Episode 273: Replace Busy With Balanced with Emily Ransone

273 Emily Ransone

Emily Ransone: Hi, this is Emily Ransone from the book Growth Junkies Unite, and you are listening to the Eat Blog Talk podcast. 

Megan Porta: Hey, food bloggers. Welcome to Eat Blog Talk, sponsored by RankIQ. I am your host, Megan Porta, and you are listening to episode 273. Today, Emily Ransone is going to talk to us about replacing busy with balanced.

Emily is the co-owner of Side Mark and office furniture dealer in the San Francisco bay area. Founded in 1984 with the motto we make work feel good, Side Mark’s philosophy is centered on the human experience of thriving in one’s work habitat to support the organization’s culture, thereby driving results.

Emily is now helping other business leaders find success by helping them implement an entrepreneurial operating system – EOS – into their businesses. Hey, Emily, thank you so much for joining me today. Super happy to have you here. 

Emily Ransone: Yeah. I’m excited to be here and excited to see where the conversation takes us.

Megan Porta: Yeah. Yeah. Before we start talking about balance, we all want to hear your fun fact. 

Emily Ransone: So my fun fact is that I am my own reality TV show right now called 48 and pregnant. So yes, it’s been a long fertility journey and I’m excited to say that we have a little one coming. Megan, I know I just let you know this, but coming early. So we are now going to have a New Year’s Day baby. We’re excited. It’s definitely a nice holiday gift that just keeps on giving. 

Megan Porta: Congratulations. It sounds like it’s been a long time coming, which, oh, that’s just so exciting. I got goosebumps just hearing you say that, but super excited for you. New Year’s baby. You can’t get more exciting than that. Kickoff 2022 on the right foot. Yes. I was telling you a little bit that food bloggers are entrepreneurial in nature and busy. That word busy is such an ingrained part of our lives. I feel like if we let busy take over, it’s so easy to do that. We have so much to do. There’s so much going on. A lot of us are trying to be at home with families, kids, spouses, and then. Doing double duty with work here at home, it’s just, it can get really crazy. Replacing busy with balanced is something that we all want to hear. So thank you for joining us.

Emily Ransone: This is a really popular topic right now, because think about it, no one gave us a rule book for this pandemic. We’re all winging it here. We’re doing the best we can to all rewrite our own scripts as we go. What’s interesting for me is that this is universal. We’re all dealing with it. So I literally developed a workshop that I give to clients called Drop The Ball, Do More of What Matters. Again, Drop The Ball – Do More of What Matters. I know that sounds interesting. But this is from a book by an author, Tiffany Dufu. I highly recommend it. What she says is you can actually achieve more by doing less. I wholly subscribe to that, especially now that I’m an EOS implementer. Which is basically taking a set of tools and principles and helping business leaders and executives and entrepreneurs run a better business.So these sets of tools that I’m going to be sharing with your listeners, are free. They’re there literally from EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system. They’re things that I think will really make a difference for every single one of us here. I use these. So that’s why I’m trying to spread the word to help others get the balance that they deserve. This is really about focus and finding the right filter. There’s so much we can dive into here, Megan. There’s so much we can dive into, Megan. I’m just excited to share it with your listeners. 

Megan Porta: I’m really excited to hear about your tools. I have a story with this exact theme, achieving more by doing less. The pandemic is what launched me into this. I just got to the point where I was super frazzled and I was like, wait a second. I haven’t left my house in three months. Why am I frazzled? It was just because I got into that habit of just doing it all the time. For many years I did that. So the pandemic is what kind of jolted me out of that and made me realize that there was an issue. At that point I started doing less. I did this experiment and went for three months. I just decided to go all in and commit to three months of doing less. I did. Guess what happened? I got so much more done. I made so much more money. I had more friends. I had a better connection. Only good things came from it. So this is right up my alley. So I’m really eager to hear what you have to say. So it tells us about your tools. I want to hear about these. 

Emily Ransone: The first is more of a concept. It’s a way to get your listeners oriented around how we’re spending our time. It’s on an X, Y axis. This is not new information. You can Google this and find the X Y axis. But on the one quadrant going north, south is important. Then the other is urgent. So if you divide it into four quadrants, it’s how we spend our time. So most of us are spending our time on stuff that’s not urgent and not important. That’s trivial work. It’s social media, it’s things like that. The stuff that is urgent, but not important, I always say is like the interruptions. It’s the stuff where it’s other people’s sense of urgency. That’s really short-term thinking because they’re robbing you of your time. Now, sometimes it’s legitimate that we have to take that seriously and we’ve got a dogleg left with our time. Okay, fine. The other one is where it’s urgent and important. These are crises. It’s a pressing problem. It’s deadline driven. This is what’s causing us so much burnout. 

Instead of us being able to think really strategically about how to solve a root issue, we’re just band-aid-ing. We’re literally just trying to get through the day to day. This is the part that I always say, if you can think about how to minimize what’s going on in this quadrant, by focusing on the important, but not urgent, because this is really where proactive work happens. This is where you’re solving issues at the root. This is more strategic. It’s more creative thinking. It’s really getting out ahead of it. It is human nature, that there are going to be things that come up that we just haven’t planned for, or that are unknowable. For example, my situation with the date moving up from thinking I have five to six weeks to do the final planning to now having less than two. It’s not controllable. There are always these things that are going to come up. The situation is that we tend as humans to spin out and knee jerk reactions out of blind emotion. 

I call it the lizard brain that takes over. Instead of stopping, pausing. These are some really good emotional intelligence lessons that you can learn. Just taking a second, breathing and then coming from a different place where you’re choosing a different response that is not stress-based. It’s not a lizard brain. You’re coming at it and saying, okay, I’m going to think differently about what this is bringing up for me. So it’s really creating that self-awareness when something is coming at you to pause and literally question, all right, what’s going on? What do I need to do about it? In EOS terminology, we call it compartmentalizing. Which basically means instead of eating the elephant and getting overwhelmed and globalizing and throwing a bunch of motion at it and all these kinds of things that we human beings want to do, it’s taking a step back and then literally just sit down. Put it all on paper, get it out of your head because that’s what’s making you feel crazy. There’s therapy and getting it out of your head and down on paper. Then organize it, start thinking, okay, is this a short-term problem? Is it a long-term problem? All these things that are bugging me and eating at me right now. Put them down on paper and start organizing them in a way that puts you in the fulcrum of control that makes it so that again, it’s turning it from being urgent into something that you can then choose to not make urgent. Or you can keep it as a hot priority. 

But the idea is you are getting in control of it. You’re getting out in front of it. So that is the pivotal moment that a lot of us humans just don’t do. We literally just are lazy and don’t do it. Yet it’s not hard. It’s that a lot of times we just act out of emotion. This raw knee jerk reaction emotion. So some of these tools that I’m going to be talking about today can be those things that help pull you into feeling like you’re in control again. It’s like the hamster on the treadmill and you don’t even know why you’re on the darn treadmill. Happy to dive into the next one or pause here if you’ve got more that’s for me.

Megan Porta: That was all so great and profound. Like you said, it’s not that hard. It’s just taking a step back and just intentionally choosing, you said that word a handful of times, just making the choice to do this. If you need a change in your life, it’s as simple as that. You need to decide that you’re going to do this and then that will allow self-awareness in. 

Emily Ransone: Yeah. So many times we, as humans, play this victim card. We like to say we’re so busy, that there’s it’s almost like our culture has rewarded us into thinking that by saying we’re all so busy that we get a merit badge. And yet, when I hear that word, I start to wonder if there’s something else underlying that. I don’t doubt that we have a lot on our plates. I’m not saying that. But I’m also saying that you have the capability within you, if you can do some of this work that I’m talking about with your listeners today. To get out ahead of it and to not have it your own you. The feeling of being busy will shift like, you had that shift, Megan. You still had things going on. The difference was that you felt delighted by them instead of owned and controlled by them. That’s what I want for everyone here. 

Megan Porta: Oh my gosh. That is good. Okay. I had to write that down. That was so well said. That’s exactly what I felt. Then once you find that magic of it, like once you’re in it and the magic starts unfolding, it’s addicting. It’s whoa, this feels really good. This feels right. Then when you go back to your old habits, your old ways. It feels really wrong. I just had that moment this morning. I got out of bed. I normally don’t look at my phone right away. I have a certain time when I can get on Instagram. For some reason I clicked over to Instagram, just out of some old habit and then I started replying to somebody. Everything inside of me just felt wrong. So I put my phone down. So it does come back occasionally and you have to write yourself again, but I know exactly what you’re saying. 

Emily Ransone: Okay. You’re going to love this next tool. It’s called Delegate and Elevate. This is actually a Dan Sullivan term from Strategic Coach. If any of your listeners are familiar with that work. So this is something that I use when I’m working with my clients, teaching them about EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system. The tool again is called delegate and elevate. And I’m happy to send it to your listeners for free. It’s literally a simple yet, so effective tool. Now, a lot of us are solopreneurs and I get that. Yet there’s so much help out there that you can get, whether it’s Taskrabbit, or Thumbtack. Small task. If it’s getting a virtual assistant. Someone that can do some of the administrative stuff. So you’ve got to think expansively about how your time is best served and don’t do the tasks that are costing you money. Do the tasks that make you money. So this tool is going to help you identify that. From Dan Sullivan, he says, this is about what you love to do and are best at because this is going to get you to your unique ability. So picture it again. This is a piece of paper where you’ve got a horizontal line and a vertical line dividing up the piece of paper. We’re back into four quadrants again. Above the horizontal line is really where we want to live because those two quadrants are the love and what you’re great at. So it’s what you love to do and are great at in the top left quadrant.

What you like and are good at in the top right corner. Then everything south of that is what we’ve got to offload because the bottom left quadrant is the don’t like, good. I always say to my entrepreneurs and leadership teams, that’s where you go to die. Because this is the stuff that unfortunately sucks you in because you’re good at it. So you’re stuck doing it. You don’t feel like you have anyone that you can delegate it to, but it drains your energy. Then of course, if you’re not good at it and you don’t like it, which is the bottom white right quadrant, we definitely need to offload that because you’re horrible at it and you’re probably sabotaging your business. 

But this is going to help you identify how to get more energy. It’s like Megan, when you said that you had that shift, part of it probably was that you were doing more of what you love. So when we find ourselves in that space of giving ourselves energy, rather than withdrawing, it’s Stephen Covey’s emotional bank account, of deposits and withdrawals, then you are truly going to get to this nexus of being able to thrive again and not feel trapped by that busy feeling. 

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Emily Ransone: So that’s one of the tools. The other tool is a personal plan and you can use any kind of planning tool. The one that I use is from EOS and it’s adopted from the business side to then shifting it to a personal plan. So we use this with leadership teams to help them get on the same page about where they’re going and how they’re going to get there when they’re running their business. Then what we do is we offer it as a personal plan. If they want to take this down to the ground on a very personal level and achieve more in their lives, not just their business, it’s some of the same concepts that are ported over to this personal plan we call the vision traction organizer. It’s a two page document, two page strategic planning document that takes it from the 50,000 foot level and then as you answer these simple set of eight questions about who you are, what you want out of your life, where you’re going, and then designing how you’re going to get there. It just lights up. The crazy thing about it is that when you do this kind of work and you get it down on paper, it’s almost like you have to effort less. I call it getting in the flow of life. If you’re not familiar with that, there’s a great Ted Talk by Mihaly, and I’m going to ruin his last name, but he’s absolutely brilliant. I highly recommend it. You can look up Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and listen to Flow, the secret to happiness. It’s truly, again, this nexus of what you love to do and your best at, because it feeds your energy.

So you’re paddling down the stream of life. You’re just letting it take you and flowing with it, but you’re also doing it by design, right? We know where there’s boulders in the stream and we’re navigating around those. We’re also keeping our antenna up so that as opportunities come our way, we’re delighted and we can meander down this river. What I find is so many of us are paddling upstream in life. We feel like that poor butterfly that is pulling the Boulder uphill. So the idea here is if you’ll use these tools that I’m sharing with you, this will help you get into that stream of life. I jokingly call it the EOS God’s smiling down on you because some of this stuff just starts to unlock and happen in ways I can’t even describe. It happens without you efforting. 

Megan Porta: That sounds amazing. I’m excited to check out your tools. And thank you for offering those. That’s such a generous offer because flowing by design, I wrote that down. I love that. So not just flowing, but doing it in a thoughtful way. That’s going to benefit you.

Emily Ransone: Some of my best opportunities in life have come when I haven’t even recognized that I either wanted or needed them. So for example, getting into a leadership opportunity of running a business. I had primed myself. I had studied. Taking some leadership classes. I knew that there was something there for me, but I couldn’t have scripted it. Then when literally an executive tapped me on the shoulder and said, Hey, I’d like you to run my branch business. It was like the perfect time. The perfect thing. It was like the example of being in the flow of life and having your antenna up for those opportunities. The second is my book. I never planned on writing a book in my life. I had no desire. In fact, my mom has been writing a book for well over a decade. Her experience has turned me off from writing a book so much that I was like, oh my gosh, absolutely not. 

But then when I had a colleague, who’s also in the coaching advising space, share the publisher that she was working with, in the format, it was like it lit up for me that this is exactly what I needed, when I needed it. I actually needed some inspiration for myself. I was going through these fertility issues. I was going through changes in my business. It was a time where I needed something to reinvigorate what I call my growth journey. Because I feel like we’re either at one end or the other end of the stick; you’re either growing or dying. Frankly, I’d rather be at the growth end of that stick. So for me, this book was so cathartic. It was meant to pull me out of what we all go through, which is a period of evolution and revolution where we feel stuck, or we are not sure. This uncertain feeling of okay, what do I want next? Or how do I figure this out? 

So it was almost like the book wrote itself in a matter of less than two months. It just poured out of me. It was really like this gift to humanity of, hey, I’ve been there. Here are some nuggets that are helping me pull out of it, because it’s a downward spiral. This stuff will suck you in. It will absolutely drag you down and suck you in. So this was what I needed to provide my own catalyst to get myself out of it. These are just, I call it like the reader’s digest of all the different books that are out there and source material. In fact my toolkit that goes along with the book of all my source materials is free, and I highly recommend it. Because it’s got like my top 10 Ted talks and all kinds of nuggets in there. But, the cool part about it is that it’s really something you can get through very fast. I’m a soundbite person. I live by bullet points and I don’t enjoy the books where it’s after 50,000 words, they could have written it in a few paragraphs and I would have been good. So this is really meaty stuff. And you can sit down with it and pull some nuggets in a few minutes in between meetings. It’s literally the size of a CD jewel case. So it’s meant for those of us that are busy and are living in this fast paced, unwritten script, pandemic world. There’s just nuggets in there that I think your listeners will thrive on. I’m going to be offering the VIP code for your listeners today. 

Megan Porta: Thank you. That’s amazing. So you talked about your tools. All of the resources that you’ve mentioned will help people know where to start, correct? So if somebody listening is okay, I need more balance. I have no idea where to start. Your tools will be their guide. 

Emily Ransone: That’s right. These are catalyst things that can get them thinking differently. That’s sometimes exactly what we need. We feel stuck because we’re applying old thinking, old limiting beliefs. Old ways of working. These are things that can help unlock a new way ahead.

Megan Porta: Yes. Sign me up. Are there any other tools or did you run through all of those? 

Emily Ransone: Those are the three primary. I do have more. What I would tell your listeners is if they want to reach out, a lot of times I try not to be overly prescriptive with someone’s situation. But I have another tool called getting more of what you want. Those sorts of things. So yes. For your listeners, there’s not only the ones that I’ve been describing. I am offering a free 90 minute meeting about how to leverage EO in your business. So this is about running a better business and it’s about execution. So for the food bloggers that are listening, and if they’re solopreneurs, these are the kinds of tools that will help them put them back in control of their business. So free workshop, free 90 minute meeting for that. Also the VIP code, which is growthjunkiesunite.com/backslashVIP. Then the free tool kit that comes along with that. Then obviously if they reach out to me over email or social, then, I’m happy to email them the Delegate and Elevate tool, the Vision Traction Organizer tool, et cetera, et cetera. Lots here, lots to offer. 

Megan Porta: Oh my gosh. Yeah. That’s all such generous stuff to offer us. So thank you for all of that. I do have a question about teams so we can get a handle on ourselves and how much we do. Then we can pinpoint those things that we want to outsource. So how do we get more out of our teams if they need more discipline or accountability or anything like that? 

Emily Ransone: Yeah. Thank you. Because you know, maybe some of your food bloggers do have teams they’re working with. So this is really important if you have people that you’re depending on for your business, how do you get more out of them performance wise. Also how do you make it easier? The biggest thing here is, a lot of times when we talk about accountability, we think we can hold people accountable. It’s actually a misnomer. People have to want to be held accountable. They have to want it. 

So the first thing that I love about the vision traction organizer tool is that it helps people get really clear on their core values, which are the essential set of guiding principles that help us define how we want to behave. How we want to behave together. So that’s the first step, is figuring out for your team, how do we want to treat each other? What’s important to us? Who are we, and define that. Then from there, it’s also making sure that you’re giving them great leadership so it’s creating an opening. Nature abhors a vacuum. So people will fill it. If you cast a vision and you say, this is where we’re going, and this is how we’re going to get there and I need you all to be a part of it, they will rise to that occasion. 

A lot of times as managers think that we have to tell them. There is a little bit of clarity of expectations, for sure. You’ve got to make sure that you’re being crystal clear. We sometimes think we’re singing a symphony when actually the person on the other end is hearing a rap. So we’ve got to make sure that we’re checking back that they’re hearing us. You know, that we’re on the same page. A lot of that gets to making sure we’re not making assumptions and, providing really crystal clear communication. But what I’m talking about is more the leadership of helping people see themselves and where they’re going with you being a part of that journey together. Daniel Pink’s book, Drive, if you’re not familiar with this it’s so good. He says you don’t need to throw more money at people. It’s really what people want are three things; autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Autonomy, mastery and purpose. So when you think about that, some of these tools from EOS will help you get more out of your people because you’re giving them the opportunity to own their career, own their journey. It’s things like giving them what we call priorities, that we call rocks. It’s a Stephen Covey term about getting more done in your business. Then giving them what we call a scorecard and measurable. Something where they can know that we can and week out that they’re on track with keeping the health of the business moving forward. So when you set the table with tools like this, it allows people to hold themselves accountable. It invites them to take ownership. To be empowered. That’s the dynamic shift we want to see, because then we have to effort less. This is where we get out of feeling so busy, when we’re feeling like the businesses running us. So many times we feel like we just need to do everything and solve everything. Then it’s all on us. Whereas if you’ll set the table and give people what they need to hold themselves accountable. I promise, you will get higher performance out of them.

Megan Porta: It’ll be easier for you. It’ll be a lot off your plate.

Emily Ransone: That’s right. That’s right. You totally get it. 

It seems like such an easy equation, but to put it into action, it seems a little bit overwhelming. So I’m hoping that the tools that you’ve offered will help people gain some clarity and some focus and maybe figure out what to outsource. I loved all that you talked through about great leadership because yeah, we often think, I just need to pay them more. Then that will take care of it, but that’s not the case. 

Because this phase right now, the great resignation. I’m sure your listeners have heard about this. So there’s really high turnover, high change. So during a period like this, where we all need to learn to be adaptable, our nature is to fight it. If you fight it, you will go the way of the dinosaur. It’s grow or die, evolve or change or literally you go the way of the dinosaur. If you look at these tools to help you do that, then again, you will feel like you’re out in front of it, that you’re in control of it. That’s really the difference between the feeling of being busy and the feeling like, yeah, I got this.

Megan Porta: Yes, we do have to adapt, right? Things are changing right now. We can feel it. I can feel it in the air. Everything is just different. Every day brings something new. 

Emily Ransone: That’s like our new normal, this is our. There’s a book called Who Moved My Cheese. It’s really around this whole concept that we’re talking about. That there’s people out there that take this victim route because they don’t realize that things have changed and they want things to just stay the same. That’s not nature. You’re going against the forces of nature. So, for anyone that feels that kind of thinking, go pick up that book, Who Moved My Cheese.

Megan Porta: Oh, that’s like an old classic, right? I remember that one being round too long ago. I think when I was working in the corporate world, I had a boss who recommended we read it and I don’t remember much about it, but I should probably revisit that. 

Emily Ransone: It’s a quick one. The other book I recommend is Mel Robbins, Five Second Rule. If you’re not familiar, you can Google that too. It’s a great concept because again, we humans allow our lizard brain to talk us out of these amazing impulses that we get. What she says is you’ve got to do it in five seconds or less. Literally when you get that impulse, in five seconds or less take the first action. What she says is that you will be inspired and you will be delighted by what it’s usually what happens as we talk ourselves out of it, out of that place of fear. So those are two book recommendations for your listeners that you can literally just Google the concepts and in five minutes or less really get what I’m talking about.

Megan Porta: Yeah. Thank you Emily. Oh my gosh. This has been great. Again, we can all use this advice to go from busy to more balanced, especially going into a new year when we can refresh and restart. Gain some clarity on some things that we want to accomplish and clarity about things we want to say no to. That’s one of the things I do often. 

Emily Ransone: It is about filtering. Filtering and focus and learning what to say no to. That’s why I call the workshop, Drop The Ball. Because again, say no to the right things and how you know what to say no to are these filters with the Delegate and Elevate tool and with the Vision Traction Organizer, Strategic Planning Tool. Those help you know what to say no to. So I’m so glad you brought that up. 

Megan Porta: Yes. Everyone go check that out. We will put together a show notes page for you, Emily, with everything that we’ve talked about. So everyone, you can go find that at eatblogtalk.com/growthjunkiesunite. So before you go, Emily, do you have a favorite quote or words of inspiration to share with us?

Emily Ransone: I think that really the one that comes to mind because of our conversation is Drop The Ball. I love that phrase because it’s so counterintuitive to what we normally would think. We’ve got to keep all the balls juggling in the air and what this whole conversation is about today is drop the ball.

Megan Porta: There’s magic and dropping the ball. I’ve seen it. That’s such a great way to end and it just summarizes everything we’ve talked about, like you said. So perfect. Drop the ball. I mentioned your show notes. So why don’t you share it with everyone again? I know you already did this a little bit ago, but where can everyone find you online? Social media and all of that. 

Emily Ransone: Yep. So I’m highly Google-able. I’m going to spell my name. Emily E M I L Y and then Ransone, R A N S O N E. Those are both N as in Nancy. So you can find me on LinkedIn and Instagram and all those things. I have a business website, that’s tractionforgrowth.com. Then you can also email me personally. So [email protected]. If you’re interested in the VIP code for the book, I’ll mention it one more time. It’s growthjunkiesunite.com/VIP. Again, Free toolkit. Lastly, lots of freebies. We talked about today. Lots and lots. So just reach out and tell me what you need. 

Megan Porta: Tons of free resources. So thank you again for all of that and everyone go dig into it and wishing you just all a super balanced new year. So thank you again, Emily for being here and thank you for listening today, food bloggers. I will see you in the next episode.

Outro: We’re glad you could join us on this episode of Eat Blog Talk. For more resources based on today’s discussion, as well as show notes and an opportunity to be on a future episode of the show, be sure to head to eatblogtalk.com. If you feel that hunger for information, we’ll be here to feed you on Eat Blog Talk.