If you could look inside most business owners’ minds you’d find a lot of thoughts. You’d probably find plenty of stress, worry and anticipation of the future. There’d be analysis of what’s happened in the past, scenario planning and a series of what-ifs. Add into that thoughts about the family, the state of the world and other stuff and you have a mental cocktail that might just drive anyone crazy. So what can you do if you really want to be quiet in your mind?
Sarah:
Welcome to the Spirit of Business, episode number 61, Mastering Your Inner World with Matt Murphy and Sarah McCrumb.
Matt:
Hi Sarah.
Sarah:
Hi Matt.
Matt:
Can I ask you a question?
Sarah:
Okay.
Matt:
What did you learn this week?
Sarah:
It’s Tuesday Matt. The week has only just started, but as it happens, I have learned something this week, maybe I’m in the process of learning it. I woke up early on Monday morning, yesterday morning, and by the time I got up, I felt like I’d been through a war. And this seems really ridiculous, but I don’t suppose I’m the only person this happens to. I received an email on Sunday night and it had some presentation in it that I needed to have a look at or something. And this thing went through me like, oh my goodness, we’re making the same mistakes over and over and over again. And I woke up early and it kind of seized my mind and took over and got kind of added to by things that I perceive going on in the world, which are pretty challenging scenarios. Many of us can see the world that way, that it’s in a very difficult place at the moment. So it all kind of got bundled up in the early hours of the morning as tends to happen. And I don’t know why I was battling with it so much, but it was the, that kind of feeling like nothing’s going to work, real deep powerlessness that I felt, and I didn’t because I was half asleep. I didn’t have the self mastery to just kind of sort it out. I eventually did actually do that. I did the thing that I’m sure I’ve mentioned here in this podcast before, and I just said to myself over and over again, I bring love to my perception of the world and covid and vaccines and things that were going through my mind, and I bring love to my perception of this presentation. And I bring love to my perception of the business and all of those things. And so I calmed down and I got up and I sat down because I normally relax every morning. I sat down and I was still, I felt really tired after this battle. And I thought, what am I to do here? What, you know, what can I do? I don’t like that kind of battle. It doesn’t seem to me to be helpful. And I just sat down and I sat for half an hour or an hour and I went really, really quiet. And I realized that I could find a place inside myself to just be quiet. I can still function, I can still do everything I need to do, but I had such a longing to be quiet, just to be quiet inside myself. And for that to be, you know, I am, I am actually mostly, but when those things come up, I wasn’t, and I saw the beauty and the power and the simplicity of being quiet, whatever’s going on and realizing that it doesn’t matter if we’re dealing with the same thing over and over again. It doesn’t matter if we’re making the same mistake. It doesn’t matter if the world is going crazy. I can be quiet and I’m then better able to deal with all of that. Now you might think, well Sarah, you’ve learned that a hundred million times before, but it, like all these things that kind of go round it, it seemed to be at a deeper level and I have really felt so quiet and so good as a result of that decision. I think I made a decision that I value that kind of inner quiet and inner peace more than I value being upset because something’s not quite the way that I thought it should be.
Matt:
I can actually feel exactly what you’re talking about there in terms of as soon as you said, I, I went to find a place of quiet, deep inside, I got a sense of what you were talking about just by you saying that. And I felt it. And it was really interesting just listening to you and then feeling what you were talking about then. And I reflect upon, you know, my week and, you know, some of the, the trials and tribulations that you have in business and the difficulties. And I was probably thinking the same thing. I want to find a place of calm. I always want to find a place of calmness and quiet and peace. So it means that no matter what’s happening around me, then I’m feeling okay with it. That’s such a challenging thing to do and from a mastery perspective and I’m not very successful with any if I’m honest, that I do find that place of peace and calmness as is probably readily as what somebody who’s very well practiced like you are in that particular space. Because it takes practice and discipline to do that and be conscious of it, where, you know, to replicate what you spoke about then and, and do what you spoke about then. But I just love the sense of the simplicity of what you say is that there was something obviously engaging with your, your head and your brain that put you into some sort of spin in terms of that energy, that heady energy that we get into that I’m often in dealing with problem solving in a business environment. But to do it from a place of complete calmness would obviously feel so much better and lighter and easier. And we’ve touched upon some of these points before, but you know, it’s so good to talk about again because it just helps to remind me that you said that, you know, you know this and I would say, you know this, but to relearn it over and over again to remind ourselves is such an important point to make.
Sarah:
And to recognize that each time it’s better. It’s not just remembering what I did before. Every time that I go through one of those worlds, which is really not often at all these days, and used to be I used to live in it all the time. I literally all, I don’t think I ever stepped out of it when I was younger, but now it’s rare that I experience that kind of storm. But every time I do what comes as a result of it is better than what I had before. And I, that’s important to remember because when I, when I’m in it and I think when everybody’s in that you feel like, oh my goodness, everything that I’ve learned has just gone out of the window. I’m worse than I’ve ever been. I was literally thinking, what an earth am I doing? What an earth, what an earth am I doing feeling like this and thinking like this in the middle of the night. Like I know better than this, but I wasn’t in control and I know enough to know that that’s old energy releasing. And I could tell myself all that stuff. I could give myself everything that I teach everybody else, but like all of us in the middle of it, it doesn’t sound that convincing. And where I went to that place of inner quiet actually that choice, that decision, that quietness was more important than what I was previously thinking was important. That was the thing that changed. Previously, I thought that the presentation is the most important thing or what’s going on in the world is the most important thing. And therefore if it’s disturbing or if it’s disappointing or it’s not what I expected, that’s going to cause me a reaction. And what I thought here was none of that is as important as the fact that I want to feel quiet.
Matt:
So I see that happen a lot. And I call it, and it’s labeled as catastrophizing because you sort of have something that you see as disturbing and then that triggers something inside you and then your mind starts to go into some sort of a cyclical pattern that makes it seem a lot more dramatic because you go to the worst case scenario because you just kept going, well, if this happens, that happens. And if that happens, that happens that, and oh my God, the whole thing’s just about to, you know, fall apart. And I’m really good at that by the way. So I’ve got a, I’ve got a master’s degree in that in terms of catastrophizing.
Sarah:
Don’t claim that, please, you might get even better at it.
Matt:
Yeah, it’s one that I want to lose pretty quickly. But because of this constant you know, looking at worst case scenario in business, looking at always the, you know, what could possibly go wrong. So that’s where that catastrophizing can come in. But then making sure that, you know, you balance it up with to say, well, hang on a minute. And that’s why there’s two things that come to mind. One, where you’re talking about that you said you’re not, you don’t often get to that place in the first place. So I want to know how don’t you get to that place in the first place very often. And then secondly, when you’re in that place, you know, you can, as you say, you can get caught up in it, but there was something that you did that broke it. And I think that’s the really interesting question too. So the two questions, what’s happened that you don’t get there very often, and then when you do get there, how do you then ensure that you get to this place that is a better place to be?
Sarah:
Well, what happened for me not to get there very often in my case was practice. And I think that I was quite slow because I was so used to feeling really uncomfortable with myself and in myself that I didn’t put any value on feeling good. And that is really interesting. I remember when I first started teaching relaxation in London to all these, we did an offer through Timeout Magazine in London and anyone could come and spend half an hour in a free relaxation and this beautiful beautiful place and many people did it. And I would lead them and they would say to me things like, I’ve never felt this good in my whole life and we would never see them again. And it puzzled me for years until I really understood from my own experience that I didn’t put any value on feeling good. I thought it was normal to feel just, just uncomfortable all the time. That’s how I grew up. That’s how I, that’s how I did everything. And so I didn’t really know anything different. And this is very much to me about value. So what’s changed is that I started to have significant periods of time where I felt good and feeling good for me was feeling quiet, feeling a kind of neutrality, not pumped and excited. Because I know exactly like if you see your kids getting really, really excited, you know, what’s going to come next? I don’t like that. So I started to discover what feels really good. But I think the thing that made the biggest difference to me was actually valuing that. Because that, that’s another thing that I’ve learned now, thank you for asking the question, is I’ve learned that I, it wasn’t because I’ve done it so many times that I made a decision this time. It’s that I decided very strongly what I value and so, the shortcut for somebody else would be like, if you actually can’t stand living in the drama of your own mind, if you make a decision that you want peace, you can make a really strong decision at a much, much earlier stage than I did. I think I really took the hard, I took the hard path of going the other way time and time and time again until I had the guts to value how I feel. And the only thing that gets in the way of it is the fact that, you know, we are taught things like what’s it, delayed gratification. So, which is really suffer now in the hope that something good might happen later. And it just makes you feel bad all the time. And then when later happens, even if something good happens, you feel bad, people carry on feeling bad because they have a habit of feeling bad. So it, it’s shifting values I think is the biggest thing. And the thing that I did, I’ll repeat because this is such a phenomenal trick or tip or technique that, and I’m not usually one for, for little techniques. I’m usually one for teaching principles and all the underlying stuff. But this is a technique that seems to work for a lot of people and it works in minutes. Most techniques I know take ages. And it is, and I may have said it before in the podcast, but it’s definitely worth repeating. But what I do is I say to myself in my mind or out loud, I say, I bring love to my perception of whatever it is that’s driving me crazy. And it’s very important. The formula of it. It’s not so, I don’t bring love to the presentation. There are lots of people who’ll do that. I bring love to this person who’s a pain in the arse or I bring love to this job that’s going really badly. It’s not that, it’s I bring love to my perception of dot, dot dot. There’s something in that formula and I can’t even be clever and explain what it is, but everyone I’ve taught it to comes back and saying, oh my God, that is amazing. It’s just like, it brings peace. And that’s what I did. I literally said, I bring love to my perception of everything from people, projects, the business, the future of the business that I was catastrophizing as a result of not having the presentation quite precisely how I thought it should be through to the state of the world. And you know, what will happen to the world if we don’t sort out certain things. I just brought, I bring my love, love to my perception of those one after the other and I fell asleep in the middle of doing it. It was that effective. So, that was that part. That’s what actually broke the cycle. And then the decision for peace for inner quiet came when I sat down a bit later. It was like, I don’t ever want to be there again.
Matt:
It’s very powerful. Obviously very difficult to do, but very powerful.
Sarah:
I think it’s very easy, Matt.
Matt:
Well, that’s right. And this is what I was about to say. Yeah, it seems like it’s a difficult thing to do when you’re in the moment, but then it’s a very simple thing to do. But then also seems to be a difficult thing to do when you’re in the moment. So that, so it becomes one of those things where it’s a simple thought process and the way you go about it. And even when you’re talking about it, as soon as you, you’re talking about the process, I’m going, well, you’re bringing peace to yourself because you’re bringing peace to your own perception of whatever’s going on. You’re not trying to change somebody else’s perception or you’re not trying to change the outcome of something. You are just bringing peace to yourself, the thing that you can control, which is how you feel about the situation as opposed to changing it. And I think that was the powerful thing that you said then, and that, you can feel it. I can feel it when I talk to you about those things. I just want to pick up on a point that you made before, which is really interesting and I see this time and time again, and this concept that you’ve got to feel bad for a long time before you’re then allowed to feel better. Now, the word that came to mind then for me was this concept of retirement, okay. Because people spend their whole life working really hard, either as business owners or as employees and thinking, I’ve got to work hard so then I can get to that golden time in my life where I can just do nothing okay. And enjoy that particular period of my life. And, and there’s this, we get caught up in this particular concept of feeling like the delayed gratification, like you’re talking about to say, well, and it, it’s like if I do all the right things now, work really hard, then I’ll get the, the fruits of my labor later on. So I’m happy to feel bad. And that’s the decision you’re making, feeling bad about it for later on I’m going to feel good. But, as we know, that’s, it’s ingrained and it’s very difficult to feel good if you’ve been feeling bad all your life. And I just thought it’s a, it’s an interesting point to make.
Sarah:
That’s a kind of modernization of the old thing, which was suffer all your life so that you can go to heaven in the end.
Matt:
Yes.
Sarah:
Which you probably grew up with.
Matt:
Yeah. Pretty much being a Catholic.
Sarah:
Yeah. I mean, I’m not Catholic. I grew up in an, in more, in an Anglican tradition. Not strong in my family, but my grandmother and my schools, my schools, you know, it was chapel twice a day type of stuff at boarding school. So it’s not as strong, but that, but the Protestant ethic of, look and I think it’s really important that like the Protestant ethic of working is a good one, but there’s a way, there’s a spirit in which it’s done that is so joyless and everyone I know wants to experience joy when they’re working and they want to experience joy in their life. And yet work, which is what we spend most of our time doing, can so often be a really joyless thing. And that just doesn’t seem right.
Matt:
I just thought about the word hard work. You know, you the concept of hard work. Easy work. Okay. But then work and easy, because work seems to be a negative connotation of the word to say work. It’s work, it’s sort of like so therefore has to be hard, that’s why it’s hard work sort of thing. But really the journey in that is to, to enjoy the work that you’re doing and be at peace with it. So then you are not delaying the benefit of doing what you’re doing now for a later stage. And there’s something in all this that we’re talking about, that makes a huge amount of sense. And it does come back to if we’re working away enjoying what we’re doing, making a contribution. Because I don’t advocate that you go through life and you don’t work. Okay? I don’t advocate that you go through life and you just have, you know you don’t make a contribution or impact or, you know, and I think works good because it provides structure and discipline and mastery and accountability and impact and those sorts of things. But why do we think that it has to be hard work to do those particular things as opposed to just something that’s a, a joyful experience. It’s just a really interesting concept. And when you, if you said that really the, the secret to that is being at peace when you’re doing that.
Sarah:
And enjoying maybe if, if joy is what you want or enjoyment, it might not be peace, it was peace, it was quiet actually even it is peace, but quiet was what I really wanted at that moment. It’s just, I’m just going to be here and be quiet, nothing else. But if enjoyment is what you want and if you value it enough, you will make it more important than your work. And the good thing about that is that you will actually work better if you enjoy it. So this is what I think is such a beautiful consequence of this way of doing things, is that if you bring enjoy, if enjoyment is what you really value, and then you bring enjoyment into your work, not only do you get enjoyment all day instead of hardness or seriousness or whatever it is that you had before, but also you actually work better. You get better results. It’s like a win-win. It makes you win more by giving yourself permission to experience what you would really love to experience. And to me, that’s just such an amazing thing.
Matt:
So I’m going to throw something at you that I just thought of then, which is a concept that, and this is a personal statement. So I can wake up in the morning and there’s a heaviness about the day that’s about to occur. Okay? And then I start to think about the list of things that I’m going to do for this particular day. And my mind will go to a heaviness or go to a something that feels a bit negative and, and muddy or just blah for want of a better word, if that’s a word. But, and then I tend to spend some time thinking about saying, why do I think of it that particular way? I can think of it in a joyful way or in a way of creativity or contribution or benefit to the people that I’m going to interact with all day. And so it’s like you’re trying to flip your brain around from this negative to a positive sort of type place. But I’m not always successful in actually, there’s still this griminess associated with the day. And sometimes I can’t work out why that’s the case when there’s no real strong reason to think that particular way. It’s just a thought that I thought I’d throw up when we’re talking about this place of peace and calmness and quiet.
Sarah:
It would be really interesting to look at how much do you really value peace and how much do you really value in comparison with peace? What’s going on in your business? And you’ll probably find that there’s just a very clear formula there. The extent to which you value what’s going on in your business over peace is the extent to which you will let your business disturb you rather than peace disturb you. In a way, what I’m saying is I’m going to let peace disturb me. So if peace is the thing that’s going to rattle my cage, it’s going to make me more peaceful. Whereas if how we make this presentation or how we do this is going to be the thing, like, it’s, it’s not about saying so that doesn’t matter because it does matter. But it’s about saying, if it’s not sorted out yet, I’m not going to lose my peace over it. Because what we tend to do is say, oh, this isn’t going the way I wanted it to, so I’m going to throw away something like peace. I’m going to sacrifice that for the sake of this thing. So I really think it is actually just purely and simply about what you value.
Matt:
Which makes sense. And I think the thing that you just taught me then was around this concept of throwing something away because something’s occurring. So you’re thrown away the ability to be joyful or peaceful or have enjoyment for what you’re doing because there might be a negative element associated with it. And so therefore you go, well I’m prepared to give that up because I’m gonna experience this. Instead of saying, well I’m not prepared to give that up so because I value it and therefore I’m gonna hold it strong while I’m doing the stuff that may not necessarily provide me with joy. Is that, is that kind of what you are talking about?
Sarah:
Yeah, because either something’s already happened, somebody’s already done something stupid, or the same as they always do it. Whatever it is that, you know, gets you, it’s already happened. So are you going to throw away your enjoyment because of something that’s already happened? I’m like, that’s a bit silly really, isn’t it? It’s already happened, so why would you, you throw it away when you hear about it, you didn’t even throw it away when it happened. You throw it away when it gets, it walks across your plate, so to speak. But the other thing is then the alternative is, okay, I’ll throw it away because of what might happen in the future. Maybe because of this awful thing that’s just happened, the future’s going to be really terrible, so I’m going to throw away my enjoyment now right away just in case something really terrible happens in the future. So first of all, if you don’t enjoy now, you’re probably more likely to not enjoy the future. You’re not really creating a great outcome. Secondly, it hasn’t happened yet. So surely you have enough capability. You especially, I mean, I’m not pointing the finger, but you know, anyone, any of us who’s listening to this, we actually do have the capability to influence what’s going to happen. But it is really difficult if we’re envisioning a scenario, a catastrophe scenario. It’s really a lot easier if I’m kind of like relaxed and enjoying myself and I have some peace. It’s like, oh, well maybe we could do this. Or maybe it’s actually there’s a blessing in disguise here, or a silver lining, whatever. There are plenty of songs that can give us the clue here.
Matt:
You’re laughing because of the fact that I said that, that every single word that comes into my head gets translated into a song, we were talking about that today. And it is, and it just seems to be so nonsensical what we, you know, when you say throw away something before it’s even happened, it’s just so nonsensical. And, but when we’re in it, we’re in it. And then there’s times where you’re sitting there and you’re, you’re going about your day and all of a sudden this negative emotion comes in or a negative thought process that, that goes under this thing. And you think, where’s that coming from? What’s that trying to do? Why am I, what’s, what’s that about? Do you, and then you’ve got to deal with that next flood of big stuff that comes in.
Sarah:
I just say that’s energy. That’s just energy. There’s energy moving maybe across the whole planet and everyone’s feeling some version of that wave at the moment, but everyone experiences it a bit differently. Who knows what it is. I just say that’s energy because it depersonalizes it. It’s usually not about you personally. It’s something, it’s just a movement. It’s kind of like the weather, like, oh, it’s raining now. It’s like you, we would say, oh, it’s raining now what have I done wrong? It’s kind of like that.
Matt:
So was that present energy passing through?
Sarah:
Yes. I mean, in a way yes, of course. I didn’t take it that way. The irony or the funny thing about it is when I sat down to do my bit the next morning, it took me about five minutes to sort it out. I thought it was going to be, oh, like here we are. There’s so much work to do. It took me five minutes anyway once I was calm and peaceful to sort out what needed to be sorted out and there was nothing. There was no drama. So yes, I reckon it was energy going through and then I just attach a story to it and then attach some other stories to it. The world’s scenario, da da da. And then you get this kind of cocktail of stories that justify the feeling of a storm. But maybe the storm was there the stories are just justifications. But I want to come back to something more important because it would be really interesting for you to experiment with this and for anyone to experiment with this. And, you know, I would love to hear about those experiments. This little technique that I gave, I bring love to my perception of. So if you can remember a first thing in the morning when you wake up to say, I bring love to my perception of today, I bring love to my perception to, you know, this meeting or this, whatever, all the things that you have lined up in your mind that are going to happen today. And the really interesting thing about it is you don’t need to feel the love. So this is, you don’t have to sit there while you’re feeling a little bit like and, and feel love. That’s not very easy to do. You don’t have to, you just have to say the words and this is what everybody’s found. It’s not about the feeling. The words seem to have the power. So it’s actually a very interesting experiment because I haven’t come across something before that has worked as well for me as quickly for me and as quickly for other people. So there’s a little bit of research that I’m sharing here.
Matt:
Well, I think they are very great words of wisdom and also techniques that actually do fundamentally work and have been tested and proven multiple times. So there’s something in that, and it’s probably great that we’ve had the conversation around the starting point was what did you learn this week? Well you probably didn’t learn some of it, it reminded you of what you’ve learned historically.
Sarah:
Yeah. And for me it really felt like I learned something significant, actually very significant for me. And that’s what’s important.
Matt:
It is. And one of the other things that, that I know that you talk a lot about is working light and what you said when you went sat down to do that presentation, it took you five minutes and you thought it was gonna take you a lot longer than that. And so therefore that’s a concept of working light. But how efficient is that when you think about the productivity gain that you had by being a calm, quiet and at peace and it took you five minutes to do something that if you’re in a different head space might have taken you a day. And that’s, I think also such a powerful thing in terms of our efficiency of time and productivity and working light as you say. It’s just a great and beautiful example of that.
Sarah:
Yeah. And I’m actually gonna give my email because I’m genuine in saying that. I would love to hear from anybody who tries out that I bring love to my perception of whatever is driving you crazy. Because it is really research for me. I can only find out if these things work for lots of people. If I, if somebody tells me and there are people listening to the podcast who are not on my courses, not doing other stuff. And so it’s an opportunity to reach a different audience. So my email is sarah@sarahmccrumb.com and I’m genuinely interested in your experience if you try that out.
Matt:
Well, I think that’s a great way to continually test and measure the stuff that we know makes a difference. But we’re here, you know, hopefully to help people and, and make a contribution and impact. So that’s another way that you know, we’ve just done that and I look forward to seeing what the results are gonna be too.
Sarah:
And if it’s as good as I think it is, I can almost put myself out of a job. And then I’ve got some, then I’ve got something to think about.
Matt:
Well given that we all need help and support in these particular areas, I don’t think that that’s going to be the case anytime soon.
Sarah:
We’ll see. Okay. Well it’s been an interesting exploration anyway, so thank you Matt.
Matt:
Thanks for the chat.
Sarah:
Thank you for listening to the Spirit of Business with Matt Murphy and Sarah McCrumb. We’ll be back next week with another episode. You’ll find the show notes with links and other useful information on our website, spirit of business.live. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with your friends.
