Areas to Focus in Leadership

Welcome to Leadership Talk! In today’s episode, Pastor Priji converses with Stewarts Roberts on key areas of leadership. Tune in as we learn from the journey of his life and gain insights into leadership.

Transcript:

Pastor Priji: Good morning and greetings to all of you in Jesus name. This is the leadership podcast and I’m very excited to have a friend, Stewarts Roberts, all the way from the United States as a guest on today’s podcast. Stewarts, welcome here. I’m happy to have you as a guest. We’d love to get to know you would love to get to see whatever you’ve learned and your experiences and learn from you personally. Thank you for saying yes. Thank you for coming here. And would you like to just take a moment to greet our listeners?

Stewarts Roberts : Yes Pastor Priji, thank you so much for having me today. It’s a real honor to be here and to be a part of your leadership podcast. I’m Stewart Roberts from the United States. San Diego, the father of two, has been married 12 years and wrote a book this past year and is happy to share with your listeners my humble journey.

Pastor Priji: Amazing, amazing. So what made you reach this point where you wanted to write a book? What made you feel that there was a need for coaching people or leading them or training them? What inspired you to become who you are today?

Stewarts Roberts : Well, quite simply, I found myself. I’ll give you a little context. I grew up a middle class kid in the Midwest, and my understanding of success was one that was very much monetarily defined, and I was fortunate enough to have some success early on in life. Along those lines, I went to Wall Street. Then I went to China and ran a trading company, and I found myself in a situation in 2015 where I hit bottom and I had achieved my monetary goals in terms of where I had outlived. I had achieved more than I had thought possible, and yet I found myself in a miserable, lonely, dark place. My marriage was ending. We had two little kids at home and it was a really tough time and I’m sorry. So I hit bottom. So my experience and what I wrote about was that I didn’t have anything any way to go from. From there, I didn’t know where to turn. I had been privileged to have to benefit from a great education and a lot of great opportunities. And yet I was stuck. I was stuck in life. And so I stopped everything that I was doing career wise, and I committed myself to learning and growth. And a couple of years later, when we recovered our marriage and recovered my life. To be honest, part of me wanted to shove it in a corner in a box and never to revisit it again. But I thought I kept running across other people where I was in life looking for those answers. And so I thought, what if I could help others through this journey and truncate, if you will, that process of. All right, I’m failing, but how can I recover? And how could I recover quickly so that the impact is less on my family? The impact is less on my life, and it comes from a humble place faster.

Pastor Priji: Amazing, amazing. So you did mention something about success is sometimes being measured in terms of monetary gains and things that we can see and feel on the outside. How do you define success today and what is the bad side about defining or limiting success to just monetary goals being achieved? We’d love to hear more on that.

Stewarts Roberts : Will society deter? Has that definition for us, right? And I’m sure this is the case where you are as well. You’re in a growing economy. There’s so much growth, so much change. Wealth is synonymous with success, and I’m not here to argue that that’s not a component. But what I argue in the book is that if you approach life with that being your end, all, be all, you’re going to wake up in a place that’s like I did. It was the very dark and lonely, and you’re not going to be satisfied. And so I’ve redefined it. Excuse me, I redefined it across five core areas self-help, inner peace, family and trade. It’s a shift model. The acronym is shift. And essentially, what I’m arguing is that if you work on a weekly basis to fulfill these buckets, you will achieve that. You will reach a level. And it’s not. It’s very similar to your journey with Christ, our journey with Christ. We don’t we don’t reach a level where we’ve arrived and then everything is great, right? We’re continually striving. We’re continually contributing and growing. And it’s a humble journey. But that’s the fundamental approach that I outline in the book and each of those areas. So, so for example, self, we find ourselves often in mid-life with kids married and we’re so busy with our work. We’re so busy with our roles, being a father, being a husband that we forget oftentimes who we are. And so self is redefining who we are apart from the roles we play. Health is very important. Physical health, the food we consume that leads to contributing to that and then inner peace, our spiritual side is our path with God. And then finally, the family, which includes a marriage component, obviously, and the kids. And then there’s the work at. So those five core areas I’ve really helped me in in defining who I am and turning my life around.

Pastor Priji: Well, well, that’s beautiful. You did mention that you reached a point where you hit bottom and that is where you realized the need to reinvent yourself. I’d love to hear what are some of the common reasons why we hit rock bottom? Why do we get burnt out or why do we reach a place where we get exhausted? And what causes it? And how can we avoid reaching that place? How can we prepare ourselves early so we don’t become burned out? You know, when we are at the peak of our self or spirituality or, you know, our families, you know, going at a particular pace or at work is increasing. Everything is going at a particular pace. And then all of a sudden you shut down. So, you know, so how can we avoid the burnout when you’re in your bag? What kind of steps can you take early on in your life so you don’t hit that rock bottom?

Stewarts Roberts : Well, it’s simplest terms. It’s balance. It’s a balanced approach. And I think where we get off track is early on in our 20s. We’re building our career and we’re growing and we’re advancing and even into our 30s. And then we get married somewhere along the way. Many of us and all of a sudden, we bring children into the mix and you’re hit with distractions on a daily basis. I mean, COVID is an excellent example of this, right? I mean, so many kids around the world have been home. We’re talking about that earlier, over the last couple of years. I mean, you all of a sudden your kids are home and you’re having to deal with issues that you’ve never had to contend with. And so it’s all this stress. And then when you start to do it you start to cut out things in your life to make time and the intention. Our intentions are good, right? Our intentions are well, I won’t work out today because I won’t take care of my physical health today because I don’t have time. And then we reach a point where we’re I did over the years where I had started putting on weight. I didn’t have the energy to show up for my family, for my wife. And so I guess the argument is, that over time, this catches up with you and it’s gaining weight over a series of small amounts over a period of years. It’s not eating the right foods. It’s forgetting God. It’s forgetting our humble roots. And it’s all justified because our schedules are so tight and so demanding. And yet we find ourselves in this place. And I would argue it’s inevitable if we don’t, if we’re not feeding certain areas of our art, whether it be our body or our spirituality or our marriage, you’re going to wake up and regret that. And again, our schedules are usually focused on work if you pull out your calendar. I would bet most of your listeners their calendar is full of their work obligations, right? And then everything else is supposed to fall into place. Well, it doesn’t work that way. We need to be. We need to be very deliberate about how we schedule time with our kids. We need to be deliberate about scheduling time with our wife. We need to be deliberate about scheduling time with God and can we do it all every day? No, but my argument is that if we work towards this diligently weekly, we’re going to be in a much better place.

Pastor Priji: Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. I believe that you know, what you’re sharing is ministry, in fact helping a lot of people. It is helping me to look at life from a different perspective because sometimes what we try to do is just, you know, keep one thing out to serve the other, whereas the solution is to bring in a balance between everything. You can’t just give up work for the sake of family or give up a family for the sake of work or help for the sake of God or God. For the sake of, you know, yourself, you need to bring balance in each and every sphere of life. And I think that is sometimes very challenging. We keep growing, we keep evolving and in different seasons of life, we need to have different strategies to bring about a balance. So, you know, I realize how for me personally, my daily scheduling and creating a routine for myself has helped me a lot in trying to build that, that balance, you know? Now it comes naturally, you know, over a long period of time, there are certain things that come to me earlier on. I had to really schedule it in and, you know, make sure that I give reminders for myself. So I’d like to know from your perspective, how important is it for us to develop routines towards attaining that balance, develop habits, develop a lifestyle towards reaching a place of being a balanced person?

Stewarts Roberts: I think you’ve really hit on it. I mean, success is habitual. It’s not something where, I mean, it’s something that we’re you. You deliberately focus every day and contribute and work towards. It doesn’t just happen along those lines. You mentioned something earlier where you said that you started doing things a certain way and you had scheduled it. And then over time it became routine, it became habit forming. And I think that’s great because so many things that we do, we’re trying for the first time. For example, in the last few years I have been very deliberate about my morning routine. I’m eight four in the past. What I would do is I would get up and I would hit that snooze button or I’d get up and I would turn on my phone. And right away I would be thrown into the chaos of the world of the day, emails at work and things that are going on. And really, what you’re doing is you’re hijacking your day. Your day is getting hijacked by all of the challenges and battles that you’re going to face. And so I think it’s really important that we take time for ourselves each morning and that we can take on a variety of focused meditation, prayer, exercise. But just having that time in the morning for me is so important to getting my day off on the right foot and having some early wins, if you will. There was a book that was published by a colonel about making your bed and this is what essentially he’s saying is that if you can score some wins early on, even if they’re little wins, then you start your day on the right foot. And that is huge. That psychological shift, if you will, is so important in your outlook for the day and for the week and for life.

Pastor Priji: Yeah, yeah, that’s really beautiful. If we can, you know, begin our day on a positive note and the rest of the day becomes easier to tackle, no matter how big the challenge is, so the circumstances may be. I want to understand also on how do you set goals, you know, short term goals and long term goals because sometimes when you are in a routine, you lose the sight of the end or you know, you’re not bothered as much as you know, you’re not like very much goal driven all the time. You just become this has happened to me where I just focus on the task at hand and I just say, OK, as long as I’ve done these, these things today, I’m good to go. But how can you have a dual focus where you are focusing on the immediate task? But at the same time, are you focusing on the end result that you want to see in the process? So how do you bring about that balance between just building your daily routine and also having an end goal in mind?

Stewards Roberts: I think it’s all it all can be measured, whether it’s the food you’re consuming, whether it’s the exercise that you’re doing, whether it’s time you’re spending with your children, with your wife, how do you measure that? And it all seems very arbitrary, but it really is it. And the book that I wrote lays out very specific ways to approach that. And there’s a lot of detail. But at a surface level, it’s a competition really with yourself. You’re competing with yourself. Where am I this year compared to where I was last year? And I’ll give you some examples. So from an exercise standpoint, you know, trying to fit in what I used to do was I would have run out of time and invariably my intentions were good. I’d say on Monday, getting up, I’m going to go to the gym. Oh, but it’s not working because I’ve got to spend time with the kids or get them off to school or I didn’t get enough sleep. And then you find yourself at the end of the week and you haven’t accomplished your goals. So now what I do to stop that is I’m committed to making that up on weekends. So for example, if I miss yoga on Tuesday or I miss my high intensity interval training class on Thursday, I’m doing that on Saturday. And it got to the point, pastor, where you know, I was I had no excuse. I had to make that up. So it’s the same with food consumed. What am I eating today? How am I? How am I fueling my body? I look at food in terms of fuel as opposed to something that satisfies an immediate craving, right? Am I fueling my body with clean, clean fuel? Or am I polluting it? It’s the same with my marriage. We have. We had a date in the last couple of weeks. Have we had time apart from the kids? And again, you can track all of this. And it actually gets kind of interesting. What am I doing with the family? Are we talking? Am I taking time out for vacations with the family? Despite the work schedule, are we connecting on Sunday and Saturday during the week? Are we connecting on an evening? And it doesn’t have to be this grand plan. It can be as simple as, you know, spending 30 minutes with your daughter with her homework or reading them a book at night before they go to bed. And as opposed to outsourcing that to our wives or to someone else in the family, that’s something that’s very easy to do. It’s easy to outsource. We live in a day and age where people are outsourcing everything here, from their lawn care to their to their child care. One of the things I like to do is drive the kids to school in the morning because they tell you about their fears. They tell you about, you know, what’s going on in class. You can prepare for their spelling test. And it’s a great way to connect. So these are all little things. But I think in short, it’s a defined, detailed or detailed growth plan from where you were a year ago or a month ago? And how can I improve that? And it’s incremental. It doesn’t happen overnight. But if you track that information, it’s very easy to see, Oh gee, the last 30 days I haven’t gone out with my wife or oh, in the last this week, I’ve been really busy at work and I haven’t had a chance to spend time with the kids. And this happens and I’m not saying we should be critical of that. But it’s self-correcting. It’s the opportunity to self-correct because we can see what we have. It’s undeniable. We can see that pattern as opposed to waking up five years, 10 years into marriage and not having invested the time or not having attended to our needs or to the needs of our family and then wondering why we are where we are right, which is which is what I did, and also just a very common, a common, a common approach.

Pastor Priji: Yeah, that’s all right, Stuart. You know, sometimes when you fail to keep up to what you wanted to do and you fail at being available for your family or being on point at your work, it can be very demotivating. And when you see that doing that, okay, this is not working out. No matter how hard I try, I keep failing to keep up with my health or I keep failing in my growth, in my walk with God.
How do you stay motivated, especially when you have a pattern of failures or when you have had a pattern of losses? Sometimes you know your health may have a setback. Your management has the same medical. You know, your finances or your work may have a setback. All of these can be hugely motivating factors. So how do you personally keep yourself motivated to keep going for it in spite of these challenges that you face.

Stewarts Roberts : I love that word failure that you used. I love that because I think it’s misunderstood. I think we need to be failing all the time. And I struggle with this. But failure means if I’m failing at something, it means I’m learning. I’m growing because there’s the recognition component where you recognize where this isn’t going well and that reality check in. Some times are hard, but yet very healthy because it forces you to say, Well, I need to course correct versus what too often what we do is we avoid it because we think, well, I’m good at work or I’m good at what I do over here.
And let me put my attention into things that I’m good at. And so I think for me, it’s that reality check where. If I’m not filling these and I deal with this all the time, I deal with two dimensional what I call two and three dimensional people where they’ll say, you know, I’m really good at it, I’m a great, great provider and I’m a great, you know, I’m great at with my family, but I’m feeling that my health, I’m failing with my spiritual side and I’m but I can’t be good at everything, right? Well, I would argue that you’re setting yourself up for failure on a colossal scale, because if you neglect these areas, these core areas of life, it’s going to be detrimental. And so instead of it’s I think it’s embracing that we’re all we’re all in this growth mindset where we all have room to improve. We’ll have room to grow, whether it be our spiritual side, whether it be within our work and our marriage. And that part of that journey is failing and it’s failing and frequently. So guys, it can be a really tough reality check. But once you get into it and once you’re used to seeing these patterns, you can say, OK, I’m not perfect here, I need some attention here. How can I bring up that area of my life? How can I raise my game in this specific area so that I don’t end up at fifty five sixty five? Facing looking back with a life of regrets? And this is maybe a shorter explanation, but there’s an exercise that I do for my 80th birthday party. And I think about who’s going to be there. I think about what I am, what my work colleagues are going to say about what my family is going to say? What are my grown children going to say about me? How do they perceive me? Who am I? And at that point, it’s pretty much cast in stone, right? You’ve made your decisions. If we’re fortunate enough to make our 80th birthday, we will look back and there’ll be some regret there. Probably that’s part of it. But is the regret going to be overwhelming? Is it going to be am I going to be so unhappy with where I am or am I going to be pleased with that and that changes over time. And that’s something that I look for and keeps me motivated, if you will. I signed up as a father. I signed up as a husband and it’s not always easy. But there are certain responsibilities that need to be addressed, and that’s what we do every day, right? We get up and fail and continue to move forward. So embrace failure, it would be my message there, embrace failure, it’s not it’s not a. It’s something that’s short term that can be overcome if it’s approached the right way. And it’s something that we should all learn from.

Pastor Priji: Yeah, and guess what? The five core areas that you mentioned are self held inner peace, peace with your family and your tree. Yes. The five core areas that each of us need to work on. Thank you. We’d love to hear a little bit about your book and everything else that you do to train and coach men, especially, you know, if some of us are interested in getting this book. What can they do about it? How can they get that? you could just introduce your book, a little bit will really help.

Stewarts Roberts : Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Again, just to wrap it up, the book starts with highlighting my journey, my success and failure, and really failure on it on a grand scale, as I said in 2015. Everything that I had in my life that I had built was blowing up. I remember driving my daughter to school one day or my kids to school, and my daughter, the oldest one, was out of control and she didn’t understand what was going on in class. And so she would act out at home and then in class, she would sit there and be a good little girl. And I broke down on the way home. My life was falling apart. My wife wanted a divorce. My kid was in a panic and I was failing to. There’s that word again on a grand scale because of things I had neglected for years, and that was my turnaround. That was my impetus for writing this book because I think so many of the men that I’ve worked with are people in general.
You know, they achieve in life what they set out to achieve. And I think it’s going to be the end all, be all, and it just isn’t. And so the book highlights my mistakes and what I learn from it and then redefine success across these five core buckets. Just what we’ve been talking about today. I’d love to. I’ve got a giveaway for your listeners if they’re interested. If you go to my website. Stewartroberts.com, you can get there’s a version of the book, the books available on Amazon. And there’s also an audio version of the book. But the E version of the book can be had for a dollar, and I priced it at that money-losing price point because I really want people to pick this up and to learn from my mistakes. I’m fifty one, and if you’re 30 or 40 now, I can save you a lot of time from errors and mistakes that I’ve made that I see a lot of people make. And that’s what I’m here for. I’m here to help. So go to Stewartroberts.com , get the book for a dollar and be happy to continue the conversation.

Pastor Priji: That’s amazing. Thank you, Stuart, for your generous offer. What are the best ways that our listeners can connect with you other than your website? Is there anywhere else that they can connect with you?

Stewarts Roberts : Sure, I do. I do. Coaching largely for free men with families in their career and all these things we’ve been talking about. I have a bootcamp that I’ve started, although this is Southern California specific. But there’s a course online. There are a number of different, different ways they can connect. So I do the course, the book. But the book is a great place to start because the book will give you an idea of what I believe and my lessons and that’s a great starting point.

Pastor Priji: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure connecting with you, and I’m sure that each and every one of our listeners that tune in are definitely encouraged. Just like hearing your story that if you could understand and work towards your success, then from your story, we can also learn from the same story, and we can also glean from your mistakes and from your principles that you have put into place in the last five years and we can grow. Thank you for inspiring us this morning. May the Lord bless you, and we all hope to have you again on another podcast.

Stewarts Roberts : Thank you so much. It’s a real pleasure to be here and to be a part of this. I love what you’re doing.

Pastor Priji: Thank you Stwearts, God bless you!