Do you ever feel mentally drained—no matter how much rest you get?

In this empowering episode of The Executive Perspective with Neal Reyes, Neal introduces a powerful mindset and productivity principle: White Space—not just in your calendar, but in your mind.

With relatable stories and leadership-tested strategies, Neal breaks down how creating intentional “white space” can reduce stress, boost clarity, and unlock a new level of personal and professional growth. Whether you’re managing a team, building a business, or simply trying to breathe amidst the busyness, this episode will speak directly to you.

🔥 You’ll discover:

• Why you might feel stuck—even if you’re doing everything “right”
• The critical difference between resting your body vs. resting your mind
• How scheduling “white space” can boost focus, creativity, and emotional health
• Real-world strategies Neal uses with executive teams, family life, and his own routine
• A leadership-level mindset shift to help you regain your edge

This isn’t just about time management. It’s about mental mastery.

🎙️ Listen now—and start reclaiming your energy, clarity, and momentum.

Chapters:

• 00:05 - Finding Balance in a Stressful World
• 03:06 - Understanding White Space: The Key to Balance and Performance
• 11:01 - Managing Your Calendar Effectively
• 17:45 - Understanding Mental Exhaustion and the Need for White Space
• 23:16 - The Impact of Technology on Productivity
• 29:21 - The Importance of White Space for Recovery

Mentioned in this episode:

To inquire about 1:1 coaching with Neal, please visit nealreyes.com/now.

To receive emails and our latest updates, please sign-up at nealreyes.com/email.

Hey, what's up, guys?

This is Neal, and I'm so excited for today's podcast.

This is something that I've been looking forward to talking and teaching about for a while with you, and it's something that I believe that if you're feeling stress and overwhelm within your life right now, I think that if you listen to what we're teaching today, you're going to have unlocks that just go off.

I'm talking light bulbs that go off in your head and you're going to connect with something you've been needing to find to help you find your mental edge again.

This is something that I believe that if you incorporate and practice, it'll bring balance to your life and it'll help you get off the hamster wheel of runaway thoughts.

It'll help you get off the hamster wheel of runaway stress and begin to bring your life back into balance.

Get ready.

This is your captain speaking.

We want to let you know we've been cleared for takeoff.

We have clear skies today with no wind, so we are expecting a smooth and highly enjoyable flight.

However, should you experience some personal turbulence, don't worry as you've chosen the right airline.

As we are trained in navigating unexpected bumps, our destination today is high performance and success.

Sit back, relax, get hyped, or do whatever you do.

As we too are pumped for today's flight, we understand you have options when you fly and we are grateful that you have chosen to fly with us today.

We recognize by choosing to fly in IL Reyes, you are committed to growing personal development and reaching higher than you ever have before.

Enjoy today's flight, be blessed and remember, the best is yet to come.

What's up, champion?

This is your host, Neal Reyes, and I want to welcome you to the Executive Perspective.

For years I struggled to answer the question, what do you do for a living?

Why?

Because most people who ask only expect to hear one thing.

I am an executive with a deep level of understanding of business, operations, leadership and technology.

I'm also the president and founder of a worldwide ministry and CEO of an executive coaching and consulting firm.

My number one passion is people and I receive significant gratitude in life from sowing into others and encouraging them as they grow to achieve their fullest potential.

If you're a high performance individual like me, or you're simply ready to take your business, leadership or inner potential to the next level, then strap in because I'm locked in and all in.

This is the Executive Perspective.

Hey, what's up guys?

This is your host Neal Reyes, and I'm so excited that you joined today.

Today we're going to be speaking about a topic that that you've probably heard from time to time, but it actually has a couple different meanings.

And I want to take you deeper into understanding exactly what it is and why it's very important for your life.

The topic we're going to be speaking about today is called white space.

Again, the topic we're talking about today is called white space.

Now, there are those of you who are out there, and no matter how much rest you get, you might just continually feel wiped out or stressed out.

Another thing that's going on around right now, and I say going around, it's been around forever, but it's kind of a buzzword that's going on is people who struggle with anxiety or nerves or nervousness or in many cases for people, it's high stress.

They feel like no matter how much rest they get, they're just always overwhelmed.

They're just always either tired or they're worn out.

But no matter what it is they do, it just seems like they can't quite get ahead.

They're always busy, and there's never enough time to get things done that they need to.

And, well, that's why we're going to talk about white space today.

This is something I learned years ago, but I want to really kind of break down exactly what white space is.

I'm sure you've heard about it before, but I also want to break down why it's important for your life.

Now, when we talk about the subject of white space, there's actually two different things that most people refer to.

Now, I'm not going to say it's the only references for white space, but usually in the business world, there's usually two main references for white space that people talk about.

The first one has to deal with your calendar, and the second one that's talked about less but is extremely important is in relationship to your mind.

So again, the one that's talked about most often is white space on your calendar.

But the one that's talked about less frequently but is the in my opinion, it's extremely important.

Probably more important than the first one is the white space of your mind.

So let's break this down for a little bit.

And I think as we speak today, you're going to recognize this within your own life.

And then I'm going to paint some examples of where I've seen this impact others and why it's so important.

The first one we're going to talk about is the calendar.

Now, just to let you know, I am a firm, firm believer in an organized calendar.

In fact, so firm that I'll tell you that during my work week, when I'm working with my executive assistant, and this is something that I recognized over, I guess I would say, a couple of years ago, my calendar.

The way I typically view my calendar, first of all, is at night before I'm going to bed, I'm opening it up and I'm looking at the day ahead, then the week ahead, and then I'm skimming over the weeks to come a month out.

Sometimes I even go a month and a half, but usually it's about a month.

And then what I do when I go to bed, when I wake up in the morning, I pull my phone out again and I look at my calendar again.

I go through the same exact exercise.

I look at what do I have ahead of me for the day, I look at what's for the rest of the week, and then I look at what's the following weeks all the way for a month out.

And I do that day after day after day.

But a while back, I noticed that for me, it seemed like during the work week, and I tend to maintain a Monday through Thursday schedule during the work week.

It seemed like my schedule was butter.

And what I mean by butter is it just was so simple.

It was so simple to follow.

It didn't mean that it wasn't a very active calendar.

In fact, usually people who sit next to me, if I've got my iPad or computer next to me and I pull up my calendar and they see it, usually they just almost go into overwhelm when they see all the things on my calendar.

But for me, it's very structured, it's very organized, it's very strategic.

And part of it's because I always know where I need to be and when, but also why I don't like putting vague things on my calendar.

In fact, when people send me meeting invites, I don't like vagueness on my calendar.

I'm a real firm believer that vague goals produce vague results, but at the same time, vague details produce vague meetings.

I've had enough meetings in my life that I've shown up to, and I'll be honest with you, I'll point at me first.

I've had meetings where I'm in meetings and as I'm there, there's other meetings that have to occur, and I'm telling my executive assistant to schedule these meetings out.

But what happens is most People, when they schedule a meeting on a calendar, a work calendar, they only focus on the name or title of the meeting.

And they rely on that to tell others what that meeting's about and why it's important.

But sometimes the details of that meeting, while you may write it and know what that means in the moment when you're scheduling a meeting that's three, four weeks out, sometimes even up to two months out by the time you get to that meeting, sometimes you get in a room and you're all staring at each other and you know you're supposed to be there, but you have no idea why you're supposed to be there because there's no details.

So I shifted some time ago, and I say some time ago, years ago is what I should say to making sure that not only did we have a super clear meeting title, but we also had good notes in there.

Doesn't have to be a lot, but they at least have to be detailed and clear enough, concise enough, where everyone who's showing up to the meeting knows exactly what's going to be expected or at least what they're going to be talking about of the topic of conversation for that moment.

Well, that's really helpful for me.

And I do that with my calendar and I use that calendar almost religiously.

There was a time I could think back earlier in my career where I didn't use a calendar hardly at all.

And then I went to work for a particular company and I had a very generous CEO who was able to show me some things.

And I realized that having my calendar filled out was very important to him so he could see my calendar.

But I also leveraged or learned how to leverage the power of having a well defined calendar for me.

And in fact, I really like color coding my calendars.

I like color coding them for different meetings mean different things to where I have kind of almost subjects or topics.

That's just kind of how I am.

In fact, even when I'm taking notes all the way back to college that I'd write things in different color ink or I would highlight certain things and it just kind of catches my attention and helps me.

But one of the things that I recognized was that Monday through Thursday and my schedule was so smooth, but the moment I got home after hours, it just seemed like not always, but many times, like as if my calendar was chaos.

And I think the biggest thing is I'm a very, very devoted husband and father.

If you don't know a whole lot about me, I have a beautiful, beautiful wife and we have been blessed with four beautiful children, and I am a very strong family man.

I'm very dedicated to my wife and my children and making sure that I spend time with them.

I love hanging out with them.

My children, some of them are in college now.

I have another one in high school, another one in junior high, and I have so much fun with them.

There's times where we go riding on our scooters, our electric scooters, and we'll go out for a couple hours at a time just exploring the town.

Sometimes we'll live and pack up those scooters and put them in one of our vehicles and go drive to another part of town and go exploring trails over there because we have so much fun.

Other times we're outside playing basketball or we're down at the tennis courts, but we're always being active in some kind of a way.

But what I recognize in the after hours is that my schedule was all over the place.

And the reason why is because, like, in my mind, I might have thought I had Friday as a downtime, or I had Friday and it was wide open, so maybe I could do a little recording, work on the business, work on the ministry, but kind of spend it how I want.

And then all of a sudden, I come home Thursday night, and I find out that Friday I've got to be at this place, and I got to be at this place, and I got to drop off this one, and I got to go over here and do this.

And it just felt like my schedule was.

I mean, it just felt like it was all over the place.

And the person who helped me actually catch that was my personal coach, the coach that I work with.

I had hired a coach who could not only help me with accountability, but who could push me hard.

You know, I was raised up in sports.

I played just about every sport.

In fact, my family, if it has a.

And it's.

Has competition connected with it, oh, my gosh, my whole family just goes all out on competition.

We just.

I love it personally.

But that being said, I had coaches who knew how to drive me for performance, push me in the.

In the athletic arena.

But I was ready for someone to do that with me now.

I knew how to hold myself to those high standards, but I wanted to have a coach who would help me do that.

And it was during this time of working with my coach that I recognized that my Monday through Thursday at the office was so smooth.

But it was the after hours that felt like it was all over the place.

Now, I don't Want to paint my family in a bad light or a bad picture?

My family is excellent.

It's just that I had no visibility into what they needed my help with.

And at times, surely they told me ahead of time.

But I'm very calendar derivative.

Remember, I told you at the beginning of this podcast that I look at my calendar before I go to bed for the next day, I look at it for the rest of the week, and I look at it out for several weeks through the end of the month.

And when I wake up, I do that again.

And I make it sound like as if I only review my calendar either at night before bed or in the morning when I wake up.

But that's not accurate.

I'm reviewing my calendar throughout the day, and I train my executive assistants on how to work with me on my calendar throughout the day.

And in fact, I will tell you that when it comes to my calendar, and if you're out there and you have an executive assistant, listen up, because this is going to be a key point that might help you if you have an executive assistant.

The way I've treated all of my executive assistants, and I've had multiple ones with my executive assistants, I treat my calendar as a cookie jar.

And my fingers, my hands don't belong anywhere in my cookie jar.

In fact, what I will tell you is when I'm working with them, I'll turn around and even ask them.

I make an understanding with them ahead of time because I've learned how executive assistants work, and they're usually very, very gifted in managing a calendar.

These are things that they like doing and enjoy.

But when my fingers get in there, it makes it hard for them.

So what I've told them is that if I ever need something, I'm just going to shoot them a simple text, or if I'm with them, I'll just talk to them and ask them to turn around and put something on my schedule.

But usually I do it through a text, so there's some type of record for their memory as well.

But then in addition to that, if I'm ever at a meeting and I need a time that I need scheduled, and if my assistant's unavailable, maybe they're at lunch or they're at an appointment, or, you know, they have a day off or something, then what I do is I put a placeholder on my calendar.

But I still don't even schedule the meeting.

I send them what I need, who I need to be there, who needs to be there for me, what we're doing, why I Need to be there, what we're going to discuss.

And I let them schedule that.

And I will tell you, that makes it so smooth.

But what I discovered with my coach was that the reason why work seems so smooth, and even though it was made me much busier than at home, it felt so much more organized that I actually had more peace around it than my after hours at the house.

And what became very clear to me was that I needed not one, but I needed two calendars.

I needed one for work, but I needed one for personal.

And the one for personal would only be successful, as if the people who I was engaged with had visibility to it as well.

Which means I created a family calendar.

And I introduced this concept to my family about a year and a half ago, maybe a little over a year and a half ago.

And at first, I'll tell you, it was a little bit of rough going because now I had this beautiful calendar.

And what I told them is that I'll be wherever you need me to be, when you need me to be, but just put it on the calendar so that I can see it and know it ahead of time.

Now my daughter Taylor, who's my oldest, she's.

She's a pre med student.

Oh my gosh.

She took over my calendar and put everything on there.

So we had to create some guardrails real quick on what goes on the calendar, what doesn't.

But she embraced it.

She's a high performance mind.

She always has been, as the rest of my kids are as well.

It's so beautiful to see that in them and as they're growing and learning.

But immediately she embraced it.

My wife, of course, embraced it and supported it.

My other children did as well.

And so what we have, we tend to use on our phones a calendar that's linked to all of them.

And we're able to see that across of where we're at the moment.

We did that and we developed a rhythm with it.

Oh, man, my schedule became so smooth and so simple.

But getting back to the white space, what I would also recognize as part of my calendar is that if I'm putting things on there where I'm always just doing, doing, doing, sometimes I don't have any downtime to either just rest, to schedule rest, or to schedule quiet time for some of you, that might be journaling for some of you, you might need to schedule time to answer emails or something of that nature.

But it's what I refer to in the workplace as white space.

And I've taught my employees to do the same I've taught all of my leaders that what's so important is for them to list white space on their calendar where they put blocks on there they need to be strategic, but blocks on there that give them white space to do things that they need to.

Whether if it's catch up work, whether if it's just little busy work that needs attention, but you got to place your hands on it and put some focus on it.

During these times I often encourage them that if they happen to have an office, close the door.

But in other times maybe don't close the door.

But just like at the gym, use the verse, the universal symbol that put headphones on.

Because when people see headphones usually they know you're locked in and you're engaged in something.

And I encourage my teams to do this.

In fact, my leaders now have done that with their teams and as they do that, there's times where I'll walk through our department and I see these people who all have their headphones on and they're locked in.

And what they do is they schedule white space time for the entire team.

So that ways it limits the distractions of people who need might want to come up to them.

And for one hour, two hours, they've got their heads down just banging at work.

And it's making them extremely successful.

Well, as they've done that and productive I should say it's important.

So the first thing I want to talk about with white space is.

White space can refer to time blocks on your calendar where you list blocks of time for dedicated tasks.

But usually it's for either downtime, resting, learning, if you need to be reading something, or if you need to be watching videos, further education or other times it's just for tasks that are repetitive tasks, but that needs some space that ways you can gain organization and it helps you with organization.

But the one that I feel that's less talked about, that I want to talk about next, what I refer to as the white space of the mind.

You know, I'm sure you can agree with me and some of you may have recognized this before, but some of you are going to have a revelation when I mention it now.

But when someone is physically tired or physically exhausted, they're wiped out.

However, when someone is emotionally tired or emotionally exhausted, that will take way more out of a person than it will physically.

You know, my family and I have been blessed to have moved several different times to different cities and different states.

It's just the plan that God has had for us.

And I can Think of the days where we were moving and at the end of the day, man, I was just wiped out.

I was just, I was so tired and I was just ready for good sleep that night.

But even in those moments where I had had what I would call maybe not extreme, but just strong physical exhaustion because of what I was doing all those days, never touch the days where I came home and I was mentally exhausted or mentally.

For some people it's mentally wore out.

They'll be mentally wore out if they don't address it.

And they do it over and over and over.

They wear themselves out.

But it's mental exhaustion or it's mental fatigue.

You're just emotionally drained.

And as you are, that makes you feel a hundred times more tired than you are physically.

And maybe it's not a hundred times, but what I'm trying to emphasize is you'll feel way more tired now in those moments you need time to recuperate.

And so most people think is that they just need a good night's sleep.

And in some cases that's true.

However, there's a difference between resting your body and resting your mind.

And so the way you rest your mind is quite different than resting your body.

Yes, sometimes you can get that through sleep.

But really what a person needs is sometimes they need physical downtime to recover, but other times they need white space downtime to recover.

But that's for the recovery of the mind.

Now when I talk about that, here's an example I'll give you.

If any of you.

Now I'm a Gen X person.

I don't know what age you are, it doesn't matter.

But the reason why I say Gen X person is I remember a time that as I was growing up and computers are starting to be really popular going into the homes I can think specifically of my mother in law used to love to do this where she loved on her Windows computer.

You know, it's kind of funny because people back then, they didn't use their computers for a whole lot other than, you know, something like aol, you've got mail or Juno mail, remember that one?

I said, you know, I think it's called Juno.

But anyways, you know, the Earthlinks and things like that that came out and some of these companies are still around.

But that being said, you know, it was either email, there wasn't a lot of web surfing, it was either email.

But the main thing that most people did on their computers especially you know, at times is they play solitaire, remember that one?

And some people Are like, I still play solitaire.

Fair enough.

But they play solitaire.

Well, why would they play solitaire?

Because at the end of a taxing day, whether if it was work or the end of a taxing day, if they were home, if they happened to were to be a stay at home parent, where they stayed home with the children or maintain the house, whether it be the grocery shopping and the laundry and the cleaning and the cooking or whatever those things are, they're wiped out by the end of the day.

That's why so many people, when they go home in the evening, they just sit there and veg out the tv.

You know, the average person in America, and this actually may be in the world, but I'm going to give you an American stat.

The average person in America watches TV up to four hours a day.

I'm sorry, I had that wrong.

Up to six hours a day.

The average American watches TV up to six hours a day.

Now social media, the average American does scrolling on social media three to four hours a day.

That's scrolling, which is known as scroll fatigue, sometimes of three to four hours a day.

If you tally all that time up, if we're talking about productivity equates to three months out of the year, a person will spend scrolling meanlessly on social media on their phone.

That's three months out of the year.

If there's 12 months.

If you take just two people and they're the same performance level, let's say if you had gears, okay, let's say if you rated someone from one through five and five is the top performance a person has, always knocking it out and one's the lowest.

Let's say these two people are both right in the middle.

They're threes.

They're not real slow, but they're not real fast.

They're not necessarily a high performer, but they're not necessarily bad workers, but they're just middle of the line, they're threes.

If you take those same two people and let's just say they're in life in general, the person who spends three to four hours a day on their social media will only be productive nine months out of the year.

Whereas the other person, if they avoid social media, they'll be productive for 12 months out of the year and they'll get more done simply because of the fact they weren't distracted by the social media.

Here's some alarming things, but these are facts that they've discovered.

But that being said, so many people do those things because they're what's Referring to as vegging out.

That was what the term used to be called, was just kind of edging out, just kind of relaxing, taking it easy and just doing nothing.

But for some people, it used to be the solitaire.

Why?

Because it was something that was engaging part of their mind, but only a little bit because it was just patterns, it was over and over, it was just something that they did well.

White space for the mind is extremely important.

It's time that you set it aside to let your mind recover, to let your mind just kind of have some downtime.

I can think of, you know.

So one of the things I do is I'm a chief information officer.

If you don't know what that is, basically it means I'm a technology executive for an organization where I lead and guide the vision of their technology and help guide them through the patterns of what's coming up in the the future.

All that being said, I have obviously a team that works beneath me and a bunch of great and gifted employees.

And this is something I've done for many years now.

I'm so grateful.

I'm also a CEO of my own company and I'm a founder and president of my ministry.

So obviously I have multiple things that I do, but one of the main things I do is I'm a chief information officer years ago, and I mean years ago because I've had so many different companies I've been blessed to work for in good ways.

But years ago I had an exercise that me and my employees went through where in our environment we had a threat actor trying to attack one of the companies that I was working for.

And I just want to let you know, when threat actors try to attack a company, it's never during the day, usually at like 10 o'clock on a Monday where it's nice and easy because they know you're at work.

It's almost always geared to where they attack you during the middle of the night when they know you're asleep.

And they usually try to attack you around a holiday time.

That's why the end of the year gets so busy with that type of activity.

Well, I was working for an organization and I had led many organizations through these types of things, of defending them and helping them recover.

As a consultant, I used to get called in because it's one of my specialties.

So just putting that out there, not asking for work, but if you're out there and you need help as part of my consulting company, I can help you with that.

It's one of my specialties It's a specialty that I do, but one of the things I would do is help them to be able to have readiness plans or how to recover.

In some cases, you call it disaster recovery plans, but it goes way before disaster recovery really goes into business continuity and different things like that.

But we got attacked one time, and there was a threat actor trying to attack our network and gain access to it.

When that happened, we all went into work, full gear.

It happened in the middle of the night.

I was woken up with the phone call.

And as I was woken up with the phone call, I'm immediately giving orders to my team and giving them.

I say orders, but really directions.

And we came together as a team and had to fight that off.

But here's how that worked, though.

This attack was so strong that we spent.

We were up for over 24 hours the first day.

But understand how this works.

We had just come off of a full work day that we had worked all day long, went home for a few hours.

We're just beginning to get some rest.

So we'd been home for a little bit.

We'd been asleep for a couple hours.

The attack hit and we had to go into effect.

And we were up at that point defending against this attack and remediating the damage that had already occurred.

But other things.

And we were up for over 24 hours, but on just a couple hours worth of sleep.

Run back home, get a couple hours of sleep.

And I say a couple.

I'm talking like maybe three hours at the max shower, get back to the office and working again, again, again.

Will you do that for like three or four days straight?

And your body begins to feel it pretty quick when you're only running off of two to maybe three hours multiple days in a row.

But also keep in mind that as you're working at that pace, you're not just working physically, you're thinking heavily with your mind.

Especially with the type of technology work that I do in the teams that I lead.

Well, by like day four, day five, when we know that we're over the hump of this thing, I have to give people time off to rest for two different things.

There's times that I'm trying to work them out where I'm putting shifts and stuff like that, where some people get to go home and rest and go to sleep and unplug, and then when they come back, the next team goes.

Goes home and goes to sleep.

But the reason why is because they need physical rest for their body.

But once you hit about day four, End of day four, going into day five, you've actually got to give them white space time, too, where you send them home, where even though they may not go to sleep until later in the evening, they've got to have time to just go and kind of just veg out and relax because their bodies are maybe starting to recover by now, but their mind is almost.

I don't want to say fried, but it's like overworked.

And you got to give them white space time.

That's what we refer to when we talk about white space of the mind.

And I'm going to tell you that this is extremely important.

If you find that you're dealing with extreme levels of stress or stress that feels like it's just never going away, I'm going to tell you without a shadow of a doubt, it's probably because you're not giving yourself enough time to have white space of the mind to where you recuperate and help.

Now, I've mentioned in previous podcasts that one of the best investments my wife and I did was we purchased an infrared sauna for our home.

Man, I'm an advocate for those things.

They're fantastic.

The number of health benefits that come from one of those is just.

I mean, it's just.

It goes on and on and on.

But one of the things that it does is it relaxes and de.

Stresses your body.

But the other thing it does as it gives you time to kind of sit and have white space for your mind, you can use it for journaling, you can use that time for downtime.

I spend quiet time with the Lord.

I'm in there.

Ours is kind of a nice one, that I should say, kind of nice one.

It's a very nice one, but it has a little screen in there.

So I could even stream something if I want to watch it in there.

I'll turn on audio books.

I'll turn on teachings, faith teachings.

I'll listen to podcasts.

I mean, there's just so many things I do when I'm in there, but it helps me because it keeps me in balance, where I'm making sure I get my physical rest, but I'm also making sure I get the rest that I need for my mind in the white space.

This is what I would refer to as an advance and as an advanced mindset principle.

And even if you don't do anything else to go down the pathway of personal development, listen to what I'm talking about here and start working to incorporate it in your schedule.

And then when you combine the two the white space on the calendar with the white space of the mind.

But what you're doing on the white space of the calendar is scheduling time.

That's downtime so you can recuperate.

White space of the mind.

Now you've locked in to something super powerful.

Guys, I'm so thankful that you stopped by to join us today.

As always, we want to recommend you go by our website@neal Reyes.com where you can find all of our teaching resources.

We have a bunch, we have all of our podcasts, but we also have our videos on there.

As always, guys, I would just want to remind you and I just want you to know that I believe in you.

It's so important to know that there's someone out there who believes in you.

I believe in you and I'm cheering you on and I'm so excited about growing with you.

Thank you so much and have a blessed day.