Power is your ability to make shit happen. Hello and welcome back, architect nation, Enoch Sears here. And this is the show where you'll discover tips, strategies, and secrets for running an architectural practice that allows you to do your best work more often and actually go on the journey of what we call the free architect, because isn't that what we all want? Anyways, the ability to have agency and more freedom in our life. Today is another dual episode, I'm joined by our director of consulting and business transformation, Mr. Ryan, Willard Ryan, welcome. Pleasure. Thank
you very much. Hey, Nick.
Today, we're discussing an important topic that you've probably dealt with before, which is how to manage overwhelm. And this is something that can affect you, as a business owner, it can afflict you as a business owner, it's going to be afflicting your team members. Heck, my wife doesn't work out of the side of the home, and I know how to flex her. It's the idea of having too much too and all the stress and all the anxiety and other feelings of burnout and everything that goes along with that. Have you ever had trouble finding an architectural photographer who could really make your project shine? Today's episode is sponsored by renowned architectural photographer Tobin Davies. Tobin Davies eliminates the hassle by traveling to your location to create the stunning photographs your project deserves, and we are happy to support him here on the Business of Architecture podcast, visit Tobin davies.com, or daily photos.com, to book a shoot in less than 10 minutes, and ask about the special offer for Business of Architecture podcast listeners. Again, that's Tobin, davies.com, or Bo, a photos.com. First of all, let's jump into the specific problems that we're looking at here. All
right, I'll start off with the first problem we've identified here is, when business owners aren't ambitious, or they've set themselves some goals, at least they've got some goals, that's the first thing. But it's not uncommon that we'll see business owners, finding that the energy that's needed to chase these big results, ends up becoming way too much. And they end up experiencing burnout, overwhelm fatigue, there might be various types of anxiety. And if this is happening over a longer period of time, we might start to see resignation, bitterness, even coming, coming forth.
Exactly. And we can, we can categorize, chasing results is sort of fitting into two camps. So number one, there's chasing the results of getting ourselves out of scarcity. So today with our Design Council, which is our highest group of clients that we work with, we talked about the idea that when we start a business, oftentimes we start it out of scarcity, we're in scarcity, meaning we're just worried we're worried about losing projects, we're worried about not having enough money. And so all that worry, that pressure, that fear drives us to push and the push, and the push, and the push and the push, and we keep on pushing and pushing and pushing. As a matter of fact, I just saw a Facebook post the other day from last cycle that we've had here on the podcast, and he was being given an award for the most influential businessman in his area where he lives. And he said, Here's my secret, it was getting up every day and effing grinding, getting up every day, and effing grinding and then still effing grinding, like all the time. So we can see that scarcity is something that can that can push us forward. That's certainly a result. And then there's another kind of results, which is okay, I'm not necessarily trying to get myself out of scarcity anymore, we're making decent money, but I'm getting for abundance. I'm driving myself into abundance. And as business owners as we're reaching for these results, let's face it, these results, they take energy, it takes energy to do this, it takes energy to get up it takes energy to walk into uncomfortable situations, it may take energy as a business owner, to do things that you're not naturally comfortable with, like for instance, do business development, make sales calls, work on marketing materials, or create content around what you do as a firm owner. And so when we're working in something that's not in our natural genius, it's naturally going to deplete us more. Because it's not going to be as natural. It's not going to bring these positive feelings of joy. It's going to feel a lot of times like a slog. And so what ends up happening, especially when we're in the scarcity side of things, is we take on so much work, we have so many things to do. This burnout can just begin to deplete our system, we're running around with high cortisol levels. We're up for an early heart attack. When we get off of work, our mind is running a mile a minute, we can't even sit still at the beach because we're worried even on vacation. We're worried and thinking about, you know what we're not doing right now because I need to be productive. So something here's we're talking about this problem, which is like the energy needed to chase big results is too much. And you end up feeling burned out fatigued, overwhelmed and bitter. And these big results could either be getting out of scarcity or Getting into abundance. Problem number two that we look at is that we're often blind to his other areas of life suffer, or you stop pushing hard, so that they don't?
Yeah, absolutely. So there's definitely the, you know, part of the grind culture, if you like, is that we have people who will. They're just working, working, working, working all the time. And just logically, this doesn't leave space for you to be able to bring energy into other areas of your life. And what does that look like? Well, it looks like the the husband who's constantly at work. And when they get home, the wife mags, moans, complains, where are you? Why have you been here, he's not getting acknowledged at home. He gets acknowledged when he's when he's working, he gets pissed off, he they go to bed, pissed off at each other. The next day, he goes back into work, and but he gets acknowledged at work. And there's results, there's making this making money. But the marriage is dwindling, the relationship the industry, intimacy is disappearing, the family life is disappearing. He doesn't want to go home anymore. Okay, we see this kind of scenario, play all the time, we see this scenario where business owners are unhealthily inside of their businesses at the sacrifice of everything, of everything else. And in the relationship, people, particularly men, men might kind of just expect their wives to deal with this, I'm bringing home the bacon, and bringing home the money you need to do fulfill on your role. And I'm going to carry on, you know, I've got to work hard, because I'm providing for everything. And if that kind of thing goes unchecked, and the relationship is losing its intimacy, and there's no communication, and there's resentment building up, and there's bitterness in this complaint, and there's nagging, and there's aggression, etc, etc. What will happen, those relationships, and they'll come to a sudden, sudden ending. So we have relationships we have what that would have the impact of that on a family. So if you had children, you know, growing more distance from your kids not being able to see them grow up, not being able to be involved in key moments in their in their lives, not being able to take time out to help them learn valuable lessons not being able to be there for support, that has an impact on the relationship that you'll have long term with your with your children. And then we've got what happens to your own physical health, the amount of stress you were just alluding to there, the amount of stress that working and particularly a particular kind of work where you're just stressed, you're stressed out and you're not getting the results. Right, that's the shitty work, that's the stuff that's overwhelming. Okay, when you're working hard, and you're not getting the results that you want, and you're not enjoying it anymore. Okay, that's when that's when we that's when we really, really starts becoming problematic. And we see this again, in architecture people, they fall out of love of what it is they're doing the job, the business becomes a misery. This takes its toll like you're you are now producing all sorts of toxins in the body, you won't have time to be looking after yourself going to the gym, your if your relationship is starting to fall apart, you're going to retreat into comfort habits, to make yourself feel better in the short term, eating lots of sugar or binging on pizzas or whatever kind of thing that you might be doing in it, you know, that might turn into something excessive. We're talking about just doing it once in a while talking about, you know, this is becoming kind of habitual stuff, you go out of shape. Now you're putting more pressure onto your body, because you're putting crap inside of it, etc, etc. So we can really start to see how the, these when this becomes out of balance, how the rest of our life can start to suffer. Now, what some people end up doing here is they might recognize that and they're like, right, okay, well, working this hard is a problem. I'm not going to do it anymore. I refuse. And then they throw out all of their goals and ambitions with it. They just they just said oh, they're just like, sorry, I'm not going to try and find another way of doing this. But it's it's like, okay, and then I'm gonna stop doing that. Who needs to be rich anyways, I'm
sorry. I'll be happy. Right from personal experience. Here's what it's looked like for me. We have a busy house. We have five kids at home and my wife homeschools Plus, they have extracurricular activities. We have a son Who's in swimming, he's actually going to public school, he's swimming on the swim team. We have other kids who are involved in drama. So we take them to play practice, we have church activities, we take them to, every single week, I take one of my kids out on a date night, where we go out, we have ice cream, or we go play at the video arcade store, Carly, as well, she'll have things where she'll go out with friends. So what ends up happening is, by the time it's time for us to go to bed, we're just so exhausted and tired, that we just look at each other, and turn out the lights. And we're just like, Ah, it's time to go to bed now. Can't wait. And then we wake up early in the morning, we get after it again, go to the gym, wake up early five o'clock out exercising. So the impact that this has on a relationship is that even you can be the best friends in the world, you could be the best, just have the most incredible soul connection. But if that soul connection isn't actually nurtured over time, if it's not watered, if it's not taken well care of, if it's not. If it's not given its proper attention, then you start to drift apart, and you don't even realize it, you don't even know it. And now the impacts of drifting apart are you as a man of what I discovered for myself as actually start to feel more lonely, I may not even recognize the loneliness that I'm feeling. And so subconsciously, I can actually try to pour myself more into work and withdraw more from my family. Now, the impacts of this over time, can be devastating, they can lead to divorce, they can lead to estranged kids that never really got to know us very well. At least case scenario, we can finally get to retirement where we have more time and find out what kind of living with a stranger. So this is a real world example, just from my own experience, how the stress and overwhelm of being a business owner can easily flow over into the evenings can easily flow over into a sense of overwhelm, that then impacts in a very, very real way, my relationship with my wife, now, let's say let's say working out in the morning as well. Again, if I feeling overwhelmed, if I feeling burned out, I'm not going to bring the same energy and intensity to the gym, I'm going to show up to the gym, and I'm already going to be tired, I'm going to want to just sort of lollygag through my exercises, just kind of half acid like, Okay, I'll lift lift a little bit here lift a little bit there, this has impact on the body, this has impact on my health.
So this brings us nicely then to the to the third problem really is that people are asleep to the reality that all areas of life impact each other. Beautiful,
beautiful. So just consider as you're listening to this podcast, have you really considered how all of the areas of life actually tied together, they feed on each other, they benefit each other, or they detract from each other. So for instance, like when my wife and I were both, we're both on the outspoken and let's put it this way, we're both we're both first children. And so oftentimes, we would butt heads. And when we butt heads, and when we argue it can escalate very quickly to where we're both getting our feelings hurt to we come to an irreconcilable kind of argument. And we're just like, fine. So we just stopped the conversation because No, it's not going in and weren't good. Now for me, this can stew on my mind. Like I'm like, Ah, just feelings of like, I did it again. And I'm a terrible husband, how come I can never get this right is this relationship ever going to the mind, the mind starts churning on all this negative self talk, I go to bed. Now this again, this depletes my energy I go to work. The next day, I'm trying to be present for our clients for what I'm doing for my team. But in the back of my head, I know I had this big argument or fight with Karla last night. And then this impacts how I'm able to show up as a business person. So again, another example of one area of life in this case, my relationship massively, massively impacts my business ability in the other area. So this is a real problem that you are asleep, to the truth about how these different areas actually connect and impact each other.
It's, it's interesting how relationships can impact your performance at work, or your performance in doing something. I'm reminded of a, of a story of a of an event that happened in my life, not with me, but with a friend of mine. And we were playing in a band. And this is what we were young, young men at the time. So kind of relationships and women and all that kind of stuff was was probably a priority. That was the probably that was that was the thing that
we were mainly only priority. Main purpose in life, our main focus,
focus all
you lives lives slept and breathed for that's
what we that's the whole reason why we were in a band.
That's the only reason why you were in a band.
Remember, the lead singer of the band was dating this a very attractive woman, girl at the time, and something happened in their relationship, something It wasn't working on the came, he came to the, to the rehearsal and he was just his energy was so poor, like he wasn't engaged in the music was just like he wasn't giving it his all. And, and then he forgot the lyrics. And he'd never I've never seen him forget the lyrics before. Never. And you ever under stopped you're like, what how many times have we done this song it was you could tell it was just obviously clearly really, really burning burning a hole in his, in his mind and what were what he was thinking about. I remember later on that evening, we went to the went to the pub to talk about it. And we know what's going on that clearly needed some some, I think therapy at the time was probably drinking. And I remember when it came to paying the bill, he was tried to use his debit card or whatever, and he forgot the number on his debit card. And I just bring that up, this is an example of you know, I'm sure we've all got periods in our life where you we've we've had been in a relationship or we've had that kind of argument or something's happened, that it's just really, really diminished our focus really diminished our focus
as destabilizing. And it's easy in a relationship to sort of detach ourselves and sedate this, in other words, kind of tell ourselves a story that it doesn't matter, I don't care, I'm going to I'm going to live a little bit more distantly from my from my significant other. The truth is, is with a primer pointing to her the truth is actually does matter. And a big no in a big way, if you're if you're seeking highperformance. So problem number four is as a result, you live a life as a one dimensional human being. What do I mean by that, it means that you may be super successful in business, but you're broke, and you're out of shape, you have a lot of extra body weight and your relationship is I mean, it's, it's not great, it's mediocre. That's a one dimensional life crushing and crushing it in one area. Let's look around, let's say you're let's say marriage is on fire, but your bank account is struggling. Business is struggling. And your health is not good. Again, carrying a lot of excess body weight, you don't like the way you look in the mirror. Those pants that used to fit your Well, well, you've worn them a little too long, you shouldn't be wearing them anymore, because they're past their prime and you're past your prime as well. So this is what it looks like when we live as a one dimensional human being isolated and believing that all of these areas of life don't interconnect and don't contribute to one another.
It's unsustainable. When we look at this, how long can that one area that's working, carry on working, when all these other areas have been neglected? We see it with business owners, we see it with people who they've got massive success in their business, but they've neglected their health and neglected their relationships. They've neglected their relationship with God, their faith, or the universe, or their their sense of spiritual entity if you like, or their connection with a greater power. And then all of a sudden they get they get massively sick. That's it. Business Business is gonna be it's gonna go downhill or you die. And then all of the areas. That's the end, that's the end game. So I think it's, it's easy to kind of put all your eggs into one basket and kind of just get into you and to just remain where you're comfortable. But these other areas of life when they when they're neglected, they will eventually start to undermine the one area that you do have success in if you're continually ignoring them.
Absolutely. And I've heard a lot of I've heard I mean, you want you to be looking at some of this business advice out there. There are people who will say, you can't have it all, like you're either going to have you're going to be super wealthy and you're going to have a marriage, that's terrible. Or you're going to put all your effort into your wife, your spouse or your husband, if you know if the case may be you can't have it all. You can only have one area and not all of it. And we stand for something different here. Yeah, like we believe that actually, as a matter of fact, if you look at your baseline as a human being, let's say that we have a man who's very successful, or a woman who's successful in some endeavor, but let's say on the homefront. Her relationship with her husband is terrible. Let's say that, you know, she's not keeping yourself fit. So she's a superstar in business, but all the others of life aren't very commendable. We see this a lot with like, ultra wealthy guys. They're going through one relationship after another. They can never stay with the same woman. You know, their kids say, oh, yeah, he's he's an alcoholic loser. You know, he's snorting up cocaine to keep him Go Go Go Go Go buddy as massive business results. So we can see this, we can see this lopsidedness of malicious consider that same guy, what would happen if that guy actually had an unfair committed relationship with a woman who loved and supported him, and they were intimate and close together, like, what his business results go up, would they go down? Nope, because that would serve as a source of fuel for him, they go up. So this brings us over, I'm gonna jump across to the possibility, which is simply this, all areas of life are sources of energy for you. And they actually fuel each other. Imagine this, this kind of vortex this this virtuous cycle, where each of these things because your relationship, your romantic relationship is so satisfying, and so fulfilling, that you show up more powerfully in business. And because you're showing up more powerful in business, you have the time now to put more energy and effort into working out. And because you work out every single day, your endorphins are higher, you feel more energy and excitement, to be the best version of yourself for your, for your significant other. And same thing for your business member in your team. This is what we mean by the virtuous cycle. So that's possibility, one, possibility number two,
possibly number two, all areas of your life expand and support each other. So that she start growing into each other. And we could see this quite logically. For example, if you've got business results, okay, and perhaps there's a way of looking at this as well, where some some areas of your life actually, you know, if you get them set up first, then it makes it easier to set up the other areas of your life. So for example, I think it's probably easier, not impossible, but it's easier if you've got good money to be healthy. Why? Well, because it's easier for you to go out and shop and buy great food, you can go and eat a healthy restaurant, you can hire a personal trainer, you can hire a gym membership, you can structure your life in a way where you've got more time to be able to allocate to fitness and health. If you've got fitness, if you've got your fitness and your health, you're feeling great, you're energized, you're making money, as a man, you're going to be more attractive, it's going to be easier for you to be able to sustain a relationship, you've now got energy there to be able to put into a relationship to attract somebody who's, who's there for you, you have all those three setup, they're working great. Now you've got now you've got a stabilized foundation to be inquiring with your spirituality, or your higher purpose, or what it is that you want to be doing as a leader on on Earth, you will naturally start expanding outside of yourself and looking for you know, it's a good foundation to have a deeper inquiry about what your life is being used for. And these, these and again, you can do it another way. I know if you've, if you haven't got, say, finances, but you've got good body, you've got good health great, because now you've got some energy you've got, you've got good energy to be able to go and put into building out building a business, applying focus. So these things are very deeply interwoven and interconnected and actually support each other. You'll also find things like if you start exercising, a say, discipline in the area of the of your body, or doing something that you've never done before, out there, that it starts to stretch and push you in the area of your, in your business, you might start looking at what you've started to accomplish as a discipline with your exercise routine and go, well if I can do it, then then I can bring it into my business. I know for me personally, I've always used the still now, my commitment to not drinking alcohol or consuming intoxicants or anything like that there's a kind of Buddhist principle that I took very much to heart and, and live by, I always use that as a, as a kind of source of energy and power of like, well look, you made it, you made a choice, you made a big lifestyle decision and choice and changed. And you went through having to enroll other people into it and to, you know, maintaining relationships and pulling yourself out of a culture where that was very normal, etc, etc. But I did it. Great. And it's there and it serves me as a source of source of power. And as time goes on, I can see the bigger and bigger benefits of having made that commitment.
So Possibility number three is that you're fully awake to the reality that all areas of life impact each other. Possibility to number four is You live the four dimensional habit all life is
amazing. Yeah. So imagine having a 4d life where all of these areas are operating at a high level.
We've got the physics, I do, I do believe Ryan and what I found in my life like there are seasons, I have seen that their seasons, like, Okay, for this season period of time, I'm going to be focusing more on my business. Or for this season, I'm going to be focusing more on my relationship with my wife. So this is important to to let our significant others know and just understand for ourselves, are we in a season, where we're going to shift the focus to something just because we need to double down, we need to get that inner inertial like, like terminal velocity to escape. And so a lot of times when architectural practices startup in the first five years, five years, they feel like they're in this sort of like unbalanced state where they're having to put inordinate amounts of energy into that, what I would caution our listeners about, it is so easy to forget that that was once just a season, and now it becomes a lifetime. So typically, what we find is, it's rare for people who focus decide to pour everything into the business, you've had now built up a habit. And so what once was something that you said you were going to focus on it for a year, becomes two years, becomes three years, becomes four years becomes five years. And now you're that one dimensional person where maybe your business even isn't even doing that great. And you're living a lopsided life. So what's the what are the principles here? First principle is you got to understand, we need to really recognize at a deep level, that all areas of life are connected how we are in one area of life is how we are in another area of life, and the impact and influence each other. If you're a business owner, you know, that when your team member is having difficulties at home, they're going to show up very differently with the way that they show up at work. And we've had this with members of our delight Design Council dealing with team members who are coming in with their baggage about, you know, drama, or things that are happening in their household that certainly are very difficult to deal with. But now you're bringing all that stuff into work, it's affecting that particular domain as well. Now, let's define power. This is principle number two. Principle number two, around managing overwhelmed because that's the topic of the podcast today is power is your is simply defined as the way we're using it is because we've used that term here several times, is your ability to make shit happen. Now, this can happen one of two ways. Number one, you power through the uncomfortable thing because you have energy. So because your relationships going well, because you're working out because you're feeling healthy, that when you're faced something in business that you don't really like to do, like, you know what, I'm going to do this, just let's get through it and do it because you have that energy. So that's number one. This is the ability to to have power. The second kind of power that happens is because you actually start feeling good about these things. You can breathing that positive emotion, even more fully into what you're doing into your activities to get better results. So these are the two ways that power, the ability to make shit happen to get stuff done, can manifest by making sure that you're magnifying that power in your life, and then directing it into these four key quadrants.
A little bit on the back to expand there on power and disability to make shit happened. Right? Power were defining here as your ability to produce the results in your life that you want to have happen. It's your ability, we could even relate this back to our word. So those of us people who have listened to the episodes we've done on integrity before. And certainly for the POA clients. When we talk about integrity, we talk about the power that comes from being your word. Imagine where you've got this power where you say something and it happens. Because that's the cat's how you relate to your word. Right? You say something, let there be light and there was like, it's that kind of you speaking things into existence. And that's part of the power that we have as human beings that we don't realize that we actually have, that we can create things through our work can start things in conversation, we can start to having them as when we start living a life where we're speaking things into existence, we've got an idea. We've got an idea for results, there's a direction we want to go, we start talking about it, we start speaking about it, we start telling other people about it, and it happens. That's exciting. That's exciting. That is exciting, Ryan.
So we just defined power. Second principle here to understand is all areas of life either contribute to or detract from your power.
So if we look at the idea that
we're out for results, some results, that's why we're in business. That's why we're in relationship. We want to get some results. That your power is equal to your ability to get those results. or not, and that these four areas of life, these four quadrants, that we'll be talking about and will identify here very clearly, they can either contribute to or detract from your power. And principle number four is simply this routines, determine your habits, and your habits, determine your destiny, you are what you repeatedly do. If you just go to the gym, every January for the next 10 years, because by the end of January, who wants to go to the gym anyways, right? We make that awesome. When he got new year's resolution, that then wanes by January, this is why the business model of a fitness franchise is so profitable, because they're profiting on this human tendency to want to start something out with power, and then eventually Wayne, and not do it. So the key here is that if you want to have power in all areas of your life, the key to do that is through routines. And when routines happen again, and again and again, which is the very definition of a routine, it becomes a habit. And when something becomes a habit, than it does require as much energy to do that thing. So you can see here is you start to see an increase in power, aka results. Because of the habits that we take on and the habits that we do, this is how we can get into a virtuous cycle
on add a little bit there about this idea of habits and habit formation. And there's lots of reports and studies that have done about how long it takes to establish a habit, I think I've probably nowadays what i've what I've seen is it's about 60 days, you'll see other studies that will say it's around about 90 days. But there's this idea of habit gravity, that when we first start trying to build a new habit, there's some kind of gravity, there's resistance to it, there's something pulling the actions back. And if we think about it, like gravity, in order to escape the Earth's gravity, for example, there needs to be a kind of sustained escape velocity, which is time, it's time and energy that we need to that we need to put into a certain kind of habit in order for it to become a certain kind of routine in order for it to become established as a habit. And, you know, when we, when we've escaped the habit, gravity, this is where we're now floating, it becomes a lot easier to sustain the routines, in fact, it almost becomes automatic. And this might be the process of where it's now embedded as a habit, you just automatically do that thing, you automatically get up at half past six in the morning without thinking anymore and do your exercise or it's a little bit easier.
Well, it does, it becomes these things can become addictive, right. So that the idea is that you're going to be addicted to something, something probably addicted to something, you're they're addicted to success, you're addicted to failure, you're addicted to positive self talk, you're addicted to negative self talk, you're addicted to pornography, or you're addicted to a wonderful relationship with your wife. You're addicted to drugs, or objected to the heaviness of just being alive. And walking through nature and seeing the beautiful nature around us. So the question is, as you're looking at this idea, how do you want to choose how do you want to what kind of habits do you want to build. And one of the core foundational things that we teach your Business of Architecture is a personal operating system, meaning that it's not just a business operating system smart practice. But backing up smart practice as a as a business operating system is a personal operating system that's powered by what we call the core four. So core four, meaning core four areas of life, defined as the body being balanced and business. Right? explain for us what these four different areas are with a body being balanced and business. What do we mean
by the body is probably fairly straightforward to understand. And it's everything that's in the domain of our physical body. So this is going to be our health. And this might include us looking after ourselves with an exercise routine. It would certainly include the fuel that we put inside of it. What kind of food are we eating and consuming? What habits do we have around our food? Are we binge eating certain things? We indulging in sugar? Are we starving ourselves and we're not eating eating enough. It also might include other things like looking after illnesses or injuries that you might have. We might include things like rest and recuperation and your ability to take sleep and take actual time time out and give yourself that time period of time to rejuvenate. So everything that's in the world of your physical, being your physical body, is what we would consider the body, the balance. This is more to do with relationships, and more to do with relationships a with your family. So with your spouse, your wife, your children, if you don't have children, perhaps it's your parents, your siblings, and also your friends, and your wider community. And it also includes a relationship with yourself, and actually having time to do things that are important for you, hobbies that you want, as pursued interests that you'd like to nourish yourself with long walks out in nature, that give you a sense of, of well being. Okay, so that's the whole world of balance has everything to do really, with relationships, from friends, family, and also includes yourself. And that includes interests and hobbies, then we move on to being now this is probably the more more one of the most important one actually, and possibly the one that's most difficult to talk about. So, I'll often say that being is really about your relationship with something greater than you. Doesn't have to be religious. So if you've got a religious framework that you follow, perfect, okay, because it will often mean looking at that, at that framework and your relationship and how you've been exercising a relationship with God, with your higher self, with the organizing mystery of the universe, whatever language you want to put around it. What are you doing in this part of your life? How much time do you spend in contemplation? How much time do you spend in solitude? How much time do you spend asking? Who am I, for inquiring? How much time do we spend here? Actually digging into our own values? And our own leadership? And considering our own legacy? What is it that we want to leave behind in life? Okay, what am I contributing to humanity. So everything can that sphere of, of contribution to something or a relationship to something which is greater than just you. And starting new to see, you're starting to see an experiencer a dissolving of your own ego boundary, if you like, is what we might consider under being and exercises, you know, things activities might be related to that meditation, contemplation, prayer, faith groups, discussing religious and spiritual texts, being spiritual friends, being with spiritual communities, being mindful, etc. And then finally, we've got the domain of business, which is basically everything that we talk about her Business of Architecture, from your, your career, your fulfillment in your career, the money that you're bringing home, the money that you've got available for your team members, the money that you've got for your family, the profit that you're making, protecting the profit. And that one we could go into for as we have been going over it for the last 10 years, podcasts.
Beautiful. So here's the thing, the core four is not a solution that will disappear, you're overwhelmed. So the core four is something that goes hand in hand, and other words, the core four habits. So be very specific here Business of Architecture, the personal operating system that you would learn as part of smart practice, would be to involve specific habits around each one of these areas. So for instance, in my in my balance area, I go on a weekly date night with my wife, Carly. And I take one of my kids out on a date every single week. This is great, I love it, they love it. It serves as a source of passion, a source of excitement, a source of a bit of a reward at the end of a long day. And so that's how I manifest my balance. Now, when we look at the core for what we have is we have habits and we have challenges. So something else that we're not going to delve into today called the challenge based lifestyle, which is yet we get our habits in these four core areas moving ahead, and then we set up little challenges around these areas. Okay, so for instance, my wife and I are going on we've we've signed up for a Couples Retreat that we're going on this particular year, we've signed up to a mastermind, where we're going to be focusing on our relationship. And as part of that, we're traveling and so that's one of my challenges. It's not something I'm going to do every single year, but it's a one off thing to move ahead this particular domain of my life. I
think that's really good to make that distinction between the challenge goals and the routine goals and the discipline goals. So for example, I might have this year a challenge goal, or a one off goal was getting married. But a routine goal is that Yvonne and I spend one day a week with each other. We have our ride on day that we call it, we go out and we do something, it's just about us to us talking about the future, doing some sort of shared activity. Or in the domain of being, I might have routine goals, which are things like journaling every day, or meditating every day. And then a challenge goal might be to do a pilgrimage, or a long walk. You know, I'm talking like a 10 day, I've been talking about doing the Camino, in Spain, the long stroke image walk to one of the
one of the churches. Okay, speaking of pilgrimage, I've always wanted to make a pilgrimage to Mecca would i be i would not be allowed because I'm not Muslim. Ha. You can come. If I've presented myself as Muslim, what do you need to do to become Muslim?
I don't know how to, you know, probably need to go to a mosque and find out. Yeah, do I just need to accept
Allah and say, Allah is the One and Muhammad is his prophet? Possibly. Cool. I could become Muslim.
I mean, there is a there is like, an Islamic passport that you get. And then interesting,
oh, wow, that you can actually signify I'm literally Islamic, because see, that's very tempting, because at least right now, in the Christian worlds, you won't, you know, you're not in danger to getting your head chopped off In most areas of the Christian world in Christianity. But if I wanted to travel in Islamic worlds would be very useful to have an Islamic passport. And I'm saying, plus, I don't really object to any of the overall views of Islam, they all seem very great. When you look at the way the great mystic teachers of Islam teach it. Obviously, there's fundamentalist sects. And that's not what I'm talking about here, you know, terrible stuff happening in Israel right now. It's just terrible how they pollute religion. But this brings us back to the idea of the four core domains, because if we're pushing all these domains forward, then we're, you know, the whole humanity will increase, let's face it, you know, one of the things that drives people in fundamentalism is they don't have any, any options, poverty, government oppression, right. So that's going to be a conversation for our next podcast, which is going to be political commentary on the world. We'd like to venture off, we won't venture into the political arena any more than we just did. So here's what ends up happening. When you start putting into place the core for what you'll find is this feeling of overwhelm slowly starts to melt away. As all areas of life begin to improve, you'll find that your bank, your bank account improves, it then fills up with ability to buy healthier foods, or be able to invest in health experiences, or have a personal trainer, ultimately, bind yourself more time, more peace more time to focus on your individual genius. So this is not just a nice to have, this is a non negotiable. If you want to live your best life as a powerful human being.
I think it's, it's kind of like thinking with us, we're talking about power, right. And if we think about ourselves as batteries, and we're rechargeable batteries, and then we need to have a routine or a process of checking in with all these four domains to make sure that our battery is filled up with power. And that there are also things that we can engage in that suck away our power, they suck away our energy, and we can dissipate it. And when we start thinking about, we kind of start getting rid of the whole idea of time management, and we start living out of an operating system based on the core four, which is a route which is about routines, and energy management, really power management. Fantastic. This is a much more practical way of dealing with the the anxiety that comes from poor time management, because we're trying to fix something all the time. Now, well, time management is often in time management itself is coming out of a place of kind of scarcity, or running. Yes, yes. And it's and the more that we look at the tools that we've got for time management, the more stressed that we become.
And Ryan, do you ever find this as the case like, it's not so much the case, I'm more aware of it now. So I do it less but certainly in the past, when one area of my life wasn't working as well, or when I was having scarce in that area, I would pour more of my time and energy into that area, which would then destabilize the other areas. So it actually exacerbate the problem and actually make it worse instead of better because now my other errors are starting to get out of out of sync and I'm getting more exhausted and more and more worn out. out more burned out, instead of filling myself up with power. Yeah, so if you as our listener, if you'd like to live a more powerful life, and you'd like an operating system that's both personal as well as something to power, your business success, you know what to do next, head over to smart practice method.com. attend one of our weekly free webinars where we talk about smart practice method, some of the biggest challenges that architects face, running a small architectural practice, we talk about the four main myths of architectural practice and the solutions to these myths, including four critical moves that you must do in your architectural practice, as well as the pillars of what we call smart practice. So with that, we bid you adieu. Ryan. carpet is very much and that's a wrap. Oh, yeah, one more thing. If you haven't already, head on over to iTunes and leave a review. We'd love to read your name out here on the show. Have you ever had trouble finding an architectural photographer who could really make your project shine? Today's episode is sponsored by renowned architectural photographer Tobin Davies. Tobin Davies eliminates the hassle by travelling to your location to create the stunning photographs your project deserves, and we are happy to support him here on the Business of Architecture podcast. Visit Tobin davies.com or Bayway photos.com To book a shoot in less than 10 minutes and ask about the special offer for Business of Architecture podcast listeners. Again, that's Tobin. davies.com, or VOA photos.com. The views expressed on the show by my guests do not represent those of the hosts and I make no representation, promise guarantee, pledge, warranty, contract, bond or commitment, except to help you conquer the world. QRP DM
