The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 310 - Under Your Nose

Transcript:

Jen: Hello there, Peter.

Pete: Hello there, Jennifer.

Jen: You know those times when you're like, "This problem is in my life and I just can't solve it, and I've tried so many different things." And then all of a sudden, like a flash of lightning, you realize you've been looking at the solution in plain sight, right under your nose, the entire time.

Pete: I mean, I'm vaguely familiar with that experience. It's happened to me once, or twice, or thirty five times. I also feel like most of our good episodes start with a big deep breath from Jen Waldman, and a, "You know...?" So, I'm excited for this. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Jen: Alright, Pete, so here's the deal. During the summer, I have a routine I just love so much. And I should say that that routine involves working out very consistently.

Pete: Morning exercise...you love it, yeah. Getting in the sun.

Jen: That's right.

Pete: Getting to the beach. Oh, so good. Makes me so jealous.

Jen: Love it, love it, love it. And then, when we get back to the school year, everything becomes a little more complicated. Because I am very much a morning person. I like to work out the second I wake up. And I live in a two-bedroom apartment in New York City, with a living room. And so my options are work out in my bedroom where my husband's sleeping, or work out in my living room where my daughter's about to wake up to get ready for school and keep walking through. And I've done it, but it hasn't been enjoyable for me. And in particular, in the winter, it's just like I can't even get outside. Anyway, I have lamented for years how disrupted my workout regimen gets when the school year starts. So I know this is long-winded, but hopefully stick with me, friends.

Pete: No, this is great.

Jen: So I've been doing, through the gym that I love, Mark Fisher Fitness, their remote classes, since I'm not in New York City right now. And the other day, I had to fly to New York to do some work, and I was like, "Okay, I'm going to wake up. I'm going to do my workout at home. And then, I'm going to go to the studio and see my clients." And then, I realized I hadn't left myself enough commuting time. So I was like, "No! My routine is screwed." And then, I go, "Wait a minute. I could go work out at the studio." So, I go to work. I work out. I cleanse myself, get some makeup on and throw on some clothes. My client walks in, and it's a beautiful day. And all of a sudden, I go, "Are you kidding me?" You know, I have had my own dedicated space since 2018, I guess 24/7 access to my own space for six years. And I failed to recognize this asset under my nose, which is, "I have a place to do this."

Pete: Ah, it's right there.

Jen: I literally couldn't believe it when it occurred to me, Pete.

Pete: That's so funny. And you have multiple options in your studio, too. You could change rooms.

Jen: Yes. And at the hour I'm working out, I could run around the whole darn building. I could run up and down the stairs, through the elevator, through the hallway. I mean, it was wild. So, I have since purchased all of the equipment that I need.

Pete: Oh my gosh, great.

Jen: And I'm committed to keeping up my fitness routine by working out at work.

Pete: This is great. Okay, I love this for you. Firstly, I thought you were going to say that you could build it into your commute, like you could run or you could ride a bike, so that was where my mind went. But your solution is maintaining the same workout which you like doing, the same program that you like being able to do, which is not necessarily running from the Upper West Side to Downtown, like that's quite a run. So, I like your solution. This just randomly occurred to you? Like taking a step back from the fact that this is you and your morning workout routine, I feel like the thread is, how do we find these solutions that are right in front of us? What do we learn from this? How did you discover this thing that was right under your nose, as it were?

Jen: Well, let me tell you, Pete. This is how it happened.

Pete: Alright, here we go. Here we go. She's rolling up her sleeves, folks.

Jen: Our trainer, the previous class, said, "What is one thing you're committing to this week?" And we all had to share. And I said, "Doing away with the excuse that, 'I'm traveling,' means I don't have to exercise."

Pete: Oh, yeah. As someone who travels a lot, I feel called out.

Jen: And I said that pretty smug, because I had already planned I was going to work out in my living room. And then, when I realized I hadn't left myself enough time, I had to make good on this promise I had made to my group that I was not going to use, "I'm traveling," as an excuse. I had to quickly figure something out. And then, it occurred to me.

Pete: Nice. So I hear, accountability to a group of peers, or accountability to a cohort of people.

Jen: And not being a liar to myself...that was also part of it.

Pete: Right. Oh, interesting. And not being a liar to yourself...I like that, yeah. So for me, it becomes a reminder that, you know, we've talked about in various different ways in three hundred-odd episodes of this podcast, of like, "Who are you surrounding yourself with and/or who are you getting coached by? Or where are you building in accountability? What do you know about yourself around your Four Tendencies, if you use Gretchen Rubin's framework? And can you set yourself up for success to be able to do the things that you want to do, knowing that?" You know, James Clear comes to mind. Like all of these things are coalescing in this one example that you shared, this slightly comical but very real example. And ultimately, it comes down to knowing myself. Like you could ask ChatGPT for a workout, and it would give you one for free. But you know that you like Mark Fisher Fitness, you like their online program, and that comes with a community of people who are like-minded and keeping you accountable. So like, you know that about yourself, which has helped create the conditions for you to have this aha moment.

Jen: And the subsequent aha moment, which I've been trying to share with as many clients as possible. Every time I do my quarterly review at the end of the quarter for the clients, this is phrased in a different way. But I realize like, this can become a more daily kind of question, which is, "What assets, experiences, opportunities exist for you right now that you haven't leveraged or haven't seen as a potential leverage point?" So like in this case, I have the asset of this gorgeous space on 28th Street, and I've only been using it for one purpose. So then, it's like, "Oh, what else could I do with this space, now that I've figured out that it's also going to be my gym?" But like, I had a client I was on with earlier today who's about to go out of town to do a gig that he's not entirely excited about and is kind of like, "Oh, this is just like draining several weeks of my life." And I was like, "Well, what about this opportunity could you leverage for yourself? Like what opportunities are embedded in it that you haven't let yourself see, because you've been sort of bemoaning the fact you have to do it? What's there?" And we came up with a list of like fifteen incredible things he could get out of this experience that are just built in, that he hadn't even noticed. So yeah, I feel like this like, "What do I have that I haven't looked at through a creative lens," or like, "What opportunities might be in there for me to discover? How do I mine gold out of this thing?"

Pete: Okay. So I need to take a deep breath, because you just reminded me of one of my favorite exercises / acronyms / frameworks / projects that I have done, you have done, our clients have done, our friends have done. And it was something I learned as a student first, in the AltMBA, which is an online leadership workshop, built and run by Seth Godin. And one of the projects is about an ABN, this idea of an ABN. Now, if you're in Australia, you might think "Australian Business Number", which is like the number that you need to register your business. It's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about an acronym that stands for Assets, Boundaries, and Narratives. And what the project forced us to do, if I remember it correctly, was list out, "What are all the assets you have, physical, software-related assets, mental-related assets, skills that you have, physical traits that you might have, like what are all of the assets that you have at your disposal?" Like, "I have a laptop. I have an internet connection. I have indoor plants. I have books. Like, what are all of the things that you can possibly think of? Then, the next step is to write about, "Okay, and what are the boundaries that you're setting?" And you want to have something in particular in mind. And you create a bunch of lists. So basically, you've got two lists, a bunch of assets and a bunch of boundaries. Then, the third part was, "What narratives can you tell? Can you create? What stories might you tell yourself and tell others based on these two things?" So in your case, you told yourself a story that your asset of a studio space had a boundary on it, which is, it wasn't a gym. Whether you realized that was a story you were telling yourself or not is kind of beside the point, but that's sort of the story that you can imagine you were telling yourself. All of a sudden, you looked at that exact same asset, took away the boundary, and created an entirely different narrative. And so, the reason I had to take a deep breath is because I feel like I'd forgotten about this exercise and how powerful it is. I've had so many people that took the altMBA but also clients of mine that I introduced this to have said to me, it's like their favorite mental model for using, to help them see different possibilities. List your assets. List your boundaries. And then, come up with as many different narratives as you can, just by emphasizing or de-emphasizing certain things. End rant. Deep breath. Exhale, Pete.

Jen: No, no, no. Don't end the rant.

Pete: Okay.

Jen: It's too good. I want you to give us at least two more examples of this.

Pete: Alright.

Jen: Because I think...like my story, everybody heard it. They get it. Give us another one.

Pete: Okay. This happened to a lot of people during Covid. We have assets as a business that are employees, and an office space, and laptops, and computers, and servers, and resources, and meeting rooms, and lights, all the things that go into an office space. The boundary is that we want our people in the office five days a week, because that's how we've always done it and that's the way we work. And the story we can then create is, "We bring our people to a centralized office because that builds culture, and it's the way we work and how we get things done, and anything else is probably going to not result in us doing as much work as effectively and profitably." All of a sudden, now this was forced. The boundary gets removed or changed. So, we still have the same assets. We still actually have our building. We still have our employees. They still have computers. We still keep our servers. But the narrative we now have to be able to tell is, "Oh, we can work remotely from home, because we have to, i.e. the boundary of, "We don't do that," has been removed and the narrative had to shift. And all of a sudden, what happened is, people realized (not in all contexts, but in some contexts), "We're just as profitable, if not more. We're just as effective, if not more. People can still collaborate in a slightly different way." And so, the entire narrative of what work looked like changed.

Jen: Mmm. Okay, give me one more, Pete. I'm totally nerding out right now, in the best way possible.

Pete: Okay. One that I think about a lot, because the question I get asked so much as someone who has a...I mean, it feels uncomfortable saying, but I have a successful business in the leadership development space, where I do a bunch of coaching, facilitation, and leadership development programs for companies around the world. The question I get asked most frequently is, "Are you going to train up other coaches? Are you going to expand your team? Are you going to bring on more people to do more work?" And my answer, at the moment, is, "No." Because I don't want to do that. So if I look at the ABN, I have assets in that I have myself, my laptop, my brain, frameworks, programs, pre-recorded courses, and a philosophy for approaching coaching and leadership development that I think is pretty good. The boundary at the moment, that I've set, is that everything that comes out of my business comes out of me. And the narrative that I tell is that, "I like that, because it allows me to do the work which I love doing, which is the actual delivery. I also love talking to other clients and trying to grow the business, so I don't feel like I want other people to come in and do that. And I like the nimbleness that allows me as a business, and I think my clients appreciate the nimbleness that it allows me as a part of my business." Now, there are certain things that I can't do as a result, which I'm totally okay with and certain clients are totally okay with that. Others might go elsewhere because they don't like the fact that it's essentially a one-man band, even though I do collaborate with people like you or partners that I have here in Australia, if and when it's appropriate. I could take that asset, remove that boundary, and start to tell a story, if and when I decide to expand my team and grow my team, that is, "I have this asset, and I now want to train people about how I think about leadership development, how I think about executive coaching. I want to bring on a team. I want to build up clients that are bigger and better." And the story we can now tell is, "We're a team of twenty people, ten people, fifteen facilitators," whatever it ends up being, "still using the same asset, just with a different boundary, and then bringing in a different narrative." Does that make any sense at all?

Jen: It makes so much sense. And I hope you know I adore you and I love talking to you, but I can't wait for this now to be over, so I can go do this exercise. This is what I'm going to spend the night doing, and I cannot wait. Because I see, Pete, the ways in which I've limited myself in the past. And even though I didn't consciously run it through this framework, most of the great strides I've made in my own personal development and in my professional development have been a result of changing a boundary around an asset.

Pete: Yeah, yeah. I agree, me too. The thing I love that is sort of embedded in and implied in this whole process is that we are all walking around with a bunch of assets. We're all walking around with a bunch of boundaries, whether we realize it or not. And we tell ourselves stories, productive or not, based on those two things. The thing I love that is implied through this is we have a choice to tell ourselves a different story or tell others a different story, based on leveraging or de-leveraging or removing or doubling down on the same assets and boundaries. In the examples I've shared, I talked about removing boundaries. You could actually double down on a boundary, and that becomes a different narrative that you might start to tell others as well. For example, "I'm absolutely not working on Mondays anymore," is a boundary that I've now set. So, if and when a client comes to me and says, "Can you do something on a Monday," the narrative I have is, "I don't work Mondays, because I spend it with my son. Happy to work with you Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday." So like, you can double down on boundaries as opposed to assets, as well. Oof, you got me fired up.

Jen: Woof, this is so good. This is so good. And now, to bring it all the way back around full circle to where we started, Pete...

Pete: I forget where we started. I forget what we were talking about. Please bring it back.

Jen: Well, we started with the fact that the solution was right under my nose the whole time, and I didn't see it.

Pete: Right.

Jen: That, what I love about this exercise is you move from unconscious to conscious. Like I'm looking around this room right now, and I'm going to see it in a way that I hadn't five minutes ago, where I'm looking around and going, "What is right under my nose right now?"

Pete: Right, right, right, right.

Jen: Like, "What is here that I've just so taken for granted, or is just so a part of my everyday existence that I don't even notice it's there?"

Pete: Yeah. And how often we...I speak for myself, I guess, in particular...how often I tell myself a story that I need other things, or I need new assets, or I need to completely reinvent something. When actually, it might just be, "What if I leveraged or de-emphasized or re-emphasized or refocused on something that I already have that's under my nose?" Ironically, over the top of my computer, I can see my SLR camera with my fancy studio mic and my light. And like, I've got this whole studio set up over there. I'm like, "Oh yeah, there's assets that I haven't used for a couple months. Maybe I need to reemphasize those."

Jen: Yeah, they are right under your nose. Well, I am fired up, Pete.

Pete: And we've got to let you go, by the sound of it.

Jen: Yeah. Sorry, friends, got to run. Got to run...lots of ABN about to take place over here.

Pete: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.