the whole thing, just like the basic standard, like this is what the American dream is. But every night that I would go to bed, I would kind of stay awake with what Lucas and I call white ceiling syndrome, which is you’re trying to fall asleep at night and there’s this constant story that’s running through your head.

[00:04:45] Am I doing enough? Am I being enough? Is this really the life that I’m meant to have? And for me it was no. And I’m a fond believer that the universe puts these gifts inside of us that we have the capacity to explore. But in order to explore expressing those gifts and getting the genius outside of ourselves, it forces us to go against the grain of our own culture, of our own indoctrinations.

[00:05:08] And I didn’t wanna do that. I wasn’t ready for it, so I just kept saying no. And I kept pushing it aside and in my world something bigger than myself, I’m just gonna call God, the universe, whatever empowers you. Said no, this way and gives me gentle nudges back on the path of getting this gift expressed outside of myself. And I kept saying, No.

[00:05:30] Lucas Root: And then you sleepwalk and you woke up one morning with a sledgehammer in your hand, pounding the crap out of the white picket fence. Am I right?

[00:05:39] Dr. Chris Lee: That’s exactly what happened. That’s exactly it. Yeah, so the more you don’t listen to the whispers, turns out you get the screams and the more that you don’t listen to the screams, you end up getting a two by four to the back of the head.

[00:05:50] And for my slow learners, there’s another phase that comes after the two by four to the back of the head to live your purpose. And it’s a black SUV going about 40 miles an hour that hits you on your 21 speed bike. That was the phase it took me to actually like step into my purpose. So that’s a true story.

[00:06:05] Lucas Root: By the way, for those of you who are listening, this is not metaphorical.

[00:06:09] Dr. Chris Lee: No, this is a true story. I had finished up one of my midterms and I had gone to Walmart with the $5 that I had to my name to get red wine and discounted chocolate off the clearance aisle. I was gonna go home and watch pirated Netflix at my like single shitty bedroom apartment at Atlanta. And on the way back I was bombing Donna Hill,

[00:06:28] Lucas Root: Which is what, you know, self supporting chiropractors do.

[00:06:33] Dr. Chris Lee: Standard for what you do in your 22, right? And yeah, I genuinely got hit and yeah, it hit me so hard that the shoes I was wearing flew off and I stayed on my bike. And when I came down I had just an awful injury and a concussion and all this other stuff.

[00:06:49] So that was first bucket that fell. Bucket number two that fell after I’d been hospitalized for a couple days and put on bedrest for six months, is that my best friend passed away, who was my father. Not only did he pass away, he intentionally chose to leave. He committed suicide in 2017 out of the blue outta nowhere.

[00:07:09] We had no idea why he was here one day and I was gonna go get barbecue with him in a week, and the next day he was gone. Which obviously leaves a mark in your life. So not only was I physically destroyed my emotions and my mental health were trashed after that. And I was also in this highly competitive quarter system for a doctorate program, which runs all year round.

[00:07:33] So there was no breaks. So a couple months pass and suddenly.

[00:07:39] Lucas Root: On the weekends only.

[00:07:41] Dr. Chris Lee: Yeah, that’s it. Yeah. Take a deep breath and then hold it for five days. And then yeah, hopefully, we’ll, you take your boards on the weekend, so take a deep breath and just till you’re purple or pass out you’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. Couple months pass after that.

[00:07:53] Lucas Root: Last question, what’s your problem?

[00:07:54] Dr. Chris Lee: Yeah, everybody else does it. And down, like these people are like gray hair at like an early age, just like that can’t be good. So the second half fell and a couple months later I discovered that I was gonna be a dad at the ripe age of 23. And about a year after that I discovered that I was gonna be a single dad to my little girl whose name is Phoenix.

[00:08:17] So all of these events happened within like a year of each other, and the only option I had was, Hey, we’re gonna throw you in the ocean, sink or swim? And thd part of that.

[00:08:31] That’s just the one two punch. That’s like you ever play the really old Mike Tyson Nintendo game?

[00:08:37] Lucas Root: No.

[00:08:38] Where you get up against the really big boxer at the end, and you have to line up exactly the perfect sequence of punches in order to do any damage at all. That lined up the perfect sequence of punches, you know? Gut face. Gut face. Gut face. Upper cut.

[00:09:00] Dr. Chris Lee: Yeah. It was the etch a sketch of like, Oh, you want these things like wrong. Like that was pretty much like, went all the way through my core. So in the midst of like completing my school I was struggling with my own mental health trying to provide for my daughter. Food in the fridge was like obviously a concern. Like I started just like wondering if I could do all of this.

[00:09:21] I was like, about a year and a half out, I had all my boards to go take. Like I had all this stuff going on and I started to realize that all the therapy and all the stuff that people were telling me to go do. It just wasn’t right for me. It just like wasn’t working. So I started to dive deeper into like mental health and I was like, all right, so like the mind is obviously like a runner inside of like the circuit of the brain.

[00:09:46] So I was like, okay, like let me start to like get into the brain a little bit more. So I would do my like typical studies of, you know, physiology. You know, kinesiology, all of those things that they teach you throughout chiropractic school. And then at nighttime, I would be taking all these personal development free things I could on YouTube, trying to better understand.

[00:10:04] So I started off with like neurolinguistic programming and I was like, all right, like, some science inside of there, but like I’m really skeptical of scientists to my core, so I need more science. And I was like, you know what there is no protocols for this stuff. Like why is there no systems for if you have anxiety, follow this road and you won’t have anxiety.

[00:10:22] So I started to build them and I got way better using these science-based tools in just doing it solo. And I was writing them down and like refining and creating and about a year later, through one thing or another. I had started to build a community around me of people in school that were really stressed out that just wanted some of these tools too, cuz they had watched me just get the absolute shit kicked out of me and then turn into this like really high performer that was carrying my daughter through residency, through labs with me and all of this other stuff while maintaining health and like I was getting better grades than most of my colleagues were at that time.

[00:10:58] How was I doing it? So I started to teach stress management at that point. And then about nine months before I graduated, I opened up my consulting agency for small businesses and tech-based companies in Atlanta teaching stress management. And yeah, the rest is kind of history. It took off from there helping people support these systems and strategies all around building stronger cultures and stronger resilience inside of the workplace. And that’s where we are today.

[00:11:28] Lucas Root: That’s awesome. Great story. I’ve heard it a bunch of times. It actually makes me tear up even now.

[00:11:35] Dr. Chris Lee: The part that makes me cry is still the dream that I had about Phoenix before she was born. That’s like that one, if you wanna make me cry. That is the pathway to righteousness every single time.

[00:11:49] Lucas Root: Maybe we’ll come back to that one in another episode.

[00:11:51] Dr. Chris Lee: Yeah. We’ll keep it as a little sneaker.

[00:11:54] Lucas Root: Today I want to talk about your community. Can you tell us a little bit about your community? What’s it called? What’s the purpose? What makes it a community?

[00:12:06] Dr. Chris Lee: Absolutely. So about three years ago from today we started to have a big transition in the world. This virus had gone through and it had disrupted the way that we had been able to communicate, connect, and have like genuine human interaction. And I recognized this huge need for authenticity, especially in the social media world.

[00:12:30] Social media is just toxic. I feel like, I don’t need to say that, but like as Lucas and I are both people that use social media to like spread purpose, it’s bad out there. It’s like, it’s just full of like, I don’t know, fakeness. I don’t even, it’s just all this smoke and mirrors of like, Oh, life is great and if it’s not this, whatever.

[00:12:48] Lucas Root: I wouldn’t even say it’s fakeness, it’s just click bait.

[00:12:53] Dr. Chris Lee: Yeah. Yeah. It’s not real.

[00:12:55] Lucas Root: That isn’t in a self fake. That’s just, you know, it’s junk food, it’s candy, it’s click bait.

[00:13:00] Dr. Chris Lee: That’s what it is. Yeah. It’s like, Oh, I’ve been eating Cheetos, and like, I don’t know why I’m not making like gains in the gym. Like, Cheetos, a guy. So yeah, I built out a community called Wired for Worthy which is really focused around a very simple purpose of giving science-based tools to help express humanity again, And humanity means showing up period, not comma.

[00:13:22] Showing up can be whatever that means, the way that I show up is the way I’m showing up right now, but if I ask Lucas to show up today, he’s showing up that way. It is so subjective that it has to be dependent on the environment in order to have that thing expressed. So once I started to understand that it was so environment dependent that there had to be some form of leadership that was real and authentic and vulnerable, but just human to almost a flaw.

[00:13:46] That the people would come fill the dreams, right? If you build it, they will come. And that was exactly what happened. I started to show up as a human, as vulnerable and real. And doing these workshops on how to be a human again after you’ve been through the ringer of a pandemic of corporate culture, of trauma, of stress, of, I don’t know who I am, of imposter syndrome, of all of these things that are centered around, let’s keep that dream.

[00:14:10] Let’s keep that goal. Let’s keep that vision that you have inside of you, safe inside of you, when that’s the best way to suffocate your own happiness, joy. So getting that outside of yourself. That’s what we built this community for.

[00:14:23] Lucas Root: I love it. What do you call it?

[00:14:29] Dr. Chris Lee: Wired for worthy. There’s been different branches of it, but yeah, worthiness was something I struggled with a ton. And trying to like rewire my nervous system to like be happier. I didn’t realize that that was step two. So I wanna rewire myself to be like joy, happy, all these different things.

[00:14:50] And let’s just say that, that is the potential that we all have inside of us, and if that potential, if we use the seed analogy. I take that seed and I throw it on the blacktop. It’s not the seed’s fault, it’s the environment that doesn’t nurture the seed’s desire, right? So step one was learning to self-regulate, which is changing the environment of my neural infrastructure so that I actually had frontal cortex online.

[00:15:13] I could actually think my way through things could actually feel, again, I could start to get some of my memories back from all these traumas that we’re going through.

[00:15:20] So the Wired for Worthy is teaching me how to use that potential.

[00:15:22] Lucas Root: So there was actually dirt for the seed to grow.

[00:15:25] Dr. Chris Lee: That’s exactly it. Yeah. Don’t care how beautiful your heirloom, non GMO tomato seeds are. If you throw them on blacktop in the middle of the summer, they’re not going to grow.

[00:15:33] Lucas Root: Doing a thing. You’ll have roasted seeds maybe.

[00:15:37] Dr. Chris Lee: Absolutely, and I’m sure that serves a purpose in one way or another. But the big thing that I had learned through all of these studies, and to this day, I still read somewhere between, you know, five and seven studies every single morning because neuroscience is pushing studies every single day. It’s all about environment. It’s all learning about self regulation and stress management because stress is gonna happen, period. Like it’s just gonna happen. And the top highest performers that I know know how to bridge certainty, predictability, and they know who they are despite the stress.

[00:16:08] The stress doesn’t define them. It helps explore more aspects of them. It’s a flashlight in the dark to help see who you truly are. Cause it’s easy to show up when everything’s going great. I wanna know who you are in a crisis, cuz that’s when genuine leadership comes out.

[00:16:24] Lucas Root: Yep. Beautifully stated. And that’s what stress can be. Stress can be a flashlight to help you. See new possibilities.

[00:16:32] Dr. Chris Lee: Yeah, I wouldn’t be the person that I am today if it had not been for the dumpster fire of my early twenties. I wouldn’t have the business that I have. I wouldn’t be the dad that I am, I wouldn’t be the friend that I am. If it weren’t for all of those things, I would be, Huh, really, really happy in my mediocrity.

[00:16:50] Really, really artificially happy in my mediocrity. I would’ve been living a life that everybody probably would’ve looked at and said, Oh wow, you must be happy. And I would’ve said, I am so happy. And I would still be suffering with white ceiling syndrome every night cuz I wouldn’t be living my purpose.

[00:17:04] Lucas Root: I watched Mr. & Mrs. Smith, a Brad Pitt and Angelina Jo Lee movie that came out quite some time ago this weekend. And the first half of the entire movie is that, it’s the facade, the entire first half of the movie explores a facade. And the tension of the facade is uncomfortable.

[00:17:33] And I wonder, my life isn’t a facade. I wonder if that’s the way it feels for people who are in a facade. Is the tension of that facade uncomfortable? Like, do you feel like you have to hold that you know, that wall of your house up?

[00:17:47] How does without taking us down that road too deep, how does Wired for Worthy create actual community?

[00:17:56] Dr. Chris Lee: Ooh. I think a huge part of community is having a directed vision of where you want people to start and where you want them to go. And I think a huge part of that actually requires leadership. And it’s not leadership of a singular person, it’s leadership of a purpose served. So when you serve your purpose, you feel it in the way somebody shows up to take the trash out, right? Like it’s something that is more embodied versus something that is done.

[00:18:29] Lucas Root: I can’t remember if you might actually know this, I can’t remember if it was Tony Robbins, but somebody bumped into the actual janitor in, I think the consulate in South Africa. I think, I’m dragging here, the actual janitor.

[00:18:48] And he was the most proud of his job and his work person you will ever meet. And I think it was Tony Robbins and when that person met him and was just so astounded by, like, this person really loves what he does, he really loves providing service. He really loves that every single person that comes through this consulate is gonna have a great experience.

[00:19:12] And they’re gonna feel good and when they go to the bathroom and they come back out, they’re not gonna feel like they got dirtied by the bathroom. Like he was proud of his work. And it’s funny that you talk about taking the trash out cuz that actually can be a thing that you’re really proud of and do well.

[00:19:29] Dr. Chris Lee: Yeah. Like I think one of the best leaders that I have in mind right now his name is Carl and he was a biology professor at my undergrad. And if you looked at him, you’d been like, Oh, it’s like a short little like biology teacher. But the space he held to do the thing that he loved, like he’s not an executive, but like anybody can walk into that space confused and walk out with clarity of action.

[00:19:58] And I like every single time, like people just went to him for advice and he’s a biology professor, It’s the space he held for the purpose he served. Like, it’s something that was just tangible. You could feel it, and it was like this calm sense of peace that you had when you connected with that person.

[00:20:14] Like that’s what that authentic leadership is that curates the environment for a community, a healthy community to grow.

[00:20:23] Lucas Root:I love that. Thank you. What is it that makes a great community leader? What aspects need to show up in order for a person to be a great leader?

[00:20:37] Dr. Chris Lee: Honestly, I think after serving the amount of people that I have, it’s humility. It’s permission to be human, truly. Like on the days that you mess up, like yesterday I had a scheduling mishap that I just messed up my calendar. So my natural instinct is to make up every excuse to diffuse responsibility of a mistake from myself to something else, right? It’s easier that way. I don’t wanna have to take responsibility for that.

[00:21:05] But my principles and my values actually come through here to help give me clarity of action. So I can say, hey, I messed up. This is kind of what happened. And to be honest with you, like what happened is like I scheduled something during my lunch break. Could I take that call? Absolutely. I could have shown up and just like skipped over my lunch for an hour.

[00:21:25] But what I told that person instead who was a private client of mine, hey, I don’t know how, but I opened up my calendar to get you on my lunch break. If we continue in this direction, I will not be able to serve you at my typical capacity, and I wanna make sure that our time together is wisely invested.

[00:21:43] So I am going to politely reschedule you for your secondary available slot so that if I do show up and when I do show up, I’m showing up as like a hundred percent myself, right? So I apologize for the inconvenience, but I don’t wanna show up 20%. When you’re showing up at a hundred, which is a part of the contract that they sign, I show up at a hundred percent.

[00:22:02] You show up at a hundred. Right. Yeah. So if I’m not doing that, I have to claim responsibility for that. If I got a bad night of sleep, great, I claim humility for that. If I did a bunch of drugs the night before and spent out the night, like at a strip club, I’m not gonna show up a hundred percent the next day.

[00:22:20] But I don’t do those things because I have clarity of action sifted through my values and principles. So a huge part of that is.

[00:22:27] Lucas Root: Let’s go back to scheduling cuz this is one that’s so culturally acceptable. Like, it’s a cultural habit for us to just say you know, it’s diffuse, it’s somebody else, blah, blah, blah.

[00:22:40] You didn’t just take responsibility. This is interesting. You actually overrode a cultural habit. You overrode a cultural habit, right? Like, that actually makes you.

[00:22:55] Dr. Chris Lee: This is so called breaking biology. Right? Where you outcompete a pathway of expectations for self standards. Cuz everything under the sun is telling my biology to like, just perform, just do, just step into this space when realistically, no, I’m not gonna do that just to meet somebody else’s expectations or a cultural standard, right? So if you don’t have your own belief systems and values.

[00:23:23] Lucas Root: Rescheduling because it’s somebody else’s fault is actually an acceptable cultural standard. You choosing to go with your principles instead of that, I’d say is like, that’s really powerful leadership. Like, I’m really trying to call some light here. That’s powerful leadership.

[00:23:44] Dr. Chris Lee: Yeah, it is the hard thing to do and the easy thing is available, right? So I could have absolutely diffused it. I could have made up every excuse, oh, my daughter got set. I have to do this. The groceries showed up late, there’s a hoose swipe, whatever. I could have done anything.

[00:23:59] Lucas Root: Another meeting got booked that I have to take. I’m sorry.

[00:24:03] Dr. Chris Lee: Yeah. I could have done any of those things. Yeah, just claim responsibility.

[00:24:07] Lucas Root: Instead, you stepped out of that cultural habit, you overwrote it with your principles. You took responsibility.

[00:24:16] Dr. Chris Lee: Yeah. If you don’t, this is where things get a little bit more fuzzy. Because now there is not a clear line in the sand of like what you’re willing to tolerate and the standards that you hold. Now it’s kind of like, ah, you know, I could if I wanted to, and then I have a mentor of mine that says it’s easier to be a hundred percent than it is to be 99. Because that 1% is doubt And questioning yourself and the moment that you second guess fear will start to use every principle that you’ve ever used in the past to have you question and stay in that limbo of indecision, right?

[00:24:55] So if I fail on my principles, Ugh, What else am I willing to fail on, Right? Like, where do my ethics fall? Where does my purpose go? Actually serving my community to the capacity that I have. And I’m not saying that you have to show up as perfect, you just have to claim responsibility for the actions that you’re taking, which sucks. It’s hard, it’s gross. But if you don’t do it and set that example, everybody else is gonna follow suit with these like societal expectations of diffusion, of responsibility, of lack of morals, lack of ethics, and we can see that in corporate culture.

[00:25:29] Before we started recording, we were talking about Harvard Business Review, just destroying the toxic workplace in the corporate world, it’s so unhealthy. Like, oh, you’re gonna work a 40 hour job, plus 20 more hours, like you have to get up at 6:00 AM get your email. No, like that is not high performance. Like your brain has four hours max of chemistry available to it for deep work, for like radical thinking, for like challenge, for stress, and that’s like optimized.

[00:26:01] That’s like the highest trained person you can think of. They have four hours max. The rest of it is just kind of like, oh, like maybe 20% capacity. That type of performance is like as if you’ve had a couple beers.

[00:26:15] Lucas Root: Yeah. Right. I don’t get four hours most days. I’m excited if I can get one four hour day a week, not four hours of work. I do lots of work, but four hours of deep focus, radical thinking, super creativity. I’m excited if I get one day a week where I get four full hours.

[00:26:36] Dr. Chris Lee: Yup, and You have designed that.

[00:26:39] Lucas Root: And I track that, like you.

[00:26:40] Dr. Chris Lee: Yeah, exactly. You’ve designed that into your life because that’s what I imagine people pay you for, right? Is the capacity to execute on associations, which are differentiating ideas to come together to build a solution, and your capacity to take action on that and create systems and procedures. That’s what people pay you for. And I would imagine that like most people that listen to this, like that’s what people pay you for.

[00:27:03] But if you don’t have that scheduled in, like you will plateau in how much you can make per hour, you will plateau in like your joy because you’re no longer serving your purpose. You’ll plateau in your relationships because if you’re a leadership position, people are gonna recognize that you’re saying the same thing over and over.

[00:27:19] Like this is why like I have people like, hey, we’re gonna go from this like six day work week to a four day work week and Monday it’s a YOU day. If you want to go surf, if you want to go hike, if you wanna go paddle board, you need to go do that cuz your brain needs fun, playful joy in order to massage these ideas through so that you can anchor onto something.

[00:27:39] Oh, that’s actually really interesting and now have an anchor to do the deep work inside of which makes you infinitely more valuable in an information based era.

[00:27:49] Lucas Root: Yep. I love it. Thank you. Humility, that’s amazing. Talking through the way that you pulled that out. I love that you chose to look at that through the lens of humility because there are other ways you could have looked that exact same story that we just walked through.

[00:28:07] There are other ways that, that could have been looked at. You could have looked at that at, from a principal’s perspective. You could have said leaders need strong principles and, and the story of what a leader needs to be that you just told could have supported that. But humility is so much more powerful because the truth is we’re never going to be in a hundred percent alignment with with our intentions, right?

[00:28:30] Intentions being separate from principles. We’re never gonna be at a hundred percent with our intentions unless we’re shooting real, real low. Like, if you lower the bar a lot, then you can be in a hundred percent. But why would you want that?

[00:28:41] Dr. Chris Lee: Yeah. I’m gonna get out of bed today and like take a piss like, all right. You’re killing it.

[00:28:46] Lucas Root: I hit a hundred percent. Yay.

[00:28:47] Dr. Chris Lee: Nailed it. Yeah, like, All right. Great.

[00:28:51] Lucas Root: But because of your focus on humility instead of principles or your focus on humility instead of performance, now you’re giving yourself and everyone who’s listening right now permission to shoot high, miss, take responsibility.

[00:29:09] Be a human, right. Cause when you shoot high and you miss, that’s just growing. That’s just.

[00:29:16] Dr. Chris Lee: Welcome to life.

[00:29:17] Lucas Root: Like that’s life, right? Like, that’s what we do. We shoot high, we miss, we adjust. We shoot high again, we miss, maybe our second shot is better than the goal of the first shot, right?

[00:29:30] You know, you look back and you’re like, of course I was gonna miss that first shot. But that’s what we do. We shoot high and we miss and we adjust and we shoot high and we miss again, and we adjust and that’s life. And by focusing on humility, you’re inviting people to step forward with you, into accepting that process of I shoot high, I miss, I take responsibility for where I ended up. And then I go again.

[00:29:58] Dr. Chris Lee: When I have these conversations inside of like leadership. The reason humility is so exceptionally powerful is because it unconsciously takes the sting away from indecision. Indecision is the destroyer of dreams. It holds people still, but when you have humility as an acting leadership principle, fail because you’re a human.

[00:30:19] So people just naturally choose to take action instead of considering what success driven opportunities look like, instead of like taking these more like calculated approaches, which serve their purpose in some regard. But if you could just have humility to say like, I’m just gonna do regardless of outcome.

[00:30:37] You’re gonna go so much faster because there’s no limbo of indecision anymore. You could just choose because that’s what makes sense right now. And if that changes in the future, phenomenal. But like, you know, that the path to success is paved in failure. So like, I need you to fail to have more experience.

[00:30:54] Right. The more experience is like the name of the game right now. So like the reason that I’m in the position that I am before I’m 30 years old is because behind me is a tire fire of just failures constantly that I can revisit with people to make sure they don’t have to go down that pathway if they don’t choose. I have all these experiences.

[00:31:14] Lucas Root: How dare you burn tires, how dare you, it’s horrible for the environment.

[00:31:20] Dr. Chris Lee: Yeah, we’re killing seals. Sorry. But I truly think that that level of humility that you can have, if you can get yourself into that space of like, okay, what does it mean to show up as this person and take the sting out of indecision. That’s where I constantly see people succeed, in life, in business, in relationships, in building community, establishing community, supporting community because you’re making progress and progress pushes happiness.

[00:31:51] Lucas Root: Yeah, it does love

[00:31:53] Dr. Chris Lee: And that’s the fuel of life.

[00:31:54] Lucas Root: Yeah. Has one of the five elements of community bubbled up that you really want to talk about how that shows up in Wired for Worthy.

[00:32:06] Dr. Chris Lee: For. I think purpose has been like a really good one. That’s like surfacing up here and understanding what that is.

[00:32:13] You and I use this example a lot that you wanna see a sunset, but you have no direction. So you run east and you use all of your time and energy running east. Are you ever gonna see the sunset? Now all the right action, all the right behavior, completely wrong, like direction. There’s a lack of clarity that falls inside of that.

[00:32:37] Having purpose should just act as a compass to know which direction you want to go in and the direction that you want to lead people inside of. Businesses fail when they rely upon the characteristics of a person instead of the mission and purpose of a business. I think that is true to its core. Don’t rely on something that can fail.

[00:33:00] It will fail. But if you put the mission first, if you put the purpose first, now there’s a collective. The collective will support that even when the person fails, because humility is our leadership tendency. So we know it’s already built into the system, but if we only have a singular leader, that is the only spotlight.

[00:33:20] What happens when the light flickers? Have we completely lost our purpose and vision? No. We’re all gonna get inside of this vehicle. That is our mission. And use different leadership tactics to have different drivers to navigate through different spaces. That way the vehicle that’s right never ends.

[00:33:37] It never ends. That’s the most sustainable pathway to culture and community that I have found, at least in my experience.

[00:33:44] Lucas Root: Yep. Yep. What happens if you’re the only driver? It means that you can only be on the road for what, six, seven hours a day? What if you can share the driver’s seat?

[00:33:59] Dr. Chris Lee: To have that level of humility to take yourself out of the driver’s seat. Those are the best leaders. The ones that go, Oh yeah, I can’t drive through this mountain pass. I just don’t have the experience to go do that. And they will step down from a CEO role into a supporting role and let somebody else come through to help them navigate recessions, to help them navigate through bubbles.

[00:34:23] To help them navigate through turmoil or startup or seed funding or all of these different things. If you don’t have the expertise, don’t try to like doctor Google your way through life. Get in the back seat and take notes from the person that has already navigated that. Like that is like the strongest position of leadership that I have ever been able to see and witness is somebody going, yeah, I’ve done, you know, a hundred startups from multiple six figures to eight figures.

[00:34:49] And I do it constantly, but I’ve never done it through a recession. But somebody else that has, can take that knowledge and information and teach them and educate them, and now they have the experience because they had the humility and experience pays the bills. Right. That’s the thing that pushes progress.

[00:35:07] Lucas Root: I love it. How do you build and support purpose in Wired for Worthy?

[00:35:12] Dr. Chris Lee: The biggest thing that we do inside Wired for Worthy is vulnerability as experience. So every single day that we go through life, we collect emotions, and then if we don’t navigate them consciously, our unconscious mind will categorize them as good or bad. And for those of you that.

[00:35:33] Lucas Root: So this is like posipline, right?

[00:35:35] Dr. Chris Lee: That’s exactly what, Yeah, just a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Your brain’s affinity for like pessimism and negativity is seven times higher than it is for optimism and opportunity. That also means that the amygdala, which controls your stress response seven to 10 times, affinity, the speed of your amygdala is 10 times faster than your frontal cortex until you’ve trained it.

[00:36:01] That doesn’t mean that I have to have you train it. I just want you to be vulnerable enough to accept the things that you can and cannot control. And this is that hard space for us to go through.

[00:36:11] So when we show up inside of Wired for Worthy and we continue to like push the envelope of the human experience, I show up and I will typically tell a story of how I have messed up this week and what it taught me, instead of it defining me, I’m using it as a tool to help me better understand myself. So I’m taking all of these failures. And I’m showing them.

[00:36:32] Lucas Root: It’s like, life is an obstacle race. And you know, the obstacle that you just surmounted could be fun. It could be there for you.

[00:36:41] Dr. Chris Lee: Yes. If you choose. Right? So, if you don’t, your brain automatically labels that as bad nine outta 10 times, right? So having these systems and procedures and co-regulation around each other to share the way that we used to back in the ancient days. We would sit around the campfire and we would tell stories of our day and we would share. And we would regulate.

[00:37:05] Lucas Root: Nope.

[00:37:05] Dr. Chris Lee: No, no. We just poof. Like human beings.

[00:37:09] Lucas Root: That’s right.

[00:37:09] Dr. Chris Lee: Culture is built into your DNA, and if you don’t have it, what is the number one trigger for anxiety and depression? Isolation.

[00:37:20] Lucas Root: Isolation.

[00:37:21] Dr. Chris Lee: So we are making people unwell by taking away healthy aspects of community, which happened for us whether you wanted to or not during this pandemic.

[00:37:31] Now the question is, did you use that as an opportunity to become stronger as an individual? So when you returned to the fire, you had new skills and new opportunities, or did that happen to you? Most people said that that happened to me. I used that as an opportunity to refine and make myself a better human being so that when I came back I was gonna be stronger, faster, smarter, and more human than I was before.

[00:37:59] And like, hey, I messed up a ton during this time, but here’s what that taught me, cuz I have lone wolf self-isolation tendencies all day, right? And if it wasn’t for Lucas, who know if I’d even be here, cuz he would call me every day through the pandemic. Like, Hey, did you do this, Are you okay? Like, are you trying to do this alone?

[00:38:17] Community and culture, because community and culture doesn’t have to be a hundred people in a room. It could be co-regulating with a single other person. Sometimes that all it takes, like you can’t read the label inside of the jar. So get somebody else that has perspective.

[00:38:35] Lucas Root: Well said. That’s right. When you’re in the jar, you can’t read the label. Or maybe you can, but boy, it’s a whole lot harder than getting your brother get over there to take a look and tell you.

[00:38:45] Dr. Chris Lee: Yeah, just ask. Like asking for help is such an achilles heel for so many people, cuz they see it as like, weakness, vulnerability, not knowing.

[00:38:55] And like who wants to like not know things? Turns out high performers do. They are so just like down to their core, like, I don’t know things, but I’m like willing to figure out systems on how to figure that out. And like most of the time they’re smart enough to ask people. Those are the people that I want to hang around with that have that level of humility to say, I don’t know, but I’m gonna find out.

[00:39:16] So like, gimme 48 hours and I’ll get back to you. I like those people. Those are the people I wanna handle..

[00:39:21] Lucas Root: I do. Let’s be honest.

[00:39:22] Dr. Chris Lee: It is, Yeah. Time and time again.

[00:39:25] Lucas Root: Yep. That’s the fun stuff go and figuring stuff out. Fantastic. Knowing the answer. It’s boring. It’s passable. Done. Problem was solved before it began. I’m, you know, yay for that. And also, let’s do fun stuff.

[00:39:42] Dr. Chris Lee: Yeah. There has to be progress made. So it’s like doing the same thing, expecting different results. Right. That’s insanity. For my people that are neuro divergent or that are like leadership, like tendencies, like your brain is built to build associations.

[00:39:57] Like you have to have a creative outlook and if you don’t, you hyper fixate on the nearest lowest hanging fruit of sensation. So like if we start to look at like leadership and conquerors in the past, if you look at any of their like journals and articles and things like that, they were so impulsive.

[00:40:13] All of our leaders in the past were impulsive because they probably had ADHD. Like, ADHD, they’re starting to find like triggers of that inside of our genetics, like why would we have ADHD like buried inside of our genetic? Like why would we keep that trait? Because it pushes humanity further. Because we’re building associations in lateral thinking to have new ideas.

[00:40:32] That’s the reason that we’re at the top of the food chain cuz we started to go, oh, I can use this stick as a tool. Damn, that’s nifty. And that saves a lot of time and fingers from poking into holes. So now we have 10 fingers and toes cuz we stop sticking fingers and holes. Lovely. What an opportunity for growth was that we could save all of these things for more fun activities like writing and language, and progressing ourselves to use fingers and holes for other fun activities, pun intended.

[00:41:02] Lucas Root: Mm-hmm. I’d like to propose a different way of looking at that, but then we have to move on.

[00:41:08] Dr. Chris Lee: Fair enough.

[00:41:10] Lucas Root: ADHD is the antidote to the other thing that makes us amazing as animals, laziness.

[00:41:16] Dr. Chris Lee: Ooh, you said it, not me.

[00:41:19] Lucas Root: Yep. The two of them work together as in synergy and in isolation. Either one of them would probably have made us, well, very different, you know, look at the sloth. That’s a fun one.

[00:41:37] Dr. Chris Lee: Tough.

[00:41:40] Lucas Root: What question have I not asked you that you wish I had?

[00:41:49] Dr. Chris Lee: I think the biggest thing that I like to think about when it comes to like asking questions is like, how do you define success? Like how good are you at asking yourself questions and answering like, honestly, that’s the thing that helps define leaders is that they have the capacity to do critical thinking on and in themselves, and then share those ideas with just the intention of like feedback, not the intention of like being validated for their like curiosities. That’s really fun space to play inside of.

[00:42:29] Lucas Root: Ooh, yeah. I like it. Critical thinking. As self critique as as self interrogation.

[00:42:41] Dr. Chris Lee: Yeah. Like when you think of like successful habits. Consistently journaling is inside of those things, right? Like the really successful people, they are constantly categorizing their notes.

[00:42:54] They constantly have pen to ink. Why is that a thing? Because they’re constantly giving themselves feedback, constantly. Like if you could be like the hardest critic on yourself, imagine like what that would be if you had a level of humility to share ideas for feedback, even if it’s bad ideas. Imagine how much further you would go in life like it’s jet fuel.

[00:43:17] And like I write down notes as we go. Like the, the desk that I work at, it’s literally a whiteboard. And I consolidate all of these notes into my journal and then I ask myself what is the action if necessary that I can take on this information constantly. Like I just wanna know what that next thing is.

[00:43:33] If it’s contemplation, sweet, if it’s research, lovely. If it’s a change in the way that I’m handling things delightful, right? But I don’t know what I don’t know. And the moment that I think that I do know what I don’t, that is genuine failure cuz I have failed to make progress in an area and I am now the driver and the car, so I have to carry everyone on my back instead of putting people in the passenger seat in the back seat.

[00:44:01] This is where things get heavy. This is where people start to fail because all of that pressure starts to cripple upon them simply for a lack of systems and integration for how they treat themselves and how they carry information.

[00:44:14] Lucas Root: Interesting question. Are you the driver or are you the car? Yeah.

[00:44:20] Dr. Chris Lee: Especially if you run a business, you need to ask yourself that. Because in the past.

[00:44:26] Lucas Root: Am I the driver today or am I the car every day?

[00:44:32] Dr. Chris Lee: Yeah. And being able to put other people in the driver’s seat is critically important. Doesn’t mean that you’re not gonna be the rally car driver passenger.

[00:44:41] That’s like shouting out directions for hard right turns, especially if your business is in turbulent times. But if you’ve got like a 23 year old pissant that has faster reflexes than you, but you’ve taken this road before, it makes sense for you to be in the passenger seat letting their reflexes do the thing. To have the communication standards, you know, where they’re going.

[00:44:59] You have the ability to communicate it, but your lack of humility and staying in the driver’s seat is gonna force you into a crash. It’s not a matter of like, Oh, I hope we don’t, It’s just a matter of time.

[00:45:09] Lucas Root: We’re slower.

[00:45:09] Dr. Chris Lee: Yeah. That’s what it is.

[00:45:12] Lucas Root: Yep. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. Where can our listeners reach you?

[00:45:17] Dr. Chris Lee: All of my stuff, everything is at Dr. Chris Lee, D R C H RIS L E E, my website, DrChrisLee.com, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, blogs, everything is Dr. Chri Lee.

[00:45:31] Lucas Root: Thank you everybody @Dr. Chris Lee. Thank you, brother.

[00:45:37] Dr. Chris Lee: I appreciate you, man. Thanks for having me today.

[00:45:41] Lucas Root: Thank you for joining us this week on Elements of Community. Make sure to visit our website, ElementsOfCommunity.us, where you can subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or via RSS, so you’ll never miss a show. If you found value in this show, we’d appreciate a rating on iTunes, or if you’d simply tell a friend about the show, that would help us out too.

[00:46:06] If you like the show, you might wanna check out our EOC Inner Circle, where we deep dive with each guest on the inner workings of their community. We cover things like community model, profitability and engagement strategies. You can join the inner circle at ElementsOfCommunity.us/innerCircle.

[00:46:26] Be sure to tune in next week for our next episode.