This week’s Top 5 with Chance Brown features my personal search to recover from burnout in 2022. It was a hard year. Three things changed it for me and have powered my 2023. This episode covers each one and how you can do a similar exercise in less than one day.
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Welcome back to another episode of Top 5. My name is Chance Brown, and I am grateful to be your host. If this is your first time joining us, thank you for stopping in and listening. This show was designed to give you five actionable takeaways that you could take and put into your business to help it grow and prosper. And today, I am going to mess all that up by only giving you a three. So today's a top three. How about that? Hey, listen, I'm going to get a little personal here on this, but I think that it's important because it will lend to the three things that I did to fix the problem.
2022 was just a tough year. It was a hard year for me personally. I know that it was a tough year for a lot of people. This is not me complaining. I am blessed. I am grateful for the things in my life. I'm grateful for the people in my life. But I ended 2022 out of gas. I ended 2022 burned out. I felt lost. We were facing challenges that I hadn't faced as a business owner. I just... It was not a good time for me. I was not in a good headspace, and something had to change.
I didn't exactly know what I wanted to change, but I knew a few things, and when I sat down and really started working on it, it really kind of narrowed down to three things. And so I'm going to go through those three things, if you'll allow me, and share some of what has happened because of those three changes. Now, I'm going to preface this by saying that it is a work in progress. There are still challenges in our business. There are still challenges in the real estate market. There are still challenges in life in general all the time. But what I've found is that with these things, if I am consistent in my execution of them, I am more focused.
I have more passion for what I'm doing, and I just feel better about life, honestly. And so the other thing I will say before we get into this is it doesn't take a lot of time. I literally sat down. I took a day off of work, and by day off of work, meaning I only check my phone like, you know, once every two hours. And I really just was brutally honest with myself, and I started making lists. I pulled out my remarkable and started writing the things that I love to do, the things I don't love to do, how I wanted to start my day, what I wanted my spirituality to look like, what I wanted my parenting skills to look like, my being a good spouse to look like.
And it really started with how I was using my time and the people that I surrounded myself with. So we'll talk a little bit about that. I don't want to get TED talky on why or things like that, but reconnecting to part of that was a big deal. So point number one came down to time management. When it comes to time management, you know, I don't want to get, again, TED talky here. I've done an episode with Brian Moran, if you want to go back and listen to it, about the 12-week year and really prioritizing your time. For me, this came in two waves when it came to time management.
So the first one was how I start my day. I am a big fan of a morning routine. I believe in it. I know that when I carry out a morning routine, I am better that day. I just know it. When I start the day on my terms, I do better that day. Here's the problem. I was not starting the day on my terms. I was trying to fit into something else, some other morning routine that somebody else had come up with. So here's the thing. I'm never going to be a member of the 5 a.m. club. If I'm awake at 5 a.m., I'm telling you right now, it's probably because I'm still awake from the night before.
I'm not a morning person. I'm just not, and I've tried. I've tried to get up at 5, I've tried to get up at 6. It's just not for me. I would rather stay until 2 or 3 and work. That's when I get the bulk of my work done. That's when my, you know, blame it on circadian rhythms or whatever else, that's just who I am. I'm a night owl. I'm not a morning person. So why in the hell was I trying to fit this round peg of being a night owl into a square hole, which was an early riser's routine? It sucked. I hated working out in the morning. I still hate working out in the morning. I'm not doing it. So I stopped. I wrote down what I wanted my morning routine to look like, and my morning routine now begins at 7 a.m. because that's what works for me. If I wake up a little earlier, great.
If I wake up a little later, okay. The second part of that is, because I need time to do that, I'm no longer starting my work day when I used to start my work day. I look at that morning routine as part of the work day. So you could say that I'm starting my work day at 7, but the truth of the matter is, if I have to schedule something on my calendar, unless I absolutely have to do it, I'm not scheduling it before 10 a.m. Period. End of story. Those three hours from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m., I start my day. I might exercise. I like to have a cup of coffee with my wife. I like to do some form of affirmation or gratitude journaling or meditation.
And I like to read. So about an hour of that is reading. And when I can do that, it really, really works for me. And I feel good. I don't mind working until 7. I don't mind working after everybody in my house goes to sleep. That's fine with me. I enjoy it. I actually am more productive at midnight oftentimes than I am at 10 a.m. or 11 a.m. And so that morning routine works for me. And I just have to be very disciplined about the scheduling. Which brings me to the second point of the time management piece of the puzzle is scheduling my days as far as I can in advance. So I did this in January. And we're sitting here at the beginning of April. And through the month of June, my days are as scheduled as I can make them.
This includes my regular meetings. It includes which office I am going to on which day. So I've got, as of this recording, five offices in Houston and one in Austin. And so I've planned I'm going to go to this office and work from there one day. I'm going to go to this office and work from there another day. And so I've got those days in my offices scheduled. My teaching days, my days hanging out with our producers, creative days, which I'll talk about in a minute. I don't put off the things that are important to me because if they're in my calendar, I won't change them. I absolutely, absolutely have to. So right now through the month of June, my schedule is set. At the beginning of May, so 30 days from the recording of this, I will set the rest of the year.
So I mentioned one of the things is creative days. So I've done this twofold, right? For those of y'all who don't know, my wife works in my business with me, right? We're always around each other, which is great because we love each other and all that. But it's sometimes hard to separate the two, right? And so we have to be very disciplined about, hey, at this time of night, we're not talking about work anymore. We're going to hang out with our kids. We're going to be husband and wife. We're going to go on a date. We're going to do things like that. And so I've kind of taken this idea, which I got from Brendan Burchard, who is a great author, a great motivational speaker. And I got it from listening to something that he was talking about called creative days.
And so I have scheduled one day a month, a creative day for myself. I have scheduled one day a month, a creative day with me and my wife, which really just looks like a day date. But it is a day where we are going to go and just hang out and be able to have some fun playing hooky from work, even though, you know, we're probably still going to do a little bit of work, but nonetheless. So the creative day, excuse me, for me, is minimizing as much electronics in my life as I possibly can. It's getting out in nature. It's taking a really long walk. It's reading. It's going somewhere else to just sit and think or sit and write. It might be getting a pedicure or getting a massage or something like that, but it's designed to just kind of unplug from everything, refresh, relax, reignite and reinvigorate what you do.
Right? So part two is connection. And this also comes in two separate parts. So the first connection is reconnecting to why I'm doing this. In an attempt to try to be everything to everybody, I had spread myself too thin. That was part of my frustration from last year. I just spread myself too thin. So as I looked at this, part of the process for me was how do I simplify things, like really, really simplify things. Focus on the things that are the things that are the most important and either get rid of the stuff that isn't, reallocate it, delegate it, whatever we need to do with it.
And this is the part that really genuinely is a work in process, work in progress, I think, because so many of us that are doing what we do for a living, we do it because we're helpers. We want to help fix things. We want to help work with the people that we know and like and love and be part of their lives. When I started my brokerage, my goal is to help real estate agents really build great businesses. It was pretty simple. But over the course of almost nine years, I let that get convoluted. And I let it get convoluted in a way that I was still trying to serve my agents and help them build great businesses.
But I was doing it in a place where I lost connection to them. So I wasn't serving them the way that I wanted to serve them, right? And so I sat down and I just made two lists. And I said what I thought was important that I really, really wanted to do and what I didn't want to do anymore. What I thought would come out of that exercise and where I hope that you will sit down and do this in your business. I thought that the stuff that I really wanted to do was the important list. But the truth of the matter is that it was the stuff that I didn't want to do anymore. Those were the things that were killing me. Those were the things that were stealing my joy and stealing my passion.
And it was water on my fire. The almost embarrassing piece of this puzzle was that that list of things that I didn't want to do anymore, it was stuff I didn't really need to do anyway. It was stuff that nobody really needed to do. So we just stopped doing it. And I think that that kind of audit, I had never done it before. But it was really powerful and really, really important. So today, right now, I believe that the work that I'm getting to do is work that will allow my agents to be more successful, happier. It makes me happier. When I'm happier, I do better at my work. When I start my day my way, and I know ahead of time what that day is going to entail, and I'm doing work that makes me happier, it's just this giant, awesome cycle of feeling good about what you're doing.
Are there still challenges? I already said that, yes. But I just tend to be more productive, and I'm able to tackle those challenges in a better headspace and better way because of this reconnecting and simplifying the why and managing my time better. So the last piece of this puzzle was really reconnecting to my people. Before I go to that, the reconnecting to the people part is really the result of the first two, right? It's the result of really having a good grasp on the time management piece of being able to be in the places that I need to be to reconnect to the people, but also understanding the why better. It's simplifying that why as much as I could allowed me to really reinvigorate, reignite that fire that wants to be around my people.
I mean, I always wanted to be around my people, don't be wrong. But it just has made it a lot more fun because I know what I'm doing while I'm there, and I'm very intentional about it. So the reconnecting, the people part has really been kind of the magic result of the first two steps, whether it's starting out my day, like I mentioned a little while ago, just sitting there hanging out with my wife. Even if we're both reading a book, but we're both not even really talking, just doing whatever we're doing, just that connection, that few minutes in the morning before I start my day is a huge deal. Then I get to go, and because I've free-scheduled my work days, I'm in my offices. I'm connecting with our new licensees as they learn. I'm connecting with our producers to learn from them and how we can do more with our agents.
We're doing more fun things in our offices. We're doing more fun things as a brokerage altogether. It's now become sort of a system of the business, which is awesome. I mean, this is the beginning of April as I record this. Just in the three months, the first quarter of 2023, I have probably been in our offices more than all of 2022. Just hanging out, just working through systems generation, doing workshops, teaching, whatever that is. And man, is it refreshing. It's so much fun.
I'm loving it. Being around people feeds my fire. Last year, I spent too much time at my desk. I will not allow that to happen in 2023 because of the management of the time, building out these creative days, reconnecting to the why I'm doing things and making it as simple as possible. And because of those three changes that literally, I told you at the beginning, only took about a day. Only took about a day of my time to really put together. I am so much more passionate about what I'm doing right now. I feel completely reinvigorated. When the challenges in our business happen, I feel like I am empowering myself, which is a weird thing, empowering myself to go and attack those.
I am up to the challenge. I'm helping on making sure that my people are too. And I'm fired up for it because of this few hours that I took to make some lists and write down what I really wanted to do, what I didn't want to do, and how I wanted to spend my days, including that starting period. So I highly recommend, take a day off. Go out in nature. Go to your favorite place. Do something fun. Get a massage. Whatever that looks like. But then when you're done with that, really think about how intentional are you being in what you're doing in your daily basis, in your daily routine. How intentional are you being in connecting to the reason that you're doing what you do? And who are the people that you need to connect to that fuel that fire for you?
Hopefully that helps. We'll do better about making it five points next time, but it was three big ones this time for me personally. So thank you for allowing me to share that with you. It's a little bit vulnerable type of thing for me, but I hope that you learn from my mistakes. I hope that you learn from what I've been able to do here that has really helped out a lot. And I hope that it helps you. So we'll see you next time on Top 5. Have a great day. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time.
