169: 5 Key Principles to Create the Lifestyle You Want In Your Life Plan

Andrea Liebross: Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the Time to Level Up Podcast. This is the first episode that I am recording inside my own personal in-home podcast recording studio. So the backstory is, I always wanted to have a podcast recording studio in my home. When we started to build this house and put the plans together, we kind of nixed it. Oh, I don't know. It felt like it was going to be too much money, which it really isn't a lot of money at all. But anyway, so we nixed it, and then a couple of weeks ago, when I attempted to start recording my audiobook, the audiobook producer, yes, I have hired someone to kind of be on the other side of me reading it, which is really helpful. Shout out to Mark at Audivita, which they're helping me do my audiobook.

So the first session we met, or the first attempted first session we met, he said to me, "The acoustics in this room aren't good," the room I was recording in. Then he said, "Okay." So I moved and I went into a closet, and then the signal wasn't good enough. We probably spent a good 20-25 minutes, me walking around my house trying to find the combination of a great signal and great acoustics. We did finally found that place, but it was not going to be someplace that I could withstand for multiple six, seven, eight recording sessions. So that kind of lit a fire under me to figure out how to actually have this podcast recording studio. So once again, I'm in a closet underneath the stairs in the basement.

But this time, there are no toys in here. We have acoustic panels all on the walls, and I'm actually sort of decorating it to make it a very welcoming space. If you're watching the audio of this podcast, you'll see I still have a fake background on because I haven't figured out the lighting. The lighting's a little weird. Right now, if you're watching this YouTube video of this podcast, it looks like I have a light shining down on my head, which I don't. But anyway, that's the backstory on that. So today, what I wanted to bring you was a portion of She Thinks Big Live. The portion I'm going to share with you was the first 15, 20 minutes or so of session two, which was the second part of the morning where we talked about a life plan and having a life plan.

I also in this session had Stacie Simpson, my Full Focus expert, time and focus expert who's on my team, who works with my clients. She came up and also chatted with the audience and Nicole Pence Becker, who was the emcee, interviewed Stacie. But before I got to Stacie, I shared with the audience what I think is some valuable content. I shared with them the five principles to creating the life you want. Okay, so five principles to creating the life you want. Brendon Burchard, if you're familiar with him, he talks about this, and I have remembered this for a while, I read this a long time ago, but I remembered it when I was creating this life plan session because I felt like it was very important in telling that you really have to be deliberate and intentional in creating the life you want. It doesn't just evolve.

Okay.

So much to my husband's dismay, being spontaneous, he's all about being Mr. Spontaneous, doesn't always work out. In this segment, I share with you the five keys to creating the life you want, and then I also share with you some stories, then after this, I bring up Stacie. So, in the next episode of the podcast, or an episode that's coming up soon, you will actually hear what Stacie had to say as well. But this is just a bite-size.

I like to make these podcasts not too long, because if you're like me, you've got 20 minutes to listen, or 30 minutes max to listen, not 2 hours, that's why I'm breaking this up. I will go back and also do this for each of the sessions, the Belief Plan session, the Time Plan session, the Action Plan session, I'm going to do this for all of them, so you will get this amazing content. So sit back, buckle up, and listen to me and Nicole Pence Becker and some audience members talk about being intentional with creating the life you want and the five things that you need to do it.

The instruction is to just draw me something. Do we have any artists? Oh, we have an artist in the room. Okay.

Nicole Pence Becker: Yes, we do.

Andrea Liebross: We do. But draw me something. I'm going to give you, I don't know, 30 seconds.

Okay, that's it. Pens down. I feel like it's like 6th grade, everybody, pencils down.

Nicole Pence Becker: Thankfully, we don't have a bunch of 6th-grade boys in here.

Andrea Liebross: No, that would be- or a bunch of college kids who take exams online. And they now have to have- my son had to have put a mirror behind him taking an online exam.

Nicole Pence Becker: Oh, virtually?

Andrea Liebross: Virtually.

Nicole Pence Becker: Oh, interesting.

Andrea Liebross: I know. All right, we can talk about that later. But when I said draw me something, what'd you think? How'd that feel if I just said draw me something? Jill said awful, uncomfortable.

What about over here. I don't like how I can't see who's person is there in the corner.

But now I can. All right. How did it feel, Stephanie, how did it feel? Draw me something. What do I draw? It's uncomfortable. You all were waiting for me to say, "Draw me a stick figure, pushing a shovel, making a snowman." You were all waiting for instructions. You wanted a plan, right? Our brain wants to know what it needs to do. So if I just say, draw me something, no matter what you drew, you probably sat there for at least three or four seconds like, "I don't know, is she going to look at this? What's going to happen? Am I going to have to go up on stage? What's going to happen?" Right?

Nicole Pence Becker: Is the art teacher going to evaluate the work? That was a concern.

Andrea Liebross: Right. Maybe Jillian is going to come up and critique our art. Who knows? Would you have your hand up? We can't hear you. Here we go. We're coming to you. We're coming to you.

Audience: When someone says, draw something in your mind, in my mind, there's always one picture and I doodle it a lot. But I'm like, "No, I'm going to wait for the next..."

Andrea Liebross: The next instruction.

Audience: The next idea.

Andrea Liebross: Yeah.

Audience: So I wanted to share that because I thought that was interesting. I just wanted to move away from--

Andrea Liebross: That norm? [inaudible] Yes.

Audience: And to what is current. So that's it.

Andrea Liebross

Okay. I love it. It's kind of like I was telling some people last night at our VIP party, whose hair still looks good from last night? Yep, looks pretty good. We went to Drybar. It was pretty fun. So expansive, right? Sarah's like, "I want to go beyond where I am right now," and that's really hard if we don't have a plan and we don't have direction. So as Nicole was pointing out, we're going to talk about a life plan. So in order to do anything in your business, especially, I think as women, I'm going to be a little sexist here, especially as women, we have to integrate into our lives, right? This life getting in the way. "My life is so busy. Just life," right? If we don't have a plan for our lives, then we kind of become stuck and paralyzed and we think things aren't possible. Okay? Now, there are lots of parts of our life that we cannot plan, right? And we could go into that. Lots of parts of our life that we cannot plan, that we would love to plan, but we can't. But I want to share with you five kind of key principles to create the life you want. All right, so if you guys are familiar with Brendon Burchard, this is kind of one of his ways he thinks about things that I've kind of latched onto that I think is very valuable. So five key principles to create the life you want. Now, you might say to me, "I don't know what kind of life I want, Andrea." I remember my mom used to say, "What do you want for Christmas?" "I just want everybody to get along, and I just want no fighting, and I just want some peace and quiet." Okay. That's one kind of life. But really, what do you want? I want that, too a lot. But what do you want? Okay, so when you think about the choices and the decisions you're making, think this.

Everything in your life is a choice or a decision. It was a choice to come here today. You had to decide. You had to make a lot of decisions, how you were going to get here, who was going to do what. What about all the other things going on in your life? Are the choices you're making helping or hindering your lifestyle? Okay. Is this the lifestyle that you desire? Is this choice or decision going to get me closer to where I want to be or farther away to where I want to be? Are you in alignment with your lifestyle? I think a lot about this, too, when it comes to my kids, because I spend a significant amount of time on my business, and they're 22 and almost 20 in a couple of weeks, but they weren't, they used to be littler. Even when I started this business, they were both in high school.

Were these choices I was making as a business owner in agreement with the life I wanted to lead? Was this good for me and them and all of us? I questioned a lot of that. I questioned a lot of that. So are the choices that you're making aligning with the life you want to lead? So, number one here, principle number one is you got to consider what lifestyle you want. I'll tell you a story. Kind of reminds me a little bit of Nicole's story here when she shared with us. But way back in the day, in 1995, I had recently graduated from college, and I was living in Manhattan in a roach-infested walk-up brownstone, which my parents were appalled by but I thought was awesome, by the way, in a bedroom where we had like created a wall to have more bedrooms in the same amount of space with my Ikea furniture. I worked in an advertising agency. It's called D.M.B.& B.

D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles. You should be very impressed by that. You would have been in 1995. It's kind of like the Ally McBeal era. I was just like the little account executive, walking to work with my sneakers, putting my shoes on when I got there. One of my people that I reported to was Gail Hollander. Gail, I haven't talked to you in like 30 years, but I'm telling a story about you. So Gail Hollander, I remember she was 42, and I was whatever

I was 22, 23, something like that. Gail Hollander had just had her first baby, and Gail Hollander lived in Westchester. So anyone that's familiar with the New York metropolitan area, that's a train ride into the city. It's not a quick little train ride. It's a train ride like you're on the train for probably, she was probably on the train in the morning for a good 45 minutes or more. She was on the train in the afternoon for another 45 minutes or more. She was pumping behind her desk. This is like before I even knew really what pumping was because I hadn't experienced that before.

I just remember literally sitting in the chair in front of her. So the desk, she's behind the desk, I'm sitting in the chair, and she's talking to like a nanny as she's pumping, and she's trying to look over what I did. I remember having the thought, "I do not want to be her. I do not want to be her." Do I want to be a mom? Yes. Did I want to be successful? Yes. But I don't want to be her. I don't want to be commuting into Manhattan on a train.

I don't want to be pumping behind my desk. I just didn't want to do it. Soon after that, I decided that I was going to, well, lots of things happened. I got engaged, we were going to move, all these things. But I decided I didn't want to stay in advertising. I didn't want to work in the D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles that I should be so excited about.

I didn't want to live in Manhattan. It was fun for the two years I was there. Believe me, I think everybody should do it. You grow a lot from that experience. But I didn't want to stay there. I didn't want to do it. So I went to grad school. We moved to Houston.

We can go on and on, but that was a choice about lifestyle. At 23, I could already tell that was not the life I want to live. So, thank you, Gail, for teaching me that lesson. But I want you to think about it. What is the lifestyle that you want? What can you eliminate? Can you eliminate anything that's not necessary? It wasn't necessary that we lived in New York. We could live anywhere. It wasn't necessary that I had to work there.

I could work anywhere. So, what can you eliminate that's unnecessary? So, that's, number one, consider the lifestyle you want to lead. Number two. Number two is be honest with yourself and your personal needs. What do you need? What works best for you? A lot of times you figure this out by failing or by something not working. Like last night, I realized that the shoes I had on were not working. So I did not want to wear those today.

But I also have realized that I need a few kind of key things in my week, every week, to keep me going. I need exercise. I like to read before bed. We just have a new house. But in our new house is this Japanese soak tub. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Japanese soak tub. I mean, it's good.

I've been going through this on Sunday night, I've been getting in this soak tub. I kind of sit in it. It's not a lie down because I would drown.

Nicole Pence Becker: Now, we're going to need a picture of the tub. I know. If anyone finds one, find that Japanese soak tub. So I need that. That is something I need.

Andrea Liebross: Now Rob makes fun of me because I turn music up really loud, and he's like, "What are you doing in here?"

I'm like, "Go away."

"I don't want to talk you." But I need that. So I want you to think about, what are your personal needs? What do you really need? Okay, number three, don't compromise. Don't compromise. This really revolves around setting boundaries, okay? A lot of times people talk about work-life balance. I like to think about it as, like, what are my boundaries? What am I willing to do and not willing to do? If you say to yourself, "Okay, my life is not so great, I wish it were better," what do you need in order to make it better? What do you need in order to make it better? Don't let anyone deny that from you. You want to do what you love.

One of the things I love about Cynde, the Whalemobile lady over there, is that for as long as I've known her, and I've known her a long time, even before we started working together, she loved whales and she's not letting anyone stop her. I mean, not many people can say they have a Whalemobile. She's doing what she loves. Okay, so are you doing things in your own way? Is someone telling you how to do it? So that goes back to, like, "Andrea, just tell me what to do." No, I'm not going to tell you what to do because you have to do it how it works best for you. Okay? So that's number three. Do business and do your life like you want to do, not like others do or think you should do.

Which kind of brings me to four. Don't blindly mimic what other people are doing. Just because someone wrote a book one way doesn't mean you have to do it that way. Just because I could share my experience with you doesn't mean you have to do it that way. Okay? The two lovely ladies sitting in that corner back there took over a family-owned business. Their dad ran it for a long, long, long time. They do not have to do it the way he did it and they're figuring that out and doing it their way.

Okay, just because he did it and it was "successful," and I'm going to put that in quotes because that can mean tons of things, and it is successful, but they don't have to do it that way. They're going to do it their own way as two women business owners who want to have families and not be at the office at 7:00 AM or 6:00 AM. 6:00 AM? What time do we have to get there? Okay, before seven, right? They don't want to be there every day before seven. I don't blame them.

Okay, so don't blindly mimic what other people are doing. Then the last one is strive for authenticity. Okay, so I had this grand plan, my grand plans of planning today, Annie and I talked about this a hundred times. I'm like, "Annie, I'm going to use this really cool thing." It's called an INSWAN. Okay, so maybe people who teach know what this is, but I was going to have paper up here and I was going to write on it, and then this little screen thing was going to project what I was writing and I was like, "We're going to do that." I was playing around with it last week.

I was like, "This is not me. I don't like this little INSWAN. We're just bringing the whole easel."

That's what we're doing.

Because that's more me. You don't need the fanciness. I mean, there's enough fancy, right? So you need to be authentic. I'm sending the INSWAN back to Amazon, so there's that. Okay, so be authentic. Then here's the last thing, we do have to get practical. I can be all belief planning, but we do have to get practical. Like, how is this life going to work? How do we have the life we want with the time we have? How do we know what we should be focusing on? So in thinking about today, I wanted to invite Stacie Simpson to speak to you all because she is kind of the expert on my team on time, planning, and focusing.

I really struggled and thought, "When should she come up to talk to you all? Should it be during the time plan? Should it be during the action plan? When should it be?" I was like, "No, she's going to come up and talk about the life plan." She's going to talk during the life plan part. Because really, all of that has to do with how you want to run your life. Period. Yes, it's about time. Yes, it's about deciding what to focus on, but really it's about how do you want to run your life? So Nicole and Stacie are going to have a little conversation. I'm going to sit up here and chat too.

Okay, my friends, which of those five key principles do you think is the hardest? I would be curious to know. What do you think is the hardest? Do you think the last one, being practical, is the hardest? Or, sorry, not being practical, but striving for authenticity. Do you think the last one, striving for authenticity, is the hardest? Do you think that being honest with yourself, the second one and your personal needs is the hardest? Or do you think number one, which is really considering what lifestyle you want, which is a little bit of the belief plan embedded, do you think that's the hardest? I think those three of the five are really the hardest. That's kind of what I think. But I'd be really curious what you think. You all are on social media, I know that. So direct message me. Tell me which of these five you think is the hardest.

I'd be really curious to find out. Speaking of messaging me, message me and tell me you listened to this episode. I want to know who is listening out there. Who is listening out there? If you really wanted to get a gold star, you would share the episode and write a review. So those reviews matter, my friends. I would really appreciate it if you could write a review if you haven't done so already. Okay, so stay tuned for kind of part two of session two.

Life plan from She Thinks Big Live. It's awesome. You're going to love it. I will see you next week.