Business Lessons From Alaska

Transcription

Hey, hey, what’s going on? Welcome back to the show. Yuri here with you once again, and I’ve got a really exciting solo round to share with you.

I was just in Alaska for a seven day cruise with my wife, left the kids at home, well not technically at home, we left them with my wife’s parents. They had a good week at their house with the pool and doing all that fun summer stuff.

My wife and I got a chance to get away, which is the first time I think in about three, three and a half years, that we were able to take a bit of a trip together which was really nice, without the kids, obviously.

What I want to share with you here are two big lessons that I came back from that trip with, with respect to our business and I think these will really, hopefully resonate with you.

This is really funny because a couple of years ago I took a two month sabbatical, so no work at all for two months, no emails, nothing, and the lessons from that sabbatical are very similar to the lessons I got from this trip.

 

My trip to Alaska and the lessons I learned

If you’ve never been to Alaska, if you’ve never taken an Alaskan cruise, I highly recommend it. It is breathtaking, it’s amazing, it’s tough to even capture on camera, so I’ll start with that.

So let’s jump into this and give you a bit of context.

Now, with that said, if you’ve ever been on a cruise, you know that most cruise ships don’t have really good internet service and if they do offer internet, it’s ridiculously expensive. So I just said, “You know what? I’m not even going to use the wi-fi. I’m not going to get online and if I need to, I’ll just quickly check in when we’re at port and I can jump on to the internet on land.”

Disconnecting while your business runs itself

So the nice thing is that for about a week or so, I had minimal to no access to the internet and thus my business. Obviously I prepared my team ahead of time and they knew pretty much what to do anyways. So here’s the funny thing, and I’ve noticed this every single time I do something like this, is the less I’m connected to my business, the better off it does.

We actually had one of our best weeks during that cruise and there’s no better feeling than being able to take off, not being plugged in, having a system and people in place to make things happen, without you having to be there in its presence, and that’s one of the biggest lessons I want to share with you and one of the things I’ve seen a handful of times over the past couple of years.

Every single time I’ve stepped away from my business, for a trip, for a sabbatical, for anything, it’s always done better. So why does that happen?

Energy, attraction, and tending to ourselves for optimal results

Your guess is as good as mine, but what I really think happens here is that at an energetic level what was happening is that I was in a space where I was simply detached from the outcome of having to control things on a day to day basis, or get stuff done.

I was enjoying experiences that simply raised my energy, raised my vibration if you will, and because we attract what we focus on and what we attract is really dependent upon the level of energy and vibration and feeling good that we’re feeling and exhibiting at any given moment, it just makes sense to do things that put you in that type of state.

Now I know that might sound a bit ethereal, spiritual whatever, whether or not you believe it, it doesn’t matter because it simply is the way it works — it’s the way the universe works.

A lot of people say, “Well I focus on what I want and I don’t believe in the law of attraction because I focus on certain things and I’ve got the other things come into my life,” and what I would say to that is that you’re probably not even consciously aware of the fact that you’re focusing on what you don’t have and as a result of that, you’re getting more of what you don’t want.

I’ll create some more episodes on that topic a little bit later, but the key here is that we as the owner, as the driver of this train which is our business, our sole objective … I shouldn’t say sole but our primary objective is to feel good because when we feel good, everything just happens with so much more ease. I talk about this, getting yourself to the right state, whether that’s through exercise or meditation, or different experiences, and not being so obsessed with making stuff happen in your business.

I’m not saying that you don’t have to do the work because there is obviously a time where you have to do the work, but we have to be able to step back and allow things to just unfold, very much like planting seeds and allowing them to turn into flowers.  You can’t over water the flowers, you’re going to kill them. You can’t speed up the way grass grows by overlooking the grass and staring at it, or drenching it in water. Nature has a natural course for everything that happens in the world and a lot of times, and I’m guilty of this probably more than anyone that I can think of is, we try to force the issue.

We try to make things happen faster than they’re naturally supposed to. We can’t.

We have to be okay with stepping back sometimes and tending to our own garden, which is internally in our mind, in our energy, in our vibration, however you want to define it, and I believe that is one of the biggest reasons why we had such a great week was that I’m in Alaska and I’m hiking in the mountains, on this glacier, doing all sorts of cool stuff and not really worrying about day to day stuff, and so I think it was a really, really powerful lesson that I want to share with you, so that’s the first one.

Lesson from a glacier: Seeing the big picture and getting perspective

The second one is, we were in Juneau, Alaska, and we had scheduled a helicopter tour up to a glacier, and then we did a trek on a glacier, it was unbelievable. If you’ve never been on a glacier, think of it like this. Think of it like lava running from the top of a volcano down to the coast, but it’s ice. So it’s essentially a river of ice and it eventually outlets into some type of lake or ocean, or whatever, depending on where it’s situated.

So we went to this one glacier called, I think it was like the Mendenhall glacier, or something, in Juneau so we got … think of it, you’ve got a couple of mountains and then in between, in the valley, you have this pouring … obviously doesn’t look like it’s pouring because it’s kind of fixed in stone although it moves a couple of feet every day. So we’re on this glacier and it’s immense, it’s absolutely incredible. So we’re taking a helicopter ride up to this glacier, we land on it, it’s like we’re on the moon, not that I’ve eve been there but just the landscape is incredible, it’s so unique.

It was like a skating rink so we had to have crampons on and there was all these crevices and we drank glacier water, it was awesome, it was so fresh and so clean, just took a water bottle and grabbed a little stream coming down, filled it up, it was so pure. There were crevices that dropped 1,000 feet into the abyss because of what nature was doing, because the water’s flowing through and just over time this water’s penetrating and penetrating this ice, and the ice from a glacier is so dense that it’s blue.

So we have really cool pictures of this deep blue, crystal-like ice and it’s so dense that it doesn’t even melt and if you were to bite on it, you’d probably break your teeth. So it’s really, really cool stuff. Anyways, so the whole lesson from this experience was we’re on a glacier walking around, and it is so immense that you can’t even appreciate how big it is when you’re in the sky. As soon as we land, we start walking around, we’re like, “Oh my goodness, this thing is huge.” What looked like little valleys, or little fault lines when we were in the helicopter were just huge, huge crevices, and what seemed like mini mountains on the glacier, and folds and all sorts of stuff.

So the lesson here is this, is that when we’re too close to our business, when we’re too close to something, we can’t see the forest for the trees. When we’re staring at the bark, we have no clue about what’s around it, so it was really interesting to be immersed on the glacier, in the glacier, and then taking the helicopter back out of the glacier and having that perspective. It’s something I talk a lot about is working more on your business than in your business, because when you’re working in your business, you’re in the helicopter, you’re looking down at the glacier and you have the perspective.

When we’re on the glacier, we’re working in our business and it’s a very, very daunting task to try to figure out the best way forward or what to do next when we’re in the trenches, because you don’t have the perspective. You can’t see the bigger picture but when you’re in the helicopter you’re like, “Okay yeah, we’ll just go this way and then we go that way and watch out for this because this drops over here.” Sadly, because of, I think, this world of entrepreneurship being so focused on grind and hustle and work, work, work, I don’t think there’s enough emphasis on setting things up properly so you can step back from your business and really observe what’s going on. Doing things intelligently than almost having to work all the time.

So those are two big lessons that I pulled away from our trip. There’s many more but those are two of the ones that I wanted to share with you. So the take home message here is that you want to set up your business in a way where you have the freedom to step away from it. Not necessarily for ever, but for a couple of days or a half a day at a time, or a week vacation, whatever it is you want to do, so that you have the space to recharge, to focus on what’s important, to get some perspective and not always be working away in your business.

Setting up your business so you have the space and freedom to recharge

I think if you are able to set that up properly, that’s really where we feel satisfied in business, I don’t think a lot of people … a lot of people we help, obviously, we’re helping our clients achieve three things, more impact, more income, more freedom.

Freedom doesn’t necessarily mean lay on a beach for ever, freedom might just be doing more of the things in your business that you love doing and less of the things that you don’t enjoy doing. When you love what you’re doing, you don’t really need to take weeks at a time off of your business. If you want to, that’s great, but I think a lot of times, we’re looking for an escape because we hate the things we’re doing in our business.

So you want to set your business up to win, you want to set your business up in a way where you enjoy what you’re doing and to have the freedom, because of the systems you’ve built, to be able to step away. To be able to go on a cruise, or go somewhere else, or take a day off and not have to worry about in the back of your mind, “Oh my God, because I’m not working, is stuff going to happen?” I think that’s a place that all of us want to get to as entrepreneurs, because if we don’t get there, then we don’t have a business, we have a job.

If the business is dependent upon you all the time, you have to set up systems properly to be able to move yourself out of that.

So with that said, if you want help with that, and doing things properly so that you have got a perspective on your business, setting up your business in a way that works mostly for you instead of you working for it all the time, then I would strongly recommend you attend our 7-Figure Health Business Blueprint training, it is awesome.

We actually had just a lady this morning who said that she watched this training three times. It’s a 75 ish minute training, she’s watched it three times because it resonated with her so deeply and there’s new insights that she was picking up each time. So watch it, it will really, really give you some ah has and some insights and it’ll show you our business model. It’ll show you, it’ll give you a very simple breakdown of how we run our business and how we help our clients run theirs and it’s just smarter than most people are doing.

So you can attend for free, there’s no charge. You can go over to healthpreneurgroup.com/training. So you want to write that down, or if you’re on your phone, just type it in.

I would strongly recommend watching it from a desktop, so you just get a better experience and obviously there’s less distractions, I guess.

So check it out, healthpreneurgroup.com/training.

Do that today, you deserve it, you owe it to yourself, you owe it to your business to really be doing things that are going to move the needle in a smarter way and that is all for today’s episode.

Thank you so much for joining me. Hope this episode has inspired you and I look forward to speaking with you on Wednesday.