ReInvention can be stressful. Uncertainty ramps up anxiety, drains your energy, and can pull you into numbing habits that keep you playing small.
In this episode, Todd and Chris break down a simple way to protect your momentum: build a daily “scaffold” that boosts vitality, focus, and optimism while you’re reinventing your career.
You’ll learn:
- Why most reinventors struggle when they leave the structure of corporate life
- How to replace that structure with habits that are healthier and ‘more human’
- A series of basic, high-impact practices for your morning and evening routines
- A proven way to wind down at night and improve sleep (reducing mental noise)
- How to stay motivated and positive as you’re in transition
Chris also shares some useful strategies like removing your phone from the bedroom and switching from doom-scrolling to reading, so your brain can actually recover.
If you’re in a career transition, building something entrepreneurial, or just trying to avoid burnout while you figure out “what’s next,” this episode gives you a grounded, repeatable system to stay strong – physically, mentally, and emotionally – so you can make better decisions and move forward with confidence!
If this conversation resonated with you, visit ReInvention.biz to explore our guided workbook and join a community of people just like you – people designing what’s next.
**Subscribe to the ReInvention Podcast to stay plugged into fresh ideas, frameworks, and real-world tools for navigating the future of your work and life.
Episode Transcript
Chris: What am I doing? How am I to the people in my life and the people around me? And then backtrack to, okay, so now what do I do on a Tuesday at 11:00 AM that is building towards that. That is the most important paradigm of this whole reinvention process. ‘Cause it’s really easy to just let another day get away.
All right, Todd, what are we talking about today? What’s on the docket for our reinventors?
Todd: Yeah, man. Well, Chris, today’s session is ultra important because we’re breaking down how to have more vitality, more energy, and more focus as you’re in the process of reinventing your career and your life.
And the reason why this particular conversation is so crucial is. Reinvention can be a stressful time. Uncertainty about the future can easily amplify someone’s weaknesses. And I know we’ve seen this time and time again in our community and coaching practices. It can be a slippery slope down into some repetitive life draining behaviors that keep you playing small.
So in today’s episode, we’re gonna provide you with a series of mindset shifts. And practical tools you can use as your linchpin to stay above the fray of your negative impulses. And look, our goal here is not to be Andrew Huberman and detail for you every biohacking method out there. I mean, while that kind of stuff is definitely my jam, our goal here is to set the playing field for every reinventor.
By providing some basic daily practices you can utilize to have more vitality, more energy, and more optimism as you’re making some pretty critical decisions about your future. So we’re gonna talk about some physical practices along with a few other techniques that we highly recommend experimenting with as you’re reinventing.
And at the end of the day, Chris, our purpose for doing this podcast, for running our community and really everything else that we’re doing is to help people reach new levels of success and fulfillment faster than if they didn’t find reinvention in the concepts we discuss here. So as we jump in, let’s remember that reinvention is an opportunity.
It’s an opportunity to create a future that aligns with the life that you most wanna lead. And philosophically, this is different than just making a quote, career pivot and staying on the treadmill so you can survive another day. And Chris, man, I know that you’ve been itching to get to this topic.
Chris: Yes, yes.
I was thinking about this topic as I was going for a run at 11:00 AM on a Tuesday, and the thought was like, oh. This feels human, like this feels natural, like what my body wants to do at this moment. Mm-hmm. And it caused me to reflect on, obviously the content of the work I had done in my corporate career was not great for me, but also like the format of the work, sitting at a desk from nine to five or eight to six or whatever it was, and like, this is the time when you work and not having flexibility to do what I was feeling in the moment as a human being. You know, that was a big part of what I didn’t like about that. And so for Reinventors, especially as we’re coming maybe from a corporate or a nine to five and we’re doing something entrepreneurial or maybe a little bit more flexible, like there can be a great opportunity here to really lean into your human rhythms, and that includes your physicality and yeah, maybe just changing your routine up a little bit and being like, Hey, I, I don’t have to work out at 5:00 AM ’cause that’s the only chance I get to during the day. Maybe there’s a better time for me. There’s this unnatural element that arose in, I guess post-industrial society, the nine to five.
You know this Todd, I’m reading this book, Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.
Todd: Love that name.
Chris: Great title, like really nails it. Goes right to the point, but talks about the fact that in a lot of these jobs, it’s just like chair filling, right? Where whether work needs to be done or not, you’re expected to be in this place, acting and seeming busy, you know, like Costanza running around the office, holding papers, pretending to seem busy, even though he wasn’t actually doing a job.
Todd: The Penske files, right? Yep,
Chris: that’s right. The Penske files. You nailed it. That’s
Todd: our first Seinfeld drop on the show. I love it. Like that’s, I’m a big Seinfeld guy, I love it.
Chris: It’s amazing. If it took us that long to get the Seinfeld, ’cause I think that’s pretty in our culture, collectively. Mm-hmm.
But you know, yeah. If you think of like. Ancient cultures. Right. This, maybe this is my huberman moment for a second, but if you look at ancient cultures, and our best view into them is modern cultures that haven’t been touched by like technology or modernity, it’s not like the hunt happens between nine and five Monday through Friday.
Mm-hmm. Right. The hunt happens when the hunt happens and it’s this intense burst of effort chasing down the animal or whatever it is to kill them and then eat it. And then you can like rest for three days. Right. I mean, this is an exaggeration, but this is really what happens, right? So there’s nothing natural about this time boxed work that we do, and I think it’s a great opportunity.
We see this in our community for a lot of reinventors to rethink, not just your balance of work in life, but your integration of your work into your life. And a big part of that is the integration of your physicality. You know, we’ve talked about this a little bit, Todd, I use like running or exercising as a tool to help me work more effectively in a sense.
You know, I’m banging my head against the wall metaphorically, and then I’m like, all right, well I’m stuck on this thing. Let me go run for half an hour. Break that wall and come back and be more effective. I think some people who maybe work remotely have the opportunity to do things like that, but for the first 20 years of my career, like that was not an option.
Todd: Yeah. You just dropped a lot right there. I mean, you’re talking about Seinfeld, you’re talking about modernity, the industrial revolution. I mean, everything, right? You threw it all in there, which is really great. But this is such a juicy topic because the way that I hold this Chris, especially when it comes to.
Physical health and physical exercise, like I mentioned the word vitality a bunch of times, and I love how you’re talking about the actual rhythms that we go through and that this is an opportunity to maybe look at those rhythms and change things around. But one of my strongest recommendations for people that are in the process of reinvention is to take your physical health on. Before we get into the actual when to do that best, because I think that is a part of it, but this is a moment in time to get in great shape. This is a moment in time to be like, all right, I’m in a moment. It’s stressful. I can see the pathway by which I go down some of these negative habits and I start watching TV for four hours a night, and maybe I’m drinking a little bit too much and doing some things to numb myself because I don’t want to deal with some of this pain and insecurity.
But I think the call here is no, let’s actually take this moment to get in great shape. To start running. To start lifting weights, to start eating better, to start finding the habits and routines and timing by which these things work best for me. Because maybe now you can, where before you couldn’t, right?
That’s part of the opportunity. So I think the call here is to take it on. For me, ’cause we’re in the process of reinvention ourselves. And when I started this whole idea of reinvention and a community a couple years ago, it was a big moment for me because I had to take a step back from some money making I was doing, it was stressful.
I’ve been in that boat and I saw myself starting to go down some rabbit holes of you know, just things that I do that are more cringey or like just to numb myself. And I’m like, no, what? No way. I’m gonna take this on. I’m gonna get myself in the best shape right now because the hypothesis is that for me to create the success that I want it’s gonna come from the version of me that is really healthy, that eats really well, that is dialed in on my sleep that does certain things. And I actually went even a step further because all this research started coming out around like lifting weights and building muscle. As you get older, I’m like, all right, I’m gonna start lifting weights heavier and more.
And you know, we’ve talked about this a little bit. I’m lifting the heaviest weights I’ve ever done in my life right now. And I can tell you that after two years of going hardcore into my health and all these things, it’s definitely having an impact positively on my mental and emotional states that’s allowed me to find you and start this podcast and do all these things that we’re doing.
Because I’ve set myself up as the foundation physically to be energized, to be healthy, to get up in the morning with some spark in my step, right? So I think that this is a moment in time. We gotta start there, right? Let’s find our circadian rhythms as you’re mentioning, but let’s also turn to this and motivate each other to be like, no, let’s take on our physical health right now.
Chris: Yeah. And I think that’s right. I mean the integration element of. looking at the identity, who’s the type of person who has the success that you want? Right? And we talk about this one-on-one all the time, Todd, but it’s it’s not just like you solve this career thing, and that is something that exists in a vacuum.
You’re a human animal and there’s an ecosystem of your life. And so if you want this great success and you want to have. Really a work life that contributes to joy and abundance in your life, well then all the things around that have to work in concert with it. Right. So I think that’s a great point you brought up Todd.
It’s a holistic concept. And again, for me it really, thinking back to being in a corporate career that wasn’t working for me, I was so disconnected from my body. Like even when I was working out consistently and I’d be running, or I’d be lifting or whatever. It was in a tiny window of the day, that was almost the only time of day that there was physicality.
Mm-hmm. And then I would go into the desk and be in this box all day. I know that that’s not what you do and that’s not what I do. Right. It’s that integration of it into the day. But yeah, I think this is a really great opportunity for people to not only rethink the work they’re doing, but rethink work in general.
Yeah. And how it fits into their life.
Todd: I love when you start talking about getting in your body. ’cause I think part of the disease in our culture is just people in their heads. Just so much in our head. Right? You know that I’ve done a lot of personal growth work in my life. A lot of retreats, you know, a lot of meditation retreats, deep dive stuff.
It’s kind of been the world that I come from and I love it. I love doing that stuff. And it reminds me of years ago I did this thing called the Hoffman Process, which is the seven day like really deep dive retreat. You go to this place in Northern California, I think there’s also a Hoffman somewhere on the East coast and like, you know, you turn off your phone and you go through this process that’s been around since the 1960s and a lot of really well-known people have done Hoffman. It’s like a thing. But one of the parts about it that I’ve loved, that I really took to heart in that process was this notion that there are four different aspects of self.
Okay. And that’s how they teach this process. That there’s four versions of you. And the way they define it is there’s a mental version of you that cognitive, analytical part. There’s the emotional part of you, the feeling part. There’s the physical part, the actual physicality of your body being in a body.
And then there’s this spiritual part, which is the more contemplative, mindful meditative, which we all have access to these four parts. And in that seven day retreat, they have you going in and out of these four different aspects of self. And it’s very interesting.
Right. And I think what you talked about here is really important because part of the hypothesis that I started to play with years back was this idea of really focusing on my physicality, like getting myself physically healthy. Because I’ve done so many interviews and everyone says the same thing. If you’re not physically well, it’s really hard to reinvent yourself and have success, and have fulfillment.
Like when you’re sick or you’re not well, in your body, it’s really hard to have success enjoy in these other areas, right? So do your very best to make that a top priority. And on the other side, okay, this more spiritual, woowoo, mindful stuff. Just spending some time every day letting go of the mental and emotional stuff and just being in your body, just breathing even for 15 minutes a day, Chris, just like letting go of it all and starting to train yourself to play with these different aspects of self.
And what I started to do, where I found so much success is look at the physical part and the mindful part. As like bookends. And the thought was that the middle pieces, like the mental, which is what the addiction is like we’re just in this mental cognitive world and the emotional part in the middle would start to get worked out.
Right. So almost like a focus on physical health and a focus on mindful health. And I found so much benefit by doing this. And so that’s part of the recommendation here. Not only look at your physical health, but start to get in your body. Use mindful practices. Use meditation as a tool to be in your body so that way you get out of your head.
And what most people don’t realize, the big obstacle that I think comes up is, well, I don’t have time for that. I need to make decisions now in my career. I need to, you know, get this figured out because my family’s counting on me. Like I get that. I’m not being not empathetic to that. What I am saying here is that what I found in all these years of coaching and experience for myself is that by integrating these practices, taking time to physically get healthy and taking time to be more mindful and have some form of meditation practice actually creates more space, right? You actually have more time. So even though it can feel so counterintuitive to listen to this, like, oh yeah, these guys are great sitting here talking heads on a podcast, right? But. You know, easier said than done.
But the truth is, is that when you start integrating some of these different ways of being in the world and you start getting in your body and you start meditating, you start really taking on your physical health, you find that the mental and emotional stuff gets worked out faster. I’ve just found this over time and that’s where you get the creativity and that’s where you get the ideas and that’s where you get the motivation to make your reinvention happen.
I know that you’ve really experienced that, over the years as well. Yeah.
Chris: Absolutely. I mean, I love, you brought up such an important point, which is this idea of like, I don’t have time for that. First of all, we can just look at this on its face and say, Hey, if we’re talking about half an hour of exercise and 15 minutes of meditation to start.
Todd: You have time.
Chris: You have time, right. I mean, listen, let me inhabit my personal David Graeber and go right at Bullshit Jobs and say, Hey, people are sitting at their desk from nine to five. There is nobody out there working eight hours straight. It’s not happening. The people who are working 12 or 13 or 14 hours, the proportion’s even lower.
You’re not actually working productively and efficiently that whole time. Go check the science on this, it ain’t happening.
So, for me, when I have that old paradigm pop up of I should be at my desk now doing this work, I have to remind myself sometimes that actually, if I go for that run, or even just take that break and zone out and just, you know, meditation doesn’t have to be this crazy thing.
It can be eating your lunch without staring at your phone during it. Mm-hmm.
And focusing on the eating and the process and just being present for 20 minutes or whatever it is. Guess what? Not that this is the goal of these activities, but you end up solving your problems faster afterwards.
Todd: Yeah.
Chris: You end up getting better results in the cognitive space, for instance, that you were trying to bang your head against.
Todd: That’s exactly right. It’s like when you’re just using the mental cognitive component to try to solve its problems. You end up banging your head against the wall and white knuckling your way through life. If you just start integrating using this idea of these four different aspects of self, and you’re like, all right, I’m gonna go to the gym and I’m gonna start running and getting in my body, I’m gonna start doing some more meditative or mindful practices where I get out of the normal mental capacity, I’m gonna start doing some of these things.
You start to find that the solutions exist in these other areas, and then they come back in. And then your mind is a wonderful tool to actually start making real decisions. And you start playing with the way that we’re made up more naturally. That’s one of the things that, especially for the folks that are coming out of this corporate world like you did, and a lot of our clients have done for 20, 30 years of like working a certain way, it’s a lot of mental reprogramming to be able to let go of this old way of doing things.
And that’s why we’re doing this podcast and we do the community and everything that we do. Because you gotta be able to lift up that record needle and start to really change some of these behaviors. Like you need to do that, otherwise you’re going to recreate the past. Okay. And I’ve seen this so many times where people come into our conversations and they’re like, all right, I’m ready to reinvent.
I’m ready to do this stuff. And then the old world comes calling. You know, another job or another situation, or it even could be an entrepreneurial venture that they’ve started, but they start doing it the same way that they always did, which is always gonna lead to burnout and lead to being stressed and overwhelmed.
I’ve seen this so many times, so that’s why we’ve gotta look at our habits, Chris. Like we’ve actually gotta change how we get up in the morning and how we do things and integrate new things. So that way that leads in a different direction. No matter what we do. It leads in a different direction with more space, with more fulfillment, with more joy and more presence.
’cause that’s where we’re battling against some old mental programs.
Chris: Absolutely. We talk about career reinvention, but this is a life concept. Right. And for some people, maybe even ultimately, the content of the work might not even be changing that much.
But the format and the way you think about it and the way it fits into your life. That is really the essence of reinvention that we’re exploring is, how can we make this integrative so that it is you? Who you are is the through thread through all of this, around the work you do, around the life you live and as much as possible in any given moment that you’re in flow with, like what you want to be doing.
Physically in space and mentally and emotionally and spiritually, it’s all integrated. Like that’s the goal, right? Obviously it doesn’t happen a hundred percent of the time, but there’s just so much more opportunity for that to happen. When we go through the process of consciously reinventing the work we’re going to do with clarity about who we are and in the context of serving and enhancing that.
As opposed to, you know, most people, or many people at least, and certainly many of our clients just kind of stumbled and bumbled and ended up in some thing for work and then tried to build their life in the margins around that, right? Squeeze in the pickups and the drop-offs and the lifting and the walking and all those things are just like squeezed into that.
This is really a call to say, Hey, rip out that middle piece for a second. And let’s build the life we want and then find what plugs into that well from a work perspective.
Todd: yeah,
it’s so huge and it’s like that’s why we didn’t name our thing like Career Pivot or Pivot Nation or something.
I don’t know. ’cause it’s not about pivoting. Pivoting, connotes, let me just stay in that mental and let me get another job. Or let me find another way to make money. But I’m not actually dealing with anything to do with myself or my lifestyle or what I really would wanna create if I had just a moment to dream again. Right. I think reinvention, connotes personal work. I think it connotes dreaming again, because why the F not right? I get on the phone with people and they look at me like, oh my God. No one has said this to me in a long time.
Take a moment right now. Like our favorite word is get clarity. Right? Which is let’s start looking at what could happen in our life if we take a moment in time to just think idealistically, it’s an exercise to do. It will free you. And then you start to see, man, that version of me, like two years ago, I, I was talking about myself and I started this process of lifting a lot of weights.
I really got a clear vision of me as I am in my fifties now. And like what I look like moving forward, when I’m 55, 60, 65, 70, I was really getting a clear vision of that and that version of me doesn’t watch four hours of TV every night. Like that version of me is in really great shape and spends a lot of time on my physical health and helps others do that as well.
And like just interacts with my family and my friends and my clients and everyone like in a certain way. And I started to see that. I’m like, I need to start doing the habits that get that future aligned now. That clarity piece always comes into play for us because when you don’t have that vision, you’re just pivoting.
You’re just like making pivots and then guess what? You’re banging your head against the wall. I’m like, ah, what’s going on? As opposed to just stopping and breathing and looking at it from a more holistic perspective. And I think we do wanna get into some, more tactical techniques in a moment. I wanna give you a moment to respond to this because I see you nodding and all that.
But this is an opportunity, right, to reinvent and not just pivot, right? And I think we wanna start with clarity. We wanna start with some physical, getting ourself healthy, getting ourself maybe a little bit more mindful, whatever that may mean to us as a person, and start the process that way.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, you just really nailed the topic too that I think is super important, which is in reinvention and listen, some people come to reinvention because they got laid off. Mm-hmm. And maybe it was a real negative thing that they didn’t want to have happen. A lot of people come to it because they want to make a positive change, and there’s a lot of different ways people come into this world. But what’s in common for most of these people is that there’s a bit of a break in the stream. There’s a pattern interrupt that’s going on, right? You are in one mode and you’re seeking what the next mode is, but you’re a bit in a middle zone there, and it is such a great opportunity. This is what you just got at Todd.
It’s such a great opportunity to take a step outta the stream and not just be reacting and responding to everything and approach with some intentionality, creating a clear vision, I love what you just said, man. The idea of like, Hey, when I’m five years older, what do I look like? Mm-hmm.
What am I doing? How am I to the people in my life and the people around me? And then backtrack to, okay, so now what do I do on a Tuesday at 11:00 AM
Todd: Right.
Chris: That is building towards that. That is the most important paradigm of this whole reinvention process. I mean, just from a life perspective, that’s so important.
’cause it’s really easy to just let another day get away, let another couple hours get away. Right. And listen, I have my own personal experience that I always tap into where I blame a lot of that on the structure that put us in these corporate nine to fives. Because a lot of people, and this is one of those things that, over time it became more and more sad to me, was the people who were just like waiting for five o’clock.
Like, I can’t wait for it to be five o’clock so we can go home, or whatever it was, you know? And, and catching myself doing that and realizing, and this was me looking five years into the future. My life is passing me by. I don’t want to be in a situation where I am willing time to pass. I wanna live a life where I am clinging to every second because I love what I’m doing and I love who I’m with, and I love what I’m creating.
Todd: Yeah.
Chris: so to me that look lookout into the future and projection into what we’re doing today is so important. And I think that lends us to some of the tactical things we can talk about, because the challenge sometimes for reinvention is you’re coming out of a very structured world and maybe that wasn’t a good structure and routine for you, but now you’ve gotta create your own structure.
so how do we do that? Right.
Todd: Well, I love, what you said before as well around just having more efficiency, you know, and more productivity. ’cause most people are just really not that productive. I’ve seen this like for myself, like almost humbling looking back and when I thought I was doing well and now that I’ve integrated some of these practices and really habituated them, how much more I can get done in less time actually just frees you up to have your foot in so many different projects and ideas and relationships. You know, when you look out into people that are really successful and fulfilled, that are doing a lot of different things in the world, if that’s what you want, it’s because they have a foundational kind of system that allows them to have that space.
And we’ve talked about some of this here, right? Just having physical health in play for you, right? Having some form of mindful practice, that allows you to get into your body. But one of the most basic things that I’ve been recommending for years, and this has helped a lot of people, Chris, we’re getting a little tactical here right now, is by having a scaffold for your day.
Okay? And I actually love that word. And I was taught this about 20 years ago, and I’ve continued to use this to this day. And what I mean is. That there are two times of day that are really important when you’re talking about infusing vitality and energy and intention. Okay? And those two times are right when you wake up in the morning and before you go to bed at night.
And most people go through those moments in time completely unconsciously, okay? It’s like you wake up, you get your phone, you look at your phone, like we all know that this is what our culture does. Okay? But what I’m saying here is let’s look at those moments in time with a little bit more of intention right now.
And the recommendation that I always give people is look when you get up in the morning, okay? And if you have an alarm, whatever it is, do not go to your phone first thing. Do not look at your phone. Do not look at your text. Like this is not mind blowing stuff. There’s a lot of data and science around this, but we know it.
Put that aside for a minute. Get up. And the number one thing that I recommend people just this alone, Chris, is game changing, is put your feet on the ground and just have a moment. Of being in your body and a moment of feeling grateful that you have this life, like, that’s it, whatever that is to you.
Okay? Like just for a moment, breathe like, all right, I’m in this body. Like I’m here. I got this house in this bed. I’m grateful. And you start off there. And then what I do is I go and I get some water. Okay. And usually I get some warm water. There’s Ayurvedic technique, which is warm water is better for you.
In the morning, it’s a little bit of a detail, but I drink some warm water or lukewarm water that doesn’t really shock my system. Maybe sometimes I squeeze a little bit of lemon in it and I, and I drink some water because our bodies are dehydrated after a long night of sleep. Okay. And I drink some water and that feels good.
And I’m like hydrating my body. And then I usually do five minutes of just some loose stretching. Just some stretching, you know, maybe a little bit of movement just getting in my body again, that’s the key thing that you said before, getting in your body in the morning, okay? Before you get to your phone and you lose yourself in this mental world we’re living in.
Get in your body, stretch a little bit. Then, for most people it’s like, all right, lemme go brush my teeth, do some things. That’s fine. And then you get out your phone and you start your day. But there’s another piece that you could add in, which is doing a little bit of free writing. If you have some time just getting out your computer or a pen and paper and just writing like free writing or even getting out a phone and recording yourself.
Just allowing yourself to get whatever information is in you out. We’ve talked a lot about that practice here on this podcast. You know, Julia Cameron wrote this book called The Artist’s Way, and then we do this practice called self-talk, and that’s another thing that you could do in the morning is just like getting the information out.
Even just for five minutes. And so I know that could sound like a lot when you listen, but we’re talking five to 10 minutes in the morning of when you wake up as the beginning of your scaffold. What are your thoughts on that?
Chris: I’m like jumping outta my chair to comment on that. This is like one of my favorite topics okay, I’m gonna cheat. I’m gonna talk about the evening for one second. ’cause it serves the morning. One of the greatest things I started doing a couple years ago was there’s a little drawer in my kitchen where the tinfoil is and uh, it’s not, ’cause you have to make a tinfoil hat.
That’s where I put my iPhone at night at like 9:00 PM. And I put it in that drawer the next morning, I don’t open that drawer until like a solid hour after I wake up.
And I wake up in the morning, I bought this little alarm clock that has like one button on it.
’cause I just didn’t even want to have my phone alarm in my room. Just that practice alone of not having everything else in the world scream in my face first thing in the morning.
And I don’t even take in like a lot of news or anything like that, but I don’t even want a text from you, Todd, in the morning.
I don’t wanna slack from you or anything. Mm-hmm. I don’t want any of that stuff. I want me
Todd: mm-hmm.
Chris: I want to be with myself and as you said. Ground myself in my body, in my moment, I actually can get more intentional about gratitude. That was a good reminder to just bring that in more intentionally. I mean, anyone who is not doing that, try that for like two days.
And just tell us how you feel.
Todd: It’s a huge difference.
Chris: I mean, it’s unbelievable.
Todd: It’s unbelievable. Yeah. I didn’t know that you did all this. This is so great. Like, I’m gonna try this tinfoil thing. I mean, I know it wasn’t about the tinfoil, but I have the same drawer right there.
Chris: You gotta put you the tinfoil hat on. That’s the key to the
Todd: thing. I love it. Put the phone away. I don’t do that. My phone is by my bed. I like this better, like putting the phone outta the room. What a great idea.
Chris: I’m gonna send you a great little alarm clock link. It’s a great little marathon alarm clock.
Todd: No, that’s, I love this. Perfect. Like you get a little, an actual old school button on it. Oh my God. Yeah. I am down. Okay. I am totally down for that. This is so much better, you know. and the difference is monumental when you just do some of these things that we’re talking about and take your morning on.
And the gratitude thing, by the way, it could just be like five seconds, even if you’re not feeling it, just I’m grateful that I have this day. I’m grateful that I have this. That’s it. And then you move on and after a couple days, you really start to see the benefit.
But I want to go to the evening part of this as well. Okay. Because a lot of people have morning routines. Very few people have evening routines. Okay. They just don’t, you know, and we, we have this day and so much happens. And then at night we usually check out, watch some tv, do some stuff, whatever.
Then we go to bed and there’s no system there at all. Right? And we go into sleep. You know, with our mind usually racing, we don’t really benefit from sleep, and so the scaffold that I recommend is actually looking at the end of the day, similarly to the beginning say, all right, what can I do to wind this down?
And what I like to do, okay, is at the end of the day, like when the sun is going down, I have a little backyard. I live in LA right? So I, I don’t have like this big property, but I go in the backyard and if the sun is coming down and like the moon’s coming out and the stars are coming out, I like to go outside and feel that fresh, kind of cool air on me, and I have a little spot of grass back there. And sometimes I’ll even take off my socks and I’ll put my feet on the grass and I’ll just like stretch a little bit and I’ll move and my phone isn’t on me, and five minutes of just being outside, letting everything go.
Right. Just letting everything go and getting back in my body at the end of the day, and like that by itself, five minutes of doing this, is so radically game changing. Okay. Because now what you’re doing is you’re telling your body the day’s over you’re now starting to align your circadian rhythm that, all right, well I’m heading into sleep soon.
You know, I don’t do this right before I go to bed, but you know, sometimes I do. But you’re like heading into that part, and you’re, queuing your body, triggering the right hormones to release where you’re like, all right, I’m, I’m getting ready. It’s nighttime. Now I’m getting ready for bed. This improves sleep, right?
This is one of the main things that improve sleep. You know, when people come to me, I can’t sleep. Well try this. Okay, wind your body down. And there’s something also, you know, the practice of putting your feet on the ground. It’s a little bit woo woo or new agey. But you know, some of the stuff that I like is it’s, yeah, it’s a practice called earthing.
It’s a real thing. And you put your actual feet on the ground, on grass and you feel it like, you’re like, oh my God, like my feet. It’s like this relaxation that comes over you just by putting your feet on the ground. So we definitely recommend trying some of these things. They’re simple to do. But just start looking at your day with that scaffold.
I mean, do you do anything in the evening or is this kind of like,
Chris: Well, it’s funny ’cause I’m like, uh, hi Todd calling in from the northeast. Uh, am I supposed to put my feet on the two degree ground or should I do something different? It’s funny because, you know, I don’t really go in for like the woo stuff, but my kids actually make fun of me.
’cause like, whenever I get a chance to, not when it’s this temperature, I’m like barefoot outside. I like to love to be barefoot outside, like feet in the grass. I don’t know, just naturally love that. I never studied any reason why or whatever. But i t just gives you a good feeling. Yeah. So what else do I need?
I’m gonna tie in something from a little bit earlier we talked about into this nighttime or evening ritual. I thought about this very recently. I love to learn, I love to read books except I haven’t been doing it that much lately because life has kind of been coming at me and keeping me busy.
And so I really recommitted to, in the last several months that I wanna read for like an hour a day. I’d love to read for more than that, but like, let’s get an hour a day. Great time for me to get an hour of reading in is like nine 30 or nine o’clock when I’m settling down to go to bed. Mm-hmm.
And one, it obviously is just a calm, focused experience and many times I’m falling asleep before I even quote plan to. It’s a really natural, nice way for me to fall asleep, but two, it’s an activity that I’m moving towards as opposed to moving away from Netflix or scrolling the internet. I’m moving towards reading a book like I’m reading Bullshit Jobs right now, which I love. My friend gave it to me and it jumped in the queue over this other book I really wanna read. So I’m like reading bullshit jobs. And then I have this Benjamin Franklin in France during the American Revolution book. Mm-hmm. That I wanna read next. So it’s like I’m a listen to how nerdily excited I am about reading those books right now.
That makes it so much easier to put the phone in the drawer and not get sucked into the infinite scroll.
Todd: Yeah, I love it. It’s slowing it down like at night, slow it down, reading slows it down, right? That’s why people have always read at night, you know? And we can go a million miles deep, you know?
’cause this is actually just the start, I’ve seen such transformations just from these recommendations, Chris, they sound like little trite things actually. They’re not, they’re huge. When you actually start to say, all right, I’m gonna implement this scaffold. I’m gonna get up in the morning, put a little energy, a little intentional gratitude, put a little water, a little movement, maybe a little free writing, and then at the end of the day, you maybe slow it down a little bit.
If you can go outside, if that’s available to you, put your feet on the ground again. Just start to slow it down a little bit. Do some reading. Like you start to get into this rhythm, right? And this is very important for Reinventors, especially when it’s stressful, as I said in the very beginning, where it’s like a lot of this could be pushing to move very fast, and so we come in with some counterintuitive statements, actually move a little slower. You know, this is an opportunity to change the foundational patterns and reprogram the way that you’ve been working and thinking about work, and that’s where the opportunity lies.
And so that’s why I love doing this with you because we slice and dice this like in so many different ways, you know, and it’s focus for people that are in that moment in time where it’s like, what am I gonna do over the next 10, 20, even 30 years of my career? I need to make smart decisions now. And I think this approach is just so powerful and works, it’s successful because it’s how we work as humans.
As you said, this is actually how we work. Let’s remember that we’re human and that this life is a blip in the matrix, so let’s actually go for it in a way that’s aligned with how we work.
Chris: It’s trusting your humanity that you’re gonna get there. And like you said, it’s going slower to get the answer actually faster, believe it or not.
just these little changes. I love the concept of scaffold Todd, because you do these things and then all the other things you want to do can be built with the scaffold around it. You can build the foundation for everything else you wanna do. So I think that’s a great concept, man. And this is, man, if people want help sleeping, we could talk about this for six hours while you go to sleep listening to our podcast.
‘ I’m so excited about this stuff because we see it change people’s lives it’s changed my life. It’s changed your life too. Mm-hmm. Just these basics and some of the things they lead to. So
Todd: Yeah, take it on and if you. Like what we’re talking about, definitely subscribe to us.
Look man, we’re right now, in the middle of our first season and we just mapped out, you know, we’re doing a season two, like we’re starting to, get some pretty awesome interviews in the queue right now for people that we wanna bring on this and, if you’re interested in reinvention and what Chris and I are doing, like come to our website reinvention.biz, we have this amazing workbook that you can work through, which is kind of some of the secret sauce that we have that we give to our one-on-one clients. And you know, we also have this community that you hear us mentioning and that’s always available to you, that you could check out our community and come onto to live calls with Chris and I.
And you know what I love about this is that we’re very clearly focused on helping people that are mid-career reinvent themselves, right? And to make smart decisions. You know, we are just better doing this together and we’re better doing it slicing and dicing all the different variables that come into it.
It’s not just I need to pivot and get a job. I need to look at this from a million different ways. And that’s why I love doing this with you because we can talk about this in a lot of different ways and I think it’s just the conversation that’s so important. Good episode. Thanks everybody, and we’ll see you next time on Reinvention.
