No don't go in there, Daddy's working.
Jonathan: Really, I should not be sitting here with you right now. I'm breaking a rule that I've set for myself for nearly the last 4 years. So check this out, last week I got a phone call, and it was my buddy, Jeff, the vet over in Colorado, good friend, good friend with him and his family. We go skiing together. For the last couple of years, we have been skiing together and we talked, the last time we were together, and Strategic Coach came up and how much I love Strategic Coach and you guys, if you’ve been listening to this, I've mentioned it all the time, four years in the program I must like it, investing ten grand a year to be there and seeing no end in sight to that because I really love being a part of the program. [0:01:07.3]
I was telling him about it. He was asking me different questions and before I knew it, he was signing up for Coach. I put him in touch with my advisor and he signed up, and I was happy for him and excited for him to be on this journey and kind of excited myself to have another friend that gets it. It's the whole Coach and Dan Sullivan creating a self-managing company, having more freedom, being inside your unique ability, all those things are exciting to me and it's fun to have someone close to me to share them with. So he calls me last week and wants to rap a little bit. He went to his first session. He was in Toronto, went to his first session of Coach and they talked a lot about the entrepreneurial time system. In fact, in the first year, that's pretty much where we spent all our time was getting the entrepreneurial time system installed in our business and living by it and that's one of the reasons why I'm telling you today that I shouldn’t be here. [0:02:08.5]
For the last four years, I have a set schedule of taking three free days a week, and I'm not going to say that I always get them or they're always perfect, but that is the schedule. It's on my schedule that way and I usually take Wednesdays, which is a free day, just for me. No family. Nothing. Nothing put on me. It's all my day. And obviously, Saturday and Sunday kiddo is out of school, everybody is around, so that's prime family time. Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, and I'm pretty good about not working on Wednesday, but at the time I'm recording this, it is a Wednesday and it's like, uhhh! You're breaking your rules. And there's a reason for that, because I love work. Not really. I do love my work, but there's a bigger reason. [0:03:00.7]
School is nearly out. Summer is here at the time I'm recording this and our kiddo, Huddy, will no longer be in weekday school. He was there 4 days a week. He's now no longer on weekday school and Cupcake is running around saying, "What am I going to do with this kid? How are we going to deal with this? How are we going to get any work done? Oh my God! The sky is falling." And I decided to be proactive about it. Instead of letting Cupcake worry about it all by herself and making her be sole caretaker of Huddy, I'm not going to miss out on this. The kid's just turning 5. He's fun to be around. We have freedom and I want to take full advantage of it. We live downtown. There's museums. There's a park. There's all kinds of things we could be doing. We're in Florida. There's plenty of lakes. There's beaches. There's adventures waiting for us around every corner, so I'd foolish not to take advantage of that, and that's really what today's show is all about. [0:04:11.0]
I'm going to brag about my summer vacation, not really, but I am going to give you some tools to help you recharge, and that’s what these free days are really all about, is most entrepreneurs will run themselves into the ground working in their business. Very few, the ones who do the best, are the ones who know how to take some space, away from the business and recharge, and that's what we're talking about. So let's jump in. I don't know if I told you about this, but several years ago when we were about the third year into our adoption process, so I've probably said on the show before, if not, Huddy was adopted. [0:05:08.3]
He joined our home when he was about two and half years old. We brought him home from the Philippines and it was a long process. It was a grueling process and it took nearly three years to get him home, so we started the process before he was born. This kid was meant to be with us. I'm sure of that. But it was tough. It was really tough but I don’t want to get down into that story. What I want to tell you is that since I had a timeline and I knew that it was going to be about three years, in the third year, I started doing some things, shaking things up, getting a little crazy. Maybe I was sowing my wild oats, I don’t really know what that means, but I decided to do some things and in my mind, it was prep work. [0:06:05.3]
I thought that if I did some stuff that scared the hell out of me, that being a dad wouldn’t be so scary, so one of the things I did was I've been terrified of water since I was a kid, the beach in particular, getting knocked over by waves and getting the wind knocked out of me and thinking that I was going to die standing up, choking on water. You know, those events scarred me, and I became afraid of water, not like lake or pool but more than anything the beach. And one of the things that I decided to do is, hey, you're afraid of water. Why don’t you get scuba certified? Yeah, that sounds great. Spend two days with heavy equipment and tanks under water to help with your fear of water, right. It worked out. [0:07:02.9]
I got certified. I made it through the class and they made fun of me because they called me an air hog because under water while I'm having my panic attacks, I'm breathing like [breathing in and out] and killing tanks of air. I was the only person refilling all the time, so they nicknamed me air hog, so that was fun. Did it. Conquered it. Got over some of my fears. And it was fun. I don't know that I would do it again, but I wouldn’t take it back. Another thing I did with one of my buddies, good friend, like a brother to me, was a little bit different. Got up in an airplane over here in Titusville, went up 15,000 feet and then jumped out. Yeah, we went skydiving. I never really wanted to go skydiving, but it was another thing. It sounded really scary as hell to me. I thought, yeah, I'm going to try that. [0:08:01.9]
I didn’t want to do it, but I'm going to try it because it's very scary, and why should I be afraid of that? People do it all the time and live. It's not like I'm going to be the lotto winner. It's not like I'm going to be the one that dies on that parachute trip, although Cupcake thought that, and we got into a big argument about it, but that was a terrifying experience. I think that was worse than the scuba diving, seriously. When we jumped out of that plane and I smelled those fumes and I looked back and I just see the plane moving away from me, I was in sheer panic. I've talked about it on the show before. I can't remember, one of the earlier episodes, maybe number five or so, but the reason I did these things is because I was trying to shock my system. I was putting myself in a position that was totally unfamiliar, seemingly out of my control, and just shocking myself into how I could keep cool under pressure. [0:09:03.6]
With the scuba diving, it was doing all the exercises, being under water, learning what the instructors were teaching me so that even if I was still panicking a little bit, I was still able to act. Jumping out of that airplane, it was like 30 seconds of free fall until I was like, alright, I'm not dead. Try to enjoy this. You got a minute left. But shocking the system, this is one of the things I feel like most people overlook, is when they're trying to make a change, when they're trying to do something different, they make a small, little change, something tiny, almost nonexistent. If you're making such a small change, how do you expect to get a big result? You can't. So you got to make big changes. You’ve got to shock the system. So, first step of recharging, shock the system. Do something totally different. I told you today is, as I'm recording this, is a Wednesday, and I'm not supposed to be working today, and I'm making a little change. [0:10:06.5]
So let's talk about that change. A long time ago, I was doing a podcast called "Making Agents Rich." In fact, it's the first podcast on The Podcast Factory network, our system, "Making Agents Rich", Darin Persinger, great mentor to me. He just had another kid, so happy for him, now he's got the boy and the girl and the perfect family. Super cool. Darin inspired me in so many different ways that I can't ever thank him enough for what he did for me and my family, and I'm always grateful to him. On one of the shows, I can't remember which one, because we recorded nearly 200 of them while we were doing the "Making Agents Rich" show, he talked about nature of abhorring a void. [0:11:03.1]
Nature hates a void. So if you create a void in nature, it's going to do whatever it can to fill that void. It's like that no matter what. If you create a void, there's going to be empty space there, and something is going to fill it, and that's why it's so important to be intentional about creating voids. And to follow along with my example because maybe this is like a little too heady, but I talked about being in Strategic Coach and how my free days were usually Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday, and if I fill my Friday or if I fill my Wednesday with something, it creates a void on my Friday. There's an empty space there. Nature hates that. [0:12:02.3]
So nature is going to try to put things on my calendar for Friday. In order to be successful at recharging, you need to be intentional. So I am working Wednesday so that I can have family time Friday. So I'm filling up that void before nature can do it because if you create a void and you have nothing prepared to fill it, it will be filled for you. So that's why you have to plan, ladies and gentleman. If you want to recharge and you create time in your calendar to recharge, you have to be intentional. You have to have a plan. You have to know what you're going to do with the space you created. Speaking of filling a void, I think that there's a void in your subscriptions right now. If you have not subscribed to this show, then you're missing out. [0:13:01.7]
The good news is you can fix that very quickly. You can fill that void. All you have to do is go to wherever you listen to podcasts, type in daddy's working, and click the subscribe button, and while you're there, you might notice another void. It's the void in reviews and ratings. So maybe you can fill that void for me. You don’t have to, but definitely subscribe. I don’t want you missing out on anything here that could help improve your life. So let's move on to the next part. So we're talking about my summer game plan for recharging, and really you can use this for any time of the year. It's not just the summer game plan. I'm just using that story here because it fits, because that's what I'm going through right now. But we talked about shocking the system, being present, like that's what's wonderful about shocking the system. [0:14:02.7]
It forces you to be present in that moment. Then we talked about creating space, creating a void and being intentional about creating that space and that void for you to put in some recharging time, and now we're going to talk about the last piece because I told you that nature hates a void, or as Darin put it in "Making Agents Rich", "Nature abhors a void." He probably got that from Wikipedia or something, trying to sound so smart, that guy. But nature hates a void and it will do anything it can to fill the void. So, you must be intentional when you make a void, when you make space for recharging time on your calendar that you have something to put in there. You must feed it something new, whether that's an adventure with your family or you want to go to the spa and get a massage or you want to just go to the beach and sit around and paddle around on your surf board. [0:15:00.3]
You got to have something to put in that void. So some of the mistakes I see people make is they're really, they don’t invest in recharging. They don’t actually take action and make intentional decisions about recharging. They're not spending their recharging time or they're not investing their recharging time into getting better, and because of this, you fail to evolve. And so recharging isn't always just taking time off. It could be taking some time in your calendar and improving some skills, taking time and investing it into people, friends, family. It could be making a void so that you have time to improve your capabilities, and of course, the one that I'm talking about today is really rest and replenishing. [0:16:02.1]
You got to make time to rest and replenish, and this is, I mean, you want to recharge. You got to shock your system. You got to give it something it's never seen before because it forces you to be present. When you are present and when you are focused, you're able to create space. You're able to be aware and see the spots where you can make some space, and once you’ve made that space, you have to have a plan of what you fill that space with. [0:16:29.8]
So that's everything I have for you today. I will be back next time with something super cool, although I don’t know what it is right now. Make sure that you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts, and I will be back in your ear buds next week.
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