The Conscious Investor
Chasing after Financial Freedom often bankrupts other parts of life.
That’s why the Conscious Investor Podcast goes beyond Financial Freedom and helps investors cultivate Personal Freedom by featuring experts in the core areas of health, mindset, and investing.
If you’re looking to grow financially, if you long to unleash your full potential, and build a life of meaning without bankrupting the most important parts of life then this show is for you!
The Conscious Investor
Ep490 3 Steps to Clarity & Momentum
Ever feel like you're running on a treadmill that's just a smidge too fast, trying to juggle life's demands without dropping the ball? I've been there, and I'm here to tell you that there's a way out of that breathless cycle. This week, I, Julie Hawley, tap into my wealth of knowledge in the realms of real estate, investment, and personal coaching to share the transformative power of clarity. We're unpacking the 'buy box for life' concept, a strategy I've honed for determining where to channel your energy for maximum impact in your life. Whether it's family, career, or personal development pulling you in every direction, this episode is your compass to navigate through the chaos.
Join me as we break down the three critical steps to gaining clarity, with actionable insights you can apply directly to your life for immediate results. We'll explore how to avoid the pitfalls of burnout by prioritizing your commitments and focusing on what truly matters. Plus, don't miss the expert advice from our guest investors and health professionals, who bring their specialized knowledge to the table, helping you fortify your health, strengthen your mindset, and build your wisest wealth. It's time to tune in, align your priorities, and start investing in the areas of life that deserve your best.
Hello Conscious Investor and welcome back. I'm your host, julie Hawley. For over four years, I've paired my background in real estate, investing, education and coaching to create powerful content for you each week. This podcast is where we take a holistic approach to investing by focusing on three ingredients to a life of personal freedom health, mindset and wealth. We'll talk about everything from passive investing through syndication and how to use your retirement accounts to boost your investing, to mineral balancing and gut brain health, and into topics that cultivate your inner strength and resilience so you can thrive regardless of any of life's current events. And yes, those are all episodes currently available and linked in the show notes below. Join me each Monday for a mindset episode and later in the week for an interview with expert investors and health professionals, so that you can experience your greatest health, strongest mindset and build the wisest wealth.
Speaker 2:Welcome back, conscious Investor. We have been talking about being stuck. We've been talking about purpose and productivity. We've been talking about what to do when we're still stuck. We've been talking about fulfillment. And today, on today's episode, I want to continue this series with talking about three steps to gaining clarity so that you can move forward.
Speaker 2:And, let's face it, I think we can all relate to the overwhelm of feeling like there is too much to do. Maybe you're overwhelmed by a myriad of tasks that are just pulling you in every single direction. We get pulled in directions from our family. Yes, our families are absolutely wonderful, but guess what? I'm all of a sudden having to run a kiddo here, there and everywhere, and I want to be present and right. Our family pulls us in a lot of different directions. Our careers pull us in a lot of different directions. If we're in school, school can pull us in a lot of directions, or if we have people in school, that happens also.
Speaker 2:Another thing that happens in life is that we get fatigued, and it's especially fatiguing when we feel like we're not making progress. Maybe you're just screaming Amen, jules, when you hear that, and when we're not making progress and we face that fatigue, the next step is burnout, and I don't know about you, but I have faced burnout in the past and it's not a pretty condition to be in, but it's not a forever situation. There's definitely solutions for that. In fact, I'm coming out of a really, really busy season right now. The past few months there have been so many things barking for my attention and that's what it feels like it feels like a whole bunch of dogs just barking, you know, wanting my attention, trying to draw me away, and I say things.
Speaker 2:We'll use air quotes for you, amazing listeners, because there's always, always going to be something jockeying for our attention and this is why it is absolutely 100 million percent essential that we have a clear what I call a buy box for life. Now, I was recently meeting with a friend and she's a social media marketer and she supports massive global companies. She's got a really great business. Um. Go check out saga house h-a-u-s. By the way, if you're looking for um, you know someone who does things globally. She's absolutely amazing. And when I said buy box, she was actually thinking about amazon and e-commerce. So she's like oh, that's so interesting.
Speaker 2:And we didn't realize that we were talking about something different when I was using that term buy box. So I want to be very clear. When I say buy box, it means like these are the things in the investing space. We have very clear what we call buy boxes, right? For example, my company Three Keys Investments. We invest in apartments and assisted living facilities across the United States. Thatments, we invest in apartments and assisted living facilities across the United States. That's all we invest in. That's our buy box, and then within that, we are even more niched down as to what we'll buy in regards in regarding tripping over our words here regarding those asset classes.
Speaker 2:So when we think about our life buy box, we need to be thinking about who is going to get our best time, who's going to have our attention, who is going, what things am I going to invest in? Where am I going to pour out my energy? Where am I going to put my heart and soul? Because I cannot put it everywhere and I'm not created to be everywhere. We're not omnipotent. So we have to have a super clear buy box. So here's the deal. We don't want anybody spinning their wheels, going into burnout. And let's think about times that we've done that and in your head you might just say, yeah, that's me, but maybe we've had a failed nutrition plan that's a nice way of saying a failed diet. Um, I've I've quit on on different nutrition plans multiple times. I'm definitely, uh, a quitter on that. I get burnt out on not having a little bit of sweets here and there, so that doesn't work well. Uh, sometimes we have failed relationships. It's not just lifelong commitment relationships. We can have failed relationships with friends, if we don't have a clear buy box, those projects, they're just going to drag us down. So we have to know what we want. But how do we do that?
Speaker 2:Well, here are three things that I have found that are really critical and paramount when we are thinking about creating that five box and having the clarity that we need in our life so that we can have the momentum that really just keeps us going, keeps us energized. First thing I notice is we just simply need to freeze time. So if you are feeling that I'm running in a bunch of different directions, I'm feeling like I'm going to burn out, I'm feeling like I'm spinning my wheels, I can't do this anymore, then stop and freeze time. So here's what that does, and I'm going to give a very deliberate example.
Speaker 2:Recently, my family traveled to our hometown in California Modesto, by the way and while we were there, we were leaving the hotel parking lot to go connect up with family, but we didn't know where exactly we were going. Actually, I think we're going to grab coffee out that we were going. Actually, I think we were going to grab coffee. And my husband has a super rad Steve, he's super rad. He has a tendency to want to just keep the car in motion and I have a tendency to say, hey, sweetie, let's just stop and know where we're going, so we're not driving in the wrong direction, you know, just inadvertently. So I want you to think about that within your life by box your productivity it might feel great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm getting stuff done, but what are you getting done and is it taking you in the right, best direction? Hey, to simply hit do not disturb on your pocket computer that likes to bark at you all the time, by the way, turn notifications off. Can you all just please do that right now? But when we do this, when we freeze that time, we can give ourselves that space that we need to become clear as to. Okay, this is good, but this isn't the direction I need to be going, so I'm not going to do that.
Speaker 2:Sometimes we're so busy go, go, go, going being productive that we're just going in so many different directions and our life ends up with a series of half built bridges, bridges that end up nowhere. And when we end up nowhere, we end up facing that just sadness. I'm going to throw another analogy out there, and that is if I am in the kitchen and I am baking something, because I'm the baker, or if Super Ed, steve or the kids they're all really great cooks If they're cooking something or I'm baking something and it does not turn out as we are hoping it will. It's disappointing. It is so underwhelming and it is a bummer. Ok, we don't want a life of half built bridges because we're spread too thin. So, number one, the first thing you want to do if you're feeling overwhelmed and you need clarity is stop time, freeze everything around you, find yourself a quiet spot and start evaluating when is my time going? What am I doing? Is this part of the greater vision mission purpose that I have for my life, the greater vision mission purpose that I have for my life? The next thing we're going to do is we're going to kill the darlings.
Speaker 2:Now, I know kill seed is like a buzzword these days, that it's like negative, but in the writing space, writers know that you can have a manuscript that is so prolific, so beautiful, but the expression is kill the darlings. That might mean that an author has to take out a word, a sentence, a paragraph, maybe an entire multiple paragraphs, because there has to be something that is so concise, so clear for the reader to pick up. On the other end of things, this happens in movies. I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, which is Founders, by David Serena, and he was discussing George Lucas. It's kind of interesting. He's from Modesto, california, and he was talking about how the editors at the big studios would trim off like four minutes after he had already edited and compiled these movies, and it drove him crazy, that's in that case. I think it was more antagonistic but thinking about killing the darlings.
Speaker 2:Editors are always going in and extracting, and so you want to go in, freeze the time, go in and start extracting. This is good, but this isn't great. My life doesn't settle for good. I go for great, and if I want to be great, I can't be spread thin and I cannot do absolutely everything. And so we're going to extract the things, we're going to edit them out, we're going to kill the darlings so we can show up in the fullness to the things that are most important to us. And guess what? That's going to be really rewarding, because we're going to get the momentum which leads to the third step, and that is stack the steps. Once we have frozen time and we have killed those darlings, now we can start stacking the steps. We're going to feel lighter.
Speaker 2:We're going to feel more agile, more mobile more focused, and so now we can say, all right, I'm going to stack my steps. What do I need to do? Okay, if I have a project, I need to map out that project. What are all the steps that I need to do for this project to, you know, cross the finish line in a way that is excellent, and I'm going to be so proud of Write those steps down Now some of you are wired like me and we just want to get going and we're like, oh, we'll figure it out in motion.
Speaker 2:Life is poetry. I just want to let you know don't learn the hard way like Jules, okay, just know it is far easier in life to have that plan thought out and you will be able to infuse everything you do with far more creativity, far more thoughtfulness, because you've built out the framework for it. Okay, so I think about new construction and you think about. You know, you've got these two by fours that are all laid up and you can see the framework of it and what it should look like. Now you can go in there and decorate. You can do the flooring however you want to do the floor. You can go and put whatever you want on the walls. You want brick Great. You want sheetrock Great. Whatever you want to do, you have the creative ability because the framework is there.
Speaker 2:A lot of people really are resistant to this part, but if we really want to be able to step into that fullness, we must say we've got to stack the steps. Here's the project, here's how I visualize it at the end of it, and here are the steps I'm going to take that are going to get me there. I know that being overwhelmed is a very common experience. I also know that it is something that we don't have to experience, and when we start to feel that overwhelm, the very first thing that we need to do is just simply freeze, because more than likely it just means I took on too much Whoops and just release something off the plate.
Speaker 2:Or you can step into that whole who, not how, concept and say, okay, well, who am I going to work with so that this actually gets done in the way it needs to get done? All right, conscious investor, that's what I have for you today.
Speaker 2:Short, sweet to the point. These are the three steps you can get used to gain clarity and expedite that momentum in anything that you're doing. Remember you want to freeze that time. You want to kill the darlings, like every good editor does, and then stack those steps. I am quite certain that if you are willing to go through those steps, that you are going to feel a lot lighter and you are going to see the results that you are looking for in no time fast. Always be patient with yourself, be kind with yourself, but lightening the load is definitely going to make a huge difference.
Speaker 2:And if you need support in this, don't be a stranger. Reach on out julie at julie hollycom or head over to my um, my website, which is an affirmation, so it makes a lot easier to spell the word conscious. I am a conscious investorcom. Head over there. Check out the coaching page. Maybe there's a fit for you and I to work together. I'm grateful for you. Conscious investor. Remember, adventure belongs on the trail, not in our investing, not in our personal lives. So make sure you head on over to IamAConsciousInvestorcom so that we can connect up. Until next time, live big, love bigger and do great things. Thank you.
