This week, Jen uncovered something that has been hiding just under her nose for a long time, and she and Pete discuss that discovery process.
Specifically, in this episode Jen and Pete talk about:
- In what ways might we seek to problem solve in non-obvious ways?
- How might we think about the assets, boundaries, and narratives in our lives?
- What else might be hiding just under Jen's nose? And Pete's?
To hear all episodes and read full transcripts, visit The Long and The Short Of It website: https://thelongandtheshortpodcast.com/.
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Learn more about Pete's work here (https://humanperiscope.com/) and Jen's work here (https://jenwaldman.com/).
Hello there Peter. Hello there Jennifer. You know those times when you're like this problem is in my life and I just can't solve it and I've tried so many different things and then all of a sudden like a flash of lightning you realize you've been looking at the solution in plain sight right under your nose the entire time. I mean I'm vaguely familiar with that experience. It's happened to me once or twice or 35 times. I also feel like most of our good episodes start with a big deep breath from Jim Wohlman. And you know so I'm excited for this. This is the love and the short of it. All right Pete so here's the deal. During the summer I have a routine I just love so much and I should say that that routine involves working out very consistently. Morning exercise you love it. Yeah getting in the sun. That's right. Getting to the beach. So good. Makes me so jealous. Love it. Love it. And then when we get back to the school year everything becomes a little more complicated because I am very much a morning person. I like to work out the second I wake up and I live in a two bedroom apartment in New York City with a living room and so my options are work out in my bedroom where my husband's sleeping or work out in my living room where my daughter's about to wake up to get ready for school and keep walking through and I've done it but it's like it hasn't been enjoyable for me and in particular in the winter it's just like I can't even get outside. Anyway I have lamented for years how disrupted my workout regimen gets when the school year starts. So I know this is long-winded but hopefully stick with me friends. No this is correct. So I've been doing through the gym that I love, Mark Fisher Fitness. They're remote classes since I'm not in New York City right now and the other day I had to fly to New York to do some work and I was like okay I'm gonna wake up I'm gonna do my workout at home and then I'm gonna go to the studio and see my clients and then I realize I hadn't loved myself enough commuting time. So I was like no my routine is screwed and then I go wait a minute I could go work out of the studio. So I go to work, I work out, I cleanse myself, get some makeup on, throw in some clothes, my client walks in and it's a beautiful day and all of a sudden I go are you kidding me? You know I have had my own dedicated space since 2018 I guess, a 24/7 access to my own space for six years. I failed to recognize this asset under my nose which is I have a place to do this. It's right there. I literally couldn't believe it when it occurred to me Pete. That's so funny and you have multiple options in your studio too you could change rooms. Yes and at the hour I'm working out I could run around the whole darn building. I could run up and down the stairs through the elevator, through the hallways. I mean it was wild so I have since purchased all of the equipment that I need. Oh my gosh great. And I'm committed to keeping up my fitness routine by working out at work. This is great okay I love this for you. Firstly I thought you were going to say that you could build it into your commute like it could run or you could ride a bike. So that was where my alignment but your solution is maintaining the same workout which you like doing. The same program that you like being able to do which is not necessarily running from the upper west side to downtown. Like that's quite a run. So I like your solution. This just randomly occurred to you. Like taking a step back from the fact that this is you and your morning workout routine. I feel like the thread is how do we find these solutions that are right in front of us. What do we learn from this? How did you discover this thing that was right under your nose as it were? Well let me tell you Pete this is how it happened. Alright here we go. Here we go. She's rolling up her sleeves folks. Our trainer the previous class said what is one thing you're committing to this week and we all had to share and I said doing away with the excuse that I'm traveling means I don't have to exercise. Oh yeah as someone who travels a lot I feel called out. And I said that pretty smug because I had already planned I was going to work out in my living room. And then when I realized I hadn't left myself enough time I had to make good on this promise I had made to my group that I was not going to use I'm traveling as an excuse. I had to quickly figure something out and then it occurred to me. Nice so I hear accountability to a group of peers or accountability to a cohort of people and not being a liar to myself that was also part of it. Right oh interesting and not being a liar yourself I like that yeah so for me it becomes a reminder that you know we've talked about in various different ways in 300 episodes of this podcast of like who are you surrounding yourself with and or who are you getting coached by or where are you building an accountability what do you know about yourself around your four tendencies if you use Gretchen Rubin's framework and can you set yourself up for success to be able to do the things that you want to do knowing that you know James Clear comes to mind like all of these things are coalescing in this one example that you share this slightly comical but very real example and ultimately it comes down to knowing myself like you could ask chat TPT for a workout and it would give you one for free but you know that you like Mark Fisher Fitness you like their online program and that comes with it a community of people who are like-minded and keeping you accountable so like you know that about yourself which has helped create the conditions for you to have this aha moment and the subsequent aha moment which I've been trying to share with as many clients as possible every time I do my quarterly review at the end of the quarter for the clients this is phrased in a different way but I realize like this can become a more daily kind of question which is what assets experiences opportunities exist for you right now that you haven't leveraged or haven't seen as a potential leverage point so like in this case I have the asset of this gorgeous space on 28th Street and I've only been using it for one purpose so then it's like oh what else could I do with this space now that I've figured out that it's also going to be my gym but like I had a client I was on with earlier today who's about to go out of town to do a gig that he's not entirely excited about and it's kind of like oh this is just like draining several weeks of my life and I was like well what about this opportunity could you leverage for yourself like what opportunities are embedded in it that you haven't let yourself see because you've been sort of bemoaning the fact you have to do it what's there and we came up with a list of like 15 incredible things he could get out of this experience that are just built in that he hadn't even noticed so yeah I feel like this like what do I have that I haven't looked at through a creative lens or like what opportunities might be in there for me to discover how do I mine gold out of this thing okay so I need to take a deep breath because you just remind me of one of my favorite exercises acronyms frameworks projects that I have done you have done our clients have done our friends have done and it was something I learned as a student first in the old MBA which was an online leadership workshop built and run by Seth Goden and one of the projects is about an ABN this idea of an ABN now if you're in Australia you might think Australian business number which is like the number that you need to register your business it's not what I'm talking about I'm talking about an acronym that stands for assets boundaries and narratives and what the project forced us to do if I remember it correctly was list out what are all the assets you have physical software related assets mental related assets skills that you have physical traits that you might have like what are all of the assets that you have your disposal like I have a laptop I have an internet connection I have in your plans I have books I want all of the things that you can possibly think of then the next step is to write about okay and one of the boundaries that you're setting and you want to have something in particular in mind any create a bunch of lists so basically you got two lists a bunch of assets and a bunch of boundaries then the third part was what narratives can you tell can you create what stories might you tell yourself and tell others based on these two things so in your case you told yourself a story that your asset of a studio space had a boundary on it which is it wasn't a gym whether you realize that was a story you were telling yourself or not it's kind of a side point but that's sort of the story that you could imagine you were telling yourself all of a sudden you looked at that exact same asset took away the boundary and created an entirely different narrative and so the reason I had to take a deep read this because I feel like I've forgotten about this exercise and how powerful it is I've had so many people that took the old MBA but also clients of mine that I introduced this to have said to me it's like their favorite mental model for using to help them see different possibilities list your assets list your boundaries and then come up with as many different narratives as you can just by emphasizing or de-emphasizing certain things in rant deep breath exhale Pete no no don't end the rant it's too good I want you to give us at least two more examples of this all right because I think like my story everybody heard it they get it give us another one okay but this happened to a lot of people who drink COVID we have assets as a business that employees and an office space and laptops and computers and servers and resources and meeting rooms and lights all the things that go into an office space the boundary is that we want our people in the office five days a week because that's how we've always done and that's the way we work and the story we can then create is we bring our people to a centralized office because that builds culture and it's the way we work and how we get things done and anything else is probably going to not result in us doing as much work as effectively and profitably all of a sudden now this was forced the boundary gets removed or changed so we still have the same assets we still actually have our building we still have our employees they still have computers we still keep our servers but the narrative we now have to be able to tell is oh we can work remotely from home because we have to either boundary of we don't do that has been removed and the narrative had to shift and all of a sudden what happened is people realize not in all contexts but in some contexts we're just as profitable if not more we're just as effective if not more people can still collaborate in a slightly different way and so the entire narrative of what work looked like changed okay give me one more piece i'm totally nerding out right now in the best way possible okay one that i think about a lot because the question i get asked so much as someone who has a i mean it feels uncomfortable saying but i have a successful business in the leadership development space where i do a bunch of coaching facilitation and leadership development programs for companies around the world the question i get asked most frequently is are you going to train up other coaches are you going to expand your team are you going to bring on more people to do more work and my answer at the moment is no because i don't want to do that so if i look at the ab end i have assets in that i have myself my laptop my brain frameworks programs pre-recorded courses and a philosophy for approaching coaching and leadership development that i think is pretty good the boundary at the moment that i've set is that everything that comes out of my business comes out of me and the narrative that i tell is that i like that because it allows me to do the work which i love doing which is the actual delivery i also love talking to other clients and trying to grow the business so i don't feel like i want other people to come in and do that and i'd like the nimbleness that allows me as a business and i think my clients appreciate the nimbleness that it allows me as a part of my business now there are certain things that i can't do as a result which i'm totally okay with and certain clients are totally okay with that others might go elsewhere because they don't like the fact that it's essentially a one-man band even though i do collaborate with people like you or partners that i have here in australia even when it's appropriate i could take that asset remove that boundary and start to tell a story even when i decide to expand my team and grow my team that is i have this asset and i now want to train people about how i think about leadership development how i think about executive coaching i want to bring on a team i want to build up clients that are bigger and better and the story we can now tell is we're a team of 20 people 10 people 15 facilitators whatever ends up being still using the same asset just with a different boundary and then bringing in a different narrative does that make any sense at all it makes so much sense and i hope you know i adore you and i love talking to you but i can't wait for this now to be over so i can go do this exercise this is what i'm going to spend the night doing and i cannot wait because i see p the ways in which i have limited myself in the past and even though i didn't consciously run it through this framework most of the great strides i've made in my own personal development and in my professional development have been a result of changing a boundary around an asset yeah yeah i agree me too the thing i love that is sort of embedded in and implied in this whole process is that we are all walking around with a bunch of assets we're all walking around with a bunch of boundaries whether we realize it or not and we tell ourselves stories productive or not based on those two things the thing i love that is implied through this is we have a choice to tell ourselves a different story or tell others a different story based on leveraging or deleveraging or removing or doubling down on the same assets and boundaries in the examples i've shared i talked about removing boundaries you could actually double down on a boundary and that becomes a different narrative that you might start to tell others as well for example i'm absolutely not working on Mondays anymore as a boundary that i've now set so even when a client comes to me and says can you do something on a monday the narrative i have is i don't work Mondays because i spend it with my son happy to work with you Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday so like you can double down on boundaries as opposed to assets as well oh you got me fired up whoo this is so good this is so good and now to bring it all the way back around full circle to where we started p i forget where we start i forget what we were talking about please bring it back well we started with the fact that the solution was right under my nose the whole time and i didn't see it right that what i love about this exercise is you move from unconscious to conscious like i'm looking around this room right now and i'm gonna see it in a way that i had in five minutes ago where i'm looking around and going what is right under my nose right now right right right right like what is here that i've just so taken for granted or is just so a part of my everyday existence that i don't even notice it's there hmm yeah and how often we i speak for myself i guess in particular how often i tell myself a story that i need other things or i need new assets or i need to completely reinvent something when actually it might just be what if i leveraged or de-emphasized or re-emphasized or refocused on something that i already have that's under my nose ironically over the top of my computer i can see my SLR camera with my fancy studio mic and my light and like i've got this whole studio setup over there i'm like oh yeah there's assets that i have in use for a couple months maybe i need to re-emphasize those yep mmm they are right under your nose well i am fired up peat and we gotta let you go by the sound of it yeah sorry friends gotta run gotta run lots of abn about to take place over here and that is the long and short of it
