Pursue Your Dreams Without Sacrificing Your Family

We didn't sacrifice the relationships. We didn't sacrifice the health and fitness. You end up doing tons of those life-changing cool things on your list. You don't have to see the whole path. You just have to take the first step. Start by cleaning up your life and your habits. You do have to start prioritizing and picking the ones that actually matter the most to you. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Extraordinary Family Life podcast. We're your hosts Greg and Rachel Denning. Super excited to answer an awesome question today about pursuing your dreams and like big the dumb goals like we talked about demanding, unrealistic, meaningful and bold and how to do it with children, with a family, and specifically how to decide which one to start with. Because if you have a lot of dreams, it can be challenging to know, well, wait, where do I start? Any meaningful dream is going to require you to grow into the person who can achieve that dream. We have been in that space of like, oh my gosh, there's so many things I want to do. Where do I start? And so that's what we're going to go through today. We have five different parts or five different steps to doing this. And I guess we want to emphasize here at the beginning that yes, it's totally possible. You and I have lived this because we started out as very regular normal people living a regular normal life and using the process that we're going to talk about today. I mean, we've been able to accomplish some pretty incredible things ultimately traveling with our seven children while homeschooling them and building a business to 60 plus countries on five continents. So, you know, we you say, well, we've taken our seven kids and we've traveled to all these countries and we're still doing that and yet inside of that were lots of other dreams and so they're kind of interwoven. And I think that's an important point we talk about here. It wasn't just working on one that in order to achieve the big ones, they require kind of prerequisite goals and targets and aims because they all fit together. You can't you can't achieve some of your biggest ones without achieving some other significant ones as well because they support and strengthen each other. Yes. But at the same time I want to emphasize that we always were trying to take a holistic approach so that some of the bigger dreams weren't accomplished at the sacrifice of some of the more important things in our life. For example, we didn't sacrifice our our parenting relationship with our children. We didn't sacrifice our own me marriage. We didn't sacrifice our health and fitness in order to achieve financial goals or travel goals or other things like that. Now, there were sacrifices crazy crazy important. There were things that had to be sacrificed, but we were very careful about paying t paying attention to what we were sacrificing and what we were willing to sacrifice and what we were unwilling to sacrifice. So, we didn't sacrifice the relationships. We didn't sacrifice the health and fitness, but we did sacrifice things like, I don't know, hanging out with friends on the weekend or going to all the social functions or like there's a whole we we sacrificed putting our kids in gymnastics, you know what I mean? Like there were sacri none of our kids played any official team team sports. Well, that's not true. One daughter played volleyball, right? Soccer, but but that was small in comparison to the other things. Like we were willing to sacrifice those types of things because to us deepening the relationships and travel and adventure were higher on the priority list. So as we get into this first one, there will be some contrarian dreams maybe and you have to be aware of that. Be ambitious, be driven, like let your mind go crazy. But then you have to realize well I want my child to be a world class um I don't know team team sport and they've got to be there all the time and I want to travel as a family. Yeah, those are incompatible dreams because they won't work. It's being aware of yes that there are going to be conflicting interests. You can't necessarily do everything. Write it all down. If that includes the team sports and everything else, great. Write it all down. But then you do have to start prioritizing and picking the ones that actually matter the most to you. You have to get clarity on those things. For us, this has been our experience. This is how we have achieved what we did. So, it's mental, emotional, spiritual, social, physical, and financial. And those six and we're always working on them all the time, no matter what we're doing. And we're always leveling up on them. None of those core six are ever like dismissed or set aside so that we can do something else. And and that's where people get in trouble. They think, well, I'm going to pursue the most common way we see this is somebody pursuing like a financial goal. And they think, I'm going to make these sacrifices now so it'll pay off later. And so they sacrifice their relationship, their mental health, their emotional health, their physical health, their spiritual well-being. like they sacrifice all these things I'll get this thing and so that all crumbles and dies and falls apart and then they have that target and they look back and like wow look at the wreckage. Yeah. So at least for us and this is the way we see it and this is the way we've done it. You don't sacrifice those core things. You do them in conjunction with the big goals and dreams. So where do you start? Well, in some ways, and I don't want this to come across in a way that seems overwhelming, but in some ways, you start with all of them because of the holistic approach that we take, we believe that's a wheel and all of those are spokes. And if you miss some of them, like you're already talking about, you fall flat in those areas and it ends up creating chaos. It ends up creating a mess down the road. Now, do you have to put the same amount of energy and effort and attention into all of them? No. You could pick a few that are are the bigger goals that you spend more time and energy on, but you should not neglect the other things like for me as a woman and maybe it's different for a for a man if I try to do giant steps in all five or six of those things I will burn out. So that's not realistic. It's not sustainable. I would guess that maybe for a lot of men also that's also going to be a problem. So yes, do the major steps on the things that matter most and we'll get into how to identify what that is, but you have to you have to keep up the others. You if you set up a system, a routine or a ritual, then you're actually making significant progress in all of those core areas. And that's literally what keeps you from burning out. The target is to nourish and strengthen mind, body, and spirit every morning. Now, you're not going to be 100%. But you should be 90 95%. So, if every morning I get up and I strengthen and nourish my mind, my body, and my spirit, I've filled myself. I've refilled the well. I've recalibrated. I've reset. I'm ready to go. And so, just by getting up and having a routine and ritual that's it's filling, it's rejuvenating. It's not exhausting. I want I want to make this distinction because people think, man, you have to work out for like two hours every day. And like, no, you don't. 30 minutes. 30 minutes of really truly moving your body. Like you you're you're getting a workout in. 30 minutes is fantastic. You remember because you were married to this person that's like this. 30 minutes of working out. I can do that now. But when we first got married, there was no way I wanted to, nor could I do 30 minutes of working out. So the way only because you didn't have the big target to get in shape because if you did, you could have done it. No, I I don't think that's entirely true because I feel like I I had the desire, but I didn't have the skills, the tools, or the understanding. And for me, I had to baby step myself into that by committing to twominute workouts so I could build because that was one of the key principles that I took away from Atomic Habits by James Clear. That if you develop the identity of I'm the type of person who works out, even if you're working out 2 minutes a day to create that identity, that's what then is able to help launch you into another level. At least for me, and again, we're giving both sides here because there's all kinds of people. At least for me, I have to have that sort of framework available to me so that when especially if I'm pursuing with tons of energy, one specific goal, say a financial goal, I'm not going to drop the exercise one. I'm going to at least do a 2 minutes or a 10 minutes or a 15 minutes and, you know, and working up to like a 30 minute workout. Great. But I'm maintaining it with a smaller effort so that it doesn't fall into the wayside and then 30 years later I'm like, I guess I should start working out now. And now it's so much 3 months, 6 months, 9 months later, it can just wreck you. Right. Exactly. But that's what I'm saying. That's what happens to too many people. they go after these big goals to the neglect of all these other things and then it's that much harder to fix to recover to to get into doing this thing they should have been doing all along. So that's why I want this framework here as we start out to understand yeah ultimately you should be pursuing all of them at the same time simultaneously but some of them are going to be smaller efforts and some of them are going to be larger effort depending on what's most important to you right now which we'll get into in and while you're improving or changing your circumstance to allow it but I guess again this for me I'm just going to share my perspective hope it's helpful 30 minutes spiritual practice 30 minutes in a great book and 30 minutes working out intensely or you do 20. So 20 30. So anywhere from 60 to 90 minutes, man, you got your mind, body, and spirit dialed in. So you can actually show up and get things done. It's so powerful. And that's it's a formula for growth and for maintenance, so to speak. Like you you can make this work. In fact, I would say you have to. If you have really, really big goals, you need the energy and vitality to get it done. And you can't if you're just limping along saying, "I don't have time. I don't have energy. I can't do that." It's like, "Well, good luck." Well, and so what you're emphasizing here is something we've used throughout our entire married life practically to achieve our goals is this foundational what we call our morning routine that provides the fuel to be able to do the other things and and you have talked about this before. I know you're using now like 20 minutes, 30 minutes, but you've talked about it in our coaching where that morning routine can be an accordion. So if you have more time, great. It's you spend an hour or 90 minutes or two hours on your morning routine. Awesome. If you have less time, you don't drop the morning routine. You collapse it. You just collapse it. And maybe you're spending five or 10 minutes on each thing now instead. So if it was a crazy crazy day, five minutes in scripture, five minute like turn on two workout songs and go crazy intense and then five minutes in a great book while you're driving to where you need to go. Right. So I still got in mind, body, and spirit. Most importantly, it's recognizing the critical importance of maintaining those and not dropping them in the pursuit of some other bigger goal. Telling yourself because it's a lie that you don't have time to maintain those other habits. That's what we want to really heavily emphasize here as we start out, which we have done here now. Okay. So number one, in that same vein though, people are always asking like where do I start? Where do I start? I'm like, for me, I was like, start with your body. Get your body in absolutely fantastic condition because it's the vehicle for pursuing the rest of the goals. It's everything and it increases your energy levels. Every single thing you do in life is through your body. Everything. Yeah. And so get your body in a great condition. Yeah. Okay. But number one is writing it all down. So if you have this crap ton of goals you want to pursue, you have to write them all down. And and you and I did this multiple times early on when we were married. We wrote down 100 goals to achieve in a lifetime. 50 goals I want to achieve before I'm 50 or something like we did that or even by years like by this year I want to achieve this or we did bucket lists and life lists and we over and over and over again. And and part of the the the value of that is just writing it down. We may not even know where some of those lists are, but the point is we wrote it down because we were trying to concretize what was important to us or what we were thinking about. And we didn't hit everything that was on the list. And I think that's important because some people like, well, if I write down 100 things and I have to do those 100 things, right? In some ways, you're just practicing. It's just creating a vision and a goal and a target and you start going and it's amazing what things pop up along your way. How God and the universe conspire in your favor and you end up doing tons of those seriously life-changing cool things on your list. It's amazing even though you don't hit them all. some that you realize you actually this process is about clarity and awareness and then sometimes you write it down and you realize actually that's not that important to me. I really don't care about that that much. It's okay to let that go. But the process of writing is what helps to bring the clarity and awareness. So then the second part that we want to address that at least for me has always been very important. Wait, can I before you finish a second because I'm thinking about this part one because you write it all out and you practice writing it out but then really start like I don't know put stars by it, number it like categorize it. Well, I think that goes that leads into the second part here. Okay, but let me let me finish this thought here for a second cuz what I started realizing is like uh I want to get my pilot's license. I still do. And I want to get you know certified skydiver and I still do. So then you start doing it and it's like, okay, that that is so cool and I love it. I really do love it. But then I start measuring and and it's like, okay, it's this many thousands of dollars and this many hours away from my family. And when I have when I have that in front of me, cuz the clarity and awareness, yeah, you're getting more clear. You're like, "Oh, okay. It's this many thousands of dollars and this many hours away. It's cool. I really could pursue that. I could, but actually I'd rather take my family to Nepal. Yeah. I'd rather take that money and go to Nepal and I'd rather take that time and do some woodworking with the kids or some trail running or some project they want to do and and it might end up being this this project. It like it never showed up on my life list, but having this connection, this bond with one of my children or you know with each of them and you're like this is cool, this is special. So, playing volleyball with my daughter, right? Like that, you know, that that never made it on my life list. Play beach volleyball with Aaliyah, right? Because I didn't even know. I didn't know what my kids were like. Well, she loves it. And so me spending hours playing with her is priceless to me. It's taking away from your skydiving goals, but it's more valuable. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. So, so that's part of the There's iterations and and it evolves as you come along. And then am I going to look back and be like, "Oh man, I never got my pious license cuz I spent so much time with my kids." Am I going to and this maybe this is part of your exercise. Am I going to regret that? No way. But that's not saying I can go get my pious license. I could do it anytime I wanted. I I could go get certified skydiving right now, too. But I'm weighing out all the other cool things I'm doing, writing writing a book, which is which is part of this entire writing process. And that's the value of writing it down. Hey there, this is Greg Denny. We want to reach as many people as possible and help as many families as possible with these conversations. And we want to keep this podcast adree forever. You can help us do that by subscribing on Spotify or Apple Podcast or wherever you listen, your favorite platform and on YouTube. And leave a quick review and and share your favorite episodes with friends and family. It makes a big difference. Thank you for being a part of this very important movement. Okay. So, but then it also does lead into number two here, which has always been important for me. I'm interested to hear. I think it's been important to you as well, but it's the role of paying attention to your intuition and certain I'm going to call them signs that show up in your life. And for me, this has always played out in very fascinating ways because as I've written down the list of all the things I want to do, which is a lot, I'm trying to think about what do I start with? where do I begin pursuing this? And it's amazing how things will start to show up in my life. Maybe someone gives me a book. Maybe someone starts talking about it. Maybe it shows up on my Instagram feed. Maybe like there's all these different ways that these things come up in my life where I'm like, "Oh, that's interesting. I was kind of I was just thinking about that and now here's this book on this topic or here's this article or somebody brought it up or mentioned it to me." I actually pay big attention to those things because I think that they're very guiding like they're guides into where to begin pursuing this path. Right. For some of you skeptics right now, you're just like, "Oh, that's just your reticular activating system. Bring it to your awareness." Of course it is. Of course it is. And some of that's absolutely true. But I also believe that God and his universe are conspiring in your favor. I really do. And and I believe you send out an energy and you get it back. And as we're pursuing things, yeah, there'll be divine coincidences. Serendipity. Yeah, serendipity for sure. Like the favorite definition of serendipity is like when you're when you're chasing something good and out of nowhere something even better pops up. And that has happened so many times to us as we've been out living and pursuing great things. even better things, usually things we were not aware of, come into our reality and we're like, whoa, we didn't know this was even possible. We didn't know it existed. And because we were out pursuing one thing, this came into our path. Now we're taking that opportunity. And it's part of this process is not like leading you to the next destination per se, but it's giving you these little mile markers or milestones or like here here breadcrumbs on the path, right? And so I pay attention to those and I pursue them like, "Oh." And sometimes it's as simple as like I'm on Amazon looking up something else and this book just somehow jumps out at me like, "Oh, that's interesting." And so I get it and I order it and I I read it, right? It's just little things like that that I pay attention to because when I do, I find that it takes me down the paths I want to go that lead me to even better places than I had originally managed. often offering you knowledge and skills. Yes. That you realize you you didn't know you need, but then you realize, oh, I needed this. I needed this in my journey. Exactly. It's beautiful. Jordan Peterson likes to talk about how, you know, we all act as and believe and behave as if our future potential is a thing that exists. Like we we discuss it that way. We talk about it like you have potential. We all know that. We all know that we have potential. even though it's not a tangible thing per se, but he believes and I believe as well that our interests is a guidepost or again I guess another breadcrumb to fulfilling our potential or maybe some kind of beacon. Yeah, a beacon. Exactly. No, I like that word. And I like for me I I feel like many of them are divinely implanted. I feel like God gives us desires to lead us to our mission, our purpose, our passion, some kind of contribution or fulfillment that they're not. And again, we have to pay attention. We have to go back to the intuition. You have to be clear because like my desires are to sit around watching sports on TV and eating Oreos and playing video games. That's my desires. Does that mean God has what God wants me to do? Like, no. you're being a lazy sack and you're like wasting your life. Like, so it's got to be it has to be a noble aim. It has to be something that leads you to better. It makes it contribute. It makes the world a better place. And it's it's drawing you upward. That's why we always talk about the upward reach. It's like, is this making me better? Is it adding value to my life, to my family, to the people around me, to the world? And that's an important measurement. Although I do find that it's very interesting. This has happened in my life and I I think it probably happens in other people's lives as well that sometimes we are interested in things like a show or a series on Netflix or something that does teach us very important lessons that we can use in our journey, right? Like there's there's it's almost like experiential learning via a series or whatnot that can teach you something that's important. Some movies will change your life and some of them will waste your life and some books will change your life and some books will waste your life and some experiences will change your life and some will just are a waste of time. And I think that's where the intuition comes in and the awareness because as you evaluate like okay having watched that show or done this thing that I felt like I was interested in, what value did I get from it? What did it teach me? What lesson did I learn? because ultimately I think that's that's the part of that's part of the journey that's um required because again achieving a goal that's beyond your current capacity requires you to become more capable. And so if you're not actually growing and improving, it's not stretching you, that to me is the clue like, okay, is this stretching me? Is it expanding me or is it just maintaining my current levels? And if it's just maintaining my current levels, then that to me is not true interest as aligned with future potential and growth. Good. Here's a here's a maybe a helpful thought for for people. So, I love Rachel. I love like personal development books and business books. U we also love the great classics um because you know expanding your education and those really challenge ideas, but I love fiction books as well. Mhm. And and you might think, well, what can you get from fiction? There's so much fluff. And and there is there's a lot of empty fluff. And you read a fiction book and there's literally no substance. There's no life lessons. There's no like that was empty. So, I love fiction, but for me, my personal standard is it it has to give me something like you were just explaining, like, am I better? Am I expanded? Do do I have a bigger knowledge base, even a skill set? Do I understand uh a demographic, a process, a threat? Do I understand something better? And so, you know, I love going through with my teens especially, we go through these long series of fiction books, but men, they are absolutely packed with knowledge, wisdom, skills, understanding, comprehension, expansion. And so, yes, it's entertaining, but at the end of being entertained, I'm actually better. And that's powerful for And that also ties in directly with your interest because what this series I think you're talking about, you know, you and our son are are drawn to that. You're very interested in it, but it also is directly connected with other things you want to pursue on your life path. Absolutely. So, it's fueling the fire, too. Yeah. I think as we're figuring out, okay, how do we actually do this? How do we actually decide what to pursue? like you take that list you've written down and you can even just circle two or three of them that are most interesting to you. That right there is a way to help you decide what to begin pursuing in a big way by paying attention simply to what you're interested in. Okay. So now the fourth part, fourth step is the researching process and the um you know finding the right sources that help you. And again this isn't something you have to overthink. It can be very simple and it can start with something as simple as a Google search or a chat GBT search, right? You're just so if you have something that you're interested in, you're drawn to, it keeps popping up with your particular activating system, you know, whatever. I'm like, okay, pay attention to that and then I'm going to ask chat or I'm going to Google it and find like what's a great book on this or what's a podcast I could listen to. Like it doesn't have to be a huge thing. It's just like you want these little crumbs, these little tidbits that are going to move you forward to the next step. Like you're just taking small steps on this journey. And I feel like for a lot of us, we think, well, I have to have a whole business plan mapped out. I have to have everything planned perfectly before I can move forward. And for us, we've never taken that approach. The ready, fire, aim approach has enabled us to do way more than we otherwise would have. And then most people will ever experience. I mean, we we feel like we've lived multiple lifetimes because we're willing to do that. So, yeah. Is there a cost to the speed and intensity? 100%. Well, and and mistakes. We make mistakes and and we lose money and like Yeah. But the learning process is crazy fast. It's true. Right. Because because it's necessary because it's required. It's like you can't ignore it. You have to learn about it. You have to do something about it. And otherwise, because if we waited to do things the way I think they should be done all the time, like, well, let's wait until we have everything in place. We'd probably still be learning about it and talking about it and planning and we wouldn't we wouldn't get to it. And you're like, oh, we're busy and so like not going to get that fence put up and and so we'd wait like many people do for years. Yeah. They're waiting and waiting and waiting, always waiting to live. and I'm like, "No, I'm going to live now." So, that is one approach is that you literally just start moving forward. You don't have to wait till you have all the answers. You just start taking the next step like, "Okay, if I was going to do this, what would I do? And what would I do next? And what would I do next?" And you start taking those step steps. But of course, you can also do lots of learning about it because sometimes you don't even have the option of taking a step. All you can do is learn about what the steps would be, right? And so that you watch documentaries, you read books, you listen to podcasts, you ask people. And this one's so so important. So if you have just kind of been idly listening, like listen up right now. Pay attention to the big mistakes, the irreparable mistakes that people make and the poor what I call the poor exchange rate, what they end up sacrificing to get what they want. because you'll often hear somebody pursuing greatness in one area and and behind the scenes and they may not even talk about it but it leaves this just trail of tears and sorrow and misery like okay then do you want to follow that guy's example right so so that's the I guess warning we give of like yeah go out looking for resources look for people who've done what you want but pay attention to those details because they matter because if you follow them exactly, you're going to end up with the same results. And so, it's great to learn from people like that, but you have to make, and this is something we've always done, we make the adjustments that makes it sustainable holistically so that we're not sacrificing our marriage, we're not sacrificing our kids, we're not sacrificing our health in order to achieve this one outcome. And it's it's aligned. It has to be aligned with what's most important to us, which takes us back to step one is write down what's most important for us. It's marriage and and our children and our family lifestyle and culture that's most important so that stays intact. It's recognizing that in order to have that holistic well-being, you're going to have to be slower in some areas. It's important to for you to define success. Okay, the last one, five on actually deciding which dream to start with. I think there's three main filters. Urgency, energy, and then alignment. So urgency means like oh well if you have a dream of traveling with your children well you have a limited time period there because your kids will be moving out like they you know they they'll be growing up so you have to I can't tell you how many times people have talked to us and they they let that pass. Yeah. They're like oh we wanted to do that we were busy and we work and they were in school and it's like now he's 17 and graduating and we missed it and like they have so much remorse. they missed the chance to get out and have those global experiences with their kids. The energy piece comes from like energy levels which is connected to health and well-being. If you're finding like you're chronically undermotivated or lacking energy, a lot of times that's really connected to food, sleep, and exercise. And people don't realize that. But if you get those things right, then you just have more energy and it's easier to do more and to accomplish more because you have you're more energized and motivated. Okay, so finally the alignment and that just means like which dream if you achieved it would make the other dreams easier. Now obviously for a lot of people that's often finances sometimes. Sometimes we're like, "Okay, if I work on this goal, say it's finances, you begin to realize that, well, I can't do that until I learn this skill or until I get in better health or until I deal with this issue with my wife." You know what I mean? It also helps to clear or bring awareness to some of those other issues, too. Like, I want you to know that that's a part of it. That is what it is. The obstacle is the way. And so when you think I want to pursue this thing and then you're like, oh, I can't move forward because I have this problem. Then that's your first step. I have this mess. So that's part of the first step. That's part of the answer to the question. Where do I start? Well, start pursuing your dreams. And what's the first obstacle you run into? That's where you start. That's where you start. Get rid of that thing, right? You just start taking those steps. and it's going to reveal to you what's standing in the way, what's blocking your your runway, what's, you know, what other opportunities are available to you. But that only happens with forward motion. That was that was hard for us in the beginning. And I know it's hard for a lot of people. And we we wanted to know all the answers. We wanted to know the how, right? And and because we're like, why would I step forward? I don't know how this is going to work out. That's the point we're trying to make. You often don't know how until you take a few steps forward and you can finally see around the corner. But those steps forward are terrifying. So get excited. Write down your dreams. Write down your crap ton of dreams. Fuel those dreams. Think about them. Put up vision boards. Circle one to three of them that spark the most interest. You and work on the like the first step. If you had to say which one first, like which one will allow the others? Which one will inspire the others? which one is the most important. It can never be neglected. Just start on those. And then if you start on that and you realize there's a bunch of stuff in your way, okay, now put your attention on getting that stuff out of the way. Now you got your work cut out for you. And always, always, always, this has been one of our secret weapons. We are always learning. Every day we are learning. We are reading, listening to podcasts. Like we are just constantly learning and it's expanding our minds every day. And so it feels like we have this unfair advantage and it's it's not it's only it's not unfair because anybody can read but they don't. And so learning gives you that advantage. And especially as we close by emphasizing where we started that in order to achieve those dreams that are beyond your reach, you literally have to become a new person. You have to become the person who's capable of achieving that dream. And that's where the real value lies is who in who you become. Exactly. Love you guys. Chase your dreams and share them with us. Reach upward.