Full Transcript

Sari 0:04
I'm Sari Kimbell and I've done just about everything in the food industry. I have helped hundreds of packaged food business entrepreneurs and now, I want to help you make your delicious dream a reality. Whether you want to be successful at farmer's markets, online, or wholesale on the store shelves, Food Business Success is your secret ingredient. I will show you how to avoid an expensive hobby and instead run a profitable food business. Now let's jump in!

Sari 0:38
Hey there, welcome back to the podcast! We are continuing on with productivity and sharing some new insights, and some mindset pieces as well as tools and strategies. What I'm realizing after four plus years of helping packaged food business entrepreneurs like yourself start and grow their business dreams is that I can give you all of the tools, I can give you all the strategies, I can give you all the how of how to do this, which I do inside Food Business Success. But until we actually create more time in your life to be able to do this work, it doesn't really matter, it's not going to work. And it's just dawned on me like this is a huge aha, that I've had to work through in my own business of how do I become more productive to be able to do more things. And then working with my one-on-one clients and with members inside the program, that I'm really seeing how important this is that we tackle this as a full process. And that this is almost the step before the steps, right? Like I can give it to you and give everything to you. But you need to be able to have the mental and physical and emotional capacity and the bandwidth to be able to pursue this. I am so excited. I presented to my VIP group, I did a little workshop on productivity. But I realized I actually really need to include a full module inside Food Business Success, all about productivity and breaking it up into four sections that you can like layer on and absorb and takes, you know, apply something and then come back and keep learning and then applying. So really excited, what I want to do is actually do a live bootcamp. And it's only going to be for members inside Food Business Success. So no paid workshops, nothing like that, you have to be inside Food Business Success. So starting in mid June, we are going to meet once a week, and I am going to do a little bit of teaching. And then we're going to do coaching. So if you want that time with me to really work this out, if you realize that you have started and stopped, and started and stopped, and started and stopped a bunch of times, it's probably because, well fear is one. Sometimes it's fear of success or fear failure. And then two is that you don't actually know how to manage your time to create the time and the bandwidth that you need to be able to do this business because so many of you are working a full time job, or you have family obligations, you're taking care of parents or kids, and you have a busy full life. So how on earth are we going to like squeeze this thing in that does require your energy? It requires time, it requires commitment. So I want to help you with that with this bootcamp, I really hope that you will consider. If you've been on the fence about joining Food Business Success, this is the time to get in. It is a low monthly affordable cost to join as a member and if you join by June 14th then you get full access right when we start this bootcamp. So this is the time! Do not put this off. Do not procrastinate anymore because this is that problem before the problem. So the problem being I want to start a packaged food business, I keep procrastinating which is what I talked about last week. I keep procrastinating on it. Why? Maybe because you don't actually have the time available yet in your calendar. So we're going to change all of that. So to join Food Business Success, simply go to foodbizsuccess.com, just click on I have an idea. And then you'll have the application there, and you'll have the opportunity to get signed up. Do not wait, this is going to be so good. And doing it live with me is going to be even more impactful. And if you're listening to this afterwards, that whole program will be inside Food Business Success. So really excited about doing that.

Sari 5:23
All right, onto today's topic! We're talking about happiness and how it directly correlates to more productivity. Did you know that? I guess I kind of internally knew that. But when I actually heard some numbers and statistics wrapped around it, I was like, oh, I gotta do a podcast on this to wrap up productivity month. So there was a study done. So I was on my mastermind call with my coach in that group and he happened to be talking about this, right? And I was like, oh, wow, this is the thing I want to talk about. And he mentioned a study that was in the Harvard Business Review a number of years ago, that said, if you increase your happiness, if you increase your workplace or the happiness of your workers by 2% then your productivity inside, this was like a manufacturing plant that was producing things, that the productivity went up by 23%.

Sari 6:35
So, what? Like 11 times. You go up 2% and you increase your productivity by 23%. So that's amazing. I was like, all right, so I was looking at trying to find this study. I'll be honest, I could not find the study. Did some, a little bit of research, but did not pop up. However, there is a recent study from Oxford University that says that increasing happiness in the workplace and your happiness overall, increases your productivity by 12% to 13%. So whichever number you want to take, it's still a huge increase. So imagine that you took back, let's just take the lowest number, let's take 12%, you have, you know, you sleep, we all have 24 hours in a day, right? So you sleep for, let's say eight of those hours. So now we're down to 16 waking hours. So let's just say we took back, you know, 10%, that's an hour and a half roughly every, if I do my math right and you guys can correct that kind of math in my head. But in any case, that's a lot of hours multiplied over the course of a week, that is the time that is required to start and grow your packaged food business to really make it happen. So what I want to talk about on this podcast is I truly believe that becoming happier is going to help you be more productive, I see it in my own business, in my own life, that the happier I have become in all realms, both in what I do in my business and in my personal life, that I am way more effective. I'm having more fun, things are lighter, I'm more inspired, they come easier. And I want that for you too. So let's talk about some strategies, both in work and a little bit around your personal life that could help you, again 2%, we're not talking about like radically overhauling your personality. And I was doing a little bit more reading, Gretchen Rubin has a great book. It's like 10 years old now called the Happiness Project. And I was kind of looking over that as well as if she had some good statistics or information. But she talks about, you know, that we all have those kinds of setpoint of happiness. That's part of just who we are. It's part of our personality, part of our genetics, but that studies show that that's only about 50% of who we are. So there is kind of that, you know, if you just picture like a thermometer that it always comes back down to 68 or 72 to 80 degrees, whatever your kind of a base level is of happiness. And then your circumstances determine about 10% to 20% of your happiness. So that could be, you know, the circumstances of the family you were born into, the economic level, the country, the whether you were born a man or a woman and how that was seen in your particular community, and on and on and on, right? So those are the circumstances. It could be your marriage or your kids, like outside forces. So that still leaves 30% to 40% of you, that is totally malleable, that is totally changeable. And guess what? This all goes back to that episode 89 on the model because our happiness is determined by our thoughts ultimately. And part of the problem is when we're chasing happiness because we're like, well, if I just start a food business, I will finally be happy that we're always going to be chasing something, it's never going to be good enough. But if we can look at that 30% to 40% that we can change. How can we be happier in this moment without achieving some level of success on the outside? It comes from our thoughts, which create our feelings, and then creates our actions. I promise you this model works and it is life changing if you embrace it.

Sari 11:22
All right. So yes, it all does start in our thoughts, for sure. However, I do think that there are some strategies that can help you quickly increase your level of happiness. So one of the tools that I presented in the productivity workshop that I did for our VIP group is I brought out this concept, and it's based on Michael Hyatt Freedom Compass but I showed a quadrant, right? A vertical and a horizontal line. And on the vertical line it said, Passionate and Not Passionate. And then on the horizontal line, it says, Proficient and Not Proficient, so meaning good at or not good at. And then there's these four quadrants, right? And when we are doing things that we are really good at, and we're passionate about, he calls that our desire zone. And that is where we want to be spending the majority of our time, that is where we feel energized, and things are flowing, and we're in our zone of genius. I love that term, Gay Hendricks brought that term to our consciousness, called zone of genius. That is where you really want to be working and it doesn't come overnight, but where you want to be working on spending more and more of your time. And then the opposite of that is your drudgery zone. This is where you are not passionate and you're not good at these things. And then there's two other quadrants. But you have to come to the bootcamp to get that, get all of it. So what I want to offer is, take a look at your life and say, what are those things that are in my drudgery zone? The things that I resist and I procrastinate, and I spend so much mental energy avoiding. And just like, you know, thinking about how to not do it and how I can do it faster and just, you know resenting it and it just takes so much energy. This is where we could actually A) free up some happiness, become happier and also B) then freeing up time to spend in our business and be doing things more in our desire zone. My coach, in his mastermind call, he talked about this happiness project that he was doing where he like, mentally took everything in his life, put it all out on the lawn. So imagine your house is your life, right? Or you have a house and your life is all in there. And you're going to move everything out mentally, you're gonna write it all down and then you're going to decide what you actually want to put back, what makes you happy. Now, again, happiness comes from your thoughts. So these are thoughts that you think about those things, right? Because we can't say that, you know, let's just take your car as an example. We cannot say that your car makes you happy. Because that same car can make somebody really unhappy, somebody else or vice versa, right? Somebody who doesn't have a car and you're like, I hate my car, makes me really unhappy. You could give them your car and they would be thrilled, right? So it is still coming from your thoughts. But nevertheless, it's easier to work on things that we truly, you know, we can easily identify that make us happy.

Sari 15:12
So I did this exercise this weekend. And it was super interesting what came up, I put things like, I mean, everything on the lawn, the podcast, YouTube, my Food, Business Success, the whole program, the whole group pieces of it. My one-on-one coaching, I put personal things like, my furniture and my car and where I live, and like both the physical condo that I live in, but also the location. Do I want to do? What does living in Denver? Do I feel happy about that? My relationships, I listed all of my relationships that I could think of, was super interesting. And then I just kind of sat with it a little bit and said, kind of over that day said to myself like, what do I want to put back in? And I circled a couple of things that were actually a little surprising to me, of things that I was like, yeah, this, I need to I need to rework this. And sometimes you want to throw everything out, right? Let's just say, you know, I want you to look at everything, look at your relationship with your husband or wife, your partner, if you have one like, does that make you happy? Well, there may be parts of it that don't. And so how do you want to change it? And does your business make you happy? Does going after this? Do you have thoughts of happiness about it? If it's drudgery the whole time, then maybe this isn't the right thing for you, but be willing to look at everything. And so we can quickly identify, think through the kind of this drudgery zone exercise and then putting it all out on the lawn. What are the things, what's the low hanging fruit that you could outsource? That you could get off your plate? Or that you could decide you're just not going to do anymore and that it's not a problem. And so what I'm just trying to think of some examples, let's say you look at your business, and you do six farmers markets a week. And you look at that, and you're like, I do not like doing that.This does not make me happy, I am over this. And then we can take it apart and say, is it all six? Are there certain markets that I really do love? Do I want to get off rid of all of them? Do I want to completely just stop doing farmers markets, or maybe I want to hire somebody? I've been working with a number of my clients this year, who are transitioning from doing all the farmers markets themselves to hiring people. And so we've been creating foundations and processes and standard operating procedures and documentation and all that stuff to get them set up. And it's been going really well. But there probably will come a time if you do a lot of farmers markets that you're like this is no longer making me happy and think about when you first started, you were like, oh my gosh, that's amazing, right? So it's okay like, you know, my coach even suggested doing this exercise like once a quarter to four times a year to just look at, what are the things that are like, just not helping you have a happy life? That you spend a lot of mental energy? If you hate doing your QuickBooks, or if you hate doing that preschool drop off, get rid of it. Find other people who can help you. Or you can change your thoughts about it. But sometimes it is easier to just get rid of it. I was having this conversation with a friend. After our mastermind call. She's on it too. And we were talking and I was like, what are you doing? She's like, oh, I'm picking up dog poop. And I was like, oh, and she's like, I hate doing this. And I was like, oh my gosh, girl, you have got to get rid of that. That needs to come out of your to-dos. Hire that out. And I was laughing with her that. There's a joke. A couple of things I say is about but if my ex husband was willing to consider hiring somebody to clean up the dog poop once a week, right? That maybe we would still be married because every Saturday there was like complaining and he was not happy about it. And then, you know, we would end up getting nitpicky and fighting. And it would take up this, you know, 45 minutes of our Saturday and like the whole day just kind of was shot and all because of the stinking dog poop. And I remember looking at a service and it was like $10 a week, right? And I was like, we spend that on a beer, right? Like are you saying, we are not able to do that, so that you can be happier, and we can have a happier day and a happier marriage? And ultimately, he kept saying, you know, well, if I can do it myself, why would I pay somebody else? But I really look at that. And when I step back and I say, you know what, there was long term costs associated with that.

Sari 20:47
So I am all for, if you hate housework, can you outsource that? Can you make a little bit of a sacrifice? I know not. It's not always in the budget. But what I'd love for you to do is identify one thing that you just really don't like doing. Maybe it's that like said that preschool drop off. Can you ask your friends like, hey, I just really don't like doing that. But here's what I do like doing, how about I do more of that and you guys do the the carpooling, right? There are other ways around it besides money but money is one of the quickest ways to solve problems. I use TaskRabbit all the time, I had shelves that I wanted built and hung, and it just was like, I do not want to do this, this is gonna take up a whole Saturday, I'm gonna be unhappy, complaining is not gonna go well, I'll probably physically injure myself, and I'll be upset about that. And so I just hired somebody, and he was like $40, and just put it up, and it was done, right? And they're like good at it and I'm not. So I would much rather pay somebody else to do something that they can do so much faster that is in their zone of genius. And once you start doing this once, so just start with something small. Maybe it's like, you don't like doing the dishwasher. And now you look at your kids and you're like, hey, you guys, time for you to step up and start unloading the dishwasher, right? I don't care what it is, just get something off your plate. And you'll notice that your energy shifts. And it's going to free up mental energy as well as that kind of energy of feeling happier and lighter. And then you're going to have that time and that bandwidth available to put towards something that you do love. And I always look at it like, what is your time worth an hour? And I do that where I go, you know what I can pay somebody certain amount of money to go run my errands or do other things for me, clean my house. And I can make so much more money an hour and I pay them to do what they're good at and what they enjoy. And I get to do what I enjoy. Or I get to just take time to self care, right? And not just be hustle, hustle, hustle the whole day. So I just want you to think about something in your drudgery zone or do this exercise where you put it all out on the line and then look and say, what is not making me happy? And how can I change one thing about that? Start small. And I think that there's a tendency to not trust ourselves that if we do this, that we are going to be lazy. I work with a lot of high achievers, probably because I am one too and I attract those people. But I think that there's a feeling of like, well, if I can just do it myself for one, right? Like, well, if I can just do it myself, I'll just do it. Which is the opposite of an entrepreneurship mindset, we have to get rid of that because you're never going to be able to grow your business big enough to actually be profitable if you're always doing everything. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. And then we think well if I actually like outsource that thing, then I'm just gonna sit on the couch and watch Netflix and eat ice cream because now I don't have as much to do. And that is just not the case. Again, if we can increase our happiness by 2%. Think about how much more productive and effective we can be, and we're enjoying the work so much more. So I promise you that will not happen. You might have like a quick dip where you're like, oh, I can relax, somebody's cleaning my house. But then you're actually going to fill that with more meaningful activities that actually provide you with a lot more reward and satisfaction and happiness and it's like becomes a perpetuating cycle, right? It keeps layering on and it, I've seen it in my life, and it's just exploded. And it's amazing. So I want to encourage you guys to just, you have my permission to look at one thing and try to outsource it.

Sari 25:20
Okay, so the other thing is how can we create more happiness in our, just our daily existence? Again, instead of putting it all on, when I achieved that big thing down the road a year from now, when my business is making $5,000, $50,000, $500,000, it doesn't matter. And I promise you, you're going to never be satisfied like the numbers are always going to keep changing, right? The goalpost keeps changing, that it's not about the achievement of that big goal. In fact, if you want to quickly give up and become very unhappy, make it all about the goal. And know that you're only be happy when you achieve that thing. Think about if you've ever tried to lose weight or something like that, right? Where you're like, I'm only going to be happy when I lose those 10 pounds. And then you do some terrible starvation diet or something like that, and you hate it, and then you end up giving up. And you're worse off than if you had never done it in the first place. There is science backed studies that show that it is actually progress where we derive our happiness. So as human beings, we have a desire to have a bigger outcome, to create goals. And if you've ever had a time in your life where like you had no goals, and you just kind of stagnated, it actually can lead towards depression.

Sari 27:04
There's a metaphor in coaching of like, a banana is always, it's never like one color forever, right? It's always ripening, or it's dying. And so if we try to just stagnate, like, we're just dying inside, right? And so there's never just one moment where you're just going to be like, I got it all, I'm super happy. And like, this is how it's going to be forever. It's fine to take some moments of celebration. But as human beings, we are most happy when we are working on a big goal, when we are contributing, when we are learning when we are growing. But we want to have a big goal, but we want to be measuring that progress daily or very frequently. Happiness comes from progress not achieving the big goal. And you guys are terrible at celebrating your progress. I know this because we have our group calls. And I asked about celebrating wins or all I know something about what you've done. And I'll kind of give you a shoutout and you deflect and you say yeah, but I'm not there yet. And it's not you know, that was fine that one post on social media, but I still have so many more to do. Right? Like you're not giving yourself credit about the progress, which is leading towards unhappiness. And what we want to do is cultivate happiness. So what I can tell you a 100% is that focusing on gains is where you are going to create more happiness. And I have a whole podcast about the gain versus the gap. And I'll put that in the show notes. But creating a practice of measuring your gains at least weekly. Ideally, daily, especially when you're just starting out, especially when you're trying to build this muscle. Because our brains are wired to look at the negative. They are wired to look at where we are screwing up and failing and not good enough. And we have to purposefully train our brains to look for the good, to look and see where we have made progress, where we are successful. Celebrate those wins. That's why every Wednesday in our Facebook Groups, there is a post that says celebrate your wins. Tell us, let us celebrate with you. You can always find something to celebrate, I promise. Even when it seems like everything's going wrong. There is still something. Even if it's just that I'm still in it. I'm not giving up.

Sari 29:56
So the other way you can do that is through gratitude. Having a gratitude practice and a lot of my clients do like a gratitude practice in the morning or in the evening. But again, like how can you stop and sort of be in this moment in the daytime, when you're in your full consciousness, and you're not just like hustle, hustle, always about some future goal that is elusive. That even when you reach that goal, you'll get there and be like, oh, I mean, yay, I'm happy. But then there's still so much more to do, right? It's never going to be done. You're never going to get it all done, I promise.

Sari 30:39
The other practice I love for cultivating daily happiness is around kind of sensory pleasure. And so having practices that I mean, these take almost no extra time, right? When I pour myself that first cup of tea or first cup of coffee. I stop for a minute and I sip it and take it all in. And I close my eyes and I just delight in the pleasure of that. I delight in the belief that I am able to go and buy this delicious coffee, this delicious tea. Shout out to Leaf Berry and her amazing purple tea, right? Like it's beautiful to look at and it tastes amazing. So just giving thanks. And being in this moment, and like tapping into my pleasures, my sensual pleasures, right? The sound of the coffee brewing or, you know, the taste of it, and the heat and as many senses as you can get in there. So if you can make this a practice, and you know, you guys are in food and beverage, this should not be hard for you, it's just about stopping in the moment. And creating more of these little moments throughout your day where you just stopping, you're recognizing, you're giving thanks. And then you're just moving along. And sometimes it's like, it's my practice, you guys know about like getting out of bed and putting my feet on the floor and feeling the carpet and just raising my arms up and saying, yes, I'm alive. So that feeling of the carpet, or I have like a fuzzy sweater that I love and like feeling that on my skin. So creating more of these kind of sensual practices will really help to elevate. I mean, if you do that alone, you got 2 percent more happiness, I promise.

Sari 32:47
Okay, the last thing I want to just throw in here is a couple of things that will make you more unhappy. And if you do these things, you will be less happy. Or if you stop doing these things, you will be more happy. And the main one, the one that is actually called the thief of joy is comparison. So when you find yourself in comparison with others, you're on social media, and you're scrolling through and you're getting caught up in oh my gosh, there's so much farther along and look at how good they look and I'm not doing it that well. All of those things, right? You are going to immediately start feeling less happy. Or when you compare you to you where you think you should be. Comparison is the thief of joy. We just have to make it a priority that we are going to focus on our happiness no matter what. So if social media makes you feel that way, then I want to recommend that you take a little break, or that you set a timer. And you really only focus on inspiration, right? I go on social media and I see what other people are doing. And every now and again, I'll have like, ooh, they're doing such a good job. And I think I'm not doing that great of a job. I wish I had done that or that's so good. But generally, and when I catch that, I'm like, nope, we're not doing that. I don't allow myself to go there, you were, I start filling my head with like all the things that I am doing. But when I go on social media, I set a timer so that I limit my time. And I really focus intentionally on inspiration and celebrating what other people are doing. I would highly recommend that for social media in particular. And when you catch yourself saying shoulds, I should be farther along, I should have this figured out, I should be doing this and not that. I have a dear friend who says F the shoulds, and her and her husband, they would play a game where every time they caught each other saying should that they would stop and say, is that true? You know, we should go to our parents house. Well, is that true? Should we? Let's look at that and say, do we want to do that? Or are we just too afraid to have that uncomfortable conversation? And like, let's just examine it all and let's become aware of when we throw in all the shoulds. Because when you should on yourself, you're going to feel terrible. So stop shoulding on yourself. All right. So that's really what I wanted to talk about today was how to be more happy, how to increase your happiness by 2% so that you can be so much more effective and create the time that is necessary to do the work to start or grow your packaged food business. I want to invite you once again to come to the bootcamp starting in June, you need to join Food Business Success by June 14th to get that invite. It's going to be a really awesome time. I am not going to do this again, this will be the only time. So if you've been on the fence, if you've been thinking about joining, now is the time. It's a monthly membership. You can cancel anytime you want. And there's a three month money back guarantee. So you really have zero risk, what are you waiting for? I would love to meet you inside. Alright, until next time, have an amazing and happier week.

Sari 36:43
Are you ready to start that delicious idea that you make in your home kitchen, or grow your existing packaged food business and take it to the next level? The most successful food business entrepreneurs have support, guidance, focus and accountability to help them make it happen quickly without wasting time or money. Plus, I think starting your packaged food business should actually be fun. Food Business Success is your secret ingredient to creating your food business dream. Please don't go this alone. Check out the private free Food Business Success Facebook Group to connect with other foodpreneurs. Get your questions answered quickly. Share your wins and receive special training and tools I only share inside the private community. Just search for Food Business Success on Facebook, or get the link in the show notes. Curious about how Food Business Success can help you? Head over to food business success.com and fill out the application to see if you're a great fit for the program. Together let's make your food business dream or reality.