Enjoy the build - Look forward to Mondays again

Show Notes

Have you built the life you've always dreamed of - family, business, team, revenue  but struggle to enjoy it? 

John talks about how constant pressure, responsibility, and the fear of slowing down can quietly lead to burnout and take the enjoyment out of the process.

He introduces the Smart Freedoms Framework, a five layer approach to creating a more aligned and fulfilling life. It focuses on Spiritual, Mental, Action, Resource, and Time freedom, showing how your internal state directly shapes your external results.

Through the analogy of a drill stuck in reverse, John highlights how pushing harder doesn’t always move you forward if you’re not aligned.

Instead, he encourages a shift toward freedom, flow, and being intentional with how you build both your work and your life.

For more on the Deru approach to leadership from the inside out, visit www.derunation.com

Timestamps

00:00:00 – Taking Breaks & Enjoying the Process

00:03:15 – Why Joy Matters in Leadership

00:04:08 – SMART Freedoms Framework

00:07:08 – Mental Clarity & Aligned Action

00:10:39 – Time Freedom Explained

00:13:32 – The Drill Analogy

00:15:40 – Building Real Freedom

00:17:21 – Reflection & Closing

Sequence of Topics Covered

Introduction & Context
 • Enjoying what you build
 • Feeling trapped by pressure

Understanding Pressure
 • Constant pressure and burnout
 • Why slowing down feels hard

SMART Freedoms Framework
 • Overview of the five freedoms
 • Working from the inside out

Alignment & Action
 • Focusing on what actually matters
 • Time and energy going to the right places

Closing Reflection
 • Freedom vs feeling stuck
 • Building a life you enjoy

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Because the old thought is like I don't even want to take the week off. The break isn't worth it. It's more stressful being away than it is being here. And that's not a way to live. That's not a way to uh grow sustainably. And if you're achieving success like that, I don't even believe it's worth it. I think you'd be as well off going at a nine to five. Welcome to the Grounded Man podcast by Deru. I am your host, John Douglas, and founder of Deru, and this space is for hardworking men building businesses, carrying responsibility, and providing for their families who feel they should be freer. You see, the world has changed, and leading through hard work and long hours now limits a man's influence. The new way is mastering the inner game of leadership so you can carry it well, enjoy what you're building, and still feel free. Deru is leadership for the 21st century. And this episode is all about focusing on enjoying what you are building. And I want to share a concept and framework with you that will help you to keep monitoring that and checking it to ensure that you're on track to enjoying what you're building. I believe that we are built for more and built for more than just work, built to enjoy it. That's half of our energy is should be put into enjoying what we do. And maybe all of it should be in theory, but you know, we're giving a lot, so we need to be able to receive a lot as well. And I think as men, we're very good at setting the direction, um, setting the vision, doing the work, getting the stuff done. But maybe when it comes to the more, let's call it the more softer things, like expressing yourself, uh, enjoying yourself, receiving that kind of element of it, we're a little bit, especially I think in an Irish culture, sometimes we find it hard to even receive a compliment, and uh and we we don't even enjoy compliments, we don't even recognise them. And we have a big, big, big problem with celebrating the wins in Ireland. I know if you go to some other countries, the US comes to mind, you know, they're always big talk and there's always uh talking themselves up and talking their teams up, talking their business up, talking business up, and some of it, you know, might not even be true, but to them it is, and it's really whatever you believe to be true becomes your reality. And this is not about doing this from a place of falseness or fakeness. This is about celebrating the everyday uh changes, responses, the growth that's happening in your life and in your business and your personal life too. And when I say celebrating the wins, I'm not talking about going and booking, you know, a holiday for or a study, a study trip uh for everyone in the business to go off for a week. I'm talking about saying thank you. I'm talking about acknowledging when you've been true to yourself. I'm talking about noticing when you're responding instead of reacting. I'm talking about remembering and recognizing the movement, the forward progress on any level, setting that into the culture of the organization that you're building as well. So this episode is all about, as I said, enjoying what you've built. And why do we even need to talk about that? Well, the other element of this is that, well, we don't enjoy it, and we start to resent it, and we start to feel restricted of it, and we actually have a want of joy. We actually we we feel a hunger for it, an absence of it. And so we obviously have taken responsibility in our lives, and that's what leadership is about. And responsibility to most people means pressure, and so we need to change how we see that, because until we start to change how we see leadership and responsibility, we won't start to change how we see ourselves within that, and therefore it's our relationship with ourselves that determines the experience of the life that we live, because nobody else is thinking and feeling the way we're feeling, only it's all an internal kind of battle and war. And so you're either working with it, working with yourself, or working against it and against life. So I want to introduce a the framework. This is called the SMART Freedoms Framework that I've developed. And the SMART stands for spiritual, mental, action, resource, and time. And so this is an inside out model. So this works from the depths from the inner side, which is the spiritual, all the way out to the manifested, the physical, which is your time, and then you use your time for freedom for uh building relationships, connecting better, working on your health, location freedom, financial freedom, different things like that. So the smart freedoms it's a it's a framework, it's a loop to kind of help you stay in check with this. But also at the same time, what's really beneficial about this framework is that we can actually look at it at the other side of the coin, and that if we're not experiencing freedom, well then we're self-imprisoned and we're trapped and we feel stuck. And so, what does that feel like at a spiritual level, a mental action resource, and time level? See, these are just different layers of freedom. They're all freedom, they're just on different layers because energy uh exists on different planes. It's not, you know, your thoughts are energy, your emotion is energy, your action is energy, your results are energy, it's all energy, it's all frequency, it's all vibration. And so it's just which plane are you living from? Let me start with spiritual. So on the spiritual side of things, this is really about the energy, you know, the energy we feel, and we always say we we we love more energy. And what is that energy? Energy is ability, energy is power, energy is flow, energy is life, and that's what energy is, it's spiritual. And we always seek it. We were seeking for for where so when we're burnt out and when we're feeling stressed, we obviously want to we don't want to feel that way, and we want to feel more energized. And so what we're actually seeking is like that spiritual energy that's that is behind all life, that's the essence of life, and so this is an easy way to gauge this, and it's basically how much freedom am I feeling, how much flow am I feeling? Am I feeling like I'm in a really good flow, a flow state? Are things coming with ease? Now, I'm not saying that you don't have any problems, but that when they come, they don't bother you, don't sweat the small stuff. You're able to focus on big picture and keep focused on just accepting things the way they are and seeing, focusing on what you can do and being present. That's what it really looks like if you're focusing, if you're on the spiritual layer, but you're living from freedom. On the other side of that is you feel friction and resistance and you're working against life. That's what it feels like. So you can judge yourself which way you you you're going in this. So one side I like to feel of it is like anti-clockwise, which is the pressure side of things, okay, when you feel trapped, and clockwise is the freedom side. So when you're on this loop moving clockwise, you're in a good flow. You you actually are experiencing the freedom inner and outer. And when you're in anti-clockwise, you're experiencing what it feels like to for everything to own you, and you feel trapped within your own life, which I've been there, so it's a it's an awful position to be in. But the main thing is to know that we can change it. The next is the mental. And so the mental, if you're experiencing that in freedom, this is like having calmness, peace of mind, being confident, having certainty. And on the opposite side of that, the anti-clock side, anti-clockwise side of that is when you're not experiencing that. So you again you feel trapped, you feel owned, you feel chaos in the mind. There's just busyness in your head, there's overwhelm, it's unfocused, it's tired. Okay, so the next level then out from that, and this is the reason I'm working in from out, because this is the way as within, so it out. That's the rule, okay? As within, so it out. So if we can start to change things on the inside, they will naturally express themselves on the outside through us as individuals, and then because we lead businesses through our businesses. Remember, you are like the pebbles dropped into the water, creating those ripples around you. And so when you're in a good energy inside, that escalates or expresses outside, and it expresses through your the people that you surround yourself with and your environment. And so the next less the next layer after the mental is action. So this is about really about work freedom and getting to work on the things that you love. Like this is where you get to work on developing the team, the culture, new opportunities, new products. It's really high impact work that can take your business to the next level and it builds momentum and you've great focus here. And outside of work, it can be like focusing on your health and focusing on things to do with your family as well. That's this layer. Now, where a lot of guys get trapped in this is that when you look at your time and where your time goes in the business, it's all in the low value bucket, or maybe some in the mid-value bucket. So the low value bucket is all the firefighting, the fixing, the repetition, the admin. And the mid-value bucket is more management, supervising, project delivery, things like that. But the high value is all that developmental work. It's like the really high growth work, it's the strategic work, leadership work. And so how free you are, you could judge yourself on where your time is spent on the business. So just check your calendar. How much of your time goes into the work where it's low value and much goes into mid-value and high value? And I would say a lot of guys that are in that kind of fixer mode, firefighting mode, probably 80% of their time in the low and the mid, and only 20% or maybe less in the high. And the the vision should be for you to get 80% of your time into that high and 20% in the low and the mid. So the next layer out beyond is so there, they're the first three layers there, the spiritual, the mental, and the action are you. That's you. And you can change your life just by changing those three. The next step out of this is the people around you. And so this is do like on a positive side of things, you have freedom here and resource freedom when your team step up. It's when your team, you trust your team. They have good standards, they uphold the standards. They don't drop below the line, they stay above the line, they take responsibility, they take ownership, and they don't use blame, excuses, and denial. And so they're therefore to get work done. Now, on the other side of this, it feels like you're carrying everything, that everything was back to you, all decisions come back to you, the team aren't taking ownership, the standards aren't there, and there's lots of blame, excuses, and finger pointing going on. That's the resource level. So you can you can judge for yourself where you feel you're at on all these different levels. And the last one then is time. Time is one it's obviously we're probably most related well, most related to. So time is the one that we probably can relate to most. So do we actually have time for ourselves, time for our family, time for our personal goals? Or is it soaked up, is all our time or energy and our headspace soaked up by the business and by work? And so time I feel is a result. Remember, we talk about cause and effect. So the cause is all the inside of things, the spiritual, the mental, and the action side. If you get them aligned, then it expresses well through the business, through other people. And then the result is you have time. Because time is the manifestation of what's going on inside. So how you see yourself inside and how you feel inside affects whether you have time or not. And then with the time, you can obviously build good relationships, you can work on your health, you can travel, you can explore, you can have fun, and so you can enjoy it more. And obviously, the more time you have, then the more you can work on yourself and on the business, and this becomes an upward spiral, an upward freedom spiral. And it's amazing to experience that because it just keeps getting better and better, even when life throws stuff at you. And I suppose on the other side of this, when you're trapped, you don't have any time. It feels like you just don't have any time for yourself. You're up early in the morning, maybe you're not even sleeping that great, so you're tired waking up, your days are long, you have great intentions maybe to get you know an important job done in the first couple of hours of the day. And as soon as you get into work, somebody knocks on your door, the phone rings, there's an email, and all of a sudden it starts off this chaotic rhythm during the day, and you feel like you've worked your ass off but got nothing done. And so when you go home, then you're you might be there physically, but maybe you're not there present with your family, you're a little bit absent on the mental side and spiritual side, emotional side for them. And so that's not fair on you or them, obviously. And so we need to kind of kind of change this. So you the main thing is you can change this, and here's a quick analogy. Imagine going into work, imagine you you work with steel, you're a steel fabricator, something like that, okay? And you work drilling steel. And so imagine you pick up the drill and you're not aware that there's a setting on the drill for forwards and backwards. So forwards means that the drill is flowing anti-clockwise, and backwards mean the drill is going clockwise, and so it's stuck in reverse, right? It's stuck going backwards, and you're drilling through the steel with this new sharp, lovely, lovely sharp bit. And uh you're you even you you start drilling and you realize it's not working. So then you put up the speed of the drill to make it go faster, you know, you do more, and it's still not going anywhere. And after a while, the bit is just worn out. It's just worn. A lovely new bit, it's gone. So you pick up the next one and you try the next one, and the same thing happens, and the same thing happens, and you go away at the end of the day deflated. You go home, you have no energy, you're wrecked after a day, and you're thinking about tomorrow, and you're dreading it because all that's gonna happen now is you know you're gonna go in and do the same thing again. And Albert Einstein said, doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. You don't realize that all you have to do is flick that switch over to forward, and the drill will start to eat into that steel because you're not broken or you're not weak or nothing like that. You are sharp, you have an edge, you have focus, you have momentum, you have grip, you have strength. But if you're moving in the wrong way, you work against yourself, and that sharpness and that edge and that grip and that strength is not building momentum, it's not getting through the steel. And so you have to focus on flip this. And the way you focus and flip this is that when you're working backwards, you're living from the outside in. You're letting what's happened in the past, what's happening today, and what might happen tomorrow determine how you're gonna think and how you're showing up today. You're letting that drain your energy, and so therefore you can't enjoy it. When you start living from the inside out, you start aligning with who you are, you start aligning back to your purpose, your vision, you start aligning with a good structure for your week, building in momentum, making time for what's important, and working on yourself, taking that personal responsibility, taking responsibility to recover and rest and recharge. Now you start working in forward. And this will be slow at first. It might be in like a speed one. You're you're building some momental, but you notice yourself, you notice a shift in yourself. You're not carrying the same weight, you're actually enjoying it a bit more. You actually notice your team are starting to respond better. You actually maybe somebody in your in your team or your staff, maybe a senior manager, says to you, I've noticed a change in you. You're a lot, you're a lot more positive or you're a lot more focused. And you start to see things, and then the team become more focused, and this manifests out from you. And this is the way to work clockwise on the upward spiral. And this is the freedom spiral. This is when you get this is when you have the freedom to enjoy what you've built, and you're not waiting for a someday, because if you're waiting for a someday or later or next month, it'll never happen. It'll never happen. Because the only way you can experience enjoyment and freedom is from within. And the only time you can feel enjoyment and freedom from within is when you're present with it right now. You can think of things right now that would bring joy to you. You might not have done it in a while, but you can do it. You can think of having time off with your family where you don't have to bring the laptop, you don't have any connection, and you have full faith that everything's gonna be running in your business smoothly when you get back. You can think of that. Even if it's never happened before, you can think of it. And when you start to think of this, it opens up possibility. Because the old thought is like I don't even want to take the week off, a break isn't worth it. It's more stressful being away than it is being here, and that's not a way to live. That's not a way to uh grow sustainably. And if you're achieving success like that, I don't even believe it's worth it. I think you'd be as well off going get a nine to five. So make sure that you're working inside, getting that alignment, working from within, so that the freedom becomes a way of life, it becomes a rhythm for you to live because nothing owns you outside. You know what you own inside, you know who you are, you know what you're responsible for, you have the right structures in place, you're leading yourself well, and you're starting to lead everyone around you better, and you create this freedom for yourself. So we'll leave it there for this week and just reflect on where am I living in freedom and where do I feel trapped. Take care. Thank you so much for listening today. I really enjoy sharing this wisdom because it doesn't come from me, it comes through me from the work I do with men like you that I serve. So if the idea shared today resonated, be sure to like and follow the show. And if another man would value it, share this episode with him. Because the more men who hear this, the more of us can break free from pressure and enjoy what we're building. So let's enjoy the build together. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next week.