Knowing What You Want from Your Life and Your Business
As life and business bring many crossroads, have you ever paused to reflect on what you’re getting from the two? In this episode, Traci shares insights from her talk, Knowing What You Want from Your Life and Your Business. Listen in as she and Rob discuss strategies to stay focused, pivoting when you need to, and how to keep the end in mind.
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Rob:
So in our last episode, we talked through a workshop day that Traci and I put together for a couple different events this year. And we talked through the talk that I gave. And with that, Traci also had a talk that went on the front part of that day. So we want to kind of go through and do the same kind of thing this week.
The title of her talk was Knowing What You Want from Your Life and Your Business. I've seen it a couple times now and I really, really love parts of it so I can't wait to talk to Traci about that and get into it a little bit.
So, Traci, besides me asking you to help me do a workshop, why did you put this talk together?
Traci:
Well, I think obviously it comes out of all the conversations I have with business owners as I'm coaching and speaking and just learning about what people are struggling with, and it comes from my own journey too.
Especially kind of at these crossroads that we come to in life, whether it's, you want to call it midlife or a certain stage of your business, a certain stage of your career, as a leader you sort of feel like, "Okay, I've hit all these mile markers that I, or society, or my family has kind of laid out before me. I went to high school. Many of us had the great opportunity to go to college and kind of went through that whole young adulthood and decided Okay, I'm going to either climb that corporate ladder, I'm going to create a business. And at the same time, hopefully find my soulmate, create a family." All those things.
And then you sort of wake up and you've achieved or sort of gone through all those motions and you kind of think, "Okay, well what's next?" And you look at the future ahead and the future looks so different for us versus how it looked for our parents and definitely for how it looked for our grandparents.
So I started wrestling with all these concepts of my own journey at these kind of crossroads. What are the questions we're asking ourselves and how do we determine what we want from the rest of our lives? And then how does that play into our business, our careers? How do we make these decisions?
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Traci:
I just started putting pen to paper and kind of pulling these concepts together. In the talk that I've given when you and I did that workshop day and other times that we've come together, trying to kind of put it all in 45 minutes can be hard. But at the same time I really just wanted to put out some thought starters to just get people to take a pause out of the whirlwind and think about these concepts, because I think it's not just good for their business, it's good for their life.
Rob:
Yeah. And I think that one of the things that you kind of paint this picture of is like, what does long-term look like? And you had some key points about longevity that I think are really interesting that set the stage for kind of what those pieces are. Can you talk a little bit about like some of the things that you were talking about life expectancy just to kind of get started?
Traci:
Yeah. So the first concept I introduced when I was talking about this kind of knowing what you want to get out of your life and your business was having a longevity mindset. When we get to these sort of middle years, whether it's late 30s, 40s, early 50s, we kind of start to think like, "Hey, how much life is left to live? How much life is left in my career, in my business? Is there another one last pivot for me to make? Should I just double down where I am?"
I think the first step for us all to take is to kind of think about our life, our life span. We have the opportunity now in our country to live longer and healthier than any of our past generations. Now, whether we're taking advantage of that opportunity, that's a whole nother discussion because we still remain the most medicated and sick country in some ways in the world. But for those who want to adopt a longevity mindset, the opportunities are there and available to really embrace being healthy and living longer.
And so, a longevity mindset is really when you just kind of choose to wholeheartedly believe that a long and healthy life is normal and obtainable. And babies born today have over 95% chance to live till they're 105 years old. That's pretty incredible. But if you're 40 years old today, you have a 95% chance of living until you're 95 years old. I mean, this is incredible. I don't think a lot of people know it. We sort of just accept that, "Oh, okay. I think I'll live until I'm in my 70s." And then if we have that mentality, we start to sort of wind down. At least research shows that we start to wind down 10, 15 years before that. So we start to back away. We maybe not engage in new endeavors or new friendships or chase after those dreams that have been lingering in our mind.
But when we pivot and have a longevity mindset and lean into like, "Hey, I could live to be 100" and when I realized that research shows that centurions are going to be by 2030 kind of standard, like we're going to look around us and we're going to see lots of people that are living to 100 and we can live healthier now, like living into old age because of—we know in the tech industry, AI and regenerative medicine and all of these wild, amazing advances—we can live healthier and longer too.
And so I'm encouraging people to engage in a longevity mindset. And once we adopt that mindset, then we can start to have a totally different view of our businesses and the road ahead and we can kind of get after what we want.
Rob:
Yeah. I mean, this is that whole sustainability piece of it that we kind of keep going back to when we talk about the humans and businesses and what that looks like. One of the things that you were talking about in your talk is about how the average retirement age is shifting with that longevity mindset. Say a little bit about that because I thought that was really fascinating.
Traci:
Yeah. It's interesting. And anecdotally, probably anybody who's listening to this realizes that in their own conversation with our parents, it was like, "Okay, you retire when you're 62. And you get the watch and you go off and to yonder and do whatever it is that you want to do." Nowadays, we're finding that when people are surveyed, they don't really know what the retirement age is. They're not sure they want to retire. And especially people who have found fulfilling work and purpose in what they're doing actually are bristling against being told they must retire. And so we're seeing more and more people that are like, "Well, I don't want to retire. I love what I'm doing."
I recently read an article by John Maxwell, who's I think he's in his 80s. He's like, "People kept asking me 'When are you going to retire?' And I finally said, 'Wait, do I have to?' I love what I do. I want to sit on a stage and talk, or I want to continue to coach people." We look at people who hit their stride later in life. I mean, there's just a number of people who pivoted, changed careers, started a company later in life that are really enjoying vibrant careers well into their 70s.
You think about Peter Drucker, who we talk about all the time, the Father of Modern Management, I mean he wrote the vast majority of his books after the age of 65. He gave his last lecture, I think it was like the week before he died at 95 years old. I mean, this is a man who just didn't even think about it.
And I'm not an advocate for like, work till you die and toil and all of that, but I am an advocate for having purpose, finding purpose, leaning into being fulfilled, having a positive impact on the little slice of the world that you affect each and every day. I think when we have that mindset, we are setting ourselves up to have a joyful and enjoyable long life.
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Rob:
Yeah. Okay. So that's the first one, which was have the longevity mindset. The second big point you had was understanding who you are.
Traci:
Right.
Rob:
How do we do that? I think the points relatively straightforward. Understand who you are, but how?
Traci:
Yeah. I know it's hard. I think, to kind of jump off my last point, when we think about that sort of long life and we think about that fulfilling work, that is often the first question people have is like, "Well then, what should I do? Should I keep doing what I'm doing? Should I do something different?" I think the first step before you can answer those questions is to really understand who you are.
Self-awareness is the first step in growth and development. It means that you have to take a little time out. You have to pause. You have to stop for a moment and articulate probably three key things first.
First is what are your talents? What are you best at? Many people that I work with I think are just wickedly smart and talented, but they're not great at everything. They might be good at a lot of things. And so I really push my clients to figure out what they're best at. What is that unique thing about you? You always call it the superpower. What's the superpower that you have that you're best at where you really shine?
And then what are your core values? Meaning how do you want to behave? What are the boundaries for you and the riverbanks for you when it comes to core values?
And then what are your current passions? What's lighting your fire right now? Now, passions can change throughout life, because depending on our circumstances or life experience. I feel like talents are true to who you are, they're innate and they are lasting. Core values tend to be very solid and don't alter as well. But your passions, it is worth stopping and asking yourself, what is it that I'm dreaming about? What are the populations of people I'm drawn to? What really lights my fire and gets me out of bed? How am I innately motivated?
And so when you can wrap those three factors together, you can start to articulate what your purpose is and understand more deeply who you are. And that is the first step. If you try to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life or craft a vision before you do that, you're going to end up coming back to the drawing board again. You've got to pause and really understand you. And then step two will be to craft that vision.
Rob:
And that leads us to your kind of overall third thing, which is understanding what you really want and align your business to that.
Traci:
Yeah. I think once you have that core, that kind of, I call it the compass of who you are, you can point yourself in the right direction, then you need to understand what you really want in aligning your business.
So I try to steer people away from this whole idea of like, "What makes you happy? Are you happy? Can you be happy?" Because I do think happiness is just tied to circumstances. We can have happy things happen or things that make us happy. But what I really want you to ask yourself is, what does a satisfying life look like to me? Because then you can encompass the good and the bad, the ups and the downs, the wins and the failures, right?
Overall, what is satisfying to me? And looking back at the end of my life, what will I say is a satisfying life to me? What do I really desire versus what has society desired for me or what has my family desired for me? All the things that sort of led us to this kind of midlife crossroads, all those predetermined mile markers we went through, let's just put those away.
Let's think about, as we look to the future, what do you really desire? And allowing yourself to dream. And then we sit down and we start to sketch out vision, right? So we know who we are. We know the legacy and the life that we ultimately want and we start to articulate what we really desire. And then we start to sketch out the vision for our life and do the work of understanding what does that mean for our business.
Rob:
Yeah. Talk a little bit about that intersection point between a life vision and a vision for your business, because they aren't always the same thing.
Traci:
Right. And I think if you realize that how you're uniquely designed and what you really desire actually fit in your business, you can fall back in love with your business if you're not in love with it now. Or maybe you really enjoy your business, but you're not seeing it through this lens. So if you see like, "Oh my gosh, what I'm doing this business actually does align with who I am. And the things that I desire or dream about, I can actually manifest those through my business." So then you start to craft vision about around…If you own your business, this is one of the beauties of owning your own business, is to say like, "Okay, can some of these dreams I have, big or small, be manifested through my business and how can I pull that off?"
Now, if you realize that there's some things that need to change in the business to align with this, then you start to need to kind of sketch out what needs to change and can those things change. But some people go through this exercise and realize, "You know what? I have created a great business and I think it could stand on its own without me. What I'm dreaming about and passionate about is something else. It's somewhere else. And so I need to, in five years, seven years, 10 years, I need to phase myself out of the business." Or maybe even more immediately if you have a business partner that you can kind of pivot to, but you start to realize, "Okay, I can't manifest this through the business. And so I either need to go off and start another business or go do something else that's completely different." It's not unheard of now for people to have completely different careers in a lifetime, in completely different fields of work, right?
And for a lot of people in the creative space, sometimes it's pivoting back to their creativity. I mean, we know people that have run amazing successful businesses who are now artists, who are now painting, crafting, speaking, writing, doing things that they've been longing to do but they rightly so wanted to build that business and really find themselves in that for 20 years or 25 years, and that's great. But I have clients too that have gone through this process and are madly in love with their business again. And they're staff is like, "Wow, what happened to you? You're like a kid again. You're back in love with this business and now you're really, really taking us in a different, even better, trajectory."
So there could be many, many happy endings to vision casting and aligning your life to your business. And even if you don't own your business, this is a crucial exercise because instead of saying business, I just say career. What is the career that you want? For many people, they're standing at the top of that ladder that they've been just frantically climbing for the last 20 years or 25 years. It's time for them now to start climbing a different ladder. So yeah, there's lots of ways this could go.
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Rob:
Yeah. I mean, I think that gets back to the thing that I think we've said before, that everyone should treat their career like a business, like they're in business for themselves and look at how they're spending their time and have a vision and crafting that vision through their career and have a direction and an in-state in mind because you're walking through your life. You are the architect, you are the designer of those things. You only give up control when you give that permission, right? Otherwise, it's yours. That's something that people should absolutely hang onto.
Traci:
Yeah. I think going back to the beginning of having that longevity mindset, I mean, one of the reasons why I start there and I find it to be helpful is because I feel like we often have this kind of hustle mentality like we have to do everything tomorrow. We have to get it done tomorrow, and like, we could die tomorrow. And it's like, yeah, I guess we could die tomorrow, but I don't like that mentality when we are trying to figure these things out for ourselves or answer these big questions because it makes us make hasty decisions. It makes us pull the trigger too quickly.
I think when we slow down and we instead see that we have a long road ahead of us, that then we can take the time to do the work to answer these questions and to really live in the moment and to really think about our impact and to not be in a rush.
So if you have a dream and you believe that you have another 30 years left in you of a career, you can think about how to best set yourself up to succeed in that dream. So maybe it's not quitting tomorrow. Maybe it's getting some more experience. Maybe it's finding a mentor. Maybe it's learning more. When we have that mentality, we slow down and better prepare ourselves for future success and greater impact.
So when I talk to people about that or to clients about that, I can see their shoulders just suddenly relax and they take a breath and they think, "Okay. All right." And then we can start to map out, "Okay, the next five years, you're going to do this. And then at that mark, you're going to do this." And then you can plan out and just very thoughtfully and intentionally live out your future.
Rob:
Yeah. So you've mentioned a couple times doing this work and taking your time through it. You've also mentioned a little bit of things evolving, things changing over time. How often should somebody set aide time to do this work? Because we've talked before that the vision you cast and the direction you're going is more of a bearing for the journey, not a destination. So how long? If I sit down and do my vision for my life and vision for my business and they align and I'm excited, how long should I continue before I stop and redo that work again?
Traci:
Well, when I do this work with clients, we're usually spending two full days together working on a strategic plan for their life. We're going through a number of different exercises, answering these questions and really sketching it out. I look at it like a strategic plan that you do for your business. So you're going to set initiatives for yourself to get to that vision and you're going to look at those initiatives quarterly.
But I encourage my clients to look at their vision annually, to really look at it and say, "Does this still line up? Is there anything I need to tweak?" And if anything, just to make sure they're reading it and replanting it into their mind.
Our minds are so powerful. Our brains are the most powerful organ in our body. The more that we can read our talents, read our core values, read our passions, understand our purpose, read our vision, the more likely it is that it's going to happen. And so taking out your vision annually, marking that in your calendar, literally in your Google Calendar, "Today's the day I'm going to go through all of these things. I'm going to reread them. I'm going to tweak them. I'm going to make sure they still feel true to me. I'm going to adjust where necessary, think about the initiatives I set out for the year ahead" and then put it away and go forth and do, I think is a super, super healthy, easy thing to do that keeps you living an intentional life.
Rob:
Yeah. How many times do these podcasts come back to intention, right?
Traci:
Yes.
Rob:
Like, that could have been the name we used for this, is setting intention for whatever it is you're going to do.
Traci:
Yeah. And it's true. It's like, we all live busy lives and we're inundated with so much coming at us. It's just crazy. It's harder than it's ever been. Sometimes I wish I was like on a farm planting or something. But we're not. And so, we have to learn how to manage the chaos. We have to learn how to pull ourselves out of the whirlwind. I think just giving ourselves the space to do things like this to be in the quiet of our own minds and to examine our hearts and our desires is such a healthy centering thing to do if only, if only we would all do it.
Rob:
Yeah. Well, so much of it is being able to see progress in the chaos. Our brains like to see a path. They like to see a way forward. They like to check things off. We can give ourselves that by setting intention with what we're doing. And you can look backwards. And even if it is that, looking backwards as things are clear of like, "Oh, I did these things, which are progress towards the thing I said I want to do. Okay, that gives me the energy, the power, the intention to do it for another week, month, year, whatever the period is."
Traci:
Yeah. it's great. I'm telling you, it is worth it. And when we get to the end of our long and healthy lives, I just want us all to be able to look back and think "That was a job well done. I have had a very satisfying, wonderful life." It doesn't happen without effort.
Rob:
That's a great place to end. Just the kind of this notion of, you're worth it. You're worth the time and investment in you.
Traci:
Absolutely. No better thing to invest in.
Rob:
Yeah. All right. Well, thanks Traci.
Traci:
Thank you.
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The Overly Human Podcast is brought to you by Navigate the Journey and Sparkbox. For more information on this podcast, or to get in touch with Traci or Rob, go to overlyhuman.com. If you like what you've heard, subscribe and tell your friends to listen. Thanks.
