TES 005 - How to Stay Sane as an Entrepreneur

Hey there, real quick before we jump into the episode, listen, if your earnings treadmill hasn't set you free yet, running faster won't either. Listen, hustle without principles just going to burn you out. So here's what I want for you. I want you to join me for my money machine experience live. It is three free trainings. Deep dive into how to escape the treadmill and build a money machine that actually works for you. All right, grab your spot here by going to moneymachinelive.com and I'll see you in the free training. Hey there. This is Mel Abraham, the author of the Entrepreneur Solution and the founder of Business Breakthrough Academy. We teach you how to design a business and create a life, create a life of financial freedom and peace of mind. And welcome back to the Entrepreneur Solution show. And this episode, and this is going to be a cool episode because I get a chance to answer one of the questions of one of the people that is in our community. And it's kind of an interesting question. He asked, how do I keep sane with all the different things I've got going on, traveling around the world, speaking and training and consulting and working and writing? How do I keep sane and how do I keep it together? So, you know, this is a challenge for many, many entrepreneurs. How do you keep life together in this process? So when we come back after this brief introduction, I'm going to answer that question. How do you keep sane as an entrepreneur?

Welcome to the Entrepreneur's Solution, where highly successful entrepreneur Mel Abraham becomes your entrepreneurial mentor. Here, Mel reveals his business building strategies and even gets a chance to answer your questions. Mel Abraham, a CPA by education, but an entrepreneur by exhilaration and a true believer in the entrepreneurial way of life. It's through entrepreneurship that we create community, support society and live our dreams.

It's where possibility meets reality again and you can have the life and lifestyle you want. One of freedom and peace of mind. Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur's Solution where it's time for you to be bold, dream big, and live life your way.

Hey there. I'm Mel Abraham. Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur's Solution where we spend time trying to give you the business tips, the success tips, and the entrepreneur tips that will shift and change your business and give you the life that you want, a life of freedom and peace of mind. And in this video, I'm actually going to answer a question that came in from David David in Santa Rosa, California, which is really a cool place. It's close to where Both my wife and I got married. And just. His question. His question is, I've been following you for many, many years and the kinds of things that you're doing, Mel, and that clearly you have a number of business interests and a number of things going on. How do you keep sane?

Well, whether I'm sane or not, that's still left out for the jury to decide, because I think if you talk to some of the folks in my life, they may not think I'm too sane. But let me tell you what we do. And when I say talking about myself and my wife and the realization that I've got a family and that that is the most important piece of my life, and making sure that everything that I do is to serve and to serve the community, but really to serve my family and to build that. And it is easy as an entrepreneur and as a business owner to just get sucked in and sucked away and pulled down by the business where you're totally focused, focused, focused on the business, but to the detriment of your relationships, to the detriment of your health, to the detriment of even sometimes your team members and your employees and your family and all that. And truth be told, when you think about business.

If we're doing it at a level that it is destroying other areas of our life, and some people would call this balance. We'll talk about that in a moment. But if you're doing it at the cost of it destroying other areas of your life, then what's it all worth? Because in the end of the day, if I'm miserable going through it, or I'm alone going through it, and I'm not sharing the successes, I'm not sharing the struggles, I'm not reconnecting, I'm not connected with my community, my team, my family, my loved ones, my spouse, then truly, what's it worth? Because the concept of business to me is to create community, to support society, and to live your dreams. And if that's the case, we need to design it and make it happen. And the challenge is that many times we're not intentional about what we do. So here's what I do. About every 90 days, about every 90 days, I will make sure that I take some time to do three things, and I call these the three R's of recreation.

And in the three R's of recreation, I reflect, reconnect, and rejuvenate effectively. What I want to do is I want to take a moment, and I typically will do this every 90 days. You could do it More often. I wouldn't recommend doing it less often. But every 90 days, I take some time to reflect. Now, sometimes when we do this, I literally take time off. In fact, my wife and I, we. We take a lot of time off. We take a fair amount of time. Sometimes they're lengthy vacations to exotic places. Other times, it's just us just hanging out at the beach or at the beach house, doing the things that we want to do and just reconnecting. And other times, it's just taking a long weekend. We just did a long weekend just recently to visit family and reconnect with them. But the point is that we make. We make the time and we block it out. And the first piece is to reflect, and it's to reflect on what have I done the last 90 days? Where have I been? What are the things that I experienced? And what are the things that I experienced that were good, that were bad? What were the wins? So many times we fail to recognize our wins.

And worse than that, we. We fail to celebrate them. And they may be small little wins, but we need to celebrate the wins along the way. And for a bit, if we simply just look back, take the moment and say, what happened in the last 90 days? And start to ask yourself, what are the wins? Then ask yourself also, what are the missteps? Where could I have improved? What are the things that I could have done differently? How could I have shifted that? What did I learn that I can take into the next 90 days and beyond that will change and shift the dynamic or the trajectory of what it is I'm doing? And so the first part of me taking that time away every 90 days to block it out is to reflect on where I've been, what my wins are, and what the missteps were, to move through it. And we do this. I do this in my personal life, in my business life, and all aspects of my life, because I think it's important for us to understand that we get to design this life. We're here. We're not put on a ship and said, here's your life. Go live it. Were actually put here and said, here's the block of clay. Go create it. And I think that's the way we need to look at it, whether it's business or life. And they're all together. I think they're completely combined. So the second R is that once we've reflected is to reconnect. Reconnect to, most importantly, your loved ones, your spouse, your significant other, husband, wife, your brothers, your sisters, whoever it is those that are in your world that are supporting you. I couldn't do the things that I'm doing if it wasn't for a great, great support mechanism, a support group, if you will, you know, a community. And most of it is my loved ones, my family, my beautiful, bright, intelligent wife that I can have a conversation with and talk to about some of the frustrations, the things that I'm dealing with, the things that I'm planning about, to have a dialogue at a deep level. You know, the kids that are in my life and my mom and the mentors that I have, all of that to maybe reconnect with them for a moment and really start to understand what's important to you and then reconnect to your mission and message. Sometimes we lose sight. We get caught up in that daily grind and that running and running and running and trying to create something, and we lose sight of why we're doing it. And all of a sudden we end up on a course or in an area that maybe we ought not to be in, or we didn't anticipate or we didn't wish to go. That wasn't the direction we wanted to go. So always reconnecting back to my mission, my message, and my purpose is really important. So in the process, reflect, then reconnect to your mission, your message, your purpose, and your loved ones, most importantly. And then from that process, actually what's birthed out of that process is what I call rejuvenation. Because when you reflect and celebrate your wins and you understand the learnings from some of the missteps, and you look at where you've been, and you look at where you're going, and you reconnect to your mission, your purpose, and your loved ones, and everything starts to gel back together again. And we come back together, and all of a sudden you do become rejuvenated, you strike out and all of a sudden feel energized to hit the next 90 days with a vengeance, with a whole lot of vibrancy and energy to bring to it. But to really make this rejuvenation even more meaningful, one of the things that I like to do is start to think about gratitude. Being grateful for some of the things that have happened, being grateful for the things that I do have, the things that existed, to be grateful for, even the lessons that came out of the missteps. And more importantly, to be grateful for the people that you have in your life, the people that are supporting you, that are serving you, that put their arms around you when you need it. That give you a shoulder when you need it, that kind of kick you in the butt when you should get kicked in the butt. And if you don't have anyone to kick you in the butt, let me know. I can serve that just fine. And then what are the commitments you're making? What commitments are you going to make through the next 90 days to your loved ones, to yourself, to your business, to your customers, to your community, to your mission, to your purpose? And come at that. Then what are your aspirations? What are the grand goals? What's the big vision for you? And are you still on that path? And does it still excite you from the inside out? That starts to bubble up and energize you to say, yeah, yeah, I want to take on this day. So in order to do this, it's the three Rs of recreation, as I call it. Dave, I hope this helps you, but let me give you a couple of specific takeaways that I think will help serve you and allow you to take this forward and start to implement it and put it into your life in a different way. And the first is what I call a 90 day gratitude card is to sit back and every 90 days when you're talking about gratitude, to write it out. There's something that happens, something that happens when you take and put pen to paper. I'm not talking about typing on the computer and putting it in a word processor. I'm actually talking about literally writing a card out. In fact, I do this with some of the folks I mentor where I tell them handwrite a thank you card to your customers. They're not used to getting something in the mail that's handwritten, not pre printed, but handwritten. Forget the email, forget the typed letter, handwritten in your handwriting in your signature and write down what you're grateful for. And of those things that you're grateful for, go out and maybe get a thank you card and literally handwrite that thank you card and pay it forward and say, you know what? And it doesn't need to be long, it just needs to be something that just says, hey, I'm really happy that you're in my life because you did this for me and I feel this way because of it. So that's one piece. The second piece is this concept of journaling. I am an avid journal. In fact, this is one of my bibles of journals here that I write in regularly. As ideas come to me and things come to me, I'm constantly writing. And the interesting thing about this now you may say, I don't want to journal every day, and that's fine. But here's what I'd invite you to do. Just journal once a week. Just start journaling once a week. And it doesn't matter what you write. Write what you learned, what you met, the people you met, the new insights, the things that have come up. But what that causes you to do is it actually takes this whole three hours of recreation and brings it down to a weekly process. Because every time you put that pen to paper, you're reflecting, you're reconnecting, and you're rejuvenating. And so I would invite you to get a journal. Get a journal. But I carry this with me. I carry a couple of them with me all the time. So get a journal book and start journaling at least once a week. Make it a habit on a specific day. Maybe it is on Friday, maybe it's on Sunday or Saturday or Monday. Whatever day it is, make it that day. Block it out and make sure you spend an hour or so journaling a week. And then the last thing is block your time out. 12 months out. When we talk about these 90 day, you know, retreats, if you will, for recreation, block them out. My wife and I, you know, my wife and I look a year to 18 months ahead of time and say, where do we want to go? What do we want to experience? How do we want to do this? And we literally will look at the calendar and we'll block the time out and we'll book the trips 12 months in advance and just block it out in that way. So it's not movable. It's committed in her calendar, it's committed in my calendar, it's committed in the family's calendar, it's committed to my team. So they know that these are the times that I'm going to go out and reconnect and reflect and rejuvenate myself to come back and hit it with a vengeance. So 90 day gratitude cards, journaling, and block that time out 12 months in advance. Not living day to day, but at least those times, because now you know that you have the time to give back to yourself. So I hope that serves you, Dave, and I hope that helps. I think, you know, I'd love to hear more from you. If you have any questions or comments, go ahead and leave them here. And for those of you that are out there, if you have questions or comments, go ahead and leave those questions. Comments. Go to askmelnow.com and you can leave me your question. And maybe find it on one of the upcoming episodes of the Entrepreneur's Solution. If you like this episode, go ahead and subscribe and share it with your friends. And if you want to get the takeaways from this episode, go to melabraham.com session005 until I get a chance to see you or speak to you on the next session. I welcome your comments, your questions, but may your vision be grand, your journey epic, and your legacy significant. See you next time.

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Make sure you subscribe so you get access to all of Mel's business and success tips. And if you like this episode, share it with a friend. If you have a specific business or success question, you can ask it at www.askmelnow.com. remember, it's all about being bold, dreaming big, and living life your way because the world needs you. Until the next episode, may your vision be grand, your journey epic, and your legacy significant.

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