131. Building a Life or Building a Prison? Take the Freedom Audit

If your business only runs when you're exhausted, it isn't built to last. This is the Freedom Audit: a 3-step framework for building a business that gives you your life back, not just your income.

In this episode:

- Why the entrepreneurship "freedom" promise quietly turns into a 24/7 job

- The exact moment a business starts running you instead of the other way around

- The Freedom Audit: track your energy, sort your daily tasks into eliminate, automate, or delegate, and build a schedule around your real energy instead of someone else's routine

- Why copying another founder's 5 a.m. routine can backfire, and how to build a schedule around your own energy instead

- What actually happened when I stopped working completely for a stretch, and why the business didn't fall apart

- How to define success on your own terms instead of whoever's loudest in your feed

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Transcript

The Routine Copying Trap

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Have you found someone whose life aligns with what you want your life to look like? And then the second they mention a four o'clock in the morning alarm, an eight o'clock at night gym session of green juice that they're drinking, we are latching on to that. We think that detail is somehow the whole formula. If we just copy and paste their routine, we can copy and paste their results. That is so not true. And I promise you, you are going to find out that it's not true if you do this. Okay, so you built this business because you wanted to take control of your life. And starting your own business feels like a great way to do that. But lately, does it feel like your business is actually the thing that's running your life instead? I am in touch with this emotion. I think honestly, people don't like to talk about some of the bad things out loud. And I shouldn't say bad things, it's not all negative, but it is reality, and we can't just ignore reality. We don't live in a fantasy world. So there is just truth to the fact that on some days, this doesn't quite feel like freedom. It feels like a prison that I built with my own two hands, right? I'm sure you would agree with me.

When Freedom Starts Feeling Like Prison

SPEAKER_00 1:30

So welcome to the Create Your Day podcast. I am Jen Cody. If you are new here, welcome to the show. I work with women who are in business, they're running a business, they're dreaming about a business, they are women who are really kind of past the is this going to work question, but stuck in the why is this so chaotic question. So what I do is I help people. They get their business under control without losing themselves in the process. No easy feat, I'll tell you that right off the bat. So let's get right to it. We become entrepreneurs for what? Because we want freedom. Most people, that's why. There are entire business models out there that are built on the word freedom. We don't want to answer to anyone, right? We want to build something that is just our own. So it's on our terms, it has our name on it, and that is not a lie. There is actual freedom available in this. But what happens for a lot of us is we set out to answer to no one. But what happens? We actually end up answering to everyone. We answer to our clients, our employees, our own email box in the middle of the night when we can't sleep and it's 2 a.m. We are the ones that every single decision comes back to. And we are the one that every question gets forwarded to, even the tiny ones, even the annoying ones, even the ones that clearly someone else is capable of handling. So, what does all of that mean? Basically, it means that we are the single point of failure in our company. We know it, even though maybe we've never actually said those words out loud exactly. There are no boundaries left because what we did was build a business that has no walls around it, none, zero. Somewhere in the middle of building all of it, we did start to lose certain parts of our life that ironically, back in the beginning, those were the parts that we built this to protect in the first place. So I want you to think about it. Your relationships, they can get a little bit thinner when you start a business. Your health certainly is not a priority, unless, I mean, I hope this is not applying to you, but some of us have no choice for but for our health to be a priority, right? Excuse me. So what happens is we stop recognizing the version of ourselves that had time for literally anything outside of the business. We are working constantly, and somehow at the end of the week, do you look around and feel like, oh my God, I didn't even get ahead. I'm still behind where I thought I was going to be at this point. So now, this is a very, very specific type of exhaustion because busy was supposed to mean that we were productive, but instead, we have found that busy just means you're tired all the time. That is definitely not what I signed up for. I'm sure it's not what any of you signed up for. I can promise you that. So let's talk about what led me to this

A $50K Launch With A Catch

SPEAKER_00 4:50

episode. A few months ago, I was on a call with a really, really wonderful client of mine. I love all my clients, but this client, she was launching a new business. It was service-based, right? So it was going amazing. Money was flowing in. She just had a $50,000 launch, her calendar totally full. So she's no longer in that early stage, which can be scary, right? Because that's when you're not sure. Is it going to work? Is it not going to work? She was well past that. But what was happening is she was what you would call a textbook success story. Every single thing on paper looked like perfect win. But she said to me in our conversation, I feel like I am building myself a prison. I thought about that a lot, and I've thought about it repeatedly, more than a handful of times, because people say a lot of things to me, but that really, really resonated because that's exactly the moment, right? That's the tipping point where your business either starts to run you or you get in front of it before it does that. So she said it out loud, unprompted, in the middle of what was really, it started out as a call that was celebratory, right? This call was all about, oh my God, look how successful, look how far you've come, look at all the amazing things that have been happening in your business. And I appreciate her honesty here because that honesty is so rare. People in those moments, they want to celebrate their wins. They want to act like, sure, this is exactly what I thought it was going to be like. And it rarely is. But they want to be perceived as someone who did what they set out to do. Isn't that what all of us want to be perceived at? And that is not always what happens. So that's the exact reason why we are talking about this today.

Peace Versus Exhaustion

SPEAKER_00 6:50

I have lived on the other side of that sentence. I remember very clearly being awake one o'clock in the morning, exhausted, right? But way too wired to sleep because hello, my brain is not going to stop moving for anyone or anything. My business was doing well, but I was definitely missing out on some things, like with my kids. I was on back-to-back calls, no space in between calls, right? And some days I didn't have long enough to even eat. And that, okay, let's just pause there for a second. That's actually familiar to me because I launched my career in a service industry, and it was very common to not have time to eat or to do anything, to be honest. My family, they still make fun of me. They tell me that when I go to a restaurant, I should call ahead and have them like have my plate of food waiting for me so it's room temperature. I am just used to eating my food colds and eating it at room temperature because I spent years not having the time to eat. That is not preferable. We shouldn't, I'm digressing, but we shouldn't be yearning for that. Okay, so the hardest part of this business is not the schedule itself. It's realizing that to fix this, and to fix this part of your life means we might have to let go of a little bit of control. And what do I mean by that? I mean that we have to take our foot off the gas a little bit. And when you are the only person that is keeping your business alive, that feels like the absolute most terrifying and dangerous thing you could possibly do. Every part of you is convinced that if you pull back, everything is going to fall apart. It's all going to fail. So here's my first question for you today, and I want you to really sit with it, okay? When was the last time that you felt genuinely peaceful? Now let's talk about what I mean by peaceful because I do not in any way mean the relief of like collapsing into your bed at the end of a day because you checked everything off your to-do list. That's exhaustion. That has nothing to do with peace. I want to talk about peace, an actual peace, quiet presence, where you are not performing, you are not managing, you are not three steps ahead in your head while your body is sitting still. That's the peace I'm talking about. Because something that I want you to think about, you've seen this on memes all over the place, but if your success is costing you your piece, it is too expensive. That is the end of that sentence. There is no only if or but sometimes or

Why The 5 A.M. Club Fails

SPEAKER_00 9:40

but wait a minute, what about when? No, no, no. If your success is costing you your peace, it is too expensive. Period. So I want to talk to you a little bit about a cousin of mine who a while ago decided that he was going to overhaul his mornings. So he read a book that most of you have heard of called the 5 a.m. Club. And he was like, I'm gonna become a 5 a.m. person and I am going to build an entire routine. I'll be up at 5, I'm gonna take a cold shower, I'm gonna do my exercise, I'm gonna do the meditation, the journaling, all of it being done by the book, exactly as written. And can we guess what happened to him? I'll tell you, by nine o'clock in the morning, he was freaking exhausted. He had nothing left in the tank. There was no energy left for the actual work that he had to do for his day. So the routine that was supposed to set him up for success instead had him starting his day completely spent, drained of all energy. So the exact opposite. And I do see this all the time. He's not an anomaly. I see this in myself also. We want to borrow someone else's idea. We want to borrow someone else's schedule, someone else's life. Because why? Their life looks like the life we want. So we assume, oh, it must be the fact that they wake up at five o'clock in the morning. That's the ingredient. That's the secret sauce. That's what's making it work. You scroll, right? The doom scrolling on Instagram, on TikTok, on LinkedIn, wherever it is that you're doing your scrolling. But I'm promising you, have you found someone whose life aligns with what you want your life to look like? And then the second they mention a four o'clock in the morning alarm, an eight o'clock at night gym session of green juice that they're drinking, we are latching on to that. We think that detail is somehow the whole formula. If we just copy and paste their routine, we can copy and paste their results. That is so not true. And I promise you, you are going to find out that it's not true if you do this. So if you are someone who is a night owl, definitely not me, you're going to find that if you try to force yourself into waking up at sunrise and being part of that whole 5 a.m. club, you're setting yourself up to feel like you failed before your day even starts. That is not discipline. You are chasing a schedule that is not built for your body. It is not built for your nervous system. It is not built for you. So, what we need to do is build the schedule around your actual energy. Not build out a schedule or build out habits that are based on someone's highlight reel that you are consuming on social media. It's hard to do, but it's really what I'm going to walk you through today, and it's going to make all the difference.

The Freedom Audit Explained

SPEAKER_00 12:39

This is called the freedom audit. It's simple enough to do right now, this week. You don't need any special tools required. So I'm going to give you a little bit of fair warning here because I'm going to push you a little bit to be uncomfortable, right? I want you to be a little bit uncomfortable. The first time you do something like this, looking closely at how you actually spend your hours instead of how you assume you are spending them, there's a difference there between those two things. And that tends to surface things that we don't really necessarily want to see or that we don't want to focus on. But we're going to do it anyway, because we can't fix what we don't look at. We need to see it to fix it. So if you can, go ahead and grab a pen. If you're driving or if your hands are full, don't worry about it. It's not an issue. Just keep listening. And then I would love for you to actually come back to this part when you can grab a pen. So the first step of the audit, I want

Track Your Energy For One Day

SPEAKER_00 13:40

you to track your energy for one day. And I mean that just for one day. A lot of these exercises, if you've ever done them, they will have you tracking your energy for multiple days in a row for a week. And I actually have things like that in my clear process, but for now, we're just starting with tracking your energy hourly for one day. So what you're going to do is pick a day. Um, the part that matters here is that it has to be a day that actually looks like your normal life. So we're not talking about a day that everything's on fire, and we're not talking about a day when there's nothing on your calendar. I want you to think of a really random Tuesday, like a regular day. How do you feel at 8 a.m.? How do you feel at noon? How do you feel at 4 o'clock in the afternoon? Like all the times throughout the day, I want you to notice where your energy is spiking, where your energy is crashing. And pay close attention to what's happening around those moments. What is happening, like what are you doing right before the crash? What's going on in your world right before your energy spikes? This is data, and this is important data because if you're going to figure out what works for you as an individual, you need to base it in reality. So that's step

Eliminate Automate Delegate Your Tasks

SPEAKER_00 14:58

one. For step two, you're going to look at three tasks that you do for your business every single day. Now, this can be super small things, answering emails. Um, maybe you do sales calls, maybe that's part of your daily routine, creating content, managing your cash flow, um, things like automating your pricing, whatever it is that is filling the actual hours in your day. For each one, ask yourself a single question for three things. Can I eliminate it, automate it, or delegate it? I don't want you to have a plan. So don't freak out. You don't need to have a plan. You don't need to know who you're delegating things to, who's gonna take this off my plate. You don't need to know what tool is going to automate this for me. I just want you to recognize what can happen here. So don't worry about that. You just need to name the task and put it in one of three buckets, right? The plan is going to come after. Right now, you're just getting really honest and granular about what is actually taking up your time. You have to be honest. What are the first three tasks that come to mind that you are always doing? Maybe it's not every single day, but on most days, what are you doing? Three things. Okay. So

Build An Ideal Schedule By Energy

SPEAKER_00 16:15

now I'm going to challenge you a little bit and tell you to forget your schedule. Okay, your actual schedule for a second. Just forget it. I want you to build your ideal schedule, okay? Pay attention. Think of the name of this podcast. This is the create your day podcast. So you are going to create your day, building out your ideal schedule based on your energy, not the energy you think you're supposed to have. But how about we're honest with ourselves here and talk about the energy that we actually have? I worked with someone years and years and years ago, and their best creative hours ran until like the we hours, three o'clock in the morning. I could never choose that for myself. But it's not my schedule to correct. That is when their best work happened. So that is when she worked, and that worked for her. I don't have to try and make that work for me. You get it? You see what we're saying here? I want you to pay attention. What works for you. So you have to be honest to create your ideal um schedule. When I did this audit on myself, I found that I really was screwed up a little bit. I had scheduled a lot of my creative work during hours that just don't feel creative, to be honest. I feel drained at certain times of the day. And let me preface it by saying I am a morning person. I don't wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at like five o'clock in the morning, but I am much more of a morning person than an evening and night person. That, however, doesn't really mean my creativity happens in the morning. Even though I'm awake, I really don't do my best creative work until like late, late morning to afternoon. So I had tried cramming, I thought I cracked the code, right? I'm like, I'm gonna schedule all of my creative work during my morning hours because I am a morning person. So the early part of my day. And I was like, oh my God, I feel terrible. There must be something wrong with me. Maybe there is something wrong with what I'm trying to create because I don't feel like I am in flow in any way. But what had happened was I had it backwards. And once I flipped it and realized I was basing my energy in the wrong place, my work did not get easier. But guess what? My work stopped fighting against me and I started feeling much more in flow. So this is where the busy but not productive feeling starts to make sense for us because effort is not the problem. I do not challenge any of you to put more effort in. It's just laying that effort out hour by hour. The missing piece here is just structure, and structure is something we can build. Not like willpower, because willpower runs out. No matter how badly you want it to hold, we do not have an unending supply of willpower. So we need the structure underneath there so that all of this actually takes hold and sticks. I'm

Pausing Without Breaking The Business

SPEAKER_00 19:25

gonna tell you something else that might be a little bit surprising, excuse me, because we live in this world where we are told consistency. We want to show up all the time, be present, all the things. And every so often I have to do something a little controversial, and that is take a step back, stopping completely. I won't post, I don't send emails for a little bit, I don't publish a podcast, I don't have any new discovery calls for clients. I need to do that every so often because my business needs to run at my pace. I can't become a slave to the pace of my business. That's an important thing for you to put in place for yourself because we can be terrified to pause. However, I'm going to tell you that every time I have ever had to do that, nothing stopped working. My clients, they respected it. And when I come back from those pauses, my content is better, my emails are better, my calls go better, all because I am better, right? I'm not telling you to close up shop for a week. I know that that's not necessarily realistic, and I understand that. But what I am telling you is that the fear of stopping is almost always bigger and louder than what action actually happens when you do take that moment to pause. And I don't want you to stay frozen in fear. So here's what I want you to try with me this week.

Schedule Joy Breaks And Track Wins

SPEAKER_00 21:02

These are small, doable, no drama, nothing that's going to require you to overhaul your entire life by the end of the week. Okay. But what I want you to do is schedule some breaks for joy. You're hearing me correctly. Schedule joy breaks. I want you to think about a song that really energizes you, or your favorite drink, your favorite tea, your favorite cup of coffee, um, a friend that you haven't spoken to in a long time, like on the phone, not over text. A few minutes of doing, I don't know, absolutely nothing or reading a book, whatever feels good, it does not need to be long. It just needs to exist on purpose. And it exists between the things that you have to do, right? So instead of getting squeezed out every time, it will exist there. So I want you to think about this past week. Let's go show. Short term, just over the past week, how many times did you have to push something off to make room for something that was more important? Think about it. Think about the things that were pushed off your schedule. And now think about how many of them were related to work and how many of them were related to what brings you joy. We need to stop delaying our joy to make room for what we think is important. Having that joy in our lives and our hearts makes us better at getting the important things done. So I want you to schedule joy breaks. And then I want you to track your wins because they're going to come. I want you to go for all the wins, not just the big ones. So did you go for a walk? Did you go for a run? Great. That's a win. Did you get um a good feedback from a client this week? Great. Also a win. Did you have a hard conversation that maybe you've been putting off for a while? See, these are all wins, and we're recognizing anything that is a better version of you. Not just these giant wins. Could you maybe recognize if you're about to overcommit and then you decide to say no? Oh my God, imagine that counts as a huge win. So we give so much weight to things that are dragging us down, and we give almost no weight to the things that are actually lighting us up and working. And that math is wearing us out. It's exhausting us. I want you to go back to your freedom audit and plan your week around your energy. Stop planning your week around your task list. When something has to get done, ask, when is the best version of me available to do this task? Not when is there white space on my calendar? We need to find that white space, but there's such an important distinction there on which white space is happening at that time. Because I want you to find the creative thing that has nothing to do with professional output, but something that sounds fun for no other reason than like, hey, that sounds fun. I want you to find that thing. Like go sit in the park and listen to your favorite album from when you were a kid or watch a guilty pleasure reality TV show. Anything that is just for fun for you, those things have to exist on the calendar also, right? So before we wrap this up, I do want to leave you with something important for you to know.

Define Success On Your Terms

SPEAKER_00 24:36

And that is that you are allowed to build your business in a way that actually feels good to live inside of. You're allowed to define success on your terms, not on the terms of the people in your feed on Instagram. If someone online is telling you that success looks like working two days a week and they're making seven figures, and you just can't make that math work in your own numbers, I'm gonna save you the math. They're not doing it either. I don't care what they say, and that's fine. Either way, their math isn't your math. Your version of success is also allowed to be simple. How amazing is it when success looks like paying your bills without panic? That sounds pretty good. Sleeping through the night. Wow, that sounds amazing. Making it to your child's basketball game, to their dance competition, to their karate tournament, and actually watching it instead of answering emails from the audience while you're sitting there.

unknown 25:46

Right?

SPEAKER_00 25:47

In the bleachers, boop, boop, boop. That counts. That is success. These are the successes that we want to celebrate. And let me tell you, I did all of this the hard way first. And that is why I'm here. I don't want that for any of you. I built my company, Solutions for Scale, because of this exact reason. Structure is what actually makes freedom possible. And a business that only runs while you are white knuckling your way through it is not free. You need to prioritize your peace, prioritize your joy, and prioritize your time in that order. Right? When you do that, the success follows. You're going to find that a business that is costing you those things is not successful. It may look like it from the outside, but only to the people who can't see what it's actually

Quick Recap And Leave A Review

SPEAKER_00 26:40

costing you on the inside. Really, really important distinction to make. So quick recap: you're going to track your energy for one day. Then you're going to um sort your three tasks from your business into three buckets eliminate, automate, delegate. You don't have to figure out how to do those things. Just put them in a bucket. And once you do that, you're going to build out the schedule that your actual energy wants. Not the one that you think you're supposed to have, but your actual ideal schedule. That's it. That's the whole audit. So if this spoke to you, if this hit you in like the right spot, I want you to let me know. The greatest way for you to do that would be to leave a review for the podcast. That is how we reach more and more and more people. So it's so helpful if you could take a moment to just leave us a quick review. And of course, I would love for you to subscribe as well. So hit the subscribe button, leave a review. I hope all of this really helped you to create your day in the best way possible. And until next time, take care of yourself, take care of each other, and I will see you here another time. Have a good one.