Mental Health Matters 🧠 - Taking a "systems" approach to life

What's up, Cadre fam? Evan here, your resident mental health and addiction therapist. This is another episode of Mental Health Matters, a live stream where we talk about everything having to do with mental health, addiction, wellness, whatever you want. You can ask me anything, essentially. So I do have my ask me anything episodes. That's every other week. However, when you come into the live stream, it's an open discussion, so you could always feel free to ask me whatever you want. Remember, folks, post in the community feed if you have any questions for me that you want me to answer, you can comment any of my videos.

And remember to check out our coaching here at Cadre. So if you see any of the creators with videos that you like, some of them are able to do coaching. Some just do videos, but some do as well. But we have a variety of good coaches. So not just learning from videos, but learning one on one. So, anyways, today I wanted to talk about something I've really not discussed all that much. Merry Christmas, jungkook junkie. I hope you had a good holiday. Any highlights for you? But today I want to talk about a topic.

Yeah, like I said, I never really have talked about that much before, but I think it's something worth mentioning. And that is, how do we create systems in our life to aid in our overall wellness? So what do I mean by that? A system is a different type of approach, something that's more planned, something more thought out, something that addresses all these different areas. It's about goal setting, but one of the benefits of having different systems in place in your life and whether that be your personal life with career, all that in your wellness is that it takes away a lot of the decision making that we do on a day to day basis, which is actually really.

Can really hold us back. For example, Merry Christmas, Cadre. Whoever's behind that. So if I think about on a daily basis, let's say my goal is to exercise, and I don't really have a system in place, I just say, okay, I want to exercise more. I maybe have a rough idea of what that looks like. But then every day I'm left to make a decision, like, do I work out today? Do I not? And it's much easier to say no. To put it aside, okay, I have a lot of work. I'm tired. I'm stressed. Today's not the day.

I'll push it off till tomorrow. Versus, if you have it thought out, if you have a plan, plan in place. If you have a trainer, set up your gym membership, everything is set up and you make a plan beforehand to say, these are the days that I'm going to work out. If I have to miss one, I'll replace it somewhere else. Right. So that would be a system that you have in place. When you have that in place, it takes away a lot of the guesswork, it takes away a lot of that individual decision making in the moment.

It's kind of like shopping at the grocery store when you're hungry. When you're in this specific state in a given moment, you may not make the most optimal decisions for what your goals are and what you want to reach. So I guess in this, we could talk about a few different ways that you could set up different systems in your life to get the maximum benefit. And we could talk about this from a personal approach, a therapy approach, professional approach. And I could go through some of the ones that I've set up that have taken me a long time because I'm not very good at this naturally.

So one is you need to have a vision of what you want to accomplish by a certain time frame. Right? So what you're talking about, JFJ, we're talking about goal setting and effective goal setting, smart goal setting. Goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timely, all these things to help increase your chances. So when you have a general idea of what you're doing, ultimate goal is. And you set up some of these process goals, essentially, in some ways that's setting up a system, but that's more of a foundation for it.

So, for example, if it is my goal. So here's an example. Let's say my professional life in the realm of content making. So I have a system set up because so long, I would have, okay, I have a general goal, or I had a goal, I want to put out a few videos over week, but I didn't really have a plan for when. I didn't really have a plan for what type. I didn't have a plan for when I was going to take the time to shoot them, to write them. So I didn't have a good system in place, and therefore I never really met my goal.

But I was like, okay, I really want to do this. I want to get a better system in place. So I have a guy who helps me out, and he and I came up with a plan to say, we're going to post Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday. One of those is a repo. I mean, I don't get too many details, but here are the types of videos we're going to post on those days, and I'm going to stick to it. And before I even started the plan, I gave myself about a month. And in that month, I decided I am going to create about 15 videos, 20 videos, and that'll cover like four weeks.

So then I don't have to think about filming them because the plans are going to be in place for at least a month. So if I make those videos and I do absolutely nothing, I have a month of this plan. Now, the plan isn't to just do nothing. Within that month, I'll continue to make videos, maybe at a slightly slower pace, but that'll give me a few months. And so I did this plan. I put it in place, I put the system in place, and it's been very effective. I've had a lot of success doing that on my social media, and that goes for a lot of the Cadre videos as well.

I have a system in place, as I've done this for a couple years now, of creating, let's see, every year I create 60 videos for Cadre, long form videos. In order to do that and accomplish it, I have to have a system in place. You know, as far as coming up with the ideas, writing, filming, editing, posting, a lot goes into it. And so I had to come up with a system so that I can achieve that goal. And just doing it willy nilly doesn't seem to work quite as well. So that'd be an example. Also, since I have, like a few different ventures as far as my counseling program, as far as my housing program, and just content in general, how do I divide that time up?

Because if I just do it, free flow willy nilly, which is my default, and probably for a lot of people as well, it's going to be a little more chaotic and I'm not going to be as effective, because one of the most incredible time wasters is transitions. Meaning if I do one task, I transition to another. I transition back versus doing, let's say, one task at a time or one block of tasks at a time. I'm constantly shifting, and that is a huge waste of time and energy to shift. So JFJ says, no matter what the vision, goal, or want to's is, you need the mindset to achieve them.

Yeah, absolutely. And the thing, though, is I think a lot of us have the desire, maybe we have the motivation, but sometimes it's difficult to even get in the mindset when you continue to try and you don't reach those goals, you know, or you don't have that system in place. So let's say you even have a system, you put that system into place and you're not getting the output that you want, right? So the system is the formula and the output is what we're going for. And the goals and part of the goal setting is within the formula, within the system.

And if that's not working, you adjust, right. So it's not necessarily you, the, that's the problem per se. It could be the system itself and that's why you could continue to tweak it and adjust it to try to get that output and get that info in real time. But typically when folks have a pretty solid, solid thought out system, they're going to get a better output. So the input decides the output. So that's a very good point. So, you know, doing as many things as I can to not have to transition as much as possible sometimes that's planning my day out, having a list of things to do, having a specific strategy as far in system, as far as time blocking and having my to do list and having a very specific way of doing that.

So these are all things that, you know, you want to consider. And then, so like for example too, let's say I'm working with clients in the realm of addiction therapy, in the realm of mental health. The typical stuff I do, what I try to do is help clients, whether I explicitly use this language or not. Usually not, but talking about how to set up a plan, a treatment plan that we go over, that we have to go over per regulation, which may not be a bad thing on that third session about a treatment plan and what does that look like?

And that plan is to be as specific as possible. What are we going to do in session? What are we going to have you do outside of session? Is that going to include medications? Is that going to include certain behavioral changes? Is that going to include, you know, probably will include therapy? And how often are we going to do therapy and putting this system in place to see if that input gives us that output and if not, we adjust. Right. Simple as that. So I think that's something I want you all to think about.

We'll just keep it simple and think about what systems do you have in play? Your life and what. Yeah. So what's your experience with that in general, what systems you have in play? Have you had success? Have you fallen out of the habit? Because that's really, you know, difficult, just like any behavior pattern or goals to sustain. And it's important that our, you know, our goals and our systems are sustainable that we're not doing too much right. So if my goal right was not attainable, for example, I'm gonna put out ten videos a week of like high quality content that takes 3 hours each to do.

That's not realistic. I don't have the time to do it and may not even be that effective. So that's my thought, folks. I hope you got something out of that. What formulas do you have? What systems do you have? Think about that for today, for the week, and especially for the new year, because we got that new year coming up, so perfect time to talk about it before we go. Junky. Junkie. One technique I do is I write down three things each night before going to bed to complete the next. That's awesome.

Yeah. Then you don't have to think about it the next day. You know, some of the videos we have from Dan. I remember one thing when I interviewed him, and that interview should be out here too, that you could see between Dan and I, the organizer man. But he talked about how, like, this stuck out to me. Made sense. But like, let's say you have like a busy day. The next day you have a meeting to go to, you know, da da da da da. To have everything laid out the night before. Or like, if you're traveling the next day, you know, just to have everything laid out the night before.

You have your lunch ready, all that stuff. And it actually removes a lot of the stress of the next day and the stress you experienced that morning, because it's all there, it's ready to go, it's organized. You don't have to go looking for everything. Oh, where's my bag? Where's this? Where's my jacket? Oh, I need this. Oh, I need this document, whatever. So I like that a lot. I think that's a good system to have the day before when we get everything set up and stay hydrated. I'm not great at that either.

And this bottle's got a little spritzer on it. It's like my favorite thing ever. Oops, my cap's covering it. Oh, that's good stuff. Alright, folks, it's been awesome as always. Take care. I hope you had a good holiday. I'll see you next week. Bye.