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In this episode of GradBlogger, we talk about recent additions to my philosophy of life affirmations after a recent vacation with my family. We discuss what a philosophy of life is and give an example from 2015 when I was working as a research engineer. We also discuss the recent affirmations I have added to my life system based on some recommended reading.
Disclosure: Some of the links in the podcast show notes and transcripts are affiliate links (indicated with [Affiliate] in front). If you choose to make a purchase through these links, GradBlogger will earn a commission from that purchase at no extra cost to you.
Introduction
Chris Cloney: 00:08
Welcome to Episode #9 of GradBlogger, where we’re helping academics change the world through online business. I’m your host, Dr. Chris Cloney. Today’s episode’s a little bit different than the ones that you’ve heard previously. We’ve done a number of episodes now on tools and techniques and concepts and frameworks to build an online business or develop content or to build a community around your blogs, around your businesses, or to facilitate the change that you want to put into the world. And we’re hoping to gear and arm academics to go out there and be superstars in their field and change the world through creating online businesses about their work.
Chris Cloney: 00:46
Today’s episode is a step back or a step in a different direction. We’re talking about building the whole person. This arises from some conversations and some thinking I’ve been doing over the last couple of weeks, while I was away on vacation.
Chris Cloney: 00:58
At the time of recording this podcast, it’s May 7th, 2019. I’m just getting back from a week away. I traded the cold Nova Scotia spring, which was hovering around two to five degrees Celsius or so when I left, for the nice, warm Florida weather for a week, which was very nice.
Chris Cloney: 01:18
One of the things I like to do when I’m on vacation is to take some time to myself. I like to about my life, what’s in it, where I’m heading. I do a lot of my business planning around these times and one of the big things that I try to look at is what I call my philosophy of life. We’ll get into what that means what it is, what the components are. I’ll also give you some examples.
As I mentioned, this is not as tactical or operational as our previous episodes, but I thought it was important to share. I wanted to give some ideas to you, to the listener, on what these different components are and how you may be able to take a step back and say, “What do I want from my business? What do I want from my graduate education? What do I want, while I’m doing my day to day?”
Chris Cloney: 01:58
This philosophy of life concept is a tool that you can use. We’ll be talking about why you should look at creating a philosophy of life and what the different components might be. I’ll give an example from 2015 and describe the process that I came up with for examining what I was doing in my life at that time. Things that were working, things that weren’t working, and some observations I had from that period.
Chris Cloney: 02:21
We’ll also talk about the additions that I’m making to my life now after this vacation, which included after some reading time. I got to read several good books and conceived a bunch of ideas about what I want in my life. Before I left, I was a little bit stressed because I was trying to get all this work done. I was trying to get our taxes for the business done, finish my personal taxes, and wrap up some other matters before my vacation, and I was feeling stressed out. Then, when I left and had some breathing time, it got me back thinking on the question: What do I want in my life?
Why create a philosophy of life?
Chris Cloney: 02:54
A philosophy of life is a collection of frameworks, models, and lenses that you can use to view what you’re doing from day to day and ask yourself:
- Is this what I want in my life or what I need in my life?
- Is this is what I want in my life right now? A
- m I heading in the right direction?
It makes it easier to filter what you’re doing day to day and how you’re feeling. It’s an informal philosophy that you can use to look at your life.
What is an example of a philosophy of life?
Chris Cloney: 03:30
The best way I can think of to describe this philosophy is to use this example. So I went through some of the old notebooks I kept during my working years and even while building my business. I pulled one of my philosophies of life from this document.
Chris Cloney: 03:45
A philosophy of life can be anything. It can be a document, a spreadsheet, or a drawing. In this case, it was a drawing I did that I held onto for a number of years and used to evaluate different parts of my life.
Chris Cloney: 03:57
The date of this journal entry is October 11, 2015. This was a couple of years after I transferred to the Ph.D. program. I was also working as a research engineer with a company here in Halifax. I was working 30 to 35 hours a week, although it was normal to be in on evenings and weekends. On top of that, I was trying to get my Ph.D. research done, so I had a lot of things going on in my life at that time so I used to write in my journal about what was happening and where I could be headed.
Chris Cloney: 04:39
This entry, which I later redrew and called my philosophy of life, was a Venn diagram consisting of three overlapping circles. One circle was called working for others. Another was called working for myself. The third was called working for society.
I looked at these three circles and said, “Okay, what am I doing every day? Where does my Ph.D. research fit in?” Then I asked things like, “Where do my personal goals, like achieving financial independence, fit in? Where is my everyday work fitting in?” I had just become a husband earlier that year and hoped to eventually become a father, which I am now. I also looked at things like rental properties and other financial processes and wondered where they all fit in. Same thing for sports and health. Where did they fit in these different buckets in these Venn diagrams?
Chris Cloney: 05:32
Once I stepped back and drew all these out, it gave me a good overview of what my life looked like and where these different buckets fit in. Where was I working for other people? Where was I working for myself? Where I was working, contributing, giving back to society as well?
Chris Cloney: 05:46
I used this process to plan for the next couple of years. I left my job and started my own company, which is now DustSafetyScience.
Three observations about my system at the time
Chris Cloney: 06:13
This was a philosophy of life. I had the three circles (working for other people, working for myself and working for society) and I made a couple of observations in my notebook. Just looking at the margins and looking around the page, I see that I made three observations that are critical to where people are at today and definitely where I was at that time
One observation was that I had little influence at that point in my life on the circles. Some people may draw these circles and have them where they don’t overlap at all. Your working for others is completely different than your work for yourself or your health or your sport, which is completely different than the impact you’re putting into the world. And when you have that little influence, when you have that little control, which a lot of people do, it can be frustrating because you want to do things that involve the other circles.
Chris Cloney: 07:01
The second observation I had was that if I had to choose to drop a circle, which one would it be? For me, it was obvious: working for someone else. But my big observation, which I wrote in big block letters on the page was: I spend the majority of my waking hours is in this circle. It’s the one that I would drop if I could, but it’s also the one that I spend most of my time in.
At that point in my life, I don’t think I realized that it was my first inkling that I wanted to be an entrepreneur and build my own business and try to get these circles to overlap more. But it started to play a role and having this philosophy and pictorial look at my life helped.
Chris Cloney: 07:44
So the third observation I had (and which I wrote in the margins of this page) was: should the goal of life be to have overlapping circles?
This was an open-ended question. I still don’t know the answer today. Should working for yourself also involve working for others and the impact you have on society or can you drop the working for others and only work for yourself and impact society?
I’m still grappling with those kinds of questions today. What does this look like? What does it mean to run your own business? I have my own business. I run my own business, but I have a team and I’m responsible for keeping that team running and making sure that they’re satisfied in their work. They’re also responsible for contributing to the team, so in one way, I do work for others. And then you know, the goal of my business is to change the world. So it’s all interconnected and related and the circles are much more overlapping today than they were back when I was working for a different company. But that’s the question. Should the goal be to have the circles be overlapping over time?
Chris Cloney: 08:38
I just wanted to share that story with you to give you an idea of how a philosophy of life was implemented and gave me a framework that I could use to examine the things I was doing and say, “Does this make sense and does this fit in?”
Even as I say this, I’m realizing that it probably had more of an impact on my life than I even thought before I started this episode, which is interesting. I think now about some things I’ve done over the last four years that have started to close those circles and gave me more control and influence over what I can do.
2019 Additions to my philosophy of life
Chris Cloney: 09:11
Jumping into the additions to my philosophy of life. I want to mention that there’s a couple of tools that you can use. (These are things I made up!)
I call one a personal strategic plan. This is where I list my values, my mission, my mission and vision over time, and then for the next six months and next month. This gives me a practical way to review how I’m doing coming towards this philosophy of life.
I also have a family planning document. I write a letter to shareholders that I date and stamp to myself and my wife (and now my son) at the end of each year. These are all tools that you can use to organize your life according to this philosophy.
My current affirmations
Chris Cloney: 09:58
Another big tool that I use is affirmations, If you’re familiar with The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod, you’ll know this process. He has a six or seven-step process that he calls his miracle morning, which I’ve implemented in my own life. One of these are affirmations or things that you say every morning to yourself to try to bring the things that you want into your life. My current affirmations are the baseline that I’ve been saying since 2015 or earlier.
- Number one: I’m feeling healthy, strong, loving, and kind.
- Number two: I have everything I need to make today a great day.
- Number three: I will have fun today and move the needle on my goals.
When I say these, even if I’m at home or if I’m travelling, it’s a hint to my body and my mind to say, “Hey, it’s time to get fired up! Let’s do something today. Let’s make a change in the world. Let’s push the needle on our goals and let’s have fun doing it!” It’s a great way to start your day.
Chris Cloney: 11:06
If anybody’s interested more in this process, I’d recommend taking a look at [Affiliate] The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. He recently came out with another book, the title of which is escaping me at the moment, but you could check that out as well.
Chris Cloney: 11:18
Those are the three affirmations I’ve had for a long time. I added four new affirmations and that’s what we’ll go through in the rest of this episode.
Addition #1: Time is in abundance. I am where time comes from
Chris Cloney: 11:31
The first of these is that time is in abundance and I’m where time comes from. So this might take a bit of explaining. It’s from a book called [Affiliate] The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. I just finished reading this over the vacation break. The book’s good. It talks about a lot of different processes and ideas around being your best self. But the chapter that struck me is this one about time. It might have been in relation to the fact I was stressed about time before going on vacation.
Chris Cloney: 12:04
I mentioned in the introduction that I was struggling with getting our taxes done for the business and lots of different things like that. It’s so frustrating because you feel like there are only so many hours in the day. If you feel like that, I’d recommend checking out this book and getting to that section because it’s influenced the way that I think about time.
Chris Cloney: 12:26
The concept that Gay Hendricks is trying to get across here is that you are the source of the things that you’re doing. You’re the source of time in your life. All this stress and time pressure is a self-reflection. He has one quote that I liked in a section called “The Truth About Time and All the Things You Don’t Want to Do.” The quote was, “You’ll never have enough money to buy all the stuff you don’t need and you’ll never have enough time to do all the things you don’t want to do.”
So if you feel stressed and that you’re out of time to get things done, it’s probably because you don’t want to do those things. I rarely feel stressed about the time required for these podcast episodes because I enjoy doing them. I enjoy doing video work for GradBlogger and DustSafetyScience. This might give you a good indication of what you shouldn’t be doing in your business, or trying to get out of your life.
Chris Cloney: 13:18
I want to share one other part of this section on time. The first thing he says is that he wants you to remove the phrase, “I don’t have time to do that right now,” from your vocabulary. You’re just trying to find a polite way to say, “I don’t want to do that right now.” By placing blame on time, you avoid confronting the blunt truth in the matter.
Chris Cloney: 13:45
He gives an example of this. Imagine you’re in your office or study working on a report and your eight-year-old child comes in and says, “Will you come play catch with me?” Your response might be, “Well, I don’t have time to do that right now.” But imagine if the child came in and said, “I just stepped on a nail and my foot is bleeding, can you help me?” You probably wouldn’t say, “Well, I don’t have time to do that right now.”
In reality, you have the exact same amount of time in both cases. You’re just blaming lack of time for your lack of desire to do something right now, which makes you a victim. So he recommends that you be polite and to say to your child, “I want to finish what I’m working on before I play catch and we will do it directly after I finish” instead of claiming to be the victim of time over and over again in your life.
Chris Cloney: 14:33
This is something I’m struggling with and I’m working towards in my business now. I’m thinking, “Okay, well, I’m choosing to do these things. I’m choosing to have this in my life and I’m choosing this process for myself instead of always being a victim of not having enough hours in the day to finish my task list.”
Addition #2: I will let people, places and experiences change me
Chris Cloney: 14:49
The second addition is that I will let people, places, and experiences change me. This comes from a previous episode or a previous quote I shared from [Affiliate] If I Understood You, I Had This Look On My Face by Alan Alda. He says: “In communication, unless I’m willing to be changed by you, I’m probably not listening, but if I do listen open, naively and innocently, then there’s a chance, possibly the only chance that true dialogue and real communication can take place.”
Chris Cloney: 15:23
Now I wake up every day and say, “I will let people, places, and experiences change me.” It opens the door to being receptive, to being open, to being naive and innocent and letting things that are going on in my life to be present. I mentioned this in the previous podcast episode, but I try to do this now when I’m in a conversation. As soon as I get in a conversation, I think to myself, “Okay, I’m going to let this conversation change me or I’m going to let you change me” and it opens you up to be a better listener.
Addition #3: I will not condemn, criticize or complain
Chris Cloney: 16:07
The third addition to my philosophy of life and that I’m using in my affirmations now is an old one. I used this one a long time ago and I needed it back in my life, so I brought it back. I didn’t reread this book over the trip, but it’s an important book called [Affiliate] How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill is another book from the same time period, which I believe is around the 1920s or 1930s, but they’re both powerful books to read, especially if you’re into self-development.
Chris Cloney: 16:41
The affirmation from this is: I will not condemn, criticize, or complain. This is something that I struggle with, being a self-proclaimed Upholder. If you’ve read [Affiliate] The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin, you will know what this is. I have difficulty empathizing with other people. I can do it, but I need to make sure that I’m in the right mindset. I need to make sure I’m being open and listening very well.
Chris Cloney: 17:01
It can be pretty hard for me to put myself in other people’s shoes. I know it’s there and I still struggle with it, but that can lead to me criticizing and being judgmental of people. At this point in my life. where I’ve got a busy business going, I need to take a step back and say I will not condemn, criticize or complain. We will accept, we will be open, and we will make improvements and we will move forward.
Chris Cloney: 17:27
I think that this thought process is going to help me in my coaching business through GradBlogger. It’s going to help me with this podcast. And again, this is something I had on my affirmation list a number of years ago and then dropped, but I think I’m going to bring it back again because it’s so important.
Addition #4: I believe in self-growth and am committed to inspiring others to grow as well
Chris Cloney: 18:22
The fourth and final one I’ve added because it fits in with my personal values about continuous growth and improvement and it also fits in with the reason why I’m doing this podcast. I looked at these first three affirmations, combined them with the ones I already had and said, “Well, why am I recording podcast episodes? Why am I doing videos? Why am I helping others?” And I couldn’t come up with the answer. I couldn’t think of what I should include that would cover that bucket.
So the fourth affirmation came in and was simply that I believe in self-growth and am committed to inspiring growth in others as well. So, I believe in growth in self. I believe in growth in love, connection, and happiness within your life. And I believe that I can inspire this and help guide this in others as well. So I added that as the fourth affirmation.
Chris Cloney: 19:14
That’s why I’m doing this podcast. I know what’s possible as we academics build our own businesses. I know it’s possible to put in the world to change that we want to see. That’s what I’m here to do: try to guide other academics to be inspired to do that and also tell them, “You know, it’s okay. It’s okay to monetize your business so that you can make more changes in the world. It’s okay to hire out to a team. It’s okay to have growth in yourself and want to work for yourself and see this change in the world.”
Chris Cloney: 19:43
That’s what this last affirmation is: I believe in self-growth and myself, but also am committed to inspiring this in others. And I hope that through this podcast I can help do that.
Conclusion
Chris Cloney: 19:53
That’s it for this podcast episode. It’s a little bit shorter than the ones we’ve had previously. We covered what a philosophy of life is. We gave an example of one of mine from 2015: the Venn diagram with working for others, working for myself, and working for society, and how I used that image as a way to categorize the things in my life, organize them, and make observations about that system. I used that for a number of years and had gotten away from it.
I’ve started building out other philosophies of life. I have my main three affirmations, which are: I am feeling healthy, strong, loving, and kind. I have everything I need to make today a great day. I will have fun today and move the needle on my goals. I’ve also adopted other ones from recent books I’ve been reading and observations I made on my vacation: that time is in abundance. I’m where it comes from. I create it. I will let people, places, and experiences change me. I will not condemn, criticize, or complain. And I believe in self-growth and am committed to inspiring growth in others as well.
Chris Cloney: 20:56
So, I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it helpful. I know it’s a little bit different than the ones you’ve seen previously. If you find this information helpful in inspiring what you’re doing with your life, with your graduate work, with your research, please let me know.
If you want to get the transcripts for this episode, we’ll include those at GradBlogger.com/nine for this episode. We’ll include a cheat sheet with the seven affirmations I have in my life right now. I would also recommend taking a look at The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod and seeing how you can apply some of those processes in your life.
Chris Cloney: 21:36
Please share your comments and questions in the show notes below. If you are enjoying the podcast, give us a shout out on social media like Twitter and Instagram. You can tag us @GradBlogger, and we’ll see it there and comment back.
I hope you have a great week ahead. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the podcast. And I look forward to talking again next week about building a business as an academic.
