Jesse Muligan (00:00): It's time for Tech Tuesday and I'm joined now by Daniel Watson, who's head of Vertech IT Services. Hi Dan.
Daniel Watson (00:07): Hey, Jesse.
Jesse Muligan (00:08): You managed to find some time away from work to do a bit of pd. You've been off at a conference.
Daniel Watson (00:15): Every quarter I get away and meet with another group of IT business owners, which is greatly illuminating.
Jesse Muligan (00:25): What was the topic of this one?
Daniel Watson (00:26): It was sales and marketing. However, they have all sorts of topics. It's an opportunity for guys to get into small groups, so similar sizes and then address kind of what's going on for them in their business, what's working well, what's not. They are very open and frank conversations. Lots of accountability about, hey, what you promised you said you would do versus what you actually did, and then everybody gets to compare. Numbers can be confronting at times.
Jesse Muligan (00:52): Presume you're not getting too up close and personal with your competitors there, Dan, or do you not worry about that so much when you're doing this?
Daniel Watson (00:58): Not so much. They do actually put a bit of effort into making sure that I'm in a group with people from all over Australia, but there are other New Zealand groups out there
Jesse Muligan (01:07): And it's actually got you thinking about the intersection of IT and mental health, which is an interesting topic.
Daniel Watson (01:13): Yes, yes. As you get talking, there's a few owners out there and they circle around as consultants, advisors, coaches, which is quite good. People sharing their knowledge as when I was off doing my senior officer course with the Army Reserve quite a few years back, Willy Apiata turned up and shared a rollie with us and he was just talking about knowledge being a Taonga. If you don't pass it on, then you're a knowledge thief, so that's quite good having people come back. It was a really neat idea and I thought, that's great. They practice it there and one of the things that came up for us is that I noticed people describing their journeys through business and in life is that there is a lot of people who have a bright, brave, shiny face on how well they're doing on the outside, but on the inside they're being crushed under heavy weights of anxiety, responsibilities of servicing debt, their mortgages on the line. There's a lot of stuff that you just don't see that pain. There are ways to deal with it and peer groups are part of that, and I just thought I'd share a few things that had helped me. I've been through rough times in business as well.
Jesse Muligan (02:27): Yeah, please, thank you.
Daniel Watson (02:29): One of the things I might've mentioned in the past is that when you're a reasonably smart person, you're kind of used to being able to figure things out for yourself, and it's a bit of a trap that you can get into that you think that you must have to figure things out for yourself. It really is completely and encouraged to actually go and ask for help to approach somebody that you can relate to because it's not always going to be the friend and family. Friends and families are great, but sometimes what I've found is that they want to see you take the shortest path to the least pain, and if you're a bit of a driven personality, you're going to resist that anyway and you'll just keep barging ahead regardless.
Jesse Muligan (03:07): What do you mean by that? They want you to take the shortest path to least pain.
Daniel Watson (03:10): There was a period where in my business, the wife said, 'hun, you don't have to go through all this. Just pull the pin, just liquidate. Yep. Just get a job doing something else. Whatever you want to do, follow your dream'. But the thing is, my dream was to be successful in business, so they don't want to see you in pain and when they do see what's going on with the lid or probably appalled that they've been putting extra pressure on you, but anyway, I mean you can't change other people. I'm just thinking about the perspective of those others.
Jesse Muligan (03:44): Whereas, If you perhaps talk to someone who's a colleague or someone in the industry or a mentor or someone who's been through it, perhaps they are more likely to see a way of doing both.
Daniel Watson (03:59): I mean, it happens so often where you literally can't see the wood for the trees, but somebody who's standing outside of your world that has been in it, looks at it and goes, oh, look what you have to do is this, this and this and the problems gone away. And you're going, what? It's that easy. Yes, sometimes it is can be that easy. It can just be a case of relieving some of those pressures and finding people who can provide the right advice or who can provide another financial avenue of rescue, those kinds of things. It's a lot better than sitting in your own corner or trying to fight your way through it when you're somewhat already handicapped by the clouds that surround your head in those times. The other good thing about those conferences is it's an opportunity to step away from the business and actually disconnect from it and get a day or two where you can just kind of think about things without that pressure, and even if you're not asking for help, having that time to get some perspective helps you get some breathing space to build out a plan that you can work on.
Some people go off and yoga retreats or meditation, things like that. Others are probably less inclined to do those kind of things, but
Jesse Muligan (05:15): Yeah, you're sort of saying that no matter what you do, that anytime out of the business or out of real life to get a bit of perspective is time well spent.
Daniel Watson (05:27): Yes, and having those peer groups where they go away, it is quite intentional. They're trying to get you away from the day-to-day stuff so you can actually think about things. What do they describe as your highest and best use of your time now in the IT area. Here's the link to IT. One thing that really, really worked for me was the five minute Journal app. I think it's gone through a couple of different iterations, the five minute journal, it's really simple. The idea of it being, every day you wake up and you write down what went well yesterday, what things are you going to do today that if you did would make it an awesome day? There's the element of gratitude in there as well, so write down three to five things that you're actually grateful for. It's a simple set of daily procedures that if you do that, you'll find that one with the gratitude, you've actually got a lot going well, but you tend not to see it when you're getting stuck in your pain. By writing down these things that if you do this, it'll be awesome.
Well, if you get one of them done, that's a better day than what you might've had otherwise, if you don't start the day with the goal and having written something down about actually what went well today just reminds you that actually something did, there'll be something. There's always something, whether it's remembering to kiss the wife on the way out the door or something like that.
Jesse Muligan (06:53): Yeah. I spoke to a guy about this yesterday, Chris Anderson, who runs the TED Talks organisation and his thing's all about generosity, and he says the first step towards generosity is gratitude, so that works in quite well with what you're talking about with that five minute journal. Is that reasonably easy to find that app?
Daniel Watson (07:15): Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think it's a well known concept. You can Google that and find it. Probably you can find in print journals if you want to do it that way, but having that on your phone so you can hit that just as you, you're going to the dunny or wherever you like to do it.
Jesse Muligan (07:35): Yeah, I see it and it looks like it's free.
Daniel Watson (07:37): Yes, which is grand. Other things that I picked up this one up because I saw lots of other big dogs in the IT world doing it. We're writing this down as one of their key practices and that's learning to meditate. Once you've got the basic skills in place, it allows you to find that little puddle of calm water in a typhoon and if you're able to just get a bit of control of your breathing and then your mind space, even if it's for 30 seconds, it does set you up to better handle the day without acting more than reacting, I think is probably the best way of doing it.
Jesse Muligan (08:19): I just looked this up on the weekend actually because I've got kind of a long story, but I've got this new life insurance where you pay a little bit less if you keep healthy, so subtly I'm taking interest in things like my steps and quality of my sleep, and you actually get bonus points for meditation, so I just looked it up. New York Times has got an article, the best meditation apps for 2024. If anyone wants to look them up, I won't give them a plug here, but just be aware, most of them you do have to pay a subscription for, so there are budget options as well.
Jesse Muligan (08:59): Or I actually managed to find one where you pay one number upfront, I think it was seven bucks or something, and there's no subscription, which I was more comfortable with and having something else coming out of my credit card each month.
Daniel Watson (09:10): Yeah, I get that. You can start adding up for these subscriptions and it gets pretty hefty of feeling that, hey, if I can trial it and I like the voice, then I'll pay for it, and something like meditation, it is actually a skill, so once you've learnt it, you can stop using the tool and just self guide. Right. We don't have to be let around a horse all the way through life, so it's about building up your capacity and capability of dealing with life's issues as they come along.
Daniel Watson (09:47): Another one that I came up is that Teletherapy. There are services like Beehive and actually there's loads, there's so many out there, but getting some online coaching or counseling, it's well worth it, right? Having somebody that you can catch up with on a regular basis if you don't have a peer group out there, I just thought I'd throw that in there as another option. Check out what's possible for you in that respect,
Jesse Muligan (10:13): Daniel Watson, plenty to think about this week. Thank you very much for the inspiration as always, and have a great week..
Daniel Watson (10:21): Cheers, Jesse. You have a great one mate.
Jesse Muligan (10:23): So that was a five Minute Journal Dan mentioned there, as well as some meditation apps and the possibility of some online therapy as well, Dan Watson talking about the intersection of it and mental health this week.
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