Years ago, I ended up on a midnight flight from Los Angeles to Dallas. Tired and slightly agitated by the cancelation of my direct flight home earlier in the day, I did my best to present a friendly demeanor to the passenger next to me, who apparently wanted to make small talk. He told me he was in the computer business and was flying to Dallas to see his wife and kids after being away for three weeks. He would be home for less than twenty-four hours before catching a red-eye flight to his next work appointment.
Trying to engage with what he was saying, I asked him why his schedule was so tight. He responded that his business had really taken off in the previous twelve months, bringing in tidal-wave profits and creating a crushing workload. Lately he’d been spending his days (and even some nights) putting out fires, calming the nerves of anxious board members, making key financial decisions, casting vision, hiring key personnel, traveling from worksite to worksite, gathering venture capital for new expansions, and babysitting the company’s bottom line.
At this point, I was intrigued. “How do you manage to do all those things and still be physically and emotionally healthy?” I wondered if he actually was healthy. His response was classic:
“Well, you know what they say, What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” He forced a smile, but his weary eyes betrayed a lack of sleep.
“Are you sure that’s true?”
His smile vanished, his gaze lowered—breaking our eye contact—and with a quiet, reserved tone, he answered, “No, but I hope so.” As he said those words, he turned and faced the window, and I could see that our conversation had taken an unpleasant turn for my new computer-genius friend. He watched out the window as the runway lights of LAX flashed by and we lifted off.
It was time for a subject change. “What do you do?” he asked. “I’m a pastor and a life coach,” I said. “I specialize in helping distressed married couples and overextended leaders.”
He seemed pleased at this and asked if I was willing to do some free life coaching. For the next hour, I listened and he talked.
While his business life couldn’t be better, his personal life was a disappointment. His marriage was an example of this. It seemed that each time his business reached a new level of success, his marriage became more strained. He and his wife had previously had an exceptionally strong marriage, but things were different now. Over the past several months, they had begun to question whether they could stay together. Marriage was feeling hollow and pointless to him, and he felt like a constant disappointment to his wife. She often complained that she was tired of competing for his attention. She felt that the business had replaced her and she was getting his time-and-attention leftovers.
Meanwhile, he felt unappreciated. Why didn’t she care that he was so successful? Why did she seem unhappy when he was working so hard?
The family stress wasn’t limited to his marriage. He’d recently felt his kids growing away from him, too. Despite his hectic work life, he tried to be a good dad. He showed up at games, recitals, and performances whenever possible, and he tried to take a genuine interest in his kids’ lives. But, as far as he could tell, it wasn’t enough. Especially in the previous four or five months, he’d felt like an outsider at the dinner table when he was home. The kids didn’t seem to have the same kind of drive to connect with him, and his attempts to bridge the divide weren’t working. He sadly admitted, “When I travel now, I miss my kids more than I used to, but it seems like they miss me less.”
Physically, he was a mess. He admitted that he wasn’t eating smart, sleeping well, or taking good care of himself. And all this personal neglect was breaking his lifelong health streak. For most of his life, he’d managed to stay away from the doctor’s office. He wasn’t often sick, and even when he was, he recovered quickly and easily. But now he frequently struggled with this ailment or that, spending a lot of time in doctors’ offices. As of late, he was often convinced that he must be sick, given how bad he was feeling. But while he was often scolded by doctors about his less-than-healthy lifestyle, he wasn’t diagnosed with anything in particular. “Go figure,” he said with a chuckle. “I’m finally convinced I’m sick, and they keep telling me I’m fine.”
I watched a single tear chase down one side of his face. Pointing to it, he said, “And that’s another thing! I cry now. I’ve never been a crier. What’s up with that?”
He explained that he was often all over the page emotionally. He felt he was needlessly sharp with staff. He was easily agitated and frustrated, and it had become enough of a pattern that it was now bleeding over into his social life. “When I was just snapping at employees, I figured I was just doing what bosses have to do sometimes. But when I started snapping at friends, I knew some- thing was out of whack.”
Then he talked about anxiety. Lately, it had become a big problem. As of late, he was prone to irrational fears that would grow into mountains of worst-case-scenario anxieties that he didn’t know how to address. He didn’t talk much about them with others, though, because he didn’t feel it was appropriate for leaders to be anxious. I remembered thinking that he must feel a tremendous amount of internal pressure.
Then the conversation took a brief spiritual turn. Since I mentioned that I was a pastor, I guess he felt obligated to share that he hadn’t been to church in a long time. After meekly explaining that no one could maintain his schedule and attend services regularly, he lowered his voice and his gaze. “Maybe I’m too busy for God. I hope that’s not really true.”
I was struck by a sense of irony. After all, the flight had barely started when he paraphrased Nietzsche’s idea that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Somehow, this poor guy had come to believe that the way to achieve success in life is always to push harder. He seemed to be telling himself, Keep going, because as long as you have a pulse, you have the capacity to do more, and doing more will eventually make you better. But the reality was dark: this fellow had been pushing harder for a long time, and he was not better for it. He was worse.
Content taken from Stress Fracture by Jonathan Hoover, PhD ©2024. Used by permission of Bethany House.