254 Reclaiming Your Authentic Path with Graham Cochrane
What happens when your dreams take a detour? In this episode, I'm thrilled to welcome Graham Cochrane, a former aspiring rock star who navigated an identity crisis to become a successful content creator and entrepreneur. Graham's story is one of extraordinary resilience, as he shifted from a conventional job path to rediscover his passion amidst personal and global challenges. Hear how he leveraged his creativity into a thriving freelance business, YouTube channel, blog, and podcast, proving that it's never too late to reinvent yourself.
In this episode, we cover:
- Introduction to Graham's REBEL Framework
- Applying the REBEL Framework to your life/business
- Benefits and Outcomes of Using the REBEL Framework
Connect with Graham:
www.grahamcochrane.com
www.instagram.com/thegrahamcochrane
www.youtube.com/grahamcochrane
www.grahamcochrane.com/podcasts/the-graham-cochrane-show
Mentioned in the episode:
Pre-order Graham's new Rebel book with bonuses at www.grahamcochrane.com/rebelbook
Listen to the episode here!
Or watch the episode here!
I’d be honored and grateful if you would head over to iTunes to leave a review and let other female entrepreneurs know what you learned! While you’re there, don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss an episode.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Megan:
Have you ever heard the phrase rebel, and maybe it leaves you feeling a little uncomfortable. Well, guess what? Today, you are going to learn to love the term rebel and you're going to get fired up to become one yourself. Welcome to the Work-Life Harmony podcast. Guess what? You don't have to feel constantly overwhelmed, exhausted and stressed out. There is another way. When you have the right systems and tools to plan and manage your time, you can live a life of harmony. If you're ready to stop feeling overwhelmed, this is the show for you. Welcome back to Work-Life Harmony. This is kind of a special day here on the show. I was just telling our guest Graham right before we started, that, graham, I think you are the third male guest on this show. I was just telling our guest Graham right before we started, that, graham, I think you are the third male guest on this show in five years.
Megan:
I don't often bring men onto the show just because we talk a lot about work-life harmony for women.
Megan:
But I want to take a couple seconds to let everyone know how I know you and why I have you on the show, and then would love for you to share a little bit about your story, because when I heard it, I found it amazing. Graham and I first well, I'd followed Graham on social media for a while and then we ended up being in a program together and I remember seeing you on a call I'm like I know him and then we connected at a conference last year and Graham gave me some really great advice and for those of you that don't follow Graham on Instagram, I would encourage you to do that. We're going to put a link in the show notes, but I'm just always really drawn to how you manage family life and being an entrepreneur and honoring time with your family and your kids. It's something that I don't see always so often, so I want to thank you for that. But I would love for you to introduce yourself, tell a little bit about your backstory and then I'm excited to dive into your new book.
Graham:
Oh yeah, megan, it's so cool that we keep bumping into each other in totally different places and then have different connections, and I know there was a connection with Colin Boyd and so it's just like, wow, it felt like three different worlds that we kept bumping into each other. So I love when those things align. I'm excited to be here. I actually it's funny that you mentioned that I'm the third male in five years to come on this show. That feels like a triumph for me and it's funny that at that event that we bumped into each other in the Kajabi event, I had multiple people tell me you have great feminine energy and I didn't know what. That if that was a good thing, I was like I live with three women.
Graham:
I live with three women and a girl bunny, so I have to have good feminine energy, but I take it as a compliment. Happy to be here. Yeah, I think the quick version of the story and we can go wherever is meaningful to your audience is I thought my dream would be to be a rock star and be a professional musician and I chased that dream hard all the way through college and the dream did not come true. I came to a fork in the road and this is something I do talk about in the book a little bit. I call it an identity crisis intersection, where you have a dream. It could be a financial dream, it could be a career dream for me it was both career and financial. It could be a relationship dream, like I want to get married, I want to have a kid. Whatever the dream is, you could have a dream. I think we all have a dream and then that dream dies for whatever reason.
Graham:
In my case, I didn't. I just never quite got the dream. I tried. I was trying to get a record deal. I kept getting nose, nose and nose and then I got a couple of yeses, but there was no money attached to the yeses and I was Engaged to be married to my now wife, shay, and I needed an advance on a record deal to to have Money to pay the bills. So I had a choice. I had this in the road. Do I keep pursuing this dream or do I just give up on the dream?
Graham:
And I I in in the identity crisis intersection, I say you can either conform and go back to well, that was stupid, that dream didn't work out. Or I lost that dream where the divorce happened, or I lost the child, or the career fell apart or the business went bankrupt, like. So what happens when you when? What do you do when that happens? You either conform and say forget that, that was stupid, I'm going to just go back with my head down and be a normal person and not dream again. And that's what I did for four years and it was the right thing to do in a lot of ways, because I needed to provide for my wife.
Graham:
But it like did not work in terms of like my soul was restless for four years, floating around stupid job after stupid job that I was not a good fit for, wondering what am I doing with my life until 26. I'm 26. I have a baby, a mortgage, a wife. I'm in a new state. It's the global recession of 2008, 2009. I lost two jobs during 10 months. We're on food stamps for 18 months and I'm like, what am I doing with my life? Like I gave up on the dream to be responsible and that didn't pan out very well. So now now what you know I'm moving backwards, and so I got to where I kind of found myself and I went on this journey to figure out a way to make an income.
Graham:
Alternatively, I didn't want to go back to work at a job.
Graham:
I knew it wasn't a good fit for me and just opened a lot of doors with ways I could leverage other skills that I had and new creative ways that turned me into a content creator.
Graham:
I started a freelance business that turned into a YouTube channel and a blog and a podcast, and 15 years later, I'm a full-fledged content creator for a living, which is wild, in two different industries, and it's been a wild ride ever since, not how I predicted it, but in a long roundabout way, I got to have my dream again and live new dreams, and I think that's the big part of what I really believe in, for people is all of us are going to have dreams that die. We're all going to be at these moments where, when our dream dies, our identity dies a little bit with it. That's why I call it an identity crisis intersection. But we don't have to just choose the path of conformity and just go back and be a normal person and give up on our dreams. We can actually make another choice, which is to dream again, and that's what I hope people do, and that's what I try to encourage people to do in the new book too.
Megan:
I'd love that and one of your, one of your revenue streams or businesses? You still are connected to music, right yeah?
Graham:
And I love that because.
Megan:
I think we think well, that dream's done. We shut down every possible door and just say I can't have any of that in my life anymore. Yeah.
Graham:
Because we're not that creative. We have a vision of what it's going to look like and I think that's beautiful. I think vision's important. It gets you in the ballpark, but you also have to be really open and flexible till life throws you curve balls. And also, we don't really know the future and we can't really.
Graham:
When I was dreaming of being a rock star, youtube didn't exist. Content creation in the way it exists today didn't exist, and so there was no way I could have had a vision for what I'm doing now. So it would have been really foolish for me to say this is the only way I could be a musician industry. Through starting the largest YouTube channel in the music industry in terms of recording and producing music.
Graham:
I've gotten to go to so many incredible events, meet some of my heroes, make music full time and get paid in other creative ways where I don't have to sell the music I can. So it's just been so wild where I've been able to do music for 15 years. I haven't had a job in 15 years and yet I've made a lot more money as an entrepreneur and it's been a lot more stable and I haven't had to be on the road leaving my family. I actually get to spend more time with them than most nine to five employees get to spend with their family, so it's been way better than what I thought my dream was, and so that's a big encouragement for people too is even if you don't get your dream, don't give up, because there could be a different version of your dream that might be a lot more beneficial than the first one.
Megan:
Yeah, it's interesting you were talking about that. I was thinking back. You know, I had this dream of building a software company, starting a software company, and did that with a partner, and then it failed for a ton of reasons, and you know it was that. Well, now, what you know, this was what I thought my entire career was heading towards and, yeah, I licked my wounds for a little bit, but without that I wouldn't have this today, and this was not the dream from the beginning. But I love that you shared that, because I think so many times people it's. I had this dream and let me tell you exactly how I executed on there and got there, and I think for the vast majority of us right, there's probably a lot of stopping, restarting, recalibrating, having it morph into something different, and who knows what it's going to look like 10 years from now. Right, yeah, so tell us about your book.
Graham:
And I love how you came up with the title of it. Yeah, so the new book's called Rebel Find Yourself by Not Following the Crowd, and so I had published my first book two years ago how to Get Paid for what you Know and that book is straightforward. It's the business model that I've run for 15 years. It's what I teach people how to leverage whatever you know, your skills, your knowledge and turn it into an income stream online in your spare time. That book had come out and that was a dream of mine was to be an author.
Graham:
I had been a YouTuber and a podcaster, but I'd never written a physical book. And I have a bunch of books behind me on my bookshelf. I have a million over here and a million at the house. I mean, books have changed my life and I always thought one day I'd love to write a book and just add to that library. And so I had done that, and here I was like proud of myself. I published my first book. I got a publishing deal which kind of felt like my record deal dream come back.
Megan:
It just wasn't a music deal.
Graham:
Yeah, somebody actually wanted to pay me and produce something of mine. So, again these versions of the dreams. And so here I am a few months later and my sort of newer dream was like, hey, maybe I'll write more books, I'd love to speak on more stages. That's where we connected was at a TEDx program and I wanted to do a TEDx talk, and so I was in that world of starting to look at speaking more seriously. And I got connected with John Gordon, who's an incredible author and speaker. He's written a lot of books, like the Energy Bus or the Carpenter. He writes a lot of fables, little small stories that teach lessons about leadership positivity. He's a great guy.
Graham:
We got connected in a mastermind. We had a mutual connection. The guy that signed me to my first book deal signed him 20 years ago, and so we had this mutual connection. We had a cool conversation and I thought that was it.
Graham:
And then I one day I'm on a walk and he popped in my head and I was thinking man, john Gordon, you know he's probably 15, 12, 15 years older than me. He's further ahead in that type of career than I am and he's kind of doing what I envisioned myself doing one day and I could try to figure it out on my own, or I could try to ask this guy, beg him to, to give me some counsel. And so I texted him and I said, bro, what would it cost to get you to spend a day with me? I just want to learn how to like the speaking world. That's what I thought I was bringing him over was to teach me the speaking world.
Graham:
He agrees to come over to Tampa. He doesn't live too far, he lives over in the Jacksonville area. I'm in Florida, comes over, we spend a day together. And here I have a million questions for him about speaking. How do you write a good keynote? How do you get on stages? How do you charge Blah blah? And so I start to ask him questions. He's like wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What's the message of your next book? And I was like John, I just published my first book.
Graham:
That was a lot of work. I don't know. I don't know. And I was like I haven't thought that far ahead. And he's like well, what do you want to write about? And we started to go back and forth on all the things I could write about and that I would be excited to write about, and none of them felt really clear. And we spent about two hours like workshopping, brainstorming. We went to lunch and I wasn't getting anywhere and he finally said well, just tell me your life story. I was like, okay, I started to tell him my story about how I wanted to be a rock star and how I remember being in the guidance counselor office at age 17. And she was like you're the only kid in your grade who hasn't applied for school yet and you need to start applying for college. And I told her like, oh, I'm going to be a professional musician when I grow up.
Graham:
I don't need college to be a rock star, there's no degree for that. You just go do it. And she was like no, you must apply no-transcript. And when he said that, I was like that is not a word that I use or would have ever labeled myself as like different things come up in my mind when I hear the word rebel.
Megan:
Usually it's kind of like that little little edgy, little off, little contradictory. You know we get almost a negative connotation.
Graham:
Yeah, it has a negative connotation, like I'm trying to be a bad boy, I want to break the status quo just for the sake of being different. But he was saying no, like, and when I went and looked up the words, like it made sense in that moment, like in my spirit, I was like that. That does actually, in one word, describe how I feel. There is a prescribed path, current, like a river has a little current, a current of conformity, like, if you don't do anything in your life, you are going somewhere. Right, you're going along the stream that's already floating on some direction. That stream is the stream of what your friends are doing and saying, the stream of your culture, the stream of your upbringing. Like you're going somewhere and so it's ironically rebellious to get out of the stream, get on the shore of the river for a second and stand up and look around and say is this the direction I want to go, or is there somewhere else I'd like to go? And that's all a rebel is is someone who has the courage to actually live their truest, most authentic self, complete with all of your talents, all of your skills, all of your joys and passions, even when everyone's pushing back and saying no, no, no, no, be like us, be like us.
Graham:
And so the moment he said that I was like, I knew I had to write a book about this, about basically living an intentional life, living the life you were designed to live, not the life that, megan, like you're designed or someone else's designed like what's the life Graham's designed to live. That's what being a rebel is. The problem is most people don't know who they really are, like Dan Miller, the late Dan Miller. He wrote a great book, 48 Days to the Work you Love. I had him on my podcast a few years ago. He endorsed my first book, just an incredible soul. But he's always said that the two most important questions you need to answer in life are who am I and why am I here? And those are deep questions, those are hard questions, but most people are too busy to ask those questions or we have a very vague sense of who we are, why we're here.
Megan:
That's really determined by what everyone else's answers to those questions are or all the external demands coming at us that we feel we have to respond to on the daily?
Graham:
Exactly, exactly. So. My heartbeat for this book, megan, is like to help people figure out. I have a five-part framework. It just it all came, it all made. So I look back on my life and I was like, well, if I was going to try to teach other people how to live the way I've lived, like, what would the structure of that be? And so the book walks out this five-part structure. It spells out the word rebel. So it's a simple framework and we can get into any of it that you want to. But really it's a simple book of saying let's pause for a moment and figure out of, like, the six core areas of life that I identify in the book. Which is the way you manage your work or career, whatever that looks like we're all doing something to contribute to society every day. The way you manage your time, which is the most precious currency we have to spend that speaks to me.
Graham:
Yep, the way we manage our finances and our money, the way we manage our relationships, our health, both physical and mental, and our spirituality. Those six areas. I want people to be a rebel in all six of those areas, because the alternative is to conform and be like everybody else in all six of those areas. And if I honestly, megan, if I look around and see the way everyone else is managing their work, they hate what they do. They hate what they wake up and do every day. They're managing their time. No one has time for anything. They're stressed out of their minds. Their money Everyone's in debt and trying to buy the same thing everyone else has their relationships.
Graham:
Marriages are falling apart, families are falling apart their health. We're the most unhealthy physically and mentally we've ever been. Spirituality well, we're in a great 100, 200 year old experiment called enlightenment, where we've kicked out spirituality and separated the physical from the spiritual and like that's not working. That's why we have such a mental health crisis. For thousands of years, we've tried to merge spirituality and the physical, and so I look at the way conformity is happening in those six areas and I just look at the results and I'm like I don't want that. People seem depressed. So ironically, it's rebellious to try to have a healthy marriage and family and stay together.
Megan:
That's rebellious in this culture. Isn't it fascinating that that's the rebel right, when we would think it would be the other.
Graham:
No, and what you teach real quick, just to highlight what you're teaching like to have harmony in your work, in your life, like to have balance, is rebellious. So much so that people are pushing back and I'm sure you hear this and saying there's no such thing as work-life harmony or work-life balance. It's a myth, it's impossible. They're delusional, they're trying to convince themselves it's not possible because they can't see it possible for them. And so now it's rebellious to have balance.
Megan:
We reward the hustle culture right.
Graham:
Who stayed up later?
Megan:
who got up earliest, who checked the most off their list, so we fuel that by rewarding exactly what we don't want, which always baffles me.
Megan:
So, knowing that you've this book with the framework, I'm imagining a lot of our listeners right now. Some of these women are going number one I feel so disconnected from even thinking about dreaming because I am in the trenches and overwhelmed with everything I'm juggling right now. So kind of two parts to this Number one how do you recommend we carve out time to start thinking about that for ourselves? Is this, you know? I think for a lot of people we and unfortunately the whole quote self-care movement, which I can't stand is is showing let's go to a spa for three days. It's a lot of unrealistic things. So how do we prioritize the time for that? And then, if we are so disconnected because we've been so busy, being busy for so long, how do we start to reconnect with? What are those dreams? What do I want with my life?
Graham:
Yeah, it's a great question. I mean there's no easy answer, in the sense that, like 100%. It's like anything you want in life, Megan, like if it's a priority to you, you'll find a way to make time for it, even if it's hard.
Graham:
Yes, and so this is not a shameful statement because, like, there's a lot of things that I want to be true about my life that just aren't yet and it's just showing that it's not enough of a priority or I'm not sick and tired of the pain enough to carve out a little bit of time Now. We're all busy. So I'm not saying you have gobs and gobs of time, but two things One, two things. One I wrote the book as like a coaching session in a book. Like if, if, if your marriage was falling apart and you're busy, would you say I don't have time for marriage counseling, I just don't have time for that. That might be physically true, you feel like I don't have time, but you almost don't not have time like for it. Like if you don't make it a priority, your marriage will fall apart, and so even if it's then just going to counseling for yourself or getting therapy or like getting a coach, like it's it's, if it's necessary, it's worth sacrificing the time for. So what I've tried to do is two things One is make it like a coaching session in a book and to make it the book mercilessly short, like it's very short, it's a quick read. I kept editing it down. I was and I intentionally was like how can I make this as fast paced of a read as possible, doable of a read? You could read it in a day. But also how can I make it as actionable as possible? So there's five. There's only eight chapters. Only five of them are the framework. There's five core exercises, one in each chapter. Even if you didn't get through the whole book, even if you just did the first exercise, it's really about carving time out to do this one exercise. It's my 50 dreams exercise. That's gonna be hard at first, but if you view it as like a coaching or counseling session, the rewards are gonna be really worth it.
Graham:
Because you need to figure out, you need to do the work to figure out who you are. Like. The reason you're busy is because you're doing things you care about. So that might be taking care of your kids. It might be running a company. It might be running a company. It might be working a job you believe in. You owe it to the company, your business, your children, your family to figure out who you really are.
Graham:
Because here's the deal, megan, like the whole point of Rebel is not to like go live your best life out there. I talk about this at the very end of the book. The whole point is to figure out who the real you is. That's been there underneath all along. As I said once in a counseling session to somebody, I don't feel like I've let the real Graham come out and play. Yet this book is trying to help you. Let the real you come out and play, because the moment the real you comes out, then everyone around you benefits.
Graham:
You go through the process to be a rebel, which is basically to become yourself. Get back to who you are. That's why the subtitle is called find yourself Like. You don't have to become something you're not. You are who you are. You just don't know much about who you are anymore. You're so distant from who you are.
Graham:
So the work is not much. It's meaningful. It's not overnight, but the work isn't much. But it's worth it to figure out who you are so that you can go back to your sphere of influence your home, your family, your workplace, your community, your church, wherever and show up as the real you, because I believe that everyone's like uniquely designed strategically to make the world a better place, like if Megan shows up fully as Megan. The world's a better place. If Graham shows up fully as Graham, the world's a better place. If I'm like this kind of fake version of me, the version I think my parents wanted me to be, the version I think my wife wants me to be, it's going to be a diluted and as ineffective like version of me in terms of like the work I'm meant to do here on this earth, like relationally. Does that all make sense?
Megan:
It does, and I first of all thank you for your honesty on just saying you've got to prioritize the time right. If it's important enough for you, you will make the time to sit and think about it and do the exercises, because people are always looking for what's the silver bullet, what's the Amazon Prime? Deliver it now. How do I get it? You can't. You have to actually prioritize the time and say this is important enough for me to work on and for women in particular. I'm not going to reshare my whole story because you guys have heard about it the day someone asked me what I did for fun and I didn't have an answer anymore. So in the trenches.
Megan:
I think that it's very easy for a lot of women to fall into a place of having these different roles in our lives, where, particularly if you have children, okay, I'm mom, okay, I'm spouse. Where, particularly if you have children, okay, I'm mom, okay, I'm spouse, okay, I'm employee, or I'm business owner, and we almost have a different. I know I did for a long time have this different persona depending upon which one of those roles I was in, and it was almost even daughter or sister, okay, well, let me dial this down but turn this up in this environment down but turn this up in this environment.
Megan:
And it was these knobs moving all day long and it's exhausting. I am not there yet but thankfully, through working with a coach I've recognized quit compartmentalizing who you are when what you're doing.
Megan:
The magic is when you can just be Megan all day long with all the Megan dials up, because then I show up very differently and I'm not so dang tired from trying to step out of this person and into that person and out of that person and into this person. And until you were talking about that living your truest, authentic self, I had not kind of put that correlation together of how that supports truly living your best life right, as if we can just be our best version of us all the time and not moving things around and turning things on and off.
Graham:
Oh, that's so good. I mean because it's a performance, right yeah. And performing I'm a performer, I've been on stage my whole good, I mean because it's a performance, right yeah, and performing I'm a performer, I've been on stage my whole life. I was a theater kid, a musician. Like it's exhausting to perform. Like people don't understand that most performers on a stage like literally like in the theater are introverts and they're going to work, yeah.
Graham:
And when you get off the stage you know they're like well, you didn't do anything, you weren't like lifting. You're like you're. Why are you exhausted? Because performing is exhausting. So if you're doing that, you're basically performing a six different versions of Megan all day long no wonder you come home exhausted because you're, you're thinking what line, what should I say? What is that? Personality's? You know, energy and response to that kind of thing. So that is exhausting. Here's the, here's this interesting reality. And this is maybe the trade-off in the book, right? If you press into being a rebel Megan and being your true self, you gain something and you lose something, but ultimately then you gain it back. The one thing you gain is you gain peace, what you're describing. You gain freedom, like the weight comes off because you don't have to. You're just like I'm not gonna have to act like something I'm not. And that is valuable, because when it's so much easier to be yourself and hey, the soren kirkegaard has this haunting quote. He was a 19th century danish philosopher. He says the most common form of despair is not being who you are like, it is crazy that you just brought that up because I literally just put that quote into a workbook yesterday oh my gosh okay
Graham:
well, that was, that was was for you and that was for me. Then, like, we both needed to have it confirmed. The most common form of despair is not being who you are. That's what you described. Is that exhaustion of like I just can't be me. So the if you do the rebel framework, you move to the path of like, figuring out who you are and then showing up fully to yourself. That is a benefit.
Graham:
Here's the negative I had I warn people about this in the book. Like this is the reality. A lot of people won't like it. Yeah, they will not like it, and not because you're doing anything wrong, but because you're not showing up the way they want you to show up, which might be for a lot of reasons. Maybe it's the way you've been showing up, so they're used to you in this certain box, in this label. It might be because it's really hard to stand out Like. There's something literally called the tall poppy syndrome in certain cultures where, like, if you're the flower that's a little taller than everybody else that stands out, people want to chop you down and say just come back down and be like us and I think for women a lot we we tend to, more so than men, we battle being people pleasers, you know, and people pleaser is that exact thing you're talking about.
Megan:
Let me not be me to make them. I think it's going to make them feel comfortable instead of realizing I'm depriving them. Yes, of who I really am.
Graham:
You are depriving them Exactly. That's the irony. So you have to to have the benefit of feeling free and being yourself. You have to be willing to walk into the uncomfortable of people judging you, because there will be a new form of judgment, but it's almost temporary. Some people will always judge you if you step into yourself, but then they weren't meant to be in your circle anyway. In terms of I'm not like a person that says cut out people of your life. That's not the point. But you can't bring everybody with you, right, like you have to be who you are.
Graham:
But the irony of rebels just think historically about rebels that we all know. Like Martin Luther King Jr right, it was a huge rebel. Steve Jobs, like just changed the idea of what a computer and technology is, jesus Christ. Like Amelia Earhart, like these people, nobody liked them when they started on the scene. Like nobody. Everyone pushed back against their ideas because they challenged the status quo. But they weren't just trying to be different for the sake of being different. They weren't just trying to piss people off. They were trying to fight for something they believed in that was meaningful.
Graham:
And now, years later, we all look at them and go, wow, martin Luther King Jr. What a hero. Wow, steve Jobs was a genius. Wow, amelia Earhart like broke a lot of barriers for women. Like Jesus, like everyone in the religious community hated him back then, but now he's transformed. Like the 2 billion people worship him like around the planet today. Like the whole calendar was changed around his birth and death. It's like nobody liked him at the time but they like him now. And a lot of the heroes we like in books and movies are rebels. You know the Harry Potters and the Luke Skywalkers. Books and movies are rebels. You know the Harry Potters and the Luke Skywalkers. And you know you watch you know the Hunger Games.
Megan:
I was just going to say Katniss Everdeen, Katniss is such a rebel, Like we all.
Graham:
It's interesting because we find rebels attractive because not because they're breaking the law we were all lawbreakers is because they're showing up fully as themselves and we long to show up fully as ourselves as well. And I think if you press into the rebel thing, you will have to deal with people judging you temporarily, but eventually those that know you best and those that you're meant to serve will finally appreciate it and they'll actually be encouraged to find themselves as well and become a rebel as well. Like it's not rebellious for the sake of rebellion, it's hey. Being a rebel to me looks like this, because this is what life is, how it's showing up meaningfully for me. What does it look like to be a rebel for you?
Graham:
Like I'm trying to bring my kids. I have two daughters, I have a 15-year-old and a 12-year-old. I'm trying to bring them along. I'm making them go through these exercises in the book so that they don't become me. I don't want them to conform and and like who are you designed to be and how are you designed to show up in the world? And so it's very important for them to become little rebels as well, because the culture is going a certain way, and I don't think it's the way we're meant to go.
Megan:
Oh, I love this. I am just thrilled to be able to be here today and talk about this book, because I think it's a must read for everyone. So, guys, I've got the link in the show notes to the book. It's out on Amazon. When is our?
Graham:
official release date September 3rd. So it's coming soon.
Megan:
But you can pre-order it right now.
Graham:
Yeah, I've got a bunch of bonuses that you can get immediately so you can actually start doing the book before you get it in your hands, and one of them is a journal. I put together the Rebel Journal, where I pulled out the five core exercises from the book and put them in a simple journal format that you can print up or do digitally to help you start the process, and also put together a video masterclass with John Gordon teaching the concepts of the book as well, so you can dive in right away and start to practice some of this stuff before the book comes out, because it really is a book you do, not just a book you read.
Megan:
Oh, I love. It All right, I'm gonna ask you one final question in closing what does work-life harmony look like for you in your life today? Juggling two businesses, two young girls.
Graham:
Yeah, so it's funny, we were talking about summer schedules before we hit record and I look at. To me, harmony with work and life has to be practical. With the season that I'm in and that could be the season at the age of my kids and also be the season of the year, literally Like the summer season. I change up my work schedule. I have to If I want to take advantage of the fact that my kids are out of school for three months and I want to spend more time with them. I have to change my schedule. And so you had mentioned, like, hey, I'm not going to push as much in the summer, like I'm. The same way, I don't do a whole lot in the summer. This book launch is a uniqueness, so, like I had to prep my kids. Like hey, this summer, because of when the publisher wants the book to come out, like the way it interviews, like this, I'm going to be in my community, I'm going to be on stages, I'll be doing a lot more activity than I typically do in the summer. So they've been. You know, I brought them in on it and they understand, but generally it's like, hey, what is the season I'm in?
Graham:
When we had little kids. It was one thing. My wife's a business owner as well, so we're both having to juggle this and we both have been. She's been 16 hours a week or less in her business and I've been 32 or less, and these years I'm down to five hours a week in my business. So there's a lot of flexibility and we've built our businesses that way on purpose. It took a little bit of work, but we had a vision for not having to have an owner-dependent business, have it be pretty automated and at least flexible. So a lot of that is by design.
Graham:
But at the end of the day it's like I want to be able to fully work when I'm working and not feel guilty about it, and the only way I could do that is if I know I have. The most important thing in my weekly schedule is time with my family. So I teach this to people and you probably teach it too. But, like when you look at your week, especially if you work out of the home, you've got to circle. When am I not working? Those are the most important blocks. Yes that, when am I not working? Those are the most important blocks. We could talk about that for hours, everyone says find your working time.
Graham:
I'm like no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, not working time, let's focus on that. And you know what's funny? Like Meg, like I, I'm blown away when I talk to single people or people who don't have kids yet. They're like oh well, I don't have kids yet, so you don't need time off for yourself to do something fun. Like you should always know when you're not working whether you have kids. You're married, no kids. But so yeah, for me it is a messy answer because it's different every literally every year I have to rewrite my schedule. Every season I have to change it. I think that's the.
Megan:
that's showing that it's that it's a priority of making sure that you have that time. This old school thing of oh here's my ideal day and that's what I wake up and do all day, every day, all year long, year after year. It's unreasonable, right, because of the change of seasons, literally stages, all of that. So I love that you put such a focus on that and that's why I knew you'd be a great fit here for the show. This is not. You know, guys, graham is not a. I'm working 90 hours a week and then I have someone else handling everything else in the house. He really is living everything that we talk about here on the show. So thank you a million times over for being here today, and I know everybody is going to absolutely love your book.
Graham:
Oh, megan, thanks for what you do, thanks for having me on, and I'm so glad we keep bumping into each other.
Megan:
Yeah, and I know I'll see you soon at the next event.
Graham:
Exactly Yep that will never end in terms of your to-do list. I have great news for you.
Megan:
I have an app in both the App Store and Google Play called the Pink Bee, and it is chock full of small but incredibly powerful trainings to help you get out of overwhelm. It includes my signature Ditch the Overwhelm training and introduction to my time management framework, built specifically for women. In addition, you get access to my epic one notebook challenge and some tips and tricks on how to get your phone organized to minimize distractions. All of that is available for you right inside the Pink Bee app. So open up either your app store or Google Play, do a search on the word the Pink Bee all one word and download the app to get started today.
