In this episode, Chris Bailey discusses how to be intentional and finish what you start. He explores how intentionality, values, and motivation shape our ability to set and achieve meaningful goals. Chris also introduces concepts like the “intention stack” and “sepia-toned goals,” emphasizing the importance of aligning actions with core values. The conversation offers practical tools for editing goals, balancing planning with action, and cultivating both deliberate and default intentions to create a more purposeful, fulfilling life.
Exciting News!!! Coming in March, 2026, my new book, How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life is now available for pre-orders!
Key Takeaways:
- Importance of intentionality in achieving goals
- Challenges of goal-setting and the concept of “sepia toned goals”
- The “intention stack” framework connecting daily actions to broader values
- Understanding and identifying personal values and their polarities
- The role of desire and aversion in goal pursuit
- The concept of “goal editing” to align goals with personal values
- Distinction between outcome goals and process goals
- The significance of the learning phase in goal attainment
- Balancing planning and action to avoid productivity traps
- Cultivating a positive relationship with goals to enhance motivation and fulfillment
Chris Bailey is an author and lecturer who explores the science behind living a more productive and intentional life. He has written hundreds of articles on the subject and has garnered coverage in media as diverse as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, GQ, HuffPost, New York magazine, Harvard Business Review, TED, Fast Company, and Lifehacker. He is the bestselling author of The Productivity Project, Hyperfocus, and How to Calm Your Mind, and his books have been published in forty-two languages. His new book is Intentional: How to Finish What You Start.
Connect with Chris Bailey: Website | Instagram | LinkedIn
If you enjoyed this conversation with Chris Bailey, check out these other episodes:
How to Break Free from the ‘More’ Trap and Find Balance in a Busy Life with Chris Bailey
Chris Bailey on Focus, Productivity, and Meditation (2018)
Getting Things Done with Charlie Gilkey
David Kadavy on Getting Started
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Episode Transcript:
Eric Zimmer 00:00:00 You may have heard me mention my new book a few times, and I can assure you, you will certainly hear it a few more. But now we are offering some pre-order bonuses. One of them is the still Point method, which I believe is the only systematic way to interrupt negative thought patterns often enough for them to change. There’s a lot out there about what you should think and not think, but there’s very little that gives you a small and portable system to actually do it. You get the guide to the method, and three free months of a new app designed to help you implement it. There are other bonuses too. You can learn more and claim them at one you feel.
Chris Bailey 00:00:39 Yet there’s this kind of vicious cycle we fall into where the goal, which is really prediction, turns into an expectation which, because we’re so bad at predicting the future, turns into disappointment, then we set more goals. This is a cycle that we need to break out of, but there’s usually a way to edit the goals that we have so that they’re more in line with the values that we have.
Chris Forbes 00:01:11 Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:56 Chris Bayley’s been a guest on this show a number of times. He’s a delightful person to talk to, and every time we talk, I end up with at least one idea that I keep thinking about. And this time it was this phrase sepia toned goals. Those goals that look amazing in our head. But the actual day to day version of the goal is miserable.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:18 I then told him a story about my Zen teacher offering this class on Luminous Dreaming, and I’m halfway to signing up before I pause and go, wait, should I really do that? Where does that fit? And that moment is basically what Chris’s new book is about. It’s called Intentional How to Finish What You Start, and the heart of it is simple don’t just adopt goals. Choose them. Put them in the context of your values and your life as it really is. We talk about the intention stack, the way values clash with each other, why planning can become a productivity trap, and how to build small islands of intention into your day so you don’t wake up and realize you’ve been on autopilot for weeks. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi Chris. Welcome back.
Chris Bailey 00:03:05 Buddy. How are you? It’s been a little hot minute.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:07 It has been a hot minute. But as I was saying to you before we started, I think this is time number four, which puts you in pretty rare air.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:15 You’re not really. You’re not at the top, but I bet you’re in the top ten percentile of.
Chris Bailey 00:03:21 Oh, I’ll take top 10%.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:22 Yeah, that’s pretty good.
Chris Bailey 00:03:23 Yeah, I’ll take it.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:24 I’ll take top 10%. Nearly anything.
Chris Bailey 00:03:26 Pretty much anything.
Multiple Speakers 00:03:27 Yeah, yeah.
Chris Bailey 00:03:28 Maybe not debt or something.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:30 Well, I was gonna say it depends how you how you want to consider that. However, your new book is called Intentional How to Finish What You Start, which is right up our alley here at The One You Feed, because we are all about sort of bridging this knowledge to action gap. And this book is a great addition to the ways we think about that. But before we get into it, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable there’s a grandparent who’s talking with a grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:14 And the grandchild stops. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you. It was a very dramatic reading of the parable. I’m feeling dramatic today. I read my audiobook last week, so I’m all about thinking about. Yeah, anyway.
Multiple Speakers 00:04:39 Mind mush.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:40 It was, I think I think I’m recovered, but it certainly was. Anyway, what’s that parable mean to you?
Chris Bailey 00:04:48 Oh, it means not falling back on autopilot. To me, you know, there’s these two modes that we go between constantly. This is very much front of mind for me right now, probably for obvious reasons. You know, there’s the intentional mode that we have where we deliberately chart our own way forward. Then there’s the autopilot mode that we so often fall back on. And this is not to put down the autopilot mode too much, because habits are a big part of that, right? But usually when it comes to goal attainment, when it comes to daily productivity, when it comes to getting what we truly want, becoming more intentional is the path to doing that so that that’s what is activated in my mind when I hear the parable for the fourth time.
Multiple Speakers 00:05:36 Yeah, I think, yeah.
Chris Bailey 00:05:37 I love it. I love it every time it gets better, every.
Multiple Speakers 00:05:39 Time it gets better.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:40 The delivery. Now that I’m a professional audiobook narrator, you can tell the difference. You can tell the difference.
Multiple Speakers 00:05:46 Yeah, it’s.
Eric Zimmer 00:05:47 Ironic that we’re talking about this book today because our newsletter that is going out today is kind of about this very idea. It’s about when are we adopting goals that we haven’t really thought about, right. We haven’t really seen where they fit into our overall thing. It’s just easy to take them on. You hear them. It’s like, that sounds good. The example I give is my Zen teacher sent out a thing today. He’s teaching a class on luminous dreaming and I thought, oh, I should do that. That sounds really cool. I’ve always wanted to kind of do that. I’m, you know, I’m halfway into signing up before I’m like, hang on a second, right? And I think it’s just easy to do this because we’re just shown again and again other ways to be better, to be happier, to be all these different things.
Eric Zimmer 00:06:35 And this is really the the central premise of the book, which is that deciding what to do before you do it. And I think putting some intentionality, some thought into that decision is the key to finishing anything. Talk to me about that.
Multiple Speakers 00:06:51 Yeah.
Chris Bailey 00:06:51 So intention is this very curious idea because we obviously don’t always finish the things that we start. Right. We all have a graveyard of goals that are in our past. We have, you know, much like old exercise equipment litters the the basement floor, we have an equivalent graveyard of goals, if only in our mind. And so it’s so true what you’re saying in your newsletter, where so often the idea of a change is much more attractive than what we have to actually do to make that change a reality. What comes to mind for me was I love the.
Multiple Speakers 00:07:30 Idea.
Chris Bailey 00:07:31 Of being an early riser. I love the idea of waking up at 5 a.m. at this honestly to me, ungodly hour to to meditate, to go for a run, to read a good book.
Chris Bailey 00:07:44 I still get the physical newspaper here in Ottawa every morning. That’s my news consumption. You know, to read the newspaper. So I love the idea of this goal. And so I integrate it into my life. And every single time there’s always these lessons that we seem to have to learn repeatedly for them to stick. This is one of them for me, where I have the routine that supposedly productivity dreams are made of. Right? I wake up, I actually do all those things, and I realize that I hate my days.
Multiple Speakers 00:08:14 I have to go to bed.
Chris Bailey 00:08:15 When, you know, hockey games are on. Friends want to hang out. I have to wake up at this hour when I don’t have a lot of energy. I have more energy later on in the day. And by the way, there’s a lot of if you’re in this camp too, there’s a lot of interesting research that shows that there’s no difference in somebody’s socioeconomic standing based on what time they wake up at. It’s what we do with the hours of our day after we wake up.
Chris Bailey 00:08:40 In other words, how intentional.
Multiple Speakers 00:08:42 Yeah.
Chris Bailey 00:08:42 Intentional we are that make the difference in how well we do. And so we don’t always follow through with what we start. But here’s the thing when we do follow through, when we do accomplish something, there was always an intention behind that. And so in other words, intention matters with goal attainment, but not all intentions are created equal. And that introduces the art of becoming more intentional and finding ones that are more motivating, constructing ones that are more motivating, but also true to the day to day change that we want. So we don’t have these sepia toned goals to.
Eric Zimmer 00:09:20 Sepia toned goals. That’s a great phrase from your book. Tell me what that is.
Chris Bailey 00:09:26 Yeah, it’s these goals we love the idea of. Right. So many goals are sexy, right. And and so we we want to we have we set a goal to get six pack abs by beach season. And then, you know, we end up speaking of the one you feed.
Chris Bailey 00:09:41 You know, we eventually find ourselves in a situation where there’s, okay, there’s a funnel cake in front of me right now, but I got this long term goal. Whatever am I going to do? And so we have these romanticized versions of a lot of different goals. Waking up at 530 would definitely qualify as a sepia tone goal in my case. And we fall victim to these goals, which are really more generalized ideas of change than they are tangible changes that we’re making to our life. You know, there’s this wonderful quote, I forget who says it, man, I forget the but but the idea behind it is that for our life to be different, our days have to be different. I think that’s the key to keep in mind. The quote will come to me as you’re reading the next question, probably.
Eric Zimmer 00:10:28 Yeah, I think this is such a key idea. And I’m in the season of launching my book, so I’m thinking about it obviously all the time. I just read it last week.
Eric Zimmer 00:10:38 Yeah, but I’ve got a whole chapter on this idea of motivational complexity. We just want a lot of different things. Yeah, and that’s normal. And that’s part of being human. But some attempt to sort through that in a coherent way is really important. And I think your book does this great job of connecting a value, something that’s deeply important to us all the way down to our day. And I think you call that the intention stack. So tell me about the intention stack, because I really love this. That connection is so important both to our ability to be productive, to do the things we want, but also to feel good about the things we’re doing.
Chris Bailey 00:11:24 Yeah, and thank you for reading the book.
Multiple Speakers 00:11:28 I.
Chris Bailey 00:11:29 You know, in every publicity cycle, you got the people that read the book and you get the people that don’t read the book and the people who read the book. There’s so much more fun to talk to. And you actually respect your listeners time. So people should should realize that you do.
Eric Zimmer 00:11:44 Well thank you. I do. It’s my way of showing love to my guests and to my listeners.
Chris Bailey 00:11:48 Yeah. And I really think it is a way of doing so. This is the interest. Well, this is one of the interesting things about intention to me is there are so many when you actually look at the architecture of intentionality. And the research behind this idea of intention is there are a lot of levels in our life across which we can become more intentional. So we all kind of intuitively know this to some extent. And we already have different words for these different levels of intention in our life. We have the day to day intentions that we have, which we store usually on a to do list. Right. To do list is really just a space for our stored intentions. Then we have the plans that we’re making, right? Our calendars, stuff like that, just how we’re going to spend our time in a timeline that’s broader than our day to day. Then we have our goals, which ideally are day to day intentions and those plans feed into.
Chris Bailey 00:12:44 Then we have the broader priorities in our life that ideally our goals fit into. And then at the the very crown of this stack is our values, which and there’s actual research behind values, which I found quite interesting because you hear the word values a lot. And honestly, by the time I got to researching this topic, my eyes were kind of glazing over every time I heard the term values. But I thought, okay, maybe there’s actual research here, maybe there’s actual science here. And it turns out there is. You know what comes to mind when I hear the term values is some corporate consultant comes in and they have a sheet that has 100 words on it, and they say, pick the the words that you feel are your values. There’s not a lot of science behind that, but there is science that says there are 12 fundamental human values that we all share, but in different amounts. And so values are essentially our ultimate intentions. They’re the ultimate goals that we’re after in our life.
Chris Bailey 00:13:44 And so for a goal to be considered complete, you can’t just have a goal, right. Waking up at 530 every morning or some sepia tone thing, you need to realize how it will connect with the day to day life that you have and the plans that you have, but also the broader call it a motivational architecture of our life, the things that drive us uniquely. Because what motivates you won’t be. What motivates me won’t be. What motivates whoever is listening, watching this right now. So that’s the key to keep in mind. Different things motivate us compared to other people. So finding of those 12 fundamental human values that the research has identified, finding which ones are truest for us. That is the key. And you can connect all of these levels of intention in something that I call the intention stack, which has all these layers positioned above one another. So our daily intentions, our plans, our goals, our priorities, and then our values.
Eric Zimmer 00:14:52 And the intention stack is the best thing I’ve seen.
Eric Zimmer 00:14:56 That takes on that thorny question that brings up all these things. What’s a goal versus a plan? Yeah, versus the value. And so the intention stack gives us a way to do that. And I also find the 12 fundamental human values very interesting and that they’ll be more or less important to us. So I’m just going to read a couple of them so people have a sense of what we’re talking about. One might be conformity, security, self-direction, power, pleasure, achievement. Those are some of the ones. And so we all value these things a little bit differently. And I do think I agree with you. The Hundred and 50 goal list is kind of a mess. Yeah, it’s a way of starting, but the problem that I always find is I’m like, I agree with all these. I mean, who doesn’t who doesn’t agree with any of these things? Circle of spades. Exactly. Which is useless. And so I have different methods of, you know, leading people towards their goals.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:55 But I like this 12 because it does just allow us to kind of go through and think about the other thing that I like that you do here is you make the core idea that there are sort of two fundamental polarities on which our goals move on. Tell us about that.
Chris Bailey 00:16:12 Yeah. So this is, quite frankly, the beautiful thing about values in my view, is so you have these fundamental motivations that we have in our life. And so one of the polarities is are we focused on enriching other people or enriching ourselves. That’s the first polarity. And the other polarity is are we focused on conserving things as they are so basic conservatism, or are we focused on progressing things, making things better, or simply often changing things? Right. Change is enough to satisfy that value. Like in the case of the value of stimulation, where that’s seeking novelty essentially in the moment. And what matters is that things are novel and different. And so from these polarities, like you’re saying, these 12 fundamental human values blossom out.
Chris Bailey 00:17:04 So, you know, things that might involve, you know, ourselves might include power or achievement, power being one of the lowest values across cultures and overall, but achievement being quite high, probably especially for people who listen to this podcast. I would imagine self-direction is quite high as well. But then there’s the the conserve values, right? Security tradition, conformity would be another. There’s the other values that are about others, which would include universalism, which is protecting. Preserving the welfare of people and of nature, benevolence, basic kindness, and serving others. And so the interesting thing to me is that from those two polarities, all the values, all the values blossom outward, but there are complete motivational continuum, these values. So there is nothing that we could ever do where the motivation behind that thing falls outside of these 12 values. And so often determining what we’re going to do in the moment, we’re often doing a trade off between these different values. Right. So let’s go back to the funnel cake or I’m good.
Chris Bailey 00:18:19 Not yeah, not plant that idea subconsciously in my own mind.
Eric Zimmer 00:18:23 It’s not funnel cake season here in North America. That’s the summer. So people are probably somewhat safe.
Chris Bailey 00:18:28 So we should be safe. Yeah. I’m not going to even entertain the idea of going to a restaurant. But let’s say you have these competing goals, right? You have a body fat law school, but you also have, like you’re saying, pleasure is a fundamental human value, right? That’s something you can value highly. In fact, of that list of values, self-direction is my top value. Pleasure is my second value. So in other words, I’m very motivated to experience a greater amount of pleasure in my life, whether that be from food or, you know, a good spa day or, you know, whatever it might look like. And so there’s always these values, these fundamental motivations that are behind the scene, competing with one another, which is fascinating. So if you’re focused on goal attainment, the book is essentially about the science of goal attainment.
Chris Bailey 00:19:16 You need to consider that motivational nature, which is our values.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:36 There’s something called a values wheel. I think it is. And it’s got some version of the human goals. Maybe it’s these, maybe it’s something different, but it’s close. Where they are on the wheel is sort of where they are on these two continuum you’re talking about. And the point of it that’s very interesting is if all your goals cluster kind of together on one side of the wheel, well, you’re going to have less value to value conflict because they’re kind of in alignment with each other. But when you have values that are across from each other are in different parts of this polarity, you’re going to have more values. Two values conflict. Yeah. And when it comes to doing the things that we want to do, I think we face two challenges. The one that most of us think about is simply the value versus desire. I refer to it as what do I want now versus what do I want most, right? The value being most.
Eric Zimmer 00:20:29 So we have desire to value conflicts, but we also get value to value conflicts. So for example where would family fit in this list of goals.
Chris Bailey 00:20:40 Oh so value or values. Yeah. So so family would be almost a priority. And so okay. It would it could fit in in any one of these really. You know, you could want power over your family I suppose you could. But you could also want to achieve incredible things with your family climbing Everest. Or it could be security, right? Family could be a great sense of security for you. It could be benevolence, right? Family could be a vehicle for for kindness. For you could be hedonism, which is under pleasure. The pleasure value with your spouse. Right? It could be any one of these 12. And that’s that’s the beautiful thing is we have all these different priorities in our life that can be expressed any single way. Health is an interesting one, right? That was a question that I had of the research.
Chris Bailey 00:21:31 is where does health follow? Isn’t that a fundamental thing? Because all of these values have an evolutionary basis to. But health could be expressed any one of these ways. We could want a body that we’re proud of achieving. So it fits with the value of achievement. We could want the pleasure value, right? We could want to feel good in our body. It could fit with the security value. We want to be able to play with our grandkids one day or today. That’s the beautiful thing about the values is the different goals and priorities that we have can usually be expressed through any single one of these values. And so this is the thing about our goals is, first of all, goals are I think we get along wrong about our goals. Goals to me are really a prediction. They’re a prediction of where we believe our current and our planned actions will take us. That’s all a goal is. And so then we become a subject in our own story, and we get to see, okay, what is actually leading to more progress, the progress that I’m predicting.
Chris Bailey 00:22:32 You know, there’s there’s this kind of vicious cycle we fall into where the goal, which is really prediction, turns into an expectation which, because we’re so bad at predicting the future, turns into disappointment, then we set more goals. This is a cycle that we need to break out of, but there’s usually a way to edit the goals that we have so that they’re more in line with the values that we have. So one example slightly after New Years, a lot of people are having resolutions, maybe to lose a bit of body fat this year. If you if you have a goal to say, have a six pack abs by beach season, right? That fits with the value of face, which is how we come across to other people. But again, health can be expressed through a lot of different priorities. So it might be expressed maybe face is your lowest value, but self-direction and pleasure are your highest. At least they are for me. A better goal for you might be to say, okay, screw the six pack.
Chris Bailey 00:23:28 What I really want, what I’m gonna edit. My goal to be is to experiment with three different ways of eating experimentation, being self-direction to find the one that is most satisfying and sustainable. Right? Satisfying being the pleasure value. So it’s usually possible to edit the goals that we have. So they’re more in line with this motivational nature, which is our values.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:54 This is slightly different than how I have traditionally looked at it, which is always good. I love getting, you know, the apple cart chicken up a little bit. Yeah, because I’m thinking about what I have is like through the work I’ve done, sort of my list of values. And I don’t think they, I don’t think they line up here exactly right. So mine are interestingly health is one. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve got kindness I’ve got curiosity. Yeah, I’ve got contentment. Yeah, and I’ve got adventure.
Chris Bailey 00:24:27 Ooh, they do line up. They do line up. I think those are different names for a lot of things.
Chris Bailey 00:24:33 So health would be something that can be expressed through multiple values. Yep. Kindness is benevolent.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:39 Benevolence. Yep. That one. Yep.
Chris Bailey 00:24:41 Curiosity would fall under self-direction. So. Okay. Yeah. So that could. It’s like a broader. These are kind of broader umbrella I guess terms for these contentment I would put under security depending on how it’s expressed. And adventure would be stimulation.
Eric Zimmer 00:24:55 Stimulation. Right. Yeah. And so for a great example of two values that lie at different sides of the thing, you have stimulation and security as a value. Again, I don’t love the word security. I understand what it’s saying. Contentment to me is an appreciation for what I have. It’s the ability to be present. It’s because I’m not really in general. I take a lot of risks, so I don’t seem to be very security oriented. And contentment is almost one of those that I have to like. I feel like I want I have to work at it a little bit anyway. So but stimulation or adventure and contentment as an example, where you and I are using slightly different terminology to talk about the same thing, which is those are often at loggerheads with each other because contentment says you should be happy right where you are with exactly the way things are, and stimulation or adventure is like, hey, I want different things.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:56 Come on, give me something new. Let’s get out. Yeah, right. That’s an example of a values. Two values clash that finds its way into my life on a very regular basis.
Chris Bailey 00:26:04 Yeah. Oh, 100%. And you see that a lot of the disagreement and I’m not going to get into cultural stuff obviously, but a lot of the disagreements we have more broadly are a clash between different values. I look at the clash between self-direction and tradition, right? That so often clashes with one another. And so we have and it’s this has been the wild thing and I should say full credit where credit is due with this research, this this values model is courtesy of Shalom Schwartz. It’s been validated across hundreds of thousands of participants, more than cross-culturally more than 60 countries, which is beautiful to me, how there’s this universal nature that we have, but it shows. And the beautiful thing about this model to me is when I have a disagreement with somebody. Lately, I’ve been starting to look through that disagreement to the values that might be at play, because there usually are some clashing motivations within these things that we have with other people.
Chris Bailey 00:27:06 But then it’s gets a bit awkward when it’s with ourselves. Right, exactly. And so the easiest way to tell if something’s a priority, to us is if we’ve done it already. right? So so often the goals that we have. There’s some fundamental part of them that is misaligned with this motivational nature that we have. This I find absolutely fast because then you can divide those into two categories. Right. We have the goals that aren’t a good fit. Maybe they’re sepia toned. Maybe they’re just something that we don’t truly want. You know, like you’re saying there may be an expectation somebody else has has of us. We should drop those goals, in my view, because then it’s more of an opportunity to try more goals on for size, because there’s an opportunity cost with goals, right. Everything we pursue is at the expense of everything that we could be pursuing. But then you have the goals that like lower your cholesterol or something where you don’t want to do it. You don’t want the process of doing it, but you want the tangible outcome that the process will produce.
Chris Bailey 00:28:09 And then then a version comes into play. You know, a version being anything that makes a task or a project or a commitment. Ugly to us, right?
Eric Zimmer 00:28:20 It’s a version, not a version of, but a version as one word.
Chris Bailey 00:28:25 Not wanting ugliness and in some cases, ugliness for our goals. So every goal has embedded within it a different amount of two things desire and aversion. So desire compels us to doing the goal and can include things like social contagion, you know, the habits we catch from other people. And then aversion is the other ingredient which repels us from wanting to do the goal. Usually the things on our list, the desire is far crowded out by the aversion that we have to doing the thing. And so aversion comes from very predictable places, though comes from when something is boring, frustrating, unpleasant, when it’s far away in the future, when it’s unstructured and when it’s meaningless. And so it’s not aligned with that motivational nature. So this is the interesting thing about goals.
Chris Bailey 00:29:18 Some of them are fundamentally misaligned with our values. Others of them have the values clash, which leads to that aversion. But goal editing can get us further, you know, editing the goals so that they actually accommodate whatever our top values are, as well as taming the aversion which can come after that.
Eric Zimmer 00:29:38 There’s so much in there, so many different places we could go. I want to start by asking you a question to get your thoughts on it, because you do reference it as one way in the book of figuring out values is to look at how you’re spending your time, and that then tells you a little bit about your values. And I find that both true and reductive. By true, I mean yes, on one sense where you spend your time does show what values are operating in your life at that time. But I would argue that so much of our behavior ends up being driven by either autopilot behavior. Yeah. Strong cultural stimulus. In the case of those of us who have mental health issues, our mental health will drive those.
Eric Zimmer 00:30:33 The easiest example is me is a heroin addict, right? On one hand, yes, I valued heroin over anything else. I would tear the rest of the world down to get that thing. So that does show on one level what value is operating. I don’t think that that is who I am. And so that was the case of I didn’t have the skills, the tools or the ability to live towards the values I wanted. Now I can look at your values list and see what I was trying to get out of doing drugs. I can see like what that was an attempt to do value wise. And so that’s the thing I think often about when I think about that, like, look at what you do and it’ll tell you what you value is that sometimes that’s true, but I also think it puts a real limit on ourselves and causes us to think. Am I just the kind of person who wants to shoot heroin all the time? I mean, that’s an extreme example, right? But pick whatever your thing is.
Chris Bailey 00:31:26 It’s such a good point where where we spend our time can give us a starting point, but it’s no substitute whatsoever for a scientifically validated values testing instrument. That’s the beautiful thing about this being rooted in science is there’s actual scientific instruments for measuring the values that we have that will cut through, you know, our mood on a given day. You know, security actually is a value that’s going up right now. You know, you look at the the changing nature of the world. And so there are these fundamental shifts, but then there are the days where we feel less of a sense of security. And so you really want to break through the addictions, the temporary states that that we pass through as well. To get to that fundamental motivational course. So you’re exactly right, by the way. I did partner with a company who created the best values testing instrument in the world for this book to give it at a lower price. But, you know, I write in the book that I think something like that should be free, right? Right.
Chris Bailey 00:32:30 Because we should all have the tools and unfortunately has to cost money because of licensing stuff and paying, you know, stuff like that. But I think something like that should be free, because the best tools that we have to go off of is, okay, how do you spend your time already? Or looking through these 12 values, which of them feel like they motivate you the most? You know, these are very well. I suppose time tracking is more an objective measure, but it’s imprecise. It’s not as precise as that values testing instrument. This is the interesting thing about values is what leads us to develop certain values. And I feel like we’re in a safe place to nerd out a little bit about where the values come from.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:11 I think we are. Yeah. Unfortunately, this could take us down an extraordinarily deep rabbit hole, so I’m going to only let it go so far. But let’s start.
Chris Bailey 00:33:19 Yes okay. So okay, I will do it like in a nutshell kind of thing because yeah I do have an eye on the clock too.
Chris Bailey 00:33:26 We have two different types of intentions that we have in our life. There’s the deliberate intentions which lead us to setting more thoughtful intentions. Right? We reflect and we choose where to go. Then there’s the default intentions, which is just the habits, whether they’re habits of behavior or thought that make up so much of our life. And values are constructed when you look at different disparate parts of the research, out of the intentions that we have mostly the default intentions, but also that layer of deliberate intentions, which is motivated by the fundamental motivations of the default intentions that we have. I feel, I feel I’ve gotten to in the weeds you you had a good.
Eric Zimmer 00:34:10 No.
Chris Bailey 00:34:10 No.
Eric Zimmer 00:34:11 No no you.
Chris Bailey 00:34:12 Haven’t. You had a good read of it. But but it’s fascinating to me where these default intentions that we have, the habits, the things that we don’t want to do, the things that we love, that we do, this forms the foundation of our values. And then we put the deliberate layer on top of it, which is what we gravitate to doing naturally.
Eric Zimmer 00:34:53 The part that’s challenging about all this is trying to recognize where even these intentions and values come from you. List social environments. Cultural and family conditioning. Desire to find happiness. Avoid pain. Lessons we’ve learned. I mean, they come from all over the place. This is the rabbit hole for me. Is trying to sort out like what of that is quote unquote mine versus which ones are borrowed. And how do you ever tell that? Because we are conditioned creatures to the nth degree. There is no me out there that has its own values outside of the context in which he finds himself. Yeah, it’s an imprecise science. I can never really be like, these are mine. I can only do my best to be as deliberate and thoughtful as I’m able to be, about which ones seem to matter.
Chris Bailey 00:35:53 Yeah, and I love that you read off that list, because one of the interesting groups of people that I had a chance to chat with in writing this book is I was learning a lot about intentionality from the research, from the scientists, from interviews, all that stuff.
Chris Bailey 00:36:08 There were a lot of gaps in the research, frankly, that I wanted to fill. And so I turned to maybe a not an unsuspecting, but a group that is full of wisdom about the nature of intentionality, which is Buddhist monks, you know. Buddhist monks observe the causes and effects within their minds. Right? So they’re coming at intentionality from almost the inside out, where science is almost coming at intentionality from the outside in. But who contemplates intentionality more deeply than Buddhist monks? And so I was really struggling with what you’re listing out there with. Where does intention come from? Because you asked that question of the research and hey, it’s difficult to find a direct answer, but B, you find that it comes from a lot of different places, everything from our biology to the social environments that we’re a part of, right? Culture, family, all the conditioning that happens in that context. So we have a lot of default intentions that we accumulate from our biology, from our conditioning, from the conditioning that we do to ourselves and the habits that we’ve integrated, the lessons that we’ve learned.
Chris Bailey 00:37:24 But one big insight from agile Adamo is the name of the monk. He declined to be interviewed for the book, but he has talks out there, so I feel comfortable mentioning his name in the podcast here. And one frankly beautiful, beautiful, beautiful source of intentionality that he put out there that is not talked about in the research. He called our self-reflective capacity, which is our ability to look within ourselves and ask questions of our inner world, to be able to determine what we would like to do differently and where we truly wish to go. And so we have this almost a gradient between how deliberate and intention is right. On one hand, we have those hard wired biological impulses that are the purest of default intentions, right? You have to go to the bathroom on a road trip. By God, you’re going to set an intention to, you know, make the next pit stop. If not, pull over on the side of the road, whatever it might be. But then you have the most deliberate intentions on the other side where you’re still, and then your mind decides, you decide what you wish to be doing differently.
Chris Bailey 00:38:44 Right. And it can be something very simple, right? You could be listening to a playlist and then hit pause. And so instead of just hearing the next song that’s offered to you, you hit pause. You wait for a song to occur to you in intention, and then you hit play on that on that song or to do list as well. I think this can be extended to that where, you know, to do lists are amazing. I write about productivity. I’m a big fan of to do lists, especially how they allow us to externalize the things that are on our mind. But often the best thing we can do is hitting that equivalent of the pause button and not looking at our to do list and really reflect. Okay, what is the next best thing that I should be doing after I finish with this current thing? Right. It’s that simple nature of tapping into our self-reflective capacity that can not only be beautiful, but also bring forth these intentions that, you know, will probably enjoy that song more than the playlist that we were listening to, that task that we intuitively decide what to do instead of logic, it might be more meaningful, it might be more productive than whatever was going to happen, instead just going down the list.
Chris Bailey 00:39:58 And so there’s this intuitive capacity when it comes to intentionality that’s connected with this almost ancient wisdom. But it isn’t really. It’s just the wisdom of the causes, effects, and conditions of our mind.
Eric Zimmer 00:40:12 As a both and kind of guy. I think this is really interesting because I find sometimes letting the playlist serve it up to me is the right choice, and other times being intentional is the right choice. Well, I’ll give you an example. So much of this is context and situation dependent. So for example, I’ve talked many times about I have a tendency towards a low mood. And when I get in that state, very often part of it is that nothing sounds good to me, but I know music is healing. So I have a playlist that in those moments I go hit shuffle and I have got something coming to me that I couldn’t sort out in the moment because my mind just isn’t working right now. Interestingly, there’s a big element of intentionality in this because I thought about it ahead of time.
Eric Zimmer 00:41:02 Yeah, the same thing with the task list. There are times that I am very locked into, like what’s important, what I’m doing. I can pause, I can reflect, I can think. There are other times that if I’m just struggling or my mind is scattered, like I just need like, okay, lay it out for me. Do this, do this, do this. And I find so many of these things end up being a result of context, and a lot of context ends up being where we are at the moment.
Chris Bailey 00:41:28 Yeah. So accounting for how much energy you have. You know, I think of packing too. This is going to show how big of a nerd I am. But there’s an app called Keyboard Maestro on the Mac where it’s a scripting app so you can have it type in certain keystrokes. So I created the ultimate packing list, where I would press Caps Lock P at the caps lock, being coded to a short code on my keyboard, and it would pop open a window, Say, how many days are you gone? Is this a domestic or an international trip? Are you going for work or for business? And I would select the different things and keyboard maestro.
Chris Bailey 00:42:03 Incredible app. If you’re a big nerd, would automatically create a new file on my computer and pre-populated it with all the numbers of the various things that I would need to pack. Wow. So five pairs of underwear if I was gone for days because I had a plus one for the extra travel delays or whatever. On the other end, would I bring a camera? You know, a nice camera if I’m going for a work trip or all this stuff. But what I found was that when it came time to pack, I wouldn’t enjoy packing. I would feel like a robot just going through the motions of it. But then there were the times when I had no energy and I was like, okay, it’s been a long day. I just got back from a trip. Just tell me what I need, tell me what I need. Yeah. And so this is another way of cultivating intention where we do have these two layers of intention in our life. We have the default intentions and the deliberate intentions, but so much of intention is not just choosing what we’re going to do, which leads us to actually enjoy it more, right? I found that it was more enjoyable to pack when I was, when I used the pack list as more of a confirmation than anything, you know, so we don’t just enjoy it more, but we have to craft the defaults in our life to some extent.
Chris Bailey 00:43:15 Right. And it’s not just about forming new habits or leaving big ones behind. It’s about the bad ones behind. It’s about having this kind of default nature of our mind, of our body, of our life that we can just rest back on when we have less energy. And you can tell I’m very interested in intentionality. The research behind this is very fascinating.
Eric Zimmer 00:43:37 An entire book on it.
Chris Bailey 00:43:38 Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we we have these moments where we shift between this intentional and intention lists mode constantly. Right. Like if if you wake up and you’re maybe your family’s out and you’re in bed, maybe you would find yourself going through the motions of your day. Maybe you’d grab your phone. You’d scroll around a little bit. Maybe you’d put on a song or whatever your morning might look like, but then you have a little mini moment of awakening right where you think, okay, it’s time to get up. What am I actually going to do now? And we have these moments where we shift between these two states of running on autopilot versus acting more deliberately, and that in itself should be something that we have a greater amount of intention over.
Chris Bailey 00:44:25 So we should not only appreciate our defaults, but we should love the things that we intend to do too. So and this is the interesting thing about intention is it’s a very complex faculty of the mind, but that once we are able to deconstruct it, harness it, understand it, you know, everything from our values to the daily intentions all the way down through our goals and priorities and plans. The payoff can be incredible in terms of how much more we enjoy things, how much more meaning we have, and that extra productivity too. It’s it’s quite wonderful.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:59 Yeah. You know, having something like your book is doing sort of walk through the process is very helpful because it is really sloppy inside our minds. At least is in my mind. Yeah. And there’s a whole lot of. Yeah. Except then but what if this and. Right. I mean, my writing, my book, I had to be like, I want to caveat everything. I want to be like, well, except when this.
Eric Zimmer 00:45:22 But in case you’re this kind of person, then that and unless this has happened, then that. And I was like, well, at a certain point the whole book would just simply be, it’s complicated. I’m done. It’s not exactly helpful. It’s it’s true. It’s probably the truest view I know, but it’s not exactly helpful. And I think the same thing can happen with all of this stuff. It’s complicated. And having a process to follow and making some deliberate attempt to do your best. Is better than not doing anything.
Chris Bailey 00:45:52 Yeah, there’s a lot of complex science, but it is possible to create a structure around the intentions that we do set right. One of my favorite ways of doing this is to have what I call in the book, Islands of Intention. So little periods of the day of the week of our life where we take a step back and think, okay, where do I really wish to go? Here? An intention is just a plan that we’re going to do something.
Chris Bailey 00:46:19 And so the more little periods that we have to plan, the more intentional we become, the more we optimize for the various currencies of our life that we’re interested in, whether it’s productivity, meaning, accomplishment, any one of these values, those are the ultimate currencies in our life as our values. And so having rituals that we’re able to connect with in this pursuit is so one of my favorite intention rituals, just just to give people something tangible. Here is the rule of three for setting intentions. And I’ve mentioned this rule so much over the last decade of writing about productivity that I should, like, have a nickel every time I mentioned it, or something. Like, I would be a very wealthy man right now, Eric. But all it is, is at the start of the day. You fast forward to the end of the day in your head and you ask, okay, what three things will I want to have accomplished by the day’s end? And you can do this with your work.
Chris Bailey 00:47:14 People like doing it with work more than personal life, but with your personal life, you can really decide how balanced you wish to be between these different contexts of your life. You can choose how much you bite off of your goals every single day, every week as well, right? You can do the same ritual at the start of the week. You look to the week ahead and think, okay, what are the three big intentions that I want to accomplish this week? The week is done. What do I want to look back on and feel good about accomplishing. And again, you know, it’s important to hold these things a bit loosely, right? Because, intentions in this way, any goal is really just a prediction of where you believe you will be at the end of the week, at the end of the day. Reality will, you know, collide with these idealized versions, and then you’ll find yourself in a different place. So see it as a prediction. Don’t hold it too tightly, but see yourself as kind of a subject in this pursuit of greater intentionality, where you know, you make a prediction, you try to follow through, then you observe, okay, was that sepia toned? Was that too aversive? Do I need to beat back aversion somehow? Do I need to cultivate desire somehow here? Do I need to connect it with what motivates me? So I love doing the rule of three every single day, every single week, as well as every year.
Chris Bailey 00:48:36 I have three yearly intentions to in addition to my list of goals. So that’s the wonderful thing is, once you start with the science behind intention. You can kind of work backwards to the tactics for what you can do to integrate that science into your life.
Eric Zimmer 00:48:52 So what were the three last year and where are the three this year?
Chris Bailey 00:48:55 Oh yes. Let me pull up my goal list. let’s see current goals. So with work or personal.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:04 Oh, you do it by domain.
Chris Bailey 00:49:05 Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:06 So give me one from each. That’ll be fine. That’ll be.
Chris Bailey 00:49:08 Sufficient. So, for my work goals under the value of security, because I have all the goals nested under the values. So I remind myself of, of the motivational nature behind them. Operate a sustainable business is the outcome. So, in other words, the process for that outcome was continue to keep one year financial runway and to revisit it monthly. Simple. But I don’t spend a lot of money. I keep I’m a simple little author.
Chris Bailey 00:49:39 and so that’s that’s my goal for personal, A health intention for this year. Build a resilient, strong and peaceful mind. That’s a big one for me this year, and the process is to invest in meditation streaks.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:57 okay.
Chris Bailey 00:49:58 Yeah. So simple. Right?
Eric Zimmer 00:49:59 But simple.
Chris Bailey 00:50:00 These these are the big things that we’re after.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:02 I love the idea of these implementation islands. Also going back a paragraph or two.
Chris Bailey 00:50:09 Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:10 Yeah I’m a big fan of small steps right. Little by little. And we often approach this stuff as if it is a big thing to do. Right? We got to go away on a on a weekend retreat to get it all sorted out. And sure, that can be great. And for many of us, we’re not going to make that an option. So this ability I think what’s more important than spending a ton of time on all this stuff at one chunk is to do exactly what you’re saying, which is just to reflect a whole lot more often. Who do I want to be in this situation or what do I want to do? I mean, those are sort of two questions that I orient a lot of the book around.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:52 What do I want to do? Who do I want to be? But the more often we ask that, the better off we are, because the answers also are always changing. We are changing. Our lives are changing. It’s it’s all shifting. And so to think that I’m going to sit down and map out my goals and then I’m going to know what to do all the time moving forward. It’s sort of like back in my project management days, I remember this. We would there were certain people who would want to create the ultimate Gantt chart, right? And they would like their Gantt chart to link this Gantt chart and to link with this other game. I mean, there’s the calm, and I just always would be like, this is just a terrible idea because we’re going to create this thing. We’re going to spend a ton of time even getting it to work in the first place, which is questionable. And then it’s going to fall apart. Two weeks in, we are not going to go according to plan.
Eric Zimmer 00:51:45 Yeah. And then you address this earlier. We’re going to then just be like, well, I don’t throw the whole thing away. And we’re kind of done instead of like, okay, yes, planning is good, but what’s equally as important is continuing to replan. You know, and I love this three thing list because it’s an easy way to do that. It’s a little by little thing. If we ask ourselves those questions regularly, we’re going to be more aligned between our values, our priorities, our goals and our tasks. There’s no perfect alignment, but there’s more alignment.
Chris Bailey 00:52:20 Yeah. You know, this is the classic productivity trap, right? You can spend all day reading about productivity and this kind of thing. But for every minute you spend reading about productivity, how many minutes do you actually get back? Yeah, right. Because if you’re losing, if you make back, you know, 45 seconds for every minute you spend reading about product that first of all, it’s probably not a good book or not a good video or not a good podcast, whatever it is that you’re consuming.
Chris Bailey 00:52:49 But that’s taking up precious time that you could be acting towards the goals that you have. And we need action, right? We need the feedback that comes with action in order to inform the intentions that we’re going to set next. So and this is, I think, what a lot of us get wrong. We don’t see ourselves as a subject in our goals. We see ourselves as somebody who we need to set up to perform in the goals that we have, and we’re either a failure or a success, and it’s a horror. Of course, we’re going to fail, right? Because we don’t edit the goal. We put too much pressure on ourselves. We don’t get the feedback to edit the goal over time. So, you know, I’m a big fan of actually listing out the goals that we have and just reviewing them regularly to think, is this still serving me? Is this still worthwhile? What’s it? Sepia tone. Does it need an edit? Do I need to reframe it around a different value? Is there too much aversion in this goal? So I need to tame that aversion.
Chris Bailey 00:53:49 Do I need to cultivate desire in some way? Do I need to carve out a different situation in my environment so I’m not distracted or I’m surrounded by different people? But it all goes back to this ratio between planning and action, where I think in general, you know, we tend to act too much and plan too little. You know, most people, you know, they maybe spend 95% acting and 5% planning. That’s not enough planning because we have a lot of different layers across which we need to become more intentional. But then there’s the productivity trap that you mentioned, too, where we spend all day planning, all day organizing. We’re shuffling deck chairs on on the Titanic, and then we we crash into whatever the metaphorical iceberg is in that situation. So this ratio between planning and action. But we also need that component to connect the two so that planning leads to action which leads to planning. And so we have this self-reflective ritual embedded within that which, you know, write about in the book.
Chris Bailey 00:54:52 There’s a lot of different ones that we can do from, from, you know, everything from tracking our time to reflecting on these intentions to looking at the goal list that we have. But we need to tap into that self-reflective capacity that we have to, because that’s ultimately where our deepest goals come from.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:07 I think this goes back to something you said earlier, which is that goals are a prediction. Yeah. And I think how we define goals is is really important. And and a real tricky thing. You talk about two kinds of goals. It’s talked about the two kinds of goals. And yeah which is better. Or do we need both or what do we do.
Chris Bailey 00:55:30 Yeah. So let me pull up my goal list again because it kind of gets to something that I was kind of talking around. There’s kind of a debate in productivity nerd circles between process goals versus outcome goals. And so a process goal is just what you’re going to do to make the goal of reality. And the outcome goal is the broader story of change that you want to make.
Chris Bailey 00:55:51 So, you know, if to give a very simplistic example, an outcome you want to achieve might be to be wealthy in retirement. Right. That might be the outcome. The process might be to save 20% of your gross income or whatever it might look like. And so both are essential though, right, because they live in different layers of this productivity stack. Because the process goal is more of a plan really. So it exists a bit further down that intention stack. It takes place over a shorter distance of time. It’s essentially what you are currently experimenting with for creating the outcome that you’re seeking. And so this is, I think, you know, holding goals a bit more loosely, but seeing the process that we’re investing into those goals as an experimentation, because this is another way we disappoint ourselves in the pursuit of our goals, is we don’t just not achieve the outcomes that are really just a prediction, but we only try one two things. We see ourselves as a failure when they’re not producing the outcome, but maybe we just haven’t experimented with enough things yet in order to produce the outcome that we’re seeking, we might need to go through a bunch of different processes to create the outcomes that we’re really after, and it goes to the different stages of goal attainment as well.
Chris Bailey 00:57:14 So we have the learning stage where we’re really just learning what we need to do in order to make a goal a reality. And then we have the performance stage where it’s like, okay, I know what I need to do now. Now it’s just I just need to put in the reps. Now I just need to perform because I have all the requisite knowledge. We so often tend to jump right into that performance phase. Yes, and skip the learning stage and skip past all the experimentation that we really should be doing, which maximizes those odds of goal attainment over time. So lots of different little tweaks that we should be doing not only to the goals themselves, but also to the mindsets that we have around them.
Eric Zimmer 00:57:57 An example that comes to mind for me is writing my book, because in the beginning I couldn’t set some goal like words per day, pages per day. I had no, I don’t know what I’m doing. I still don’t know what I’m doing, but but I really, really didn’t know what I was doing.
Eric Zimmer 00:58:14 So all I set were effort goals, right? I can measure this. Am I putting the time in now? There was an outcome goal that wrapped the whole thing, which was I got to deliver a book back to a publisher on X date via the contract. So there’s a big outcome. But to your point, I didn’t know enough early on to start saying something like, okay, here’s what it’s going to be. I knew I had 12 months and I had 11 chapters. I was like, okay, that’s roughly a chapter a month. But even that I was like, if I pin myself into that, I’m going to start to get really stressed really early. Now, over time, I began to get a rhythm and be like, okay, I do think I can turn around. The next draft of X chapter in a week seems reasonable because I knew what I was doing. But I think this is so important. Is that ability, as you say, to learn and give ourselves time to figure out how to even do this thing.
Chris Bailey 00:59:08 In the process of learning. The research shows it’s it’s the same as, you know, having a growth mindset, right, where any feedback you get that happens to be negative in pursuit of a goal. So you hit an obstacle, a milestone or something. You’re in the learning phase, so the learning process actually absorbs that frustration, where if you’re in the performance phase and you hit a roadblock, a milestone, you see it as a personal failure.
Eric Zimmer 00:59:35 Yeah.
Chris Bailey 00:59:35 And so you might actually do the same actions, right? In both of those cases. But what changes is your relationship with the goal, which has a huge impact on the long term sustainability of a goal. And it goes back to the the goal editing around values that we were chatting about, where if you have a goal to have that six pack abs by beach season, which connects with face that you’re not motivated in the slightest to achieve, but you edit it to be about self-direction and pleasure. Right. Whatever the example was that I used, eat cleanly, experiment with a few different ways of eating cleanly, whatever it might look like.
Chris Bailey 01:00:12 The actions that you might take under each goal might be the exact same. But what changes is your relationship with the goal? It becomes more exciting, right? You get more involved with it. You see it as something that you can mold, that you are an active participant in shaping and not something that some past version of you burdened your current day self with. It’s some change you’re actively working to create that’s tangible in your life that’s also meaningful to you. This is how goal attainment should feel, right? When we’re attaining our goals, we should feel like we’re an active participant in our own life, but so often it feels the exact opposite, where it feels like we’re saddled with some responsibility, some expectation that we have from our previous version of ourselves. So goal attainment should feel good because we’re making these positive changes to our life. And so it’s it’s exciting to encounter these ideas that will get people to that place.
Eric Zimmer 01:01:16 Well, I think that is a beautiful and hopeful place to wrap up. Goals should feel good.
Eric Zimmer 01:01:23 Yeah, not all the time, but most of the time. Should. Yeah. Should feel.
Chris Bailey 01:01:27 Good. Sometimes you just have to lower cholesterol.
Eric Zimmer 01:01:29 Sometimes you do. Yes, sometimes you do. Yeah. Thank you so much. I always enjoy seeing you. I always enjoy talking to you. The book is great. It’s called intentional how to Finish What You Start. And in the show notes, we’ll have links to it. And you.
Chris Bailey 01:01:44 Hey thank you buddy. Always good to be here and chat with you.
Eric Zimmer 01:01:48 Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.
