Michael Erwin  03:59

Correct. And so, that same sort of idea or concept would apply to reading a book. So obviously, like you, I listen to podcasts. I read books. And so, where the solitude plays its role is when you hit pause on the podcast; when you hit pause on the book, and you put it down, and you spend three or four or five minutes thinking about what you just heard, and thinking about the application of those ideas to your own life, or to your own leadership life, so that’s where you can get the best of both worlds. Listen to podcasts. Read the books. Have the conversation with somebody. But then, the question is: Are you then putting in the time on the back end, where you’re distilling and analyzing those ideas and applying them to your own life?

Sean Murray  04:42

But where did the idea for the book come from?

Michael Erwin  04:45

There was a talk given at West Point in 2009 by a guy named Bill Dershowitz. He was at the time that a professor at Yale University, and he turned that talk into an article or into an essay. It was in a publication called, The American Scholar. And so, I read that when I was in graduate school. I remember reading it and just being completely enthralled by the message. It was not just one of solitude. It was also one of having the courage to not conform, which when we get to the later conversation. We talk about the last section of the book, when we profile Churchill, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Pope John Paul II. Like having the courage to not conform. That is a huge part of the message that resonated with me as well.

Michael Erwin  05:28

We actually reached out to him and said, “Hey,” I said, “This is such a fascinating topic and conversation. I think you should write a whole book on it.” And he came back to me and said, “Hey, I’m already…thanks a lot. I really appreciate it. I’m actually working on another book right now. You know, if you want to read that book, then you should write it yourself.” You know, and so that really was the idea from Bill Dershowitz…to say that, “Hey, like, I agree with you. This is a really fascinating concept, but I’m not a leadership expert. I really know a lot about solitude and nonconformity, but you’re going to write a book that really ties together leadership and solitude, but you got to go out there, and put the work in yourself to do it.”

Sean Murray  06:07

It’s a fascinating article. It started obviously as an address, right? To the cadets? And just as a little side note, I have a friend who’s the president of Fort Lewis College in Durango. He reached out to me recently. He’s teaching a class on leadership to incoming freshmen. And he said, “What should I have these students read?” And I suggested that article, and he shot back almost right away: “Wow, this is exactly what our students need to hear today,” because it also touches on this idea that you need reflection. We’re so busy. We’re so inundated with email and information that our time to really reflect and think is sort of getting shrunken down. And without that time, we’re not going to be effective leaders.

Michael Erwin  06:53

Absolutely. And just building on that a little bit is that one of my favorite quotes out there is that, “Experience without reflection is nearly meaningless,” you know? So like the power of experience is that it gives you repetitions. It gives you observations, but then you have to actually reflect on it for you to be able to really derive the maximum value of that experience. If you just keep on going rep after rep, experience after experience, and you don’t slow down enough and analyze, and think and learn, right, then you’re leaving a lot of productivity on the table. And just another quick note about that, you know, I’ve spoken now at lots of universities, so Michigan and Catholic University. I’ve spoken to lots of high school students, and lots of college sports teams, and professional athletes on this topic. And you hear it over and over again. This message resonates deeply with them, you know? They are hungry for this message, right? They are really hungry to hear more about how important it is that they be able to step back from the noise of the world as people, and especially as leaders.

Sean Murray  07:52

You make a claim in the book that personal leadership or leading oneself is the foundation of leading others. And obviously, there’s a link there between the solitude and leading oneself. Maybe you can elaborate on that.

Michael Erwin  08:06

For sure. I mean, I think we know that…so leadership as defined in the very opening of the book. We really cite General Eisenhower’s definition, right, which is the ability to…it’s the art to get other people to do what you want done because they want to do it. So really, when you start thinking about leadership through that framework. If you need to be able to get other people to help you get done what it is that you want to do, what you first need to know what it is that you actually need to do. And so often, again, we just kind of go through life so fast that we don’t slow down enough to really analyze. “Well, wait a minute, what is it that I need my team to get done,” right? Because sometimes, yes, we’re told what needs to happen. But sometimes, there’s a lot that needs to still be figured out. So that to me is a huge part of this whole framework, and this concept of leading yourself first is that you have to be spending the time to be able to get your ducks in a row, right? Be able to be clear on where you should be spending your time; what you should be doing before you can effectively be able to project that out to other people.

Sean Murray  09:11

What you found in your research and in the book, you kind of mentioned this at the beginning, that there’s really four primary objectives or goals, when you use solitude as a leader to become more effective. It’s clarity, creativity, emotional balance, and moral courage. And I hope we can get into all four, but maybe we could start with clarity because you tell a wonderful story about General Eisenhower around this idea of clarity, when he’s making one of the biggest decisions in World War II.

Michael Erwin  09:42

Yeah, I mean, when you think about the enormity of that. So it goes a lot of it into…and we profile Eisenhower in some of his practices of solitude before that. He’s a pretty fascinating person to study, when you look back at it. He was a major in the mid-1930s, actually carrying general MacArthur’s bags. You know, and he went from a major in 04 to 010. You know, like the Supreme Allied Commander in a period of like seven years. And so, it’s kind of like bamboo, right? You know, it doesn’t grow. It doesn’t grow for like five years, and all sudden boom! It shoots up. Eisenhower was seemingly just like humming along basically 20 years. It took him 20 years to become, you know, he was a major at 20 years in the army.

Michael Erwin  10:26

Going back to this example of D-Day. I mean, there was so much information. There was…they had to take into consideration the weather; the tides; the enemy forces. There were so many factors, then they had to take into account all the opinions of everyone else in the Allied forces. People who are going to be doing boat work. People who we’re going to be on the ground. Hundred and first and the 82nd Airborne Divisions we’re going to be jumping in, right? There was so much information that he had to distill, and to analyze, and make the decision about when to go. It was unbelievable. Again, I say that but like in the world today.

Michael Erwin  10:58

I think the average person on a given day, right, is trying to process the same amount of information that he was trying to process when it comes to D-Day. Obviously, the stakes were so much higher for what he was doing. But he spent, you know, this time in solitude, journaling and writing his ideas out; getting the ideas and his analysis of the situation out onto paper, so that he could see them more clearly. He can think more clearly, and then make the best decision possible. So hence, leading off into this idea of you achieve clarity through solitude, because it allows you to see clearly through all the noise. But it’s not easy. This is the kind of solitude that is often uncomfortable. It’s hard work. It’s sometimes like psychologically painful, right, to like, just get inside your own mind, and to really think hard about the challenge at hand. But Eisenhower was an expert at doing just that. And we argue that really, it played a huge role in him rising to the level of leadership that he did in the military in the political fronts.

Sean Murray  11:56

Yeah, it’s a fascinating story. And it’s interesting to kind of try to put yourself in Eisenhower shoes in that moment. And because as you said the stakes were couldn’t be higher. The information was overwhelming, as you mentioned. And you mentioned something else I just want to touch on, which is his career. And if you go back, I do encourage listeners to read about Eisenhower. In your book, you’ve got some vignettes. You don’t go into the entire biography.

There are some other biographies that would be beneficial. But a moment like that didn’t just come out of nowhere. It’s really there were many years of reading and reflection, right, in his…the way that he went about his career. And you mentioned another kind of pivotal moment for Eisenhower, right, at the beginning of the war, when he was tapped. I think he was in San Antonio on the base down there, and they immediately brought him to D.C. after Pearl Harbor, and said, “okay.” He must have had a good reputation in the army for being a thoughtful leader. And they said, I can’t remember who the general was. They sat him down and said, “Okay, what should we do,” right? And he didn’t just react like we might have like when we get an email. We’d fire something back. He didn’t do that.

Michael Erwin  13:07

Yeah, General Marshall. He was asking these complicated questions. And rather than just…on the fly, he said, “Hey, can you give me a few hours to go out and to get my thoughts together, and then come back to you?” Because he has some really big questions about like what you would do here and what you…strategy like high-level stuff. More or less trying to assess Eisenhower to see if he would, you know, have the strategic leadership chops, right? To be political with all the other forces, but also be able to think about the actual military maneuvers that would need to take place and how you handle egos and all that. And so yeah, he stepped back from it all, and said, “Hey, I need a few hours to get my thoughts together. Can I come back to you?” I mean, what a powerful thing to be able to say like, “You know what? I don’t have the answer right now. But I will. Give me a little bit of time to get my thoughts together.” I mean, just brilliant.

Sean Murray  13:58

Yeah. I should mention that the stories that you tell they’re not all famous people. You weave in stories of business leaders, people who started nonprofits, people you can relate to on a day-to-day basis, and modern stories: how we’re dealing with in a modern world, the technology, and I love that part of the book. But what I wanted to mention about Eisenhower is in both cases he wrote, too. He stepped away from the situation, and he got his thoughts down on paper. And writing would fit into your definition of solitude, right? Unlike reading, where you’re taking in information from someone else, which is great. We all got to do it. It’s part of our learning process. Writing is about getting your thoughts down on paper, and it’s helping you clarify what you think; what your assumptions are. And it’s essential to what you call “productive solitude,” which is a great term, so maybe you could talk about writing and productive solitude.

Michael Erwin  14:55

Sure, writing is we all know this, but like this is hard. And one of the things we do in the initial part of the book is going to talk about just the sort of dumbed-down nature in which we communicate today so often, right? Like the text messages; the 140 characters; the emails that just go back and forth that are like, you know, a paragraph long. You’re not really fleshing out any like meaningful, deep thoughts. I mean, you’re communicating. You’re sharing ideas. You’re sharing information. But when you’re talking about a book, you’re talking about, or you’re talking about like a white paper. You’re talking about something really big and heavy like that just takes a lot of time and effort. And you can not produce that unless you are very productive in your solitude.

Michael Erwin  15:35

And so for us, like we really…interviewing so many people, they talked about how, you know, cathartic it was; how important it was to be able to step back and to carve out time to write. And so, yes, we all make time to be able to read, write, to be able to listen to podcasts; to be able to consume information. But I would argue that it’s just as valuable as a leader and as a person going through life to be able to carve out time to journal, or to write thought pieces or white papers, or just analyze your past month or your past year, right? Just being inside your own mind and putting it down on paper is really hard, but I think more important than ever.

Sean Murray  16:15

I’m part of a project right now. We’re working on a leadership development program that uses the Lewis and Clark Expedition as kind of a metaphor for leadership. And although, I don’t think this came up in your book, I just wanted to mention as I learned more about that expedition, which is a pretty amazing story in itself. One of the takeaways I got out of reading their journals and just learning about that story was the fact that these leaders wrote in their journals every day. And I think that was actually…had a big impact on their success. It just goes to show you, I don’t know how many; how often you hear someone, who has been successful say, “Yeah, I journal. I write regularly.” And Warren Buffett is a great example from the business community. He says through writing, he clarifies his thought. He often doesn’t know what he’s thinking exactly until he writes. And of course, he writes his annual letter to shareholders, which is something that has become a bit of an obsession with business leaders because of the clarity of his thoughts. So that’s clarity. Maybe we could move on to creativity. What is it about creativity we can tap into in this idea of solitude?

Michael Erwin  17:20

Yes, I think a lot of times people think about creativity through the lens of whiteboarding sessions or brainstorming, or you bring a lot of people together, and they bat ideas around. And I think there’s absolutely power in that, when you can come together, and you get a group of people, or get the team together and discuss, you know, the right solution or coming up with an outside-the-box approach to something. But when you really study it, and you look at it. And you look at especially entrepreneurship, but also really just leadership writ large, is that a lot of the big ideas are developed by individuals in solitary thought, right? They come up with the idea of founding an organization to approach this, or they come up with the idea of building a company to do this, or he or she decides that this is a new way forward. And then the ideas get fleshed out and refined, and you bring people together to figure out how to collaborate; to be able to operationalize it; and bring it to life.

Michael Erwin  18:16

But very often the creativity; the thinking outside-the-box; the new concepts, it comes from one person. For me, this was very personal for me in my example in the book. I fall under the emotional balance section, but also the creativity section of the book as well, where, you know, I would just use solitude to really just free think. So if you think about what’s literally happening, right? We have all these neurological connections in our brain, and our neurons are firing all day long in a million different directions based on what we see; what we process; what we hear; what we read. Solitude is actually that space that says, “Okay, step back from it. And just let those neurons; let those connections that have been developing and taking place for the past couple of hours; for the past day to unwind, and see what comes of it.” That to me was what I think about, when I think about the role of solitude and creativity is. It’s making these new connections, new ideas that…frankly, just talking back and forth with someone, you’re not going to get to in the same way that you do, when you get inside your own brain.

Sean Murray  19:17

Yes, and the way that I tap into that, and I think, you brought this example up, too, in the book is running. And because running is a great activity that just sort of forces you to get into that flow state. And let your mind tap into those connections; the subconscious in some way. You’ve got a great line in your book about, “Solitude is a fusion of mind and soul.” And I think that’s what I’m trying to do when I’m running is tap into the connections in the subconscious in a way that makes connections that, you know, they wouldn’t arrive otherwise if I wasn’t out there doing that.

Michael Erwin  19:51

Yeah, absolutely. I mean the running, the walking, hiking, right? For some people, swimming. I think, you know, one challenge is if you’re going too fast, right? You’re so focused on just like your breathing and all that. You can’t allow your mind. So I do think that a part of this is running or hiking or walking or swimming or cycling at a moderate pace, so that it gives you that mind space to be able to engage in solitude. The other thing, I would say about running as well, like the trap for some people can be if you’re out tracking your heart rate, or you’re looking down at your pace, and you’re looking at your watch, you know, every three to five seconds, or even every minute, that’s not optimal, right? So part of it would be in 2010, when I was running out, I had no GPS device. I didn’t carry my phone with me because iPhones were barely out. And so, it really was me going out with like, you know, a Timex watch to kind of see how long I’ve been running for. And then eventually, as I got more serious training, I would start doing heart rate training, and I track you know, aerobic and anaerobic. And so, a lot of my brain power went to analyzing my heart rate and my pace and all that so you can do that right.

Michael Erwin  20:53

But if you want to gain the optimal experience for solitude, you want to leave your phone. You want to just have a basic watch that’s not causing you to look down and check your pace too much. You want to get to a place where, you know, you can sort of like moderately handle your breathing and all that. That being said, I mean, I think it’s powerful, right? It’s arguably the most powerful place because like what’s going on, again, in your endocrine system; in your brain; in your cardio. Like the blood’s literally pumping through your brain faster. It is such a fertile ground to do deep inspired thinking. And I think that so many of us miss this opportunity in life, when we run, or when we walk, or hike, or do those kinds of things. We get too wrapped up in the physical success aspect of it. And, look, that’s fine to do that, but again, if you really want to derive the benefit of solitude, while running or walking or moving your body, those are a couple of things to take into consideration. But for me, it was huge. I would come back and launch on a run with a couple of things that I’m still struggling with; that I was thinking with. And I come back with like eight different ideas on a run. So to me, it’s such an amazing time to do that thinking that I don’t want to miss it.

Sean Murray  22:02

Yeah. For me, about five or six years ago, when listening to podcasts became a kind of a part of my world, I would listen to podcasts as I run. I still do. But I found there’s a trade-off there because I saw it as almost a two for one. I’m exercising, and I’m learning, you know? I’m utilizing my brain, while I’m working out my body. This is great. And after a while, I realized that I sort of missed the time just with my own thoughts. And if I…every time I went for a run, I always put my ear pods on and my phone, and was learning. I sort of pushed out that space in my life, which was so helpful. I don’t know if you read the book, Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. But Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, he was a runner in college. And this kind of segues into this emotional balance section because he in that book talks about the importance of running.

Sean Murray  22:53

He was starting a business that was underfunded; constantly stressed about capital. He was starting a family, so he had two boys at home and his wife. And he was trying to keep his family together. And he was building a team. And he said the one thing that saved him were these six-mile runs. Six miles is kind of interesting, too, because that’s kind of a good amount of time for me in my life because I’m married with kids, and have a business, and all that too. And I know you’re busy, too. So he found emotional balance in running. I find it, too. And then you obviously put it here as one of the pillars for what you can get out of solitude. So talk a little bit about using solitude for emotional balance. What does that mean?

Michael Erwin  23:36

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s ironic. You know, I had read that as well. And that’s exactly how long the runs were that I would go on. They’d be five and a half and six miles. That’s just happened to be like, yeah, I wanted to get to an hour, but *inaudible* like you get to an hour, right? There’s kind of research that shows you derive physical benefits, when you get a run to an hour. So for me, I would do about 10-minute miles, you know? Again, nice and slow and steady, when I was training for marathons. But yes, I mean, emotional balance is a big one. So I always kind of talked about this in terms of the fact that like in life, we all do things that we’re not proud of; that were, you know, that bother us; looking back at it, whether it’s how we treated some people in high school, or we didn’t put in our best effort on a project or something that ended up causing somebody their job, or in my case in Afghanistan, I had not done the analytical work, the level that I should have to allow me to draw conclusions about some of the places, where the Taliban-led insurgency was going to attack. And like, so we all go through these things in our lives.

Michael Erwin  24:37

And I always say to people, I was like, “There is only one person that can tell ourselves like it’s okay to move on. And it’s ourselves.” A million people in the world can tell you, “Hey, it’s okay. You did your part. You did your best. You did this like,” right? But we have to come to that conclusion ourselves. And the only way we can really get there is through solitude. And so, from an emotional balance standpoint…derives so much benefit myself in the 2009 to 11 window, when I was a graduate student. So I’d followed up one deployment to Iraq, two to Afghanistan. So I’d spent 26-27 months in Iraq or Afghanistan between 04 and 09. I went, then I came back, and I went to grad school. The army sent me to graduate school at the University of Michigan en route to go back to West Point, where I went to college to teach. So I had this five-year break from the deployments, and from that, you know, prepare to deploy, deploy, come home, party, travel, prepare to deploy, deploy, right that that whole cycle. And so, here I am now in the beginnings of this five-year, non-deployable window, and it was eating me up, especially as we were announcing the surge to come into Afghanistan, and I knew lots of the units and the soldiers that were being like either shot out or hurt, you know?

Michael Erwin  25:46

And so me, I really struggled with that from an emotional balance standpoint. That’s why, I created, you know, my first nonprofit, Team Red, White & Blue was to try to make a difference, and try to help men and women, who were being injured in Iraq or Afghanistan. Bring it back full circle. At the end of the day like it just…you know, it was hard. And so, those runs, they…those six-mile runs, they saved me, too. I was becoming a father for the first time. I had all these things going on in my life. But ultimately, it gave me that emotional balance; be able to make peace with the decision to go to grad school because part of me is like, “Oh, I should be back out there in the operational army; getting ready to go back to Afghanistan,” right? Part of me thought like I had that obligation or that responsibility. And despite hearing from lots of people, “No, you’ve done your part. You’ve deployed three times in five or six years. Go to grad school; learn; serve the army the best you possibly can in the way that you’ve been selected to.” I still struggled with it. And again, it was through those runs that I achieved the emotional balance necessary, right, to eventually say, “Okay, yeah. I’m where I’m supposed to be, and I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.”

Sean Murray  26:52

Yeah, it’s interesting. We have to say those words to ourselves. Like you said, we can hear other people absolve us or offer any kind of comforting comments or words. But eventually, we have to convince ourselves that we can move on. And it doesn’t happen if you’re just reacting, and you’re constantly listening or processing information from the outside; other people’s thoughts. You’ve got to tap into your own thoughts. It’s another excellent benefit of solitude. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your journey; this nonprofit. One of the things that really struck me about the nonprofit was we hear a lot about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

People who have been in combat, and I’m sure that some of your comrades and you know more about it than I do. But you at the University of Michigan, one of the subjects that you are, I guess assigned to learn about was post-traumatic growth, which is an excellent concept because you read about, I guess, General Madison is an interesting example because he comes up in your book quite often. He talks about, yes, there’s something called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It’s a challenge. But you can also go through something like that, and it can stretch you. You can grow, and you can turn it into a positive in your life. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that study and how that led to your Team Red, White & Blue, and what you’re doing today.

Michael Erwin  28:16

Sure. Yeah, so post-traumatic growth is like you said. It’s really the kind of the flip side of the coin to PTSD or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We know that people go through life, right, and experience trauma. And it comes in various forms: car accidents, physical or sexual abuse, or you know, losing somebody close to you. There are all kinds of ways that trauma enters our lives. And ultimately, since we’re not robots, we’re human beings. You know, our well being takes a hit, when we get that news; when that setback first happened like immediately, our well being lowers significantly. And that’s really the question that boils down to is like, how do we respond? The research shows that most people get back to what we call the baseline, right? They get back to where they were, and some people never get back to where they were. And that’s the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder side, where they’re never quite the same as they were before that bad car accident.

Michael Erwin  29:08

And then, there are some people, and this is what positive psychology, which is what I studied in graduate school, is really interested in studying; which is people on like that…their trajectory, which not only get back to the baseline, but they actually somehow grow in response to the trauma. They somehow use it as a springboard to be a better mother or father; son; daughter; soldier; professional; whoever it might be. It’s this idea of how can we help more people. In our case in Team Red, White & Blue space, how can we help more veterans to experience post-traumatic growth over the long term. And this is something that’s very, very complicated, right? And there’s a latency effect. How long down the road? Sometimes PTSD doesn’t show itself for a decade; 15 years; sometimes way down the road. But ultimately, this idea of growth from trauma is something that is very important to understand. And specifically in Team Red, White & Blue, where we try to help as many veterans as possible experience that post-traumatic growth because we know it is possible. We know it’s possible to experience, you know, major adversity and trauma in life, and over time with the right support, the right strategies, the right relationships in your life that you can grow stronger in response to that trauma.

Sean Murray  30:22

And does solitude play a role in the recovery process and helping returning soldiers tap into that positive growth?

Michael Erwin  30:30

So I think it’s kind of a…like anything, right? There are two sides to it. I think that if you go inside of…and you think about solitude as isolation, that’s bad, right? So to be clear solitude as we frame it and define it is a very positive term, right? It’s separating yourself from all the noise and all the input from other minds. But you can take solitude too far, right? You can isolate yourself from other people, and from other ideas, and people that want to help you. And so, if you take it too far in that direction that’s problematic. But in terms of as we use it like, yeah, the idea of solitude, and reflection, and making sense of what happened.

Michael Erwin  31:08

And the fact is knowing that, hey, I’m still alive, and the guy to my left or right didn’t make it, you know? And I’m grateful for that, and I want to live my life to honor, you know, and honor, and recognizing the sacrifice that he made for me, right? So that’s where I think solitude plays such a powerful role in post-traumatic growth is analyzing and making sense of things. It can go too far. And some veterans and some people in general take it too far in that direction, and it can be problematic. So again, like anything, you know, moderation and balance is the key. It’s a matter of blending together the solitude and reflection with the conversation and the feedback from other people.

Sean Murray  31:50

Well, we talked about solitude, helping leaders gain clarity. We talked about tapping into creativity, and then emotional balance, and your work with veterans. The fourth benefit you talked about in the book is moral courage. I think this might be the most important as I was thinking about it. You make a very good point. When you’re a leader, if you’re going to do something, you know, something great; something beyond normal, you’re going to have to make decisions that are outside of…they’re unpopular. That means you’re going to be unpopular for…at least for a while. That’s just the nature of leadership. How we deal with that; how we deal with that adversity really comes down to: Do we have the conviction or the moral courage to move forward? And where does that come from? And you make a great case that you really cultivate that through solitude.

Michael Erwin  32:52

Yeah. And when you think about moral courage, you know, and the ability to lead when times are tough, or when you’re going to make decisions that are unpopular. Again, if without putting in the time for solitude and reflection on the front end; to think and to analyze, you know, I think it’s really hard to have that bridge, right? To be able to make those hard decisions, I think that…we use the analogy of like a poorly built ship that when it crashes, or when it makes contact, it shatters. Solitude is really the thing that fortifies the vessel. And in our case, and we believe that the fortification is absolutely critical that you do that analysis on the front end, so that when you make those hard decisions, and you inevitably hear the criticism or the pushback and the blowback that you’ve done that preparation, right? But you’ve already analyzed it. You’ve thought about it, and you’re ready for it. So I think it’s such an integral part of the lead up to the decision. Not just the clarity to make the right decision, but then the lead up to it, so that you are prepared for those emotional feelings that will kind of bounce back to you or that you’ll hear from other people.

Sean Murray  33:43

On the moral courage side, you know, one other story that really struck me in the book was President Lincoln during the Civil War. But there was a moment, when after Gettysburg, if he could have just gotten General Meade to really strike and just move. And we all…most historians agree that the war probably would have ended earlier, which would have saved numerous lives. And Lincoln recognized that, but he… it didn’t happen. And so, talk a little bit about how he dealt with that sort of setback.

Michael Erwin  34:15

Absolutely. So this is, you know, I think like there are so many lessons we can extrapolate from today in our lives. He basically was able to, in the moment, feel anger, feel frustrated with him for not continuing the attacks, right following the victory of Gettysburg. But rather than calling him to report to the White House, or you know, he wrote a letter, right? And it was, you know, a relatively scathing letter saying like, “How could you not do this? How can you let this go? This anguish; this has been going on ripping the country apart for several years now. And you had the chance and why didn’t you take it?” Then, what they found is that he basically didn’t send it. He just held it.

Michael Erwin  34:53

And so, again, the analogy today is like when you get that email that comes across your inbox. The…immediately you feel like your blood pressure; like in your heart rate go up. Your fight or flight system kicks in. You know, you start sweating. You start to go, “Oh, my goodness! I got this email.” And immediately you have like an emotional response. The temptation often is to just respond right away; in the moment. And again, what we see over and over again from people to include all the way back to, you know, President Lincoln, is that giving yourself space and time before you actually hit send on that communication around that message, or on that letter, or on that email, right? To just give yourself that space because the emotions that we often feel are ones that burn hot, but then, burn out. And so, when we speak, then we say something, when they’re burning hot, sometimes cause us more problems than we had even in the first place, right? So it’s really then that discipline and the ability to kind of control the temptation to do that. It is just so powerful.

Sean Murray  35:51

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. In the story about Lincoln, when he was going through the anguish, and the anger, and the emotional trauma of not striking, when the opportunity was there. He said something like, “What does this all mean?” I think he was talking to one of his colleagues. And it was through the writing of that letter that he…you could see, he figured out for himself what it meant. He solved that riddle. He put it into terms, so he could understand it. And once you can understand, the unknown is a little bit more known, then he could deal with it better. And I think that’s part of what we’re doing in solitude. It’s part of what we’re doing, when we write. We are filling in some of the unknowns, which when they’re just blanks, it becomes fear, and we become immobilized, and we don’t know what to do. And we sometimes react emotionally and in ways that we would regret later. It’s definitely a lesson we can take in, and I think with technology; deck’s kind of stacked against us because it’s so easy to hit send, you know? At least Lincoln had to put it in an envelope, and seal it, and give it to someone. I mean, boom! He just hit a button, right? Well, this has been a fabulous conversation; a great conversation. Where can people learn more about you, your writing, and your nonprofit?

Michael Erwin  37:06

The easiest way is just mikeerwin.net, so that’s a website kind of talks about Positivity Project; Team Red, White & Blue; The Character and Leadership Center; Father Vincent Capodanno High School; the various initiatives that I’ve helped to start, and, you know, more information on all those can be kind of found there on mikeerrwin.net. And then, really on social media, I’m there on LinkedIn. And that’s one of the things about all this, right, is that I don’t advocate, while I am a big proponent of solitude like I do think there’s power in social media. There’s obviously power in podcasts, and there’s power in email, and all that. It’s really just a matter of making sure that we have these things in alignment. So I’m on LinkedIn, and I’m on Instagram, and Twitter, you know, those places. And I share a lot of my thoughts on these things, you know, on those various platforms.

Sean Murray  37:48

Great! Well, thank you for being on The Good Life.

Michael Erwin  37:51

Absolutely.

Outro  37:53

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