Unlocking Entrepreneurial Freedom: Escaping the Daily Grind

This is the Momentum podcast.

I'm excited to record this episode of the podcast because I want to speak directly to the visionary personality type. If you're a visionary, then this may be one of the most important podcasts I have recorded for people with our personality and our abilities. If you're someone who loves a visionary or works with a visionary, I think this podcast will give you insights and support to understand how to help that visionary better, and how to help them do more and be able to create more. This is an episode that as little as a year or two ago, I wouldn't have recorded because I didn't have the insights I'm going to share with you today.

I'm Alex Charfen and this is the Momentum podcast. Made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, 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.

I've been a visionary entrepreneur my whole life. I have been one of those people who gets up in the morning, goes into the future, creates a new reality, then comes back to the present and demands it becomes real. It's not an easy journey. It's not an easy life to live. It's the life of a creator. It's the life of an innovator. It's the life of someone who takes responsibility for themselves. And when you look at what a visionary really does, you know, when I, when I look at like, what do I, how do I define a visionary? To me, a visionary is somebody who sees things that do not exist today. It's someone who feels there's an opportunity to change the world, and they're willing to put the effort in to make it happen. It's someone who can see opportunity where the rest of the world only sees problems in situations. It's someone who can see the improvement that needs to be made that eludes everybody else. And it's someone who can literally create the future today. That's what we are as visionaries. That's what we've been gifted with. We are this incredibly unique personality type that walks through the world seeing what needs to be here and is not here yet. We walk for the walk through the world, seeing the opportunity to make a difference that hasn't been made. We see the opportunity to solve a problem that hasn't been solved. That is who we are. And it is an extraordinary gift to be a visionary. I feel so proud and so gifted to have been given this ability in this lifetime and in the past couple of years. I feel so fortunate to have gotten the messaging that I've gotten and the clarity that I've gotten and the insights that I've gotten around what it really means to be a visionary and how we need to protect ourselves. Because even though I've run a company called Simple Operations since 2016 or, well, it wasn't called that in 2016, but I've run this same company that we rebranded a couple years ago to Simple Operations since 2016. And even though I've been working with visionaries for my entire career, and even though I've been showing visionaries how to get out of the day to day of their business that entire time, I'm almost embarrassed to tell you that I've never done it myself until the past few months.

In the past few months, I have pulled myself out of the day to day of my business methodically, and over time, I'm no longer in daily huddles. I'm no longer in weekly meetings. I have assignments and things that I need to get done for my team. But every day, here's what I have: Now I have time, I have space, I have spaciousness, I have time to take care of myself. I have time to spend with my wife. I have time to be in neutral and quiet. I have time to work out. I have time to make myself a better person, to mold myself into the person that I want to be. And you know what happens while I'm taking care of myself and while I'm lowering the noise around me, and while I'm making my world better? I get messages. And when I say messages, here's what I mean. Some people might call those messages ideas. Some people might call it intuition. Some people might call it downloads. Some people might say it's the Holy Spirit or divine guidance. It doesn't matter how you define it. But I can tell you that when you slow down enough, you don't outrun your intuition. When you slow down enough, you allow space for the words of the Holy Spirit to come through. When you slow down enough, you allow for divine guidance and intuition and the downloads that you have been running right by to actually become part of your life and to start guiding you in the direction you need to go and you want to go. And this has been absolutely life changing for me in just recent history.

This has been completely changing the paradigms through which I see business and the paradigms through which I see us as visionary entrepreneurs. Because here's what I've come to know with certainty is that as visionaries, we spend most of our time in the future. If you're a visionary, just gut check that for me. You probably know what I'm talking about. We're driving around and we're in the future. We're working out, we're in the future. We're bored on a zoom call, we're in the future. And when there's high pressure and noise in our lives, that habit of going into the future becomes unintentional. Here's what I mean by that. We go into the future and we think about the worst case scenario. We go into the future and we have weird sexual fantasies and stuff that comes up. We go into the future and we think about what could happen to us that hasn't yet. And that's not so great. We go into the future and we see that there could be challenges and we could lose everything and the business could go away. We go into the future and we don't really create with intention. But on the other side of that, when we lower the pressure and noise in our lives, when we become present and aware, when we get into our bodies and we are embodied, when we are taking care of ourselves, when we have time, space and spaciousness, when we get out of a parasympathetic, nervous, responsive fight, flight or freeze. And we're actually here aware, present and in the moment. That's when we can go into the future with intention. We can go into the future with the intention of creating the person we want to become. We can get clarity around exactly who we want to be. And the magic of doing this is that you can start making decisions in the present for the person you're becoming, not the person you are. And you will get there faster.

And when we go into the future with intention, we can regard our relationship and look at the relationship we have, and we can create a future for that relationship, a future that looks even better, a future that's more connected, a future that contains more love, more more gratitude, more time together. You know, over the past few months, I have, with certainty, clarified my life goals. My life goal is to help as many people as I can and spend most of my time with my wife, Cadey, because that's the place where I get my security from. That's the place where I get my connection from that secure attachment that Cadey and I have created in our relationship over the past 20 years, and countless challenges and situations and problems and issues and bankruptcy and business challenges and all these other things that have come in and caused static and noise between us. We've survived all of those. And I can tell you that today, I know that the most important thing that I do on a daily basis is take care of myself. And the exact second thing so close to first is take care of my wife and help my nervous system regulate her nervous system and show up in a way that makes her feel safe and loved and adored and precious and like the incredible, magnificent, sensual, sexy, ridiculously talented and so beautiful goddess that she is. That's my purpose on a daily basis when it comes to my relationship, because the noise is gone and I have clarity as to what really matters.

And when I look at my business and what I do in the world, the amount of clarity that's coming through and who I want to help and how we want to help them, and what we're going to do has shifted and changed completely. And if you continue listening to the podcast, you'll hear more about that because. I feel like. Slowing down, getting even more present. Getting even more into the moment. Has changed everything for me. And I'm going through this incredible awakening. You can call it a spiritual awakening. You can call it divine guidance. You can call it whatever you want to call it. But for me, it feels like this awakening into the person I've always wanted to become, who is actually the person I've always been. And I'm uncovering and introspecting and understanding more about myself than I ever have. And the reason I have this perspective today, the reason I've been gifted with this awakening, the reason that downloads are coming so often that it feels like the most incredible gift I've ever gotten in my life is because I got out of the day to day of my business. I lowered the pressure and noise everywhere that I needed to. I've slowed down and increased the intentionality with which I do. Everything in my entire life has shifted and changed.

And I share this with you because as visionaries, somewhere along the line, almost all of us, including me, have been convinced that success requires some level of self-destruction. And I say that, and I know it's confronting and I know it's challenging, and I know it sounds uncomfortable, but I absolutely believe that's what's happened to you, and that's what's happened to me, and that's what's happened to everybody in the entrepreneurial world. Because the message of do more and show up more and put in more hours and hustle harder and work harder is everywhere. It's a lowest common denominator message. But the message of “slow down”, “take care of yourself”, “getting your body hydrated", “be present”, “be aware”, “Give yourself time”, “give yourself space”, “take care of yourself” is vacant in our ecosystem. There might be some people here and therewho talk about it, but they're hustling 60 hours a week to tell you how you need to take care of yourself.

And here's what I'm here to tell you. If you're willing to take the leap of faith, that if you lower the noise in your life and you create time and space for yourself, and you create spaciousness, that the life you have always wanted is right in front of you and the universe, or God, or the Holy Spirit or divine guidance or whatever that is for you. You will see just how hard that force is working to create the success you have always wanted. But if your life is too noisy and you're going too fast, not only can you not see that, you'll miss everything else as well. And I share this with you for many reasons, but one of the primary ones is that for my career, I've watched hundreds, maybe thousands of entrepreneurs run as hard as they can and as fast as they can in the direction of creating quote unquote success and hustle and go fast and work 100 hours a week and work nights and work days and work weekends and put all their time and all their energy and everything they have into something, only to arrive at the destination and realize it was never what they wanted in their lives. And the reason that happened is because they were running so hard, they never stopped to ask, “What happens when I get there?” And far too many of us are doing exactly that, and you can see the evidence of that in the market today. There's an epidemic of quote unquote, successful entrepreneurs with large businesses getting up one morning, shutting it all down and trying to figure out what to do next. Because if you run so hard and you run so fast and the noise is too high and you're not letting yourself actually process what's going on, you have no idea where you're going to end up, and it's highly likely it won't be a place you want to be.

Now, if you lower the noise and you allow for those messages to come through and you take care of yourself, you will start seeing an entirely different way to approach contributing to the world. You will start seeing that it's not your time, it's the ideas that matter. You'll start seeing it. It's not all the effort and energy you expend. It's the intentionality with which you do everything. You'll start seeing that if you put more intention and more care and more process into what you're doing, you will have a far greater level of success than if you just run as hard as you can and expend as much energy as you can. As entrepreneurs, we are that small percentage of the population that creates our own rules. We should create rules where we win. We should create rules where we get healthier. We can create rules where we make a massive contribution in the world. And we should create rules around ourselves where we take advantage of the gifts that we have been gifted in this lifetime. And if you're a visionary from one visionary to another, I want you to know I see you, I hear you, I know how much this means to you. I know how badly you want to make a contribution in the world. I know how much it means to you to create success and to help people, and to help yourself, and to change your situation and to grow and to transform and become the person you've always known you could be. But if you're running too hard and you're running too fast, I don't think you're going to get there. But if you're willing to slow down and willing to take some time and willing to raise your intentionality, in fact, if you're willing to be intentionally. Just be intentionally. You will become magnetic. And the forces in the world. That move energy in the direction of where it's needed, will push it towards you, and you will see your entire life, relationships and business transform for the better. I really appreciate you being a podcast listener. Thank you for being here today. Today there's no call to action. I don't need you to go to a URL. I just have a simple request. If you know a visionary or two or 3 or 10 that needs to hear this message, do me a favor. Copy the link to the podcast right now. Send it to him, and I'm sending you all the love and light for helping me in advance and for helping them. Because the more visionaries hear this message, the more grounded they will be, the more contribution and change there will be in the world. And we all know the world needs us now more than it ever has. I love you, I appreciate you. Thank you for being here with me today.