Trusting the Process

How are you? Well, come on in here. Let me ask you a question. Have you ever been up at 3 o'clock in the morning, maybe you just wake up and you're thinking to myself and yourself, myself, Freudian slip there, right?

When's it all going to work out? When's it going to go my way? Why is stuff such a hassle? Why, why, why, why, why? I don't want it to be that way. I need

It is The Daily Boost from MotivationToMove.com. That's where I hang out and my stuff is. It's all spelled out. Two big words, one little itty-bitty word.

MotivationToMove.com. Go there and check it out. Hey, it's me, Scott. Good to have it. Yeah, it's kind of what a way to start the show, right? But it's true.

We all feel that way. Even though you're upbeat, you're motivational, you believe the world can be yours, you can make whatever you want. Why not, right? But still, sometimes life gets in the way.

Talk about that all the time. How do you get through that? I just got off a phone call, well, a Zoom call with my inner circle group. What a great call.

And these happen, you know, several times a year, more than I would expect them to. Really deep calls. I'm going to share some of the thoughts with you today in random order. These are just notes that I just took during the call, which is kind of how I'm doing the podcast these days.

I'm not so much sitting down and saying, hey, let me go figure out what I'm going to teach you or anything like that. Instead, I'm taking what I just did, working with people and sharing it with you. That's kind of where I'm heading these days. And it's a much more organic way of doing things.

And frankly, a lot more fun. Yeah, life, trying to figure out the ups and downs of life can be a challenge. I was talking to my daughter the other day, and it's so funny. I'm still working on her on this, too.

Because I have this rolling feel that I want to have. I like to be a kind guy, but a practical guy. I'll be kind all the time to people if I can. I'm never going to be mean.

It doesn't have to be. It's like the old movie Roadhouse with Patrick Swayze. Be nice. Well, how do I know when not to be nice? I'll tell you. It's kind of the same thing.

I think be kind until it's time not to be kind. And there is a time. You're always still going to be kind, but sometimes you're like, okay, why did I have to do that? You have to, right?

It happens. Being real with you, okay? And the other thing is I really choose to live a joyful life. I really do. No matter what. No matter what goes on.

Good, bad, crazy. Sometimes you feel like I am not joyful about anything, and yet it's there. I think gratitude kind of slides into that as well. Some people very, very much in the gratitude side.

I just live in a grateful life all the time. I don't sit down and count my blessings all the time, but I know they're there. But joyful is interesting. I was talking to my daughter the other day and I said, I'm just joyful about things.

I just try to be no matter what happens. She goes, well, dad, joyful doesn't mean happy. I said, why not? I'm not stupid. I know it doesn't mean happy all the time, but happy is fleeting.

Happy comes and goes, but why not? Why can't I not be joyful and unhappy all the time? It's a nice goal, right? Why not? So that's where I live all the time, no matter what happens.

I kind of drift in and out and I just have moments just like you. I run a business. I have a lot of people I work with, a lot of people I pay and stuff like that.

And so, yeah, I just choose to be there. And then I come here and do kind of the Scott coaching confessional. You kind of hear me this confessional side of coaching where not only do I try to teach you something, I'm going to probably tell you too much about myself.

Man, can you be joyful today? So we just got off this call. Inner Circle call. I do this twice a week and it's just so cool. It's a very intimate conversation.

It is not flashy at all. In fact, today's call became, I said, guys, I'm going to check in with y'all and y'all think about it right now because I want to work on stuff. I want you to bring something to the table. We just want to have a conversation today and see where it goes.

And I never know what's going to happen when that happens. But when you have a group of people that have been together for a while and they trust each other, man, a magic happens.

So I want to share some of the things that popped out on today's call as we went through it. It all began with a member. I will not give names at this point because I don't want to track them down.

But one of our younger members, actually, she's right around a little bit less than 40 years old. And when she joined us, she was busy. Busy as a 40-ish person would be. I'm not going to say that.

She's not going to like me if I say that. But busy. You know, kids and got the big job and got all the stuff, the whole thing, life. But she was just crazed.

And we have slowly been working with her over time. When I say work with her, she's had a bunch of calls with me. She's a client with me as well. And what I do when I'm talking to people is I kind of slow you down.

One of the things that I do, and if you're a type A personality, this may be something you don't want to hear. But if you're a type A personality, when you've got everything going and yet it's still not quite right, I know to slow you down, to be a brick on you. I'm like a cement block and I tie myself around your ankle and you're not allowed to go very fast. And people hate it when I do that.

At the same time, there's all the freedom you want, except we're just going to go a little slower at it. When we started the call this morning, it was very interesting because she was a different person and everybody on the call knew it.

Several months have gone by, but because she's joined a group and she just slowed down and she was able just to kind of give things time to happen around her and sort through bosses and sort through people and give it the time it takes, you change.

You will change when you wear yourself out. That's a very positive thing for me. When I say that, that's not negative. I've just seen it. It's like people say, well, you know, if you stick with it, you're going to be miserable.

Here's a Scott logic standpoint. If you have a job that you say you're going to be miserable and eventually, yes, you will change when you wear yourself out. What I mean by that is you're tired of being miserable.

You're already miserable. If you think you're going to be miserable in the future, guess what? You're already there. So if you can just accept that the minute something pops in your mind that's not good, you're going to go try to change it and you just start that path to try to change it.

Eventually, you will pull the trigger when you wear yourself out and you'll change it or you get lucky and someone will do it for you. But when you surround yourself with people who add your energy and don't take it away, it's interesting. I work in a world of subtraction.

And what I mean by that is that most everything I do is subtractive. If there's something going on in my life, there's probably something I need to take away to make it better.

If my garage is a mess, I probably need to get rid of stuff from my garage, right? Same thing with personal lives. If I'm too busy and I'm not being fulfilled, there's probably some friendships that aren't really friendships that need to be subtracted from my life.

More is on the other side of less. So I like to subtract things first. But when it comes to energy, good energy, people who fill you up, that's a place I add.

And I'm so careful about adding that energy because the truth is you just don't know. You just don't know. If you were to work with me in one of my groups, you'd be like, I don't know if this is going to be for me or not. And in the first couple of weeks, you're going to be just blown away.

You're not going to know. But one day you'll know. And here's the trick. If we can subtract it, take stuff out of your life and make your life easier and we can add the energy in at the same time, it gets better.

Right. And this is not my group. This is just you every single day. So I subtract where I can. And when I do add in, it has to bring energy to me. A rule I've had with a job I've done forever, I coach a lot of people, I carry a lot of weight because of that.

And the minute I can feel somebody, I don't mind subtracting, I don't mind helping people at all. But if I have to help them and subtract from them and they drain my energy at the same time, that relationship must come to an end.

I must add to my energy as I'm working with people. And you should do the same thing. If you're doing a job that is actually wearing you out, why? Because there's somebody, there's a business across the street, there's somebody someplace, there's something you can do that will not do that.

You want to be running to what you want, not from what you want. You don't want to be in a holding pattern because you have to be. You know, a comment that came up on today's call was, no matter what you do, they're not going to miss you when you leave. A lot of people get caught up with their friends.

They caught up with their business associates. They're not going to miss you. A gentleman said on a call, he had retired recently, younger guy that retired. He said, yeah, they don't miss me.

They don't even think about me anymore. They don't. We have somebody on call today who has lost a couple of people in the past couple of weeks. They've died.

And if you ever lost somebody who died, one thing you notice is that, you know what? It just ends. It just stops. It doesn't matter how busy or crazy life is for you right now.

It makes no difference. The day you end, it's just over. And once the funeral is gone, people just move on. That's it. The way it works. Hmm. Another comment today was, do what's important to you.

Nobody else cares. I've preached that for years now. You're not going to believe me about it. It's not narcissistic. Not at all. But when you can step back a little bit and relax a little bit, and you can begin to do the things that are important to you, life changes.

And it's going to take some time. And nobody wants to hear that. It's going to take some time. Usually a couple of months of being surrounded by this kind of energy.

And eventually you realize that, you know what? I'm now focused on what's important to me. And you go do it. Joyful, happiness. Yeah, if you want that.

I asked this morning as we got off the call, I do two things when I start pretty much any call I get into. If it's a smaller group, Inner Circle is running about a dozen people right now. Very small, very intimate group. So I want to check in.

We literally are at Inner Circle. We help each other. We're vulnerable at the same time. We're strong people. We're trying to make our lives better. So I ask a couple of questions.

The first one I always ask is retrospectively, where are you? What happened last week? Not what did you do? Not what did you check off your list? But how are you feeling about it?

And it's just a wonderful place to start. That came from my daily awareness diary. And I end the call with a conclusion because it just makes sense to me. In fact, you should do this, I think, in everything you do.

When you walk out of a meeting, when you get done having dinner, whatever it is, your mind is like, if you actively say, so, okay, what do I think about what just happened? I just sat down with my wife for dinner. We just had some conversations. Was it, hey, we just ate and TV was on in the background or did something happen?

It was kind of cool. I'm smiling the other night. I got in trouble. I wrote retrospectively in my daily awareness diary the day before. It made me laugh because that evening I laughed.

My wife is a woman of a certain age. I won't say what that age is, but I will never see her gray hair, although she says she's completely white. And she's young, but she's, well, relatively speaking.

And she gets her hair done like every five weeks or so. You know, the color thing that I don't do anymore. And I looked at her and I was like, It was a dark room.

I said, you know what? The room is dark, but I can see because that flashlight on your head is beaming toward the ceiling and it's light spreading out in the room. And she looked at me and said, what are you talking about? The flashlight on my head beaming.

And of course, it was that little gray spot that had the root. And I cracked up and she cracked up. We had one of the best labs in the world because her husband was being stupid silly.

I got up the next morning and that's what I wrote down. And I'm talking about it today. It was just a moment in time. I got done with my call today and I asked a gentleman, I said, how are you feeling?

And he gave me excuse, excuse, landing, and then excuse. Here's what I mean. The first two things he said, well, I'm thinking about this and I'm thinking about that. That doesn't matter.

The third thing he said, I guess I'm feeling overwhelmed. Boom. He stayed there about 30 seconds and said, well, and then there's the, and he moved on. I said, stop.

I see you get, you get prelude, prelude, actual thing, prologue. Did I get that right? I could get it wrong. Don't you do that when you have a conversation?

Hey, how you doing? I'm doing great, man. Man, it's a hot day today. Listen, I need to talk about something serious. Third thing always gets you. Overwhelmed.

I knew it. I knew he's been overwhelmed for a couple of weeks. Haven't called him out on it. Haven't talked to him about it. I just saw it. I've done this a long time.

I'm not smarter than anybody else. I've just done it a long time. I can see it. Feel the energy, right? And I had a moment in time where I was able to say, just directly face-to-face, surrounded by people he knew, overwhelmed, man, what's going on?

And he began to go into it. He said, you're right, man. I said, no, don't have to be, I just know it. Talked to somebody else. He said, you know what it's about?

It's about awareness. Paying attention to being overwhelmed, right? I heard the word peaceful base come up about five times during the call. Building yourself that base, financial base, whatever it happens to be.

Always going back to what you need to make your life good. I heard the phrase, give yourself some time. Often people don't give themselves time. I heard the phrase, and it will sort itself out.

So if you're aware, you're building your peaceful base, you give it some time, everything will sort itself out. When you don't pay attention is when it doesn't sort itself out. It's when it gets worse. But when you are paying attention, it always gets better.

Somebody else said, everything's on hold. I don't know where I am right now. I said, yeah, you do. You're just trying to figure out how to get out of where you are right now.

But we know where you are right now, right? Where are you? And I will not tell you what he said, but he said, yeah, you're right. Here's where I am. In this case, it was grieving.

I'll go that far. Nothing else matters. You know where you are right now. But oftentimes what you're thinking about in being happy and pushing forward is, I guess, well, I know where I am, but that's not where I want to be.

So I don't want to think about that. And the last thing, that I heard was trust the process. The elephant in the room is called time. So when you know time is going to tick no matter what, it's right there, but you're not looking at it.

It's just not. And sometimes you want to rush it. You want to push it, the whole deal. But sometimes it just takes time. And that is the process we have to trust.

Can I share one more story with you? Just one more? This is a motivational story about time. When my first wife, Cheryl, passed away, the day she died, I took my watch off.

I'd been wearing my watch for a long time. I always wore a watch. And I certainly wore it when she was sick because I had time medications and things like that. So I had my watch on.

The day she died, I took it off. I put it in a drawer. I didn't pay any attention to it. And for the next year, as I was going through grieving and met my new wife, Joy, and dated and had a hell of a good time for the next year as well, while I'm going through the process, I didn't wear a watch.

Time didn't matter. It was going to be there no matter what I did. I just needed to get through the process, right? A year later, on the anniversary of my wife's death, I came out with a watch on.

And Joy, my wife now of almost 19 years, said, I didn't know you wore a watch. Oh, yeah. Hmm. It was confusing. That's all I can say. And these days I wear like 50-50.

Depends. Depends. It doesn't really matter. If I need to keep track of something, I wear it. If not, I just leave it over there. It doesn't matter. Like the phone.

Don't need my phone all the time. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don't. Doesn't matter. That's all I got for you today. I hope it helps. I'll see you tomorrow.