In this episode, we hear from Matt Caldaroni, who talks about the deeper meaning of what makes the best in the world tick. He explains resiliency around professional athletes and business professionals.

For the full show notes, head on over to https://www.salaryfinance.com/us/podcast/Matthew-Caldaroni-Resilience-is-Key

Anita Ward

Hi, everybody. Welcome to our show - Working On Well-being. Today, we're live from Toronto, Ontario. It's going to be so much fun. We're joined by the always unflappable and always resilient Matt Caldaroni, the CEO of Molliteum. Welcome to the show, Matt.

Matt Caldaroni

Thanks, Anita. I appreciate you thinking of me to have on here.

Anita Ward

I'm so excited, but I'm going to do something and embarrass you right away. Before we start, I want to share Matt's pedigree. It includes founder and CEO of Molliteum, professional soccer player in North America and Italy. To my naïve brain, that means that you've played sort of rough and tumble American stuff. Then you've played with finesse and technique, in Italy.

Matt Caldaroni

Absolutely. I see American football and the land of milk and honey - I've got to see both.

Anita Ward

There we go. Matt is also a performance and mental well-being consultant and coach. Before you think, "Oh, he's coaching, then that needs a few people" - no. Six thousand high-performance athletes, professionals, CEOs, teams - even me - are coached in resilience and mental well-being by Matt. He's a motivational speaker. He's a TED talk regular. My favorite description of you, Matt, is that you're a limitless competitor.

Matt Caldaroni

I love that.

Anita Ward

I am so excited because we could talk about mental well-being, financial well-being, emotional well-being, resilience, mindset, lifestyle - so much and there's not enough time.

Matt Caldaroni

Everything.

Anita Ward

I have waited my entire life to meet a CEO whose mission was to save the world through resilience. That's a high bar you set.

Matt Caldaroni

Go big or go home.

Anita Ward

Go big or go home. Matt, I'm not normally Captain Obvious, but I have to start with what is a "Molliteum?" What does it mean? Why did you choose it? This is the name of your company.

Matt Caldaroni

Anita Ward

Oh no.

Matt Caldaroni

My brother and I were like, "Oh my gosh, we have all this branding that we've done for it." So I said, "Chris, you're the creative, genius, old-school, deep-rooted guy - come up with something." He goes, "What about Latin?" I said, "I love Latin", especially as being Italian. I said, "Absolutely." So we took the word "mollitiam", which literally means resilience in Latin. We spelt it out the way that it sounds so that people can pronounce it and enunciate it the right way. Now we're here with it, and it has been awesome. It's been an amazing shift in brand because it has that cool Nike way of things. I love it.

Anita Ward

Like you said, what good Roman doesn't like Latin? I love this topic of resilience that we're gonna get into today - the grit, determination, and overcoming odds. All of that is really near and dear to my heart. You know my personal story. I have lived in 13 cities and had been in 13 schools before I was 16, and then I had this moment where my trajectory was shifted. I know that you had one of those too. Maybe we could start your journey with what happened when you were 12 years old? That was kind of your "Wow!" moment, right? Maybe even in some ways, it's the genesis for the company.

Matt Caldaroni

Anita Ward

I love it because you said something about weaponizing adversity. It seems to me, that at 12 years old, that was pretty mature to think about. How do I turn my adversity into my secret sauce? How do I align behind that? As you said, all of these tools that you put in place, you didn't even know existed. I guess for the rest of us, for the uninitiated, what does weaponizing adversity mean to make the best version of me? How do I ...

Matt Caldaroni

It's understanding that it's not a positive thing and that it's not to be positive all the time. It's something that we use a lot here that we call "realistic optimism." What people don't realize is that there was a study done, where they went and took about 40 of the top chefs that were about to become new head chefs on the line in New York, for some of the world's top restaurants there. They took 20 of them and they told them, "Tonight is going to be awesome for you, sous chef. You're becoming the new head chef. It's going to be smooth. You're going to be ready. You're going to be fine." Then they took another group of 20 and said, "Hey, listen, you're about to go through one of the toughest nights of your life but you need to trust yourself. You're going to realize that you're going to have someone who gets annoyed. You're going to have a sous chef who makes a mistake, your servers are gonna piss you off at some points, but you're going to be okay. You have trained for this and you're ready for it." Funny enough, the studies came back and the results showed that the 20 - those who were given that positive is everything kind of mentality - didn't do as well as the ones that were overwhelmingly doing better, who found that, "Hey, it's gonna be a hard night, I know. I'm going into this, but I'm going to be fine." What they found was that the real tool to teach this was adversity. We often talk about how adversity is an amazing and beautiful thing, and we hear cliché sayings until we're smacked in the face with it and realize what we really have to do. What we're starting to realize is - and it's a major insight - but it's starting to flip this understanding of what we, as human beings, often question. Why did this happen? Why does this happen? Instead of looking at it and saying, "How can I get through it, and what's the next step?" Conditioning yourself to do that and being thrown into more situations forces you to act on your feet a lot quicker than the majority would. If you can learn to weaponize that and understand that adversity can actually become your best friend, it can be a stepping stone for the next level of your life in any area of it. You can really start to make something out of nothing, essentially.

Anita Ward

Matt Caldaroni

It's interesting because a lot of people don't realize the biggest thing. What's funny with this whole mental side of things is that you take it for granted - because when things are good, they're great, and when they're bad, they're terrible, right? Unfortunately, until you hit that bad point or that rough patch, you think we're in a field of daisies. The problem is that you don't realize how much you're constantly building this identity. We talk about identity a lot, and we say a lot about it. But it takes something like COVID to completely shift what we've been doing that aligns with that identity to show us that, "Oh, my gosh, what's happening here?" So whenever it comes to "return to play", or getting back to it, the first thing we always start with - with athletes, or even business professionals- it's understanding who you are and who you want to be. If you're coming back from a setback, it's who you are. What people don't realize is that all of us have capabilities, we really do. If you're at a spot where you are performing on a stage, or even just the current job where you're trying to work your way up, you've got yourself to that point. Some way, somehow, and sometimes you just forget it. It's normal for everybody. We're human beings, we're imperfect. The first thing that we always look to whenever we're trying to help somebody get back to that, is getting their identity on track. Who do I want to be? Who was I before, and what got me there? The second thing? Immediately raise your standards. People are mad, "That's rude!", but hold on. You can't tell me that you want to be outstanding at what you do, or in anything. It could be from being a parent to a CEO to an athlete, and you can't do it with low standards. It's impossible. One of the hardest things is conditioning that because when you're in a state of high performance - which we're all in at any given time - your standards are higher than you can ever imagine whether or not you know it. [inaudible]

Anita Ward

Right.

Matt Caldaroni

Absolutely.

Anita Ward

You can't move the goalposts closer to you. Although that would be American football, Matt, so I'll have an interpreter there. But you can't move it; I think it's the net.

Matt Caldaroni

Exactly, right? It's the same thing; it's just like going into the gym. You're reconditioning from an injury, or you're building back strength, or you're raising standards by adding more weight on and you do that with your mental side by adding higher and heavier habits on yourself that allow you to reach excellence.

Anita Ward

Yes, I am obsessed with this idea that athletes, without even knowing it, learn great business lessons when they're playing. It's because you have to be thinking ahead, and you have got to be gaming it out. What's your next move? You've got to hide your fears, you've got to take risks. And so I wonder, did being a professional athlete help you? Or is it in some ways your Achilles' heel, too? Or is it both?

Matt Caldaroni

It's like any metaphor we use in life. It's got its extreme empowerments and extreme limitations. What's interesting about the athlete world is - and you can do this to an extent in the business world as well - if you kick and stomp your feet enough, you're gonna get what you want eventually. It's because you have so much power within your team, to basically change everybody around you as well, where you can get them on the same page as you and really become an issue with that. But you also learn in sports that there are many different ways that we follow the same paths of goal-setting. There are many different ways to attack that goal in sports, where, let's be real for a second - in business - yes, you need to build skills in sports; yes, you need to do all of that. But sometimes we run into a fire without any kind of a fire suit as athletes into the business world and just hope that it's going to be the same as in sports where you can pick it up in a couple of weeks. In reality, it gets a lot more technical sometimes. It teaches you in sports, the discipline of routine, habits, and systems. But when it comes to the business world, the big limitation I would notice is that, eventually, it has that naiveté of "I can go do anything." Yes, you can, but you have to realize that it takes a little bit more patience sometimes.

Anita Ward

Yes, this might be controversial. I had a mentor, Moshe Rubenstein from UCLA, one of the greatest thinkers in the world. He's an engineer, and he worked on the Mars Lander. When we were talking, I was talking about my business plan. He said, "Okay, I need a timeout. Stop. A plan is nothing more than an anchor that keeps you from acting. What you should do is that you should be preparing instead of planning. If you plan more than 50% of any project, you will never excel." I think that that is the lesson from sports, where you have to react, and you have to act. We, as business people, think and talk and plan but we fail to execute. This idea of execution and risk-taking and movement of any kind, versus planning - I think it's invaluable.

Matt Caldaroni

Yes. It's interesting that you say that because it goes to the part in sports where - or if anybody's a gym-goer - there's going to be days that your muscles are sore, but you naturally just have to push through it. It's like, "I might only complete maybe a third of that workout, but you know, I'm doing something." I've noticed a lot of the times in the business world, a lot of people get this whole paralysis-by-analysis mentality that starts to happen, but it's not following. We're skipping step two. I used to fall into that trap. Anybody that asked my brother, he'll be the first to tell you that sometimes you just got to let it run - and it's all right. I've noticed that that's a big one too. The difference with sports is that you're not forced to train when you're sore; you're almost expected that "Hey, you're only going to be 80%", right? It's our mentality that when we talk with a lot of athletes, and even business professionals, I think we have to realize that nothing in this world - other than some mathematical or scientific equations - is perfect and that everything, to an extent, is subjective. Right? If you're always looking to have this thing where you're trying to impress everybody and anyone, it's just never gonna happen. So, it's easy.

Anita Ward

Yes. I'm gonna geek out a little bit - the OG personal coach Yoda always said, "Do or do not there is no try." I think you also say that "try" is a dangerous word.

Matt Caldaroni

Yes.

Anita Ward

And so, how do you build the courage to commit?

Matt Caldaroni

I love that. It's having an understanding and a lot of the time weighing your pain or your pleasure. I think we have talked about this a little bit before, but human beings are driven by it, we do things to avoid pain and to gain pleasure. If you get to a point that the pain is extreme enough, and it's like, "Oh my gosh, if I don't do this, I'm going to have so many regrets. I'm going to cost myself this relationship. I'm not going to get what I want. I'm never gonna know if I discovered my true potential." You're gonna act - and that's honestly what it was for me. Even when I went to Italy to go play soccer, I had to call my grandmother - who at the time was, 73 or 74 years old - who then went and called her cousin in Italy, who then went and called his friend who went and called his friend that got me a tryout with a team, and then I stayed at my uncle's hotel. I remember sitting there thinking, "Why am I going through this problem right now?" Everybody's operating on Italian time there. I'm only going to have so many weeks to do this. What the heck's the point? It's the one thing that kept kicking me; I'll never forget this. My friend said to me as we were driving to university together at the time, he goes, "Man, how many pro soccer teams are there in the world?" I said, "I don't know, man, there must be like six, seven, or eight hundred." And he goes, "Don't you think at least one's gonna take you?" And that kicked. "I guess you're right, man, like something's gotta give, right?" It always sat in the back of my head, but it took me to a point that if I don't go and explore this to the fullest, I'm going to have so much regret on this. Not to go too deep on it, but my grandfather recently passed away at the time back then. I owe so much to him. There was a whole backstory - that's for another conversation - where I was leaving the ICU room to go into my practice. The hospital was five minutes away from where I was practicing at the time. I did all that, I'm going to see this through now, I have to. So if you can build an amount of positive pain, where it's not in an extreme where it's life-threatening, but a way that's "Hey, you're really going to push yourself and you want to see if there's a next level." Don't go to bed at night wondering; It's the best way to motivate yourself to keep going. That commitment eventually happens.

Anita Ward

Yes. You talk about engineering your life around your definition of greatness. That mindset and those words resonated deeply with me because I talked about obsessions, and you talked about making that the reason why you wake up, or the way you start your day, or the way you motivate yourself - that to change your mindset, you have got to engineer your life. So, is resilience a lifestyle?

Matt Caldaroni

Absolutely. It's so much more than it's been given credit for. There are three aspects to it - there's physical, mental, and social. We often get caught in ...

Anita Ward

I'm gonna add financial.

Matt Caldaroni

Sure, absolutely, financial.

Anita Ward

You can't have those other three without financial resilience, right?

Matt Caldaroni

Yes. You look at all this stuff because we often see that in performance psychology, we specifically focus on this idea of resilience but there's so much more to it. We know that if your body can't handle the day-to-day stress of having to get up, go to work, and be your absolute best. What are we really doing here? We're just teaching a mental skill on it. People don't realize that everything that starts in the morning. One of the most powerful sayings that I've ever had in my life that I've started to live by, and we've taught a lot of our people to, is that you need to consciously set the track of what you want the day to be like for yourself. We often think that all these external conditions are what is going to impact my internal side, and so on. I know this is cliché, and a lot of people talk about this - it's so simple, but it's so unpracticed. As human beings, sometimes we just don't do it. You have to go out there and find a way or make way. I don't think we realize that enough. Looking at it on the financial side, this year gave me an amazing perspective, we understood the part of financial, but we got deep into it this year when we started working with a couple of Olympians. The amazing place behind it was that these two individuals had all the great physical and mental resources in the world. They had the Aites on stock, physical therapists, strength coaches, and so on. The one thing we noticed that brought the biggest burden to these individuals was the financial side. I don't know how much of it works in the American part. I know that from working with this individual, there is a bit of a financial stipulation. On the Canadian side, it's really tough when you're not making a lot of money and you're asked to perform at peak levels, and having to go out there and do above call-of-duty work that we like to do for our athletes. Something we're passionate about is helping them understand and get financial resources because we know that that adds to the stress of these individuals on a day-to-day basis. It's a real stress test when you can't go home and when you depend on yourself.

Anita Ward

In salary finance, we've done a lot of research and data analysis around this. Here in America, half of Americans don't have $400 in savings. A third of them exhausted all of their savings during the pandemic, taking care of family and friends, or maybe they were furloughed and needed cash flow. On top of that, 78% of those applicants for loans get denied. When you look at that through a diversity lens, it disproportionately impacts African-American and Latinx communities. We have payday loans, but they're just predatory lenders who take advantage of people and charge them 300 to 1,000% interest rates when they need cash. In Italian, we think of that as loan sharks, right? There are these legal loan sharks, if you will. But when we started to look at it - replace your Olympian with a high-performance manager who's maybe on a hospital floor, or a nurse, or a health care professional - and when they're financially stressed, they have nine times more likely to have troubled relationships, they're seven times more likely to suffer from depression, and ten times more likely not to finish tasks and lose focus. Now, I broke my ankle, and that scares the heck out of me when I start thinking about people who are financially stressed, in a health care environment, or teaching environment, or just delivering my Amazon Prime packages. I think that these levels of financial stress are tied to mental and are tied to physical. We've got to look at high performance, resilience, and well-being much more holistic. I'm sure that you've coached so many athletes, celebrities, and executives; They just don't know the language of money.

Matt Caldaroni

It's true.

Anita Ward

There are crazy statistics about NFL players who are broke.

Matt Caldaroni

Or have gone broke.

Anita Ward

Yes. Do you see an intersection between the two in terms of resilience?

Matt Caldaroni

There has to be. What the resilience aspect adds into the financial aspect - not just for athletes, but also for working individuals - is that at the end of the day, being an athlete is a job. I think what people really need to see is that there is an intersection on is understanding that the resilience part of it is "Okay. Now, what?" If there was one question that could be the overarching term of resilience, it's "Now, what?" Like, okay, your career is done - now, what? What's the next step? Flipping the Why to the How is such a game-changer for a lot of people. Even with our athletes, we always talk with them more about building a brand through sport than it is anything else. I think people don't realize that everybody has something unique and special to offer the world. I'm not trying to be cliché or say positive stuff. I really hate that, I do. I'm optimistic, but what I mean is ...

Anita Ward

Did you just call me special and tell me you didn't mean it?

Matt Caldaroni

Not at all! I think people don't realize too, that there's always another way if you look hard enough. People don't realize that, even on the financial side too. You can do a lot more for yourself if you switch perceptions - and we take that word so much for granted. We're just switching your mentality of investing to pain or to have to pay this or pay that. That was even a game-changer for me as an athlete, to be coming out of it. It's the same even for the guys we do work with who are now retiring. It's such a game-changer, you know?

Anita Ward

Yes. So, tell people, how does it start? know that I started with a baseline assessment of myself. Is that where you always begin the resilience process? And why is your assessment different? I know that how you engineered it was really different. Could you share that with the listeners? Here's a place to start, because I think a lot of people don't know where to start when it comes to resilience.

Matt Caldaroni

It's interesting because I think a lot of people associate it with the therapeutic "Lay on a couch and tell me how you feel" when really, it's not that. It's nowhere close to that. That's the biggest barrier to starting. We actually created a test on our own because while I had a lot of great psychologists that I tried to speak with on the performance side when I was playing - and they were outstanding at what they did - the problem for me was that it didn't strike that lifestyle aspect I needed. It was great for tools, it was great for temporary band-aids - but I needed something deep that was going to help me transition myself. So we created a test where we realized that resilience really is a fluctuating trait in life. What people don't realize is that from one environment to another, speaking on the social side of resilience, you could have all of the right tools you need - physically, mentally, financially - but then you're thrown into a completely new environment that you now need to adopt new skills, and it's naturally going to play on your confidence. We developed this test because we found this whole thing with certain personality types where we're not talking on a clinical basis. We're talking on a strict performance basis and life basis. You can change that if you put the work into it just like you work your muscles and your body. When we looked at it, we said, "Okay, we need something a little bit deeper than the Myers-Briggs - a little bit better on the disc assessment type of things. We created ours - where we put our science into it - that when people take this assessment, it measures them and the four things or pillars that we found in resilience - which is your competence, commitment, focus, and toughness. Competence - it's just trusting in yourself; it's understanding that you have the required skills to be efficient at a task. Commitment is where we want to be able to see that your habits are going to throw you off and sabotage you because, maybe, you do have the competence you need, but you don't have the consistency that you need to stick with it. We've measured the commitment side, and then there's the focus. Do you have the competence and commitment, but you can't stay focused on the single task at hand? Maybe there's too much noise that's happening in your life. The last part is toughness, which is simply just having those mental skills to adapt. That's probably one of the most mental parts of the resilience aspect overall. So when we take this assessment, it's not to rule anybody out and say, "They're not, and you're this." It is one way to say, "You're here, right? Now, here's what we would suggest to help you develop these aspects out." When we have that assessment, we look at it and all of these questions are not an answer of strongly agree or disagree - it throws you into a scenario to see how you best identify or react. By getting to the bottom of that, we've been able to get a 93% validity behind what we're doing without ever having to talk to the person in our lives. Amazingly, that breaks down all the barriers that we need to get somebody on a couch and ask them how they feel. So by simply putting them through an assessment, we can understand right away where they're at, and give them any kind of electronic feedback that they want. If they want to take on a deeper level of coaching, we have something that we call the "Molliteum Pocket Coach", where we've got this cool little app that we use a third party for, to help them align their habits based on that profile to better themselves. It's really easy for them to do because it usually takes about 10 minutes a day. People just don't realize that.

Anita Ward

Yes. For me, I'm looking at it from the business development standpoint. We're coming off a year where the sales teams were stuck behind Zoom monitors like we are today. Now we're back into the wild, if you will. They've lost some of that resilience. How can you bolster your team? How do you get somebody back in gear? How do you shift their mindset back to where it was? I love the idea that I personally self-assess, and then my team members will assess. You step back and say, "Wow! Now how do we engineer our lives and recreate that mindset?" Because sales is all just about engineering to greatness, right? How do you get it to that point? Are there examples where you've used this in businesses, and could you share with us?

Matt Caldaroni

Absolutely. We've been fortunate enough to work with some small businesses, right up to the larger performing ones - even recruitment companies. We were talking that it's not a matter of trying to rule anybody out because that's probably one of the worst things that you can do when you realize that anything mental is very temporary. So when we took a look at everything - and we have seen it with teams that we work with, or groups, or organizations - it's helping them understand what they currently have on hand and how to get the most out of those people. There are two ways you can go about it, there's an act of intervention where it would be like us intervening with somebody one-on-one, or there's a passive one where we can talk to the managers and talk to the leaders and say, "Listen, this is what you have, and here's how you need to best communicate with them to really get them to the next level - and not just keep them where they're at, or just use them where they're at, but to move them forward." By doing that with teams, we've seen that what's amazing about it is that if you really focus on human development, not only are there overwhelming studies from different areas of company wellness but making sure that your people add a level of "I'll fight for you" mentality that starts to happen after something like a big break where everybody's working at home. If you know somebody who's a little insecure right now and they're coming back, I don't know why that's any different than somebody who's returning from an injury and they're a little bit weak on the right leg. So it's understanding where everybody's at to be able to help them get the best possible version of themselves and in turn, save the company's money by not having to potentially outsource for an entirely new employee.

Anita Ward

Yes. I think there's that alignment too as I'm trying to build my mindset around resilience, whether that's me going to the gym, or re-engineering my life. Part of that is also re-engineering my mindset around money, too. So how do I start to build my financial resilience from the time that I'm young up to now? How do you build that in? I think it's important that you measure this because it's all about mindset. It's not about the dollars - it's about mindset, right? How do I own that resilience if I want to be X and I want to manage Y? It's about building that into my getting-up-in-the-morning or into focusing on my day. For me, even financial well-being is the same as mental health when it comes to changing your mindset and building that inner resilience.

Matt Caldaroni

We often look to the effect a lot of the time and not the cause, and the cause has everything to do with why you're doing what you do, why pain and pleasure. To anybody that's tuning in, I will guarantee that if you have a problem in regards to really having a good grip on your finances - when we look at resilience with these individuals - you're avoiding some kind of pain. There's a reason that you're spending it. I get that sometimes, yes, you have to do that. The pain might be survival - I am totally empathetic towards that. If you can really get down to the basics of the mindset of the psychology behind it, and you understand how to change behaviors, you become super powerful. Think about this - we're such amazing computers; as human beings, we have amazing hardware in our brains that we have never been taught how to use or without being given a user manual. It's just software.

Anita Ward

Yes. That's how I felt when I took my son home for the first time, "Where are the manuals, kid?" There is a bottom-line measurement that we look at. We know that the impact of just financial resilience among employees can be between 13 to 18%. To your point that if you lean in around your employees and help them build resilience, then performance is going to go up - their call center behavior, their sales behavior, their managerial behavior; it all begins to shift and there's an improvement on the bottom line, anywhere between 13 and 18% with just financial well-being. So you start to reduce those stressors, and an employer can realize that actual and measurable bottom-line impact. I think putting together that mindset and building that resilience with a program like yours in a program like ours, could be quite beneficial. Before I lose you, there's something that I want to talk about. What's the extra gear that applies to business? I'm trying to figure out how does that kick in. When does it kick in? How do I tap into it? How do I find it? How do businesses find it? Can you tell everybody about it?

Matt Caldaroni

This is what's interesting about the extra gear. First, it is resilience. The extra gear can hit people in so many different ways based on their life experiences and previous trainings. People don't realize that you almost always interact with resilience in your life - like when you interact with a marketing campaign, or you might see a commercial, or you might see it on an Instagram channel, or you might hear a radio ad. It's the same with resilience where you might have resilience with your relationships, but you might lack it on a financial side. That may be holding you back from getting to your true potential, but everything else in your life might be great. You might be the fittest individual out there or you might have an amazing social life, but when those two things are off, it's really holding you back. What people need to grasp is that if you start to study and understand what some of the most successful people do in the world, you can call it resilience. That resilience allows them to be resourceful. The amazing thing is you can give everybody a screwdriver, but only the ones that have been trained in it will know how to use it. What's interesting about it is that if you take a look at this whole extra gear side, the point that we try to make is that you don't know yet until you work on what area you need to add resilience to - which is why the assessment is so important for us, because we can see hidden dangers. We can help you call that out so that you can live the best life possible.

Anita Ward

That's amazing. Clearly, Matt, you have that extra gear and you challenge me every time I talk to you about being a better person. This conversation is wonderful. Every show we share a lesson, and I feel like you've just shared lessons for the last 30 minutes, so thank you for that gift. Is there something that you want to leave our listeners with? Is there something that you might want to share with them?

Matt Caldaroni

Take the negative connotation away from selfish and it's one of the most powerful things you will do in your life. Be selfish so that you can give to others. What people don't realize is that in order to be of value to anybody, and interact on any team, you first need to take care of yourself. It's something that I've often seen people have a struggle with, like, "Oh that's negative. Selfish is negative. That's bad." But think about it for a second, let's pretend that you decide that you need to take 10 minutes in the morning to yourself to get yourself aligned, and you can't go help your significant other with a kid right now. But you know, in 10 minutes, you're going to be the best mother or father on the planet. If you pitch it that way to your significant other, I guarantee you can find the 10 minutes. People need to really understand - and I wish they take this away - is that if you put a lot into yourself, and you get selfish with the absolute intention to be selfless and give to others so that you can have something to give to others, you will absolutely crush it. I promise. It's one of the biggest changes I've seen in myself when I started this. It's one of the most basic practices we use with everybody in any area of resilience, and it's needed.

Anita Ward

That's lovely. It reminds me of "You can't love somebody else until you love yourself."

Matt Caldaroni

Bingo.

Anita Ward

Matt, I love you. I am so grateful for today. You shared something in your blog that life is as simple as this. The glass isn't half full, and it's also not half empty. There's either something in it or there's not, and so it's all right. There was so much in this conversation. I'm so grateful. Thank you for sharing your ideas, your business, and yourself. Everybody can find you at Molliteum, right?

Matt Caldaroni

Yes, that's right, [olliteum.com](http://olliteum.com).

Anita Ward

Thank you. Thanks, Matt. Thanks for sharing yourself with us today. Thank you everybody else for listening. Until next time, keep working on your well-being. See you. Goodbye.