Success Road

People have varying definitions of joy. Some tend to look for material things to guarantee such joy and associate it with happiness. While only a few go beyond these external things to find the true meaning of joy. However, with the society that people live in – people succumb more to superficial things in defining joy and bridge such ideas to happiness. But the real question is, how do we seek joy in this world fully dictated with material things in defining life's beauty?

Erin Mac joins the podcast to talk about joy. Specifically, how you could recognize your experience and learn to strategize it to a positive experience regardless of outside influences. As someone who's built her company 20 years ago, Erin shares more how money can't provide the real meaning of joy, and it won’t help if you only rely on external things. In this episode, she shares how one can start finding oneself and get on that journey.

Impenetrable Joy

Impenetrable joy is the experience that you no longer have to be at the mercy of or beholden to people or circumstances to dictate as to whether you're having a good day or a bad day, or for that matter, a good life or a bad life. You're no longer on the roller coaster ride of emotions, like when someone says something or something happens, and all of a sudden, our mood switches, and we start going south. When you recognize that you are responsible for your experiences and learn how to change them into the experiences you want, then create a penetrable joy, which is internal. It's not based on something that's going on externally.

It's recognizing that some things are going on behind the scenes that we are often unaware of, and when we can get awareness of them, we can begin to unpack what's going on. Not so much on why it happened, what were the circumstances or the things that led to the experience, but more just in the proactive state of how can I change that experience? 

Joy vs Happiness

The difference between happiness and joy is that happiness is based on external things. It's a brand-new car, but it's short-lived and is based on an external thing. Joy is an internal experience that you can create throughout each day. However, the idea of happiness that we've been taught in our society and many other societies is based on external things. But the real joy is the kind of joy available now, regardless of what's going on out here. The internal experiences, the one that's meaningful and has a purpose. And that's what we're after. But people don't know it because we don't make these distinctions.

Sufficiency and Excess

We have this idea of sufficiency and excess. It's like, what is going to be enough for me? Is it enough to have a nice home, to have shelter, to have access to food and water? Is it enough to have those things to have deep, meaningful relationships with people and purpose and meaning in your life? Or do I need to subscribe to what society would have you believe? 

If that's the case, why are multimillionaires or billionaire clients also miserable despite having all the money? It's because of that happiness thing they were pursuing. Because it's the journey inside that has meaning and purpose. It's not the exterior nor the external things.

Journey of Growth

People are essentially here for growth. As humans like to evolve as human beings. And when we can align with that idea, then we find purpose and meaning in our life. Hence, the way to begin the growth journey is to recognize that you do not have purpose and meaning. And sometimes, that comes in the form of a crisis. Like recognizing that if you keep doing the same things repeatedly, you will have the same result. 

Now, it's that idea that you want to do something different. But if you don't insert or apply new information, you will continue to do the same things repeatedly. It's not reconciliation – but a recognition of that story and how it's playing out in your life. When you start to recognize the pieces that are showing up in your life and heal some of those emotional scars, you can begin to retrain your brain and rewire it in ways that make more sense for the future that you're trying to create. 

Patterns of Behavior

You start to see these trigger things that are happening in your life. It's not anxiety, or stress, or overwhelm or worry. They don't happen in a container. It's because of something that is triggering something that you are either unaware of or latent in you. And when you have recognition around it, take it as an opportunity to switch that to shift right there. Try to recognize it right before it happens. Take a deep breath, take at the moment, where's it living in your body? What could you possibly do differently? And it's just those little things, but you have to become that scientist or detective to see what's going on. Otherwise, the patterns of behaviour will keep going.

Five Pieces

It is not easy to assess oneself, especially when you're someone not used to doing that. But there are some things one can do. First is initial awareness, like, ''I don't talk about the crisis", or, "I just, I don't want to be like this". Second is emotional awareness, like, "how do I start to recognize when I'm in reaction to people and circumstances". The third piece is getting intentional about what you would like to create to avoid getting stuck. The fourth piece is strategy, like rewiring the brain to habitual things that you love to do and thinking about the action you can take. And the last piece is practice. Because practising these things for years, these habits, thoughts, and actions can help you go consistently and get the good kind of results.    

Baby Steps

There are incremental steps that you can do that are easy. It's when you begin to put things in large categories, and they become overwhelming. So, take it slow! If you recognize that you are in a state very often that doesn't feel good, like stress, anxiety, overwhelm, worry, depression, sadness, etc. Begin to seek alternative solutions to that experience.  

However, it would help if you were intentional about what you want to achieve, as the cessation of anxiety or stress. Essentially, there's somebody there for you out in the world that's talking about these things that can help you. You can also start to read books, watch videos, and go to seminars. All of those things are growing in the right direction. And there's so much free content out there. Seek until you find one and make it a part of your life, not just today.

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With the constant demand of time in a fast-paced world, automation took the stage of varied industries. From marketing, management, support, and more, human intervention was less needed, and technology became essential. Hence, businesses delve more into implementing automation, especially when industries shift to virtual set-ups.

Samantha Porter Fox of Samantha Porter Enterprises helps businesses automate their marketing and sales systems. Her whirlwind journey began as a professional organizer in 1997. After ten years, she started to help clients organize their digital files and go paperless. From there, she went to marketing and started a web business design after college. Years later, she joined Chris Davis’ automation program. Now, she joins the podcast to talk about automation. Specifically, mistakes people make when they start getting into the automation process and how they should overcome them.

Beginner’s Mistakes

One of the biggest mistakes is that people immediately jump into the technology tool itself without any strategy. In the end, they feel disgruntled. It would have been a great tool if you had started with a strategy on how you need to use it and knowing your end goal. It is like how easier it is to see problems beforehand when you’re doing it on paper first or mapping it out first. However, since many business owners aren’t tech-savvy, they get easily overwhelmed with the options. It’s like spending money without using it for your advantage and end up becoming a collector of all this software.

Document the Process

Keeping everything in your head on how to do things will keep it trapped in there. It’s easy to blow things up if it becomes complicated. But if you write it down, you can streamline a lot of things. Remember, you can’t scale your business if you’re the only one who knows what’s going on in your business. Document your process! It doesn’t have to be fancy. You can write or record and let someone else transcribe it into a document. It will help you pivot things up when need be.

Getting Started

Start at the place closest to the money. For example, if it is a process that you generate money and you are doing it manually, like a coach manually booking people. It can be a start to document the steps like what do you send out to the people? What information do you need? And find a tool that will automate that. Another place that’s easy to automate is social media. There are a plethora of social media dashboards you can use to start to automate that process. Like Facebook, you can start automating your posting with native Facebook and schedule stuff ahead of time. If you want to automate your content to drive awareness to you quickly, that would be a quick thing you could do to get started.

Things People Automate

People want to save time, but some apps don't allow the usage of third-party tools, for you can be penalized for that. However, you can take advantage of a lot of stuff right from your phone and schedule or create content in advance. Also, most booking software has integrations with email management software like MailChimp or Active Campaign. You can have it set where it sends information once something is booked and send out these sets of emails. These are the types of things people can automate.

Identify your Needs

One major thing is to sit down and think about your goal for your business. What area is the most important for you to automate right now to put you on the path to reaching that goal? Once you do that and have the vision and the goal, that's where the strategy starts. Don't look at every other business out there. Because what works for one business may not necessarily work for yours, or you may not even need that. And don't get overwhelmed with all the technology out there. Because, again, something has been invented every second. So, you're never going to be on top of that. Just think about what your business needs and what you need to get accomplished right now. Ask yourself, how can I save myself time? How can I save my employees? How can we be more efficient in this area? And what are the tools we need to get that done?

No More Spinning Wheels

It uses conditional logic, and you can do that through some of the email platforms. And a lot that could be helpful for that has an FAQ on your website or canned responses. Suppose you're getting the same type of question all the time, having those canned responses set up and using a text expander. So, you don’t have to do things over and over again. That's why it's so important to document your processes and the questions you get, and your answer to them. Then, link it to any assets you might have out there, like videos or podcasts that go into depth and answers you can send to people. That's where automation can help and save you time.

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People find it very difficult to manage their energy. Especially if the energy comes from considering one’s food intake, hydration, exercise, sleep, and etc. It almost feels as if the difficulty comes not with the lack of focus or time. But the lack of habit to condition ourselves into doing so. Looking into these areas would actually lead to a good energy flow, as well as making us more productive in the process.

Chelsea Stegman has an undergrad degree at Miami University of Ohio. Got her dietetic internship in Louisiana, and worked with the worst diabetes, and kidney dialysis. Afterward, she became a dietitian, moved to Cincinnati, and worked in a health club for three years. Now, she’s in downtown Chicago, worked in another health club, finished her master's, and started her own virtual business. She now joins the podcast to talk about energy management. Specifically, about managing nutrition, how to decrease burnout, increase energy, productivity, and performance.

Managing your nutrition

Managing nutrition often depends on the person but the most realistic way for you to start, with priorities in general, is finding that needle mover that moves all these other habits. Health-wise, it's focusing on exercise, and a lot of nutrition habits, water intake, and eating frequency. But a big priority with most people that leads to all these other things is managing blood sugar throughout the day and looking at macronutrients’ meal timing. And that can also help with productivity and reducing brain fog throughout the day.

The Blood Sugar and Diet

You don't have to look at blood sugar, or blood values consistently. It's really what makes up your meals. Starting off the day with adequate protein, non-starchy vegetables, a complex carbohydrate, healthy fat, or overall a well-balanced meal. Also, looking into the components of each meal throughout your day, and ensuring that you are eating or snacking to just keep that blood sugar stable. So, you don’t ride the blood sugar roller coaster. And symptomatically we can feel it, we feel the cravings, we feel the brain fog, the energy dips, and rises and everything that comes with it. Hence, what people should look at is what they are eating and noticing that link between a lot of those symptoms. Also, we kind of life in a world of extremes, there are some components that do help with brain health, people with actual disorders, such as epilepsy. It can be beneficial for the general population. Not advised for that, just making more of a well-rounded approach. Because carbs can support brain health, muscle development, and so many other things. So just making sure we have all those components to keep it stable, and not just go into the extreme forms of dieting. All is right.

Cortisol and Energy

It is your stress hormone, it takes a diurnal rhythm, that spikes in the morning then slowly taper off throughout the day. And has an inverse relationship to melatonin. For instance, at night, when cortisol is supposed to be low, melatonin is supposed to be high. But some people could have that imbalance if their cortisol is high. A lot of people with productivity energy levels throughout the day performance, like at work or at the gym, are looking more into those cortisol levels and how they're managed. Also, it has a very close relationship with blood sugar too. Managing blood sugar can help manage that cortisol throughout the day. If blood sugar is super low, your cortisol spikes and vice versa. Also, you can tell symptomatically if you're tired and wired throughout the day. Your brains keep on going but you're physically tired. If you're relying on coffee throughout the day, there's a lot of factors with that. But cortisol or stress hormone is what you should look at. When you're stressed and have no sleep, it’s a stressor on the body too. You power through things until you can't anymore until you feel the intense brain fog until super low energy throughout the day, and you kind of try and look into what's wrong with you. And it all makes sense, just looking into your history, or it was just looking more into the science that your cortisol is low.

Hydration

Hydration delivers all the nutrients to all your cells, all your organs. It helps with that in a natural way. But yes, it's not as quick. It's not as noticeable at first, but after a while, once we get that hydration up, you can feel it definitely. People talk about how they struggle to drink enough water. And some experienced a couple of heat exhaustion. If we start forcing ourselves to drink more water and really do that. We eventually got into a habit. Others drink eight glasses of water a day. But still, a lot of people struggle to be able to drink the water that they need. And they drink very little. So, how can they be able to? Well, first of all, how much water and how can they be able to implement drinking water more into their day? The general recommendation would be half your body weight in ounces, which sounds like a lot for people just starting out. But again, baby steps. Keep a water bottle with you that has the ounces. Start off with maybe one bottle and then go to two, and just gradually increase. After a while, most people crave more, they get thirsty, or they want it more. It just takes a certain amount of time to get to that point.

Balancing with Supplements

When it comes to supplements, it's quality over quantity. A good quality multivitamin, covering those bases. B vitamins can help with energy and other things as well. Omega threes and fish oil help with brain health. And Vitamin D is super low with a lot of people so a baseline dose through a multivitamin or heightened dose if it is pretty low. Magnesium is also deficient in most people, especially in their diet. Usually, you can get it through dark green leafy vegetables, and then greens, but usually depleted if you have a lot of caffeine and alcohol intake. And if you're very active or very stressed, you do need more. At night, just taking a good quality dose, and that can kind of help you relax at night, it's called the relaxation mineral. And these are the general ones and certain protein powders, though not necessary, but good for convenience if you feel like you can't prepare the adequate protein that you need. Your multivitamin should have B vitamins and that would not be beneficial at night. It'll keep you up for those help with energy and fish oil too. Vitamin D can be taken at different times. At night, generally a probiotic, magnesium and anything else that you would need for sleep.

Recover, Rest, or Heal

If you're active, stressed, doing a lot in general, or in higher output in life, then you need to recover to bounce back stronger. With nutrition, magnesium definitely helps with that recovery. Muscle recovery or relaxation of your whole body in general can help with that. You can build back up stronger. Another thing, vitamin C can help with immunity and so many other things that most of us probably know. But also, with adrenal health, cortisol production, and recovery. Zinc can also help with muscle recovery. And habits, lifestyle factors to the main thing we want with the word recovery is activating that parasympathetic nervous system. But winding down a little bit more, a simple deep breathing can also help with that. It could be a five-minute meditation, a 20-minute yoga class, and anti-inflammatory eating in general. Eating to reduce inflammation and antioxidants can help too. Mediterranean bass eating can help with inflammation. A lot of fish in general can really help. And yes, there's a lot to recover but super important.

The Needle Mover

In an ancient Chinese proverb, “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second-best time is now”. It means that the best time to start with nutrition is when you're young and be able to get this in balance. But for some, that's not necessarily possible at this point. So, the next best time is to start now before we start to make things worse, or we get older and it becomes harder to overcome. People should look at the symptoms first like blood sugar swings, cortisol levels off, and notice what's going on with one’s baseline habits. “Am I drinking adequate water throughout the day? Am I consistent with my meals throughout the day? Do I have the basic multivitamin? Am I taking that consistently? What do my workout routines look like if you're training for something, or if you want more of a well-rounded, like walking strength, recovery-based kind of routine? Simply looking at all those habits related to the symptoms, and seeing honestly, what is a needle mover, the easiest way to start?

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As everything comes online, sometimes we could not eradicate the overwhelming pressure. We constantly work and speed things up. And we often forget to take a short pause or break. Then we either forget things altogether or leave things in a mess. Hence, burning out ourselves too in the process. 

Jimmy Claire is a motivational speaker and an autism advocate. He joins the podcast to talk about different time management tools and tips. Specifically, the tools he used to help improve his work-life balance.

Block Scheduling

One of the biggest things that helps a lot is block scheduling. And not like block scheduling and Google Calendar. It’s a different tool called Time Tune for Android. It helps you to block your time. It's useful because it helps you stay on track of each task on a day without overwhelming your calendar. It helps you to stay away from burnout, and information overload. Because sometimes too much information could shut you down. But with Time Tune, it can tell you that there's two hours’ time remaining, and you can find two hours of time that you didn't even know that you had.

Stack Browser

What process are the most unfriendly tools to use and keep your most important websites at hand possible? Yes, you can have bookmarks, but then you can also have search functionality. Eventually, a bookmark bar is also going to fill up or you start scrolling down and say, “Now where do I put this website?” It's like a shell kind of game where that person puts the ball underneath it and mixes it all around and everything. So, there is this tool called things browser stack or stack browser. It lets you bookmark all the important web pages that you use on a daily basis. It keeps them all in one spot, and it syncs across your devices, from Windows and Linux and an Apple.

An All-in-One Tool

The notion is basically an all-in-one app that can do pretty much everything. You can store files, has databases like spreadsheets, and it condenses everything in just one box. So even if the text is long, it just makes the box bigger. And it doesn't overlap with another box or another row or column. It’s literally the best tool.

Browser Extension

One of the other tools that you will find helpful is called station. It is a web browser extension and helps you find all the files that you need in different places that you put them in. And if you might say, “Okay, well, why can’t I just use my browsing history?” Yes, you can but if you want to have everything just a click away - you can use Station. It used to be an all-in-one app, but their goal was not to become a web browser, it was to help people find stuff. So, they kind of rebranded their tool and made it into a web extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. It's helpful because sometimes there are so many places where we store stuff, and we can't find it all nor do we really want to go to that service area, a lot of times.

Blocking out Distractions

One of the things you can use is called a Dragon. It's a Pomodoro timer app, it's free, and it syncs with your to-do list. If you are a person who likes everything digitally and has it on all your devices wherever you go and need them. Like if you forgot to upload up the night before on your computer, then you should be able to go on your phone, get it from the web browser, like the cloud storage. And instead of logging into every system.

Another tool that you can use for blocking out distractions is this tool called freedom. There are some nights where you still want to continue working because sometimes you have so many great ideas in your head. And you’re always just trying to fire off every single idea. When you are using freedom and when it kicks in at five o'clock, it blocks you from all your work. Their logo is a big butterfly and has a green background. And when it pops up, it’s like everything is about to be fried! But it is useful because it stops you from overworking.

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Jim Rohn said, "You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with." 

The amount of information we can get from people is astounding, and most of it is pretty useless. If you want to accelerate your learning,  you need to surround yourself with the right people. The people who will help you accelerate the ladder of success and not failure. It might seem pretty intense but not impossible. And all you have to do is to get started!

Geoff Woods was a former medical sales representative. In 2015, he started The Mentee Podcast because he wants to start a business that will deliver a massive impact on society. Later, he joined Gary and Jay in building the company around The One Thing. Now, he joins the podcast to talk about The One Thing. Specifically, how The One Thing can be the simple truth behind extraordinary results.

Take the First Step

It's mind-blowing to see someone be able to pull off something amazing and seemingly effortless. But it can be hard to imagine it for yourself because we're so used to "Well, he is a movie star" or "He is a famous actor." But just because you don't see the clear path on how to go from where you are to where you want to be, doesn't mean that you can't take the first step. 

Enjoy the Climb

You need to learn to focus less on the destination and more on the journey. You hate it when you're in the middle of it but miss it when it's gone. So, enjoy the climb because that is where the value is. Stop focusing on the destination that you want and start celebrating the journey.

Time Over Money

Which is more valuable, time or money? Time for sure! We're in the business of time and it's our most valuable resource. But most people spend time and do not invest it. We don't hold our time to the same standard we hold our dollars. But anything that we want in our life happens over time. You look at somebody who's built wealth, they built it over time. You look at somebody who's in shape they got there over time, you look at great marriages and relationships, they were developed over time. The key is over time. 

The Domino Effect

The path to getting everything you want in life personally and professionally starts by getting one thing at a time. Back in 2009, there was a group out of the Netherlands Wieder Domino productions, they broke the world record for Domino falls, they lined up 4.5 million dominoes. But the most amazing part was that when the leader of that group knocked the first one down, how much effort did that take? It's almost effortless. If you were that leader, you would have just unleashed 94,000 joules of energy. Put that into context, if you were to do 545 consecutive push-ups, that's how much energy you would release. So, think about it, the flick of a finger, that one subtle action could create a massive reaction. Small actions can unleash massive reactions. And if you graph this out, it's that hockey stick growth where it feels like you're moving forward not making much progress and suddenly, boom, it's just exponential. This is the shape of success. 

The Seven Circles

The seven circles are the seven most important areas of your life. And you only need one area to focus on. However, this is hard for people because they feel like they want to focus on all of them. But again, the path to getting everything you want starts by getting one thing at a time. Think big, go small, trust the dominoes will fall, start by picking one circle. It could be a circle that you are struggling with or it could be a circle that you are crushing. Then ask the question, what's the one thing I can do for my [circle] such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

A Wall of I DON'T KNOW

Most people who ask that question, “What is my ONE THING?” then hit a wall called "I don't know". If you ever think "I don't know", that's just where your mind currently stopped searching. Give yourself permission to keep searching. Sometimes, you'll come up with an answer.and recognize that that answer is probably not the one thing. Then, it's probably still too big. So, you ask the question again. Keep asking the question until you arrive at something that is so small, that effortlessly it will fall. It will almost feel like it's cheating. When you answer, you'll go, "Oh, I can't do that". And that's when you know it's the Lead Domino.

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