It’s often said, “it’s lonely at the top.”

As venture capitalists, business executives, and professional athletes at the highest level, there can often be a mentality that you should just focus on performing and avoid feelings of burn out, toxic stress, or loneliness. 

However, we’ve all seen examples of - or felt ourselves - this mentality not being sustainable over the long term.

In this episode of the Athlete CEO, Erik is joined by Andy Maurer, licensed therapist and emotional wellness coach specializing in leadership, trauma and emotional health. Andy utilizes cutting edge clinical research paired with therapeutic best practices and strategies to help high performance leaders - including CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs - operate at a higher caliber and in healthy and sustainable ways.

Erik and Andy discuss pursuing wholeness and avoiding fragmentation while leading and give practical steps to starting work on your inner game.

Episode Highlights

• 95% of cognition happens at the subconscious level (2:33)
• Can we overcome our subconscious? (3:40)
• Two kinds of processing (4:13)
• Logic vs Emotion (5:29)
• Demystifying “emotional wellness” (7:31)
• “With emotional wellness coaching, what I'm really trying to get across is I'm trying to help people live an integrated whole life as a leader. So, I focus a lot less on how to get rid of problems and I focus more on how to bring about something in the leader's life. Oftentimes, I see that they're fragmented, they're disjointed, they're lost internally, they don't know what they feel, they don't know who they are in a lot of ways, and my job is to help them reclaim that or rediscover that.” – Andy Maurer
• The difference between therapy and emotional wellness (9:37)
• The stats on entrepreneurs (12:17)
• The big issue that the top business editorials miss (12:45)
• The external vs internal (13:16)
• Fears about addressing your inner game (17:06)
• Defining “wholeness” (18:57)
• Battling imposter syndrome (23:43)
• Tools and tactics in pursuing wholeness (26:12)
• How burnout happens (28:44)
• When dialing in fitness and nutrition isn’t enough (29:53)
• Taking first steps toward emotional wellness (31:57)
• Practicing reflection (36:53)
• The impacts of toxic stress (42:45)
• How the body deals with stress (46:06)

Resources

• Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
• Anatomy of the Soul by Curt Thompson
• Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett