Transcript Episode 22: Behind the Scenes: A Day in My Mom-Entrepreneur Life

Transcript Episode 22

Stephanie Skryzowski:

Welcome to the 100 Degrees of Entrepreneurship Podcast, the show for purpose driven entrepreneurs who want to get inspired to step outside of your comfort zone, expand it to your purpose and grow your business in a big way. I’m your host, Stephanie Skryzowski, a globe trotting CFO whose mission is to empower leaders to better understand their numbers to grow their impact and their income. Let’s dive in.

Hello, hello! Welcome back to the 100 Degrees of Entrepreneurship Podcast. I’m Stephanie, I am super excited to chat with you today. Because I am letting you in behind the scenes, I am showing you what goes on in my house, in my life in my business, and we’re going to talk about a day in the life. You know, I love when people do these kind of posts when they sort of do a behind the scenes on Instagram, because it’s so interesting, just to kind of see how other people live and go about their day and go about their life. And I wish you were able to be on video here with me, actually, maybe I don’t. Because right now I’m recording this after my girls have gone to bed. So I’m sitting here in my pajamas with my contacts out glasses on. So maybe I don’t wish you were here in video. But you know how you’re driving like, around neighborhood at night. And if people have their lights on inside, but their curtains are open, you can peek in and see what’s going on in there. Is that creepy? I don’t mean like right up to the window. I just mean, it’s your driving, you know, you know what I mean.

But that’s kind of what I wanted to do with you today. Because I think it’s just so interesting to hear how different entrepreneurs, different leaders really live their lives and balance their day. So I thought I would share that with you. What do you think? Let’s do it. Okay.

So the reason that I’m sharing this with you is because I think it’s really important to plan your day, like you plan your year, like you plan your month, right? So we want our day to be aligned with our bigger vision with our goals. And so often, we’re kind of like in the details in the minutiae of our day to day life. But it’s not really aligned with where we want to go, what our goals are for the month, what our goals are for the year, what our goals are just for our life in general, our day to day is not aligned with that. And so that’s why I think sometimes it’s important to just step back and assess how we feel about our day and how we are structuring our day, and all that good stuff. So that we can really make sure that our day is aligned with our big picture goals.

Let’s set the scene for you. It is six o’clock in the morning. It’s dark outside, I’m laying in bed, I wake up, and I am headed to the treadmill. I’m like super excited to head to the treadmill every day. So we’ve had this treadmill, I bought a NordicTrack treadmill about six months ago. And I get up every morning, and I get on the treadmill. And I have to tell you, I haven’t really missed that many days since we got it. I can probably count on both hands in the last five months how many days I’ve not gotten on the treadmill in the morning, because I’m truly obsessed with it. I truly am excited about it!

So I get up, I usually have my clothes set out in the bathroom so I can get ready to run without disturbing anybody. So I head down there. I usually run anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes. And the NordicTrack treadmill is awesome in that. I don’t know if the Peloton stuff does this, but you can basically run outside. So you can choose all different terrain and courses and tons of places all over the world. And so this morning, I was running in Croatia, and yesterday I was running out in Utah, and it’s just so cool. And you’re following along with a trainer. So it’s exercise, it’s also inspiration because our trainers are so great. Sometimes I will turn the sound of the treadmill off and listen to a podcast. But what I realized was, I had become sort of addicted to work stuff. And it was really messing with my sleep at night. So what I was doing was I would wake up in the morning, I listen to the podcasts on the treadmill. And then I would work all day. And then I would relax at night. And I would read a workbook, not a workbook, but like a business book or some sort of business development type book at night before I went to bed, so I was literally starting and ending my day with work. And I wasn’t really sleeping very well. And I felt kind of anxious. And so I had to cut the podcasts out for a little while. So anyway, so I run on the treadmill, sometimes if I’m really feeling into it, I’ll finish my workout. And I’ll just walk very slowly on the treadmill but read at the same time, which is kind of nice. So this is really the first time in a very long time that I’ve had any type of consistent self care routine. With two young girls at home, I have a four year old and a one year old. It’s kind of crazy, you’re losing sleep for a long time and your time just doesn’t feel like your own but I’m finally in a good routine where I feel like I do have consistent self care and it’s that you know hour every morning that I have to myself to exercise and to read and sometimes journal if I have some extra time and everybody’s still asleep.

So that’s how I start my day, the kids usually get up anywhere from 7:00 to 7:30. And the circus begins. There’s screaming, there’s laughing, there’s coloring, there’s playing, there’s eating breakfast, there’s getting everybody cleaned up and dressed. It’s pretty much a circus from 7:30 to 9am. In my house, I don’t know if there’s any other parents out there. But like, I feel like mealtime is just pure chaos. Everybody always wants something, I’m up from the table 50 times it’s chaos around here. So I try my hardest not to schedule anything before nine o’clock, because I just know it’s going to be really hard. And then it’s going to push all of the chaos, the whole circus is going to be on my husband. So we try to split those 7:30 to 9am hours.

So typically, I start work at nine every day, and where my business is, right now, I spend at least half of my day on calls, sometimes four hours, six hours, eight hours on calls. It’s something that I’m really actively working to shift and change in my business. And I’m actively working to shift my business model around so I am not required to be “live” on the phone quite so much. But it’s just honestly, it’s reality right now. Sometimes I’ll get a couple hours here and there during my day, and that’s when I will work on client work and do other things for my business, work on presentations and whatever. But usually, it’s pretty busy. I don’t have childcare five days a week either. So the three days a week that I do have childcare, that’s when I’m head down from nine to five on my calls, doing my client work and really fitting as much as possible in as I can. So I try to stay pretty focused on those days that I do have childcare.

5pm rolls around. It’s a circus again, five to seven is another circus. I don’t know parents is this a circus around your house from five to 7pm too? It’s crazy, right? People are hungry kids are whining, there’s playing there’s fighting, there’s getting the table said there’s cooking dinner, cleaning up from dinner, cleaning up kids, bath time, stories. You know the routine. It’s crazy. So luckily, my little one still goes to bed at seven. My older one. My older daughter is a sleeper man she loves to sleep. So sometimes she’s in bed at seven to sometimes it’s more like eight. And then it’s my time and what do I do with myself? What do I do at 8pm? Well, if I’m going to be honest with you, sometimes I work if I have a lot of calls during the day, or if it’s one of the days that I don’t have childcare. All day I work, I work for probably about two hours from 8 to 10 in the evening, and other times I read, I’m really trying to get back into reading a little bit more. And I watch TV. And you know what, I watched? The Office again, and again, and again. I cannot even tell you how many times I have seen that show. Front to back back to front, inside and out. I have seen that show so many times. Does anybody else have a show like that? What is your show that you have seen so many times? For me, it’s The Office. But you know what? I was reading something or I saw somewhere the other day that the office is like a comfort food but not a food like this comfort that you just sort of feel at home and you just come back to it when you’re feeling stressed or down or tired or whatever. And it just was like, like a warm cozy blanket. So that’s the office for me.

So I usually try and put the electronics away laptop away by 10pm latest, so that I can sleep. And sometimes I fall asleep to like a meditation, I use Headspace and other times I’m just pretty exhausted. So I just, I crash. But I thought about in the busiest times of my business, I was talking to my friend Jesse today. And one thing I never ever sacrifice is sleep. I think partially it’s like I literally can’t because my brain kind of stops functioning at 10pm anyways, so it’s not like I could even work at 11 or 12 or one o’clock in the morning, even if I wanted to. I don’t think I would be very effective if I did that. But it’s one thing I just never ever sacrifice is sleep. And so that is one of the pillars to health. And I might not have all of the pillars down pat but that is one thing. I will say I never sacrifice is sleep as much as I can help it. So yeah, so that’s kind of a day in the life.

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So I wanted to share with you a couple things I like about my routine. It’s not perfect by any means, but it kind of works for me and then I want to share a couple things that I dislike about my routine and things that I am actively trying to change in my life. And so if you’re in a place right now, where you kind of don’t love your daily routine, there’s a couple things I want to just encourage you to do is, I encourage you to write out what your dream day looks like, and write it in present tense. And this exercise has been talked about a million times before, I’m certainly not the creator of this idea. But write out your day in the life with present statements like, I wake up at 7am I have breakfast on my patio overlooking the ocean, or, you know, whatever it might be, like, literally write that out, what does your dream day look like?

And I think this exercise is so fun, because it’s interesting to see how many things are aligned with your current routine, your current day, and how many things are sort of in your future in your vision. And sometimes we are casting a vision that feels really big. And so it can almost feel unattainable. If we’re like, yeah, I want to live in a mansion on the beach in Florida. And I don’t work and I have $5 million in the bank. Like, that’s awesome. But it also feels like a daydream for a lot of us, right. But if you’re writing things about your day, “I wake up at 7am. I have a cup of coffee, and I read for an hour on my patio”. Those things. They sound dreamy, right? When you’re in the like kids circus from 7:30 to 9am. Those things sound incredibly dreamy. But honestly, they’re not that far off from like what it could be.

So, I really encourage you to think about that and kind of write like your ideal day, your perfect day, what does it look like? What are you doing? How are you feeling? What is the weather? Like? Who are you with? What are you eating? Write all of that down? That is a really powerful, I think I’m going to do that, again. I’ve done it a lot, but I think I’m going to do it again.

So I want to share with you a couple likes and dislikes about my current routine. I think it’s important to really be grateful for what I do have. And there are things that I really love about my routine, but also to think about, okay, how can I make this just a little bit closer to what that ideal day looks like? For me, one of the things that I like is the flexibility of my day. Yes, I do have childcare on three days. And I do have a lot of calls. But I have flexibility. So if I decide that, okay, I don’t want to have calls from 12 to two because I really want to have lunch with my kids and, and my mom when she’s here watching the kids. So I’m going to do that I’m going to have lunch with them. And I’m 10 steps away in my office 10 steps away from the kitchen, so I can easily pop out and do that. Or this afternoon, it was lovely outside. And so I decided, Okay, I’m going to take my calls outside this afternoon. So I decided not to get on video on zoom. And I took my calls outside. And it was like life giving to just be away from this desk that I’ve been sitting at for the last year of a pandemic so you don’t have the flexibility.

Another thing I like, I really thrive on consistency. I know there are some people out there that’s like, Oh my gosh, if that was my routine every single day, I would be miserable. And yeah, I get it. But you know what i like consistency. So I like knowing at least to some degree, like what’s ahead of me the next day, what’s ahead of me the next week, I like not being all over the place when it comes to schedule. And you don’t I feel for a lot of the parents out there that are dealing with inconsistent childcare or not knowing if and when their kids are going to be in person learning or if they’re going to be home like, I feel for you. Because that inconsistency is very, very hard. So the consistency of my routine is something I am very, very grateful for.

And finally, the balance, I really do feel like I’ve got a pretty strong balance of like work and kids in my life. And so like I said, if I want to go have lunch with the girls in the middle of a workday, I can do that if I want to take a quick afternoon break and go for a walk with them, I can do that. I love working from home, I always have loved working from home because I do feel like, man, if I just want to like go hold and snuggle my baby, I just walk out of my office and go do that because she’s right there. So I really do love that balance that I have in my schedule.

What I don’t like is I had a lot of calls, I’m on so many calls. Oh my gosh, I just calculated my time. I’ve tracked my time quite a bit over the last six months or so. And I spend anywhere from 20 to 25 hours a week on calls on average. Like that’s a lot. That is a lot. 24 hours would be three full workdays nine to five on calls. That’s too many calls. So I know and I am working actively to shift this in my business to figure out okay, what needs to be a call versus what can be an email or a loom video. What needs me on the call versus what can my team handle, things like that, so I’m actively working on it. But that’s something I really really don’t like. Because what that means is that I don’t have a lot of white space in my childcare during the day time, which is the best time for me, the mornings are the best time for me to think and be productive, I don’t have a lot of white space. During those periods of time, in order to really get deep and focus on either client work or development work for my business or strategizing on bigger picture things, I don’t have a lot of time for that, the time that I do have for that after my girls go to bed, honestly, at 8pm, that’s kind of the last thing I want to think about. I just want to lay on the couch with Michael Scott, from the office, Michael Scott from the office, just to be clear, I just want to lay on the couch with the office and just veg out for a little while and relax before bed. Right? I don’t want to think about like a five year strategy for my business at 8pm.

So that’s something that I don’t really like that as I think about my dream day. That’s something I’m building into my dream day. Part of my dream day is that I am only on calls for maybe two hours, I have two calls a day. And the rest of the day is mine to work on client work, to dream big for my business, to strategize, to work on fun sort of passion projects, that is the majority of my day. So that’s my dream. So that’s the other thing that I’m not a huge fan of when it comes to my day.

And the last thing is, as much as I love working from home, and I really love working from home, I can’t imagine a world in which I had an office outside of the home, truly, I love working from home. Sometimes it’s very distracting, I will be honest, if you have ever been on a call with me, you may have heard my children or my dog or my in laws, or my mom or my husband, you may have heard someone in the background, I have an office, it has closed doors and the doors are always closed, but they are made of glass. And they are also about five feet away from the kitchen. And so it’s very hard to quiet the distractions out there, because I certainly can’t expect everybody to be quiet while I’m in here. So it’s a little bit distracting sometimes. But then I just pop the headphones in and listen to Brain.Fm Have you heard of this? It is this amazing paid subscriptions like a couple bucks a month. But it’s this music and sounds designed for focus. It’s really interesting. So they have I don’t even know how to describe the sound. I think there’s a word for it. But I don’t know what it is. They do have some sort of classical music and some like ambient sounds like beach noises and things like that. But they’re really supposed to help you focus. And I put my headphones in. And I listened to that. And it actually really does help me. It’s just kind of like background noise. I’m not a person that likes to work with music. I like silence or just very, very subtle sound. And so this helps, that helps cut out the distractions.

But that’s one thing that again, in my dream day, I have a beautiful office, a large office that’s still in my house. But it’s maybe at the opposite end of the house from the kitchen, and from where the girls are playing all day. And so it’s nice and quiet there. And I can open the windows and let the breeze in coming in off the ocean. Because yes, in my dream world, in my dream day, I live at the beach. So that’s part of my dream, my ideal day.

Anyway, hope you found this interesting. I always love to kind of hear behind the scenes of how other people live their life and live their days. Like I’m always fascinated by those people that work for the morning and then go work out at lunchtime and then work for the rest of the day. I’m like how do you do that? I don’t think I could stop my flow and like workout at 1pm. That just seems crazy to me. But then they’re probably like, wow, how are you getting up at six o’clock in the morning? That seems crazy to me. So we all have our own ways of doing things that work the best for us. And, I hope you found this interesting.

So you know where I’m at. You know, I’m over on Instagram @stephanie.skry and I would love to hear your day like what is your favorite part of the day? What is your ideal day look like? I want to hear send me your thoughts on what your ideal day looks like. And I will see you next time on the show. Thanks for listening!

Thanks for listening to the 100 degrees of entrepreneurship podcast. To access our show notes and bonus content, visit 100degreesconsulting.com/podcast. Make sure to snap a screenshot on your phone of this episode and tag me on instagram @stephanie.skry and I’ll be sure to share. Thanks for being here friends, and I’ll see you next time!

Transcript Episode 22

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