#TDSU Episode 211:

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:45 - The rise of “Meltdown Rob”

00:02:07 - Taking work too seriously

00:04:19 - Playing the game of life and work

00:05:09 - Walking the line between open and guarded

00:06:33 - Navigating emotional extremes at work

00:08:01 - Culture, vulnerability, and multitudes

00:08:32 - A company that truly “gets” mental health

00:10:14 - Rob and Dillon’s top self-care habits

📺 Lifetime Value: Your Destination for GTM content

Website: https://www.lifetimevaluemedia.com

🤝 Connect with the hosts:

Dillon's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dillonryoung

JP's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanpierrefrost/

Rob's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-zambito/

[Rob] (0:00 - 0:17)

It was a rude awakening, and it kept me up at night. I was sweating bullets. I was feeling sick.

I didn't have an appetite, even at times literally dry heaving over the amount of pressure that I felt over software. Like, pardon my French, but like, come on.

[Dillon] (0:24 - 1:44)

Are you ready for this? Are you ready? What's up, lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day.

I got my man, Rob, with us. Rob, do you want to say hi? When you're here, you're family.

And I'm your host. My name is Dillon Young. That's right.

It's just the two of us. And, I'm going to take the wheel today. All right, you ready?

I have a question. Something that's been, it's not bothering me, something I've been thinking a lot about lately. It's my favorite topic.

Not my favorite place, that's Reddit, but my favorite topic is mental health. Don't groan at me, audience members, but I'm interested to hear from you. Maybe it's not personal experience.

Maybe it's just the conversations you're having. What are your favorite tips and tricks for maintaining your mental health? And let's keep in mind, this is a very personal topic, so I don't want this to sound like these are recommendations, but rather to get your brain working on how you personally, the audience member, might also work on the most important thing you have, which is your mental state.

Tips and tricks on how you do this, Mr. Rob Zambito.

[Rob] (1:45 - 1:58)

You know, that's a good question. It's a really good question. I'm just thinking live about what's helped me in the past.

And actually, where my mind went back to is the days of Meltdown Rob. Meltdown Rob.

[Dillon] (1:58 - 2:06)

I haven't heard this one. We have a lot of names for Rob. Tortilla Rob.

Framework Rob. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Rob] (2:07 - 4:07)

Meltdown Rob. Those tortillas didn't make it, but yeah. So, look, I'm notorious for just taking myself too seriously at times, and it may not come off that way to everybody that I speak with, but anybody who knows me personally knows that I can take things just way too seriously and anchor my whole existence for a period of time on something like my work.

Or like, you know, in college it was exams, and Meltdown Rob was a name that my friends that I worked with so lovingly called me because I was hitting the panic button on the fact that our company was just growing too fast. And I still have notes in my phone about how reckless this growth was and how we had to stop selling. And we had just hired this hotshot VP of sales, and he was like, stop selling.

Okay, I'll do that. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

It was a rude awakening. And it kept me up at night. I was sweating bullets.

I was feeling sick. I didn't have an appetite. Even at times, literally dry heaving over the amount of pressure that I felt over software.

Like, pardon my French, but like, come on! And I say this now in hindsight, I took it way too seriously. I anchored my whole existence around my work.

And it was bizarre. It makes sense in hindsight. It makes a lot of sense in hindsight.

Here I was struggling to find my identity in my work, which is its own can of worms worth unpacking. But I think one of the things that really helped me is the fact that I worked with friends who gave me a hard time about it and gave me a silly nickname about it, helped me actually study a little bit more around how to not take yourself too seriously at work and how to treat work almost like a game. And I worked with this friend.

He just sees life as a game. I went to college with him too. The thing that he always did better than me in school he just viewed exams as a game.

So, he didn't take them too seriously. It was like he was just shooting free throws in practice when he took exams. Let me clarify this.

[Dillon] (4:08 - 4:19)

Yeah. Treated them as a game and so he found the joy in it or treated it as a game like it's not that serious? Good question.

[Rob] (4:19 - 5:08)

A little bit of both, really. But more that it's not that serious. Okay.

You imagine a basketball player just, you know, on the court throwing up shots, just kind of messing around and trying out things they wouldn't necessarily try, giving themselves like the freedom to fail. And I think that's really at the core of it is having this freedom to fail. And we don't all have that luxury.

I know a lot of us, you know, we really depend so heavily on our jobs and we feel like we're always on – it's a tough job market too, so we're always worried about like, well, what if this thing doesn't work out? What happens? But I also think that if you can find it in yourself to set up sort of the game theory of the work that you're doing, it can be quite liberating at times.

[Dillon] (5:09 - 6:32)

I've found this to be a thin line because I think that part of mental health is being honest with yourself. Yeah. For me, that often exhibits as I try to be very vulnerable, but I often lose the plot with my audience in that they're not in the right space or they're just not the right recipient for my vulnerability.

And then it ends up being a very – there's a lot of friction in that conversation. So then I end up going, as our friend Alex Turkovich likes to say, guardrail to guardrail. So like ultimate vulnerability, the only other mode I know is totally guarded, never actually say how I feel, speak almost exclusively in movie quotes.

And this is not the path I necessarily expected this conversation to go down. My answer was going to be, I like to work out every day. But I think this is also an interesting angle to view it from.

How do you strike that balance? And how do you maintain awareness of when is the right time to practice each one of those extremes that I just gave as an example?

[Rob] (6:33 - 6:33)

Yeah.

[Dillon] (6:33 - 6:52)

The extremes being you're overly vulnerable with someone and then – Or like you're just taking everything so seriously. Like this is my one life to live. If I'm not spending every second being productive and achieving, I got to get this right versus like I'm just going to talk like, oh, Will Ferrell highlight reel.

[Rob] (6:53 - 7:12)

Yeah. Yeah. And those are interesting.

I wouldn't even put them on opposite ends of the spectrum. It's more like this big mind map of ways to interact with the world. It's kind of interesting.

What you shared is around situations where you've – it's like your default is to be vulnerable. And that's – And serious, right?

[Dillon] (7:13 - 7:13)

To your point.

[Rob] (7:13 - 7:59)

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's noble to lead with that because I think we've all worked with people who are quite guarded about their work and it's generally not that comfortable.

And now it can be very uncomfortable if people are overly vulnerable as well. But it's interesting. You mentioned like losing the plot, realizing, reading the room and then becoming overly rigid.

To me, that still feels like a risk worth taking. Maybe you don't have to react so strongly in the other direction. Maybe there's a middle ground where you find that certain people, certain situations, certain topics are fair game.

But it's an interesting one. And I started to think about like how to build a company culture around this as well, around what's acceptable to share and what's encouraged to share, right?

[Dillon] (8:01 - 8:31)

Do you ever think you can actually build that? You can't put that in a document. You know what that makes me think of is just a level of tolerance.

You take my example, Dillon might come to work differently each day and tolerating that and not having expectations about that. But I think for culture in general, it's probably a tolerance around people in general containing multitudes, as Mr. Whitman would say.

[Rob] (8:32 - 10:12)

You know, I'm trying to think about the best example I can think of. I want to give a shout out to a former client of mine. Recovery.com used to be called Rehab Path. And I've told you about them. Their whole mission as a company is to help people with mental health challenges find treatment. And their specific niche is around substance use.

But their goal is to be the one single best place in the world and on the internet to find mental health resources for anybody in need. And when you go on site with them, it is so soaked into their culture. I mean, the first day I walked in, I talked to the chief product officer and he was talking about this thing that he's building.

And he was talking about the cost of the build, what it could bring revenue-wise, and then how it would impact the mission. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. I haven't heard someone reference the mission of every little feature that they're building.

And it didn't just happen once, it happened all the time. And it came up in the company All Hands. They would create space for people to share a lot about their personal selves and bring their whole selves to work.

And it was that company where I first said, I feel like here, everyone has the freedom to fail. And so what is the magic behind that? Look, there's an extent to which it's documented and codified and written out.

And they have a really talented leadership team that reinforces it all the time. Along with personal best practices, like paid time off, working out, company offsites, stuff like that. It is still a mystery to me, though, because no document in the world is going to really just create that vibe.

[Dillon] (10:14 - 10:28)

All right, let's get back to it. Yeah. I already told you my number one tip, exercise every single day, even when I don't want to.

Close us out and tell us your number one tip, the biggest impact on your mental health that you add into your routine.

[Rob] (10:28 - 10:49)

Can I agree with you? I mean, yeah, yeah, it's fine. I think I've told you, I like...

Just a couple of gym bros. But I'm more like, you know, you're more likely to find me ripping it on an elliptical than you are with your leg warmers.

[Dillon] (10:50 - 10:59)

Yeah. That's our time, Rob. Thank you for indulging me.

Hey, come back soon. Take it easy. Take it easy.

[VO] (11:04 - 11:40)

You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all general inquiries, please reach out via email to hello at lifetimevaluemedia.com.

To learn more about advertising on The Daily Standup and the Lifetime Value Media Network, please reach out via email to advertising at lifetimevaluemedia.com. Find us on YouTube at Lifetime Value and find us on the socials at Lifetime Value Media. Until next time.

Do you have a story to tell, an opinion to share?

Join us on The Daily Standup.