Reclaim Your Time: Living in the Moments That Matter Most

Transcript

Today I’m going to talk to you about taking the moments. Hey, my name is Mike. You’re listening to Lone Wolf Unleashed where I help you switch off sooner and live larger.

Today I’m going to talk to you about living in the moment.

I talk a lot about on this podcast taking the steps to systemize your business so, so that you can have more time off for yourself to achieve the things that you want in your own time. It’s basically reclaiming the time as your own rather than having the time sucking monster of your business take over your life.

It’s not fun having your business take over your life. And it’s really important that we take the time to consider what it is that we want to be doing.

In this episode, I’m going to take you through a mindset shift and I’m not really going to be talking about systems. Recently I’ve gone away on holiday with a family and we went whale watching, which is cool.

And I think I mentioned that on a previous episode and it was so nice just to be able to sit there and just take it in and sit on the boat and just look at the water, look at the horizon. By some miracle, I didn’t get seasick, but just to be able to just sit there and take in the view.

And in those times, there wasn’t any stress, there wasn’t any thought about what needed to happen in the business.

There was only thought about maybe what to do for lunch, but there’s no thought about, oh, I need to call that client or I need to get a piece of content out or any of that. It was just peaceful. And what I started thinking about is we live our life in a series of moments.

We really take that for granted because I think we get so caught up in what to do every day and we just let it run our lives over.

I want you to sort of just think about those types of moments where you just love, like, what are the things that you really want to experience more of? I’ll give you some examples for me. So just this morning I dropped my kids off at school and my older daughter is in grade two and she loves school.

We do the, the hug and the kiss goodbye.

And there’s a moment where I turn just as I get back in the car and I give her another wave and she turns around to me and gives me the thumbs up with a little smile. And I would miss that if I didn’t make space in the mornings to do the school run.

Like, that’s a really meaningful moment to Be able to look back on and go, oh man, I just love that kid so much. And I want to see her, I want to see her smile, I just want to see her thrive and be happy.

And there’s other times where in the afternoon I sit on my back deck and our house is situated where it looks out over a park. So I don’t have back neighbors per se. So I look over the park and there’s a couple of trees there and there’s playground in the distance.

So it’s a fairly large field. It actually does fill up with water when it rains a lot, so it drains all the way.

When it’s been a sunny day at around 4:35 o’, clock, the sun just hits the trees and the grass. They just seem to glow. It’s awesome. And I just sit there and I just, I’m just amazed by it.

It just sort of takes you out of whatever thing you were doing before to be able to just spend that time being mindful and just being able to pay attention to it and take it in. What are those moments for you? I work with a lot of business owners and they pride themselves on how busy they are.

I get so much done and I’m effective and I’m so busy and oh no, we can’t meet for another two weeks because I got all this stuff on, which is fine, except all the stuff is business stuff. I sort of challenged them sometimes and go, what’s the thing that you did for yourself outside of your business in the last week?

You know, was there a time where you could just spend in the moment, on that moment in the present, running a business myself, there’s so much time that you sort of spend with your mind in the future. So I’ve got to do this, I got to do this next. I got to do this, I’ve got a plan, I’ve got to do this other thing.

You get carried away and then the present slips by and you don’t really pay attention to it. You’re always onto the next thing.

And there is an element of mindfulness there and it helps you sort of consider some of the bigger questions in life. What do I really want to achieve? Did I do the right thing or was there a situation where, oh, what could I have done differently?

If we have our mind 95% in the future, there’s no way that we can properly self reflect. There’s no way that we can properly meditate. There’s no way that we can properly just take stuff in and be present in the Moment.

Another one of the fun things that I do is just when my kids are learning something new. It’s one of my favorite things about being a parent.

You sort of sit at a table and they’re trying to figure a problem out, and it’s just the look on their face as they’re trying to work it through. I just love that. Are there moments like that that you sort of look at? You know, you sort of just sit there and just blown away by it.

Like, I know I’m biased, but I think my kids are amazing. And I sit there and I watch them and go, wow, these kids have so much potential.

I look at my kids and go, wow, our next generation has hope because they’re just awesome. How good are these kids?

I look at them when they’re learning stuff and just the concentration on their face and they’re trying to work something through. I love that. Are there moments like that for you where you can do that? I want to challenge you, right? Because we work for this time Sucking monster.

And there are many, many times where you’ll say to yourself, it never allows me to switch off. There’s always something to. There’s always something to be done. Part of this is just about drawing really good boundaries for yourself.

If I’m dropping my kids off in the morning and I prioritize doing that, it is by exception that I don’t do it. That means that I miss out on other opportunities. Okay? It means that I can’t do business breakfast because I’m not back in time.

I miss out on some exercise opportunities. But, yeah, what are those moments for you, you know, in amongst working for this time sucking monster, what boundaries do you draw?

This is not even really about the doing stuff and the systemizing stuff in your business because you are your business. So this is looking after the human being. This is looking after you. If you don’t draw good boundaries, you will burn out.

You got to pay attention to that.

Once you’re starting to draw those boundaries and you’re starting to build up good habits, you can look internally to your business and go, okay, I’m doing these things. How do I actually make them better? If I systemize this, I can save this much time.

And to do this, you have to be quite purposeful and you have to carve out the time to do this. Okay? I’ve talked about this before. Investing time is like investing money, okay? You gotta spend money to make money.

You gotta spend time to make time back, okay?

So you have to think about how you’re Going to carve out your day, set some time aside to go, okay, I’ve been doing these things or this is my client onboarding process or my delivery process. I did these things. Is it working? Well, I do this thing over and over and over, but I start from scratch every time.

Is there a way that I can templatize that? Is there a way that I can do this faster? Maybe. Is there someone else who could do this for me?

I know that this is lone wolf unleashed, but there are opportunities to outsource or delegate or bring people in based on your business requirement. So have a think about it. Yes, I want to stay solo forever. Okay, what are the things that you can get rid of that allow you to do that?

Okay, maybe it’s outsourcing to a contractor. Maybe you’re more comfortable with managing suppliers than you are employees, that’s fine. But maybe you do want to bring someone in.

Maybe you do realize, oh, actually I think I’m going to get more benefit and I’m going to save more time in the long run if I can just get someone to take over this specific function. So sit down, work it out and then start to implement those things. A lot of the low hanging fruit and I work through this with customers.

Okay, I hate this term because, you know, it’s so consulting low hanging fruit. But they are the ripest of opportunities. Okay.

They are the things that you can implement that have really great benefit in a very short period of time. These are the opportunities that can see, you know, 1000, 2000% return on investment in terms of your time because they are so simple to implement.

If you need help with that, reach out to me if you can figure that out. That allows you to take more moments. What are the things that you want to experience outside of your business? What’s your Persona? Okay, who are you?

What are the things that you want to achieve? Remember why you started a business in the first place. You started it for freedom and flexibility.

You’re not getting that because you’re working the 60, 70 hours a week. What are you missing out on because you’re working so much? Okay, you might go, I love my work. Like, I love my work, that’s fine.

But there’s life outside of work. What are the moments outside of work that you really just, you can just hone in and just look at it and go, I’m blown away by that.

You know, we, we center our life a lot around food.

So when we’re out, we want to experience new food or we’ll get together for life group as part of church and we’ll bring stuff which is part of a particular theme and stuff like that. I love food. I love coffee. What are the moments? Coffee in the morning, making coffee.

I’d love to be able to spend more time in the morning making filter coffee over Chemex. Making coffee. You just spend the time paying attention to making the coffee.

I love the way that the bubbles come up through the coffee when you’re making filter coffee. Have you ever seen it? It says the carbon dioxide is leaving the coffee as the hot water water hits it.

I just love that you can just take your focus out of everything else and you can just focus on one thing and it’s just actually very relaxing to do. Why don’t I do more of it? What are those moments that you sort of look there and go, I wish I could do more of that. Why don’t I do that more often?

Because I’m so, quote unquote busy. What if I was less busy? How do I become less busy?

You become less busy by setting good boundaries, knowing what you want, and then taking care of your business so that you can save the time in your business. Systems mean scale growing. I just did a webinar before part of it, I talked about scaling.

If you’ve got revenue in your business and you’re growing your headcount at the rate of your revenue, you’re not scaling, you’re just growing.

Now if you are alone in your business and your revenue is building, then one day there’s going to come a time where it’s going to plateau out because you didn’t grow your headcount. What’s the alternative to growing headcount? It’s by building systems that do those tasks for you. So that is my challenge for you this week.

This has probably been a little bit of a shorter episode, but I really want you to sit down and work out what are the moments that I want more of in my life. You could be missing out on so many things.

If I wasn’t doing school drop off, I would miss these little moments of my kids smiling back at me, giving me the thumbs up, give me a hug. What are those moments that you’re missing that you can get more of? Have a think about that this week. I’m going to see you in a fortnight’s time.

I’m starting to run events. My first one’s in Brisbane. It’s going to be on the 5th of December.

There’s still some spots left if you’re interested in joining me, you can head over to my website, lone wolf unleashed.com that is going to do it for this week. I want to thank you so much for your time today.

You could have been doing a million things and listening to a million other podcasts, but you decided to spend it with me today. I really appreciate you and your time. Thanks and I’ll see you next time.