033: Saying No to Things That Don’t Serve Your Goals

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This year, I made some really ambitious goals. One of the most difficult parts of the process was trying to determine which habits, routines, and activities served my goals, and which ones didn’t. Sometimes knowing what to say no to is very obvious, but difficult to do. Sometimes the things we need to say no to are not that obvious.

The first month of the year is over and, if you’re like me and set some goals at the beginning of the year, you may already be experiencing the pull back into old routines. When your goal is something you’ve never experienced before, it can be especially difficult not to justify going back to what is familiar.

In this episode we want to talk about the goals we set, how to protect them, how to determine what we should be saying no to, and how to make meaningful changes in our habits and routines.

Highlights, Takeaways, & Quick Wins

• Despite what your past behavior has taught you, believe that you have the ability to resist things that don’t serve your goals.
• People don’t give up on goals the same way they do on resolutions.
• You can’t just remove an activity—you have to replace it with something else.
• Visualize yourself doing the things that lead up to reaching your goal.
• Fight pessimism if it influences whether you do the work to be successful or not.
• Get an accountability partner.
• The more accountability and support you have around your goal, the easier it’s going to be to say no to things that aren’t serving your goals.
• Let your values define your goals.
• Giving up one thing at a time is more sustainable than trying to give up everything at once.
• The thing you need to focus on right now may not seem to have anything to do with your goal.
• Stop trying to accomplish two conflicting goals or you won’t reach either of them.
• Have regular check points with your family where you re-establish what you’re saying no to.

Show Notes

• 02:17 Ben: At the beginning of the year, we always set goals for ourselves. We set goals instead of resolutions, and I like that. It’s been our experience that we don’t give up on goals the same way we do on resolutions. When you break a resolution, it feels like there’s finality. You’ve closed the loop on that pursuit. You think, “Well, I broke my resolution, so I guess I’m done with that.” Whereas, a goal is something you continue striving toward. Some days you succeed and some days you fail, but you keep moving forward toward it. Many people have adopted this idea and are setting goals for themselves regularly.
• 03:11 We’re almost a full month into the new year, and you might be experiencing some of the resistance that comes from your normal habits and routines, old stuff you’re trying to let go of that’s trying to creep back in. You might be feeling like it’s a little bit more difficult to keep your goal in focus and to continue not just doing the activities that work toward your goal, but saying no to the things that aren’t helpful to get there. Rachel, have you experienced that resistance yet this year?
• 04:12 Rachel: I’m a pretty focused person. We had an almost-crisis this week that threw be for a loop—my computer harddrive almost died with all of my work on it. Even in that, I sat down at the computer and wrote on what I could. I ended the day with 15,000 words even though I had no hard drive. I don’t feel like I’ve felt that resistance yet.

When It’s Hard to Say No

• 08:46 Ben: I set some fitness goals, and I employed a lot of the stuff we’re going to talk about today. At the beginning of the year, Rachel made brownies for something, and we all know what happens in the Toalson home when there’s a pan of brownies. Ben eats about half of them, because Rachel makes the most delicious brownies in the world. I was so focused on my goal, I was strong out of the gate, and I thought, “I don’t even want those brownies. I don’t care. I’ll walk past that pan every single day.” They were sitting there, barely getting eaten and lasting way longer than they would ever last because I wasn’t eating them. That enthusiasm is starting to wear off because my normal habits and routines lead me to eat brownies and sweets when they’re around.
• 10:16 Rachel went to a book club meeting last night, and she came home with this cake from the store, a nice triple chocolate layer thing. She come home with half of it, and it was sitting on the counter. I didn’t eat any of it, but when I went downstairs this morning, as I walked past it, the first thought in my mind was, “Cake for breakfast would be awesome.” I didn’t have it, but I feel that pull. There are some things that are very obviously in conflict with our goals, and it’s easy to identify what those things are. Some things are not quite so obvious. I want to start with the things that are obvious, but are difficult to give up.
• 11:23 For as enthusiastic as I was with my fitness goals, I didn’t put quite as many supports in place for some other things. I do have some habits that are difficult to give up. Even now, with the fitness stuff, the stuff that’s trying to pull me back in is difficult. I feel the difficulty of that. We can do hard things. That mindset is really important, and that’s a great place to start. Believe that about yourself, and get around other people who believe that about you as well.

Despite what your past behavior has taught you, believe that you have the ability to resist things that don’t serve your goals.

• 12:27 Rachel: I have a hard time when people ask me to help out, friends who send me their blog links and say, “Hey, check this out and tell me what you think.” I don’t really have the time to do that, but they’re my friend and I feel bad, so I do it. One of my goals is not to be a blog critique person.
• 12:57 Ben: I got a great question from Cory Miller in the Community chat earlier today that is very similar to the question Rachel just asked, and I want to devote some time to that later in the episode. What about the things you do for others that don’t necessarily serve your goals? Should you leave margin for those things? Is it okay not to leave margin for those things? We’re going to get into that conversation. You’ve set a goal and identified something you’re going to say no to. If you’re saying no to watching Netflix before you go to bed, that’s probably become part of your routine, so you have to establish a new routine.

You can’t just remove an activity—you have to replace it with something else.

• 14:01 For a long time, I didn’t realize the power of that reality. I would just say, “I’m going to say no to doing that.” For me, it would look like getting in bed and thinking, “My iPhone is sitting there, and I’m kind of bored now. I’m not sleepy yet.” Without something else to do, I’m more likely to go back to what’s familiar. For example, if my goal is to get better rest, what can I do in the place of that thing I’m saying no to that’s going to serve that goal? Reading a book is great. For me, I have to read fiction. If I read nonfiction, it gets my brain going. Having the glow of the lamp against those pages and getting into another world helps me fall asleep and get better rest. I had to define what I was going to replace my activity with.

Keep Your Goal Visible

• 15:19 There are a number of ways you can keep your goal visible. If it’s something you can write down on a sticky note and put in the bathroom, put it in all the places you normally spend your time so you’re constantly reminded of your goal. Especially put it in places where you have a tendency to go back to old habits that don’t serve your goal.
• 15:42 Rachel: I’m really old school in everything, so I actually keep a binder full of ideas, to-do lists, and goals. The goals are right next to my to-do list for each week, and periodically, throughout the week, I’ll go back and look at those goals to see if what I’m doing is actually serving those goals. When we make goals and they get put away in a folder we never open, we get to the end of the year and start evaluating and see that we didn’t do any of those things. We need to check in periodically to make sure that what we’re doing is still serving the goals we set for ourselves. Obviously, those goals will grow and change, because we can’t plan for everything. It helps to have that framework there so we can then decide if the actions we’re taking serve what we believe we’re called to do in a certain area.
• 16:54 Ben: I want to talk a little bit about visualization. I haven’t made this a regular practice.
• 17:00 Rachel: I’m not very good at visualization. I’m such a pessimistic person. I have a really hard time with it. You’re supposed to visualize people coming to you on your email list or on your social media channels, and I always think, “Why would they?”
• 17:44 Ben: One of the ways I keep goals visible is the sticky note thing that I mentioned, putting a physical version in your handwriting of the goal you want to accomplish in places where you’re going to see it often. We put all of our goals into a Google Document online, and I can pull it up any time I want, but if it stays there and I never make a point to go look at those things, then it’s more likely that I’ll forget about them. I think it can be really powerful to schedule time every day, maybe five minutes at the beginning of your day, where you revisit your goals and take the time to visualize what it looks like on the other side of having achieved the goal. That’s part of it.
• 18:37 The other part that I think is really important is to visualize yourself doing the things that lead up to reaching your goal. A lot of times, it can be easy for people to imagine and daydream about what it looks like to accomplish their goals, but they have a harder time seeing themselves do the work of getting there.
• 19:04 Rachel: I think that’s where I’m different. I have a hard time visualizing the end product, but I know exactly what I need to do to get there. I know that I will do all the work necessary to get there. At a certain point, if you’re visualizing so many people visiting your website every month, that’s out of your hands as long as you’ve done all the work you can. That’s where I have trouble. I have trouble visualizing that that will actually happen after I’ve done all that I can do.
• 19:42 Ben: Optimism can be powerful. When you’re pessimistic, you can’t visualize, or you have a negative outlook on the results of your work, on a subconscious level that creeps into your work. If there’s a possibility that me putting out that vibe could influence how people interact with my goals, like if your goal is trying to build an audience, that’s worth fighting against. There’s nothing wrong with being pessimistic or being cautious, because some of that has to do with not being emotionally tied to the outcome and trying to protect yourself from having too high of expectations and having those dashed.

Pessimism is worth fighting against if it influences whether you do the work to be successful or not.

• 21:14 When it comes to saying no to things, we often see the opportunity to do something that’s not in service of our goals and we think of the discomfort we’ll feel by not doing that. I feel uncomfortable having not eaten cake this morning. In the moment, I thought, “That would be wonderful,” and I visualized myself sitting down with that cake and a glass of milk. I have my phone up and I’m scrolling through the seanwes chat backlog and seeing all the valuable stuff there. With one hand, I’m doing that, and with the other I’m eating the cake. I had this vivid mental picture of how wonderful that would be. I needed to say, “I know what that looks like. I’m going to fast forward the clock on that timeline and I’m going to see that through all the way to the end. What’s the result?”
• 22:26 It’s not difficult, because I’ve been in a place recently where I’ve been overweight and dealing with the issues that come with that. I think about that lack of energy, the soreness and not feeling sharp and focused on the things I’m trying to accomplish. As wonderful as eating cake might be, I definitely don’t want the result. I visualize my goal, and as uncomfortable as the steps in between might be, I really like the version of myself that has more energy, is healthier, is stronger, and is able to accomplish more, because my body has been taken care of. Visualization is great for helping motivate you toward your goals, but it’s most important in moments when you need to decide to say no.

Get Accountability

• 23:45 As Aaron pointed out in the chat, I also thought about having to tell Aaron that I ate cake. That would be awful. Aaron Dowd is my accountability partner. This year tracking my health and fitness goals between now and October. October is my target date and I’m blogging about the journey. There’s a video there explaining why I’m doing this. Rachel did a good job taking the video for me. I was inspired by Aaron Dowd, who has The Podcast Dude podcast. He did a similar thing and put up a page to get some public accountability, and I thought that was really neat. I also reached out to him and asked him to be my accountability partner.
• 24:58 If you find it difficult to say no to something and you feel like you don’t have the self discipline it takes to say no to that consistently, get an accountability partner, someone you can talk to one-on-one. That’s your first line of defense. Also, establish some public accountability. You can do this on Facebook. You can get up in front of your church on a Sunday morning and make an announcement. Be creative, but find a way to make your goal public so you have more accountability.

The more accountability and support you have around your goal, the easier it’s going to be to say no to things that aren’t serving your goals.

• 25:46 Even to the smallest degree, I find that’s very helpful. In my case, it has been very instrumental for me staying on track.
• 25:57 Rachel: Sometimes, that has to be someone other than your spouse. It can seem like nagging when you hold each other accountable, especially for women. I don’t feel like Ben’s nagging when he asks me about things, but I think he might be more sensitive to that kind of thing or I stay on him more.
• 26:29 Ben: You don’t want to be in a situation where you feel so afraid of disappointing the person that you are willing to hide things. You feel like you can’t talk openly about the struggles you’re having. Be careful not to let that conflict of interest come into play. The best way to do that is to have accountability with someone who will be your friend, love you, and care about you whether you fail or succeed, and who understands that staying on track with your goals is not about being 100% perfect. It’s about recognizing that when you do slip up and make mistakes, you continue working toward your goal. You don’t give up. That’s the first and most important reason your accountability partner is there.
• 27:31 Second, it’s a good motivator to think, “If I mess up, I’ll have to tell them. They’re going to say something, and that’s going to be uncomfortable.” On the seanwes podcast, Sean and I have talked about accountability and having the ability to say no to things and having self control (Related: e107 Why You Need an Accountability Partner & How to Find One). We talked about this three strand approach. The first strand is your accountability partner, the second strand is public accountability, but the third strand is your own personal self discipline—your ability to go against instant gratification in favor of the long term rewards you are working for.
• 28:34 Building self discipline comes in many different ways. One way is through meditation. You have to sit and force yourself not to think about things and try to focus on your breathing and putting thoughts out of your mind. It’s surprisingly difficult to do that when you first start out, but it’s amazing how it strengthens that self discipline muscle. Also, put yourself in situations where, though it may be a little bit difficult to say no, it’s easier. I used the brownie thing as a little bit of a game because I felt strong enough to do this. I would look at the brownies and think about how delicious they are and how much I would enjoy one, and I would purposefully make myself think about the goal I wanted to achieve. That was my way of exercising my self discipline.
• 29:42 I had a conversation with Aaron Dowd, and he told me about a time when he ordered a hamburger. It came with fries, which he had forgotten about, because he didn’t eat fries. That’s exercising your self discipline. Good job, Aaron. I told him to go out, order a plate of fries, and stare at them for ten minutes just to throw them away. Strong self discipline!

Ease Into Change

• 30:22 This is especially helpful if you have many different things you’re working on. Fitness goals can be that way. They can be multi-faceted—saying no to staying up late, saying no to certain types of foods, saying no to certain types of beverages, and saying no to certain types of activities. Sometimes, it works against us to quit everything cold turkey. This goes back to the goal vs. resolution idea. Your goal is to get to a certain point, and there is a journey to getting there. Part of your goal includes all of those activities you want to be doing and saying no to the things you don’t want to do anymore, but sometimes it takes time for you to get there.

Giving up one thing at a time is more sustainable than trying to give up everything at once.

• 31:34 Rachel: How would you apply this to something that’s not health and fitness related, but is more like a job goal?
• 31:42 Ben: If your goal is to grow your business, to grow an audience, or to get more clients, you have to deconstruct that. Finding the things that are obvious but difficult to give up can be similar. Not getting enough sleep makes it difficult for you to be as productive as you could be. Playing on social media can be a difficult thing to give up if you have a habit of going to that when you feel resistance or you are waiting for something. Those are some obvious things. If playing on social media is such a difficult thing for you to give up that you can’t do it without accountability, it may seem silly, but get an accountability partner to help you stay off of social media. Put some other things in place to help you say no to that. Delete it from your Bookmarks tab so you don’t see it in the browser window every time you feel distracted.
• 32:58 You can even go in and disable certain pages on certain browsers, so you make it so you’re not allowed into Facebook or Twitter unless you go in and physically disable it. Those little things won’t 100% prevent you from doing the things you want to say no to, but as many supports as you can give yourself, you should. If you truly want to see yourself be successful in accomplishing your goal, take advantage of the supports you have.

Less Obvious Barriers to Your Goals

• 33:49 A lot of times, this comes up when we don’t necessarily know all of the steps to reaching our goal or our goal shifts or changes and we haven’t given much thought to that. For growing an audience, you may have a general idea for your brand that you want to grow an audience. Part of what you’re doing is that you’re doing content marketing. You’re putting out videos and doing a blog. You’ve got a newsletter and you’re working on a lead magnet. All of those things can serve that goal. You have this goal, you think, “I’m going to grow my subscribers to a certain number this year,” and you thought of all the things you could do to reach that, but maybe you didn’t put them in order. You’ve got all of these things going on, and it’s not so obvious because it’s easy to feel like you’re making progress toward your goal when you’re actually splitting your focus between a lot of different things.
• 35:15 In that scenario, what might make the most sense for you right now is to stop doing the video stuff. Stop doing the blog, and focus on finishing your lead magnet so you have that done and it’s ready to go. Keep one channel open where you’re communicating with people and letting them know that you have something available, but don’t try to do all of those things.
• 35:40 Rachel: I’m not going to give any of my stuff up, Ben.
• 35:43 Ben: I know you don’t want to, Rachel. When you’re right in the middle of it, it’s difficult to see. You need to zoom out and look at an overview of everything, and you should probably do that with someone who can look at it with you objectively. Bring a friend in who has some experience in your field or that kind of thing, and let them look at all of those things with you. Developing your zooming muscle is one of the best things you can do for your goal, because the ability to zoom in and focus and make progress toward your goal is great, but you also need the ability to zoom out. Make sure you’re still on the right track and that all of the activities you’re doing right now are still vital. That’s really important. Be flexible with that. It’s good to have a routine, a schedule for zooming out. Every other week, say, you have a time set aside to zoom out and look at everything. Often, you’re going to need to be able to do that on the fly. It’s good to develop that zooming muscle.
• 36:57 Rachel: It’s good to have someone do that as a partner with you, too. Ben and I work really well together when we’re looking at each other’s things to analyze what we see and what the other person might want to try.
• 37:14 Ben: It’s difficult when you’re too close to the project. Sometimes, you get into doing stuff for your goal, like the video stuff, and you seem to be getting a good response to that. It’s harder to give up, because there’s activity there.

It helps to have a second set of eyes looking at your goals objectively.

• 37:46 Rachel: There’s so much contrasting advice. I’ve been studying marketing for a year and a half now, and you have to do what feels right for you. That’s what I’ve come to believe.
• 38:05 Ben: In the absence of personal experience, I agree with that. Over time, trying different things out and going with your gut, based on research and what you’ve seen work for other people, all goes into the mix. Hopefully, you also gain some experience and start to see some patterns so you understand it a little bit more. Then, it’s easier for you to be objective with the things you’re doing toward your goals. There are a lot of people doing too many different things, and it’s not that those things don’t have a time and place along the journey toward the goal, but it may not be the season for that thing right now. It may not be the time for you to have a video channel for your platform. It may not be the time for you to focus on something right now that you can focus on later, because what you need to focus on now is going to set you up to do that other thing in a way that will be more impactful and efficient.

Saying No for Now

• 39:45 When you zoom out, define the thing you need to do next. What’s the next thing you should be doing? The more you can focus, the easier it will be to make progress toward your goal. The thing you need to focus on right now may not seem to have anything to do with your goal. If you have a goal of starting your own business but you don’t have the money set aside to be able to do the things you need and spend the time to build it the right way, the thing that might serve your goal best right now is saying no to anything related to your business and just working your day job and saving up money.
• 40:35 Rachel: That’s hard to hear.
• 40:38 Ben: It is hard to hear, but think about this. Think about how much money you can save per month. I know that looks different for everybody. Some people work a full time job and they have to do something on the side to pay their bills, but whatever version of that covers your bills and leaves a little bit leftover, think about what that will look like six months from now. Save up all of that, and don’t try to build your business while you’re worrying about your job and your family and all this other stuff. What will it look like 12 months from now? Think about what that launching point will be and how much more equipped you’ll feel.
• 41:30 Think about the time you can spend between now and six months learning about your business. Have conversations with people in that industry. I know that six months or a year feels like a long time to wait, and you feel like you might be missing your opportunity, but if it’s really something you’re passionate about and really a goal you want to see done well, it might mean restraining yourself. Wait. Say no to getting your business cards made, your website set up, and doing all these things prematurely.

Set Regular Checkpoints

• 42:25 Rachel: We kind of talked about this, going back periodically. It’s sort of the same thing.
• 42:34 Ben: There’s checking in with your accountability partner regularly. If you’re doing this in the context of your family, which can be a fourth chord of accountability, they’re in the boat with you and their lives are affected by the decisions that you make. If you set out to accomplish a goal, whether you like it or not, it’s going to affect the people who are in the boat with you. Checking in with them is good, too. Zoom out regularly and re-evaluate everything. This practice can be really helpful, and I’ve employed this for my health and fitness stuff—have a reset week. It can look like whatever frequency or length of time you need it to be. Maybe it’s a reset day or a reset month, depending on the scale. For me, between now and October, at the beginning of every month, I have a reset week. During that reset week, I’m a little bit more vigilant about saying no to the things I’ve decided to say no to. I’m a little bit more vigilant about doing all the things on my list of things I want to do for my health.
• 44:01 It’s kind of my way of re-establishing those goals for myself. It’s not a mechanism for being lazy the other three weeks. I came up with a funny example. In Mario Kart, you’re going along the track, and there are these Chevron shaped things, these arrows pointing forward, and if you drive over it, it gives you a boost. That’s kind of what this week is. It’s a boost, a reminder, and a re-establishing of my goals. It helps me treat it almost like that first week when I started out, to have that same kind of enthusiasm and vigor.

Conflicting Goals

• 46:05 When you have a family, you often have conflicting goals. You have goals you set for your family that seem to come into conflict with goals you set for your business. I want to start out, first, by saying that we hold to the belief that, as parents, when we pursue our dreams and experience the fulfillment of that, that makes us a more whole version of ourselves. That’s good for our family, as long as it’s not coming at the expense of our relationships or to the detriment of our financial situation. Pursuing our dreams makes the whole family healthier. I’m not talking about goals that come into conflict being that you have to choose your family or you have to choose your dream. I’m talking about where, when you follow the goal to it’s finishing point, you get to a place where one can’t be reached when the other one is being pursued or visa versa.
• 47:21 I’ve got a pretty recent example of this. On the seanwes podcast, I shared about a financial goal that I have. That financial goal is to reach $500,000 in income by the end of this year. I’m still wrestling with this. What was also on my list of goals was to build the In the Boat With Ben brand, to finish our email newsletter offering and make that available for folks, to write some books and come out with some courses, to be more involved in the conversations that are going on around family life and work-life balance, and to do more on social media. Those were some of the goals that I set as well. I realized that my financial goal and my goal to see the In the Boat With Ben brand grow were coming into conflict with each other. I started thinking about what it would really take for me to reach both of those goals.
• 48:51 It’s worth sitting down and examining your goals. Try to hold them against one another, and see the places where one goal might be working against the other. In that moment, you have to decide. As much as I would love to, I can’t accomplish both of these goals at the same time. Do I need to defer one and let it be a goal for another season? Do I need to come up with a different version of this goal that does fit with the other thing I want to do?

If you’re trying to accomplish two conflicting goals, you’re going to frustrate yourself and you probably won’t reach either of them.

• 49:46 That’s a difficult conversation both to have with yourself and with other people. I encourage you to bring someone into that conversation who can look at it objectively. Aaron Dowd was one of those people for me. I had a conversation with him about this goal, and he asked me some questions that really helped clarify the issue for me. Thank you, Aaron.

Completing Side Goals

• 50:52 Cory Miller asks, “Is it more important to see things through to completion or to immediately stop things that aren’t helping you meet your goals?” I asked him to give me an example, and I think a lot of people are experiencing something like this. He says, “For instance, I have a music album I’m close to finishing. I’ve been working on it for six years. It’s not going to serve the purpose I set out for it to serve, but I also know I’m going to regret it for the rest of my life if I don’t finish it. It’s not helping me accomplish my current life goals right now, but it’s something I feel I need to complete because of the person it will help me become. So maybe it is helping me achieve my goals, just lesser ones?” I’ve heard some of the stuff he’s working on and I’ve heard the story behind it. I know how passionate he is about this project, and I also know some of the other things he has going on right now.
• 51:55 I also know that he has sabbaticals, so I would encourage Cory to set aside sabbatical time, as much as he can, to put toward that, and not necessarily try to bring that goal into his regular workflow. Even then, I’m not familiar with all of the other goals he’s set for himself. On the one hand, why don’t you wait five years? You’ll be rich and have all the time you need. In five years, a lot changes musically. Does that matter? It depends on what you want to do with that project. I don’t feel like I’ve answered the question for our listeners at all.
• 53:07 Rachel: When you do have sabbatical weeks, there are other things you can do, but you have to schedule those into your life. I’m not the greatest person to ask, because I have a hard time having a great idea and not following through with it.
• 53:38 Ben: I feel really compelled to sit down with Cory and have a good conversation with him. I think he would get a lot out of that. He might even find someone more objective than me, because I love music.
• 53:59 Rachel: It’s good to have someone who knows how long it would take to do something like that. Ben, you know the hours it would take to produce something like that.

Is There Room for Generosity?

• 54:10 Ben: Here was the question I mentioned earlier when Rachel asked about doing things that help other people—Cory asked, “What if the things I’m doing are helping other people achieve their goals? Should I still say no to that, or is there margin to allow for helping others accomplish what they want?” Again, I asked him to give me an example of that. He went on to explain that he does some graphic design work for his church because they don’t have someone who can do that right now. I know how badly most churches need good graphic design, and Cory’s a very talented person. The question, really, is whether we should leave margin to do things that don’t serve our goals, but they help other people.
• 55:12 One of your goals, though it isn’t necessarily your primary goal, may be to help other people. In general, one of your values might be generosity. Your values ought to define your goals even when they don’t do so explicitly. If your value is generosity, you don’t have to say, “One of my goals is to try to be generous this year.” Because it’s one of your values, it’s something you do, and it defines and establishes goals for you. The better question to ask is, “How am I fulfilling the goal of being generous? If that’s one of my values, how am I doing that?” I know Cory is also doing the Behind the Brand podcast, and he’s helping a lot of people out with that.
• 56:12 Even with the work he’s doing with seanwes, the seanwes network is all about helping people. He’s constantly in the seanwes chat helping people work through their problems. Though there are other goals attached to that, that also fulfills the value of being generous. The question has to be, if that’s the case, have I satisfied that value? Do I feel satisfied with what I’m giving? I could go on this for a long time. There are a lot of ways that Rachel and I are being generous with our time, and I wasn’t thinking about that. I wasn’t considering that as us being generous. Because I wasn’t admitting that to myself, I kept feeling this nagging pull to be generous in other areas. We couldn’t be as generous as we wanted to be financially, and I felt frustrated about that.
• 57:28 I felt guilty, but I was missing the things we’re already doing to be generous. Sometimes, you need to step out and try and take an objective look at all the things you’re doing or allow someone else to step in and say, “Actually, you do a lot of stuff for people, and you should stop.” Sean needed to hear that recently. Sean is giving away tons of value, and some of the people closest to him said, “You’re doing too much. You need to start selling some stuff.” It was really good for him to hear that.

Aligning Family Goals

• 58:18 I like this question. Damien asks, “In a family setting, how can we make sure that all our nos are aligned and well understood by everyone?” This comes back to the topic we covered last week (Related: e032 How to Get Your Family On Board With Your Dreams). We talked about getting your family on board with your dreams, and part of that is sharing the plan you have for accomplishing your dreams and reaching your goals, what the steps are going to be along the way and what the checkpoints are. We talked about putting together a business presentation and sitting down with your family and allowing them to be part of that with you. Part of that is defining the things you’re going to say no to. For Rachel, one of the ways that’s really practical is a doctor’s mandate that she’s not supposed to have wheat products because of one of her genotypes.
• 59:36 Rachel: I’m not supposed to have carbs at all.
• 59:39 Ben: Which is a huge bummer. Because Rachel and I had a good conversation about that, now I’m really conscious of that when I go to the store and buy groceries. Every once in a while, I still slip up. I brought Rachel these delicious avocado chicken wraps with homemade tortillas, and she said, “That looks delicious, but I’m not supposed to have that stuff.”
• 1:00:20 Rachel: It was just the tortilla. I can have all the bacon and grease, all the protein I want in the world, but carbs can clog my arteries.
• 1:00:36 Ben: It was helpful for Rachel to remind me of that. First, establish and communicate that stuff.

Have regular check points with your family where you re-establish what you’re saying no to.

• 1:00:54 Rachel: I was just thinking the other day about how we have a family meeting every Sunday to go over what the week looks like. We have a couple of kids who don’t do well with surprises, so it helps us plan our week and let them know what’s coming up. It would be good to have a conversation in those meetings about things that may have been on the horizon that we said no to, and the reasons why we did that. We can show our kids the value of saying no to some of those things. For example, this last year, I volunteered at all of the kids’ Christmas parties at school. The previous year, I had said no, because I had other things I needed to finish up. The boys were super excited. We had a conversation about it, because the first grader was asking, “Why didn’t you volunteer in my Kindergarten class?” I had to explain that this year I have time and I get to do it. Raising those conversations with your kids is really valuable.