EP 109: Stop Trying to Manage Your Time-Do This Instead!

If you are feeling frustrated with how your days are going. If you are overwhelmed by the prospect of "getting more done." If you want to engage in more personal growth but have no idea how you would possibly fit this into your life...

This podcast is for YOU! 

This simple idea transformed my life, as I learned to focus NOT on my time but on something far more powerful and unlimited instead. This secret to changing the dynamic of our lives from overwhelm and frustration to optimism and accomplishment, has changed the lives of many women who have learned and practiced it in the MDM Academy. 

NOW I'm giving you this secret too! And I know if you'll change your focus and practice this skill, you will increase our confidence AND your capacity 10X!

For more tools on how to overcome the worry and overwhelm, go grab your FREE MINI-TRAINING "How to Conquer Your Worries and Mom-Guilt": https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

Transcript:

I'm excited to spend some time with you today. We're going to talk about how you need to stop managing your time and manage something. Instead, I'm going to talk to you about how you can take this frustration that you may be feeling with. How your day to day activities are going, how frustrated and overwhelmed you might feel with how you're showing up for yourself and for other people, and how you can move in a better direction.

You have the power right now to really make things significantly different, to feel pleased with how you're showing up, to have more optimism, more positivity, and to just feel better about yourself and about how you're performing in your life. Before we get to that, I want to ask you a favor. If this podcast has been helpful to you and blessed your life, it would mean a lot if you would pass it along and if you would leave a review.

That helps other people to know the value of this podcast. And of course, if you've not been over to the mission driven mom.com, go check it out. We'd love to have you opt in for any of the things we have there for you for free. You can learn how to overcome your worries and turn them into forward momentum.

You can get a 7 laws cheat sheet. If you've never read my book you can also get two chapters of it for free. So head on over there and check that out.

Today we're going to talk about how you can show up better for yourself and for your family, and for your loved ones and, and all of that stuff. So, in order to start, I want to just take a moment and I want you to think about a typical day in your life.

This is all about you. Thinking about, how does your day look? When do you typically get up? What do you usually do first? What kind of schedule do you have? Do you have to go to work part-time or full-time, or not at all? Are you taking care of children full-time? Are you doing half and half?

Some of our audience, I know even homeschool, so that might be the circumstances that you're in. Who are you caring for? What appointments do you typically have in a day or in a week? What are the demands on you? And just kind of step back from your own life. Act like a third party observer. And watch your life for a moment, those things that are daily being expected of you by the people around you and the things that you expect of yourself.

Now, hone in a little bit, look more closely, how are you feeling during all these activities? When you get up, are you energized or are you groggy? Do you feel excited about your day or frustrated or worried or overwhelmed when you come to breakfast or make breakfast? When you interact with your family, when you go to your appointments, how is that looking for you?

How are you showing up in all of those places? Are you at your best in these appointments and in these interactions? Do you wish you could be accomplishing more? Do you feel like you're falling short? Do you get frustrated, overwhelmed, or just wanna check out entirely at some point or at multiple points during your day?

Well, if you are like me, then the answer to some of those questions is yes. It's hard to show up the way that we wanna show up for ourselves and for other people all the time. And what you've been told, maybe perhaps this is what I was told for a really long time, was that if I could just manage my time better, I would feel better.

Things would go better if I got up earlier, if I scheduled things better, if I kept myself to the timeframes that I had laid out for myself for different activities. If I didn't try to get so much done in a day. You know, back in the day, this will kind of age me, but I owned a Franklin planner and that thing was not cheap and my husband and I really tried to use those religiously well.

The consequence of what we've been thinking about and describing in terms of our day is if you're less than satisfied with how these things are going for you, here's the problem that we create for ourselves. Not only do we feel frustrated and overwhelmed by how the day is going and how it's looking and how we're showing up, but then the, the added consequences of that is how we end up feeling about ourselves.

Because then we feel like, well, I just didn't get it all done and I'm just kind of a loser and I can't really ever hit my goals and we have a lower self-confidence. We start really feeling lost in motherhood, in the responsibilities of our lives. We want to accomplish more, but we really feel overwhelmed.

We're frustrated, and so our self-image is really damaged. We have more negative self-talk. Sometimes we fall into self-pity. Sometimes we start to feel resentful of other people or ourselves or God or whatever it is, and it just doesn't have to be that way. This doesn't have to be the story of your day-to-day life.

I want to introduce you to a new paradigm.This is in comparison with the old paradigm of time management. This is something that, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz came up with, and it's so fascinating. It's one of, of course, many things that we do in the MDM Academy that helps us to have a better relationship with ourselves.

So I want to go through the old paradigm. In other words, the things that we're being told by the world or maybe the ideas that we were brought up on that are telling us how to manage ourselves, how to manage our lives. It looks like this. We should manage our time. We should avoid stress. Life is a marathon and we just need to keep going and going, Downtime is wasted time. Rewards fuel performance. So if we get rewarded enough, then we'll want to do the work. Self-discipline rules. We just need to have more self-discipline and more willpower, and then we'll accomplish everything that we've set our minds to and the power of positive thinking. We just need to have the right thoughts all the time and think the right things about ourselves and other people, and do our affirmations and our vision board and all of that thing, all those things, and then we'll get where we wanna be and we won't feel this way about our day anymore.

And that's just not true. Those paradigms are not helpful. I hit up against that time and time again. I thought that that's how I was supposed to live my life. Well, the new paradigm is very different. It's the reverse, basically the opposite of each of those things I listed.

So instead of managing time, we manage energy. We seek stress rather than avoid it. I'm going to talk to you about why that's actually the case and why that's so important. Nobody out there. As for, I want very few people, maybe Loehr and Schwartz are telling you that you need to seek stress, but it is the key to growth. Life is a series of sprints. We actually do best when we're project based, when we push really hard for something that's meaningful and then we rest and rejuvenate.

There are important reasons for that too. Downtime is productive time. Purpose fuels our performance, not rewards. It's the purpose and inherent meaning of what we're doing that makes us want to do it. Rituals rule, not self-discipline. When we put the approach appropriate rituals in our lives, we will have more and more of the results that we're really longing for.

And it's not the power of positive thinking, it's what they call the power of full engagement.

So I want to stop really quickly and define some terms because that's really gonna help us to understand what it is that we're talking about. First of all, energy. What's energy? How would we manage? We know what time is. You know, time is the clicking, the ticking clock, and once it's gone we can't ever get it back and we only have so much of it. And what's really cool about energy as compared to time is it's actually limitless. There's not a total amount of energy that we can bring to the table. We can continue to increase our energy levels, but time is always limited.

So what is work? Work is activity involving effort that's done in order to achieve a purpose or result. Attention is applying the mind and the body to something selectively narrowing or focusing of consciousness and, and receptivity. And what is stress? Stress is pressure or tension exerted on a material object.

This whole paradigm of managing energy instead of time is so revolutionary because when you are focused on the energy that you're bringing to your day, everything shifts. The best way of thinking about this change in paradigm from. Managing time to managing energy and from avoiding stress to seeking stress and to living in terms of marathon and living in terms of sprints.

And rather than having self-discipline to building rituals. Instead, it begins by understanding or at least being reminded of how muscles are built. You probably know this, I'll just quickly remind you. Anytime we want to build a physical muscle in our body, we have to stress it. We have to strain it. We have to overexert it.

We have to take it beyond its comfort level. And in fact, often this involves pain. We have to choose to be in pain and to lift weights or do activities that put strain on those muscles that they haven't had before. And that strain on the muscle causes it to tear these little tiny micro tears. Are created in your muscle, that's the source of the pain.

You're actually tearing your muscle. And then as you rest the muscle, the body goes in and repairs it. It adds amino acids to the myofilament, and this causes them to grow in size. So if you want growth in your muscles, you have to get out of comfort. You have to choose pain. You have to intentionally strain, struggle, and be in discomfort, and you have to let those muscles be torn and then you have to give your body the necessary nutrients so that the amino acids can properly repair the muscle, and then you have a bigger muscle. And with that bigger muscle comes increased capacity. Now there's things that you can do, real things in the real world that you can do now that you couldn't do before you volunteered to be in discomfort, before you stepped into stress.

The revolutionary idea that these men are presenting is that in every area of life, the key areas where we need to care for ourselves and truly love ourselves, require this same process.

This is something that Tony Schwartz said.

“It’s not how many hours you put in that determines how productive you are. It's how much energy you're able to invest during the hours you work.”

Now, remember, work is simply doing the tasks that are necessary to bring about a desired end. And stress is when we intentionally cause strain and tension on something.

So this is what this means, which is really, really cool, is that if we want to show up better, if we want to be more optimistic, be more full of energy, we simply go through the process emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, that we go through physically with our muscles, we seek stress, and we rest. We go beyond our comfort zone. We do something that's intentionally hard for us, and then we rest and relax and let our body, mind, soul, emotions repair. And that is how we increase our strength, our spiritual strength, our mental strength, and our emotional strength. And the way that we can do that consistently is through, instead of trying to have a lot of self-discipline every single day, we run in sprints.

So we do projects or activities that are intentionally hard for us. Like that time you set aside to go to the gym and intentionally be in pain so that you can have increased capacity and better physical health the rest of your life. And we do the same thing spiritually, mentally, and emotionally. We set aside time and we run a sprint, an emotional sprint, a spiritual sprint, a mental sprint, and we push ourselves way beyond our current levels of capacity.

And that's where the pain comes in. The emotional pain, the spiritual pain, the mental pain, and then we rest. And instead of trying to live life like a marathon, we live it in these sprints and rests. And one of the ways that we can maintain that process is putting rituals in place. Now, I don't have time to get in today into this whole process.

This is something that we really deep dive in the academy and learn how to do. But I want to go over the four principles of this process with you. Principle number one. In order to have more energy, you have to draw on all four sources of energy, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. These are all absolutely vital, and instead of trying to have the perfect day all scheduled out, if you'll nurture your energy levels.

By seeking stress in these four areas, you'll have increased capacity, you'll have reserves to do more. I was looking over some testimonials yesterday that I thought I might use in this podcast. Several of them talked about how they were doing a lot when they signed up for the academy, and they just thought, “Well, I'll just go at my own pace. It'll take as long as it takes.”

But what they found was that when they added more to their life and they learned tools like this, and they pushed themselves mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, that they had increased capacity out on the end, there was more that they could do. They got more done than they thought that they could do because this process really works. This is how we really grow. This is what it takes.

Now the second principle is that energy capacity diminishes with overuse and underuse, so you have to balance the expenditure. With intermittent energy renewal, just like I was describing before, you have to push yourself beyond the boundaries.

I'll give you some examples in just a minute, but let me give you the last two principles.

The third one is something I've been mentioning several times that we must push beyond our normal limit limits training in the same systematic way that we do physically in these other areas of our lives.

And the fourth principle is that we need positive energy rituals. These are routines that help us manage our energy, and they keep our energy high throughout the day and throughout the week and throughout our lives.

So here's an example. Let's say, and I have been in this situation that my emotional and perhaps my, even my spiritual reserves are at a low. And the reason that I know that is because I feel negative. My thoughts are negative. My emotions aren't negative. I'm getting up in the morning or I'm going throughout my day and I'm noticing that I'm having negative thoughts, negative energy output, and so I know that. That's an indicator to me that something is wrong spiritually or emotionally, or both. And when I evaluate what those negative emotions are and I look carefully at the thoughts that are associated with them, when I actually take the time to sit down and journal and evaluate that, then I begin to see that my thoughts are directed. Or coming from a space where I'm upset with someone about an event or about something that they've done, what this tells me is that there's something wrong with my emotional reserves. I don't have the emotional reserves to go through my day without just collapsing into some kind of self be or negativity. And if that's happening ongoing, then I know I need to increase my emotional capacity and something is blocking me. Something is in my way. Now, this might have to do with my relationship myself or with someone else, but as an example in this specific situation, it may be that I need to forgive.

It may be that resentment is a block to me and I'm hanging on to something in the past, and it's doing damage in my day-to-day right now, and I'm allowing it to block me from having more positive emotions about my future. That means I need to go through the process of forgiving. And that's hard. That's difficult. That's something I've been avoiding. I have to push through. I have to live those principles. I have to practice them, and that's pushing myself. And so I set aside time, over the next few weeks or even few months, to push myself beyond my comfort zone to do something emotionally difficult to do the work of walking through this situation with myself or with this other person to truly and completely forgive them.

And as I do that, I'm pushing my emotional capacity and I'm enhancing my ability to do this in the future. I'm increasing my ability to live principles of forgiveness, and the next time I need to do this, it will just be that much easier to see the situation more clearly, to let go more quickly, to move through the forgiveness process, uh, more speedily because I'm increasing my ability to be able to keep my emotional energy higher.

So this might be the case in the spiritual realm if I'm feeling like I don't have any good goals and the future looks bleak and negative. Emotions are a good indicator of anything that can be wrong. Those and negative emotions and negative thoughts are indicators of something's wrong spiritually or physically or mentally or emotionally.

And so journaling, evaluating, again, we walk you through this in the academy. That's a place where you can go to get more of this. Point being, when you identify that area where your energy is low, the block that's in your life that's causing you to not have the energy that you want to have, then you work on that by pushing past the limits of where you're comfortable and what you've done in the past, and increasing your capacity to do more of that thing.

Spiritual reserves get really low. Spiritual energy is low when we don't have a lot of meaning and purpose, when we're not actively working toward. Noble goals and worthwhile outcomes that we care about. When we don't have those in place, then it zaps our spiritual energy and we wind up negative again.

And then we might go through the motions every day, but our life doesn't look the way that we want it to. And like we thought about in the beginning, if you're having more of those days than you want to have where you're feeling overwhelmed or negative or depressed, or whatever. It may very well be the case that you need to learn to increase your capacity. I've had many women come into the MDM Academy who didn't realize that their mental capacity wasn't met, that they actually felt like something was missing in their life and they couldn't put their finger on it, and it was causing them to feel frustrated and upset, and it was that they weren't being pushed mentally.

And the Academy was a place where they could really learn a lot of new information in a short period of time where they could push beyond the limits of what they might naturally read and read more difficult things and use better study skills and push their mental capacities. And as they did that, their reserves increased.

Again, they could do more than they could do before. So it's important for us to remember that the cadence of any given day is, the first few hours of the day are the hours where we naturally have the most energy. There are ups and downs, there are cadences. There's an ebb and flow to the day. But as the day goes on, energy reserves will decrease and decrease as we deplete them.

Now, the more energy we bring to the table through what we're doing with our physical body, through what we're doing for our spiritual needs, our mental needs, and our emotional needs through the capacities that we've built by pushing ourselves and inviting stress, and then taking time to relax and release.

That's the amount of energy. That's the package that we've created. That's the energy that we get to show up for that with that morning, and that energy will only last, to the intensity that we use it, and it will decline throughout the day. That's why it's so important not to try to have really hard, difficult discussions with people late at night people often end up sleeping on the couch.

When you're pushing yourself in any way, when you're inviting or choosing stress, like a hard conversation or forgiving or writing goals and creating a vision for your future or repairing a relationship or increasing your physical energy, you’ve got to set aside the time to do that. Then rest and rejuvenate from it.

So there's two parts to this process. One is what they talked about with rituals. We want daily rituals that keep our energy, get our energy levels up, and then they're higher throughout the day. But we also need events, too—the sprints where we push extra hard for a time and then we relax and kind of spring back. If you think about a rubber band, once you've pushed it really, really tight, when it springs back, it will be larger. That's you as you sign up for sprints, as you choose to go in and give yourself extra stress and then relax from it, you will find your capacity increased.

One of the things I hear people saying a lot is that, they already feel so stressed right now. They could never take on more stress, but it's choosing things that will increase your capacity. That's what you've got to do. So if you're really overwhelmed with your day right now, you probably don't have good enough morning rituals that get your energy to a higher level for that day. You’re probably also increasing your stress, whatever the circumstances are that you're going through, if you're saying that you feel really stressed and that you can't take on more stress. It’s probably because your stress is of a negative nature and you are contributing to it knowingly or unknowingly by the negativity that you bring to it.

Actually, this is choosing positive stressors that will help you understand your talents and abilities and develop them, or that will help you heal a burdened relationship, or that will give you vision and clarity for the future, or that will help your body to heal so that it, you have more physical energy as well.

You have to make the time and space to stretch yourself in those capacities. Choosing those sprints is where you've got to journal and evaluate and figure out what's a roadblock for you or what is an area where you're going to choose stress to increase your capacity. The other element of choosing rituals, putting rituals in your life that keep your energy up day by day.

That's where you do things each morning to remind yourself of all the good things that are going on in your life and to get you yourself mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually ready for the day. The way that I do it is first thing in the morning. I make sure that I do a thorough stretch because I am, still healing my hip. It's so much better. I can do so much more than I could a few months ago because I've been so vigilant with diet and with the stretches and with all of the protocols. So I make sure and do that and then I control my diet throughout the day and I make sure I get enough sleep. So those are rituals that help me have maximum physical health, even though I'm in the middle of repairing huge, injuries and things that are wrong with my body. Then I make sure that I read some quality material and am inspired by great men and women. All of the study I've been doing for my book, How Truth Makes You Free is really a mental boost every morning. It's so exciting to read from great men and women who talked about truth, who lived inspiring lives. Their life rubs off on me and I want to be more like them. It's really a huge mental boost.

Then emotionally, I make sure that I go through and do my gratitude and my true statements every morning so that. I'm reminded of why life is good and this is a wonderful place that I want to be at, and all the things I have to be grateful for, and all the things that are true about me and about my family, and about the world that get me recentered.

Then spiritually, I connect with the divine. I make sure that I read words from scripture that have the most elevating power. Of any type of writing, and I let God speak to me through those words and speak to me through prayer and time and meditation with him, and that that helps me get my energy levels really high.

Then I do my hardest mental work as early in the day as I possibly can.

I put rituals in place to keep my energy high all throughout the day. I choose activities intermittently throughout my life that stress me and then release. Sometimes I've had to do the work of forgiving someone. Sometimes I've signed up for classes so that I could develop a talent or so that I could push myself mentally. Sometimes I have worked really vigilantly on my thoughts and my daily emotions and had rituals and patterns and a goal set around that. Sometimes I go out and I spend time alone and I think about my future and I connect with God and we make plans for the future. That's another thing I do in the morning is a little bit of envisioning, looking over my goals or thinking about where I'm headed and, and how what I'm going to do today is part of a bigger plan that I've created that's meaningful for me and for the people around me.

All of those things get me ready for the day. It doesn't have to take a lot of time. If I'm in a hurry, I can do all those things in less than an hour. It's just doing a little bit of those every day. And then, like I said, all throughout my life, I've gone to conferences. I've taken courses, I've worked with mentors, I've signed up for things, or I've given myself a task and been accountable to someone and just chosen to keep pushing the envelope, to keep stretching myself and then relaxing.

That is how energy is created and maintained. And if you will focus on managing your energy, not your time, you’ll find that as your capacity increases, time becomes more and more irrelevant because you can get so much more done in such a shorter period of time, because you don't have all of your negative thoughts and emotions getting in the way because you think more clearly, because of whatever it is that increases your capacity.

If you paint enough, you will just be able to paint something or draw something way faster than you could a few years ago. If you played the piano consistently, if you dribble a ball, it doesn't matter what example that I give, if you do it enough, you’ll get faster. If you have a ritual of going out and setting goals and thinking about your future, the more you do that, the better you'll get at it, and the more you'll fine tune those. You’ll be clear, and then you'll live with more intention, and then you'll have more reason to get up in the morning, and then you'll be more positive and optimistic with your children, and the mood and the atmosphere in your home will be more productive and everyone will work more kindly and well with each other.

It's an upward spiral of increased capacity and productivity. But it isn't through all of the perfect scheduling. Now, I schedule too, I still have a planner. It's not that I don't plan in my planner. It’s not that I don't think about what I need to do today, but I'm less focused on the amount of time it will take.

Even with this podcast. I need to get ahead because I'm going to be out of town so I needed to record several podcasts in a short period of time. I went through my notes and I prayed over what would be good information to share, and I pulled some books from the shelf and I sat down and worked. In about an hour, I was able to create the outline for this podcast.

And now I'm recording it and posting it in another hour or so. And. I couldn't do that many years ago. It's because of all the ways that I've pushed myself in the past and all of the things that I've read and all the books that I've marked, and all the things that I've taught and, and practiced and have been meaningful to me, and all the ways in which I've increased my capacity.

I've spoken thousands of times publicly at this point. Through all the videos and all of the conventions and all of the online conferences that I've spoken at, I've just become more and more articulate. I've practiced that skill so much that I can record this once and not have to record it again. I promise, this is the way of personal growth. This is the way that you can keep your energy optimistic and realistic, and that's what you want. You don't want to live in a fantasy world where you think everything's going to be perfect all the time. You want to see reality for what it is. But you want to hope for the best and expect the best and and plan for your future and all of those wonderful things.

I want to read to you, as we finish up, a few quotes from a couple other authors that I really, really love that have to do with this whole process.

Tom Rath, who at 16 was diagnosed with a genetic disease where his body, doesn't have what it needs to fight tumors. So he's had cancer on and off all his life and multiple surgeries in the battle of physical health. And he says that,  ‘…mission-driven people often spent a lifetime putting everyone else's needs before their own,” which is wonderful.

You're mission-driven men and women, and you want the world to be a better place, and so you're striving to be a servant leader who puts others' needs before your own. But we have to remember that what I've been talking about today is your real needs. It's what I explain in my book, The Mission-Driven Life, around the three principles of self-love. You must meet your own needs. You are the only one that can meet your own needs. You're the only one that can focus on your energy and get your energy higher. No one can do that for you. And your needs aren't more important than anyone else's, and their needs aren't more important than yours.

Tom Rath says.”Even if you're determined to be the least selfish person on the planet and do nothing but serve other people, you need daily energy to do so effectively.”

There's a story of Mother Theresa. You can go listen to her mission-driven story on this podcast, but there was a moment where she was serving in this calling of helping the poor in Calcutta. She went out there every day to try and help the people. She brought her own lunch with her. It was hot outside and it was demanding physical conditions. Often the children would steal her food from her, she wouldn't have sufficient water, she wouldn't have sufficient food, and so she would sometimes pass out. And then eventually she became very sick and a nurse had to come and teach her how to better take care of herself. She had to learn this principle that her energy was not going to remain high unless she nurtured herself. She was always nurturing herself spiritually. She knew what her goals were. She knew what she'd been called to do. She knew what God wanted her to do, but she couldn't serve in that capacity and unless her energy was high, and for her it was the emotional and physical reserves that she desperately needed. She could only do that by taking better care of herself and making her needs a priority.

Tom Rath says, “People who have very high energy levels in a given day are more than three times as likely to be completely engaged in their work that same day. If you want to make a difference, not just today, but for many years to come you need to put your health and energy ahead of all else.

“When you need to be your very best for work, family, and friends, start by ensuring that you have adequate energy to be fully charged.”

You need to be there for the people that you love. They're depending on you. When you show up negative and crabby, you don't know who you are. You don’t have a lot of confidence. You are feeling lost in motherhood. You don't have goals for the future. You don't have a soul centered in your worth as found in God when you aren't focused on connecting with him regularly, and when you aren't pushing yourself to go beyond your current comfort levels. You cannot become the person that you want to be, and you cannot solve this problem of having enough energy.

I want to end with this wonderful quote. This is Greg McEwen. He talks about how important it is in our lives that we hone in on what's most important, and we do only those things that are most important.

“It's about getting the right things done. That doesn't mean just doing less for the sake of doing less. It is about making the wisest possible investment of your time and energy in order to operate at your highest point of contribution.”

Doing only what is most essential, working on these elements of energy, nurturing your own energy, is what is most important. Everything will change when you are at your peak, even if you do less. As you do more of building your energy, it will accumulate into a life of greater purpose that's more optimistic and exciting and energized. One where you have a better sense of yourself and more confidence. One where you know who you are and where you're going.

Where the people around you find the light in your presence and they are inspired by your example. One where you manage your energy on a daily basis and you sign up to push yourself and stress yourself so that you can be more than you are today.

That's the life we all want to have, and that's the impact we all want to have. And it starts with managing your energy. So eat your veggies, go for a walk, make time for prayer. Go be alone and plan your future. Do all those things that are essential to fuel your energy, and you'll find that you'll stop saying, “I don't have enough time," and you'll start nurturing your energy instead.

Thank you so much for joining me today. It was a privilege to share these principles with you, and I hope they have a hugely positive impact in your life. See you next time.