← The Journey with Morgan DeBaun
The Journey with Morgan DeBaun
7 Bad Habits Keeping You From Your Highest Level of Success
00:22:44
This episode originally aired in July 2024 and quickly became one of the most popular episodes of The Journey. Whether you're tuning in for the first time or revisiting this conversation, this episode help you get unstuck and moving forward in your...
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Journey Podcast. Today's episode we are going to talk about seven habits that are holding you back. These are things that you might be doing passively, you might be doing them subconsciously, and there are things that are potentially keeping you from reaching your highest level of self and also speeding up your success. So let's get into them today. I'm really excited about today's episode. Before I get started, I am really working on my YouTube channel. If you have not watched the videos on YouTube, I know you probably watch the clips on social or you're on my newsletter. But make sure you check the YouTube channel because we're going to start releasing exclusive content just on YouTube. More of a behind the scenes, more of a blog style. There's so much going on in my life and I've been really enjoying longer formats as a way to keep my content creation simple and my storytelling simple. Sometimes I think a longer format is actually much easier than a 30 second video. So head over to YouTube and make sure you subscribe to my channel and let me know what you think. Hey everyone, I'm Morgan debon, a passionate entrepreneur and life advisor. With the Journey podcast, you'll discover that success isn't about the destination, it's about the journey. I'm sharing stories of amazing people who've taken control of their lives. Join me on my own journey to discover the secret sauce behind reaching success. With permission from no one else. All right, let's get into today's episode. All right, seven habits that are holding you back. Number one is an over reliance on one hour meetings. My default meeting is 30 minutes on my calendar. Why? Because typically when I'm getting into a meeting, I already know what the topic is. I have an agenda and I've typically done some sort of pre read or I have a dashboard that I look at before the meeting. In other words, my meetings are typically conversational meetings. We're talking about solving a problem. We're talking about an issue that we've parked from earlier in the week and said, hey, let's talk about this during our one on one or during this meeting. We're not doing meetings that are updates meetings. I'm not sitting in a meeting and letting people just ramble off all the things they've done in a week or ramble off all the things her team has accomplished that week. No, I want to see all of that in writing in advance so I can come to the meeting with questions, the highest and best use of my time and the person's Time that I'm meeting with is us in dialogue, critical thinking, having discussion, understanding what one another's perspective is, and figuring out where there's a gap between what I want and what they want or how they want to approach things and how I want to approach things. That is the purpose of meetings in my life. Having a one hour meeting is frankly a lazy way to do life and it sucks up your calendar. Like eight one hour meetings, your whole day is gone. Eight 30 minute meetings, you still have half a day to function, okay? And to get work done and to do your work, I want you to consider 30 minute meetings. Now here's the caveat. If it is a working meeting, where we are getting into it, we're sharing screens, we're looking at designs, it's a larger group of people, maybe four or five people, we're problem solving, or it's some sort of readout that's larger than like five people. Then I think it's appropriate to do a 45 minute meeting or an hour meeting. I still have the same standards of excellence in terms of a pre read and agenda, making sure everybody knows what the purpose of the call is. But I think that's really important. So let's say, for example, you're in a scenario where you are not the one running the meeting, you are the one receiving the invite. And it's an hour meeting and you already know this is probably not an hour meeting. I think you can say, hey, what can we accomplish in 30 minutes? I have a hard stop in 30 minutes. Or you say it in advance, hey, happy to accept this meeting invite, but I have a hard stop at 30 and see what happens. Literally, you can just try to set that tone or you can communicate in advance and say, hey, I'm trying this new thing so that I have more time to get my work done during the workday. And I really prefer 30 minutes or 45 minute meetings. Let me know if that's something that you guys are open to or something that we can like test out as a working group or a team, try it out, don't be scared. All people can say is, no, we need an hour. And honestly, maybe that's okay too. But my preference for you, if you're listening to this podcast or you're watching this show, is that you are attempting to be more efficient with your time. And by doing that, you're going to actually typically wind up more productive. The other thing that I see as a caveat, the reason why people have really long meetings is because they're Trying to cram like 17 different things in one meeting. And in my experience, that results in everyone not really remembering or digesting everything that's happening in that meeting. So I would rather have two 30 minute meetings with the same teams, but about separate topics. Like, let's say I'm meeting with the finance team. We might have a financial, like, monthly readout meeting and then we might have a finance meeting where we're looking at one specific budget. I don't need that to be the same meeting because those are different brains, those are different parts of like my decision making process and what I'm evaluating. Could they be all together? Sure. But it's really unlikely that I'm going to have ability to stay focused for an hour and for everybody else to also be locked in for that whole hour. So something to consider. If you are either in the decision making seat where you are deciding how meetings are operating in your world, or you're the recipient of a lot of meetings and you want to try to have a little bit more structure, a little more ownership and more freedom on your calendar, consider pushing back on that. Okay? The next habit that is holding you back is failure to delegate. And when I say delegate, I mean get somebody else to do it. Somebody else can probably do this better than you. And this applies in your work life and in your personal life. Let me tell you guys a quick story. You all know I'm a very bad gardener. It's something that I enjoy. I enjoy what I call chaos gardening, where I just sprinkle seeds out into the world and see what grows. I enjoy having basil in the little kitchen garden in my backyard. I enjoy planting and going to Home Depot and looking at plants that I probably will never pot. Like, I enjoy the process of being a gardener. However, what I also enjoy is the flowers being there visually. Like, I enjoy the color, the energy, the butterflies that come in, the humming birds that come in my backyard, the little bird nest and the little eggs that pop up every spring, and the little baby birds popping around my backyard. I love that energy as well. I spent the last two years diying my backyard, okay? Josh and I have probably spent at least 2k in our backyard. From trees that we randomly buy at Costco to random things that we pick up at the nursery when we're driving home from brunch. Like, it's been a very haphazard, impulsive activity for me at least. He's very planned out, so I can't speak for him, but for me, it's been very impulsive recently. I said, you know what? The garden is just not gardening the way that I needed to. Why do all my neighbors gardens look good? I know they're not out here doing this as well. So we were going for a walk one day, and I asked one of my neighbors, I said, who is your gardener? And they gave me this lady's information, and she is amazing. She has come in our backyard, she has an entire plan. She goes to all the wholesale nurseries. So we're not paying a premium on top of the premium premium for the middleman at Home Depot. And she's going to come to the backyard once a week or once every two weeks just to maintain it and make sure that all the seasonal perennials and everything are doing what they need to do. And it's beautiful. If I told you all the price, let me just tell you, it's a fraction of what I paid in total. And I know my girl's gonna get me, right? I failed to delegate. I had a hobby, and I enjoyed the hobby, but I also wanted the full outcome. And I was incapable of doing that myself because I actually don't have the expertise or the time to dedicate to learning how to be a better gardener. And I was missing an opportunity for just a little more joy in my life. And so I should have delegated this probably a year and a half ago once I realized, oh, sis, you don't know the difference between an annual and a perennial. Like, this is not your ministry. That is one example in my life as I'm saying this. Hopefully you all are thinking about other things in your life where you're like, I enjoy this, but I probably should delegate some of it. And it doesn't mean I'm not going to be in the back, like, randomly making suggestions to her, even though I'm not qualified, or randomly being like, oh, you know, I picked up this plant, like, let's put. I'm going to put it in the ground. You know, I can still do all of the things, but the garden energy is not dependent on my ability to get this done because she's much more qualified than me. The other thing with delegation, even outside of things in your personal life at work, I'm not saying pass everything down to someone else on your team and constantly put work on somebody else's plate. When I say delegate at work, I mean, be really clear about what you're going to contribute. Stop taking on other people's jobs. I see this often actually at blabbity, where somebody will be, like, doing something. And in My head, I'm like, ma' am, is this your job or is this somebody else's job? And typically the response is, well, there's no one else who's going to do it or the person whose job it is to get it done. I basically they're saying, I don't like how that person's going to get it done and it's going to wind up back on my plate anyway, so I'm going to do it. Here's the problem with that. When you do somebody else's work, one, you're taking an opportunity away from them to understand or know the truth, which is that they that is something that's expected of them or as part of their job description. If you're always doing it, how would they ever know that they're supposed to be doing it? Two, if they're doing it and you don't like it, you need to figure out why you're being conflict avoidant and figure out how to have a productive conversation with that person to have constructive feedback or to ask them how you can support them in getting the job done so that you can get your job done. Don't avoid conflict by taking on other people's work. When it comes to delegation, it's important for you to consider the entire part of all the work that you're doing and who else should be doing it. Okay, here's one of the habits that I see a lot with high achieving people. People are incredibly ambitious and have a lot of things on their plate at all times. Neglecting self care until it's too late. A lot of times people are prioritizing self care as a way to rehabilitate themselves and rehabilitate their energy and get back to a baseline because they're in a deficit. The true benefit of self care is that you don't get in a deficit because you have a surplus of care. You've put chips in your bank in terms of fitness, you put chips in your bank in terms of rest. You've put chips in your bank in terms of renegotiating how you are in relation with other people who trigger you. Self care is a proactive activity, it's not a reactive activity. And I think one of the habits that's holding many of you back is that you're taking the time to do self care only when it's something has become a problem where you are burned out and you're putting your well being last. Instead of putting your health and well being first or even second or third, let's just not let it be last. It's really simple adjustment that you can make in your habits to say, I'm not going to wait till I'm at this threshold of burnout to take a half day off work. I'm not going to wait until I literally haven't eaten all day to make a plan to make sure I have nutritious meals in my fridge. Right. Be proactive in maintaining a baseline and don't neglect your self care until it's too late. Okay, here's one of the habits that I see often with people who are creative, people who have a lot of sense of self and have a clear vision of what they want to do, but maybe struggle with overthinking. So one of the key reasons why overthinking is holding you back is because by taking too long to make a decision, you are in fact oftentimes making a decision and overthinking it and thinking about all the different scenarios that could possibly happen and researching all the information to help you feel more confident in making it. Decision 80% of the time is not going to change the decision that you were already going to make. In my experience, particularly as someone who has to take risk as a part of my job, it is my job to set a vision that is ambitious and has some sort of outsized outcome from the expectation of the market or the world or what they think could happen, which is genuinely the definition of being a creator is you believe that something should exist in the world or something else is true and you see something that other people can't see easily. I have to be comfortable with making decisions. So to help you with your overthinking, what I suggest is that you have decision making criteria and you think about, is this a decision that needs to be made today? Is this a decision that could be delayed for later? And then also if you're going to make a decision, what are the things that need to be true for you to make the decision A or decision B? So identifying decision making criteria oftentimes can help you reduce the time that it's taking for you to make a decision and reduce therefore your overthinking. And that will propel you to having more progress, faster in your life and ultimately more success. I want you to consider how you could uniquely change your relationship with overthinking. And perhaps you thinking that thinking more is going to change the outcome is a wrong way to approach making big changes in your life or even small changes in your life. The next thing that is a habit that is potentially holding you back is an obsession with setting goals. You set goals for everything. You set goals for how many steps are you going to take today? How much water should you be drinking? You set goals for you know how many habits you should be doing and habit stacking these different things. You set goals for literally everything in your life. I love goals. Don't get me wrong, I have a guiding set of goals that I have every year and then I shift from goals to priorities. Instead of having goals, if you had more priorities, then you would have a clear set of information and guiding principles to help you move faster in your world. By having priorities, you know what to make happen first and you know the order of operations of how you should be doing things. Things. When you have a million and one goals, there are trade offs that you're going to wind up making. And how do you decide which trade off you should make if you have so many goals? And I think high achievers because of how we grew up with our parents or how we grew up in schools and then work and you know, it's like, what are your goals for the year? What are your goals for the quarter? What are your goals? If you're a salesperson, what are your goals? What are your goals? Instead of we said what are your priorities that would shift to what actions do you need to be taking? Which will eventually the outcome will be that you hit your goals. But if you shift from goals to priorities, it's going to actually enable your ability to reach your ambitions much, much faster. For me, just to give you as an example, one of my priorities has been to make sure that I work out. Instead of setting a goal of like, I'm going to work out three times a week, I say I'm going to prioritize active movement at least once a day. And by prioritizing active movement once a day and not saying, being explicit about how many times a week this gonna happen or like exactly what the outcome is. Not gonna go to the gym or Pilates or go for 10,000 steps. I'm not prioritizing the end outcome. I'm prioritizing the action that's gonna enable my end outcome, which in fact is not to arbitrarily hit a number of days that I'm working out. But it's to feel the best, feel strong, and to have a good relationship with my health and my wellness. So consider shifting some of your goals to being priorities and making sure that when you have a priority that you're setting the boundary of like, I'm not going to not do this because it is a priority for me in my life. And if that means for me that I need to take a walking call that day instead of a video call that day, I'm going to make that shift. But if my goal had just been work out three times a week, I probably wouldn't make slight tweaks that are actually more achievable. Another example, from a work perspective. Let's say you're an entrepreneur and your goal is to hit $10,000 a month in revenue, and you're really locked in. I'm going to hit $10,000 a month in revenue, and you're tracking how much per week you are getting to that $10,000 a month target. Instead of setting a goal, how about you set priorities in terms of. I'm going to prioritize engaging with my customers and my clients. I'm going to prioritize response time to all of my open invoices and proposals that are out. I'm going to prioritize updating my website today and sending out renewal notices to my clients or raising my prices. Prioritize the actions or that will result in you hitting your end goal. And if you prioritize those tasks and those projects, your end goal is inevitable. And maybe, maybe your goal should have been 15,000 or 20,000. Who knows? It actually doesn't matter. Because if you're doing the actions and you're doing the work every single day, then it is inevitable that you will reach a new level of success. But if you just say, I want to hit $10,000 a month, but change nothing about how you're prioritizing your time or prioritizing the work that you're doing every day, it's unlikely that you're going to actually hit that goal. I'm sorry to break it to you, but that is potentially one of the habits that's holding you back. Okay, here's a habit that's holding you back that is potentially controversial. The world is obsessed with boundaries and balance. And I'm suggesting that perhaps you might be a little too balanced at time. You might be a little too nonchalant about things at times. And here's the reason why. If you really want to do something extraordinary and you want to reach a new level in your life, you want to accomplish a goal. If you don't want to do any of those things, this podcast is not for you. I don't know how you found my page. I don't know why you are here. I don't know why you downloaded this episode. So I'm assuming if you're here, you are trying to go from point A to point B. You know where you're trying to go and you know where you are and you're trying to get there, and you're looking for resources, motivation, inspiration and tools to get you there. That is typically why people listen to this podcast and watch this show. Sometimes having really strong boundaries and then expecting everyone else around you to honor them is creating scenarios in which you're highly disappointed by everybody else around you. Like, by having an expectation at all, it is leaving you with room for disappointment. And that is the case at work. If you're like, I only work from this hour to this hour and somebody emails you and you're like, now you are upset because you've set this boundary and somebody crossed your boundary. Instead of having really rigid boundaries, think about how you're going to spend your energy. Like, I'm going to spend my energy here and I'm going to just be neutral everywhere else. And then whatever happens when those places where I'm neutral, great boundaries sometimes in today's society and because of Internet culture, and I don't know what these therapists are telling you all, but sometimes boundaries are coming off and they're so negative. What you don't want to happen, what you don't want this and you don't want that. Instead, renegotiate with yourself a more neutral position on other things in your life and then the positive places in your life. It's going to, in my experience, open yourself up to more flexibility. You have less points of view on things that you don't really care about, and your energy is pointed in a direction that is positive as opposed to spending so much energy on all the things you don't want to happen or how you don't want things to go. Spend more energy on the good in life. That is a habit that is going to help make your general disposition through work through your personal life like a much more joyful way of living than if you were only focused on all the things that you don't want to happen. And as a reminder, your boundary is what's in your control. A boundary is not something in which you are attempting to control someone else. So if your boundary is that you are offline at 5 o' clock and somebody chooses to send you an email at 6, it's actually not on them to respect or not respect your boundary. It's on you to not engage with them after the boundary that you have set for yourself. And I Think if more people approach boundaries as things that were part of what they were going to put energy behind or not put energy behind, I think that it would go off much better and be a habit that could actually propel you forward. Last habit that is potentially holding you back is a fear of just being mediocre and not doing things perfectly. Oftentimes when I'm coaching entrepreneurs in my work smart program and I'm working with entrepreneurs one on one or even people who are have nine to fives and they are already top of their class, they are in the top 1% of entrepreneurs, they are doing six figures in their business, they are climbing up the corporate ladder. They are already so successful. They spend so much time on process and thinking through how to get the work done to the point of it being a sense of a crutch because they're really striving to not have an outcome. They're really focused on how do I make sure that this is a hundred percent fail proof truth. And the thing about it is the higher you get up in life, the more it is impossible to be in any scenario in which it's 100% fail proof. If you do find yourself in a scenario where you are creating a product, launching a product or you are doing something huge at work and you know it's going to be successful 100% you are not stretching yourself and you are not using your skillset to the best advantage of yourself. In my opinion. The habit that people need to change if you fall into this category is you need to get more comfortable with being mediocre. You need to be more comfortable with some things not working out all the time. And my suggestion to you is that if you are a high achiever, you just need to put out more into the world more frequently and have a higher batting average than everybody else. The most successful people I know don't not fail. They are better at failing than anyone else and they are more prolific than everybody else. When you look at Rihanna or you look at Beyonce or you look at some of the the biggest like entrepreneurs and entertainers of our time, do they have flops? Absolutely. But they're so prolific that you forget about their flops because you're like it doesn't matter. Their Beyonce, like it doesn't matter. They have produced so much out in the world that is good, that is working. That is a one of one. If they perseverated on well, what's the sop? What's the process? And I got to follow the rules and do all of these different things that it would take them so long to put work out into the world. So my encouragement to you from a habit perspective is to renegotiate with yourself your fear of failure and your fear of being mediocre. And yes, thank you Langston for that ad lib. I paused this for a verbal affirmation from Langston that it is important for you to set aside your fears. Okay? Fear of failure is one of the habits that's holding you back and it's something that is 100% in your control. And to practice this, start being mediocre at a lot of different things. I've talked about this before. Be mediocre at a hobby. If you don't have a hobby in your life, go listen to my hobby episode and go to my website and take my Hobbies quiz. Be mediocre at something that brings you joy and practice being bad at something. It's going to help you in other areas of your life, be able to achieve more and take more risks more confidently. And there you have it folks. Seven habits that are holding you back. Thanks for listening to the Journey podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you leave a review and head to our Instagram and YouTube to leave a comment. I look forward to hearing how this podcast has made an impact on your own Journey.