Episode 17: The Power of Margin

Welcome to the Pursue You Podcast, where we are empowering you to continually reflect, design and pursue who you were created to be so you can give the gift of your best self to your family, community, and business!

If you’ve heard me speak, you know that I LOVE being busy. I love activities, productivity, and efficiency. After four years of pregnancy and nursing babies, I was so excited for 2019 to ‘max out’ my life and jam pack as much possible into my life. And you don’t have to have had a human to have gone through this experience, it could have been from a sickness, challenging family situation, etc. but you might be able to relate to when you literally, physically cannot ‘max out’ your life the way that you think you have to in order to succeed. I knew that margin wasn’t a luxury, and I knew that it was a necessity, but I had no idea how to implement it in my life. I didn’t know how to go from my life of exhaustion, chaos, and a mindset of I have to be working, to having margin and rest. Learning this and creating this margin wasn’t easy for me, it was a process and a journey, but I’m going to share with you some questions to help you reflect on your current life so that you can design a life of margin in 2020.

[6:50] Question 1: What would your life have to look like so that you never felt like you needed a vacation? I challenge you to think on how your life would need to be designed so that when you had a scheduled vacation or self-care activity, you actually looked forward to it and were happy during the time leading up to it, rather than desperate and miserable. I encourage you to go back and listen to Episode 2, all about self-care for a refresher on what self-care really should be.

[17:25] Question 2: Where am I not being intentional about my time? I challenge you to get your planner, paper or digital, and time block every hour of your week. Include everything, even sleep. Then go back and see where you have empty time slots and areas where you aren’t being fully intentional with your time or wasting time you could be doing something more refreshing or productive.

[21:00] Question 3: What are you filling your margin time with? Once you’ve found even 10 minutes of margin in your day, how are you using that ten minutes? Are you wasting it on social media, or are you using it to rest, or to be with your kids, or to read a few more pages of that book you want to finish this month? Check your margin to make sure you’re filling it with things that are rejuvenating you.

I went from ZERO margin to being able to logistically create margin. I’ve been able to be absolutely okay with that margin in my soul, and I’ve grown from spending time reading and consuming amazing content instead of wasting time scrolling social media. I’ve been able to be more present with my family because I’m not running ragged and showing up every day being exhausted. Margin isn’t a luxury in our schedule, it’s a necessity. When we have margin and utilize it in a way that refills our bodies and souls, we have more to give! So, pursue margin, so that you pursue you, so that you can give the gift of your best self to your family, your community and your business.

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I am grateful you were here for today’s episode! To make sure you don’t miss out on future episodes, I encourage you to subscribe to the podcast. Click here to subscribe on iTunes.

In order to help others find this podcast and help inspire them, I would love for you to leave a review of the podcast. Share something that motivated you, or something that helped you rerame the way you approach your life and goals. I’d love to hear how you’re pursuing your best self. Click here to review the show on iTunes. You can go to “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review”. Your comments are greatly appreciated!

More Episodes You’d Be Interested In

Episode 2: Why Self-Care is NOT the Answer…and What Is

Episode 3: 3 Reasons You’re Not Making Your First Hire

Episode 14: My Top 5 Personal Reads in 2019

Episode 15: My Top 5 Business Reads in 2019

Episode 11: Using the DISC to Hire with Dr. Ed Gigliotti

Welcome to the Pursue You Podcast, where we are empowering you to continually reflect, design and pursue who you were created to be so you can give the gift of your best self to your family, community, and business!

I can’t thank you all enough for the support of this podcast! It makes my heart soar to hear how it’s impacting your life and business! Your reviews are so helpful to make sure I am providing the valuable content you’re wanting to hear. Leave a review, screen shot this episode, and share it with others!

Today is a really big deal! I love listening to interviews and I love to share and learn from other people who are excelling. When I recorded Episode 3 – Three Reasons You’re Not Making Your First Hire, I got the idea of who my first guest would be, and it was only confirmed when you guys asked for more information on hiring. I knew I had to bring on my husband, Eddie, Ed, Papa, aka Dr. Ed Gigliotti. Before I bring him on to share his favorite hiring tool, I have to share a little about him. He has grown his chiropractic office from the ground up. He knew no one here in Rochester in 2013, and today, he's one of the top chiropractors in the state. In the six years he’s been open, his business has exploded, and he has perfected his systems and hired an incredible team. Today, he’s on to share his favorite hiring tool, the DISC assessment along with practical tools for making your next hire.

[4:55] Eddie and I start off sharing a little about what the DISC assessment is. We talk about the theory behind it that centers on four personality traits: dominance, influence, steadiness, and compliance.

[5:45] Eddie shares how he got into learning about and studying the DISC assessment. He shares how his own interactions with his team lead him to search for a way to hire the best people for the work he needed. He wanted to best serve the people on his team, so they could provide the best service to their clients.

[8:05] Eddie and I spend the next several minutes digging deep into each of the four characteristics and what different traits tend to show up in each category. We discuss their strengths as well as their fears. We also share stories of how we’ve learned to better interact with these different people on our own teams as we’ve become more understanding of the DISC assessment.

[17:00] We recommend you start by taking the DISC assessment for yourself. You can take it for free from WizeHire. Find out who you are and how you’re showing up, and then offer it to people on your team, whether that’s business or family.

[18:00] Eddie and I introduce four ways you can use the DISC assessment as you begin to figure out roles you may need to fill on your team and how to find the right person to fill it.  

[19:00] 1. Look at your job description and decide who would find the most success in that role. You want to make sure that you are putting people in the right role, otherwise you’ll have great team members get burnt out because they are doing the wrong job.  

[24:40] 2. When you get a good resume in response to your ad, request that they take the DISC assessment and send it back to you. This will give you more clarity on who is excited about the job and who would be a good fit.

[27:00] 3. Review each person’s DISC assessment before setting up a phone interview with them. Review the information so that you are able to communicate with them in the best way possible, and so you can decide what additional information you’d like to find out on the phone interview.

[27:40] 4. Have a phone interview to validate the DISC assessment. Use pointed questions that will allow you to clarify and validate the results of their assessment. This will allow you to make sure you want to take the time to bring them in for a full, in house interview.

[29:27] – Eddie shares one last piece of advice on how to start using the DISC tool now, with your current employees and team members before you start implementing it as a hiring tool.

Utilizing the DISC tool when you are looking to hire, and with your current team or family has unlimited value for you. Remember, do not label yourself your one DISC trait. It’s great to know yourself better, and it helps the relationship you have with your team, but you can also use this information about yourself to grow and change as you pursue you.

Links from Today’s Episode

WizeHire Free DISC Assessment

Upper Cervical Chiropractic of Rochester - Dr. Ed Gigliotti

Subscribe to the Podcast

I am grateful you were here for today’s episode! To make sure you don’t miss out on future episodes, I encourage you to subscribe to the podcast. Click here to subscribe on iTunes.

In order to help others find this podcast and help inspire them, I would love for you to leave a review of the podcast. Share something that motivated you, or something that helped you re-frame the way you approach your life and goals. I’d love to hear how you’re pursuing your best self. Click here to review the show on iTunes. You can go to “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review”. Your comments are greatly appreciated!

More Episodes You’d Be Interested In

Episode 3: 3 Reasons You’re Not Making Your First Hire

Episode 6: Good Enough to Move On

Episode 5: Pursue You Picks: The ONE Thing

Episode 10: The Pruning Challenge

Welcome to the Pursue You Podcast, where we are empowering you to continually reflect, design and pursue who you were created to be so you can give the gift of your best self to your family, community, and business!

Today I want to talk to about pruning, and before I get into it, I have to call out the elephant in the room. If you know what pruning is, it has to do with gardening, but don’t be fooled into thinking I know what I’m doing when it comes to gardening. In fact, I’m so bad at gardening that I once killed a cactus. But today, I want to talk about pruning as a metaphor for your life. Pruning, by definition is when you trim a tree, shrub, or bush by cutting away dead or overgrown branches or stems, for the purpose of increasing fruitfulness and growth. Today, I want to share with you four areas of your life that might need pruning in order to increase your ability to pursue your best self, and thereby give the gift of your best self, to those around you.

[1:50] I share a story about when I first came to understand the idea of pruning as a metaphor for life, and how it prompted me to realize that I needed change in my life, no matter how hard it was going to be.

[5:35] I introduce the four areas of life that I am going to challenge you to reflect on and see where you might need to do some pruning in your own life.

[5:50] 1. Commitments: The things you have committed to, be it committees, family, church, etc. are either fulfilling you or draining you. I share some of the excuses I made before I finally made the decision to leave the committees that were draining me, and I challenge you to examine your commitments and see which ones you need to step away from.  

[10:52] I ask the question, “How do we know if something is fulfilling or draining?”. Then, I challenge you to ask yourself these questions in relation to your current commitments: How did I feel doing what I did today? How did I feel on the way there, after it was over? How do I feel about it at the end of the day? Did I show up better or worse after?

[11:45] 2. Habits – Which habits are positively or negatively impacting your life? This one is hard because they are small things, like hitting the snooze button, or checking email in bed, or not hugging your spouse enough. They aren’t massive, but they compound, and they turn into bigger problems. Ask someone else to help you notice these things. What is consuming your time at each segment of your day?

[16:20] 3. Content Consumption - You are in control of what you consume on social media, tv, movies, etc. I challenge you to reflect on how the people you follow on social media make you feel, how you respond to watching the news or certain T.V. shows, etc. Find the content that lifts you up and empowers you as you go throughout your day.

[23:00] 4. Relationships – If you met the people you spend the most time with at a party today, would you see them and want them to be the people that were influencing you? Do a relationship check to make sure your close, close friends are all people who fill you up. Are there people in your life that aren’t serving you? If they aren’t serving you, you can’t serve them.

Pruning is hard. It takes a lot of work, reflection and self-awareness. It takes counseling and experimentation to see what’s serving you and what isn’t. Here’s the harder part, for me at least. As you start to prune, you may go into panic mode and try to hold on to things that you need to be letting go of. Until you really reflect, you won’t have the confidence to do the hard action of pruning. Pruning can make you feel so empty, but what feels like emptiness at the time, that emptiness is really space. It’s space to make active choices on everything from your commitments, to habits, to relationships, and as they slowly fill back up, you realize your life is now filled with things that empower you and fulfill you. All your energy and time is being put to the best use and that focused energy goes towards the right things. I challenge you to see how pruning can change your life. It will give you space to design and pursue a life that allows you to give the gift of your best self to everyone around you.

Subscribe to the Podcast

I am grateful you were here for today’s episode! To make sure you don’t miss out on future episodes, I encourage you to subscribe to the podcast. Click here to subscribe on iTunes.

In order to help others find this podcast and help inspire them, I would love for you to leave a review of the podcast. Share something that motivated you, or something that helped you re-frame the way you approach your life and goals. I’d love to hear how you’re pursuing your best self. Click here to review the show on iTunes. You can go to “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review”. Your comments are greatly appreciated!

More Episodes You’d Be Interested In

Episode 8: Pursue You Picks: Do Less

Episode 6: Good Enough to Move On

Episode 3: 3 Reasons You’re Not Making Your First Hire