6 Principles To Stop Feeling So Frantic - Brad Stulberg | Modern Wisdom Podcast 377

Sometimes you feel like you're doing something because you have to and you don't really want to, but that have to is wrapped up in self-worth, or numbers, or sales, or getting promoted, or, um, having the opposite sex be attracted to you. Or you're doing something by choice, 'cause like you're making a deliberate choice in the moment to do something 'cause it's what you actually want to do. And I think that the more that we can do the latter, the happier, healthier, and more sustainable our performance will be. (winds blowing)

Brad Stulberg, welcome to the show.

Hey, Chris. It's a pleasure to be here.

How would you describe what you do for work?

I coach and I write. I wear those two hats. So in my coaching practice, I work with executives, entrepreneurs, and a handful of physicians, and I help them on their performance and well-being. And in my writing, I am very interested in exploring those same topics, so what makes for sustainable performance, what does it actually mean to be well, how can you marry performance and well-being, and I explore that in my books and in my magazine work.

What are ... Like among the high performers that you work with, what is some of the most common errors that you see people making?

Yeah. I think that there's a lot of selection bias in my own coaching practice because the people that come to me for coaching have almost, like, unanimously read my work. So I'm fortunate that people come to me wanting to, um, to find a little bit more fulfillment in what they're doing, and I think it's a lot of people that go into whatever it is that they do off the bat for all the right reasons, uh, but then it can get noisy later on in your career, and it's hard to find that signal. And, um, I think a lot of people come to me very successful by conventional standards, but perhaps wanting to, um, feel more internally successful, if that makes sense.

Yeah. It's something that I think all of us play with, this desire for success, but also the happiness to be where we are and to sort of just have our feet underneath you. I read a, this Cal Newport article about how you downsized your life. Can you explain how you decide what you let in and out of your daily routine now?

Mm-hmm. So that Cal article, um, focused on a couple years back. Uh, my partner, Caitlin, and I and our, our young son, Theo, decided that we wanted to move out of, um, a high cost of living urban area, we were in the Bay Area, where it's very expensive to live, to go to a place that afforded us, um, a little bit more autonomy. So we felt that we wouldn't have to necessarily work as hard as often, perhaps could start saying no to things that we didn't want to do if we didn't have to pay a gazillion dollars in rent every month. Uh, so we moved to a small mountain town in North Carolina, and that's definitely the biggest thing that we've done to simplify. Um, some of the other things that I try to do to simplify my life, I, I am very structured in how I separate coaching and my writing work. So I only coach on Mondays and Fridays, and then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I have for writing and more creative activities. Um, what I have found, both in myself and with a lot of people that I work, uh, that I work with, is that oftentimes, the switching between tasks is the thing that actually drains you, not so much the task itself. So in my own life, I found that if I had a coaching client and I was in a writing groove, I would resent having to coach someone, and that is not what you want in a coach. It's not what I want in myself. And if I was, um, in a coaching groove, like just talking to clients, really being fully present, helping people, the last thing I'd want to do is have to go work on an article on deadline. So, um, something that, that has been really helpful is, again, really compartmentalizing those two components of my work. And you're talking to me in the middle of a book launch, so it's an aberration, I'd say, for the few weeks after a book comes out, but in the normal world of Brad, um, just really making sure that I prioritize, uh, physical practice, so something that I'm doing with my body, where I am not online, I am not thinking about work, uh, time outdoors with my dog, and then in the evening, really trying to shut everything down by 6:30 pretty religiously.