182: 🏚️ The Challenges of Renovating a (Business) House while Living in It

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

There's a big white wall in my house that I know would look gorgeous if it were painted a deep, rich, velvety navy blue. It's right behind the tv, just to the left of our floor to ceiling bookshelf. This is my pride and joy of the whole house. In rainbow order, of course, the thumbnail of which had flicked across my StreetEasy app when I was looking for a new apartment in miniature, letting me know that even though I wasn't expecting or looking in this general neighborhood of New York City, that this apartment could be the one. After two years of diligently searching and going to open houses. And yet here we are, having lived in this place now a couple years. Every day I stare toward this wall while we watch tv, and on some days I even remember my vision of painting it blue. But alas, it remains stubbornly bare, stuck on factory settings. Why is it so hard to change one seemingly simple thing, even when a future vision can be so strong? That's what I'm going to dive into in today's solo episode. But first, this is the last reminder to cast a vote for the Webby nomination. If you haven't already, we're publishing this week's solo episode one day early as a friendly reminder that the Free Time podcast is nominated for a Webby the Oscars of the Internet. This is a big deal. The nomination alone is a major achievement. It puts us in the top 12% of nearly 14,000 projects entered. And you can cast your vote by the end of day today if you happen to be listening on Thursday, April 20th by visiting itsfreetime.com webby that's itsfreetime.com webBy thank you so much in advance for casting a vote, not just for free time, but for independent podcast creators everywhere. I also want to give a shout out to two reviewers. One is from jawsytime who says so good and so relevant. A long overdue review for this brilliant podcast. Jenny's ideas are a must have for any solopreneur or aspiring solopreneur. Also great for creatives and and anyone who wants to reassess their relationship to work. And then I got one that made me chuckle. This came in more recently. The title is 445-6446 stars. Exclamation, exclamation, exclamation. So you made me laugh. This is like, what is it? Four million stars. Wow. The format of this show makes each episode incredibly valuable and I'm grateful that Jenny is willing to share everything she knows with enthusiasm, hope and tons of creative ideas. I often listen more than once and take notes. Thank you so much to the submitters of these two great reviews and again to all of you who are here listening, supporting the show one last time. Just for the people in the back row, it's freetime.com webby and you know we're the underdog here in this individual episode category for business podcasts. But you never know. You never know. So of course I'll report back if we end up winning. But just this nomination alone, just you being here is win enough for me. On Tuesday's episode 181 on how to be irreplaceable with Jay Acunzo, you heard from my creative coach. I had hired Jay in November. Full of optimism. I'm thinking, all right, the free time podcasts were over a year in now we've gone pro by hiring and outsourcing all elements of production. I even have a joyful, delightful recording studio where I try to get once a week to record episodes like this one. Now I'm going to dig in and make sure I'm doing the best job I can, producing the best quality content that I can. One of the things I love about Jay is that before I hired him as a coach, he said, listen, if you want growth tactics, go elsewhere. I'm not your guy. You can Google how to grow a show. There are lots of things you can do, but that's not my area of expertise. However, if you want to work on the craft of what you're creating, if you want to improve the quality of every episode so that more people share it, so that when you get into growth tactics and marketing, it is more shareable and it spreads farther and faster. I'm your guy. And that is what I wanted. I was looking to make sure that I was learning and growing myself personally as a podcaster and that I was improving how the show is because I could feel myself having moments of uncertainty when I was in an interview, when I was recording solo episodes of not quite knowing which decisions to make, not quite knowing where to take things. So when I signed on with Jay, I thought, here we are. I'm wrapping up my work for the year. I'm going to be able to fully focus on coaching for these next eight weeks with a small break for the holidays. It's going to be amazing. I'm going to revamp both of my podcasts and 2023 will be just like a whole new year of podcasting and really taking things to the next level again now that my systems are in place. Alas, you know what happens next. Life intervenes, as it always does. I became one of those clients who could barely keep up with the coaching, where I wasn't really doing my homework. I wasn't taking the action that we talked about on our calls. I wasn't even fully engaging with the coaching format that Jay had set up, which was being able to exchange asynchronous messages with him and ask questions in between our calls. I couldn't believe it, because coaching has been a big part of my career and my business. Even though I don't do one on one coaching anymore. It was such a joyful stream of income for 10 years, working with clients, helping them set a vision and diligently work toward it. But here I was now as the client. Not only was I struggling to keep up with my homework and integrating what we were talking about, then the holidays came. So that was total chaos. But we knew that. We planned a little break and then I got Covid. So the first two weeks of January, when I had previously had all this optimism of our work together and the changes I was going to make to free time immediately flew right out the window. Now it was enough for me to just feel healthy at all and get the basic elements of my work done. As you know, I've also shared that I for three months before seeing a pulmonologist, just recently, my asthma was waking me up multiple times a night, not to mention very challenging during the day. And now, even though I finally got something that has it under control, Symbicort. If any of you know anything about that medication, it's been a miracle worker, but it's making me lose my voice. So even now I'm still challenged. I'm recording this in mid April. I'm still experiencing health challenges related to how I started the year and related to my ability to podcast to have my voice, not this weird scratchy one because of this medicine that I'm taking, even though it's working miracles and enabling me to get the sleep I need to do the strategic thinking and creative thinking and output that this podcast also requires. This is a long way of telling you that my experience as a coachee reminded me how tricky it can be when you're the one in the client's shoes. Because I know that many of you as well have experience coaching and training others, both individually, one on one and within organizations. That's the thing about desiring and even planning for change or improvement. Like my blue wall, my fictitious imaginary fantasy blue wall versus actually integrating and implementing it. This is that famous Michael Gerber quote from E. Myth Revisited. Someone should get a dollar. Maybe an angel in heaven gets their wings every time someone cites it. But you know his thing. You don't just work in the business, you've got to work on the business. And the reason E. Myth Revisited is such a best selling perennial book is because it's really hard to do that. Steering in a new direction or even renovating or adding new revenue streams while you run your core business is challenging. And I'm going to get into what I find to be the three most challenging things about it. But think of it like a house renovation. If you have renovated any element of your home, or you even have a friend or neighbor who has done this, you know that for example, just to repaint the walls, even if it's not fancy or fun colors, is just repainting them white or cream or beige. Who knows you have to move all your furniture to the center of the room. It's very hard to live normally in your space when you want to do something as seemingly simple as painting the walls. I remember when I was moving into the very first condo that I bought back in Mountain View. This was now almost 15 years ago. I thought, I don't need to hire a painting crew. We can do this diy. I'm going to get two friends over and we'll paint the walls and the ceiling. Nbd. Like no big deal. Oh my goodness. I couldn't believe how long it took taping off the edges. Doing the first coat of primer, then the first coat of paint, then the second coat of paint, then the ceilings was extraordinarily difficult. And you have paint like dripping Onto your head and onto the floor, the whole thing. I could not believe how much work it cost. Look at that Freudian slip, how much work it took. And it reminded me that the cost of hiring someone would be worth never having to do this amount of work and effort again, partly because I did it poorly. I'm not the most detail oriented person. I'm not good with crisp, clean edges. I remember saying to myself, if I ever need to paint anything ever again, I am going to hire professionals who can do it neatly, who have systems in place to do it quickly. And yes, it will cost more than I probably want to spend, but it will be worth it. I remember that note I gave to myself even all those years ago. Think about renovating the kitchen. I have never done this, but I know people who have and they're like, oh, it's horrible. My family, we've been eating takeout for three months straight. And you know that quote, the law of renovation is that it will take twice as long and cost twice as much as you plan for. So maybe they think their kitchen will be out of commission for a month, but somehow, some way, it always ends up taking three months or six months. Maybe some permit gets held up. That happens a lot here in New York City. Or imagine renovating a bathroom in your house. What if you only have one bathroom? You almost can't live there anymore. You have to go stay at an Airbnb and get out of the house until that renovation is complete. From something that it's not the whole house, but it's one crucial element of the house. This analogy of home renovation maps to running a business, and it maps to trying to invent a new revenue stream and get that off the ground. Taking something from 0 to 1 while you run the core business or bring in the bridge income that's actually funding the Runway for that new revenue stream. And it also relates to renovating an existing revenue stream or creative outlet. I gave you the example of this podcast. It seems simple. It seems kind of easy or even straightforward from the outside. And yet there's so much more that has to happen behind the scenes in parallel to running everything else that it can be challenging. I can't even promise that I can give you all the answers or all the systems on how to fix this. It feels important to just speak it out loud, to say that this is the case so that we don't set ourselves up for failure. There's another element that ties into work and business and home renovation. For many, many years now, I've had Podcast studio fomo. I remember the first time I stepped into my friend Jonathan Field's podcast room. This is when he and his beautiful wife Stephanie lived on the Upper west side. They're like family to me. I always loved going to their house for dinners, small group events and things. They're really great hosts. Jonathan had created this dream podcast studio of a little side room in the house. It definitely wasn't as big as a bedroom. It almost was like a big walk in closet. And he had this super plush fuzzy carpeting that I think Stephanie had picked out. He had these two plush swivel chairs. The mics were on mic stands, the walls were insulated because Jonathan can totally geek out on sound and making it impeccable. Back in the day when they lived in New York City, which sadly they don't anymore, Jonathan would do most of his interviews in person. In fact, he would often reschedule if somebody couldn't come in. And I just loved picturing and I got to do it once as a guest. But picturing his guests coming in, kids to kick off their shoes, have their feet in that like plush carpet, even if you have your socks on, be in this cozy recording room. So I remember another one of my fictitious projects. In my house. I started collecting wallpaper samples and I had these big dreams. I made a Pinterest board of turning my home office, where I currently work, which is kind of quirky as is. I have a peloton bike in the closet under a stairwell. And that little closet only fits the bike. So it was a very quirky place to ride. And then I have a built in bed, bunk bed above my head on my desk, which is what the previous owners had put in. And I had a vision of turning this little room, this little office, not only into the guest bedroom, not only into the peloton studio and my office into a podcast studio. So I looked at carpets, I picked out all this wallpaper, I ordered wallpaper samples to my house. And what do you think? Have I created a podcast studio? I will answer that question. But first, all of these examples, I picture them, there's this gap, there's this vision, and then there's the reality. What happens, what we kind of miss is that we don't account for the extra time, resources and energy required. I've had a lot of fun fantasizing about my podcast studio slash home office. But something gets in the way. I can order wallpaper swatches, but the thought of hiring somebody to put up the wallpaper correctly, cause I will definitely screw that up. I'm completely blocked. It doesn't happen. The other thing that's at stake here, as I kind of alluded to, is that we set our expectations too high and we don't actually design the right support systems to implement this type of change or vision. And we also don't delegate to the point where it could actually happen because there's just too much on any one person's shoulders if you're already running a business and even delivering services in that business.

We'll be right back just after this.

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So here are the three core challenges that I've teased out of this My experience as a coachee trying to improve this podcast while still meeting our production goals and deadlines. The first is something that I highlight in Pivot the levels of learning. I'm sure you've heard of this before. This is a big one we used to talk about in adult learning and training and development back when I worked at Google that there are four levels of learning when you're growing your skills. Unconscious incompetence. You don't know what you don't know. Then you move into conscious incompetence. You're fully aware of how much you don't know, how much room you have to grow. Then you get to conscious competence. Think of the 16 year old that just got their learner's permit or just got their driver's license. They got to be super aware. Are their hands at 10 and 2? Are they checking the mirrors at the right time while driving? You know, how is it? Oh, I used to be so terrified merging onto freeways. To this day it still freaks me out. But Somebody who is consciously competent has to think really hard. It's not yet automatic for them until they move into unconscious competence. Think of us now, if, I mean, I don't even have a car right now. But driving can become second nature. Walking becomes second nature. You no longer have to think about it. You're not using any bandwidth of your operating system to do things that are unconscious competence for you. So in terms of levels of learning, we have to account for how challenging the conscious incompetence stage can be. For example, when I was just starting to work with Jay, he had me do a free time show bible. And this is his template that he's created to help other shows and show designers and production teams really get clear on the purpose of the show and how it's all going to work. Prior to working with Jay, I didn't know what a premise is. I don't know what a show cross is. This is like that meets this. I didn't know what an episode rundown looked like or how to write an empathy statement or what is a logline. You know, I learned all this vocabulary and a big part of our coaching was just figuring out who is this for? What is the premise? For example, when I started this show, the tagline was set your mind, time and team free to do more of your best work. But one of the first things that Jay said to me is mind, time and team. It's too much. Pick one. People are overwhelmed. Like, you can't just promise all these things, you know, which one is it going to be? If you had to pick one, which one is it going to be? That process didn't happen overnight. Landing on what it is now, it took weeks. It didn't happen in one conversation. I had to sit with it, ponder, ask my friends, leave Jay some voxers and get his feedback. For example, which one is it mind time or team? Another idea is do I want heart based business right there in the tagline? Is that absolutely vital to the show or is it something else? The one ultimately that I landed on is set your time free through smarter systems. That is the premise of this show. There are two must have elements. One is that every episode helps you set your time free. I'm not interested in time management, productivity or even efficiency just for the sake of it. I want you to be able to take small steps that you don't have to think about again that are gonna create ease. But specifically if I'm choosing one thing that will set your time free and how are we gonna do that through smarter Systems. That's the thing that I love. That's the thing I want to ask guests about. That's what I wanna make sure I'm always sharing here in a solo episode. Although, yes, it would be nice to free your mind and your team at the same time. Although it'd be nice for you to do more of I actually don't need to tell you what to do with your free time. I just want to help you free it. And of course the umbrella that this all sits in is that this show is for small business owners and specifically heart based business owners. But I don't need to stuff all of that into the tagline or description of the show. But that one simple shift, set your mind time and team free to do more of your best work. Shifting to set your time free through smarter systems, just more streamlined, more clear, more elegant. It took weeks. That one thing, let alone all the other vocabulary I was learning all the other ways we were kind of redesigning the show, not to mention my skills and roadmap as an interviewer, even though I was interviewing people from the time I was very young, it was one of the games things I used to do as a kid. I was editor in chief of our high school newspaper, so journalism was a big part of my life. And then even learning coach skills, that's all about deep listening and asking questions. I've had these podcasts for eight years, but still, there's so much that I could have been doing to improve how I interview guests. As you heard Jay share in his episode, the one just before this 181 that let's say an author has a book come out, there's a big difference between them just, you know, making the circuit and talking about their book on 20 different shows where they're sort of informing the conversation based on their book versus I, Jenny, have a mission here at Free Time. And I have a lens and yes, author that I'm interviewing. You have a book out, but I am going to talk to you through the lens of what I care about. I think of it like a garlic press from the way Jay talks about it, or a pasta press where I might be taking somebody's work or body of work or expertise, but it needs to be pressed through my lens. And that's really something that Jay helped me understand. So no matter how many decades of question asking and interviewing experience that I have, or 8 specifically directed toward the podcast, I was completely consciously incompetent. Now, when it came to designing exactly why I was bringing a guest on how Am I going to structure the show? How will I be intentional to make sure that. That what we get quote on tape, is beneficial for you? Who's here listening? Who's spending your precious time with me and with my guests? The second challenge of trying to renovate the business house while living in it or operating it is the time it takes to integrate. And that's kind of what I've been alluding to, but specifically, all the deadlines of the business press on podcasting is one element of my business. It is a main focus now, but it's not the only one. And yet producing 12 episodes a month, I know I'm doing that to myself, but I like the challenge of it. There are so many deadlines of getting the next set of people scheduled, conducting the interviews, preparing to conduct those interviews by reading their book sometimes in a day or that morning, conducting the interview, helping write the show notes, reviewing the show notes. Like, every single episode has so many moving parts. And then there are plenty of other activities that I'm doing in the rest of the business. So even though I might hire a coach with the highest hopes, there's so much the press of production continues and just the crush of kind of the business mechanisms continue moving, even while I'm trying to integrate something new. So in that case, doing the same work, like producing 12 episodes a month. But if I'm doing it now, with my conscious incompetence and new systems and new ideas about all the ways I could improve, even planning for one solo episode is going to take twice as long or four times as long because I'm improving. That's that growth process I'm trying to stretch into a new vision. And it takes time until it's fully integrated, until it's fully how I operate and how I think, and it's a little more natural. That brings me to the third challenge here. Old process grooves are well worn, and new ones take time. Part of the challenge of renovating a business house while operating it or living in it is that there are all kinds of legacy systems and process that are ingrained, that are already now pushed to the back of our mind and executive functioning like they're just not at the forefront. And so part of integrating change or improvement means habit change, and it does mean updating your systems and process. One tiny example is that I have templates in notion for solo episodes and guest episodes. But every time I make improvements to how I want to prepare for guests or think about the structure of an episode, if it's a solo, if I Click on my old template. It populates the old way of thinking. It's not old. Always as easy as just saying, oh, let me spruce up the template. The template requires thinking, but if I can slowly integrate what I'm learning, let's say from Jay, and then I can bake that into the template. Now, the next time I go to record a solo episode and I click to populate my template, I have new questions. All of a sudden it's like I ask myself, what's your opening story? That's the thing about tagline. That's what Jay has me practicing to actually connect it to a bigger, more universal thing. Maybe there's open loops, there's transitions, there's examples. It's all much more spelled out now. And this is the training wheels that I need in order to integrate what I'm learning. I actually need to create this more detailed almost worksheet for myself because it's not second nature yet. And I'll forget a lot of what I've learned. And I was forgetting, that's the thing. I was working with Jay for months, having not yet updated my templates or any of my systems. And so even though in my head I knew I could be doing so much better, the systems and structure and scaffolding wasn't there to support me. And so we all need this. We all need training wheels when we're learning how to ride a bicycle. We all need bumpers at the bowling alley when you're learning how to bowl. That's what systems can do. That's what process can do. But that takes time and that takes conscious awareness to say, how can I build in fail proof systems? How can I build in the training wheels, the bumpers of the bowling alley, to make sure that this change happens the next time I go do X, Y, or Z in my case, record a podcast episode like this one. I'll give you one more example of this. Just yesterday I was interviewing Jessica Abel, who wrote one of my favorite books about narrative storytelling called out on the Wire. And her episode will be coming out soon. This was a really funny situation because when she worked on that book, she's interviewing the greats of podcasting, Alex Bloomberg, Ira Glass, all these people who are such luminaries in narrative storytelling from radio who've transitioned to podcasting, she was interviewing them about how to create great storytelling, how to create great radio or podcast shows. And so she had this meta awareness of how do I now capture that in a book? And then here I go, rereading her book that I first read in 2017. When I first read it, I didn't absorb a lot. I couldn't absorb a lot. I was very new to podcasting, so I kind of took things in in passing. I kind of let the book wash over me, but that was it. And then as I reread it to prepare for interviewing her, I thought, oh, my goodness, there's so much more that I'm picking up on now. There's so much more I could do to improve the questions that I ask, the stories that I tell, the product that I'm creating here. So then I had this meta awareness of getting ready to interview Jessica, who herself studied all this while hearing Jay's voice in the back of my head. And the result is that there I am trying to be present while talking with Jessica. And it's almost like those sliding doors movies, the actual movies, sliding doors, where you start to see two potential scenes playing themselves out side by side. I'm interviewing her. Meanwhile, I know that I'm basically failing at integrating everything I was just rereading from out on the Wire and everything that Jay has told me about a strong interview. I realized that I didn't prepare as well as I could have. I prepared in the old way. I prepared in the, like Jenny Blake, fly by the seat of her pants, go with her gut, be in the moment way. But I didn't prepare in the way that I could have based on what I had been learning. I'm sure the episode will still turn out great. I hope it does. I hope you enjoy it. But it was a very bizarre experience to be sitting there both trying to be present and conduct the interview, have a conversation. Rather, it doesn't have to be this formal interview. Knowing, seeing a different self, being able to play it out in an entirely different way. And one of my takeaways was I need to be more prepared that in the beginning of trying to introduce change and improve.

The only way to integrate it is to prepare more, to do double the work and to come full circle to the topic of this. It's just so challenging to do that while you're in it. It doesn't always feel like we have time to step out or step aside and create these systems. But I'm telling you now what you can carve out to create for yourself in terms of setting your expectations, that learning, growing, improving existing either skills of yours or revenue streams in the business, or again, inventing new ones from scratch. It might take twice as long as you think to integrate to create the systems around in my case, it's taking four times as long. You know, it's taking much longer even than that. But it is worth doing. It is worth pursuing.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I encourage you to look for an area where you're trying to make improvements and try to carve time out. Try to remind yourself that the time that you spend now will be worth it, even if it's half an hour. I remember one day completely neglecting my email inbox so that I could create a really fancy 20 to 30 page licensing overview PDF that's available on pivotmethod.com and I remember thinking this is the best way I could spend my time. This is a $10,000 task. Going back to the conversation with Khee from earlier where I knew that yes, I was neglecting the day to day part of what I felt responsible for and a little guilty about, which was my email inbox, of course, what else? But I knew that if I could just almost steal the time, it felt like literally stealing it away from my email, clutching it back and saying if I can create this PDF, it could help me land six figure contracts that is worth doing. Improving this podcast it's so hard. Like I said, not just the time and energy, but the awkwardness of learning. It's actually so challenging, I'm noticing, to try to produce 12 episodes a month while improving how I approach those episodes, how I prepare for them, how I am present when I'm on them, whether a solo or with a guest. I mean the whole thing, it's just so awkward and it does consume time and energy, but it's so worth it. It's worth it because this is something that I really care about. Going back to My dream podcast home studio. I never did end up changing the walls. I never bought comfy velvet swivel chairs. But Gotham, where I'm recording right now, did. I didn't expect it, but when I started coming, they were in this old space. They ended up moving to a new space a block away. And slowly but surely, week after week, I would show up to my favorite room, the only one that has natural light, and there would be improvements. Now, as I'm sitting here, there are plush white couches and swivel chairs. I'm in a SOFL chair as we speak. There's a little round table with flowers on it and a big textured green, almost leaf textured wall behind me. Flants, as my brother calls them because they're fake plants. It's set up for video. I could have guests when I want to, so it's not my home office. I didn't follow through on that front, but in a way, the vision remained and I found a way to meet that vision, almost taking a sideways approach. So don't forget that every now and then, when you're lucky, you can even outsource some of the work of home and business renovation to others, like I've done here with Gotham. If you get creative about it, maybe even achieving the same goals for a fraction of the time and a fraction of the energy that you have to exert, almost sharing a space or sharing services. I remember Jeffrey Shaw saying he and his fellow business owners share a private chef. They all pay into it to get a service that sparks joy for them. In general, though, as with a home renovation plan, for change in your business to take twice as long than you think, maybe twice as much energy, twice as much time could be twice as much money, could be twice as much awkwardness. But you can design systems to support you during that conscious incompetence stage. So ask yourself. I can't tell you specifically today, in this case, exactly what those systems should be. But I can tell you that if you can figure out what bumpers, what training wheels that you can design to make it easier for you to integrate and implement change, that's already a huge win. You hereby have permission not to do everything all at once. You have permission for things to take longer than you think that they should. And you have permission to be incredibly awkward and a little confused, maybe even lost, even discouraged, as you traverse those levels of learning, moving from unconscious incompetence into that oh so awkward stage of conscious incompetence. And you slowly but surely build your way out through systems and scaffolding toward conscious competence, and then fully integrating and improving whatever area of the business is most important and relevant to to you. Thank you so much for listening. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

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