The Charged Life

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SUMMARY:

How do you balance taking care of yourself and others without sacrificing your dreams or suffering burning out? Here are four strategies:

1. Focus on your circle of influence:

With all the texts, emails and requests you get every day, it can feel like you have to reply to everybody. But you don’t. Instead, be incredibly clear about who are the people in your life you most deeply care for and those who need your greatest amount of quality time, service or leadership. These are the priorities in your circle of influence and you should give those people the most focused attention. Learn to say no to anyone not inside your circle, at least at first until you know you won’t overcommit yourself at the cost of your circle and yourself. Don’t let random people or their false emergencies knock you off path from serving those you’ve already committed to.

2. Stop micromanaging and start empowering:

You don’t have to do everything for others. People don’t need to be micromanaged. When you switch your mindset from needing to take care of everybody and every little thing for them, to empowering others to take care of themselves, you get massive amounts of time back and a renewed sense of control and aliveness in your own life. If you choose to help people, as quickly as possible set them up to win without you. That must be your strategy from the outset.

3. Automate more:

Outsource or automate things that don’t matter, bring you joy, need your unique focus and attention. The tiny things you *think* you have to do can usually be automated or handled by others or modern tools, apps and systems. Once you set up the little things to run automatically, you save time and can return to what matters most.

4. Give people quality time: 

What people want from us isn’t all our time; they want the time they have with us to matter. They want their interactions with us to be authentic, energized, heartfelt. When you’re with people, make sure you give them quality time. Giving someone just twenty minutes of full attention and energy is worth four hours of half-hearted attention. Make the time you have with others count.

When you put these strategies into place, you create a deeper connection with those who matter most (including you) and you start to experience what we call The Charged Life!

Get the mp3/podcast of this episode free on iTunes.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Hey everyone, it’s Brendon and in this episode we’re going to take on one of the most common questions I get asked all the time which is, “How do you manage it all and take care of yourself while taking care of other people?”

Because I’m sure you’ve got family or team or other people that you care for and love, and you want to

• support them and
  
• champion them,
  
• empower them,
  
• take care of them,
  
• be a good mom,
  
• a good dad,
  
• a good leader
  

but also take care of yourself so you don’t burn yourself out trying to help everybody and sometimes sacrifice your dreams at the cost of supporting everybody else around you.

How do you make that balance between taking care of yourself and others?

Well that’s such a great question.

It comes from the spirit and the heart of just saying, “I really love other people and I also love my own life and how do I just deal with that?”

Sometimes, you hear a lot of frustration or stress with that and I hope that this episode just helps a little bit, break that down.

1. I think the first thing we all have to get used to in this modern era is the reality that we don’t have to take care of everybody.

Today, with everyone

• Pushing in your inbox,
  
• Pushing on your text,
  
• Pushing in your voice message,
  
• Pushing into you 24/7 all day long.
  

With requests, requests, requests, emails, emails, emails, we feel like we have to get to everybody and we apply to everybody and the reality is we don’t.

You need to identify the circle of people who you deeply need to care for, support, mentor, champion on and realize that everything else that hit you from other areas:

• Those are people who are doing marketing.
  
• Those are people who are not in your true circle of influence.
  
• Those are people who just want, want, want, want.
  

And it is not your job to reply to everybody in the world.

And sometimes, you are spending so much time replying and serving and helping the people who, it’s not that they don’t matter but they are not your key priorities. They are not the people who deserve your most focused attention.

And just by, stop feeling like you need to solve everybody’s problem and fight fires for everybody over here. By learning to say “No” or frankly learning to ignore those who are outside your circle of influence, it gives you more time for yourself and for others who do matter, who are the highest level of priority.

I really believe that most people, they’re not lacking time to serve themselves and take care of other people at the same time. They’re giving away all their time doing things that are frankly distractions and not that important.

The average American today as an example, watches 4 hours of television per day.  It’s like okay and maybe your drug isn’t television. Maybe you’re clicking or feeling distracted or directionless throughout the day.

Well that time could be applied to taking care of yourself and other people. And I think we all need to get a better accounting of where we’re really spending our time because if we could get just a little bit more of that pie of time back, we could dole it out in more fulfilling ways.

2. I think the other thing that we have to learn to realize is that—other people in our lives don’t need us to support and take care of them the way we feel like they do.

We feel like often because we’re caretakers, we’re leaders, we’re managers, we love those. We feel like we have to do everything for them.

Our mindset needs to switch from, “I need to take care of everybody” to “I need to equip and empower everybody to take care of themselves.”

You don’t have to cook the kids lunch every day. They can be taught to get their own lunch. I’m not talking about handing them a gun and making them go shoot their own cows. I’m taking about like, look a kid can be taught to make a sandwich.

Empower them to handle their own stuff. And I don’t mean just your children. I mean your team. Your team doesn’t need to be micromanaged. Let them run with the ball.

Learn to equip and empower people versus take care of them and all of a sudden you’re getting hours and hours and hours,

• Time back for you to follow your own dreams.
  
• Time back for you to sleep.
  
• Time back for you to take a bigger picture of the world.
  

For you find your own sense of creativity and contribution again versus micro managing every little element of your day.

Stop micro managing; start empowering. And you’ll see a sudden huge shift in everything in your life.

3. I think another thing is we have to learn the difference between doing the small things that matter and outsourcing the things that don’t.

We all think we have to remember, “Oh gosh I got 50 birthday cards to write this month.” You know that? There are services that do that. That once a year you can, just one time ever you can go in and type everyone’s birthday and it will remember to send a card out to them and you never have to touch and deal with it again. Awesome! Do that.

Except may be the hand-written notes you want to write to people you really, really, really care for. Guess what? You can do that in advance too. All of these things that we think are just sucking at our time; these little tiny things that we feel like we have to do. Usually, we can automate those.

How can you automate the correspondence or the things that you feel like must be accomplished?

Automate it and step out of the way so you don’t have to do it again.

Sometimes that takes advanced planning, using the apps and the tools that are available to us today. But once you set it up, you can forget it and you can return to time that matters.

4. Which really leads me in my last point here—people think that they have to take care of everybody and they have to be there all the time. And I think the reality is what people want from us isn’t necessarily our full time. What they really want is to make sure that that time they have with us matters.

• That it’s felt.
  
• That it’s real.
  
• That it’s authentic and
  
• Spontaneous and
  
• Alive.
  
• That you are there.
  

When you are there with people make that quality time. It’s not about quantity, giving every hour of your day to everybody. It’s about when you do give that time—be present, be fully aware and alive, vital, attentive, conscious in those moments and give people what they really want.

• Your joy
  
• Your positivity
  
• Your champing
  
• Your support
  
• Your cheerleading
  

Give people a positive experience emotively and energetically in the little amount of time you have with them. And look, they’ll take twenty minutes of you being in an incredible space, fully attentive versus you an hour at lunch sort of chatting with them and checking your phone the whole time.

When you realize when you do have that time with people to make it vital, to make it really count as if this was your last time with them. If you really gave them full energy, full awareness, full conscious—you vitally there in the moment with them. If you can learn to teach yourself to do that when you are with them; it’s okay, they don’t use much time and then you get more time back with yourself.

Then in your time with yourself if you learn to avoid the distractions and the belief that you got to serve everybody.

Learn to focus on, “What is it I really want right now” versus kind of bumbling through, trying everything, accepting everything, doing everything.

• What do I want really?
  
• What do I want to experience?
  

If you’re more clear about what you really want to experience. About what you want then taking care of yourself becomes optimized.

You don’t have to sit there and wonder all day, “Well I guess I’m not sure what to do with myself”. It’s like, “No, I’m clear about what I want in my free time.”

• And now in my free time, I know I need rest.
  
• In my free time, I know I love to read a book and get creative.
  
• In my free time, I love to journal or browse music.
  

And you find what to do in your free time and you do it well. Then you feel effective in your own life.

And now with all these other things you feel effective in managing, equipping and empowering, serving, being present with other people.

Suddenly, you start to feel like a renewed sense like you are handling it all: Because you got rid of the distractions. Because you focused on those who did matter. Because you gave those who did matter what they really wanted: You fully present.

Because in your off time you realized what was necessary for you to recharge and take care of yourself. You had clarity on that and you executed. You did it. You start to feel this new energy about life. You start to experience what we call, The Charged Life.

Like this? Please share it with your friends so that your loved ones can balance taking care of themselves and others without sacrificing their dreams or burning themselves out starting now. - Brendon