Episode 50: Be Your Own Guard Dog

Okay, y’all. So, I realize it is January when you’re hearing this, but I am recording this on Friday, December 9th. Tomorrow, we leave for the travels that my partner and I are going on for the holidays. We are going to Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Stockholm, Sweden. So, we’re gonna be all over the place, and this past week has been a really stressful one which is what I want to talk to you about in today’s episode. I want to talk to you about what I learned, and I kinda want to walk you through my own review and reflection process.

So, in December, we do something unique in the business in that we take two weeks off, and that is all fine and dandy. That is actually great. It’s a great practice. I really support it. However, what happens is that our business is on a sort of monthly cycle. So, every month I have a Six Hour Syllabus call. Every month I have a Change Academy call. Every month I have a Change Academy Pro call. And when we travel, I prefer not to have those calls when I’m gonna be at someone else’s house because I just don’t know how stable the Wi-Fi’s gonna be. I also do a lot of YouTube, podcasting stuff that really takes a lot of equipment that I’m not gonna haul to my mom’s house in Pennsylvania or Jon’s parent’s house in Indiana. I’m just not gonna do all of that.

And so, what I realized this year (being 2022) is that I have to be more aware of how short December is for me when I do travel like this because I was not proactive about planning exactly when all of those different monthly events were going to be, and I did not time-block my calendar ahead of time. And so, it ended in this nightmare situation where the week starting on Friday, December 2nd, I had a week where I had 16 or 18 hours of calls, I had to film 8 YouTube videos, I had to do a bunch of podcasts, and, on top of that, I was preparing to travel so I was stressed, I needed to pack, I was very, very concerned the whole week that balls were gonna be dropped and, of course, there were things that happened on the backend of the business that made it even more chaotic.

And so, this whole week (I’m recording this on Friday at the end of this week), it was a level of stress I have not experienced in a long time, and I did not like the version of myself that I became in this week of stress. I accommodated a lot of things, I dropped a lot of balls, and I let those balls drop, but retroactively, I need to take better care of myself in moments of stress like that, and that starts with being more aware of when they are possibilities and taking more proactive action in order to make sure they don’t happen.

So, I think that is a shift that I would encourage you to make. Yes, we need to manage our stress, and, yes, we need to work on our resilience, and, yes, we need to think about doing hard things even in the moments that we’re tired and we’re worried and we’re anxious and what not, but I also think we need to pay equal attention to proactively managing those situations and adjusting expectations around everything else.

So, I could have told my partner, “Hey, I think we should leave on Monday rather than Saturday,” so I have the full weekend to do personal stuff rather than trying to cram it in during the week on top of everything else. I could have adjusted and done two Six Hour Syllabus calls in November and not had to do one in the month of December. I have a lot that I can adjust and control about my life, but even if you don’t, I would focus on the things that you can do. If you have a stressful situation coming at some point in 2023, what can you do to be more proactively defensive of your future self?

So, one last thought on this is it’s interesting because we have a full-time employee, Katherine, and she is, really, our integrator at Body Brain Alliance, and she’s a coach, but she’s also the person who is sort of in charge of guarding my energy. And so, I sort of think of it as she is the person standing in front of me, almost like a bodyguard, and anything that is gonna come to me has to go through her first, and if she decides that it’s not worth my time or it’s not worth my thought or my energy, then she handles it. I love her for that, and it is the only reason I’m able to be the CEO I am because I’m so thankful that I have someone like that, and I learned that it’s important to have someone like that from amazing mentors that I look up to like my mentor Naomi who has that person as well.

If you’re at a place — I wasn’t at a place until two months ago where I had that person — what would it look like to be your own guard dog? What would it look like to be your own integrator? What would it look like to be the person who is protecting your energy with viscous tenacity? If you put yourself in that mental headspace, what would you change about the next few months? What would you cancel? What would you say no to? What would you refuse to let get to the energy of your future self?

That’s what I want you to reflect on today. That’s what I’m reflecting on this week. Tomorrow, I will get into my car — It’s Friday night. I’m recording this at 4:07 PM. I’m gonna be done at 5:00 PM — and everything is done. It all got done. It was all fine. But I was hella stressed, and so, I am thinking about that as I go into this trip. I am thinking about, even though I have Katherine, how can I be a better guard dog for myself?