Paul Yuhas On Navigating The Toughest Times With Faith In God
Our journey in life will never be smooth-sailing. There will be challenges and tough times ahead. In the same vein, there will always be another greener pasture on the other side of all of it. Chad Burmeister reflects on this with his guest, Paul Yuhas. Paul is an independent consultant who also used to work for Statefarm and IBM. In this episode, he shares how he learned to navigate life's toughest challenges with his faith in God. He also talks about the importance of taking care of ourselves, taking time off every now and then to reconnect with ourselves and the people we love. Join Paul as he takes us across his life story, how he found God, and how he learned to give back to society.
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Paul Yuhas On Navigating The Toughest Times With Faith In God
I've got a guest with me from North of Chicago at Lake Barrington. Paul Yuhas has a history in technology with IBM in the early days. He graduated from Illinois State University. He has experience with State Farm, Citibank, and has been a consultant on his own for the last several years. Paul, I'm excited to have you on the show. Let's dig in. Welcome to the show.
Thanks, Chad. Thanks for your time. I appreciate it. I'm up here in Lake Barrington or the Barrington area.
Tell us about this lake. Is it a big lake? How many miles does it go?
It was a man-made lake. It’s about 0.75 miles to 0.5 miles long. It’s a beautiful lake. There are a number of homes and condos on the lake as well as a golf course on the other side of the lake. It’s a beautiful area.
Faith In God: It's hard to get good feedback. Everyone wants good feedback, but organizations, companies, and individuals might be afraid that they might get sued.
Thanks for being here. I like to get our audience to get to know who you are by going back. A lot of our tell of who we are starts when we're a kid. At the end of the day, we're all big kids playing in a sandbox. We may feel like we grow up but at times, we're wired in a certain way from the time we're born. I’m curious about your first memories when you were 6, 7, 8. What was your passion? What did you love to do when you woke up in the morning? What was your thing?
I lived in a neighborhood where I had boys and girls all around me that were almost the same age. I used to have a sandbox. I used to love doing that in the summer but you can't do that every day.
It gets a little warm sometimes and your knees get a little scraped up.
In Illinois, the sand gets frozen. Playing team sports with my friends that were in my neighborhood, whether it was at school. It was basketball and baseball. Doing those things as a team was a lot of fun. We had a great time and that could have morphed into some other things but it’s mostly those things.
I heard you stress the word team, the team orientation. If you think about connecting the dots between then and now, and the work that you've done, how did those two things interrelate? Did you learn a lot from team building when you were younger?
It laid a foundation for me, Chad. That was talked about in school in college when I got my degree but when you get to the workplace, that's where it got laid down. You would have this idea that a client had a problem and you would assemble a team. You would assemble a group of people with talents like in the neighborhood, you'd bring them together, solve that, get a solution out there, run that by the client, and then you would run with it. That's exciting. That was fun. We'd walk in there not knowing each other but knowing that we had the right people on the field, fixing and/or delivering what they were looking for. I had a knack for assembling the right people and I was taught well from some of those experiences, either in the neighborhood or in my early days in being a developer myself.
My son's going into computer sciences and computer engineering at the School of Mines in Colorado. It's interesting to see the new generation and some of the things they're doing around artificial intelligence. I have another podcast called AI for Sales. I've had over 100 people on the podcast. I talked to someone who's a cofounder and CTO of a company for over twenty years. They're doing avatars that can speak and you wouldn't know if you're talking to a person or an avatar. They even do brand mascots for big companies that you would have heard of and you might think that person is a real human but they're an AI-powered bot. I'm looking at it going, “What do you think is going to happen in the next couple of years?” He goes, “We're about a year away from when you will not even be able to tell the difference that it's a person or not.” Times are changing.
It's exciting and scary a little bit because to me the biggest question is around ethics. Which law of the land are you deciding to follow? Is it man's law that gets it wrong all the time or is it a law that's built on something a little firmer than that? As I see AI gets rolled out and makes decisions, whoever programs the AI is going to exacerbate whatever opinion they have about what's right and wrong. I hope and pray that there's a new position called Chief Ethics Officer who can look at it and say, “That's right. That's wrong.” If it's left up to us as humans, we get it wrong more than we get it right, I'm afraid.
That's a good point. Ethics is touching everything that we operate in now. We maybe need some different guidelines and that's what I'm hearing you say.
A lot of smart people look at it and come up with some smart answers around the ethical side. The part of the show that is usually interesting for me is this question. Share only what you're comfortable sharing. We all go through something in life that's tough. You might be going through it right now. Sharing that with other people helps them to understand that if you put one foot in front of the other, good things end up happening. There are songs about it. Annie is a play about this. What's something you're comfortable sharing that's a tough time and it’s something that you got through or getting through?
Faith In God: Look for a trusted friend, especially during these times of being locked up in your house.
I've been through some tough things, we all have in our life. Those have made me stronger. I can see that from looking back at them. However, being of a certain age and also the time that we're in right now, I'm looking for a full-time job. I'm not done yet. I have a long runway, a lot of capabilities, great experiences and also, I continue to learn. I want to continue to learn. That's my challenge right now. I've had job coaches. I’ve networked, go to meetups, applied for different jobs, and tweaked my resume for every position. I don't know if there's somebody that could be more hungry and more determined than I am. I say that humbly. I'm out here trying to knock it down. I have twins that I'm trying to set an example for. I have a lot to offer. It's hard and it's hard to get good feedback because you want good feedback from people. Organizations, companies and individuals are afraid that they might get sued or whatever.
With the legal suits that they face, they're more likely to say, “It wasn't a fit,” and they leave it at that, versus, “Here's specifically what we're looking for and here's where the gap was.” That helps you determine where to go and where not to go. That's one of those policies where the Chief Ethics Officer becomes an important piece of the equation. You're in the zone where I'm sure your stress levels are higher than usual. What tactics do you use to know that there’s another greener pasture on the other side of all of it?
There are a few. I use a job coach and talk to him before I'm going in and after I'm coming out. I also have men in my life that know who I am. They know what they see and what I'm doing. They know I'm knocking it. In the end, it comes back to what Paul is doing for Paul. How do I see Paul? What does God see in me? Who am I in God? Who's working inside of me and knows who I am, how I was created, where I was wired up, and how I was wired up? Who knows every hair on the top of my head and knows how many are there, even though there's less and less every day? I know who I am in Christ and I know he gives me strength every day when I go to look for him.
My grandfather worked for Mobil Oil in the HR department. He met his wife, my grandmother, in South Dakota at what was called Socony-Vacuum or something like that. It got rolled up into Mobil and he became a mid-level executive at Mobil. He was the best man that you would ever meet. He’s the perfect example of Christ's love. He would do anything for anybody. He went to church every Sunday. He educated my mom, sister and brother. He was an amazing individual. In the eleventh hour, he had Alzheimer's. This was several years ago.
I remember in the final days, he asks a question because he was in and out of reality a little. He came into reality one day. He looked me in the eye, and looked at a group of five of us, “Was I a good person?” We're like, “You were the best person on planet Earth.” It was cool to see someone who you know is the most amazing person ever. They did everything they possibly could within their being and has that question at the end. It was a neat experience, “Did I do everything I could do?” That example of him at that moment asking that now has caused me to say, “If I'm at halfway point through the eighteen holes of life, what am I going to do on the back nine? How do I make sure that I take what grandpa's lesson was and help share that with everybody else in the world?” That’s why Living a Better Story came about.
We launched an app called 77 Pray. In the world of business, we can often forget the things we need to do to stay on target. I did an app called 75 Hard that's a mental toughness app and you work out twice a day for 45 minutes. You drink a gallon of water a day. You don't drink any alcohol for 75 days. It's a regimen. On day 75, on December 31, 2020, I was in great shape again. My mind was good but it lacked the spirituality component. I came out with 77Pray as a tug saying, “You’ve got to up this in the game a little bit. Let's show people what happens when they pray in the morning and read a Bible verse every day.”
It pops up on your phone with a little text reminder, and then you act. You text somebody and say, “Check out this app. I've been doing this for a week. It's cool,” or post it on Facebook and you pray again at night. What's amazing to me is when you start getting the visions at night and you're like, “I hadn't thought about that one.” They come to you. To me, it feels like the Holy Spirit. It's there when you open yourself up to it. I'm happy to hear you say you've got Christ inside leading you on the path. Have you tried the daily ritual of going back-to-back asking, “What’s my will for the rest of my life?” I'm sure you do.
I do. There are days that I get distracted. I go off on that and I'll own that. I do catch myself and take a moment for myself to recheck who that is. I'm finding myself doing that every evening as I lay my head down on the pillow, saying, “Thank you, God. I see you. I love you.” It does make a big difference in how I enter my sleep and it does make a difference when I do that every day at the beginning of the day.
A friend of mine, John Guydon, played for the Buffs and he lives in the Dallas area. After I went through a rough period where my company cratered for a quarter, I felt what he shared. He said, “There's this fake alien named Zartog and he visits me at night. He's a shitty basketball player. He talks trash to me and he says, ‘John, your hair is not right. This group of people that don't look like you that you're speaking in front of today are not going to take you and accept you as you are.’” He's had to learn that the Zartog fictional character is there and he can have a conversation with them and say, “Shut up. Get out of here.”
He gives about fifteen things you can do to solve for Zartog. One of those he calls yabba dabba doo. It was, “Yeah, but you don't understand I've applied ten times last week. Yeah, but this. Yeah, but that.” He's like, “Yeah, but, yeah, but do.” If you do the next little thing like being on a show like this one or whatever it is and following the thread, the bottom line is all of us are one of one. We're a fingerprint. There's only one snowflake that will ever be and it goes away. That was the one snowflake of that kind ever. There's a position that someone would pay a lot of money for help with and it's knowing that having the faith that will occur is half the battle. Also, doing something every day to move one foot in front of the other.
Thanks for sharing. I know in these crazy times with COVID and everything else, I found out that my neighbor passed away from a COVID complication. I walk out every week when I pick the trash out, he says hi to me. He's a car guy and I'm like, “That's close to home.” You have to realize, “I still have a heart and lungs. I can talk, speak and move forward. I live in America.” That's the bottom line as tough as it gets. We had a neighbor in Colorado who was a multi-millionaire. My parents lived in a nice neighborhood and then 2007 hit. Talk about being upside down. He went negative $20 million and the rest of us looked at like, “I’ve got this credit card bill for $34,000.” He’s like, “Wait until you get a negative $20 million.” It's all perspective with what we face as humanity.
Faith In God: Everybody has a caring and concerned heart for people in the world.
I like the yabba dabba doo. If you get stuck there, you’ve got to find that next thing to go do. Also, my friends can help me. What's one more thing you can do? Can you go take a walk? Can you do something for yourself? Can you pray? Maybe some people like to go outside and pray? Can you reach out to a trusted friend who knows you and will accept you no matter where you're at? Especially during these times of being locked up and not being able to see the people or hold on to the people that we love and yet we've been told, “Don't shake hands. Don't give hugs.” It’s like, “I feel okay. Do you feel okay?”
I’m willing to take the hug risk. My business is called ScaleX.ai and we do LinkedIn outreach. When my uncle was looking for a job, he was in collections. He headed collections departments. That job can sometimes be automated or changed or they want the 25-year-old instead of my uncle’s age level. We did an outreach campaign through email and LinkedIn and got him in front of a lot of different places. I'm doing the same thing right now for a college grad from Denver University.
We create what's called a virtual assistant. I have this virtual assistant that says, “I'm representing Paul. Here's a link to his profile. Would you like me to make an introduction?” It runs at a clip of 50 to 100 a day. We own the technology so it doesn't cost us a whole lot of money to click the go button and get you in front of thousands of people instead of dozens. Your prayer could be answered because I'm happy to set that up for you and click go. Let's get you in front of employers in your region and even remotely. It's a virtual world that we live in. A lot of times you're thinking myopically like, “I need to work five blocks from my house.” Not anymore. We can go out into the whole universe.
We've made remote working acceptable in these times. Since the early 2000s, I was working remotely. We were on conference calls as needed. I don't even know where you're at. You're in Colorado but you could be anywhere.
I'd love to be able to provide some support for you there. No doubt. Are your twins boys or girls?
One of each. I got lucky.
That's nice. I’ve got a boy and a girl too. They’re 1.5 years apart. Some people would think they were twins when they were younger because they were so close and both are blonde. Thinking three years out and you're back on the show in three years. You go, “Chad, this was amazing. You wouldn't believe what happened.” What would you tell me looking back on the last three years from now?
Somebody saw something in me. Somebody believed in me and I believed in them because it gets right down to that and we connected. Everybody has a caring and concerned heart for people in our world. There's a small minority on the other end of that. There's a good population that maybe they don't even know this is going on in our world so they want to help. In three years, we would see that we're all happy. Our world is moving forward in a great way. I'm also able to maybe give back in some other way to somebody else.
You pay it forward.
That's a way I would be able to do that. Here's somebody on this show again in three years and say, “I was there too.” Can we help somebody else?
The other thing that comes to mind, we're going to be doing Living A Better story chapters. The concept of Living A Better Story, Robert White has found 3 or 4 mindset companies. There's a great magician, Harry Houdini, who I have a signed card from him that says, “My brain is the key that sets me free.” Here's a master magician who could be 50 feet underwater and get out of the chains and be up 50 feet in the air and get out before it comes crashing to the ground. He realized that the brain is the key.
The Living A Better Story exercise is called Complete Your Past. We all carry something from when we're younger, whether we remember it or not, and whether it was real or not. It could be made up. That’s what was happening to me. It was made up because my dad never says, “I love you overtly,” because he grew up in the Midwest and it's not something you do. I always had the question, “Why isn't my dad at my soccer games?” I carried that for a lot of years. Complete your past, tell the truth about your current reality, and live a better story. We're going to be doing these. We've done one a quarter and we're planning to do one regionally and open up chapters.
Something that comes to mind is we should do a chapter meeting of Living A Better Story in your region. Drive a group of people of 25, 30 and 50 people to come out and say, “Come and experience Living a Better Story for two hours.” That becomes a networking group in your area where you get to have other people that come together as a community and all share stories of, “This is what's going on in my life.” Recognize that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We are all unique individuals. I'd love to talk to you about putting one of those on and having Robert come out.
He's graduated a million people from his classes. John Denver was one of his students. He wrote a song about the experience with Robert in his class years ago called The Gift You Are. It is right in line with everything we've been talking about. John thought he was just a musician. He's like, “That's what I am. That's what I do.” By going through this Living A Better Story, at the time it’s called something else, he realized he's a dad, a son and a brother. He's a lot more than just an artist. That's not who he is.
Thank goodness, Father's Day is done and I can go back to the handwritten notes of my twins. They can tell me, “Here's what Paul is. Here's who you are, dad.”
The cool part is God sees you the same way. I got an exercise and I'm going to forward it to you. Pastor Travis from Atlanta talks about grace and a lot of us chase what we are as a person. This whole exercise and lesson are when we start from grace and recognize we are a one of one. We are a fingerprint. It doesn't matter what all the outside thinks of us. It matters what He thinks of us. Certainly, your kids are a good reflection of that mirror.
The Da Vinci's look back and know what their pieces of work were going to be worth. That's the same thing that I am. I am a Da Vinci. I am my own God's masterpiece. We’re uniquely created. You too and everyone. Every individual is a unique snowflake. We are one that's ever been and will ever be.
Thanks. This is awesome. The last question we've already touched on but I like to ask it anyway because it seems to me to be one of the most important, what role does faith play in your life? How would you describe it? What role does faith play?
In action. It is continuing in the game and the process. It’s continuing in the journey step by step, foot by foot. It’s continuing in that process as if we're going to have that. Faith is active. It's reaching out when I need it to reach out. It’s having conversations like this with somebody else that understands. Also, sharing the real truth with my kids so they can see that it's active. I do not stop. I may take a small break. It continues so I can potentially see where God's going to take me next.
We need rest from time to time. A friend of mine, Deb Brown Maher, wrote a book called Sell Like Jesus and it's an awesome book for salespeople because Jesus was a good salesperson. It's a little controversial because it's like, “He wasn't a salesperson.” He was the best seller in the history of time. She is taking a break right now and she said, “When I go to bed at night, I pray and I get these visions, the number 307 came up the other day.” She looked it up and she's like, “It's saying, ‘This is your time of rest.’” She's like, “God, I'm ornery and anxious to go back to helping people sell but if you're telling me to rest, I'm going to rest.” Sometimes we go through those seasons. They might feel like they're months, years, weeks or whatever. At the end of the day, when you look back, you go, “I needed that quarter, year or whatever it is.” It's God's time. That sometimes doesn't map up to human time.
Sometimes we just got to listen to that, “When is that time to stop?” Take a break and rest. Set things down. Take the headphones off. Get out from behind the little white light.
That’s an amazing conversation. The app is coming out. I'd love to get your feedback on it. There are two pieces that are pretty cool. One is crowdsourcing prayer. My son had a little accident in February 2020. It’s what caused me to build the app. He was cooking and it caught fire and it blew up in his face. He put water on it as a nineteen-year-old boy would do. He had 2nd and 3rd-degree burns, face and hands. It’s a terrible experience, three weeks in the hospital in the burn center. All we could do is pray. It's a physical thing. There are mental things we go through but there are physical things and it's your son. You're like, “God, I'm asking you for a miracle. I rarely asked for a miracle my whole life. I'm asking now.”
He goes into surgery, comes out, a week later they start to take the gauze off and his nose is healed. The skin under his eyes and his right hands were healed. I'm like, "Miracles do still happen." I feel like you're not supposed to tempt God and that was when I was like, “I'm sorry to ask, God. I'm going to do this. I need you to do this one time.” That’s why I put out 77 Pray because I have 20,000 people on LinkedIn so I put out a prayer request. Hundreds of people said yes. Not everybody has 20,000 connections on LinkedIn.
With this app, you can put your prayer out, “I'm prayerful that God puts me in the job that I'm meant for.” You'll be amazed as this app gets stood up. You'll see when people do it because they'll click the Done button. You go, “850 people prayed for me last night.” I had the whole United Airlines Pilot Association praying because people know people and it worked. That’s what I'm optimistic about. I don't know how to build an app. I happen to have someone contact me at the right place and right time. A team rolled that out It'll be live. We’ll plug you into the power of 77 Pray.
Thanks, Chad. It's a pleasure getting to go behind the scenes. I'm curious about what's been the most powerful principle or lesson that you've learned in this process? I'm sure you've had some interesting guests.
There are two big lessons so far in 35 of these. Lesson one was the second interview I did. He’s an undercover detective from New York City who used to bust organized crime. He goes in as a teenager or maybe in his early twenties. He's undercover getting into the gangs and busting them up. One time he gets the call and they say that there's a robbery or something or a shoot up at the Grand Central Station in New York. He goes and he's not familiar with what to do. When you go in guns a blazing, how do you handle it? He’s like, “I didn't stand sideways. I went in full chest open.”
Two shots to the chest and his partner that he went to help gets killed on the scene. He's questioning, “Why was I saved?” Why did he live? He's built a company that helps people become closer to Christ. He talked about his three sons. The biggest regret that he had was, “If there's one thing I could change, I would want my three sons to come back to church.” The world's changed and attendance is not the same as it used to be. I told him about the vision of 77 Pray. It was right when I was still in the early visioning stages of it. I said, “What if you could bring the church to the kids, instead of bringing kids to the church?” He was like, “That's powerful.” With virtual these days, there's so much you can do. It was amazing that the number one thing he cares about is that his kids find Christ throughout these interesting times we live in.
The second one cuts across the aisle. There is no aisle. There's just God. You can talk to someone in San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. It doesn't matter where they're at. When they've got a relationship with God, everything else becomes a moot point. It becomes, “Do what you can do for other people regardless because they live in their situation and they're faced with stuff that's tough for them so don't judge. Let God be the judge of them. Don't let us be the judge of them.” That's the biggest thing. Forgive them for they know not what they do.
I went through some interesting things that I was judged by people. I was like, “You don't know me? I'm a good person. What are you doing? What are you talking about?” It's not in court. It's the court of public opinion and it's all made up and fake news. That was frustrating but it helped me learn that they're living the life that they're meant to live and they have the opinions they have. That's them. I'm judged by God and no one else. Those are the two biggies.
Thank you. It's been a pleasure, Chad.
It’s good talking with you, Paul. I've got some follow-up action items to follow up with you. These meetings aren’t by chance with people who come on the show. God can move his mighty hand to help you progress towards where you're looking to get to.
Did I expect our conversation to go this way? I didn't know. I just took a step out in faith to say, “This is good stuff. I like what you're talking about. I like where you're going.” I relate to stories a lot better than I do when I can see or hear that person. I can relate to that in some way. One way or another, their story may not be the same but that story is powerful usually and you can remember it.
My son can make it through 2nd and 3rd degree burns in a three-week window. He didn't breathe in and that could have been the end. He didn't open his eyes. He could have lost his eyesight. Many worse things could have happened. He fell down and that helped. Another guy was in the room. He ran out of the room so a lot of good things happened. The main statement he had the day after it happened while he's there and his eyes were swollen shut, he could hardly see us, he goes, “Mom and dad, I'm glad this happened to me so it doesn't have to happen to anyone else in our family.” You’re like, “High-five.” He’s an amazing kid to have made that statement through that situation.
How old was he?
He was nineteen at that time.
That's amazing. I had an experience when I was 21 that was life-threatening myself.
You've lived through that stuff. It wakes up and tells which path to be on.
It got me back into the church. It made it personal. It's not so much about the church. It was about personal and about what's going on here.
Amen. I appreciate you being on the show, Paul. It’s fabulous getting to know you. I hope we can meet live. Maybe we'll do a chapter meeting in your region someday and bring together 30 like-minded people who bring their own stuff to the table and need to form a relationship. Thanks for sharing with me on the show
Thank you.
Important Links:
Paul Yuhas - LinkedIn
Second Interview - Gregory Demetriou: Keeping the Faith Through Small Acts
About Paul Yuhas
As a tactical, front-line, full-cycle recruiter and strategic Human Resource professional with a valuable blend of corporate recruiting and staffing experience, I have a proven track record of successful placements in high-pressure, fast-paced, and diverse environments.
I am an articulate and strong communicator with an eye for quality and have been recognized as a focused, high-energy individual who has consistently demonstrated the ability to effectively build business relationships across multiple geographies.
