Episode 610: 5 Things High Achievers Do (Mindset & Self-Care)

EBT610 – 5 Things High Achievers Do

Intro  00:01

Hey food bloggers. Thank you so much for joining me in this mindset and self-care focused episode here on Eat Blog Talk. One of the reasons I started a blog talk was to hold a space to talk about the importance of mindset and self-care. Being an entrepreneur can be a lot. If we are not taking care of ourselves, then getting actionable information about SEO Pinterest or whatever else is all moot. I will meet you back here every Wednesday to discuss various mindset and self-care topics. So you have the energy and space to tackle the rest.

Sponsor (Kara Myers)  00:37

Hey, bloggers, are you feeling overwhelmed by your blogging business and unsure where to focus your efforts to grow? Do you have trouble finding systems that work for you? I’m Kara, food blogger at sweetlysplendid.com. And full service blogging business coach, there’s so much that goes into blogging and finding what works best for you is the key to growing and making profit. I don’t believe in a one size fits all solution. It’s about what’s right for your business, not what the industry says you need. With my person first approach, I see the person not just the business, because at the end of the day, burnout won’t make you profitable. We’ll work together to pinpoint bottlenecks, make customized solutions and provide actionable steps in a one to one environment that fits in with your life and your time constraints. your blog and your success are the priority and main focus of every coaching session. My coaching program isn’t just another blog coaching system where you get a generic list of things to do. I would love to chat with you about how we could work together to grow your business for any questions or to sign up, just head over to sweetlysplendid.com/coaching to get started.

Megan Porta  01:39

Food bloggers. Hi, how is it going this week? I hope you guys are having a wonderful week. Welcome to this mindset and self care focused episode of  Eat Blog Talk. In today’s episode, we are going to talk through five things high achievers do. I am just getting back from a conference filled with inspiring high achievers, high quality people. And I thought I would turn my reflection of the event into a mindset episode. It’s so interesting to me how settled we get when we are interacting with people who are not necessarily in the entrepreneurial space, how we can kind of conform to their words and their thoughts and their habits. Then when we spend time with people who are in that high achiever place, traits of those people really stand out. So talking about high achievers, another way to put that, is high quality people. And I also want to point out that you are a high achiever and you are a high quality person, so don’t get the impression that I’m talking about someone else. I am talking about you. So these are qualities that you embrace, hopefully already, and we can all use a little reminder to keep working on them. I’m going to use this episode as an opportunity to reiterate something I say a lot to you guys, and that is that people are so important. If you are looking to achieve some level of freedom in your life or your business, and I know a lot of you are, and you’re committed to your entrepreneurial venture for the long haul, which I also assume you are, then you must prioritize people and relationships, the high quality driven positive people that we are going to talk about in this episode. So get yourself in the middle of other high achievers and other high quality people as much as you can so you can absorb their habits and qualities and all the other good things they exude. On the flip side, allow your high quality habits and characteristics to rub off on others as well. I want to get right to the episode, because I’m super excited to chat about what I observed from my time with some seriously awesome people this week. So let’s talk about five things high achievers do. 

Megan Porta  03:54

Number one, no garbage. I cannot even tell you how refreshing it was to be in the midst of people who just absolutely refuse to pay any attention to the garbage, and by garbage, I’m talking about criticizing others, gossiping, cynicism, pessimism, negativity and complaining. It is so refreshing to not absorb any of those things from others and not to even be tempted to fall into those things myself. You know how it is going into a group that tends to criticize or gossip. You have the best of intentions with it, but it really does get easy to fall into their bad habits. I’m gonna tell you a little story from the week that was kind of funny. So we’d been in a room all day together. This was after the first day, we were sharing stories. We were learning from each other with just this oozing vibe of positivity. At the end of the day, I was walking through the lobby, through a different group who was gathering, I think, for maybe appetizers and drinks or something. And as I walked by this table, I overheard a woman just verbally raging on someone, not to someone, but she was talking about somebody. Her face was all red. She was swearing about something someone had said to her. I don’t know. I didn’t get the exact details, but she actually pounded her fist on the table. She looked so mad. She was so riled up, and the vibe I got was that she was just unleashing on someone. That was the extent of what I observed. My first thought was that, oh, this woman needs to come join us tomorrow for our positive gathering. Seriously, though, it’s so common that when we’re out in the wild that we hear people complain and gossip and criticize really a lot, high achievers just don’t do that. They have more important things to spend their energy on. They literally have no time for it. So my encouragement to you and to me is to ignore the garbage. Extract yourself from groups where garbage happens. Unfortunately, there is occasionally garbage that pops up in our space, I think probably in every space, right? And it can be really easy to get sucked into it be the one to not engage in the garbage. I know it’s hard sometimes, but it feels so good to do that this matters, and there will be a ripple effect. 

Megan Porta  06:13

Number two, give and receive challenges and questions. Something I noticed immediately being in the space of high quality people was that everyone, and I mean every single one of them, openly challenged others about their thoughts, their goals, projects, etc. I could tell so many stories about being challenged over the course of this week, but a few things stand out. I sat down next to a very insightful woman at lunch one day, I’m so grateful that we sat next to each other. She was super compassionate. She’s a healer, a doctor and an entrepreneur. We started by exchanging small talk, how’s the weather? Where are you from? All of that stuff. And we really quickly got to the topic of my summer burnout. Normally, when I mention something like this to people, I receive sympathy, like, Oh, I’m really sorry. That’s too bad. I’m sorry you went through that. And that’s kind of the end of the conversation. It doesn’t go much further than that. But this woman challenged me. I was not expecting this, but it had such an incredible outcome. She kept asking me why. When I talked about being burned out, not having energy, and having a few extra things this year on my plate, that just drained me. Honestly. I didn’t know why she kept challenging me, but felt I could really learn from her. So I opened up and I allowed myself to go deep. We got down to something that I felt as a child, yes, this is getting deep, which was that I didn’t matter to my parents. My parents divorced when I was five. They lived across the country from one another, and they had really chaotic lives, I would say, individually honestly, I felt secondary to their chaos. Looking back at Megan as a child, I really didn’t matter. I was not priority number one to them, or maybe even two or three, this woman said something that healed me in a single moment and that I will never forget. I will carry this with me forever. She said, when you feel like you don’t matter, the ego does everything it can to convince you that everything matters. Oh my gosh, you guys, I could almost start crying. That was so powerful. This is why I felt so drained this year, because I have been number one involved in way more things and working with way more people. And number two, attaching importance to absolutely everything that I’ve been doing and working on and to the people I’ve been working with. So the silly thing I said to that person, the thing someone said to me that bothered me and that I’ve been stewing over. I mean every little thing I assigned importance to, and this is what has been taxing me.

Megan Porta  09:08

To make this chat even more life changing. She finished with and sometimes it’s okay to not matter. Wow, that gave me permission to not place importance on every single moment of my life. Sometimes a moment is just a moment, and an exchange with someone is just an exchange. So I retroactively was able to give my parents permission to prioritize their lives when I was a child, because there was a lot of stress and strife going on there, I didn’t need to matter as much as I’ve always thought I should. If my life were as chaotic and unsettled as theirs was when I was a kid, I certainly would not have the time or energy to give as much attention to my boys as I do today. This new friend of mine who was challenging me over a delicious Mexican lunch in Southern California changed my life. So my encouragement to you on this point is that we all need to embrace this idea of challenging and questioning other people way more often, both to help them grow and to experience a deeper connection with them. We also need to be more open to receiving feedback and being challenged. When this woman I spoke to first began questioning me, I honestly wanted to leave the table, there was a moment, though, when I reminded myself to stay open. I knew if I did, it was going to be good, and it was. There were so many other times during the week when I would tell someone about a project I was working on, or maybe something I was just thinking about doing, or a goal I had when they would start asking, Why? Why? Why? Why? Why are you doing that? Why do you want to do that? What’s your end goal? And again, my first instinct was, why are they questioning me? But it always ended with value and insight, and it all came from a place of love. I was telling one person how I wanted to place a focus on just really fine tuning my public speaking skills, because they really do need fine tuning. Of course, I got the why questions, and we had a chat about that. I threw in some comment somewhere in there about being a terrible public speaker. The guy was talking to looked at me like I had literally just confessed to murdering someone. At first I was like, why is he looking at me like that? Then he said, Megan, don’t say that. Words are powerful. You are honing your speaking skills. You’re not terrible. Be careful what you say. He was so right, and I was very happy. He challenged me with that. I say this all the time to other people, just be careful what words you use in your life about yourself and about others and about everything. So of course, I should never say that about myself. I should not put that negativity out there ever. I just think we should all be challenging each other to be better, to think better, to speak better, plan better, work better and live better. So challenge and question others, and also be willing to receive challenges and questions from other high quality people. 

Megan Porta  12:10

Number three, embrace failure. I absolutely love the way high achievers embrace failure. This is so refreshing. So many of us run from the possibility of failure, as if I don’t know Michael Myers were close by with a knife. I think he has a knife, right? High achievers have all experienced failure, sometimes on a really big scale, and sometimes more than once, and they claim it as one of the biggest reasons they’ve found success. It’s almost like they wear failure as a badge of honor. So basically, if you have not failed big, you are playing too small. You need to play bigger. I remember hearing an interview with Sarah Blakely a while back. She is the founder of Spanx, and she was saying how, growing up, her dad asked her every day how she had failed. I love this. He knew that failure was the key to her finding success and also happiness. So he encouraged her to fail every day. So my encouragement to you is no more allowing the fear of failure to keep you from chasing your dreams, change your perspective on this and search for failure. 

Megan Porta  13:18

Number four, learn constantly something else I noticed while spending time with high quality people this week is that they were all hungry learners, growth books and mindset books and business books were everywhere in this room. People were talking about podcasts and books and other resources they consumed that provided them with knowledge and improved their mindset. It’s so easy to say that we’re too busy or we don’t have enough time to read or listen to podcasts. I think learning should be a regular part of our day. Every single day, when left to our own devices, we fall into bad habits, we ditch our routines, we can think negatively and say terrible things about ourselves and others. High achievers make learning a priority daily. This keeps it on track with habits, routines, thoughts and words. There are so many good business and mindset books and podcasts to absorb. So my encouragement to you on this point is to go find those resources that really resonate with you and incorporate them into your daily routine. If you want inspiration, you can check out my list of favorite business and mindset books at eatblogtalk.com/books.

Megan Porta  14:29

Number five, routine, high achievers have routine built into their lives. I was listening to some people talk about their impressive morning routines this week, and how just starting their days focusing on health and wellness and self care very intentionally, sets them up for success every day, whether it’s a morning routine or a daily routine, any routine inside of your day, the happiest, most successful people have figured out how to incorporate routine into their lives. So when I talk to food bloggers one on one, to plan and set goals for their year, something very distinct always stands out to me. The people who have established some sort of daily routine, even if it’s a really small routine, are the ones who accomplish their goals, they finish their projects, and they stay motivated throughout the entire year. The ones who don’t have daily routines are the ones who feel like their wheels are spinning. They wonder why they never accomplished what they set out to do, and they just generally seem very unmotivated. My encouragement to you on this point is to incorporate routine into your life. Just do it your future self will thank you. I promise. Start with something bite sized so you can sustain it over time and add to the routine as you can maybe you start with taking just a 10 minute walk in the morning or writing in a gratitude journal, or doing 10 minutes of yoga. Commit to something that’s good for your soul and your brain and your body, and that you know you can sustain consistently and build from there. You need routine in your days, every day. 

Megan Porta  16:06

To recap, high achievers consistently focus on avoiding negativity, embracing challenges, learning from failure, prioritizing learning and sticking to daily routines. They surround themselves with positive people. They stay open to being challenged, and they see failure as a stepping stone to the success that they want. Incorporating these habits into your life will lead to greater focus growth and progress towards your goals and all the good stuff. So as you aim to reach new levels of success in your business and your life, take a minute to evaluate where you can implement these five practices into your daily life. High achievers don’t let obstacles deter them. Instead, they use them as opportunities to grow and remember that you are a high achiever. You are a high quality person, so you’re destined to embrace these things. And remember, I’m always here to challenge and support you. So reach out if you ever feel inspired to do so. Thank you so much for listening. I had so much fun talking through this episode. I will see you next week. 

Outro 

Thank you so much for listening to this mindset and self-care episode here on Eat Blog Talk. If you are a food blogger providing a service for other food bloggers, and you want to spread the word about the value that you offer. I would love to offer you a free way to do just this. Send me a 60 second audio clip to be featured in a mindset and self-care episode here on Eat Blog Talk in 2024. Go to eatblogtalk.com/audioclip to learn more.