Making Room For Growth
This week on the Higher Purpose Podcast, I spoke with Dan Miller, best selling Author of 48 Days to Work You Love and No More Mondays.Now, Dan Miller has always been an entrepreneur, finding and following opportunities as they presented themselves, and believes meaningful work, whether as an entrepreneur or member of a team, happens when you blend your natural skills and abilities with your dreams and passions.You can listen to the full interview here (and subscribe on iTunes or your favorite podcast player so you never miss an episode), but I want to really explore one of the ideas that Dan and I touched on during the call.If you are constantly adding and adding and adding to your business or your life – you’re never going to have the space to think, breathe and reflect on what you truly want to be doing. You’ll have no time to find your WHY. If you add and add and add to what you have to do every day, week, month and year, then at a certain point you are going to see both the quality of your life and your work degrade.And that kind of degradation is unacceptable. We want to be bringing our best selves to all of the facets of our life – our faith communities, our families, and our work. We can’t do that by consistently trying to add to our plates.Sometimes, you need to step back, and mindfully choose NOT to do things.Here’s Dan Miller’s method.Dan makes it a practice to, when the plan for the next year is finished, choosing 15% of his activities, projects, and tasks, and eliminating them. They won’t continue into the new year and are going to be either finished for good or shelved for another time. These aren’t small things, time wasters or leisure activities. They are real, significant parts of his business that he conscientiously decides to STOP doing.(Fun fact – the specific date for this decision to be made is November 14th – 48 days before the new year Find out WHY that is significant here.)And that 15% of newly freed time and space is room to grow.Nature abhors a vacuum and will rush to fill it, but if there is no vacuum in your life or your business, then there is no room for something new and different to grow.The space created by eliminating 15% of what you are currently doing could be the ‘breathing room’ to experiment, take risksSo that is our question for this week – what would you do if you had 15% more time to do ANYTHING? And can you make that time in your life?Head on over to the Higher Purpose Community Facebook group, where we’re going to be discussing this topic, and anything else that has inspired us from the podcast this week on Thursday.In the meantime, you can listen to all of our podcast episodes, and make sure you never miss an update by subscribing to the Higher Purpose Podcast on iTunes, or your favorite podcast player. If you like what you hear, please share, and give us a rating!