Designing A Life You Value - Halfass to Badass

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Resources Mentioned in this Episode:

To talk to Satori, go to https://www.talktosatori.com

3 Key Points:

Find out how Satori dealt with a decision that cost him more than just money.
Find out how you can stay focused on the essentials and not get trapped in information overload.
Learn how Satori coaches a woman to get balance in her life

Show Notes:

Skip to: 00:57 How do you find balance? Is it even possible? Is there such a thing?

Skip to: 02:30 Let me ask you, how do you juggle all the moving parts of your life? Have you ever stopped and looked at what pulls for your attention?

Skip to: 02:57 If you don’t take command of your focus and fill your day with high priority activities that are meaningful to you, your life will be filled with low priority, stress-inducing distractions that are meaningless.

Skip to: 04:29 But let me ask you, Who’s life are you living?”.

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FULL TRANSCRIPT:

You don’t understand Satori, it’s really hard to build a business, to be a good parent, it’s such a struggle to juggle it all, how do I find balance?

Hey, what’s up my friends, Satori Mateu here and welcome to a Brand new episode of Halfass to Badass.

Good morning, good evening, good afternoon wherever you are in listening right now…

How do you find balance? Is it even possible? Is there such a thing?

I was in a conversation with a client, and she says,

“Satori, I get up early every morning to meditate, I make breakfast for the kids, get them ready for school, make sure they have snacks. I have to have everything ready in time so my husband can take them to school. After they leave the house, I put on a load of laundry, clean up the kitchen, vacuum quickly with my handheld because the kids leave a mess after breakfast. I then do my 20 min workout, take a quick shower and by 9am I am at my desk ready to start working on my business.

As soon as I get started I’m on a roll and I’m focused, but then I hear the buzzer from the dryer. So I turn that off, throw the clothes in a basket so I can take care of it later. I get text messages from sister. I get notification from Instagram from people I follow. I get private messages on Facebook messenger from a people who are in my entrepreneur group and before I know it, it’s time for lunch and soon after that, it’s time to go pick up my kids from school and take them to soccer practice and gymnastics. How am I supposed to get anything done? I feel I start getting momentum and then something comes and pulls me away…”

I’ll come back to this conversation in just a moment but first…

Let me ask you, how do you juggle all the moving parts of your life? Have you ever stopped and looked at what pulls for your attention?

What are the disruptions, distractions and demands (which I call the 3D’s) in your life? How do you take command of your focus and create momentum in the midst of whirlwind?

Here’s why this important. If you don’t take command of your focus and you let the 3D’s (disruptions, distractions, and demands) run your life, your life will be like a ship without a captain and you won’t be able to weather the storm when it really matters. Is this making sense?

If you don’t take command of your focus and fill your day with high priority activities that are meaningful to you, your life will be filled with low priority, stress-inducing distractions that are meaningless.

And who will pay for that?

You will. Your kids will. Your spouse. Your clients. Are you following?

You’ll feel stressed, overwhelmed, unfulfilled. Which can take the form of overeating, overdrinking, binge-watching Netflix, taking 20 min bathroom breaks with your phone numbing your brain with other people’s fantasy lives on social media.

You may snap at the wrong people. You won’t be present in your key relationships, are you with me? And that’s just me scratching the surface of the consequences.

Back to the conversation with my client…

I say to her, “I understand you’re not getting the momentum you want. You’re not moving fast enough and you’re working hard to navigate all the parts of your life, right? Your family, your business, you meditate to take care of yourself. I get it. It’s now always easy.

But let me ask you, Who’s life are you living?”

“She’s like what do you mean?”

“Well, who designed this life? Whose path is this?

She got quiet for a moment…

“I don’t know. Haven’t thought that.”

“I understand, most people don’t. Is it ok if I share some life design strategies with you?”

And so we started talking about it and the more we talked about she realized how non-consious, how undeliberate she was living. And she was blown away, the more she saw how she was living according to automatic social norms she had been conditioned to live by. Even though she was an entrepreneur growing her own business. She wasn’t working 9-5 for someone else but still stuck in unconscious patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving. In other words, habits she had stopped paying attention to a long time ago.

When we started looking at her patterns I asked her, “You told me earlier that you feel frustrated when you get messages and feel like you have to answer them right away. What would you have to believe in order to feel this way, what are your thoughts?”

“That if I don’t answer right away, I’m rude. Disrespectful. And… That they’ll be upset with me.”

“Aha, and how does that make you feel…?”

“Even more stressed!?” She starts laughing. Sounds a little bit nervous.”

And I said, “That’s right. Here’s what I want you to notice. You’re thinking, I don’t want to be rude. Disrespectful. I don’t want them to get mad at me. Be upset. Right? The moment you think that, you’re immediately sending a message to your brain, that sends a signal to your body making you feel just the way you think, and then your body sends a confirmation back to your brain saying, ‘yup that’s how you’re feeling’ and now you get even more thoughts. And you go, I’m so stressed. I have to respond… and you whip yourself in into an overwhelming loop that just keeps cycling, right? And this is NOT something new. True?”

“That’s true. How do I get out of this? How do I stop it.”

I said, “Great question. Here’s what I want you to get first. These loops; these thoughts, feelings and behavioral habits are just memorized patterns from your past of how you believe you ought to respond. And you do it perfectly without even having to think about it. It’s automatic. Are you with me? So, therefore, your future won’t change. You’ll keep dragging your past into the future and reliving it. It will just become an exact replica of your past, and you’ll just keep triggering stress and survival hormones. Not useful if you want to live a fulfilling life and have a big impact.

So the first thing we want to do is to start to deliberately pay close attention to number one, the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that keep repeating themselves. But you’re NOT here to

analyze or judge or criticize yourself. Just to observe. I want you to be relentless in your curiosity about watching these habits happening. Got it?”

“I got it.”

“I said, it won’t be easy because the moment you go into any of these habits you’ll be seduced into the cascade of emotions which got you into trouble to begin with. And you’re so familiar with them because they’re normal to you and you may start justifying them to yourself. Just like an addict. So I want you to text me or call me the moment it happens. Cool?”

And she did. She was very focused to break these habits and give herself and her family an opportunity to a brand new future.

Why am I sharing this with you? Because what my client and I did as we started to unravel these automatic patterns that caused so much stress and overwhelm and leaving her unfulfilled and not inspired by the amazing business she was building, is that she, like millions of others, was living by someone else’s norms. Someone’s else’s standard of how life “should” be like.

Balance is not a place without friction, without challenges.

Balance is a place designed and birthed from your values, not based on the projections of other people’s values or social norms.

How much you work. How much time you spend with your family. How you take care of your well being, could be questioned by everybody, but it has to come from you and your design.

My life is not like anyone else’s. There may be similarities but it’s still a fingerprint unique according to our values. We world school our kids. And in a future episode, I’ll go deeper into what that means how we do it. We travel a lot. We can work from anywhere. We’re not tied to a particular place. But we do know we want to live where it’s sunny most of the time and has palm trees. Our team is also mobile.

Most of our lunches and dinners we eat together. We work and travel together. It’s part of our kids’ schooling.

I was not lucky or privileged. This is by design. This is how I wanted it to be. I didn’t want to work from home or in a remote office by myself and only see my kids and my wife for an hour at night.

We focus on the same thing I teach inside of our community which is our 3 core pillars. Family, business, and self. ( Self is our personal growth and physical well-being). This is what we keep focusing on. If it’s not contributing toward it, it’s usually not something we put a lot of energy toward.

The biggest takeaway I want for you today is that there’s no one life or one business that fits all…or some magic formula.

Your life and business is your design.

Can you pull inspiration from others? Of course. Just like cooking, there are lots of ingredients to choose from but you can mix in so many ways. Not only that, the ingredients and the amounts and spices will vary, even if you follow a recipe.

What’s the key here?

Don’t feel trapped or forced to follow or subordinate to someone else’s expectations. You’re free to make it just the way you want it. Cool?

Here’s what I want you to do until we talk next time…

Start observing your habits. Specifically, your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that are limiting you or causing you to feel stressed. Just notice and be curious without judgment.
Ask yourself, “If I didn’t feel stressed, or overwhelmed or worried about this, what would life be like?
Whatever images or thoughts that are generated from the question, allow yourself to feel grateful and enjoy that future right here right now. Here’s what I would do to make sure you’re rewiring yourself and pruning the old thoughts. Set a timer for 5 minutes and deliberately do this step 5 min before you go to sleep and 5 minutes when you wake up for the next 7 days. I would love to know your results…

Talk soon!

Hope this was helpful and I can’t wait to connect with you in our next episode.