Episode 1605 - The golden triangle: money, time, and autonomy

Alan Fredendall // #LeadershipThursday // www.ptonice.com

In today's episode of the PT on ICE Daily Show, ICE Chief Operating Officer Alan Fredendall discusses the "golden triangle" or the foundation of personal & professional success where time, money, and autonomy overlap. Alan shares research supporting a direct relationship between money earned & happiness, as well as the importance of respecting time & autonomy in the workforce.

Take a listen to the podcast episode or read the full transcription below.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

INTRODUCTION Hey everyone, this is Alan. Chief Operating Officer here at ICE. Before we get started with today's episode, I want to talk to you about VersaLifts. Today's episode is brought to you by VersaLifts. Best known for their heel lift shoe inserts, VersaLifts has been a leading innovator in bringing simple but highly effective rehab tools to the market. If you have clients with stiff ankles, Achilles tendinopathy, or basic skeletal structure limitations keeping them from squatting with proper form and good depth, a little heel lift can make a huge difference. VersaLifts heel lifts are available in three different sizes and all of them add an additional half inch of h drop to any training shoe, helping athletes squat deeper with better form. Visit www.vlifts.com/icephysio or click the link in today's show notes to get your VersaLifts today. ALAN FREDENDALLTeam, good morning. Welcome to the PT on ICE Daily Show. Happy Thanksgiving. We hope your Thursday morning is off to a fantastic start. We're here on Thursday, Leadership Thursday, talking all things small business management, practice ownership, that sort of thing. Thursday, Thanksgiving Thursday, still means it is Gut Check Thursday. This week's Gut Check Thursday is a little bit of a tradition around here at ICE. We are gonna do a hero workout called Burp. This is a very long bodyweight workout. Starts with 50 burpees, a 400-meter run, 100 pushups, a 400-meter run, 150 walking lunges, a 400-meter run, 200 air squats, a 400-meter run, and then now we're going to come back down that pyramid. 150 walking lunges, 400-meter run, 100 pushups, 400-meter run, and then finally finishing with 50 burpees. So, very long workout. This is gonna take most human beings about an hour to finish. Obviously, you can tell a lot of redundancy in there with the running, the lunges, the air squats, and then the burpees and the pushups. So, if you do not have an hour today to work out, scale this. Cut all the gymnastics reps in half. Maybe cut the runs down. If you know you're a better biker than a runner or something like that, sub out a rower or a bike for the run. Obviously, the more you reduce the volume, the less time it's going to take. This workout is not for the faint of heart. This is going to make your upper body and lower body sore between all the lunges, squats, pushups, and burpees. But it is challenging. We love how simple it is. You don't really need to warm up or really have any sort of particular skill or range of motion to do this workout. So that's why we love Burp. Courses coming your way, I don't want to bother you with those today. Check out p10ice.com, click the Our Courses tab, and see what's coming your way. We do have a couple more weekends of live courses starting back up again next weekend before we take our final holiday break over Christmas and New Year's. So check out ptonice.com and click on our courses if you're interested in jumping into a live course before the end of the year. THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE Today I want to talk about a concept that I call the golden triangle. Talking about when folks reach out and they describe maybe an employment situation that they are not happy with. This is kind of how I evaluate what I think of the three pillars to success when you are not only working for someone else but just working in general. Even if you are self-employed, even if you do run your own business, carefully managing the three sides of this triangle, I believe is really important for your own personal and professional success, but also for those of you leading others in charge of others, I think even more important to fundamentally understand these concepts. So those three concepts are money, time, and autonomy, and we're gonna break each of those down here in a little bit. I want to start here though first, and this may be a weird place to start, but I promise we'll bring it back around again. I want to talk about what is the role of the human brain. A lot of us may think the human brain is for high-level computations and calculating the physics of a black hole, but that's not how most people's brains work. That's how very few amount of people's brains work, but for most of us, Our brain is a survival mechanism. It is a comparative analysis engine. And it's really good at making comparisons. Your brain is making one billion billion calculations per second. That's a one with 18 zeros. That is a million times faster than today's standard cell phone laptop or desktop computer. We call that an exaflop. It is the most powerful processor on the planet. It is always gathering data, both internally and externally, and making comparisons. Am I hot? Am I cold? Am I hungry? Am I thirsty? Am I not making enough money? Is my coworker making more money than me? Is my boss doing better than me because I noticed that he just bought a speedboat? Those sorts of things. Yes, very basic survival mechanisms, but also higher-level stuff. And that kind of brings up the next point of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If our brain is this comparative analysis engine, what is it really focusing on? Well, psychologists would say it's focusing on comparing ourselves on this pyramid, this hierarchy of needs, where at the base we have our physiological needs. Am I hungry? Am I thirsty? Am I tired? The next level up is safety and security. Do I have a safe place to rest and sleep at night? Do I have a place maybe that in my mind when I compare to others I call my home? The next level up, the third level, love and belonging. Do I have friends? Do I have a family? Am I raising children? Not only do I have them, but do I feel like I'm thriving in those relationships? And now as we get to the top of that pyramid and we approach that peak, the fourth level is esteem and the last level is actual actualization, self-actualization. So do I feel like I am doing something meaningful, and do I feel like I'm doing something meaningful very well basically You know what is my life's work, and how am I doing at that? And now the brain is always comparing both to environmental factors and to other human beings where we sit on that hierarchy. Trying to chase the top tiers before addressing the bottom, I think is the cause of a lot of dissatisfaction in our daily lives. So shelving that for a little bit, the brain is a comparative analysis engine and hierarchy of needs. Let's get back and talk about the golden triangle. MONEY The first I want to address is money. Money is uncomfortable for some people to talk about. It's often a pain point for almost every single one of us. I think really understanding that about three-fourths of people live paycheck to paycheck and about half of all people now work two or more jobs. really helps us understand that we're not alone in being concerned about money. Most people are concerned about money, but also that it's okay to be concerned about money, right? That kind of sits at the base of that pyramid of those physiological needs, that safety and security. We do need money in modern society to do things like buy food and pay the rent on our apartment or the mortgage on our house. There's often an adage of don't focus too much on money because money can't buy everything or money can't buy happiness. And I would refute that. I would say that that is categorically untrue. We have some really interesting research from the 90s and 2000s that found money and happiness do correlate. There seems to be a plateau, at least in the earlier research, of around $100,000. Research from the 90s and early 2000s found that if you make about $100,000 a year, The more money you make. beyond that doesn't really seem to increase your happiness. Now, the thing to recognize is that if you're not making that, there is room for happiness between that and $100,000. New research, specifically from this year, an article from Killingsworth, I love that name, Dr. Killingsworth and colleagues, this year, March 2023, from the Journal of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, titled, Income and Emotional Wellbeing, a Conflict Resolved. Strong title, I like it, let's talk about it. These folks repeated the studies, some of it their own research from the 90s and 2000s, and they're looking specifically at the relationship between income level and happiness. What they