Finding Harmony Between Calling and Life w/Scott Maderer Ep 43

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In this episode, Eddie Isin sits down with Scott Maderer, a seasoned coach dedicated to helping individuals discover their true calling. Scott shares his journey from a public school teacher to a full-time coach, emphasizing the importance of aligning one’s life with their deeper emotional drivers.

Key Segments:

• 00:00 - Scott discusses the true meaning of calling, emphasizing that it goes beyond career or assignments to become an emotional driver behind one's actions.
• 01:45 - Eddie introduces the podcast, welcoming listeners to the episode focused on calling and authenticity with Scott Maderer.
• 05:19 - Scott shares his background and how his journey led him to become a coach, pivoting from teaching and corporate roles to fulfilling his calling.
• 09:40 - Scott defines calling and differentiates it from mere goals, stressing the importance of emotional drives behind actions.
• 13:00 - Scott outlines signs that indicate someone may be struggling to live out their calling, from feeling drained at work to subtle discontent in life.
• 19:11 - Discussion on exercises to help discover one's calling, including reflecting on past experiences and envisioning future aspirations.
• 27:55 - Scott elaborates on the concept of authenticity, highlighting the importance of being genuine in all areas of life.
• 31:46 - Scott provides insights on time management, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing tasks that align with one’s calling.
• 45:18 - Scott introduces his four-part framework from his upcoming book, Inspired Living, designed to help individuals find their calling.
• 51:50 - Scott shares a special resource landing page for listeners, offering worksheets and tools to help them explore their calling.

Resources

Scott’s book: Inspired Living: Assembling the Puzzle of Your Calling by Mastering Your Time, Your Talent, and Your Treasures -  https://amzn.to/4dHFi0R

Join the NEWSLETTER at http://Transform Your Future.com where Eddie writes about Entrepreneurship, Reinvention and Identity.

Scott’s website: Inspired Stewardship  https://inspiredstewardship.com/transform

Subscribe to Transform Your Future Newsletter Where Eddie writes about personal development, reinvent & identity: http://transformyourfuture.com

Transcript

0:00

I look at a calling in a similar way. A lot of times we confuse our calling with our career or an assignment. What we're doing in the moment, the calling is bigger than just the career or the assignment. It's the emotional driver behind what you're doing, maybe in your career, maybe in your hobby, maybe even in your relationships or your spiritual walk or all the different components of your life. Oftentimes, as you begin to examine that, you find things that bubble up that are in common that give you energy. They feed your called it express it as feeding my soul. It's the things that you do it and you're like, man, if I could do that all day long, it would be awesome. I would be doing this. You don't really have to pay me money to do it. It feeds me, it gives me energy. Yeah, there's things about it maybe that are hard or difficult or challenging. It doesn't matter. I still want to do it. I still feel driven to do it or called to do it. So that vocation, that call, and by the way, the word vocation comes from vocal to call, And we've confused it with career, which by the way comes from the word for cart. How do you get from point A to point B? So it's that same sort of analogy of sometimes our assignment, what we're doing in this moment, how much of it actually overlaps with those underlying drives and those calls. That's what lets you know if you're living it out. Papaya. Hello all and welcome to another episode of Transform Your Future with me, Eddie Isin, where I sit down with entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and high achievers as they identify areas I can improve on and guide me to further my self-improvement practice. For more information and insights, join my newsletter@transformyourfuture.com where I write about reinvention, personal growth, and entrepreneurship. If you like the show, you'll love the content on my site. We want to hear from you. Let us know how we can improve your listening and viewing experience. Suggest upcoming topics or a great guest for the show. Please reach out to us through our website, your podcast app comment, or just text me directly at 813-722-1417. We want to hear from you in this episode of Transform Your Future. We delve into the profound themes of calling and authenticity with our special guest, Scott Madeira. As a seasoned coach and a passionate advocate for personal development, Scott shares his transformative journey from a public school teacher to a full-time coach dedicated to helping individuals discover their true purpose in life. Scott emphasizes that many of us often confuse our careers with our calling, missing out on the deeper emotional drivers that can lead to true fulfillment. In this enlightening conversation, he unpacks the concept of calling, not merely as a job or assignment, but as a guiding force that connects us to our core values and passions. He encourages listeners to explore their own unique paths and consider what truly feeds their souls. Throughout the episode, Scott provides valuable insights and practical exercises that listeners can implement to align their daily lives with their calling. He stresses the importance of living authentically, asserting that the more our actions resonate with our inner drives, the more harmonious our lives become. Scott also shares signs that may indicate a struggle to live out once calling, encouraging us to examine our experience for clues about what we may be missing, whether you're feeling unfulfilled in the current role or simply seeking to deepen your understanding of your purpose. This episode is packed with inspirational and actionable advice. Join us as we explore how to find that delicate balance between calling and daily responsibility, paving the way for a more meaningful and authentic life. Tune in to discover how you can embrace your unique journey and live out your true calling. Scott, welcome to Transform Your Future podcast. I'm happy that you're here today. We're going to spend some time together talking. How are you doing, sir? I am doing awesome. It's been a great day. Excellent. I love to hear that. I love to hear that today. I'm feeling very good as well. I think if I was any happier, I'd be a set of twins. Well, that might be a good thing. I'm not sure, but. It sounds like a lot though. That's what I meant it to be. Yeah, I know, I know. So Scott, I want to jump right in for a second. So I know that you coaching and helping individuals to find their calling, make sure that they're operating at their best capability in their uniqueness. Let's talk a little bit about how you end up being called to help others and to coach people. What was going on that led you in that direction? Yeah, so a lot of folks looking backwards, it's a lot easier to connect the dots and kind of go, yeah, that's what I was supposed to do than looking forward when you're a kid. What do I want to be when I grow up? Right? Everyone asks you that, and the real answer is, I don't know. Even though you may answer with something. So I actually, I've always had this passion for helping others. I've always enjoyed helping others. I was always that kid, even in school that other people came to for help with stuff. I was that kind of person that was the sounding board for everybody else, and I actually went to school with the idea of I was going to become a doctor and I was going to do medical research. I actually have a couple of degrees in hard sciences. Did all of that training, started doing some research work and figured out real quick that research work was about 90% chasing money and about 10% actually doing work, and I didn't really want to do that because I've always again enjoyed pouring into others and helping others. So I literally pivoted and became a public school teacher. So I have two degrees. I've done medical research, I'm doing all of it, and I go start teaching school. So I taught school for 16 years. I taught middle school, I taught high school, taught pretty much every science that's out there except for earth science. I tell everybody I don't do rocks, I'll do everything else. I just don't do rocks. So I love teaching. I love pouring into the kids, and it wasn't just the subject matter stuff, it's not just about teaching other people stuff, facts, information. It was all the chances you get as a teacher to pour into the kids, to help develop them, to help 'em make life choices, learn how to interact with other people and communicate and all of those things. That's actually more fun than the science fact of today is this kind of thing. Did that for 16 years, really had a lot of love for it, but at the same time, teaching is a lot of long hours, a lot of hard work. It's very emotionally draining and it's not very much pay. There was a lot of time spent doing a lot of different things, and so I left teaching and I entered the corporate world. I did that for 11 years. I went into work for a testing company, so I left teaching, just writing tests for living. So my students said I joined the dark side because that's what I now did was write tests. Again, I loved it, but very quickly I moved up into an executive senior position where my job was to train other leaders within the company and lead the whole team. So I was the leader of leaders, had about 180 people that reported up through me about 20 direct reports, but I was also on a plane all the time, flying all around the country, spending a lot of long hours, 50, 60, 70, 80 hour work weeks doing all of those sorts of things. Loved it, but again, still really wasn't a hundred percent of what I wanted to do. So I began doing some soul searching and doing some exercises that honestly now I teach other people how to do and started looking for what are the things in common here? Well, it was always the pouring into and it was less of the other stuff like getting on a plane and meeting with a client and those sorts of things. So I started a coaching business on the side because that was a way of directly interacting and pouring into others and helping them achieve their goals, and it really started feeding my souls. So within a few years, I pivoted left the corporate job, I reversed my climb up the corporate ladder. I told them, I'm giving you notice. I'm leaving the company in a year. We need to train my replacement, train my replacement, replace myself. Went down to a part-time position and then left the company. So I did all of that while launching a business on the side. So now I'm working 50 to 70 hours a week on my day job, and then another 20 or 30 on my side hustle launched that, and since 2017 now I've been coaching full-time because that is the piece that really feeds that core thing of my calling, which is the developing and leading and lifting up others. I know you talk a lot about your stewardship as a men and couples that are struggling to lift out their calling. Let's define that a little bit. What is a calling and how do I know if I'm struggling to live out my. So a calling, I'm going to make an analogy first and then I'm going to go to your question. So one of the things that I have people get confused about is we'll talk about goals and goal setting and goals are important, but then there's also something behind the goal that becomes even more important. I call that the why. So the goal, the way I know it's a goal is as a beginning, as a middle, and as an end, I want to do this. I'm working on doing this. I've done this as a beginning, a middle, and an end where a, why is that emotional drive behind the goal? Why do you want to achieve that goal? What's the emotional driver? What's the feeling? What's the freedom or transformation or growth? It's something bigger than just, I did this, I'm doing this, I've done this. I look at a calling in a similar way. A lot of times we confuse our calling with our career or an assignment, what we're doing in the moment, the calling is bigger than just the career or the assignment. It's the emotional driver behind what you're doing maybe in your career, maybe in your hobby, maybe even in your relationships or your spiritual walk or all the different components of your life. Oftentimes as you begin to examine that, you find things that bubble up that are in common that give you energy. They feed your, I called it, express it as feeding my soul. It's the things that you do it and you're like, man, if I could do that all day long, it would be awesome. I would be doing this. You don't really have to pay me money to do it. It feeds me, it gives me energy. Yeah, there's things about it maybe that are hard or difficult or challenging. It doesn't matter. I still want to do it. I still feel driven to do it or called to do it. So that vocation, that call, and by the way, the word vocation comes from vocal, which to call, and we've confused it with career, which by the way comes from the word for cart. How do you get from point A to point B? So it's that same sort of analogy of sometimes our assignment, what we're doing in this moment, how much of it actually overlaps with those underlying drives and those calls? That's what lets you know if you're living it out, if most of, and it's never all, but most of the things you're doing in your roles, in your relationship, in your acting as a father or whatever it is, your volunteer work, your career, all of these different components of your life, the more pieces of those connect to those deeper things that really drive you, the more authentically you're living out your call. It's never necessarily going to be a hundred percent, but the more pieces you can get in alignment, you're living it out. When those things aren't in alignment, that's when we start needing to examine it and think about it and figure out how can I transform and t move from where I am today to be more in alignment with those things that are really feeding my soul? What are some of the signs that I am not in my calling that I'm struggling with it? What are some of the signs that somebody could look at and say, maybe this is what I need to look at. Sure. So a lot of times it shows up in both subtle and sort of dramatic ways. So let's talk about the dramatic first, just because those are kind of the big ones. It may literally be that feeling of, I hate my job, I hate what I'm doing. I have to do it because I got to put food on the table and this is what I have to do, but man, this environment is toxic. It just feels, I go to work and I go home at the end of the day and it's just like, I got to do this again tomorrow. It's that draining feeling, and again, maybe it's not your career. Maybe that's showing up in other parts of your life, relationship in the relationship or in your spiritual walk or whatever it is. The career is a great example because for most people, that's where it starts showing up first. But it could be in another place, like you said, it could be in your relationships. It's that feeling of, boy, do I have to talk to this person again? Whoa, yeah, I have to. They're my mom. Whatever. It could be those areas of your life that are causing conflict and friction. So those often show up in the kind of big moments, but the subtle ones are often showing up in what I would call those quiet moments. So those moments where maybe you've taken it off a few days and you're resting and you're relaxing and you're recouping and there's part of your brain or part of your thought process that's itching to go do something, but it's not what you normally do to feed some part of you that doesn't normally get fed. I'm not talking about you get to go down a zip line and it's something exciting in the moment or go ride a roller coaster. I mean, it's like, man, if I could go, I'd like to go spend some time doing this or learning this or reading this book about that because I want to feed that part of me because I am excited by it. It gives me energy. Those things that attract you in those moments when you aren't busy, when you aren't running and gunning, when you aren't hustling and doing all of those things, those itches that show up that man, I need to learn more about this. I wish I could read more about this or maybe go volunteer and do something around this. Those are often showing you in subtle ways, some directions towards areas of your life that maybe you need to bring more in alignment with those underlying drivers that are your calling because your brain's telling you, I need this, I want this. I'm just identifying. I know there have been several times in my life that I felt those things. For example, I want to say it wasn't just, and maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, but it wasn't just that I felt that life was draining or that I was frustrated or I wasn't getting anywhere, or I didn't feel it was all connected, but I felt like there was something lacking that there wasn't being fed, that was lacking. I started moving towards this direction of, because interestingly enough, lemme jump ahead a second. So there's a lot of people that I've worked with and helped in the past. A lot of times it was around sales and helping people to be better sales and grow in their sales process hit their goals. But many times I would ask these questions because people seemed unhappy or frustrated, and I would ask them just suppose for a minute that you didn't have to worry about money. Just say hypothetically, you didn't really have to worry about money after you got all your yay yas out or whatever, and you flew around the world, whatever. At some point, what are you going to do with your time? What would bring you joy to do with your time at that point? And then they would tell me the answer and I would say, so why don't you do that now? Why don't you doing it now? Why don't you find a way to do that now? Incorporate that in your life today if that's really what you would do with your free time. And so is that kind of like on track with what we're talking about? It could be part of it for sure. One of the things that I've seen happen though with that kind of question is a lot of times people think what they would do if they had an infinite amount of free time isn't actually what they would do, if that makes sense. So you'll have answers like, oh, I just play golf all day. I've seen people then retire and after a few months of playing golf all day, they're like, I kind of want to find something else. I love golf. I still want to play golf, but maybe I can find something. Else. So it's more what brings you joy. It's what gives you, I use the phrase what gives you energy very deliberately because joy I think can sometimes be, again, can kind of fool us into, oh, we have to be happy all the time. That's not really what the emotion means, but it kind of is what hear when somebody says, does it give you joy? And the truth is, there's parts about my job as a coach that don't bring me joy. They're work. They're not stuff that I love to do, but the overall experience of coaching and working with clients and digging in and doing all of that and seeing the light bulbs go off and seeing people make breakthroughs and changes in their life and all of that stuff, it gives me energy at the end of a hard week where it's been tough. I still want to do this next week. I still want to have that next call. I still want to jump on that thing because I've still got energy to drive forward and do it. It's not sucking the energy out of me, it's adding energy to me where it's not always joyful. I've sometimes had to walk through experiences with a tough and hard and emotionally draining, and after we've had the call, I need a nap because it's like, wow, that was hard. That was tough. That wasn't something that I would consider Joy Field, and yet it still gave me energy in that overall experience, if that makes sense. It still was rewarding in some way. Yeah. Okay, so how do you know what your calling is, right? So you're saying the answer to that question is what brings you energy? What is it that you feel enriches your life that you feel it's rewarding? So there's a couple of exercises that I actually teach people to do that not necessarily answer the question in full, but at least get you to start moving in the right direction. The first thing on a call is to recognize that it's always a journey. It's not really a destination in that I still, even today, there's things I'm uncovering and discovering and going, wait a minute, that part's a little bit more in alignment than this part, and so let me refine that. Let me add that to my mix or take that out of my mix. So I don't think you ever find your calling and it's like you put the flag down and you're done. It's always a journey, but a couple of things that can help you start on the path. The first one is looking back, exercise, and basically anyone can do this, you can hear this, you can do this afternoon. It literally, I mean sit down with a couple of sheets of paper and a pen or a voice app if you're a talker and don't like to write and just start talking about all of the different things you've done in the past. I don't just mean jobs and careers, I mean things you've done around summer camp, hobbies, activities, relationships, volunteer, whatever. Everything is fair game. What have you done and what things about those things you've done have taken energy away from you or been draining? And then what things around those things have been energy givers and life giving to you and felt like, wow, that part, I really liked that part that gave me those moments and uplifted me and start doing that for everything that you've done as much you can brainstorm about, this is one of those things that you can take several days or weeks to do, even just keep adding to it and keep circling things and then begin to look for patterns. Look for patterns of what things keep showing up in the takeaway energy away column and what things keep showing up in the give energy to me column Because you'll start to see patterns and out of that you can begin to bubble up and go the question that you asked, how can I do more of these things that give me energy and get rid of some of these things that take energy away from me? What can I do to begin moving in the direction? It's not going to be instantaneous of that. The second activity is what I call a looking forward activity. By the way, both of these work, regardless of how much history you have, how old you are or whatever, but they are kind of framed to be one of them is a little bit more productive if you're younger and the other one's a little bit more productive if you're older in some ways. So the looking forward activity is basically this. Imagine for a minute it's five years in the future, so it's five years from today, you are walking through an airport, you've got a flight to catch home. It's kind of your connecting flight. So you're in an airport in a strange city, don't really have any place to go or anything like that. And sure enough, as you get to the gate, plane delayed four hours, great. Now I've got a four hour layover in this airport. So you do what anyone in an airport where a four hour layover does you go find a bar or a restaurant that you can hang out at because what you do when you've got a four hour layover, so you go find the place and as you walk in, a friend of yours who you haven't seen for five years comes walking up to you, Eddie, I haven't seen you. It's great to see you. How awesome. How long are you here? And you said, I've got a four hour layover. And they go, I've got a four hour layover too. Let's grab a bite. And you go and sit in a corner table, kind of in a quiet area, grab a bite to eat, get a drink, and as your friend looks at you across the table, he says, man, how have these last five years been treating you? And you say, this has been the best five years of my life because your job is to tell me what comes after the word because what is it about the next five years that would make you say, man, these have been the best five years of my life. What's happened in your finances? What's happened in your career? What's happened in your relationships? What's happened in everything, all of the different parts of your life? What is it that made you say, man, this has been the best five years of my life? Those two exercises together, one is looking forward and the other is looking back, what you'll start to see is some themes and some patterns that will show up over and over again, and that's probably giving you a direction to least begin that journey towards discovering more and more about your call. Yeah, I mean, again, I identify when I was younger, I had a lot of things going on that I didn't like the outcomes of things I had areas in my life that I just didn't feel was working in the right way, that it was causing me stress or burnout or I was very depressed in certain areas the way things were working, and I started a plan to figure these things out and to start moving to basically reinvent myself into a new way, into a new life. And there was a lot of things that I did in that second reinvention I did. But one area was that since I was very young, the creative arts is what was all about my life. It's what I spent all my time doing, reading, writing, taking photographs, making videos, making movies. When I was 16, I started working in film and video, and so for whatever reason, when I was almost 30, I had several degrees and a lot of things went on and I decided I'm going to go ahead and open up production company and just write produce and direct, and that's what my dream is and that's what I did, and I felt that I was called to do that and I did that. What we're talking about here about there's things I didn't like. So it's like you constantly trying to tweak it to get it to the right kind of balance, I guess if you want to call it, it's not really balanced people normally took up, but just so that you feel that you're on the beat. Harmony. Is the word. That I, harmony. There you go. That's the better word. That is a much better word. And I started eliminating the things I didn't like and it was not that complicated. Just these things I don't like this I don't want to do, and so I got somebody else to do it. I eliminated way to get it done or rid. I just eliminated. We don't do that no more because I don't like it. But now time has gone by and I've done other things, and then I felt called to do something else and I did that, and now I'm being called to do something else. So sometimes I think the calling changes, right, and things change. Yeah, I would agree a hundred percent that things change. I don't necessarily know that always the underlying calling changes. Again, in that example, you use the production house work that the being in the film, the creative art, those are more assignments and those absolutely change. What I would say is what was behind that assignment that kind of fed you? You're right. I bet you that is still showing up today. You're right when you're right, you're right. That's true. What it was is I wanted to call my own shots and be able to lead the way and do what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it and have that kind of freedom in my life, which is really what I live by. This is the life I live. It's what I do today, freedom to move and do what I want and call my own shots. You're. Right, that really what it is is really the underlying call That you're after. How it was expressed is different at different moments in your life. Absolutely. Now, I have seen, by the way, I have seen people where that underlying drive completely changes. So it's not impossible. So if there's anyone out there going, no, for me, it's really changed. I will say that usually when it's a pretty dramatic change of that underlying driver, it's because of a traumatic event. It's something has happened in their life that's truly, deeply traumatic, death of a loved one, divorce, these sorts of major life events that will sometimes make people really shift from I was after freedom and flexibility, but now actually my drivers are more these kinds of things. Interesting. Interesting. So I want to talk a little bit more about authenticity and living your life a fully authentic life. Can we describe that a little bit more? Because the word authenticity gets thrown around a lot, and I'm not sure that everybody understands exactly so I would like to dig a little bit deeper there. Sure. So what I mean, and I'm like, I'm a big believer in kind of let's define our terminology because you're right, two different people could say, oh, I'm living an authentic life and me completely different things by that. So it's important to know what people mean. For me, authentic is really kind of what we've already been talking about. It's that idea of finding the way that you can live your life without mask kind of honesty, kind of with that in all different parts of your life, you kind of show up as the same person and you show up as an integrated or integral or all whole is another way of saying that person. In other words, the face that you wear on Sunday morning is the same as your face you wear on Monday afternoon. That kind of phrasing. It's how you show up for your wife, not a hundred percent obviously, but it's still that same core. Authenticity is how you show up for your friends in terms of that same level of caring of authentic behavior. It's that idea of getting you down to those core things and being able to show up with those core things 24 7, 365 days out of the year. Now, truth is, again, we're back to that. It's a journey, not a destination. There are days that you will do that better than others. There are places that you will do that better than others. It's not something that you just achieve it and now you've got nirvana and you can spend the rest of your life gazing at your navel and everything's perfect. It's more like, yeah, today man, today was an authentic, and then tomorrow I kind of flubbed it up in that area. What can I do to get better there? But we do our best. We do our best. I know I have terrible neck problems. I've had a couple of surgeries. It's a nightmare. There are just some days where it's like, oh my God, and then I need to still show up and do things. I say what I mean. I mean what I say, I'm a man, am I word. If I tell you I'm going to do this at 10 o'clock, I'm going to do it at 10. Like it's a little bit harder to show up and be real and authentic when that happens, but you push through and you do your best. But interestingly enough, I was just also thinking that I have changed though, and I'll tell you what I recognize. When I was younger and I started this journey of calling my own shots and doing my own thing and wanted to be the guy who made the decisions, I was very egotistical and so although my belief and my values were to serve and to help other people, I certainly did a lot more stuff that was selfishly driven about what's in it for me and what am I going to get out of it. As I got older and I started to change certain things in my life, I started to become much more about service and serving others and putting the needs of what they need ahead of whatever my selfish needs were, which was really good, especially since predominantly my whole life has been about sales and influence. And so it works much better when you actually really want to help somebody and serve their needs and fix their pain points rather than just closing the deal. And that would be authentic sales as opposed to manipulating. Sales. Exactly. I like that. I'm going to use that. I'm going to use that by the way, so as we move through here, it's interesting. I want to talk a little bit about, I know that part of the other area that you work in is about managing your time and your energy and how you use your focus. What are some of the things that we could talk about about getting more done and managing your day and managing your time? You actually touched on one earlier, but I'll reiterate that one, but I'll talk about some other things too, which was that when you identify those things that you don't really need to be the person doing it or I don't really want to be doing it. Finding a way to either eliminate it or delegate it, get somebody else to do it or get rid of it, that actually believe it or not, is huge because honestly, one of the biggest problems most of us have is we've said yes to way too many things. We've said yes to tons of stuff that now is keeping us from doing the stuff that's actually really important to us because we put all of this other stuff on our plate and the stuff that we really thought was important is now falling off the edges. So a lot of it is having that honesty, having that ability to sit down and really do an audit and start looking at what have you said yes to, what have you allowed into your calendar? What have you allowed onto your to-do list, what have you allowed into your life and thinking through, okay, which of these things are actually important in terms of they have an impact on my life, and which of these things are actually not important, not necessarily that impactful. What can I say no to so that I can say yes to more of the stuff that is the impact? Literally, when I say do an audit, I mean sit down. Again, one way to do it, I'll give you an example. You can do this a couple of different ways, but one simple way folks can do it is just sit down with a sheet of paper and write down times in 30 minute increments starting when you get up and ending when you go to bed and then set a little silent alarm on your phone or on your watch or something that every 30 minutes it just kind of vibrates or gives you a little heads up and just jot down real quick, what have you done in the last 30 minutes? You don't have to capture every detail. This is not about, I sent 37 emails and I did this, just worked on email, scroll Facebook, that's enough, and then again, go back after you've done that for two or three days or a week and start paying attention to what are you actually spending your time on. I'll tell you Mo, when they do that are shocked. It's similar to what happens to us when we look in the money arena and we go back and we audit what we've been spending our money on. You look down and go, really, I spent that much on that. The gap kind of thing. Same thing happens to our time, and as you do that, that awareness alone will actually begin to modify your behavior. The funny thing is as you become more aware of how you're spending time in ways that isn't authentic and isn't aligned with your life, automatically, you'll start doing less of those things. It's hilarious. Our brain just can't accept it that we're doing it. So it begins to say prompts. You start to scroll Facebook in the back of your head, it's going, really, this is how you want to spend the next five minutes. It's like, oh yeah, nevermind. And you put the phone down and you walk away. So that's just a simple beginning point. There's obviously a lot more you can do and a lot deeper that you can go, but for a lot of folks out there that are just not sure how to start changing some of their behavior around how they spend time, that's a great way to do it. Yeah, it's interesting. My career, I've had run sales teams and help them reach goals and do things, and it's amazing how many people are like commission only salespeople and they waste most of their day just sitting around hour hours of their day just chewing the fat and long lunches and playing on Facebook, talking to their friends and family and not really doing anything to push the needle forward, to make the living that they're going to live. And they complain that nobody's buying. They say, oh, this sucks. There's not enough people, there's not enough leads, and these guys are just tired kickers and blah, blah, blah. But the truth is, is that in sales you have a certain amount of time allotted for your day that you're going to say, this is my work time. And the more you focus your attention and energy to actually doing income producing activities during those eight hours or whatever that you're going to spend, the better your income your life is going to be and the more energy you have really. Because unless you don't like people, and this is another areas I often told sales guys that they might need to look at either changing their personality or changing jobs because if you don't really enjoy people and you don't like talking to people, then this is not the right kind of gig for you. But it's amazing that there's many people who just really don't enjoy that part, but they're in a sales position that they're front facing talking to people. But I love it. I get energy from it talking to you right now, I'm filled with energy people sometimes when I told you I'm working 14, 16 hours a day, you're like, oh, wow, I don't know. But dude, I'm filled with energy. I love it. I take really good care of myself. So naturally I have a lot of energy and the things that I do that I focus on make me feel good and give me more energy. So it's beautiful. Living authentically is very good. Absolutely. So you mentioned finances in there. I'm sorry, I want to go back. So when you're talking about breaking down the day, so how deep do you get them to break down their day and time? So once they start developing this awareness that maybe they're wasting half of their day or a couple hours a day or whatever, that they could be more productive or they're doing tasks that are just not high level tasks. I was always one to feel like I'm a level 10 player, but maybe I'm in a level five game and that's not good. I want to be in a level 10 game if I'm a level 10 player, and I certainly don't want to be doing stuff that's a level two task as a level 10 person. If my forte is talking to people and helping people to solve problems, that's what I need to focus most of my time on, not doing things like cleaning the floor or things like that. So other than those kind of basic things, what other ways do you help them to focus their times and energy? Well, and some of the answer to this is my actual favorite answer to pretty much any question, which is it depends because that's really always the right answer to that kind of question because there is a bit of it to where it is. It depends because for some people it's about, for instance, I'll give you a couple of examples. It's what I would call an Eisenhower matrix situation. You actually know what the Eisenhower matrix is, even if you don't know that you know what the Eisenhower Matrix. Is. Yes, please explain it. So the Eisenhower matrix is simply two axes, right? Crossing in the middle, one axes, one up and down, let's say is important at the top and not important at the bottom. And on the right to left is urgent on the right and not urgent on the left. So if you think about that, you get four quadrants or four sections. One is not urgent, not important, one is not urgent, important one is important and urgent, and one is what would the other one be important and not urgent? Or did I do that one already? So the other one would be urgent but not important. There we go. So those four, right? The idea is how are you spending your time? It's similar to what you were saying with the level 10 in terms of where should you be spending most of your time. Well, clearly I should be spending most of my time on important stuff, but remember, there's actually two things that are important. There's important urgent, and there's important not urgent. Guess where most people spend most of their time? Important, urgent. I'm putting out fires. Putting out the fires. I'm putting out fires. All I'm doing is pulling a beer, putting out fires, beer. That's it. I'm running around putting out fires all day. Every whack-a-mole, right? It's the whack-a-mole, and you've worked in sales. You've seen this happening where the sales manager is never actually getting to do any sort of strategic thinking because all he's doing is handling emergencies all day long. Guess what? You need to create some white space where you can do some of the important not urgent stuff like strategic planning, actually looking forward, like looking at projections, like looking at what's going on in the market, not today, but maybe in five months so that you can actually prepare for it, and now all of a sudden your sales team using the example from your world is perfectly positioned to take advantage of something while everyone else is trying to react at the last moment. Because guess what? They were always working in the urgent important, putting out the fires mode so that for a lot of people, those two become really important. By the way, the other area that actually bubbles up a lot for folks and creates a problem is urgent, not important. I'll give you an example. For most people, phone ringing is actually urgent. It's making noise. It's going pay attention to me. But honestly, for most people it's not that important. I mean, if you're a neurosurgeon and you're on call, yeah, it's urgent and it's important. Please pick up your phone. Somebody needs you. It's a surgery stack. But Even for sales guys, a lot of times they can let that call, go to voicemail and call it back, and it's perfectly okay. Now, again, it depends on your sales cycle and other kinds of things, but for a lot of them, no, let it go to voicemail. Deal with finish the thing that you're actually paying attention to, don't let it interrupt you. Sure, especially if you're with one customer, you're not going to stop and answer the phone. But I've seen people do that. So have you. I know sales guys that'll be actually texting one customer while they're talking to another customer and it's like, guess what? You just blew two sales, not one, because you're not there in the moment. So that idea of something that sometimes feels urgent, like a text message or a phone call or something that can pull our attention away, but really isn't that important in that moment. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying completely ignore it, never call your customer back that, but no, that's stupid. But. You can move it off of and let it be and then move it up into later and that kind of thing. So it's this idea of not letting the tyranny of the urgent rule over your day so that you can actually be strategic and plan and engage and act as opposed to just react. Yeah. One of the best things that I learned from a coach in structuring my day and focusing was that what he did and I duplicated what he did was all those customer problems, put the fire out issues that customers have complaints to push that to the end of the day, maybe the last hour and a half, two hours of your day, that's when you're going to deal with that stuff, so you're free. And I've always liked the idea of chunking my time. So I like chunking. Like these first two hours I'm going to work on lead generation and talking to new people because new people are the lifeblood of everything, and then these two hours, I'm going to work those high level people that if I could have these hundred people as customers, that would change everything for me. So I'm going to work those high level people, et cetera, et cetera. But breaking things down in a day, it's. Interesting, good from a brain chemistry point of view, because we tend to, if you can focus on doing the same task kind of over and over again, you actually are more efficient and moret effective at it than when you're kind of bouncing between. Now I'm answering email. Oh, now I'm calling the customer. Oh, now I'm doing this. Oh, now I'm doing that. Your brain's not very good at that. That's why that chunking or theming works really well. It also, by the way, and again, you mentioned sales, so now I'm kind of on the sales guy because I had sales folks say, I've got to answer an email within 37 seconds if the customer sense or blah, blah, blah. And I actually have got them to go ahead and in their signature of their emails say, I answer emails at these times during the day. If it is an emergency, please call me at otherwise expect an answer at one of these three times. Guess what? The customer reads that and goes, huh, Eddie's taking care of business and this isn't really an emergency, so I'll wait for the email. They're not mad. And if it is an emergency, they pick up the phone and call you and then you answer the phone and you deal with the emergency or you call 'em right back and you deal with the emergency. So a lot of times what we think of as the reality is really less about the reality and more about we haven't actually set it up and communicated it. We haven't designed it and set it and then communicated it because the customer does need to know if you're going to only answer emails three times a day so that they know that, that's the expectation. Okay, great. 99.9% of the time I've seen that actually work remarkably well because now all of a sudden the person's in control of their day and they're actually serving the customer better and the customer's Happier. I brushed over this. What is the four-part framework in your book Inspired Living to help people find their calling? Did we go over that? No. Well, I touched on it, but I didn't explicitly do it. So yeah, my book is coming out in July. It's called Inspired Living, and the framework that I'm talking about is kind of high level what we were talking about earlier when we were talking about kind of moving towards your calling. So the idea is first invest in yourself. Remember that one of the ideas that I was talking about earlier was this idea of figuring out what is it that you like to do? What is it that has your energy? That's an example of spending some time on some self-thought, some self-development internal work, right? The second is invest in others. You mentioned it earlier. You said you really liked serving others, and as you did that more and more, you found things got easier, got better. Things began to happen more as opposed to when you were kind of self-serving and egotistical when you became other focused, all of a sudden it's like, well, I actually get more of what I want, even though I'm not going after what I want. That's the invest in others idea. This is the way of finding a way to pour into others, because from that, you get feedback, you get energy, and you actually get more of what you want even though you're not doing it to be selfish. It's a weird kind of paradoxical thing that happens. The third is developing your impact. So as this happens, the third one is going to naturally happen because guess what? We'll go back to your career and sales stuff. When you begin working with sales teams and you're investing in them and you're helping them succeed, you're also getting more of what you want and all of a sudden you start getting reputation of being the guy that can actually help this situation and the phone rings and people are looking for your help. That's your impact. And impact here doesn't realize it's not a scale thing. This isn't about, oh, I reached a million people. This is just about you're changing some lives here. And then the last one is, so it's investing yourself in others, develop your influence. And the last one is impact the world. The idea here is, again, this is where scale is important because everyone hears world and goes, wait, I got to impact the whole world. Yeah, believe it or not, you are even if you only help one person, because the truth is that impact is about making those changes that then ripple out. So again, I was a school teacher. I've had the pleasure of having some students come back to me 10 years, 15 years, 20 years later, and now they're doctors or they're lawyers or they're working in cancer research or whatever they're doing life-changing things, and I had a little part of that journey. I'm not saying it was just because of me. No, but I still had a little part of that journey. So a lot of times we think about our impact just in terms of one-to-one, when the reality is it's always one to many because that person that you impacted goes on to impact others. That's great. I can't wait for your book to come out Inspired Living. What a great title. Thank you. So I know we've talked about a lot of stuff, and I could tell Scott that we could probably talk for another hour or so easily. Yeah, people tell me I talk a lot. It's a good thing. It's not a bad thing. I'm kidding. It's a good thing. But I'm just curious. I know we've talked about the things. I've asked you some questions. Is there anything that I haven't spoken about, topics or ideas that you would like to talk about? Not particularly. You did mention money earlier, so I call myself a stewardship coach, and my joke is that people come to me for help with either time or money. That's usually what people feel like is the problem. My joke is really, I only work on talent. Stewardship is time, talent, and treasures. Talent is really where I work because at the end of the day, the way you handle your time and the way you handle your money is actually all about how you handle yourself. Because we don't really manage time, and honestly, we don't even manage money. We manage our own behavior, we manage our own things, we manage how we think and how we act. That's where the time and the money becomes the effect, if that makes sense. It's what happens in response to, so a lot of times if you're struggling in time or money, realize that's the symptom, but what I try to do is help get to the underlying actual cause so that we can fix that. Interesting. That's awesome. I guess lastly, do you want to talk a little bit about human behavioral consultants and member of the John Maxwell team? Sure. Human Behavioral Consultants says, I'm actually certified in disc. Which of those of you that have heard of disc, it's a behavior kind of personality and communication framework. It was born out of some work in the sixties where basically everyone else was studying abnormal psychology and how things didn't work, and this one guy went, I want to go study normal people, and went and looked at normal people. Not that any of us are really normal, but you know what I mean, and started saying, how do we communicate, how do we interact with each other? And out of that came this DISC framework. I'm certified in that. It's one of the tools in my toolbox that I use for helping people with kind of communication, self-discovery, managing themselves, because I think a lot of times understanding ourselves give it credit for and then add to that, now I actually have to understand other people and then modify my behavior to interact with them. And so it's kind of about, it's a good framework for doing that. And then the John Maxwell team as I'm actually certified to coach and teach material out of the John Maxwell company that they license to coaches as well. Basically, that works a lot in leadership and communication. I use a lot of that with some of the small business folks that I'm working with that have a team and are trying to get better in that leadership and development area and how do they actually lead their team. That's great. So I will drop the links that you gave me in the show notes, and I really appreciate your time. I'm great for you. You gave me a lot of energy and a lot of things to think about and refocus. I feel pretty good about the things we spoke about. And I'm going to be in touch with you and maybe we can bring you back on again and we talk about a few other topics. Absolutely. Anytime. I did actually set up a special landing page just for your listeners, and I think I sent you this link already so that you can put it in the show notes. They can find that over at inspired stewardship.com/transform. The reason for that is it's got some free resources over there for folks, so some of those activities that we were talking about earlier, you want to download a copy of them for yourself. There's some worksheets and things like there that you can use to jump in and get started. Very cool. Thank you so much, Scott. Absolutely. Thank You.