Hello everyone. Welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind. I’m your host Kristin Maxwell. And in this show, we explore the process of transformation, and give you tools and strategies that you can use to transform your own life. Today we are going to be talking to Denise Gosnell, about how to create time by working smarter. Denise Gosnell is a Serial Entrepreneur, Business Strategist, Productivity Hacker, Attorney, Author, and Real Estate Investor. Who now through her company The Vacation Effect, teaches busy entrepreneurs how to use unconventional scheduling and techniques to grow their business by working less. She has a process that she calls Growth by Subtraction, which applies to entrepreneurs and busy people everywhere. So, I am very excited to talk to Denise about, how she manages to do about what 15 of us would need to get done. Denise, welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind.
Thank you so much for having me Kristen. I’m really excited to be here.
Thank you. So, my first question is always, what superpower did you discover as the result of mastering your mind?
Yeah. So what I discovered in mastering my mind is that freedom is a mindset not a destination. What I mean by that is, freedom is not something that you get to someday when you have more time, or you have more money, or when you retire. Freedom is a decision that you can make right here, right now and decide to claim it and step into it. And that’s something that I learned. There’s actually a story behind how it came to me from my mind. And if there’s something that you’d like me to go into, I can. But that’s the short version of what I learned by mastering my mind.
Yes. Well, so what I would love is, how did you come to that? Because, that seems like such a big decision. How can you make that decision when you are feeling super overwhelmed by everything?
Yeah, so I had always dreamed of having a work schedule where I could have two days off. Two business days for myself just to be, and be happy, and do whatever made me happy. I’m a serial entrepreneur, is always interested in starting new companies and doing new things. But I was always so crazy busy being an 80 hour week workaholic entrepreneur, that I just craved that freedom of having a couple of days for myself. And the weekend time is great, but it’s friends and family time, and it’s Aaron time, and stuff like that. I had craved just quiet time with myself but I never had time for it, so I thought. So, long story short Kristen, I went to a meditation retreat a few years ago. And we were supposed to come with a question that we wanted to answer. So, that was the question I had gone there with. How can I have the schedule I’ve always wanted?
And when I got quiet and when I was laying out on the lawn, the green grass in Colorado hitting my back. And it’s like just laying there for 30 minutes, just doing this little meditation ritual they’d given us. I heard … it was like, somebody whispered in my ear. Like that reading voice that you hear when you’re reading to yourself, that voice. That voice said to me when I asked the question, what are you waiting for? All you have to do is decide and make today what you want tomorrow to be. And so I’m like, “Okay, well I guess I think they’re saying to step into freedom right now, and have the schedule that I’ve always wanted.” So I was a little scared to just do it forever. So I just decided to give myself permission to do a little experiment. And that’s when I did this whole 30-day time experiment that totally changed my life.
But it’s just fascinating how when we get quiet and still, and actually listen to ourselves, what we can have whispered in our ear from our higher self, our soul, whatever you want to call it, or even our guides or our angels or whatever, people believe. I don’t even know where that came from. I just know it was divine wisdom that was being shared with me when I stopped being so busy and listened. Does that make sense?
Yes, it does. But that was a pretty big realization.
Absolutely.
You can make today, what you want tomorrow to be. So, you said that you did a time experiment. What was that?
Yeah, so I’d always wanted the Tuesday, Thursday schedule that I talked about. And now this is easier for me because, I’m an entrepreneur than it is necessarily for someone who works for someone else. But the concept can still apply to them too, and I’ll tell you how. So what I did was, I literally went back for 30 days and I’m like, “Okay, I’ve always wanted to have Tuesdays and Thursdays …” When I’m not traveling, but I have to adjust it when I do travel. But I’ve always wanted to have Tuesdays and Thursdays free for myself, to just do whatever made me happy. Not in the trenches of the comminate, just to be happy, and explore, and whatever, have fun. So I literally blocked out those eight days for the next 30 days. And I just put in, as if I call it a freedom day. Freedom day just to be happy.
And so, Tuesdays, Thursdays for the next eight Tuesdays and Thursdays. And then I had to reschedule some meetings, and I had to shift some things around. Things I already had on the calendar for my three companies. And it was scary at first Kristen. Like imagine being an 80 hour a week workaholic entrepreneur, and all of a sudden just being like, “All right, I want to take off these Tuesdays and Thursdays for the next 30 days.” It was really intense and there were some things that rose to the top. And when I started doing it, that way where I realized I was being inefficient. Where I was wasting time, where I was saying yes to things I should have either delegated or said no to. But at the same time, I also had this wonderful joy that I hadn’t … and this clarity that I hadn’t had in a long time. Because I was actually taking that time off.
And there’s a lot that I had to do in order to get over the guilt that I felt of not working all the time. Because our society, and especially in the North American business culture, we’ve just ingrained in this grind of, you’re lazy if you’re not working all the time. And success is measured by how much you work and all that stuff. So I had to unwind from a lot of that. But at the end of the day, it changed my life and I took the … at the end of the 30 days, I extended it to 60 and 90. And at that point, I gave myself permission to just say, “You know what? I’m going to step into this freedom mindset and it’s just going to be the rest of my life.” And you know what happened after that first year of doing that?
No, what?
I made the most money I’d ever made in my life in the year I had worked the least.
Wow.
Now that doesn’t necessarily always happen for somebody just because they work less. There’s other things you have to do in order to make that happen.
Yes.
But what I was doing was, I had stumbled onto what you called in my intro, Grow by Subtraction. To learn how to actually grow by removing things from your to do list instead of adding to it. And it’s all about focusing on the right things.
That’s perfect. Good. Because you were going exactly where I was going to go next. Which is, how you get everything done. But we do need to go to a break before we go into that more deeply. So where can people learn about you and what you’re teaching? So, we can learn more of this, how to create time and work smarter at ourselves.
Yeah, so my main website is vacationeffect.com. And that’s most helpful to entrepreneurs and executives. That’s the audience that my content is targeted to, but there are principles that … There are some of the articles there might help anyone. I have a podcast, and a book coming out, and things like that are all mentioned on that site.
Great. Hang on everyone. We’ll be right back.
Â
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
Podcast: Play in new window
