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Introduction to Steven Howard and Brain Health [1:09]

Matt Feret:

Hello everyone. This is Matt Feret, author of Prepare for Medicare and Prepare for Social Security Insider's, guidebooks, and online course training series. Welcome to another episode of The Matt Feret Show, where I interview insiders and experts to help light a path to successful living in midlife retirement and beyond. Steven, welcome to the show.

Steven Howard:

Thank you, Matt. Looking forward to our conversation.

Matt Feret:

Same here. So, tell everybody what you do and how long you've been doing it and how you help people.

Steven Howard:

Well, my day job, so to speak, is a leadership coach, leadership mentor. But really what I like to do to help people is kind of spread the word, kind of be an evangelist for what we can do to protect the long-term health of our brains. And I do that because when my father passed away, he had early Alzheimer's disease, so I've done a lot of research on that while his primary caregiver.

Matt Feret:

So that sounds like a really great topic. How do you keep your brain healthy and when do you need to start? Is it genetic? Is it practice makes perfect? Or somewhere in between?

Steven Howard:

It's kind of in between, but it really leans more towards the lifestyle issues. I mean, in the last 20, 25 years, scientists, because of the MRI technology, being able to look inside our brains better, understand that only about 5% or 6% of Alzheimer's is genetic and another 3% or so are usually related to brain injuries or some kind of trauma. So, most of it's lifestyle. And as I often say to people, the best time to start planning your long-term brain health is in your thirties and forties because what we do at our bodies in our thirties and forties increases our risks for Alzheimer's in our sixties and seventies.

Matt Feret:

And Alzheimer's is one of many dementia rated or dementia related afflictions that can happen as we see with the famous case or the most publicized cases like Michael J. Fox. But then I was talking to an Alzheimer's expert on another show, and she said something, and I'm going to mess this stat up, I'll have to go back and listen to it, but it's like by 2035, she said something like 60% of the world will have some sort of dementia related diagnosis. And I'm probably messing that stat up, but it's somewhere around there.

Steven Howard:

It's somewhere around that. I know other stats show that just in the United States, Alzheimer's, dementia and stroke was projected to increase by like 70% between 2020 and 2030, and that projection was actually before the pandemic. So those numbers will definitely go up. And I know that the American Heart Association in somebody else has predicted that, believe it or not, in our lifetime, four out of every ten adults will experience some kind of a brain health issue in their lifetime. So that's like 40% of the population. That's not healthy.

Steven Howard on How to Maintain Brain Health in Midlife [4:23]

Matt Feret:

It's not healthy. And so, you mentioned thirties and forties. So, let's start there. In your thirties and forties, you, you're humming along, you're maybe taking care of some kids, maybe got some aging parents, maybe got some aging grandparents. You're trying to balance a career, having fun, worrying about your health, work out, the list goes on and on, right? Of all the responsibilities, those are really scramble years. What can we do and what do we need to be mindful of? No pun intended, around our brain health during these times?

Steven Howard:

Oh, Matt, mindful is a good place to start, but I think the other two places to start are stress. Just control stress as much as you can. Learn stress techniques, of which mindfulness is one, keep your blood pressure down through that and watch your weight. I mean, the thing that shocked me when I did the research is men who pack on the most abdominal fat in their forties have the highest risk for dementia in their sixties and seventies. So, I wish I'd known that because the age old story, yeah, I can eat anything I want until I turn 40, and then once you turn 40, burning those excess calories becomes more difficult. I didn't believe that when I was in my twenties or thirties, but I sure believe it now.

Matt Feret:

No. Yeah, mindfulness. And you talked about stress. I mean, I just went through a very short, high-level list of stressors that happen in your thirties and forties. Bills, children, perhaps marriage, divorce, career, job, all these things. There's acute stress, I'm sure, which is, gosh, I feel panic, I feel anxiety, I feel panic attacks. And then there's this kind of underlying stress that exhibits itself in all forms, right? Lack of sleep. It affects your appetite. It affects both ways, right? Some people don't eat when they're stressed, and some people stress eat even spots on your skin if it gets that bad. I can certainly relate to that. I woke up one day in my mid-twenties in a really high stress situation at a job, and I was noticing that there were bald patches on my beard, and I went, what the heck is going on there? I went through all sorts of tests, the allergy tests where they prick your arms all the way over, turned out it wasn't allergic to anything. It was stress. It was underlying stress. How do you go about balancing all of your to-dos and somehow keeping this in a less stressful or keeping your brain in tune with managing stress? Well, what are some practical tips?

Steven Howard:

A practical tip is to pause every now and then go out and get some fresh air. Mother nature is a great, probably our best doctor, if you will. One of the things I teach leaders to do, and actually everybody, is stop running back-to-back meetings. I mean, if you're in charge of your meeting, you run the agenda, set the meeting for 60 minutes, but run the meeting for 45 minutes. Give your brain five minutes to digest what was just talked about. Take five minutes, give your brain a break. Don't look at email, don't look at text messages. You want to call a friend or something to something non-work related, that's fine. And then you have five minutes to prepare for the next meeting because if you don't, so many people run back-to-back meetings. You hang up from this interview. And if I go into the next meeting right after my brain's still focusing on what Matt said, what did Matt ask? Did I answer that question right? And I could spend the next 5, 6, 7 minutes in the next meeting physically present but not really mentally present. So that's the number one thing is find time to de-stress during the day as well. And don't vegetate in front of the TV when you get home. Take a little walk, a little bit of exercise.

Matt Feret:

Yeah, that's really good practical advice and one that sounds easy to say. And then people kind of forget, I mean, heck, I have days now where I feel like I'm driving an 18 wheeler and I've got 16 gears and I'm going to second and fifth and fourth and third, and every half hour or hour, I'm onto the next thing and I go, I got to downshift. I got to upshift. Find that right gear. Take time between those. Schedule your day if you possibly can. And then if you can't do that, talk to me about, and it's the off-used, probably overused phrase of work-life balance from a leadership perspective. And I don't even mean if you're managing people, but you manage your boss. If you're an individual contributor, how do you manage your boss to give you those breaks or to make sure every meeting has its agenda, make sure at work you're not being pummeled with a fireworks show of tasks. How do you manage that if you're in a situation at work where it's just a high stress environment?

Steven Howard (09:36):

One way to do that, Matt, is ask questions. Particularly people want you to make decisions. You say, all those fire people come at you, hey boss, I need this boss. I need this. I need an answer on this is to ask questions and pause and let your brain reflect. Because if you react in a situation like what you're talking about, the back of our brain, as you know, the amygdala takes over and that's the emotional control center. And I'm sure you, and I'm sure every one of your listeners at some point in their lives have said, I was so angry I couldn't think straight. And that's physiologically correct. If amygdala has taken over, you cannot think straight. You are the prefrontal cortex, the front part of the brain, the rational control center. It subdues itself to the amygdala. So, you have to pause and tell yourself, I'm going to get myself under control and then I'm going to rationally make a decision here rather than respond to people, events, and situations.

Steven Howard on Addressing Stress with Mindfulness and Meditation [10:39]

Matt Feret:

How much stock do you put in meditation? Things like meditation, transcendental meditation have been around for a long time. It takes 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening. A lot of people say they can't find 40 minutes. I believe them. You got to make time for it. And then you got these new apps. I'm watching a college football game and there's LeBron James on there talking about is calm app or something like that. Or they say, take 15 seconds and look at this. Wonderful. Do those things work or is it really just getting you to do the same thing that you were talking about, which is take 15 minutes, go do something else.

Steven Howard:

They do work if you have the time. I think if you just put it on your to-do list, it becomes more stressful. I got to meditate, do one, then I got to cross it off. And while you're still trying to meditate, your brain's all over the place, I have a little app that I use. It's called I Am, and you can customize it. So, I have it. It sends me messages seven times a day with a question, and it says, mindful as two words or mindful one word. And when I see that, I look at it, I go, just for my 20, 30 seconds am fully present. Am I in the flow of what I'm doing or am I scatterbrained all over the place? And just that little reminder can bring me back sometimes when I'm trying to do too much or I'm not focusing on what I'm working on, particularly if I'm trying to write a book or something. So, I think they can, they're helpful. I don't think we have to rely on them, but they're little techniques that can help us just build better habits. I think that's what it's all about. I don't meditate twice a day, maybe 10 minutes in the morning. I do some reading and some reflection, but I'd be hard pressed to find two 20-minute segments a day to meditate. So, I appreciate what people say when they say they don't have time.

Steven Howard on Addressing Stress in the Workplace Post-Pandemic [12:38]

Matt Feret:

Let's stay on the employee kind of end of things. And again, we're not talking about retirement or post-retirement yet, but I want to get to that. You're in a job, you've maybe been there for a bit, and then the pandemic happened, and you got sent home, and that was good and bad for a lot of reasons. I'd love to hear your take on employees and the level of stress they felt, not just from the pandemic, but moving from an office situation into a fully remote. And then many companies are asking people to go back hybrid. So hey, we need you to show up three days a week and then Monday or Friday or Thursday and Friday, you're at home. And there's a lot of, I mean, all you got to do is open any newspaper, well, not physical newspaper hardly anymore, but any article online is saying that people are really still revolting against coming back. I've read all the stuff around your tribe, right? Being in the same room does have value, especially when you're doing ideation meetings when you're talking about strategy and managerial pieces. But yet a lot of people want to stay home because the stress level that they felt getting up, getting work ready, getting kids off to school, getting in the car, sitting in traffic, parking, I mean whatever that commute was like sitting in your office and then coming back home at five or six and doing it all over again is a stressor. And so, my completely amateur opinion is one of the reasons people are resisting this is not, it's just because they can close their laptop and go eat dinner 10 minutes later, but it's because of the additional stress that they no longer feel of everything leading up to work and then after work. Would you agree with that?

Steven Howard:

I would totally agree with that. And listening to what you just talked about and the litany of things you're talking about, very few of those stressors are workplace related. It's all about getting ready to get to work, going to work, coming home from work. So, the stresses in the workplace are a little bit different. I would add one other stress that happened more so in the work environment than working from home environment. And that's bosses just coming up to you and saying, hey, Matt, how's that project going? Where are you and catch you unawares. You're not prepared. And then you feel like, am I being micromanaged? Does my boss not trust me anymore? Whereas now with the remote, they kind of have to almost send you a message and say, hey, can we talk in 10 minutes about? And that at least gives you a little heads up. I'm not saying you're not doing your job, but you probably have three or four things you're working on, and your boss comes up to you and tries to talk about one, and it's not top of mind right now because two or three other things you're doing. So, I think that was also a big stress and a little bit of micromanaging, a little bit, looking over the shoulder of people, and also the feeling that I'm not trusted and my boss has to constantly check in with me, whereas remotely that didn't happen as often.

Matt Feret:

Yeah, that makes sense. And so, the level of stress, and I'm sure again, staying at home creates its own stressors. So, while you're working, you already went over some practical tips while you're working, but again, going back to the whole theme of thirties and forties, what are some other things outside this whole piece around work? If you're leading people and some of them are close and some people are living in Florida and your corporate headquarters is in San Diego, are there ways to address those stressors or ask even remotely? I mean, I think a lot of leaders would tell you it's very difficult to help people feel less stress remotely sometimes they've never even met. Are there any things that leaders can do in companies right now that can help alleviate the stressors that come with remote work?

Steven Howard:

Matt, I wish more people ask that kind of a question because leaders can do it themselves and organizations need to do it. And so, I would advise all your listeners, as soon as this broadcast is over, go Google the early warning signs of burnout. And there's six or seven, depending which article you read, very specific signals of burnout. But most leaders aren't taught that. And I talk to leaders about this all the time. I said, why aren't you helping your people? And they go, well, I'm not a psychiatrist. I don't know what to do. I'm not a mental health practitioner. But if you just knew certain things, you could catch that for one of them. For instance, one of the signals is somebody who's very optimistic all the time, the early warning sign is when they start saying, oh God, here we go again. Oh, they start getting pessimistic vocally and they start saying things and then you go, wait a second. That person's usually pretty up what's going on and they do it one or two days. That's one thing. But if they're doing over two weeks or three weeks, that's a sign that maybe, I'm not saying definitely, but maybe they're approaching burnout. So just educating yourself so that you're in a position to help people. The other thing is, and again, leaders as well as organizations need to do this, we need to de-stigmatize mental unwellness conversations. Typically, if I came to you and say, hey, Matt, I'm tired. I hurt my leg yesterday playing basketball. I really need to go home and rest for a few hours. Is that okay with you? And you'd say, yeah, go ahead. But if I came to you and said, Hey, Matt, my brain's fried. I just can't think, well, I didn't get good night's sleep last night. I'm going to go home for a couple hours and nap. Most bosses would look at me and say, Steven, pull up your socks. Get in the game. Don't be a weakling. So, we treat mental unwellness differently than physical unwellness and we should not. And because of that mental unwellness and has a stigma to it and people are afraid to talk about it. Last quick thing I'll say is Gallup did some research, and it showed that 40% of women and 33% of men are unwilling to go to their direct supervisor, the direct manager, to discuss mental unwellness or burnout. And it is not a gender issue. It's not women reporting to men or women reporting to women or men to women, men to men. It's the stigma in the workplace. They feel uncomfortable even bringing it up. And we need to de-stigmatize that. We need to have open honest conversation in the workplace and say, hey, it's okay to talk about this stuff.

Matt Feret:

I hear you. I like it and I practice it. But there's a lot to somebody listening out there right now like, nope, I couldn't do that with my boss because I'm here to produce, right? I'm a worker. I'm not an owner. I'm here to get a job done and get a job as fast as I can. And then if I've got anything else that's in the way, that's kind of on my time. So, if you're in an environment like that, again, managing up or popping out, how do you carve out space for you? How do you make those wishes known? How do you have those uncomfortable conversations with your leader? If you're feeling that way,

Steven Howard:

If you have a good relationship with your boss, you bring it up. I don't have Harry Potter's magic wand. I can't hand it to anybody and say, this is the way to do it. I would suggest that if you're leading people, you need a role model. This, I think as a leader, and again, this is a new concept of leadership, a little bit of vulnerability to be able to tell your people, hey, team, my brain's fried. I'm taking the next two hours off unless the building's burning down or unless our biggest customer is sending us a letter that's threatening to cancel our contract, don't call me. You guys are good on your own for the next two to three hours. And just to model that. And people would step back and go, oh my God, is he okay or she okay or what's going on? You walk in the office the next day and said, man, that was great. I went to the park. I walked around. I got some fresh air. I walked my dog or whatever. I feel great. Let's get into it today, guys, and it's going to take time. You don't do this on Tuesday and the whole organization changes on Thursday, but you need to start role modeling this as a leader and be receptive to it.

Steven Howard on Brain Health in Retirement [21:01]

Matt Feret:

Let's pivot a bit towards later than thirties and forties and maybe when you're starting to think about or able to financially about retirement. And the question is, do people wait to, well, people wait to retirement. It's always this far off land sometimes for people. When I retire, I will travel the world. When I retire, I will get back to my hobbies when I retire. I'll have more time for me when I retire. I'll focus in on my brain health and my mental health. I'm just too damn busy right now. Why do humans and why do people put off brain health until those retirement years? I

Steven Howard:

Think part of it is lack of understanding. I mean, like I said, last 25 years, scientists will learn a lot more about this topic. I know when I was in high school, I was taught by my biology teacher that my brain stops growing at age 23 to 25, and that's not true. We now know that the brain continues to grow into the seventies and probably the eighties or nineties haven't been a lot of 80-year-olds and 90-year-olds to test, but we're going to find our brain continues to grow. So, a lot of myths about the brain, misunderstanding about it. When I wrote my book called “Better Decisions, Better Thinking, Better Outcomes” and it talks a lot about brain health in it, one of the reasons I wrote it was I talked to so many leaders about brain health, and can you start talking about in your organization? They said, I'll worry about that when I retire. Then when I showed them that by not taking care of your brain in your forties and fifties, it impacts your decision making. And by impacting your decision making, it impacts your bottom line. Now, I had their attention, and that's one of the reasons I wrote that book, and one of the reasons I wrote that title of “Better Decisions, Better Thinking, Better Outcomes,” people often ask me, shouldn't it be better thinking first then you make better decisions? I said, no, I wrote it that way. Because the first decision you have to make is not to get emotionally hijacked when you're making a decision. You have to make that decision. I'm going to pause. I'm going to make a rational decision. I'm not going to respond. Now I can think better and now I will get better outcomes. So, to me, that's one of the first things that people need to do is focus on it in their forties and fifties and understand that it is impacting your decision making today. It's not something to put off until you retire.

Matt Feret:

You've lived and worked all over the world, and I'm thinking back to studies I've read about productivity and worker productivity, and one of the much-ballyhooed stats is the American workforce is the most productive in terms of GDP workers in the world. And then we make fun of places like France who seem to go on strike every five minutes and have a lot of maternity time, paternity time, vacation time, and we go, oh, there's a certain amount of pride, universal pride in this country about hard work, nose to the grindstone and all that. From your travels all over the world and as it relates to stress and brain health, what have you seen in cultural differences that we should really be thinking about without going up against our largely immigrant, second, third, fourth, fifth generation, immigrant upbringing of hard work. If you can't make it here, you can make it anywhere. What are some of the things you've seen over your travels and dealing with leaders and companies and people over the world that you would ask us to consider here in the states?

Steven Howard:

That's part of our Puritan upbringing. It goes right back to the founding of the country and the colonies, and the education system built off that and everything, and it's worked very well for the country. It's worked very well for a lot of people, but you might say that Americans live to work, whereas something in Australia, I lived 12 years in Australia, Australians, they work to live Friday at two o'clock. No one's going to have a meeting in Australia. No boss, unless he wants a mutiny, is going to say, okay, team, let's get together for a 30 meeting on Friday afternoon. They're going to say, no thank you. We're going to the pub. And so, it's a totally different concept. And very rarely do people in Australia work on weekends, for instance. They're much more in their families, much more in their sporting life, things of that nature. I think, and it kind of goes back to when we were talking earlier about the hybrid working environments and the working from home environments, I think we all have to understand that everyone's going to be different. Forget stereotypes and find flexibility and what works for you might not work for me. What works for me might not work for you and find that flexibility and help people get harmony in their lives coming out of the pandemic. I think we all need more harmony in our life, both professionally and personally. So whatever we can do, even as neighbors, as much as leaders, just how can we help each other get a little bit more harmony in our lives? And I think that will reduce stress, which will reduce the brain issues we're talking about that will reduce blood pressure and probably going to make us have a little happier life than working 60, 75 hours a week.

Matt Feret:

So going into that retirement piece, and let's say, hey, you're not twenties, thirties, forties anymore. You're in fifties, sixties, maybe late sixties, by seventies all the stats say most everybody is unquote “retired” by 70. Obviously not everybody, but the vast majority of the population by age 70 is on Medicare and social security and they're out. If you've ignored your brain health as you've described it here until such time, what can I do now?

Steven Howard:

Well, remember that your brain is the biggest user of oxygen and the biggest user of blood in your body. So, anything that's good for your heart, by definition, it's going to be good for your brain. So, get up and walk 20 minutes a day. I'm not suggesting anybody needs to run a half marathon or a marathon, but a little bit of mobility. Get up and walk around, get the blood circulating. Don't vegetate in front of the TV. And I say this from the heart and experience, this is probably the one thing I did not do with my father. My father in his last couple years, he just wanted to sit and watch the old westerns on TV that he watched a kid, and he was happy as hell, and I was looking at him, he's happy. I wish I made him get up and walk. And the few times I tried, he pushed me back, no, no, I'm too tired. I don't want to do this. And I'm not saying he would've lived another 10 years, but he might have lived a few more months or a few more a couple years, who knows? But so, a little bit of activity is very good. Keeping your brain engaged and watching old westerns on TV, your brain's not very much engaged. But here's the kicker, Matt, if you do crossword puzzles, which is good, but you only do crossword puzzles after a while, your brain gets really good at crossword puzzle and then it's not growing anymore. So, you need to do crossword puzzles for a few months and then go over and do Sudoku for a few months or do those puzzles where you circle got the letters in a square and you find the words inside the square. Just keep doing different things and socializing. And I didn't realize this. I did the research and again, my dad didn't do any socializing other than with some immediate family members. Socializing keeps the brain engaged and outside family members, because typically as family members, we talk about the same thing over and over and over. Do you remember when Anne Hilda did this? Do you remember? So-and-so did this? And the brain likes new things. The brain wants to grow. And so, the other thing, the last one I'll say is particularly if you're in the 50-to-75-year category, take different routes when you drive. I bet you almost everybody in this audience, if you drive to the grocery store, you drive the same route. If you drive to your doctor, you drive the same route. If you drive to your family's house, some relative's house, you take the same route. Mix it up every now and then, go two blocks to the right and run parallel, and your brain's going to be looking and say, wow, look at the color of that house. Wow, that tree's really blossoming now. Oh, look, that so-and-so's got a new car. The brain likes new things, but you have to give it opportunities. Otherwise, we go on autopilot. We get in our cars, and we drive the same street, and the brain's not focused on anything except what's directly in front of us. So, give the brain some new experiences. That's why travel, people say travel is so good for the elderly because you're traveling to a different city or different country. You're experiencing all new things, and that's good for the brain.

Matt Feret:

Yeah. Yep, I like it. So, when you retire and you go from, and I've had a lot of guests on the show about the other side of retirement, you have to have a plan. You can't just retire from working and then golfing. You have to find some purpose. You have to understand what you're going to do. You have to keep your brain engaged, maybe audit some classes at the local college. Go take a course down at your town at the rec center or something like that and pick up a new sport. But I haven't heard though, as you're planning your retirement or you're moving into work is work, I mean pretty much at that point you know what you're doing. You know what your job role is. You've been doing it for a while, and I don't know, I won't call it rote, but you kind of know what you're doing. And that in and of itself is not as stressful as, say taking a new job. That first 12 months of a new job or even 24 months is just so many things coming at you. Your stress levels are high if you've been in those jobs for a while and then you retire. I got to imagine too, if you put yourself on a schedule that's new, and that can be its own source of stress. So, when you're transitioning from working to retirement and you got a plan, right? The old what that Jack Nicholson movie, the bucket list, right? Everybody's got a bucket list now. It seems like a to-do list, and I don't know about you, but I probably get a little stressed of checking things off my to-do list. Is there a different approach around making that transition from working to not working as much or not working as all that is stressful? Or is there a different approach to that in terms of don't stress yourself out when you're in retirement, don't try to get it all in at once, or how would you take this and the mentality you need when making that change?

Steven Howard:

Yeah, have shorter to-do lists, not 10 items, 12 items. There's another one that you should be aware of. Matt, a friend of mine once told me this. He said, it wasn't my to-do lists that would drive me crazy. It was the honey-do list, and his wife had, honey, can you do this, honey, can you do this, honey, can you do this? And that was stressing him out. So, I think like most things in life, a little bit of moderation. Have a few things you want to do. Like you said, audit a course. In my case, I know what kind of courses I want to take but probably be online rather than physically. But in my case, I might also go teach a course. I might volunteer at the local college and say, hey, you don't even have to pay me. I have these experiences. What do your students want to learn about? I'll be happy to do once a week for an hour and a half course or something. So, I think moderation and have some also, whether it's called purpose or goals or interests, I mean, traveling to Europe for two weeks is not necessarily your purpose in life, but it's a nice goal. It's a nice thing to do in retirement. So yeah, if you can find something like that, have also a purpose. Whether you volunteer local college, soup kitchen, the boys and girls club, whatever it might be, your local library, whatever, all those things would be good for you. But I totally agree with you don't have a to-do list of every morning I have to do this, and then I have to do this, and now you're just in a routine, which is, unless you're really enjoying that, that's not going to be healthy for you.

Steven Howard on the Importance of Sleep on Brain Health [33:51]

Matt Feret:

Thank you. So, we've covered a lot and we've covered a lot of ages really. So, we've talked about thirties and forties. We've talked about long-term brain health having to be set up in your thirties and forties. We talked about work not only as an individual contributor with a boss, but as a boss and how you need to approach people's stress and health in a fully onsite work, hybrid work at home. I mean, it's a really delicate dance to manage a team of all three or at least two out of the three. What topics about the stress piece about brain health as you move through the decades and as it relates to your work and your leadership? Did we not talk about today that we should have?

Steven Howard:

Let me say one thing about the retirement era. First, your retirement years, and even free retirement as well. We really didn't talk about the importance of sleep. Your brain needs sleep, it needs quality sleep. It's not the number of hours, it's the quality hours that you get because the resets of synapsis in your brain. So physiologically, it's good for your brain and there's a lot of research. Now also tied to that is also naps. A 20-minute, 25-minute power nap in the afternoon, whatever age you are, is extremely good for your brain, and I know that from personal experience. If I don't get my 25-minute nap in the afternoon, usually around 4:00pm, wherever I am, I try not to make any decisions, important decisions until the next day I will push them off. I know I make less than optimal decisions when I haven't had that little nap. Now I get up at five o'clock in the morning. That's one of the reasons for the four to four 30 timeframes. I think that's really important in the workplace. I think one thing leaders should do, but all of us, we lead ourselves that annual physical with your doctor is so important. I'm coaching three people right now in one organization, and none of them have had an annual physical since 2019. I keep saying, have you made your appointment? Look, your company's insurance pays for it. It's not going to cost you any. One guy says to me, yeah, but I don't like the blood draw. I had a bad experience one time said, well, get over it. You're 35 years old, get over it. Did you fall off your bicycle one time as a kid? Do you ride mountain bikes today? Yes, you do. Well, get over the needle issue. But that annual physical and with the blood draw, seeing your doctor, getting your doctor's advice on all the things your blood shows, your cholesterol, your triglycerides, whether you have pre-diabetes, what your blood pressure, that's so important as part of healthcare routine. You owe it to yourself, particularly if you've got insurance, if you've got the Obamacare, you have company insurance, it's going to pay for almost the entire process. Then you owe it to yourself to do it.

Matt Feret:

Yeah. I'll say a little known fact, because I've got a lot of experience working with insurance companies and for insurance companies. Insurance companies want you to go to your primary care physician. They want you to go in and get your blood drawn. They want you to get in there because they want you healthy. I mean, it makes business sense, right?

Steven Howard:

Yes.

Matt Feret:

If they can identify things early on, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high triglycerides, whatever it is, they want it diagnosed early, not only for your health and your wellbeing and your livelihood, but also because you don't want somebody showing up in the ER with a blood pressure 280/150. You got to get in front of that because not only is it bad for your health, but it's also bad for the insurance company because now all of a sudden, a $180 primary care visit is now a $15,000 ER visit. So yes, please. I'm with you. Go get your annual stuff done. Don't ignore it. Don't pretend it's not. There it is. You just got to get it checked. So good foundational advice. Thank you.

Steven Howard:

My pleasure.

Matt Feret:

Yeah, Steven, this has been a real pleasure. Thank you very much for spending time with me.

Steven Howard:

Thank you, Matt. Very much enjoyed talking with you, and I wish you great success, and I wish your audience great health and wellness and take some of the advice, please.

Matt Feret:

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