[00:00:02] Speaker A: Ramping up your business. The time is near. You've given it hard, now get it in gear. It's Passage to Profit with Richard and Elizabeth Gearhart.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: I'm Richard Gearhart, founder of Gearhart Law, a full service intellectual property law firm specializing in patents, trademarks and copyrights.
[00:00:20] Speaker C: And I'm Elizabeth Gearhart, not an attorney, but I do marketing for Gearhart Law and I have my own startups and podcasts.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Welcome to Passage to Profit the Road to Entrepreneurship, where we talk with entrepreneurs and celebrities who tell their stories about.
[00:00:33] Speaker D: Their businesses and their solutions.
[00:00:36] Speaker C: I am so excited to get to our next two guests. Really. The next one we're going to talk to is ryan Sobel with LifeFlow, Cutting Edge Software and coaching rooted in neuroscience. So welcome, Ryan, please tell us everything, what you're doing. Sure.
[00:00:50] Speaker E: So I started this company at the beginning of 2023, and prior to that I was running two different businesses and then managing a rental property. That was a huge handful. I was running a financial planning business, a different software startup, and then also my. My rental property. And I felt like I was being pulled in all these different directions. And I went to my business partner and said, hey, I feel like there's so much on my plate right now. I'm having a hard time managing all these different things. Could we stop working on the financial planning software and instead build something, a life management tool that I can use to manage all these. These different things. And over the last two years, we've been building and creating and developing that. It's now named LifeFlow and it basically is how to be in a flow state continuously, even in the face of tons of different stuff pulling your attention. Multiple businesses, lots of stuff like that. And so we can work on that now pretty actively.
[00:01:36] Speaker D: So do you plug something into your brain that controls your brain patterns? Is that how you do this? I mean, please tell us more because it sounds like you found the secret to life here.
[00:01:46] Speaker E: Not quite. You know, maybe at some point you might be able to do that. But the biggest thing in being in flow state one is to manage cognitive load, and most people are doing a very poor job of managing that. And cognitive load is effectively how much stuff is being kept on a person's short term memory. That's anything from to do list items, commitments, emotions, thoughts, feelings. Brian was talking earlier about the importance of meditation and journaling and being present. That's kind of been a sort of reoccurring theme. And Elizabeth, you were even talking about how sometimes you get the best ideas that you have when you have the least going on in your life. Because when a person's cognitive load drops significantly, their ability to produce and the creativity goes through the roof. And the most important thing somebody can do to manage cognitive load is to immediately record stuff out somewhere outside their head. Basically continuous brain dumping. And if anyone's ever read David Allen's Getting Things Done, he's huge on this. Every single thing that comes in your head goes into a trusted system somewhere else because the amount of energy that it consumes, having that kind of stuff on a person's mind can be massive. So that would be the first thing. The second one is organizing neurotransmitters correctly. Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and making sure that those are lined up correctly. And that can be done through managing our goals, for example, external circumstances. It's also really important that the task that we're working on is at the appropriate level of challenge to skill amount that the person has the challenge skills, balance. If something's too easy, we tend to get bored and not be in a flow state. It's too hard, we tend to get overwhelmed. So piecing all that together has been the core of the project.
[00:03:15] Speaker D: Wow, those are great insights. And just going back to cognitive overload, I really believe that there's a lot of truth in that because as, as my business has matured, I continually look for things to delegate because I find that the less I have on my mind, especially taking up mental space for the more trivial stuff, the better I can focus on the more important stuff and the more energy I have to work on things that are going to move the business forward. So how do you do that? I mean, how do you do that with software? Are you capturing the ideas or how does that work?
[00:03:53] Speaker E: Yeah, so a lot of it is capturing ideas. It's basically constant brain dumping. So if you had a thought, for example, Richard, hey, maybe I should delegate this task to this person before it's even delegated. That was an idea or a thought. It needs to go somewhere into a trusted system, delegate this task to this person, and then you want to, ideally would want to review that. When you're in a flow state that's conducive to deciding how to best manage that task, very rarely is right away the best time to do it. And a lot of times people are jumping from this stimulus to that stimulus. This email came in to this person, walked in my door. And being an. If you have a lot of things you might want to delegate, getting those all organized and doing that at the same time, delegate this to John, this to Eric, this to Sally. Whatever it is, can. Can help a lot.
[00:04:34] Speaker C: And that goes to your other point a little bit. I think that if you delegate something to someone and they're not doing the task, I think it's typically because it's over their head, they don't know how to do it. So how do you find the right person?
[00:04:46] Speaker E: That can be challenging. One thing that has helped tremendously is I have a virtual assistant working in the Philippines that is absolutely phenomenal. And one of his qualities that I like the best is he takes a lot of initiative. So he would rather go and take on doing the task. And even if he makes a mistake, I'd rather him go and take it on than to kind of hesitate and wait for clarification. For me, just go for it. And there's been some things that have been done that I'm like, you know, I wouldn't have done it that way. But overall, I feel like it's better than him constantly waiting for my approval for stuff. So I would say someone in that, in that case is better, take an initiative.
[00:05:17] Speaker D: I've also found that when you're offloading things to other people, it's important for them to understand what it is that you want. And so when I first started delegating things, I would say, just here, do this. And they really wouldn't know what the outcome was or the timeframe or the tools that they were allowed to use in order to get to the result. Now I'm much more careful about how I delegate and what I tell people I want done. If it's a new task that they haven't done before, I spend a lot of time talking with them to make sure that they fully understand what it is that we want. And you do want to give people freedom to approach the problem in a way that makes sense to them. But you also want clarity on what is going to be the ultimate output. Right. So I think that's also a really important piece.
[00:06:07] Speaker E: Yeah, you have such an important point with that, because people who are typically, I find they don't have any employees will tell you, oh, just delegate this thing. But they don't actually realize that sometimes it takes a significant amount of time on your end and a lot of neuroprocessing and thinking to, how do I actually explain this in a way that makes sense and is going to have a good result rather than just shoving stuff over? And that was one of the mistakes I made before is, hey, figure this thing out. I was actually two hands off. Figure this out, figure that out. And eventually I'm like, you know, they, they're not set up to win in all these situations. And then sometimes it takes so long to delegate it, it can be better. Do it yourself. I hate to say something like that, but sometimes it is.
[00:06:41] Speaker D: Yeah. Well, the thing is, is it was always obvious to me, but that doesn't mean that anybody else knew what the heck I was thinking about. Right. I mean, how can you like, you know, just one sentence or a short email do this?
[00:06:54] Speaker E: Yeah.
[00:06:55] Speaker D: And then they're just kind of left hanging there.
[00:06:57] Speaker C: So, Ryan, do you have a question or comment?
[00:07:00] Speaker F: I'm fascinated. I think it's so much in line with how you stay on purpose. I kind of look at flow state as Ryan defines it is, you know, how do you stay on purpose? And I think is your skill set increases, you're able to stay on purpose. But when you want to effectively delegate to me, the addition I have there is, I always consult other people. Do you know someone, Is there someone that I could hire that can do this better? And it's funny, my partner has an assistant in the Philippines and is so frustrated right now trying to teach that assistant how to edit video properly. And sure, it's been really, I think, a source of stress because it's about repeating things over and over and over again. So I think recognizing when someone just isn't going to get it and you have to cut them loose. But then the other thing I wanted to ask Ryan is if you are delegating, how do you get that person that you're delegating to understand flow state for their own sake?
[00:08:04] Speaker E: That's something I've definitely contended with. Obviously we're running a flow state company. It's a coaching program and also a software company. And it's how obsessive do I want to have my team be about them being in their own flow states?
[00:08:17] Speaker D: Right.
[00:08:18] Speaker E: Because on one hand there's a balance between what's optimal for flow state and then one of the other flow triggers, which is autonomy. And I tend to be more on the autonomy side, whereas, hey, use whatever system is working for you the best. And my workflow tends to be very different looking than the stuff I'm delegating to my va. For example, a virtual assistant or personal assistant tends to. It tends be more important for them to be available when emergencies happen that day. Hey, this flight got messed up. Fix this thing. Hey, call this bank. This issue happened. Whereas for me, where I need to split My time between doing the day to day tasks and also entering zones of really deep creative thinking, I have large blocks where I cannot be interrupted no matter what's going on. So their flows are actually different. And that's one of the nuances that we've been exploring and discovering as we've gone on is which the nuances of different people's workflow and brain chemistry are different from one person to the next.
[00:09:12] Speaker F: I think this is fascinating because you look at company culture and how important company culture is over time. I've worked with clients to help establish company culture. But if the culture includes flow state, I can only think that that would be so good for everyone who works for the company for their own well being. So it's just really interesting to say, okay, flow state and company culture, how do those two things combine?
[00:09:38] Speaker E: It's a difficult balance because a lot of companies are valuing somebody, responding immediately to emails, immediately to slacks, immediately to text messages. They think the faster that we're in tandem and synced up, the faster things will move. But when that happens, they're not actually able to get to those deep flow states. And there's different schools of thought around this. Jack Dorsey from Twitter. I recently listened to a book about how he would be constantly available, always around, door open kind of policy, responding to different kinds of issues and then on the far other side is hitting the the deep creative spots. And I think that generally speaking, people are overly addicted to instant responses and instant communication. One of the concepts that we talk about is something called the communication waterfall. And the idea for maximizing deep flow state is to flow as deep down the waterfall as you can. And it starts with the most consuming engagement, which is an in person meeting. And the second one would be like a zoom meeting. And then the third one would be a phone call, then after that it would be a text message, then an email than maybe a WhatsApp. And so ideally you want to try to flow down the communication waterfall as much as possible so that you're being as little consumed by what's going on as you can. All the way to nothing. If you can get to nothing is at the bottom of that.
The other thing that can be very helpful for flow state is intentionally doing things out of sync, asynchronous communication, which is when we message somebody, we actually don't want them to respond right away. We want to message all the things to somebody and then wait and then have all those responses come back. Because if you're kind of halfway synced where somebody is Sending you a response back 60 seconds later, 90 seconds later, you're sort of in it, out of it, Your concentration is shattered. So it's better to either be totally out of sync or fully in sync for flow state in many cases.
[00:11:20] Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, I remember I've always been interested in flow state. When I was a young guy, I used to play tennis and there was this book called the Inner Game of Tennis by Tim Galway. And he talked about how there were two selves, the self one and the self two. He was one of the first authors. The book was written in the 70s, early 70s, and talked about removing the ego self and getting into the self 2, which was the one that could, you know, perform without judgment. And that was how you were going to get your best tennis game. And at the time it was a pretty revolutionary book for western culture. But, you know, now today, umpteen years later, it's good to see that it's really important part of our culture. Besides unloading your cognitive brain from tasks, are there other things that you can do to get into the flow state?
[00:12:14] Speaker E: Yeah, absolutely. So the second part of that is stacking our neurotransmitters correctly. And dopamine is one of them, which is the reward chemical that we get for doing something that's in align with our clear goals. So it sounds really basic, but goal setting stuff is really, really important so that we know when we're making progress towards something that we want oftentimes very much overlooked. So let's say that you're mowing a lawn. Every single time that you mow a new row, it actually releases dopamine into your brain because you have the direct goal of mowing the lawn. And then if you add on top of that, that, okay, I'm now getting paid for mowing the lawn. And I also have another goal of accumulating a certain amount of money per month. It's going to trigger even more dopamine in order to get that done. And then maybe on top of that, if I'm trying to win a contest or how fast I can mow the lawn, now I'm doing, doing more. You can keep adding things. If you were to then add a community around you and you have people cheering you on and you're in competition with a neighbor across the street and they're mowing the lawn, suddenly your neurotransmitters start going nuts and your ability to focus on that lawn increases exponentially. So it's, how do we create that kind of an experience within a person's regular workday is the science and the art of this.
[00:13:26] Speaker C: That's great. That explains to me, you just explained to me why I have to play wordle every day. There goes the dopamine. I got my wordle.
[00:13:34] Speaker E: Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah.
[00:13:36] Speaker C: So do you have a lot of people using this now? Have you just rolled it out or has it been around for a while?
[00:13:40] Speaker E: We have had two beta groups that have come out. Our first beta group had three users, then our next beta group had 13 and we're launching our third one in February and we're looking to have 50 plus. We're trying to see how many we can handle and still create some of the small group flow dynamics. But yeah, somewhere, somewhere in that ballpark of is what we've seen so far.
[00:14:01] Speaker C: And are people reporting good results?
[00:14:03] Speaker E: Yes. So interestingly enough, this started off as a software solution for me trying to manage multiple businesses and I set out to create the best way to manage some of these concepts. And then right before we started our first beta group, I'm like, you know, what we should do is have a flow coaching attached to the software. And the feedback that I got, which I wasn't, which I was surprised about, was that the flow coaching for many people was far more powerful than the actual software. It was things like turning off our notifications or actually managing blocking out all distractions for a certain two hour block every single day. That's become increasingly difficult behaviorally with the amount of notifications and emails and pings and other stuff. So the feedback was the software is great, but the coaching program actually moved a lot of things in my life further than just the software would have alone.
[00:14:52] Speaker C: That's excellent.
[00:14:53] Speaker D: It's kind of a paradox. You're controlling yourself so you can work in an uncontrolled way.
[00:14:57] Speaker E: That's a great way to put it. And you know, Brian was talking about, I think you said a prisoner of to do lists, right? So you can be a prisoner to the to do list, as in they're controlling your life, or you can use that to clear your mind and actually use that as a source of freedom. It can, it can work in both ways.
[00:15:14] Speaker C: Absolutely. So we're running out of time. But how do people find you?
[00:15:18] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:15:18] Speaker E: Go to lifeflowstate.com there's our landing page and our registration is open for an expedit course if somebody's interested. And that'd be the easiest way to get in touch.
[00:15:27] Speaker C: Well, thank you very much, Ryan. That is just really cool.
[00:15:30] Speaker B: Passage to profit is a nationally syndicated radio show appearing in 38 markets across the United States. In addition, Passage to Profit has also been recently selected by Feedspot Podcasters Database as a top 10 entrepreneur interview podcast. Thank you to the P2P team, our producer Noah Fleishman, and our program coordinator Alicia Morrissey, and our studio assistant, Rissecat Bussari. Look for our podcast tomorrow anywhere you get your podcasts. Our podcast is ranked in the top 3% globally. You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram X, and on our YouTube channel. And remember, while the information on this program is believed to be correct, never take a legal step without check checking with your legal professional first. Gearhart Law is here for your patent, trademark, and copyright needs. You can find
[email protected] and contact us.
[00:16:22] Speaker D: For a free consultation.
[00:16:24] Speaker B: Take care everybody. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week.
