Uncommon Freedom

Lifestyle Design: Shaping Your Success and Fulfillment (Part 2)

• Kevin Tinter

Share episode

In this continuation of their previous episode, Kevin and Bekah Tinter delve deeper into the practice of lifestyle design and its impact on success and fulfillment. Drawing from their personal experiences and insights, they discuss:

  • Defining and living by your core values
  • Effective time and energy management strategies
  • The importance of embracing an abundance mindset
  • Practical tools for auditing your time and energy
  • The value of consistent reflection and adjustment in lifestyle design

Kevin and Bekah offer actionable advice on aligning your daily decisions with your long-term goals and values. They share personal anecdotes about delegation, managing family dynamics, and the power of surrounding yourself with positive influences.

Whether you're an entrepreneur, a busy professional, or someone looking to live more intentionally, this episode provides practical steps to design a life that reflects your values and aspirations. Join us for a conversation that will inspire you to take control of your time, energy, and mindset to create the life you truly want.

Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share this video with someone who could benefit from intentional lifestyle design!

Subscribe and tell a friend!

Get my book "The Seven Disciplines of Uncommon Freedom" on Amazon!

Visit bekandkev.com today to sign up for our email newsletter.

Access our Free health assessment HERE

Speaker 1:

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Uncommon Freedom Podcast, where we explore the intersection of entrepreneurship and intentional living. Today's episode is part two of the episode we recorded a few weeks ago, entitled Every Decision is a Vote for the Life you have. But we had so much content we needed to come back into the studio to finish it up. So today we're going to wrap up the discussion about why lifestyle design isn't a one-time project, but a continuous practice that shapes your success and fulfillment. Beck, welcome back. It's good to see you again.

Speaker 2:

Good to see you too, it's been a while it has been.

Speaker 1:

Are you excited for your trip tomorrow?

Speaker 2:

Yes, leaving for Italy tomorrow with the ladies Very excited.

Speaker 1:

The queens.

Speaker 2:

The queens, that's right.

Speaker 1:

Which is Regina? Is that Italian for queen? Or why is that? In the welcome letter from Brooke, I don't know it says ciao, regina, becca.

Speaker 2:

Well then, I'm assuming it is I need to study up on my Italian, so I don't know. Otherwise I got the name wrong, but they're pretty good about making everything very professional, yes and um.

Speaker 1:

The goal was to get everything into one suitcase. How'd you do one?

Speaker 2:

carry on one carry on and a giant tote bag.

Speaker 1:

Thank god for vacuum packing technology.

Speaker 2:

I still haven't decided if the vacuum packing was better or if I should have been rolling my clothes. One person bailed the vacuuming and ended up going with the rolling and said that worked. But I don't know. It's amazing the shrinkage.

Speaker 1:

Yep Shrinkage is real. It's like cold plunging for the body, right Vacuum packing.

Speaker 2:

Potentially. Yeah, it's amazing. I've never done it before. It's working pretty well, but this is very stressful for me. I am a over packer. I really like to be prepared. I have all of my outfits pre-planned with only a few extras, because there's some hangout time where it's like you know what if I don't have anything else to wear? Um, I'm not taking almost any workout gear because I'm not going to do scheduled workouts in the same way, and I'm bare minimally packing all the other things that I need the four four-hour work week.

Speaker 1:

Tim Ferriss.

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker 1:

He talks about packing super light. If you need it, buy it when you're there.

Speaker 2:

Don't be surprised if you see some charges for a large suitcase to get all my crap home.

Speaker 1:

An overpriced whatever Italian leather suitcase, which I don't even need a suitcase. What you could do is pack one of my old military sea bags.

Speaker 2:

I don't even have room for a sea bag. I don't have room for another bag, otherwise I absolutely would have packed another bag. So I'm kind of proud of myself. It's also a little pathetic and I'm not really sure how it's going to turn out, but last night I definitely wasn't having any of the teasing. Also, I was thinking it's funny. We are dressed similarly, matching again today. It's just a white t-shirt, but I swear we probably dress similarly, I don't know half of the time, or at least when we travel together well, events together.

Speaker 1:

Tell the kids all the time great minds think alike great minds think alike and 26 plus years of yes yeah, it's like I don't know what it is. I didn't see what you were wearing.

Speaker 2:

I walked downstairs. I'm like of course we're both wearing a white t-shirt.

Speaker 1:

Know, I was thinking the next time we go to an event, we should take a photo of us together every single day, because our ability to unintentionally match At least coordinate.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, coordinate We've only had one massive failure in this, and that was a couple years ago at that level of event. We were both on the stage together, we both wore red on the stage and not the same color of red. There's a lot of different like you could do blues, maybe greens would be okay, but you get in the red category and if it's not like the same color, it's really bad together. And I remember being like what were we thinking?

Speaker 2:

but we weren't we did not pre-plan, and we actually don't normally plan unless it's like a formal event. So, yep, we're just in tune, babe. All right, awesome. Well, have an awesome trip. Thank you, babe.

Speaker 1:

So we're going to move on to talking about core values and intentional living. So let's explain the importance of defining and living by your core values. So on page 159 of Seven Disciplines of Uncommon Freedom.

Speaker 2:

Such a good book, everyone should pick up a copy.

Speaker 1:

We have a simple list and things like this are available all over the place, but it's a simple list to really identify your core values. So if you haven't done anything like this, pick up your copy of the book and go through. There's probably about 30 different core values here, but what we've found is that when you know what is really important to you, you can focus on what you want and what you want to create in life, instead of just focusing and trying to avoid the things that you don't like. Do you have anything else to?

Speaker 2:

say Well, just because when we talk about lifestyle design, we're talking about being intentional with the life we've been given, the one life we've been given, and I think because most of us again, we've said this multiple times, it's not us who came up with this statement Most people spend more time planning for vacation than they do their life.

Speaker 2:

Most people go through their life year by year, decade by decade, and they don't actually know what they're aiming at. They don't know what their outcomes are, their intentions, and we're never going to get 100% of what we set our sights on. But we'll surely get 100% of nothing if we don't plan on anything, and 100% of nothing if we don't plan on anything. And I think that you know some people end up lucky that their kids have turned out well, lucky if their finances are strong, lucky if they're still married, but that's probably not the case for most people who aren't intentionally investing in those parts of their life. And so I think having core values, it helps you know again what you stand for, what you don't stand for. The podcast we did the other day with the other couple that was really helpful because they were talking about their purpose statement, which remind me how they defined it, cause I haven't read the book yet. I think they were talking about what you're willing to commit your time to. Do you remember that part of it?

Speaker 1:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

What you're willing to invest in.

Speaker 1:

I don't remember exactly how they worded it, so brilliantly, but it was basically like.

Speaker 2:

You know, what I decide to give my time to is based on whether it fits my purpose. And if it doesn't, I'm probably going to phase out on it or I'm not going to stay consistent with it.

Speaker 1:

And I might also butcher how they said this, but they talked about. I am worthy and my work is worth it.

Speaker 2:

Yes, or what makes my work worth it.

Speaker 1:

What makes?

Speaker 2:

it worth doing the work to me. I think that was how they worded it, so that's important, worth it.

Speaker 1:

What makes it worth doing the work to me? I think that was how they worded it, so that's important. The importance of design is like we're trying to be intentional about creating something. So even if you think about putting up a tent, like there is a design that goes into that and if you don't follow it, it's you know until you haven't figured out, you do follow it.

Speaker 1:

It's a little rough Sometimes you end up with a mess. And certainly when you talk about building some type of structure like the design, knowing what is the end purpose that I have in mind, what do I want to create? Right, that goes into the design and the foundation and all the aesthetics that you want to ultimately create, and when you don't do that, you end up with a mess. It falls apart over time. It's just not going to last the way that it should.

Speaker 2:

I definitely think of core values as the foundation. So you know again, many people are building their life on a very unfirm foundation, a very flexible or, you know, it's just not solid, and so they're not clear on what they want. And when they're not clear on what they want, it becomes difficult to make wise decisions as life and society and culture shift.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's great, all right. So let's talk about managing time and energy, and once again we have a time audit on page 163 to just help you. And once again, there's a lot of different tools out there available on the internet, but this one is right here in the book. But it's really important to track what you're spending your time on, because the truth is, people can say that my family is important, my wife is important, my marriage is important. You know, my relationship with God is important, but you know, show me your calendar and I'll actually show you.

Speaker 1:

I'll tell you what's really in your bank account exactly exactly what you value and what we find is that most people they have very little true idea of where they're spending their time.

Speaker 1:

People especially for you and I, who work with people who are self-employed. One of the biggest challenges of self-employed people is that they overestimate or they give themselves too much credit for how much they're actually working, and so doing a time audit is very helpful for that. It's just like when you do, when you track your food right, most of us think we're eating healthier than we thought, and then we start to look at nutrition labels, we start to enter it into an app and actually track the calories and we say, holy crap, we're eating a ton, a ton of garbage, we're eating too many calories. Yeah, and same thing with your.

Speaker 2:

And just like we give ourselves more credit for the activity that we do, often, you know, it's like well, I did a workout, you know, if we didn't have these devices on our wrists or wear heart rate monitors and even those aren't perfect in their calculations, you know, we would probably say to ourselves oh, I burned, you know, five or 700 calories, when maybe you burn 350 calories, especially because the more fit you become, the more efficient you become.

Speaker 2:

So we tend to overestimate our activity levels and underestimate what we're actually putting into our body, and so those calculations can be off quite a bit. And I think the same thing can happen with our time, where we feel busy. But busy does not equal productive, and so that's a really good way for you to assess, you know again, where am I spending time that's productively, moving my life forward, investing in relationships, my business, my personal health, my faith, walk, things like that that are going to make me a better version of myself, versus just being busy in the day-to-day things that might not serve you well Do you have any practical tips to help people prioritize activities that align with core values and also eliminate or delegate the things that don't?

Speaker 2:

One of my favorites is a matrix that talks it's four quadrants and across one spectrum, one.

Speaker 1:

Is it the Eisenhower matrix right? Urgent and important?

Speaker 2:

Yes, urgent and not urgent importance and not important, thank you, and it's broken into four quadrants. But basically, urgent and important things need to happen almost immediately. We usually need to be the ones to do them and that might be like you know, you've got to just clarify if it's important and urgent.

Speaker 2:

And that's happened right quadrant one is urgent and important. Quadrant two is, um, important but not urgent, and those are things that we need to schedule. These are the things we should be putting on our calendars to make sure they're getting done. We're probably the ones to do them, but what happens is if we don't take care of them in a timely manner, if they don't go on our calendar, if we don't follow through, they become quadrant one emergencies. So that would be things that, again, are important but not urgent in the moment. Quadrant three are things that are important but not urgent, and they can.

Speaker 1:

Can, did I say that. Right, I'm not looking at it um quadrant three, not important but urgent, urgent yeah, harder to do without the actual diagram.

Speaker 2:

Um, and those are things that we choose to delegate most of the time, and we have an ongoing, uh, love affair with delegation. We've basically, once we discovered it, figured out how to use it. We've been perfecting it for the last many years and we've become better and better at delegating.

Speaker 1:

So like picking up your dry cleaning or dropping off your dry cleaning would be. It's important or it's not important, but it is urgent In the moment. Yeah right, I guess it's.

Speaker 2:

Again, it's a little bit hard. This can be, I think, kind of a gray area as far as which quadrants you delegate out of. Let's get to quadrant four, which is not urgent or important, and that is obvious time wasters, where most of us lose time. So we feel like we don't have enough time for things. We feel like we're busy, we're spending too much time in our quadrant four activities. I was just observing a child in our home spend a lot of time in quadrant four instead of unloading the dishwasher and it was driving me nuts.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

I mean quadrant four, most especially in today's modern world devices, and specifically smartphones, is probably the biggest quadrant four time suck Right. Our phones, our electronics, can also be tools when we're sitting around with nothing else to do at a kid's practice, and we can be very productive, but it can also erase time for us almost immediately. So let's go back real quick to delegation, because one of the things that we do is we work with a couple of different assistants. We have lists on an app on our phone and we literally delegate anything that we don't enjoy doing or need to personally be doing. Some of it we might be okay at or good at. A lot of it we're not actually good at, and so it's very easy to delegate, and what we're learning is our different assistants also have different personalities, so one of them can take general ideas and run with it.

Speaker 2:

One needs a lot more specifics, but we also get the communication is the results we get is one of the sayings that I think is from maybe Brene Brown, and it's a great saying because it helps us understand that if we didn't get the outcome we wanted when we delegated, that's on us and we need to circle back and make sure that we have clarity. But it's so freeing to have 10 things on our to-do list and realize that we don't need to do any of those things. So that's one way to make sure that you're living very intentionally yeah, so we're talking about managing time.

Speaker 1:

The other thing is managing energy yes and, and so once again in on page 165, there is an energy audit, and energy really has to do with, like a lot of times, people, but also activities. There are some activities that just are a drain and these are very much personality based, but there's also a lot of people that can be either energy givers or energy takers.

Speaker 2:

We also call them like anchors and engines.

Speaker 1:

Yes, yeah, and it's so important for us to understand who is the. You know who's the energy giver and who's the energy taker in our life and you know there are going to be some relationships. You know they could be. You know past friendships they're energy takers, they're anchors, and you realize you know they could be. You know past friendships that they're energy takers, they're they're anchors, and you realize. You know what.

Speaker 1:

I can pretty much eliminate them, at least eliminate spending time with them, you know. So I might still see them at a party, I might still send them a Christmas card, but I'm going to be intentional about not scheduling time with them, because I realized when I spend time with them they suck the life out of me. And then there's going to be other people who absolutely fuel you up. You spend time with them and you feel better. You know they're going to challenge you to be a better person, you know, to deepen your faith with the Lord and to be a better spouse, to be a better parent.

Speaker 1:

But this is really important. And then also, you know too, a lot of times you know there's there's family dynamics that come into this, and you know it's September when we're recording this, so we're coming into the holiday season and so the reality is for a lot of us, we need to examine OK, who are the family members that are the anchors versus the engines, and how can I be intentional, to strategize to minimize the amount, not saying that you don't spend any time with your family, but to be very intentional. You know how can I manage this so that the energy isn't sucked out of me through the holidays, or you know whatever the case might be for you, but this you know energy management is so important there's the rule of twos as well.

Speaker 2:

we didn't come up with it but it's very brilliant and it's understanding that people. Some people are your two minute, some people are your two hour and some people are your two day people and many times someone might be someone that you could have originally do two days of a vacation with. But over time you grow, they don't grow and they become a two hour meal friend or a two-minute conversation person, and so just kind of understanding. Many times we assign people, we misalign our roles in the lives of people or give people different permission into our life, I guess would be the way to say it. I think I read a book recently called Relational Intelligence. So I take on emotional intelligence. It was a great book. I read it a long time ago, so.

Speaker 2:

But one of my takeaways are many times we put people into like a friend category and we might just be assigned to them for a season. We might be assigned for a purpose or for mentoring or just to basically we're going to pass through life together for a short period of time. But maybe we associate them as someone, as a close, trusted friend, or they assign us that role and we don't have that same feeling back to them, and so it's just understanding that there's different criteria that you go to to basically figure out where you actually belong in your relational intelligence and reading people well and making sure that you're also in relationships that are mutually beneficial, unless you're in the relationship to serve the other person. But if you're calling it a friendship and it's one way, then it's going to be an energy taker not very long.

Speaker 1:

And one of the other little strategies that we've learned to use is you can't overestimate the value of investing in things that will help you manage your energy. So, just as an example, we travel a fair amount, and we learned years ago that traveling really isn't fun, and so we invested in the process of the traveling process. Yeah, I mean.

Speaker 2:

God, we're going places. Thank.

Speaker 1:

God we've moved beyond the dreadful days of COVID, but even today traveling being an airport, as a general rule, is not fun. So we invest in TSA PreCheck, we invest in Clear these little things that help reduce hassle in your life. We've realized I'm managing my energy. I'm actually conserving my energy for more important things. You know, basically it's kind of like investing or paying so that you know what stresses me out. And so what do I need to do so that I can have a better attitude?

Speaker 2:

You're just minimizing drag as much as possible.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And it's also you mentioned activities, but I know we're both thinking of probably similar things. For you, meetings can be very draining for you to be in meetings.

Speaker 1:

Oh, they cannot be they are.

Speaker 2:

They are and for me I would say one of the things is like looking at spreadsheets and find details like that, analyzing metrics. None of that is good for my brain. If you give me information I can use with people and to create influence and activate people, I really enjoy data, but outside of that, raw data is, like you know, trying to have a conversation about those complicated things late at night for me are just not going anywhere. So I think it's understanding. You know where do you get energy, where do you lose energy and at least minimize? You can't eliminate all the places that take energy because we have to do life, but minimizing those is really important.

Speaker 1:

All right, so let's move on to embracing an abundance mindset. This is something that we have learned to love. It really wasn't necessarily how either one of us was raised, not by any fault of our parents. It just wasn't kind of the concept that our parents had, we didn't discuss it, for sure we certainly didn't discuss it.

Speaker 1:

But when we talk about an abundance mindset, it's really about thinking do you think of life as there's one pie and everyone is fighting for the biggest piece of that pie, or do you have a mindset that there's actually no limit to how many pies that can be created by the world and by the economy and by people, and so that when you create more pies, you're actually not taking from anyone, which is the reality of the economic system that we live in, because we actually, when we were at our absolute max in earnings, our income has gone down, our gross revenue has gone down a little bit, but we were able to give significantly more, and this is actually something that has hit us because we have become very passionate, we've almost addicted to giving at a very high level and when we were making the most, we were spending the most but we were also giving the most.

Speaker 1:

And so the abundance mindset is so important, important, it's realizing man, when I hire an assistant, if you can afford to do this, but once again, you can kind of work your way into um, delegating more, but you start with those most energy sucking activities, um, and you start to delegate those, you realize the person you're delegating to you, you're, you're, you're blessing them, you're putting them to work. There's a lot of people who do things and they're working in their gifting. They're actually working in the things that give them energy and it's an absolute blessing. And the more abundance that we can create, the more overflow that there is to the entire world potentially.

Speaker 2:

So we want to see opportunities instead of limitations and also to make sure that we're being good stewards of what's been given to us. I mean we love the parable of the talents because in our world we feel like you know, at some point we're going to be held accountable for how we have stewarded our resources. That means people, relationships, our health, our physical bodies, our mindset, our walk with Jesus and our finances. That's a lot of different areas, but we look at it like stewardship means that we are being good caretakers of what we've been given and then hopefully, to be trusted with more. And we've really seen that in 26 years of marriage we stewarded the little bit of finances we started with really close to below the poverty line and then the Lord has given us more over time and I think it's really defined how we've lived our life at this point, knowing that it's not really ours, but it is ours to manage.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's so good. So we really want to encourage everyone to start, and I think one of the best ways to make the shift from the poverty mindset to the abundance mindset is to spend time with people who live from an abundance standpoint. For us, doug and Tia were probably some of the first people to really model that abundance mindset. We've had other mentors through the years that have. Really the poverty mindset is all about what can I get? You're kind, you're kind of looking what can I? How can I get things for free? What can I take advantage of? And it's kind of a give me type of mentality where the abundance mindset is how can I create? How can I add? How can I add more value to others? And the reality is when you, when you're operating from that standpoint, you end up getting more and when you operate from that poverty mindset, it is. It definitely. It's not fun, it can leave you stuck, I mean.

Speaker 2:

I'm thinking about even just the difference between a growth and a fixed mindset, which is really another way to look at this. You know, a fixed mindset is there's only one way to do something and I probably can't do it, I can't get better at it. The way I was made, the way I was born, is the best it's ever going to be. And a growth mindset says no, I can improve on things, I can make them better, I can look for opportunities, I can practice, I can be responsible, I can take extreme ownership, and obviously we are still a work in progress. But I love the the ability to raise our kids with some of these values, because some of them came from our parents and a lot of them have come from the personal growth that we've done in the last 13 plus years of business and learning that we have a lot of opportunities for growth and if we'll reach out and take them, then we have more unlimited potential than we would have started with at the beginning in our mindsets.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So just to wrap up here, we talked today. We talked about really identifying your core values and being intentional about the lifestyle that you want to live. We talked about managing your time and your energy, talked about the fact that there's you can identify your core values on page 159. You can do a time audit on page 163. And then the last thing is just to embrace that abundance mindset and probably, like I said, the number one thing that you can do is to identify someone in your life that you'd say man, they really have that abundance mindset. They're the type of person that when we go out to dinner, they're offering to pick up the tab, or they leave a generous tip, or you know, they're just.

Speaker 2:

They're probably going to have a smile on their face even I think it's beyond the financial like you think about. Those are the people that take a minute to learn the server's name. You know they're just, they're looking to bless other people with their time and their energy and it doesn't mean they're going to have a side conversation with a server in the middle of a dinner that you're having with other people, but they're looking for opportunities. They're also good listeners. They ask a lot of questions because in my, in my experience, abundant minded people want to learn from you, even if they are smarter than you. I think about some of our conversations with like John Maxwell and sitting at a table with him and he's willing to give information and answer questions, but he's also very interested in people. He has an abundance of relational equity with people because of how he listens, how he asks questions, and some people are are poverty focused when it comes to relationships and they want to take all the time and talk all only about themselves, and those can be energy takers when you spend time with them. So I think it's a lot of, you know, self-awareness, making sure that we have that heightened sense of self-awareness about our decisions and our actions. It's also about consistency in these habits that we've been talking about. You know being consistent to practice lifestyle design.

Speaker 2:

When we discipline our kids, when we make decisions in our family, you and I are constantly going back to our core values. You know what is our end game. Where are we headed, does this support it? Which decisions do we need to make to pivot towards that, and which ones can we let go of? And then doing reflection.

Speaker 2:

You know most people, even if they do set goals, they often set them at the beginning of the year and I don't know that too many people look at their goals throughout the year, which creates a lot of false promises to ourselves and in the world. And I think what we're practicing and teaching ourselves, our family and our community is that it takes intention to circle back every quarter and say how are we doing? These are the things we're nailing, these are the things we need to change. This is the area we're still working towards and it allows us to look back and assess and have that close account of our progress, instead of waiting until we get to an end of the year and being like man, we missed that or hey, we nailed it, but if we nailed it, it was probably by luck instead of by intention.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So, hey, friends, hope you enjoyed this podcast episode. Remember to subscribe, especially if you're enjoying this. This way, you automatically get every episode of this content. And then also remember to follow us on social media for daily tips and inspiration. And then also remember, leave a five-star review for us and share this episode with anyone that you think might benefit and enjoy from our philosophy on life.

Speaker 1:

Thanks again for tuning in Excited. We're actually right around the corner from our 100th episode, which is a pretty amazing milestone. Very few podcasts make it that long, and so we're excited to really focus on some really important topics as we get closer and closer to episode 100. And then we just wanna remind you to live that abundant life and surround yourself with people who are modeling that for you. Have a great day. All right, friends, please subscribe to the podcast for more insights on blending entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial mindset with intentional living. You can follow us on social media. We are on Instagram, primarily, and Facebook, and you're going to find daily tips and inspiration from us there. You'll also find us on YouTube lots of shorts as well as our video podcast. And then please, if you enjoy this podcast, please leave us a five-star review and share us and remember to subscribe on YouTube, as well as whatever podcast platform you're listening to us on.