Episode 121 – Bins vs Business

This is Rebecca Clark Episode 1 21 The Bins vs The Business. Mm This podcast is for anyone that knows they haven’t yet found and offered up their best work but are compelled to seek it out and do it. Are you ready to move your desk? Yeah. Mm hmm. My friend MJ may laugh when she hears the title of this podcast because she coached me this week and we had a very good session because I recognized some things about myself. And as she put it, I’m on to myself. I have new awareness of something I was doing. That is not in my best interest. So, as I’ve talked about in some of the past few episodes, I am working on the d junking of journals, letters, memories and memorabilia, little trinkets, things I’ve saved and just kind of walking through going, okay, I’ve looked at all these before, but I’m going to be serious this time. I mean, how old do I have to be to do this in seriousness. And I decided that now is the time. Why not? And in that process, I’m finding lots of extra things like really long letters I wrote so many notes and letters. It’s incredible. And my parents gave them all back to me. So I have, there’s in my possession as well as things that I had in my own possession already. And it creates a lot of noise. Part of it’s good noise because it forces me to look at my life and choices and work through some emotions with that. But part of it is realizing some of these things I can enjoy for a minute I can take a picture of and I can let it go. And quite honestly I’m sitting here having gone through about 95% of the process that I wanted to go through of getting rid of physical items and going, wow I don’t even remember everything I threw away. Mhm. And it’s just been over a period of like this last month I’m down to like one or two bends I wanted to tackle and I’m talking to M. J. And saying you know, I’m glad I’m doing this. But there’s also other things I’d rather been doing even more like finishing some of my business ideas that I have not finished because I’ve been consulting because I’ve been coaching it’s summer been taking care of a tiny person and I’ve had all these different things going on and yet I’ve been making time for this whole d junking activity and part of it is wanting to simplify down belongings. So it’ll be easy to take them right in the process of figuring out okay where to be what to do that kind of thing. And I wanted to simplify. And as I was getting coached on this I’m realizing that for me this d junking along with other things have become kind of a buffer for me and when I say buffer it’s a way for me to stop feeling emotions I don’t want to feel and some of the motions I don’t want to feel perhaps are related to putting out some of the products that I actually want to sell And instead of finishing those things I make other activities more important. And for me that often translates into getting really good at getting Adminis trivia done at doing some cleaning. I have a new one where I’ll mow the lawn right. I’m staying at my grandparents house for a little bit and last week I mowed the lawn three times and that was like an acre of grass or something granted the lawn more setting was too high. So I finally put it to a low settings and like I got to knock this out and the grass needs a little time to dry out a little bit. Mm It’s getting a little too much water. But often we turn to something right? We can turn to shopping, we can turn to spending a lot more. We can turn to eating, we can turn to pornography, we can turn to games, we can turn to anything and access two, try to not feel an emotion. And she helped me see that all of this effort to get through these bins of stuff is really a way of me trying to feel accomplished kind of for a quick win a quick dopamine hit. But really the accomplishments I want to do are greater than that. So after I spoke with her I thought, okay well I’ll just take a look at this last been. But instead of doing what I was doing I said no, I’m putting the timer on for 20 minutes just so I’m aware of what’s in here and I’m going to put it away and I’m going to move on and go awesome job this last month of going through these things, you’ve worked through a lot of emotions. You’ve gotten rid of a lot of junk. You’ve shared pictures with some people of things. You’ve taken pictures haven’t thrown out because they were related more to that person than it was to me. I have a lot of those right? Like if I went to your high school graduation, I have your high school graduation brochure what program or whatever and like why am I keeping this? But I can send it to you, you know? So Anyway I went through that been for almost 20 minutes. I didn’t even spend the full 20 minutes. My awareness was so attuned at that point that I like listen, this last been is actually a lot of photos and certificates that I’ve already taken pictures of or already have the electronic version of and for some reason I have kept certain pictures for certain reasons and that kind of thing like you know what I’m complete like this is complete right now, this is all I was supposed to do this last month now is the time to turn my head toward my business toward other things. And it’s very interesting to look back on the day when it ended and realize, oh my goodness, I did some consulting that day. I helped to friends with proposal creation. And I actually went through a power point that I need to record for one of my products. And when I looked at the date on that power point, the last time I looked at it was the end of May. Not at least that was May of this year. Yeah. But isn’t that fascinating? There was a shift in my thinking during that discussion where MJ helped me realize that I was choosing bins over building my business. Like when I say bins, they’re like These clear plastic bins that you could probably put like 10 books in, right? I store things in pretty small bins because I want to be able to carry it. You know, I made all those mistakes of those massive things that you can’t carry around and it’s just a burden. And the older I get, the more I like to keep it simple and I was prioritizing this d junking over building my business and party was like, well I want to have the smallest possible amount. And I looked at that Ben and my thought was is it worth spending a few hours on this bin that probably would just take up a little bit of space in a truck or what would I earn if I created something in those same three hours and realize how amazing it was to contrast those two ideas now, if you are a big time, harder of physical belongings, it may be worth your time for a month or two to go through and d junk those. And that might be the difference of thousands in moving costs at the same time. You could probably spend your time on a creative idea and make far more than thousands in those couple of months. And so you get to decide, right, when is it important to spend the time to do that? And when isn’t it? What I have started to notice in my life is when I have these crucial conversations where I suddenly reach a new level of awareness on something. It’s almost like it’s giving me a clue that it’s time to make the switch. So it’s not that it would have been right the week before, but it’s right the week that I step into that new awareness, if that makes sense. So I can look back to last week, the week before, the week before that and go, that’s awesome. Pat on the back. You did a great job of working through the memories, getting rid of old letters notes, all these things that you’ve been carrying around for years, working through some of the things in your journals and good for you. But now that you’ve stepped into this new awareness, you’re stepping into it right at the exact time that you need to shift your focus. And so I’m not ashamed of any of the time I spent. But now that I’m aware like going forward. No, it’s time to now execute those ideas you had when you submit for a trademark in the United States for a basic trademark, you can go through the process pretty cheaply for like a couple 100 bucks. You don’t have to get a lawyer if you have a pretty simple trademark. And six months later, so it gets approved. Right? And so I already have one for move your desk and I submitted another one for the brand. I guess you could call it that I am going to be putting most of my products under. And I received an email about 3. 5 months ago saying uh you’re not approved yet. We need to see more evidence on the website you gave us of you using this trademark. So you need to submit another document. So of course I’ve been bombarded with letters and emails from all these lawyers that think that I need help and I don’t need help. Well I do need help but not from them. Mm. Mhm. Because they give you six months to respond with the you know the attachment they request and updating your website or whatever. And I remember when I got at that damn like six months I can knock this out in a day. Well my friends has Rebecca knocked it out. She has not now. I did go to the website and I did pulse on my videos from Youtube to put on that website to show. Hey, yeah, I do have videos out there. Hey, I do have a course out there. I do have, you know, evidence that I’ve had this out there for a while, but have I submitted this response? No, because I go into the clunky website that they give you and you have to read all this small font and thou shalt or whatever’s. And I go, well, I’ll do this next week. I know it’ll just take like 30 minutes, but I’m not going to do it now. So here I am. I have 2. 5 months left and I’ve been dinking around with cleaning out my bins but not completing a task on my trademark for my business. I have over a dozen products halfway through development. Have I finished them? No, because I think I have to go through them with a fine tooth comb and go now. Did I cover every angle. Did I talk about everything? I did I do it in a way that resonates. Are there really five steps or they’re really six steps to this process and overthinking going on. So over d junking over mowing the lawn, doing all these things in access when really I will find out that most of the things I’m putting off are things that Could even possibly fit neatly into 1/8 hour work day, get multiple products done. My friends, we all go through this craziness in our mind and in our decision making and we do it out of fear. We do it because we wonder what will happen if we put ourselves out there, What kind of feedback will get, What if it’s wrong? What if we were not inspired and oh no, what have we done wasting all this time? And all the judgments pour in. So I have personally, I learned a lot this week about taking a look at this bins versus business thing to realize how important I’ve made. Downsizing the number of bins I have over creating what I know I meant to put out into the world that matters because the creation process is a process, right? So you can’t make your stuff better until you put it out into the world, right? For some reason, if you just keep trying to make it better on your own IT languages. But the minute you put it out into the world, you suddenly get the next step of inspiration and you might get it from others. You might just get it coming as a spiritual nudge. You might get it from customers who actually buy it. But apparently it just is set up in the universe this way. Mhm. That you do not get the next piece of inspiration until you take a step and I recognized that I am taking some steps in the direction of my past, but not enough steps toward the future, which is fascinating really because I always think that I’m forward thinking. But as I forward think I carry around all this baggage from the past. We all do it. Some people reminisce on it. Some of us just keep it in books, then we go back to them periodically and reread them and reread them. And you get to a point where like, okay, I’ve reread this. I am now taking the lessons. I am now doing the mental work on this to work on my emotions around it to turn it into a story that serves me going forward and I’m going to kind of let go of that until I’m ready to deal with it again and I will deal with it again. But in a different way, right as I’ve shared before, one of the products is showing how to start writing your personal story. I’m not going to tell you about the hero’s journey and all that. I’ve got friends that can teach you that. But to start with a chart to get some of this down. So you’re going from what’s in your head already, what are the top memories And then after that you can go back and pull from documents, that kind of thing. But just to realize we are creators and how important it is to spend most of our journey moving forward and learning how to effectively look back at our past toward helping us continue on that journey to move forward. Lots of interesting thoughts this week. And of course there’s interesting thoughts, right? I mowed the lawn three times and I listened to great books while I was doing it because of course I read more during this or in my case listen to it more because that fits more of my activities. But I encourage you this week to pay attention to what you spend your time doing and you may be in a project where you are d junking physically, things you may be in a personal project, you are trying to de junk mentally some things and just to recognize as you do that to notice what you’re trading off if you are noticing it, not to be ashamed or think you wasted time prior to noticing it. But just think that maybe perhaps you have been given the privilege to notice this right now because it’s time to take a step in another direction. I’ve been talking quite a bit about this lately, but it’s been on my mind lately. And so I wanted to share it and I’m excited that I’m taking steps to get my own products out the door. Some of the products have to do with writing your life story, some of them have to do with working with your boss and your boss relationships, some about leadership, managing and project management. Like all the work stuff. Right. And all of our feelings about work and all of those personal projects we care about in our life, even though a lot of you care about the work you offer in your career or your entrepreneurship, but I think that trickles into wanting to offer things in other parts of your life. I am grateful that you are listening. I love that I get to share pieces and parts of my life and work with you. I don’t share a lot of it actually, I think some people would find that surprising, but I think we get to choose when we share certain things about our lives and that. It’s okay if we create a private space for ourselves to work on certain things, while also putting ourselves out there to contribute our ideas to others, to help others with their work or whatever we help them with and we can do that. Even if we’re coming imperfect or still d junking or still working through emotions from our past, we can still move forward regardless of that work. We’re still doing on ourselves. Okay, my friends. I hope you have a great week and take a look at those bins bins versus business and you’ll figure out what to do next. Talk to you soon. Mhm. Thanks for listening to the show today. If you enjoyed it. I’d love if you’d write a review and share the show with your friends, sign up for a weekly nudge at move your desk dot com. Yeah. Mhm.