#212: The Gifts And Challenges Of Working From Home And Building The Skillsets To Stay On Top Of The Job Market With Adam Schroeder

Absolutely, absolute pleasure. I loved our interview. It was really nice. I appreciate it.

Yeah, it was a ton of fun. What's not part of the bio that I just read that you would like for people to know about you?

So one of the things that I think people should know is kind of my journey to working from home and working from home. I initially didn't get into the field that I'm in now. I didn't do web design. I did some audio production before, but I started out at a public radio station. Then I moved to a financial radio station when I moved to Houston, Texas. And then we were kind of winding up that part of my life and we were having our first kid. This was about 10 years ago. And I had to transition and I was like, ah, don't want to send our kid to daycare. What can I do to not work because my wife had to work because she makes all the money. Let's be honest.

That's great.

And so I started doing that and I was like, well, I need to learn a skill. And so my last job, I was like, I started learning web design and I was like, well, I need to learn a skill. So I started doing that and that allowed me to meet a whole bunch of people doing web design for them. And I met a guy who I work with now who actually transitioned me to another job that I started doing and helping people build up their real estate portfolios and everything. And so My life's been a life of transition, but I've been able to transition from home for 10 years now.

Resilience. It's the unsung hero in every success story that you will ever hear about. And in times of massive change and disruption, the kind of rapid change that we're all experiencing as leaders, as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we have to learn how to not only increase our own resilience, but that of our teams. So right now, we have a powerful opportunity for you to find out just how resilient you are. 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 resilience 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. This is a really great conversation, I think, for us to have here because my guess is there are lots of people out there who are really happy that they can now work from home. That the corporate world collectively has not been on board with remote working. I'm making this number, it's a total wild guess, but I would say 95% of the conventional workforce was going to and from a job, commuting to and from the office, that kind of thing, and required to be in the office most, if not all, of the time when they're not on the road and traveling for business and that kind of thing. Even though there was a lot written and a really great book, I think Thomas Malone wrote a book called The Future of Work in around 1999 or 2000 where he predicted that decentralization in organizational structures and for a number of reasons related to communication and the speed of communication that we'd be able to work from remote locations and that that would become the norm at some point. Of course, he didn't say in that book 20 years ago or so that it would be a pandemic that would bring about that change, but that change has been brought about nonetheless. So I'm just curious from your standpoint, people listening to this who are happy to be working from home and people that are maybe having a real challenge with it, what's the gift in working from home? What are some of the challenges that you've experienced? Because maybe we can help some people with this conversation right now get a little more comfortable.

Yes. Just the freedom that I was given. I was 95% you were talking about. And I think you might actually be low on that number because whenever I was working in an office, the only time I got to work from home was I took 2 personal days because at the time we didn't have kids, my dog died and I was very unexpected. And so I took like a day or 2 off and I worked from home and I was like, I'm so much more effective from here. And it was because there were so many people stopping by my office wanting to ask me questions because I wasn't high up, but I wasn't low. So I kind of oversaw people. So they would just come by my office and say, what about this? What about that? Can you look this up? And this was before smartphones. My officemate and I used to always joke and be like, Google on. And then we would respond to them, be like, your question was so obvious. And there were just so many distractions. And working from home allowed me to just— first off, the boss didn't know when I woke up. So that was fantastic. Mm-hmm. I could roll out of bed and go straight to work. And then the only way people had to get a hold of me was to call me, and they had to actively acknowledge that they were going to interrupt me to come in. Like, it's so easy to be walking down the hall and be like, oh, hey Adam, how you doing?

Right.

But now when you're at home, they have to schedule a time with you, or they have to see you on Zoom or Skype and call you, and it's a conscious interruption.

Yes. And

I think that allowed it to do that. But on the other hand, there's not the stop-in by the office. There's not the, hey, how you doing? What's going on? And it has to be conscious. So your social interaction gets a little lower. I actually talked to a guy this morning who works in tech and he said, man, I hate working from home. He was like, my job— he does coding for apps. And he was like, it's so much easier just to sit down in the room and show them my lines of code and point at things and do this, that, and the other. So it really just depends on your work environment and knowing that In so many jobs, you don't need that. You don't need to actually physically be there. And so the big stretch for people has just been, well, how do I fill my time? How do I fill my 8 hours a day? How do I fill my 40 hours a week? And the simple answer is you don't. You're working at home. You have to get over the mindset and you have to realize, if I can do my job in 20 hours, my boss doesn't have to know I finished it in 20 hours. They're paying me my $50,000, $60,000, $70,000, $100,000 for my expertise. And if I can do that expertise in 30 hours, 35 hours, they don't care if it takes me 50 hours. They've agreed to pay me for the job. And I think that's a big mindset that people have to get out of whenever they start working from home. And it can be a struggle because a lot of people are sitting at their desks saying like, all right, well, what do I have to do next? How can I prove my worth? And the big way to prove your worth is to get your job done on time.

Yeah. It's a performance mentality. It's a performance-based system really. Yeah. You're being paid to get a job done or multiple jobs done. Obviously, it's just like ongoing things that you're being asked to sort of respond to and handle and solve. And if you can do that, what does it actually matter whether it took you 10 hours to do it or took you 100 hours to do it? That's really a product of your own productivity, your own ability to be efficient at whatever that task is. And the delta is either yours or theirs.

Exactly.

If they paid you $50K to do a job that someone could do with maybe higher skill set, they could get it done in 30 hours. But for you and where you're at, it took you 60 hours. Well, they got a good deal on you. They paid you less. It took you a lot of time to get it done, but you got it done. And if you're the person who got it done in 30 hours, then that other 10 hours or whatever that delta is, is yours, which is what we call freedom. It's like there's time freedom. Like you said, if you're a late riser, if If you're an 8:00 AM riser or whatever, but you're going to log in and start working officially on the clock at 9:00, if a half hour is enough time for you to brush your teeth and put on a work shirt, who knows what's going on underneath, but hey, then more power to you. Yeah.

And especially one of the things I would caution people of is overworking and trying to— you can show your boss somewhat that you can do more in your 40 hours, but make sure That, that doesn't become a part of your job description without the reciprocal payment. Because I read a study back in 2010, maybe 2009, 2010, that said people who work from home tend to actually work more hours because they'll, you know, you're at home and it can be easy to just stay at your computer and keep working or pick it back up later. I'm a contractor, so I'll be working at 10, 11 o'clock at night. And it's not a big deal to me because I don't work from 10 AM to 2 PM, and I don't work from 4 PM to 7 PM. And there's just chunks that I don't do it. But it's so easy to just keep working and keep working and to continue doing things and be like, oh well, I could just do this one more thing. And then your boss is like, well, Adam just did that one thing and I didn't have to pay him any extra. And then you just get sucked into the rabbit hole. And then eventually maybe they give you a 3% raise, but you're doing a job that they would pay somebody $30,000 a year to do. And you're doing it for either free or $3,000 raise.

Again, that's so interesting too, Adam, because there's a part of, you know, I'm sure people are thinking maybe that by doing that extra work, being so productive on their time, you know, looking to, like you said, fill their time as opposed to just celebrating the time off. I didn't plan this and never do. It's just one of those wonderful little mysteries That I start with a thought about having time to ourselves to think and to plan our lives and to evaluate. And where does that time come from? And so many people that you speak to these days are so freaking busy. They're more busy than they were before the pandemic, right? Always busy. And you go, what are you so busy doing? And it's interesting because you said if somebody is working a job and they can get it done, and then that other time becomes their own to have dinner with their family or breakfast with their kids or, or time to work or work out. Whatever, you know, work on something else even. There's a sense of maybe guilt that they shouldn't be doing this, battling their own suspicion that what they're doing is wrong, that there is even the sense that if they don't work so much harder or produce so much more, their job— that they're more vulnerable to being laid off and that kind of thing. So your podcast is constantly tackling this topic. So what's your thoughts on that? Is there a mindset kind of a shift? that has to precipitate people being able to work more harmonious way from home, or is it something else?

I think it's important for people to realize when they're at home, when they're not working, it's not like they're just sitting in the break room and they could be seen not working. It all comes down to, yes, you have to be available if they're expecting you to work 8 to 5, 9 to 5, 8 to 6, whatever. Maybe you're not working, but you're available on the phone. But if they call you, you probably need to answer. Or call them back within a reasonable amount of time. But it really is the mindset of, I need to continue to work. And a lot of people, if they're thinking, I'm going to have to go back to the office, they don't want to get into the habit of breaking that continuous working. But you have to realize that you may not be going back to the office and it may not be your decision. And so you kind of almost have to keep your old life in your head. But embrace your new life and realize that you can have that time and it's okay. And it's almost like you have to allow yourself, you have to give yourself the permission to do it. And yeah, that's a big mindset shift is I'm allowed to sit on my couch and read a book for 30, 45 minutes if I want to, because that's what I want to do and I'm done with what I needed to do.

Right.

We as a society are so, so fast-paced and every moment has to be filled even outside of work. With 4 kids, your weekends can easily disappear. Your evenings, if each of your kids is in one activity, there goes every night of the week.

There goes every night of the week.

And so, I mean, you look at that, now you're suddenly like, well, my kids don't have activities to do right now. Or like my kids, we were driving to taekwondo a couple days a week. Well, now they're doing taekwondo on Zoom. So now we have that hour that we would have been on the road, and we've got that from home. So We had to resist the urge to fill the time.

Yeah,

because you can fill your time with so many unnecessary things. Let's say that you have to work. You have to work to not work.

I was interrupting this to ask you that question where, what's your theory about this? The working to not work? Like, what is it about us? I'm almost asking you to put on a psychology hat or something, but why do we do that? Why do we feel we're rushing always to fill our time?

I think a lot of it is due to the fact that We know that corporations fire people so easily and we see all these layoffs that we think, if I'm the lazy one or if I'm viewed as the lazy one, I'm gone. And so there's very little loyalty from companies to workers. And it's transitioned also to be little loyalty from workers to company because of that, especially right now. You think, well, if my company fires me, who's hiring? Nobody's really hiring right now. And so It is a little scary to think about pulling back your hours at a time when if you're viewed as lazy and you get laid off, you're just stuck in your unemployment for who knows how long till people start hiring again.

So if you were giving advice and there's these 2 competing things, there's this idea that we're kind of working perpetually and maybe even working ourselves into states of exhaustion that are different than the kinds of exhaustion states that involved us commuting and going into the office and all that kind of thing. What's the way to resolve the tension between those 2 things, if there is a way?

I think a big part of it is looking at your job description. And I mean, whenever everybody gets hired, you have a general job description and thinking, what do I need to do to accomplish this? And how do I prove it to my boss that I accomplished this? Because those are your 2 big things. You have to prove— you have to do the thing you did, and you have to prove you did the thing you did. And then, so once you can figure out those 2 things, realize you don't have to go beyond that. Now, maybe there were some things when you were in the office that you took on that aren't in your job description. You need to know what those were and you need to figure out how to accomplish those. And you need to realize almost like whenever you hire a contractor for your house, you give them a scope of work, right? And you say, how much will it cost you to do these things? And they'll say $10,000. And you say, all right, you're hired. And then at the end you go through and you look, well, did you fix my stairs? Yes. Did you Fix this drywall. Yes, your boss is going to do the same thing. They're not going to look at the list that you had on the side that was, here are 10 other things I could do with my time. They're just looking at what you were doing in the office, and you have to figure out how you can do those things from home and how you can prove those things. And a lot of it, if it's clerical, they might actually be looking at your time and seeing when you were working. If it's more the information society, Then you just send them the file or you send them whatever you would do. And if you don't know, you need to have a sit-down with your boss and you need to say, what are you expecting me to do during this time? And if they're a good boss, they'll sit you down and say, well, when you were in the office, you were doing this, this, this, and this. And you say, okay, that's what I need to do. How can I prove to you that I've done that? And they'll tell you, well, okay, I expect this to be in my inbox on Tuesday morning. Okay, then every Tuesday morning you'll have that in your inbox. If it changes, let me know. If not, leave me alone. But say it nicer than that.

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 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 resilience leader assessment is go to resiliencerank.com. It takes less than 3 minutes and 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. Hasn't email become like Big Brother? Because one thing for sure that, you know, like if your boss calls you, I know, like you said, you got it, you're going to respond. You're absolutely going to pick up the phone or call them back. Or if she texts you, you're going to need to text her back because a failure to text or return the call is a clear out in the backyard with a cocktail, you know, with the feet up and all that kind of— or that's the perception. But email is more insidious because is it your experience from what you're hearing and seeing that bosses and companies are just emailing people all times of the day, night, and weekends? It's like There's no sort of set, like, I'll just email you between the hours of 9 and 5 while you're at home. That's not the case, right?

No, there's absolutely creep. And I think a lot of that—

Scope creep, like you said, right? That's an interesting term, right? I mean, it just morphs.

Yeah, and especially as we've added our email to our phones and our phones are with us all the time, it's so easy. As a contractor, it's completely different for me. Because I can decide if I want to respond at 11 o'clock. But sending the reply email at 10 or 11 o'clock at night gives your boss permission to expect that from you. And you have to be very, very careful of that because once you set the precedent, it's really hard to pull that back. So you can just tell them and be sure, or say when you email them the next morning, I just received this, this, that, and the other, even if it's not necessarily true, you know, maybe you saw it at 10 o'clock at night. Saying, hey, I just saw your email, this, that, and the other. Maybe you answer it until 7, 6, 7 o'clock. Maybe that's a little later than you would have been at the office, but be careful. It can be so easy just to fire an email back, but as soon as you do that, they start expecting, well, I emailed Adam at 9:30 last night and he responded at 10:30. I can call him at 10 o'clock now. I can call him at 10:15. I can email him and expect a response. And then suddenly you look worse even though you're responding after hours. It's like, well, why isn't he working now? Scope creep is definitely a concern for many people. I mean, I've gotten emails from people asking in general, hey, how do I set my hours? And the simple fact is you have to let your boss know, I stop work. I don't work after 6:30. And if they ask why, say, well, I'm not in the office after 6:30. I'm not going to be at work after 6:30, and I'm not going to be at work before 8, or you can talk to them and say, hey, I like to wake up early and I'm more productive in the morning. I'm going to work 7 to 3. I'm going to work 7 to 4. Is that okay? If you email me at 4:30, are you expecting me to respond that day? And if so, then I want to let you know that I'm going to take more time off in the middle of the day because I'm not going to dedicate 10, 11, 12 hours to the company right now.

Yeah. We're talking about boundaries.

Yeah, absolutely.

So easy to blur the boundary lines and to hold the boundary, to set a boundary, to remind people of boundaries, really uncomfortable. Like you said, especially if there's this insecurity that's always in the background that there isn't a lot of good, that the job market out there might not be optimal at the moment. Talk to me a little bit about the podcast. Again, I was really happy to be a guest on the show. That's a bit of a pivot. How did you get into that space and what's that been like for you?

So I've been working from home for 10 years. My co-host has been working at home for 7 and a half years. And this is one of those boundary things that we don't have. He texted me one night at 10:30 my time, 11:30 his time. He's on the East Coast. I'm in Austin. I'm in Central Time. And we kind of hashed it out via text. And he was like, hey, this NBA friend of mine worked for a front office in the NBA, said they're going to start working from home Monday. He doesn't know how to do it. We need to start a podcast. And I was like, okay, let's start a podcast. Let's do it. So the next morning we just got to work, designed the logo, made the website, started doing all that. I mean, he's a digital marketer. I'm a web design and audio editing guy. So we had the whole thing built in and we published our first episode that next Monday, I think, because we knew there were going to be so many people working from home or laid off and having to figure out how to make a business from home. And we were looking around. His first idea wasn't, let's start a podcast. It was, let me find a podcast for you. And there weren't any continually frequently publishing podcasts about it. And so it became a see a need, fill a need. And so we just started recording for it and it's been amazing. We interviewed one lady who's been working from home since the early '80s. I didn't even know that was possible with what she was doing. But yeah, she's been doing it since then. I mean, we've talked to a lot of people who have shown people how to make a business, how to build a business. We interviewed some CPAs about how to— this podcast was not designed to make us money, but it made me $7,300 from the PPP because I interviewed a CPA who said, hey, if your business was impacted from COVID and mine was, you're eligible. And so I was like, wow, okay, even if my listeners aren't getting anything out of it, I am. So it's just been a blast. And teaching people how to shift into the work-from-home environment has been fun because, I mean, I've been doing it for a decade, like I said, but It's still new to me in some ways. Like, I'm still setting boundaries between my work and my family and figuring out when to work, when not to work, and all of that. So it's a continually changing field even though you're not continually changing job environments. Right.

So we talk a lot about resilience in this show. What's the kind of resilience— how would you describe what resilience is required to work from home versus the kind of resilience, let's say, that's required when you're working out in the office, let's say?

It's really the resilience there. If you're working as a W-2 employee, the resilience has to be setting the boundaries and understanding it's so easy to go and not do work. It's so easy to say, I'm just going to do this today and I'll do that later because you're not at your office. You don't have the stuff sitting on your desk and really pushing from inside to say, I have to finish this. I'm not going to do it later. I'm not going to do that during family time. I'm going to stick with this and I'm going to not allow myself to slack. And then your resilience there, if you're doing contract work, you really have to be willing and you're shifting to that. You've got to be resilient because you're going to hear no a lot. And when you go out and you're pitching yourself to companies, you're pitching yourself to headhunters or whatever, You're going to hear companies saying, no, we don't need you. And it can be hard. You know, you have to know somebody does need you. You just have to figure out how do I convince them that they do need me? Anybody can just say to me, I don't need a new website. And I have to figure out, okay, well, is that true? Or is this somebody I have to prove myself to more? Well, you may not need a new website, but if you did this, You can make this much money. And there are sometimes you get far along in the sales process and you think, oh man, next month I'll be finishing this up and I'll make $2,000, $3,000. And so they get to that point in the sales process and they go, I just don't think so. You know, I don't think we need this, or, oh, our budget disappeared. And it's up to you to find the next job. And it can be really disheartening and it can make you want to just say, I'm just going to go get a full-time job. I'm just going to go work in the office, or I'm going to Or let somebody be my own boss. And you have to decide whether that's important to you. And it was important to me. I told my wife whenever I left my last job, I said, I never want to work in an office again.

Right. Once you've been bitten by the bug of making— yes, just having that freedom and that element of control. And yet right now where we are in the world, there's such a lack of control. There seems to be so much uncertainty. How is it that you personally are able to manage the uncertainty, even utilize, leverage even the uncertainty?

I actually made a very interesting decision at the beginning of the year that looking back is, it created way more uncertainty this year than I thought it would. I actually scaled back my web design and my audio editing and I scaled up. It was a beautiful time for this, selling investment real estate to investors nationwide. And I started doing that in January and March came and people suddenly told me, you know what, call me in July. For a little bit, I kind of pulled back and I was like, am I doing the right thing? Should I continue down this path or should I ramp up the other thing? And then I realized, you know what, I need to push. Even if it doesn't succeed, I need to dedicate 2 hours a day, 3 hours a day to just calling people and get told no. Even if they tell me no, I can start the relationship now and start talking to them. And so in terms of dealing with the uncertainty, I just kind of had to say, you know what, I'm fortunate in this regard that my income is not required for us to live comfortably. But I had to say, you know what, I'm gonna get told no, I'm not gonna make any money, but in 6, 9, 12 months, I'm going to make money. I'm gonna set the base now And I'm just gonna do it. And I knew, and I was right, I didn't make any money. But you just have to commit to it and figure out if this is something you think will be good for you long term, then you're in it for the long term. If you have to do some stuff on the side to make that income to go along, then do that. But don't give up on the thing that you think is going to be your gift to the world or what allows you to do What you want to do to make the income you want to make.

So, in that place of uncertainty, what seems to me you leveraged was getting really truthful with yourself.

Yeah.

Getting super honest about what it is you actually wanted and getting also equally truthful about the timeline that it might actually involve to get what it is that you wanted. Is that right?

Yeah. And I'll have to admit, doing the podcast, it didn't help in that regard because I was talking to all of these people who were working from home and making $10,000, $15,000, $20,000 a month doing this thing. I was like, oh, maybe I could do that. And then I realized that's not what I'm good at. I could spend 2, 3 years learning how to be really good at that, but I am good at helping people with their real estate portfolios. You know, I've learned about that for the last 5, 6, 7 years. I am good at audio editing. I am good at web design. I need to focus on my strengths and I need to stay true To what I know I can do for people and for businesses.

Yeah. Getting distracted or chasing after, as you say, trying to comparing yourself or maybe even look at someone else's grass as being greener and saying, you know, oh, I could do that. If they can do that, I can do that. It can be pretty dizzying to see that your mind can be so easily distracted or drawn away. As you said, that core inquiry about what do you want to do? What do you love doing? What are you good at doing? Where's your current skill set lie? And I'm a big believer in if there's something you want to do, you can You can always figure out how to acquire the skills to be at a basic level. You can figure out how to do it well enough. And if you loved it that much that you'd commit to being a master at it, that you could create the deliberate practice and get the mentorship, get the training to at some point be that good at it. But it doesn't happen overnight, like you said. So I'm just kind of intuiting that maybe some people, when they heard you say earlier, as an honest guy, and you said, so the caveat is I could see this might take a couple of months at a minimum to kind of get up and running and producing income. And fortunately, I didn't have to worry about it because we've got enough income coming in already. Is there something that you might even be able to say to somebody that wouldn't be in that situation? Like, imagine yourself if you were in that situation and let's say your spouse was not earning as much as she's earning or somehow or another just wasn't comfortable. What would have happened in that moment? Can you even—

Yeah, I would have stuck with— this is a time when there's a lot of opportunity. But even if I knew I'm not going to make money doing this right now, maybe I stick with the job that I'm doing that I don't love, that I'm not the best at, but I'm making money doing. And then I watch a bunch of YouTube videos about how to do the thing that I want to be doing in 6, 9, 10 months from now. But just focusing on sticking with the things, you know, you have to pay for your your shelter. You have to pay for food. So I wouldn't suggest anybody, especially right now, give up their job that they need to do it. But like, there's so many options for learning new skills. YouTube is like a free university. They're uploading like 4 days worth of content every second on YouTube. It's some insane number. And it sounds cheesy, but building your skills during this time is so important because as soon as the economy turns around, and people start hiring or companies open up their checkbooks to independent contractors, that's going to be your time to strike. And so you need to position yourself to take advantage of that opportunity. So right now, maybe you stick with that $30,000 or $40,000 job while you're eyeing that $80,000 job. You need to build up the skills. So whenever that $80,000 job is hiring or available, you come in and say, I have all of these skills and I am better than anybody else you're looking at right now.

Yeah, it's such an interesting thing because at times like this, there is a tendency to hunker down. I think when we get feeling insecure and things are uncertain, we kind of play it safe. Play it like in football, you play defense and you play it— even your offense becomes defense. And I remember the team that I follow since I was a kid, their prevent offense is what we used to call it. I'm sure there's a lot of teams. That used that phrase, right? You can't at a time like this go into a prevent offense. And to me, the offense, or at least one of the aspects of the offense, is what you just said, that it's a time to acquire new skills. It's a time to work on yourself, perhaps in working at home or in any way that you're able to recapture time like you and I had talked about at the very beginning, that some of what you can use that recaptured time to do is not just to sit around with a Mai Tai, even though if that's what you want to do and you got the time and you got your work In and done, great, fine, do it. But what you could also do at that time is to read, is to research, is to study things on YouTube, to look at where the market is headed or where you want to be headed a year from now, 18 months, 2 years from now, because we know just like snapping your fingers, that 18 months will go by. Yeah. And this more recent disruption, as tough as it's been, we'll come out of it. And as you said, companies will be hiring, companies will be thriving, the ones that are still around, and that'll be quite a number. Obviously, there'll be new companies that have sprouted up from the ashes of burned-up old companies that weren't able to pivot. And all of that's part of the cycle of life. It may not be nice and it certainly might not be easy for a lot of people who are dealing with it, but it is on a macro level just what is to be expected. It's the norm. And so since that's a repetitive cycle that happens just the same way as spring follows the winter every year, as much as you think the winter's never going to end perhaps, spring follows the winter, you'll see the exact same thing happen in our economy and in various sectors of different industries where now would be the best time, as you say, to be making yourself that much more relevant, building your skills, positioning yourself either as an entrepreneur, and maybe that's the arena that you want to be in, or just to be that valuable from home in the particular area that you are either great at already or wanting to become great at. So

I would also say if you are a salaried employee right now, or even if you're a contractor in one way. As you're learning these skills, you can always go to like Upwork or Fiverr and start offering your services with that delta time that you have. Or even if you're willing to work in the evening and you don't have to make a ton of money doing it, but you can take on a job here and there and it will allow you to start doing things faster so that whenever you do get a job doing your next thing, you don't come in taking on a massive load of work that's going to take you 80 hours But now that you've done those 1 or 2, 3, 4, 5 jobs on the side, suddenly you can do that massive load in maybe 40 or 50 hours, and it's going to shorten your learning curve after the pandemic's over. So, I mean, there's so many companies right now that had to lay off workers that are looking for that one-off person, and you can be that one-off person.

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 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. Become an Outsourced Solution helps you to really fine-tune your skills, get faster, At doing a really good job, but doing it more quickly and potentially, who knows, maybe in doing that you go, geez, why wouldn't I just hang out my own shingle, so to speak, and do this piecemeal for as many companies as would like to hire me kind of thing. Adam, what are some other suggestions? I'd say, I don't normally get this in this podcast, the ability to ask somebody this question, but since you've been curating a lot of that information and those answers, it's a perfect opportunity for people listening now. who are working from home, either in their own thing or for someone else? What are some of the best suggestions you could recommend for folks in addition to what you've already shared?

I would just say also you need to have an honest conversation with your significant other if you have one, and just start setting boundaries with them too and say, I'm going to be unavailable at this time, but we will do this at this time or this part of the day or maybe even on this day. My wife knows, for example, that I work when the kids are sleeping because I stay home with our 4 kids as well, even pre-pandemic. And before they wake up, I work during their rest time and I work after they go to bed. But every Friday night, that's our date night, even though we don't go anywhere. So we know that that is a time for us. And it's so important to have that, whether it's daily, weekly, monthly, whatever. Your relationships can suffer if you don't figure out what you want to do. And then the other thing is to figure out when you're most effective. My wife is a night owl. If you asked her to wake up at 7:00 AM and be productive before 10:00 AM, you wouldn't be looking at the best employee. She wouldn't be putting her best foot forward.

Good luck with that.

But if you say 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM, she's your woman. And so you need to realize and figure out when you're most productive and how you're most productive. You're productive, sequestered away from your kids while they're watching TV or doing something else. Or maybe you can function because of what your job has you do while they're in the same room as you. But you need to figure out how your household can work around your job because we've lost the time and excuse of my kids are running around and being crazy is gone. You know, everybody had that excuse for the first. 1, maybe 2 months. We're adjusting, the kids are home, this, that, and the other. Now that's gone. They don't care. It's like, well, you've had 4 months to figure this out. If you haven't figured it out, then maybe you're not the right person at this time. So you've got to figure that out.

Yeah. I think the question you just asked is really a great one. When are you most productive? To just ask and obviously be honest with yourself about it because there's a lot you can do when you have the flexibility of 24 hours. You now have the flexibility of 24 hours and 7 days a week. Not suggesting that we ought to be working 24/7, right? Just so we're clear. But what's great is that if you come from a performance mindset where what you're being paid for and what you're looking to produce is a result, and I used to love to work Saturday mornings. I was a lawyer for 18 years. Yeah. I love Saturday morning when I wasn't coaching on the baseball field or something like that at a certain point in our kids' lives, getting into the office and doing that sort of 3, 4 hours and clearing out everything so that come Monday, which is usually the bear of a day, I didn't— my Mondays were relatively easy because I took all the pressure off on Saturday and the phones weren't ringing and nobody was bothering me and it was just a great time to catch up. But knowing that about yourself or learning that about yourself really, when do you work best? And setting up those boundaries in those zones of productivity to coordinate well. And the other thing I thought you said that from a relationship standpoint, I really believe is powerful. I'm married to my college sweetheart and I suppose she's married to hers, hopefully, for 31 years. And one of the things that I learned a while ago that's really important is you've got to schedule time together. It doesn't matter that you say, well, what do I need? I mean, like somebody might be thinking, what are you talking about schedule time? We see— all we do is see each other. We're running into each other in the house more now than ever before and we can't get enough. We have so much face time. But there's a difference between that sort of blending of all of these things, like you said, family, business, every other thing, and what separating, creating space and calendaring that space, literally putting it on your calendar that at 8 o'clock at night, it's foot massage time or whatever it might be, or we're going to go walk and go get a coffee or we're going to go take the walk that's just for us, that the kids are not there and it's just us taking a 45-minute health walk. Well, that'll happen when you schedule it and it's likely not to happen when you don't. And I think there's something else to it as well. Not only will it more likely happen, but you're telling your spouse or your significant other something about what's important to you when you put it on the calendar to do it. And that's just for what it's worth, folks who are listening to this after 31 years, you're doing yourself a big favor and you're doing something really important for your relationship when you make it a priority in that way. Adam, I think you were alluding to the very same thing. So I'll

also tell people, you were talking about 24/7. Weekends don't have to be Saturday and Sunday, especially as you're working from home. If you get to continue working from home, once everybody goes back to work, some people aren't. It's fantastic to go places on Tuesday or Wednesday during the day. I mean, it's fantastic. I mean, there's nobody there. So weekends can be whatever days you want them to be. Just let your boss know, hey, I'm gonna work Saturday and Sunday and not, not Wednesday or not Thursday morning or whatever. Days mean nothing in a lot of cases.

It's so true. My dad growing up, he had a job where he had the choice of his weekend, so to speak, and he made his weekend Friday and Saturday instead of Saturday, Sunday. Friday was a day when so many wonderful things were happening and he was doing things he wanted to be doing. My brother and I both It was like the message was loud and clear without him telling us anything. We grew up and as soon as I could get my Fridays to myself, when I owned my own law firm at a certain point, that Friday was mine. It was tough to convince my boss before that, that Friday could be mine, but I think we have that ability now. So it's such a great suggestion. Adam, last question for you, back to resilience is, do you have certain rituals, things that you do unconsciously, like a habit, but you do it consciously? That build your resilience, that are building you up mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually even.

I guess one of the things I do that helps me sort through everything is my wife and I, we've actually gone away from it a little bit since this pandemic started, is we have weekly check-ins. It's our Sunday evening check-ins where we list everything that I need to accomplish, what she needs to accomplish, and set the week in place. And so that way we don't have an excuse that next Sunday comes around Did you get this done? Did you get this done? Why didn't you get that done? Why didn't you get this done? And you have to be held accountable for it. And we haven't been doing that as much and it's hurt me, honestly. She was actually mentioning it Sunday. You've become less productive when we haven't had our meetings. And so I find myself not being as productive because I don't have my weekly list.

Why do you think that has been the case?

Why we haven't done them? I guess it's just because The kids' activities stopped. And so it made it easier for us to say, well, I'm never leaving the house. So what do we need to do that? But we need to get back on the ball.

Well, it worked. And it's good to look at something and go, yeah, that was working for us. So just because the world is different now, lots of things are different, we can still go back to what worked for us. And I think that's a really wonderful way to end is for people to look at where it is that there were things that were working in their life pre-pandemic. That they've just stopped doing. Now, obviously, there are things that were working like, hey, I love going out for happy hour on a Friday night, meeting my friends at the bar. Yeah, okay, that's not one of those things maybe that you can do, but there's a lot of other things that could have been working that we just have sort of in our minds go, well, haven't sort of connected the dots to being able to reinitiate that, I suppose. So my own personal ritual has to do with the way I wake up in the morning. And so as a way to close out this conversation and a reminder for myself and for everybody out there who's watching and listening, I think the waking ritual is one of the most, if not the most important ritual that we could create for ourselves. Because as my grandmother used to say, and I think this is really very important, is how do you get off on the right foot? Like, how do you start your day on the right foot? How do you leave the house on the right foot kind of thing? That was the way she would always express it. So those thoughts in the morning, that those things that you state out loud, those things that you intend either consciously or even unconsciously, have a great deal to do with the kind of results that you see in a particular day. And then you string enough days together, it kind of looks like a life. That waking ritual is very important. And for me, it's waking up. That's the simple first part. I hope everybody's willing to agree that that's not negotiable. Let's wake up again tomorrow. Be grateful. What's one thing in the waking moment? Not 10 minutes later, right then as you're getting out of bed, instead of thinking about your creaking back or you didn't sleep enough or you got stuff to do, whatever it might be that goes into your head, or I got to check my Facebook page and see how that post did from last night. You could just consider what's something I can appreciate in this moment. And then lastly, if you can Think about what's the first words that come out of your mouth. What do you want the first words to express? What's the energy of those words and what's the intention behind those words? My first words of the day are written on my t-shirt. Those of you watching on YouTube, you can see it. It says, I love my life. Those 4 words. And now more than ever with everything that's going on in the world and so much uncertainty, how I deal with uncertainty in many ways is by leveraging this state By leveraging the things that I know with all of my heart are so important, leveraging my spiritual practices, leveraging the power of my own words, power of my own intentions. So think about what you could say when you wake up tomorrow. Be grateful in that moment and then say something out loud. It could be, I love my life no matter what. It could be anything. And Adam, as we close out, so is there something you say in the morning routinely?

I don't actually have a pattern like that other than, well, I'm glad my kids let me sleep.

It could be anything. I mean, there's a woman I had on the show a couple of months ago and she's in her— I think she's approaching 80 years old. She said, I asked this question out loud. She says, I wonder what miracles are coming today. And again, man, think about that. What miracles are coming today? It presupposes there's going to be miracles. So that's a good start already. And then she's sort of like looking for them to see what those are. And still at her beautiful age is curious, like the curiosity of a child in that state of wonder just blew me away. This wonderful lady, Judy Whitcraft is her name. So Adam, I've so loved our conversation. Thank you very much for being a guest on the show today.

Absolutely. I appreciate it. It was fun.

Yeah. Everybody, please feel free to let us know how you think about the show. Give us your thoughts. You can go to adamarkel.com. Leave a comment there. If you haven't subscribed, please go ahead and subscribe and tell your friends and all that kind of thing. Join us on Facebook, wherever it is that we can serve you. Let us know what you're looking for and we will see if we can't fill the gap with some resource, some information, or some way to just give you a tip that makes things a little easier. Okay. Ciao for now, everybody.

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