Connecting Your Biggest “Why” with Lyle Benjamin| UYGW048

Welcome, everybody to unleashing your great work on this special 10 episode series, we are focused on resilience. What is it? How do we get it? And if we've lost it, how do we get it back. So listen in, because we know that great work is so much more dependent on your resilience than it is on your hustle.

Welcome, everybody to unleashing your great work. Today on our special holiday episode, I'm super excited to have Lyle Benjamin on the podcast. As a child, Lyle had a difficult family life. When he started working at 11 years old just to get out of the house, he learned to appreciate the acts of kindness that others showed to him. And he went to law school with the goal of helping others. After working with the New York Attorney General's office, he left law behind and became a successful entrepreneur. And then the founder of three nonprofit organizations 16 things kids can do. Planned acts of kindness and one planet one people. Lyle knows that the world is in crisis, and that this decade is going to determine the quality of life for billions of people. Welcome to the podcast. Lyle.

Well, thank you so much, Amanda. You know what you're doing is absolutely tremendous. And it's really well needed. So thank you for having me.

Yes, it's my pleasure. Well, Kyle, I would love there's so much in that bio that has me going but tell me more. So why don't we just start where we always do? Can you tell us a little bit about your great work?

You know, I've always felt a debt of gratitude to the people who showed me so much kindness when they didn't have to when I was growing up, and it really saved me. So I made a decision early on that I couldn't repay them, but I can help other people. And that's why, like you mentioned I went to law school originally. But I found out I was very naive. Really about that. Unfortunately,

that's a bummer to find out after law school.

Yeah, it's unfortunate. But you know, we live and learn, right? So the thing is that I've been on a mission, sometimes on and off to go ahead and repay that debt. Mm hmm. And I've created I was the publisher of a national newsstand magazine that was psychologically based in terms of helping people deal with all types of intimate relationships, intimate family friendship and work. Best Selling board game. I've done other other things in order to help people as as as well as I could. But also I was also doing entrepreneurial business. Although as successful at it, I realized I was really straying from the mission that God has given me.

Well, I just have to interject to ask what was the award winning or best selling board game,

it was called romantic journey, an intimate evening, just for to, Oh, interesting. When you play the game, you record what you want to get from your partner, should you win the game, but there's no winners or losers, because just by playing the game, you both win. And what it does is it brings better communication to the relationship, better intimacy. And it's a really fun game as well.

I bet it builds resilience. I'll have to put a link to it in the show notes so that we can encourage people to go check it out. But okay, back to the mission. You realized you were maybe a little off track. And then what happened?

So I decided to give everything up and focus on developing programs to help kids people and the planet. And my first organization is 16 things kids can do what you mentioned, from that, after the election, or after 2016. After the election in 2016. I really said, you know, this country, regardless of who you support, it was going to go down the road that was going to become more divisive. Yeah. People were going to suffer because of that. So I created planned acts of kindness. And that's a program where people can wake up. And every day there's a new planned act that they can do with their friends, family, coworkers, and in their community. And the goal is to have 10s of millions people in the US hundreds of millions of people around the world, doing the same planet act on the same day and unleashing that much positive, powerful energy in new world to living happier, healthier lives and being energized during the holidays, which is what we're talking about. You know, it's not a question of how much money you have, how many toys you get, or how many eggnog you drink during that time. I mean, it's really the quality of your relationships with other people and your sense of community. And that's what planned acts enhances in people. What I really did was I gamified karma.

Karma, the karmic wheel, you gave it that,

yeah. No clarity around for a little while on the planet, right? What goes around comes around? Yes. And the thing is that in the climate Club, which is the foundation of planned acts of kindness, there are four different achievements that you do during the course of a month, your planned act, your engagement, volunteerism, no matter where you are in the world through our organization, and support. And when you do these, you can level up in the karma club. And the more you do the greater your rewards. And by the end of 2023. Oh, you is to be in all 200 countries, and giving away hundreds of gifts daily. And then people who have leveled up in the karma club.

Fascinating. Very, very cool. Thank you. And there's one more of these right?

Well, there's actually a bunch of different programs. And, you know, one of the aspects of the karma club is how people can take individual responsibility. You know, when you think about volunteering over the holidays, what do you think about, you know, serving food in the soup kitchen giving out food in the pantry, cleaning apart doing a walkathon? Well, those things are great, but the thing is, they make you feel good. But they don't really go ahead and create life changing things for other people. Wouldn't it be great if you can go ahead and get an even better feeling by providing quality of life for yourself, your family, your future, and other people. And that's what we're inviting people to do, is to be more powerful than they ever could imagine. These people are really more connected than they think. So, you know, it doesn't matter whether you're interested in helping people with schools, right, or helping people with faith based or helping people in government or nonprofits or NGOs around the world, we're in business. There are ways that we've created because we have over 40 different programs that get into quality of life. So no matter where you want to go in order to help people no matter what part of the world no matter what illness, you want to go ahead. We have programs that are based on collaboration between individuals, influencers and institutions. Yes, you know, this decade is going to determine quality life, leads people on the planet.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I like what you're saying about collaboration in, when we talk about great work as a concept, there are these four pillars of it. One is legacy, and one is your unique point of consciousness, like your unique expression of your life story, your ideas, your whatever. And one is that you do it in relationship with other people. Because like, so, like you were saying, like, it's this unsung hero of life, like, one of the interesting things we discovered. So the research that we were doing is that people really need community, but they will not pay for it. It's like this thing that they that we all really, really need, but can't quite for whatever reason admit to ourselves that we need. And yet it is the it's the magical elixir. It's the accelerant. It's the it's what makes it go viral. It's what makes it take off. It's what gives it actually teeth and force in the world. And so if we don't do it with other people, we're always limited in what we can accomplish, no matter how great your idea is, you can't do it on your own. So I love that about your nonprofit, I think it's it's really providing a mechanism for people to do that, which I think is great. Now, Lyle, I have to assume if you're running three nonprofits, that you get tired. So I'm wondering, one of the things we say on this podcast a lot is that this kind of work, great work, that work that pulls out of your soul, and is given to the world as you're offering as your legacy. It's kind of hard, it can be tiring, it's you're very emotionally connected to it. And it's easy to sort of lose your energy around it. And yet we know that great work is much more dependent on resilience than hard work. So we need some strategies here during the holidays. We've got a minute, we never have a minute. What can we do during this time to really sort of recharge and get to feeling back like ourselves again?

Well, I think one of the things is that we have to be kind to ourselves. And, you know, we have to, as the saying goes, right? Not sweat the small stuff. Yeah. Okay. It's too, there's so many things coming at us that we have to deal with every day. And it's so easy to get overwhelmed and overwrought by it. I think that we've got to just step back, right? Do some breathing exercises, wait for a couple of minutes, and put it all into perspective. Because guess what, the next day? It's over with the next hour, right? It can be over with also, it's a question of, What is your mindset about how to deal with this. So at the same time, when you have all these stresses coming at you just understand where they're coming from, and let them go deal with them, let them go. You know, and if there's nothing you can do, because it's a Friday afternoon, and the place doesn't open till Monday, or the person you need, well, then don't spend the whole weekend worrying about it, let it go. Great. And, you know, one of the things that I did as a kid to deal with the craziness that was around me, is, I found a lot of joy in very, very small things. And that's all basically I had,

yeah, what's an example of a small thing you got some joy from? Uh huh.

And I still do the same thing today. So, you know, it's not the two weeks vacation that I'm looking forward to? It's the conversations with you, Amanda, it's, you know, that's not that this is a small thing, right. But, you know, it's, it's the everyday things.

What are some examples of small things that can recharge us in little, a powerful way?

Oh, my goodness, it's, it's, it's the joy I get from actually looking and interacting with my cat. Who, who is upset when he's not included? In the conversations I have sometimes right in the other room, and he's the doors closed, and he's like, you're talking and you let me and you kept me out of the room. I'm like, Oh, my God, that's so funny. You know, so it's, it's the weirdest things, it's putting on a, you know, your favorite television show that you're watching currently, and just dropping everything. Right, it's getting, it's treating yourself to some of the food that you like, you know, as you know, with some caveats to that, but so it's the little things calling up a friend talking to a friend, you know, and those things have a lot more meaning in our lives sometimes than some of the bigger things that people are waiting for.

Right? Waiting to be happy. Yeah, I love that. I love I love that as a, almost like a daily practice of like, you know, release what you can. And when you're when you're just done. At the end of the day, start noticing what's around you the little cat, the the coffee, the the TV show, the clean sheets, clean sheet days, my favorite day of the week. I love that. But you know, sometimes you do sweat the small stuff. Sometimes you run too hard. You run into the ground. You start body hurts. You have y'all you want to be as done, you have you have no like interest in other people's perspective, right, like we all get there. What can we do in those moments? Or what do you do when you experience those moments to kind of find your way back to what is a pretty big mission?

Well, you know, I am actually a long COVID. suffer. I'm sorry. Yeah, thank you. So I've had to go ahead and deal with headaches, 24 hours a day, seven days a week for going on since the end of March 2021. So it's over 18 months. Oh, my goodness. And it was really difficult for the first nine months because it interfered with everything and the neurologists don't know how to cure it, they still don't know how to cure it. But what I've been able to do is push past it for the most part and and cope and deal with it. And I think that when we have these problems, and we're really burned out and we're really tired and we're really, you know, exhausted from what's going on in the news, right? On at work, sometimes what our families right and even our friends bring us I think that really we have to go ahead and just change our mindset a little bit. Have to have more resiliency, mentally. Other words, we are stronger than we think. And we just have to go ahead and think that and leave that and act that so that these things don't overwhelm us. It's like building up resistance building up, you know, your, you know, your aerobic or your cardiovascular system, right? The more you do it, right, the stronger you're going to become. If you let yourself succumb to these things, and you're always woe is me, this is too much for me to handle. Well, you're convincing yourself that that's the situation. If you go ahead and change that mindset, and you say, You know what, yeah, okay, that's what's going on. That sucks, right? But no, I'm not gonna let it get to me now.

Yeah, I like that. I think I mean, we know from fMRI brain scans, right of people who think they can and think they can't, their brain acts completely differently. So I do think that there's a ton of truth in that. And I think when you were talking about cardiovascular fitness, right, there's also like, little victories, because when you first starting running, it's like running for a minute, you're like, Ah, no, sir. No.

Yeah, that's not gonna happen.

You have to celebrate that because and so sometimes I think you're right, like with burnout and other large problems, or any kind of like, chronic health issue. There's, like, you know, you sort of eke your way out of it. And what you really have to believe is like trusting yourself that you can build resilience, you can build a little more, stick to itiveness, or like, whatever the right words are. You damn it out? That's the word yes, you can build those things. And I think, also, I always, I always feel like, this is the missing piece. Like, it's like, also say to yourself, like this sucks. Like, really allow yourself to say that because I think sometimes we push through to past the point when we can do anything but feel woe is me, as opposed to like, sort of regulating ourselves and finding our finding our way through it and learning about ourselves and what our limits really are. And honoring those matters, too. It's very interesting. And not to put words in your mouth. But I have to believe that part of what is able to lift you up out of what's truly like, oh, man, I hope they figure that out. Is the fact that you have committed to and recommitted to and left behind expectations. And, you know, probably, you know, moving from like successful business to nonprofit is not usually a financial decision. Right? So

not as smart when according to your family.

Exactly. But you you've sort of laid your heart on the line. And that brings you back to it too. I think it's harder to live through hard times, if what you're doing it for hasn't truly isn't truly your great work. Yeah,

that though that 100% 100 You know, it's the resistance. You know, if if you're not feeling it, your resistance crumbles. If you're feeling, right. It's a rock. Hmm,

fascinating. Well, I love it. So I want to give you a chance to tell us how we can support your work, because you probably need people to participate in the programs and share about it on social media tell us what we can do to support this amazing effort that you have underway.

Thank you so much, Amanda. Yes. Well, you know, one of the things is, is get involved, you can volunteer and it doesn't matter how old you are, you can be 12 years old, you can be 112 years old, okay? And what we do is we listen to what you want, what your objectives, what's your passion. And then we're going to go ahead and provide you with pathways where you can collaborate through that passion in order to achieve objectives. And that's how we go ahead and beat back the issues that we're facing. Okay. So one of the ways that you can get in touch with us is through our web, we have different websites that our websites one is real simple. It's planned x.org. That's for planned acts of kindness.org. Another is one planet dash one people died calm, nice. And also, if you're interested in having me talk at, you know, one of your events or your school or faith, or nonprofit or government agency or business, we have Lyle benjamin.com. And even if you went to that one, you're going to find a lot of information about how you can go ahead and get involved. But we have an app which is based on planned acts of kindness. And if you get the app through our website, it has tremendous ways for you to find programs in order to be the hero. And our programs are really kind of amazing for a nonprofit, because most of them have, you know, one program, we have over 40 different programs. Wow. They're featured in a book that is coming out in, in January of next year,

very soon, when these right after the holidays,

right after the holidays, and 2023, we've named the year of one planet, one people. And if you speak a different language that you know, in addition to English, there are things that you can do on a global scale in order to go in order to help other people learn about what we're doing, and also be the hero.

You're gonna give me all those links you I'm sure you already have, we will put them in the show notes. And I would just recommend, I think my recommendation would be go to at least one of these websites, find one thing that you can say you'll do and give it a shot and then find your way to the the rest of them. Because I think that getting involved seems to be the sort of primary foundational drive here. So you know, Lyle, thank you so much. I love your mission. I like your energy. I'm so happy to have had you on this holiday edition of unleashing your great work. I just want to thank you for the time that you spent with us and for the work that you're doing.

Well, Amanda, it's been great. It's been a pleasure to be here. And I hope to speak to a lot of your audience, you know, over the holidays and into the new year. And together we can make things happen. Because we're talking about community before. Well, we got one planet, we got one people on the planet, and we got to start acting like it. So we got to collaborate to succeed. We got to collaborate.

It's time. It's time. All right. Thank you so much. Take care. Happy holidays.