How to Work Less And Live More – Sam Kabert
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10/04/2021
Show Notes:
If you’ve ever thought that there are not enough hours in a day to get everything done at work, it might be time to hire a virtual assistant. Even if you do manage to stay on top of your tasks but can’t find any free time for yourself, you should consider outsourcing. How can VAs help? You’ll get to hear more about it from our today’s guest Sam Kabert.
Sam is the Founder & CEO of SwagWorx & Cloneyourself where his mission is to help people work less and live more. Also a fellow podcast, Sam’s built his brand through content creation, networking, and giving back. At the age of 31, he was named to Silicon Valley’s 40 Under 40 List.
Sam helps business owners scale by building and managing a remote team of virtual assistants on their behalf. Hiring VAs has become incredibly popular during the past few years and it’s pretty obvious why. They allow you to improve your performance, increase productivity, and spend less money. But the most valuable benefit of working with VAs is that they give you your life back.
Sam is a firm believer that work is only a component of life and he’s on a mission to help entrepreneurs achieve soul-life balance. Interested what that is? Tune into this episode to find out!
In this episode of the Think Business With Tyler podcast, we talk about the term work-life balance and whether we should reframe it and call it differently. How to work with virtual assistants more successfully and why it’s better to do a time audit before outsourcing tasks. And lastly, we get into the importance of mental health and why work should come second.
Guest-At-A-Glance
💡 Name: Sam Kabert
💡 What he does: Sam is the Founder & CEO of SwagWorx & Cloneyourself.
💡 Noteworthy: Sam was listed on Silicon Valley’s 40 Under 40 List at the age of 31. His mission is to reframe the way we look at our lives as it relates to work and focus on a soul-life balance approach.
💡 Key Quote: “The invitation here is a reframe of soul-life balance, where we look at work as a component of life, and we put feeding your soul first. And like I said at the beginning, soul can mean whatever it means to you.”
💡 Where to find Sam: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook
Key Insights
Work is a component of life. There’s a lot of talk around work-life balance and how important it is for our mental health. Sam’s a firm believer that work is a component of life and that our lives are so much more than just work. Rather than talking about work-life balance, he reframes it and focuses on soul-life balance. His latest book will center around exactly that. “The main thing I’m really focused on right now is writing my fourth book, this one’s all centered around soul life balance, rather than work-life balance, which is just a reframe, to realize that work is a component of life. And that whatever soul means to you, whether you’re religious, you’re spiritual, agnostic, whatever it is, could be as simple as walking your neighborhood with your shoes off and connecting with Earth, whatever it is, we need to put that first. Our mental health is the most important, and there’s just too much of an emphasis on work.”
Virtual assistants are people too and you should treat them as regular employees. Sam talks about the mindset shift that needs to happen when it comes to how we look at VAs. They’re not almighty and they’re certainly not robots. The key is to build relationships with them, not throw tasks at them. “If we start to look at them as if they were employees, and we slow down, then we don’t have these unrealistic expectations. And we start to realize, Oh, well, maybe, since we know and we accept that there are growing pains with employees, maybe we’re going to be okay, that there might be as much or even more Growing Pains with VAs but we’re in it for the long haul. And we’re gonna make this work.”
We should put self-care first, work second. Workaholism is an addiction. You get caught up in the vortex of success and the feeling it gives you and you want to experience it again and again and again. Sam believes that not everything should revolve around work, but that it should be the other way around. We need to put work as a category underneath life. “Work-life balance, this whole thing, it’s a distraction. […] How does that make any sense at all? Mone of it makes any sense. So the invitation here is a reframe of soul life balance, where we look at work as a component of life, and we put feeding your soul first.”
Figure out where you spend your time to improve your mental state. One of the ways to achieve a better soul-life balance is to work on awareness. Become aware of how you spend your time. Once you figure it out, you’ll be able to outsource tasks accordingly. “Most business owners or business people still though, if you ask them where they spend their time, they really don’t know. So to do an exercise like this, it’s not fun, no one enjoys it. But then the day, when you look back at the data, you’re able to see where you spend your time. And not only that, I have more worksheets that come after that where you can plug those tasks and projects into a matrix that really shows you which of those tasks and projects require your specific skill sets and which ones don’t.”
Top Quotes
[03:02] “Flow is a real thing and I’m in this fellowship and mastermind called Fit for service and actually just yesterday, we had a call with coaches. And my question for them was about how to recover from a crash of being in flow. And they had a really good reframe where they’re talking about how to get in flow. And I’ll see if I remember this, but there’s four stages of being in flow. ”
[10:38] “I like to joke I did what all great entrepreneurs do that night, I ordered a large pizza and got a six-pack of beer. And I said I’m not going to bed till I figured this out and made a lot of phone calls. And it was that night that I made the conscious decision that I was doing pretty well with working with VA. So I’m going to switch my business model and only work with virtual assistants for the swag business. And that’s going to be it.”
[12:58] “There’s a lot of growing pains in the process. And to be more direct your question about standard operating procedures and slps and building out efficiencies and processes, I didn’t do any of that. My whole thing was if my employees could do this and build out slps for our business, why can’t VAs and I think one of the biggest mindset shifts to make when working with VAs is to realize that virtual assistants are people too, they’re not magical elves..”
[16:35] “If we have simple mindset shifts where we start to realize that, then we begin to slow down, and then yes, it is easier, and it is less expensive. But we need to have those mindset shifts.”
[26:54] “I’m a big fan of breathwork. I’m serious, though. I do breathwork. Most days I did 10 days straight. Then I took yesterday off. And then this morning, I only did like five minutes of breathwork. But I’ll do breathwork for anywhere between 15 to 45 minutes in the morning. […] And it just gets you in this meditative state that’s so much more powerful for me than just simply meditating.”
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