Lessons - Breaking Free From the Rat Race | David Wood - Founder of Focus.ceo

And I'm curious as you work with these individuals, I feel like a lot of people get caught up in the rat race, which is something that you probably were caught up in when you were first starting your career. Like you mentioned your first half of your career was numbers and business and revenue and then you started to understand some of the importance of I guess self-awareness and truly understanding what you can bring to the world and yourself and whatnot. But how do you break, how do you break that cycle of rat race of needing to make more money of needing to get the next promotion or needing to get the next round of investment? How do you break that psychological cycle? Because that's how we're all wired now and everything just reinforces that. Yeah, it's really tricky for us humans because you know, making money to feed ourselves and to feed others and to house ourselves and to clothing is a biological drive. It's an evolutionary trait. And so that's good and valid man, I'm hustling, I'm hustling all the time, I just created a, and I don't think hustling is a bad word, it's just, you know, your hustle. To make a living, the trap is, as you're pointing out, we can get into that pattern, we can get into that groove and we can forget to ask how much is enough. We can also forget, so, oh, this is great, it's bringing up some powerful questions that we forget to ask and my invitation is to everyone to ask these questions of themselves and you could write these down on a piece of paper. So first question is how much is enough? How much is enough for me to be comfortable in life? And then how much would I, would I really like to make and have in the bank that would, that would probably make life better as a, those are two, hmm, those are four numbers actually. So you've got an income amount that would have you comfortable and an amount in the bank that would have you comfortable and then you've got what you would like. Now many of us go past that, I've got one client I'm working with now who set a goal of bringing in a company, making a company that's worth about two or three million dollars. And then he achieved that and then automatically thought, well, what's the next goal? Okay, get it up to say ten or twenty million dollars. Now that's not fun for him. He's not having a good time. It's harder to go from, from the three, from, from say one million to two or three, then it is from three to six. That's what he's finding. And he's not having a good time. And so we're really diving into these questions. How much is enough for you? And I asked another great question last week and he did, he did his homework. If money was not an issue, you won the lottery, someone just gave you thirty million or someone gave you five million. All right, for many people, that'd be plenty. If money wasn't an issue, what would you do? And he really had to dig deep and things came out like he'd love to be on the beach more, just taking walks on the beach, swimming in the ocean, more time with family, playing tennis, loves to train, loves to be learning something, also loves to be building. So he might still be in business, even if money wasn't an issue. So it'd be really good, I think, for all of us to work at our core values, three of his core values were passion, creativity, and love. And so we're looking now at how he can create more of that in his life. And to your question of like, how do you bump out of the right race, well, you ask yourself questions like this, and even better, have someone else ask you questions like this, because it's hard to do it for ourselves. You can't read the label from inside the jar, sometimes you just need someone else. I'm about to hire a nutritional coach, because I can do a lot of it on my own, but I won't do a lot of it on my own, and she's going to spot things that I wouldn't spot. And even in our first session, as we're talking, my brain started coming up with new things. She didn't, my brain came up with it, but because I was in a coaching session, and I started writing down all the things that I knew I should be doing, but I was sliding on. And so just out of that one session, I went and joined a gym and committed to three squash games a week. I committed to being in bed by 11 instead of 1230, stopping television by 10. I booked a singing lesson, and now I'm taking singing lessons. So all sorts of things can come out of someone else saying, how could life be better? What would that look like and digging in into it with you? Maybe it's a friend of a friend's willing to show up once a week for you. Sometimes it's hard to get friends to do that. Maybe it's a therapist. Maybe it's a mastermind. Maybe it's a men's group. Maybe it's a women's group. I hope that answered your question. It does. And so it's getting somebody to sort of just take a, they can be invested in you, but invest it in you in a way that they don't see things through your lens. So an unbiased view, an audit of your life, so to speak. And that's what's going to help you understand that maybe everything that you're investing yourself in, some of it's going to be very good. Some of it does move the needle. Some of it has to be done for the career, for the job, for the business. But yeah. What's up? What's up? What's up? Mind is on. Yeah. Mind. Right? We're creatures of habit. We're living in our own personal matrix. If you've seen the matrix, we're living in that. And if that's going well for you, if you're loving it and you're inspired by what you're doing and you're moving at the pace, it's good for you, then great. Don't change anything. But there's a reason that people, even like Bill Gates, goes and gets a coach and the top athletes, the top of their game have coaches because we can't read the label from inside the jar. I consider myself, this is a reveal, I consider myself as a very intelligent, very self-resourceful and motivated independent person. And so the biggest thing for me to watch is my arrogance. I often assume I'm the smartest person in the room. And in many rooms, that's probably going to be true. But the shortfall, the real problem, pitfall, is that by assuming that that leaves me closed and not open to, wait, maybe there's a better way, or maybe this would help. Yeah, I just got coaching on the promotion that I'm doing right now. And something obvious that I should have spotted was pointed out and like, oh, okay, that's really good. And then there were four other things that I hadn't thought of. So yeah, outside input can be absolute gold. One because in that space, just someone else, being in front of you, asking these questions, more things are going to come out of your brain than would have come out before. And then there's the accountability factor. And you know, you got to show up once a week and you got to say if you did what you said you were going to do, it's embarrassing. It's embarrassing to say I didn't do it, right? Don't feel good about yourself, you're embarrassed in front of someone else. So the next week, you probably do it and then you feel good, hey, I did what I said I was going to do. It wasn't easy, but I got it done. I feel proud. Now you're, now you're building a positive cycle. And if you keep doing that, you get in the habit of, oh, wait, when I do what I say, I'm going to do, it feels powerful. It feels good. And look, I just got these results. So I'm a big fan of building positive reinforcing cycles. Unfortunately, we get into some very unproductive habits and cycles. And it's all about this is changing.