Small Habits Impact Your Energy As A Creator
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Shawn Buttner: Daily habits and behaviors support your energy and your ability to serve or slowly prevent you from making your biggest impact. So your behaviors are either adding to your energy, keeping it sustainable over the long term, keeping it buoyant and fun and motivating and creative.
Or, it's taking away from that. are you a creator that constantly feels exhausted and finds it hard to keep motivating yourself? Or, are you a creator that always says yes to opportunities? Or, one that prioritizes work over everything else? And then, at the end of the day, you're exhausted. At the end of the day, you Don't know where the day went or you wake up dreading your day because it's going to require too much of you.
What if you can make minor habit changes that allow you to keep your creative career in [00:01:00] marathon mode, sustainable over the long term, versus sprint mode where you have peaks and crashes? What if you could summon or create the energy that you needed on demand to create, to serve, to deliver the greatest impact you can with your work?
Welcome to Creators that Crush, the show where we help you move from crushed to crushing it as a creator. I'm your host and certified high performance coach, Sean Butner. In today's episode, we are going to answer the question, how do Creators that Crush keep exhaustion at bay? And what are the simple things you can do to have boundless energy when you need it, and to sustain that energy over the long term?
before we get into that checklist, I have a quick story for you. About 10 or 12 years ago, I went to a Brendan Burchard event. It was like a three day seminar where Brendan talked for from [00:02:00] 9 in the morning to 9 at night, with some breaks in between. And on this particular event, we, go into the conference room, there's about six or 700 people there, and there's a lot of energy, a lot of loud music, it gets quiet.
Brendan starts to talk, and his voice is hoarse, and you can tell that he's struggling, and he explains right off the bat that we all paid to be in this room to hear him talk for three days. And, he's a coach, he does these online events, he's a speaker, he had a YouTube channel, he does webinars and marketing, so his voice is very important to him.
And he said he had been doing a series of speaking events and he was losing his voice. And that they're working to make adjustments for the next three days, so they might end a little bit early on that first day, and they're looking to try to make it work, but we'll He assured us that he'd figure it out, and he's like, [00:03:00] struggling, you tell his voice was gone.
And I remember thinking, like, how terrible must that be as a creator where your number one tool is your voice? Or your number one tool is your head or your brain or your ability to write or your health? And to have that give out when it really mattered. Maybe you've had that experience. I know as a coach and a podcaster, I can't imagine losing my voice.
So we struggle through that morning with Brendan, we take an extra long lunch, and I found out later, cause Brendan talked about it on one of his other events later, He said that, he called around all his speaker friends, and was like, hey, I'm struggling, my voice is giving out. Is there anyone that knows anything that could help?
And so he's networking. He gets back to, he's You need to give this guy a call. His name is Roger Love. and Roger Love's a voice coach. I think he deals mostly [00:04:00] with celebrities and people in LA. He's the guy who, was Bradley Cooper's voice coach for Star is Born. And so he gets a lot of these calls, so the speaker circuit knew of him.
So Brendan, at lunch, called Roger Love. Roger gave him some exercises to help him with his voice. And so when we got back from that lunch break on that first day, Brendan's voice was back, right? He wasn't as loud or dynamic as he normally was, but you could hear him clearly, which is what he needed to get through that weekend, and crisis was averted, right?
Turns out, after surviving that weekend, Brendan then started to do the work to learn how to breathe and support his voice so that he could talk forever, right? So there's a way to talk where you're damaging your vocal cords if you're not breathing properly, if you've ever taken a voice lesson. and Brendan did [00:05:00] the work and, his career skyrocketed.
The guy has really rocked it. But that's beside the point. The key lesson here for you as a creator is that Brandon was doing his normal business. He had the heart to serve and he was taking on more and more as he was expanding his business and his impact and his message. And the one thing he needed physically to deliver that was that Jeopardy because he was doing one thing a little bit wrong.
There's one thing that just wasn't dialed in. And that, that after the 30th speech in three months, his voice gave away. And as a creator, we're all doing this to ourselves. We are damaging our brains, we are damaging our energy, our motivation. the things that require us to have a healthy body to show up.
And that's what we're going to talk about today. In [00:06:00] today's episode.So the quick checklist I developed for you, and this is the basic things, right? So like the story about Brennan, it's specifically about one habit, not fully supporting his tool, which was his voice, and him nearly having a catastrophic event because he lost his voice.
there's basic things we can do to our energy to make sure that Habits that we can have that will help us generate the energy we need when you need to sit down and hit record on that podcast or YouTube video, or help you when you have that blank page sit in front of you and you need to think through and create that article, that book chapter, that, that thing that you create, that's uniquely you and your voice.
So that framework, I've, I very silly called your emo BS only because creating frameworks is hard and I [00:07:00] was able to manipulate the framework to spell out that and that made me laugh. So that's why we're now dealing with my emo BS framework. So as we go through this, I want you to keep in mind though, these are just illustrations of how small habits.
This can really impact how you show up in your work. That's why this is really important. And this is a lot to do with helping your physical body, right? So the first part of the emo BS is E, which is eating. Nutrition, right? So this has to deal with your, showing up and energizing your body with healthy food.
And this is important, and I found this out doing the Whole30 a while back with my wife. if you're not familiar with the Whole30, it was a fad diet from a while back ago. I don't even remember what year. that was really solid, [00:08:00] right? It really, short cliff notes. It's no carbs, it's no beans, it's no dairy, it's no sugar, right?
And you do that for 30 days. So it's mostly vegetables and protein, meat or whatever. And then you slowly add those things back and you find out what is messing you up. And what I took away from that experience is that I didn't realize how much carbs and legumes were really messing up my body and sapping my energy, right?
Because my experience in the Whole30 was the first two weeks, your energy is crap as your body is like, what are you doing to me, right? bread is awesome. Why are you forsaking bread? Which is a problem, for me. But,after the two weeks, I started sleeping better. I started to lose weight at a crazy pace.
crazy just being a couple pounds a week, but it was noticeable. I felt like my head was clear. I felt like I had more consistent energy, to just work throughout the [00:09:00] day. And, like I said, I was sleeping better. What that showed me personally is that the things that you eat really do matter to your energy level and your ability to create and produce.
So I'm not a doctor, I'm not a nutritionist, make sure you talk to your health professionals before you do anything that changes your workouts or nutrition. But, my question for you, creator, is What are you doing to make sure your nutrition's dialed in? Is it supplements? Is it knowing which foods are good and bad for you?
Or what foods give you the best energy? And if I could boil downyears and years of experimenting for myself, If you keep it unprocessed food, and mostly fresh, stuff. That's a pretty good basis point for anything. And you'll notice a drastic change in [00:10:00] your energy if you do that, in my opinion as a coach and in my personal experience.
unprocessed food being things that don't come in bags or boxes and then just your produce aisle and, get good quality proteins. pretty simple. But whatever that is for you, it's very imperative that you dial that in because if you are operating at 1 percent less energy or you're bringing 1 percent less energy to your work as you possibly could, you're not going to connect as well with your audience.
You're not going to have the motivation or the creative energy when you need it. And that will prevent you from. Living the life that you want as a creator, having the impact that you want as a creator. So that's the E in the Emo BS framework eating. The M is movement, right? If you know so much of our health is concerned with our physical body, but we also have emotional energy [00:11:00] and that can get trapped in your body.
And I found that out. Again, in my life, when I had my first job at Walmart, I was a bunch of student debt. I was working a job that was, I had to be available 24 seven irregularly to make sure the systems were up and nothing crashed. And it was just a lot, right? And so I was snappy, I was exhausted, I was worn out.
And I was so worn out that I thought it'd be a super great idea to sign up for the Chicago Marathon in nine months. that's how desperate and, dark it got for me. I'm like, a marathon will be something that's better than my current existence.and what I found out through that experience is,I was snappy with teammates, I was always stressed out, always thrashing about, like I had a bunch of [00:12:00] stuff I had to do and I could never get it done and I felt bad about it and then I wouldn't sleep because I was stressed out about work and it was this vicious cycle.
Running miles and miles a week was really good for me because I could burn through a lot of that emotional stuff. And then be like, okay, this is just a problem that I can solve logically. So,physical activity can cover up a lot of emotional energy problems. And it can help you actually process them out so you can get to the work.
if you are constantly battling with your team, or battling with audience members, or battling with people around you, You might need to up your movement gain. and really, you don't have to do a lot of movement to see gains, right? Again, consult your health professionals, but a half hour a couple of times a week of weight training and a half hour a couple of times a week of cardio is the base recommendation that we've found in [00:13:00] the high performance literature, right?
That will get you performance gains. And if you can't do that, you can do something A little bit less, but, I'm here to challenge you to push yourself a little bit, and if you're already doing it or you've exceeded it, would an experiment of bringing a little bit more of that to your life, would that change how you felt day to day?
Because it's so easy to just forget. But we need to move as humans, so make sure that's part of your daily and weekly rhythms. Okay.next point in the emo BS framework is outside sunlight. if you've ever had, the vampire lifestyle, which is you wake up before the sun, you work in a building where there's no windows, and you leave After the sun has gone down and you never see the sun.
you know how miserable of an existence that is. and if [00:14:00] you've never experienced that, good. this is an extreme scenario that showed me that you really need to get out in the sun.and really, cause I had a couple of times where I had jobs like that.putting 30 minutes on the calendar to walk outside before or after lunch.
It was a mood relegator, it was really calming, I found it very centering, you're getting some movement in too, which is good. Maybe not as much as like a cardio session, but it's something. And it's just good for your mental health, right? You can, I know Steve Jobs at Apple would take walking meetings when he needed to talk or work through a problem.
And I found it to be very helpful myself. And When you look at your calendar, where do you have these planned outside movements? Planned rain or shine, snow, sleet, hail, tornadoes, earthquakes, [00:15:00] whatever. be safe. Be safe and be sane about it. But, when are you scheduled to get some sun on your face regularly?
it's a simple tactic. It's one I think so many people neglect because you don't I don't really realize how impactful that is, but it has a huge impact, especially if you live in like Chicago, too, when the sun goes down at four o'clock in the afternoon in the winters. Anyways. Okay, Emo BS framework is eating, movement, outside, sunlight.
The B is a breathing exercise. And really the key takeaway here is. What habits do you have to sustainably raise your creative and energetic levels?one simple habit that I really love from, teaching people in my high performance coaching practice is just taking deep breaths, right? 10 deep breaths in through your nose forcefully and out through your mouth forcefully.[00:16:00]
can completely change how you're feeling. It can turn you from grumpy to feeling relaxed and ready to get at it. it's something that I do before coaching clients, before I do podcast episodes, to help slow my nervous system down. And, I know Andrew Haberman in the Haberman Lab podcast talks a lot about regulating your nervous system, doing breaths and breath work, and part of it is not,basically, deep rest, sleep.
I can never get the daying letters correct, but there's like a rest protocol that he has that talks you through some breathing exercises. It's super important to help you, raise up your energy, but in a way that's also calm. and not like doing like a hundred jumping jacks and getting your heart pumping, because Usually what happens after that, there's a crash.
this is really good for writing or being creative. I recommend that, try it once a day for the next week, [00:17:00] just once per day, maybe in the morning, take 10 forceful breaths in your nose, out through your mouth. It will change your life. I promise you. So check that out. So breathing and then the, okay.
So we're on to the fifth part of the. Emo BS framework, which I'm going to laugh every time. fifth thing you need to do is sleep, right? And so many people need more sleep than they realize. as I've gotten older, I've appreciated this a lot more. I used to be a night owl and I think I could get away with lower amounts of sleep, but, there's a guy that I worked with at Apple and he was.
to work with, right? He's a super smart, bright guy, and he would snap at you. He would be snarky. He would try to make you feel dumb. all because he thought he could survive on two to [00:18:00] three hours of sleep a night and What really was going on is it just made him super tough to love and be around.so it wasn't really working as well for him as he thought.
just because you can do something doesn't necessarily mean you should. And, he ended up burning out and leaving that job because he was having health problems. And I'm sure sleep was part of it. But Also, it's hard to get people on board or to connect with people when you're berating them because you're cranky because you're tired.
it really does impact us more than I think. So the thing to keep in mind, the general idea for an average adult is you need like seven to eight, it was like seven to eight hours of sleep a night.schedule it. Do what you have to do to get a great night's sleep. There's tons of, great things out there to research.
if I had a solid system, I'd let you know. I generally, [00:19:00] I think, for me, it's if you can keep your, room cool at night somehow. That really helps. Just a couple other things that I do, but. really you have to find what works for you. So alright, so again, that's the emo BS framework, which if you don't implement the emo BS framework you will be more sad and emo, which will prevent you from doing the work that you want.
I'm not sure if that works or not, but here we are. So again, it's eating, what nutrition? Are you taking in to keep your energy consistent so you don't peak and crash? Movement, how are you moving emotions out so you can focus on problem solving and doing the work? Outside sunlight so that you can get a better sleep and just feel better and more connected.
A simple breathing exercise or whatever energy. For the B part, to help you [00:20:00] sustain a creative energy and help you create it on demand, like the habit. You can do it anytime when you need more energy. It's good to have that in your back pocket for when you need it. And then sleep, getting 7 hours of sleep.
Not trying to trick yourself, you can get away with before. Because the people around you will know, that The people around you will give you the feedback. You need to know if that actually works for you or not.alright.the secret to unbound energy and creativity is in your emo BS. And, again, the great news is these are habits you can do to increase your energy.
You can do this. And you have more control over this, over your energy than you think. And the struggle is, for most creators, is after learning about their emo BS, It's getting into action and implementing these habits. schedule your nutrition, your movement, your outside time, your deep breathing, or energy breaks, and [00:21:00] sleep.
And you will have a, an energy that enables you to crush it. with that said, if you want to go a little bit deeper, I have a 5 day email course. You can go to creatorsthatcrush. com, sign up for that. We go through the Creator Crush Path, We outlined that in episode one. And, we talked about psychology last episode.
this is under the pillow, under the pillar of physiology. We talk about productivity and perspective people skills. So check out that email course if you're interested in, and we'll see you in the next episode of Creators That Crush.
