Inside CVC: What Executives Don't Say: Nick Jonsson on Loneliness, Addiction, and the Cost of Asking for Help

Outwardly, Nick Jonsson had everything that success is supposed to look like: two decades as a senior executive across Asia, an Ironman athlete, a family, the villa and the driver. Alone, he was turning to alcohol, and eventually drugs, to cope. 

It is an issue many corporate leaders carry in silence, and it is the one Nick, now an executive coach, spends his days trying to change. 

In this conversation with Philipp and Steve, Nick shares his own story: the divorce, the collapse, and the friend he lost to suicide a year into his sobriety, a loss that pushed him to write one raw LinkedIn post that went viral and changed the direction of his life. 

He walks through the real numbers behind addiction and suicide among corporate executives worldwide, what he is doing to remove the stigma through EGN, the confidential peer network he built into Southeast Asia's largest, with over 900 executives, and the advice he gives anyone carrying something similar. A conversation about what gets hidden at the top, and what it costs to keep hiding it. 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Welcome to Inside CVC, the podcast that brings together leaders in innovation and capital investment to explore the trends shaping the business of corporate venture capital. I'm your host, Steve Schmith and together with Philipp Willigmann we're speaking with corporate investors, entrepreneurs and ecosystem builders. Driving the Future of Innovation. Inside CVC is brought to you by u-path Advisors, helping corporations and startups unlock sustainable growth through strategic partnerships. To learn more, visit u-path.com. That's the letter u dash path dot com. And to catch up on all of our episodes, search Inside CVC on your favorite podcast platform or visit u-path.com/podcast. 

In this episode, we sit down with Nick Jonsson executive coach, psychotherapist, and the number one international best selling author of Executive Loneliness. Outwardly, Nick spent two decades as a successful senior executive across Asia. An Ironman athlete with a family and all of the trappings of success. Privately, he was turning to alcohol and eventually drugs to cope. He says it's a mental health issue that quietly impacts executives around the world. It's also one that's not discussed nearly often enough. In this conversation, we talk about his own story, the real numbers behind addiction and suicide among corporate executives worldwide. What he's doing to remove the stigma and the advice he gives to leaders carrying something similar. We close on what real recovery looks like when stepping away isn't an option. Here's our conversation with Nick Jonsson. 

Nick, welcome to the inside CVC podcast. How are you doing today, sir? Doing great. Thank you so much for inviting me. Well, Philip and I are really excited about this Conversation. We believe it's going to be vulnerable. We believe it's going to touch on something that, at least for our audience in many cases, is kept behind closed doors, right? In those private sort of situations and scenarios. Why don't we start today's conversation with giving our audience a little bit of background about you? You spent twenty years as a senior executive across Asia, looked exactly like a successful career. Something started feeling different. What was on the outside versus what was on the inside? Maybe he was a little bit mismatched. So can you share a little bit about your story with us? Yeah, sure. And I believe if someone looks on the outside, it looked really good. I mean, I had all the titles, the promotions, the villa, the car, the driver, and, you know, a son in private school, married and yeah, everything going for me. And I spent a decade in, in that kind of field to climb up the corporate ladder. Elbow my way up the corporate ladder. And on the inside, though it was a different picture, I felt lonely, isolated. I questioned my selection on career path and so on. And with that, perhaps I became a little bit dilutional as well. I was an underperformer, perhaps an anxious overachiever, and I just suddenly became delusional and thought that I deserved something better. And I had quite a lot of job offers, other opportunities externally approaching me. And with that, I just basically resigned from my job. Uh, with that though, uh, with that moment, it started to really tumble down. Um, losing myself completely, losing my finances, being challenged by my wife. And that led eventually also to a divorce. And that was the start, you could say, of a complete collapse. You've talked about turning to alcohol as a coping mechanism. Mechanism. How do you recognize that pattern? Right. If there's somebody out there listening right now that, you know, might be dealing with this themselves, how do you recognize those patterns? Yeah. So when I was at work, I controlled it quite well. I was an athlete then as well, sort of. I was running marathons, doing triathlons and so on. And I knew that, you know, in order for the training to go, well, I have to control it. So I usually stopped at the three or four beers on any weekday. I let it go a little bit more on the weekend and so on. And because I worked in the medical industry, I even had a contract where it clearly said that I wasn't allowed to consume any alcohol during working hours, something which I never violated. And so I had very strict rules on myself and it seemed to be working well. But then finding myself suddenly outside the corporate world, more in an entrepreneurial journey where I didn't have anyone sort of controlling that. Then I started with a feeling that I can have a lunch during a, you know, lunch beer sometime. Uh, then that led perhaps to have an afternoon beer. Sometimes it slowly started to creep in, and you could almost say that over a period of gradually three years, it did become increasingly a coping mechanism. While it didn't start like that, uh, it certainly became one. And I realized that, you know, I could drink on my feelings and emotions, both positive and negative. Nick, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you very much for coming on and sharing your personal journey. Um, you shared with us in the conversation that you got sober, um, around May twenty eighteen, uh, and um, a year later, a very close friend of you died by suicide. Um, so that kind of loss, especially at that moment in your own recovery, um, changes how you see everything. Can you? Can you take us back to that time? What did it mean for you to do this work? Yes, indeed. It was twenty eighteen. I sobered up and, um. I just had had enough of alcohol. It didn't serve me anymore. And I hit you could say my rock bottom. And I kept that pretty secret, though I didn't want the whole world to know that I had been, you know, facing some alcohol challenges. There's a lot of stigma and shame surrounding that topic. So I kept it to a close circle of close friends and my new wife. I got remarried during this time also. Then I didn't share it externally to that. But when in twenty nineteen, I lost my friend to suicide and that's when I started to question myself. Well, the way I was spiraling downwards for three years, I start to wonder how close to this would I be? I had not had any suicidal thoughts as per say, A. But I was clearly going that way because I had already written my will, my testament, and I sort of cleaned up my act because I realized that if I continue to not look after myself and I was abusing food as well, eating real junk food, gaining about thirty kilograms for our American listeners, I guess that's about fifty, sixty pounds. And and therefore not caring at all about my health. Um, so I was going down that path. And then when I lost my friend in twenty nineteen, sadly, I decided to speak up about this. I, I not only for my sake, for his sake or his family's sake, but I thought that, you know, we need to be more vulnerable. We need to be more comfortable to talk about this because everyone goes through challenges in our life. And if we can talk about these dark moments, then, you know, or as we can say, if we become comfortable discussing uncomfortable, then it's easier to get help and support. And how are you doing today, Nick? Today I'm doing absolutely wonderful. I'm eight plus years into my recovery journey sober. And the work I did then was basically to, you know, work on myself with coaches, mentors, psychotherapists, and also joining then recovery groups, twelve step programs. And instead of drinking on my feelings and emotions so high and low emotions, I now talk about it and I have I'm much more deep, deep. I have much more deeper connections with myself and other people. So I replaced basically an alcohol addiction with human connection. I love, I love, I love how you describe this and how important human connection is, um, and will be going forward, specifically the times we are getting into with, with AI and people stuck in front of their computers. Um, but staying, you know, with this topic of executive loneliness. Steve myself. We both have been executives in senior roles, and oftentimes it just gets talked about. It's a very abstract. But what what does it actually feel like? What is that Sunday night feel like for senior executives who is quietly struggling or is getting ready for the plane? Can you, you know, share with probably a lot of the executives who may feel that how, how you think about this, what the executive loneliness really means? Yeah. So as I, as I was coming into my recovery, then I was looking into this and asking myself, you know, could there be other people who also have been suffering from this loneliness and how did they deal with it? I started to do some research and I looked up, for example, statistics that at that time showed that thirty three percent of adults were suffering from loneliness. And then I put together a survey specifically in Singapore, where I questioned executives and senior executives and asking them how lonely they were either they are experiencing now, or if they had experienced loneliness in the workplace in the past and the results were very similar, thirty percent. So clearly I wasn't alone. And that was the picture I saw. So about one in one in three are actually having feelings of isolation and loneliness in the workplace. And what does it look like? Well, let's just say that it's different to be lonely and loneliness. Be lonely or being alone is a different thing, right? The executive loneliness that I'm talking about here is really that if you are in the workplace, you're surrounded by your colleagues. People you know are around you, but you still feel lonely there. And this can happen also outside the workplace. You might be around your family, you might be around your friends, but you're feeling lonely in there. So that can happen. If we lost the connection with ourselves and therefore the connection with other people. I say it always starts with ourselves because if we are in a bad spot, then it's really difficult to have connection with other people. So that's the topic that I then continue to look into. And I've done many more questions and more results in regards to to loneliness, but also in regards to seeking help and other means. Nick, you mentioned loneliness. You mentioned the way that you found help was opening up to others in a corporate environment. That takes a lot of vulnerability to do that. I imagine there are different philosophies towards opening up in many cases. If you're a man or a woman in these sorts of leadership positions in your conversations, I'm curious how much was the notion or the fear? How large, how was the fear of I'm just afraid to open up. I know I need to, It makes sense. I'm just scared to do it. Yeah, and that's exactly the follow up questions that I had on that. So if around thirty percent then are suffering from loneliness, I then wanted to find out. So if you are suffering from loneliness, do you talk to someone in your company about this, like your boss, your HR and so on? Eighty four percent said that they wouldn't do that or so. So that means, you know, sixteen percent therefore are therefore suffering here in isolation. Then a follow up question to that is would you seek professional help about it for your loneliness? Seventy five percent, again, is no. So that means that you have people really suffering in isolation. Don't talk about someone to someone internally not seeking professional help. So really we it's due to the stigma and the shame and it's similar findings around alcohol and so on. We all do everything we can to, you know, cover up or protect ourselves from things. May it be loneliness or addictions per se. We. We're just not ready as humans to talk about it. We don't mind to admit if we have a broken arm or a leg or injured ourselves physically, but anything to do with mental is still a lot of stigma out there. So putting on your athlete, putting on your coaching hat, what do you say to those folks? How do you encourage them? Well, I was one of them for a start, right? I did everything I could to cover it up. My message to them is clear. Think about which safe spaces can you have conversations about this about? And there's a difference from having safe spaces and talk to someone versus oversharing in office. I don't believe that we should come in and overshare and, you know, tell all our biggest secrets and the full truth to everyone in the office. That's really probably going to be a bad idea to use against you and everything else. But think about, firstly, is there someone in the office I feel I can trust. Is there a colleague, a boss? Is the HR. Do we have a hotline, a helpline? Is it someone I can call an attorney? If there's no one there, what about externally? Is there someone in my family who I can have an honest conversation with? Or maybe. Is there a friend, one or two people I can share this with? And if there's not, then you have all these anonymous helplines, hotlines. You have suicide hotlines, you have recovery groups. The twelve step programs now have hotlines for every single addiction out there. It doesn't matter if it's drugs, alcohol, you even have recovery hotlines. Now, if you run your company bankrupt or if you run in personal bankruptcy, they are support groups with volunteers for this. And if none of that, then you can still call a counselor. You can call a therapist who's qualified also to help you. And the beautiful thing now is that you don't have to go and be seen in a waiting area. Most of these people, including myself, now work online and we can have a Zoom session. So therefore you don't have to break your anonymity. Fifty five percent of CEOs reported mental health challenges in twenty twenty four. Six in ten C-suite leaders turned to alcohol or other unhealthy coping during the pandemic. Instead of getting help, people earning over seventy five thousand dollars a year are the highest drinking economic group. When you see those numbers, what is leadership culture doing to produce this? Yeah. So the issue is that we are always looking at the fact devising the business, right? What I keep hearing is senior leaders working across multiple time zones. Uh, it's very common to work sixteen hour days. You're on calls early in the morning, late at night, and then you have a lot of business travel. And in the business travel. Yeah, we got to connect. We got to network. We got to have team building. We're going to have team bonding. We go out, we have drinks, there's dinners. So if you are a senior leader traveling from one country to another and you constantly on the go, and you never have time for the self-care and neglect, many of them are neglecting their health and just their to drive the business. Constant pressure and then throwing the alcohol in the mix here. And it's really, really, really detrimental for the senior leaders. So if you're an office, then you expected sixteen hours a day on calls or you're traveling and then it doesn't stop either, right? So when do you have time to recharge? You don't. Nick you're Swedish, right? And you just talked about your career in southeast Southeast Asia. Um, and that we are living in a, in a very global world now. So from your perspective, how is this problem look differently around the world? I would assume being in Asia, for example, Japan and Korea, the stigma there is even compounding, uh, the silence. Um, but in the US or maybe in Europe, there's maybe a bit more openness. Can you share how different cultures are dealing with this? Yeah. And, uh, I've been mainly sharing from an Asian perspective. The book I wrote was based on interviews and research in Asia and mainly Singapore, and however, I do a lot of work also in Europe and in US. And you're right, there is a difference. And actually what I found is that the stigma is even more in Asia than in Europe. When it comes to this on us, it seems like, you know, it's easy for the Westerners to ask for help in general over there in Asians. And I have been myself after I sobered up, I've been to close to one thousand of these recovery meetings around the world. I keep coming back to them. I will volunteer tomorrow again. Uh, one here in Sweden, uh, when I'm in Singapore, most of the time I'm attending these meetings to be there for others. And what I found then is that, you know, the it's a vast majority. About ninety percent of the attendees are Westerners. But I also had the hotline, a twenty four hour hotline as a volunteer, and most of the phone calls that I received then were from locals and particularly the maybe the wife calling on behalf of a husband who has a drinking problem. And, you know, we've really been trying for a long time to get the help them with the courage to come to a meeting then to get help. But they really, really that is so strict for them that they don't want to be seen. They don't want to admit this in front of other people. That's at least what I've seen. You're talking about, you know, the partners. Um, you know, if you think about divorce, family distance and relationships, how they erode quite quietly, you know, if you have years of seventy hour weeks, uh, constant relocation. Um, and I mean, I looking at my, my career, you know, as a consultant, as an executive, I mean, the hours you spend focus on work and not connecting with your partner and your loved one is real, right? So, and, uh, it's, it's a, it's a struggle if you don't have a close network around you, you know, you can rely on. So what is the relationship between professional isolation and what happens at home behind closed doors? Yeah. So, you know, a lot of the work that I do now, I talk about holistic leadership and what I refer to there is the impact on the physical health, the mental health and the social health on the performance at work. And it has a huge effect. I mean, gone are the days when we said that, you know, leave your emotions at the door. Don't bring yourself to work, you know, don't come in and bring your personal trouble to work. But it's only a few decades ago when we all said that. But now we know that if someone is really going through a turbulent time at home, uh, naturally they're going to underperform at work. It's really hard. If you've been up arguing with your partner to three, four a m, had one or two hours of sleep. How can you come in and make huge decisions and be really focused? It's going to be impossible, right? And the stakes are always higher and higher. The speed is, you know, the decisions are coming at the highest speed, especially now with AI and so on. And it's easier to make wrong big decisions perhaps in these environments. So we got to really, really now, you know, be there for our team members. I have one of my colleagues today who, um, whose son is hospitalized. And she sent me a picture this morning saying, this is what's happening today. Just so you're aware. And she felt safe to do that because she knows that we have I will do the same. When something is happening in my life, I will overshare. I will tell all my colleagues I'm working with, this is happening now, so just be aware that I might not be responsive and so on. I have no problem with that because we all go through ups and downs, and I don't think someone can start gossiping if a family member is sick and need some additional support for a day and so on. So you have an open culture. We talk about what's happening, then let's just support each other. We can all have a tough time, but if we don't have that culture, then people will just tell lies and try to find excuses, etc.. So I'm a big believer of yeah, that we should be a bit more vulnerable, a bit more trust between each other, and naturally people want to make a good job at the end of the day, at least at a senior level as well. They will catch up. So why hold back on the truth? You touch upon, I think often some of the most undervalued characteristics of exceptional leadership, vulnerability, transparency. You said a few minutes ago to open the conversation that you wouldn't come into work and share all of that. Where's the balance? Yeah. So I think number one, when it comes to vulnerability in the workplace, the best we can do if we are a leader is to admit our mistakes. When we made a mistake, own it and demonstrate what we learned from it so that other team members will feel safe to also make mistakes and look at it as feedback for something that we can improve from. So that's, I think is the number one when it comes to vulnerability in the workplace. But if you are a leader and you're scared to admit your mistake, you're trying to covering it up, that's going to be a never ending cycle. And then everyone else will keep it. But when it comes to disclosing our personal struggle and challenges into the workplace, the examples I mentioned before, my house is flooded. My, my, my daughter is sick and need extra attention. I believe those are human things that we can disclose. But if someone is going through a very serious illness and have treatments and something is very, very much, you know, challenging, then maybe we don't want to disclose this to everyone, but at least talk to your direct report and talk to your HR so you don't have to start playing mind games and secrets with the people who you report to. And if you have a few direct reports. Also, perhaps they should be in your inner circle at work, and maybe we deserve to know what's happening. If you are, for example, going through a challenging time in your relationship and you have couples therapy because maybe you're up for a divorce. I do think that a couple of people close to us deserve to know that, because it might just help us rather than otherwise. We just bottle up and also tense. I don't want to find out, you know, and I think that was one of my challenges. I worked in the medical industry and yes, I was having plans on a divorce, but I didn't open up to anyone about it. Unfortunately, many times these addictions, these internal personal challenges end in suicide. But in business cultures and business circles, that's almost never discussed. Um, hard to find any sort of data on C-suite suicide. Uh, I do remember headline here and there over the last several years. Um, you know, as I think about those, I seem to recall most of them were out of Asia, whether it was Korea, whether it was Japan or something like that. Have you been in conversations related to suicide and any point of view on how what the population looks like? Um, and are there ways that I don't know, you can detect it? Are there signals based on your conversations? Yeah, for a start. And you're spot on there, Steve. It's very difficult to get any numbers. I mean, if you I don't want to even mention some countries here, but all I can say is that there are countries out there where in the numbers of deaths you will hear classification, such as from a fall from height. I mean, what is how many people will naturally just fall from height and die? Um, there's so many classifications with these falls under and it's games here and there for life insurances, insurances. These families for the stigma. They don't want to have it classified. They will move it at so many levels that the numbers are is really impossible to get a grip what's there? But I think one thing we can say in common is that suicide rates are increasing and it's becoming more and more common. And it's not only among the C-suite, it goes across all generations, even among pensioners, even on teenagers. It's just escalating and escalating and escalating that I think we can say. And what is the solution then? Well, it is having the conversations like we're having today. If we are reducing the stigma at the lower level to talk about loneliness, to talk about addiction so that people feel safer to seek help rather than going down the spiral. I went downhill for about three years, and that was almost the end of my road. I didn't have much more to give. So if someone else is suffering, you know, I was fortunate that I picked alcohol. Perhaps that wasn't detrimental enough. For three years I survived it just. But maybe there are other means people would go through if they do self-harm and cutting themselves and whatever means and form they have or drugs, maybe that's much heavier and then maybe they don't survive it, right? So but having these conversations is what helps. And we need to destigmatize also the suicide. And there is a lot done and there's more hotlines, helplines also out there. Tell us about the Southeast Asia's largest confidential peer network, nine hundred senior executives in the closed group. I think we understand the why, but how did it come together and understand that it's a confidential peer network? Anything you can share about what happens the first few minutes? Somebody is new to the room. Yeah. So Ian was founded in Denmark in nineteen ninety six, and it's now actually part of Vistage, which is the big American peer network. While this is more for business owners and entrepreneurs, IGN is more for the executives and the one level below than the CEOs. And so I started to be involved in this for about a decade ago. So before my downfall, but I didn't really use the network for what it was until I became more vulnerable, because actually the format of an IGN meeting is that you come in as a member and you share two things. Number one, what's your expertise you can add to your groups, or what is it that you can be of service to the other members of the group with? That's number one. Number two, what is your and your biggest problem right now? Your biggest issue in the workplace that you need help with. So that really makes you vulnerable right there. You have to come present. And it's only two slides. One is your expertise, how you can help them. Number two, I need help with this right now. And it can be a concrete problem. And then it's the rest of the group to help you to solve that problem. So it's beyond addiction. It is. It is more all encompassing of of professional life. Yeah. So Aegean is a network, uh, which is for any executives like a mastermind and so on. The good thing here is that you're catching all of these work related issues before they lead to loneliness, before addiction comes into play, because you're tackling the root cause, which might be what someone starts thinking about asking for help. Personally, that's, that's hard for me. I, I struggle with, with asking for help. It is something that over the last several months, I have been forced to ask for help more and. And honestly, I like what I'm getting in response to asking for help. Yeah. These days I'm a completely changed person. And in my whole transformation these days, my biggest strength is asking for help. I immediately have post-it notes all over my desk. Whenever I get stuck, I write it down, maybe take a step back, You meditate or whatever. And then I think, okay, what would be the three different people to talk to about this? Maybe it's AI, maybe it's one or two people and then the ball gets rolling, right? And I had a major issue with my YouTube channel I built for fifteen years, just disappearing a week ago unexpectedly. And it was quite traumatizing knowing you invested a lot of time and money and so on. But I didn't panic. I really figured out everything what to do. And then I reached out to the right network. The right people escalated here and there, and now I'm in full contact with the leadership team. Even direct people from YouTube is emailing me and they're sorting it out. And so if that was a decade ago, I might have dealt with solving this problem with with panicking, alcohol, screaming, shouting and, and, and it would not have helped. Right? So fascinating. Thank you. Thank you for sharing this, uh, this Nick, and thanks for the question, Steve. I just want to underline, you know, really the importance of a peer to peer network in a trusted environment. Uh, it's it's so important. For business related topics, but also like for personal topics. Um, so, you know, great, great work. You're driving and I hope there's opportunities for us to do some work in the future around the networks we are building. Um, coming, coming back to your, to your personal story, I was quite, I don't know if I was surprised, but I was kind of like when, when, you know, you shared it with us and I was, I read about it how you actually shared your personal story and you went out, uh, and you, you wrote a public LinkedIn post and it went viral. Uh, and so kind of curious, why did you decide to do it this way? What was this moment like after you? Yeah, you hit push and publish. Yeah. So that was the week when I lost my friend to suicide. So I was in a shock. You could say. Um, I really I was working with him on a project at that time, and he was going to be a guest speaker at an event down on Beach Road in Singapore. And we were there. We had rented a space. I met him for coffee just a few days before everything was ready. And as the events were going to start, he just didn't show up and I went to grab my phone to give him a call. And I had all these missed calls and messages that he died of suicide just then. And that left me, you know, in anger, sadness, despair, because I just met him before and I had not given him a disclosure that I had gone through a tough time myself, you know, so I started to blame myself. I imagine if when I met him for coffee a few days ago, that I would have shared the dark hole I was in then he might have felt safe to open up to me, you know, because as I called all his close friends and family members, no one had any idea that he was going through a difficult time. And we normally hear that right. In fact, looking at his social media, he had made a post just before this with him and his girlfriend saying that he's never been happier. And I just reported a month project of his where he climbed or hiked to the Mount Everest base camp, and he did it for charity and I was donating money and following his course. So it really seemed like he was in a very good space when this happened. So that's why I was so puzzled. And out of all this sort of, I had so much energy, so much emotions going through my body that I just had to do something. I mean, I called the family, I said, can I help with the funeral? Can I do this? Do you want me to help close his LinkedIn profile? What should I do? You know, I was just looking for things to do as a way of coping myself. And that's when I thought, well, why don't I call up S.O.S., Samaritans, the suicide prevention Agency in Singapore? And I did that, and I said, I want to help, I want to volunteer. And they took me, then onboarded me right then and there. Um, this was before they were as big as they are now. This is twenty nineteen. So I set up a fund and raising money for them and awareness. And this was the the post I made and with a bank account details and how you can go on this page to donate money to this course. And that post in itself went viral. I didn't expect that. But there was so many people then who were chiming in to say, thank you, Nick, for sharing about this. And I also started to then put in a bit of my story, saying that I went through a tough time and now I lost a friend to suicide. Let's talk about this. And so that's how it all started. And that's, that is, you know, seven years from now, basically. And that's why we are here on the call today are still now seven years down the line, have these conversations on a daily basis. Nick, what does recovery look like? Well, recovery for me started with really the, the twelve step programs for me. Um, I didn't have a, uh, should I say the financial means to right away go to, you know, to pay to all the counselors and everything else. And I didn't know where to turn. It's a jungle out there. So it was the twelve step programs, uh, that helped me, specifically the one for alcohol. And in there I started to build some trust, repairing myself. The stigma reduced because I met so many other people going through a very difficult time. So that was the beginning of recovery for me. And, uh, I would say, you know, having been now eight years in that space, it's the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me. I don't think I would have, you know, grown so much and bent myself inside out this much if I would have gone on living the life I did before. You've said a couple of things in this conversation that I think are pretty easy to wrap up, right? Replace those addictive traits that cause harm with addict, with addictive traits that bring joy and peace and good. Ask for help. Two very powerful statements. Is there anything else you want our audience to hear? I think you summed it up pretty nicely there, Steve. But what I would say is, you know, if there's something that you can feel it in the gut as we're having this conversation, if someone is listening and feel, yeah, that's me. You know, I'm, I'm having these suicidal thoughts or maybe I'm drinking a bit too much or I'm overeating my emotions or I'm gambling too much, or if any of those feelings go through you, then make a call today to someone to talk about it. And if you're scared that your friends or family will judge you, then pick up the phone to one of the the anonymous twelve step programs. Most of them exist in all major cities around the world, and it's complimentary. They have a hotline. Typically, you can speak to someone and if that's not attractive, you really want to have one on one. Then call a counselor or therapist who is qualified and you can search on whatever it is. If it's gambling, alcohol or loneliness or whatever, there will be people and everyone I know would have a have a complimentary connection call, including me. So speak to someone about it. Take the first step. Nick. Um, so going through the journey, right. Going through recovery is a lot of work. Uh, it takes a lot of courage. Um, you need to be very vulnerable for, for those listeners, you know, the executives we have listening to the show. Can you share what's on the other side, what's possible? And you're not not the marketing version, please. Right. What's really waiting on the other side for those who are willing, willing to face what they have been carrying for, for, for years, maybe decades. Yeah. You're right, Philip. It is hard work and it takes work to work on ourselves. Because maybe there's a reason why we are so busy driving in a business. Maybe we are not ready to face ourselves, but in recovery, you know, you getting naked from your perhaps bad habits and addictions, whatever that has been. Right? So you have to face yourself. But if you don't do that now, then in the future you will have to face yourself, right? Eventually, one day you will need to face yourself. So why not do that now, when perhaps you're still younger and can have the whole life ahead of you? There's a saying in the twelve step programs, you know, don't give up before the miracle happens. And what that means is, you know, you've got to work it before something happens, right? And, uh, there is that release when the urge, uh, for whatever addiction we had or the loneliness is lifted when we feel the connection or when we no longer, no longer have the urge to drink a beer, for example, or an alcoholic beer. When we see that, then that is the miracle we're talking about there. And it's possible I, I done it myself and so many people have done it. So I just hope that anyone who's listening, who's suffering from any of that, take the first step and sort it out so that you can live free. My company I've registered now is called limitless. And that's what I mean. That's what the life that lies on the other side. 

That's this week's episode of Inside CVC. If Nick's story hit close to home, you can find him and his work at nickjonsson.com. That's N I c k J o n s s o n dot com. As always, thanks for listening and to catch up on nearly fifty episodes of our show. Search inside CVC on your favorite podcast platform or visit ups dot com forward slash podcast. We'll catch you next time.