I’ve been feeling pretty lost as of late. I am thinking about my youtube channel, about my job, about coaching, about my health and about my challenges with youtube and fitness. I’ve been stressed out about all these different things and I don’t really know how to tackle all of them at the same time. I don’t know what to focus on, which ones makes sense to put energy into, and how I will go about focusing on any of these things.
I’ve been feeling depressed, overwhelmed and depleted, constantly self medicating with youtube videos and games.
Recently, I’ve been inspired by this video:
Health is everything. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you don’t have to choose between that and health. You will be a better entrepreneur with better health.
I want to drop all of my other challenges and focus on this for a while.
I want to focus on my health.
I thought about what this meant for quite a while because health is such a nebulous topic. I feel that Brian Johnson in project Blueprint is taking a very scientific approach to health, but I want to take a more personal approach.
Here are the areas that I care about:
Mood: How positive and happy I feel overall
Passion for life: How motivated I feel about life, relationships and projects
Energy: How energetic and strong I feel
Flow: how in the moment and attuned to my body’s sensations I feel
Attractiveness: how healthy I look
Some ideas of times that I can measure these things:
When I wake up: great for seeing how well I slept
Around 10 AM: good for checking up on my morning routine
Around 3 PM: good for checking on my afternoon routine
Before I go to bed: good to seeing the cumulative effect of the day and how fulfilled I feel
I’ve tried these type of challenges before, but I feel that I sort of neglected the mental part of health, feeling healthier physically but mentally trapped and unhappy. I want to really commit to doing video journaling this entire time in order to make sure that I can express myself and work through mental challenges.
What would mean success to me is not just feeling much more happy, passionate, energetic, in flow and attractive, but also to create a lifestyle, mindset and routine that will maintain and grow that over time.
I was thinking today about boundaries and needs, and how I’m starting to work on recognizing them. I’ll add a new one to the list:
Honesty – truth is important
Empathy – emotions are important
Respect – it is important to be valued and value others
Time – control over your time and space
Possibility – belief anything is possible
Health – lifestyle is important
Needs are interesting, because I think boundaries are used to protect needs. I’m not entirely sure whether or not these are needs or boundaries. I also don’t know if they are values. In doing a little more research it seems that some people would consider these values, not needs. Maybe I should switch up my terminology.
In any case, health is a value that I recently added to incorporate my dedication to sleep, digestion, and exercise all in the service of feeling happy, strong, and energetic (for the long run).
I also recently thought about possibility. The most often neglected of all my values/needs but I feel equally important. I realized recently that possibility is what drives solutions. Boundaries are important, but communicating them, enforcing them, often requires compromise and communication. And what helps with that is the feeling of possibility.
Recently, I was feeling resentful of my parents not wanting me to go to a social gathering with friends. I felt it was violating my boundary around health (mental health), empathy (where they would value my emotions) and honesty (I did not feel like I could be honest about any of this).
However, I didn’t know what to do because I respect their boundaries around health might be a bit different from mine. Being older and frailer, they were more worried about my health and their own. I know that I cannot protect them from getting sick, but I felt increasingly stressed.
The possibility value came into play when I thought about how anything is possible. I started to think about how I could meet my need for emotional health in different ways, for example, talking more to my friends and meeting more of them (in a more one on one setting) that would potentially reduce and control the risk to my parents. At the same time I still see possibilities in meeting up with my friends working out as possibility is always there.
For the longest time, I’ve thought that my job was pretty much perfect. It wasn’t the highest paying job, or the one that I loved the most, but I think it has many many good elements such as:
Good enough pay to never have to worry about money
Good work/life balance, lots of work sometimes, little work others
Lots of traveling
Get to practice speaking and work on fun projects
Obviously, I could find a job even better in every area, but this is quite good already.
I realized recently why I still feel tired and think that it is too much work so often. THE WORK LIFE BALANCE IS HORRIBLE.
Ok, I understand I just contradicted myself there, but the reason why I think the work life balance is good is because on paper, there are lots of downtime where I can do whatever I want. However, because of the amount of emotional pressure that I put on myself, I’m actually always thinking about work which means that there is actually no worklife balance at all.
I worry if I kick back and ignore work for a while:
I will not be able to focus when I really need to so I need to get all the work done that I can
I will not be able to have enough time to get my work done when I really need to so I need to be working all the time
Someone will ask me what I’ve been working on and I will be outed as someone who is not contributing anything
Some of the anxieties I have around actually working:
I worry I will create ugly applications and I will come off as bad and incompetent
I worry I will not build enough for my application and I will come off as lazy or incompetent
I worry that when I go into meetings I will look unprepared and stupid
If I am able to deal with the emotional burden of this job and turn work into something soothing and relaxing for me, I will actually be so happy in this job. This will be the easiest money I will ever make and it will free me up to make money in other ways as well.
I’m going to do this in a couple of ways:
Practice acceptance of where I am. Give myself permission to be bad
Reprogram the idea that I will be rejected if I am not perfect
Look for ways to make my job extremely easy
Find ways to meet my needs through my jobs
So Step 1:
I am lazy, incompetent, unproductive and stupid. I accept myself for it. I give myself permission to be this way as much as I want to be.
Step 2:
The Bossy Man
In the meeting
Which I spent
Almost no time preparing for
He asked me to show
Something
I didn’t want to show
I said no
The meeting
Was under my
Control
The Finicky Architect
I created something
That I didn’t think
Was good enough
To stop him from asking question
Yet I showed up not to impress
But to help
And we were both happy
By the end
Step 3:
Where are the hardest parts of my job?
1 – Learning about new technology
Takes a long time
Hard to know what to focus on
Hard to remember
Ideas on how to make it easier:
Create materials for myself to make my life easier (cheat sheets, presentations)
Look for a way to make my life easier
Timebox an attempt to learn quickly
Focus on one area that has impact
2 – Building mockups
Takes time to understand the customer’s process
Hard to formulate what I need
Hard to understand how to design it
Hard to work out the technical parts of building out a process
Ideas on how to make it easier:
Clearly articulate what I need
The interfaces
What the style is
The processes
The data structures
The priority
Get help on the UI
Get help on the build itself
3 – Presenting the product
Never know what they will ask me to explain or click on
Hard to boil down the flow to a few steps
People may want to test you on areas that they don’t understand or may be hard to show
Ideas on how to make it easier:
Get the clarity I need:
Why they are asking the question?
What are they testing me on? What is the thing I need to prove?
What do they already know or understand?
Pause
Think about my gameplan
Use metaphors to bridge understanding gaps
Walk through what I’m about to do in my head before I do it on the screen
Step 4:
The most annoying things at work and how I will meet my needs through it:
Building mockups
Contribution: Who am I helping with this?
Growth: What will I do better with this demo?
Significance: What special signature will be mine?
Uncertainty: What is it that interests me the most about this demo?
Certainty: What do I want to copy? Who can make my life easier? How long do I need realistically?
Filing expense reports, doing training and filing quarterly reviews
Love and Connection: Who can I have a working/hangout session with?
Uncertainty: What time challenge should I give myself?
Boring meetings/trainings
Certainty: Why am I joining? What questions do I need to ask? If none, make a note of what I need from the meeting and watch the recording.
Love and Connection: Reach out to the presenter and tell them what you liked
Giving demos and presentations
Contribution: How can I be the most helpful?
Significance: Why am I showing this?
Uncertainty: Don’t prepare
Certainty: What am I afraid of?
Ok, that’s it for now. I will say that writing this blog post has been tremendously helpful. I will be referencing this over and over again it is just so useful. Hopefully after using it many many times, it will be ingrained within me and I won’t need to look at it anymore.
I’ve been struggling with an idea recently, the question of how and when to charge for coaching services and when to propose coaching to someone.
The way most coaches approach this is by simply thinking about every hour they spend with someone as a billable hour. They do a “free” intro or demo sessions. I find this approach problematic for numerous reasons:
I love solving problems and delivering value. The reason why I think coaching is the right career is that I would do this stuff even if it was for free.
I hate thinking of every hour of my time as billable. Does every conversation that I don’t get paid for mean that I’m bleeding money everywhere?
I don’t know how to propose coaching, what will the difference be from talking to them? Won’t they feel like I’m charging money for something that should be free?
I don’t see why I shouldn’t prioritize my friends and help people for free? Why should I prioritize only people who pay me money?
I thought about it a lot and I realized that when I want to pay for a coach is because I want to be able to take it seriously. I don’t want a friend, I want someone who can help take me to the next level (emotionally, career and success-wise).
I realized that I can help as many people as I want to for free. I can prioritize friends and spend time with them without thinking of billable hours. But coaching is different. It isn’t just about brainstorming solutions to problems or being an empathetic ear. It’s about taking professional responsibility for someone’s success. The difference between a friend who hired you as a coach from an ordinary friend is that by hiring you they are asking you to meddle with their life!
There are three questions I can ask to see if they would be a good client:
Should they invest in themselves?
Are they doing something that requires coaching?
Do I feel confident that I will be the best coach for the job?
If the answer to all three is yes, I will push to sell them on coaching. If they are friends, I can tell them I will help them and give them advice for the rest of their life for free, but it wouldn’t be coaching until they invested in it.
The price of coaching is a mix of what would be an investment for the client, what would make ME invest, and what value I would be delivering.
In terms of differences in details:
Much more structure (cadence for meetings, methods, note-taking etc.)
Different mindset (clients’ goals are my goals, not my friend’s goals)