Podcast: Famous at Home with Dr. Joshua Straub

Cultivating an environment of emotional awareness is one of the greatest works we can do, but is often neglected. Today Josh and Lantz share a few ideas about creating a home that is emotionally aware and will be helpful to your family.

As Josh says, “The greatest red carpet you will ever walk on is through your front door.”In Dr. Joshua Straub’s reflective question at the end of the podcast. “What do you need to do to show up as the best version of yourself on that red carpet that enters your home?”

Josh is most renowned for his role as a husband and dad. He is also a recovering human, an ongoing journey that includes therapy, coaching, a tight-knit faith community, and staying fit. On stage, Josh is a speaker, author, marriage and leadership coach, and podcast. He and his wife, Christi, lead Famous at Home, a company equipping leaders and corporations in emotional intelligence and healthy family systems.

Download a free copy of Jump Start. Jump Start is 46 quick wins for the Modern Christian Man and discovers how to be fully alive from the bedroom to the boardroom.

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In Dr. Joshua Straub’s reflective question at the end of the podcast. “What do you need to do to show up as the best version of yourself on that red carpet that enters your home?”

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Unedited Podcast Transcription

Lantz Howard 4:04

So I got one of your early works a few years ago, the kids book, what am I feeling. And I think that’s possibly where where we stumbled across it, we were kind of navigating some anxiety in our family, and you know, for girls. And so that’s what we got as a tool and a resource and credible, incredible. So let’s, let’s use that as our launching pad for today’s conversation. And I want to just ask you personally, like, how are you navigating the anxiety of our of our day and our season that we’re currently facing?

Dr. Joshua Straub 5:35
Yeah, great question. And that’s a pretty heavy place to start for sure. You know, it’s been wild, because we’ve been super, we’ve got we’ve had to get very intentional about it recently, in our own family. So we have a nine year old, a seven year old and a 15 month old. And, and we, you know, for me, personally, I realized in so many ways, so goes to the parents, so goes to the child, and that was really where the What am I feeling book came out of, I’d written a book a few years ago called on emotional safety and kids called Safe House and, and just the idea that, you know, our kids become who we are. And so we set the emotional climate, we set the atmosphere of our home, by how we show up as, as moms and dads and, and I realized recently, just my own life, you know, with everything going on in our culture, one of the ways that I had to start doing this so that my headspace, you know, it’s one thing to be physically present with your kids, it’s another thing to be emotionally present with your kids. And I realized, even in my own life, how easy it was for me to be physically present, but yet how often I’d find myself looking at my phone, or my kids, you know, trying to say, Hey, Dad, look at this, and, you know, it’s taking me even just that five to 10 second delay to like, Hey, Dad, look at this, and I’m still buried in my phone before I look up and set, you know, see them or whatever. And so, one of the ways I recently have done this is we have, we don’t watch TV in our house, like, you know, call us antiquated or whatever, we just don’t put the TV on, you know, we’ll have different you know, it’s not that we don’t ever watch TV, but we don’t keep anything live, we don’t watch the news. There’s no news media, the spirit of fear that comes and when I talk about an atmosphere of our home, like I’m talking about, like, there’s a spirit that comes into your home, there’s your home has a carries an atmosphere. And I mean, the news just carries the spirit of fear. But fear is going to be in your home, you just look at the news headlines, whatever. I mean, they keep coming back. And so we don’t, we don’t put that in there. You know, we listen to music that’s uplifting, we listen to music that’s going to, you know, carry peace in our home. And so music plays a part of that I turned off all notifications recently from my phone, so I don’t get notifications onto my phone. It doesn’t bode well for getting back right away to people for text messages. But that’s another thing that I did too, is I actually now have scheduled times where I’ll answer emails, and I have scheduled times where I’ll get back to text messages. I just don’t want, you know, this, there’s this idea that we have to be constantly immediately responding to people as soon as something happens, you as soon as we get an email or a text, I just don’t do that anymore. And and people are starting to pick up on that. And you know, not take it personally, but it takes a little bit of time. But it’s brought me more life, you know, I’m not constantly be, you know, looking and you know, that type of thing. And I’m putting my phone away a lot. It’s so funny how a lot of it revolves around our phone, you know, we don’t look at our phone for the first hour before we wake up in the morning. And we also the phone goes to bed, you know, an hour before we do so we plugged him in away from our beds and an hour before we go to bed. So we have time to read and pour into things that are not social media and that type of thing. And so yeah, so that’s how we’ve been recently doing it. And then what we’ve been doing is we’ve been you know, we’ve been in the backyard, we just got some new yard games, we got a basketball hoop, you know, we’re playing basketball, you know, in the driveway. It’s just simple things like that, that are getting us outside and, and more connected as a family than we’ve ever been. So those are some of the ways that we’ve we’ve been doing it on a very practical level.

Lantz Howard 9:21
You’re, you’re unpacked several things. But I want to go back just so everybody can have just a brief intro of who you are and what you do, and even kind of how you got into this work because what you’re describing mean is so close to you. That is normal, right? But it really becomes magic to other people is what I say. And so some of this emotional awareness, this anxiety awareness that you’re talking about. We know it we feel it. So we kind of just go back to your origin story because this wasn’t possibly always your norm of being this aware. So how did you get into this work and the origin story of that?

Dr. Joshua Straub 10:03
Yeah, great question. Yeah, so my parents, my parents divorced when I was 10 years old, that was kinda I mean if you if we go all the way back all the way back there, but in but but in, in the prospect there in in, in that whole journey my parents were they were always there for me like I can count on one hand the number of wrestling matches my dad Miss, like I had great parents. I don’t remember my childhood other than dealing with the ramifications of a parent of parents divorce, like I was back and forth from one week to the next. My parents were pretty cordial with one another. I have an amazing stepdad. You know, it’s it’s been, it’s been a wild to see how my love for family transferred over into you know, my my profession, I was a criminal justice major was going to be a state cop got out of college and started working in a maximum security juvenile detention center with juvenile delinquents. And realize that most of those boys, pretty much every single one I’ve met one who didn’t, who, who had a great relationship with his dad either didn’t know is that at all, or had a really fractured relationship, and that ended up putting me into the counseling space, I went for my Master’s in counseling, I realized I was in for over my head, but wanted to be on the restorative side, as I was growing in my faith, I wanted to be in the restorative side. And so I went into that route and went into counseling and started really just serving families, troubled families while I was single and teenagers. And then once I got married, we started seeing the, you know, the ramifications of the stress of life and business and work and all that on the home and in the marriage. And that’s kind of how I got into where we are today in our heart is to reach the next generation of kids, like I want my kids to grow up and just, you know, I think we live in a world that lacks emotional intelligence. And so for me, you know, I ended up getting my PhD in counseling along that journey. And I did a lot of my work in emotional intelligence, attachment, attachment, research and that type of thing. And, and it’s just led me on this journey to really helping families and in organizations, be emotionally aware of their surroundings. Because at the end of the day, that’s really what makes us thrive on our stages, and also thrive at home. And when we’re thrive, being both places, man, that’s, that’s, that’s richness. That’s, that’s what, that’s what it’s all about. And so often we end up getting, you know, I think what I see is we end up putting all of our identity because we have a world that’s just trying to get us to put our identity in our work or getting our identity and other things that we end up having this, you know, we pull away from our family, and it wreaks havoc on our family and, and what we found over and over and over again, research shows us that when you really press into your family, you can show up and thrive on your stage in ways you never thought possible. And you and you can do both. And so we just really tried to say hey, how can we marry that? How can we help you, you know, really show up at home and prioritize that because we go to leadership conferences all the time for our business, right? But but but what does it look like to really show up at home and have that transfer over into your leadership in your business? And, and that’s where we’ve seen the most fruit? And we get excited about that. So So that’s, you know, stem personally, and then kind of went into that professional side of it all? And and yeah, the more research I do, and the older I get, the more I realize the simpler I make my life, the more satisfied I am and the more happy I am. And so we just try to keep implementing these strategies in our own lives as well.

Lantz Howard 13:38
It’s good, it’s good. When you when you say emotional awareness. How How do you describe that? How do you begin to help somebody on this journey, about examining themselves looking in the mirror? Right, because this is these are words that we throw around, you know, but we really don’t ever take time to to say, this is what it is. And I know we can get back to some of the practical stuff. But how do you define that?

Dr. Joshua Straub 14:06
Yeah, well, this is this is practical, you know, you know, a lot of times so one of the populations I work with the most is Joint Special Operations Command. And I’m, you know, I’m working with them on emotional awareness, and emotional safety. And a big part of that is because the very thing they’re trained to turn off to survive in the battlefield is the very thing they have to turn back on to survive when they get back home. And that’s their emotional awareness. And so often that begins in their marriage. And so one of the exercises I’ll typically give them is to sit down with their spouse and just simply look at each other and say, describe it’s almost like a high low of the day. You know, what is what give me one emotion. One positive emotion you felt today had one negative emotion and don’t start with don’t start with each other. Don’t you know, don’t start with you know, because usually what you’ll do, unless it’s a positive if it’s a negative, typically what happens is we start by blaming, you know, you know, you made me feel angry today, you know, It’s like, No, we can’t do that we got to start with, like, give me one thing that happened today to in your life, that’s a neutral situation where you just felt rejected or disappointed or embarrassed, right? What happens is, is we so often give our lows and highs that they don’t tag emotion language, our emotional vocabulary is very, very, we’re emotionally illiterate, as a whole society. And I think it’s really beneficial to our kids, if we as adults start in our home, by putting an emotion word, and you can do this by downloading a feelings chart or, you know, getting, you know, putting it on your refrigerator, and just really starting to see what are emotions that are out there. And it doesn’t just, it’s not all, you know, touchy feely, it really gives you insight into who you are, and gives you insight into why you might be behaving the way that you are, or why you see a situation the way that you do. And so often we don’t, we don’t see ourselves, we don’t see the world around us that way until we start putting vocabulary to what it is we’re feeling. And so emotional awareness is really just understanding what I’m feeling and why I’m feeling that way. But so often, we get so busy taking kids from one activity to another or we’re running in places that we just talked about the business of the day, but we don’t necessarily talk about what did it do to my heart We stay we stay up here, right? We stay in our head. But what is it what what is my heart? What What am I feeling? What am I what’s going on in my inner world? And and man this is, it didn’t it hasn’t just brought me like personally it’s brought our marriage alive because my wife and I are able to go to a whole different level in how we serve one another when we really know what’s on our when one another’s hearts.

Lantz Howard 16:41
It’s good. I think you bring up a very valid and interesting point about about marriage, right? We we are setting the culture in the stage of emotional awareness. And our environment of anxiety really comes out of out of so much of our lives as a married couple. Could you could you if your would be willing, could you describe a time that you and Christie possibly recently have kind of ran up against this wall? Like when when the things that you teach people? You’re like, I’m not teach people this and I coach people in this, but it’s really not jiving right now. Like, on a very, you know, helpful level of like, cuz I know sometimes we don’t normalize our own things that are going on in life. But I think if we hear our own stories of like, Oh, this is actually how it works out in real life.

Dr. Joshua Straub 17:34
Yeah, which one? Do you want

Lantz Howard 17:40
it all the time I go home, and I’m like, Man, I’ve coached men all day on this, and I’m like, I can’t even pull it off right now.

Dr. Joshua Straub 17:46
It’s so true. And, you know, I’m trying to think of which one to even give you because I have I have so many where, you know, varying varying illustrations, we can pull out a number of different stories or a number of different things in it. I think one for us that tends to get, you know, overlooked. I have a longer one I could tell, let me tell this one, you know, recently. So where we’ll get in trouble is we will try to take on so so let me give you this example. So our son’s 15 months old. And there was one particular night it was through the night, you know, we went back so we have a nine year old and seven year old and we had a third and, and he’s he’s 16 months. So then I always say that, you know, nothing good usually happens after 9pm you know, so if you’re getting into an argument after 9pm just hold each other’s hands fall asleep, and wait and deal with it in the morning, right? You usually have new perspective, but it’s the middle of the night and, and I’m the one and at the time, she’s not doing this anymore, but at the time, Christy was pumping. And so she’s up in the middle of the night pumping, and I am taking care of him when he’s awake and I can remember getting up but I was frustrated that night because he was up way more than he should have been. And it’s the and and so I’m exhausted, like I’m like, you know, I’m frustrated and you know, to like the side like you know, and I did that it’s like three o’clock in the morning I lay I lay him down I’m changing his diaper. I’m trying to you know, get him back to sleep and and I could feel the tension in the room. I could just feel the room go cold and I’m like what is going on here like this is just not this isn’t going well. And and so what I did was I didn’t say much else. I just put them back to bed. But the next morning I woke up and I could still feel the tension like Christie was was definitely you know, not not feeling it. And I finally I just pressed into it. I said what’s going on, like, tell me what’s going on and she said she She said, I get it. She said, I’m doing everything that I can. And, and I can’t remember exactly how it all played itself out. But it was one of those things where we just got into this argument about, you know, her feeling like she’s doing everything she can, and me being frustrated. But her feeling like she then had to take on that frustration, and I can remember saying to her, don’t just basically allow me to be an adult, like, allow me to take on my emotion without trying to fix it. Like don’t, you don’t have to fix my emotion, I’m not frustrated with you, you’re crushing it, like I’m telling you, you’re doing ever I know you’re doing everything you can. And my site isn’t that you my site was just I was frustrated, allow me to be frustrated without taking it personally. And I think, you know, and it was an eye opening moment for us, because I do the same with her, we both have high levels, you know, strengths finders, we’re both high responsibility people. And we, we, we feel like somehow we’re responsible for each other’s emotions, codependency, you know, with, you know, we process that in our therapy, but I think sometimes we get at each other. And I think what’s important is to realize, just because someone’s having a negative emotion, doesn’t mean you have to take on that negative emotion, but to sit with your spouse in it without trying to fix it. And I think where we run into trouble a lot is we we try to, we try to either not have the person feeling the negative feeling that they are the uncomfortable feeling, because we don’t because we feel uncomfortable, right? So we’re trying to fix it. And, and I think that that’s a rather than just sitting with the person and being present, is really a powerful thing for us to be able to do. And so we get into trouble sometimes when we’re trying to fix each other’s native emotions, when rather than just allowing the person to, to, you know, to walk through

Lantz Howard 21:53
it. Nothing, nothing like living with two highly emotional people that serve and connect and counsel people all day long. And then you’ve got to walk through it yourself, you’ve got to do it yourself. But But what I want to point out in your story is that the courage that you had, not to sit on it, not to stew on it, not to throw it away. But that simple, opening your heart of what’s going on, right, so many, so many times as men as women, were like, I don’t know how to engage this conversation, I’m going to explode. We don’t know where to begin. But just a simple spot of just opening the conversation with a question. I think.

Dr. Joshua Straub 22:36
And I think that’s what we found, too, you know, so often, what we end up doing is we don’t bring things out into the light the way that we should. And when it stays in the dark, we call it opponent. So we all have an opponent in marriage, like in our case, like, for many, many years, and your opponents can be good things like our opponents, our kids, you know, their infants, their babies, you know, and when I say an opponent, what I’m referring to is anything that comes between the between you and your spouse and the intimacy in your marriage. So there’s opponents out there that that we have, whether it’s work, whether it’s a kids, whatever, whatever it might be, sometimes it’s not so healthy things like you know, you know, alcohol or drugs or those types of things. But But a lot of times it’s it’s, it’s it’s good stuff, it just comes into in sometimes it can be in laws, you know, it can be all kinds of stuff. But it comes into the intimacy of your marriage. And if you don’t bring it out into the light and talk about it, what you end up doing is you making you make each other the opponent, right, when the reality is what you want to do is get in the same locker room in your you and your spouse, your greatest teammates. And when you get in the same locker room, and you name the opponent, now all of a sudden, you’re working as a team to tackle that opponent. And what we have found is when we don’t name it, overtime, it becomes an elephant, it becomes the elephant in your marriage. And you dance around it. And every now and again, it’ll come into the living room if your marriage come waltzing in, and you might have an argument about it. But if you keep brushing it under the rug, it will it’ll be that lingering issue that just always lives there. And you see you’ve got to bring it out into light. Because when you bring it out into the light, it takes the power out of it and puts you and your spouse in the same team.

Lantz Howard 24:12
Absolutely. Absolutely. When we had, I guess 10 days removed from a similar incident, you know, there there’s a little bit of tension. We went to bed woke up the next morning. My wife’s about to go on a run and I’m working out in the garage and I just walked over I said, What is going on? like Kim, can we just spend 510 minutes talking about whatever this is right now? Because you’re right. I mean, you got to realize the enemy spiritual warfare is really real. And he wants nothing more than to pit us against each other. So as as men, we’ve got to lead with our whole heart and having that courageous conversation and being vulnerable. You bring up strengthsfinder enneagram nine, I’m like, don’t want Don’t want to bring up hard conversations, right. But I want to talk for a moment about some of the beginning part of our conversation anxiety, building a safe house. And, and and helping, I’m sure you have many clients the same, I’m thinking about all the men in the 30s. Even some of the CEOs that are 50 empty nesters, but, but what is what are some of the things that you’re teaching these days on an emotional awareness? I know you mentioned some new curriculum that you’re currently working on, as well. Yeah,

Dr. Joshua Straub 25:37
yeah. So. So a lot of it is it comes down to, you know, for for basically, emotion intelligence is our ability to understand what it is that we’re feeling and why we’re feeling that way. And then what another person is feeling and why they’re feeling that way. And then our ability to be able to step into that, and be able to use that knowledge to be able to serve the relationship well. And so a lot of what we’re working on now, so we had to follow up books to what am I feeling when it’s called, what do I do with worry? We’re actually I was just working before this phone call on on another one that we have coming out next year called What do I do with anger. And so so that’s a, so that’s a big, you know, piece that we’re doing with kids, we also have developed an emotional intelligence curriculum. And we’re working to refine that, and we’ve implemented it here to school in Nashville, and so we’re piloting it this year to school here in Nashville, and we’re, we’re taking that, that data, and we’re gonna put that out so that parents can have that, you know, all over that. That’s kind of our hope there. Because we just really want to foster emotional intelligence in kids. Like that’s, that’s the piece, you know, and, and how can we do that? Well, and obviously, that always begins with the family. And then another component of that is that we we have a coaching program with two coaching programs once called the leaders heart cohort. So we we take leaders through a one year program, and in we have a women’s cohort and an immense cohort, and we take them through a year program and it is a it’s really on the emotional and spiritual growth of of who they are. And, and then we coach families. And that’s another way that we do it and that that program itself is coming out into a book next year, which we’re excited about called famous at homes release in April. energies I think it gets to the moreso, the the dancer, the question that you would ask, you know, how are we coaching families and a lot of times that really begins it also the anxiety beats, but a lot of times, it goes back to what you’re talking about in the beginning, I we start with two key components to two major steps. One is asking yourself the question, what is the biggest barrier right now of me showing up as the best version of myself? So in other words, what is that one? What is preventing me from showing up as the best version of myself and so you know, it can be as simple as your to do list, you know, you just can’t get over your to do list enough to you know, to calm your brain enough to sit totally present with a child. You know, sometimes I find myself out in the yard, I finally left the yard with my kids, and I see the weeds growing in the bed. I’m like, Oh, I gotta go pull those weeds. It’s like no, you know, Straub knock it off, you know, and yourself talking yourself away to just go be with the kids. And, and so, you know, what is that one thing and then putting a goal setting a goal around that, you know, for me, and I know, you’re This is huge for you, as well. But for me, when I wasn’t showing up as the best version of me a few months back, I was, you know, part of that was because I hadn’t been working out. And you know, I’d gotten out of that rhythm. And so I started waking up at 530 in the morning, and it’s the first thing I do before anybody’s out of bed is I get I work out and you know, it’s as much emotional and spiritual for me as it is physical, you know. And so that was that was one goal, I set. One recent, you know, way that I wasn’t showing up was the phone. And so I said, Hey, you know what, and so it’s constantly changing. I’m constantly asking myself, what is that one way, and but there’s a feeling behind that too, right? Like what is not the feeling of like feeling like I need to be in control or I need to be in the know. And the more you realize that you’re you’re not actually in control anyway, but I can control what I can control and that is I can control how I show up for my family. And that’s what I’m going to do. And so for me that was a big a big shift recently. And then the second part of that so so you know what’s preventing me from showing up as the best version of myself setting a goal around that but again, you know, the way we coach people is using an emotion, emotion language to figure out what is why am I not showing up as the best version of myself? What am I feeling what are the feelings that are driving me to binge watch Netflix or to not be working out or to be watching the news all the time or whatever it is that we’re doing that that barrier what feeling is driving that you know, what are we using to numb out in a lot of ways

which leads To The second big one, and that is, you know, the big question that you’re asking yourself there is, what is the atmosphere? What? What atmosphere? What environment Am I cultivating in my home? Because you’re cultivating an environment in your home, whether you realize it or not. And so a lot of times that has to do with, you know, how we’re showing up with our loved ones, are we showing up? You know, are we walking in, in a, you know, Woe is me type of attitude, you know, are we yelling at our kids and snapping because of things going on in our in our worker, or in our inner world that are causing us to spill over into our kids? You know, those are that’s creating an atmosphere in your home? And so what environment are you cultivating? And a lot of times what happens is we cultivate what we’re connected to over time is the way that I describe this. And so you have to ask yourself, What are you connected to right now, you know, john 15, talks about divine being, you know, connected to the vine. And I think, for me, that’s personally if I’m, if I am emotionally distraught, if I’m, you know, snap snapping at the kids, or I’m short with Christie, my wife, or those types of things, I always have to ask myself, where am I, usually I go back, and I realize I’m not as I’m not as connected to the vine, I’m not as connected to God as I need to be in that season, or I’m not taking my, my worries and my own emotions to Him in prayer, whatever that looks like. And so I’ve had to look at, okay, if the atmosphere, I’m paying attention to the atmosphere of my home, and if the atmosphere of my home feels off, that’s the will always say what feels off. And if you feel that something’s off, ask yourself, What are you feeling and in input emotional language to that, put an emotional word to that, and then start to identify how it’s creating that atmosphere in your home. And a lot of times, it’ll lead you to a whole bunch of answers and things that you can do. And what we say is, it usually just takes one thing. I mean, when I started working out at 530, in the morning, it started changing how I showed up for my kids right away in the morning, as soon as they come down the stairs, or as soon as Christie comes down the stairs, I’m showing up different. And not only am I showing up different but it’s it’s spilling over into the atmosphere of my home, because now they’re happy. So it’s it’s these small, little small little adjustments that we can make that aren’t major, but just small turning off notifications, working out doing those types of things. So

Lantz Howard 32:28
I love what you said there about your cultivating what you’re connected to. Yeah, that is powerful. Because right alter, ultimately, that’s growing and becoming that that culture, that environment in your home.

Dr. Joshua Straub 32:43
Well, if you think about I mean, you can be called you can be connected to the American dream, you can be connected to the corporate ladder, you can be connected, we there’s all kinds of things that we get can even be connected to social media and the opinions of others. You know, what you’re connected to is what will spill out? You know, Jesus said it this way said, you know, where your treasure is there, your heart will be also, you know, it’s a very similar, very similar

Lantz Howard 33:04
statement. So, so just kind of wrapping up for timewise. If I was gonna ask you, Josh, and say, say, three months? What is Josh aware of? That he needs to start disconnecting from? Like, I know, you’re kind of a new season, but you’re you’re really ambitious, you’re putting out a lot of content. A lot of great helpful podcasts. But what is it for Josh, that, that you keep running into that you’re like, Alright, I think this is my next step up getting disconnected from something

Dr. Joshua Straub 33:40
was a good question because I just I feel like I just went through a massive purge that I’m really so I’m being honest, you’re speaking to me at a time where I’ve rediscovered my joy, I’m more joyful than I’ve ever been that I’ve been in a very long time. My wife actually looked at me the other day and she said, I have my husband back. So so I feel like I have you know, I’ve come out of a season of working really hard and in and so if I can keep if I can answer that question, I kind of answered it to you. I don’t think we were on on on record yet. I think we were chatting ahead of time here but it’s not so much. I’m gonna continue to disconnect. In fact, I don’t want to make this commitment on the podcast but I’m really researching flip phones I’m really researching like, how I can get off of my I don’t like social media, it’s just it you know, we need to use it you and I met through it and I you know we keep up with each other through it. So it can be used for good things. But what I found is that I you know, in an ideal world if I can get more away from and I would love that and outside more, it’s it’s more so disconnecting from being inside and reconnecting to being outside so we’re going to do some camping this fall but the next three months. As a family, we’ve got some plans to get camping. And, and get outside more. And so I think for me turning off those notifications doing all that I think I’m at a point now where I’m saying, um, for me disconnecting looks more like disconnecting from being inside and reconnecting to being outside, especially with the fall and the weather changing, you know, we want to be outside more, and that it just brings me to life. I mean, it really does so.

Lantz Howard 35:23
But even being aware of that, getting the calendar out planning those camping trips, right, you got to get the gear, you got to start ordering all the gear. I mean, it’s the process and the journey of just even being aware of like, I look forward to my soul being restored and that process of so thank you for sharing that because it is, it is helpful. Yeah, any any closing comments, that would be encouraging from famous at home team, you and Christy, thank you so much for what you’re doing. But I’d love for you to share closing thought with us.

Dr. Joshua Straub 35:56
Thank you too. And, you know, I think from a closing thought perspective is I’m just going to wrap, I’m just going to reiterate kind of what what we’ve already talked about. And that is this, you know, we close our podcasts with this phrase, you know, the greatest red carpet, you’ll ever walk us through your front door. And I think that, you know, so often we the key behind that is we have so many things point for identity, you know, in in the world around us, and really asking ourselves, what are we putting our identity in, when at the end of life, we know through end of life surveys, and just, you know, qualitative data people, you know, don’t say I wish I would have worked harder, it’s more so I wish I would have spent more time with my loved ones. And I think asking yourself the question, what is preventing you from showing up as the best version of you on that red carpet, and in saying, you know, not looking at the negative of it, but looking at the positive of it. So in other words, flipping it and saying, what will make me show up as the best version of me and finding that one thing and you kind of alluded to it, Lance, you know, it’s that if it’s if it’s baking with your family, man, even the process, you know, I’m not a baker, but, you know, I’m learning to get in the kitchen more because it’s reconnecting me with my wife, you know, it’s not something that I gravitate towards. But she also doesn’t necessarily she was being outside. But the process of like camping and doing all that doesn’t bring her alive as much as with a process of getting all this together for camping. But we press into it together. Because it’s bringing us together, it’s making those memories and I think just asking yourself, what is it it’s going to help you show up as the best version of you and that red carpet. keep finding that keep pressing into it and make it a positive it’s not a negative. It’s just, you know, you have to look at sometimes your pain points, but you know, and look, but but don’t make it so gloom and doom. And I mean, make it awesome, like fun and find the things that bring you alive. That’s what you want to do. Find what brings your heart alive.

Lantz Howard 37:59
Slowly. Absolutely. Thank you Josh for your time and I’m encouraged honor for our connection over today’s

Dr. Joshua Straub 38:05
podcast. Man, thank you so much, Lance. appreciate all you do.