Our lives have been impacted by many innovative technologies, but we often struggle to find the time to incorporate them into our routines. Although it may seem counterintuitive, working around the clock does not necessarily lead to increased productivity. In fact, it can lead to stress and burnout, which can have a negative impact on the health of a business and yourself.
In this episode, Brie Z Operations Founder Brie DeLisi Zoller shares her insights on time management in both the workplace and personal life. She highlights the significance of recognizing tasks that are beneficial to our work and discarding those that are not. Brie also stresses the importance of taking breaks, including spending time outdoors activities and daylight hours.
Tune in to learn from Brie’s expertise in time management and how it can improve your productivity and well-being.
—
Listen to the podcast here:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:07 — 42.2MB) | Embed
Maximizing Productivity and Achieving Work-Life Balance with Brie DeLisi Zoller
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We’ve had a lot of disruptive technology come into our lives in recent times and we also have a lot of expectations placed upon ourselves and one of the things that I’ve heard quite frequently is, “I don’t have time for this,” and sometimes that’s a proxy for, “I don’t have energy for this.” My guest today, Brie Zoller of Brie Z Operations, helps people prioritize what’s really meaningful, what you should be doing with your time, and maybe get rid of some of the things that just really aren’t delivering value.
—
Brie, welcome to the program.
Thank you.
So what are you observing with people’s time management skills in the setting of 2020s Western culture?
And I could be speaking about this particularly as a woman and working mostly with women is that fill ourselves to the max. If I see a possible free half hour in my schedule and somebody asks for that half hour, I’m going to give it to them. I have several peers and clients who do the same exact thing. We just are an on-demand society. We need to meet with people, we need to meet with them now, we need to give them that conversation, we need to just kind of overload ourselves. And then not only that but just outside of how we’re actually managing our time, on the flip side of that, we then fill our time because we think we have to. So, even if we don’t actually have anything we need to do with that free half hour block, we’re going to find something to do with that half hour, if that means scrolling on our phone or doing extra work instead of just giving that time back to ourselves.
Now, is this playing to this idea of productivity guilt?
Oh. I love — that’s such a great term because of fighting that for myself personally right now. I think absolutely there’s — if you have the time, you should be using it. That’s this whole thing that we’ve built for ourselves if you need to be working this at a minimum 40-hour workweek and that’s if you’re lucky with a lot of folks. There are other folks who got the 60-, 70-hour weeks that are almost glorified, like you are working at this top huge firm and, “How many hours did you work last week?” “Well, I got 60.” “Oh, well, I got 65.” It’s almost glorified that you should be so then when you’re not, there’s this whole mindset of like, “I’m doing something wrong.” And I experienced that when I was starting my business as well. I would talk to fellow small business owners who would be saying like, “Oh, man, I did 50 hours last week, 30 of them were business development hours,” and I’m looking at my own schedule and going like, “Oh, man, I only did 10 hours of business development last week, I must be doing something wrong.”
And that’s something I observed in what I refer to as the 20th century or old school work culture where there seems to be a strong connection with number of hours. I know this is going to sound a little crass but that the baby boomer generation to me seemed to pride themselves in, “I work this many long hours.” Do you have any idea where that came from? Where this idea that the value I’m producing or my value in life, my value as a human being is correlated to the number of hours I actually spend on the job.
I would say that’s industry. That has come up through industry of when we started exchanging money for the work that we’re doing, the work that we’re producing. Once we started that exchange, that turned into time is literally money and we want and we’re basing value on how much money we have. That’s how it came about, in my opinion. I have no actual factual data behind that. The feminist in me says that’s also a white male supremacist creation as well. My parents are of the baby boomer generation and that’s something that they’ve ingrained in me and me now looking at my — I aim for 25 hours of work a week and I can talk about that a little bit later on but —
Sounds awesome.
I feel so guilty about that on a regular basis and I feel like I am doing something wrong by only doing that.
When you’re doing quote-unquote “nothing,” and I’m putting this in quotes because doing nothing is not often really doing nothing but when you are doing nothing, when you find yourself with that empty half an hour, if it were to happen and you don’t pull your computer out, you don’t scroll, you don’t do anything, what goes on through your head? Is there some sort of mental process where something in your head is telling you like, “Oh, my God, I’m doing nothing. I’m gonna regret this half hour. Two days from now I’m gonna be swamped and this half hour is gonna —” you know, something like that, yeah.
It’s almost not even a thought process. Well, and I know it is a thought process, it just happens so fast that I don’t even think of that of, “There is something I could be doing. I could be problem solving with this half hour. I’ve got a load of laundry I could be doing if I’ve got nothing to do for work.” My checklist of things that need to be done is bottomless.
I don’t even allow the thought process to happen, it’s just like, “Time, go do something.”
Feel like it’s been within the past five years that people have been placing more interest in ideas such as meditation, the mindfulness, putting aside time, is this, in your view, a good way to set aside time or is this also kind of adding something to a task list, like even your brain’s downtime is now suddenly a thing —
Yes. Oh, I love that you brought that up because I do meditate. I have a meditation journey myself, which is on and off, like depending on the week. I have a couple different perspectives on it. One of them, I have to thank my therapist for pointing this out to me because it could just be another checklist item. So, making sure that if I put that on my list of things that I want to do on a day, that I’m not beating myself up if I don’t get it done. So that’s one thing to make sure that it’s not a true checklist item and that I’m going to be upset with myself if I don’t do it at the end of the day. That was a healthy perspective change for me. But then I scheduled walks for myself, I schedule lunch for myself, I schedule a meditation time for myself, and I’m using that time intentionally to step away from my technology, so that I’m not focusing too much on the small day-to-day tasks instead of thinking back to what the big picture is, which is to have a fulfilling life.
So many people, and probably a lot of your clients too, is so focused on, you know, you mentioned laundry which is what I call a day to day, what I sometimes refer to as a maintenance task. It’s a task you do to keep your life going, it’s not really an advancement task. And it’s easy to kind of drift away. Do you observe that a lot where people are so focused on, “I need to do what I need to do today. Today, I need to make sure I get the groceries. I need to make sure I fill out these expense forms, I need to fill out those things,” and then all of a sudden they realize that their life has kind of drifted in another direction and it wasn’t necessarily what they wanted?
Oh, yeah, absolutely, and that’s something that — I used to call it — in my previous life, I was in occupational safety and health working in industry and I spent all of my days “firefighting” and I put firefighting in quotes there. So when I’m firefighting, that means there’s an issue, it needs my attention immediately, I’m going to go and handle that, instead of thinking long term how am I helping my company to meet its goals? How am I creating overall improvement? Those conversations are so important, both internally and with our organization if we’ve got an organization, and I know people who are so wonderful and I get to do this with my clients too of we actually set aside time for strategy sessions and that’s something that I help my clients with is let’s sit down for half a day and work through what are your goals for your company? What are the actions that you’re doing to meet those goals? Build out a whole action plan and then I like to check in with them on a monthly basis, going, “What’s your progress on our action plan for your overall goals?” Because, otherwise, especially if you’re in any form of startup mode or just a high-demand work environment, we generally don’t give ourselves the space to be able to think about what’s the big picture and are my actions aligned with the big picture. And we could have that conversation for the business, we could also have that conversation for our own personal lives.
Yeah, your life as a whole.
Yeah, absolutely. Is this the direction that I want my life to be going? Am I satisfied? Am I going to look back when I’m retiring or on my deathbed and be like, “Oh, yeah, that was a good life. I’m proud of that one”?
Well, this is probably a good time as any since you mentioned a little bit about how the program works. Give some information, if anyone listening is interested in talking to you about your services. I don’t know if you have any availability for clients but is there a good website or contact information you’d like to provide?
Well, thank you. Yeah, you can go to www.briezoperations.com. On there, I mostly have availability right now with my strategy sessions. I’m kind of maxed out as far as retainer support on a monthly basis.
So, it could be where they want their business to go but then also how they’re spending their own time personally in there. And then talking about, okay, what are all of the steps that you need to take in order to achieve that goal and making it real tactical, real tangible, we’ve got actual things you can do on here, let’s assign a date, let’s assign a name for who’s doing what, and then actually having someone hold you accountable to meeting those goals because, again, as I mentioned, and it breaks my heart when we go through that process and then that’s just a file sitting on their inbox never opened again because they’re too busy with the day to day.
So in your personal life and with your business, how often do you revisit these goals? How often do you think people need to reassess, “Is what I have planned for today in alignment with what I need to do to live the life I want?” as opposed to, “Is it just what came up that I just put on my to-do list?”?
Totally. It depends on the individual and what works best for them. I am fortunate that, generally, during the month of December and January, both my husband and I are slower in our businesses and that’s when we both take the time to take a step back and go, “How did we do last year?” And it’s a conversation. Would we call ourselves successful and why were we successful? And what’s really fun is, for me, my new measurement has been how happy I am, how satisfied I am with my client engagement. Am I working with people that I love working with? I’m fortunate that it’s moved away from the dollar signs and I’m not focusing on that, which I’m very fortunate to not be focusing on. For other folks — I’m able to do that on a two-month conversation and then build out my schedule for the rest of the year, sort of prioritize how to continue meeting my goals in the direction that I want to go. For other folks, I know they need to be doing that on a monthly or quarterly basis and taking two hours to step back and go, “Okay, what are my goals again? Am I working to meet those?” Sometimes they even need to have I’ve worked with people where we literally put Post-It notes at the bottom of their computer, at the top of their computer that say what their goals are or what their values are as a checkpoint when they’re pausing that they’re thinking like, “Does this align with the values that I set for myself, or the goals that I set for myself?” is a totally unique approach for the person and identifying what works best for you.
Yeah, for sure. I actually have a Post-It note in front of my work computer that says, “You’re gonna disappoint others or you’re gonna continuously disappoint yourself.”
Oh, okay. There you go.
How do you think people lose themselves, I guess? Or kind of lose control of what they’re doing with their time where people end up in this state of mind where they’re like, “How did I get here? Why is this my pursuit? Why am I spending my days here? I’m not happy here. I’m not working with people I don’t like,” et cetera.
I think there’s two responses to that. One of them is the dollar signs. They are I will say yes to this work because it means money. I will say yes to doing these things because it means money. And there are some people where they don’t have any other choice but to say yes. They’re fully recognizing that those situations exist, that not everyone has the luxury to say no to making types of money. So that’s one aspect of it. And then the other aspect is we don’t want to disappoint people.
We don’t want to say no so we’re just going to keep saying yes because if we say no, that means that maybe that person is not going to see us as valuable anymore. Click To TweetMaybe we’re going to hurt some feelings. Maybe we’re going to burn a bridge. There’s any number of reasons but it’s almost that, “Yes, I’m going to give you my time,” or, “No, I’m not.” I remember the first time that I told a client I didn’t want to work with them because I just actually didn’t want to work with them. And it had nothing to do with qualifications, it had nothing to do with time, I had the time to be able to do with it, I just knew that I wasn’t going to enjoy the work that I was doing. That wouldn’t be a helpful use of my time. And I was so scared. I was so scared to say no, which — I mean, the ball was in my court. They could pick someone else, in fact, I had a referral for them, I was helping someone else out. I was still terrified to say no.
And is that one of those like wake up in the middle of the night replaying the scenario type of event?
Over and over and over. Not even waking up in the middle of night, couldn’t go to sleep because I’m thinking about it. And not only that but repeating the statements over and over again because I’m too scared.
Yeah, yeah. Thinking about it. What was the result of that situation, by the way? Did you get a negative response?
No, no, they said, “Totally get it.” I called another firm that I know that does the same work and said, “Hey, do you have the capacity? Is this something you’re interested in?” Made the introduction, it worked out for everybody.
Oh, that’s interesting. I love pointing that out because I think we’ve all been in that spot where you’re afraid of something, you’re afraid, usually it’s around disappointing someone or some form of ostracism, which is similar, and then you say your truth in some capacity or another, say what you really feel like you need for your life and it turns out that it wasn’t that big of a deal. Maybe the person that you thought you were really disappointing was just like, “Oh, no, I’ll just find something else anyway,” or didn’t even care that much but we all kind of make a big deal of it in our heads. Did that become easier for you over time as you progressed?
Honestly, the way that it became — and I hate that this was the reason — well, I shouldn’t hate this as the reason why but it’s sad that this is the only reason why was when I became pregnant and I literally only had eight quality hours a day in me. Something happens during when — for some women, when they get pregnant during first trimester and third trimester, they are exhausted and that happened to me. And I had eight quality hours per day to give to people, which meant I was doing eight to twelve hours between the actual work that I was doing then going and meeting a friend for drinks and then doing a networking thing afterwards. Couldn’t handle that anymore. So it forced me because I didn’t have any other choice. It was, “Okay, I need to follow up with my commitments for work and then I’ve got a few hours a week that I can give to the people that I want to see.” It was really hard. I felt like I was making excuses and they weren’t actually excuses, they were just me trying to over explain why I was saying no to them. And the number of people who were so understanding, like, “Oh, I get it. No worries.” All of them. No one, not a single person pushed back. Now it’s a lot easier and now I have the choices again where I’ve got a kid in my life now and how am I spending my time?
You have to flip it around. Am I going to be upset if someone says the same thing to me? Nope.
Yeah, great point.
I’m going to be very understanding.
Yeah, and so you have this expectation of others and expectation of yourself that comparatively does not give yourself grace, I guess.
Absolutely. And that is so typical of our human brains.
Yeah.
Yeah, we’re not looking at it in that flip perspective. But, truly, if someone were to tell me, “I can’t make it today,” period, I’m not even questioning it and I’m not getting upset about it. “Thanks for letting me know,” and let’s leave it there. And not only that but if someone were to be nasty back, is that really someone I’d want to have in my life? Is that someone I would want to work with?
I love that. Sure. So if you say no and they say like, “Well, you’re a piece of shit, you’re blah, blah, blah,” you’re like, “Well, I just dodged a bullet, this would not have been a great working relationship.”
Absolutely, yeah.
That whole flipping the script that you were talking about, like if this had been done to me, can that be used in the other instance that you were kind of bringing up which is the idea of needing to over explain like, “I can’t make it,” and a lot of people will say like, “My child was sick, I had an icicle fall into my nostril,” they’ll make up something else just so like people will be like, “Oh, wait a second, it’s not me. It was an extending circumstances is why I got blown off.” Can that same thing be applied there?
Oh, totally. Well, and can I say it’s really funny because actually did that with my email to you earlier today.
Oh, yeah.
So I probably and I shortened it to just, “Can we push back a half hour?” I shortened it to just that, I literally was trying to go into — you know, my client moved a meeting a half hour and now I need to breast pump for milk for my baby and that’s going to like…and then there’s lunch, I don’t have enough time anymore, and I was about to like put all of that in an email to you and I’m like, “You know what, he doesn’t need to know all of this information, I can just make the request.” And it’s funny that it took like literally 15 minutes for me to write that email, typing it, deleting it, typing it, deleting it.
It is kind of weird, yeah.
And tell me, what was the experience receiving that email?
So, first of all, when I received that email, the first thing I did was look at my calendar here and as someone who wants to help people get away from overuse of technology, my calendar is always written down in this thing —
I love it.
So I looked at the calendar. I also kind of assumed that you typed that email out in about 45 seconds, given that it was only one sentence, but I also kind of had the same exact conclusion in my head. I was like, “Oh, she must have a client that pushed something off for half an hour or had some other thing of similar nature just moved and put it there.”
Right. You weren’t mad at me?
No.
Oh, thank God.
It was like, wait, 12:30, you set at 12, no…
Rude. Absolutely, and it’s one of those things where it’s almost like I need to coach myself on it on a regular basis of it’s okay to make these requests. It’s okay, and if it doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t work for you. It’s just a question.
Yeah, for sure. And so now we all have a limited amount of time and a limited amount of energy, to be honest, to be used in a day, are there things that you observe a lot of people spending their time and energy on that tend to, quite commonly, I tend to shy away from making kind of a universal, “This is true for everybody,” but for a lot of people, a common use of time, use of energy that is just not really helping them get anywhere in life? And I say this knowing that rest is useful, saying that like if you’re resting, it doesn’t have to be productive all the time but there might be some things that you’re observing that are like you’re really throwing some time and energy away on this.
Oh, there’s so many. Where do I even begin? Okay. So the first one that I will say is team meetings. So I’m a part of two businesses. I have my own business and then I’m a partner in another business. In that other business, there are three of us. We meet on a daily basis for 15 minutes.
Yep.
And in those 15 minutes, we talk about, “This is what I’m doing in the next 24 hours and this is what I need from the two of you,” and it is just a very fast daily check-in, let’s go over everything very quickly. It does not need to be a one-hour meeting, which most commonly, those types of meetings are around one hour.
So that’s one huge time suck, like what could be written in an email instead of having a whole meeting about it, being very careful about how we’re using time. Click To Tweet
I’ve listened to a lot of seminars on that that have said like when it comes to meetings, think about are all the people on the meeting invited need to be invited, does it need to be as long and can it be an email? So, yeah.
Absolutely. So that’s one of them from the business perspective. Another one from a business perspective, particularly with business owners or people in leadership is doing the things that can be outsourced. I have a great example of that with the business that I’m a partner in, where my business partner does a whole lot of work on the website. He’s not a coder, he’s not a web developer, he’s an emotional intelligence coach, and updates all of this information and then I go in there and have to change a whole bunch of it, which is that’s natural for our relationship, he is not going to be upset with me for saying that, but we also pay someone to manage our website. We can send them, “This is how we want it to be changed. This is what we want the blurb to be,” and we can send it to them in order to do all of the formatting and making sure that it looks good on our website. We don’t have to be doing that. So identifying those opportunities of, “Can I outsource this to someone who couldn’t do it better and faster so that I can spend my time doing the things that matter more for my business?”
Yeah, that makes sense.
Is that one hour that I could pay someone to do so I could actually be doing the things that I like doing and earn money doing that? So that’s one aspect of it. Another one and this is more just on a personal level for most folks is social media scrolling.
Yeah, for sure.
It is toxic for ourselves, our brains, and I say that fully admitting that, “Hi, my name is Brie and I’m addicted to social media.”
Almost everybody is right now in some capacity.
Yeah, absolutely, and it is such a massive waste of time. If we are — especially when it comes to scrolling over the same stuff repeatedly, which is something that I find happens on Facebook for me is I will be scrolling past the same thing multiple times a day —
And you’re wondering why, right?
Right, and not even I don’t wonder why, I don’t even think about it. I know I’ve seen it. I don’t even question it. I’m like, “Okay, yep, saw that. What else — is the thing that’s right underneath that same post gonna be exactly the same? Yep.” And then I have a love-hate relationship with what Instagram suggests that we look at so I can see things from millions of other people posting that I don’t know them, I don’t care about them, and yet I am consuming their content and there’s a bottomless pit of it. You can go forever. And I only stop when I’m realizing that I’m taking in unhelpful information. That is the only time that I stop. It could be a while before I get there.
I guess in your view with social media, what percentage of the information that people take in is helpful? Because there’s a few examples I can think of where it’s like I have a friend on Instagram who like she posted pictures from like a vacation, and it’s like, “Oh, cool. I’m glad I knew you took this trip to that spot”, so it’s like not all 100 percent bad but, obviously, there’s a lot of stuff that are either not helping us or, in some of the cases with some of this negativity and negative content, causing us to become divided, negative, angry, fearful, all that stuff.
Oh, my gosh, absolutely.
The biggest thing for me is when we start to judge ourselves based on what we’re seeing in social media. Click To TweetThat’s something that happens for me and, right now, all of my examples are through motherhood of I’m seeing all of these, “This is how you should be taking care of your baby” posts.
Yeah, I know the story so well.
And they’re conflicting and they’re not what I’m doing and it’s one of those things where I start almost questioning like, “Oh, my gosh, my baby sleeps, her naps are more than two and a half hours. Am I doing something wrong here? Am I endangering her?” No, she’s fine. She’s fine.
And as far as how much we’re consuming, I think it depends on the person and their algorithm, what’s been catered to them? Unfortunately, since I look at those posts so much, I see them a ton so then I have to go through my phases of just deleting Instagram from my phone for a few days and resetting my brain.
And then so like with the resetting your brain, when you do delete this stuff for a few days, what do you notice yourself feeling after, say, day three, day four, day five, of just not consuming this, “Oh, your baby’s not walking at six months, you’re not as cool as me,” type of thing?
I’m more present because I had a rule which prior to having my kid which was I don’t bring my phone into my bedroom.
Oh, yeah.
So that way, I’m not looking at it first thing in the morning because that’s a black hole. That changed when I had a kid and I am now in a place where I can actually remove my phone again. But what I find when I’m in that place of separating myself from it is I’m a little bit more confident, I’m more present, I’m more secure in the choices that I’m making. It’s a self-esteem boost.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What’s weird, it seems like a self-esteem boost just from not being exposed to certain things, it’s like one thing when someone says, “Oh, you look wonderful today,” “You did a great job in this project,” all the things that externally give us the self-esteem boost, but this is like I’m not comparing myself to this stuff, I’m not absorbing this content.
Right, absolutely, and I’m actually in the — my real life. That’s the other aspect of it is when I go down that black hole on social media, I’m not in my life anymore and when I remove access to that, I’m so much more present. I’m able to have a real conversation with my husband instead of like scrolling and chatting and only half listening.
And we see so many people do that out in the world, it’s become normalized whereas I feel like before 2008, 15 years ago, before the social media smartphone era, it was actually considered pretty rude to pick up reading material or anything to look at while you’re talking to someone.
Oh my gosh. I can’t remember where I was the other day, I was at some restaurant or bar and there was a table full of young women, there were like six of them together, and all of them had a beautiful drink and all of them just had their phones in front of their faces the entire time, taking pictures and like doing great pictures with each other, big beautiful smiles for the camera and then immediately look back at their phone smile gone.
So it had nothing to do with what they were — the Instagram post, I’m assuming it’s Instagram, maybe it’s TikTok at that age, had nothing to do with whatever they were doing and it wasn’t even an accurate depiction of their experience.
Right and the reality is like those are six beautiful young women that are together in this — I’m in Florida right now, at this great bar in this great weather, let’s enjoy each other while we’re here. Let’s actually have fun together.
Yeah, as opposed to — so it’s this prioritization of showing people you’re having fun versus actually having fun.
Yeah, yes.
Oh my gosh. That’s so silly. And is part of this whole mission to kind of scale back from this in whatever capacity that everyone else feels necessary related to being okay with doing nothing? Because I think the first time most people pick up their phone, at least that’s what it is for me, it’s like I’m not doing anything, I have a minute between this distraction, this task, this particular — “My meeting ended at 1:30 and I have another one at 2 and I decided I was going to do this thing, it took 12 minutes so now I have 18 more, I don’t know what to do now so I’m just gonna pick up the phone and pull out my Instagram or Twitter app.”
Yep. Oh, totally. I’ve got 18 minutes that I could distract myself instead of, and I’m working on it with myself right now, of let me just step away.
Yeah.
Let me go outside for a minute. And this is — I assume you live in Colorado as well, right?
Yep.
Did you know that we are one of the most vitamin D deficient populations in the country?
So I knew the national rate was 70 percent vitamin D deficient but I didn’t ask about — I actually when I first heard that from a doctor said, “Even in Colorado,” assuming that that was like more of a problem for Pittsburgh and other stereotypically cloudy places.
Yeah, absolutely. We’re not going outside in Colorado, which — not on a daily basis, at least. Most of us are sitting inside of our homes or our offices the majority of daylight hours. I also just want to take a step back, like fact check me on that.
Yeah.
I said that, that is something that I heard from someone else. That’s something where we have an opportunity with those 18 minutes, we could just go and sit outside and enjoy our beautiful outdoors.
Oh, for sure, especially when the weather’s nice. I actually —
Yeah.
This weird thing I tell a lot of people whenever this topic comes up is that I honestly think that the history books from half a century from now or the end of this century are going to look back upon this era and say, “Wait a second, you’re saying in this era, they had mostly indoor desk jobs in front of computers and they chose to do it during daylight hours? That was that was one of the stupidest things we’ve ever done.”
Some of the most depressing jobs that I’ve had were basically in warehouses without windows, no sunlight access, where now I always make sure at least when I’m at my desk, I have a window by me so that I’m getting some of that daylight. And not only that, I even think about that from, again, I’m going to bring up the kid thing, like from a childcare perspective. I toured several daycares before picking the one that I’m putting my kid in and the number of daycare rooms that didn’t have a window was astounding.
Yeah, probably it’s something a lot of people don’t think about.
No, no. It’s a problem.
With those extra 18 minutes, sit outside, get some vitamin D, move a little bit. Click To TweetThat’s a huge issue too.
And to bring this kind of full circle, is that a good time also for people to do those kind of little mini, micro versions of those assessments saying, “All right, what am I doing with my day? What did I do with my week last week? Is this what I want? Is this what I want in life? Were these tasks, these things I got obsessed about getting done even what I needed to be doing?”
It is a good opportunity. I am going to put a slight spin on it of asking yourself through a positive frame and what I mean is, “How did I achieve this goal today? What is the work that I am doing that’s aligning with my values?” So that way, I don’t want to turn into a — because I could see someone going down a rabbit hole of, “These are all the ways that I am not aligning with my goal and now I’m more anxious than ever.”
Oh, I see. Yeah.
You know what I mean?
So it’s less about shading yourself and it’s more —
Celebrating yourself.
No pun intended with the whole sunshine discussion before with that but it’s not about self shading, it’s more about just what can I do or what am I doing well.
What am I doing well? How am I achieving my goals? What am I proud of myself for today? And to add on another layer of that is to actually go and have a conversation with someone about that. I schedule a half-hour walk with my neighbor every other day, in the middle of the day, and she and I talk about what’s going well in our lives, and it’s intentional. It’s an intentional — it’s a hard thing to do, it’s an intentional practice of either having that conversation with yourself or with someone else of like what are the good things that are going on.
That’s wonderful because we definitely need more face-to-face, in-real-life interaction with people in this era that’s also kind of marked by loneliness and isolation, which is part of the source of a lot of the depression and terrible depression-related results that we’ve been seeing over the past six, seven years in particular.
Oh, totally. Well, and with that, I’m going to also plug my partner business, which is called Finding Good and Finding Good is all about learning how to have those connecting conversations, listening to one another, and actually learning listening techniques through question asking and it’s so fun. It is so fun.
Does that relate to that —
That’s a different conversation.
Yeah, oh, no, it’s like does that relate to that active listening that I hear a lot about which is as opposed to listening, just waiting for your chance to respond, actually like letting them continue and finish what they’re saying type of thing?
Totally through that perspective and then coming from a true sense of curiosity. That’s where we check our assumptions at the door and say — you know, our base question is, “What went well the last week because of you?” That’s our base question that we built everything up on, and then defining what does good mean to you, why did it go well. All of these questions of — basically, what it comes down to is helping that person understand where they find value and what makes them tick and, for us as the question asker, we get to learn a little bit more about them and maybe we can learn about ourselves a little bit too in the process through authentic curiosity.
There’s just so many things that I love about your life, to be 100 percent honest, just hearing everything about it because bringing back community, bringing people together is really important, something we all need. We all need to do a better job of listening to one another so that’s really awesome. I think a lot of people need to do a better job of finding the time, prioritizing their time, being a little bit reflective about before knowing what you want to do with your time, you have to know what you want, so, oftentimes, people drift because they don’t even know what they want, they’re just doing what is expedient, what I call living by the script. And I also love that you have the capacity or free state of mind to take on multiple pursuits, because I think there’s a lot of pressure sometimes with the whole do one thing and do one thing well type of mentality, which might be from that same industrial mentality that you were referring to before that people hire you for a job and they expect to have all of you. They expect that to be the only thing you care about, that maybe you care about your family a little bit as a side project to this job, which is so weird, not to throw it back on something negative.
Totally. Well, and what I will say is I love my life as well. It was so scary getting here. The process of I had a secure job with a trajectory through retirement in the aerospace industry. I was set for life in that role and to look at that and say, “This isn’t what I want anymore.” Yes, I have multiple pursuits right now, that also comes at a cost. There’s the hustle life, which is exhausting. There’s the lack of benefits. Fortunately, I have a partner that I’m married to who I can get benefits through. And feeling very fortunate for that because there are many people who might not have that. And it’s small steps. That’s something that I’ll say, and being able to look at your life and go, “Is this something that I am proud of?” and if it’s not, how can I pivot it just a little bit today? And each day making that choice to just pivot it a little bit more and a little bit more, that’s where you can get the confidence to make some of those bigger changes is when you make those small, little changes.
Let’s just say anyone out there listening, tomorrow night, you get done with your workday and, normally, you would pick up your phone and scroll on social media but, instead, you’re like, “No, I’m gonna read a book and I’m just gonna read two chapters of a book, something I wanna read, something that’s gonna help me get to where I wanna be.” That represents an example of a pretty small step that someone can take?
Absolutely. And if you’re — that’s one great step if you’re looking to try and get off of your cell phone. Another great option is to, if you still want to be on your phone, to look for something that’s a little bit more helpful for your life. So instead of just scrolling, maybe be more intentional of who is someone who I would like to know, I admire their lives, how are they doing it, maybe I’ll reach out to them directly and say, “Hey, would you mind telling me how you got to where you are so I could learn a little bit?”
I love that and I’m like — so, by the way, in case this is, you know, anyone’s listening in a different year, this is early 2023 that we’re recording so I’m doing the little thing that people do with their hands with the heart that you see. Saw it a lot in the Olympics last year. And maybe if you’re listening to this in 2026, that’s not a thing anymore.
That was one way that I got to where I am now is just reaching out to people and picking their brains, like I’m not going to model my life 100 percent off of anyone else but I would love to hear what worked for them and what sounds interesting to me and maybe I could take a little nugget of information from them to influence my life and that builds that connection that we were talking about and it changes your life as well in the process. We can use social media for good.
I mean, that’s a conscious act, right? So as opposed to letting the algorithm decide whose information you’re taking in or letting the algorithm decide what content, you’re just like, no, I’m going to choose, this is a person maybe I don’t want to hear from or I’ve heard from enough and that’s a person that I need to reach out to, that’s a person I want more of in my life, whether it be reaching out to them or just reading their content instead of what’s at the top of your feed.
Yeah, totally. Oh, I love that. And I will say I have a new one that I’m doing at the end of my day. I pick my daughter up from daycare and we get home and there’s — I’m tired at the end of the day. She’s not in a place yet where she can be tired at the end — I mean, she’s tired all day, she’s a baby, but doing a dance party when we get home. Just a quick reset. Put on some good music, connect with each other by boogying down for a few minutes and that just kind of resets for the rest of the evening. That’s what I’m doing now. That’s my commitment.
I love that because music can really — you know, I mean, obviously, there’s not one thing that works for everyone but it can be powerful, just even changing, elevating your mental state.
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And we got to support our artists.
Yeah, for sure. And then another thing, the last thing I want to see if you have any comments on is like the value of rest, the value of taking some time, whether you need it in the middle of day, the end of the day, and saying, “It’s okay that I’m sitting and doing nothing.”
I view that almost of what we would tell someone else. If someone else is exhausted, are we going to tell them, “Work through it”? If they’re burnt out, are we going to tell them, “You know what, you don’t deserve a rest”?
I can think of some people that would but…
We don’t want them in our lives. Think about what you would say to someone that you truly care about and if they were feeling the way that you’re feeling, that’s how I would give permission to myself and how I might suggest for someone to give permission to themselves is what would I tell someone who I truly love? Would I want them to take that nap in the middle of the day? If they need it, yes.
Oh, for sure. I mean, as a frequent middle-of-the-day napper, I will never throw shade on that.
Nope.
Well, Brie, I’d like to thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, telling us all the stories about how you got to where you’re wanting to be through some of these kind of small steps, small intentional steps, and what we can all do to better use our time and put ourselves in a place where we’re comparing ourselves with others more favorably or less often or just kind of flipping and saying, “If I wouldn’t expect this from someone else, why do I think that I need to do this myself?”
Right.
And I would like to thank everyone out there for listening and tuning into Action’s Antidotes and encourage you to tune in to more episodes as we kind of go about these journeys that we all have.
All right. Thank you, Stephen.
Thank you.
Important Links:
About Brie DeLisi Zoller
Brie is the Dream Wrangler. A dream wrangler is someone who understands that you have big, bold dreams you want to accomplish, but those dreams are pinballing around in your brain, or maybe inconsistently throughout your business.
Her expertise comes into play by pinning your wildest dreams down, outlining how to make the dream a reality, and then implementing the processes to make that dream happen. Once a dream is wrangled, it’s only a few processes away from coming true.
There’s a world where your dreams work for you.
You don’t have to spend sleepless nights toiling away over your business.
You don’t have to feel stuck and like scaling is an impossible mountain to climb.
You don’t have to face this entrepreneurial journey alone.