Lessons - The Exact Strategy That Pulled Me Back From Financial Ruin | Luke Lintz - Business Recovery Expert

In this lessons episode, discover how to manage overwhelming stress during your first business venture. Learn how to build resilience in the face of debt, uncertainty, and pressure. Understand how early life experiences can shape your mindset and uncover healthier ways to cope while staying productive and focused. So what would be the advice for somebody who's going through their first business and is in debt and owes investors money or owes somebody money and they're just trying to figure out, you know, how do I, how do I keep going when I'm dealing with all this bullshit because all this bullshit is normal for entrepreneurs, for anybody who's taken a risk and built something, but for the first time you're going through it is very stressful. So what's the advice for people like how did you go through it? Was it just, because you could have gone two ways, you could have said, I'm never fucking doing this again, your families, they're supportive, but they're probably all like a little bit pissed off. So what do you, what do you suggest to that first time entrepreneur? Yeah, the go in the two ways is very true. It's kind of like with a lot of things. Like for example, if you grow up in a household that's extremely toxic, a lot of the kids grow up two different ways. One, they take those toxic attributes and they bring that into their adult life or the second way is they want to get as far away from that as possible. And so they do everything they can to get as far away. It's usually like very polar opposite. And so like I think that's very similar with going the two ways when you're under extreme amount of stress and entrepreneurship, especially when it's your first business. For me, just when you were asking that question, I was thinking back to the mindset I was in back then. And I remember it being so hard every single day, I would wake up with so much stress on my mind constantly. And what I would do is I would just numb myself out from reality by just going straight to my desk every single day and literally working 14 to 16 hours a day. I wouldn't talk with anybody. I wouldn't say anything if people asked about how the business was going. I wouldn't talk about it because it was just so much pain inside. And so I really just thought that I could work through it. And if I was working constantly, that I would get to a place where I was out of this pain, of this stress. And it's very interesting that me and my brother have constant conversations. Now my brothers, so like because our little brothers are completely part of the business as well. And we actually look back on those times and reminisce on those times. I laugh at them, you know, it's literally in such a good way. It's like wow, like because it's such it's such a perspective shift of being able to have such a low point in your life where now I'm able to, like now I go through hard times still, you can't get away from problems in life. It's not possible. Problems go through every stage of life. And if you go down a street and look at people who are walking down the street, every single person is facing their own problems, whether they're rich, poor, whether they're happily married, every single person has their own problems. And so being able to have that perspective shift of looking back on like what you thought was just, you know, just the worst time of your entire life is pretty, pretty fun. Well, it's good. After he got there, it's not good in there. Do you think that the way you dealt with it is the best way to deal with it? And I don't have an opinion or I don't know what the best way to deal with it is I've never had, oh, my family, $300,000. That to me would be super stressful. I don't know how I deal with that. I don't know if I deal with it well at all. I mean, I've had investor money before, but it's like different when it's family because you don't want to lose anyone's money. You don't want to invest your money either, of course. But family, it's like, family's going to be with you forever, no matter what, no matter what business fails, they're going to be around. So how do you think that was like the smartest way? And not just, not just don't answer that question just from the perspective of like this specific problem, answer from the perspective of any time you're dealing with something that is a degree more stress than you're used to dealing with. What is like the healthiest way to work through that? Because even if you owed somebody family, $300,000 or you owed investors $10 million and things aren't going well, what's like the way to work through that? So you can still be effective, but you don't like you still protect your mental health? Yeah, I personally believe that there are so many statistics out there about stress killing and stress causing diseases inside of your body and stress being the biggest cause of cancer, stress being the biggest leading indicator of early death. I think stress kills more than any single other thing, any workout routines, any any health diets, all of that. I think stress kills more than that. So I think figuring out ways to eradicate stress of your life is the number one priority that people should be working towards. And it's very, very difficult during times like that where you know, it is very stressful like being $300,000 in debt at such a young age. What I did was I just numb myself out from reality as much as possible. And I created a safe space with work. So everything else outside of work wasn't safe and work was safe. And so I still have this to this day where every single morning, most of the time I wake up with anxiety, even though there's not really anything to be anxious about. And it's because for a four year period of time, I train myself to every single day I wake up, I wake up with anxiety to get as fast as possible to my computer desk to start working. And so it's like your your brain is a computer and it can be trained. And when you train and start away for such a long period of time, it's very hard to train it out of that. Do you think that's healthy? No, I don't need to tell you at all. It definitely. I didn't know that's how you are. Yeah. Yeah. You like, so when you work, when you first start working every morning, it's from a place of, it's almost from a place of like a little bit of fear, very anxiety-based. And is that, I mean, that thing that happened with your family when you were young and you owed the money. How long did that last? How long was that period? Oh, wow. Three years. Three years. Yeah. That's some trauma, dude. Yeah. That's some trauma built up trauma. So when you talk about like stress being like a silent killer, have you, I mean, this is say what you want to say, but you've not tried to like do work to try and unwind that trauma. For sure. Because now you don't have these money issues. You have business, you have stress, but you don't have like you have experience. You understand that $300,000 first of all is not a lot of money in business contacts, but it can be repaid. Any amount of money can be repaid and any amount and no problems are so significant enough, especially what we're dealing with. I mean, maybe there are people that have much bigger problems than us than they do, but the stuff that we deal with on a day-to-day, even in a business, even if it's doing very well, you're still going to be alive tomorrow. The business is going to keep carrying on. So have you tried to like go through like, I don't know like therapy or anything like fast that you don't approach each day with trauma, but like you have a different perspective? Dude, for sure. Yeah. I've been in therapy for the past 10 months, weekly. So this is more of a new thing. For sure. And do you find that it's working? Yeah. The therapy that I go to wasn't directly for stress. It was mainly for relationships and it was because of like childhood trauma that was built up and created the type of person I am. But a lot of things, a lot of the problems that we face today, I think come from childhood experiences. And so unpacking a lot of the things that I faced as a child in my childhood was able to give me more clarity in terms of how I operate day-to-day, even so much as why do I operate from an anxiety-based framework and why do I operate where I feel the need to be constantly working? And it comes from childhood of the feeling of not being good enough for only being good if I perform in a certain way and things that are trained into you. I mean, sometimes, sometimes, like, someone's dark side can actually help them in their career. And it seems like it actually has helped you in your business, but it may not be the healthiest way to do what you do. And you thought about that before, like, your dark side helping you? For sure. Yeah. I think my childhood and my dark side, like you're saying, has helped me tremendously in business, but has been a huge detriment in every single other area of my life. What was the thing in your childhood that you think led to this feeling of anxiety? It was probably just sort of further doubled down on when you owed your family some money. I'm sure that didn't help at all, but it came from much earlier. Well, we get unpack a lot here. Like, I could speak about this for hours. Like, I spoke hundreds of hours of my therapist. Yeah. But yeah, my parents went through a divorce when I was at a very young age. And the thing that was very unique about our situation and very difficult was the child custody case. And so whenever two parents get divorced with kids, like, if they can't work it out themselves, then it goes to the court system to be able to figure out the child custody. And sometimes it goes like 50 50 or sometimes like they can't agree on anything. And so we started off 50 50 between our mom and our dad. And then our mom pretty much like completely parental alienated us from our dad. And so people don't necessarily know what parental alienation is. But it's basically like instilling beliefs and instilling sort of thought systems inside of a kid's mind. That's like very susceptible to, you know, yeah, influence. And so she instilled these thoughts that her dad wasn't safe and that the only person that was safe was basically her. And pretty crazy thoughts like things like sexual abuse inside inside of our minds when it never really happened. And then it would lead to so many different things where we went into CFS, which is basically like child custody services in Canada. And all of these things. And that brought its own set of problems. But basically within all of that, I was the person who stayed quiet throughout it all. So I was like the stationary ones. Stay quiet. The majority of brothers. Yeah, like my older brother was the one who talked to adamantly about a lot of things because he was the one who my mom like mainly worked with. So to speak. And then my little brother acted out throughout all of them. And so he basically was deemed that he had ADHD. And so he got put on medication at a very young age. And it led to his own problems with that that he has been able to get over tremendously. And he's an amazing human being now. But myself, what I did was I just stayed quiet. And so I went through a period of, you know, getting a very lack of attention. And this is trauma building up. Yeah, I'm not saying anything else, speaking out. You're not dealing with that. Yeah. And so like my parents, well, my dad ended up getting custody of us. And he grew us into like the people we are today, the men we are today. And so like my dad is the person who I have to thank for the people who me and my brothers are today. And the reason we are today, he was an amazing dad with the stuff that he was given. And you know, the situation that that was. But yeah, throughout all that, it was the lack of attention that I had. It was that I was never really taught how to showcase my emotions. And to acknowledge my emotions inside of my head. And then to actually communicate those emotions. And so it led to just the ridiculous amount of problems. But in business, it was definitely, it definitely helped me out in the business. Thanks for tuning in. 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