Episode 81 - Your Boss Does Not Deserve Your Anxiety

Passover is one week away and we’re in countdown mode, but the real question is uncomfortable: can you actually stop working long enough to feel the holiday? We talk about why a long stretch of Passover into Shabbat is not a burden but a gift and why feeling restless without your inbox can be a sign your priorities are drifting. If you can’t enjoy the pause, we challenge you to ask whether you’re being run by deadlines, bosses, and the constant urge to fix everyone’s problems. Presence is not passive. It’s a form of spiritual discipline and a path to calmer mental health, stronger faith, and better work life balance. 

From there, we get honest about human nature. When pressure hits, most people protect their own first, even good people. We share a real story about getting our daughter home from Israel during wartime travel chaos, when flights are limited and cancellations keep coming. It’s not a judgment, it’s a reality check: corporations, clients, and even friends will take care of themselves when the stakes are high. That awareness changes how tightly we cling to approval at work, and it helps us detach from the anxiety that comes from trying to please everyone. 

We then shift to the moral weight of authority. Judges, teachers, lawyers, managers, bureaucrats, and anyone with power over others can cause deep grief with one careless choice, and those choices echo in ways they may never see. We talk about the lifelong impact a teacher can have, including the story of Rabbi Zachariah Wallerstein, and we land on a clear principle for ethical leadership: the bigger the decision and the more it affects another person, the more you must remove emotion from the equation and lead with disciplined thinking. If this hit home, subscribe, share the episode with someone who leads others, and leave a review so more people can find the Trust Factor Podcast.

Transcript

Passover Countdown And Mindset

Why People Choose Self First

Disconnecting From Work During Holidays

The Hidden Cost Of Authority

Teachers And Lifelong Impact

Remove Emotion From Big Decisions

Closing Message And Share Request

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Welcome to the Trust Factor Podcast, the only podcast that guarantees your success when you implement its divine age old teachings. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining. Welcome to another episode of the Trust Factor Podcast. We are officially in countdown mode. Passover is a week away, my friends. And it should be, God willing, that this Passover we will see tremendous, tremendous miracles. Now, two things. Number one, it's going to be a long Passover because it goes right into Shabbat, which historically, depending on what your outlook is, can be a good thing or a bad thing. If it's a bad thing for you, then you've got to work on yourself. Because if you were going to the Dominican Republic for four or five days, you'd be elated. You have the opportunity to be in a perfect place in your mind and in your soul. You have an ability to disconnect from the mundane for day after day after day, not having access to the craziness. If that bothers you, then the indication might be that you haven't refined your character enough, that your priority lies too much in the idea of work and the here and now and trying to fix everybody's problems and trying to meet deadlines and trying to appeal to bosses. And if that's where your head is at, then you're focusing on the wrong things in this world. You're focusing on the things that are going to give you grief. They're going to cause you anxiety. Because these people, your bosses and your bosses' bosses, and corporations and clients, at the end of the day, they are all self-serving. Everybody, no matter how well intended they are, and there are wonderful people in this world who are quality individuals and who care. But when it all comes down to the wire, we know that people have to take care of self. Look, I'll give you an example. We just brought our daughter back from Israel. There's a war going on in the area. And there's so many of her friends who are trying to do the same thing, get back to Canada or to wherever they live. And there are multiple chat groups that the parents are on, and there are people who we know who are close friends and family who are in the same predicament. And I want to tell you something, and then this is not a judgment. It was every man for themselves. That's what it was. We were equally guilty. Yes, we tried to help. Yes, we shared access to the same WhatsApp groups. Yes, we had conversations and told them what we were working on. But bottom line, at the end of the day, who did we care about most? We cared about our children. And we wanted to make sure that they were out. And when you have limited capacity, when they're only sending out planes with 50 people on it, and when flights are being canceled every single day, we've had multiple bookings canceled on us. At the end, it becomes all about taking care of number one. And it's reasonable, it makes sense. Now, can you start to make efforts once your child is home to help other people? Absolutely. And a lot of people do. And that's wonderful. But recognize when it's you or them, when your neck is on the line and everybody's neck is on the line, people are going to be self-serving. They're going to take care of number one. So remember that if you're constantly just thinking about appealing to other people and fixing their problems and doing the right thing to make them happy, whether it's your bosses or your customers or your coworkers, your head is in the wrong place. You've got to give 100% at work. But when you have that opportunity to disconnect, because Passover's coming up and it leads right into Shabbat, you've got holiness after holiness. You've got multiple days to unwind and to enjoy the holiday and not think about work. Grab onto it. And if you're not able to, if it doesn't come easy to you, then it's just an indication. That's it. It's just something that you should now reflect back on and say, wait a second, wait a second. Why can't I enjoy the holidays the way that everybody else does, or that so many people do? Why am I constantly looking to get back to work, getting back to problem solving? Why? Are they running me? Am I a puppet to the system? Have I been influenced by them too much? Are my priorities not set correctly? Because if not, then I need to work on myself in that area. That's it. That's called being present, my friends. Not just pushing through those four or five days, not just forcing it and not being happy about it and just constantly thinking about when it's going to be over and watching the clock. And then when the clock runs down, you're back to the same mundane. The stuff that, funny enough, causes you grief and anxiety. For some reason, we need to run back to it. We're gluttons for punishment. But that's the human function, my friend. So got to deal with what we know. And we know that we're programmed like that. So deal with it. If you don't, if you just allow the status quo to remain, then there will be no change. There will be no growth. The smart money takes that opportunity. Yesterday I talked to you about a person who is in a position of public authority over other people. There are entire laws, entire mitzvahs that have been crafted specifically for these individuals, because the very nature of the day-to-day of these individuals is to have impact on other people. They have authority over them. And we said it includes judges, it includes possibly even doctors. I know that there are certainly mitzvahs that are written specifically for people in the medical business, but people in positions of government, the bank manager, all of these people, your boss, obviously, these are people who wield power over you. And they can cause a lot of grief. And so these people need to be extra careful with their actions and with their choices because they will have ripple effects that will affect so many people on an intimate level. And if all these people that they impact are constantly thinking negatively of their boss or the judge or the clerk and the secretary in the office or whoever it is that wields power over them because they're not treating them fairly, they're being very mean to them, then these people are constantly in their hearts holding malice towards these people. And when they pray, they're constantly mentioning these people. Get them out of my life or wake them up or why do they have to be so mean? And they cry out to their creator, and the creator listens to their prayers. So now you have these individuals who also have to earn their own eternity. And if they aren't acting favorably towards the people that they have power over, then they have umpteen people, those very same people that, in certain cases, they don't know who they are, they can't account for them, there are simply too many of them every day of their lives praying for the demise of that individual. Just imagine the decrees that happen in the heavens. So you have to be very careful. That's the takeaway. The takeaway is if you're the boss, if you're the person in charge, if you're the judge, if you're the lawyer, if you're the person who has a duty above your client or the individual standing in front of you, and your choice, the decision that you make, will have an impact on that individual's life, then you have to be very careful. You have to be that much more careful than if you only had yourself and your family to worry about. It says that a person of authority has tremendous weight on his shoulders. The success of his subordinates or those that need his services depends to a significant extent on his behavior. He gives a couple of examples. Number one, a teacher's treatment of a student has a profound lifelong influence on the student, for better or for worse. Now, all this serves to do is to explain to you that if you're a teacher, that you can't take your job for granted. Every single one of those individuals in your classroom is just that. They are an individual with a custom created soul that is going to make choices in this world. And if you're the teacher of a child, you are responsible for molding that individual into who they are. And your every interaction needs to be very carefully weighed because the outcome of who that child turns into very much depends on your choices, the words that you use and the actions that you take. I know one of the rabbis that I learned from, who I often mention on the podcast, Rabbi Zachariah Wallerstein, his memory should be a blessing, was a giant, a giant in life, somebody who most people won't even begin to understand or to accomplish a fraction of what this individual accomplished in his short time here. And he was taken early from this world, but he has an unbelievable story that he shares. He's very open about it. That the reason he became the person he is, and here's where it becomes a double-edged sword, the person that he became and the successes that he had and the impact that he had on world jewelry was directly connected back to a teacher who had wronged him. Okay. So here's a funny situation: a teacher who doesn't conduct themselves properly, uses the wrong words, is not sensitive about the student's emotion, says something that devastates a child. I don't know if his rabbi understood what he did to Rabbi Zachariah Wallerstein. I don't know if his teacher, his rabbi, knew what he had done, but the impact was lasting. Rabbi Wallerstein, because of the individual who he was, took the negative and turned it into a positive. That is a massive, massive feat that the vast majority of the population are simply not doing. While for him, he took a negative and turned it into a positive by saying, I will never allow anybody to harm my students, and that's why I'm going to become a Rebbe. This guy had no connection back to becoming a Rebbe. He was a terrible student. He was not a scholar by any means, and he was not a teacher, but he said, No, I was harmed in the classroom. I'm going to do everything I can to become a Rebbe, a teacher, and I'm going to make sure that nobody ever harms any of my children, any of my students, the way that I was harmed. So he took that negative and turned it into a positive. But still, when he was praying, when he was crying his eyes out in the washroom after his Rebbe had insulted him so terribly, he was bawling his eyes out. He had broken him down, reduced him to nothing. Who do you think he was speaking to? Who do you think he was praying to? Who do you think he was asking for help from? His creator. He was praying to God. And I can assure you that the words and the requests were not favorable ones because that's just who we are, especially when we're kids. We don't understand. We judge immediately. And at the end, this Rebbe, whoever he was, while he may get reward for having done what he did, he's also going to be very much punished for how he did it. We have to be careful with the way that we operate with other people. A government bureaucrat's decision can either help a family or cause them extreme anguish. A judge's verdict can be the difference between life and death. Doesn't get any bigger than that, my friends. Between freedom or years of incarceration, and the same goes for anybody else in a sphere of influence. Think about government. You want the best example ever? You know my feelings about them. I've been crystal clear. We understand that when you take human beings who are flawed, remember, every one of these people, including a teacher, has an evil inclination. They're human beings. A teacher can wake up on the wrong side of the bed. A teacher can have a very bad day. The problem is that can come at a very high price, as opposed to somebody who has a desk job, as opposed to somebody who works in construction and interacts with very few people, sits in a crane and does his work, operating a crane. Who cares? If he's upset, he can talk to himself all day long. That teacher, that judge, that lawyer, that government official, when they have a bad day, everybody suffers if they don't control their own thought processes, if they're not disciplined enough to make good decisions, to put their emotions aside. And that's why we come back to that whole conversation around emotion. Making decisions from a position of emotion. It will always serve to hurt you. You have to remove emotion from an equation. That's why I've said many times, when you have to make an important decision, the more important the decision is, the more you remove the heart from the equation and you just rely on your brain. And if it's not that important, the less important it is, the more you can check in with your heart. That's fine. Sometimes you can make a decision based on emotion, depending on the consequence of that decision. But certainly, absolutely, without a doubt, if the decision that you're going to make is going to impact another human being, then you better do everything that you can to remove the heart from the equation. Your feelings don't matter. The only thing that should matter to you when you're looking in that student's eyes is that student entirely, 100%. You become negated. You negate your own will. You don't exist. You become what we said was a Vatran, somebody who lets go. Yes, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Yes, I had a fight with my spouse the other day. Yes, I'm having financial difficulties. Yes, I have my own health challenges. All these things affect a teacher just as they affect somebody else. But that teacher needs to be able to stop and take all of that and leave it at the door. Check it at the door and then come in and teach with your head and not your heart. The same with a judge. You're coming into the courtroom and you've had a rough day, you leave your baggage at the door. You do not bring it in with you because those mistakes, my friends, if you're in a sphere of influence, can be extremely, extremely costly. Have an amazing day, my friends, as we cant down to the holiday of Passover one week away. Have an amazing day. Thank you for spending time with us on the Trust Factor Podcast. If you've heard something today that moved you, save this episode and share it with someone who might need to hear it. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss upcoming conversations that challenge, empower, and uplift. And if you're on social media, connect with us. Leave your thoughts, drop a quote that resonated with you. Hashtag the TrustFactor Podcast. Until next time, keep growing in your trust and keep living with purpose. I'm Jesse Revivo, and this has been the Trust Factor Podcast. Thanks for listening.