Protecting Your Peaceful Base

How are you? It is The Daily Boost from MotivationToMove.com. My name is Scott Smith. Good to have you here today. What kind of show are we going to have today?

If you notice, if you listen to me, listen, I'm an ever-changing person. I'm a complex guy. If you expect me to show up and be funny all the time, probably not going to be. If you expect me to show up and just give you deep, deep content all the time, probably not going to happen.

If you expect me to be dramatic all the time, it's not going to happen. If you expect me to mix it up all the time, it's not going to happen. What's going to happen? I don't know.

I do know this. I pay attention to kind of what's going on with humans, including me. And I walk in here and I absolutely refuse to be put between the lines. And either you dig me or you don't.

And if you don't, that's cool. Come on back tomorrow. You might like me tomorrow. But today, a little bit different from the previous week, I think Monday and Tuesday and even Wednesday this week, I was in a storytelling mode.

I was kind of trying kind of a little bit different format, trying a different way of presenting what I do to you. A little storytelling, maybe a little funnier, I don't know, a little bit more dramatic.

And then today I walk in, I said, I just kind of feel like just being real. I was real then too, by the way, that's me. I said, well, let's chill a little bit today. Let's just talk about some cool stuff and teach you about something that is probably causing some overwhelm in your life.

And you don't know why. Now, a lot of what I do, it's a natural place for me, is I just try to figure myself out. I always try to figure out, well, why is this not working for me? Or why is this working?

Why did I think that way? I've always been that way. And I'm not trying to optimize myself because there's a lot of stuff out there in the world of personal growth that just doesn't work.

And so much of it has been copied by everybody else. And people who teach it don't even know what they're talking about. And I've tried everything. I've read the books.

I've been to the seminars. I've done this a very, very long time. I don't want to sound negative, although I probably will. But, you know, sometimes if you pit something to me, I'm like, blah, take it away.

I know that doesn't work. I've tried it before. Well, you just didn't do it right. No, your version. It may work for you. It's not going to work for me.

So I've just got to figure stuff out. So I'm always looking and saying, well, scientifically... If I can dig into my brain and say, why did I do this or why didn't I do it? Is there a reason for it?

And that's kind of what spurred this call today. Another thing that happened, I want to tell you something just to be very frank, and maybe I shouldn't do this now. It's fine, but it's not a big deal. I want to give you my framing and my perspective on this.

So you might hear me as a podcast, right? I do a podcast for you. I show up, I do this thing. I don't know why. It's free. It's all over the world. It's who I am.

It's how I like to express myself. Sometimes it makes zero sense to do it because I understand that 99% of the people, if not more, to me, I'm just this guy. I'm an MP3. That's all I am.

This guy you might like to listen to, your guy you listen to, whatever. You're not going to send me an email. You can talk to me. You don't care. I'm going to change your life in a cool way, and I'm happy with that, and that's cool.

But at the end of the day, this is what I do, and I like to do it, but I spend my time in front of humans. And you get the benefit of that, honestly, because I bring that to you. I just tell you that, to be honest with you, okay? How much time do I spend?

Can I lay something down for you? I've got 5,400-plus episodes. I've done this a lot, and this is a minor part of what I do. Just in the past two and a half years, I did the math this morning.

It's an estimate, but it's very close to it. In the past two and a half years, I've spent nearly 3,000 hours of coaching people. I'm sitting in front of individuals or groups and

20 plus hours a week for the last two and a half years. I've done it a lot because I'm kind of in a stage of life now where I have the time to do it. I'm also really trying to figure out just all this hockey, pooey stuff they taught us over the years. It doesn't work.

And I've spent time doing that. The only way you can do that is actually get in the lives of other people and spend time with them. So today I'm going to teach you something that I've been kind of tap dancing around for a while. And I had a lesson on it yesterday and I presented it to my face your passion coaching group today.

And it's one particular line in this that they really grasped it onto. I'll make sure that you get to today as well. Okay. All right. So a client yesterday, she's in San Diego.

relatively new to me about five weeks, maybe, maybe six in, which is a cool time when you're working with somebody. Cause it takes a few weeks just to kind of get used to each other and to get the trust built and the whole thing. And, and for me actually to get to know people, cause people lie, they don't mean to lie. They just omit.

That's all they do. Take some time. But once I can get to know them a little bit, we can start to sort things out and we do, it works out pretty well.

So I got on the call yesterday and she says, man, it's amazing how, how much things can change in a week. Now, as a guy who's helping people kind of make the best of their life, when I hear that, it's like, oh, yay, win, win, win, here it comes, right?

And she was smiling the whole time. Maybe that's what threw me off. She was smiling. It's amazing how much things can change in a week. What I didn't understand was the amazing part was just like, whoa, freaking amazing how things can just go into the toilet in a week.

That's kind of what she was really saying. I didn't know that. I didn't know it until about... I don't know, maybe 20 minutes in. Well, I knew it instantly, but 20 minutes, I was like, man, what a hole we're in here now, right?

So here's what happened. I teach a concept called the peaceful base, and that basically you can't build a cool life on a hot mess. If your life is in chaos, you cannot do the things you want to do. If you're a parent, you might have hot mess kids.

They'll figure it out, right? If you're a parent, you've probably gone through a hot mess yourself. And you do eventually when you got things settled, when your money was right, your relationship was right, your spirit was right, you had your body in check, you had your time management done. When you had all that stuff taken care of, life is pretty good and pretty settled, right?

So I teach peaceful base, and that's what that is. We go in and we basically say, let's lock down a base that is good for you because we know we can't build beyond that. Most people, what they want to do is they want to get rid of everything that is in front of them and throw it away and then go do something new. Well, the challenge is if you do something new and you don't have a solid base, you're going to fail every single time.

You have probably seen people do it, and you've probably done it yourself more times than you would admit. I've seen it again and again. It happens to me all the time. I'm just willing to admit it and talk about it.

So I started this peaceful base concept and began to teach it. And it's one of those things that as a guy who coaches and works with other people, I don't really care what I come up with. I'm an idea machine. I study a lot.

I come up with, I make connections between things that maybe other people haven't made before. And I go out and I test them in front of you and other people.

And some of them are tests, but about 80% of them work pretty well. And about 20% work exceptionally well. Peaceful base is one of them. So she told me about her amazing life.

And how amazing life had been for the past week. And I'm all excited. I got my sleeves rolled up. I'm ready to go. Let's go hear this story, right? And then it fell apart.

She had let some people into her life. I won't say, I'm not going to give you details. So let a person into her life, actually, that became multiple persons.

And suddenly life, within seven days, I talked to her just seven days ago. Her life was not what it was a week ago. How many times that happened to you?

It does, right? It makes you want to not talk to anybody. But it happened. So we got talking in a conversation after I worked her through the process, and she knew what she did.

She didn't want to talk to me anymore about it. Okay, fine, move on. But I brought it to my Face Your Passion coaching group today, and I titled it today, Protecting Your Peaceful Base.

Usually when I start the coaching call, we do it 7 a.m. on a Wednesday morning. I'll start with probably about 15 minutes of some really solid, hard teaching to get the call going in a right order. And these are very mature people, very mature in their life, mature in their personal growth, mature in their businesses.

So I start with a pretty high level for them right away, right first thing in the morning. But I call it protecting your peaceful base, which everybody wants to do. So let's start with the lie about protecting your peaceful base.

A truth that I've known forever, and maybe you do too, and you just haven't admitted, is that every single action you take has a multiplying effect to it.

Even not taking action will have a multiplying effect to it. If you ignore something long enough, it's amazing how much goes bad. Every action you take has a multiplier effect to it. It's not a single action, which is why sometimes people say, like Tony Robbins, take massive action, and then your life freaking falls apart.

Because if you take a couple of actions, they multiply. And before you know it, it's out of control, right? You've seen it. The decision part of to take the action, that is actually the easy part of what you're doing here.

And what comes after is where most of your plans die. So it's a lie about action. Yes, action is the way they happen. What the hell happened there? My tongue just died for about 30 seconds.

Oh, well, we move on. Yeah, so that's a lie. Action is what you need to do. If you won't get off your ass and go do something, you're going to get nothing anyway.

But when you do get off your ass, you're going to get a lot of what you want and more of what you didn't expect. It's just going to happen, right? Are we on the same page?

Yeah. We are. Okay. What happens after that? Well, it's a math issue. Now, I'm not great at math. I'm really smart. Back in ninth grade, they said, Scott, take algebra.

I said, no. They said, why not? I said, I know the future. In the future, I won't need you. I don't do farming. I don't do engineering. I don't need algebra.

I got a calculator and friends and I know how to operate spreadsheets. I'm awesome. So, and I stand by it. I'm doing okay. I'm actually pretty good numbers, even though I don't know algebra.

It's math. It's not just you, okay? Two people together, get together. And you have a conversation. That's one conversation. It's two people, one conversation.

Doesn't matter what your opinions are. It's one conversation, right? Agreed? Ever go to like a theme park with you and your wife? And it's great. You just kind of meander around.

You have a great time. But what if you take like another two families with you? That's a stressful day, guys. What do you want for lunch? Which ride should we go to next?

Boom, it falls apart. When I ride my motorcycle, my wife and I go out, we ride together. My Harley Davidson Street Glide, big bike, both of us together. And we're great together, obviously.

And then if I ride with one other bike, really good. It's easy. Want to pull over and get some gas? Want to stop and get something to eat? No problem.

Ride with three, four, five other bikes, it gets to be a problem. Everybody's doing their own thing. If you have five people, you have the equivalent of 10 conversations. It exponentially multiplies.

If you have 10 people, it becomes 45 conversations. Yeah. Go to a small group. Go to someplace where you get even 10 people and watch how much complicated your life gets.

Actually, if you want to see how complicated your life gets, get involved with a group of five or 10 people. Just get involved with them and get on a group text.

How many times have you been with a group that you love the group, you love the people, and the text starts flying and you silence the text and you leave the thread?

It multiplies and nobody can stop it. Now, this is called Brooks Law. And there's a few people who have studied this effect over time. Brooks is the one that we'll talk about specifically today.

What's happening is we're getting some communication channels that are operating. And between people, they grow exponentially. I'm not going to give you the formula for it because it's really complicated and you wouldn't understand it on a podcast anyway.

Every person you bring into anything isn't a plus one. They're a multiplier. If you add one person to a team, it's not a plus one. It's multiplied versus the entire team.

They have their own questions, their own timing, their own opinions. And the wheels come off right after you bring people in. Just one person. You're not crazy.

It happens. The math just caught up with you. So this happens all the time. So I'll go a step further and say that it's not just a person. It could be AI as well.

AI is additive. If you notice, if you use ChatGPT, it says, would you like me to tell me about this? Would you like to know about this? It's additive.

It gets you more. If you use it enough, you understand that AI, it goes way beyond even that. It's so crazy how much it adds. So the more you use it, even if you're trying to get smarter and find more free time in your life, you'll end up with more things on your mind, more loops that are open and more stress that happens because you literally have busted your peaceful base.

Why does the peace break? A peaceful base is built for stillness and it shatters the first time you move. You built everything around you to maintain status quo.

That's cool. But the minute you get more than that, things fall apart. That's why you can have a perfect life, and then Christmas season comes, and suddenly everything falls apart. Even though you know to build in capacity for Christmas.

You should do that, and some of you do. A peaceful place fails because it's built for stillness, and it shatters when you move. Now, we don't do that around here. We actually do it differently.

A reframe of this is a real peace isn't in stillness. Real peace is capacity. So you build your peaceful base for the capacity you want to have in your life. So if your capacity is you want to be around a ton of people doing lots of things, working with hundreds of people all the time, your peaceful base must take in the fact that you have the multiplying factors of all these people that are going to mess your life up.

You're going to have multiple tech streams, multiple challenges, all good because you chose to be there. I'm not saying this is bad, but you must build a capacity in. You can't build, there's a lot of people do this. I just don't have a calm, cool weekend.

Well, you can't predictably have a calm, cool weekend if you brought in 100 or 200 people in your life or you're on Facebook all the time, whatever you're doing. It just is going to break it. This firewall just dissolves.

Real peace isn't stillness. It's built on capacity. That's the line that everybody grabbed onto in my Face Your Passion coaching group. So what do we do about this?

Well, we need to protect the margin. So a lot of people are optimizing for a full life. You're trying to do that. That's not what you do. If you go back to my perfect week planner, a lot of you have it.

A lot of you don't. A lot of you missed the concept of that. You don't realize that I'm not optimizing for your busy life. I'm not optimizing so you can do more.

I'm not optimizing for that. I'm optimizing by protecting the empty. That's what I'm optimizing for. So I understand I'm building my peaceful base on the capacity I want to have.

I want to be a high performer. I want to deal with a lot of people. I want to travel, whatever it is. I want to make a lot of money. That's a different peaceful base than somebody who just wants to chill and go to the park on the weekends.

So stop optimizing for everything, but optimize for the empty. So you look at your calendar. Again, if you have the perfect week planner, it's at motivationtomove.com. You can get it.

If you have that, you'll realize that what I'm doing is striving for an empty calendar, nothing on my calendar, or if you're in the UK, nothing on my diary.

If you have it, I'm optimizing for empty. And yet I'm looking at the entire thing and saying, how do I want to live my life? Is it going to be really busy or not really busy? And then I'm protecting to make sure that happens all the time.

Does that make sense to you? I sure hope it does because I spend a lot of time with this and my clients. This is probably the biggest thing we do as we accelerate and grow and give their aspirations some life, kind of take their goals and turn them into reality via their anticipation engine. We have to protect the peaceful base and make sure it's been designed to handle what capacity they have in their dreams.

And if not, they're going to sidestep and fall apart. That's my whole coaching thing. If you're interested in that, go to motivation2move.com. There is more there and I can teach you a ton about it.