Episode 65: Getting in the Flow State to Operate at the Speed of Excellence

Episode 65: Getting in the Flow State to Operate at the Speed of Excellence

Brandon Condrey:
I've said before, like swallow the frog, like to the thing that you don't want to do the most, I'm kind of having a rethink on that lately, which is do the thing that you feel like most accomplished for it. Like I moved the needle on all these important things by having that slow state in the morning. And so now the rest of it is just like icing on the cake. Like I did the really important stuff in the morning. Now I can go back and do whatever I needed to do, but I know at the end of that day, I definitely felt really accomplished.

Brandon Schoen:
Yeah, man, that's huge. And I think what I hear you saying too, it's like, what is it that people could change in their environment? Normally there was distractions. People coming up to the office, talking to you, all these emails, social media, turn off the person to the thing that's dragging you down in your life. So you can just focus for an hour to get something really important done. What we're talking about here is just change your environment and creating structure actually creates freedom and creativity allows you to be more creative when you have that structure to work around it. Doesn't stifle creativity and actually gives you more freedom and creativity to move around,

Announcer:
Grow your cleaning business, make more money, have more time. This is the Profit Cleaners podcast with your host Brandon Condrey and Brandon Schoen.

Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Profit Cleaners. You are in the place to be learning from the top 1% of cleaning business owners from around the world to next level,

your game, take it up to the next level. And when we're so excited for you guys being here, thank you for your time today. I am your host, Brandon Shane, and I'm joined by my cohost Brandon Condrey and we are the Profit Cleaners in the house. And well, actually let's just start out the show doing a little housekeeping. Brandon.

Let's tell them if you haven't already joined the tribe of Profit Cleaners around the world, listening to the show, sharing out the show, pay the price of admission. Share the show out guys. If you're getting value from these shows, if you're getting a change of perspective, some inspiration, maybe did you laugh? Think a little bit, share it out,

help us out guys. We're doing the show for free. We're not running your ears with a bunch of ads. So help us out on this episode, guys, we want to dive into something really cool that we've been actually experiencing ourselves as Brandon and I. And I've been getting a lot of stuff done lately, and we want to share the title of this show is how to get into the flow state so you can operate at the speed of excellence.

So let's dive into it. Brandon, how do we do that? That sounds freaking amazing. I want to do that. Yeah. So if you don't know, the flow state is this kind of like focused state of mind that you can get into like really accomplish a bunch of work in a short period of time. And typically you want to be spending that time on something that's very,

very important. Like you don't want to be using the flow state to play video games or clean your kitchen. Like, do you want to use it for something bigger than that? I remember this being mentioned in a bunch of books that I had read, like before I met you, Tim Ferris talks about it pretty often. It's a lot of things that high-performing entrepreneurs talk about.

And it's something that I have struggled with for a long time. Like it's really hard to turn it on and turn it off. And so I had a breakthrough recently that I think is kind of important. So I wanted to share that with, Yeah, absolutely. It's funny that you say that, man. Cause I feel like I've been having a similar breakthrough.

Maybe not exactly like you, but I've just been getting into these states lately where I'm doing work, but I'm feeling like hyper productive and it's just amazing, like how much I'm getting done. And I'm going to reverse engineer that and we're going to break it down for you guys on the call, but we think that is, and I think in a nutshell is essentially what we're doing is being more productive,

making more progress by eliminating something and creating a structure in our life that allows us to operate at a higher speed and a higher efficiency. And so that's what we're going to get into. You're getting more done in the same amount of time. It's pretty cool. Yeah. So I've told you guys before that there's a local business peer leadership group that I'm part of.

And we did a retreat recently in Durango, Colorado. So the whole group went up there and stayed together in this big house for a couple of days. And one of the things that our facilitator covered was this concept called the five gears. And so the idea is that you should be able to, you need all these gears and ideally you're doing all of them every day.

So the first gear is recharge and that's taking a break, going to exercise, like whatever makes you feel refreshed. The second gear was like connections. That's one-on-one with your employees, with your spouse. Like it's a deep connection where you're focused on one person. The third gear was social. So you're going to go out with your employees after work for happy hour.

You're not talking work. You're just sitting around. And then the fourth gear is tasks. So doing stuff. And this is the one that I typically get stuck in. So I'm doing stuff to do stuff. So I'm cleaning my desk, I'm writing emails, I'm the research and things. I'm looking at stuff. That's good. Those things have to happen to run a business.

Like you have to do certain tasks in a certain order like payroll and things like that. But the one that was most important for me was fifth gear. And that was for like deep focus work. And so during this exercise in Durango, I had said that, look, I really struggled with getting into fifth gear and this one sentence often, it's just like one little sentence will trigger it.

You know what I mean? Like she said, well, to do that, you have to know the recipe. So you have to know the recipe to get to fifth gear. And she gave an example of like baking cookies. Like, you know that you have these basic ingredients, but you have to do them in the right order to like pull it off,

Man. That is awesome. So did you get the recipe or So, like she said, I was like, well, what's the rest of me. She's like, well, that depends on you. Like you have to come up with the recipe is for you. So I really made a concentrated effort to do it. And I am going to share with you my specific recipe on how I do this and you can create it for your own,

but I do want to share you a very similar, it's like a corollary from college. When I was in college, I was a pretty hardcore insomniac. I remember a stretch where I stayed up for 63 hours street during a finals week, cramming for this cell biology final exam. And I took the test. I thought I did amazing 20 red bulls later.

I'm super prepped for this test crushed. It went home and slept for like 30 hours. And then I email my professor like, Hey professor, how'd that final go? I think I did pretty good. He was like, Ooh, sorry to break it to you. You actually got a 41 out of a hundred, like, oh, damn it.

So I went straight to the student health center, told the doctor that I, you know, what happened with my test and I can't sleep. And she also said something very similar, but I didn't, you know, I haven't thought about it in years. She said that you need to get your body ready to go to sleep. And so you need a nightly routine.

So you've got to do the same set of things in the same order. And that will start triggering your brain. That sleep is coming. It's time to go to sleep soon. So make a glass of warm milk, change into your pajamas, read a book like whatever it is, just do the same stuff in the same order and then you'll be ready for sleep.

So that was the recipe for sleep. Nice, dude, that kind of reminds me of something I've heard lately. That was all about creating that structure in your environment. Like if you don't have success is 50% mental. The other 50% is your environment. So the environment that surrounds you has a huge impact on the results you get on the predictivity that you have.

So you can get more mental toughness. You can create more discipline in your life, but if you want to actually put that on steroids, put a structure around it and put that recipe you're talking about is that structure that Kaizen all together. And then man, that's a game changer. So here's the recipe. Here's what I did. And this is what works for me.

So I usually get distracted by websites and social media and things like that. So, well, here's what I do. So on my computer, I'm going to queue up what I want to work on for the deep focus. So whatever the flow state is, I'm trying to get into, I'm going to load up a website that I need to look at a spreadsheet,

ready to do a thing, whatever it is that I'm hoping to accomplish that day. So I'm going to cue that up on my screen. Got that going next. I'm going to try and eliminate distractions. That's what you're talking about before. So I'm trying to cut off the distractions before they even get there to the point. So what I did was I actually bought there's three things you really need to cover it.

You need to cover your phone, your computer, and then like your physical environment around you, like wherever you're at. So for the physical environment, I bought an led sign that says, do not disturb. It's got a remote control that I can turn on or off. So I closed the doors to my office. I turn on that sign. I've told the office staff downstairs that they're welcome to come up and like make coffee or something.

But if that signs on my doors closed, like don't knock on it. Don't interrupt me. Like whatever it is can wait a little bit. My phone and my computer, I found this app would have tried various versions of over the years, but this one's called freedom. And this is the one that actually works. So you make a list of apps and websites that you don't want to be able to use.

You have to know yourself a little bit. Like I'm going to go to chess.com and I'm going to go to Reddit and I'm going to distract myself that way. So you plug in all those apps and websites and then you start a session it's called a freedom session. So mine are 90 minutes long. So start a session. Then it automatically shuts down that stuff in your computer.

And if you do manage to get distracted, you force a habit, you pull up a new tab and you try to open a website. It just flashes up this great big green thing that says you are free to do what you're supposed to do. So that lets you know, so it's blocks my computer, my phone. And then I do have a smartwatch,

like a lot of people do I think, and I put that to sleep. So I put that in, sleep on. So I can't see what time it is. I don't see notifications. Then I do a meditation session right now. I'm using calm, but I've previously used Headspace. So I do a focused meditation session, which is about 15 minutes long.

And then as soon as I opened my eyes from that focus session, all that stuff that I queued up before I started is on my computer. Ready to go. And then I know like, right, I was going to do this, that, and the other thing it's queued up all next to each other. And then you just go, you do a sprint.

So for me, what works for me is just 90 minutes. I'm gonna do a 90 minute block, bang it out afterwards. I'm done, I'm done with deep focus. I'm going to take a break and get some coffee or go get lunch or whatever. And that is Super cool. Just while you're talking about that, it totally reminded me of a story.

I heard recently there's a book called atomic habits. I haven't read all of it. I'm still reading through it, but it is an amazing book. Atomic habits by a guy named James clear. And he talks about this, how he tried to write this book for like, I don't know how many years it took him like three to five years just to write this one book.

And when he actually finished it, it wasn't like New York times, best seller, millions of copies sold and made a ton of money from it. But the way that he actually got this book done was exactly what you're saying. Brandon. He actually gave his office staff, all of his social media passwords. And he's like, I'm going to give these to you,

have to change them. So I can't log into my accounts. And at the end of the week, you can give them back to me and I'll log in on the weekends and have my free time and stuff. But he did that. And as soon as he did that, which is doing what you're talking about, eliminating distractions, creating this environment where you eliminate a thing or a person or whatever it is,

that's robbing you of your focus. And then you become hyper productive, hyper in the flow state and making all sorts of progress. And that's actually how you like created that book. And he's like, that's the only reason I finished it. And I could have finished it in like three days, but he's like, it took me five years. But when I finally did that at the end and eliminated all these distractions,

that's when he was able to get it out to the world. Hey guys, I wanted to take a quick break to let you know a little bit more about our course, the 10 X toolkit we've put together so many amazing resources to help cleaning businesses like yours, learn how to get more recurring clients on the schedule. The systems we teach you in this course are the exact same systems we've used to grow our cleaning business to seven figures in just three years.

In fact, in one year we were able to accomplish the growth that our mentor in Denver had in 10 years. So it's definitely a shortcut guys to success model. After that success, everything from finding the perfect clients to learning how to keep your schedule filled, we cover everything you need to 10 extra business and without wasting your time and money to learn more about this incredible course,

head over to Profit Cleaners dot com slash courses, that's Profit Cleaners dot com slash courses. I didn't invent this, this isn't my thing. It's just that someone said the right sentence to me, that you need to know the recipe before you turn on ovens, you got to get ready to do it. And that to me was the game changer. And I've been trying to do this for years since I was in college and struggled with procrastination on my sales job.

When I hated cold calls, it was like a phobia of calling strangers on the phone. If I'd done all this, I feel like it would have had really lasting impact there, but it's working now the way that I want it to, and I'm controlling the way that it works with it. And then there's another part of this that I should mention is that when you're done,

I try to reward myself for having done a good deep focus session. So I worked for 90 minutes and the way that I do that is with that first gear recharge. And what I do for that is I go to the climbing gym. The climbing gym that I go to is about five minutes from the office. So as soon as I wrap up at 90 minute thing,

put my bag on, go to the gym, get in some exercise, some physical movement there for about an hour and then come back and I can do another fifth gear session. If I want I'm already in the mood for that. Or I can switch to like fourth gear to just bust out tasks. I have an ongoing list of things I have to do all the time.

And what really happens at the beginning of the morning, I've said before, like swallow the frog, like do the thing that you don't want to do the most. I'm having to rethink on that lately, which is do the thing that you feel like most accomplished for. Like I moved the needle on all these important things by having that flow state in the morning.

So now the rest of it is just like icing on the cake. Like I did the really important stuff in the morning. Now I can go back and do paperwork or emails or whatever I need to do. But I know at the end of that day, I definitely felt really accomplished. Yeah, man, that's huge. And I think what I hear you saying too,

is like, what is it that people could change in their environment? What are the, you just changed this scenario in your environment where normally there was distractions, people coming up the office, talking to you, all these emails, social media, maybe that is what it is for people turn off social media, turn off your phone, turn off the person or the thing that's dragging you down in your life.

So you can just focus for an hour to get something really important. Done. Really a lot we're talking about here is just change your environment and creating our structure. Which to me sometimes sounds a little scary because I'm like, I want to break all the rules and not have a structure on me. And, but in Brandon's time, a lot of this too,

but structure actually creates freedom and creativity allows you to be more creative when you have that structure to work around it. Doesn't stifle creativity and actually gives you more freedom and creativity to move around. One of the examples I learned from Brandon early on was he's really good at meal prep. And that's just like an example of creating a structure around your week, where instead of finagling and trying to figure out what you're going to do for dinner last minute and being all stressed out and like,

just create that structure, prep your meals. Now you've got this easy solution that now you can flow through your week. You don't have to be wasting time worrying about your food or in Brandon's case in the office. Like people constantly interrupting you or whatever, some type of system, some environment, or even if you have to give your office staff, all your social media logins,

whatever it takes to cut off the distractions. So the thing that Rob you of your focus and all you can do is go into that flow state and just focus in and get to be hyper productive. Yeah. So for you guys, like I Gave you what worked for me, you need to, to try and do it for your end. So you got to come up with a list of the things that you need to eliminate.

So I eliminated certain websites and certain apps. That's what was really bothering me down. Maybe you respond to email all the time. Maybe you're just that person that is always responding in five seconds to email. Okay, well, if that's the case, then get that app, get freedom, blocked Gmail. Don't look at it while you're doing this. Maybe it's people,

maybe you need to remove yourself physically from the place that you're asked. If you're in the office, let's say you're brand new. You only have one room and everyone's in there. You can't be like closing your eyes and breathe in deep over there. People are going to think something's wrong with you. Go somewhere else, tell them you're going to leave the office.

I'll be at my house. I'm going to be in the garage. I'm going to be in a different room. There's lots of things that you can eliminate. You can change your location. What's around, you put headphones on. There's so many ways to do it, but you just have to think what's holding me back from accomplishing these things. Is it,

this is it that, how can I eliminate those things? How can I change those things? So in my case, like I can't eliminate the office staff downstairs, but I can tell them, like I gave them a system. If you come up the stairs and you see that led thing through the window, at the top of the stairs that is on,

then, you know, you got to come in and be a little bit quiet and respect my time where I'm doing this. And then we can talk later. Yeah. I love that, man. If people that get an, a B the new year, almost people are always wanting to lose weight and getting shaped through their fitness goals. You can't do that.

If you've got a big plate of chocolate chip cookies sitting on the counter and you're like, but I want to get super fit. But your environment doesn't support that. Right. Or something that I heard recently, that was really cool as beer drinkers, which Brandon, I love IPA's. And we've got a lot of great craft brews and stuff here in Albuquerque.

But if you're trying to cut down on drinking, somewhat beer, some studies showed that if they just move the beer from the top shelf to like the lower shelf, it was like some dramatic difference. I don't know what the percentage was, but it was like 60% lower chance that you're going to drink like six beers that night. If you, if it's not as easily accessible,

right. The environment change. And now you're not going to go, just grab the thing on the top shelf anymore. It's harder to reach down there. And so it's just simple stuff. Guys just eliminating something or sometimes eliminating alcohol. So I can focus more for a week or two or whatever it is longer or social media for the just don't even turn it on.

Cause it's easy to get sucked into that sometimes just, just create that environment. So the point is just find out what's gonna work for you. If dietary change has worked for you, do it. Something will work for you. You just need to take a little bit of intention here to think about what do I need to get rid of to actually make this happen,

where I can get down and repeatedly do this. So now I've got my calendar set up where every weekday, I am going to do a 90 minute session in the morning before I do anything else so that I know if I got bogged down in meetings, if my kid got sick and I had to go pick them up, I at least got that stuff done in the morning.

I got that stuff done. So that part was off the list. I can check that one done. So just work with it. There's always a way you were talking about the dietary stuff. There was, I can't remember what book I read it in, but it was something to the effect of you're warring against your future self. So do your future self a favor and don't buy the junk food at the grocery store in the first place.

And then when you actually go to crave, it you'll open the cabinet and it's not there you'll find beef jerky or seaweed or something that you bought that was a little more healthy. So if it's not there for you to get right away, you moving the beer to the bottom shelf, you're not going to get in the car and go get it unless you have a serious problem.

But that's what you're trying to do is so try and set yourself up for success. And so part of this success, in my case, calendaring this out and doing this little prep routine, which takes about 20 minutes. You take a couple of minutes, knock down some stuff on my digital devices, cue up what I'm trying to get done today. And then,

Yeah, and I think that's huge, man. Just a lot of time that I'm getting better at this. You've taught me this. I'm trying to get my calendars a lot more organized and you should see Brandon's calendars, man. He's got them dialed in to that's something I've noticed. A lot of really successful people do is they have their calendars just like outlined every single day.

When the time they get up in the morning, they have it on. Even on the calendars meditation, do this, do this. They have a morning routine. A lot of times that is what gets you going right for the day. Get your mind, right? Take care of yourself, invest in yourself, take care of your body. And then you can pour out into your business,

into your teams, into your relationships, taking that time for yourself and making sure you're intentional about it so that you can put that structure around yourself so that you can operate at the speed of excellence. So take that guys run with it. There's some cool stuff in the show notes. You'll find some links to that book that Brandon talks about and the apps that I mentioned,

work it out, man. See if you can use it. Freedom is the inexpensive, just give it a shot. I think there's a 14 day free trial. So I'm not sponsored by freedom. It's just the one time. It's the one app that I found that actually did all the things that I wanted it to do, which I thought was really.

Yeah, that is cool, man. Let's, we'll keep you guys updated on how that goes. I know you've gone through quite a few journals, so have I in different systems over the years, but it's awesome to hear it's working. And I think just in general, man, like if everybody could just pick and choose one or two or three things,

whatever it is to change in their environment, to remove something, a thing, a person, what is that for you so that you can create that structure so you can have more freedom, more creativity, and you can be taken 10 times more action and getting way more accomplished, which is specially important. Coming up the new year, everyone wants to be accomplishing goals and stuff.

Well, this is how you do it, guys. You put that structure in place so you can get in that flow. So you can get into that fifth year and take it to the next level. All right guys, that's it. So keep it clean, keep it clean guys. Thanks for joining us today. To get more info, including show notes,

updates, trainings, and super cool free stuff. Head over to Profit Cleaners dot com and remember keep it clean.

Announcer:
Thanks for joining us today. To get more info, including show notes, updates, trainings, and super cool free stuff. Head over to Profitcleaners.com and remember keep it clean.