Brad Stulberg

And that became the operating hypothesis on the book.

I think something else to say that's really important is about four to five months, let's see, no, actually it's closer to seven months into experiencing OCD, I decided to write an essay

that went into pretty intense detail about my experience.

And the genesis of that was exactly what you said when we brought up this topic.

To the outside world, I'm like 31-year-old whiz kid coaching world-class athletes and executives in a best-selling book and another one on the way.

But inside, I'm totally falling to pieces.

And the cognitive dissonance that I felt when I get emails from people along the lines of, how'd you figure it out?

Tell me about your path, especially young men.

Like, how did you get to do what you did?

And then I'm feeling like it just that became almost as bad as the OCD itself.

And at that point, I'm like, I'm either going to stop doing this kind of work or I need to reconcile that this is a part of me, but I can't hide it.

And a psychiatrist told me that a huge part of peak performance, which was literally the title of my first book, is the ability to play through the pain.

And that really stuck with me.

So I wrote this essay saying, hey, some of you might think that I'm a fraud, I'm a fake, you're never going to want to work with me again.

But this is my experience.

This is what I'm experiencing right now.

And I believe that I can know and coach towards these concepts and struggle myself.

And I was a little bit scared about the response to that essay, of course, but it was so overwhelmingly positive.

And I think that was another aha moment when all these people that I never would have guessed come out of the woodwork emailing me about, oh, me too, or I have bad depression or I've experienced anxiety or, oh, I've never felt like this, but my colleague has.

And you've given me a whole new way to think about it.