Ep. 99 - The Comfort of Familiarity

Follow Rob's meandering thoughts as he crunches through the snow and finds his way back inside the office, talking freely about a vision for the future (or lack thereof) and the comfort of familiarity.  Served with a side of fear, this has everything you need to question yourself.  

Show Title: Snow Day (Comfort of Familiarity)

Why Snow Day?

 Well...that's what it is. 

 For those new:

 I am actively building the life of my dreams through consistent goal setting utilizing (7) categories:

• financial
• physical
• personal development
• family
• spiritual
• social
• career

Contemplated all categories decided to freestyle it

Especially after reading The Rudder of the Day: Stories & Wisdom to Kick Start Your Workday

 If you don't have a vision for the future, then your future is threatened to be a repeat of the past.  - A.R. Bernard

"The comfort of familiarity can be so alluring; even if it is not the best.  I see countless people droning through their mundane lives, hanging on to their comfortable misery and blocking the thrill of new and unrealized but available success. " - Dan Miller

We can change our lives...if we *really* want to.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:02

Good morning everybody. Today's a snow day. So it's gonna be a bit of a freestyle day on this 99th episode of the All Around Growth Podcast. This is a show focused on building the lives of our dreams. My name is Rob Kaiser, and I am your host. Today is Tuesday, February 16th, 2021. And yeah, it's a snow day. And I ran outside to the truck to pick up the microphone and decided to shuffle the walkway for mom and dad. Um not mainly the concrete and uh salt that so everybody's safe walking around the barn. And um for those of you who are new to the show, normally this is my commute, and I find myself headed down the driveway. But today it's a little different because it's a snow day and I am capitalizing on the opportunity to work from home. So we're getting a little different taste of the show. But normally during the morning commute, I talk about, or at least the introduction talks about how I actively am building the life of my dreams. Hey Buddh, I'm back, through consistent goal setting utilizing seven different categories. And those categories are financial, physical, personal development, family, spiritual, social, and career. Now, as I contemplated all these categories this morning and thought about what today's topic was going to be, rather than talk about something in the physical or actually any one of those categories, I decided to freestyle it. And the freestyling kind of came to mind, especially after reading The Rudder of the Day. And that's a book by Dan Miller, and I'm going to read the excerpt to you that stood out to me the most. Okay? And this is from his little story called Get Off the Nail. Midway through the page, there's a quote, and it says, If you don't have a vision for the future, then your future is threatened to be a repeat of the past. And that's a quote by A. R. Bernard. The comfort of familiarity can be so alluring, even if it is not the best. I see countless people droning through their mundane lives, hanging on to the comfortable misery and blocking the thrill of new and unrealized but available successes. Think about that. Let that sink in a minute. The comfort of familiarity can be so alluring, even if it is not the best. I see countless people droning through their mundane lives, hanging on to the comfortable misery and blocking the thrill of new and unrealized but available successes. Okay, so that stuck out to me because that's kind of where I feel either I already am, or I'm rapidly approaching. I'm I find myself actively searching for my passion, my purpose, and my why. And at a point in time, I thought that my day job gave me something to work towards with regard to those things, my passion, my purpose, my why. And I soon realized that my focus on the projects and my focus on the improvements that I was making and contributing to allowed me to overlook other aspects of my job and my career and my life. And it's that comfort of familiarity that makes it so difficult to change. Now, that comfort of familiarity compounded with financial debt, oh, that's a recipe for disaster. So many of us who suffer from the throes of consumer debt in the form of credit cards, and the comfort of familiarity often do nothing about it except complain. When the answers are right in front of us. And in my case, the answer was in the form of Financial Peace University. I talk about this a lot. I'm not going to talk about it today, not too much. It wasn't that that led to what I'm reading this morning. But it was that mindset. That mindset of all-around growth, even before I knew what all-around growth was. That continued desire towards personal growth and development. And over time, I became accustomed to change. And in this case, I feel like I find myself in a situation where collectively we seek solutions. I've been put into a position to provide them, and change is what we want, yet changes what we're unwilling to do in order to get the results that we desire. And in turn, we complain about the inability of certain people and certain companies to provide us with the desired change. Yet we are unwilling and unwanting to acknowledge why we are unable to achieve the desired result in the first place. Getting to the root cause. And that's okay. I'm not judging anybody for what it is that we do or what we don't do, but I think that my role there is drawing to a close, so to speak. And not so much a close as a transition. And that's what this snow day is in part about. It's me. Now I don't really feel comfortable doing this, okay? It like because I don't know what I'm doing, quite frankly. But I have this idea in my mind that in order to become what I want to become, I need to push the limit. And by push the limit, what I mean is if the situation that I'm in desires change but is unwilling to make the change, and I feel as though my role is has kind of run its course, and that I'm able to train other people to do what we do, and maybe I can do certain, continue to do certain things that are a little bit more challenging to train, and also can be done remotely. I can continue to do those things while training other people, move forward this whole transition, but to do so in the way that I see fit, I'm going to have to force it because I don't think it's going to be a go if I if if if if I make these proposed changes. And I'm not at liberty to you know go into detail about what the changes are because I don't even know. But I think there's either the option of working a little bit more on a part-time basis somehow, or exploring becoming a contractor. But all this is scary to me because I can't even get well, I shouldn't say what I'm about to say because I've only tried once. I applied for long-term disability and was denied because of my history with seizures. But I think in order for me to really grow into whatever it is that I'm trying to do here, I need to continue to push the limits. Now it was nice because yes, it's a snow day, and as I went out to get the microphone, you know, I was able to shovel the walkway and do some things for my parents, and I know that they're gonna appreciate that because they'll be back and forth in the barn, you know, doing some stuff with sauerkraut or whatever. And if I were in their shoes, I know I'd feel uh a lot of gratitude for my child doing the same thing. Um, and I'm realizing that working towards finding my purpose, my passion, my why, it's become easier to do, exponentially easier to do after getting out of debt, first and foremost, but then also it's become easier when I've kind of relinquished myself to this idea of a life of service and love. And if I can do that to and for my parents, I mean our parents are getting old, and some of us listening out there, your parents may no longer be with us, and I'm sorry about that. And for those of us whose parents still are, they won't be much longer, and it would behoove us all to take a moment to think about what it is that we are doing in life and how we are going about life with regard to our parents and the rest of our loved ones. And if there are some ways or some opportunities to go about restructuring our work in order to live the life that we love, I think we really ought to think about and explore doing that. And for me, I think what that means is giving some serious thought and consideration to making some lifestyle changes that might reduce my actual cost of living, and in the interim, um explore what I can do on the side and outside of work, outside of the day job, to grow or explore opportunities as well. And before I know it, I will be living the life of my dreams. And you know, I started the show talking about how I'm actively building the life of my dreams, and perhaps going through the process of doing so gets you to the point of doing exactly that. It just takes these moments of quiet reflection for us to realize that we indeed are living the life of our dreams while we are actively trying to create it. So again, if you don't have a vision for the future, then your future is threatened to be a repeat of the past. And the comfort of familiarity can be so alluring, even if it is not the best, I see countless people droning through mundane lives, hanging on to their comfortable misery and blocking the thrill of new and unrealized but available successes. Now, if that doesn't get you thinking, that doesn't get you motivated, I don't know what will. Oh, for those of you who are interested, those are little passages from a book titled The Rudder of the Day, Stories and Wisdom to Kickstart Your Work Day. And that's a book by Dan Miller, author of 48 Days to the Work and Life You Love. And on the back cover, I just noticed this. It reads, the first 60 minutes of each day will set the stage for what the day will hold. Be very careful how you start your day. In those first few minutes, you are planting the seeds for your effectiveness, influence, health, and spiritual vitality for that day. If you get up late, grab a cup of coffee and a Twinkie, rush to work fighting the idiots in traffic, and drop down exhausted at your desk ten minutes late, you have just set the tone for everything that will happen that day. Every task will seem like pressure, and your best efforts will be greatly diluted. So the purpose of this book is to serve as the rudder for your day, setting a baseline or a foundation for your day with some healthy, positive, and beneficial thoughts and thought-provoking questions. That's what comes to you on this snow day. And hopefully, wherever you are, you're weathering the storm safely. You've been able to do so by living a life of all-around growth, which includes being prepared to weather storms like this, whether they're actual storms or metaphorical storms of hard times in life. So hopefully this show was of value to you. And if it was, I'd like to encourage you to go to the show notes, go to the very bottom, click to rate and review the podcast. There's a big link in all capital letters. You can follow that link to do exactly that and give it a five-star rating, or if you feel so inclined, a written review. There's also a link to all past episodes down there as well at the bottom. And if you have any questions or feedback, I would like to encourage you to join the Telegram group. You can find us on your internet browser at t.me slash all aroundgrowth. Or if you've got the Telegram Messenger app on your phone, you can find us by searching for all around growth there as well. And that's it, everybody. I sincerely appreciate your time listening. This is Rob Kaiser, and thank you.