I Talk to the Man Who Changed How I Connect With Others (With Will Guidara)
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And I was like, Dad, that was really hard. I was nervous. And he said, work harder and then you won't be. By the way, he's right. He said, you did a great job. He like lifted me up and loved on me and celebrated me. But he's like, if you didn't like the way that you felt, work harder and then you won't feel like that.

What's up? This is John with the Dr. John Deloney Show. I'm so grateful that you have joined us talking about your mental and emotional health, your families, your relationships, your workplace, whatever you got going on in your life.

I'm here to sit with you, and we're going to figure out what's the next right move. If you want to be on this show, go to johndeloney.com slash ask, A-S-K, and fill out the form, and we'll go to Kelly, and she will figure out what's the next right move for this show, and hopefully she will get you on. All right, today, I invited my friend to be on this show, Kelly.

But that's kind of a hashtag humble brag. Will Godera is one of the greatest men who's ever lived. And I don't say that lightly. Anyone who's ever been around him for more than 30 seconds is like, that's the greatest guy I've ever met in my whole life. I had an experience with Will backstage at a speaking event that changed my life forever.

And then Will was the executive producer of this little TV show called The Bear, which is the raddest winning every award show ever. In the show The Bear, they wrap their show around his New York Times bestselling book, Unreasonable Hospitality. If you haven't read this book, stop right now, pause this and go buy this book.

It will change how you parent, how you are married, how you show up to work, how you treat your neighbors. It's astounding how good it is. But it tracks his journey as a restaurateur, as somebody who's learning the restaurant business and takes over kind of a fledgling restaurant. Kelly, what's all the awards he's won? So he was the co-owner of Eleven Madison Park, and they are a three Michelin star restaurant, which is that's amazing. It's not Arby's.

Beyond, yeah. He's also the James Beard Award winner, which to the foodies that are listening, that's a very, very big deal. It's like an Oscar. Yeah, definitely. And like you said, he is the executive producer of The Bear. And for those that have watched it, he's also in season three. Yes. And then, of course, his fingerprints are over that entire show, which is so amazing. The...

The thing that Will was best known for originally besides just being an amazing guy. And when you watch this show, you'll see it. And we get into some of his childhood stuff and some really heavy stuff he experienced throughout his childhood that I think it laid the groundwork for who he has become as a father, as a husband, and as a business owner. But he took a restaurant that was good. It was good. It was fine. It was good.

And they won restaurant of the planet twice. I think it was in London or in France, wherever they get together with the fancy food places, they won it twice. And it was based on this concept of radical hospitality, unreasonable hospitality. And if you want to know more about the book, you can check it out in the show notes, but

Please invite everyone you know, gather around and listen to this episode. It will change who you are from the inside out if you start applying these principles. Will is super open about his childhood, about his mom and his dad and some of his relationships.

And he's just a national treasure. And again, it's one of my great honors in my life to call Will Godera like a close buddy. And I can't wait for you to check out this conversation. It will change your life. Stay tuned for my conversation with my good friend, Will Godera. We focus so much on the major seasons in life that we can like blink our eyes and miss the micro seasons that separate them. And I think it's in the space between. Yep.

It's some of the best stuff. All of the stuff. That's right. And so we're living in a little Airbnb. We're on top of one another. We have five suitcases worth of stuff. I'm on the road half the time. I've never felt so connected to my kids and to my wife. And it's like life-giving. Yeah. I feel like, you know, when you're writing or just creating...

If stuff in your house isn't filling you up, you eventually... Like, the well runs dry. Oh, yeah. I've fallen off that cliff a few times. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. And, like, for the last six months, I, like, would sit down to write or just go into, like, a brainstorming session with my team. And I wasn't, like... Yep. It felt hard. And it's never felt hard before. And now it feels easy again. Yeah. And that's the coolest thing in the world. But how do y'all do...

How do you do friendships, new friendships, in an ecosystem where pretty much everyone only just wants something from you? That's been my hardest transition is I still got the same friends that I've had. We lived in the dorm together and we made bad decisions together and now we're all old, right? You got those guys. I find it incredibly challenging to make new friends. Either you start segmenting away with like,

Everybody wants something from this whole table. So nobody like, and that always feels weird. I remember leaving one, leaving an event one night and our kids were there and everyone's kids were there. And my wife said, everyone at that home had a PhD or a JD. That's not the real world. I remember saying that and I'm being like, oh yeah, like,

But I don't... I still don't know how to do... Well, but so, okay. So here, we were talking about like performative on either side of it. I think the same... I look at friendship as being the same in a way. So I have, similar to your guys, I have like five, six really, really good friends. Oh, day one, zeros. Yeah, yeah, yeah. From kindergarten through college. That's it, yeah. And...

Because I'm the guy that throws the party, they're all best friends with each other now. Like my best friend, this guy Andy, I went to kindergarten with, and my crew from college. They're all very, very close. They all live in New York. And there was a season where I saw other people becoming successful as I was becoming successful and watching them trade up friendships.

You know, where they weren't friends with their people anymore. And then they were like friends with the next most. And then again, and they like, they didn't have any friends that they'd known for more than three or four years. I think it's dangerous, man. But so that is definitely dangerous and whatever, performative. Sure. But I found myself almost reacting to that and saying, I don't need any new friends. I have my friends. I don't need anyone else in my life. Yeah.

And that was almost performative in the other direction. Performative is not the right word. No, it is. Because I have no things in common with those guys. Yeah. Zero things other than our parents lived in the same street when we were all born. Shared history. Nothing else, right? And so, yeah, for me, it's performative. But as you grow, if the friendships around you don't evolve a little bit, not that you shed all of your friends. Invariably, you do end up shedding some friends. Yeah.

But if you're not picking up new ones along the way, I just don't think you're limiting your ability to grow as much as I think we ought to be. I think you're a thousand percent right there. But to your point, like how do I figure out friendship in this season? I'm a little more guarded. Yeah. But I think like, you know, one thing I think we've all stopped doing is trusting our guts. Yeah.

But everyone's told us our guts are wrong about health, about marriage, about love, about finance. You know what I mean? Well, there's a book about everything, and so everyone tries to raise their children based on a book they've read or be a good husband based on a book they've read. And by the way, I'm not anti-reading. Or a terrible podcaster. But yes, exactly. But I think sometimes you just need to listen to your gut, knowing that it's going to be wrong a good chunk of the time, but you can't let it...

You can't let that question the extent to which you trust the feeling you have inside of you. And so, yeah, more guarded with friendships. But if I feel a connection to someone, do I want to pursue it? Yes, yes. One of the things I do, I...

Obviously, I talk about hospitality all the time. I like to redefine that word often. Okay. Because I think the better you are at articulating an idea, the better you become at compelling those around you to embrace it. Yes. One of my favorite definitions of hospitality is to be creative and intentional in pursuit of relationships. And that's your customers. It's a business book, ultimately, the one that I wrote. It's the people that you work with.

It's a leadership book, but I think it extends, and that's not what the book is about, but to your life. You need to pursue the people in that picture, but that doesn't mean you're not pursuing new relationships to see whether there are people out there that you're meant to know as you grow into the next version of yourself. And sometimes I've been like, oh man, I have this feeling like this guy I just met, we're meant to be friends. And I pursue them, I'm like, oh, yeah.

I'm a coke guy. He's a weed guy. No, like, well, it's funny because the things I wrote down to talk about today was I think for me, and I tend to look everything through a emotional health or relationship lens. I think you wrote the best parenting marriage book that I've read in the past decade with Unreasonable Hospitality. And we'll get to kind of dig it, pull it apart. But

I kept thinking as I worked through that, my gosh, dude, this is the best marriage book ever, right? Thank you. But it's very not popular.

It's very in a strange way countercultural and it's similar to how you describe the restaurant culture as what you were doing Just didn't make a lot of sense on paper Even though you could prove it on a spreadsheet even though I can prove it with morale It just doesn't make sense because we don't do it that way. Yeah, it's not the Arab people are breathing very similar There's some really heavy countercultural like overlap between that your book and marriage, but I want to I want to go back to a moment and

So you don't know this, I don't think. I don't think I've ever told you this. But you specifically, in a single interaction, transformed how I do my work in a way that... So I'm a private guy, and I'm also, shock, I'm pretty introverted, right? I run out of gas. Yeah. And so...

but i do love being on stage that's my favorite thing is speaking on stage this whole exchange is still odd just because i love having deep private conversations and the thought of someone ever recording me it sends me into the fact that we're having this like intimate moment together but it's not intimate right the thing that i lived and died died by at all these events right so you've you and i you speak all over the place me too and you end up on backstage with people

Just like, how am I here, right? There's that guy over there and there's Jalen over here. Those are just surreal moments we all have, right? So the thing that kept me from not spooling off was the speaker scores. I always went to, okay, who won, right? And there's always audience surveys and things like that. I was always like, who won? Who's doing better? How's this person doing? How's this person doing? I need to get in my room and have this little bubble, right? Yeah, so...

The night that we first met, it was a dinner and it was me and you and

and Jade Simmons and Jocko and Dave Ramsey. And we're having dinner. And by the time it's over, Jocko was full Jocko and Dave was full Dave. And Jade was like, her and I were both from Houston. So there's a little bit, but you came in and the whole table lit up. And by the end, this is going to shock. Jocko was reciting Shakespeare. It was this whole, it was a whole thing. So then we left. Right. And, and,

If you're going to go in front of 3,000 people and tell them something they don't know about business, you have to have some sort of courage or ego, whatever you want to call it. I have to think, I'm worth X dollars to tell you guys something. So I come down the next morning and it is Jade followed by me, followed by you, then Jocko. And I get down there.

You're the first one down there. I was like, what are you doing? You don't speak for like three hours and I'll never forget. You said I'm here to watch you I was like, what do you mean? I was like dude I'm here to watch you like and when I got offstage you and Jade were the first people to greet me offstage like backstage big hug I don't know you man. We said dinner, but I remember thinking oh, that's how this that's how this is there is a

Grace and a giving and a hello and a no we had a great dinner It was different than just a regular dinner like we laughed and told Shakespeare next to a Navy's it was kind of fun but you can lay around in your room and act dramatic for three hours or you can go celebrate people and Will since that day since that day I remember thinking that's how this is done dude. It's over and so everything every event I've done since then has been modeling

I want to make sure I'm the last guy that sees somebody. I don't care how famous you are or how not famous you are. You're going to make sure I saw you, and I'm so grateful I get to be here with you, and I'll be the first person you get to see when you get off. Backstage, nobody in the audience sees this stuff, but that's Will Godera. So thank you for bringing that to my life. It was just this lifting up. It was pretty amazing, so thank you for that. And you know the added benefit?

is you're going to learn a few things along the way. Well, I was scared of it. I think I was scared about what was coming, right? By the way, the reason not to do it... Is Jade Simmons. You crushed that day. But Jade Simmons goes in heavy. You're like, oh, I'm going to go home, right? So... Gosh. That was also like one of the first really big ones I did. I've done a ton of these talks since that one, but that was one of the first really big ones I did. And I go down there and I'm trying to like...

pursue this craft because it's a craft like anything. You're hosting a podcast. This is a craft. You're a student of it now. Anyone who does anything, if they're not a student of that thing the entire time they're doing it, they're never going to be as good as they ultimately could one day be. And the moment you start speaking, that's now something you need to start studying and pursuing too. And so I was nervous going into that first day. And so I went to watch everyone to understand why

okay, what are we working with? Two, to learn a few things. Three, because I felt very close to everyone from the night before and to my point before, these are now relationships I want to pursue. Sure.

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Go to helixsleep.com slash deloney for details and save 20% off. That's helix, H-E-L-I-X, sleep.com slash deloney. Because with Helix, better sleep starts right now. Tell me about your dad. So my dad, my dad's my best friend. Okay. Still alive? Still alive. Okay. Still alive. I mean, they've tried to take him down a few times. He had pancreatic cancer. He survived. He's the one, right? He's...

But my dad and I are real close. My mom was a quadriplegic when I was growing up. My dad, in addition to taking care of her, working 12, 14-hour days in the restaurant business, was still an amazing dad to me. I mean, I've learned so much from him, but probably top on the list is integrity. One of my favorites of his quotes is, life is filled with crossroads at each one. Ask yourself what right looks like and do that.

Knowing that oftentimes doing what right looks like is not in your own short-term best interests, but you do it anyway. I mean, my dad lived with a quadriplegic wife for 14 years until she passed away. Most guys don't do that. Most guys...

put them in a home, a facility where people can take care of them. Because I have to have my happiness or my life. I've got to do my, you know what I mean? Dude, I don't know if I've ever shared this. I remember when I was in college, they had moved to Los Angeles and I was there with them. And my mom couldn't walk or talk. And now at this point in my life, I knew what it was like to have a girlfriend and companionship. And I remember my dad and I going out to dinner and I said, hey, dad, I'm

If you ever want to date someone else while mom's still alive, I hope you're not doing that. I hope you're not not doing that because of me. Like, I wanted him to just... Like, I'm giving you my blessing. I wanted him to have grace from me that, like, you are doing so much right by her, but that doesn't mean that you should have to be alone. Yeah. And he was like, hey, thank you, but that's not what I want. Mm-hmm.

I made a commitment to this woman and until the day she dies, I will uphold that commitment. I mean, when she passed, it wasn't almost what we were talking about before. It wasn't a surprise, right? We had been mourning her loss for years. It can be an exhale, right? Yeah. And within a few months, he was on dates. Yeah. And I loved that for him. But he's just always lived with this level of integrity, like...

Ask yourself what right looks like. Do that. And has never once felt bad for himself along the way. And so my dad and I, to this day, are extraordinarily close. Anytime I speak in the state of Florida, he gets in his car, drives there. That's so cool. We hang out. He came to Nashville. Oh, no. Was it Orlando? It was in Orlando. That's right. Yeah, they were there. He's in all of them. By the way, this is like a great dad-ism because he's also like a very excellence-focused driving person. Uh-huh.

And we left and I was like, dad, that was really hard. Like following Jade and then John, like I was nervous. And he said, work harder and then you won't be. Yeah.

By the way, he's right. He's right. That was too much. You did great. No, no, no. He said you did a great job. He lifted me up and loved on me and celebrated me. But he's like, if you didn't like the way that you felt, work harder and then you won't feel like that. And by the way, he's right. Now I don't get nervous. Where does that come from? Because it doesn't exist anymore. Yeah, it's an old school. It feels weird to call integrity old school.

But integrity at the cost of quote-unquote how I feel. The right thing versus what I'm going to miss out on. Well, yeah. And I think there's so much focus, appropriately so. I think this is a good thing around self-care. Yeah. And yet, I think it's been misinterpreted by way too many as permission to be selfish. And I think that that is...

That is the thing that broke the chain. Whereas my dad understands that, yeah, you take care of yourself, but not to the point where you're putting yourself so far ahead of everyone else and your interests so far ahead of everyone else's that you're just doing things that lack integrity. I think people excuse immoral behavior as a form of self-care.

Yeah, because it's not, it's not the only immoral thing to do is to feel bad or to not feel great. That's the new immorality. Yeah. I don't actually feel like I'm caring for myself. And like, and by the way, and like, okay, toxic relationships. Yeah. There's abuse. And of course, there's like so many different things. I'm not trying to be overly sweeping here, but.

So tell me about your mom. One of the parts in the book that I, again, I keep going back. I was working through this again last night. I'm sorry, two nights ago. My daughter and I took our first trip ever. She's eight. And we got on a plane and flew to my uncle's 80th birthday party. And then it was just us two. Just the two of you. Just the two of us. Never done that before. In fact, in the car ride to the airport, she was like, I've never gone out of town without mom. And I was like, we're going to.

She's like, I'm feeling unsafe. We both might be borderline diabetic right now. We ate a lot of garbage. But I was in bed reading when she was asleep and I got to the part about your mom unable to speak but still requiring that the person who helped...

push her down the street to smile at you and you got off the bus yeah that next morning my daughter woke up too early in a hotel room and said dad let's go swimming huh and for the first time in her life i said i bet i'll beat you to the get our swimsuits on instead of hold on man like no coffee let's just run let's run and the water was freezing and we laughed our heads off and is that it makes sense yeah but i got that from your mom right tell me about your mom

So my mom, my mom was exceptional. I mean, my mom grew up in Boston. Her parents died when she was 12. Then she moved to New York to move with her and with her aunt. And then when I was like four, she was diagnosed with brain cancer. They removed the tumor. Um,

But it was malignant. They needed to use radiation treatment to kill the rest of it. This was before radiation treatment was super refined. And she, over the course of a few years, was rendered into becoming a quadriplegic. I was her only child. I'm an only child. And, man, I mean, she loved me, like, recklessly. Recklessly. To the point where it almost, like,

destroyed her and my dad's marriage when she was still healthy. Because she didn't have parents. She never had anything. They didn't have a lot of money. And yet she was buying me, like, clothes from Pierre Cardin at Bloomingdale's when they could not afford that stuff. Because, like, I was just everything that she'd always wanted. And it was really hard for them to have a kid. She was meant to live not very long. She was supposed to be dead by the time I turned 10. Mm-hmm.

But she has kept living and living and living. And I remember when I graduated high school, and at this point she couldn't move or talk. She could say some words, and I was always the person that could understand her more than anyone, that beautiful mother-son bond. When I graduated high school, everyone got really nervous. Like, was that the thing that she was waiting for? But then she kept living and kept living.

And then I graduated college. And I remember she couldn't get up to watch me graduate. She fell into a coma right before graduation. And so I graduated, threw my cap up in the air, jumped in the car, sped to Boston where they lived at that point, and went to the hospital and just fell asleep on her lap. And then woke up in the middle of the night and she was awake out of the coma. And this is not like a lucid dream or anything like I know for sure. Yeah.

And we had a proper conversation. And she was like, did you graduate? Yeah. And she died. She fell back asleep and died a few hours later. But I really believe in a couple things, and they represent the two sides of my personality. One, that persistence and determination are everything. Like Jay-Z said, I believe we can speak things into existence. I don't believe there's a goal that you can't attain if you set your mind to it. Okay.

On the other side, I believe that if you just love someone, if you are willing to take the risk of just loving someone recklessly, the impact you can have is profound. And like loving people recklessly and maniacally pursuing goals aren't necessarily friends. But I think that I am who I am not in spite of that tension, but because of it. And I owe a lot of that to her.

She loved me recklessly. And the thing about her nurses pushing her to the end of the street, I would come home. She couldn't talk or move. But the smile that I was greeted with made me feel the kind of way that I hope to make a lot of other people feel over the course of my life. And the fact that she was supposed to die 11 years before she did and she hung on just because she wanted to see her only son like...

get launched into the world. And I, this isn't a shaming statement. This is just an is. I hear that. And I think of a 10-year-old getting off the bus and running down the street and seeing this radiant smile a block away. And then I think of the just countless ocean of children who have able-bodied parents who are scrolling their childhoods away, just staring at their phones. You know what I mean? And

I guess for whatever it's worth, me with a young kid still, a teenager but a young kid, it's the memory that, I mean, you're talking, I can feel it on you. Like that's encoded in your nervous system. That is, she didn't say the right things, for God's sakes. No. Um...

But there was not a doubt that come hell or high water, I can always come home. I can always... I've gotten her in my corner. Dude, I felt so loved by her. I mean, she couldn't move, but she, like, for a while there, she could still, like, move her arms a little bit. She couldn't get to me, though. And, like, she had a cane. I remember when I, like, if I, like,

cursed or something before I was supposed to or allowed to, she'd call me over and hit me with the cane. And she'd be like, come here. And I knew I was walking. I didn't need to go over there. No, but man, now I'm a dad and it's not a shaming statement at all because sometimes I'll catch myself. Anyone who pretends to be perfect is not trustworthy. We all make all... Everything I talk about is...

What I aspire to be. And I know the same to be true for you. And I'll catch myself doing that. And I think about her. And it's almost like blasphemous to her if I don't jump around and run around and get dirty and do stupid things with my kids because she never was able to. And so if I am able to and I don't. How dare you not. Yeah, yeah. I've heard that from veterans who lose somebody close to them that

I don't care how I feel. I have an obligation to live for two now. We're going to have extra adventure and have extra... I'm going to have an extra beer. I'm going to have an extra thing of nachos. I'm going to work out because I have to. So let me ask you this. I'd be good at having the extra nachos. Maybe not doing the extra workouts. I love nachos. Exactly. All right. So I feel like I can only ask you this because you're my friend. Yeah. So...

I find myself, there's some guys working on an app, and so they've run all of my calls through a language learning model. Like, how does John respond to things? Yeah, yeah. And come to find out, I quite often ask, what did you see growing up? What did you experience growing up? And so, I've heard you talk about this reckless love. And reckless is one of my favorite words when it comes to...

Love and giving I give obnoxiously. Yeah, you'll think you'll figure it out. Give crazy. Yes And watching this pillar of integrity, all right in your old man, which is just so phenomenal There's the other side of that right? and so I like to tell the story about how my mom went back to college or went to college and she was in her 40s and graduated her PhD when she's in her late 50s like this whole thing. Yeah, and

There was another side to that, which was I cooked dinner a lot, right? And I did my own laundry starting when I was really young. And there was a lot of tension in the house because we didn't have any money. And mom was in school and dad was a cop. And then there was a reality to that that was hard, right? So knowing the beautiful part, but also getting to see the gritty ins and outs of, oh, this is what this means, right? This might mean 15 years of...

working all day, doing math homework with my kid, and then having to help my wife go to the bathroom or to bathe, those kind of things. This is what you see day in and day out. What was it about that experience that made you say to your amazing wife that you have now, Christina? It's Christina? Yeah. I do. I'm in. I'm in on that. First of all, you posted something the other day about that, like, be your person's biggest cheerleader. And I loved that. I thought the way you articulated it was great and

and by the way like i remember growing up and like some of the marriages that i really had the most admiration for they would always say marriage is hard and i would always like be like those idiots they just didn't figure it out right i'm gonna have an easy marriage right and just be hot and have more sex yeah exactly yeah like my relationships are easy that's right right and my relationships are like seven months and that's why they're easy um

But like the thing I always learned from them is like, wake up every single day and pursue your person. Like the best marriages are those where you'd literally make a choice every single morning. You wake up and decide actively, maybe not out loud, but you know, you assert, I'm going to pursue my wife today. And if you do that, a majority of the days, it's pretty cool what you can accomplish. How you framed it, like be their cheerleader. That's another level. And I really loved it. And it's,

That impacted me. Even over the last few days, as we've been out, I've been... My wife doesn't like... She gets shy when I tell people how awesome she is. I'm like, you know what? I don't care anymore. I'm still going to do it because I think it's an important thing to do. And yeah, my dad had to help my mom go to the bathroom. I had to help my mom go to the bathroom. Yeah, true.

And so, yeah, you could see that and be like, okay, if there's a chance that happens, I'm just going to be single, right? Like, there's no reason. My dad decided to continue in a marriage where he had to help his wife go to the bathroom. That's not just integrity. That's just love. And if love is so powerful that you're willing to endure that,

then how could you make any choice but to want that? Well, I want that with all I've got. Right? And so I got married late, which I was building a career in New York City. You get married later when you're doing that there. But also because I knew always that I wanted that. And I had a pretty high bar for the person there.

That I was going to go all in on it with. For this. This doesn't just happen. You know, you don't just get this. That's right. Jump through the hoops for this. And I'll tell you, like, I dated a bunch of different types of people trying to figure out who is my person. What made you say, because I love how you framed it, I wish it was something other than this. Yeah.

I wanted Titanic to be so real. I wanted to walk into a room and just be like, I'll die today for that person. It just not worked. What was the switch that you flipped that said, I'm going to choose... I'm choosing you. I'm going to choose you every day for the rest until I'm dead. Well, so I...

I'm an emotional person. I'm also an analytical person. And so I was almost doing A-B tests on girlfriends for a while. I dated a girl who didn't have much going on in her life because then I got to be the center of her life. But I found it to be really hard for me because I would get home exhausted after work and there was nothing bringing her joy outside of me. And then I was like, all right, I'm going to date a really busy girl. But then I felt like...

cast away you know and like I was really far down on her list of priorities and then eventually I was like okay dude stop it like stop trying to like categorize people into you're this kind of person or you're this kind of person and I belong with this kind of person and I met her and she's a she's a baller right like she has she's the founder of Milk Bar a nationwide chain of bakeries that's in stores and she's been on television and um

And I was impressed by that, but it wasn't the reason I was drawn to her. And at the same time, she had all this stuff going on, but I never felt like less than the other things. And so I was doing this whole study like, okay, well now this, and then one day I was like, wait, hold on. I feel awesome when she's in the room. There you go. And then when I had that, like I was still really in my head.

And it was the first time in pursuit of my person that I allowed myself to just live in my heart and not be totally consumed by like... The exams. Yeah. And it wasn't... You just did a real life example of why most online dating profile things don't work out, right? Yes.

Oh, yeah, you get so... And by the way, it wasn't what I felt in my heart that got me there. It was the fact that I allowed myself to leave my brain and go to my heart for the first time that got me there. Yeah. And the way you said that that was really important to click on, it wasn't that I get super horny when she's around because she's attractive. It's not that I feel finally worth something. Like, it wasn't this you complete me. It was like, I don't know, I feel awesome. Yeah. And I'm not...

I'm just giving in to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh. And then giving in to it. The problem with that, like, because you can't make a choice based on what you feel in your heart because sometimes your heart is overflowing with love. Right, right, right, right. Love is not... I don't think, like...

No, it's a choice. It's a decision. It's a set of behaviors. Yeah. Sometimes when you hear people saying, I'm so in love, and then two months later, like, how's it going? They're like, oh, it didn't work out. I'm like, okay, were you really in love? I think our heart sends messages that we misinterpret. Still, it's marriage, and you have kids, and it's hard. And what I love about her is I feel from her towards me the way that I felt from my dad towards my mom. Yeah.

There's no giving up. We're together. That question has been answered, so let's figure this out. Exactly. And that is something that I think is really, really special and something I'm really, really grateful to have because it's hard for you to feel that if you don't feel that in the other person. And you can't know everything about your person no matter how long you've been together, but I know that about her. Yeah. And that's pretty cool.

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Um, it's a masterful gift for the person you're in a relationship with, but I think it's also a masterful gift for ourselves. Yeah. So charitable assumption is one of my favorite expressions from my longtime boss and forever mentor, Danny Meyer. It's a, one of his isms to me and give people the benefit of the doubt or ask the question before you say the thing. One of the things I believe like strongly is addressing things as they come up. Yeah.

In work and in life. I think the worst leaders oftentimes are good people who are just inconsistent in how they deal with problems. And so problems mount and become emotional even when they're unemotional things. So you need to address stuff consistently, quickly. But in order for criticism, which is ultimately what it is,

To be constructive, it needs to be thoughtful. And one of the rules of criticism that I really feel strongly about is that, the charitable assumption, which is ask the question before you say the thing. Like, this is in service and leadership. If a guest comes into a restaurant and they're acting like a jerk, it's totally natural and completely human to decide they no longer deserve our most loving hospitality. They don't deserve it. They're acting like a jerk.

The charitable assumption would have you say, wait, maybe they're acting like a jerk because on their way to the restaurant tonight, they found out that their wife was just diagnosed with brain cancer. And maybe the person that we are inclined to think doesn't deserve our most loving hospitality actually needs it more than anyone else in the room. Anybody. That's right. Now, sometimes they end up just being a jerk. That's right. But, I mean...

I can't imagine anyone not agreeing with the following statement that you'd rather err on the side of assuming the best and being wrong than assuming the worst and being wrong. Oh, man, yeah. And so that, the charitable assumption, yeah, it's in how you serve people. It's in how you lead people. Someone comes in late and you can say, why are you late? As opposed to, hey, are you okay? Yes. And they maybe say, yeah, I'm okay. I just wanted to...

get a massage on the way to work and then okay now that's a different conversation yeah yeah yeah yeah and I think it applies to gosh our kids our friends our partners that that the the game changer for me was finding out that the stories we make up about other people have a physiological con like consequence when I start to like see the towels on the floor and I think

My wife just left them there. Oh, she left them there. Dude, okay, get your mess. Yeah. My body doesn't know that I'm not in a real fight. So it floods it with all the cortisol and adrenaline. It's ready to get go time. Yeah.

And then she walks in and I've been in a fight for 45 minutes with her. She has no idea. Right. It's, it's this strange instead of, instead of that. You're going into the eighth round of the fight and she's just walking into the ring and she's like, wait, she's back. She's back in, she's under the arena, right? Looking for the snack, the catering. So, but is that seeing those towels and thinking, good God, what must have her day been like? And I just pick them up. I had somebody call my show recently and he's,

talking about coming home to his house and he works so late and so hard and his wife has a toddler in the house and it's just not clean anymore. I was like, bro, just walk in and pick up a vacuum, man. Like for what? Assume that the day was crazy. Don't do that. Well, you know, mine was probably like, it's a, or I love how you said that. Just have the conversation up front because I've been guilty of not saying anything, not saying anything, not saying anything, not saying anything. And then there's a shoe.

And I'm like, the shoe! And everybody's bewildered, right? Because it's just a shoe. Or my poor kids. My wife has some context because she didn't know she married kind of an emotional goofball. But it's my kids that I don't say anything. They're late. We're running behind. They didn't clean up the room. They don't, they don't, they don't.

And then I just come unhinged off something little and they're like trying to figure out dad. And that, that is, that scale seems to be off to get that mad over this, right? Or that frustrated. Well, so many people want to be cool. They want to be liked. They don't want to like, and so you just avoid the conversation because you think it's going to be awkward or tense or like, as like I always use the example I was using, like in management, like,

Someone comes in, their shirt is wrinkled. And you're like, yeah, but they just started here. I don't want them to think I'm like an annoying manager and you don't say anything. And then finally, like three weeks in, their shirt's wrinkled. You're like, they don't care about me. They don't care about the excellence of this establishment. They're doing this as a little passive-aggressive way to stick it to the man. And then you blow off the handle when maybe no one ever told them it was important to iron their shirt. Yeah.

And like with the towel on the ground in the bathroom, there's like a hierarchy of assumptions. They're a slob. They're angry at me. This is like their way of communicating it to me. Charitable assumption is, gosh, I wonder if they were getting out of the shower and our kid fell and they had to run across the house naked just to help our child. Right.

Maybe I could just hang up the towel. But if it's every single day, maybe they just don't know that it's something that bothers you. And you could just say, hey, babe, like, I know this is weird and I don't want to be like annoying, but could you just hang up the towel? Right. And oftentimes, like we've had that in my marriage where she'll say something like, oh my gosh, yeah, that's so easy. And I'm doing this little thing that's upsetting you and I could easily change it. Of course. Yes.

And it's a gift. That's to me because now I can serve her in like this new way. And it's also a gift because I've come to believe that secrets kill relationships. They just destroy them. And whether it's business partnerships or relationships, romantic kids, whatever. And

If you've just picked up a towel and you haven't said anything, and it's, I don't know why with our marriages, they get so existential so fast. If you were at my house and I left a towel or you left a towel on the floor, be like, well, put me in a slob and I put it up and then be like, Hey, where are we going to go eat? But the person that you're closest to in the world, what is she trying to say? And it's so existential and dramatic. And so, and that's me. But if she walks in the bathroom and I've just picked her tail up and

She knows. She can feel it. There's something. And by me not addressing it as a way to get back, right? It's my way to throw a secret punch like a ghost punch. It's just everything. It's just un... To use your words, unreasonable. It's just a decision to live a little bit more miserably. I don't think we need that. I was spending time with Tim Norton, Tim Hortons. You know, Tim Hortons. It's like this Canadian coffee and donut show. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Really, really good stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I did like a whole talk about unreasonable hospitality. And one of the questions from one of the people that worked there is like, okay, yeah, but you have three hours with people. Like our exchanges are super, super quick. Like how can you be unreasonably hospitable? And I answered in two ways. The first way though is this. I took a flight. Me and my family went from New York to Seattle and back. My daughter was three. She had just turned three at the time.

On our way there, you know the gate agent that checks your ticket? You're with that person for a split second, right? And the woman on the way there, it was just something had gone wrong in her day. Charitable assumption. And we're halfway down the gate bridge, and my daughter says to me, Daddy, why is she so mad? And we get on the plane. Go on.

On the way back, this woman, something had gone right in her day, or she was just one of the most lovely people. Because we do the quick check-in, halfway down the gate bridge, my daughter says to my wife, Mommy, is that your friend? And so this is a three-year-old with a stranger. And the energy exchange in a split-second interaction made her think one person was really mad and the other was my wife's friend. Mm-hmm.

So, okay, if you're thinking about just hospitality and business, yeah, you can make a real impact without even doing anything. It's just about the energy you put out into the world. But now you take that and you bring it to marriage. If my three-year-old daughter could feel that from a stranger, what do you think my grown-up wife, you don't think she's going to feel it from the person that she knows better than anyone in the world? And yet, we believe that we can be thinking something else.

And they don't know it. Oh, yeah. Which is an insane display of self-deception. I think it'd be cruel. I think it's cruel. Yeah. To send my wife on a story-making up adventure to figure out what's wrong with her husband. But by the way, I do it sometimes. Oh, I do it all the time. Something will happen and I'm just not ready to talk about it. Which, by the way, I do think there's merit there. I do think sometimes you need to find... I'm not going to be a good version of myself in this. Yeah. And I want to get it right. Yeah.

But I do think that's what you should say. That's right. Hey, what's going on? When you're not yet ready to talk, we say, nothing, I'm good. By the way, how I just said it is how every human being in the world says nothing, I'm good, when there's something and they're not good. As opposed to saying, hey, we're good. There's a little something, but can you just give me a little bit of time? Because I want to make sure I find the right words to get it out. That's it.

And I think most people don't realize that that gift is to their partner, but that's also a gift to yourself. Yeah. Because you just exhale. Because now you know. You have to carry this thing around. Now you know like. It's out. Okay, I'm going to, now we're going down the ski slope. Mm-hmm.

I always talk about that even with taking risks in business. Sometimes you're at the top of a double diamond. And all you got to do is put your poles in the snow and just push. Then you're going to get down. You might be a little bruised by the time you get down, but that is all you need to do just to start. Tell me about your disdain for the words, I can't. That's my dad. My dad has a disdain for the words, I can't. This is what's so funny. You think about all the things...

Or I don't know. I should just make it about me. I don't want to assume. There's a bunch of stuff that my dad made me do or stuff that he pushed onto me that I found so annoying when I was a child. And I am so profoundly grateful to him for now. And it makes me realize that if I'm not doing some things that are annoying to my children, I am not actually being a good dad. That's right. Or if you're not peppering them with these life lessons. Yeah. That they're like, ugh. But dude, my dad made me journal my entire life.

What? Yeah. The moment I started working, he made me journal every day after I got home from work. Dude, they need to donate his heart and mind to science. Well, because he said perspective has an expiration date. And he wanted me to be an empathetic leader one day. And you're a busboy. When you become a server, your greatest superpower is that you can see the world through the eyes of a busboy. So you're a more empathetic server. But after five, six months, you can't do it anymore. Yeah.

That perspective's gone. So he wanted me to always document my perspectives such that one day I could reread those journal entries and tap back into it. I hated writing those journals. I'm so grateful that I did. Now I do it joyfully on my own accord. I can't. You know, you start saying that when you get to a certain age. And my dad just never wanted that to be my thing. He gave me a paperweight when I was a kid. I have it on my desk today. It says, what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?

He has challenged me over and over again to just answer that question honestly. And whatever that answer is, just to try to do that. And he always says that far too many people, they're like scared to say their biggest goals out loud for fear that if they do and don't achieve them, they'll let themselves and probably as importantly the people around them down. But he'd always say like, hey, if you don't say this stuff, you're never going to achieve it. And so like that idea of

Believing in yourself. Confidence. It was always just something that was really important to him. So when I started saying, I can't, I forget how old I was, he printed out these little fortune cookie-sized pieces of paper saying, success comes in cans, failure comes in cans. Nice. Which was so intense for a kid my age. And hid them everywhere. It's like I'd put on a pair of underwear and I'd be like, what is this? And it'd be like that piece of paper. Oh, he hid them in your stuff. All over my stuff. Everywhere in the house. Who is this guy? Yeah.

And I say the story now that I'm saying it out loud to you in this room. That was a little too intense. But I actually don't think it was. I'm so grateful for it. And so yeah, I try really hard to instill that in the people around me too. We are capable of so much more than we think we are. You bring it back to like...

What you said about marriages and people feeling like their tank is empty on their marriage, that the marriage has run its course, run out of gas. Like, no, it is that because you've decided you can't make it work. Or you won't. You won't. But what we're telling ourselves is I can't. Right. You won't because you've convinced yourself you can't. And...

I think we can do much more than we think we can do and it just starts by dropping that word. - Bringing it back to your dad, I hadn't thought about this, but I go back to my parents and I've talked about the Mad Nauseam on the show, but the two things I learned from my parents, my dad being a SWAT guy, like when things get bad, you go in, so what you do? And my mom going to school at 42 and then now she's in her 70s, she was back to, she had retired, but now she's back to being a professor still.

There's no such thing as you're too old. You can't. It's not for you. Like, there's no such thing as that. You just go figure that out. And when I think about your dad, he told you that and printed off notes. But you have this, like, blueprint of a guy that did. Yeah. He did raise an amazing son who never one second didn't believe he wasn't loved. And he did teach his kid what the word fidelity and what integrity actually, like, not, not

not how you talk about it, but here's what this looks like. And he did, you know, it was a successful restaurateur and, and it was like successful business. Like, like we say that all the time, more of this gets caught than taught, but he gave you a picture of what you can, but also was there to like, still hold me and love me. And when I messed up, I did something stupid. And like, I think what my dad did, but accountability can be a gift inside of a relationship. Right.

Yeah. Accountability doesn't mean you hold someone accountable by turning your back on them when they don't live up to the standard. No, you embrace them tighter. Exactly. Yeah. Even if I have to embrace you as an employee and say, now's not a good time for you to be here. Right? And I remember used to tell my students, you know, I'd catch them with drugs. I'm like, you can't sell drugs here. The most graceful thing I can do for you right now is to say, not right now. Yeah. You need to leave school. Like, it's not a good time for you. Yeah, my job is to. That's the greatest gift I can give you. Yeah. Yeah.

No, but I think what he did, what I think you're doing, like, this is not pandering. I really do believe strongly what I'm about to say. So I'm about to praise you. So just like prepare yourself. I accepted it, but I'm very uncomfortable already. I think we're in a place where being intentional and thoughtful around vulnerability and pursuit and emotionally connecting and investing in people matters.

Like there's a lot of people out there that like say it's not manly or like my dad was as much of a man as you could be like military, won six bronze stars, varsity lacrosse, but still like leaned in and pursued like a proper relationship in all of the ways that we're kind of talking about today. Yeah.

And I think that's a really important thing, especially right now. I think you're carrying the flag in a beautiful way to show you can be like a man's man. And that doesn't mean you can't be emotionally in touch with yourself and endeavor to be emotionally in touch with the people around you. In fact, I think for me, it's been... I trained with MMA fighters for a while. I'd much rather...

dress out an elk and carry it out of two miles up and down mountains and to sit down with my son and say, hey man, I'm sorry, I was wrong.

One of those is my wife, especially like, hey, I totally blew this over the last nine months. I've blown this and I'm sorry. That's way on the manliness scale from like, I do hard things. It's way easier to go lift and go do jujitsu. It just is. Yeah. And then you ultimately wake up one day and you realize that actually that's the only way to truly be like the most manly man you want to be. That's it. Yeah. It's to say, how can I love you today? Yeah. That's hard. That's hard for me.

And so if I'm looking around the scope of my life for what's the hardest thing I can do, it's that right. With the biggest payoff as well. When you, as a guy who's been in the work, you've been training and leading people. Are you optimistic? All I hear is negativity. And I've been out of the classroom long enough now that, um, I mean, five years and being out of the university system for five years is ages, right? Yeah. Um,

Are you optimistic about new workers coming in, younger workers coming in? There's just so much bad press on work ethic, on character, on yeah, like this and that and this and that. And I've got my thoughts and opinions on it, but you're in it. You see it. Yeah, I'm super optimistic. I think a lot of people are complaining a lot about Gen Z because almost the love language is,

They are leading that generation in the way that they once wanted to be led. As opposed to understanding what their love language is, what their leadership language is, and contouring their leadership. Like a leader. No, a leader is supposed to dictate to everyone around them how they want to be loved, Will. Right? And it's kind of wild to me.

Like a great leader is, what does the word mean? You are a leader of people. That means you need to get to know people and figure out how to motivate them in a way that is unique to them. That is hospitality and leadership. That's it, yeah. And in the same way that you can't love everyone in the same way and expect every one of those people to feel loved, it's not dissimilar when it comes to leadership. Now it's especially exaggerated when it becomes a generational thing. Mm-hmm.

And I think a lot of the people that are frustrated should be just as frustrated with themselves because they're not actually compelling themselves to learn new tricks. Yes. That's what I believe. And when I think about what leadership, the reality is, once upon a time, being a great leader meant you were the person.

with the confidence and conviction to say, this is where we're going. People crave convicted leadership. And then Simon Sinek came around. That wasn't enough anymore. People wanted to be told where they were going and they wanted to be inspired why they should want to go there. And I just don't think that's enough anymore, especially for these younger generations. They want to be told where they're going, inspired why they should want to go there, but they also want a seat at the table and helping to figure out how to get there. And we can call that entitled leadership.

Or we can embrace it, recognizing that, okay, we can probably learn a lot from them if we give them a seat. And we're going to get a lot more out of them. And they're going to feel that much more of a sense of loyalty and dedication to the spirit of our collective endeavor. And at the end of the day, leadership is service. In the same way that I'm not going to serve a filet mignon to a vegetarian, I need to lead this generation in service.

And the way that they want to be led. And the way they can hear it. Yeah. And by the way, this is not like, it's not meant to be a monologue in the other direction. You don't just like bend over backwards. Sure. But hospitality is a dialogue and it's about making it a meaningful conversation. I remember that what I would say is probably the single greatest gift that was given to me professionally was by...

one of my forever mentors, John Noel Thompson, and he said, "I see something special in you, but you're not there yet. So here's what we're gonna do.

You need to learn how to speak CFO and you don't. And you need to learn how to speak president and you don't. And you need to learn how to speak these positions. And so you're going to start coming to me with these meetings and you're going to sit in there and you're not going to say anything. You're going to listen. You're going to watch. And that experience over the next X number of years was the greatest gift because it was my quote unquote entitled. I want to be in that room. I want to hear what's going on. Okay, you can come. And there's some boundaries to this. It's not a free for all.

And I think he would tell you when I come out and say, why don't we do it like this? There's several times he was like, all right, that's a new idea. I hadn't thought of it. You know what I mean? And so it was a mutual good that raised everybody up. But it was a very different, I am the boss and you will sit there and I will tell you when it's your turn. And again, I go back to you write about this eloquently, but what a waste of human. Yeah. Like I've employed you, all of you.

But just to utilize you for this one thing is such a waste. Everyone has much more than that to give. It's amazing. Thank you for being my friend. I'm glad you're in town. I'm so happy to be here, man. Seriously. And I can't wait to hang out. I don't have any friends, so this is going to be good for me. It's going to be awesome. But no, thanks for being a blessing and for coming to hang out, man. Thanks for having me.

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go to thorn.com slash you slash Deloney. That's thorn, T-H-O-R-N-E dot com slash the letter U slash Deloney for 25% off everything in the store. I trust Thorn. My family trusts Thorn. And you can trust Thorn too. All right, that was my conversation with Will Godera. Now can't you see why he's the most lovely, wonderful person who's ever lived? By the way,

How you saw him on this episode is how he interacts with everybody. Everybody. And the story I told in this episode about him changing how I do live events and how I talk and interact with people backstage, in front of stage, in front of house, out in the parking lots. Um,

Will is a guy who I have decided I want to be like more and more and more. And I think the world would be better to be more and more like Will Godera. Send this episode out to all your friends. Like and subscribe to the show wherever you can. And any and all things Will Godera are linked in the show notes. And if you're in for like, if you're like, man, I need some more attention before I go to bed.

Start watching The Bear tonight. It is an action-packed restaurant show. Love you guys. Stay in school. Don't do drugs. And be kind to one another. Find places where you can be unreasonably hospitable. It will change your life, their life, and all of our lives. Love you guys. Bye.