Reflecting on Rest and Growth: Insights from a Belated Honeymoon

Foreign. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Meaningful Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Sean Butler, and this is the podcast where we hope to inspire you into following your passions to live a life that you find fulfilling and meaningful. And so today it's gonna be a little bit of a different episode. It's gonna be much shorter. Um, I'm getting back from a belated honeymoon slash anniversary vacation with my wife. And so the interview schedule's a little bit goofed up. And instead of trying to think about what might be helpful and useful for you guys, I thought I'd just maybe talk a little bit more from the heart today. First off, this vacation was amazing. I got to read a couple of really amazing books, a little bit about purpose from Evan Carmichael. He's a big YouTuber guy, really super sweet, super cool dude. His built to Serve book was amazing. And this got me again thinking about how to make improvements to this show, to the YouTube channel and podcasts and my coaching business. But I don't know if you've ever felt this way, but I didn't realize how much I needed to have 10 days of not thinking about work, not really thinking about responsibilities too much. There's still things that we have to do. But yeah, as someone that's a high performance coach and praises breaks and taking those strategic rest breaks so you can be more productive, I did not heed my own advice on the longer term type of rest. And I can't remember the last time I took 10 days where it wasn't a business conference or I'm learning or I'm doing something, or it was just go to someplace warm, sit on the beach, read books and connect with one of the most important people in my life. Yeah, this is one me showing that I don't have all this stuff figured out. I'm still on the journey with all you, like all of you. And we give advice so many times and this was a reminder. Oh, I need to take this advice a bit more. Yeah, make sure you are planning those breaks in the hustle and in your life to reflect, to grow, to get yourself regrounded so you can hit the ground running again. So that would be the suggestion I learning I did from this past break. Second book that I read related to this break was Bittersweet by Susan Cain. And Susan Cain is one of my favorite authors and has had a profound impact in my life. And I share this because her first book, Quiet and I think that was her first book, which is about introverts my wife lovingly says is an operating Manual to me. So it helped me in my relationship with my then girlfriend and now wife and just normalizing a lot of my more quiet tendencies where it's like, I'm not interested. It's just I don't have a lot to say sometimes or I need time to. To myself to. To re. Energize. It's not anything that she's doing, it's just how I manage my energy. And it's had. We've had a lot of really productive conversations from that. So. I absolutely love Susan Cain, her book Bittersweet, about how we need to incorporate sadness in a world, especially here in the US where it's optimism. You're winning, you're. You're always moving forward, but taking the time to, to settle into those sadder moments that we experience in life. Grief, depression, anxiety, like those types of things. And it's not that we need to wholly focus on that, but we can combine that with the more positive, to just be a more rounded human being. It was interesting because it got me thinking that my decision to leave Apple in 2019 as a software engineer, which was the dream for a while, was actually the end of my story with grief, or ish, I should say, Meaning that I think when my mom passed, I was still working at Apple and doing the software engineering thing and super happy. And by grieving, I didn't realize I was. This was how I was dealing with grief. But there's that initial. When we lose anyone, I believe we have this moment of reflection that happens where we start questioning, am I doing in my life the things that I want to do or how do I feel about how things are going? In a weird way, I think a lot of people with the pandemic also had this moment of reflection. So it's these big moments where your world changes. And part of that reflection was, I want to help people more. That's something I've always had in my soul. I found some paperwork this year when I moved my dad out of his house into his new place. Like paperwork. And it was school projects from grade school. So it was like third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade. So pretty young. You write a book about your future life and it's, I want to ride bikes, I want to play video games, I want to help people, and I want to juggle or whatever it was. But there's a couple of these books throughout the years where the common theme was, even as a young boy, I was like, I want to make this world better somehow. And I just don't know what to do. Which is a lot of the reason why this podcast exists is I am closer to that feeling of wanting to help or how I help people. And I'm hoping to translate that search and that discovery and highlighting the people that, that I know on how they've really found their purpose. So Apple's a great organization and I loved working there. But there's this calling in my heart, this longing that, that Susan King talked about in Bittersweet for something more, right? And that started a three and a half, four year process of slowly not feeling my heart in the engineering work anymore and slowly focusing on, oh, I want to be a coach. And I want to help people talk through the things going on in their life and really find their authenticity, really find their community, really find their unique voice out in the world and how they can help people, right? And helping people help people is how I built this business really to be. And that's great, and I feel super amazing about that. But it ultimately led me to quitting that really lucrative, that really great environment, a job that I absolutely did love to do, something difficult to do, something more aligned with who I wanted to be and how I wanted to contribute out in the world. And I hope you all have these moments where you can reflect, right? That you take the vacation, you read something or you journal about your life and you're like, oh, okay, maybe this wasn't such a positively driven decision, but maybe this was a response to growth, this is a response to change, or this is a response to transformation. Because I think that's where this bittersweet idea really comes into effect. Any case, I feel like I got to the point of this short podcast episode where I'm rambling. So I'll wrap it up, but definitely go check out Susan Cain's book, Bittersweet. I think someday I would love to interview her on the podcast. I think that'd be super fun and hopefully you guys are still around when that happens. Cause I'm sure it will at some point with that. Guys, yeah, take your breaks. Really make sure you do the self reflection to learn more about yourself. If you need help with that, let me help you become a better helper out in the world through high performance coaching. Link is below in the links in the show notes. That'll all that jazz. And we'll see you next week with a really powerful interview with the Journeyman Collective guys. So until then, this is Sean Butner signing off live with more joy, more growth, and more impact. We'll see you then.