The day stress poured down on me. Literally.
🪜 March 1998.
The first warm day in a long time. My wife Beth and I decide to take our two-year-old Kenny out to play in the yard.
When we get out there I tell Beth I’m going to unclog our front gutter.
All winter long the freezing rain had been running off the roof, over the gutter and onto our sidewalk. We had icicles and ice patches all winter long.
I got up in our plant box and tested the downspout at the end of the gutter.
I tapped on it, hoping to find the clog. I tapped up as far as I could reach and never found the clog.
So I went back into the garage and pulled out the step ladder.
I put it in the plant box and started climbing. I tapped all the way up to the top of the downspout and found nothing.
The crime scene
⚠️ I need to stop here and say that this was not my brightest moment.
Not finding the clog, I decided to remove the downspout from the gutter. I pulled it down, and what do you know? There was a mass of mud, bird poop, shingle parts, and so on.
At this point, I am directly under the clog.
Let me now repeat what I said before: this was not my brightest moment.
Because the next thing I did really defies any logical explanation.
👉 I decided to test the clog to see how bad it was.
With my finger.
I reached up and poked at it.
That was all it took to dislodge the plug.
And in that moment, I was Wile E. Coyote – when he’s about to get hit by the boulder.
Except I didn’t have an umbrella. ☔️
The first thing that happened was the clog broke into bits and hit my head.
The human brain can have thoughts in a micro second, at least it can before it gets hit with gallons of 33 degree water.
And as soon as the clog hit my head I had a thought: I’m going to need to take a shower.
That’s exactly what I got. An ice cold shower.
🐔 That’s when the chickens lost it — clucking, flapping, yelling in panic.
Cynical Cedric yelled, “WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?”
Then the ice water hit them too… and suddenly I had a coop full of frozen chickens.
❄️ Side note: I do not recommend this method for silencing chickens.
And as the water kept running on my head I had another thought.
DON’T. LEAN. BACK.
Because if I leaned out of the way I was going to fall off the ladder, and out of the box as well.
So what did I do?
I leaned in.
This meant that the water which had previously been pouring on my head was now running down the back of my neck, into my jacket, into my shirt, into my pants.
I don’t know how long this went on, but my best guess at the time was forever.
Eventually it stopped. I climbed down the ladder.
Beth has a fantastic sense of humor (she married me after all). But in that moment she wasn’t laughing. She looked at me and said:
“Come on – we have to get you inside and warmed up.”
I walked into the house. She got me a towel and ran me a hot bath.
💡 Lesson
Stress is all around us – it’s going to hit. And when it does, you need to have someone to lean on, someone to help you.
👉 Who is your go-to person to lean on?
💡 Stress costs companies billions every year. I kill stress. Now booking 2026. Reply STRESS and I’ll send you details on bringing this message to your team