Jay Papasan:
I’m Jay Papasan, and this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
Our goal this week is to help you find your calm in the chaos of this holiday season. We all have a lot happening. We all have a lot of challenges. How do we figure out what matters and then kind of cut through the chaos, exit overwhelm, and get back to productive action?
Our guest this week is my coach, Jordan Freed. Jordan also happens to be our head coach at The ONE Thing Organization and helps us build out all of our training content. So, you’re just going to love everything that we have to share this week. We’ve got lots of practical tips for you in this episode and we dive right in.
Most people are listening to this in December. And for me, December is one of the most chaotic months. If you’ve got kids, school’s ending, you’re planning to figure out, “Well, what am I going to do when my kids aren’t in school, but I’m still at work?” You might have holiday parties that start to dot and litter your calendar, and now you have to plan for babysitters and outfits. And holiday parties might mean holiday gifts, what do I get the boss? And what do I get my coworkers? What do I get my family, my friends? All of these things start to pile up.
Lest I even mentioned holiday travel, which usually means family. And normal year we’d say – and you’ve got family politics, but this year you might have family politics plus politics given the state of where everything’s going. I’m probably just stressing people out just saying all this at once, right? And then if they’re an achiever, they’ve got their year-end goals. They’re making the last sprint. Did I get my health goals or my work goals or whatever? And to me, the cherry on top of the chaos pie, the thing that stresses me out the most because I’ve got one of those Southern moms, is a holiday card list. Like we actually try to send out holiday cards. I’m not sure why we do this to ourselves. Do you do this or do you escape that?
Jordan Freed:
You know, I largely escape most of this. They call me Jorzen because I’m very Zen about most of this stuff. But, yeah, I kind of excused myself from a lot of that stress, Jay, but I’m really good at that.
Jay Papasan:
We have all of these things converging at the end of the year, which is kind of an arbitrary moment, but there’s just a lot that happens. What’s the first step? Like, how should we be thinking about all of this?
Jordan Freed:
So, you know, whenever we are breaking down how to think about something, I think the first thing that I share with people often as it relates to chaos is your ability to handle chaos is amazing. Your willingness to tolerate it is maddening.
Jay Papasan:
Okay. I’ll take a deep breath. Okay.
Jordan Freed:
Yeah. And so, when you’re thinking about the holiday season, for example, or really any season, one of the things that I encourage people to focus on first is don’t hit pause on the positive. And so, don’t hit pause on the positive, for example, our family, we do this massive dinner Christmas Eve every year. And yet one dinner is not an excuse to hit pause on the rest of my good habits for the rest of the week. I don’t need to scrap the entire week, because then what happens is one dinner turns into the next day. We’re not eating. We’re not sleeping as well. The stress level could be high, and that’s when people tend to get sick.
Jay Papasan:
Well, sick and also sick of each other or things because we’re not sleeping well. We’re not keeping our promises to ourselves, which can make some people – I’m not talking to anyone in particular. I’m listening to this too – get grumpy or snappy because they’re not getting the things that they want. So, also the first person to say no to shouldn’t necessarily be yourself is what I’m hearing.
Jordan Freed:
That’s right. And I think that, you know, in anything, when we say begin with the end in mind, Jay, there are some thoughts that we always take to the macro. Beginning with the end in mind for some people means going all the way to the end of their life. And yet you can do the same thing inside of a season.
And so, I had a coaching call recently with somebody and she was kind of caught up in this minutiae. And the thing that I asked her was, “What is the intention of this holiday season?” And that was honestly a question that didn’t land very well. She was like, “I don’t really get that.”
Jay Papasan:
What does that mean?
Jordan Freed:
That sounds so airy fairy. I’m like, “Okay, great. Think of it like this, how do you want to look back and remember this holiday season? What do you want to be really special this holiday season?” And then, she shared with me, for her, she never sees her sister. They’re actually really close.
So, her sister’s not a source of stress, but her sister’s coming back for the holiday season. And she said, “You know, I really just want to remember this as the season where my sister came back, our kids played together, and that we really kind of reignited that connection. I love her. I haven’t seen her for a long time.” It’s like, “Great.”
Now, I’m super happy as a coach because now I’ve got something to optimize for. And so, we’re going to optimize for this being the holiday season that you remember as the season of your sister. And so, what if – and I know it’s a crazy idea to take this thing of time blocking into your personal life – how would it look if we time block for that? Does that make sense?
Jay Papasan:
No, it makes total sense and I love what you did there, you had her very swiftly go into the future and look back. Which we know and the folks that are listening that are big fans of The ONE Thing Goal-Setting To The Now, it’s an amazing hack that we all should have learned earlier, is that when we look back, the milestones that matter seem to be more evident even if they haven’t happened. We can say like she got clarity that this season, it needed to be about reconnecting with her sister.
So, that’s what I heard is that you had her step into the future and look back on this season because now all of the junk that’s right in front of her is not blocking her view anymore. She’s not thinking about dropping off the kids or all the other things. She’s looking back and there’s nothing between her and clarity.
Jordan Freed:
Right. And what we really did is we connected her back to the purpose of the season.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah. Can you do that for more than one thing? So for your family, that’s the whole thing. We’re going to optimize for time with your sister more than anything else. Can we also say now when you think about this season as it relates to maybe another thing, like work or whatever, can you do the same trick there and identify the handful of things that matter? Or do we just need to optimize for one? I know it’s The ONE Thing, but also it’s one thing at a time.
Jordan Freed:
Sure. One of the big things, Jay, that as a coach I’m always looking for what I call synergistic solutions, or inside of The ONE Thing, we call it the first domino. And the first domino means that a synergistic solution is simply what’s the one problem that if we solve for that, it will solve ten problems down the road.
And, of course, you’re always going to find that inside of a business. One of the things that I’ll always ask is what’s the primary question of this organization. And for me, I coach a lot of high powered real estate professionals, and inside of a real estate business, the primary question is always going to be centered around how many listings do we need to take. And so, if it’s ten, for example, with all the chaos and things going on right now, what I share with them is, if you just knock that down, if you just get that right, then everything else will work itself out. It may not be perfect, but it will work itself out. And so, the primary question is how do we hit just that one goal this month, and then that’s going to set us up For January and February?
Jay Papasan:
In my experience, that’s a perfect example for real estate if people don’t understand real estate. In my experience, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in, there’s usually kind of a lead domino. There’s a leading indicator for the total success of your business. And if you’ve been doing it long enough, you’ll probably know what that is. So, I know because we’ve studied it, like movie theaters make most of their money in concession, by far the margins are ridiculous. But the leading indicator of their profitability isn’t concession sales. It’s ticket sales.
And so then, they go up the line – another weird factor – movies have territories. So, if I get Godzilla vs. Mothra – I have no idea why I went to Godzilla – or Elf 2, or whatever’s out holiday season, that’s only going to show in a limited number of theaters in that territory. So, if I’m trying to maximize my profit, I want to say can I get the number one film that’ll help me sell the most tickets, that’ll help me sell the most popcorn and soda and whatever else I sell so that we’re profitable.
And I don’t know how to break that down in every industry, but that would be like, what is the leading indicator for your business success? So, that would be the answer to the question.
Jordan Freed:
That’s right. And I can share with anybody, it doesn’t matter if you’re in real estate or not, the process that we put people through is imagine that you’re on a deserted island, and there’s going to be this pigeon that flies over you once a week and it’s going to have this message attached to it. Now, this pigeon flies right to you. You open up the message.
Jay Papasan:
When you have a pigeon flying over, I didn’t think we were going to an actual pigeon message. I thought we were going to some other sort of it was going to drop something else on you.
Jordan Freed:
No. No. That’s a different story. That’s a different story. But here’s the deal, that pigeon is only going to come once a week. The operative word here is lead. What is the lead measure?
So, whenever I do this with a business owner who’s not in real estate, I’m going to put them through this exercise, if you’re on the deserted island, this pigeon is coming once a week, it’s only going to show you one number.
And that number is going to tell you the health and direction of your company. Now, if you could only get one number to show up on that pigeon’s leg, which number might it be for you?
And so, regardless of your industry, you can answer what is the primary focus, what is the primary question through that exercise? Now, we may have to massage that a little bit and really think through it, but eventually you’re going to land on it. And as you know, Jay, priority was never meant to be a plural word.
Jay Papasan:
No. It means first in the Latin roots. So, what’s the plural of first? It’s hard to say, right? First? I’m going to go back one – I kind of broke a little bit of our rule, but I’m happy we did. You can be successful in more than one area at a time if you know what the priorities are. I want to go back because I missed an opportunity with the example of your coaching client, optimizing for time with her sister.
Let’s just say she knows what the number that pigeon is going to drop off for her, and let’s just say it’s making eight widgets a week. If the business is doing eight widgets a week, everything is good. If she optimized for time with her sister and that pigeon dropped off seven, six, seven, six over the month, do you think she would be just miserably unhappy about that?
Jordan Freed:
No. I mean, if you’re miserably unhappy about just based purely on how your business is performing, we need to have a completely different conversation about what really matters in conditional happiness.
Jay Papasan:
There we go.
Jordan Freed:
And yet at that point, this is just going to be a discussion. You know, what’s the lead time for us to influence that number at this point? Is there anything that we can actually do about it? Do we need to let it go?
Jay Papasan:
Or you know what? I don’t care. We’ll make it up next month, because what I did is I did get time with my sister. That was where I was going with it.
I didn’t mean to think I was throwing you a curveball.
Jordan Freed:
No, that’s fine.
Jay Papasan:
But that’s like, look up, and you’re like, no. Actually, if you know what you’re optimizing for, first and foremost, you now know the things that you’re willing to settle for. What you said yes to means I may have to say no to this, but because this is more important, I’m okay with that.
And I think I missed that when we talked about it, but that is a really important factor because I know some of the people we serve. You know, we work with people and huge Fortune 50 companies. We work with people that are business owners. We work with people who are leaders. And a lot of them are incredibly ambitious about what they think they can accomplish. You’re not going to do it all. You can’t optimize for all seven of those things. They’re going to take this idea that I introduced that you could do more than one. We can line up some dominoes here, but you’re making a stand on the first one. We’re going to make a stand. We’re going to build our existence around that first domino and it should make those things easier or unnecessary or tolerable if they’re not optimized because we have optimized for the number one thing.
Back to the pigeon and the business, where else do we go with this? Do we just get really focused on the one thing? I mean, that’s it, right? We focus on that. How do we make the other stuff go away?
Jordan Freed:
Well, that depends. I mean, there’s going to be a nature to things that can and can’t go away. Children, for example, they’re not going to go away. And yet when we think about beginning with the end in mind, there’s another great perspective that’s offered through The ONE Thing of the Christmas Carol.
And so, what Scrooge got from the three ghosts, the past, the present, and the future – and this is a really critical thing for people to understand – he got all the perspective without any of the pain. Because the pain had been if the dream wasn’t real, it was real life. And he had wasted his life, that would have been for real pain. But he got all this perspective because he woke up the next morning and he didn’t know that it was a dream only to realize his whole life is still ahead of him.
And so, when we think about all the other stuff and this process of letting things go, if I go to my client, for example – it’s always easiest for me to think through the example of a client – and we’re not hitting goal in the month of December, and we know that it’s going to require a lot of effort from her. She’s going to have to leave the family maybe, maybe see her sister a little bit less to get that ship righted.
Well, we’re about to make a decision, and the way that I’m going to put that to her is, if we float out 6, 12, 24 months three years down the road, which of these two things are you going to be happier with? Are you going to be happier with the fact that you hit goal in December and ignoring your sister? Or are you going to be happier with the fact that you saw her and maybe didn’t hit the goal? And I’m always going to take it to their kids.
Jay Papasan:
And what do you mean by take it to their kids?
Jordan Freed:
I’ll explain that. So, our job as coaches is not to tell people what to do. It’s to use questions as a power tool to mine the wisdom in their head and their heart. And the wisdom that you and I both have, Jay, the purest wisdom that we have, is the wisdom that we would give to our children, because we love them like nothing else and we will unlimit them like nothing else. You won’t put limits on a kid you will on yourself.
And so, if I can get you to think through it through the perspective of what would you share with one of your children if they found themselves in the same circumstance, and you can voice that to me, I’ve essentially mined that wisdom out of you, haven’t I? And so, now it’s all about do you have access to the courage to follow it?
One of the things that we share often, Jay, especially in the holiday season, I think this is critically important, you have to choose who you’re going to disappoint. You are going to disappoint people in your life. There is no way around it. And you’ve got to be really intentional about disappointing the right people. And so, if in the holiday season through your frantic, stressed out state, you’re disappointing the wrong people and you’re making the right people happy, how’s that going to feel when we get into January, February down the road? Are you going to look back and regret it? Or are you going to be really happy about it?
Jay Papasan:
Where I go with that is I’ve disappointed my family. I’ve made a customer, a client, or a business partner happy at the expense of, actually, I’ve now disappointed my kids or my wife. And so, yeah, no, I won’t be happy with that choice later on.
Jordan Freed:
And I know that we want to take care of our clients and customer experience is important, and yet you can get another client. We’re not going to get another kid.
Jay Papasan:
We don’t get another 11 year old holiday season. Whether that’s Hanukkah, Christmas, whatever it is for you, for that 11 year old, that’s a one time event. Next year, they’ll be 12. And the year after that, 13. You can’t miss that and get a do over.
Jordan Freed:
That’s right. Santa Claus has a very limited – I think I’ve got one more year with my eight year old and my ten year old is already onto us. So, it’s perspective.
Jay Papasan:
We may have to put a parental warning in this one, just in case there are kids in the car. What do you mean? Because he’s going to start giving more practical gifts?
Jordan Freed:
No. He partnered with Amazon and they’ve worked something out. It’s different now.
Jay Papasan:
There we go. There we go. Well, this is probably a good time to pause. And on the flip side of this, I want to pick a part, I’m seeing a pattern in the coaching and I want to go a little deeper on that.
[Pause]
Jay Papasan:
All right. So, Jordan, we’ve talked about through some coaching scenarios about, it seems to me the key to getting people to find some calm through all the chaos of the holiday season. Is you’re helping them get really clear about what truly matters to them?
The pattern that I’m seeing in your coaching, and it’s a little meta for me – because if you missed the beginning of this where I introduced the episode, I mean, Jordan is my coach. He’s not just a coach that serves our customers. He’s also my coach – is that you’re constantly displacing them from their current reality. You’re creating a hypothetical. You’re on an island and there’s this pigeon flying by. You’re in the future. Why is that important? Is it because it’s like a kid that’s feeling all of the emotions? How do we get them into their human brain and out of the monkey brain or whatever?
Jordan Freed:
I believe, Jay, that if I were coaching a room full of coaches, one of the things that I would share very early is that the human imagination is the greatest power tool that we have, and yet it’s completely underutilized, and we can have physiological responses from an imagined experience. And so, when we’re working with people, though, like as you and I both know, we’ve got this mantra. You know, we have a hard time with dreamers who don’t do, but we really want to focus on the doers who don’t dream in this company. And I just believe that perspective is the greatest tool we have to mine potential.
I’ll never forget, I had a client, this was last year, a big lawsuit came through and it was going to change everything about his day-to-day and he was kind of freaking out. He owns multiple businesses. He had a lot of people coming to him. And he said, “I’m putting on a brave face for everybody else, but I’m really struggling.”
And I said, I just want you to imagine that you’re going to write a book, and the book is about how to thrive during tough times. And this is a book that is autobiographical. It’s how you actually did it, not how you wish you had done it. And you’re about to write a chapter about when things change, when circumstance that you have no control of changes the game. And I’m curious if somebody you loved was going to be reading that book, you were going to give it to them at a milestone in their life. What would you want it to read? And so, he just started listing it.
And so, I believe that we only create and perceive our lives from the emotional state that we’re experiencing right now. My job as a coach is to get you into that kind of peak state of thinking, and I do that through perspective and using your imagination.
Jay Papasan:
Does this work on little kids too? I almost expect you to say, and I want you to use your strong voice and tell me how you’re going to get through this.
Jordan Freed:
It depends on the level of rapport.
Jay Papasan:
I mean, it’s true. I find so much of what works in these situations is just a variation on what works with your kids. And you’re coming at it with that same level of compassion, I want what’s best for you. So, how do we navigate through this emotion? It’s funny, as powerful as imagination can be when it’s infused with negative emotion, it actually does the opposite. We imagine the worst of everything. We imagine things are going to fall apart.
Like at the beginning of this episode where I’m doing the litany of all the stressors that show up this time of year, there are probably a couple of people who had to pull over because they broke out in hives because they start imagining dealing with all of that with no solutions. So, we just need to get people using their imaginations to look for the solutions versus focus on the problems.
Jordan Freed:
That’s right. And I think that if you’re indoctrinated into the philosophy of The ONE Thing – and this book changed my life, that’s why I’m here – I believe that you have to eventually come around to agreeing on something with us here. And it’s something that I observed, in fact, I observed it today in a conversation with one of my clients, and that is, is that people who typically optimize for maximums, like they’re trying to do everything, they typically get the minimums. And people who optimize for minimums, they get the maximums. It’s kind of a paradox of success.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah, let’s unpack that a little bit. And tell me if I’m even hearing you right, when you say people who optimize for maximums, they’re trying to get the absolute most out of everything. Which would be in our lingo, they’re thinking big, but they’re also going big. They’re spreading themselves out thin. And so, optimizing for the minimums, is that more about what we talked about like a successful holiday is going to be me reconnecting with my sister. You’re identifying not the minimum in the sense the least, but what the real core of the matter is.
Jordan Freed:
Yeah, that’s right. I mean, just understand that the 80/20 principle is always at play. And there’s only a handful of things that you’re actually going to do this holiday season that are going to matter.
Jay Papasan:
That you’ll remember three months from now, much less three years. I think it’s for people that we serve, the doers that don’t dream a lot, they don’t reflect a lot, they don’t think back a lot. You ask them, what was the highlight of last year’s holiday season? They’re only going to list one or two things, and they may have to think about it for a second.
Jordan Freed:
And when you focus on the minimums, that’s going to create that maximum, that result that you want. It’s very counterintuitive. When I explain this to people, it’s almost like, there are certain paradoxes of life. When I focus on trying to go to sleep, what happens? I lie there —
Jay Papasan:
No, it doesn’t work.
Jordan Freed:
Now, I know sleep is a superpower of yours, it’s not one of mine. And so, there are certain things that are paradoxes, and I have seen this too many times in my career and in my life to believe anything else.
And I know it seems counterintuitive, but it’s right in the philosophy of The ONE Thing that you’ve got to narrow your focus. And narrowing your focus, again, this applies just as well into the holiday season as it would a business, narrow your focus to just the two to three things that absolutely matter and eventually you’re going to land on one, and that’s that first domino.
Jay Papasan:
That’s what we talk about, extreme Pareto. Pareto Principle is the 80/20 that we’re talking about. And if you take the 20 percent of any list of things, it’s going to get shorter and you can keep saying that, what’s the 20 percent of this new list until you get to the one thing? And when people go backwards, we have an exercise we do around that, and I’ve done it in training rooms with hundreds of people. They’ll walk in with a list of 30 or 40 things on their list, and I’ve almost never seen a list that was longer than six items on the other side, usually three. And what you’re asking them to do is of all of these things, which ones actually matter?
What is the real 20 percent here?
And most people know, but like the game we play and especially going into the holidays, I think we do this really, but poorly is we’re just trying to check as many things off as we can – I know I fall guilty – if I want to make the list shorter without actually having to think about it. But the first domino – I’m glad you brought that up – this principle, and every chance I get as the host of this show and when I’m talking to my coaches and our clients, I need to also emphasize, when we focus on that small, sometimes it looks like it couldn’t possibly matter so much, it’s almost always surprising how much it matters if you just start doing it and focusing on it over time.
Well, obviously, we’re going to have Jordan back a lot because I think I could go absolutely down five different avenues. But I do think we gave people the crumbs they need. So, they’re going to calm their chaos by identifying the two or three things that actually matter and focusing on those this holiday season, and then just knowing that the rest of them will take care of themselves.
Jordan Freed:
And the thing that I would share with people, too, Jay, because I like to have very practical tools that I can put in the pockets of my clients, I call this the medicine cabinet of the mind. So, at any time if you find yourself hijacked, you’re emotionally stressed, whatever, just ask yourself this question, What’s the uncontrollable I’m seeking to control? What is the uncontrollable that I, in this moment, am seeking to control? And if you can get yourself to just pause and think about what that is, the more you do that, the more you will relinquish control or your attempt to control things, and you’ll feel your stress level come down. And what I share with people all the time is that when you try to control the uncontrollable, you lose control of what you do control.
Jay Papasan:
We don’t want to, in our efforts to kind of solve the problem, make things worse.
Jordan Freed:
Do no harm.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah, do no harm. Well, we like to end the show with a challenge for our listeners, something bite size that they could take on this week. They’ve listened to the podcast, it drops on a Monday, they might be driving to work. Based on what we’ve talked about, what’s something we could challenge them with, a small domino, a first domino that they could maybe start making progress on that we’ve talked about?
Jordan Freed:
I think it’s something we’ve already alluded to, which is don’t hit pause on the positive. So, in the spirit of the first domino, what is the one habit that you are going to stick to through the holiday season? The one positive habit that you’re going to engage with? For some, it might be exercise, it could be go on 10,000 steps a day, a certain amount of water. But just pick one doable habit, one first domino that you will engage in through the holiday season.
Jay Papasan:
I love that. Jordan, thanks a lot. Definitely going to have to have you back because I could have gone 15 different directions, and I’m sure they’re saying in the car, “Ask him that question.” We will ask him next time.
Jordan Freed:
All right. Thanks for having me.
Jay Papasan:
All right. That’s a wrap on my conversation with Jordan Freed on chaos and navigating it in the holiday season. What I love about how Jordan approaches this is he doesn’t just say, “Well, ask what your one thing is. Let’s just prioritize.” That’s the advice that we always hear, but it doesn’t always seem to serve us. He’s giving us the tools of our imagination. How can we go into the future and imagine back? If we go out three years from now, what will actually matter during this season? It’s amazing how that trick of imagination gives us clarity.
Likewise, I love how he used the trick of make it like you’re talking to your own child, maybe someone you love if you don’t have children, someone that you care for, because the chaos that we’re willing to tolerate is not something that we would ever wish on them, so we tend to give them more pure advice than we would give ourselves.
And finally, let’s not forget his really important advice, no matter what happens this holiday season, don’t pause the positive. Those little habits that keep you going that fill you up, that make you healthy and happy, able to deal with the chaos, don’t pause those things because they may be the very things that sustain you.
Now next week, it’s going to be a solo episode. I went on a deep dive on my journey with habits from the time we wrote the book until today. And crazily enough, I’ve tracked a lot of data. We’re going to parse into that, and I’m going to show you a path to how little things can absolutely transform your life. The power of habits in your life through The ONE Thing, I can’t wait to share it with you next week.
