Short Podcast This week
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Shawn Buttner: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Meaningful Revolution podcast. I'm your host, Shawn Buttner. And this is the podcast where we hope to inspire you into following your passions to live a life that you find fulfilling and meaningful. And so today, it's going to be a little bit of a different episode. It's gonna be much shorter.
I'm getting back from a belated honeymoon slash anniversary vacation with my wife, and so the interview schedule is a little bit goofed up, and instead of trying to think about what might be helpful and useful for you guys, I thought I'd just, maybe talk a little bit more from the heart today.
First off, this vacation was amazing. I got to read a couple of really amazing books. A little bit [00:01:00] about Purpose from Evan Carmichael. He's a big YouTuber guy. Really super sweet, super cool dude. His Built to Serve book was amazing. And this got me... Again, thinking about how to make improvements to the show, to the YouTube channel, the podcast and my coaching business.
But I don't know if you've ever felt this way, but I didn't realize how much I needed to have 10 days of not thinking about work, that really thinking about, responsibilities too much, there's still things that we have to do. But Yeah, as someone that's a high performance coach and praises breaks and taking those strategic rest breaks so you can be more productive I did not heed my own advice on the longer term type of rest.
And I can't remember the last time I took 10 days where it wasn't a business conference, or I'm learning, or I'm doing something, or it's just Go to someplace warm, sit on the beach, read books, and [00:02:00] connect with... One of the most important people in my life yeah, this is, one me showing that I don't have all this stuff figured out, I'm still on the journey with all you, like all of you, and and, we give advice so many times, and this was a reminder oh, I need to take this advice a bit more Yeah, make sure you are planning those breaks in the hustle and in your life to reflect, to grow, to get yourself regrounded so you can hit the ground running again.
So that would be the suggestion I'm learning I did from this past break. Second book that I read. related to this break, was Bittersweet by Susan Cain, and Susan Cain is one of my favorite authors and has had a profound impact in my life, and I share this because her first book, Quiet, I think that was her first book which is about introverts, my wife [00:03:00] lovingly says is an operating manual to me, so it helped me in my relationship with my then girlfriend and now wife, and just, Normalizing a lot of my more quiet tendencies, where it's like I'm not interested, it's just I don't have a lot to say sometimes, or I need time to myself to re energize, it's not anything that she's doing, it's just how I manage my energy, and it's had, we've had a lot of really productive conversations from that, so I absolutely love Susan Cain, her book Bittersweet, about how we need to incorporate Sadness in a world, especially here in the U.
S., where it's optimism, you're winning, you're always moving forward. But taking the time to settle into those sadder moments that we experience in life. Grief, depression, anxiety, like those types of things. And it's not that we need to wholly focus on that, but we can combine that with the more [00:04:00] positive, to just be a more rounded human being.
It was interesting because it got me thinking that my decision to leave Apple in 2019 as a software engineer, which was the dream for a while, was actually the end of my story with grief, or ish, I should say, meaning that I'm I think when my mom passed, I was still working at Apple, doing the software engineering thing, and super happy, and By grieving, I didn't realize I was, this was how I was dealing with grief.
But, there's that initial, when we lose anyone, I believe, we have this moment of reflection that happens, where we start questioning Am I doing... In my life, the things that I want to do or how do I feel about how things are going and in a weird way, I think a lot of people with the pandemic also had [00:05:00] this moment of reflection.
So it's these big moments where your world changes. And part of that reflection was, I want to help people more. That's something I've always had in my soul and I found some paperwork. This year when I moved my dad out of his house into his new place like paperwork, it was school projects from grade school.
So I was like third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade, so pretty young, you write a book about your future life and it's I want to ride bikes, I want to play video games, I want to help people. And I want to, juggle or whatever it was. But there's a couple of these books throughout the years where the common theme was even as a young boy, I was like, I want to make this world better somehow.
And I just don't know what to do, which is a lot of the reason why this podcast exists is I am [00:06:00] closer to that Feeling of wanting to help, or how I help people, and I'm hoping to translate that search and that discovery and highlighting the people that I know on how they've really found their purpose. So, Apple's a great organization and I loved working there. But, there's this calling in my heart, this longing that Susan K talked about in Bittersweet for something more, right? And that started a... Three and a half, four year process of, slowly not feeling my heart in the engineering work anymore and slowly, focusing on, oh, I want to be a coach and I want to help people talk through the things going on in their life and really find their authenticity, really find their community, really find their unique voice out in the world and how they can help [00:07:00] people, right?
And helping people help people is how I built this business, really, to be. And that's great, and I feel super amazing about that. But, it ultimately led me to quitting that really lucrative, that really great environment, a job that I absolutely did love. To do something difficult.
To do something more aligned with who I wanted to be and how I wanted to contribute out in the world. And I hope you all have these moments where you can reflect, right? Where you take the vacation, you read something, where you journal about your life, and you're like, oh, okay, maybe this wasn't such a Positively driven decision, but maybe this was a response to grief.
This is a response to change. Or this is a response to transformation. Because I think [00:08:00] that's where this bittersweet idea really comes into effect. Any case, I feel like I got to the point of this short podcast episode where I'm rambling, so I'll wrap it up. But definitely go check out Susan Cain's book, Bittersweet.
I think someday I would love to interview her on the podcast, I think that'd be super fun. And hopefully you guys are still around when that happens, cause I'm sure it will at some point, with that guys yeah, take your breaks, really make sure you do the self reflection. To learn more about yourself, if you need help with that, let me help you become a better helper out in the world through high performance coaching, a link is below in the links, in the show notes, that'll, all that jazz and we'll see you next week with a really powerful interview with the Journeyman Collective guys, so until then, this is Shawn Buttner signing off, live with more joy, more growth, and more [00:09:00] impact, we'll see you then!
