Day 14 – How do you get in the proper mindset to handle all of your daily responsibilities?

Action Steps

Answer this question – How busy are you? What needs to change for you to be more fulfilled in your life and work?

Session Transcript

Lily: Tell us what you do on a daily basis to set your mind for the responsibilities you have. So, what is that you do in the mornings? How do you set this up?

Michael: To give a little bit of context, and I don’t say this at all to be bragging or anything like that, that’s my point, I want to give you a little bit of context. I’m on the board of our non-profit, very active. I’m also currently the executive director for the non-profit, so day to day management. I also lead our for-profit, the Guidestone Group, which we do all our coaching, speaking, and training through. I’m the president of that company as well, very involved in that as well. Then we have several other things that we do. In fact, we have multiple businesses that are subsidiaries or initiatives of either the non-profit or the for-profit, and so, it could get unwieldy. I mean, we talk about people being busy in one job. They get one job and stay in one office every day. That’s the chaotic world that we live in. I made a conscious choice, a purposeful choice, to live out the Five Phases of SIMPLE Leadership that we developed over the last several years, and now that we’re using to train companies, leaders, and teams all over the world.

Essentially, it’s that we look at really the first 3 phases, we look at who and what is most important to you. Then we decide how our work should fit into our overall life. Many people do it the other way around, they’re like, “Well, I got to have a pay check in order to live, so I need to go find something to do,” and we try to find something to do that we like, that we enjoy, and so we say, “I have a job and I have to do it.” Then life kind of fits around whatever that work day looks like, whether it’s full-time or part-time. For us, we’ve chosen to do it the other way. We say, “Okay, what’s to life that we want to create? What’s the legacy that we want to create?” Then we say, “Okay, if this is what we’re going to do, then our work has to fit within that.” There are very few weeks that I work 40 hours a week and most of you would be like, “What?!”

Lily: With all that?

Michael: Yeah, and we’re still a relatively small company. So, most people that are doing what we do work 60, 70, 80 hours a week cause you’re trying to get your company off the ground. But, we found ways to be highly productive by simplifying things for us and we’re helping people and companies who used to work 40, 50, 60 hours a week to significantly reduce the number of hours that they’re working and increase the productivity.

Here is another great quote, I can’t remember who said it, might have been Tom Rainer, “Your company will soon forget the long days that you put in but your children will never forget the memory-making moments.”

Lily: Wow. As you’re talking about high productivity and working less than 40 hours, I think of how beneficial this would be especially in ed leadership because you have a lot of burnout. You have a lot of very talented, wonderful leaders with great vision and creativity and teachers who burnout because we don’t have this straight. I think we would benefit so much from going to your program.

Michael: Yeah. We don’t have think space and so our ideas are shallow. Our relationships are shallow. Our work is shallow work. We’re not doing the transformational work, the fulfilling work that we want to do. Our family’s shallow. What we’re trying to do is help people go deeper. We might do a few less things but we want to go deeper.

This morning, I was having a conversation with my wife, we got away a couple of weekends ago, went to the beach in Destined, Florida. I said to her this morning, I’m like, “Sarah, I want to figure out how to do more of that.” I loved sitting there under an umbrella on the beach watching her and my daughter playing the waves, watching my son throw sand all over himself and we actually took a couple of their friends, met another couple down there. I mean, that was, to me even though I was not productive at all, I didn’t do any work, those were the memory-making moments that I want to create with my family. Now some people are like “Is that even possible?” or “You just don’t understand my life, that’s not possible.” I’m telling you, we are helping hundreds of people to simplify their life and work. I mean very few people I feel like are busier than me or could be busier than me but I’ve chosen to fit my work around the life and the legacy that I want to create and that’s what it’s all about.

Lily: Great, thank you so much.[/text_block]