Quality vs. Quantity

Hey, everybody. JC here with a mindset shift. So let's do a little exercise. I'm going to time you for a minute and I want you to count how many inhale and exhale cycles you take. So you'll breathe in and breathe out, and then your head, you'll go one and keep counting those cycles for a complete minute. Here we go. Three, two, one. Start counting your breaths. Three, two, one. And stop. So make a mental note. How many breath cycles did you go through in a minute? All right, we're going to do this again.

This time, I want you to pay attention to the quality of your breath. For the next minute, you may go ahead and decide to gauge the quality by the depth or maybe the balance of your inhales and exhales. Maybe the quality is in how the breath makes you feel. But for the next minute, pay attention to the quality of your breath. Ready? Three, two, one, go. Three, two, one, stop. So, for the first minute, you had the invitation to focus on the quantity of your breaths. So how many breath cycles did you have?

1012. 713. It's probably pretty easy to answer that question quickly. How do you feel about that number? Do you kind of wish you were breathing faster or slower? Your curiosity kind of peaked on how few breaths you could take in a minute. I don't know, but I bet it's relatively easy to manipulate and maneuver the quantity of your breath. In that second minute, we focused on the quality. So if I was to ask you right now, hey, so how was the quality of your breath? You may pause. You may find the courage to go ahead and say, you know what, I'm going to answer the question in this way.

You may have noticed that in that minute of focusing on the quality, it was a lot harder to stay focused on the challenge at hand or the work at hand. And this is the challenge in modern day. Let's go and look at a little graph here. So on the x axis here, I have marked quantity. This is where we spend most of our time, most of our work. This is our key performance indicators. This is our sales goals. This is our to do list, this is our. Hey, so what do you have coming up this week? Well, I have six meetings.

I have nine appointments. I have to accomplish these 17 things. All of that is on this quantity axis. And then I added the y axis here and I marked it quality. Consider, at the end of a long day, a day that feels good, a day where you go, wow, today I feel accomplished. Today I feel fulfilled. Today I feel like the work that I did really paid off. Right. Those are the types of things that end up shifting you on this quality axis. So as we look at these four quadrants, what would each of these days look like?

The days we do a lot of things and those things are fulfilling. Yeah. How about the days we do a lot of things and it absolutely leaves us feeling empty and drained. We've all been there. Well, what about the days when we decide we need a day off and we invite the amount of things we have to accomplish to pile up, but it fills our cup. And then, of course, there are those days that we have nothing left to give, and we let those things pile up because we are empty. And it continues to drag us further and further down from the quality of life that we seek and deserve.

Let's do a little exercise. So grab your journal and draw a graph on the x axis. Go ahead and write quantity down at the end. And on the y axis, go ahead and write quality up at the top. And think back for a moment. Right at the beginning of our time today, you counted how many breaths for a minute. And I bet if I asked you, hey, how many breaths, it'd take you a split second to go. Ten, 712. And I bet if I asked you after the second minute, hey, how is the quality of your breath? It may take you a moment to pause, to think, to answer.

And depending on where you're at in your journey, it may be a little bit easier, a little bit more difficult for you to answer that question. So we're going to look back at your last week and through the practice of observation and awareness, maybe you'll learn a little bit about where you exist in terms of quantity and quality. And perhaps you'll see the desire, the invitation to create a little shift in the way you look at your next week. So let's begin on your x axis, quantity. I want you to think back over your last week.

If you're a paper planner like I am, go ahead and grab your paper planner. Or if you have your Google calendar or computer calendar, pull that up as well. Pause. And when you're ready, jump back in. So look back seven days. Seven days ago. How much did you accomplish? If you accomplished a lot, maybe you put a little mark where you would deem a lot to be. Perhaps there was a day last week, think back six days, that you're like, hey, I took the day off. I put on my out of office, I laid down my technology, and you would say the quantity was very, very little.

It was negative, right? More things piled up that day and then over time, do the last seven days so there will be seven marks on your x axis. Cool. I bet that is going to take a little bit less time than our next step. In our next step, go back to those seven days again, seven days ago. How is the quality of that day? If you struggle to remember, it's probably going to be a good indicator that the quality was maybe a little bit less stellar. The beautiful thing about quality is it resonates, it hangs around, it builds upon itself.

So over the next few moments, you'll probably end up with seven lines at various places. And what I invite you to do is to take a look at where these 14 lines exist. First of all, see how many are above the quality line or below the quality line. How many are above the quantity line or below the quantity line? The way that I mark this, there's five above quantity saying I accomplish a lot of stuff a majority of the time. I have five quality above the line that says most of the time. And I'm finding that the work that I'm doing is bringing the good stuff to my day.

Take a moment and observe where you find your output going. Like all of our weekly mindset shifts. The point here is not to say you're good or you're bad, but to provide you a tool that you can come back to again and again and again. To go, huh? What does this mean? Our world very much sets us up to be quantity focused, right? Quantity is easily trackable. It is easy to go ahead and say, you can do more, you can do better, you can be stronger, you can be faster, and all those things are great. But two points from our exercise today, your quality is your fuel.

The quality of the work that you put into the world is what keeps you going. It's what inspires new ideas. Fresh, fiery direction. So if you feel stuck, if you feel sluggish, if you feel under equipped at the moment at hand, it is a good time to ask yourself, are you locked in the quantity you need to be freed and fueled by the quality of your work? The second point, the quality of your work is what inspires those around you, right? If you are a leader or if you are an exemplar follower, people will look at the quality of your work and understand how they can follow in your footsteps.

And with that being said, the quality of your work drives the quantity of your work. The community around you is inspired and moved and grown. When they look and they see the quality of your experiences, they are touched and their memories are vibrant and vivid and long lasting. And in turn, the quantity begins to accelerate. The quantity exponentially grows. So look at your graph. All four of those quadrants are always going to have moments in them. It is the ebb and the flow of the realness of life.

It is your awareness of where you exist and where you remind yourself that you have control to shift that sets you up for that beautiful balance of quality and quantity. Have a good day. We'll see you next time. Clear night tonight. Ready to fall for the last time?