#122: The Art Of Staying Grounded with Sam Liebowitz

Welcome to The Conscious Pivot Podcast with international speaker, business mentor, bestselling author of Pivot, and your host, Adam Markel. The Conscious Pivot shares the stories and wisdom of people who have successfully reinvented some area of their business and personal life. You'll gain powerful insights into how you can fully embrace new opportunities, increase your performance, and master the art and science of innovation and resilience. So please join Adam as he guides you on your conscious pivot.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Conscious Pivot Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Markel, and I'm so happy that you're a part of this community. I love to start at this point. If this is your first podcast, well then, then what I'm about to say won't make any sense. But if you are in fact listening or even watching these on a more regular basis, then you know It means a lot to me to begin with context, to start by creating a space really. I was going to set a context is about creating a space for something to happen. And what I love about this podcast is the opportunity to share other people's pivot stories, of course, and my own as they come out and ongoingly, because I think we're all pivoting. I was just sharing with my guest who I'll introduce to you in just a moment, the fact that just a dear buddy of mine, old friend is in the middle of a career pivot and kind of unexpectedly as well. So these are just things that are happening on a regular basis in all of our lives. So we share that in common. I love to begin with gratitude. So I will start by saying how grateful I am to be a part of this community, to be a voice in this community, and of course, to have you all be part of the community as well. I know a number of you individually. I know people that are listening to this and are walking on the beach or hiking in the mountains or sitting perhaps in their car listening to some of these stories of other people and the wisdom of some of our incredible guests. So I want to say thank you for being part of this. Thanks for supporting it. Thank you for supporting me personally in all of this and for supporting yourself. With that gratitude, I want to introduce an amazing man and gentleman I think you're gonna both enjoy and learn a great deal from. I'm looking forward to this conversation as much as you might be. His name is Sam Lebowitz. Hi. And he is known as the Conscious Consultant. So what a perfect guest on the Conscious Pivot Podcast, right? To have the Conscious Consultant join us. That's a good fit. As a mentor, coach, speaker, healer, and serial entrepreneur, he's really impacted many, many people's lives over the last many years. He's been in business for himself since 1993 and has owned several successful businesses, including an IT consulting firm, a video publishing business, and an internet business for aerospace engineers and managers. Talk about— Yeah. A diverse range of experiences. It's gonna be fun to talk about. Probably got more pivot stories than the average Joe or the average Sam. Sam has inspired people to live a life that is happier, healthier, and more fulfilled. That's where I think in many ways our hearts collide. Sam, welcome to the Conscious Pivot Podcast today.

Well, thank you so much, Adam. I really appreciate you having me on your show. I'm kind of not quite used to the tables being turned since I do my own show and I'm used to interviewing other people. I'm still getting used to being interviewed myself.

Thank you for that. It's a different paradigm, right? To be on the other side of sort of the questions. But one thing the community here is pretty used to is that this is a dialogue. This will be a conversation.

So

I don't even have any set questions that I absolutely have to ask you. They'll just be the things that flow back and forth between us. And so I'd love to start by saying, well, first of all, you've been in business a long time. You've had a very diverse experience. I think it's fair to say that. What's something that's not written in that bio and that introduction that you would love for people to know about you?

That's a good question. I would say I'm just like everybody else. I started off with a career in IT working at banks and financial institutions. And I've worked a 9-to-5 for like 9 years. And it took a little while, but eventually I realized, you know what? This is not the life for me. And I don't think that it was necessarily anything special about me. I don't think that I'm such a great entrepreneur per se, but I just kind of followed what felt right to me. And I just kind of paid attention to life. And I just like listened to when opportunities came my way and that's the direction that I moved and that's why I've had such kind of a diverse life. So again, I don't think anything special per se, but I say yes, it's a life a lot.

Yeah. And it's an interesting thing that what you just said because there's a lot of depth that's embedded in that. The idea that you were following something. I don't want to use words for you. So how would you describe what it was you were following when you made these changes to your career path?

Well, I like to joke around and say like the universe is going to have its way with you whether you want it to or not.

I love— no kidding, right? No shit. Yeah, that's true.

And when I look back on my life, there have been some very, very difficult times, some very, very trying times, and some amazing and wonderful times. And I could not in my wildest imagination ever imagined my life as it is today and doing what I'm doing today.

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And so I guess it's kind of like— I don't want to use the term God because it's such a charged term, but I do kind of look at things this way. If we as individual beings have souls or spirits, which more and more evidence is pointing that way, if we have spirits, then why doesn't the planet have a spirit? And why doesn't the solar system and the universe have a spiritual side to it? Or an energetic— let's call it an energetic side to it. So I kind of feel like there's much more than what we perceive with our physical senses. And to me, it just seems natural that there is some kind of a collective consciousness to it.

Interesting. So when you were making these decisions, were you tapping in more intentionally, or— I don't want to use the word consciously— more intentionally attempting to tap into some universal consciousness or to some Wisdom outside of your own physical senses?

Sometimes yes, many times no. I think a lot of the times it just followed what felt right to me. And like when it felt like I got to get out of here, this is not the place for me, I got out of there. And really, I mean, even to what I'm doing today, it literally all grew out of meeting a guy at a party. People ask me all the time, so Sam, how'd you get started with the podcast network and this wellness center you're running? And I'm like, I met a guy at a party. It was literally that simple. And then meeting him, learning that I kind of knew about him, and then meeting and talking and ending up— I thought he was— I don't know if you want me to go into the whole story, but I thought I was just going to help him sell his business. Instead, I ended up buying it and it just kind of flowed naturally. So I would say, yeah, I was tapping into some deeper intelligence, but I wasn't tapping into it necessarily so consciously. I was tapping into it because I was just trusting. And I was just sort of showing up and saying yes because yes felt right.

Yeah. Well, you're being— I won't say humble. I don't know if you're being humble or not. But I will say this. To me, it feels like there's a deeper meaning or deeper understanding that's embedded in the way you just expressed that. So just trusting. I hear the word just trust. I think, hmm, we could teach a very, very high-level college or postgrad program on just trusting. Just spend your whole life Learning how to just trust. That's a spiritual path all by itself, right?

Oh, absolutely. And it ain't easy. It ain't always easy. And the way I frame things today is also formed by my experiences and the work that I've been doing on myself and my studies and practices over the years. So how I describe things today is not necessarily how I would have described things 10 years ago. But as I look back and as I gain a broader and broader perspective of my life, I mean, that's how it just seems right to frame it is I just trusted. Even when I didn't know what I was doing, I just trusted. I just one foot in front of the other, just what's the next step? I wasn't one of those guys who had a 10-year plan. I had to be making X amount of money and I'm going to be doing this kind of business. I had certain dreams and desires. I loved— I was a child of the '70s and Star Trek and Star Wars, and I loved the idea of space exploration. science fiction and stuff, so I always knew that it was a dream of mine to do that. But the truth is, I never thought I would actually be able to bring that into reality because I always thought I would be an astronaut, right? That was the thing you naturally thought of. But I've had glasses since I was in 3rd grade, and then when I was in high school, I learned that, oh, all the astronauts basically come through the Air Force, which I wasn't into going into the military, and they all had to have 20/20 vision back then. So I was like, okay, I guess that's it. There's nothing for me. Although I had the dream, it kind of— I just didn't see there was a possibility for it until years and years and years later, this opportunity to start a business with a friend to do something in the days of Web 1.0 to provide a service within the aerospace industry. I'm like, hey, this is fulfilling my dream, even though I'm not necessarily the one on the spaceship going out into space. I'm still contributing. I can still do something. And even that kind of came about... I mean, I don't want to say it was unintentionally because there was intention behind it, but again, it wasn't something I thought I would ever be able to do 10 years before.

So is there a common denominator or a thread that you can sort of create between all these different diverse experiences of having been in more of a formal business, in a job working for someone else, and then ultimately being a consultant and working in the aerospace industry and owning your own business? And is there a thread that you see between those decisions along the way other than what you've said? Because you've said, you said yes. And I think that's a powerful— it's a very powerful word. We all know that. And how often it is that people are saying no to things because the timing isn't right or they feel like maybe there is not a future in it, that somehow there's too much uncertainty or they don't see a way to earn money doing it or any of the other number of things that stop people from saying yes to something that might feel good or they might be intrigued by or interested in or even passionate about.

Yeah. Well, I mean, the first thing is I never did anything I didn't like. Like, even as a job, my initial jobs was working with technology. And, you know, I like technology. I like computers in the early days. You know, again, I always had that kind of love of future stuff, of science fiction, of what's the future going to be like. And technology was developing rapidly. So I always did things that I liked. First, I thought I would be a programmer. But the truth is I like working with people too much. So I was doing things like technical trainings or quality assurance and interfacing between the programmers and the users. So, I was still working with people, but like every job I had, the work I was doing, either the work I was doing I liked or the environment I was in I liked. If neither of those were true, I was out of there. And I get bored easy. So, like, I pretty much early on changed jobs about every 3 years or so, except for one time. I was working at one bank and I was only there a year, I think 13 months. And it was the shortest time I'd ever been at anything. For before or after. It was because I came in one way, working for one person, doing one thing, and it was okay. Then I got reorged under somebody else who I did not trust, did not feel safe or supported by. Everything kind of shifted around me and I was like, this does not feel good. I'm not in a good environment. I am out of here. I started looking for another job, I think, 9 months later, and 13 months I was out of there. Because it just didn't feel right to me. And I guess because, to be unhumble for a minute, I'm a competent person. I can learn things. I can do things. I can pick things up. And I have a lot of interests. So, it was never really that difficult for me to find something to do that I liked because I do have a wide variety of interests. But the kind of thread that I see developing over my life was first with technology, then interfacing with people, kind of managing technology, working with people. And then it was, I became a computer consultant. It just kind of made sense. And it was really, it was an opportunity that I had with someone that I knew from— I was a member of a local chapter of the National Space Society, which was a grassroots volunteer organization that was very pro-space. So, at the time, I was working at a nonprofit as a systems manager, and I just kind of felt like I wanted to go out and be a consultant, but I knew nothing about it. And I was talking to somebody in the organization. They say, hey, well, you know the guy, John, who does our newsletter? He's a computer consultant. Why don't you talk to him? So, I talked to him. He said, yeah, come into the office. We'll do it. And I went in and he said, look, I don't have enough work for you to do full-time. If you want to work part-time, come work part-time. And when a big enough project comes along, you can switch to full-time. And I'm like, okay, great. You know how long it took for a big enough project to come along? It took like over a year. Over a year, I was working with him 1 or 2 evenings during the week, maybe a day on the weekend for 1 year, still working a full-time job and coming to work with him. Until something came along big enough that I could say, this is enough money. I can do this. I can quit my job. After that, we were together and then we did my first company together with him and we went through a couple of phases. But he said to me years later, he goes, you know, I had so many people come to me saying they wanted to learn to be a consultant and work with me, and they would show up for like a month and then they would disappear and I'd never hear from them. He said, you were the only one who stuck around really long enough to turn it into a reality.

That's such a powerful point, Sam, because, well, this is going to sound funny now that I'm putting in this framework, but it's the process that the book Pivot's really written around. The foundational process is one where you create a plan B or create a second bridge before dismantling the first one. Mm-hmm. So it's the opposite of what is sometimes taught that if you're not passionate about what you're doing or if you want to do something differently, get into some new area that you've got to sort of jump ship and quit what you're doing now.

But that's a very ungrounded approach. You got to pay the bills, right? You got to be in the position where you know you can support yourself because the other thing too is you start something new, you don't know how it's going to go. You may need enough reserves to last you 6 months, a year to be able to do it. And that was one of the early lessons I learned as a consultant is you save money when times are good because times aren't always going to be good. You go through cycles. So, when you're going through cycles, you don't want to live high on the hog just because things are going well because there are times when things are not going to be going well. So, you want to be sort of balanced and live appropriately as you build. Then as you build up, the lows are not as low and the highs get higher. You see, you observe. But I believe in taking a very grounded approach to things because sometimes I see people and they're too ungrounded. And so, when you're not that grounded, yeah, you can jump ship and you may jump real high, but then you fall real far and flat on your face.

Which is what keeps people from doing it at all. I mean, when the jump ship approach is the best one out there. Yeah. I mean, I think if you've got very few responsibilities in life and it's early on and you don't like what you're doing, you should pretty well stop that. Stop it almost immediately if it's not something that you think longer term you can gain skills, gain knowledge, gain experience. I mean, there's a lot of reasons to do things outside of paycheck and even outside of personal enjoyment in the moment. Maybe a challenge that's sort of embedded in— I don't know that it's a part of the millennial makeup because we have millennial-aged kids and I haven't seen that be a part of that. But I think it's how older generations call it, whether it's baby boomers or Gen X or something, are looking at millennials as not wanting to do anything for any length of time that they don't like. Now, I think that's just too extreme. I think more true to the point is that millennials don't want to do things that doesn't have a purpose. That they're very much grounded and rooted in the why and in having a deeper purpose behind a career or other decisions or trading their time for money or for advancement in some way. So I actually think that's a very ethical approach to how it is that you live and especially how you develop a career. But I also have had the experience that learning something is sometimes not easy. Learning curves take time. Establishing not just the knowledge base, but also it's not always easy to know whether you're going to enjoy something early on. If you ever started to learn to play the piano or play the guitar, which is something that I've dabbled in. I wish I could say it was more than dabbling, but there are things that you want to do in your life. And at the start you do them, they're frustrating, they're not easy. And when you're not good at something, I mean, I'll just speak for myself. When I'm not good at something, it's not a lot of fun. Yeah. I don't enjoy sucking at anything. My company now, we work with public speakers. We work with people that want to do TEDx talks or want to develop a speaker platform or want to just get paid to speak around the world and develop their own ideas and be perceived or really have some A brand that is based in thought leadership, and that's not easy. And at the beginning of anything, just like playing the piano or violin or guitar, you kind of suck at it. So I can see where that story that you shared with us, that gentleman who sounds like he was a bit of a mentor and later a business partner of yours, sort of more than 9 times out of 10, people just won't go that extra mile. Right. They'll quit after a month and aren't willing to dare to suck or can't deal with sucking for some period of time. at something or not getting a result. But longer term, there are sometimes these great fruits that come out of that willingness to stick to something and certainly have the tenacity to do it. And consulting is one of those things. Why would you assume that at the very beginning you'd get a gig that was sufficient? I mean, I suppose providence or luck could deliver.

Right. It can happen, but yeah, not too likely. I think it more has to do with sort of the very short-term nature that we tend to think about here in the West. They tend to think much more long-term. Here, we're thinking about the next quarter. We're thinking about next month. We're not thinking about necessarily 5, 10 years and what's the foundation that we're building. However, I will say that the time for you to go, like if things don't feel right, even if you're not set, when I hear somebody tell me, oh, I got fired from my job, or, I got laid off, I always say, congratulations, because to me, that's the universe telling you, you're not supposed to be there anymore. Go do something else. So I always look at that as—

You've been released. You've been given a reprieve. It doesn't feel like that. I mean, look, I don't know if you've been fired. I've been fired. My wife's been fired. Like I said, a friend of mine just got the boot. I mean, it never feels good for the universe for a door to close when— Wow. The pace of change over the last couple of years has been rapid. And if you're a leader, a business owner, an entrepreneur, you know exactly Exactly what I'm talking about. Every day it's something different and something new, but the one thing that I've learned in performing at the height of all of those roles has been that we must be resilient. In fact, it's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about, and it's the reason why my team and I created the resilience assessment that more than 5,000 business leaders across the globe have taken. And all you have to do to get your own free resilient leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes, and it's our gift to you for being the leader that you already are. Other free resources and tools will accompany your score instantly. So go to resiliencerank.com and find out just how resilient you are. Actually, The writing— Who Moved My Cheese book is just coming to mind, but it's like the writing was on the wall. There were signs long before that maybe the situation was nearing the end of its useful life. Everything has a sort of a time, a season, if you will.

And the other thing too is sometimes you got to be willing to do the things that you don't quite feel like doing just to get you through until that thing that really lights you up comes along, until you really find that thing that's your thing. I mean, look, I've been doing different businesses since 1993. It wasn't until I really kind of came and got this wellness center and doing this podcasting session that I've been doing this now for like over 8 and a half years. That's the longest I've stuck to anything my entire life. So now it's like I finally know, okay, like this is it for me.

Is that because you can't fire yourself?

Yeah, no, the universe fires you. I like to say all my businesses except for one, there's one business that I consider unsuccessful. All my businesses were successful. It does not mean I necessarily made a lot of money, but I had a successful exit from each business. But sometimes, those exits happened not completely of our own accord. So, I like to say sometimes the universe fires us even if it is our own business. But now, I've come to see things. I kind of use a different kind of filter. You know, I've been studying the shamanic work for the last 4 and a half, almost 5 years, and I really look at things through heart, mind, body, and spirit. Like those 4 sort of archetypal element aspects: earth, air, fire, water. The symbolism of that and how that shows up in our lives. So body is earth, which is grounded, which means we need to be grounded in it. Mind, which is fire, you know, in our society we so mind up on a pedestal and we think it's the greatest thing and we do mental gymnastics like crazy. But we forget that like what feels good, it's all about heart and that if the feeling isn't there, then we're not really going to do our best work. That's our spirit that really inspires us. That's the air in it. And so over the last 4 years, I've been able to kind of use this framework to look at life and what I've done and what I'm doing and what people are doing and be able to look at things and say, maybe someone's stuck because there's too much body or too much earth there. Or maybe somebody is too ungrounded because they're all in mind or spirit. And so there's no grounding. Or maybe they're not really building community. So there's a problem in heart and really need to connect with people more. And so, by looking at sort of these different ways, I can look at life and sort of what's brought me along and I can see like at different aspects of life, those different aspects were being developed and maybe I was working on one or the other at a particular time and now I'm able to look at it and say, okay, let's do this more holistically. Let's recognize all of these different facets and work on them together. And so, that's why it's like, yeah, it's great to be inspired and be passionate and have this amazing dream. But we still need to be grounded when we pursue it.

Yeah, this is wonderful. I'm nodding inside and even outside because the body of work that we've spent the last year and a half on has been in, in the area of developing resilience. So we work in the corporate space. We do some coaching of some folks that are in the upper levels of management as well as do keynote talks to groups of people who are exhausted. I mean, there is almost nobody today that will not sort of nod in affirmation that we're constantly doing more with less. We're constantly being We're being asked to do more with less. So people are just exhausted. They're busy, they're exhausted, etc. And to me, I don't know that we can do anything about the outer piece of that, meaning the world is fast and it's getting faster. The disruption, the pace, the change, as we talked about earlier, isn't going to change. I mean, I love what Ram Dass says, that we've got to make friends with change. I think we've got to make best friends with change for sure. Yes. But then there's also this other piece of it, which is what you're talking about. The holistic approach to how it is that we are able to thrive in an environment that is the way we're feeling it. How do you do that? Well, to me, the answer— and I'm not saying it's the answer, but it's the answer that we've been researching and speaking about— and that's resilience. It's developing resilience, and that's holistic mental, emotional, spiritual, physical resilience. And it's not just the physical piece of it. Yes, endurance, being able to go the distance, go long hours. Be the night owl and all that. That makes sense, but we also know, I know from my lawyer days that being a workaholic is not the answer. 18-hour days is not the answer. So if you're not taking care of your spirit, if you're not taking care of your heart, if you're not doing something to establish really strong rituals for recovery, there's a good chance you're going to end up on the burnout heap. And that heap is a big pile.

Absolutely. And I actually want to say something a little controversial right here. And I'm going to say that this whole idea of productivity, it's good for society. It's not good for the individual. And I think we're way, way, way too focused on being more productive, more productive, more productive. And we're so focused on an unbalanced way that it actually decreases productivity. And that actually sometimes going slow is going fast.

Yes.

Because our body, our nervous system, You go fast, you get trauma like that. But when you go slow, when you ease into things, it's so much better. And this was actually pointed out to me in a very strong way when I read the book. I don't know if you've ever read it. I highly recommend it, The Diamond Cutter by Geshe Michael Roach. Yes. In it, he talks about these Buddhist principles that he integrated into this business that ended up being like this quarter of a billion-dollar business that Buffett bought. And one of the principles he talked about was taking a day off in the middle of the week. And it would be a day off where you don't answer your phone, you don't do anything work-related, just to go off and take a walk in the woods and play and meditate and do whatever to get fresh so that when you come back on Thursday morning, you're fresh, you can see things from a different perspective, and you can actually be much more creative and much more productive by taking that day off, which means working 4 days a week instead of 5 days a week. And it just, it really stuck with me ever since I read that in the book. That we're so focused on the go, go, go, do, do, do. We don't understand that that burnout is— you cannot avoid the burnout when you're like that. And yeah, there may be specific times when it's necessary. You have a deadline you have to meet. You're rushing to get something out the door. But it's the environment. We need to change the environment around this increased productivity being the god of everything and really look at, well, what's truly sustainable? And what's really going to support— how are we going to live in an environment that's going to help us to be the most creative, the most productive, not in the short term but in the long term?

What a wonderful point, Sam. I mean, productivity in many ways is a euphemism for we drive our people hard or we drive ourselves hard. That's it. I mean, how long can you drive anything hard, your car, anything, before it breaks down? And so we are seeing a lot of breakdown in our society in many ways. On all levels, we're seeing that breakdown.

I mean, look, I get it. If you're the CEO of a huge company, everything is the bottom line and profits, then yeah, you need to get the most out of every single employee. However—

Here's the thing. This, I think, is what's controversial. At least we feel like there's a space for us to communicate something and deliver a message that's helpful in that space. And that is that it's not the most productive to drive that way. The research is actually counter to that. In fact, the cost of exhaustion, a thing we've been looking at lately, is in the $60 billion a year range just in terms of health and safety costs to companies, to those companies you're describing, the most successful companies and mid-sized ones as well, costing them so much money because people are just not at their best. Not physically at their best, not mentally at their best, not in other ways as well. And there's a great Harvard Business Review article some years ago that was written about the corporate athlete and comparing actual athletes, professionals as well as Olympians, to us, the business athletes, the enterprise athletes, and found that there was something really strikingly similar about those 2 groups, meaning the people who succeeded in each of those categories were the ones that had rituals for recovery. They were able to bounce back because they were resilient. They were able to bounce back because they took care of themselves. So just like you said, it was this idea that you've got to— and they didn't use this terminology, but I want to riff on what you said— you've got to slow down. Sometimes you've got to slow down to speed up. Similar to how when you were a kid and used to use a rubber band and you pull a rubber band back and then point it at something, at a person usually. We were foolish to do this, but

you aim it.

Exactly. And the reason you could aim it was because you pulled it back slowly. And then took aim and then let it go. And it's that pulling it back slowly that enabled it to speed up, have momentum, and hit something. And I think it's very much the case for us. We've got to be able to slow down. And so maybe there's something between the famous 4-hour workweek, which I still don't know anybody that's developed a 4-hour workweek, no offense to Ferriss, right? Right. But there's something between the 4-hour workweek and what we're doing now, which is sort of a boundaryless workweek. There is no weekend. The week doesn't end and people are checking their emails and are engaged in work even on Saturday and Sunday. So, I go back to when I was a kid, my dad and my mom, who didn't have a lot of money but understood some things about self-care, were actually taking Friday off. That was their day and it was to go to the bank, go to the dry cleaner, go to the health food store, this thing they called a health food store back then, go to the chiropractor, the gym. But they took care of themselves. And even to this day, my brother, who's a partner at a big law firm in the city of Manhattan, Friday's the day he works from home. And Friday for me has always been a day for self-care. And I do some work for sure. I do things on that day, but I also— it feels different. So maybe one of those things that folks from this podcast can take away is how is it that you're going to take some part of the week and make it yours, yours alone, something that you devote to self-care so you can recover? I'll also give you guys a gift. I'll share it now just so I don't forget at the end. But if you go to startmypivot.com/resilience, startmypivot.com/resilience, I've not done this before on the podcast, but I feel inspired to do it now. We have a gift there. It's a resilience kit. It's more than a white paper. It's really a full-blown exploration of how it is that we create these new habits to recover in all the areas of our lives, morning, noon, and night, and in those quadrants, the mental, emotional, spiritual, physical quadrants Sam, that you were talking about earlier. I love the reference to Geshe Michael Roach's book, The Diamond Cutter. I read Karmic Management. That was the first book of McNally. There were 3 authors on that book. I can't remember. McNally was one and Roach was the other, and there was a third I can't recall, but certainly recommend that. Sam, what are some of the things that you do on a ritual basis to take care of yourself?

It's interesting hearing you talk about self-care, which is now such an important part of the conversation, which nobody was talking about 10 years ago, and boundaries. And this is something that I've been looking at much more recently. And so, what I'm developing now, what I'm working on now is really having very clear boundaries with myself so that I can then have clear boundaries with other people. So, as an example, and this is just like what you were saying before, I have a boundary around my weekends. And if somebody sends me an email on Friday, If it's not super urgent that I have to get back to them right away, they're not going to hear from me until Monday. I may look at my phone, I may check my email, but I am not responding to anybody on Saturday or Sunday. My weekends are mine. And then during the week, I don't necessarily make it so stratified, so structured, but then I always try and find time. Like when I feel tired, when I need a break, I take a break. If I need to just not think about what I'm doing, take a break, play a game of solitaire, watch a video or something, I will take that break, whatever I need in the moment, for however long I feel I need it, and then I come back. I really am trying to pay attention to how I feel and not push myself unnecessarily, which doesn't mean I never push myself, but I don't push myself unconsciously or without a very specific reason or cause.

I'm so happy that we ended up in that place. And I even wrote down something. I wrote down #TakeBackMyWeekend. So it might be something that we— We pay forward. But I loved how you said that in essence, the ritual you've created is a boundary ritual. And it's a boundary for yourself because if you don't maintain or create and maintain boundaries for yourself, how are you supposed to create them and maintain them with other people?

Exactly.

The answer is you can't, right? Because as within, so without, and in so many other areas. So I really have loved this conversation. The last thing I want to drop in, and I feel for time reasons I can't explore it further, but there's a great I was watching this great documentary that just came out, really pretty recent, about Bill Murray and this whole idea that Bill Murray, who I have loved, like just about everybody I think loves Bill Murray from when he was Second City TV, and that's long ago in Chicago, to his days on Saturday

Night

Live and SNL, and then his incredible movies, for me starting with Meatballs and then Caddyshack and Stripes. I really hope you're enjoying this episode of the Change Proof podcast. If you've not yet gone out and gotten your own copy of Change Proof, it's not too late. You can get your copy right now by going to changeproof.com and not only getting the book and all the bonuses there, but getting access to our proprietary resilience assessment tool. It'll just take It'll take you 3 minutes to do, and it's something that will really help you to utilize the book even more effectively to create practices and rituals and habits that will increase your mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual resilience for the long term. Again, go to changeproof.com to get your copy today. Gosh, and Groundhog Day and so many, so many, so many others.

But

this guy, Bill Murray, started showing up in places. This is sort of a little urban legend about him just appearing in places randomly. And I mean, in people's homes, at their parties, at their weddings. Like, somebody taps you on the shoulder, you turn around, it's Bill Murray. All these kind of Bill Murray sightings and his antics in these moments So I highly recommend, I believe it's on Netflix and you guys can search it. You'll find it very easily. But this documentary about Bill Murray that he didn't have any involvement in. He's not the one behind the documentary. He's not in the documentary. So to say, I mean, it's all about him. He's sort of in it, but I don't want to give anything else away. Really phenomenal in the area of how it is that we can become more present in every moment of our lives in a way that brings joy to the moments in our lives. And I think that why I'm feeling called to share that is just because That's a way that we generate, that we are able to regenerate our spirits. We can regenerate our souls. And when we stop enjoying life, we stop finding joy in things, little things, random things, unexpected things, whatever those things are, I think we start to deteriorate. We start atrophy. I was saying earlier, just begin to shrink. So I love the conversation that we had today, Sam. I really want to thank you for being a guest on the show.

Oh, thank you so much, Adam. I appreciate it. I really enjoyed it as well. I look forward to having you on my show in the future. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Thank you. There'll be show notes as everybody knows it, and the show notes are great because you guys can find out more about Sam and his work and the healing work that he's doing and places where you can get in touch with him, et cetera, as well as an opportunity to leave us a review. If you go to adammarkel.com/podcast, you can leave a review, comment, something that we can respond to. You can go to the Start My Pivot community on Facebook and join us. You go to startmypivot.com to get into that community quite easily. And as I had said earlier, there's a gift that's available for you as well. startmypivot.com/resilience and you can pick up what is sort of a treatise. It was supposed to be a small little kit like our Resilience Regeneration Kit, turned into a tome of sorts, which is just chock-full of great resources and information and practices that you guys can check out. So really excited about doing that. Love, love, love this time, of course, with all of you. I feel blessed that we got to be here together. Yeah. As we are virtually. And my request, my hope, my prayer is that we get to do it again tomorrow. We get to wake up again tomorrow. So my sort of call to action, if you will, is that everybody wake up again tomorrow. Please do that. Please do that.

Absolutely.

All right. We all agree to that. We'll do that. And then if you're inclined to go one step further, it takes just 10 seconds, just 10 seconds. Take ten seconds at the start of your day to feel gratitude and appreciation for yourself, for the universe, for all the other beautiful beings that you're sharing this planet with at this time. And in that moment, if you're even that much more motivated to say something, to declare something that is affirmation of your love for yourself and for the universe as a whole, say these words: Say I love my life. I love my

life.

I love.

I love my life.

Ciao for now, everybody. We'll see you again very, very soon. Thanks again, Sam.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We hope you now have the tools and greater insights to navigate your own pivot. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over at adammarkel.com/podcasts. For more tips, strategies, and support as you consciously pivot into a new business and lifestyle you love, join our Pivot Community on Facebook at pivotfb.com.