Here’s a riff on what I’ve been learning since the last update and my challenge to consider different perspectives around the notion of time.

 

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Highlights

  • Learning can come from anything, including things that don’t happen
  • Bouncing between lots of different tasks and projects is tiring and unsatisfying
  • Decluttering pro-tip: take everything out of a particular close and only return the stuff that is staying
  • Taking the whole week of spring off was just what I needed
  • Are you “creating” or “reacting” ?
    • Creating is better
    • You can’t do both at the same time
    • Reacting is exhausting
  • The collective power of a group of people to give input into your life and business from the mastermind format
  • Embracing the ups and downs (being with them) instead of trying to make them go away as quickly as possible
    • Removing and avoiding personal judgment
    • Staying out of the comparison game to other people
  • Going for a walk and giving your brain a problem to solve on that walk
  • Three important topics that came from my walk
    • Relationships
    • Business building
    • Time & Rest
  • Missing conviction and commitment to my revenue goal for 2018
  • I’m having an upcoming Zoom call for people that want “more” from their life or business
  • Doubling down on theming my work
  • What does it mean if there’s something you want, but you aren’t consistently working to get it?

Credits

All songs licensed under Creative Commons

Transcript

This transcript was created automatically and may contain small errors.

Today I’m sharing the things that I learned in March and so far in April and whatever else comes up. So big learning, big learning. So March was going to be promotion month and it didn’t end up being that so much. One of the most surprising things I learned in my coaching training was the things that we can learn from the things that don’t happen. So what I learned was there’s not as much to promote as I thought there might be as it relates to my business, what I’m up to, etc.

So it ended up being kind of a funny month. I ended up working on some promotional things like LinkedIn, not so much that it’s that’s a promotional platform, but wanting to get my profile a little clearer about what I’m doing and more attractive to potential clients that check me out there to see what, you know, who I am and what I’ve been up to. So I went to a webinar on that. I did a few other things and I found myself bouncing from thing to thing to thing to thing.

That was kind of exhausting and not very satisfying. March was also the month of spring break here. Unlike previous years, we didn’t have a trip planned anywhere. And so this year was more focused on taking some day trips and working outside. It ended up that we only did one day trip.

We did several day trips. Days of working outside in the yard and also a huge decluttering project. There’s one closet in our den that kind of holds all my earthly treasures, and it was in a huge need of being decluttered. And so completely emptied the cupboard. This is what I recommend, by the way.

We’ve learned this through other decluttering exercises. You take Everything, everything out of the closet, and then you only put back the things that you’re gonna keep. It creates a tremendous mess, and, uh, but the closet that you end up with is so much better than what you started with versus trying to kind of do one shelf at a time or whatever. So try that out. So anyway, a lot of decluttering, a lot of time away from not really working on my thing almost a whole week.

And like the last surprise break that I took, I knew this one was going to be a break, but we weren’t sure, you know, how many days I was going to, quote, officially take off. I ended up just taking the whole week off, and it was exactly what I needed. It was exactly what I needed. During that week, incidentally, I published an old podcast that I had recorded, and kind of also in the category of constantly just being aware of what’s going on and what’s happening around you and who you are. As I listened to the energy of the recording that I did and the challenge that I gave to people in it, I wondered, who is this guy?

And I thought, oh, Yeah, that’s not me right now at all. Where did that energy come from? And I realized it had come from the mastermind event that I’d gone to in Los Angeles a couple weeks before I’d recorded that. And that, that had me kind of start down the path of asking some questions of, hmm, I get some of this energy back. As I mentioned a little bit ago, some— a lot of that energy was being lost in sending myself in circles, not focusing, just kind of hopping from one thing to the next to the next.

A really, really great question I got from my coach on this was, are you creating or reacting?

Something to consider when you think about your life right now. Are you creating stuff?

Are you reacting to other stuff? Maybe it’s your own stuff. But the idea that came to me there was you can’t do both at the same time. And ultimately one is more valuable than the other. Now, if your house is on fire, yes, you should react to that.

But in general, I find that reacting to things is exhausting. It makes you feel fragmented. You’re just constantly reacting to things. Versus sitting down and thoughtfully creating something. I also learned the power, the continued power of asking for what you think you need.

So the coach I’m working with did this same— did this mastermind group in Los Angeles I mentioned at the beginning of January, was super helpful to me. And so in conversation with them, I said, you know, maybe one of the things I need is to go to this event again. That seems like kind of a crazy idea, but maybe that could help me. And then I threw out some other possibilities that I had thought of, and they immediately came back and said, well, we’ve had some cancellations. You should come.

Why don’t you just come get a ticket? So with 2 days, 2 days to go, I found a fairly reasonably priced ticket from Portland to Los Angeles, booked it, Found some relatives I could stay with, got a rental car fairly cheap as well, and the rest is history. I went to the event and it gave me the energy that I was looking for and kind of put some more gas back in the tank. And the learning from that is that’s just how I roll. That is what I need.

Yes, I’m an introvert. I’m kind of actually right in the middle. I straddle the line between introvert and extrovert. I do definitely have a preference for kind of doing my thing and having time to myself and all that. But I really am coming to learn that I need energy and outside inputs from other people to give me energy, keep me focused on the right things, stay upbeat, stay encouraged.

I love to learn. And in this environment, And then the mastermind environment, there’s learning. It was 2 solid days of learning. So the way this event is structured is, I believe there were 10 people and then the facilitator of the group, that’s Rick Tamlyn. And each person had a hot seat of sorts that was anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half.

And this person would present What they were up to and then what they wanted help with. It was just mind-boggling how much wisdom is in a room like that, particularly when the, the audience is kind of self-selected and they’ve put skin in the game by paying money. And they’ve been self-selected by someone of the caliber of Rick Tamlyn. It was just— He had a lot of valuable contributions. There were also really valuable contributions from everyone in the room, and these were people from just a variety of disciplines.

Owners of a gym, experienced coaches, experienced business owners, HR professionals, someone from the movie industry. Just really just a diverse, diverse audience. But the power of this event was the collective energy of the group, not an individual person, which is, I guess, the theme I’m kind of riffing on here, which is I had to get out of the house and get myself into a group of people to get re-energized and re-broaden my perspectives.

What’s hilarious about this is that April was looking like a fairly quiet month. And on my way to this event at the airport, I got an email from a person that I had done coaching classes with that was leading a local workshop in Portland around leadership. And so they invited me to their 2-day workshop. Event, which once I found out what it was about, I immediately said, yes, I’m in. So that was another weekend, 2 days of, of workshop and getting to know some new people.

And then to top that off, I also finalized plans to assist at one of the CTI coaching training classes that’s going to be in Seattle. So another opportunity to meet a whole Another group of people. So I went from like no events to 3 in the same month, and it’s been nothing but good. So the big takeaway from this is that I got from both events is, given the choice to spend more time behind the screen and the keyboard creating stuff or meeting people, right now I absolutely need to be meeting people, meeting my, my kind of people, my, my tribe. And Whether it’s people I know or new people.

I guess there’s— I also have kind of a renewed interest and intrigue in meeting new people. That’s kind of new to me and kind of cool. Some of the things I learned were around the ups and the downs and the lows and the importance of really accepting them and being with them. Versus turning them into an immediate problem that needed to be solved. Also not trying to judge them as, you know, what’s wrong with me?

I’m in this low space. Oh, what’s wrong with me? I don’t have the drive and focus and energy that I had last week. And then also just trying to stay out of the comparison game. Why is this taking so long?

Why am I not like other people? Why, why, why? In, you know, a whole bunch of just totally unproductive, unhelpful areas. So the value of really acknowledging them, sitting with them, and then taking some actions to move them forward and unstick them. But again, not in the knee-jerk reaction of, yuck, let me get rid of this as fast as I can.

In one of these moments, I went for a walk. In fact, I was getting ready for a coaching session with my coach, and I just was not clear on what am I talking about? Where am I going? It just felt like everything was so fragmented. So I intentionally went for a long walk after dinner one night with the question— I kind of got this idea from Cal Newport from his book Deep Work a few years ago.

But it was this idea of going for a walk with a very specific problem to mull over and attempt to solve in your head. And so I went on this walk with, what do I need to talk about in this session tomorrow. And I walked and I walked, and about 30 minutes into it, I started to come up with some ideas. And there was a kind of a park bench along this one street, so I sat down on the park bench. I took out my phone.

I had not been listening to any podcasts or anything. I’d just been walking, just letting stuff just roll around in my head. And I came up with 3 things. That was really cool. I used the little Notes app so that it would sync with my computer and I could, you know, turn it into something later.

So the first thing I did was I opened Trello and I just kind of scanned all the cards that were there in the current columns. Right now I have a Today column, a This Week column, and a Backlog column. Those are the, those are the current columns I’m playing with. Anyway, I just scanned the cards for this week and this month and just kind of— is there an overall theme here?

And then as I thought about things, I just like, what were the things that were weighing on my mind? Like 3 things came up: relationships, business building, and time. Then relationships, some thoughts that came up there, maybe they’re useful to you to consider, was do I have the depth and connection in my relationships that I want to have? And realizing that There’s some missing. And so asking myself, what am I going to do about that?

Then when it came to business building, it was, what should my priorities be? I feel kind of lost, feel kind of overwhelmed. What are the— what should the near-term deliverables be? What should I be focusing on? And then around time, what are realistic expectations around how long it should take To do the stuff that I’m doing, for it to be successful, for it to really pay off.

And then also the idea of rest. How does rest factor into all this stuff? I can’t just grind it out every day for 12 hours and think that it’s gonna work. That seems to work for some people. I’m coming to see that it doesn’t work for me.

I have to have breaks. I have to have space. I have to be working on the right things and saying no to the wrong things like the news and social media and the things that distract me or weigh me down. So to that end, actually, I’ve started using— on my Mac, I’ve started using the application SelfControl, which you give it a list of places you don’t want to go and then it Locks you out for up to 24 hours. I wish it went for a longer period of time, but it doesn’t.

So this idea of resting, realizing there’s a lot of unrest around time, there’s disappointment that things are taking longer than I would like, and then really coming to a realization that what could be different if I looked at this as if I have enough time. That there’s always enough, that there’s gonna be enough time for what I need to do to happen. I know that’s kind of a mind-bender, and I know if you’re drowning in stuff, you’re thinking, give me a break, John, there’s not enough time. Like, just thinking that there’s enough time doesn’t create more time for me. But I would challenge you, it’s a perspective.

In coaching, with something a lot of times we talk about different perspectives on things. And, and I’ve, I’ve seen this with clients. I’ve seen this demonstrated in, in a coaching, in a real coaching demo where we took the notion of time and we created different perspectives, different perspectives around it that we could hold. For instance, you know, and some of them were just wacky and a little unbelievable, but they expanded the awareness and what was possible. So one perspective around time is that there’s always enough.

Another perspective is there’s not enough. Another perspective is it’s finite. So anyway, where I’m going with this is see what could be different as you take a step back and look at your day if you started from the perspective of there’s enough time. So recapping on this one. Some things you might want to think about: relationships.

What’s going on with the relationships in your life? Are you satisfied with where they’re at? Do you need to have a conversation with someone to say, I want more, here’s what I’m going to do, here’s what I’d like us to do? Business building. Are you building a business?

How are you feeling about that? What’s working? What’s not? And then your relationship to time. How What’s your initial thought about time when you think about time in a particular day or week?

The other thing I learned was around a revenue goal that I had set for this year and realizing that I’m not totally committed to it. It’s kind of one of those, yeah, it’d be nice if it happened, but if it doesn’t, oh well. I haven’t gotten to the bottom of this totally. But I am asking myself, what does this mean? What does this mean that I am not committed to this number?

And by committed, I mean I will do everything under heaven and earth to try to achieve this amount of revenue. So I’m still sorting that out. But I’ve seen this also in my work with clients where for whatever reason, we just never quite get this thing across the finish line. And what I’ve started to see as a pattern is underneath that is, what is the level of commitment? Are you 110% committed to making this happen or is it just a nice idea?

Back to this idea of spending time with people and meeting new people. I’m going to do this on a virtual level. So I am going to be having a Zoom call. It’s going to be around coaching, basically doing some spot coaching with people, helping you move forward something in your life that you want more of. So if you want to find out about that, be sure to get on my list.

I will be sending something to the list, and I’ll probably post on social media as well. It’ll be a Zoom— yeah, like I said, it’ll be a Zoom call. And we’ll see what happens with that. I don’t know what the outcome is going to be, but my goal here is to start showing up more and experimenting with things and not thinking about them so much. So in terms of the rest of April and what’s going on here, a real focus on doubling down on theming.

Highly recommend listening to episode 46 with Mike Fardy. I’m going to be doing some more about what I’m learning around that. Hopefully it’ll be helpful to you as well. So getting serious about that and almost looking at April as a month to regroup, get on track. And get on track, not that there’s like one right track, but maybe Get back headed into a better overall direction.

In terms of doing that overall direction, one of the questions I’m really digging into is, what do I want? What am I really looking for out of this time that I have right now in 2018? Is it making a certain amount of money? Is it about having a certain level of— Freedom. Impact with people?

Is it meeting a certain number of new people? I’m still working on that, but I think it’s a useful question that can help all of us, which is, what do we really want? Where are we headed? And if we say something, if we say that we really want something, but we’re not consistently going after it, What’s that all about?