Maintaining Sanity Is a Full Time Job

Hey, Nick Hanson here from Cadre. And I wanted to talk to you a little bit today about balancing high performance with sanity, you know, keeping our lives stable and moving forward, this can be especially difficult, you know, if. Well, I think it's difficult for everybody. Being human is seemingly inherently difficult a lot of the time, and I think it can be even more difficult or difficult in a different way for people who have mental illness or addiction or trauma or grief issues. But really, let's just say to be human is, you know, difficult.

And really, to live a life of any kind takes courage. So kudos to you for just getting up out of bed today, or if you're still in bed, kudos to you for opening your eyes, taking breaths, and trying to keep going on this human journey of existence. So if you are at a point where you are, you know, have a job that is stressful or a family that is stressful, you know, and you want to have this high performance, and you want to achieve and accomplish and fulfill your ambitions and fulfill your destiny and get to your dreams, you know, that is absolutely huge.

I gotta let the dog out. Give me one sec. But we also need, you know, we need to balance that with standing. And so here's what that looks like, you know, for me. And if I think less about the tasks and more about the kind of my purpose and just feeling good, because if I'm feeling good and taking a day at a time, you know, I'm able to get what I need to get done. And so I wake up, I pray, I meditate. I pray, I meditate every morning. Sometimes I miss it. Not very often, because I know that it works for me.

And then I usually will write. You know, I try to do the morning pages that Julia Cameron recommends in the artist's way, which is three long hand pages. I oftentimes don't get there. I write as much as I can in the morning. It's like a meditation for me. I get out for a walk, you know, pretty soon I get a little protein in, you know, Tim Ferriss recommends walking around the neighborhood, bouncing a tennis ball, thinking of those mindfulness type activities. And so that gets my day started in a good way.

And no matter what happens after that, I'm just in a little bit different of a place, a little bit more mobile, a little bit more right brain oriented to kind of handle anything. And then I just try to focus as well as I can. I'm an eNFp, which means I like to get a lot of things going. I have trouble focusing some of the time. So I just do the best I can. Sometimes I take it five minutes at a time and I try to take action. If I have an idea, I try to take action on it. If I want to talk to someone, I try to call them.

And so, for me, you know, action can actually lead to sanity. And I find that if I'm doing these things and I'm trying to seek out what my higher powers will is for me to do, then, you know, everything's going to be okay. And sometimes it's like a canoe. You might tip up a little bit far into the. Into the realm of too much going on. This is overwhelming. How am I going to get through this? Well, that's where we marshal every resource that we have. We call a friend. You know, so many of us are so afraid to ask for help, but we ask for help.

And then I like to think of my spirit expanding during those times when I'm overwhelming, when I'm overwhelmed, I want my spirit to expand. Right? I want it to enlarge and say, it's okay. It's okay, you know, let's help me. Help me here. And it's in those moments of sometimes overwhelm where we learn things about ourselves we didn't know. And then sometimes things are just smooth sailing. Maybe there's not enough going on, or maybe it's just a period of time where it's a little quieter, you know, and that's okay, too.

Gotta let the dog back in. Give me one sec. And, yeah, so that's a little bit about how I balance, you know, work and life and try to maintain some level of sanity. I hope that helped in some way. I hope you have a great day. Talk to you later. Bye.