Noise, Noise, Noise, Noise!

Hey, I'm Joe Fear and welcome to the Hustle and Flow Chart podcast. This is where we talk all about building businesses so they give you the freedom and fuel for your life. I'm not here to help you build a billion dollar business, but I am here to help you create a business with systems that work for you so you can make more money than you need just by working part time. You know, I was a chronic Hustle mode kind of guy and I want to share my experiences and mentors I've met along the way to help you reframe things to be the most effective as an entrepreneur. I wish I had this guidance and insight when I was younger, so that's what I'm doing here for you. Please share and enjoy. Hey, this episode, I want to talk about the noise, noise, noise, noise. That's a Grinch reference. You know, it's coming out of the holiday season now and I was reading the Grinch, the Grinch who Stole Christmas to my daughter many, many, many times. And my wife was as well. And for some reason it kind of resonated when the Grinch, he was talking about, you know, they were talking about, oh, oh, the noise, noise, noise, noise. There's one thing I hate. Oh, the noise, noise, noise, noise. And you know, he's talking about the who's, of course. Come on, Whoville. If you haven't seen the Grinch, you gotta see it. Read the book. So point is this, this stuff was in my head and I was thinking about it and I was like, you know what? There's a lot of noise. There's always noise around us and there's always noise in our heads. There's noise around us all the time. We're constantly feeling, filtering and inputting what is coming into our minds from outside. But also, if we're sitting down quietly, maybe it's just hanging out, trying to just chill out outside, inside, sitting in the hot tub, whatever it might be. That's what I like to do a lot. There could be a lot of noise in our domes, in our inner minds. And a lot of us, we kind of struggle to quiet the noise. Over this last handful of months or so since quitting stuff at Hard Fork and splitting stuff up with Matt is, I've been doing a lot of reflecting and figuring out how to first kind of slow that noise and slow down so it can kind of settle. There's things to decipher in the noise. With slowing down, things will kind of start to pop up, these more important things that we should be doing or focusing on that maybe the noise around us and the pace that we were moving and business or whatever, doing some action. We're just too caught up in that dust and that noise and all that stuff moving around. There's good stuff in the noise. If we can slow down and then start to decipher what are these things in our minds that that might be reminders. I try to get this stuff out of my mind to then pluck out what matters the most that then I can act on. And maybe that's an idea for a podcast episode like this. It could be texting someone or calling someone, family, business person, friend, whatever. Quieting my mind has helped a lot over the last handful of months to figure out what are some actions. And this podcast was a big thing that I remember thinking. I was like, I need to. I would like an outlet of some sort. I didn't know what that was. That podcast, surprisingly, was not obvious to me that this could be the outlet, but I knew that there was something, you know, and I feel like that outlet can be a private outlet in the terms of like a journal or, or voice memo or whatever. It could be even a voice memo like this as a public podcast that others can hopefully benefit from. Yeah, the noise, noise, noise, noise. You know, it just reminded me that there's a lot going on, not only outside in noise from others and things, but also just in our mind. There's noise from my friend Dan Ryan, who's texting me right now. There you go. He always likes his name dropped in an episode, so you're welcome, Dan. So the noise, if we could decipher, and he's probably good noise because he sends helpful things, don't shut out all the noise, but like decipher what is the best noise to then pursue. So I guess a few action steps here I thought about and things that I've done for myself is figure out how to quiet yourself and take yourself, maybe remove yourself from the situation of whatever that noise is. You know, it could be the noise of a business that you're in that's just constantly, go, go, go. That's how hard Fork felt like. For me at least, that was personal experience. I cannot say that's the experience that Matt felt or Buffalo felt because we all were approaching it in different ways and we have different things going on in our lives. So. But for me, you know, removing myself for the last handful of months or more from that business and also the day to day and some things that Matt and I were doing has allowed me to Let go of the noise that was consuming my mind a lot from those inputs and allow me to then start to see, all right, what were those things that mattered the most? I could decipher what those are. Obviously allows me to free up more energy for other noise inputs and then decipher what to do there. Taking time away. I would say step one is figuring out how to step away from something, even if it's a weekend or a week or a month or multiple months. And that could even be for a minute, actually, like, I was reading a book by a Buddhist monk. And we can do conscious breathing. Tell yourself that you're breathing in every time you're breathing in. Breathe out, and tell yourself you're breathing out. And then do that repetition for like a minute. You're gonna feel better, you're gonna feel calmer, you're gonna feel more present, and then ideally, you're gonna be able to pluck out whatever in your mind that might have been catching you up or keeping you up at night or whatever inaction you weren't taking because you were overthinking something. Just do some conscious breathing and chill out for a minute. I mean, that's. That's one way you don't have to take multiple months off from a business to maybe feel better or figure out what you got to do next. So take some time to slow your mind down would be step one, and then step two is figure out what is like a discipline or a routine that you can put into your life and figure out how to find that presence. Go back to that breathing. Or maybe it's exercise. Something that allows your mind to focus in and feel more at flow. Like, I'll say it a lot, it's not just because of flowchart and in the name, but, like, getting into the flow state and removing friction, I think is super smart. So you can decide what to do with a clear mind and then actually be a step ahead rather than always trailing behind something and playing catch up on everything. That's how I felt like I was. So figure out what it is, how to slow your mind down, and then figure out a routine around that. So you can do that whenever you want, almost tricking your mind on demand that that's how you can drop back into that flow state and figure out from the noise what to pluck out and decipher. That's the ultimate goal here. So as we go further into, let's call it step three now, is as we're deciphering things, you know, we can keep them in our minds. And that's a great thing to start. But let's figure out how to actually communicate them and take them out of our minds. Maybe it's writing them down, voicing them out into an app. Like I was saying, get them out of your head. Maybe it's talking to yourself. You can look like the crazy person walking down the street talking to yourself. Well, that's all right. Be that crazy person if it makes you feel better and if it gets your mind to think clearer. Sometimes I actually think that is more helpful for me is to voice out things. And rather than writing, or maybe it's a other way around for different topics, however you feel like in the mood, Voice it out, write it out, act it out. I don't know what you got to do, but get it out of your mind so you can then start to actually see and understand in a little bit more context what you feel about that thing that you might have played plucked out of the noise of what's happening around you and in your mind. And then step four is connect those dots. Like, start to review the things you wrote down or listen back to that voice memo that you probably didn't title because it was late at night or early in the morning, or that voice memo you thought you would go back to and it's been two months. Go review it. Because there's probably a reason why you recorded or journaled. Go back and read your stuff, go review and then start to connect the dots. Because it's when you start to connect the dots and then when you start to see, oh, that was an interesting idea. Maybe I should expand on that like a prompt in a journal and think a little further of that thing, whatever that thing that, that you were tempted to write down and record. So connect the dots and then ultimately, let's take action. That's really the ultimate goal, is to take action on whatever just popped up from all this noise that your brain was able to decipher that was most important, the thing that might have even been keeping you up at night. But maybe because you've connected the dots and maybe thought of it in a different perspective, or you spoke it out, maybe you spoke it out with someone else. Whatever you gotta do, then take action. And again, build some routine and start to track the metrics behind it so you can then improve. So those are the steps I've been thinking about for a while and kind of a process I've been taking over the last handful of months where I have limited a lot of the work input and and the previous stuff I was doing, I've. I've quit. And it was so I can slow down and decipher what are the things that I really should be doing. And the process, like I was saying, I'll just recap it again here is find time to slow down in a way that you can slow your mind down and get present. There's a lot of ways to do that. Breath is one that I like the most. And then figure out how to practice that and then figure out how to build a routine around it. Ideally not always doing months and months away, but you know, like if you can get yourself back to present within like a minute of breathing or so, it's pretty damn powerful, don't you think? And then figure out step three would be how to get that out of your mind and communicate those things to yourself. Figure out how to get these thoughts out of your mind and actually put them on paper or voice or wherever they might be. And then start to connect the dots. Start to connect the dots and review these things that you just put down on paper or wherever and then start to create an action plan and actually move forward and track these things. That's kind of the process. Keep it simple. This is all just a work in process anyway for all of us. But I'm curious of your thoughts and how the noise, noise, noise, noise can actually be a good thing. So I'm happy that the Grinch inspired this for me. In the Christmas season, I figured it'd be kind of timely for you to think of some ways that you can apply the noise, noise, noise to your life. There's probably some gold in that noise. All right, enough for me today. I'll see you next time. Bye. All right, all right, that's what I got for you today. And remember, it's not all about living a work. It's all about working to live if you need to do the work. But you know, work can be fun and it should be feeling for your life. So if you enjoyed what you just heard, if you got some nuggets of wisdom that you want to share or you're just noodling on right now, please go tell others the way that people find this show and how you can help others get their aha moments is through word of mouth. So if it is telling your friend, telling your family, send an email to your list, writing a review or whatever it might be, everything helps. So thank you so much for listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast and I will see you next time.