Ken Huey 0:00

Welcome to The Voice of Hope, where bold leaders and healers share how they're building hope, not just talking about it. I'm Dr. Ken Huey. Let's meet the changemakers transforming lives from the therapy room to the boardroom. Today's guest is Nick Padlow, TEDx speaker, mental health advocate, and founder and CEO of Sopros Recovery. Breakthroughs Counseling, you also founded a West Point grad and Stanford MBA. Nick is an Inc. 1000 CEO and Army Combat Veteran who is pioneering innovative PHP and IOP addiction treatment programs to help people reclaim their lives. Passionate about recovery and leadership, he is building impactful businesses that expand access to quality behavioral health care. Nick, thank you very much for joining us.

Nick Padlo 0:48

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Ken Huey 0:50

Yeah. So you describe yourself as a guy in recovery. Tell us about that, your personal journey and how it led you here.

Nick Padlo 0:57

Yeah, so I went to West Point. I was in the Army, went out, went to business school, and was running a business out of Dallas, and the business was doing really well, and I was not. There were a lot of things I finally felt emotions and didn't know how to handle those. I coped with drugs and alcohol, and that made the emotions bigger. And so I coped more. You know, until I got to the point where I just didn't think life was worth living. And I hit my own rock bottom moment, which was really just me making that decision of whether or not to go on. And fortunately, I had enough gas left in the tank to Google rehab centers and I ended up at a really good one. And I'd love to say that was my last drink, and it was not. I had to do it again, but it was it started that process for me and it started my journey to what is just such a better life for me.

Ken Huey 1:43

Yeah. It's interesting. So often I talk to people who've been down the addiction road and had to figure out how to do that or get into recovery. And there's such a rawness and frequently vulnerability to that, which I so appreciate. But why? You're just you're out there with it. Why be so open? I think it's fantastic.

Nick Padlo 2:03

Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. I think two reasons. One is the most obvious reason, which is it's what I do for a living, right? So it's easy for me personally to be open about it because it's part of my story and part of the business's story. I think that's the easiest reason. But the benefit of it that I find is it allows me to impact other people. And so often when I tell that story, somebody will say something like, man, I'm struggling too, or like, yeah, I know what that's like. My sister went through that, or my sister's going through that, or my brother, or my mom, or my dad. And so it really allows us to leverage our story to help other people. And I think that that keeps me sober in a lot of ways. And frankly, if I was out at a bar drinking in Jacksonville, there's a real good chance somebody would recognize me because I am so open with my story. So that's one more thing between me and the next drink.

Ken Huey 2:52

Yeah, I love that. I read many years ago that what was the biggest factor that kept people from slipping into addiction again, falling off the wagon, so to speak, was having an identity as somebody in recovery.

Nick Padlo 3:07

Well, and you should think about your friend groups. My friends are all army guys, and if I said I wasn't drinking, they would do everything within their power to get me to have a shot with them just because they wanted to get me to drink. If I let them know that I'm an alcoholic and this thing is like threatening my life and that I'm not okay if I drink, they're the last ones that would let me have a drink. They would they'd sooner punch me in the face than let me have another drink. So it just flips the dynamic from having a friend group that, in my case, would probably peer pressure me to drink to a friend group that would do everything within their power not to let me drink. So it just it really flips that dynamic as well.

Ken Huey 3:41

Yeah. All right, let's talk a little bit about your focus of your career. What inspired you to focus your career on improving access to behavioral health and addiction treatment? No, we talked about some of it. What else would you add? Yeah.

Nick Padlo 3:54

You know, I think for a lot of us who served in the army, our identity was inextricably linked with what we did. Who we are was an army guy. It was part of our image. It was a big part of our image. And the army does that on purpose. The military does that on purpose in order to create a better esprit de corps, right? But I think that early on I learned that's what I like, what I thrive in, where my where I have a personal reason behind what I'm doing. And even the first run when I worked in pet cremation, I owned a pet crematory, but I loved animals. I love animals and they were my passion, and my dogs were my favorite thing. And I had this ability to help other people through a tough time with their dogs, and I got it because I had two dogs that I loved. And going through this experience and treatment, as any good entrepreneur would do, I'm coming up with ideas while I'm in rehab. And of course, my therapist is telling me I need to focus on myself first before I do that, which he was completely right. I think for me, having that mission of the business tied with something that's really meaningful to me like helps me perform better. If I perform at 100 when it's tied, maybe I perform at a 23 when it's not. I'm not one of those people that just when I love what I do, I perform here, and when I hate what I do, I perform here. There are people like that. It's not me.

Ken Huey 5:04

Yeah. Okay. West Point and Combat. All right. That's gotta leave some marks. And how did it influence your perspective on trauma and resilience?

Nick Padlo 5:17

My experience in war, I was not an infantry soldier, I was not a special forces guy, but I was always attached to the infantry. I was on a mid-team in Iraq, and so, you know, I think I had a pretty fair combat experience. A lot of combat missions, a lot of time outside the wire. Never lived on the big base where there's the coffee and the massages, and never got that luxury, right? And you get your mail and all that stuff. So I was out in it to some extent. And so I'd say my experience was somewhere in the middle. I don't know what percentile as far as trauma or difficulty or whatever. But for so long, I always said that I didn't have that PTSD moment. You know, I didn't have the moment where I held my friend who was dying on the battlefield, and I don't get to qualify for that. I don't deserve to address that trauma because so many of my friends saw it worse. But when I look back and I say, man, I was deployed for 27 months and we got rocketed every night, and my truck got blown up by IEDs more than once. When I look at those things, if you tell a civilian that, they'll say, that's not normal. And so I've come to realize that, you know, those traumas, even if they're not PTSD, stack up and they do impact you. And I think that me trying to figure out where a lot of my challenges and issues stemmed from and what I need to address, it certainly was part of it. And I'm very thankful for the time that I served and the things that I did and my friends that I gathered there and all that. And at the same time, I have to let myself know that even just re remaining hyper-vigilant and trying not to get killed for 27 months straight. Well, not straight, there's a little break between, but 27 months is does a lot to the nervous system.

Ken Huey 6:55

Yeah. Fascinating to me that uh there's even in the middle of trauma, that's intense stuff. The idea of IEDs blowing up your truck and things. But we always want to compare to well, some so-and-so, that's really where it was bad. You know, oh, but to your average American, they're going, well, damn, that's a small thing. When you reflecting on it now, I'm stumbling here, but let's think this through. I'll start over. You look at it now without comparing necessarily to somebody else's trauma. How do you reflect on the level of what you saw and did?

Nick Padlo 7:30

I mean, I think for me, the biggest challenge was this constant state of hypervigilance. For so long you're worried about the lion behind the next corner, right, that's gonna eat you. And you see so many veterans from Vietnam, from the Gulf War, from my war, from other wars, and you see them and they're sitting at an Applebee's and their back is to the wall and they know where the exits are. And there's a reason for that, right? Nothing's gonna happen. It's 4:30 on a Tuesday at Applebee's. Nothing is gonna happen. I don't need to carry a gun. Things are gonna be okay. No one's gonna try to kill me today. Some people who experience war and experience what I've experienced, yeah, they fight that their whole life. They're always in that state. They never come home from the war because something's always about to go down and they must be ready. Well, the tax on your nervous system, the anxiety, the cortisol, the way that affects our dopamine and serotonin and neuroepinephrine, like all those body systems, it's just a lot. And so I've really had to learn how to exist in the present moment for what the present moment is, and a lot of mindfulness practice has been helpful to me.

Ken Huey 8:37

Yeah. What are some of the biggest barriers people face when seeking help for that kind of trauma and substance abuse and mental health challenges, challenges?

Nick Padlo 8:47

I think the biggest barrier is the one we place on ourselves. We're taught in the army that if you sprain your ankle, you run on it, you just keep going, ignore the pain and just stick with the team. And so I think the biggest challenge is this tough it out mentality that we have collectively. And it's especially prevalent around mental health because that seems like a substance is because that's a willpower thing. It I'm putting in air quotes a willpower thing. Get out of bed. I feel depressed, just do it. I can't, I can't get out of bed right now. And so we try to make ourselves do it because we tell ourselves it's a willpower thing. Don't have that next drink. Oh, you're stronger than that. I'm not stronger than that. I clearly wasn't. And you know, we have to let that go and say we need help. And how I've tried to reframe it with other vets is to say, you know, when you were in combat, would you have ever run away from an enemy? And they said, No, I would never run away from an enemy. Well, then right now, your enemy is alcohol, it's drugs, it's depression, it's anxiety. Like, why are you running away now? And so we've got to face it.

Ken Huey 9:45

Yeah. You spoke it to the Ted X recently. What's the core message about recovery and hope that you wanted the audience to get?

Nick Padlo 9:55

I wanted the audience to understand that in order to have solid mental health, in order to find recovery for those of us who are struggling, there's no one solution. So if we were building a house and we had a hammer, that's a great thing to have to build a house. You probably need a hammer to build a house. But you're not going to be able to build that house without a saw and without a level and without a broom and without all the other tools, screws, and everything that we need. And so life being much more complex than building a house requires another set of tools, a big set of tools. And some of those tools are physical, some are mental. Within the mental health tools, you might need cognitive behavioral therapy one day where you have to reframe an unhealthy thought. Another day, you might just have to accept that thought and do something else anyway, which is dialectical behavior therapy and mindfulness. And so you have to stack all these tools within a toolkit in order to be the best version of you. At least I have to do that to be the best version of me.

Ken Huey 10:51

And talk about accountability, if you would, and what role it plays in healing and transformation.

Nick Padlo 10:57

I think addiction thrives in the darkness, it thrives in secrecy, it thrives in isolation. And one of the reasons is because if it's just me, then I'm not hurting anybody other than myself. And at least I think that's true at the time. And so sometimes my brain will say, Nobody's gonna know. Nobody's gonna know today. And that's fine, except for I know. And the problem is if I get away with it, then I'm gonna do it again. And if I get away with it, I'm gonna do it again. And then at some point, the walls collapse for me. And for me, having accountability, whether that's my sponsor, whether that's my therapist, whether that's my friends, whether it's my colleagues, whether it's a breathalyzer that I volunteered to take for a year after that had Bluetooth and notified everybody, like the all these accountability measures that I say, man, I want to put this in place so that I don't do what I don't want to do. Because the reality is 98% of the time I don't want to be drinking. Even when I was in active addiction, I didn't want to be drinking 98% of the time. But that 2% of the time, that time when I can hide in the darkness, when I can isolate, when I think nobody's gonna know, that's all it takes. This isn't like baseball where batting 300 is okay. I've got to bat 100%, right? Because just that small crack, and then I've released all these brain chemicals, and then I've taken the power of choice away from me. I don't have the once I start drinking, I'm no longer making the decision to drink. At that point, it's my brain making the decision for me. If I don't pick up, I've got the choice to pick up the first time. And so I've got to have accountability in order to make sure I don't do that.

Ken Huey 12:38

Yeah. All right, we've talked a little bit about being a veteran and really identity loss and hyper-vigilance. I'm a veteran and I'm that's my deal, man. I just where was I and I'm just hyper-vigilant. What are what's a practical first step you would recommend to moving through that?

Nick Padlo 12:55

I think therapy is great. I obviously I'm a little biased, but I think therapy is great. I think having somebody to talk to about this stuff that's not in your friend group, not in your family, somebody that's external where you can start to voice some of these things and get a sounding board that might be a little more objective. Um, I think that's a first step. And then the second step for me was really developing a mindfulness practice. And people say, Oh, meditation, I can't keep my brain still, whatever it might be. Meditation is just learning how to focus. So focus on the thing that's in front of you and that that thing being okay. So even if it's not meditation, it's what are the things that we do where we're lost in that moment, so to speak. Might be fishing, might be golfing, might be going for a walk where when I do this, I feel like I can focus on one thing and my brain's not jumping around. Well, do more of that thing. Start to live in that place. And what you do is you train your brain to be able to come back to the present moment. So it's not about necessarily going for the walk or meditating or fishing or whatever it might be. It's about learning how to exist in the present moment and doing those repetitions like you would at the gym so that it feels more natural when something happens and you get taken away. That's like you know what it's like to come back. And so that's been a big thing for me.

Ken Huey 14:04

Yeah. Well, Nick, you're walking around the planet walking a walk that matches your talk, and I really appreciate it. Thank you for what you're doing. People are gonna hear this and they're gonna want to know how do I find out more about this Nick guy? How should they find out about you?

Nick Padlo 14:19

You can find me on LinkedIn. We're on Instagram at SoftRos Recovery, S-O-P-H-R-O-S recovery, first recovery.com. There's plenty of places, and my email is Nick at softrostrecovery.com if anybody ever wants to email me. So I'm an open boat. All right, Nick. Thank you very much.

Ken Huey 14:34

Thanks for joining us on The Voice of Hope. If you were inspired, share the light. And remember, hope's not just a feeling, it's a force. We'll see you next time.