Business and creativity can become like a giant bowl of spaghetti. A tangled mess of awesome but impossible to tame. All of the ingredients for delicious are in there but every day is fraught with problems because no processes are in place.

Instead of peaceful pathways leading to predictable results, there’s a constant run round the same mountains, increasingly eating your time and hampering your creative flow.

But creative natured entrepreneurs often prefer the chase. They love the starts, not the stays. The making, not the maintaining.

But a business is not built on excitement. However much the sales pages sell you on passion, passion is not enough to build your business on. There has to be structure, however simple, and process, however rudimentary.

Once the pathways are in place, the streams can run freely, and results can be expected today, tomorrow and for as long as the machinery of production is in place…

https://davidleemartin.com/peace-through-process/

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00:00:02.100]
A systems is not my. Not my favourite thing to think about organising stuff is just that that’s not my personality. And I guess that’s why this has become a subject of great interest to me and one that I kind of swing round the mountain quite often to revisit and either relearn if I’ve not learnt it the first time around or actually build up on and move towards a much more efficient lifestyle. And for me, it’s not just all about production. It’s not just all about like multitasking and doing more.

00:00:49.930]
Oftentimes it’s actually wanting to do better. What I want to do, the things that I do better and more efficiently so I can free up bandwidth like mental bandwidth, largely emotional bandwidth, because everything takes energy. In order to that, I can then give that same energy and thought to other things and to expanding, into learning, into growing instead of just the kind of maintenance of something. And the problem is, you know, if we don’t put habits and systems in place, things are left way too much to chance and we end up having to make the same decisions again and again and again.

00:01:38.410]
Again, this kind of proverbial mountain that we go round, we we often many times, particularly in business, but in life as well. There are lots of activities that we undertake that we do either on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. And having systems in place can make those activities a great deal more seamless and remove friction. Decisions are always, always caused friction decisions that we have to make if we are the one needing to make those decisions each and every time can be a real bottled bottleneck.

00:02:19.550]
A system frees you from that and a system and a process whereby you’ve made the decision once and then, you know, you document you granularly that you document that, and then that becomes your playbook. And we can do that in so many areas and just remove friction because like life can be very sandpapering. Life can be full of a can be like walking through thick mud. Sometimes we’ve had a lot of rain here and things. We have very clay like soil where I live and I like walking through sometimes can be quite an interesting challenge.

00:03:07.600]
And so so really, you know, I just want to encourage you today if you are in business, but at the same time, this does apply to so many activities we undertake on a day to day basis just in our personal life, because administrating a home, administrating all of the different responsibilities that we carry, everything requires energy. And sometimes we fail to put a process in place. We fail to even recognise that a either a process is needed or that we ourselves are already kind of following a process of sorts in most of the activities we undertake.

00:03:53.360]
Once we begin to get that system down and to document it, we can get someone else to do it for us. I’m a big advocate and a big believer in not doing everything yourself. If you are in business and I’m thinking entrepreneurial business, I’ve not really ever had a brick and mortar type business. No big concern with like 60 employees or something like that as just me and my laptop, a few kind of virtual helpers, writers, creatives, designers, whatever.

00:04:34.880]
My my business is actually very, very simple. But at one time I was doing every part. I mean, it literally was like, what do they call it? The chief cook and bottle washer of my business. And slowly I’ve moved around and moved away from that kind of overburdened model and understood that actually in order to scale and in order to instead of me working for my business, my business, working for me, it really requires like stepping into a different mindset and a different level of trust.

00:05:18.410]
Trust really is a big, big thing in business. I think oftentimes the difficulty of stepping over that line of like letting go and relinquishing control of aspects of your your kind of process, you’re relinquishing control of that to someone else to fulfil actually takes a level of trust. Oftentimes we are it’s actually much easier to just stay with the comfortable familiarity of what you’ve always done. But the problem is what you’ve always done is not necessarily what you can then hand on and have someone else do for you.

00:06:05.600]
It’s it’s based around your own kind of you know you know it all in here. You’ve got the playbook in your head somewhere, but it’s never actually been put down. So you can hand that road map to someone else and say, I seek to do that in my business. I seek to look at each of the different components that make up, say, for example, my publishing business or the running of other aspects of my kind of online coaching and look for where I can apply systems, look for where I can apply processes that will extract me from being the necessary cog in that machine.

00:06:51.740]
And as you do, instead of big, instead of just kind of being an entrepreneur who has created their own job, you can kind of step back and become a business owner who is managing the business and managing the the the expansion and the scale and scope of that business. I’ve certainly found that it’s something that I have to come back around to again and again. I have to it’s like peeling an onion. I think I’ve got it. And then I discover, like holes.

00:07:36.030]
There’s a hole in my bucket. Delisa and the system leaks. And when a system leaks, it can break down. I mean, there’s the second law of thermodynamics, which is like it really does. It really is a big problem for evolutionists. Okay. On the scientific side of things. But the second law of thermodynamics works all the time in this natural world. Yeah. If a system is left without any injection of energy or design, it will naturally break down.

00:08:11.030]
You know, time does not turn an amoeba into a stallion. Like, it just doesn’t happen that this stallion may break down and become a pile of goo. Yeah, it’s it works in the opposite direction. Yeah. Time breaks things down. If energy and design are not infused into that system, it’s the same with the processes that we create in our business. They need to be certain. Certainly there’s there’s a huge infusion of energy and thought and consideration goes in up front, which is why many people never even kind of apply the.

00:08:52.420]
Herself to that they’re so busy doing doing the work that they failed to actually document the work that they do so someone else can do it on their behalf. And secondly, once we’ve got the systems in place and this is where I certainly fall down, is that we don’t we don’t bind ourselves to that system and do what is necessary to infuse whatever energy and focus is required to make sure everything goes into that system and is kind of monitored as it goes through the system, whatever system you’ve you’ve created.

00:09:34.600]
The thing is, though, with a good system, like I say, you remove friction and a very, very efficient system requires little energy to keep the wheels moving. And this is really my aim is to create put systems and processes in place for safer like my publishing business, my online training and coaching etc is to look and think how can I put efficient systems in place that can really virtually run without my input. Now, obviously it takes oversight, but instead of me kind of pushing a wheelbarrow up to the top of the hill every day, I want to install an elevator at at the on the ground floor so we can just step in and go right to the peak.

00:10:33.040]
And I think that, you know, these these systems, what I wrote about today, I titled Peace Through Process. And process really can give us a tremendous sense of peace and can open up a much broader scope for us to grow and expand and give consideration to things other than just the daily grind of trying to keep all the wheels moving. I believe that God has great things for you. I believe that God has a I mean, I want to some of my favourite scriptures, some of the I mean, there are many I’ve got many, many favourite scriptures.

00:11:24.980]
But my I just love the scriptures in Hebrews four, where it talks about their therefore remains a rest for the people of God and that the people of God have a have the ability to receive that, to receive wisdom, to know how to cease from their own works and enter into a rest of faith. And I think that wisdom, part of that wisdom, part of that rest is not that we just sit under a tree singing Kumbaya until Jesus comes back, but that we actually apply ourselves with kind of divine direction and wisdom, how to build our lives, how to build our businesses, how to build our marriages, children, you know, and to have things in place that support and undergird the goals and desires that we carry in our heart instead of pulling against them.

00:12:28.820]
We want things that actually work with us and push in the direction that we want to go, rather than a bunch of kind of uncertainties that we’re carrying like boulders tied to our back. And so I just really wanted to kind of weigh in and just encourage you. I mean, even in your personal life, you know, I’m beginning to put habits and systems in place for the building of your spirit life, for the building of your emotional life.

00:13:05.420]
All of these things are the same thing, finding peace through process, having a certain time every day that you spend with Jesus, having a certain kind of programme that you follow to try and stay fit and exercise. And these things don’t have to be some kind of grand undertaking. Very, very. But there’s a very popular book called Atomic Habits that talks about like how just very, very small habits can lead to incredibly powerful and life changing results.

00:13:47.210]
I believe that. I believe that because small habits build upon small habits until they actually develop into a lifestyle. And whereas at one time, you know, we would take our habits were to helping us take just one or two steps forward toward the desire of our heart. Pretty soon those habits have a tendency when we exercise them to get bigger and stronger and more more powerful and can lift us further. We can we can go further with them. And we find that what began as a very small change over time becomes a very kind of notable, remarkable, dramatic kind of pillar in our lives, which carry a lot of the weight that maybe we’re dragging right now.

00:14:44.540]
So, yeah, you go ahead, take take from this what you want, whether it’s whether it’s for your personal life, whether it’s for your business life, whether it’s for your spiritual life, infusing energy in and giving consideration to how you can kind of be very systematic in the way you approach things. So you remove the friction of decision. It’s just what you do, I pray each day I rise at a certain time and I pray. It’s just what I do.

00:15:28.310]
And so, yeah, just apply this in your sphere, apply this in your life in whatever way you deem it to be useful. Hey, God bless you. Have a great day. And I look forward to seeing you next week. Well, thanks for listening. Hopefully it’s been an encouragement to you today, if you want to connect any further, you can do so through my website at Davidleemartin.com. Have a great day.