Self-care Is Not a Weakness

Recently, I attended an event where most of the business owners in the room were beginners, were seekers, starters, that sub-300,000 dollar range, and there was this discussion that came up that really surprised me. It seemed to be a competition to see who could bring up how they took less care of themselves or abused themselves more as an entrepreneur.

They started talking about how little they slept, how much they worked, how much they did, how few days off they took, how they really didn't take care of themselves, and here's the challenge. It was all said in a way that made it sound like a positive.

Self-care is not a weakness, and as an entrepreneur, the sooner you figure that out, the faster you get into and stay in momentum.

I'm Alex Charfen and this is the Momentum podcast, made for empire-builders, game-changers, trail-blazers, shot-takers, record-breakers, world-makers, and creators of all kinds, those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny. We define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop, and we don't know how.

While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future, and instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive, human evolution, and we always will be.

Recently, I was at an event where there was a lot of entry-level business owners, and I was shocked. I was sitting at a table and a conversation discuss and it felt completely and totally competitive as if the people at the table were trying to figure out who had taken the least care of themselves or had abused themselves the most.

If you've been around entrepreneurs long enough, you probably heard conversations like this. They sound something like, "Oh. Every few days, I just stay up all night and get stuff done," and then somebody else will say, "Oh, yeah? Well, I skip sleep all the time," and then someone else will say, "You know, I haven't taken a weekend off in forever," and it's this competition to see who's a harder worker, who's doing more, who's putting more into their business, and here's what was interesting. This was at a Mastermind where most people were just getting into business because here's what I can tell you.

I've been part of some of the most exclusive and most expensive Masterminds on the planet. We're talking five figure Masterminds that people spend a ton of money to be in and you have to apply to get into. I haven't been in one or two. I've been in a lot, and here's what I can tell you. The higher level the Mastermind, the more people pay to be in it, and the more successful the population is in the Mastermind, the more self-care is a discussion of strategies of how to take better care of yourself, to sleep better, to bio-hack to be able to create momentum physiologically.

It's very interesting that at the high end, there's never a discussion of, "I don't take time off. I don't sleep. I don't do this. I don't do that for myself," unless it's in the discussion of, "Hey, I'm going to get past this really soon and make it better because here's what any experienced entrepreneur knows: when you go down, so does the business. If you're not taking care of yourself, if you're in that competitive place of trying to take the least care of yourself, like I was watching these entrepreneurs talk about, you have to understand you are working against you growing a business. Here's the reality.

Self-care is a gateway drug to success, and I don't care who says otherwise. That is a reality I have watched my entire life with people that I've coached, with people that I've worked with, and even with me. I can remember being part of those conversations. When I was in my 20s ... Actually, when I was in my teens, I wrote an article about ... or read an article about Bill Gates, and the article said that Gates, in his 20s, didn't take any time off at all. He didn't take a day off, he didn't take any vacation time. He just worked through his entire 20s.

Well, when I read that article, I felt like that was an instruction manual, so that's what I did. I worked through my entire 20s. I didn't take time off, I didn't take care of myself. I just kept going. It was incredibly challenging and difficult, and here's what I know now looking back. Here's what I know now with the perspective of being 46 and looking back at those years. I know that I was completely out of body. I know that I used to believe that taking care of myself took too much time. Then, now, with perspective, I know just how much time I was losing.

See, here's this epiphany that you have to understand, that you have to listen to, you have to see if this resonates with you because here's what I found. When you don't take care of yourself, you train yourself to tolerate discomfort. You train yourself to put up with things around you. You train yourself to put up with being ... not having the success you want, with being in a place you don't want to be, with being around people you don't want. You train yourself to tolerate the world around you, and here's what I want you to understand. When you stop tolerating, you will be more successful. Let me say it again. When you stop tolerating, you will be more successful.

See, as entrepreneurs, we've been taught this lie that we have to be comfortable feeling uncomfortable, and it is a lie. Now, should you feel challenged? Should you feel vulnerable? Should you feel like you're doing things you've never done before? Yes. But should you feel discomfort? No. No. You should offload where you're uncomfortable. In fact, if you start to take care of yourself and you offload where you are uncomfortable, this is how you beat the voice inside your head that says, "You're not worthy. You shouldn't be doing this. You're not good enough. You don't have what it takes." You beat that voice in your head by dismissing discomfort, by digging it out of your life, by offloading it, by building a team, by having other people do the things that make you uncomfortable because here's what happens.

The biggest priority in the business, the most important person in your business, period, is you. So many entrepreneurs have a hard time, first, admitting that, and then two, acting as if. See, if you're the most important person in your business, you have to take care of yourself. If you're the most important person in your business, you won't be running yourself down and getting sick and feeling like you can't get things done. If you're the most important person in your business, you will prioritize taking care of yourself, and it will change your business permanently. If you want to shortcut into the big Masterminds, if you want a shortcut into a room where you pay 25, 35, 50,000, $75,000 to be in ... I've paid all of those checks to be in Masterminds, and if you want a shortcut into that room, if you want to know what's talked about in that room, let me share it with you. The higher end the Mastermind, the more the talk of self-care.

The higher level the Mastermind, the more people are talking about optimizing sleep, optimizing diet, optimizing nutrition, hydration, breathing, movement, meditation. It's a constant source of conversation because entrepreneurs who are successful, who can write the checks for those Masterminds know that the more you take care of yourself, the more you are willing to offload. The more you're willing too offload, the more leverage you get by building a team of the people around you. The more leverage you get, the bigger your level of success, and that's not just how you get into those Mastermind rooms, it's how you stay there. See, you are the most important person in your business, and the day you start treating it that way is the day that everything change, everything changes, everything will change. I know that, for me, there was a dramatic shift in my business when I started taking care of myself.

When I was 32 years old ... A lot of people don't know this. I share it all the time, but I don't think I put it out there enough where everybody knows it, but when I was 32 years old, I was probably over 300 pounds. The highest weight I ever got when I was actually on the scale was 295, but then there was a period of time that I just religiously avoided the scale because I didn't want to know. I was wearing a 44 inch waist and it was fighting for its life. Let's be honest, it was not fitting. I felt unhealthy, I was sweating all the time, I had rashes, I didn't feel well, I was completely beat up, cortisoled out, totally and completely inflamed, brain fog, and I felt sick all of the time.

That came from a decade of working every day, not taking care of myself, sleeping very little, going as hard as I could every day, building a company that was responsible for nine figures in sales, but also building a company that was responsible for almost killing me. I remember, when I started to shift, it wasn't easy. I started thinking I wanted to take care of myself, and it was hard to even figure out how. I remember one of the first things I did was, "Okay. I'm going to get in shape. I need to shift this. I don't want to die. My doctor ... 32 years old, my doctor just told me that I am ..." This was in South Florida, I was 300 pounds, and my doctor told me ... or at least 295, and my doctor told me that I was high most likely case for a heartache and he had an again population of patients.

So, I had to change fast. I remember starting to make that transition. I got on a treadmill, tried to run, didn't even make it a mile. I threw up. I remember trying to figure out how I could make myself feel better, and what I did was I started with the simple things. I started with just drinking more water, hydrating. Hydrating became a gateway to eating better. Eating better became a gateway to losing some weight and moving more. Moving more became a gateway to wanting to breathe better and meditate and take better care of myself. All of those things led to sleeping better. I started working out more, bio-hacking, optimizing.

When I started to move in the right direction, there was dramatic success, not just in my business, but in my marriage, in my life, and the people around me and how I related to people around me. Anyone, anyone who says things like, "Fat people are lazy first," needs to have their head examined because passing that type of judgment on another person just isn't fair because here's what I can tell you. Fat people aren't lazy. I worked harder than I ever have in my life when I was 300 pounds. Everything was hard. Going up stairs was hard, moving around was hard, just getting through the day was hard. It was incredibly difficult just to do what I needed to do, and when I started taking care of myself, like I said, it wasn't easy at first, but one thing led to another.

I started with hydration, that was the gateway to food. Food was the gateway to movement. Movement was the gateway to weight loss, and I just kept going and going and going until today. I'm 46 years old and I'm probably in some of the best shape that I've ever been in my life. I'm optimized. I feel good. I sleep well most nights. I have tons of energy. I get a ton done. I run a multi-million dollar company and make an impact around the world, but it didn't start out that way. When I was 300 pounds, I was struggling. I was having a hard time. I didn't like my business. I didn't like my life. In fact, a lot of what I did at that point was walk away from my life and create a new one.

So, if you're in a place where you're not taking care of yourself and if you're in a place where you are competitively abusing yourself to grow a business, if you're in a place where you haven't really thought about yourself in a while, I want you to know something. The biggest opportunity you have, possibly, in your business today is to start using gateway ... Sorry ... is to start using self-care as a gateway to success. Self-care is not a weakness. Self-care will change how you look at yourself, it will change your ability to run a business, and it'll change your ability to lead people, and it will give you an entirely new value equation of who you are.

It's easy to start. We've created a program for entrepreneurs to hydrate. I want to give you the same first step that I had when I was getting healthier. I obsessively researched water because I wasn't just going to get hydrated. I wanted to figure out how to get hydrated and keep hydrated and make it work, and it was hard. When I first starting trying to drink more water, I found myself drinking a ton of water one day and then forgetting the next day and then doing well the day after that and then the next day, looking up at 2:00 and realizing I haven't had any. I had to create a system where my body helped me drink more water, and I did. I've shared it with thousands of people. I want to share it with you.

It's called the Natural Thirst Challenge, the 10-day Natural Thirst Challenge. Let us show you how to reawaken your natural thirst. Here's why I share this. Because as an entrepreneur, mind/body connection is one of the most important things in your life, and when we work with people in our highest level coaching programs, the first thing we start them on is hydration, just like I'm starting you. In fact, the exact models and methods that our highest level coaching clients use for hydration are available at GetThirstyNow.com.

So, if you've been looking for a way to start taking care of yourself, if you're looking for a way to make it easier, if you're looking for a way that doesn't feel like a massive uphill climb, let's use your natural instincts to help you drink more water than you ever thought possible, connect you mind and body, and get you into momentum. Go to GetThirstyNow.com, join the Natural Thirst Challenge, take 10 days and see what happens. I assure you, if you haven't been taking care of yourself and you haven't been drinking as much water as you should, the 10-day Natural Thirst Challenge will not only help you drink more water, but it'll change your life. GetThirstyNow.com. If you try it out, please let me know on social media how it worked for you. Take before and after pictures and share them. If you move in the right direction with self-care, you can aspire other people to do the same.

GetThirstyNow.com