The 6 Weekly Anchors Behind My $8M Business (That Have Nothing to Do With Marketing)

Sam Vander Wielen: Taking care of yourself is going to make you a stronger business person, a more creative person with better ideas that are more original, that come from who you really are and what you’re here to contribute to this world.

Hey there, and welcome back to On Your Terms®, a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to be as present in their lives as they are profitable in their businesses. If you’re new here, welcome to the show and if you listen each Monday, welcome back. I’m so glad you are here. So today we’re talking about six of my top, like what I’m calling weekly anchors, things that I have to have, things I have to prioritize each week in order to be able to run a multi seven figure business, be present in my life, be able to stay sane, you know, all that kind of stuff.

These are all things that ultimately help me grow and run my business on a day-to-day basis because they’re the things that prioritize and protect my boundaries, my energy, they keep me healthy. You have to be healthy in order to run a business, in order to have the energy to run a business. And they really help me to manage my mental health, like running this size of business with this much feedback and noise and just being a human in today’s world and being a human in today’s world, online is tough. It’s really tough.

And I know that you’re here because you want to have, or you already have a business and. I know it’s easy to think like what you actually need to grow that business is just more tips and tricks and strategies and hacks and like to know what’s the latest thing to do on Instagram. But in reality, here’s the secret I would love to give you.

None of those things will work without you, you can try every strategy and tip and hack in the book. If you don’t have the energy, if you can’t show up, it doesn’t matter. So we need a version of you who has energy, who’s calm and clear, who’s creative and full of ideas, and has the like zest and vigor in life to show up and actually do that stuff.

So in order to do that, we need to take care of you. Really we need you to take care of you. And so while I’m sharing my six anchors this week, I hope that you will use them as inspiration or even just to start to like kind of formalize maybe some things that you might already be doing but not really paying attention to, to come up with your own.

And then I hope you share them with me ’cause I’m sharing mine with you today, so I would kind of love it if you shared yours with me. I’m also really hoping to change your mind about something today, which is this idea that these things that you do that like aren’t related to your business are a waste of time, or they’re selfish or like that your business maybe isn’t where you want it to be yet, so you should be doing all like businessy related things.

I’m just kind of secretly hoping to change your mind today that these things, the things we’ll talk about today, count just as much as doing more marketing research, building out a product or posting on social media. So let’s get into today’s episode.

First up, one of the weekly things I do every single Sunday is a little something I call the “Sunday Preheat” .So this is where I set aside a little bit of planning time on Sunday, kind of just like wrapping my mind around what my week looks like, where I’m gonna fit things in and get myself organized. So part of it is planning, and then I would say the other part of my Sunday preheat is execution, doing some things like meal prep, laundry, getting myself situated. It’s kind of like, preheating the oven so that you can cook something, but the oven is your week. One of the first things I like to do on Sunday is just do a little reflection on how the past week went, because sometimes when you just sit down and think about how things went last week, there might be some things last week that you’re like gosh, things just got like so out of control and I just didn’t end up getting to anything that I actually wanted to do for myself.

Sometimes when you do that, you then start to see patterns of why something didn’t work out for you or why your appointments keep getting, you know, put on the side or something like that, and then we can do a little planning to make sure that that doesn’t happen this week.

On the flip side, I think you can also start to notice positive patterns where you do certain things in your week and you start to see like, oh, when I, you know, meal prep, I end up eating at home a lot more and that saves me a lot of money and so therefore putting in the hour on Sunday to meal prep, it really helps me, you know, stuff like that.

So I like to do a little bit of that reflection first. Based on that, I then like to set a focus for this week. Usually I break these down between what my focus this week is on the personal side and on the business side. Usually when I’m setting these focuses, it’s usually based on something that I don’t love how it went last week, and I can feel the difference.

Like you’ll hear me talk today about my sleep and how much I prioritize my sleep and my sleep routine and all that. And if I had a week where I just got off kilter, like it happens, we travel, we have family visit, like I was in a launch, something happens, right? It’s okay. I don’t spend any time really beating myself up about it or wasting, wasting any sleep about it. But I do then say like, okay, well based on the fact that that got off track last week, and that’s really important to me, that’s going to be my personal focus this week.

On the business side, it’s usually more like a focus where it helps me to have like more of a 30,000 foot view of saying like, what am I really focusing on in my business this week? Because there are about a thousand things per week at on any given week that I could focus on. So which one am I choosing? Like, and I think a lot of this just has to do with being really realistic in your business.

When I started, or for the first like five, five years probably I would be like, my focus is this week are to start a podcast, grow my email list, hit 50,000 people on Instagram, and also come up with like the best product ever. And it was just like, okay, this is not, that’s not a realistic focus for the week. So. In reality now it’s more like, you know, right now, for example, I’m focusing on growing my podcast. That’s like kind of a, uh, a big overarching focus that I have at the moment. So, on Sunday, when I’m doing some of my planning, if I know that this is a week coming up that I have a lot of recording or I’m doing a lot of planning for the podcast in terms of, uh, outlining and researching episodes, then that’s something that’s probably going to be my business focus for the week, is just like, I’m just focused this week on making really good podcast episodes. Does that mean I’m not doing other things in my business? Heck no. I have 80 million thousand other things to do approximately in my business on any given week. It just means that generally, like I’m prioritizing that and then when I’m doing those tasks, I’m kind of mentally being like, you, you told yourself you’re prioritizing this this week.

Now that I’ve set my focus, I tend to sit down with my schedule. So I tend to open up my Google calendar. Um, I look at my phone, like I look at everything I have going on, and the first thing I wanna know are what all my like calendar anchors are so what, those are my appointments and my meetings.

These tend to be things that are more or less set in stone. Sometimes during this review process, there are a couple of meetings or things on my calendar, that I go ahead and cancel. There may be things we put on a while ago or like things I would reach out to my director of operations, Lindsey, and I would be like, is this something I have to go to? Can you go to this instead? That kind of stuff. So I tend to do a little bit of pruning during this time too, but that’s not often, oftentimes my team is pretty good about keeping my calendar and the things that are on there. I pretty much have to or want to go to.

So I look to those things as anchors, and then that’s when I start slotting in things for myself first and then for my work. So the first thing I do is I go through and I think about my workouts for the week. So if I have personal trainer appointments, which I usually have one or two a week, those are again kind of set in stone so I pop those onto the calendar first. After that, I then take a look at my schedule. I usually crosscheck with the weather, which also influences the next thing I’m about to talk about where I then pop different workouts on my schedule because I might schedule in time for me to intentionally do a run outside because I saw that Tuesday is supposed to be a beautiful day, or it’s gonna rain all week, except that it’s gonna clear up on Thursday magically. You know, I live on an island, so we, we run an island weather here. So if I see like a day that’s just gonna like mysteriously clear up, I will be really intentional in protecting my time and my energy on that day to be like, I want to prioritize getting outside on that day so I’m gonna make a workout scheduled at 8:00 AM at the beach for a run.

So I schedule in my movement, I literally put that on my calendar as if it’s an appointment, as if I’m going to a $40 Pilates class, even if I’m not, I put that on there. I then like to look at my schedule and schedule out kind of dinners / what I’m making for the week. Right now, the way I’m doing some meal planning is that I tend to have one lunch that I have in mind or something that I’m going to prep, and then on the other days for lunch, I’m eating leftovers, that’s just the easiest thing for me. But I do schedule my dinners so that I make sure first I’m utilizing as much as I can that’s in my pantry already.

It’s really important to me to minimize and reduce food waste as much as possible. I also try to be budget conscious and so I always look in the fridge and freezer and I’m like, oh, I already have a pack of chicken that I haven’t used yet. We have three things of tofu, so like, let me plan one or two tofu meals, stuff like that. I also like to look at the weather when I’m doing this because the weather really influences what I wanna make for dinner. Like this week as I’m recording this podcast episode, for example, we’re having some unseasonably warm weather and I’m really dying to just like, make soup and like my favorite vegetarian, Shepherd’s Pie. It’s, it’s one of my favorite things to make this time of year. But it’s just too warm for me to enjoy it. So like I’ve been looking at the weather on Sunday. I, I sat down and I looked and I was like, what nights is it starting to get chilly out? And I just like can’t wait to make those meals. So personally, I let the weather dictate my meal plan. I think when I do it like that, I actually execute on the meals that I planned, to be honest.

I also used to waste a lot of time making such a specific meal plan for every single day, like on Tuesday we are eating this, and on Wednesday we must eat that. But now. I tend to just kind of like buy, like I’ll come up with what five meals I wanna make this week.

I buy the things for those five meals or do my pantry shopping, and then I kind of like plug and play on the days where it makes sense. Again, probably based on the weather.

Okay. Now that I’ve looked at my schedule and I know what appointments I have, I’ve scheduled in my workouts, I kind of know what I’m making this week and dinners I’m having and all that kinda stuff. I then like to go into the calendar and do some time blocking for deep creative work. If that week is a week where I need to write newsletters. If I am filming podcast episodes, if I’m filming YouTube episodes, I’m writing a Substack article. So it really helps to know like, what are the core pieces of content that you have to create this week?

Do you have like one newsletter, one podcast episode, one Substack? For example, if you’re a freak like me, then yeah, you have to block that off on your calendar. I actually have more than that, but I still, I still, I sit down and I put these time blocks in.

The biggest tip that I can give you related to this is to block off more time than you think you need because it just takes time. By the time I make like my 17 beverages, like I’ve reheated my coffee for the third time, I made some sort of herbal tea. Oh, I realized I gotta refill my water bottle. Now I have to go to the bathroom from drinking too much water and then I sit down. It’s like it always is just longer than you think. I also like to build in some, just mentally in these time blocks that you put on your calendar. Time, like maybe 2, 3, 10 minute breaks depending on how long this time block is. But let’s say it’s like nine to 12. I schedule several little mini breaks where I go and usually circle the block, um, or I lay outside, uh, for a couple of minutes, or I lay on my yoga mat in my office and just stare out the window, I call them stare breaks, but I, I like to build that in as well. Like you can’t expect that time block to be full on creative work the whole time.

So that’s sort of the planning side of my “  Preheat Sunday”. The execution part of my   ”Preheat Sunday” typically relates to food and kind of getting myself set for the week.

Honestly, it doesn’t feel that different than what my mom used to have me do to get ready to go back to school every single Sunday. I find that in life in general, I just feel like I’m in a perpetual school night. Like vibe, you know? And so like I still mentally on Sundays I’m like, it’s a school night. I need to get ready.

Like last night I actually put out my clothes for today. I like got my workout clothes for the day. I had prepped my lunch already even though I work from home. Right? Like, that’s what I think is so interesting about what we’re talking about is like sometimes when people start their own businesses, they think like, oh, I’m home, so then I’m like able to do, like, that’s the benefit to doing all this stuff, but in my experience, that actually will hinder your business progress. And I like to simultaneously take advantage of the fact that I work from home, again, like I take those breaks, I play with Huddy. I just took Huddy for a 10 minute walk before I sat down to record this.

Like, I, I take those advantages, I wear, wear comfy clothes, but. It does take a certain amount of discipline and organization and like, I don’t know, just kind of setting your intentions and still treating it like it’s work, like running an online business is still work. I know that so many people glorify this on the internet, but it is a lot of work and it can be stressful. So that’s why I’m, I’m stressing these things and I’m talking about these things because these are the things that I do that are still treating it like work while making it fun.

On that execution side, like I said, I prep my food to make my week easier. I just wanted to mention that on weeks that are really crazy, like maybe before a launch or the launch week, like if I run a sale or something, I tend to lean even a little bit more maybe into outsourcing. So maybe I buy a little bit more prepped food that week, like precut veggies, precooked veggies, you know, the shredded cabbage instead of the head of cabbage, like I do all the little things. Just to make it easy, like I have a mantra in my head all the time, pretty much, but definitely during launches where I’m like, what if I just make it easy? Let’s just make it easy. What’s the easiest thing? Like I’m always thinking that, so this definitely plays into it. And like I said, I can sometimes lay out clothes, do my laundry, like just get yourself set, do a little reset for the week.

My second weekly anchor is focusing on sleep. Now, this tip is worth its weight in gold because sleep, I mean, without sleep we have nothing, right? If we are tired, if we are not feeling our best, we’re not gonna be clearheaded enough. We’re not gonna feel creative, like we’re gonna not look great in our, in our videos and all these kinds of things. So we really need to prioritize sleep.

In the last year, I’ve learned that getting good sleep is about so much more than what you do right before you go to sleep. It’s so much more about the bigger picture. For example, I have learned, at least for myself, and of course everyone is different, you should do what’s best for you, listen to your body and speak to your doctor. But for me, I have learned that what I do first thing in the morning impacts how I sleep that night, for example.

And pretty much everything else I do throughout the day also impacts how I sleep at night, and then I sleep better at night, which then impacts how I feel the next day and making sure that I actually have the energy and the like mental mindset, I guess, to actually do these things, right? So it’s, it’s like a giant cog, it’s a big wheel that all works together.

So here are my 24 hour tips, the things that I’m doing within a 24 hour period that are leading to really good sleep, which are then leading to making healthy decisions the next day, which are then leading to good sleep, and it all goes round and round. The very first thing, like I mentioned, is eating when I’m waking up, this is probably not revolutionary to anybody else, but I am not hungry in the morning unless you take me out to a diner. You take me out to a diner, I’ll be starving. You take me home, not starving, I don’t understand how this works. So for me, it actually has taken a lot of work, lot, a lot of like more serious deep work to be hungry when I woke up because I’ve learned why I wasn’t hungry when I woke up, which I’m not gonna all get into because I’m not your doctor and I’m not an expert and so you should talk to your, your expert people, but, I did a lot of work to calm my nervous system, lower my cortisol in the morning, and be a little bit hungry when I wake up, it’s getting better, but it’s take, it’s taken a long, long time. My point about eating when I wake up though, is not just to eat anything. I actually am really prioritizing having a savory breakfast that’s made up of 30 grams of protein. This could literally be anything from my leftovers, to soup to that, you know, vegetarian shepherd’s pie I mentioned. It can also be eggs. , I’ve been doing eggs with labneh and a little bit of chicken sausage and spinach, so I am making sure I’m hitting 30 grams of protein.

It doesn’t feel well, it doesn’t hurt me. It doesn’t make me sick or anything like this, but like I am not hungry when I’m eating it. I really have to be conscientious to, to push myself, to eat it all. All I can tell you guys is by doing this. I feel like this has like radically changed my life in the last couple of months.

I feel so much different. I feel so much better. I am sleeping through the night for the first time in years. I’m not hungry until lunchtime. Like there are just so many really positive side effects, i’ve really, really noticed. Probably the biggest thing too is like the lack of cravings then throughout the day and then at night, I always used to like to treat myself to a snack after dinner., I’m a popcorn girl. I cannot go without popcorn for like 15 minutes, and so I would always have like a big thing of popcorn. I get to the end of my day. I stop eating at 7:30pm now, and I get to the end of the day and I am so full and just satiated in a good way from the entire day. That’s what’s been working for me. So eating when I first wake up, 30 grams of protein and a savory meal. And then I have coffee, which if you know anything about me, you know that this was one of the more difficult challenges I’ve faced in life. Not really, I’ve been through a lot, but this was a very difficult thing for me. To delay having coffee.

I then eat my balanced meals throughout the day and I really trying to hit 30 grams again at, at those other meals. And then I do my best to unplug at night. Typically, my routine these days is that after work I walk with Hudson and Ryan, my, my husband and my dog. And then we, come home and we make dinner.

We usually watch like one show. And when I make dinner, usually that’s when I go and I plug my phone in somewhere and I don’t really look at it much for the rest of the night. Maybe I get up once or twice to check to see if a friend texted me or something, but that’s really it. I tend to landline my phone. That’s kind of been my thing. So I will go plug it in, in like the front of my house where it’s a little bit outta my face and I treat it like a landline. If I wanna go use it, I have to go to it. So it’s not within arms length. It’s not sitting next to me on the couch. It’s not on the coffee table.

This is where it’s really important for you to know yourself because, you know, I know that the research shows about not using phones because of the light that it emits and is keeping your brain awake.

For me, it’s, it’s, yes, that too, right? I’m not immune to that. But even more so, like I have a very active like marketing and business mind, and so I’m already like always thinking about like this like story that I heard and how I can turn it into an email or like this like campaign idea I have or whatever. Like my mind just kind of doesn’t. Shut off with that stuff. And so then if I just like mindlessly scroll Substack, one of my favorite things to do, for example, I then start seeing all these posts by people talking about, you should be doing this with Substack or look at this thing I did on Substack that got me a thousand subscribers. And then, you know, the curiosity in me is just like peaked and I’m like, oh, well what is it? And then I start thinking, and then I start thinking about a strategy and something I can do. For me, it’s more about that. It’s like my mind gets all wound up. So this is where it’s just really important to know yourself and know like where, what works for you and kind of what your triggers are, right? And like that’s a trigger for me. It’s already bad enough. I like dream in email sequences, so it’s really important for me to not see that stuff, especially before bed.

After I’ve unplugged, I go into doing my nighttime routine. My nighttime routine consists of three pretty short little things that I personally, I don’t know if it’s mental at this point or whatever, but I feel like if I do these three things, it really winds me down.

I end up having a good night’s sleep, and again, I know it also has to do with what I did during the day, but those three things are that I meditate, I wash my face and I read. My meditation that I like to do are usually one of Peloton’s 10 minute sleep meditations. I love Peloton, period. But I also love Pelotons meditations so much.

I have like a very simple skincare routine. I always think of it as like a little signal to my brain, like, okay, we’re going to sleep now, and while I do my, my little skincare routine, I’m just like really, really present. Like even literally as I’m like massaging my face and putting on the serum and then putting on the moisturizer, like I’m just being really intentional. I’m feeling my skin, I massaging around my jaw. I know that my jaw gets really tight. I massage under my eyes. Like I’m really just taking that opportunity to be super present and to even meditate a little bit as I do that. I honestly think that the actual smell of even my skincare routine triggers me to feel like, okay, body, it’s time to go to sleep now. Like we’ve done it, we’ve done it for the day.

One of the things I kind of like to tell myself, if my mind drifts off during that time, in case you’re someone who struggles with meditation or something like that is like, there’s nothing else I can do about that today, right? So if my mind starts coming up of like, I should have done this today and I didn’t get to that and I didn’t do this, and I have to remember that tomorrow, I just say, there’s nothing else I can do about that today. Now it’s time to rest. There’s nothing else I can do about that today. Now it’s time to rest. I just say that over and over and over again and usually the thought kind of drifts away like a cloud.

The last thing that I do is read, and honestly, sometimes I make it like two pages in before my head is nodding off, and that’s okay, I just think it’s really the art of, of reading. Um, I don’t read on a device, I read a paperback or book, but I think that that really helps me to put me, put me out honestly.

So, you know how there’s like this thought process about watching sitcoms before you go to sleep because it’s something that you’ve probably seen before, like an episode of Friends or Frasier or Seinfeld or something like that. I’m just naming my nineties favorites, but you probably have yours.

I think that the same thing can sometimes apply to books where, like right now, for example, I’m rereading the Harry Potter series, which I’ve read a million times and I know where it’s headed. I think that that’s actually what helps me to read it before bed, because it’s not like, I’m not standing there being like, what’s gonna happen to Harry? Is he gonna make it like I already know? You know? Spoiler alert. So I, I think that it helps, um, to read something like that. Or at the very least, just like finding a genre of books that works for you that’s not too overstimulating or like not too dark and scary. If, if that kind of stuff bothers you, like it bothers me.

My third weekly anchor is calendar management. So this is where it’s really important that you know yourself and how you work and what you need, and kind of when you operate best, and you have to drop any idea that you have, that there’s a right or wrong, or that you’re supposed to be this incredible morning person with like a 3000 step morning routine. Maybe you’re a night owl, maybe you do this stuff at night, like it’s okay, you gotta find what works for you. After years of experimenting, I’ve sort of figured out that my mornings really need to be protected for creative work. If I spend the whole day in meetings or first thing in my workday, just jump into like getting all the tasks done for everybody else on, my team and kind of extended team, right? Like copywriters send copy for me to review and like, uh, the web designer sends a page for me to look at and I start doing all these things and then my mind’s just going in a completely different direction.

Now remember at the top of the episode, I said if I sat down and it came up with my focus for the week, like. I said my, my focus for the week, as an example, could be my podcasts. If I spend my mornings chasing down everybody else’s stuff or taking care of client work or doing all that stuff, that’s not really making my podcasts the focus.

So it’s not about not getting that other stuff done or brushing everybody else off, or that other people aren’t important. It’s about making sure that you’re really in touch with what your priorities are to move your business forward. And if you need, like I do for example, to be in your most creative space and like, I don’t know, for me to be able to produce a podcast episode that I not only have like the energy for, but I don’t start to like doubt myself and say, oh, but I saw that other person talked about this and they talked about it from this angle.

But I was thinking about talking about from that angle, so now I’m worried that my angle is stupid. If I just do it first thing, then I don’t know any of that. I haven’t looked at my phone. I haven’t logged onto social media. I’ve just gotten my most creative work done, the thing that I said I wanted to prioritize.

So once you know what that is for you, it’s great to know it, but then you have to communicate it and you have to stick to it, and that can take some practice. So I like to group like meetings days and creative days, like, so I know like, oh, I have a bunch of meetings on Tuesday, so if like somebody else asked me for a meeting, I’m gonna be like, yeah, you can meet me on Tuesday.

So I really try to control so that things aren’t all spread out and all over the place. There’s no right or wrong here. Like I’m, I’m even like nervous to share what mine is because it doesn’t really matter. The point is that you figure out for you, like, do you need half days for your client work? And so that’s blocked off. Do you need half days for your creative work? Then do you want one whole day maybe for meetings? Something like that, right? Whatever it is, you can come up with it.

Now here’s a sneaky little thing that you have to watch out for. Not all meetings are required or necessary or helpful, and not all meeting requests have to actually be meetings. So I have people contact me a lot asking me, can I have a meeting? Can I have a meeting? Some of them are just straight up nos, right? Some of it’s like, can I pick your brain? Can I, I’d love to get to know you, like I’d love to ask you some questions, these kinds of things. I, for the most part. Can’t do that unless it’s something that I, I really wanna do.

If that’s the case, great, but if I honored every single request, I wouldn’t be able to work anymore. So not all those things you don’t even need to say yes to. But the things that even you’re like, I wanna connect with this person, or I wanna have a conversation further, but I am feeling really bloated with meetings. Why don’t you suggest a voice memo exchange? Why don’t you send a loom, use Marco Polo. Use things like video ask where you can send videos or audio back and forth. There are so many tools and things that you can use to go back and forth. Somebody just asked me the other day like, can we hop on a quick call? I would like to get to know you more, talk more. This was somebody I actually wanted to connect with. I just in the timing in which he wanted to connect with me, I couldn’t because of things I have going on in the business. So I said, would you mind if I gave you my cell phone number? Let’s just send each other some voice notes back and forth. That way I can listen to it on my walk. I can listen to it when I have time while I’m cooking dinner. It was just so much easier. And guess what? We exchanged one voice memo. It was probably five minutes total of back and forth, and we got done the, the part of our conversation we needed to, it probably would’ve been like an hour meeting.

So I came up with two little scripts that you can use in case you need somewhere to start when people ask you for a meeting or when you’re just trying to hold boundaries over what times work for you, the first thing you can say is that week or that day is at capacity. I can do this day or I’d be happy to send you a resource, like sometimes I’ll say, I can do this day or I’d be happy to send you a link to my podcast episode that I did.

The second script you can use is to say something like, to protect the thing you wanna protect, like to protect client work time, I keep my calls to Tuesday and Thursday between one and four Eastern. Which one of those times works for you? Now, here’s an important difference. Instead of saying, does that work for you? Where the person could just say, no, I only meet on Fridays, right? I really like to say like, I keep calls to Tuesday and Thursday, one to four eastern. Which one of those works for you? Or send me a time during that, that window that works for you, like make it so that you are committed to that window. You’re not moving. You just wanna know which part of that window works for them.

Now, of course there are exceptions that I have to note here. Like when I started, I was not nearly as gutsy to tell people to like buzz off and that I couldn’t meet them. I took way too many pick your brain meetings. I took tons of coffee meetings. Like I get it. I think we all go through that period. It’s like dating too many people, you know, and then realizing like not just going on every date that someone asks you to go on. I get it. I think it’s a, a bit of a rite of passage in business. I also get that you might feel like you’re not in a position to say no to people. If I could impart any advice, like to my past self though, it would be that taking all of that stuff was actually keeping me where I was and it wasn’t allowing me to grow. So just something to consider.

The fourth weekly anchor that I practice every single week is a little bit of mind hygiene, so this is where I get really conscientious of what I take in. I think as an online creator in particular, you have to be really conscious of what you take in because you’re in the business of creating content. Kind of keeping your finger on the pulse of what’s going on, you probably spend a little more time on social media than the average person, and it can be really easy to just drift too far into too much consumption and what you consume there can have a negative impact on you and your business.

Personally, I really like to digitally surround myself with expanders. I like to surround myself with people who are trying to go where I want to go. People with similar values, similar vibes. This is where, you know, you’ve heard this advice a million times before, like you need to unfollow or mute or politely see your way out of being around people digitally who are making you feel any which way without really questioning like, I don’t like how this girl makes me feel, but that probably means that it’s because of my money mindset. Like it doesn’t really matter if it’s not making you feel good. We just can kind of drop the story and I would encourage yourself to not only focus taking like who you’re taking away, but actually look at like who are you consuming?

Who are you putting yourself around? What orbit are you putting yourself around? But more than anything, you know that I think my very first, uh, episode of this podcast was about how I think community over competition is bs. I really, I really don’t understand following tons of other people who are in your space.

I don’t see how it’s helpful to you or them, um, for the most part. And how that can keep you in not only a weird legal space, ’cause you’re gonna constantly question whether what you’re creating is original, but it can, it can also put you in a weird head space. And so more than anything, when it comes to practicing mind hygiene, I like to make sure that what I’m consuming is very diverse.

So it’s not about, not only in an actual and literal diversity, so that I am taking in things from people and voices and opinions and perspectives that are different than my, than my own or who I am, but also diversity in terms of the subject matter. So for example, when I started my business, it was very easy for me to just take in tons and tons of stuff about business, right? Like I went through that phase where I’m just like, everything has to do with business and marketing and I wanna learn all the things. And I’m just like, I. You know, emerging myself in this world. The more that I surrounded myself with things in my feed, in my YouTube channel, wherever else, substack about food, about travel, about politics, things that are meaningful to me outside of what it means for me to be a founder and a business owner, that’s when my mind really freed up to be able to actually create better content for my business ’cause I wasn’t so busy taking in everybody else’s, it’s, it just felt like it was clogging my ideas, clogging my perspective, clogging my originality for sure. And so I really recommend taking things in that are not related to your business or your subject area.

My fifth weekly anchor is constantly working on reducing my screen time. So it’s kind of funny ’cause we own online businesses, so we’re like chronically online. So I know reducing screen time is hard, right? So I’m not saying it’s easy, but at least for me, I wanna be more present in my life. I read a stat the other day about, you know, if you look at the amount of hours you spend the screen time on your phone and other devices per day, and then you look at that for your whole year.

For me, it’s a few months of my year are gone. And that’s kinda wild when you start thinking about things that way. You know, losing both my parents and going through so much grief really reoriented my relationship with time, I wrote a Substack article about this recently. But it really does make you question like, you know, you kind of have that like existential, I don’t know how you go, go through what I went through and like don’t come out with some big existential crisis.

But you have that existential question of like, what are we doing? Why are we here? Is this what it’s all about? Is it all about reels and likes and reach and followers and subscribers and like, who cares? Right? It’s just not, that’s not what I want to focus on. My Capital L Life, right. And so with that all being said, that really pushed me to like work on my screen time. Really take a hard look at those numbers and face the reality, like I said, like look at the amount of days, weeks, months of your year that you’re losing, looking to your phone.

Now, on the flip side. The things that we do on our phone are not all bad, right? Or on any screen are not all bad. Like you’re running your business there, you’re FaceTiming your, your friends and your family that might not live near you.

You’re using meditation apps. I use my Peloton app through my phone. I listen to podcasts, like there’s so many good things that come from that and, and that contributes to that number and so there’s a certain, you know, I don’t know, like allotment I guess, that I’m like, okay, well that makes sense. But I, I think we can probably all agree there’s some sort of like tipping point and that it’s probably gone too far for most of us.

I actually would make the argument that this makes your business stronger, like by spending less time on your devices because the more that you can get in this, like when you’re on, you’re on and when you’re off, you’re letting yourself actually recharge mode. The more that you’re going to come back clearer and more creative and the less you’re going to spend so much time taking in everybody else’s opinion on all of the things.

Now, this can be particularly dangerous in, when you own your own business, because there’s a like a fallacy here that some people fall into where they spend a lot of time on their phone or on their devices and they conflate that with work, right? And so when you are doom scrolling and all that good stuff, that’s not work.

And so it can sometimes, if you ever feel like you get to the end of the day and you’re like, I’m exhausted, I feel like I was doing stuff all day. My head is so fuzzy, but why do I feel like I didn’t get anything done? It could be because of this, right? It can also be because when you spend a lot of time on your phone or to spend a lot of time consuming content, which you know you have to do through your phone, you end up taking in a lot of advice, but doing very little implementation.

And that’s where I sometimes would catch myself and I would get frustrated of like, I’m watching everybody else talk about the thing that I want to go do. Why don’t I just freaking go do it? Right, so here are my best tips for doing this, to reduce your screen time and actually just like put in the work and when you’re off, you’re off and all that good stuff.

For one, the probably the biggest thing is to just not have my phone near me during work. I’m not talking about like a foot away or on the chair next to you, like literally not even in the same room or really, really out of sight. I actually just bought the brick device. The thing that you put like on your fridge ’cause it’s a magnet and you like tap in, tap out to be able to use your phone.

I have not used it yet, so you’ll have to let me know if you have, if you want me to come back and share about how that’s going. I’ve already significantly, like, I’ve almost reduced my screen time in half, um, over the last couple of months and so. The things that I’m sharing today have already worked, and I’m hoping that the brick just make, makes it even better.

But I have been able to implement these tips and like, I think you get used to it as you go along. Like it was a little sticky for a few days, but then I, I got used to it and then now I kind of forget and like the phone just doesn’t bother me so much.

The second thing is that I delete social apps, so I don’t have Instagram on my phone except for when I need it. I download it when I need to post something, when I wanna post stories. Now, for Instagram in particular, my, my kind of main platform for social media, when you post Instagram stories, they last for 24 hours. So I will download the app. Post my stories and then delete it. I then go onto the browser version of Instagram on my computer to reply to comments in one batch. So I’ll reply to comments, I’ll reply to dms. I have someone on my team who handles responding to dms that are more like, uh, looking for information, looking for links to things like that kinda stuff. But if there’s something either from somebody I really know or something that I need to answer, I’m doing that in a one short batch.

I also have all of my notifications turned off on my phone and my friends make fun of me that I’ve literally never turned on the ringer on my phone. Especially since my dad died, my ringer has not been on, so I personally am impacted by like the constant dinging and pinging and all that kind of stuff.

I even for a while, for like six months turned off text message notifications so that didn’t even pop up. , I actually found that I had like the reverse effect where I was checking my text more frequently because I was so worried that I would miss something, so I turned it off and just generally worked on being less attached to my phone.

For me, these things really started a cascade of my phone being less interesting, like when you remove things like social media and all that, like I pick up my phone now sometimes and I look at it and I’m like, what is there even to do? Like, it’s just boring. It’s like boring. I can. Like Google something. I can look at my Peloton app. I use the clock app a lot to keep track of timers when I’m cooking, I text my friends like, that’s pretty much it. It’s pretty boring. You really can turn it into like a dumb phone, I think pretty easily.

I just mentioned that because I think that so much of like the phone usage stuff is so cyclical that if there’s anything you can do to break the cycle, to remove the thing that makes you reach for it all the time, you’d be surprised how quickly you can break the habit. And then here’s an example. The other day I downloaded Instagram to post my Instagram stories for that day, and then I forgot to delete it, and a few, I’m not posting on Instagram stories every day right now, so several days later I went to go redownload it because I was going to post my Instagram stories for that day only to realize that I had never actually fully deleted it off my phone. So it had been there the whole time. Now you’re talking about a girl who probably used to go on 50 times a day, like. At at least I would imagine. It really just like I feel like I’ve broken the habit, like I’ve broken the spell of looking at it all the time. To the point that when I go on Instagram now I look at it even when I go to post my stories, I’m just like, this is annoying. This is loud. I’m busy and like, what are we all talking about? And especially like with how I’m feeling with everything that’s going on in the world and in this country, I’m just like, what does this matter? Like why are we talking about this?

And I treat it like it’s my business. Like my business goes there and promotes my business and then I get out like me, the person, the owner doesn’t have to spend hours there a day like kidding myself that that’s work. Instead, I’m getting off of there and going and doing deeper work, work that’s going to actually grow my business exponentially more than the hope and the prayer that something I created on social media somehow like hits the social media lottery and catapults me into existence.

If you wanna learn more about some of the things I’ve been doing to reduce my screen time and some of the settings on my phone and the tools that I’m using to reduce screen time, I’ll link down in the show notes to a Substack article I wrote all about reducing screen time and breaking up with Instagram.

Last but not least, my six weekly anchor is that I have daily non-negotiables that I set and that I am committed to doing. So I’m committed to doing these every day regardless of what I have going on with my life and with work. And usually these are the things that you’re first to cancel when you’re busy or overwhelmed, but in reality, they should be the things that you do first when you are busy and overwhelmed.

So a couple of mine I’ve already mentioned throughout this episode, but, uh, some biggies for me are hydration. I’m chronically bad at drinking water, so I know this is another one of those like cascade habits that just like, makes everything else work properly and so I am really, um, kind of on track with my hydration these days.

I am dedicated to doing that night routine, that wind down routine that I talked about earlier. I’m dedicated to doing some sort of daily movement every single day, regardless of whether that’s a walk, a stretch, a yoga class, or something more intense, like a strength training session or something like that.

My other daily non-negotiable is to have that 30 grams of protein at breakfast, typically as a savory breakfast, because again, I am noticing a really big difference with having that be so savory.

From there, from my non-negotiables, I kind of have a little bit of a menu of sorts that I tap into depending on how I’m feeling. So if your day is getting a little bit wonky and you’re feeling stressed. You feel like you need a break. You had a meeting that like stressed you out more, or a client call that was just like not great and you’re like, I need something to do, I like having a little bit of a menu available and I look at this on my phone and then I think, okay, which one of these things do I wanna go do?

So some of those things on my menu are to take a stare break. These are things where I literally lay for about five minutes, sometimes 10 minutes. I set a timer on my watch and I literally just stare out the window. I also do this outside, obviously if it’s nice out. Another is to set a 10 minute timer and read, and I’m talking read fiction, something that’s fun. You’re not learning, you’re not improving yourself, you’re not learning what’s wrong with you. We are just reading for fun. Another one would be at least a 10 to 15 minute walk, obviously, preferably outside if we can to like combine this with some fresh air. And last but not least, I have some favorite, , meditations that I save on my Peloton app that I go to, that I’ve probably done hundreds of times at this point, that when I’m feeling whichever way I can go to these meditations and I just know I’m gonna get relief.

So those are my six weekly anchors. I, I really find these so helpful, and this is like this week I’m going to be especially focused on these because last week I just had a huge launch and promo, which means we have been in promo mode for probably about the last month and so it’s like even more important that during this time or last week that I did all of these things.

These are not things that I’m like, oh, I do these when I have time then I set them aside when I’m busy. It’s more like these become an even bigger priority when I’m busy. Now, again, I give ourselves grace and, and lots of self-compassion that like we all have busy full lives and you can’t do these things perfectly, and I’ve drifted away from certain things, but that’s why that weekly “Sunday Preheat” can be so helpful because on Sunday you can sit down and be like, oh, I did drift away from those things that I said where I, I was prioritizing and that I know are helping me and are having a healthy impact on me. And then how I show up as a business owner and then you just get back in touch with them. Like it really doesn’t help for us to spend much time beating ourselves up or anything like that.

Your list of like anchors and all that can look a lot different than mine. First of all, it can be a lot shorter. It can be just completely different. You can have different priorities, like I don’t think that there’s any right or wrong. I just hope that the point of today’s episode and that you got from it is that taking care of yourself is just as if not more important than any funnel strategy, email list hack, social growth hack, anything like that that you can learn.

Taking care of yourself is going to make you a stronger business person, a more creative person with better ideas that are more original, that come from who you really are and what you’re here to contribute to this world. And I doubt that what you’re here to contribute is just a bunch of more like regurgitated trendy crap that we see online, you know? And so I hope that you’re here to take good care of yourself and to prioritize your own health and wellbeing as much as I know that you’re probably prioritizing everybody else’s, both in your life and in your business.

Thanks so much for listening to the On Your Terms® podcast. Make sure to follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. You can also check out all of our podcast episodes, show notes, links, and more at samvanderwielen.com/podcast. You can learn more about legally protecting your business and take my free legal workshop, Five Steps To Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business at Samvanderwielen.com and to stay connected and follow along, follow me on Instagram at samvanderwielen and send me a DM to say hi.