How Do Entrepreneurs Achieve Success and Happiness? – Gv Freeman

In this episode, Gv Freeman and I chat about the importance of entrepreneur self-care and well-being. How to develop a healthier relationship with your business, and why it’s vital for living a happy and successful life.

The entrepreneurial journey is a journey of ups and downs. And after a while, it can get overwhelming and extremely challenging. That’s why it’s of utmost importance to find time for self-care before you burn out completely. Our guest today will tell you all about it!

Gv Freeman is a Self-Awareness Coach for Entrepreneurs & Executives. For over 20 years, he helped entrepreneurs launch and grow their companies. In parallel, for the past 15 years, he was doing his own deep inner work. Now, he teaches other entrepreneurs how to be both successful and happy at the same time. Other than that, Gv is a psychedelic and integration guide who works with clients who have suffered severe trauma or seek clarity in life. He also launched Founders Thriving, which is a community of entrepreneurs committed to running a business and living a conscious life.

According to Gv, mental health is everything, especially for entrepreneurs. That’s why it’s essential to put more focus on founder self-care and well-being.

In this episode of the Think Business with Tyler podcast, we chat about the importance of finding time for self-care as an entrepreneur, why your happiness depends solely on the stories you tell yourself, how to develop a healthier relationship with your business, and why spirituality is vital for a happy and successful life.

If you want to learn how to take care of yourself more while building a business, tune into this episode to hear some useful tips!

Guest-At-A-Glance

 

💡 Name: Gv Freeman

💡 What he does: Gv is a Self-Awareness Coach for Entrepreneurs & Executives.

💡 Noteworthy: He’s also a psycho-spiritual guide with over 20 years of experience living at the intersection of entrepreneurship, mental health, and psychedelics.

💡 Key Quote: “When we can become more knowledgeable about ourself, and when we can get more deeply in touch with who we are as a human being, the need or the requirements to becoming successful don’t go away, they just decrease. So, I need less to be successful. The less I need, the happier I become.”

💡 Where to find Gv: LinkedIn

Key Insights

 

Find time for self-care. One of the most common mistakes entrepreneurs make is that they rarely find time for anything besides work. But for your business to thrive, you need to take care of yourself first. Not only do you need to nurture your business, but you also need to nurture your health. That’s your best bet for success.

Gv shares his experience, “Without all of the therapy and yoga and meditation and all of that stuff, I would have probably been going crazy. Not the clinical way to address that but I think that a lot of entrepreneurs understand that. That feeling of being completely helpless and out of control, like when the world is just moving way too fast for you and you can’t seem to catch up. My antidote for that, building companies and building products was to focus on self-care.”

Your happiness depends on the stories you tell yourself. Perspective is everything in life. Whether it’s in business or in personal life, a small perspective shift can change everything for you. That’s why self-awareness is so important; if you’re aware of the stories you’re telling yourself, you have a better chance of seeing the bigger picture.

Gv says we need to be mindful of the stories we tell ourselves. ”We create a relationship with our business. Frankly, we create a codependent relationship with our business to the point where we think that our business is demanding that we work 60 or 70 hours a week. We think that our business is demanding that we get up on Sunday mornings and answer support tickets. And those are all stories that we’re telling.”

Personify your business. When it comes to developing a healthy relationship with your business, practice makes perfect. Nothing can change overnight, so be prepared to practice until you get it right. One of the best exercises that Gv recommends is to personify your business.

He explains, “Name your business, don’t call it the name of the company name, give it a person’s name, give it a human name, and then say, ‘How does this business make me feel?’ […] Most of the time, the voice in our head is pretty angry. It’s pretty negative. And if that was personified as a person we would never want to hang out with that person. Same thing with your business. Imagine your business as a person. Would you want to hang out with them outside of work? Are they kind to you? Do they say nice things about you? Do they validate you?”

The key to becoming successful and happy is developing a spiritual life. Spirituality is often mistaken for religion. But spirituality is more of individual practice focused on personal peace and purpose. Gv says that entrepreneurs can benefit tremendously from spirituality. According to him, it’s the one key to a happy and successful life.

He says, “The one key to becoming successful and happy at the same time is developing a spiritual life. And I want to be really really clear that spirituality is not the same as religion. And my personal definition of spirituality is simply self-knowledge, understanding the self. We know that spiritual beings are 80% less likely to become addicted. They’re 60% likely to take their own lives and spiritual beings have more grit, resilience, perseverance, sense of community, and creativity.”

Top Quotes

 

“I started to look at this and what I realize is that for every eight hours in a day, if I spent two hours in self-care whether that was therapy or yoga or meditation or just eating a healthy meal or taking a walk, spending quiet time with friends or family, that 80/20 rule got me through 10 years of really, really strenuous entrepreneurship.”

“The pain has to exceed the pleasure. Usually, people hit a breaking point of some kind, where they’re like, ‘Wow, my life is out of control.’ Because what we find most of the time it’s like the old analogy or the old story with the frog that’s hanging out in the pot of cool water and you slowly turn up the heat and slowly turn up the heat and we begin to normalize our pain and our suffering and before we know it, our bodies don’t work anymore.”

“As entrepreneurs, we tend to say, I am successful if my business is successful, and thereby if my business fails, I am a failure. We put up a lot of our self-worth in the financial and career buckets.”

“When we get to start learning about how we function in the world, we usually have feelings, and we don’t often know how to deal very well with our feelings. We’re not really taught how to do that very often as children and especially as entrepreneurs.”

“When we can become more knowledgeable about ourself, and when we can get more deeply in touch with who we are as a human being, the need or the requirements to becoming successful don’t go away, they just decrease. So I need less to be successful. The less I need, the happier I become. What we try and do as Americans or Westerners, in general, is we continue trying to be happy getting more, getting more money, getting more experiences getting more property, getting more customers. The less I need, the happier I will become.”

“When we can find happiness from the inside out, we do not have to stitch together outside things anymore to be happy. And here is a process that people go through where you come in and you get 100% of your happiness from the outside. And then as you start to learn about yourself, maybe 10% of your happiness comes from the inside and 90% comes from the outside and you just slowly begin to shift from external to internal happiness because when you can make that shift we have an unlimited amount of happiness that comes from the inside out. We just have to find it.”

Links

Gv Freeman Website

Founders Thriving Website