Adding Rocket Fuel To Your Studio’s Growth (With Something We Often Ignore)

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode one Oh eight

Whoa, you're listening to the six figure home studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your host Brian Hood and Chris Graham. Welcome back to another episode of the

six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood and I'm here with my bald, beautiful, amazing purple shirted cohost, Christopher J. Graham. Hi everybody. Hey, it's good to be here. I need to stop doing that damn announcer voice cause you always come back with that horrible just cringy car salesman voice every single time. And I absolutely despise it. So I try to hype you up and you can't handle it. I can't. It freaks me out cause I'm like, he's going to ask me how I'm doing and I'm not going to ask him how he's doing it. It's going to make me look really bad. How you been, man? I've been okay. Yeah, things are good. We have a lot going on right now in the gram household. But more importantly, I've talked about how I'm doing. Like I went back and I checked and I'm at like 27 minutes cumulatively in this podcast and you're at seven minutes. I'm just kidding. I didn't check that. But I would like to know how you are doing and how your new coffee roasters treating you.

Okay, so fun story. I ordered some bags and I'm going to get a custom label maker thing and I'm getting a friend to do a little like graphic design thing for my brain of coffee just for gifts and I'm just going to call it hood home coffee and it's going to be just for gifts to send out to people. Similar to how Billy Decker gives those little like cutting boards out to his people. Dibs. And so I get my first gift bag of coffee out yesterday to actually a client of my wife's and made her some coffee from I think it was Kenyon and I wrote all the details of the bag, the roasting, the like gross level, the origin, the farm. It came from the roasting date. I scribbled down my brand on there and like put home coffee and so she tagged me on Instagram this morning, enjoying her first cup of foot home coffee. So I think it's going to go down. Well,

I'll tell you the Graham house, we're out of green coffee right now. Oh my God. And I have not had a chance to go to the special spot here in Columbus. I like to buy it from and so we went and got a Americanos this morning. I went and bought us Americanos at a local coffee shop and they were terrible. They're so bad.

Dude. I can't even tell you man. Like there's very few places that I can actually enjoy a cup of coffee anymore. Yeah. I just have to get like lattes and sweet trash just to cover the bad taste of their coffee. That's why honestly we're going to, we're not going to, I didn't plan on this today, but that's why American coffees so trash is because people don't know how trash it is. They're forced to drink sweet coffee because they think black coffee tastes bad. They think Americano or espresso is tastes bad. The reality is the stuff you're drinking is just trash and the only way to make it palatable is to drink it with milk and sugar.

Yup. Black coffee is delicious and I think everyone would think that if they tried real good black coffee, it tastes nothing. Freaking Dunkin donuts or McDonald's or even Starbucks. Starbucks is slightly better, but not by a large margin. The only good thing about Starbucks is it will be in a place that otherwise my only other option would be like gas station coffee. Yeah. So when it comes down to between gas station coffee and Starbucks like Starbucks, all of a sudden it looks like an incredible option. I went through a large phase before I got into the coffee roasting game of I would get a ristretto Americano. The hell's that. I don't even know what that is. I'm going to be embarrassed to say the wrong stuff on our podcast, but I think it's a cooler temperature of water. But it's got like a, I dunno, I missed calls are always served with near boiling water.

You know, like when we roast coffee, when our air press, it's like I brew mine in like 175 degrees. Same. That's Fahrenheit not Celsius. So it's like not very hot. You can drink it immediately. Yeah. And that cuts down on the essay to D in the bitterness. So like it's a, it's the weirdest thing man. With our coffee. I love telling people this is, if you get an arrow press and if you haven't bought an air press, yeah you probably should. They're on Amazon for like 30 bucks. This is probably six figure home studio required gear. If you're your listener and you like coffee. But like the thing about narrow presses, it makes low acidity coffee. And so you can make yourself a cup of coffee and then put it in the refrigerator. Go about your day, wake up the next morning and drink it and it still tastes good.

It's delicious. The next day, normal coffee. Like if you did that to a Starbucks coffee, Oh my gosh, you might die. I'm serious. That's a great way to die. Yeah, it's going to taste like a sock. Well, let's move on today cause we spent way too long last week talking about my new roaster and all things coffee. And we don't need to do that again because not all of our listeners light coffee. Not all of our listeners give a shit about coffee. But for that small little group of people who love coffee, these last two episodes have been in delight for you. I gotta say one thing though. I think I should probably clarify. I am not addicted to coffee. Oh, it says every person in the world that is addicted to anything that's like, that's like the first thing any addict says about anything they're addicted to.

Yes. But the most coffee I have in a day, so as long as I'm not at Nam with you because I'm exhausted and jet lagged is about 80 milligrams, it is a tiny amount. I don't know if you understand the metric system, but most people overseas do not measure the liquid in grams. They do milliliters. Oh well fun fact, Brian, one milligram of water equals one milliliter of water. Yes. But I have learned that not all liquids translate in that exact way. Some are more dense than others, but I guess you're right about water. Would you like to discuss the, which denser liquids are you discussing? Brian? Edit, edit whenever you want out James. Um, let's move on here. Oh actually let's not move on. You spoke of Nam January. I want, I think it's like the 16th through the 20th or something like that. Is winter ANAM in Anaheim, California. Chris and I will both be there. Yup. Any of our listeners who are going to be there either tag us in our Facebook community by going to the six figure

home studio.com/community or just by searching for the six figure home studio community on Facebook. Tag us in there. Don't send us a message on Facebook. Chances are if we're not friends, it's going to show up in a message request folder. I never checked that, but do tag us in a post or just email us podcast@thesixfigurehomestudio.com. Let us know you're going and we may try to get a little group together to do something. I don't know what it's going to be, but we'll both be there and we'll be hanging around and last year we both were shirts with our faces on it. That said the six figure home studio podcast this year, I'm not doing that. I'm probably going to wear a file pass shirt this year. You know that's funny, Alison, uh, my wife has been talking to me about that. She's like, you have to wear a bounce Butler shirt.

Yes, yes. So I probably will wear a bounce Butler shirt too, but it'll be purple when you order it in any size besides medium. Please do. You are not a medium shirt. I helped hire you first of all. I've lost a ton of weight since. Okay. Yes, you have lost a ton of weight. I wear a medium every day. Yes, it is a little more fitting now than it was before. But tell our listeners how tall are you? Six one. How much do you currently weigh? Probably 194 pounds. No 194 pound adult that is six foot one ever should wear a medium shirt. This is the worst banter ever. I can see every detail of your body right now. I just want to shake shit right now. Trust me. There's the few details that you can't see. Brian, let's move on to our Dan episode. Today we are talking about self care.

I don't know what the title of the podcast is going to be, but we're talking about self care and this is an episode for those of you who are currently working yourself to the bone. Those of you who really struggle to take time off someone who is constantly overwhelmed. If you are maybe anxious about work or you are putting in a hundred hours a week or maybe relationships are kind of withering off and dying because you're not fostering those relationships. This is an episode for you. We're going to talk about self care, why it's important, what you can do to foster self care, but also I want to state who this episode is not for. This is not for those of you who lack work ethic. If you're the type of person you sit around all day playing video games, if you struggle to have any sort of like self motivation to get shit done in your studio or in your business or in your life, this is probably not for you.

If you're a slacker, this is definitely not an episode for you. This is for people who work too hard. Yes, skip this episode. If that's you. If you're a slacker, if you're the type of person who has no work ethic, this is not an episode for you. There's other episodes out there for you. This is an episode for those overachievers who struggle stepping back and reigning in their work ethic. Yup. We've got some stuff today. So Chris, let's start off this thing. Why self care? Why is self care important? Well our podcast is about self-growth. It's about growing and self care is rocket fuel for growth. Ooh, say that again. Self care is rocket fuel for growth and now I feel guilty cause that was your, I just stole your line. You put in our notes and I get so frustrated when you steal my lines. So you say it now. Oh man, I'll steal from you. Yeah. So self care is rocket fuel for growth. There's a number of reasons why this is, but if you just think about it doesn't matter how fast you're growing right now, it doesn't matter how much you're crushing it right now. If you do not focus on self care and this episode's helps you shift a little bit towards the self care road, then it will absolutely put rocket fuel into your business.

Totally man, you rocked my face off about a year ago you recommended a book called peak performance and [inaudible] performance. Uh, there is a formula for growth and that growth is stress plus rest. And for many people they get the stress part right and they don't include the rest

or if you're the type of person that shouldn't be listening now because we told you not to listen, you get the rest part right, but you do not get the stress part right. Exactly. If that's, you don't listen to any further. This is your last warning.

So yeah, like getting this ratio of hard work to rest, right. Is a non negotiable for humans, period. It's the way our bodies operate is the way our physical beans exist and if you don't get that ratio right where you're pulling back and resting, I don't care what it is, whether that's it's your recording studio, whether it's like you're trying to run a marathon or whether you're trying to like become an ultimate fighter, whatever it is. If you do not have an appropriate amount of rest in there, you'll never actually grow. You'll hit a plateau and you'll never get past it.

That's 1000% true. I forgot about that, but I'm glad you mentioned it. That is a really good book. If you haven't read peak performance, it'll be in our show notes. Just go to the six figure home studio.com/one Oh eight that's slash one zero eight and there'll be a link to that book in there. We talk about being your future self's best friend on this podcast a lot. That's a phrase that gets thrown out, thrown around a lot and I think this self care topic, this conversation is a massive part of being your future self's best friend. Would you agree or would you disagree Chris?

Oh, I totally agree. You know there's a weird balancing act there. If like I look back at, I mean reading books is a perfect example of like younger me, you know, see 31 year old Chris or 29 years I guess big 29 year old Chris from 10 years ago, 29 you're on 30 are you 39 I'm 37 I'm 39 I'm only 37 wow. So like 27 year old Chris decided to start reading business books and 37 year old Chris is so grateful to 27 year old Chris because I'm not a dumb ass anymore. At least not that as much as I was. And it's so nice to be like, Oh my gosh, my business is, I have successful businesses. This is great man. Holy crap. But yeah, that's the be in future self's best friend.

I think a big part of it, and this is one of the other benefits of why focusing on self care is so important is because this is optimizing you for the highest possible momentary IQ. This is actually one of your lines Chris, so you take it away here.

Yeah, so I really think, I've been talking about this with a lot of the guys that I do coaching with business coaching with. I really think that a lot of the secret to success is not how smart you are, but it's how smart you are for like one moment per week. If your IQ is like 20 points higher than average for a moment because you took good care of yourself, you optimized well, you've got that moment of clarity. And for me that's yoga class. I take yoga classes every week, hopefully three or four or five yoga classes a week and I take notes in a yoga class. I've got like a pad of paper next to me and the teachers are always like, are you the only one in the class that has a cat on the notepad? I figured I'm notepad guy at our yoga studio.

There is way worse things to be called and known as. That's not to totally fart guy. Yeah, too tight clothing guy, see-through shirt guy. Like there's plenty of bad guys you could be in yoga class, none of which are in my yoga class. Thank God, but well occasionally there is a fart person in the class. It's rough man, but I always take a notepad with me, the yoga class and I'll sit there because I get in like my highest state of mind, like I'm the most healthy at certain moments in yoga class after yoga class or the next day I'll sit down and read my notes and it's like getting like an an email from future me. It's like I read through it, I'm like, Oh my gosh. Never in a million years. During a normal work day would I have enough clarity to have written down, Hey Chris, make sure you do this.

Hey Chris, don't do this anymore. Hey, make sure you add this feature to bounce Butler. Like there's just all these moments where I'll be like, Whoa, I'm so glad I have this piece of paper. Like all of the things I need to do for the next three days are written on it. But it's because I optimized for the highest possible momentary IQ. Yes, you don't need to be a genius. You just need to be a genius for like 15 seconds every once in a while. So the next thing on our list of why self care matters is because your negative energy will affect others. And I think this is a huge one on the podcasts. Like if there's days where you or I are just having a horrible day and we just say despite that we're going to do a podcast episode, it's always a terrible episode every single time.

And because of that, our terrible episode affects our listeners too. So like our lack of self care trickles down to our listeners, to thousands of people to not give them our best is affecting thousands of people. So I think this is a really important thing for you and I, but also for anyone we interact with from a day to day basis. So our listeners have to take this into account. If they do not focus on self care, they're not just affecting themselves, they're affecting those around them, which is intern effecting the way those people perceive them and what they feel about those people. They may not even remember exactly what you said to them or exactly what you did for them, but they'll remember exactly how you made them feel. And by focusing on self care, you're able to make sure your negative energy isn't rubbing off on other people.

Yeah man. And so there's a responsibility there and I think you could even look at the flip side of what you're saying. The flip side of that coin is anything good that we've ever said on this podcast is a result of past self care that we have done. You don't have anything interesting or anything healthy or anything positive to add to the conversation without like taking the time to consider that stuff instead of like doing something unhealthy like a, I don't know, like arming to spend 17 more hours editing this single snare hit so that no one judges me. But yeah, so your negative energy affects other people and the only way to remove that is self care. You have to take time to work on your stuff and I would say I'm going to get real hippy dippy here. It's sort of like there's a mirror inside of every person and self care is the courage to look at that mirror and look at the reflection and be like, Ooh, that needs a little work there.

Hmm. I'm going to spend some time addressing that issue. I've got tons of issues. My wife, if we ever get her on here, she could have a list of 27 things. Like Chris is not especially good at this. He needs to work on this. I can do that. Yeah, of course you can. And you often do much, much to my joy. Seriously. But you know, back to this idea here of recognizing that your negative energy affects others. Great story on this and I'm going to use our platform here to spread my hippy dippy, you know, agenda here. Oh I can't wait to see if we need to cut this out or not. Fun fact red food dye that you find in Halloween candy and all kinds of funny story about this. By the way, continue on this little, this little tirade. It is illegal in every developed nation on earth except for the United freaking States.

You can buy food in the United States that has toxic ingredients that is illegal everywhere else in the developed world. One of the most notorious of these ingredients is red food dye. I share this because children are particularly susceptible to red food dye and when my kids and they are very aware of this, eat candy with red food dye in it, especially the younger they are, they turn into little demons and their negative energy affects the whole family and they're really, really in touch with it at this point. Like it is not a subtle, like others seem to be slightly grumpy. It's like, Oh huh. They're on the ground spinning around screaming, which is not normal in our house at all. Super, super, super, super, super rare. But it's this red food dye. And so when you look at like when my son saddened or like earlier this week state farm insurance was handing out red, you know, little like suckers and my daughter was like, can I eat it?

And I was like, no, absolutely not. You'll be awful for the rest of the day. And so it was this sort of like moment of like her knowing like, ah, if I ate that it would create negative energy. I would, I would be out of control and it's self care for my kids. Like there'll be with like grandparents and they'll be like, Oh, do you want some candy? Jeremiah and Jeremiah like my middle ability. But does it ever had food day? If Southern know that's self care, he recognizes the red food dye is, makes him an asshole. You make your son sound

like an audio engineer, know it all asshole way to mimic him and say he did something like that. We haven't mentioned this on the show yet. This is back to the banter just slightly, but we did go to the Mogue AKA Moog synthesizer factory and he lost his frigging mind. That's in Asheville, Nashville, Asheville, North Carolina. That's great man. Pause on that story. I'm going back to the red food dye conversation because this does negatively affect me and I didn't realize this. My favorite cake of all time is red velvet cake and my wife was making me one from scratch for my birthday and come to find out red velvet cake has a fourth of a cup of red food dye in it. That is an insane amount of red food dye and so she tried to use like this natural red food coloring thing like beet root or something and it came out and said it's really just chocolate cake with frosting icing like cream cheese icing.

That's all red velvet is with a ton of red food dye. It turned out to just be like this kind of like a Brown red color. It looked awful but tasted amazing. But yeah, I'm like, I made fun of you plenty of times in the past for the red food dye thing. But now I'm like, I don't really do red food dye anymore. It is super, super weird that in our country it's not illegal. So let's move on here before we start talking about the next point on our outline here. There's another thing that gets rid of your negative energy and that is our sponsor today. LaCroix, I would share this sponsorship and opening session, but I've already finished the two cans I brought with me to work today. I literally saved that. So I do that on there. We're not actually sponsored by the, but I do that shit all the time.

If you're a listener, you know what I'm talking about. All right. So those are all the reasons why self care matters. But Chris and I were talking about the popularity of the kind of the self care movement. It's kind of like a pendulum that swings. Is it pendulum or pendulum? I don't really know how to say it. Pendulum, it swings one way or the other. I think just a few years ago it was the big Gary V was like, hustle, hustle, hustle, grind, grind, grind, work, rain or shine, like don't stop working until you've reached your maximum output. You know? That was the kind of the way the culture was in the world. I think it's slowly starting to swing back the other way towards self care, but I want to say that neither extreme is healthy. Obviously the grind and work a hundred hour weeks is not a healthy way to live your life and run your business, but also going the other way.

The other extreme where you're focused too much on self care, that is actually something that is also negative because then it becomes too much about you becomes too selfish. To me focused and I just want to say that it's kind of a caveat before we get into this that you don't want to go either way too far on that pendulum. You want to find a good balance in between. And honestly, most things in life, if there's a one extreme or the other, the best place to be is somewhere balanced in the middle. And I think the world forgets that when you see all of the divisive stuff you see online, it's always this or that. You can never have a thing in the middle. And I think self care is one of those things you need to find the happy middle ground. Yup. So let's move on today to our self care. How to some ways that we have listed here that you can focus on self care, things that you can implement in your life to your self

care. What is our first one here, Chris? Well let me take a moment kind of some back to our opening statement here. That self care is rocket fuel for growth. That's not clickbait, that's not us like trying to come up with some revolutionary new idea. That is the God's honest truth. And that is man foundational for at least how I live my life. It's foundational problem. My wife lives her life. It's so freaking important. And to try to grow without, you know, a view toward self care. Mm each ouch. Good luck with that. It's not going to go well. It's going to hurt really bad and you won't grow. So that's why we're doing this episode and I think that's why we're going to get into some how tos here. What are some things you can do that can create rocket fuel for your own personal growth?

That's great. So the first thing on our list of how to focus on self care is actually taking the time and energy to focus on self care. And this is obvious, but I think most of us fail to do this and if you do not take a step back and assess yourself on what areas need time and need attention and then take that time and attention, you are not going to be able to make any sort of progress with your self care. Yeah, taking the time to focus on self care is huge. And we've talked about this a bunch on the podcast before. This is not me trying to like sneak in Christian stuff for you guys, but there's an idea in, I think that pretty much all the major religions as far as like it's going to say this isn't, this is not just a Christian.

I know not at all. Yes, but it's the idea of a Sabbath in the Sabbath is this idea that you take one day per week and you don't work. And it stems from the book of Genesis, the creation story. You know, God's like God makes everything and then like on the seventh day he rested is what it says. There is something to this idea of a Sabbath, whether you're an atheist, a Muslim, Jewish or Christian agnostic, whatever. I don't care. There's something to this idea of a Sabbath. And you know, a great example of this is there's a guy, I'm not going to say his name cause I don't want to share anything is too private here. But there's a guy been, I've been coaching younger guy who had been struggling to kind of put some stuff together in his life and through me asking him a ton of questions.

It came out that he had worked like 50 days in a row or something like that. And what we started doing with him as far as like coming up with actionables that he could work on in between coaching calls, it was like I wanted him to start taking one day off per week and during that day off per week, I wanted him to take a traditional Sabbath. And basically all that means is you don't work and you don't do any sort of play that's stressful. So like a good example of that would be like, I love the game pub G, it's like a bang, bang, shoot him first person mobile game. Super duper fun. Not something I will ever play on my Sabbath because it riles me up. It like gets me like, Oh look, I almost second to last person living, you know, like that's not a good Sabbath activity.

Watching like a horror movie. Probably not a good Sabbath activity. You're looking for stuff that's restorative. Just to clarify, you said horror movie. Yeah, totally. So like a movie about, um, scary stuff and not a horror movie. Uh, come on anyways. Yeah, you should be doing stuff one day per week. That's all restorative and nothing that adds any stress to your day. I think that's super duper duper duper huge and an important part of any healthy lifestyle. And usually when I meet somebody who's young who's just like, you know, getting the crap kicked out of them, like not having a good go of things. One of the first questions I ask is do you take one day off per week? And the answer is almost always no, because the problem, especially for younger guys in particular is FOMO, fear of missing out. That's the Sabbath killer.

[inaudible] I don't want to miss the hang with friends and do whatever,

you know, like all of that is what kills the Sabbath and it makes you stupid or the rest of the week. So back to the guy I was doing business coaching with, it had been taken a Sabbath, couple of weeks pass after our first call and he reached out and was like, Oh my gosh, this is amazing. This is the greatest thing ever. Like Holy crap, everything is better in my life. And it's sort of like a car with no oil. If you're not taking a Sabbath, it's not going to run right when you start taking one day off per week to be restorative. So the big thing about taking a Sabbath for him is all the sudden it's like he's playing with a full deck of cards. It's like he's actually achieving his maximum IQ because he's taking this Sabbath each week. The things he's doing during the week to try to grow are starting to work.

Yes. So this is back to the stress plus rest equals growth. This is the rest portion of that is taking a Sabbath, taking a specific day off each week to rest and recover. So if you guys end up hearing anything in the background, there's a construction thing that has just started right above me. So it's gonna keep happening to the whole podcast. So you guys can ignore any random sounds you hear. Sorry about that. So I think there's one thing that's keeping people back here, and it's a story that you had from the book. It was from an author, Daniel Kinnaman. What's the story there? Daniel Kahneman. Oh, sorry. Yeah. This is the traffic can keep you from actually taking time off, I think is the moral of this story or go ahead. Yeah. Daniel Kahneman is this Nobel prize winning economist. He is one of the smartest people of the last hundred years.

He's a genius and he specializes in understanding why people do what they do. That's behavioral economics. It's sort of half psychology. It's half economics. One of my favorite topics on earth. I'm just fascinated by it. I've read a ton of books about it and somebody was interviewing Daniel Conaman one time and said, if you could have a billboard and show it to the entire world, what would you want that billboard to say? And I forget his exact words, but he said something along. The idea of whatever you're currently working on is less important than you think it is. What he meant

by that is that we as humans have a now bias. We think whatever the last thing we thought of is the most important thing that we could be thinking of. Oh yeah. Or whatever email. Just hit your inbox is now the most important thing in your life or whatever complaint you got from a client is now the most important thing. It's the recency bias. That's actually a thing. Is it a familiarity bias? Okay. Whatever it is. When we're trying to sit back on our Sabbath, whatever day off the day of the week, you take off and you're trying to sit back and relax and you get something in your inbox that all of a sudden that seems like it's this burning fire that has to be dealt with right now instead of actually focusing on the time off, you need to take off to rest and recover. So that's the first step of self care is actually taking the time and energy to focus on self care and not let yourself get distracted.

Whether it is an email that just hit your inbox or whether it is all of the construction happening in Chris's office right now. That sounds like somebody seeing in the background. It's crazy. It sounds like a mug. Yeah, it's, it's again, tuba. Yeah, it's crazy. It's a, it's kind of amazing, like I'm going to make sure that actually stays in in the edit. It sounds like an old man singing in the shower. We just gotta roll with it cause we got to get this episode done. Yep. So the next thing on our list is investing into healthy relationships. I don't know many ways that you're going to have the ability to invest into self care if you do not have healthy friendships around you. And this goes back to a popular quote, Tim Ferriss made this popular, it's not Tim Ferriss who had this quote, but you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

And I think if all the people around you that you're spending the time with are toxic people who are either focused way too much on business or not at all in business, but dragging you down in some other way, then there's no possible way that you're gonna be able to focus on self self care. So investing into the healthy relationships in your life is going to be a huge part of this. And I think one of those parts is either fostering relationships that you currently have with growth mindset type people or finding new people to add to your social circle that have the growth mindset. Totally. So one of the things I love about this is Brian, you're in my five. You are one of the people I spend the most time with. I'm in your MySpace top eight. You're in my MySpace top eight. Brian only boomers will get it. Joking.

Gracious. But yeah, I mean like you really are the average of the five people you hang out with the most. And if one of the people that you hang out with the most is a negative. Condescending. No at all asshole. That's going to seep in to you man. Yeah, and if all the people around you roast coffee for fun and try to get you to make better coffee, you're going to make better coffee, which is what happened when I met Chris Graham. There we go. I think this is one of my super powers in life is I have surrounded myself with growth mindset people. I have almost, I would say probably too far the way of ruthlessly cut people out of my life. I think there's a balance between cutting the right people out of your life. I probably am a little too brutal about cutting people. My life that are I think are toxic, but the result of that is the only people in my life are the ones who are fantastic influences on me who are fantastic friends who are massive growth mindset. ERs. I am privileged to have mr Chris Graham as to one of my topics for sure.

Yeah. I think a big part of this is finding other people that Brian and I would call quote unquote growth mindset ERs.

Huge. Another thing is when it comes to relationships is finding other people who believe in boundaries. It's one thing to have people who are growth mindset is. It's another to find people who are growth mindset is who also believe in and respect your boundaries in life. Boundaries in your time, boundaries with your family, boundaries with your business because it's not always hand in hand. I do know people that have the growth mindset that don't have boundaries and it's really hard to be around those people because they just don't understand how to limit their interaction with me or how to not step over a boundary that offends me or not. How to not, you know, invite themselves over when they're not welcome or how to not. And that doesn't really happen. But you get what I'm saying, it's they don't really have boundaries in life. And so even if they're great people, even if they have the growth mindset, even if they're not toxic people, their lack of boundaries is almost a toxic effect in and of itself. So finding other people to spend your time with that have boundaries and respect boundaries and have their own boundaries, I think is a huge part of making sure this entire self care thing is going to work at all.

Yeah, 100% like the boundaries thing is huge. And I think you hit the nail on the head. You can have a growth mindset but not believe in boundaries or endorse the people around you having boundaries. And it's really tough to do self care because self care is about boundaries. Like a Sabbath is like, well I don't, I don't work on Saturday. I don't work on Sunday. For me it's Saturday. Yeah, I mean there's something really, really important about that. Believing in boundaries and I think a good example of that is speaking of boomers, you know this idea of like as soon as I text him, if he doesn't get back to me in one minute I'll be offended. No. Why do boomers know? I don't know the official accent of boomers everywhere. But yeah, like if someone believes, if I text you, you have to get back to me right away. They don't have the right to decide that what they want from you is more important than what you're currently doing. Even if they're a growth mindset person. I've got, you know, one of my best friends, I'm working through this with him of like everything is important. Everything is urgent, everything is now and it's tough to have a healthy life and to do self care. Well, if people are just now, now, now, now, now all the time with you and you let them.

Yeah, I don't appreciate you airing our dirty laundry like that, but that's something I'm working on with you, Chris. I'm sorry I pushed all my agendas on you like that. Uh, that's a joke. I don't do that. I don't think I do that. At least new don't. Let's move on to the next point. In our list we talked about taking time and energy to focus on self care. We talked about investing in healthy relationships. The third thing on our list of self care, how to is are we called our self care toolkit. How about that? This is part of our self care toolkit is investing in enhancing the positives in your life. Now this can go a lot of ways. This is too broad of a thing to actually really cover in detail, but a simple example and one that you're all familiar with. This self education courses, books, podcasts, YouTube videos, blog articles, things that we probably, if you're listening to this podcast, you don't have an issue with this, but this is a great example of self care. It is investing in enhancing a positive in your life. Unless you're listening to a podcast about how to murder somebody and get away with it, which is like 90% of Americans, like the whole murder podcasts, what is it called? They're called a [inaudible].

Do you want me to say the P word there? You know what it is? Murder porn.

Oh yeah, I forgot. I use that term murder porn. That's the phrase, but it's called true crime. True crime podcast. Grace. That's probably not really enhancing anything positive in your life, but you know what? I'm not going to judge you. If you love true crime or your significant other loves true crime, then we're not. We're not wanting to judge, but you don't where I'm talking about when it comes to self care in self-education, it's usually something that's enhancing something positive in your life. The next thing is exercise. This is something that's enhancing a positive in your life. Chris talked about yoga earlier. This is a huge part of your life.

Huge part. Yeah. I think having something that you do that makes your body better, you know, I've got at least historically have had significant shoulder pain issues and yoga has been a miracle for me there and lately I've been going to a chiropractor which has been an absolutely incredible as well. I'm super weird, awesome. But because my body feels a little better, I'm in less pain, it's easier for me to be in a better mood. It's easier for me to be more upbeat and positive and it's easier for me to do better self growth, to focus more on self care as a result of not being in pain. I mean I think just your overall body shape,

whether it's when it comes to exercise, yoga, running, lifting weights, whatever it is, and then our next point in our list, which is sleep. Really the rest of this list has to do with body. Your body has a lot to do with how well you perform in life.

And let me hop in here. What's the guy's name that owns Virgin air? That's a Richard Branson. Russell Brunson. A completely different guy. What's the guy's name, sir? Richard Branson, I believe Richard Richard Branson. That's close to Russell Brunson. It is true. And they're both really good at business. So yeah, Richard Branson blew my mind. He was on, he's being interviewed on something and somebody asked him, you know, like, what's the number one secret for business? And he said, exercise,

are you talking about? That's crazy.

But you know, if you're 25 it might not be the most important thing, but if you're 65 itch probably is. Yeah. And you know, I'm 37 and the older I get, the more important it becomes for me to have a good mindset. It's really tough to be struggling with physical stuff and to do well mentally.

Yup. And I think I'm just going to lump these last couple things in here. When it comes to enhancing positives, this all goes into body and mind. But sleep and diet, just eating right. Those two things along with

exercise go hand in hand. We've talked about it way back in the day. I don't remember which episode is it's so long ago. We talked about dealing with anxiety. Actually there it is episode 74 our five favorite ways to prevent stress and anxiety. We actually go way more into detail when it comes to exercise, sleep and diet. So if you want more details on just some thoughts around that, go to episode 74 but these all go hand in hand with self care and if you can improve your sleep, if you can and eat right and you can exercise, which is the three most generic pieces of advice you've ever heard in your life. This goes a long way to self care. And I can tell you right now that some of the most unhappy people I know, people that have completely given up on eating right on any sort of exercise and because of that they can't sleep well, which affects every single part of their life and their business 100% and I would kind of add something to that.

I would say some of you are probably like a man. They always are talking about this stuff. It just keep repeating like nap time and like sleep and bodies and get coffee. Shut up Brian and Chris, like the reason we keep repeating it is because pretty much everything we talk about is you know, a, a Umphrey getting what? What do we call it on the advice buffet. Yeah. And here's the thing. This advice is for you. My daughter said something hilarious the other day. She said, I'm inside a body and what she meant by that, she's four freaking adorable. What she meant by that was like her, her essence is inside of her body. The body is the ship of which her consciousness travels this world. That's a very deep thing for a four year old to say. It's so deep. It's so deep. Yes, she's hilarious man.

But this is important. If you want your consciousness to do well, you need to take care of the vehicles traveling in. Yeah. So we're going to keep talking about this because it's important. Yup. And I think honestly if you hear us bring up something from episode to episode to episode to episode over and over and over and over again, it's probably one of the required pieces of our advice buffet. It is not something you can pick and choose from. It's something you should probably almost always count as a requirement in life or business. Totally. If it gets brought up that much, like good coffee, there's no we don't negotiate there. All right, let's move on to the next point here. And this is kind of our final overarching topic when it comes to self care and that is eliminating the negative. So the last point was enhancing the positives.

Now we need to talk about eliminating the negatives because what good are the positive if the negatives just overwhelm us in life. And a good example is you had a story about an elephant in a rope. Chris, this has something to do with a negative that most of us probably have that sounded so dark and elephant and a rope. So here's the story about elephants and ropes. If you want to tame an elephant, it's pretty easy. Get a baby elephant, tie a rope around his foot, and then tie that rope to a stake in the ground. Now the catch, is it a full grown elephant? If you just tied a rope around that full-grown elephant's foot and then put it in a stake in the ground, that elephant's going to break the rope and or rip the stake out of the ground. But if a baby elephant has always had a rope around his, he'll learn at a young age. Well, I can't get away from this rope and he'll get older and he'll never try again to escape from that rope. He'll accept it as a fact in his life. That is a limiting belief and we as part of our self care need to be examining things in our life and thinking, is this an elephant rope or not?

And this comes when we talked about taking time and energy to invest in the self care. This is part of the energy portion of that. It takes energy to sit and think and to analyze our negatives in life. The things that are holding us back in life. It's honestly, it's a lot of work to identify these limiting beliefs in our life. And if you're the elephant and you have that rope around your leg and you haven't thought, you know, in the last year or two, why is this rope holding me back again? Can I actually pull this out of the ground? I should probably try. I'm five years old now and a thousand pounds heavier than I was the last time I tried this. I might can actually pull us out of the ground if you never pause and sit and think and assess why it is that you let that hold you back. How are we ever going to heal from some of these wounds that are holding us back?

Well, and it comes back to this idea that I mentioned before that there's a mirror inside of all of us and self care is having the courage to look in that mirror and deciding whether you like what you see. And a big piece of this is discovering these areas of your life of like, Oh man, that's not consistent. That's not healthy to just the other day we're renovating some of our house right now and I had ordered a bunch of automatic outlets, like the little wifi enabled outlets on Amazon and I got a package of five, five came, only four of them worked and I kept the fifth one even though it didn't work because I didn't want to admit that I got shifted because I like, I didn't take the time to return it and so I kept it rather than throwing it away. Made no sense that I kept it, but I like recognize like this is stupid. Why do I still have this? Throw it away. It doesn't work. But there was like a moment of like admitting ah, something didn't turn out right by me throwing it away. I don't think it all is.

I think some of it is just doing things the same way despite things that have changed in our life or things that have progressed in our life, just continually doing the same thing over and over again. A lot of times when you see to sit down and think why do we do things the way that we do? And I think a good example of that when it comes to cutting the negatives is you posting your rates publicly online for years and years and years for no other reason than the fact that you just, that's the way you always did it.

Yeah, totally. I mean it was crazy the other day, like I've had a couple people fill out quote forms rather than, you know, the old way was just like my price was published and there's a section on there, this is a little controversial, but Brian, you encouraged me to do and I'm glad I did. There's an optional, you know, field on that form for what their budget is and it's blown my mind what people put in that field. I had a guy put like just an obscene, I think he put $3,000 per song for mastering that and I was like Oh this breaks my heart but I am going to be honest with you and tell you that it's too much. At least for me. Maybe there's somebody else out there that's worth $3,000 a song that's got like 1 million

number one hits. I will say this though, if you are stuck in like for the longest time cause you were charging so fucking little like such an obscenely low amount for your quality of work and how long have been doing this. And I think the limiting belief was holding you back from doing that. And I think until you start to see those sorts of budgets, yeah, there's no way you can mentally allow yourself to charge more than the fat thing is. Like the 50 bucks a song or whatever you used to charge like yeah, yeah. It was like, man, it is night and day. What can happen when you start to actually assess the negatives in your life? And I started eliminating those things. Well, to be fair, some of that was like when the podcast started to explode, it was just like, uh, I can't keep up with this anymore despite my best efforts.

So it was kind of like I got forced to test that rope and sometimes you know, having a situation in your life that forces you to test your assumptions, it can be a really healthy thing. Yeah. Another area for eliminating the negatives is removing toxic people. This goes hand in hand with the conversation we had earlier where we talks about investing into the positive people, the, what do we call them? The growth mindset. ERs. Yep. The ones who believe in boundaries and follow boundaries. There's also the opposite of that. The people who constantly drag you down, the people who constantly preach insecurities into your brain and into your mindset like these types of people need to be ruthlessly cut from your life. And Chris, you had a story here for that. Yeah, there's a story. I don't know if it's true cause I'm not a lobster expert, but so the story goes if you have a bucket full of lobsters and one of the lobsters attempts to crawl out, the other lobsters will grab that lobster and pull him back into the bucket.

They don't want one of their brother into escape to freedom. Yeah. And there are a lot of friend groups out there. I know some of you are like, Oh Steve, that was a gut punch right there to them. Yeah. Like you're thinking about a particular friend who just has no tolerance for your own growth. Fire him. Yeah. To look at the opposite of that. I think if you are a growth mindsetting lobster in a bucket with other growth mindset or lobsters, those lobsters would help boost you out of the bucket. Yes. Because they want everyone out. They don't want anyone held back. And that's just the difference between surrounding yourself with people who are positives in your life versus surrounding yourself with people that are negatives and just dragging you down in life. So eliminating the toxic people in your life. And then final sub point on here when it comes to eliminating negatives to focus on self care is doing an 80 20 assessment of your clients firing bad clients.

You had a story here at Chris, you're just our story guy, Chris. Like I come up with all the advice and you just come up with all the stories and it's a perfect pairing. Yeah, I'm the story guy. So when I first read four hour work week, it rocked my face off because Tim Ferris broke down the 80 20 rule in chapter five and said 80% of your revenues coming from 20% of your customers and 80% of your misery and heartache is coming from a different 20% of your customers and you should fire the people that create 80% of your headaches. That blew my mind. And immediately couple people came

to mind where I was like, I have to stop working with this person. Um, I have one of these guys reached out to me today, not from 10 years ago, but somebody who I've worked with a number of times who just is like, I generally love everybody. I work with and one of the things I do on my quote for him, it's like, Hey, you can schedule a phone call with me if you are interested in working with me on a mastering project and we'll talk about your mastering project. He scheduled multiple phone calls because he thought I would see that and then would call him like not at our scheduled time and it was just like, no you won't. No, no, no, no, no. Like red flag, red flag. It's one of these guys like he, he'll send like five emails in a row without getting a response, one sentence and the hour later he'll email you again with one more sentence and then an hour later he'll email you again with another sentence.

So a guy like this, I've just been like, no boundaries. I cannot work on your rush project. You are toxic and uncomfortable to work with and you like to try to make me feel worse in order to get a better deal out of me. I sent an email out last week where I talked about revision. Hell, actually last episode was about revision hell and there was a companion email if you're my mailing list where I went and talked about the revision hell client who sent me like three or 5,000 words worth of revisions over a 35 day period. You might think that that's a toxic client. However, when I actually assessed the situation, was it seven years later? Sometimes it's actually broken systems in your business that caused those toxic situations. So it's not always a toxic client that you need to fire. Sometimes you need to actually assess the systems in your business so that you have better relationships with clients.

So I just wanted to throw that out as a caveat. Don't think that every single problem in your business with a client is the client's fault. Sometimes you need to take ownership over the mistakes that come up with a client because sometimes you can fix those problems and you don't have to fire every client. So that's just a little something. A little food for thought there. Yeah. Oh, 100% I love that because what happened for me is when I started to build systems for my business to make myself more efficient, I was stunned to find that I immediately began to like the people I was working with so much more. Yeah. Yeah. And so those red flag clients that pop up every now and again were popping up much less frequently whenever you implemented better systems. Yup. So as we wrap this episode up, Chris, is there anything else we want to chat about related to self care?

Yeah, I think just an overarching idea here. I've got two things to say. Anxiety is I think the enemy of self care because anxiety is created by the word. Now when you feel like every single thing that you have to do is now I have to do this, now I have to do this, now I have to do this. Now that creates anxiety. When you have people in your life that are like, yo, I need this from you now. I need this from me. Now I need this from me. Now that creates anxiety. And in a space like that, there's no room for self care. 100% agree with that man. Like if all you're doing is focusing on those things that need to be done now, those things that are giving you anxiety in life, you're not actually ever being your future self's best friend. All you're doing is treading water, trying to stay in your

brain, at least trying to stay afloat. How do you get out of that trap and you have to create boundaries? Yeah. I think if we were really talking about, I mean that's what this whole episode is about is focusing on just to go over it again, taking time and energy to focus on self care. That'll help with that part. Investing in your healthy relationships, investing in enhancing the positives in your life and then eliminating the negatives. That will help a lot with the anxiety in getting past that word now. It's so toxic in our lives. Yeah. I love this man. Well, as we kind of close up shop, I got to say something here. One. I'm sorry about the noise in the background or if you have no idea what I'm talking about. Then hats off to James and Brian for editing out the extremely loud background noise. Let's let, let's friction. Are they? They're, they're renovating the office of, of you or why? We ran a little bit over and I told them we'd be done earlier than we actually ended up being done. Yeah. Usually we're done by three or 4:00 PM your time, but it's like four 30 your time now. Yeah, so to the soothing sounds of construction, we appreciate your listener ship thing. I'm talking right now, trow, man, we're done here.