← Dream Life Club
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Sumi Krishnan
If you're in a place right now where you're just feeling like you're not super happy, you feel like you're kind of living the mundane day to day, go to work, come home, make dinner, watch tv, go to bed, I want nothing more for you than to get out of that rut. And if you're listening to this, then that means something inside you is saying, yeah, it's time to change it up. I'll walk you through the six P's. The first P is like literally the foundation for everything else. And that is I know that you're in my head and I know what's up. What's up everyone? Hi and welcome back to the Dream Life with Sumi podcast. I am so excited you're here with me today. This podcast is for the high achieving woman who is super successful on the outside. She's won all the accolades, climbed the ladders, started the business is doing amazing, but on the inside you just feel like there's something more for you. There's, there's the next level, there's the different thing, there's the new dream and you're ready to go for it and you're done playing small. My name is Sumi Krishnan. I was in that boat. I had built a super successful life for myself on the outside. I had grown a tech company that I started out of college into this really thriving small business. We had 200 plus employees at our peak working for us full time across the country, serving some of the most mission critical programs for US Federal government agencies. I was being honored at the White House, being asked for media press, blah blah, blah, all the time. Yet on the inside I just felt like there was something else for me. I knew there was something different and I had to take the risk to do it. So I sold my company, left everything I had ever known behind, moved across the country to la and now I'm pursuing and living my new dream as a recording artist. And I'm so excited to share my lesson, share my thoughts on how to be successful in any dream that you're pursuing and how to actually take some of the lessons that I've learned in my life and apply them hopefully to inspire you, encourage you, or give you something to think about when you're going through whatever it is that you really want to do and trying to break through for yourself. So on this episode I thought I would talk about something very specific, that it's my framework that I actually teach in my Girl get yout Dream book and it's the six Ps, the six P framework to creating your dream life. Because our dream lives are more than just work, right? Like for me, I think that whatever it is that I'm doing in the world is such a big part of my life. Probably because I'm a single woman with no kids, that that might be a bigger part of my life than it is for somebody else. But what I know is that with or without a partner, and with or without kids, I will always need to be working on something that I feel like is a meaningful pursuit and that lights me up and that brings me joy. Because we have to diversify our efforts in finding joy and finding happiness. We can't just. If I know anything, I know this by now, finally is you can't expect one area of your life to fill you up completely. It's so important to build up all the areas of your life so that you're literally have so many areas and outlets that fulfill you and that you can dive deep into and offer yourself to. That two way thing is how we become like fully alive human beings. I truly believe this. So if you don't know what I'm talking about, just keep listening. The six P's of your dream life. If you're in a place right now where you're just feeling like you're not super happy, you're not thriving, you feel like you're kind of living the mundane day to day. Go to work, come home, make dinner, watch tv, go to bed, go to work, come home, make dinner, watch tv, go to bed. Like, I know how horrible that rut is. So I want nothing more for you than to get out of that rut. If that's what you're in right now. And if you're listening to this, then that means something inside you is saying, yeah, it's time to change it up. It is time to do something different. So I want to walk you through the six P's. The first P that is kind of the bottom of the pyramid. If you imagine a Pyramid with these six Ps, the first P is like literally the foundation for everything else. And that is your psyche. But another word for psyche is your mindset. What is going on in your head? How are you thinking and how are you processing things that is affecting your life? Because how we interpret the world becomes our world, what we think becomes our reality, right? Like, these things are just so true. And one of the things that I know that I know, that I know is that in order to change our life or make a pivot or get to the next level or start a new dream is that we have to be telling ourselves the right stories and we have to be looking at things with the right perspective. Otherwise we're just going to self sabotage, feel stuck, and never do anything at all. So in my book, I tell the story about how. And on this podcast, in previous episodes, I've shared a little bit of, like, the mindsets that I used to win my first $2 million contract. If you remember that, that was episode one and two. If you've been following along, it was my very first and second episode and I was actually, I can remember I was a little bit, I think I was a little bit less comfortable than I am even now on episode five. Just being on camera with you guys, on audio with you guys and sharing my life and my stories, my. The things that I think that I've learned that I think could help you. But anyways, that right there, what I just said about like putting something out there and then getting better is actually like super meta because that's part of my mindset. That's part of the reason why I feel like I am equipped with the tools I need to actually keep trying new things and keep pushing myself. And like being a recording artist in LA right now is because I don't expect perfection out of myself anymore. I used to. I used to and it killed me. You can hear more about that in episode three, I believe around the get, getting feedback right? And like all the lessons that I would tell my younger self before I was building that big company. But right now I'm like, nothing has to be perfect. Like, I'm just starting a podcast. I don't expect my first episode to be super smooth and confident. Like, I'm sitting here talking to the back of my camera. Like, it's kind of awkward, but I'm doing it and I'm putting it out there. And that is part of having the mindset of creating your dream life. Because I know that I want to build this platform and I know I want to use this platform to inspire and mentor and coach other women to go for their dreams and to use this platform to get myself out there so that I have a bigger platform to share my music and I can make a bigger impact in the world and that I feel like I'm living into my full potential and that I'm living fully expressed. That's what's going to make me happy. And I can't do that if I expect perfection of myself. Another example I give is, like, I can't do that. If I think that, like, I'm never going to win, right? Like, I talk about this a lot in episodes one and two. Like, I had to assume that I was going to be chosen. I had to look at all of my disadvantages and flip them and try to figure out how can I actually make the fact that I am a young Indian American woman in a sea, in an industry filled with men twice my age who are mostly white, how can I make that inherent disadvantage that I wasn't smoking cigars with them, I wasn't playing golf with them, I wasn't going to dinners with them, I wasn't in that club. But that could have been a huge disadvantage. And that could have really prevented me from thinking I had any chance in, like, getting anywhere in this industry. But I didn't look at it like that. I tried to see, I tried to look for, well, how could I make this my advantage? Well, one way is that I always stood out. When I walked into a room, people remembered me. That's a good thing, right? That's something that I can use to my advantage. When I'm following up with somebody, they'll remember who I am. And I tried to think. And the reason I stood out is because I was just so different, right? So everything that we're doing in life, and especially when we're pursuing a new dream, everything is dependent on how we think about it and the stories we tell ourselves. I can also, like, give examples of, like, you know, when it's so easy to sort of, like, let our wounds from. Mostly from childhood dictate how we live our life right now. So, for example, like, I think a lot of us have the wound of not feeling like we're enough. A lot of us have the wound of not feeling like we're lovable. And so if you are, like, thinking that, you know, if you weren't, like, super popular in high school, you might have the wound of, like, thinking that people don't really like you or, like, people don't actually really want to be your friend or anything like that. And so if you pursue your new dreams and your new life with these old wounds kind of running the show, it's gonna mess you up. Like, you're never going to be able to be, like, fully in it. You have to. We all have to figure out ways to, first of all, ident what those stories are that are kind of narrating our life. Because we're all the main character in our own stories, right? Like, we're all the main characters in our own stories. And so we have these narrators going. And how we interpret the world is like how our life then unfolds. And so that is the first and foundational P. We have to figure out ways to always flip things to the most helpful thought, to rewrite our narratives about what we think about what people are thinking about us, to figure out how to remove any of these blocks and limitations that might be coming up for us. So that is the first P. Is all of the work on our psyche that will make or break our dream life, really? Because you can't. You can't live your dream life if you're not aware of how your mind is running the show. A really good starting point for this. Everybody is just journaling. So I think something as simple as when you feel like you start to feel sort of negative feelings in your body, you start to feel overwhelmed or anxious or angry or just like, you don't feel good, you feel this like knot in your gut and you're not really even sure why. It's really good to get in touch with that by just taking out your journal and writing like, what do I feel right now? What are the. What are the physical sensations? What are the emotions that I'm feeling? What could I be scared of? Question number three. What could I be scared of? What am I fearful of? What's the worst that could happen? What do I want to happen? What is it that I'm worried about? What is taking space up in my head? Is it all my to do's? What is taking up the space in my head? These are some of the questions you can just start to ask yourself on a journal page that'll, you know, and it's a really helpful thing. Like right now I have gotten to the point in my life where, like, when I don't feel good, I do this all in my head super quick. And I know exactly why. And I'm like, oh, it's just because this one friend said this or didn't do this. And that's literally like, it keeps. It keeps bothering me over and over and over again and affecting my mood. But if I understand that that's what's happening, I can quickly turn that off and not let it keep affecting me and go on with my day and appreciate all the other things in my day and find joy in things instead of what would normally happen to me in the past and to most people is like, when something's not perfect, it kind of railroads everything and you're not able to move on from It. And you, you kind of live with this pit in your gut at all times, and that's just not a fun way to live. So that is the first P. It's addressing your psyche. And it's an ever evolving, continual piece of work. Like, you never get to the point where, like, I have mastered my psyche. Time to move on to now. I don't have to think about that anymore. No. No. Well, unless you're a spiritual, enlightened master, then yes. But if you're not, then no. It's something for us, for all of us, that I think is a lifelong thing. But it's awesome because we get to have control over it. We really. That is the one thing we have full control over. And that's why I love thinking about this. No one else can tell us what we should. What we're thinking. No one else gets to. We have full power. So that's awesome. Okay, that was the first P of my 6P pyramid that I wanna share with you guys today. The second P, in terms of building your dream life is focusing, is putting energy toward and knowing that your physicality matters. Your physicality. Our physicality affects our energy. It affects our brain. It affects our ability to focus. It affect. We feel. It affects so many things. So I just don't want you to ignore it because this is not about, you know, anything to do about what kind of how much you should weigh or what you should look like or what kind of shape you should be in. Fitness. Like, I'm not talking about specifics. I'm talking about taking care of the vessel with which we live this life. Life. I'm talking about the things that everybody can agree on that are so important for us to do and focus on, like, moving our body on a daily basis, strengthening our muscles, not letting our strength die off so that we're weak and frail and fragile when we're older, building our muscles so that we're strong, capable humans. And all of this actually, now there's science that proves that the more that we focus on building muscle, it actually helps our brains perform and it helps us feel happier. And of course, exercise releases happy hormones and all those kinds of things, right? But it's so. It's like exercise, movement, lifting weights. It's sleep. It's sleep, everybody. If you're not getting eight to nine hours of sleep every night, you're cheating yourself. You're just straight out cheating yourself of living into your full potential. Like, that's not even an argument anymore. And I know it's like not Possible for everybody at every stage of life. So don't beat yourself up if you don't have that time right now. But most of us waste enough hours in the day that we could put towards sleeping, but we don't. We turn on the TV or we end up scrolling our phones, or we end up putting putzing around, doing nothing. And with something, it's like, what, how did half an hour go by? So there's all these pockets of time that we could put to better use if we're really prioritizing our sleep, which is so freaking important. It's the second level of the pyramid to building your dream life. Physicality and I believe nutrition, highly dense, real, not processed foods, enough. Sleep and exercise are the three keys here. And I'll also add in meditation keys to taking care of our physical bodies. The third p. And by the way, just one last thing on the, on the second P, Physicality. Finding people that help you with this, that not help you literally, but that share the same value system is so important. If you don't have at least one friend, ideally your whole community of people, but at least one friend who's prioritizing this with you, find that person. And this leads me to my third P, which is people. Because we can't do things alone, you guys. It's not possible. Like, we can't just willpower ourself through the influences of the people around us. If the people around us are, you know, in the habit of going out to eat, getting all the appetizers, getting the most unhealthy thing on the menu three times a week, every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and then not moving, not exercising, staying up late, not getting enough sleep. Like it's. We're going to be fighting a losing battle if we try to compensate and still spend all of our time with those people and then expect to have different habits ourselves. Like, it just doesn't work that way. So when we think about the people we need in our life, when we're going after our dream life, we need people who really are committed to doing the hard things. Because in order to get your dream life, the overarching theme in all of this is it's not easy. Like, if it were easy, everyone would have it. Everyone would be fucking going around saying they're living their dream life, right? But are they? No, most people aren't. Because of circumstances and because of disadvantages and because of socioeconomic inequalities and structural racism and all the things. But also because not a lot of people want to put in the Work that it takes to actually build a dream life for yourself. It's a lot easier to go with the flow and not do the hard things. But this is like the irony, the laws of life, right? It's the laws of life, of the universe that say in every aspect of our lives, if we go for the short term reward, the short term pleasure, it'll sabotage us in the long run. But if we can do the hard thing and not give in to the short term pleasure of sitting on our couch eating chips and guacamole or ordering the pizza and instead get up, go lift some weights at the gym, come back, have a nutritious meal full of vegetables and protein and healthy carbs, and go to bed early. That's like doing the hard thing, right? Just as in an example of like taking care of ourselves. But that's what's going to get us our dream life. Because that compounded over a year, you're going to be a completely different person than if you had stayed on the couch and ordered in the pizza. Compounded over a year, it's like not even in the same universe, right? And so it really is about this whole thing about building a dream life is about doing the hard things, doing the things that you don't necessarily want to do all the time, but making those actions a part of your identity, a part of who you are. You are the person who takes care of yourself. You are the person who records a podcast. I'll tell you, it is 1:20am right now. I never stay up this late, but I have so much going on this weekend. I am leaving for a one week long yoga retreat on Tuesday and I had no other. I have to get these podcast episodes done today if I want to launch this podcast on time. And so what am I doing instead of of I actually came home from the gym and I wanted to watch TV and go to bed, but instead I was like, nope, gotta knock these episodes out. So it's always about making the choice to commit to yourself and do what you say you're gonna do and follow through, through on it in order to get your dream life. So the third P of our pyramid is people. We need people around us who support us in our dreams. And I want you to think about if you're trying, if you're okay, if you're listening to this right now, you clearly have something that you want to be doing, right? A dream that you want to be pursuing that you're probably not doing right now. And I want you to ask yourself and make Make a promise to yourself that in the next month, that is plenty of time in the next month, you're going to make a number of reach outs to try to find people in your life who share the idea of going for their dream, who share the idea of being their best selves so that they can live their dream lives. We need our dream buddies. We need the women that we are running with. We need that group of, of people so that we are in that vortex, that energetic vortex of people going for it. We need those people in our lives. And so without those people, we're not going to be able to achieve our dreams or live our dream lives. Lives, lives, lives. Okay, that's the fourth P. The fifth P in the pyramid of your dream life framework is place where you are. Our environment is so impactful on how we feel. I mean, granted, some people get more impacted by, like, visually how their surroundings feel than other people. Like, I do know that, for example, in my old offices in D.C. we had really, like, uninspiring office space for the first many years of the business. And when we moved offices, I made a commitment to myself that I was going to liven up our office, make it look visually appealing. And what that did, I put art up. I got some nice pieces of furniture, There was some color, there was a nice coffee machine. Like, everything just felt really vibrant and fun. And what that did for me was I felt more inspired all of a sudden in that environment than I did in the old office. But my dad, he was like, oh, it's a waste of money. Like, why are you buying that art? Like, we really don't need, we really don't need to get a painter. Like, he didn't feel the same impact from the visual surroundings of where he was at. So ask yourself, like, if you are the type of person who needs to be inspired aesthetically by your surroundings and feel good in them, then, like, take that seriously. And what I mean by place as the fourth P in this pyramid, it's not just like how your office is designed. It is how your office is designed, but it's also more than that. It's. It's like, okay, everything from your external environment and your internal environment. So where are you living? Like, a lot of people, I used to live in Boston for a couple years. I mentioned that on previous podcast. So many people who live in the Northeast complain about how cold it is and how hard the winters are and just complain, complain, complain that how unhappy they are for like six months out of the year because of the weather. Well, guess what, you guys. You can move. Mind blowing idea, I know. But you are not rooted into the ground like a tree. You can move. I'm not saying it's easy. Nothing is easy about building our dream lives. But don't let anything about your environment kill your mood or kill your inspiration or get you to the point where you're just complaining all the time instead of doing anything about it. And so I want you to take kind of an inventory of all the places in your life. Where do you work, whether it's your home office or whether you go to an office. Where do you sleep? Your living room? What city are you in? What kind of environment? What kind of coffee shops do you like to go to? What kind of art do you like? What kind of textures do you want in your bedroom to make it feel super sexy and juicy and gorgeous? Like, what do you want to feel in the places that you spend your time in? Do you like trees and nature? Then do you want to spend more time around trees, in nature? Like, I love water. I feel like my entire body just comes alive when I'm around water. And so when I lived on the East Coast, I would try to get to the beach, but I didn't go all that often. I would try to go to the Potomac river and just sit along the river, but I didn't even do that all that often because I wasn't really taking this seriously about my place. But I moved to la and I spend so much time on the beach, and every single day I feel alive because I get to just look out at the water and see the sunset. And it's the most inspiring thing. It's the most inspiring place for me. So take this part of your life seriously. You can move, and if you're not going to move, you can make changes even where you are. Okay, so that is the fourth P. The fifth P is purpose. This is kind of the whole thing. Like, this is kind of the whole thing. We are here and what are we doing here? Like, what is your purpose? Do you know what it is? And most likely, you know, if you're listening to this podcast, you probably want more clarity on that. Like, you have an idea, but you want more clarity and you want to be living more into your purpose. And what I know now is, like, my purpose is not my dream, because I think I'm gonna have multiple dreams in my life. Like, right now. The dream. What I mean by dream is like, the dream that I'm working on, my pursuit. Like, me being a recording artist, being A singer, songwriter, building that career that is my current dream that is going to be built. And I have no doubt that I'm going to get to places that I never could have imagined. Like, I was just at Coachella and I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna be playing Coachella. I'm gonna be on one of those stages, and I don't know exactly when, but it's gonna be soon. And I just, like, feel that. I feel that in every ounce of my bones. But anyways, that's not my purpose to be a recording artist, because I'm going to have multiple dreams that I'll do in my life. My purpose is to be fully expressed at every moment. That means fully expressed, like, fully offering my love to people that I love, fully offering myself self to my songwriting, fully speaking my truth, fully not holding back, not of being afraid of looking stupid, but living fully expressed. That is my purpose. And that purpose stays the same throughout my entire life. It's just gonna look different as I get more and more and deeper and deeper in touch with myself and more and more comfortable with myself and more and more spiritually connected to myself and more and more connected to other people and more and more excited about my life and what I'm working on and living in gratitude and all these things that I'm working on. I know that the way I show up fully expressed is going to change a lot, but with that as my purpose, it feels so good. Like, everything just feels right. And so I want you to think about for yourself what is. You can. You can take that same one, because I think that's actually a great purpose for all of us humans to adopt if it resonates with you, but if it doesn't, what does? And what, what, what. What purpose could you incorporate into your life statement in terms of how what your dream life looks like that makes you feel really good. Because without that, that's kind of our North Star. That's kind of our North Star that we can keep coming back to. And it's really, really fun to have something like that. The other thing is you can incorporate, like, you remember, like in episode three, I think it was, when I was talking about not showing up fully as myself when I was building my company. And probably that's why. That's why this purpose statement of living fully expressed feels so good to me now because I spent so many years not doing that. But you can incorporate parts of yourself into no matter what world you're in. Don't forget that. Like, I always remember this Example of this nurse who had a passion for writing people's stories. Like, she wanted to be a fiction writer. But what she started to do was she started to take. When she was taking like her intake forms of the people coming through the er, she started to write these narratives about every human that she was meeting into these, like, long form essays that started getting passed around the hospital because people were in awe of how fun and, and interesting they were to read. And it made everybody's jobs better. And like, that was just an example that I read somewhere, I forget exactly where, but of how you can bring yourself, your passions, all different pieces of yourself to whatever your job is currently. Like, lots of times it doesn't mean that you have to quit and start new in a totally different thing. A lot of times it's just about bringing more of yourself to your current pursuit, to your current career, to your current life. And that changes everything. Okay, the last p in the 6P framework is process. That sounds boring, but hear me out. Process is actually so key. It's literally the key that unlocks everything. Because what I mean by process is setting up your daily life in a rhythm that incorporates everything that we've talked about before. All of the P's in the pyramid your process should incorporate. So right now, like, my ideal day is set up. I'm not saying that I hit it every single day day, in fact, I really don't. But my ideal day is set up in a way where I wake up and I do all the things on my 6Ps, like I reach out to PE, my loved ones, people, I'm. I go for a walk on the beach, I meditate, I eat well, I go to the gym, I take care of my body, I train my thoughts, I journal, I constantly think, watching my mind and telling myself more helpful stories and narratives, right? All of these things. I'm having time to write, I'm recording music, I'm doing, living my purpose, living fully expressed, and how that in that form, that is for me right now. I just realized this episode is getting really long. I should wrap it up. But process is the top of the pyramid because it brings everything together. As you set up your ideal day, the rhythm of your life that will carry these values through with you so that you can actually live your dream life. It's not easy, but it is so, so worth it. And actually, if you want to tap into a community of women doing this very thing, you should join the Dream Life Club. DM me on Instagram @Exosumiax with the word Dream Life and I will send you the invitation to join the Dream Life Club. It's a membership for women. It's a community of high achieving women going for their dreams, all committed to doing the things we just talked about, to getting their dreams and living their dream life. So yeah, that's there for you if it sounds appealing and inviting. And if not, no worries. Find the people in your life that you feel most on fire with and go do it. Tag me on Instagram. Share what you learned in this episode. Share your thoughts. Share something. Share one thing that hits you that you're going to go and apply in your life right away. I can't wait to hear from you. And until next time.