Hey, it's David. Welcome back to A Changed Mind, A Sanctuary for Your Spirit, a place where each and every episode, I will remind you of the certainty of the goodness of the future. I am your friend, your host, your guide, a guy who's just translating some of his own experiences that have been very, very difficult and also a lot of wonderful experiences into frameworks so that you can have a powerful living experience. And so I'm really excited about this episode because as you probably know, we believe in entrepreneurship. I believe that entrepreneurship is what's gonna change the world. I believe that entrepreneurship is really the only way to have true financial freedom, time freedom, location freedom, emotional sovereignty, psychological sovereignty. And it's an opportunity for you to package up what it is that has been working through you through your own life experiences and render it into something that you can give the world. And the reward for that is financial income and financial prosperity and abundance. So today's conversation is gonna be about how do we manage action versus rest? How do you know when you should be taking action in your business, when you should be doing things, when you should be pursuing opportunities, when you should be working on your copywriting or putting together your offers or going out there and networking or trying to figure out how to build a funnel or whatever it is, all the daily activities in your business as you grow and scale, managing a team and hiring new people. There's all this action and activity. How do you know when you should be active or when you should rest? How do we find the balance between creating in our lives in a way that inspires us, but also taking the necessary downtime in order to recharge and allow innovation and new ideas to emerge? And my experience is, up until recently, I haven't been very good at that. Even when I'm not working, I'm thinking about work and I'm passionate about my work. So I'm thinking about something that I'm passionate about, but maybe you've had an experience where you know that it's time for you to rest and to no longer think about whatever it is that you're creating, even though you're excited about it, but you just simply can't rest, or you feel guilty about taking some time off or some time down, and then you end up in this very uncomfortable no-man's land of you're kind of sort of resting and you're not being productive in your business, but you're not also resting and recharging. And so I want to address that today because that gap is really, really important. I think in order to be a successful, impact-driven human being or entrepreneur, you have to understand the internal emotional seasons that are taking place within you and to be able to operate appropriately depending upon what season is active. Is it an action season or is it a rest season? And so this came up recently in one of my private client conversations, and the problem that they were experiencing were things like, on one hand, burnout with hustle and grind and pushing so hard all the time with very little rest or superficial rest, as I talked about a moment ago, like I'm not working, but I'm still working in my head. My nervous system has not down-regulated. I am not recharging. I'm not being fully present right now for whatever the experience is, whether it's a vacation or a trip to the aquarium or Disneyland or spending time with your kids. Obviously, that's what's on my mind a lot now since Gabriel's 20 months old. That's a lot of my downtime. Or even really taking time to meditate or go to the gym or be in wellness or spend time with friends. Many entrepreneurs are just actively burning out. They're wearing and tearing on their neurophysiology, on their biology, on their mind. They're not operating at the highest level. And then on the flip side of that, you have a set of people, and I've been in both groups, who are just procrastinating, not really doing much work in what we would call self-sabotage, kind of dabbling. This is someone who's probably spending a lot of time on social media, not that you can't be spending a lot of time on social media as someone who's also pushing too hard and burning out. But if you think about some of the activities maybe growing your business, it's like I'm working on the fifth banner on my Facebook fan page and really fine-tuning it even though I have no fans. Or I'm overhauling my website even though nobody comes to my website. Kind of procrastinating activities and also spending a lot of time in worry, in anxiety, in overwhelm. I mean, I think both groups of these people could be in overwhelm, but dabbling. And then there's a lack of commitment with this sort of latter group, right? The people who aren't taking as much action. Where there's a lack of commitment, there's self-criticism, there's feeling like you should be more disciplined, that you should be doing more. And so, most people fall into one of these two categories. And the challenge is that if we're not in appropriate rest, then we're not in the space where innovation emerges, new ideas, new creativity. We're not in the space of connecting with ourselves. Because ultimately, I believe that your business is just, I guess I would describe it as a rendering process of your own journey. In other words, you've had this life, and maybe past lives. You've accumulated character and skills, values, business experience, life experience. And when you're an entrepreneur, you're now in the process of rendering that information into a set of structures. Sales, marketing, offers, your story, your team. That represents a version of you, which we would call a business. And if you're able to authentically render who you've become over the course of your life into these business structures or frameworks, then you end up having a successful, authentic, impact-driven business that's profitable and a wonderful culture and place for people to thrive within. You're creating an ecosystem, basically, out of who you've become. And that's super amazing, right? Like, to think about business that way. And it's why we're so passionate about entrepreneurship. And so, how do we know when we should be taking action in our business or when we should be resting? And a lot of what I've been teaching comes down to being aware of how you feel. Yeah, we spend a lot of time looking at our thoughts, looking at our limiting beliefs, using these incredible tools that we have, like the decision matrix, to transform limiting beliefs into new empowered decisions or to identify what I would call the unintelligent thinking that emerged from the early programming of our lives. And in seeing the thinking as unintelligent, there's this radical moment of transformation where you realize, oh my gosh, that was never even true. And it changes your perception of yourself, it changes your perception of the experience of your life, and then it changes your life. And so, we do work a lot on the psychological side, but the guidance system is an emotional one. And so, it's important to start paying attention more and more and more to how we feel, because our nervous system will indicate what season we should be in. Should we be in action or should we be in rest? So, there's a belief, oftentimes, and you may even be in this place, that you know you should be resting. But there's kind of two things that come up. Like, I don't even really know what rest looks like because it's been so long since I've rested. And I've got so many commitments and obligations in my business. Like, I have things to do. We've got a product launch in three months, we're hiring some new people, we've got a thing that didn't go well that we're now having to do some damage control around. Like, I can't rest. And I understand that. I understand how that feels. I mentioned before, in an episode where I talked about Parkinson's Law around how to hack time, that as long as we continue to give ourselves to what we've created, in other words, our business, in the form that it's in, it'll continue to suck all the time and energy out of us. And that there are wisdom principles that, for example, Gandhi spoke into where he said, I have so much to do today that I must meditate for two hours instead of one. It's like, hold on a minute. You got so much to do. When I have so much to do today, I meditate for no hours instead of one. You're saying meditate for two hours. Gandhi understood, and Einstein actually proved this or illustrated this mathematically, that time is flexible in the sense that it is based on the observer. And so you have a lot of things to do in your business right now, let's say, but there are an infinite number of ways that those things could get done. And if you just continue to do the things you need to do in your business the way that you've been doing them, it'll consume all of the time and you won't have any space for rest. The paradox is that if you actually pay attention to your internal seasons and you say, I have to rest, and you put a little planning around it, say a week or two, maybe three, to make sure that some of the critical items in your business that need to be addressed get addressed by you or your team, but you decide that you're gonna take time to yourself, and we'll talk about what that time looks like in a second, the way that your business operates will evolve. It'll change. There'll be more efficiency that emerges. People will start to have different ideas than the ideas that they would have if you were not deciding to take some space for yourself. And so they'll start doing things in a more efficient way. Problems will be avoided. Certain things that you thought needed to happen on a particular schedule or timeline will change. A vendor or a customer that you were delivering something to will say, hey, you know what? We don't really need this for another month. We call these things synchronicities and coincidences, but it's really the response from your business to the decisions that you've made. So there'll be a recalibration that will accommodate the space that you wanna take, but you only realize that if you decide to take the space, right, if you decide to take three days off or if you decide that, hey, I'm gonna work with a little bit more space through my day-to-day. I'm gonna take an hour here, an hour there, or I'm gonna take a week vacation. I'm gonna talk in a moment here about how to think about taking space because it doesn't have to be super extreme. It doesn't have to be like one month off of work, but it is important to understand from a root cause or first principle standpoint, a metaphysical standpoint, that what you've done is you've taken an idea and you've turned it into something we can see physically in the world. Like you've materialized a business. That's pretty amazing, right? You're like a magician. You're like Dr. Strain, Harry Potter. You had this idea and boom, through thoughts and actions and emotions, both through your direct action that you've taken and also kind of synchronicities and coincidences, now you've got this thing that you've created and we can see it, it's material. And so it's important to understand that material things have gravitational pull, right? You've made something material. In physics, it's now matter. And so on an emotional level, this business matters to you, right? But on the physical plane, it's now physical, it's matter. And matter has a gravitational pull. And so oftentimes what happens as entrepreneurs is we create a business out of who we were a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, right? Who we were. Who were we? Well, that is the total sum of our emotional habits, our psychological habits. We would call that our consciousness. So out of a consciousness from a few years ago, you created this business and so this business is basically built upon your belief systems. It's now physical in the world, just like the Earth is physical in the solar system. And so your business has a gravitational pull. And so it's gonna continue to pull you into the empowered beliefs and the limiting beliefs that you were when you created the business. And so oftentimes we feel like we're orbiting now around our business. It's like it's gotten out of control. It got so big that like now we're a satellite or a moon that's like locked into its tractor beam. And so you have to be able to step away from the business. You have to disassociate yourself psychologically in the way you think about the business. Disassociate yourself emotionally in terms of how you feel about the business. Disassociate yourself physically in terms of your proximity to the business so that you can really check back in with yourself in terms of who you've become since you started this business. Recalibrate that vibration, meaning recalibrate those thoughts, recalibrate those ideas, and recalibrate that physical positioning. And then you go back into the business with sovereignty, with emotional and psychological freedom. And then you start to change the frequency of the business. This is actually, it's a super deep conversation and I love it because this is the real conversation about business. One of the things that we try to get to is the root cause of business success, the root cause of happiness, the root cause of financial prosperity, the root cause of relationship intimacy, the root cause of physical wellness and well-being, the root cause of spiritual development. And to get to the root cause, you have to look at the energetic drivers that are organizing what we then see in the physical world. I can't remember if it was Plato or Socrates who had the allegory of the cave. He talked about these people who were chained and they were living in a cave and there was a fire behind them. And the shadows of the people would be cast upon the wall. And because it was the only thing that the people who were chained ever experienced, they thought the shadows were real. They didn't realize the shadows were themselves. Well, similarly, there's a light behind us. It's energy. There's an energy behind physics and chemistry and biology. It's called metaphysics. It's energy and it is broadcasting a light and we're seeing the effect as it translates into physical form, which we would call our business. But a metaphysical approach or a spiritual approach, and this is why I believe that business is a spiritual game, entrepreneurship is a spiritual game, is understanding the energetics behind what we've materialized in our business. And so again, just to reiterate, you've changed in your consciousness, but your business has materialized. It's now matter. It matters. It has gravity. And so you'll experience situations as well that are like grave situations in the business. Those grave, like things that are problems, a grave situation or a situation that could actually take your business to the grave, that could kill your business, that's actually just the dissonance or the difference between who you are today now, ready to create in the present moment and what you created in the past. So you got to be able to take control, re-control of your business because it should be representing your vibration as you grow and evolve. When it doesn't represent your habit of thoughts and your habit of emotion and the.and the innovation and ideas that are trying to work through you as you're growing, when it doesn't represent that, then there are problems. So what do we do? We have to step back away from the business. We check in with ourselves and who we've become and then go back into the business. And so we do that through space. We won't give ourselves that space if we think that we have to continue to accommodate all the current needs of the business. And if we're not aware of the fact that, no, if you step away, the business will reorganize, do a little bit of preparatory work, but the business will reorganize in its efficiency and it will allow you to take the space, right? It will be okay. In fact, what won't be okay is if you continue to entangle with the business, where you're trying to move into a higher level frequency or you already have and the business has not caught up and you and the business continue to have that energetic friction between the two of you. So you've got to step back out, just like you did in the beginning and come back in and become master of your own business or really co-creator of your business with whatever your higher power is, right? Different conversation. But so, how do we take this step back? Well, it's really not about taking a week off or taking three days off. I think that's great and I think it's important. That's like a big reset. But it's more about, and you may need to do that, in order to give yourself access to what is, I think, the real practice, and that is on a day-to-day basis, having space. Because space, right, away from your business is where new ideas come from. If you actually pay attention to your thoughts, if you sit down and meditate, what you'll notice is that thoughts emerge from what we would call nothing, right? A thought is a thing, it's a thought. And as a thought evolves, it goes from a thought thing to an emotional feeling, that's a thing, right, an emotion is a thing, to action, right, action is a thing, to producing a result that you see in the world, a thing. This is the journey of things, thoughts to things. But if you look at where the thought came from, it actually came from no thing. It came from nothing, it came from space. It's the space of potential, right, what some people would call the quantum field. And so in order for you to be able to access the ideas that you need in order to support your business in its next evolution into an alignment with the frequency of who you've become, you have to take space, you use space. And so that space can be anything but the business, anything that connects you back to the frequency of really no thing, of nothing. That's why nature is so beneficial. Nature is a base reality, it's a base frequency. There isn't thought in nature. And so connecting in nature, going for walks, taking time for yourself to just be kind to yourself, for whatever that is. That might be going out and kayaking, it might be if you like to cold plunge, or go dancing, or go out to your favorite restaurant. Connection with other people is also an opportunity to get into non-business space. Meditation is great, reading is great. It takes your mind away from the thoughts around your business and it puts you in a different state. And so I get to do this today with my kid, right? I get to spend time with my year and a half year old and I'm not thinking about business. And what's interesting is that when my wife, Carol, and I came into this year, 2023, we had our big event, The Powerful Living Experience in February, and all I knew was we weren't gonna do the same thing after the event this year. We weren't gonna do the same thing we did last year or the year before. We weren't gonna do, I was open to not doing the things that helped us go from zero to $30 million in revenue over the last seven or eight years because we needed a change. Some of the things we were doing stopped working. Some of the things that we were doing, I realized I didn't love anymore. I was feeling burned out because I had to do things that I didn't wanna do and we took space. And it's been incredible over the last six to eight weeks how the strategy has naturally dropped in. And what's dropped in is some of the things that we used to do but doing them in a different way. Doing them from a higher level of consciousness. Doing them from the place that we've developed ourselves into today, not the place that we were developed into back in 2017, 2018 when we started the business. So now our business is operating at a higher frequency, a higher intelligence, new strategies, ideas that I had, for example, around building more partnerships, getting my content out there. And it feels really, really good. And before I recorded this podcast episode from nine to 10 in the morning, rather than feeling pressured that I needed to work, I got to spend time with my kid. I'm gonna record this podcast episode and I have some meetings that I'm excited about today and the nanny called and wasn't able to make it. And so if I have to cancel some of those meetings, I'm just gonna cancel them. And I'm okay with that. I'm in a place right now where I just feel okay with whatever's showing up in my business. And I don't feel like I have to, the business is not my taskmaster. And so there's a period of time where you decide this. You decide you're gonna take some space. You decide that you're no longer going to respond to your business as if it owns you. And there'll be a transition period where it's uncomfortable. Stuff's gonna show up that feels like it owns you. And it's okay for you to do those actions, but do it from a different emotional place. Don't do it from, oh God, I have to do this stuff. Do it from, I'm happy to do these things because I know that what's happening right now is a transition of my business into a business that is going to accommodate my decisions to live my life and not hustle and grind. So this is the space and how we use it. And you're able to take inspired action. The things that I'm doing in my business right now, again, this isn't some sort of law of attraction, take time away from your business and your business will just grow. No, what we're doing is we're wanting to put ourselves in a position where we can be living in inspired action and taking inspired action each day, each week, each month by allowing ourselves some space, by giving ourselves some grace and by stepping away. And it's a bit of a paradox because it's like, wait a minute, what you're telling me is I should actually just go dancing with my wife or my husband and that's gonna help me access the next level of ideas and efficiency for my business? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. You're telling me that when I feel like there's too much to do, I should just go play with my furry friend or go for a walk with my kid? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. You're saying, hey, instead of working on the weekends, I should actually go out on a boat or the water or do whatever I enjoy doing, going cycling or go back to church or meet up with friends? That's what I'm saying. You have to realize that's a business plan. A lot of times, especially in my private coaching program, my clients are wanting to double, triple, quadruple their businesses and they do. But their business plan initially is step away from the business because the only way we're gonna scale this baby to the next level is for it to be a true expression of you. And right now it's an expression of an old you and that's why you're experiencing all these conflicts and all this friction. Now on the flip side of this, just to speak to some of the folks who are in kind of paralysis, what I'm saying is when you start to feel overtaxed in your business and when you feel stressed and you feel overwhelmed, stop. That's what I'm saying. That's an indication that you're operating in an inappropriate way in an unmatched season, right? You're in a season of rest and you keep pushing and your nervous system is telling you, hey, this is what's going on and that's why you feel so stressed. Step away. Step away for a couple of days. Do the things that you need to do to try to make sure the critical things get handled in your business. Reset yourself and the ideal strategy is to actually learn how to live each day with space, whether that's in the morning, in the afternoon, with flexibility. Also know that if you need to cancel a meeting, you can cancel a meeting. The world's not gonna end. You know what? If God forbid you got into an accident and you ended up in the hospital, that meeting would be canceled and your business would survive. So stop acting like you're much more important than you are, you know? Life will go on. But then we have our friends who are like, oh, well, I don't feel good when I feel stressed, when I need to do the things I need to do to grow my business, like go out there and network or work on an online marketing campaign or write some social media content. That's different. That's fear that's coming up for you. And the opportunity there is to work through the fear. So there's some, remember, we have two types of people. We have the hustle and grinders and we have the procrastinators, indecision, self-sabotage dabblers, right? So for the dabblers, you gotta be aware that those are old programs and limiting beliefs coming up around how you're not gonna do it well or you're not gonna do it right or it's not gonna work out. And so that's causing you to distract yourself and you're not able to make progress in your business. That's fear and that fear needs to be worked through and that fear is actually worked through in two ways. One, you could take a look at the psychology that's taking place, you know, oh, I'm not good enough. You could use some phenomenal tools like what we teach, like the Decision Matrix to work through that limiting belief and uninstall that program. You could even go deep into the whole vehicle of deep transformation that we have, the whole human framework, where you can take a look at the resentments that you have, your core program, this feeling of not good enough and use the whole framework that we teach to address it psychologically and emotionally. Okay, that's helpful. You start to pull some of the weeds. Pulling the weeds allows you to take action where you're not taking action right now. It allows you to feel inspired where you're not feeling inspired right now. But odds are there's still gonna be something holding you back and there isn't any other way to actually work through what's holding you back than to take the action that you're feeling resistant to and do it. Do the thing. Every time you do something that you have some resistance or limiting beliefs around, encouraging you to not do it, but you do it anyway, you change your brain. You start to prune the neural networks that have the belief systems that were preventing you from actually doing the thing. It's like doing a new rep. You know, like when you go to the gym, you haven't been in the gym in like six months and you do some sit-ups and you can't even feel your abs. You just feel like you're hurling your nipples towards your knees, right? That's how it kind of feels in the beginning. You gotta just do it. It's like standing at the edge of, I have a cold plunge. I get on a cold plunge most mornings because I like putting myself in a position to do things that I don't wanna do. It makes it easier for me to do the things that I don't wanna do. It helps me build discipline. It helps me build commitment. So I jump in 42 degree water for anywhere from three to eight minutes early in the morning when that's the last thing that I wanna do. It's like jumping into the cold plunge. You gotta just do it. So you gotta just, you know, you gotta just do the outreach. You gotta just do the networking. You gotta just do, you know, build the presentation. You gotta just do the thing, write the copy. You gotta just ask the girl out. You gotta just ask the guy out. You gotta just do the thing. Because every time you do the thing and you realize that everything your mind was telling you in terms of the rejection or the denial or the failure or the embarrassment like didn't happen, then you're gonna rewire your brain. And it'll be much easier to do it the next time. It's the same thing as like, you know, picking up weights at the gym. You know, I just started getting back in the gym. I'm very excited that I've got like 35 pound dumbbells in my biceps that I can, you know, knock out, you know, three sets of 10 reps with. But I started out 90 days ago with like 10 pounders. So every time you do a rep, you get stronger and stronger and stronger. And so for our procrastinating, dabbling, lack of commitment friends, it's not so much about you taking space. It's about you doing the thing, right, in order to produce the results. So, you know, how do we find the balance between action and rest? Well, it's an emotional awareness. If you're in your business and you're taking action and you're stressed and you're overwhelmed, you need space. It's time for a re-innovation of the business because there's been an unconscious re-innovation of you taking place and there's now misalignment between your business and you. And by stepping away, you can reorganize yourself and then come back in with a stronger vibration, with a stronger psychology, with stronger emotions, with the new you, and then you can reorganize the business to the next level. Now, how do you find the balance between action and rest? Well, if you're resting way too much, but you're resting in fear, right, that's the difference. You're resting in fear because you know you should be doing certain things in your business that you're not doing. Well, in that case, the prescription is do the thing. Do the thing with the fear anyway. Really take it upon yourself to become excited about doing things that you're uncomfortable doing and perhaps build a regimen of discomfort. You know, I wake up in the morning and I meditate for 20 to 40 minutes a day. It's actually very uncomfortable for me because I have such a monkey mind. I don't want to do it every single morning, but I do it. I mentioned the cold plunge earlier. I hired a trainer who works with me virtually. He's one of the best trainers in the world, puts me through brutal workouts four days a week. Why? Well, one reason is I don't want to do it. But you know what's happened recently is like, now when I have to sit down and record a podcast episode, I have so much less resistance. All that like, oh, this isn't gonna be good enough or maybe I need to organize it more. Maybe I need to write an outline for it. The last episode didn't get that many views. I'm like, I don't give a shit. I'm just recording, recording, recording, recording, recording, posting, posting, posting, posting, teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching, coaching, coaching, coaching, coaching, parenting, parenting, parenting, parenting. Just doing it because the more I do it, the better I'm gonna get at it. And you know, I've heard that from a lot of other people that I look up to or people who have developed influence or success, and that seems to be the common theme. So for you hustle and grinders, get some rest. For you dabblers, take some action. And I love you guys so much. I hope this was helpful for you. By the way, one thing I ask, and I'm gonna start asking on every episode. You know, I don't have sponsors on the show. Sometimes I'll tell you about my book or an event coming up. But if you want to pay it forward, tell a friend about the podcast. Tell one person about this episode or another episode you've listened to. Say, hey, I found a great podcast and it's really helping me to reorient the way that I'm thinking around whatever it is that you listen to, right? In this case, business or money or relationships or law of attraction or whatever it is. And I think you should check it out and tell them about A Changed Mind. Because there are a lot of people out there who are in difficult psychological and emotional situations that are unnecessary and this show can help them, right? That's why we created the show. And the world is in a difficult, uncomfortable place right now. And the reason why it's in a difficult, uncomfortable place is because it's filled with people who don't know how to manage their mind effectively, who don't understand these root cause principles and who are just flailing around like the people chained in the cave, thinking the shadows on the wall are the reality and trying to fix the shadows on the wall. And that's why the world looks so crazy and why it seems like we're having such a lack of success of making a better world. The more people we can get listening to the show, the better the world is gonna be because we're gonna have better human beings who actually understand how it all works. So that's my one ask for you. Please, please, please tell a friend, all right? I love you so much. And I will see you on the next episode.