Building a Life of Significance

In this exciting episode, I am joined by Andrew Petty, Life Coach & Podcaster, to discuss how to create your dynamic "Personal Owner's Manual" to better understand yourself,  enjoy yourself more and build a life of significance.  We discuss the aspects of nature, nurture, and now.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

So it's Kenny Megan Stop from the Megan Semester and Walking to another episode of Tuddy for Your Thoughts. So we discussed our thoughts and minds that affect our health, our happiness, and our performance. I'm so excited for this episode of Building a Life of Significance, where I'm joined by Andrew Petsy, who's a life coach and podcast host. And we're going to be discussing what he calls the personal interface on better understanding yourself, enjoying yourself, and building a life of significance. And we're also going to be talking about the aspects of nature, nurture, and health. So let's get started. Hello, Andrew. Welcome.

SPEAKER_02 0:40

Hey, hey. Welcome. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Thanks for coming. So my pleasure.

SPEAKER_02 0:44

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 0:46

It's great. I'm always interested in knowing what's your journey, like what's your story? What led you to the work that you're doing?

SPEAKER_02 0:54

I thought about that before us getting on this call today. And there's kind of two versions. And as I chewed on it even more to try and make it as simple and as useful to your audience as possible, the tag phrase that came to mind was sort of that my pain is others' gain. And because my journey has been one that's been characterized by a long history of psychological and emotional pain that has been with me for as many years as I can remember and compelled me to work hard to understand myself and to understand the kind of human that I am. This is language that I put to it now that I see makes sense better in hindsight than it ever did before. Some of that was anxiety that showed up in childhood that was unrecognized and undealt with, that became acute in my early 20s and almost debilitating for a while that kind of opened up a fresh and new chapter of understanding the kind of human I am and addressing the pain that I was experiencing. And other parts of the pain are just kind of normal things that we experience in life. And I've realized over the years that my the pain itself was the pain was compelling enough itself to pursue understanding. But I've also come to realize that I just am fascinated by the human condition and fascinated by trying to understand life on planet Earth as a human. And that's kind of part of how I'm made. And that's insight that I've gained through doing just work on understanding myself, and the language I now use around that when I talk about an owner's manual concept is um understanding myself so I can deploy myself more enjoyably and more productively in the world. And so I've spent a lot of years on that. And uh now I've realized um this is kind of what I do in the world. This is a big part of what I do in the world. If I wasn't, you know, applying that mindset to myself and trying to understand myself more, I'm applying it to other people and expressing my curiosity through meaningful conversations. So that's sort of the big picture umbrella concepts around my journey and how it came to be. Um, but then fleshing it out a little bit. Um, yeah, I grew up in rural North Carolina um to great parents with a sister. Um soccer became my passion early on. Um, and I quickly shed all other sports in the interest of just pursuing soccer or football as the Europeans call it, which is more appropriate, like in my opinion, um, and pursued that with wholehearted passion and intensity. Um, in many ways from the outside looking in, I was sort of the proverbial golden child, decent looking, athletic, uh, intelligent, at least in the terms of how we use intelligent, how we measure intelligence in the standard school setting. You know, they'd throw information at me and then I could regurgitate it back on the test really well. Um, that was well behaved.

unknown 3:36

Go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 3:37

So the anxiety and the pain coming in.

SPEAKER_02 3:40

Um in hindsight, I see better now. I think I just had a generalized anxiety. Um, I I haven't ever had a more clinical diagnosis than that, but it was just an underlying sense of being an outsider. Um, maybe that's the social anxiety. I don't I don't know what it was, but I knew it was painful. We had moved several times. I had moved a lot during elementary school, and I think I never established a sense of I belong to these people in this place. And for someone like me who's I'm I'm highly sensitized to my environment and how people are doing and what's going on, um I think that was difficult for me. And and by the time I hit high school and then moved um back east after a two-year stint in just this paradise of Southern California, which was a wonderful time in middle school, I came back east to a high school that was really, really diverse ethnically and and socioeconomically, which of course is fine, but I just didn't know how to deal with it. Um, it was just like a totally new world. And so the social anxiety ramped up a lot then. And is that kind of maybe that's the word for it? I don't know. I just know I felt bad and like an outsider.

SPEAKER_01 4:49

Um and the defining moments was there a time that things clicked for you where you knew you wanted things to change.

SPEAKER_02 5:00

Yeah, I'm gonna fast forward a bunch of years though. Um it was post-high school, post-college. I played soccer through college, but by the time I got to college, I was already burnt out on soccer, but managed to squeak out through more years as a starter, and then I lost my starting spot as a senior. Um, and I realized only just recently how much I've been grieving that loss as a source of my identity. Then leave college. I wonder, I'm an English major, had just a general liberal arts English degree, and was under the illusion that life would just kind of start to stitch itself together and I'd just find my way. And apparently it doesn't work that way. You have to you have to make stuff happen. Um, so I took a job at uh a church that I had gone to in college. Um, they needed somebody doing communications, and I was like, Well, I've read a lot of books, I write really well, I'll communicate for you. And they took me on. I spent 14 years there, and it was a prolonged period of stuckness, which is actually an episode I two episodes of my podcast recently are a lot about that and the power of stuckness. And about 12 years into my 14-year tenure there, uh my wife had been gently helping me realize that I was not happy what I was doing, I wasn't happy where we were. Um, and I, through a series of random serendipitous experiences, got connected with a coach, and he began to help me work through a process of having the courage to decide if I don't want this, what then do I want? Um and the defining moment, sort of in my own little mini-hero's journey, was when my boss went on sabbatical, who was one of the senior leaders of the church, for two months. And I found myself assuming all of his responsibilities plus my own at a time when some of his responsibilities, including laying off some of my peers. Um, and in that moment, there was this call to adventure, like happens in the hero's journey. Hey, I've got to do something I don't want to do that I wasn't planning on doing. Then there was the few refusal of the call. Um, I prefer not to do that, so I just got angry and and decided not to do it. And then finally, acceptance of the call, which I realized in hindsight triggered all these events that led to me and my wife being where we are now and doing what we're doing now. Um essentially the defining moment was um, and there was an anxious edge to this for sure that other people might not experience, but we had eventually decided that we did want to be out here in Steamboat. Um we've been Steamboat Springs, Colorado, where we live now. We've been visiting my wife's family out here uh a couple times a year. And every time we go back east, I would just be dark and brooding and depressed and irritable for at least a couple weeks, and I'd finally kind of recover. Um and the defining moment after realizing we wanted to be here and we really wanted to do it was me lying on the floor in our living room before my family was up, not because it was comfortable, but because I was just gripped with terrifying fear. And I remember uh in that moment, um, just completely scared of making this decision, afraid I was gonna blow my family up. You know, what if we just go off the rails? I don't know why I thought that exactly, but it was indicative of kind of how I approached life and myself at that time. The phrase that we used to tell our boys all the time, um, if you're scared, practice being brave came to mind, then I was like, oh, petty. You're gonna tell your boys that and ask them to practice that, then here's your moment. And so in that moment, I just made the decision to be courageous, um, which taught me a lot about what courage is and what courage isn't and its value. Um, and as soon as I made that decision, okay, we're going, courage came alongside, resolve came alongside, the fear didn't go away, um, but the resolve and the courage were enough of a counterbalance to it that I was able to move forward. And we haven't looked back ever since. And that really triggered the most significant season, which has been now seven years of growth and development for me, my family, my wife, um, to the point where I can say, today, I'm doing today, what I'm doing in the world professionally, what people see that I do in the world, is my best attempt to apply my understanding about the kind of human I am and what I'm made to do in the world. Um, and it's been a blast. Um, hard days, good days, everything in between.

SPEAKER_01 9:08

Right. Yeah, that sounds great. So, how um let's talk about this personal owner's manual. I know you talk a little bit on some snippets about uh relating it to your your own personal life, but um let's let's break it down. Like what what um what is it and what are the parts and how how do we create a life of significance?

SPEAKER_02 9:29

Can I add one thought before I address that question directly that I can't think is a bridge? Is that okay? Yeah. Um, I was looking through your resources and your bio and your website, and I'm super interested in your story, by the way, and and the impact that your dad's passing had on the way that you view wellness and what a good life looks like. And um, it's really apparent to me that part of what you're helping us do is understand the human condition in a more holistic sense. It's not just being fit, however, you might measure fitness, it's not just being um content with yourself like you you realize your dad really helped you to be, is happy with who you are, that it's a more complex blend of those things, bringing them all together. And as I realize that about the work that you do and your story, I realize that this owner's manual um maybe is supplemental to that approach in the sense that as you help people, um, as you're helping people gain a physical and mental sense of well-being in the world, you're positioning them to then deploy themselves even more effectively in the world for with uh greater impact and great longevity because they're just a healthier, wholer person. And what the owner's manual can do for people like those that you serve um is then help them gain a little bit of separation from themselves as a human, sort of that executive functioning, that um third way of knowing ourselves, and say, what kind of human am I? Like what were my default settings that I brought into the world? Um, and then that's the nature part. And then what are the impacts of the nurture, our environment, family of origin, all those kinds of things? How have those influenced my expression of my default settings? Um, how much have they obscured my default settings? How much have they amplified and nourished my default settings? And always it's a combination of the two. Um, you know, you know, always nurture has obscured and amplified some of those things. And I think one of the great opportunities and challenges of adulthood is to realize number one, that those things have happened. I have some default settings that I came into the world with. I have the impact of nurture, especially through my formative years as a child. And now as an adult, I have the opportunity and the challenge to um understand the kind of human I am and what I do in the world, and to take the parts from my past that are useful to me moving forward and use them, and to take the parts that aren't as useful and adapt them or discard them. And I think uh in the 21st century, we're dealing with some new threats to our sense of place and presence and personhood in the world. Um, and I was thinking about this yesterday, I've got this metaphor about fish ponds that we're all born into a fish pond of some size, and I realize it's sort of a global fish pond crisis. You know, today we live in a global fish pond. We don't get to say I'm just in the steamboat fish pond, because by virtue of the amazing technologies of internet and those kinds of things, I have access to all of the peoples of all of the world at at my fingertips.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

Which can be an impossible thing as well. So it can be a positive, but it can also be a negative. I agree with you.

unknown 12:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:34

It's a new, it's a it at its foundation, it's neutral, but you know, because is it bad to have access to the whole world? No, I don't think so. Is it good? Well, it can be. So it depends about, you know, like so many things, how we relate to it. And I think some of the unconscious impacts upon us in the 21st century is that we don't have a sense of what kind of fish we are and what pond we live in. We have there's a greater burden now to understand what kind of fish we are and what kind of pond would we be well suited to. So sometimes we're either having to understand ourselves more so that then we can go find an existing pond to swim in, or realizing, no, I'm the kind of fish that needs to create its own pond to swim in. Um, either way, and whatever, even if there's a combo of those two, I think there's a lot of undiagnosed, unconscious psychological and emotional pain occurring because of this disorientating impact of living in a global fish pond, which is why I often spend so much time with people on this owner's manual idea. And when I work with clients or just folks that I'm in conversation with, I have very little structure to the way we use it. I just put it out there as a concept, a container within which, as we do our work together, they put insights about um new insights about the kind of human they are and create their own owner's manual. Some of them use the metaphor of a car, some of them use the metaphor of anything that floats their boat, really. Um but as I thought about, you know, what is the owner's manual? It is this nature nurture now piece. So more specifically, the nature piece and the pieces that I focus on most with my clients are your born with personality style. Um, I happen to use Myers Briggs as a key tool there. I find it corresponds really well with reality and helps us understand ourselves pretty well. Um and then I also use another assessment called the natural ability battery, which helps us understand our innate abilities, especially from a cognitive standpoint. And these are abilities that um we're born with that we can neither lose nor improve upon and then mature around the age of 14. And I find between those two, people gain a lot of really solid insight about the kind of human that they are. Um, one analogy that might work is uh that of a vehicle. So, like I'm kind of like a 78 land cruiser, and in Europe, more people might appreciate what a land cruiser is all about than here in the States. Um, I'm not fast, but I'm dependable. I'll go anywhere you need me to get, and might not I might not get there very quickly. But if you wanted me to go up that mountainside, I probably could do it. I might meander a long ways on the way up, but I will keep going. Um, my wife is sort of a Ferrari. Um, she just can process more information. She's so situationally aware. And it would be silly on the one hand for me to get on a racetrack with a Ferrari like my wife and think I'm gonna perform the same way. Um, and these understandings of nature, the nature side of things that I've gained through these personality assessments and other observations just about my life experience have helped me to understand that, hey, I'm more of a land cruiser. Okay, so live a land cruiser's life. Um, don't try to be a Ferrari on a racetrack. And so the life that I live now with very few external deadlines, with a lot of independence, with a lot of flexibility, with a lot of autonomy, is largely built upon what I've learned from understanding the nature um side of myself. Um, I love not having deadlines, like it stresses me out to get on a call at 8:45 with you, you know, in the in my time in the morning because okay, I've got to make that deadline. Now, deadlines are important, and I make deadlines, but I like to have as few as possible.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:02

So that's the nature side.

SPEAKER_01 16:05

So, Andrew, this is interesting because I think you the key to where you begin is with self-awareness, where um I think I kind of start from the now, and where do you want to be? Like, what is it that's not working for you, and what do you want to change? Where you're starting from like this is who you are, and this is why. So, where do you go from there? So that's uh I wonder if we're going the same direction, or uh, we probably meet up in the same place, but seeing it from a different point of view.

SPEAKER_02 16:36

The reason I the reason I find, yeah, no, I think they're par they're parallel and or converging paths. Um, the reason I end up spending so much time on the nature self-awareness bit is because I find so many people lack it. Um, they don't know what kind of human they are. And for example, they're driving themselves to trying to drive themselves like a Ferrari when they're not made that way. And it's it's leading to a lot of um residual collateral damage. So they're un and I live this for much of my life, which is why it's especially important to me because um when I'm, you know, if I'm a land cruiser trying to perform like a Ferrari on a racetrack, my engine's gonna burn up, my tires are gonna get bald, I'm never gonna perform as well as the Ferrari, so I'm always having the sense of less than around the people that I'm with. Um, and but with greater levels of self-awareness, I can go, oh, I'm a land cruiser. No, I drive on mountain roads and I do that really well. If that Ferrari came out to the mountain roads, they'd have a really rough time. That's not to judge the Ferrari versus the Land Cruiser, simply to say, um, I'm not a Ferrari, so I'm gonna go be the Land Cruiser to the best of my ability. And even though the life that my wife and I have created over the past seven years has in some ways been a hundred thousand times more stressful because of the trend nature of the transition, we've never for one nanosecond look back because the stress that we've chosen we've created is stress that we've chosen in pursuit of the lives that we believe we were made to live. And I'm I'm living as a Land Cruiser right now, and she's living as a Ferrari in real in the real estate world and killing it. I would be a mess trying to do what she's doing in the real estate world right now. So I find often often people just don't understand who they are. So it's like, if I don't know who I am, how can I then become can become who I can be? And many of us, and this brings up the nurture side, learned in childhood that certain kinds of professions or ways of living were acceptable and others weren't. Certain ones were respectable and others weren't. And so maybe then you followed the four-year collegiate degree and got a postgrad degree based upon that kind of thing. But at heart, you've always known I'm sort of an artist. But you live 25 years of your professional life as an adult in the accountant's seat. Um, and you know, midlife is a thing, whether or not you have a career blow-up or not. But I think many people have these blowups in midlife because they've been driving themselves to use the metaphor again, like a Ferrari when in fact they're a land cruiser, and suddenly the pain and the cognitive dissonance of that blows things up.

SPEAKER_01 19:01

Yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned the midlife, because uh I've been having this conversation with quite a few of my clients now, where I really feel because we're living longer lives, that um this idea of just having one career for a lifetime no longer suits us. And I don't know if people are just necessarily getting burnt out or it was never the career for them, or if they've just changed, if they've grown into something else, or maybe there's another aspect of themselves, a creative side that they now want to pursue. They've done this thing and now they want to do something new, a new challenge. And it isn't a crisis. It's just they're ready for the next step, the next chapter, you know, and um and that's okay. And we going forward, we're all going to have two or three different careers, and and that's okay. And it should be that way, and it's normal, and um that sort of thing. And so I really see where the self-awareness comes in because I work a lot with EFT hacking and that sort of thing, and figuring out your core beliefs, and that's a lot of the nurture, but I don't think I talk about the nature very much. It's really like, you know, what are your core beliefs that, you know, what's holding you back, and let's find a way to, you know, give you the life that you want and the feelings that you want and uh the emotions and not being triggered by stress and that sort of thing. But I think that self-awareness really keeps you grounded, and maybe that's uh what a great place to start, right?

SPEAKER_02 20:25

Well, and that's that's again where what you and I are doing is overlapping. We're just sort of barking up the same tree from different sides. Um, and that's because often I've found we mistake personal pain, emotional pain, challenges in life as a judgment, as a uh as an indicator that we're inadequate in some ways, when in fact, sometimes it's evidence that you're trying to be a Ferrari when you're a land cruiser. Like innately, you're not made well for what you're trying to do. And you could continue to try to do that, but it's going to continue to contribute to a sense of inadequacy. You're going to be more fatigued than others who are more gifted for that kind of work. And so much of the self-awareness piece can go, oh, well, that's why I get irritated when I have to spend hours on the phone. I am truly an introvert and it robs me of the ability to have alone time. It's not that I'm an angry, irritable person merely, even though I may be that. And so often it helps people just kind of clear the decks and go, oh, much of what I've been attributing to myself in a with a tone of judgment is just a neutral observation about myself that I'm more of an introvert than extrovert. And I've been trying to operate for 30 years as an extrovert. And that is really problematic, actually. Um, a lot of people in the corporate world, and in the US, I don't know how it is where you guys are, but there is a prevailing uh, there's a prevailing higher estimation, in my opinion, of extroversion than introversion as a way of being in the world. And when I work, I'm an introvert, and when I work with introverts, I'm quick to say, look, you need to realize introversion is not a disease to be gotten over. You don't need to be cured because I think introverts genu generally believe that it is something to be gotten over. But some of the most powerful intro innovations in the world, some of the most powerful leaders in the world have been introverts.

SPEAKER_01 22:14

Absolutely. I have this conversation a lot, just having children and having lots of friends with children who all have some aspect of a learning disability or a dyslexia or something like that, or ADHD, and how a lot of these kids are actually quite gifted. And the process that our schools and our education systems and just society in general just don't sort of allow for the freedom of free thinking and thinking in a different way. And so we that, you know, they don't test as well because they're thinking in a completely different way. And then when they get out into the world, they create these great innovations and great art and you know, some of the great writers and things like that. This creative energy, we don't sort of have a place for it. And so I think a lot of these people grow up feeling like there's something wrong or they don't fit in, that sort of thing. Um and if it's just they need to know that this is who I am, and I'm gonna do something great in life. And, you know, I've got 10 million great ideas and I'm gonna do it. And instead of feeling like, why can't I be like everybody else? You know?

SPEAKER_02 23:22

Um that's a great point.

SPEAKER_01 23:26

Yeah. Um, do you have an example of someone that you've worked with um where this um idea of the owner's manual and um building this life of significance, um, you were able to sort of switch or reframe something for them?

SPEAKER_02 23:41

Yeah, this is timely because um the person that I'm going to talk about is actually someone who I'm hoping to be having my podcast shortly. Because as we were winding up his his our partnership together, I realized he had checked every single box in terms of creating a more powerful owner's manual just in the course of doing the work together. I I had not been trying to like make sure he checked all those boxes. That's not my agenda. I'm not trying to force an owner's manual on someone to degrees they don't need it, but just in the course of our work, I realized he had done all of these things. So um he had been in a pattern of um he's in a specific kind of role in a specific industry and had found himself in a pattern of losing jobs. He's a trustworthy guy, he shows up on time, he does good work, but he kept losing jobs. And he and I encountered one another after losing a job by I think last July-ish. So, you know, the pandemic was just really setting in around the world, and he just lost his job, and he and his family just moved up here to Steamboat, which was a steam uh a dream move for them, and so suddenly, boom, crisis. And rather than this time just immediately seeking employment in the ways that he had in the past in an organizational setting, he decided to pause and take a little bit different approach because of this pattern of repeated um terminations. And that's when he and I got connected. And we worked on the nature part. We used Myers Briggs, we didn't use Natural Ability Battery to help him gain a more solid sense of what he's bringing into the world, why some environments and some kinds of jobs have really helped him be in the zone, and why other moments and other jobs have left him feeling depleted and frustrated and aggravated. One of the things, for example, that he came up with by looking at the nature side of things was realizing that he likes the big picture and the vision and having access to uh influencing the big picture and the vision. And all of his jobs to that point had left him too distanced from the ability to influence the big picture, and it led to a chronic sense of dissatisfaction. Now, he could he couldn't not pursue being involved in the big picture, so he had created opportunities within his jobs to be involved anyway without getting paid anymore or having any advancement. He couldn't not do that. Um, but eventually, you know, that wasn't what they hired him for, and he would be let go from these jobs. Um, so realizing that he he realized I want to be actually in smaller settings where I do have my hand on the rudder, so to speak, of where the organization is going and how they're doing it. On the nurture side of things, um he learned uh that he had assumptions about what responsible versus irresponsible uh um roles as a spouse and a dad looked like. And they were just hardwired. He just they were there, they had always been there, and he had been operating with this idea that having lost a job, if he didn't go and get a job and provide in a certain way and spend 40 plus hours working, then by some definition he had inherited long ago, he was being, quote, irresponsible. When he realized that that had been given to him and not something that he had formulated on his own, he began to challenge that assumption. And in challenging that assumption, um, began to realize wait a second, you know, I I am actually responsible and I do take good care of my family. And and maybe I can go about that in a different way than I have before, which then set him on a path to the pivotal moment in my perspective. And he'll have to say on the podcast interview whether or not it was for him, I think it was, where I encouraged him to tune into his inner voice. What was his inner voice telling him about the next step? And I think in the modern world, we lose our inner voice often in amidst the clamor of all of the other voices, especially through social media and news cycles, telling us what we ought to pay attention to. And often it's not our inner voice. Um, and I remember walking down by the river, we stopped walking, and I said, What is your inner voice telling you? And he said, I want to do my own thing. Um, and that acknowledgement was key. And this is more of the now piece that we haven't talked much about yet. So he's gone through some nature and some nurture, and there were many other moments to his process. Um, he said, I want to do my own thing. And I said, Well, how willing are you to begin doing that? He said, I don't know. I said, Look, courage is not out there. The courage that you need in this moment to begin doing your own thing is right here, right now. All you have to do is decide to use it. What do you want to do? And he said, I'm gonna do that. And I mean, the next couple months of our partnership are just kind of like him figuring out who he wanted to work with, and oh, he's got a gig, and now he's this independent contractor doing great marketing work, and um, so that's where this owner's manual piece just unlocks so much capacity um that we're not aware of when we're locked into a very narrow mindset about in his case, for example, what it's like to be responsible versus irresponsible. So that's a very recent example, and I was really thrilled for him.

SPEAKER_01 28:48

Yeah, no, that's that is really great. Um, what are some tips that you would give to our listeners? Um, one or two tips that they could maybe start right away um thinking about or working with.

SPEAKER_02 29:01

I love this question. Uh, and as I chewed on it before we got on the call, I realized, gosh, what would if I wasn't able to work some with someone personally on an owner's man, what would I say? And the three things they came up with were um cultivate an owner's mindset. Um learn to see yourself as a resource that you have the ability to uh drive and to know, much like if you had walked onto uh a car lot. Do they do that in Europe? Are there car lots and you go buy a car?

SPEAKER_01 29:33

I have no idea what they call it.

SPEAKER_02 29:36

Anyway, we Yankees, that's what that's some of what we do. Um, you know, develop a mindset about yourself as if you had just met yourself and you were learning about what kind of human this was, much like you would if you just bought a new car and wanted to learn about um schedules and maintenance and ideal operating conditions and adverse operating conditions, so that you don't, for example, drive a 78 Land Cruiser off a lot and try to drive it on a racetrack like a Ferrari and burn it up. Um, so cultivate an owner's mindset. What kind of human am I? The tools that I've mentioned are ways that can help you do that, but you can also do that simply by training yourself to have that distance and to observe yourself in life, that executive functioning. Um the other would be monitor your energy as you cultivate this owner's mindset and learn to observe yourself as you move through life. Watch when your energy goes way up, watch when your energy energy goes way down, and really specifically jot down what is happening in those moments. In my previous chapter of my life, when my energy was going through the roof, it was when I was having conversations like this with peers and subordinates and other colleagues. But those are brief moments in my otherwise, and amidst all the other duties that I had to do. Um, and then by definition or by comparison, after I had those conversations, I go back to my real work and just the air would just be knocked out of me. So that's one example of how I began to realize these kinds of conversations, I don't know how I'm gonna do that exactly, but I need to have a lot more of these. Um that's something I learned from monitoring my energy. Um, it's sort of like a master key to understanding yourself better, enjoying yourself more, and building a life of significance. If you were to do nothing else than monitor your energy, there would be a whole lot because you're getting your innate abilities, you're getting the nature side, you're getting your nurture side, you're getting your now piece, your value, which we haven't talked about much, which is values, opportunities, obligations, um, experience, all those things are part of the package that you are now that you can then deploy in the future more enjoyably and more productively. And then finally, and key key here is take action on your insights. You've got to do something with what you see and what you learn. Um my three-part formula for human change is insight plus action equals transformation. It's as simple as that, even though it can be terribly difficult actually to apply. Um, so make sure no matter what, no matter what you learn about yourself, find one thing you can do with it. It doesn't have to be a big thing, but just find one thing you can do with it today, not tomorrow. Um so that that insight can um create transformation. Without action, there's no transformation ultimately.

unknown 32:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:15

Those are three tips I'd offer if I had to offer three.

SPEAKER_01 32:17

Yeah. No, I think that's great. Thank you so much. So, Andrew, how can people get in touch with you if um if this really resonates with them, if they've got questions or want to work with you? Uh, where can they find you?

SPEAKER_02 32:29

Uh Facebook and Instagram at andrew pettycoach. Um, my website is digdeepwhenbig.com. Uh, my podcast website is andrewpetty is dying.com, and that podcast is available on all the major platforms that you might like to use to listen to podcasts. Um so yeah, those are the main places.

SPEAKER_01 32:47

Great. All right, well, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure. I feel like you've got hours. But um that was really lovely. And um, as always, uh I will see you guys next week, and you can always find me at Meginson Method on all social media. Thank you.