Help Yourself!
Stirring the Pot of Creativity and Courage
Discover the art of culinary reinvention and personal growth as we take a whimsical journey from kitchen to character development. This episode is a veritable feast for the soul, steeped in the rich broth of history and spiced with the zest of self-improvement. Gather 'round as I recount transforming holiday leftovers into a delightful ham and corn chowder, a tradition rooted in the pragmatic gastronomy of the Great Depression. Then, we'll meander through the curious alleys of perpetual stews and nursery rhymes, finding resourcefulness in the most unexpected places.
Taking a break from the simmering pot, our conversation shifts to the exploration of life's flavors and fears. I'll share my offbeat encounter with buffalo wing soda and a chili that’s a symphony of chocolate, cinnamon, and beans, challenging the palate with the unexpected. We'll also dive into the essence of motivation, arming ourselves with strategies like 'fear setting' to confront our trepidations head-on. Listen as I detail a Toastmasters Club experience that proves with a plan in hand, the once-daunting task of facing our fears becomes a well-chartered journey.
As we near the end of our time together, we don't shy away from the weightier ingredients of life's stew. We tackle the overarching struggle with burnout, perfectionism, and aligning work with values, stirring in anecdotes and insights to motivate and ground you. The episode is ladled with pearls of wisdom on managing overwhelm, the fortitude of support systems, and the significance of gratitude. There's no recipe too complex, no ambition too grand, as we serve up a blend of nourishing thoughts and energizing encouragement to inspire your next steps, both in the kitchen and beyond.
Discover the art of culinary reinvention and personal growth as we take a whimsical journey from kitchen to character development. This episode is a veritable feast for the soul, steeped in the rich broth of history and spiced with the zest of self-improvement. Gather 'round as I recount transforming holiday leftovers into a delightful ham and corn chowder, a tradition rooted in the pragmatic gastronomy of the Great Depression. Then, we'll meander through the curious alleys of perpetual stews and nursery rhymes, finding resourcefulness in the most unexpected places.
Taking a break from the simmering pot, our conversation shifts to the exploration of life's flavors and fears. I'll share my offbeat encounter with buffalo wing soda and a chili that’s a symphony of chocolate, cinnamon, and beans, challenging the palate with the unexpected. We'll also dive into the essence of motivation, arming ourselves with strategies like 'fear setting' to confront our trepidations head-on. Listen as I detail a Toastmasters Club experience that proves with a plan in hand, the once-daunting task of facing our fears becomes a well-chartered journey.
As we near the end of our time together, we don't shy away from the weightier ingredients of life's stew. We tackle the overarching struggle with burnout, perfectionism, and aligning work with values, stirring in anecdotes and insights to motivate and ground you. The episode is ladled with pearls of wisdom on managing overwhelm, the fortitude of support systems, and the significance of gratitude. There's no recipe too complex, no ambition too grand, as we serve up a blend of nourishing thoughts and energizing encouragement to inspire your next steps, both in the kitchen and beyond.
Welcome to Help Yourself. Food and Philosophy with Brian and Nick. I'm Nick and I'm Brian. Brian, did you know that I'm going to open a rehab clinic for procrastinators? No, no, someday, what you eating?
Speaker 2:That's just. That's too close to home, actually. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. What am I eating? Yeah, I had a need to. You actually inspired me on our last episode with your dinner roll sandwiches. It was really awesome. So I was always I'm always looking for a way, because so much food after the holidays goes to waste, and so we had all this extra ham, and so I and since it's been cold recently, I was like, hey, you know what? I should find some kind of like ham soup, something that uses ham in it. Right, and so so I did. I found this awesome ham and corn chowder that I, that I made. I took, I made with love, I should say.
Speaker 2:It was I always forget how good a homemade soup can be, because it's rarely do you do it. Usually it's just like oh yeah, you get a can of soup and you open it and you heat it up and you do whatever it right. And when you do that homemade you know the homemade feel to it and you get to choose all the ingredients and how they're chopped up and how thick it is or how whatever. So I found this ham and corn chowder that has bacon, onion celery, it has a whole bunch of stuff in it. It's got chopped up ham in it, it's got garlic, it's got, and then you put it a little whipping cream, like you put in a little heavy cream in there to make it a creamy. So it's a chowder, you know. So it's a creamy based soup and and frozen corn obviously put the. You take some just frozen corn, a couple cups of frozen corn and and, of course, potatoes and it's super hearty. Like it came out like really almost like just a bowl of all those ingredients with a little bit of creamy liquid in it, you know. So it was very. I did ask, I did add a little bit of extra ham and a little bit of extra potatoes to make it a little bit more chunky. But, man, it turned out so good. I was really, really excited about it.
Speaker 2:Just because I, you know, like I said, I forget how. You know, like, how easy it is and how good it is to make a, you know, a homemade soup and how many ingredients that also how cheap, like people don't understand. That's the reason why, like in olden times I say olden times, but like in the early, like in the you know why there's soup kitchens and why there's you know why in the depression, people ate a lot of soup and stews and things like that. Because you can make it for, you know, you can sort of spread it out, it fills up your belly a little bit better and you can use very, very inexpensive ingredients. I mean, buying three, three potatoes is doesn't cost that much. Or, you know, buying an onion doesn't cost that much. But you can make this huge bowl of soup I mean, excuse me, huge like pot of soup that will feed you for multiple, multiple meals, and, you know, per meal. I'm sure that it's cheap, you know.
Speaker 1:And if it starts running low, you just add more ingredients to it? Yeah, and they used to do that.
Speaker 2:I didn't know this, but if you ever do research, this is total tangent.
Speaker 1:But if you ever do research on, on, on, like the.
Speaker 2:I want to say this was like 16 or 1700s, you know they would. They would just have a pot of sort of what they would call stew, I guess and I guess this would be not not the wealthy people, but they would have just stew on the fire all the time, that would just be there, staying warm all the time. They never, like dumped it out and washed it and started over, like if they got more ingredients, they just added more ingredients, added more liquid to the stew, and then they just stirred it up and just kept eating out of that same cauldron or whatever they were, whatever they were heating it up in. I'm sure it was like a cast iron, something that was hanging over a fireplace, right, and I can't imagine the, you know the. I think that people back then, probably their, their, their constitution was probably very strong because they ingested a lot of things that had been not refrigerated and not, you know, in any way kept in any kind of safe food preparation manner.
Speaker 1:But Well, that is kind of its own way of preserving something, right? Because if you're always cooking it, there's no way bacteria can live and grow Sure, it's just always scalded and you're killing anything that tries to live there. Yeah. I mean, do you remember the or heard of the nursery rhyme peas porridge Hot. Yes. I think. I think that's a reference to that practice. Oh Peas porridge, hot peas porridge, cold peas, porridge in the pot, nine days old. Ah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Some like it hot, some like it cold, some like it in the pot. Nine days old Wow.
Speaker 2:I didn't even realize I completely had forgotten about that. Yeah Well, this soup that I made is not going to sit on the oven, I mean on the stove for nine days.
Speaker 2:We actually put it in a refrigerator after we were done. Peas, porridge cold, brian, yeah Well, but I feel like, so it's funny because I so this is the funny. I got up this morning and I was saying to my wife I said well, man, I think I want to. I want to find another recipe that I can use more of that ham. And she was like why? I thought you really liked the soup that we made. And she's like oh, I'm like. Oh, I made, I did, but I was just going to find another recipe to use more of the ham up, you know. And she's like or you could just make more of the same that you already like. Why? Why are you? She's like I'm going to try to find another recipe that I don't know if I'll like and anyway, I do have.
Speaker 2:I do still have a lot of ham left that I'm trying to use up, and so some of that's going in the dog bowl. The dog is happy, very, very happy these days because she's getting a little treat every time she has her breakfast in the morning. So a little bit of cubed ham in there.
Speaker 2:But, but yeah, it was again. I know it's. I'm. I'm sure that's not an epiphany to most people, but every once in a while it's like I cook something I haven't cooked for a while and I go, wow, why don't I just do this all the time? I don't understand why I don't do this all the time. So maybe a little motivation for me to cook some more soups. Brian's Beverage Corner. I've got a thing. This is sort of a throwback from a few episodes ago where I had some of those drinks that tasted like different various things. I think you, I think we remember some like you know, soda that tastes like ranch and soda that tastes like you know those ones. Yeah, you're like, vaguely, I vaguely remember that.
Speaker 2:Oh, I remember it because I was drinking it. So, yeah, I blocked it from my memory, right. So mayonnaise flavored soda, yeah, oh, on that note I have to share with you. I'll share it with you off pod, but the there's a there's a shot. Patreon yeah, exactly. There's a shot that I that I saw that on one of the forums I'm on and it was. I can't remember what it's called.
Speaker 2:It's called a tapeworm shot and the reason why, no, so the reason why it looks like a tapeworm shot is because you do it in a shot glass and then you, you, you have all your alcohol and everything in there, and then you take one of those squirt bottles of mayonnaise and you squirt it in there and it's suspended in there. It looks like a tapeworm I think I made. I think I just made Nick throw up in his mouth a little, so I haven't tried it. I don't plan to try it. There are limits to my mayonnaise obsession.
Speaker 1:but there's, there's a. There's a couple of leaps to get here, but that makes me think of the Chalaza and eggs. Chalaza. While I was, I'll, I'll get there. Okay. So, while I was still impressionable and thought my dad was an authority on certain subjects or new things that I didn't you know, gullible actually, um, he was making eggs one morning as, watching him, and he told me he pointed out the three parts of it. There's the you know, from now I'm going to butcher the whole thing but there's the white part.
Speaker 1:um, the whites of the egg, there's the yolk and then there's the Chalaza and it's this little little little tuft of white looking mayonnaise, sploogey looking stuff connected to the yolk Right, and he's like that's the rooster sperm. It's called the Chalaza and I believed him as, like I thought that was so funny, it's so interesting. It was a connection of all the stuff I was learning about you know, and anatomy and what like. It makes total sense. It's not. I don't know what the Chalaza is, but all I remember is it's not actually, but it is actually called the Chalaza, like that's the actual name of it.
Speaker 2:I've never heard that before.
Speaker 1:Look at that, there's there's a Wikipedia article about it. It's functioning, the biology of the egg and whatnot, but it has nothing to do with the actual fertilization. If you think about it, that would be pretty sick and sadistic if that's what we did to eggs all the time that they were fertilized and we just yoinked them just before. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so we were talking about your food.
Speaker 2:So anyway, my yeah. So we were getting back to my Brian's beverage corner and the drinks that I had that were not Chalaza flavored. So I had one drink left from that little batch of drinks that I had, and it is Lester Fixins, which we talked about before, but Lester Fixins apparently does all this stuff, and it is Buffalo Wing soda. It looks like orange soda.
Speaker 1:You hear that Marshall.
Speaker 2:Oh, I should send a case of this to Marshall. I wonder, I wonder, how far Marshall is on his gallon of Frank's red wine he told me the other day. It's been a year hasn't been like a year. It was like last year at this time, wasn't it?
Speaker 1:He might have even sent me a picture. Marshall, here we go. Yeah, he's, but when was this? This was mid-December of 2023. And he this is after he just emptied out 12 ounces. I'd say there's about 12% of that jug left, gauging from the size of the bottle and how much is in there.
Speaker 2:Good job, Marshall. He's good on his word. He really does love the buffalo sauce.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's 128 ounces. Yeah, a full gallon. So yeah, he probably has 12 to 14 more ounces.
Speaker 2:Oh wow, Back two weeks ago. Two-wish, two-wish, that is crazy.
Speaker 1:Good job Marshall.
Speaker 2:Good job. Seriously, I'm impressed actually. I really am impressed.
Speaker 1:And I'm sure his wife is disappointed.
Speaker 2:Well, and so yeah, so for the audience members, listen to a friend of ours, friend of the podcast. Marshall's been on a few times but we gave him he loved buffalo sauce and so he said he incorporates that almost all the time into something on a weekly basis. So we gave him a gallon a while back and we're just checking on the progress. So yeah, okay. So I have this buffalo wing soda, which I wonder if Marshall would like that. I don't know if he likes mixing his stuff, but I will say the color of it is very unappetizing.
Speaker 2:It's really bad. But I'll tell you this what it feels like when you're drinking it, because it doesn't taste a lot like buffalo wing, it tastes a little bit like orange soda a little bit, and then just sort of sugary, like sweet, but then it feels like you know, when you feel like when you have a little bit of acid reflux, like the back of your throat burns and like stuff like that, that's what it feels like you take a sip and like maybe a minute later you're like my throat is burning and it's. It's the I'm sure it's the buffalo sauce in that, but or whatever semblance of or portion of the buffalo sauce, maybe just the spiciness, but it's not a pleasurable feeling. So I would recommend you drink, you eat something creamy or something else to counteract that. If you're going to have this with a meal I really don't know if there's anybody who actually drinks these things for real or if it's just like a gag kind of thing that people yeah, exactly, yeah, exactly. You know, a gag kind of. Thing.
Speaker 1:It's a gag reflux gift.
Speaker 2:So anyway, I'm about a third of the way into the bottle and I don't know if I can take much more of it because, again, like I said, it feels like I need to go take Tums because I'm having acid reflux. I'm sure it's not that it's just the soda, but anyway. So that's my, that's my Brian's beverage core, and I have water too that I'm drinking out of my normal, my normal aluminum, double walled, beautiful bottle. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So what about you?
Speaker 2:What are you eating and drinking?
Speaker 1:I am eating again. Great minds man. I'm on the similar track here. I'm eating from a bowl as well. Yeah. I made chili and I would call it chili chili, partly because I've let it get cold. Okay, some of it cold, but it's got, you know, the usual medley of beans black, kidney, white, actually two different kinds of white beans. Wow.
Speaker 1:Lentils, and then for various flavors, there's cinnamon, cilantro, parsley, some coloua, some chocolate, yeah, chili, spice, green chilies, and I added a ton of them after the fact too yeah, a pinch of cayenne, salt and sour cream and shredded cheese. Nice.
Speaker 1:So kind of a hodge podge right. Yeah, A hodge podge of different greens though. Yep, yep, dory and I will be tooting along for each other, and I'm also going to add for my next round, probably for dinner, I'm going to throw in some lightly salted potato chips, oh, and thicken it up and give it a bit of crunch, crunch.
Speaker 2:Uh-huh.
Speaker 1:So it's good stuff, very satisfying wholesome, like you were saying.
Speaker 2:I like chilies that have different, weird like not weird, but different things like cinnamon and chocolate and I know those are relatively common in some of the different chili recipes. But it gives it like a whole another dimension of like. You can't necessarily like individually taste the cinnamon in it, but it definitely tastes different. It gives it like an extra, something that you can't maybe put your finger on, but you're like, hey, this tastes different.
Speaker 1:So yeah, yeah, there's a. This may be just just me. I have a strange double standard when it comes to consistent flavor for my food. Uh-huh. If it's home cooked. I like that each bite has a bit of variety between the next bite. Okay. But if I go to a restaurant and each bite is different from the other, it's sus.
Speaker 2:I don't like it. Did they stir this or what happened? I want to know what I'm getting. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Is this the part they poisoned, Right? Is this where they found Like it's not, that's not the actual conscious thought, right? But it's just an exaggeration of I don't know. You use consistent process you take, you make it the same way every time on its own. So not only should it taste the same, across different you know visits to the restaurant it should taste the same within itself.
Speaker 2:That's my, that's my biggest. I don't know about like the consistency within one meal, but going going once and then going the next time you order the same thing and you're like this doesn't taste at all like what it was tasted like last time. I get a little bit like weird, like what are they doing? Why are they not? Why does this not taste the same? You know, did they change the ingredients? Did they do you know what? What happened here and you know. But yeah, I think you're right, though I think having a different bite every time when you're home, when you're home cooked meal, you're like, cause you know what went into it. So you're like I know what I did here and you know, yeah, I didn't use an industrial mixer to mix it evenly.
Speaker 1:So this is fine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and drink oh yeah, yeah Drinking water and a caramel brulee latte.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:From Starbucks. Caramel brulee no coffee.
Speaker 2:That's a, that's a mouthful to order.
Speaker 1:It's pretty rich, it's. I think I ordered it because of the brulee part. Yeah, I think it's a friend of mine who his favorite dessert is creme brulee. Yeah. I'm not actually much of a fan of caramel brulee or caramel in general, but it's just, you know different chemistry and stuff to make the flavor similar to it and I like the flavor similar to it, kind of like pumpkin spice. Doesn't actually have any pumpkin in it. Right.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I don't like caramel, but I like caramel though, so sort of weird.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I don't like either one. I don't like desserts that stick to my teeth. Ah, yeah Like a dessert where, yeah, so yeah, toffee butterscotch. Yeah, I don't like caramel.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I could see, how that would be.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, do you want to work up some motivation to try to get to our topic? No, not really. All right, see you guys. Have a happy new year. Bye.
Speaker 1:We can just talk about it next episode.
Speaker 2:Well, we're yeah, as the audience knows, we're trying to do our second episode here of our, you know, continuation of our last episode about motivation. As we said before, sort of organically came up with this topic because both Nick and I, towards the end of the year, trying to stay motivated about everything, just trying to continue doing what we want to do. Being towards the end of the year, we are everybody's sort of in that mode of okay, what have I done this year that I liked, what have I done that I share, that I don't like, and you know other things like that. Actually, I think our friend Mary Dunn brought up the what do I want to start next year, what do I want to stop next year and what do I want to continue next year? Right, which I love.
Speaker 1:Start, stop, continue.
Speaker 2:Start, stop, continue, and so everybody's sort of in this. But the thing is, you have to be motivated for any of those things. You have to be motivated to continue. You have to be motivated to stop something, you have to be motivated to start something. So in the last episode we talked about something. Which is real.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and so we talked about some of the causes of, you know, lack of motivation, and I think in this episode we sort of want to dive into as has been in the past with this podcast, trying to come up with something tangible that maybe you can use in your life in order to move forward, in order to try to, you know, do something different, try to or do something exactly the same, or however you whatever is the best thing for you.
Speaker 2:But how do we fix a quote unquote problem that you might have? And try to figure out how we can. You know, and really this is just for us doing this for ourselves, but we're hoping that the audience has some benefit from it as well. So, yeah, so, yeah. So in the last episode we talked about sort of those eight things that know where, where, lack, where can a lack of motivation stem from? You know, basically, causes of lack of motivation, and I think probably the best way to do is just go through, probably go through each one of those things and maybe discuss some things that we, that you, can do to combat that particular thing. I think that'll probably take us into some tangents, as it usually does throughout the conversation.
Speaker 1:Sorry.
Speaker 2:No, that's, that's what it is. Tangential, it's where we our podcast, should be called tangentially related. So well, so the first one on that list was fear of failure, and I think this, that's sort of a. I think they're all sort of big ones, but fear of failure is interesting to me because the first word in that is fear is. I think fear is a huge motivator in both directions of people who are you know, you're looking at this going, hey, what you know, fear. Like I said, fear is a motivator to do to do things and also to not do things, and I think in this case, we're talking about it as in terms of a lack of motivation to not do things. But I think that that, you know, like I said, that plays into you know how to move.
Speaker 2:You know sort of how to move forward is how do you conquer fear Is I guess that's the underlying question is, how do you, how do you conquer fear?
Speaker 1:Well, one. One of the first thing tactics that come to mind that's worked for me the times I've used it. I need to use it more often comes from Tim Ferriss in the TED talk he gave. I forget the topic, but I'm pretty sure he's only done one. It was something about the unexpected alternative to goal setting or something like that, but he calls it fear setting and it's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Briefly, you take a sheet of paper, flip it so that it's landscape mode, right, and you make three columns. And on the leftmost column you just list off all the things, all the ways you're afraid of failing in this case, but all the things you're afraid of related to a project or that you feel is causing you a lack of motivation, all things that could go wrong, whether it's going on a trip or doing your taxes now versus later, whatever it is. And the second column you list off one thing for each item in your list. Just right beside it you put in one thing that you could do that would reduce the likelihood of that bad thing happening, even by 1%, like, basically, what can you do to reduce the odds of that happening in a little? And then the third column is listing, again, lined up with each fear, one thing that you could do to repair the situation. If the thing you're afraid of happened anyway right, even though you might have done something to prevent it, imagine it happens anyway what's something you could do to recover from that fallout, from that situation. And it was super helpful I did it just to get a little personal.
Speaker 1:You might remember, brian, years ago, when I ran for president in our Toastmasters Club. It was the first time in a very long time that that club had a contested election Right. Usually it's hard enough to find volunteers that you just find enough people to agree to one role each, and that's good. I felt called to run for president against somebody and I was afraid. I was worried about losing that person as a friend. I was worried about being ostracized by my fellow members because I was breaching tradition in lots of ways.
Speaker 1:There's lots of fears and I just listed off all the things that go wrong and then listed off ways I could prevent it and ways I could repair from it, and it helped me have the motivation I was basically creating a plan and a road map to navigate that sticky situation Right and I'm to sort of in that case it worked out from my perspective. I did win that election. And some of the things I wanted to prevent did come to pass, but I had a plan for it. Yeah, well, I had made the decision appropriately beforehand rather than afterwards.
Speaker 2:I'll have to go watch the Tim Ferriss thing, because his approach reminded me of the Dale Carnegie book how to Stop Worrying and Start Living, which we I'm not a stole it from that.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well he might have.
Speaker 2:I mean, as we know, like self-help, in the self-help arena, a lot of it is repackaging, sort of putting your own twist on something that's been around for quite some time. There's nothing wrong with that. I don't think it's stealing. I think getting the message across, just like this podcast. We might say something 10 times on this podcast, but only one of those resonates with the person that's listening, and so that's what self-help is. Well, I really like Tony Robbins. We'll just pick on Mary. She really likes Tony Robbins. So if Tony Robbins says something versus another author, she might hold that in a higher esteem just because of the way that that person says it, because she knows background, because she's in a relationship with him, basically. But I think that's the thing. So, anyway, that is sort of another tangent. So the concept that he talks about in that book is in order to combat the worrying habit. So the number one is analyze the situation causing you to worry, to determine the worst possible scenario. If you fail, then number two is accept that the worst possible case scenario if it is to happen. So basically say, okay, I'm going to resign myself to the fact that that is what's going to happen, the worst case scenario, and then the next thing is focus on trying to improve the situation so that you end up with a better outcome than the worst case scenario. So it's very, very close to what Tim Ferris was talking about. And also, I think again, we probably should talk about doing a review of that.
Speaker 2:This book One of my favorite self-help books of all time is this book and written in the style of Dale Carnegie, as we did. You know, we had the how to win friends and influence people. We did in the past, which a series of anecdotes and all kinds of other things. But the interesting thing is written, you know, almost 100 years ago now and it's still. You know, the worries that people had in the 1930s are basically the same as the worries that we have now. It's just maybe there's some more technology and some other things that go along with it.
Speaker 2:But I think that's a. I love the idea of looking at something and going, yeah, okay, you know what, I'm gonna fail and I'm gonna get fired for my job, or I'm gonna fail and my wife's gonna divorce me, or I'm gonna fail and this is what's gonna happen. Okay, what can I actually do to make it even 1%, like you said 1%, better than that worst case scenario, whatever that might be. And that's, I think there's a comfort level to that, because you can do that most of the time. You feel like I can conquer that a little bit.
Speaker 1:So well, there's another element, I think, to the fear of failure stuff and listing out these fears and you know, doing what Dale Carnegie suggests and I'm borrowing this from a guy who's borrowing this from AA there's a TEDx Nashville video that I'm pretty sure I've put on my little watch weekly list and haven't watched weekly, but I need to. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And he says the title is great leaders do what drug addicts do. And he has three main points and one of those is surrender the outcome. Yes, so I think, even though you do these exercises and everything else to become more comfortable with, or alternatives to failing, even though you're reducing the odds, even though you're making it less likely, you could still fail. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You've had to sort of surrender that outcome. Right Right. Sometimes we make sports analogies, even though I personally am not a sports guy. But when somebody goes for the goal, they might be disappointed that they miss the shot, whatever game it is. That doesn't mean that they're debilitated from taking the next shot. It doesn't wound them right. There's that cliche if you miss 100% of the shots, you don't take. People who think they're lucky don't actually win more often than people who don't think they're lucky. Yeah, they just roll the dice more often and therefore win more often. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They pay more attention to wins than losses, Right? So, yes, there's the cliche also of feel the fear and do it anyway. Maybe have a plan, depending on how big or ambitious the thing is. Don't quit your day job until you're ready.
Speaker 2:I'll say this with regard to sports, the reason why we talk about I don't say we, I say we is a human species why we actually watch sports, why we care about sports and also what we can learn from sports, is because it really does give an example or exemplify things that happen in real life and it's in an artificial construct. It's a lot easier to understand, like, for instance, in real life. So let's just take the example of football. Right, football, you have a 30 to 45-second play and then you stop for about 30-45 seconds and then you do another 30 or 45-second play and then you stop for 34 seconds. So, in terms of, you don't get the luxury in life to be able to say, okay, I'm going to set my goal for the next 30 seconds, I'm going to do this. Okay, now I'm going to stop for 30 seconds, I'm going to reflect upon what just happened. Okay, now, for 30 seconds, I'm going to do this. Okay, now I'm going to stop and reflect. You just don't get the luxury but it's a microcosm of what actually happens in life and really you can juxtapose that and say okay, what is your ability to be able to forget the last success or failure?
Speaker 2:And I say success or failure, because it doesn't really matter which it is. Maybe your last play was highly successful. That doesn't mean that your next play will be. Maybe your last play was a huge, an utter failure, but that doesn't mean your next play will be. And it doesn't mean you've lost the game, right, in most cases. You know, some cases, yeah, it's the last play of the game. You get one shot, you get one shot. But it's also that's just like life. You're going to have a handful of times where this is your shot, you get this one time and that's it, and you either succeed or you fail. And so you know, it's interesting to me because that's you know, I don't think that most NFL quarterbacks walk up to the line to take the snap and start the next play and they're still worried about what happened in the last play.
Speaker 2:I think that's one of the reasons why they're successful is because they have the ability to say, okay, well, that was that, I'm done with that, now here's the next thing. And I think it's harder to do that in real life because obviously there's, you know, it's that immediate feedback loop. Like, I got the immediate feedback, but can I shed that? And as another example, you know golfers. Another good example is how many shots you might have on a traditional 18-hole golf course. Well, they're hitting the ball and they're going to. You know. They're going to hit the ball 70-something times, you know, depending on how good they're playing that day. So the question is, when you and even them playing this game all the time, they're going to make, mess up a shot and not put it the ball exactly where they want it to be, or they're not going to have the concentration on that one thing? Well, how? What's your ability to shed that last failure or success and just say now this is a fresh, a fresh slate.
Speaker 1:And so I don't know how that gets us to the fear of failure but I guess, you know, I think it touches on it and I don't know if this wouldn't about to say touches on the other causes of low motivation. But another way to overcome fear of failure is to, you know, proverbially speaking, dip your toe in the water. Yeah. And they say in design thinking, prototype, yeah, so if you like, you mentioned in the previous episode, you have this dream of owning a breakfast restaurant, starting a breakfast restaurant.
Speaker 2:Well, that's pretty ambitious. I think I called it a fantasy, the fantasy yeah.
Speaker 1:Like you. But what if? What if you made a point to bringing different recipes of breakfast items every morning to toastmasters and getting feedback on the? Or hosting brunches every Thursday for your clients? But you know you're not doing any money outlay, but you're experimenting, you're prototyping, you're dipping your toe in that water with low consequence, low stakes, but seeing what's there and maybe even building on the momentum or the feedback. You can do the same thing with things like one thing I want to do. I know what I could do to prototype, I just haven't done it Right. People who want to get started in writing.
Speaker 1:You know there's all kinds of venues to write short stories to build up to long stories right To write eventually books, or develop a Patreon and develop series. So there's plenty of ways to prototype to make small incremental efforts in the direction of your wildly ambitious goal without risking ultimate failure. You can quit well before you find out way too late that it was not viable. It can just be a hobby that you're like yeah, this isn't going to be something that I try to do for the entire world, It'll just be for my family.
Speaker 1:Yeah, or for myself, you know just for myself, yeah, but yeah, so long sort of it prototype, try get a great proceed Well.
Speaker 2:so the next one on the list is overwhelm and sort of feeling overloaded or having too many tasks and lead to paralysis and lack of motivation to start anything at all.
Speaker 2:And I think we talked a little bit about this in the last episode of you know.
Speaker 2:We were talking, we got off on the sort of tangent of personality type and how you and I tend to be say yes to too many things and sort of allow ourselves or cause ourselves to be overloaded. Other people don't necessarily have that. I mean you might be in a job where you don't have any choice. Your supervisor comes and says here's all the work you need to get done, and if I, you know supervisor increases that workload by 25%, then you either continue with a lot of work or you choose a different job, like you go and find a different job, or you talk to your supervisor and say, hey, I'm feeling burnout. And if your supervisor listens to the help yourself podcast, then they're a reasonable person and they so little right, exactly. So I think I think that's the number. I don't say number one thing, but one of the things is are you is how much control do you have over the tasks that you have you know the things that are on your plate perverbially on your plate.
Speaker 2:How much control do you have over them? Personally, me, being self employed, I have complete control over which clients I want to take on, which clients I don't want to take on. I have complete control over my workflow. I have complete, complete control over anything that I want to do. The question is do I want to take on more clients, Do I want to have more revenue come into the business? And that's but that's the. That's really the bottom line with me.
Speaker 1:But overwhelm is feeling like you're not, your things are out of control, right Like you had complete control until you took on too much. That's right or too much was given to you, whether it's whether you have complete control or not, or it maybe, if it's not even too much, it's just the sense feeling like you have too much Right.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's a good point, that's a really good point, because that's different for each person.
Speaker 1:Sure, one of the things that I'm borrowing this from that Ryan Doris, but I've heard it elsewhere too. I mean in Atomic Habits. James Clear talks about this as like breaking it down into an atomic step the smallest possible, hardest to miss, lower the hurdle as much as possible breaking down into small tasks.
Speaker 1:If you've got a project of like starting a business, well, give yourself a small, clear goal, right? Yeah, Coming back to the sports analogy and this is directly from Ryan Doris is you know, the players on the field aren't least the ones that win, right? The ones that excel and aren't freaking out are the ones who aren't actually focused on winning the game. They're focused on getting the ball in the net. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right, or getting the ball you know, to get through the goalposts or whatever the game is, and it's those small steps of being able to focus and you're using the parts of your brain that are optimized for that and are efficient such that you're not you know how to say you. We are incentivized to do as little as possible, like it's an evolutionary, biological, adaptive thing to conserve energy. Your brain uses a lot of energy. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So if you can avoid doing work, especially knowledge work, thought, work like design, planning, creativity, then evolutionary speaking, you're winning by conserving energy. Yeah, but then there's other parts of your brain that are like, hey, there's the here and the now. I got to work on the here and the now and if you can connect your goal large, long-term goal to the here and now. You'll optimize for that and build upon your immediate successes into something long-term. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that reminded me a little bit of you know what you hit on with, the creativity or the you know mind work or thought process. You know that kind of and in any given profession there is that I call I use the word creative creativity or creativeness or whatever in the broadest sense. So, like you know, when you're using your brain to strategize or to come up with ideas, or like how am I going to tackle this issue? I think it's a, I think it's something that there are many people who have to do that in their career, but it's often discounted by the people that are around them. It's like what is that guy? That guy's just sitting at his desk all day, like what is he doing? What is that person doing? You know what I mean. And many times, the people that are like I don't want to say like sometimes the people that are saying that are the people that are yeah, I have to, actually they're doing something. I've got to get process this thing right and you've got the person that's in charge of it all going. Yeah, my job is to make sure that all of the things are thought about right, which is a weird thing because they're, because, like I said, the people around them are like all I see is them sitting at their desk like not doing anything the whole time. So I don't know how that gets like, why I'm, why I was zeroing in on that. It's just something that made you know that sort of hit with hit when you said it, but I think, in terms of feeling overloaded, I think I just I always go back to that, I think I've mentioned this in one of our Toastmaster meetings recently is you can you know there's there's two things you can worry about, you know.
Speaker 2:One is you can worry about the things you have control over, and one is you can worry. The other is you can worry about things you don't have control over. And if you have control over it, then why are you worried about it? Because you can do something about it. And if you don't have control over it, why are you worried about it? Because you don't have control over it. So and I'm stealing that from Wayne Dyer, wayne Dyer and I'm, and Wayne Dyer might have stolen it from someone else, but that's where I heard it, from Wayne Dyer.
Speaker 2:So, anyway, if you have control over things, then maybe that's a way to help. You know, sort of look at that and say, hey, I've got to do that. The other thing that's the underlying for all of these things probably is what I said before is are you reaching out to someone and saying, hey, I'm having these feelings of being overwhelmed or overloaded with this, and that might be your supervisor, that might be your spouse, that might be someone else in your life that can help you with that? If you're not doing that, then that might, you know, that could probably lead to a level of helplessness or, you know, it's like I can't really do anything about this one. Really, you could if you reach out to someone and say, hey, I'm having these feelings, okay, well, how can we work together to make sure that that's not happening anymore?
Speaker 1:So Hold me to this. This will be the last thing I say about the fear of failure. Okay, there's a book I'm reading called dream year and one of the things it says and questions that follows. There's basically two things to fear. You can have the fear of failure, which is the default, or the fear of insignificance. If you're, if you can't develop and cultivate your fear of insignificance to overcome your fear of failure, then you won't be living whatever your dream is right, like right.
Speaker 1:Of course. Yeah, there's the whole other concept of like, what is my dream? How do I find my dream? But assuming you've, you've gone through and figured out that work, or you've admitted to yourself that you do have one and you've just, you know, allowed yourself to forget it yeah, it's part of the reason you haven't done anything. That fear of failure is the default, and your fear of insignificance needs to outweigh your fear of failure before you'll pursue your ambition right.
Speaker 1:Be motivated to do what, whatever it is you think you want or truly want.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all right. Next one on the list is unclear goals. So either having no goals or not having clear and achievable goals, and I think you talked about smart goals. We've talked about this on the podcast before having smart goals and don't ask me what smart stands for, because every time I say this I always forget, and you've told me 50 times but it's like significant motivating. No, nick is like you're not even close. You're not even close, Bryce.
Speaker 1:Well, you're close in that those concepts are there, but those aren't the words and they're in different places.
Speaker 2:I told you, I forget every time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, specific measurable, not achievable. Oh yeah, achievable, a is achievable, r is relevant and T is time bound. Right. Some. I'll say this every time, but it's what helps me remember that R is not reasonable because, A is achievable. It's the same thing. Yeah. And R being relevant is critical. This is something a friend, Stephen Schaener, iterates and reiterates, and I agree, Because if you don't have a strong Y barring from Simon Sinek, we're just.
Speaker 2:we're just hard to find this, referencing everybody Honestly this is.
Speaker 1:It's pervasive in our culture because clearly we have a problem with it. Everybody has something to say, but if you don't have a good reason to do the thing, even if it's specific and measurable on time down, you're not going to do it because you don't want to, you don't have to.
Speaker 1:There's no condolences, but I think a clear goal needs to be more than smart, right and this is barring from that, ryan Doris again Like winning the match winning the sports match that's specific and measurable and achievable. And was it relevant and time bound? Yeah, but you're still not necessarily motivated to do it, or you're not. You're going to have to think too much about too many variables to achieve it. A clear goal would be, according to them him, get the ball in the net. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right that is specific and measurable and achievable. Relevant because you want to win the match. Right. And time bound Like break it down to the most fundamental thing you've got to do. Yeah. To win, and just always connect it to what you really want to stay motivated to do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and I think there's something I was going to say about goal setting, but it was, oh, I think also something that gets lost in this all the time is I think that one of the and I don't know if I've ever heard anyone actually I take it back. I've heard, I think I've read people say this is write it down, Like literally write it down. It's got to be like it can't be. I've set this goal in my head of to lose 15 pounds, Like it's something. There's something weird about writing something down, whether that's a pen on a paper, or whether that's writing it down and typing it into a spreadsheet or whatever it else. It's now been recorded Like it's outside of you, and I think there's a weird thing that happens. When that happens, Like, at least in my experience, if you sit down and write things out, that's a completely different thing than here's what I'd like to. Here's what I'd like to work towards.
Speaker 1:And sort of an initial step to make it tangible. Right, you can't become a reality.
Speaker 2:Well, I think I think anything outside of yourself, like outside of your physical person, like once you put a pen on a paper and you write something down, it's now outside of you and it's looking back at you, whereas when it's in your brain it's still inside you, you're you know, I know it sounds weird, but it is a weird thing that has some kind of magic to it. I and I say magic like it really is like a. It's a different thing when you write something down. So I think that has thoughts thoughts are easily dismissed.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Right, yes, yeah, absolutely Okay. Next is burnout, which sort of goes back to overwhelm. So prolonged stress and overexertion leads to burnout and I think this go ahead.
Speaker 1:No, go ahead.
Speaker 2:I was just going to say I thought we were going to move past it, but if you got something, oh no, I was just thinking that you know sort of what we were already talking about with overwhelm, which is, you know, burnout. I think feel like you need to reach out to someone outside of yourself, like one of the ways you can combat burnout is I'll tell other people around you that you're experiencing this, because I think burnout is a is a what should I say? A solitary thing, like it's inside of you, you're feeling it and it's different. It's different for each person. You know you might feel burnt out at a certain level of work, whereas I might not feel burnt out at that, or vice versa. So, but if nobody knows that you're experiencing it, then nobody knows, because nobody knows what your level of performances. If that makes sense, sure, okay.
Speaker 1:One of the things that came up I mentioned in the last episode our engagement survey. There was an interesting development was the dichotomy between these two questions. One was that burnout question. Yeah. And there was a higher number of people saying burnout than there were people who said or disagreed, agreed with the statement. I have too much work on my plate. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So it's like in this situation it was on my team it wasn't that they have too much work on their plate that's causing their burnout, something else. But to your point, others will and they would too, if they had too much work probably feel burnout. There's multiple possible contributing factors to burnout and I think one thing that can help with it and again, like you said, it's sort of overwhelmed prolonged would be to do what Elsa from Frozen's talked about. And that's you know it's funny how some distance can make everything seem small. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know that. Go and you're already emotionally disengaging, right, you're fizzling out, so literally disengaged, like take some time off, be by yourself, quiet or in a calm situation, and get some perspective that maybe the work that you're doing isn't as essential as it feels. Or get that perspective of, oh, this is important, this is what should be focused on. This 10% of my total list of work to do. This other stuff is actually optionable or delayable or delegatable, deferrable, negotiable. And get some distance to get that perspective of what's necessary.
Speaker 2:What you've hit on is a little bit of time management of you know we've talked about it before the four quadrants and my favorite person, stephen Covey, talking about the four quadrants, and you know which things are absolutely necessary or crisis. This is you know. Then, basically, you've got the four quadrants that you can prioritize or not motivate. You can set priorities and that's what you're talking about. There is, and that's part of it, Important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, importance versus urgency Right Exactly. The Eisenhower matrix.
Speaker 2:Yes, which you know Stephen Covey stole from Eisenhower.
Speaker 1:Who probably stole it from Confucius?
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. So the next thing on here is perfectionism, and I think we touched a little bit upon that last episode.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think surrendering the outcome applies there.
Speaker 2:Yes, and also focus on progress, not perfection. So, as I said before the you know, when I talked about going to the gym, that's just focus on the one thing, not it's. You know, you've got to go to the gym and your workout has to be perfect and you have to this and you have to that. It's no. Here's what you need to do is you need to be consistently going to the gym.
Speaker 1:That's it, and that's a bit of a paradigm shift. I know perfectionists have that paradigm ingrained, but to the extent that they can, or anyone dealing with perfectionism, acknowledge that nothing is ever really finished. Right. You clean your house to perfection, the dust is going to accumulate all over again, or you know, a software you're developing could always be better. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Or the legal document you're drafting is never going to be, it's never going to be framed, you know, like it's not never going to be a piece of work of art, right, nothing's ever really finished.
Speaker 2:You just hit on like the exact thing that is my problem.
Speaker 1:I'm going to stop now. This meets my standard and maybe you need to lower your standard, but I try to meet other people's standards. You imagine the standards.
Speaker 2:I have experienced this in the gym and I've been trying to expand that out into other things. I call that the good enough principle is this is and I don't know if I'm stealing that from anyone else Like, for instance, if the coach is telling me, like in the warmup, you need to do 20 of these things, and I do 16 of them and I stop, I say that's good enough and so you know, same thing.
Speaker 2:There is like okay, is this up to my standard? Maybe not. Is it good enough to get the job done? Like, is this thing that I'm filing with the court or is this document that I'm preparing for my client? Is it going to catastrophically fail? No, the fact that it's not formatted correctly and maybe there's a you know something that doesn't look right on the page is that of any significance, except for the fact that I have a perfectionistic need to make it look perfect? No, it doesn't have any effect on the. You know whether or not that document is effective or not. So, you know, trying to let that go as another Elsa reference, and you know, let it go, that's the same song, right? So, anyway, I think that's. I think the good enough principle is like is this good enough? Is it? You know? Like is, is anybody? Like I said, there's a lot of questions, you can follow up with that, but is it good enough to get the job done?
Speaker 2:If the answer if the answer is yes, then you don't really need to go any further, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, here it is. So in the Ryan Davis video again, I'll provide this link for both, both episodes, because they keep bringing it up. Yeah. He calls it. It's under the challenge skill problem. I forget what he put there, but is define the scope or the end state Right, like when in software development or things like it, they call that the definition of done. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's done when and you know there's perfectionists on my team and I have to tell them like, yes, you could do that and yes, we want to value add. That's another kind of cliche in business. We want to add value wherever we can Sure. If they want five columns, give them seven, but they don't need 17. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They don't need to know every single possible configuration of the information, right, just give them what they ask for, deliver what they need, yeah. And then we want to create value for someone else, right? Like, yeah, yeah, I guess that's all I have to say about that.
Speaker 2:No, that's actually a good point. Okay, so next on this list is lack of interest. Tasks or goals are not aligned with your personal interests or values. I think sometimes too, if it's not aligned with your personal values, I feel like that's a deeper problem than you're just like, yeah, I'm just sort of not interested in this. But if you're really having a struggle of, yeah, I don't know if I can morally or ethically continue doing what I'm doing, I think I've told the story about this attorney before a local attorney here that his job was to look at cases criminal cases that were on appeal, so somebody had been convicted of a crime and then it goes up for appeal.
Speaker 2:What many people don't realize in the appeal process is that it's not a whole nother trial, the person that is evaluating the case on appeal. They're looking at what evidence was brought up at the lower case, the lower level, and they're first making a determination of whether or not a new trial should be given. Right, because they have to look at what evidence was presented and whether it was presented in a bad way or whether there was bias or all kinds of a number of legal things. Right, and what happened with him is he was doing that job and happy, making money and doing what he wanted to do. But then he found out the backstory of some of the people that were convicted of crimes and realized that he was making his decision based upon a very limited amount of information that didn't tell him the whole story and he wasn't by. He wasn't like, looking at it, I mean I'm going to go research and give them an appeal based on that, but ethically he's like I couldn't do it anymore.
Speaker 2:Because then there's one specific case that he talks about where the person was convicted of murder. But they were also heavily abused as a child. They were kept, they were forced to be a prostitute. It was a woman who was forced to be a prostitute and she ended up killing her pimp, the guy who was basically keeping her captive, and according to the evidence that was presented, she should have been convicted According to the entire story.
Speaker 2:If you told someone she was being held captive by a man who was forcing her to sell her body out and taking the money and there was no way out of that, and really her thought process was hey, the only way I'm going to get out of this is if I kill this person. And so she did that and was convicted, because it's a crime to kill other people, right. But if you knew that backstory you might say, wow, but I know it's wrong to kill people, but in this circumstance so all that to be said he had he quit his job and did something different because he said I can't, this does not align with my personal values anymore, and so I know that's a really, really extreme case, but sometimes maybe that's something that will can help.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it checks out again. Ryan Davis, he talks about that. He doesn't use this term, but it's almost like a defense mechanism. Your procrastination might actually be a good thing, because it maybe it's not really procrastination, maybe it's ambivalence. Yes, maybe it's subconsciously, it's a sign that you shouldn't be doing the thing that you're. You tell yourself you should do and you're not doing yeah.
Speaker 2:I find in that case, like sometimes, when I'm having a thing like that, where it's procrastination for me is always a problem, but one of the things that I do, I will sit back sometimes and just say, like literally ask myself the question why am I not doing this, what is stopping me from doing this? And I try to like dive a little deeper, just sit back and just like think about it, just like why am I? Why do I have such a resistance to this thing? What is happening?
Speaker 1:here Be curious.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, and and I really try to figure out, like what am I? Am I seeing this? Am I scared? And a lot of times I will actually be able to evaluate and say like, yeah, I'm worried, I'm going to fail, or I'm or. I've never done this before. I don't know quite what I'm doing and so I'm not doing anything because I'm scared that I don't know what I'm doing.
Speaker 1:Whatever, that might be. And the dialogue between the horse and the rider? Yeah, exactly. Well, I want you to drink the water like, because I'm not thirsty.
Speaker 2:Right, oh yeah, and and so I don't know that sometimes that helps, I mean, and it sounds stupid that you're sitting there talking to yourself, but I talk to myself all the time, so you know, it's, it's healthy.
Speaker 1:I don't care what the social stigma says.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, um sec. Second to last one is mental health issues. So this is actually where you have depression, anxiety or other mental health conditions. Those can impact your motivation levels. Obviously, if you have something that I mean I'll say this on the record I feel like almost everyone I'll say I'll say probably everyone. This is like a bold statement. I think everyone could probably benefit from some kind of counseling at some point in their life.
Speaker 2:Uh, you know, a third party being able to talk. The big issue is who are you talking to? Like? Do you, do you respect that person? Do you feel like you have a connection? Does that like if they gave you advice, would you say, oh, they're just doing that because of this, or would you actually say, no, they're just trying to help me, you know. And so, basically, if you can find somebody like that where you're like, hey, you know what, I don't need this all the time, but you know, every other year or so or every six months or whatever I need, I just need to sit down and just hash out some of the issues that I'm going through in my brain and have somebody say like yeah, those are perfectly normal, reasonable things and maybe not even help you come up with solutions like we're trying to do. But maybe they just are there so that you can have an outside person to say the things that you're thinking to and have a sounding board for, and some people have that in their family. You know, some people like some people's families are very supportive in that way. Other people's are not. Some people sometimes you want to. They're personal issues, so you want somebody that's a third party that's not connected to you in any way emotionally.
Speaker 2:But I feel like if you have an issue like that, that there shouldn't be a stigma. You were just talking about stigmas. I don't think there should be a stigma against people going to counseling, whether that's marital or individual or whatever else. That's a healthy thing to do. It's the same thing as if you were having pain in your right leg. You would go to your doctor and say I just have this chronic pain in my right leg. Can you help me with this? And we don't see mental health issues in the same way. But I think we should. I think that there shouldn't be any reason why you shouldn't think that anyone should think have shame about going and seeing a counselor and saying I need to talk some of these things through, and I think there still is, though and that's why I'm saying all this, because I think there still is a stigma of like oh, you can't handle this yourself, you can't handle life yourself. What's the problem here? Why can't you just hey, bootstraps man, pull yourself up, let's go, yeah. One more time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I get it and I agree. I also know that my own inner critic, when I think about I myself doing such a thing, that stigma still seeps in I know better, consciously. But again there's a horse in the rider.
Speaker 2:There's the thing I said, that I've never gone to counseling. I probably could benefit from counseling. I've never done it myself, so there's a reason why you know whether, whether they're professional or not.
Speaker 1:I think we all need a trustworthy not necessarily trusted. Yes. They should be trusted and trustworthy. Right yeah, A trusted and trustworthy confidant. And again, whether they're professional or not and I think the more isolated we are, the harder that is to find. Yes.
Speaker 1:The more skeptical we become, the harder it is to trust, and the more jaded we become, the harder it is to become trustworthy. So it's difficult and it's necessary. I think, yeah, I don't know what, there's probably not one solution to that problem, but I think they're counseling, like you say, is an entity that stands in that gap. I don't know that it's big enough to fill the gap, but at least there's something there that might help you get across if you can jump far enough. Yeah, we have another four to stick with.
Speaker 2:Well, and that leads us into our last. They should take my own advice. Well, I was going to say that leads us into our last thing, which is what we were just talking about is. The last thing is external factors, so a lack of support, negative environments or discouragement from others affect motivation. So a lack of support. The first thing there is, like you have to find your support system, and that's you know that that's a variety of people, right? You also have to be able to recognize what we've already talked about, which is the people that maybe aren't supportive or are discouraging, maybe indirectly or directly, to you.
Speaker 2:And you need to limit your time with them. You need to limit your. You know you've got to surround it. I think you mentioned it before. It's like the you're the sum of the five people you hang out with the most, or something similar to that.
Speaker 1:I know it's been around. I forget where I heard it. I know it's been around.
Speaker 2:It's been around so many self-help circles yeah. I've heard it with regard to income, Like your income is at the level of the, you know, the, basically the five people, the income level of the five people you're around the most. So I don't know if that's pans out or not Like the data actually plays out that way, but it makes sense, you know, if you're around a lot of people who are just, yeah, this is you know, this is, this is what you know, this is our level of living than you know.
Speaker 2:Theoretically that could, but I think counseling is one of the things that you can do to have, you know, some level of support If you don't have any other levels of support, like if you don't have you know. Another one is you've already mentioned, which is, you know, aa and other you know groups like that are specifically called support groups. I mean they're so you know, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're, you know, and that's for a specific thing, but there's lots of them. There's, there's, you know, overeaters anonymous, there's, you know, there's. Narcotics anonymous. There's. Alcoholics anonymous, there's. You know, sexaholics anonymous, there's all everything that you might be having. And, granted, those are specific things, but there's always a group of people who are supportive, I think. I think also just being around positive people and having a positive attitude.
Speaker 2:So two other things I'll bring up is I did, did a search, actually chat GPT gave me this and I just asked it how can I increase my motivation? Just a flat question how can I increase my motivation? So some of them we've already covered set clear goals, create a routine, find inspiration. So that's what we do. You know, that's what we're. We've been borrowing a lot in these two episodes from from a lot of things we're finding, trying to find inspiration. The other two are the last two here are. So number four is stay positive. Focus on you know, focus on progress, not perfection. Stay healthy, so exercise, proper sleep, balanced diet and accountability. And then the only other thing that I did that was not on this list that I wanted to bring up because I know you, at least in the past, have practiced this is one of the things suggestions I saw was to to practice gratitude and to have, you know, have some.
Speaker 2:So one of the things that said was hey, maybe in the morning or maybe in the night, at night, before you go to bed, write down three things that you're grateful for in you know whether there's going to be anything. You know there's no limit to what those could be intangible, tangible, whatever that is. And I think that helps you with what I just said, which is having a positive attitude when you're, when you start to turn things into like man, I'm really I could. I could say, man, I have all this business, I'm super busy and it's stressing me out. Or I could say, man, I have all this business, I'm so thankful that I have all this business. That's what my business is here for. Like I'm able to help more people, I'm able to add value, as you said, for more people, right? And so you can look at that one same thing in those two ways. Well, if you are grateful for it, then it's.
Speaker 1:It looks different to you than if you're not grateful for it, or if you're just like, oh gosh, this is a burden, you know so anyway, and taking a different glance at that, in any time you're in a stressful or survival situation, anytime I am even like in a video game, one of the first things you do that's affected. I say you, one of the first things I do that seems very effective. Something I see a lot of other people do that seems effective is take inventory. Like what do I have? Yeah, answer that question. What do I have? You know, what am I equipped with? It could be skills, it could be you know food and shelter. Like what do I have? That's good. And then the other one would be you know where am I? Like? Every, every directory and every public place that has any size to it is going to have that you are here.
Speaker 1:Yeah map interspersed right and we have GPS to know where we're at. It's like what's in that you kind of inherently create some distance there, like where I'm. What situation am I in? Who are my antagonists? What am I antagonists?
Speaker 1:That's overwhelming me Taking inventory of how you feel, but part of that inventory is what I'm playing off of with regard to gratitude, right, it's remembering that, oh, I have three pairs of shoes. Why am I so frustrated about being in line at a grocery store or turning it into a first world problem joke? But at the same time, there is that thing of having that kind of gratitude. Is having that perspective, to some extent, of what do I have, who's in my corner, who's on my team, what do I have going for me? It's just a good reminder that not all is lost. You're not necessarily in a dire situation, right, and you have things to fall back on.
Speaker 2:I, just, I just. That's going to be one of our episodes this year is what can video games teach us about self-help and motivation, and what, what, what can we? How do we?
Speaker 2:learn from video games that you know like, because that's a, that's a huge thing and that's a, like you said, that just hit in you know pretty big way, for you know taking inventory, because it's part of the process is you sit back and go, okay, you know again, you're, you're now, you're not looking at the problem anymore. You're saying, like, what can I do, like, what do I have to help fix the problem? And that's a whole different mindset than, oh my gosh, now I'm just focused on this problem and so, anyway, I think we covered it pretty good. Man, that's good. Yeah, it's good enough. It's good enough. It's good enough. You know, I think, for, yeah, for you know everything. I hope everyone's having a good 2024 so far and we're going to continue doing all these podcasts. Thank you for listening and yeah, I think that's it. So go out there and get motivated.