The Voices for Voices Podcast Episode 11 with Guest, Jan Almasy, Startup Founder of Apex Communications Network Ltd.
Justin Alan Hayes:
Welcome to the official The House of You podcast sponsored by Voices for Voices, where we discuss how mental health and our careers intertwine. I'm your host, Justin Alan Hayes, business professor, author, career coach, founder, and President of The House of You. Here at The House of You we're passionate about helping others navigate their workforce preparation while also thriving on their mental health journey. So we're sitting down with career professionals and mental health advocates to take a deep dive into our professional lives, our ambitions, swap stories on mental health in relation to career moves, and so much more.
Justin Alan Hayes:
From making the leap to transition careers, job losses, difficult interview experiences, feeling stuck or helpless in your current position, or whatever the case may be, we're so glad you found us. Join The House of You as we explore raw and real stories of mental health and the workplace. No matter where you are in your career, you are not alone. Welcome home. Today I am grateful to be joined by Jan Almasy. Thank you for joining The House of You podcast.
Jan Almasy:
Thanks, brother. How's it going?
Justin Alan Hayes:
All going good. Glad to have you here. For our listeners, Jan is a very multi-functional, diverse individual. Has lots of experience.
Jan Almasy:
I think that's probably the kindest way I've ever heard that put.
Justin Alan Hayes:
A lead-in really into your... I saw a post on LinkedIn where you talked about being a Swiss Army knife versus a scalpel. Being somebody that's able to do things in many different ways versus one. Can you, I guess, give a little background about yourself and then maybe jump into that topic?
Jan Almasy:
Yeah, of course. First, thanks for having me come on. I love the drive up to this area. So for those of you that are listening, we're recording right now in Stow, Ohio. In Northeast Ohio right now, it's actually kind of odd that in the middle of December right now it's sunny and like 35, 40 degrees outside instead of freezing cold with wind and sleet, so I'm grateful for that. It was a beautiful drive up here this morning. So for a little bit of background for the listeners, I was born and raised in Canton, Ohio. I am 26, and as of right now, to Justin's point, kind of being all over the place or being a Swiss Army knife, I feel like I've lived a couple of different lifetimes already. I started out, graduated high school and immediately joined the Air National Guard, so I literally signed paperwork September 3rd, 2013.
Jan Almasy:
Not that that would stick in my head, but turned 18, joined the Air National Guard and decided that I was going to go to nursing school at Walsh University, which is just a local university, the place where actually you teach. So entered that journey for the next six years of my life. I was in the Air National Guard, made it up to the rank of tech sergeant, was in charge of a group of about 30 to 50 new recruits. They would come onto the installation and it was my job to indoctrinate them into air force culture and train them up and get them ready to go to basic training. And then obviously over the course of that six year enlistment, I got my nursing degree and I was working as an ICU trauma nurse at Aultman Hospital, which is a local hospital system.
Jan Almasy:
That job actually required me to be certified on every ICU in the hospital, plus the ER. And then I went above and beyond and went and got my trauma-based certification, so I was actually certified to work on the cardiac ICU, the surgical ICU, the medical ICU, the ER, and then also was trauma certified. So I stuck with that for about two-and-a-half, three years, and then COVID hit and everything kind of went haywire. A couple of months before COVID hit I had had a podcast of my own called The Apex podcast that I had started in 2018, 2017. It had gained some momentum. There were people asking us to help with social media and website design and development, and just digital business growth in general. And I was a nurse. I didn't really know anything about business at that point, so I kind of got curious.
Jan Almasy:
I was like, "Well, what's the worst that could happen?" That's the question that I always ask myself. "What's the worst that can happen if you give this a shot?" And so we gave it a shot and we started taking clients, and our first account was literally just basic social media posting. I think we were just editing some graphics in Canva, don't shoot me graphic designers, and just putting it up for local businesses. And over time through a series of what I like to call, just, eh, screw it, we made it phase through phase. I brought on two cofounders. Then we met a gentleman named James Warnken, who you are intimately familiar with as well.
Justin Alan Hayes:
Yeah.
Justin Alan Hayes:
Just want to let you know about our upcoming Voices for Voices, A Brand New Day event, which is our annual gala event. It's on October 12th at 7:30. For those that are in the Northeast Ohio area, it's going to be held at the Canton Cultural Center and tickets are $20 and all the proceeds go towards the Voices for Voices organization, which is also a 501(c)(3). Dr. Jessica Hoefler is going to be one of the ... I call it the blockbuster speakers, but one of the three individuals that's really going to talk a lot about what she's talked about here with us today and really just that thought of A Brand New Day, kind of like with Piper's Key, of unlocking and setting her free, that's with Voices for Voices and with the brand new day event specifically.
You'll want to share experiences of real everyday people, not celebrities, just people that are going through and have gone through some traumatic things, whether that is mental health related, whether that is anything really traumatic. So it doesn't have to be mental health related. That's how I started the organization, but obviously as I'm learning and want to have a broader reach, that individuals with mental health challenges aren't the only individuals that have gone through traumatic experiences. So again, Dr. Jessica Hoefler will be one of the blockbuster speakers. We're also going to have Brian Laughlin, who is a lieutenant at the Twinsburg Fire Department. Then one of my actual former students, James Warnken, he is an online specialist with expertise and search engine optimization and data analytics and he's actually legally color blind. So he goes through certain software packages to be able to do the work for his businesses now. Even when he was my student at Walsh University, there were some I guess, accommodations, accessibility, things that he was able to do.
So really not only from a spectrum of age range, but from first responder to somebody in education, traumatic, male, female, that we are all going through and have gone through things and I really want with A Brand New Day is to talk about not just some of the tough times, but how the message of a particular mission and vision is living on and how it's touching and reaching and helping more people. So again, you can find out more about A Brand New Day at voicesforvoices.org, or you can go to Eventbrite, which is the official event platform to put events together, and you can search A Brand New Day and then you'll find the event tickets there. Then you can join us in person. We'd really love to have you and bring a friend, a family member, somebody that would like to be uplifted.
So it’s not just the speakers, we're also going to have a special needs band, RockAbility, going to be playing. So some real rock music. So some of these individuals are going to be playing real live instruments with some mentor musicians and everything from the music. It's all going to be played live, in person. We're not going to use auto tune like some of the music today, and even the singers, the vocals, are going to be done. So it's going to be a lot of fun. We hope you'll make plans to join us and you'll see more on this coming up on our social media pages, the Voices for Voices on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, wherever you consume content, as well as future podcasts.
Jan Almasy:
If anybody wants to listen do cool podcast interviews, look up James on LinkedIn. He's got some really cool stuff that he's been putting out lately. He's a legally blind individual that is just absolutely beyond passionate about what he does. I wish I could attach jumper cables to that kid sometimes. We brought him on and he added website design and development to our capabilities and a lot of SEO and Google ads work. And now actually less than two years later we're a team of six, and our main goal is helping businesses get the word out about themselves and helping them grow and scale. I'm completely out of the nursing field. I got out the military in 2021, so my life has just completely flipped on its head in the last two years and really completely shifted momentum, as I like to say.
Jan Almasy:
I thought that I was going to be a combat medevac ICU nurse in the Air National Guard, and now I own a marketing consulting company with six employees. So that was a wild switch, but it's actually a perfect lead-in into what you were asking about, the Swiss Army knife principle because the only way that I survived all of that was by using that mentality. And so what Justin was talking about when we're discussing this, this Swiss Army knife principle, what does that actually mean? When you're thinking of a Swiss Army knife it's got a blade in it, some of them have little rulers. Some have little saws. Pliers a lot of the time. You can find pretty much anything you need inside of a Swiss Army knife. There's some ridiculous ones you can buy on Amazon that have like 120 different tools. They're crazy. They're like three or four inches thick.
Jan Almasy:
That's just extra, but a scalpel on the other hand, really just kind of a single use, right? As soon as they get dull, they're pretty pointless. Then they're really only super effective in the hands of a surgeon, which is my message. A scalpel is really only good in a very controlled environment, in a very, very trained hand with a specific team of people gathered around it ready to make sure that if anything goes sideways that they're ready to jump in, right? Whereas a Swiss Army knife, I mean, you could throw somebody into a mud pit with a Swiss Army knife on a deserted island and they could figure out how to survive.
Jan Almasy:
I mean, there's just so many different ways that you can approach a problem rather than just having, "Okay, I can cut." It's like, "Well, no, I can cut. I can use my pliers. I could use the screwdriver. Whatever is inside of this toolkit." And so that mentality as I was going through all of these shifts was, I think it's actually probably very similar to the whole House of You ideas. What are all of these experiences and things that I've contained and gathered into my toolkit and not shutting my mind off to the possibility that some experience, for example, for me in nursing could also directly apply to business?
Justin Alan Hayes:
You bet.
Jan Almasy:
And until I was forced to be in that situation where I was forced to kind of scramble from the pressure of the pandemic and trying to keep the company alive, because we decided to put people on payroll right before the pandemic hit. And so that was a horrible decision/fantastic decision, right? Like, "I'm glad that we're here, but knock on wood, we're still rolling." And that was probably one of the scariest times in my entire life. But if we would've just been like, "Oh, this is our one tool and this is the only way that we do things is the only way we know how," we would've died.
Jan Almasy:
But because our culture is a Swiss Army knife culture, it's not, "Oh, we have this problem. We don't have the tools to solve this problem." It's, "We have this problem. What do we have that we can use to teach us something new? Do we have to go out and find new skills to solve this problem? Are we asking the right question? Is the problem actually a problem? Or is it just an inconvenience?"
Jan Almasy:
There's all of these things that you can ask and then you end up, A, asking better questions, and then B, having a higher percentage chance of solving that problem. It may not be perfect, but it can be functional and practical. And I think that that's one of the most important things to understand in entrepreneurship, in life, in general, is that it doesn't always have to be perfect. Sometimes you just need to get by. And if you can do that and you can make it to fight another day, then you have the opportunity. The sun comes up again, you have a brand new opportunity to try to do something better the next go around.
Justin Alan Hayes:
Absolutely. I'm glad you went into the detail of your background and in different shifts, because I think for our listeners and really whether it's themselves or somebody they know, maybe stuck in a job, in an industry that they're not really loving, that they just punch the clock, and to know that there's other options out there, it does require some work. But in the long run it's going to be more beneficial to have that multifunctional use versus that single use. The single use I think can be helpful, again, in those certain circumstances, but only in those certain circumstances when it comes to [inaudible 00:10:58]-
Jan Almasy:
Yeah, there are definitely circumstances that require precision. And that's something that I say in the blog. I might actually just send you the link to this blog post, if you want to put it-
Justin Alan Hayes:
Yeah.
Jan Almasy:
... in the show description. But I mentioned in that blog, I'm not discounting the necessity of the scalpel because I don't want a heart surgeon trying to cut open an artery with a rusty spoon. You know what I mean?
Justin Alan Hayes:
Right. That's for-
Jan Almasy:
That's not how that's supposed to work.
Justin Alan Hayes:
No.
Jan Almasy:
So it is very, very necessary and applicable. And there's times in business and in life where you just have to be precise for whatever reason. This is just natural law of the universe. It has to be done in this order otherwise it won't work. Like baking. I always say it's the difference between baking and cooking. Cooking, you can just kind of like, "Eh, I'm going to put a little bit of here, I'm going to dash a little bit of this. I'm going to... Well, dip my pinky in it and taste it. Nah, that's good."
Jan Almasy:
Baking. I can't bake because I need that ability to just free flow, test things out, taste things as they go along. Every single cookie I've ever made is flat. I can't make a cake to save my life. Like, you give me a Betty Crocker in the box and it's not happening.
Justin Alan Hayes:
It's the how...
Jan Almasy:
Because I just am horrible at following direct instructions like that. But, yeah, the scalpel, definitely, has its applicability in certain aspects.
Justin Alan Hayes:
Yeah. For sure. And definitely, really stripping the business aspect to the human aspect of being a human being, going through all those changes. You had all those experiences. Not only were those happening, but there were also some mental health challenges, issues that you worked through earlier in your life. And as we sit here today just still day-by-day, doing the best we can.
Jan Almasy:
Oh, yeah.
Justin Alan Hayes:
Would you be able to share a little bit with the listeners about that? You're comfortable?
Jan Almasy:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. So prior to... Let me think about the best way to frame this. We'll start with high school and then probably we'll just jump to today, actually, probably, because that'll be a good comparison.
Justin Alan Hayes:
Okay.
Jan Almasy:
When I was in high school, I went from being homeschooled all the way through eighth grade. So, I always mess with people and I say, "Ages zero to 13, I was just locked up in my parents' basement." But all love to mom and dad. I mean they set me up pretty well. So, was homeschooled and then I went directly into freshman year at a high school that was going open enrollment that year. So we were getting, at that time in my local area, we had two inner city schools that were getting merged together. There's a whole bunch of issues with rival gang members at different schools. I remember them making the paper a whole bunch as they were trying to merge together Timken and McKinley high school. And inevitably the schools that were open enrollment in the peripherals got a lot of students that were getting kicked out of those schools because they were having issues with violence as they were trying to merge.
Jan Almasy:
So they would try to send the problem children out into the peripheral school districts away from each other. So we got a lot of inner city dropouts. Or not dropouts, but transfers. At the same time, the schools that were south of us that were further into the more rural areas, were also going through changes and they were pushing a bunch of students up. So Canton South became this massive melting pot of kind of middle of the road and then inner city violent kids and like super rural kids. And you can imagine the difference in mentality between drastically inner city and drastically rural. So it was a war zone.
Justin Alan Hayes:
Yeah. Literally.
Jan Almasy:
Entering. And the biggest thing that I noticed is, I didn't have a friend group really to back me up. I think it actually plays a lot into my entrepreneurial mindset at this point. It's just like, I just had to forge my path. I had no other choice. You know, 13, 14-years-old, I was just like, "I'm thrown into this. It's a shit storm," and I'm trying to just figure out my way. Inevitably the people that were willing to kind of adopt me into their group were also the outcasts. And when you get involved with that group and at 13, I'm trying to figure out, "Okay, how do I adapt? How do I survive?" Because I'm getting bullied at the time. I'm getting picked on.
Jan Almasy:
And some of it even was self-inflicted, I think, just by not knowing how to properly orient myself inside of a social structure. So I get in with this group of kids and immediately I'm like, "I'm not rooted in my own identity at this point," right? So I'm just trying to reach and grab at straws to find anything that I can do to connect with people. And what I could do to connect with people was steal my dad's liquor and drink with them, or get into finding pills and smoking weed, and all of this other kind of stuff. And so I got really, really into drinking, got really, really into Percocet, and I got really, really into marijuana.
Jan Almasy:
And that all started really picking up steam when I was 15, I was a sophomore, junior. Joined the wrestling team, joined the football team. I was still like 3.9, 4.0 student, three sport athlete, like picture perfect on paper. But then you take that paper away and I was a completely different Jan. And that started to cause dissonance because now I was kind of embodying two separate identities and I had to remember who knew which one.
Justin Alan Hayes:
That's right.
Jan Almasy:
Right? And then, depending on who I was talking to, I had to figure out which Jan I needed to portray. And that made things even harder and even worse, to the point where at 17-years-old I almost OD'd. I was at a party, I was drinking and took some Percocet and woke up just covered in puke and was kind of like, "What am I doing?" Because I had this Jan, this aspirational Jan that I was like, "This is the Jan that I want to be. This is the 4.0 student. This is the kid that is leading the classroom, that's winning physics project competitions, that wants to be in the military," all this other stuff. But there's this other Jan, my shadow Jan, right? People that like Nietzsche or Carl Jung will understand that really well. So there was this shadow me that was just rampantly trying to pull me away from what this was.
Jan Almasy:
And that ended up manifesting itself. I got through that OD, I got into the military and got myself clean, but that experience through high school is something that, and the reason why I want to fast forward till today is because that's something that I'm still dealing with. Something I still grapple with. There's a lot of stuff that people talk about inside of the world of trauma psych and therapy, and this type of inner child work is something that's huge inside of whether it's cognitive behavioral therapies and walking people through steps, or it's just getting them to really grapple with those feelings and then get gentle with their previous self, and exchange dialogue with that previous version of yourself.
Jan Almasy:
And I find myself now still working on forgiving high school Jan for not knowing what to do. There's still days where I wake up and I'm like, "Dang. I can't believe that that actually all went down." And that shadow me is still very prevalent. He still wants to come out and there's a constant kind of war going on between... And I'm a Catholic, so I really believe in spiritual warfare and stuff like that. But there's these blatant points where the only difference between me now and me when I OD'd at 17, is that now I can recognize the spiritual warfare where the shadow me trying to manifest itself way earlier in the process. So now I can see a conversation with somebody and seven steps down the line, if I engage in that, what that would mean and where that would take me.
Jan Almasy:
Whereas when I was 17 I wasn't capable of that. I wanted to be friends with everybody. I wanted to talk to everybody. I really wanted to get validated. I wanted validation. I wanted friendship. And now I'm more rooted in myself and confident in my own reality, and I would rather bring people into mine. Like, "Let me show you some positive light. Let me help you out." I've now rooted myself and filled up my glass so that I'm capable of providing for other people. But that took a lot of years of work, and I love it inside of therapy when I'm talking to social workers or psychologists and stuff that we use that term, work. Like therapy is work.
Justin Alan Hayes:
It is.
Jan Almasy:
Because it is probably some of the hardest work that you will ever do in your life, but it is some of the most beneficial because you dig that stuff up. And if you would've asked me to talk about any of the stuff that I just said on the microphone five years ago, I have told you to go GF yourself. But that wasn't healthy at all. I hadn't reached that point in my journey where I was capable of talking about it comfortably. But now that I have, it almost feels like, and partially the reason why we're sitting here behind the microphone, because of you, like The Voices for Voices conference, and any of the other things that you've been doing that have been absolutely amazing.
Jan Almasy:
Once you realize that your story could potentially help somebody find a key to open a door to get them to the next phase, it's like this gnawing need to share. And that's where I think that transition really started to flip to where now, even though I wake up, like this morning, I was super excited to come record this podcast so it was easy to wake up in the morning, but there's days as an entrepreneur where I don't have anything scheduled till 11:00. How hard it is to pull yourself out of bed at seven o'clock in the morning when you know you don't have any responsibilities till 11:00 AM?
Justin Alan Hayes:
Oh, it's hard.
Jan Almasy:
It's a pain. It's like, "Oh, my God." Especially with seasonal depression starts to kick in and I'm laying there. I'm like in my cocoon, and I'm like-
Justin Alan Hayes:
No, I don't want to leave.
Jan Almasy:
... but you get to that point where it's like, "No, I want to get up. I get to do this today." I get to wake up and have a coffee and watch the sunrise and go do all of these little things in life that I used to shy away from because I was like, "Oh, I'm too tired," or, "I don't want to have to do this." The depression would pull me away from those little things.
Justin Alan Hayes:
Sure.
Jan Almasy:
And now I'm realizing more and more that those little things are what keep me moving. That's what keeps me in the world.
Justin Alan Hayes:
Sure. And I think, also, a big key is that for listeners and really anybody that this podcast touches, is recovery, whatever you want to label it, it's not a destination. It's not somewhere you get and say, "Okay, I'm recovered. Life goes on. I'm perfect. I'm back to normal, back to where I should be." That Jan was explaining, and even with myself, there's good days. There's bad days. I mean, just a couple of days ago one of my medications ran now over the weekend and I was like, "Oh, crap." And my psychiatrist wasn't able to fill over the weekend. And then I called in first thing Monday morning, and I had to go into the pharmacy to get a one-day supply after missing the first dose of that medicine for four years.
Justin Alan Hayes:
And so just little stuff like that. Is it life threatening? No, it's not life threatening. But when you get into that zone of feeling better about yourself, what you're doing, and you have a little bit of that structure to help give yourself that foundation, I was like, "Crap." And my wife was like, "Oh, it's not a big deal. It's one day." And so again, it wasn't life threatening, but those types of things, how I reacted to that, how it made me feel, whether it was conscious or subconscious, definitely the recovery is whatever term people want to use if recovery is too deep.
Justin Alan Hayes:
It's a process, something that I'm grappling with today, and I think you displayed it beautifully with what you're talking about, like, "Hey, I don't have anything till eleven o'clock on this particular day. Should I sleep in? Should I get up? What should I do?" But then once you actually get to that meeting and get started, like today with the weather being a little bit chilly out and having to drive and getting stuck in traffic, all these crazy things, like those suck. But then as we're sitting here right now talking, it's like, "Wow, this is what I want to do. I want to talk and share and help others."
Jan Almasy:
I think it's interesting, and I'm going to drag us into a little pseudo scientific/philosophical rabbit hole here.
Justin Alan Hayes:
Good.
Jan Almasy:
It's really interesting to me. I spent a random weekend, I think, just diving into anthropology and neuropsych. I'm one of those weird people that on the weekends I enjoy watching lectures, just to take notes on, and I love learning new things. I very rarely watch... I don't even have Netflix or Hulu or anything like that. I just watch documentaries on YouTube. And one of the things that I was watching is, I believe it was a Jordan Peterson lecture, but he was talking about how interesting it is that humans evolved with our eyes facing forward and how most animals of prey or most animals, not of prey, but animals that are prey, have their eyes on the side so that they can see the peripherals. They can see above them, below them, behind them, because they're so paranoid about being eaten that they have to have that visual... They're more focused on their periphery than they are focused forward.
Jan Almasy:
Humans, on the other hand, we are directionally focused. We point ourselves at something and then we go do that thing, right? Like I look at this cup of coffee, I take my hand out, I grab the cup of coffee and it's all directly in line. It's not like I have my head turned sideways in order to see this cup of coffee. So when you comes to those times where you're waking up at seven o'clock in the morning, or like you were talking about it, where you feel like you have stability in routine, it's because we're wired for that routine to achieve fulfillment. And that was something really, really hard for me to learn as an entrepreneur. When I first entered the space where I was like, "I have complete freedom over my schedule." I was like, "Okay, freedom is what I really want."
Jan Almasy:
And then I got freedom and I was like, "This sucks. I don't know what to do with myself." And it was especially because I had just gotten out of the military, so I was going through the post-veteran blues, right? Like you get out, you take off the uniform and you're officially like, "Okay, I have no higher purpose at this point calling me to serve with duty to my country. Now what?" And then I also took off my scrubs the same year. So I completely stripped myself bare down. There was no structure whatsoever holding me accountable to anything outside of myself and my company. And what I really had to learn was how important it is to not hit the snooze button when you wake up, and how important it is to wake up at the same time, day in, day out, regardless of when I have meetings scheduled, regardless of whether I have anything else going on, how important it is to make a routine to go to the gym certain times during the week.
Jan Almasy:
The food is crazy. If my diet starts to get too off track, I am the most anxious person on the face of the planet because it does. It affects your gut. Your gut is where your neurochemicals are produced and then they send up to the brain. So if your diet is off track and you're anxious all the time, that might be a reason, right? There's things that we can auto-correct before we jump to meds. But that forward facingness, if you orient yourself towards a goal, and this is one of the things that I did to pull myself out of depression cycles, because I'll go through these phases where I'm borderline manic for like three months at a time where I'm just getting a whole bunch of stuff done, I feel fantastic.
Jan Almasy:
And then like a month will hit me and it's like a Mack truck just hit me in the face where I'm like, "Oh, my God, I've got no energy. There's nothing." And the only way I can pull myself out of those depressive cycles is by picking some small goal to orient myself towards. It doesn't have to be big, and actually it shouldn't be because if the goal is too big, it intimidates you and just makes you more depressed because you can't accomplish it and it's like, "Damn, that's really far out of reach." And you're like, "I'm even worse now."
Justin Alan Hayes:
I'm even worse. Yeah.
Jan Almasy:
But for me, it was like, that tiny little goal when I get really bad and I'm really anxious or really depressed, and this happens when the business is going through cashflow pinches or on the opposite side, when we're growing really quickly, I also get anxious, which is something I'm passionate about talking to people about, is that you stress is a thing. I literally make that tiny win, getting up, brushing my teeth, taking a shower, getting dressed, making a coffee. If I can do that then the rest of my day can be better. That's all I need to do. That is my win. Those couple of actions.
Jan Almasy:
If I can do that day in and day out, I'm still good. But that's like, people always say you want to set your high bar and you want to shoot for it. I don't believe in that. I don't think you should set a high bar. You shouldn't put a cap on yourself. You should set a minimum bar, and that this is the bare minimum that I'm willing to let myself sink to. And you hit that point, and even if you're accomplishing the bare minimum, instead of saying, "I'm accomplishing the bare minimum," saying, "I'm doing what's necessary to survive."
Justin Alan Hayes:
That's right.
Jan Almasy:
Because bare minimum makes it sound like you're cheating yourself. But if you're doing what's necessary to survive with 90% less energy than the rest of the world because you're going through a massive depressive cycle, understand that that's not forever. At least for me, personally, in my experience, it's not forever. And sometimes it lasts a week. Sometimes it lasts a month. Over COVID it lasted like a year-and-a-half.
Justin Alan Hayes:
Yeah. Sure.
Jan Almasy:
But even a year-and-a-half in the grand scheme of life is like a pen dot. So if you can set that minimum bar and say, "I will accomplish these goals, even if it's just getting dressed and making a cup of coffee," you still got breath in your lungs, you're still ready to rock and roll, and that can set your foundation for positivity for the rest of the day.
Justin Alan Hayes:
Wow. I love it. I feel like our conversation could go on for a lot longer, but really want to give the listeners the opportunity to learn more about you, what you do, how they can find you, get in contact with you, as you want to share information.
Jan Almasy:
Yeah. So, probably the best way, if you want to learn more about the mental health aspect and a lot of the nuances of business and my observations of the world, I actually started a blog not too long ago called The Blissful Stoic. I can give you the link to that. So The Blissful Stoic is basically... I view it as my personality. Like to a lot of people forward facing I can be very stoic, but internally I feel very blissful all the time. And so I wanted to marry those two together because I think that they're both very powerful.
Jan Almasy:
So that blog is one place for those of you that are really interested, and specifically the mental health aspect, the psychology aspect and how to orient yourself in the world. I talk a lot about that kind of stuff in that blog. My Instagram is @Jan_theapex_almasy. That page is a little bit more all over the place. And then also, if you want to check me out on LinkedIn, I post a lot of articles on there. Try to engage with people, but run polls and ask questions and stuff. And you can just look it up, Jan, looks like Jan, J-A-N, Almasy.
Justin Alan Hayes:
Yeah. We'll include all this information in the description so it'll be easy to click through for our listeners. Well, that brings our time, our conversation to a close. Is there anything that you want to cover that we didn't cover? We can jump into that real quick, or...
Jan Almasy:
Not... I mean, not particularly. There's one thing for people that are listening to this, one thing that I've gotten extremely passionate about recently is actually speaking to college students, specifically kind of college age, junior and senior males. I went and I spoke on a podcast in Akron to a group of fraternity brothers, and we talked about cell phone addiction, how it plays into anxiety, addiction to dating apps, what that looks like, how to deal with the transition from being a senior in college to entering the workforce, and really trying to give back to that population through speaking. So if there's anybody that needs a speaker or somebody to come in and talk to a group of guys on a college campus about social media addiction, and I like to say, how to properly orient yourself as a young man entering the world, then reach out. That's pretty much all on my end.
Justin Alan Hayes:
No, that's great. Definitely reach out, and I think as I turn the page on one of my next chapters into my third book of bringing mental health into the workplace and talking about that, I might tap into you as a resource for that because that's definitely popular, whether in the workforce, out of the workforce, in school, out of school, the devices are ever increasing as we go on. And I think the more information we have, the better informed we can be to make a decision. Maybe we agree with the information, maybe we don't. Maybe we take this piece of information, maybe we don't. But the key is that, as you've probably learned with your company and speaking, that you're really just trying to connect. If you can connect with one person out of that particular group at some point, then you've done your job and that's really what it's all about.
Justin Alan Hayes:
We're in this world as kind of vessels, and so what are we going to leave the world with when we're not here. And so that's something about being attracted to certain types of personalities. That's why for our listeners, one of the reasons I'm attracted to Jan's personality, his background, his passion, his experiences, his thought process of moving forward and helping others. And I think that he is and can be for more individuals a model of, here's some crappy experiences I went through. Here's some good experiences. And here's some data to really back up some of the things. And I think that that's kind of key. Well, Jan, thank you so much for joining us today. It's a pleasure to have you, finally get you in the studio and record this episode.
Jan Almasy:
I appreciate it, man. Yeah, this was a great... I absolutely love this studio, by the way. So, props to the studio. What is it? Defunk?
Justin Alan Hayes:
Defunk Studios.
Jan Almasy:
Defunk Studios. Shout out to them. Give them a little bit of a ringer here. And then I'm really looking forward to continuing to watch this grow. I'm super excited about everything that you're doing.
Justin Alan Hayes:
Great. Thank you so much, Jan. This has been the official The House of You podcast sponsored by Voices for Voices. Thank you so much for joining us as we explore mental health in the workplace. Our team at The House of You is dedicated to supporting folks as they prepare for a fulfilling career while also thriving under mental health and wellness journey. For more information, please visit our website at thehouseofyou.com, and check out our book series available for purchase on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Audible, or where you consume content. Until next time I'm Justin Alan Hayes, and we are excited you are here.