Bedros Keuilian Podcast Show - How to Plan Out the Perfect Week - 073

Episode Date: November 14, 2018

No more postponing date night because you’re stuck working. No more filling your schedule with activities that waste your time. In this episode, Bedros Keuilian and Craig Ballantyne reveal how to schedule your week around the things that matter most to you. Watch or listen now to steal the tricks today’s most organized planners use—you’ll see how far those tricks can take your business. “AT THE END OF THE DAY, IF YOU WANT TO GET ON THE COUCH OR [TO] THE KITCHEN TABLE AND START WORKING, GO THROUGH YOUR MORNING RITUAL AS FAST AS YOU CAN TO GET TO THE OUTCOME.” – Bedros Keuilian Here’s what you’ll discover: 2:16 – How to schedule your week around whatever you value the most 6:14 – Why every entrepreneur needs to fit self-care into their schedule 9:48 – How to prioritize the work that makes you the most money 12:11 – Why the perfect morning starts the night before 15:55 – How setting a “reverse alarm” can help you get to sleep on time “BUILD YOUR BUSINESS AROUND YOUR LIFE, NOT YOUR LIFE AROUND YOUR BUSINESS.” – Craig Ballantyne

Make your weekly planning into a beautiful thing. Not something you rush doing on a Monday morning or Sunday evening. No, you do it on Sunday morning when you're calm and peaceful and you look at it and you say, okay, I'm going to plan out this perfect week. You'll start focusing on the things that matter most, the things you want to focus on, and the things that move the needle. Welcome to The Empire Show. I'm Bedros Kulian.

Here on the Empire Show, we help passionate and purpose-driven entrepreneurs like you turn your idea into a business and your business into an industry-transform. Empire so that you can grow your income, impact, and influence. If you're a new listener, then welcome to the show and be sure to subscribe to our podcast. And if you're looking to dominate in business and in life, then this is the show for you. Hey, Craigie. Yes. I heard you're writing a new book.

I am indeed. I am indeed. And you know what? I have to be, to be honest, it's because of you. So, hey, everyone. This is Craig Ballantzine. Welcome to the Empire Podcast. I'm here with Baderos Kulian.

and Bedros, you inspire me to write this new book called The Perfect Week Formula, the Perfect Week Formula. And it's because so many of my clients that come to me for coaching, they say, hey, listen, you know, I've got my day dialed in, but it doesn't fit into this week. And I thought of you immediately because you kick me out of the house or out of the group here on every Wednesday. So why don't you tell everyone how I get kicked out of the band on Wednesday? Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So every time you come over, you know, we spend like a week together here in Chino Hills. We batch processed a whole bunch of the Empire podcast videos.

Typically, we'll run an Empire Mastermind. We might have some business meetings, et cetera. And we will go for a steak dinner or some sushi. Steak dinner or sushi. So we pack a lot in. We get workouts together. But on Wednesdays, I can't play with you. And that's by choice.

It's a hard choice. And it's a non-negotiable because Wednesday nights are date nights for me and my wife. And the reason we do that, obviously, is so that we have a planned date. We know we can pause life. Non-negotiable. Non-negotiable. And connect on all the different levels that are. that a couple needs to connect on, right?

Yeah. And so that's something that's, you know, been happening for years now, and it's been a part of my structure, but I'm curious how it impacted or influenced your new book. Well, I will say that you may have always done a date night, but in the last 18 months or so, it became that non-negotiable thing. And so you would say, hey, buddy, you're on your own tonight, and I would, you know, have to go and get dinner with somebody else.

And that's cool, and I love it, and now I brag about it, because my clients come to me, and we sit in a Perfect Life Workshop and they say, hey, listen, we want to have weekly date night. That's one of my family values. And I say to them, how often do you do it? And they go, well, we want to do it weekly, but we might do it once a month. Now, what's stopping them from doing that? It's not the fact that they don't have ideas.

It's not the fact they don't have someone to go out with. It's because it's not a non-negotiable on their calendar. And so I realized, I kind of wrote the wrong book, and I'd say that as a bit of a joke when I wrote the Perfect Day formula because there's more than just a day. We have an entire week that we have to plan. So I went back to the drawing board, and for people that are watching this who are not driving, if you're not driving, take out a scrap piece of paper right now.

If you are driving, and if it's a Tesla, I guess you're okay too, but other than that, you know, do this when you're sitting down at a table. Take out a scrap piece of paper, and I want you to make this seven by six grid, okay? And then across the top, you're going to Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then you'll have six blocks of time. Now, here we have a nice blank, perfect week. We're going to plan this out.

And we're going to do it regularly on Sunday morning. We're going to make this. Our friend, Charan Stravatsa, gave me this idea because he heard it from Robin Sharma, who said, make your weekly planning into a beautiful thing. Not something you rush doing on a Monday morning or Sunday evening. No, you do it on Sunday morning when you're calm and peaceful and you look at it and you say, okay, I'm going to plan out this perfect week. And then, so what did you do?

What did you put on the calendar first, really, for your perfect week, B? Well, for me, it started off with date night, right? Because I'm going to build everything else around that. Yeah. And to me, that's a priority. And if you don't put your priority on there, then other things are going to start taking priority. Right. And in the case of your spouse, how do you think that looks to him or her all of a sudden

when they're no longer a priority? They become an afterthought. Oh, yeah, yeah. This month, listen, we can only go on a date once this month because I've got this going on, that going on, that going on. At the end of the day, if I had a gun to your head and I said, pick your spouse or pick your business, pick your spouse or pick your pair of new Nike shoes are going to go stand in line for, whatever the thing is. Your fancy car. What are you going to pick?

What are you going to pick your spouse? So if that's the case, why not pick your spouse first thing on that Sunday morning on your calendar? Yeah, absolutely. And so you make time for it. And I want you to think about this quote. You don't find time for what matters in life. You make time for what matters in life. You don't find time. It's not like it's underneath the bed with the ab roller and all the stuff that you bought and you hit away, right? No, you make time for what matters. So we make time for date night. You make time for family stuff. So B, you probably put, you know, Saturday afternoon, either kids have sports or you're going on a boys day with Andrew, whatever it is. Then on Sunday you put down, hey, we want to have device free time. Maybe we want to put away the electronics for four hours or maybe we go to church every Sunday. Because I will say, you know, you can take a look at, this is similar to the rules for your life.

that I talked about in the Perfect Day formula, there's a lot of things that you are doing automatically that are non-negotiable. Now we just wanna codify it. So my mom, for example, every Sunday, she goes to church. Her life was built around that. You know, she doesn't miss church because there's something on television or something.

No, she goes to church and she builds that around it. And so what we're doing here is high performing entrepreneurs, even though we wanna build an empire, is we're building our business around our life, not our life around our business, okay? Write that down. Build your business. around your life, not your life around your business. And that involves making time for what matters.

So first of all, we put on those things about our family. Or if you're single, you make time for doing social stuff. Because a lot of entrepreneurs, they get stuck in that, oh, I'm just working, work and working, and I don't have time to go out and meet somebody. Bullone. You have time to go out and meet some. I thought you were going to say bullshit. Why? I was actually thinking of saying bull crap or baloney, but, you know, one of the two. So everybody's got the time. We all have those hours in the week, we just have to make time for it. So you put all the family stuff on the calendar. Next, you know what you're going to put on? What? Think about something that's really important to you, that you do daily. Workouts. Right, right. Because how many entrepreneurs know they need to be

higher performers? They know they're lacking energy. And if they only had better nutrition and better, you know, regular workouts, consistent movement, you don't have to go and do CrossFit. You don't have to be a marathon runner to be a high performing entrepreneur. Just put a 30 minute walk on the calendar, some self-care time, maybe a massage, some stretching, whatever it is so that you don't have shoulder and back pain. You've got to go and take care of that stuff first so you can be a high-performing entrepreneur. So now you're looking at your calendar and you're already fitting in these really important things for your family, for your relationships, for your health. And you know what else you've got on there? Boundaries. Boundaries. So when you put some of this stuff on B, what do you? What

does that do where you're like, oh, well, I've got to do a workout here and I've got date night here. You know, the date night's non-negotiable. So what does that do to your workday? Well, it gets me to focus on the things that matter, right? Which we always talk about the 5% rule. There's typically 5% of the things you do as an entrepreneur, a leader, a boss that really matter. All the other trivial stuff. Like if you're building your ClickFunnels page or you're building an optium page or you're about to run an ad, there's people you can hire to do that stuff. So when you are forced to only pick and choose certain things because your calendar only has a seven by six spots to it, right?

Guess what? You'll start focusing on the things that matter most, the things you want to focus on, and the things that move the needle. Absolutely. That is really important. So if you don't have those boundaries in place, you know, that stop time, that cutoff time, you know what happens is it bleeds in and you say, if you and your partner and your spouse are not fully committed to date night, one of you will say, hey, listen, I'm running

30 minutes behind. The other will say, you know what, I'm busy to let's just push it till tomorrow. And tomorrow becomes next week and next week becomes next month. And sooner or later, your relationship is decreasing in its strength. And then that's when things go bad. So you absolutely positively have to have that stuff on the calendar. Can I say something, by the way, as an entrepreneur, and again, this is the Empire podcast show. I'm just assuming we're talking to entrepreneurs and high performers and people who get obsessed and we lock on.

So sometimes when you're obsessed and locked on into your work, you tend to, to forego your relationships. You mean well, you've got the best of intentions. Like, gosh, I'm doing this for her. I'm doing this for us. And I'm doing this for my family. But at the end of the day, the message you're sending is, you're not as important as the thing I'm doing now.

And here's what I can tell you as an entrepreneur. And this is a fact and a prescription. It is not just a suggestion. You are given. It's given that you will have a hard time. You will have a tough period where you will make a decision and it will be painful. and if your relationship is not strong, that event that's taking place in the entrepreneur's life

will then bleed into their relationship. Because, hey, listen, if I make a decision, if I make a bad decision at work here, and I have every intention that I'm going to invest $20 million and we're going to grow FitBodybu Camp in this other vertical, but then it doesn't happen. And that $20 million was our last $20 million, let's say, because I went all in on it.

If I don't have a strong relationship with my spouse, that might be the end of my relationship. because we're going to go through some tough times. You might have to tighten the belt, and she may not be on board with it because all those months and years, I didn't make her priority. So just remember that, Mr. or Mrs. Entrepreneur, listening to this.

Absolutely. And I will say one of the things I admire most about your relationship is that you guys are partners. I mean, I see you lean on each other. It's amazing. So we've got that on the calendar. Next, we are going to go, and before we even start fitting in our calls and meetings

and all that stuff, we're going to fit in something that absolutely is super important. It's super important to me to do it first thing in the morning. It's super important that you do it first thing in the morning. And that's deep work. Take us through your daily domination habit. I just love how you describe your work set up and how you focus. Yeah.

Yeah. Again, it's kudos to you. I learned it from you as you were writing the perfect day formula. I was learning the perfect day formula through environmental exposure to you. But I started off doing realizing that, well, not realizing. You told me, hey, your perfect day starts the night before. Yeah. And I was the guy that would have all these ideas at night, like, oh, what I want to do tomorrow morning.

And I'd go to sleep with all those ideas floating around in my head, keeping me awake because the subconscious mind is trying to solve them. The easiest thing you can do is do a brain dump, where you take a pen and paper or in my case, I take my iPhone. And I just open up the note section. And I write down the three or four things that are running through my head that I want to do tomorrow morning that are going to move my needle, right? The money needle, the meaning needle, the impact needle. And once I do that, now I don't have to worry about it at night. I wake up first thing in the morning, always between 5 and 5.30. My alarm is set to go off at 5.30.

But oftentimes, like today, I woke up at 517, just turned off my alarm and off I went. Never hit the snooze button because when you hit the snooze button, you're telling your subconscious mind that I'm willing to put off my dominating my path, meeting my purpose in exchange for 10 more minutes of interrupted sleep. And you're just fucking with your subconscious mind if you do that. Then I'll get up and I'll have water, go through my gratitude exercises. I'll shower, make my coffee, have my protein shake with a scoop of oatmeal in it. They're like that precise. Within an hour of getting up, I'm now sitting on the couch with my iPhone that I have right here. I put it on silent.

All notifications are turned off. I turned it over upside down, screen side down, and I push it more than an arm's length away from me. Why? Because I'm tempted just like you are as a human to let me see who texted me. Let me see if a notification came up. But no, man, I've got my list of three to four things. So I'll look at it, put my phone on silent, and push it away for me. and now I can dominate that list of three to four things that move the needle.

Once I do that, it's typically 9 a.m., then I get my phone, answer the text messages, emails, whatever that came in. And I'm off to the gym before I come here to the headquarters at around 11 o'clock, shower, and then I'm ready to help my team move the needle here at the franchise. Boom, boom. So let's break that down. I'm actually reading a book that you will appreciate this story. It's about the chef.

The chef, and they have something called Misan Place, which is making sure that they have everything arranged so they go in and, you know, they can take in hundreds, you know, 400 meal orders in a couple of hours and prepare them. So they have the knife in the right spot and the sauces and all that stuff. And what they say in this book, I'm really, I mean, I actually forget the title, is that today, you know, tomorrow begins today. Tomorrow is really one today. And so we do that nightly planning. So what I want you to do, I'm going to talk to you about two reverse alarms. The first one is at about 15 minutes before you end your workday. That alarm's going to go off, reminding you, okay, I got to shut things down here. Then you go and you do a

brain dump, whether you do it on your phone notes, whether you do it on a perfect day scripting pad, or whether you do it on a scrap piece of paper. You write down all those things you got to do tomorrow, all those errands you got to run, all those people you got to talk to, all the things you want to do. Now you've done your brain dump. It's out of your head. You're going to be able to sleep so much better. And then you go and you prioritize that. You make your to do list because if you're making your to do list in the morning, it's already too late. Okay, you got to make it the night before. And now you have, okay, here at my top two or three things, I absolutely must dominate in my deep work time tomorrow morning. Now you have that.

And then here's the third part that most people never do, but I learn this as a writer. It's absolutely essential. So I do something called Process Planning. And I got this from a book called Switch by Chip and Dan Heath, very good authors. And they talked about how you, if you want to develop a new habit, if you want to be productive and successful, you have to make the path as smooth as possible. remove all the obstacles. Now as a writer, I want to get up and I'd want to write chapter two for my new book. But if I wake up and you've written books, you know how this is, you wake up, you open up the laptop and there's a blank screen. How's that working for you? Not going to work so well, is it? No, no. So at night, I think, okay, I want to write chapter two. Here's the title. Here are three subsections. Boom. Now I only have to write 500 words three times and it's easy. I've made the path smoother. So here's another example, real world example. If you want to exercise first thing in the more.

morning. It's a new habit to you. Well, my goodness, you can leave all the clothes in your cupboard and, you know, have to go and find your shoes out in the garage, or you can put that stuff all right beside your bed. So you wake up and you get into it because like half begun is half done, right? You need to get that stuff going, and now it's easy. Oh, I got the clothes on. I may as well go do the warm up. I do the warm up. I do the first set, and you're off to the races. So you know what I like about that, by the way, true story. There was a client that I've been coaching recently on her business. She's an amazing entrepreneur, works with children. And I said, going back to the quotes, I said, you do realize how you do anything is how you do everything.

I just wonder to myself, you're so successful, but if you could just focus, because she brought up her weight, she brought up the fact that she was insecure about her body, that allowed me to then bring the personal trainer out within me and go, hey, look, how you do anything is how you do everything. You know, what do you think you need to do? She says, well, I need to make more time. I said, well, then where can we cut some time from? She goes from the evening before. Great. So she stopped watching her shows just like half an hour, right? Yeah. Earlier. So now she's waking up about 45 minutes earlier, giving herself time.

But she found herself hitting the snooze button, so we had to talk about that. But now her new processes, and this, she sent me an email. She goes, Pedro, I know this sounds gross, and you're probably, I'm giving you TMI, too much information. But I sleep in my Lulu Lemon workout legions so that I can wake up and just wash my face, put on a tank top, and go right to my gym and work out. And I said, actually, you're doing the right thing. If it's working for you, don't stop it. Exactly. You have to do whatever you can to get to the outcome that you want.

Yeah, absolutely. And the thing is, it's like we all know what to do, but it's those bad habits that stop us. So we need that not-to-do list as much as we need our to-do list. And she's doing the right thing. She's building a fence around herself from distractions and temptations that allow her to operate in a zone of success. So the other reverse alarm that I mentioned, and you kind of alluded to this, you said she's stopping watching her shows 30 minutes earlier. So now she gets to bed on time. And we all have had those days when we wake up and it's like, oh, I'm so tired today. If I had only gone to bed on time

last night, tonight I'm going to get home early. I'm going to go to bed early. And then you know you get home and you end up going to bed late again. So what do you do? You set a reverse alarm, an hour before you want to go to bed. So if you want to get to bed at 11 o'clock, you set the reverse alarm for 10 o'clock at that time everything gets shut down phones laptops Netflix all that stuff shut down boom now you can go and you know talk to your kids put them to bed you can go and have a hot bath or shower you can read you can make your lunch you can do all of these i call them old school activities you know let your imagination run wild with what you want to do in the bedroom with your spouse in the old school activities and now you fall asleep on time okay you're on time you wake up

on time you don't need to hit snooze you're up 13 minutes early like you were today bang, you're on time. Now you can go into your deep work. And here's where a bunch of people make a mistake. As entrepreneurs, we have read so many articles about the 14 things that successful people do before breakfast. And then you add it up and it takes four and a half hours to do these morning routines that people have. It's ridiculous. In fact, one of your fit body boot camp owners, one of my coaching clients, once sent me an email at 7.30 in the morning. She said, I've been up since five doing all these things. And I haven't got anything done and now I feel really stressed out. You know, she's up, she's doing gratitude journaling, meditation, free form journaling, interpretive dance, you know, all these things, right? You know, and the next thing, you know, two hours had gone by in the morning without anything getting done. And so I'm a farm boy. I come from the farm and, you know, what we did is, what my father did was he would wake up and you go and you feed the cows.

Because cows don't take a day off eating surprisingly. So every single day, he's out, he's doing his work. And so for me, I get up and I go right to my computer and I start writing. Because I know I'm a weak, lazy, unmotivated person. And if I say, oh, I'm going to write at 9 o'clock in the morning after I do my workout and I read the paper and I have breakfast and all this stuff, I'm not doing that. So no, get up and go right to work. So a lot of people are putting self-care first and I understand the importance of that. But you're making it, you have this perverse form of procrastination when you're doing all of this self-care stuff that is,

leaving you behind the eight ball. Now you're just as anxious as when you were just getting up at 7.30 in the first place. So be honest with yourself. Do you really need to do all of this stuff before you get into your work? You know, meditation's good. Journaling is good. Gratitude is good. But be like Bedros. You know, Bedros, he said, meditation's not my thing. I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to force it on myself. I'm going to do my little gratitude, ritual that you have while you're playing with cookie. And then you go right to your work. And you dominate and you build an empire. You know, I got to say, I wonder if some of this ends up just acting as procrastination.

Totally, right? Totally. And at the end of the day, if you want to get on the couch or on the kitchen table to start working, well, then go through your morning ritual as fast as you can to get to the outcome. But I believe most people start using all the gratitude lists and, like you said, the meditation, the interpretive dance as a way of procrastinating and putting off what they got to do. Yeah, I was really impressed when you gave up interpretive dance. It was good for everybody.

And that was good attitude. Remember that? The spandex that I would wear? Exactly. And so we had a client at our Empire Mastermind meeting the other week. A guy named Sean Hatzel, very successful. He had this thing called his Hour of Power. And he was doing that first thing in the morning. And he came to one of my workshops and I was like, you know, I know you're doing great work. I mean, because he's a very successful copywriter.

His business is growing massively. But I said, just do an experiment. Do your hour of power after lunch. Okay? His hour of power is gratitude, mind movie, you know, devotional, Bible reading, all that stuff. I mean, you can do that. any time of day. But do me a favor and write copy first thing in the morning. And after two weeks, he came back to me and said, that was a game changer. And it's such a simple change. So I urge you to

try it and to move things around because there's no rule that says you have to do meditation first thing in the morning. Or if you read the Bible after three o'clock in the afternoon, it doesn't count. I mean, I'm pretty sure you can read it any time. So just make sure that you have your deep work, then your self-care. That's what I recommend you do. And then you go into the rest of your day. So look at what we've done here. We've put the most important things on the calendar first, on that seven by six grid. And the six on the side, it's just six blocks of time over the course of the day that are about two or three hours each. And you have that on the calendar. You have your bedtime, your wake up time, you have your work time, your workouts. You

have all of these things on the calendar. And now you fit in what matters. And it stops you from doing silly things, like scrolling social media and all that. So that is what I call the perfect week formula. You live it. You know, it's supported you as you've gone on to build fit body boot camp into the empire that it is. It's going to support so many people. I know that, you know, guys like Ed Milet follow this stuff. You know, guys like Tim Grover, they follow this stuff. Shanda Sumter, one of my clients, follows this. It's built an eight-figure business because she has her perfect week formula. And one of the things that she put on the calendar first was 245 done the day for work, because that's when she goes and picks up her son. You know, that was the first thing that got on the calendar because before she

with that on the calendar. She was going and getting her son. She was on her phone while walking on the beach and she was crying one day. She was like, this is when I got to contact Craig. And so that's what we went and did and built that out for. So take that piece of paper, plan out your perfect life, build your business around your perfect life, not your life around your business. And it will be a game changer for you. You know, I've got, you're so brilliant in the stuff that you share here. And I'm wondering, again, being the listeners and the viewers' eyes and ears. Yeah, but Craig, what's the rush?

Like right now I've got a lot of time on my hands. It's no big deal. And I think about someone saying that right now because look, if you are a person who's got a lot of time on your hands, it's because you don't have a lot of money. And you don't have a lot of money because maybe you're just starting out being an entrepreneur. Maybe that's why you listen into the Empire podcast.

And if you don't have money, of course you have time, so you're asking us, why do I have to structure my day that way when I have all this time anyway, right? The reality is, as you get to a place where you, have a lot of money, you start having less time. So when you have time right now, you don't have money. When you have money, you have less time and you've got to find a way to put into things that are most important to you in that structured box. Otherwise, you're going to be dealing with anxiety and all types of weird fucking medical challenges that you and I have gone

through. Many of our coaching clients that are doing, you know, 5, 10, 15, 30, 100 million a year. Yeah, absolutely. And so I see this at every one of my workshop with all my clients. And it's the first thing I teach during the day, and then the rest of the day I just kind of sit there and I just point back at the calendar. They go, oh, yeah, that's the solution right there. That's how I have a better relationship with my spouse. That's how I make more time with my kids and have those amazing memories. Oh, that's how I get more done at work. That's how I dominate my deep work. That's how I finally write that book that I've been thinking about for years. And so yes, as you become more successful, time becomes more valuable, but you have less of it. And you just

don't ever want to waste a minute. And that's why I'm so dedicated and obsessed with it for your sake. Well, friends, thank you so much for watching this and listening to this episode of the Empire podcast. Craig, want to thank you for doing the deep work and educating us on the Millionaire Week and what it looks like. Appreciate you for that. And if you got a lot of value from this podcast, and of course, we'd love for you to share it. Make sure to rank it and give us five stars and leave a comment and we'll see you on the next episode.