In this fifth part of the six-episode special series, Jeffrey Saad and his business coach and mentor Steve Shull continue to sit down as guests. Chatting once more with host Madison Fitzpatrick, they discuss the ever-powerful practice of starting your day right to avoid getting bogged down by mental clutter and unnecessary long to-do lists. They share valuable tips on clearing your head, avoiding the pressure of catching up, and learning to live in the moment. Jeffrey and Steve also emphasize the importance of showing up as your best self at all times, staying still in a fast-paced world, and mustering the courage to embrace all kinds of risks in life.
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Conversations With My Coach (Part 5 of 6)
Starting Your Day Right
We’ve got Steve Shull. We’ve got Jeffrey Saad, and we are going to try to pick it up somewhere around where we left off last time. We talked about a lot of different things, but towards the end of our last episode, we were getting into the practice, the actions you do to cultivate a mindset of harmony, a mindset of accepting what’s happening in front of you and bringing your best to the moment. Steve, you called your practice loosey goosey. Let’s say fluid. Jeffrey, you have a little bit more structure and I’m very curious to know what that structure looks like. I love your analogy with learning a language because I know you study French. Tell us about your mindset practice.
Just to give my awesome coach and friends, Steve, he lives in the routine all day long. That’s the thing. It’s like he’s saturating himself with it all day. For the rest of us, you have to make a conscious choice to start your day the right way. I always say a great burger is ruined by a bad bun. The 5:00 to 9:00 in the morning, and the 5:00 to 9:00 at night matter. It’s how you’re bookending because if you don’t start your day well, it’s not as likely to go well. If you don’t end your day well, it’s the same thing. To me, those two segments are even more important than the part in the middle. The part of middle will take care of itself if you get the beginning and the end right. A great book, maybe. I don’t know.
This is wild. I’m still processing this bun analogy. This is brand new to me.
Have you ever had that perfectly juicy burger? The cheese is dripping down the side, the pickles are sharp and perfect, but then you get this thick, dry bun and you’re like, “You just stole the flavor? You just ruined everything that went into the middle.” That’s why Shake Shack is just so good. The bun just stays out of the way. It’s just enough to hold the goodies and get it to your mouth.
I love this because if you ask somebody what’s the most important part of a hamburger, no one is ever going to say the bun.
Yeah, you’re exactly right.
Why Are You Catching Up
Let me jump in for a second. I don’t understand. What does that mean, catch up? What are you catching up to?
That’s a great question, Steve.
This is probably true for a lot of people, so I’m going to put myself out.
It is true.
I set deadlines for myself. I say, “I’m working on this manuscript. I want to have it finished by X date, and therefore, I need to do this chapter this day and that chapter the next day.” It’s all planned out. One day, stuff happens and I don’t do the chapter I was supposed to do that day. Now, in my mind, I’m behind. “I’ve got to catch up.”
Catch up to what?
To meet that date that I set for myself.
This is how everyone screws themself up. Now I’ve got to do twice as much work. All right.
The good news is it’ll be half as good.
I don’t have time for your little espresso in the morning. I don’t have time for your little journal.
That’s an honest assessment.
I don’t have time to do one hour of writing today, however, tomorrow I’m going to do what? Two hours.
You bet your bottom dollar, yeah.
Tomorrow comes, two hours, I’m not doing anything. We get to the end of the week and how much writing have we done? Nothing. The way I look at it, if I miss, I miss. It’s gone. There’s nothing to catch up to. I just have to go back to my schedule and where I’m supposed to be that day. I haven’t had a to-do list, literally, and it’s probably twenty years now. Everyone’s had this experience.
You’re not dead. You are, in fact, alive.
He looks pretty happy and he’s doing really well.
I was the guy with the briefcase. We used to have briefcases. You’d packed the briefcase up.
Was this thing made of leather or cheaper material? If you weren’t on Wall Street, it was cheaper material. You put stuff in it, and you took it where you were going.
You put all your work in your briefcase because when you go home, you’re going to do all your work. When you bring your work home, you don’t do anything. You take it back to work and you add more stuff to it. You take that home. You don’t do anything. You go back to work and then you put more, and all you’re doing is just dragging this stuff back and forth. Every single thing on your to-do list is calling your name every day. “What about me? What about me?”
It’s so much mental noise.
It’s a drain on your energy. The reason why you’re not doing anything is you’re so bogged down worrying about how much stuff you have to do. I studied this guy. He’s still alive, great guy, David Allen, Getting Things Done. I got into his methodology a long time ago and did work with David. We actually go out with David on these appointments and it’d be amazing.
What you do is you go through everyone’s stuff and the first step is you have to accumulate all the stuff and get it in piles because you’re going to go through everything. When you start going through your stuff and you get it in piles, you can just feel the heaviness. You can feel the energy going out of the room. The next day, you come back and you start going through each single piece of paper and you either dump it or do it or delegate it.
I love that he said, do it, delete it, delegate it, or the greatest thing he ever did for me, put it in a someday folder.
Which is actually trash.
It feels great that it’s out of your inbox.
This is so funny. It’s Marie Kondo for your to-do list.
Exactly, and the next day, as we’re going through all this, you can feel the energy come back into the room. We’re weighing ourselves down with all this nonsense. That’s why I just went to time blocking. If it’s in my calendar, I do it, end of story. I get to wake up every day feeling totally free. People look at my calendar, which is nonstop half-hour appointments. They look at it and they go, “I would never want to do that.” To me, it is total freedom because I never have to worry about what I’m going to do on any given day.
Just the next half hour.
I do all my work in the gaps that show up during the day. A minute here, 5 minutes here, someone cancels an appointment, 30 minutes. I just get all my work done in those gaps. I’ve learned that you can get things done in 30 seconds.
Dealing With Mental Clutter
You’ll get it done well because you have 30 seconds. One quick thing that I love about the David Allen analogy is that people get the idea that you need to have a clean desk, even though many don’t. When you have a clean desk, you have a clean head. I think people need to think about their head like their desk. What is all that stuff that’s stacked up and laying around that you’re not going to touch anyway? Clear it away because then, you’re left with what matters.
When you have a clean desk, you have a clean head. Share on XI think there’s a lot of mental clutter. One of the things that I think compounds that mental clutter is the digitization of all our stuff because you don’t have piles of paper anymore, at least, a lot of people don’t. They have overflowing inboxes. They have Asana or Monday.com or whatever. Your project management tool is with like a gajillion undone tasks. The crazy thing about that is that because you can’t see it, it’s almost scarier. It’s invisible and it’s like a shadow behind you that you can’t quite see, but it’s there.
I have friends that have 23,000 emails in their inbox or something. I don’t have any on my spam. I have 7 or 8 in my inbox at all times. It’s just like storage. The storage industry is genius. I’m willing to put money on it, that 70% of storage never gets touched. Throw it away, donate it. People have this thing where like, “I just got to have it in case of.”
My wife gets scared. If we haven’t touched or used it in three months, I get rid of it. She’s like, “Where is it?” I’m like, “It’s gone.” I would rather buy it back than have it bog me down. Guess what? We never buy it back. Maybe the occasional cable adapter, “Where’d that go?” “I threw it away with the box,” but it is rare, and I think that’s what people have to remember. The value of buying it back once or missing it once is so much more powerful than thinking you need to keep all this stuff.
That’s why I turned off all my notifications. I’m done. No more dinging. I don’t read my emails anymore. Someone else is reading them. Text me, good luck with that one.
Whenever I go to text you, it’s like he has this notification silenced. I’m like, “He’s never going to see this.”
When I first turned them off, it was a little weird at first and now it’s like I’m free.
I’ve never had them. I don’t know how people can live that way. That is, to me, is the epitome of the issue. You are being controlled by everybody and everything else. I love the fact that it’s like a proven fact that the brain cannot multitask. When people think they’re multitasking, all they’re doing is doing everything a little bit poorly. It doesn’t work. It’s just about being present. It’s cliché because it works and it’s real, like being present and what you’re doing at the moment. I never get bogged down. I only think about what do I need to do now? What is this step? Not the twenty books you have to write, but just the next chapter. The next word, even.
When people think they are multitasking, they are actually doing everything a little bit poorly. Share on XBeing Present And Staying Still
You get to experience this, as many of you probably don’t know. Would you say you race motorcycles or ride? What do you call it?
I don’t race in the sense of like you’re going to be first, second or third, but you go to the track. As they said, when was the first race? The day the second motorcycle was made. It’s like, you just want to go.
You’re going how fast?
In corners, we could be going as high as 80 miles an hour, dragging your knee on the ground. On the straightaways, 145. It just depends.
The idea that you’re going to drag your knee, that forces you, I would think, you’ve got to be present. You can’t be thinking about your to-do list when you’re leaning into that corner.
One of my favorite things about being on a motorcycle, and I think people have made analogies to it with other things too, is exactly that. You are forced. The only thing that matters is the six feet in front of you. Actually, ironically, you’re looking through the turn before you even get to the turn, but yeah, everything has to be locked in. That’s why it’s so exhilarating because you are fully in the moment, all senses, everything firing to just make that corner.
It took me a long time to figure out what I was supposed to be doing. You were clear when you were young. You loved food. You wanted to be a chef and you were into sports immediately. I was so unclear because there were so many things that I was pretty good at. There wasn’t the one thing. I’m finally in a place in my life where I’m really clear about writing. There are days when I have that thought, like, “I have to get up and write this chapter,” and it doesn’t feel good. Do you know why? It’s not because I don’t want to write. It’s because of the mountain I’ve created in my head.
Bravo, that’s what Steve was talking about earlier. Compound effect.
I’ve taken the joy out of the thing that I actually like doing because I’m freaking myself out about being behind.
You bring up a really good point. It’s first saying, “What do I want to do when I wake up?” The second thing is not sabotaging that joy by the way you’re thinking about it.
Talk about a practice. You have to learn how to get quiet. You have to learn how to get still. You have to learn how to just let go of everything. What do I mean by that? All our thoughts, all our feelings are just thoughts. That’s all they are. We have 50,000, 60,000, whatever the number is, thoughts every day. We let go of most of them. They come and they go. We don’t have the ability to control our thoughts. We have the ability to let go of all our thoughts. Same thing with feelings. They’re just feelings. The challenge we have is we think we are our thoughts. We think we are our feelings.
The sad part is, and no one talks about this, most of us are going to go through our entire life and never know who we really are. We think we’re our body. We think we’re our thoughts. We think we’re our feelings. We think we’re our accomplishments, our failures. We’re none of that. We’re just simply consciousness. We’re just simply energy. We don’t need anything. We need the awareness of everything that’s going on. All we’re trying to talk about is how to become more self-aware, not self-absorbed. That’s not what we’re promoting. Just self-aware. You’ve heard this a million times. We all just get in our own way. That’s all we do.
This idea of getting quiet is so interesting. It’s making me think of something I’ve heard my husband say many times to various different people who have been in a stuck place in their life. “I don’t know what to do next. I don’t feel like I’m doing the right thing. How do I figure out what I’m supposed to be doing?” His advice is always like, “Go sit down. Don’t do anything and see what happens.” See what comes to you because when was the last time you actually stopped? Everybody’s always responding to messages, looking at social media.
We wear it as a badge of honor. The busier you are, you’re amazing.
Even when you’re not busy with work, you’re doing something. You’re consuming something. You’re trying to fill your time. What happens when you actually say, “I’m not going to fill my time. I’m just going to let my brain do its thing here alone in the dark. Where is it going to take me?” I think a lot of people are really afraid to find out.
We’re running from it. That’s why my litmus test has always been, I can die tomorrow and my last words will be thank you with a big smile on my face as I fade away. No would’ve, should’ves, could’ves. Just did. I think that if everyone could really be true to themselves and say, “If I die tomorrow, am I good?”
Living Your Best Life
Where have we gone in this conversation? What do you want people to take away from this episode?
What I want everyone to take away from every episode is just one thing. Getting clear about how you want to live your life and then committing to it for the rest of your life. It’s not about the short-term, it’s about the long-term. The first thing we have to get clear about is we’re born and then we die. Three generations from now, no one’s going to remember us. Literally nobody.
What are you doing with right now? Everyone’s so focused on yesterday or tomorrow, and again, nothing new here. It is real. Just like Jeffrey, he was a great coaching client. Everyone needs a coach. He was a great coaching client because he took the coaching rather than questioning it. I share this all the time. My favorite question that I get from clients is, “What else can I do?” That is code for, “I’m not going to do anything you just told me to do.”
“Give me something else. I want it to be difficult.”
This came up in an earlier conversation, and I tell people this all the time. My coaching, there are no new ideas. The last thing you need in life is a new idea. That’s the last thing you need. What do I want people to get out of this? We don’t need a new idea. We need to execute the ideas that we have. It goes back to Bruce Lee. Rather than trying 10,000 things to find out what our life is going to be about, pick one thing and just work on mastering that one thing over and over again. I believe we all know what we want to do with our life. We just have to get quiet enough to listen to the answer because we’re so busy all the time, we’re never discovering. Again, instead we go chase our pleasure or we try and avoid pain. Chase pleasure, avoid pain. That’s not living.
Get clear about how you want to live your life and commit to it for the rest of your life. Share on XI love that you just used the word discovery. I feel like that really captures the intent.
We are on a mission of discovery. The answer is there. It’s there for all of us. Once you tap into it, then you stay committed to it. A guy named Albert Gray wrote this article, I think it was in 1958, called The Common Denominator of Success. He was in the insurance industry. The conclusion that he came to, the common denominator of success is that successful people do the things that failures aren’t willing to do. That’s the common denominator.
I always say, do the thing you want to do least first. Do it long enough and it becomes a thing you want to do most and it’ll change your life. Do it first. What I want people to walk away with is like it’s not about the perfect presentation, the right thing to say. You will get the person of your dreams by showing up as a person they want to be with.
You will get that listing by showing up as somebody who truly is interested in what you want out of this transaction. Not what I want. It is not a coincidence that some people keep vending joy and others keep having problems. If you can show up as your best self, you don’t need a whole lot of technique. You don’t need a whole lot of other stuff. You are just going to create an energy and a vibe that makes people want to be with you and work with you.
It sounds like the first step to showing up as your best self is finding out who your best self even is. That’s where the getting quiet is. Step one.
We are all truly extraordinary. Again, that’s not just a cliché or words. It’s true and it’s up to us. It’s our responsibility as a human being to find out who we are and to find out what we’re capable of. The only way we’re going to do that is put our ass on the line every single day. We will get into it at some point. Life is not without risk. I go back and I think about the things. I jumped off cliffs. You’ve jumped off cliffs. Mental and emotional is where you just go for it. You don’t know.
I would rather splat than wither away on the cliff. That’s the thing. If you’re not willing to splat, you are never going to get anywhere. A life with no risk is not a life worth living. I don’t mean that meanly, but I think whatever version of risk it is, and for some people it’s different than others, that’s the juice.
Everything goes back to what I said earlier. Every day, we’re walking into uncertainty. There’s no way around that. Every day is a risk. What do you want to do with it? As human beings, the goal is to experience all of life. Not just this sliver, “I only want this and I don’t want this.” It’s not an a la carte menu. If we want to have the fullest experience of life, it’s developing the ability to experience all of life and finding the joy that’s in whatever.
Do you know what makes a juicy, medium rare steak so good? It’s the burnt edges. Without that contrast, you don’t appreciate juicy. You’ve got to have some burnt edges.
Something dry and bitter.
The beauty of life is the contrast.
One of my favorite things is I’ll go out into my pool at night and I keep it really warm, like 92, 94 degrees.
I’m with you. Hot water is one of the great pleasures of life.
I’ll just sit there looking at the trees and the potted plants and the flowers and just sit there in that moment and just take like, “Wow, bravo.”
How many people do that? Bravo, Steve. That’s what I always say. Listen for the silence between the noises. You hear the birds chirping and you hear the leaves rustling. What’s in between those two?
You look at it. How could life be any better? I like what he likes to say and he means it and lives it. He thinks he’s the luckiest guy in the world and he lives his life as if he’s the luckiest guy in the world. It doesn’t get any better than that. It has nothing to do with luck, either. I love this idea. I heard Michael Singer say, “Part of it is self-effort and part of it is grace.” The grace of the universe. We’re not in control of the grace part.
Thank you, guys. Great conversation.
Cheers.