LISTEN TO THE LATEST PODCAST EPISODE:

How to Stay Sane & Fulfilled as an Entrepreneur!

SUMMARY

  1. As an entrepreneur, you might get sucked into your business so much that you miss out on the other important aspects of life. If this happens, it won’t be worth it – as having your own business should actually allow you to create a community, support the society and live your dreams.
  2. Make sure to take a time off every 90 days or so and do three things: Reflect, Reconnect and Rejuvenate.
  • Reflect: Take a vacation or a long weekend, and block out your work and schedule. Reflect on the things that you experienced. Think about both the good and bad experiences. As you look back, recognize and celebrate your wins. Also reflect about the missteps that could have been improved.
  • Reconnect: You are able to do great things because of the people that support you. Take your time to reconnect with those loved ones and talk to them. Also, reconnect with the purpose, mission and vision of your life; as it keeps you on track.
  • Rejuvenate: After reflecting and reconnecting, you are naturally rejuvenated. A lot of energy builds up in you and you are ready to take on the next 90 days. To make rejuvenation more meaningful, make sure to be grateful for the things that you have and that have happened to you. Be prepared, make your commitments and get ready to take on the coming days.
  1. Practical takeaways to change your life:
  • Handwrite with a pen on a card and send it to the people that matter, thanking them for being in your life.
  • Journal every ideas, the things that you’ve learned and the experiences that you had. Make it a weekly habit.
  • Block your time out for a retreat, 12 months in advance. Plan this ahead and mark your calendar. Plan your trip and the experiences you want to have.

— Begin Transcript —

Hey there this is Mel Abraham, the author of The Entrepreneur’s Solution and the founder of Business Breakthrough Academy, where we teach you how to design a business and create a life: Create a life of financial freedom and peace of mind.

And welcome back to The Entrepreneur’s Solution show in this episode. This is going to be a cool episode because I get a chance to answer one of the questions of one of the people that is in our community and it’s kind of an interesting question.

He asked, “How do I keep sane?”

With all the different things that I’ve got going on, traveling around the world, speaking and training and consulting and working and writing.

“How do I keep sane and how do I keep it together?”

So, this is a challenge to many-many entrepreneurs:

How do you keep life together in this process?

So, when we come back after this brief introduction, I’m going to answer that question:

How do you keep sane as an entrepreneur?

Hey there, I’m Mel Abraham. Welcome to this episode of The Entrepreneur’s Solution, where we spend time trying to give you the business tips, the success tips and the entrepreneur tips; that will shift and change your business and give you the life that you want: A life of freedom and peace of mind.

In this video I’m actually going to answer a question that came in from David in Santa Rosa, California, which is really a cool place. It’s close to where both my wife and I got married and just his question is:

“I’ve been following you for many many years and the kinds of things that you’re doing Mel. Clearly you have a number of business interests and a number of things going on. How do you keep sane?”

–   Well, whether I’m sane or not, that’s still left out for the jury to decide because I think that if you talk to some of the folks in my life, they may not think I’m too sane.

But let me tell you what we do and when I say we, I’m talking about myself and my wife, and the realization that I’ve got a family and that is the most important piece of my life and making sure that everything that I do is to serve and to serve the community, but really to serve my family and to build that.

And it is easy as an entrepreneur and as a business owner to just get sucked in and sucked away, and pulled down by the business; where you’re totally focused-focused-focused-focused on the business but to the detriment of your relationship, to the detriment of your health, to the detriment of even sometimes your team members and your employees, and your family and all that.

Truth be told, when you think about business, if we’re doing it at a level that it is destroying other areas of our life and some people would call this balance, we’ll talk about that in a moment. But if you’re doing it at the cost of destroying other areas of your life, then “What’s it all worth?”

Because in the end of the day if:

  • I’m miserable going through it or
  • I’m alone going through it and
  • I’m not sharing the successes and
  • I’m not sharing the struggles,
  • I’m not reconnecting,
  • I’m not connected with:
    • My community,
    • My team,
    • My family,
    • My loved ones,
    • My spouse.

Then truly what’s it worth?

Because the concept of business to me is:

  • To create community
  • To support society and
  • To live your dreams

And if that’s the case, we need to design it and make it happen – the challenges that many times we’re not intentional about what we do.

So, here’s what I do:

About every 90 days, I will make sure I take some time to do three things and I call these the three R’s of recreation and the three R’s of recreation are:

  1. Reflect
  2. Reconnect
  3. Rejuvenate

Effectively, what I want to do is I want to take a moment and I typically will do this every 90 days. You can do it more often. I wouldn’t recommend doing it less often.

But, every 90 days I take some time to reflect.

Now, sometimes when we do this, I literally take time off. In fact, my wife and I, we take a lot of time off. We take a fair amount of time. Sometimes they’re lengthy vacations to exotic places. Other times it’s just us, just hanging out at the beach or at the beach house – doing the things that we want to do and just reconnecting.

And other times, it’s just taking a long weekend. We just did a long weekend just recently, to visit family and reconnect with them. The point is that we make the time and we block it out and the first piece is to reflect.

It’s to reflect on:

  • What have I done last 90 days?
  • Where have I been?
  • What are the things that I’ve experienced?
  • What are the things that I experienced that were good, that were bad?
  • What were the wins?

So many times, we fail to recognize our wins and worse than that we fail to celebrate them. They may be small little wins, but we need to celebrate the wins along the way and for a bit if we simply just look back.

Take the moment and say, “What happened in the last 90 days?”

And start to ask yourself “What are the wins?”

Then ask yourself also:

  • What are the missteps?
  • Where could I’ve improved?
  • What are the things I could’ve done differently?
  • How could I have shifted that?
  • What did I learn that I can take into the next 90 days and beyond that will change and shift the dynamic or the trajectory of what it is I’m doing?

So the first part of me, taking that time away every 90 days to block it out; is to reflect on where I’ve been, what my wins are and what the missteps were to move through it. I do this in my personal life and business life, and all aspects of my life because I think it is important for us to understand that we get to design this life.

We’re not put on a ship and said, “Here’s your life, go live it”. We’re actually put here and said, “Here’s the block of clay, go create it” and I think that is the way we need to look at it – whether it’s business or life and I think they’re completely combined.

So the second “R” is that once we’ve reflected is to reconnect.

Reconnect to most importantly your loved ones, your spouse, your significant other, husband, wife, your brothers, your sisters; whoever it is – those that are in your world that are supporting you.

I couldn’t do the things that I’m doing if it wasn’t for a great-great support mechanism, support group if you will; a community. Most of it is my loved ones, my family, my beautiful bright intelligent wife that I can have a conversation with and talk to about some of the frustrations of things that I’m doing, things that I’m planning about – to have a dialogue at a deep level.

The kids that are in my life and my mom and the mentors that I have – all of that, to may be reconnect with them for a moment and really start to understand “What’s important to you?”.

And then reconnect to your mission and message. Sometimes we lose sight, we get caught up in that daily grind and that running and running and running and trying to create something and we lose sight of why we’re doing it, and all of a sudden we end up on a course or in an area that maybe we ought not to be in, we didn’t anticipate or we didn’t wish to go; that wasn’t the direction we wanted to go.

So, always reconnecting back to my mission, my message and my purpose is really important.

So, in the process reflect, then reconnect to your mission, your message, your purpose and your loved ones, most importantly.

And then from that process actually, what births out of that process is what I call “Rejuvenation”.

Because when you reflect and celebrate your wins and you understand the learnings from some of the missteps and you look at where you’ve been and you look at where you are going, and you reconnect to your mission, your purpose and your loved ones and everything starts to gel back together again and we come back together again. All of a sudden, you do become rejuvenated and you strike out, and all of a sudden feel energized to hit the next 90 days with a vengeance, with a whole lot of vibrancy and energy to bring to it.

But to really make this rejuvenation even more meaningful, one of the things that I’d like to do is start to think about gratitude – being grateful for some of the things that have happened, being grateful for the thing that I do have and the things that existed. To be grateful for even the lessons that came out of the missteps and more importantly to be grateful for the people that you have in your life, the people that are supporting you, that are serving you, that put their arms around you when you need it, that give you a shoulder when you need it, that kind of kick you in the butt when you should get kicked in the butt. If you don’t have anyone to kick you in the butt, let me know. I can serve that just fine.

And then, “What are the commitments that you’re making”, “What commitments are you going to make” the next 90 days to your loved ones, to yourself, to your business, to your customers, to your community, to your mission, to your purpose and come at that.

And then

  • “What are your aspirations?”
  • “What are the grand goals?”
  • “What’s the big vision for you?” and
  • “Are you still on that path?” and
  • “Does it still excite you from the inside out?”

That starts to bubble up and energize you to say:

“Yeah I want to take on this day!”

So, in order to do this it’s the three “R’s of Recreation” as I call it. Dave I hope this helps.

Let me give you a couple of specific takeaways, that I think will help serve you and allow you to take this forward and start to implement it and put it into your life in a different way.

And the first is, what I call a 90 day gratitude card: Is to sit back and every 90 days when you’re talking about gratitude, write it out. There something that happens when you take and put pen to paper. I’m not talking about typing on the computer and putting it into a word processor. I’m actually talking about literally writing a card out.

In fact I do this with some of the folks I mentor, where I tell them, “Handwrite a thank you card to your customers”.

They’re not used to getting something in the mail that is handwritten. Not pre-printed, but handwritten. Forget the email, forget the typed letter – hand written in your handwriting in your signature. And write down what you are grateful for.

All those things that you’re grateful for go out and may be get a “Thank You” card and literally handwrite that Thank You card and pay it forward. Say, “You know what” and it doesn’t need to be long, it just needs to be something that just says, “Hey, I’m really happy that you’re in my life, because you did this for me and I feel this way because of it”. So, that’s one piece.

The second piece is this concept of journaling: I am an avid journal. In fact, this is one of my Bibles of journals here that I write in regularly as ideas come to me and things come to me. I’m constantly writing. And the interesting thing about this, now you may say, “I don’t want to journal every day” and that’s fine, but here’s what I invite you to do: Just journal once a week. Just start journaling once a week.

It doesn’t matter what you write. Write what you learned, what you met, the people you met, the new insights, the things that have come up. But what that causes you to do instead is it actually takes this whole three hours of recreation and brings it down to a weekly process.

“Because Every time you put that pen to paper, you’re reflecting, you’re reconnecting and you’re rejuvenating.”

And so I would invite you to get a journal. I carry this with me, I carry a couple of them with me all the time. So, get a journal book and start journaling at least once a week. Make it a habit on a specific day. Maybe it is on Friday; maybe it is on Sunday or Saturday or Monday. Whatever day it is make it that day, block it out and make sure that you spend an hour or so journaling your week.

Then the last thing is, block your time out- 12 months out: When we talk about these 90 day retreats, if you will for recreation: Block them out.

My wife and I look a year to eighteen months ahead of time and say:

  • Where do we want to go?
  • What do we want to experience?
  • How do we want to do this?

And we literally look at the calendar. We’ll block the time out and we’ll book the trips 12 months in advance and just block it out in that way so it’s not movable. It’s committed in her calendar, it’s committed in my calendar, it’s committed in the family’s calendar, it’s committed to my team so they know that these are the times that I’m going to go out and re-connect and reflect and rejuvenate myself to come back and hit it with a vengeance.

So, 90 day gratitude cards, journaling and block that time out 12 months in advance – not living day to day but at least those times cause now you know that you have the time to give back to yourself.

So, I hope that serves your day and I hope that helps. I would love to hear more from you. If you have any questions or comments go ahead and leave them here and for those of you that are out there, if you have questions or comments: Go ahead and leave those questions and comments.

Go-to AskMelNow.com, then you can leave me your question and may be find it on one of the upcoming episodes of The Entrepreneur’s Solution.

If you like this episode, go ahead and subscribe and share with your friends. And if you want to get the takeaways from this episode, go to MelAbraham.com/Session005.

Until I get a chance to see you or speak to you on the next session, I welcome your comments, your questions.

May your vision be grand, your journey epic and your legacy significant!

See you next time!!

— End Transcript —

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