99. Are You Afraid of Free Time?

Speaker A: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? This is the end of a poem called the Summer Day by Mary Oliver. And it's a phrase that I've loved for many years and that I've come back to over and over again. For a while, I always thought this phrase was about accomplishment and meeting my goals and living the biggest life. But with time, I've come to realize that Mary Oliver wasn't talking about goals and achievement. She was talking about also how we're going to be in the journey of this life, in the day to day, in enjoying and being present. And that's what I want us to talk about today. In the past few episodes, we've been discussing how as business founders, we sometimes get involved in too many things and we get so busy with our work, then we stop living our life. Today, I want us to talk about what happens once we get to that place, that we've organized our businesses, our jobs, in a way that gives us free time. What happens once we reclaim our time? What do we do with it? I'm Carolina Suleta. Uh, this is the Visionary's Pursuit podcast. Let's get into it.

Speaker B: Hey.

Speaker A: Today and tomorrow, I'm teaching a masterclass called the six founder habits that that cost you freedom. How to reclaim your time without slowing your company's growth. Here's why I created this class. I know you're a leader. I know you're ambitious. And I also know you care about freedom. And what I want to do is show you in a very simple way how those strengths that make you incredible at what you do can get in the way of living with freedom. What I tell my clients all the time is awareness is 80% of the work. And sometimes when we see the habit that we then cannot unsee it. And that's what catalyzes change. The link to enroll is in the description of the podcast. If you can't make it at the right time, we're going to send a replay. But don't miss it. I know this can be the opening for you to start living with more intention and freedom and enjoying the thing that we value the most, our time. Imagine I could give you 10 hours back every single week. Imagine that your business is not suffering. Revenue is doing well. Your team is working efficiently. Nothing is falling through the cracks. What would you do with that time? I really want you to think about it. 10 hours back each week. Let that sit in. What would you do with it? Would you exercise? Would you spend more time with your Kids or your spouse or your friends? Would you finally get to those novels you've been wanting to read? Would you travel? Would you learn something? Would you spend time in nature? Most people tell me they want more time, but I'm not sure we've spent enough time asking ourselves what we would do with it. Here's what I've seen. Empty space makes us uncomfortable. And if we haven't really thought about what we're going to do with that time in an intentional way, we end up feeling it with being busy or with activities such as scrolling on the Internet or on social media to numb the discomfort that empty space creates. 10 hours sounds like a lot, but just think about it. You have half hour. You know, you had a meeting and they canceled in the last minute, or something changed, and all of a sudden you have an hour free in your calendar. What do you do? Do you think to yourself, hey, what a great opportunity. I'm gonna go for a walk. I'm gonna sit in nature, I'm gonna connect to myself. Or do you open your email Slack? Or you go to to do list and you start doing things and yeah, perhaps you feel good about doing something on your list. But I think that there's a deeper belief, and actually I'm going to be very transparent. This was happening to me. If for some reason one of my clients canceled in the last minute, I didn't take that hour back for me, I immediately jumped into doing something else, or I went to start reading the news or getting, you know, down a rabbit hole in YouTube. Because I think what we've all learned is that using our time well means being productive. Being busy means we're being responsible. Being productive means we're being valuable. And that empty space means wasted time. I was having a conversation with, uh, the students who are currently doing the visionary mindset program about this, sitting with the question about what does it mean to waste our time? And for many of us, if we looked at it in a deeper way, it meant not being productive. And yes, being productive is incredibly rewarding. It's what our businesses need. We all want to become better at it. But I also want to create a distinction between being productive, being busy, and actually also valuing time where we are not being productive, where we're not creating an output, but we're enjoying our life, our wild and precious life. So in the past few episodes, we've been talking about how we can become very busy. And some of the reasons why we become that busy are structural. We are not very good at delegating we're, um, unclear on who owns a specific project. There's too many decisions that we have to make at a single moment. We haven't built the team. We need to hire more people. Or maybe we've created a culture where our employees depend on us. And all that I'm gonna address in the masterclass I'm teaching today and tomorrow. But there's another layer, and it's how when we have empty space, we unconsciously refill it with things. And the reason we do this is because being busy, being productive give us something psychologically. It gives us maybe a sense of accomplishment or evidence that we're valuable, that we work hard. It fulfills a need we all have as human beings, that the need to feel significant. It gives us certainty. It eliminates the fear of the empty space where we have to actually face ourselves and be with our thoughts. The opposite thing is empty space. Right in empty space, there's all these thoughts that start popping up, and we start feeling the discomfort of it. So a few weeks or months ago, I was talking with my friend who's a coach, and she was actually coaching me, and we were talking about this topic, and she asked me this question, kind of, when a client cancels, what do you do? And I was like, I immediately jump into doing something, into looking at my task list and filling it up. And I also realized that many years ago, I heard Tony Robbins talk about that time when you're driving on where you're organizing something or you're showering, that you're not doing something. That requires a lot of brain power. And he said that time is great for you to learn something. So I realized every minute of my day, I am either creating output, talking with clients, creating content, or I'm listening to a podcast. I'm reading our book. I'm listening to an audiobook. My brain is always filled with things. I'm talking with my friend. I was telling her about this experience I had over the summer when I was kayaking, and it started pouring rain. And I was just in the middle of the rain in the lake. No music, no one to talk to, just paddling in my kayak, trying to get out of the rain. And all of a sudden, I started having so much clarity about important things in my life. These beautiful thoughts about what matters to me, about decisions I needed to make start showing up in a very clear way. And she reminded me that I'm not creating those spaces in my life. So as a challenge, and I share this challenge with all of you, I'm trying to go for a daily walk without my phone, without AirPods, without anything. Just me and my thoughts. And here's what I'm going to tell you at the beginning. Every time I go on a walk it becomes really uncomfortable because my brain goes into that to do list. I didn't send this email. I have to remember this. I need to respond to the client, I need to buy this thing for my kids school. And then it starts coming up with great ideas and then my brain thinks, oh my God, I'm not writing them down, I'm going to miss them. These are great things for the podcast or for this course that I'm teaching, but there's a moment where I can surrender all that. And all of a sudden I'm there, I am present, I'm hearing the birds, I'm feeling the wind in my face. And that experience is incredibly valuable as well. And because every time I live these moments or I have these insights for myself, I'm always so curious if someone has studied them. And I was thinking about this episode. I went to look at some research about this and actually there's a lot of research that talks about how empty space can be incredibly productive. One of the pieces of research that I found is called the incubation effect. And I know you can relate to this. You've worked really hard on a problem and you're stuck and then all of a sudden you stop because you're tired, you can't think about it anymore and you go do something else. And when you're doing that other thing, all of a sudden you see the problem in a different way and you start coming up with a different answer. In 2009 they did a meta analysis in which they studied multiple pieces of research around the incub and they again prove that there is a positive effect on taking a break when you're trying to solve a problem, especially when that problem is creative or divergent thinking that

Speaker B: it's not linear thinking.

Speaker A: So if you're facing a problem at work that is complex, taking a break, going for a walk, doing something different actually allows your brain to process through that problem, change your perspective, seeing in a different way, and come up with a better solution. This research actually reminded me of a story I had read a while ago about this great mathematician. His name, I'm not going to say it right, but it's something like Henri Poincare. And he had been working on a math problem for a long time and he was so frustrated because he couldn't find a solution. So he decided to stop and he went on this geological excursion. And he later was describing that when he was getting on a large horse drawn carriage, all of a sudden the answer came to him. He actually said, at the moment when I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me. He hadn't been at a desk thinking, he hadn't been trying to solve the problem. He was doing the most common thing, getting on his transportation. And all of a sudden this idea came and it felt like magic, but it wasn't magic. He had done his work first. He had put a lot of effort trying to solve it. Then he disengaged from that problem and the inside happened. Because I believe there are problems in our day to day, in our business and all that that are not solved by thinking harder, but by taking a break and to allow ourselves to do the work in the back of our brain and the insights to come in that moment. You all know about the shower effect, right? In fact, talking with Andrew about this, he was telling me that there's an entire subreddit dedicated to shower thoughts. So what the shower effect research shows is that mind wandering leads to more creative ideas, especially when we're doing activities that are not too engaging, like showering, maybe driving, maybe going for a walk, maybe washing our dishes, building a puzzle, something that feels repetitive. I think having our phones all the time with us has limited the time we have for our mind to wander. And the last piece of research I want to share with you all is from two researchers from Stanford, Opezo and Schwartz. What they found was that walking boosts creative ideation in real time. And shortly after, one of their experiments found that 81% of the participants improved on a divergent thinking task while walking. And here's something interesting about this research. It wasn't just that you needed to walk in nature or in a very special place, on a treadmill, it worked just as fine. So make it easy for you. Maybe it's a walk around your neighborhood, maybe it's getting on a treadmill and walking for a little bit. But just getting up and walking connects your brain to that part where you can be more creative, where you can solve problems that are not sitting on Excel spreadsheet and trying to solve it there. So I invite you to join me in this challenge. What if you commit to going for a walk? It can be a 20 minute walk, 40 minute walk every day, without your phone, without a podcast, without slack, without email, just with yourself and your thoughts and find and connect to the wisdom that you already have. Within yourself. And I think with AI, the, uh, skill to be with our own thoughts, to spend time in the emptiness, in the discomfort of the not knowing, has become even less desirable because we go to ChatGPT or Claude, and in seconds we. We have the answers to any question. But is that creative thinking? Is that going into ourselves and finding answers that are, uh, maybe not already published on the Internet. I think as leaders, especially as leaders of our businesses, as this future that is changing so fast is happening, I think where our highest value is is in seeing patterns, in anticipating problems, in imagining possibilities, in identifying opportunities in creative thinking. And yet we have optimized our calendars for reactivity, for showing up for meetings, for sending a message, for making a decision on the spot, for answering an email, for giving an approval. We expect ourselves to be visionaries, but we've designed our days to have no room to create our visions. So let's make more time to connect to our inner wisdom, to the visions, to the ideas that want to come out to the world through us. Now here is a trap which is very interesting. I've just been justifying why you should have free time. I've been saying, have free time so you can be productive. But I want to give you a warning. When you go out for that walk without the phone and you're like, okay, I'm going for a walk for an hour and I have to solve this problem you are missing out on. Actually, what I'm trying to say, which is create free space and see what happens. What if you go for a walk and nothing useful comes out of it? There's no breakthrough or no strategy or no innovative way of solving the problem you have. Is that walk still worthwhile? And this is what I'm sitting with, right? And this goes back to the poem I read at the beginning. What are you gonna do with your one wild and precious life? It's not just about accomplishing something or your output. What if it's truly about just going for this walk and seeing the birds? I've lived in the same place in the same neighborhood for the last three years, and just last week I went for a walk without my phone, without the intention of solving anything, with just the intention of being present. And I saw this beautiful big bird

Speaker B: that I had never seen, and I saw it flying, and I actually stopped walking. And I just spent, I don't know, maybe a minute seeing it, how it was opening its wings and it was going around and had huge, like, dark gray wings with, like, white on the bottom. It was Incredible. And I also want us to be human beings that are not just about accomplishing and getting to the next goal, but that these moments, these idle moments, can also be areas where we are surprised by the magic of nature, of

Speaker A: being alive, of this beautiful gift that we have right now, that is to be alive in this planet. By the way, this conversation I had with my friend that challenged me to go on walks without my phone or without the intention of doing anything. It's not the first time I've had it. It's been my tendency for years to be productive, to be in my to do list. And some years ago I remember talking with a, uh, homeopathic doctor about the Dutch art of doing nothing, which is the art of intentionally doing nothing. Or you can also think about it as doing something without a specific productive purpose. So it can be looking out the window, sitting somewhere, watching people go by, letting your mind wander.

Speaker B: And you know what?

Speaker A: It reminded m me that as a little girl, I used to love to do this. I remember going to my grandparents house and sitting and looking at nature and just getting lost. I felt like my brain would go blank and I would just be staring out, doing nothing. And that was so rewarding and it felt so good. So in a world where we're always thinking about goals and productivity and what is the purpose of this. But I want us to remember that also not having a purpose is part of the point. And it's not about being more productive, healthier, more creative, more successful. Because when we go for a walk with the intention of that, when we exercise with the intention of one of those goals, we turn doing nothing into another task. And I'm guilty of this. I can ruin doing nothing in about 30 seconds. Okay, great. I'm gonna do nothing because it's going to lower my stress, because it's gonna make me more creative, because it's gonna give me insights. What is the ROI of this? But that's not freedom. But that's not what I'm talking about here. Here. I'm talking about truly being in the present moment, connecting to what's around us, connecting to ourselves, just for the purpose of being there. Back to the question I asked you at the beginning. If I give you 10 hours back, what would you want to do with them? And I encourage you to use those 10 hours back for some leader work. Thinking, walking, reading, thinking about a specific problem. But also remember to add life to it. Go have lunch with a friend that you hadn't had lunch in a while. Surprise your kids by picking them up at school one day, go outside and simply wonder and, uh, see nature and connect with it. Now let's start by reclaiming your time. I invite you to join me in my masterclass today and tomorrow. The six founder habits costing you freedom. How to reclaim your time without sacrificing your business growth. We're going to look at six very common behaviors we have as leaders and how they are the ones that are creating a busyness that we don't need in our lives and how to change them. Go to the description of this episode. Sign up and I'll see you there. My goal, my vision for all of us is to create successful businesses that are creating an impact, that are making money where we're nurturing the lives of so many employees and clients while, uh, at the same time we are being intentional and enjoying this one precious life we have. All right, my friends, have a lovely rest of your week. Bye, Sam.