Today we talk about how to audit our time and extract more meaning from the moments we have. It’s important to not just try to get through things to reach the next goal, but rather, honoring and respecting the present moment. When we have a deeper respect for life and recognize the incredible complexity and beauty of existence, we can experience a deeper sense of fulfillment and enjoyment in life in each moment.

Takeaways

• Auditing our time involves more than just trying to add more time to our schedules; it's about extracting more meaning from the time we have.
• Instead of wishing time away or constantly seeking the next thing, we should pause and honor the present moment.
• Having a deep respect for life and recognizing the complexity and beauty of existence can bring a sense of fulfillment and enjoyment.
• Measuring our days in minutes and extracting more from each minute allows us to experience a deeper sense of meaning and purpose.

View full show notes here.

One of the messages that we're really trying to get out there and one that's reflective of my own life is auditing our time. And I think there's a lot of different ways we can break auditing our time down. You can obviously audit your time from a calendar perspective and looking at the blocks of how you look at things and how you interact with time. A lot of people that have been working with this on even our own organizations right now, it's not just auditing our time to,

to add more time to something else. I think that's somebody's first natural reaction and maybe the right move. I'm not saying it's there. I think there's a deeper way we can audit our time, but if everyone's first reaction is, okay, how do I get more time on that? How do I get more time on that? And that may be true, right? There may be, you need more time with your family, more time in business, more time in leadership, more time in training for certain sports. I mean, my kids are heavily involved in the sports right now and they're like, we want more time playing the cross. We want to be able to practice more.

There is an element of time on task on that, there's for sure. But one of the messages that, you know, I was having a conversation, one of my middle son was down to Philadelphia for a nationals tournament. He made a national team and he came back and, you know, he got his ass kicked and had some success down there. And so he came back and said, how do I get better? And so we started talking about obviously adding some time components to that, but really more about extracting more meaning out of the time that we give to things.

And it actually parlayed into a larger conversation that we ended up having. And I think it's one for all of us to consider is when we audit our time, which is not necessarily just looking for more time. It's actually about extracting more meaning out of the time that we have. It's about extracting more experience from the moment. It's not about overlaying an objective with the time that we have. It's about extracting more.

from it, which actually slows time down and gives it more meaning. Versus a lot of us, what we try to do is we try to distract ourselves from the time so we can get through situations. It's like, I just need to get through this next really challenging situation. I just need to, you know, really this, I'm so excited for this weekend. I can't wait for it to come. I just need to get through these next couple of days. You know, leading up to the tournament was one of the things that he was talking about. It's like, I just need to get through this week. And I go, Asher, slow down, man. I said, the week's gonna go by and also the tournament's gonna be gone.

And then next thing you know, you're gonna be, what are you gonna be searching for for then? And it happened. And then, you know, of course, when we're all done, I said, dude, it was a wonderful experience. But I said, you see how fast that went? And so last week, when you didn't think the week was gonna end, that's when we have to audit our time, audit how we actually interplay with time itself. Because we also like to segregate and bifurcate like our work and our life or our personal life, friends and family. And to me, life is just all encompassing of all of that.

Life is work, life is challenges, life is successes, life is family, life is friends, life is all of those components. It's just we try to separate our timing. And then there's a mechanical nature to it. I certainly understand that and teach that. There's a time, there's a certain amount of time you can allocate to work. Absolutely, there's a certain amount of time you can allocate to physical fitness or nutrition or learning, right? Or growing or time with friends, 100%. And you should use if that works for you.

But if we don't raise to the higher level of this and we can get caught in thinking that time is something that we need to have more of, then we just play this game of getting through whatever we're trying to get through to get to the next thing to only then want to get through the next thing after that. And so we ended up playing this entire game of looking for ourselves or looking for opportunities to do things when in reality, what we're doing is we're just...

trying to get to the next thing and then the next thing. And as that starts to happen, we play this game our entire lives. And that's why people are still searching for things. That's why people are still doing that. Prince, come on, bud.

Sit down.

you sit down. Stay.

So as we think about auditing our time and really what does time mean to us? It's how do we get what people are really looking for is how do I actually feel the depth of the moment? I know it's a very deep way of saying it, but it's just how do I enjoy the moment that I'm there? How do I honor the moment? How do I respect the moment? And respecting the moment means that there's gonna be challenges, struggles. It's gonna feel immensely painful at times. It's gonna feel immensely.

Beautiful at times, but if we recognize this, your entire life you've had moments of both. And by the way, they always go. The best of times always come and show up with some challenging times. The most challenging times always reveal themselves to open some light up and allow some good successes to come in as well too. And if we're in there just wishing the time away from these things, then we've audited our time for the wrong reasons. And this is where that we can pause where we're into June.

So if you're in the challenge or in the struggle and you go, man, I really am honoring this feeling that's just so discomforting because this challenge that I'm going through, by the way, it's a better way to handle the challenge versus then you getting all upset about it and wishing it away versus just accepting it, acknowledging and allowing the challenge to come in. So the challenge itself gives meaning to the moment because otherwise it's just there. And then you realize,

99 % of the time you're not in that flight or flight response if you're able to look at things that way. It's only the personal mind, it's only that narration of the voice that tells you when things gonna go wrong. I mean, it's not like you naturally wanna do this. It's not like you, I'm sorry, a better way to say it, it's not like you willfully want to cause this disturbance and suffering inside there. There's a natural process that just creates this voice that talks.

And we can go in depth as to why that's there and why that happens. But for today's conversation, it's just when we think about scheduling and thinking about life, life is not work. Life is not these boxes. Life is everything. And at the end of the day, when you have moments left, a week left, a month left, whatever it is, or you just get to an older age and really start contemplating your own mortality and your own death, you start to realize there is a part of you that doesn't survive, but there's a part of you that does. And then you just wake up and go, man,

I'm here in this beautiful world and there's so many different things. There's so many different personalities that are out there. And yes, you have a different personality. I have a personality that's flawed. Everybody has a personality that's flawed. That's part of the human experience. It doesn't mean that you are the human experience. You are the one who's witnessing the human experience. That's the difference here. It doesn't mean that you are the experience. You are the experiencer who's having the experience that gets to pay attention to it. There's no difference when you're dreaming.

and you have an experience versus in the wake, there's still something, consciousness, right? That's there, that's receiving the experience for you to be able to experience. That's why you're the experience or not the experience. So there is something that's in there. Again, call it what you want, God, consciousness, whatever it is that you want to use, spirit. They're all just manmade words anyways, but just remove the word for a second and just recognize that you're in there and there's a bunch of experiences that are happening.

and they feel totally different and they just are, but we can honor those. And then you actually begin to just navigate those differently. It doesn't mean it takes this thing away instantly. What it allows you to do is just be able to stay seated and handle the situation and help out and see where you can do and see what you can do to help. So when we audit our time, the first thing is, is let's stop looking at life in these segregated ways of I need to get my work in order. I need to get my business in order. I need to get this in order. Just look at it as like this all of life. And there's...

Then you can drill down and go, yes, okay, let's create a plan for my business. Let's create a plan for how much I'm willing to work each week. That was actually one of the best pieces of advice that I ever got early on in my life because I was in stages of my life, I would work nonstop. And I could easily fall into that trap of just working nonstop. And when you do, that becomes something that's all you do is just continue to work. And that just, you can stay in that for a long, and actually the phase of my life, I enjoyed that. But then there's other phases. So like,

One of the pieces of advice that I got was, how do you figure out how much you're willing to work and then how do you extract more out of that time? How do you extract more out of each minute? That becomes your key to time as you audit this is, how do I extract more from minutes? And the way I like to think about this is if you measure your day in minutes, you can extract more from the minute versus if you're just wishing the week to get by, a minute will fly by and you just really didn't get much out of it.

And that's why it feels like you either didn't accomplish much or it feels like you're still searching for something. So calling off the search, right, from a spiritual perspective is one of the first ways to actually get more out of time because then you're not creating a narrative about how you just need to get through your day or get through the week. You're actually pausing and reflecting and go, you know, man, this is a wild experience. I'm bored or I'm really...

you know, angry or I'm really nervous, I'm scared, but you're still the one experiencing all these and you lean into whatever the experience that you're having. That's where the honoring of it, you know, this is concept and many of our masters have taught us.

Many of the masters that have been teaching for, you know, way before we've, you know, had iTunes and podcasts and YouTube and all those different things and writing down ancient scriptures and pyramids, they've been teaching the same things, just this deep respect for life. And this kind of, you know, is coupled with, to me, and the way I think about this is auditing with your time. The first thing you do is just making sure that I'm not just trying to...

get through the next thing, to get through the next thing, to get to the next thing, to get the next thing, to then think about the next thing that I have to get through, which is literally how most of us see life. I just need to get to this next project. And there's nothing wrong with setting a goal and accomplishing it. Again, we can talk from both sides of this, but it's just if you're doing this your entire life, don't you wake up one point and go, man, I've just been my entire life. I've just been waking up going, how do I get to this next thing? And then maybe for a day or two, you're not thinking about it. But then it's like, okay, then I have the next thing.

And again, goals are nothing wrong with it. If you want, you can check those things off, but that's not the point of life. Those are just things that we're doing while we're here. So the auditing of our life is how do I extract more while I'm actually doing the goals? That's the deeper part of this. The deeper part of this is that when you extract the meaning, you start measuring your day in minutes and you're extracting more out of that. That gives you a completely different sense of the experience that you're having, which will fill you up more. So then you're not caught in this,

of then needing something else outside to make you feel a little bit better for a moment, just then have to repeat this process, which is exhausting in the first place. This respect that has been taught for so long about respecting and honoring life, it doesn't say anything about you getting what you want out of life. And I mean getting what you want from a material objective conversation, right? Like vacations and things and cars and houses, which...

You should improve your life. It's wonderful. If that's your thing, then you should absolutely do it. You should simplify your life. That's a wonderful thing to do. You should live below your means. Look, there's some truths mechanically that we can bring into our lives, but that's that one plane. The deeper plane of this is to respect all of your experiences, respect the fact, again, and then you just take it to the basic level. You can do one of two things here. You can just say, where did you come from? You were a cell that then split and then continued to take a...

genome or sequencing that created you from a single cell. I mean, that is impressive. Mom didn't really do much. Dad didn't do much. I mean, really from the grand scheme of things, you didn't do anything. You just, you fed yourself. Yes. And I understand there's some things you can do to make it healthier or razor. Absolutely. I get all that. You should, but we're talking deeper here, but you didn't really do much. And then of course, when you have a child or you are a child, you are like, what 16 inches and you grow to five, six, seven, eight feet.

maybe not eight feet, but you know, you get taller, you get bigger, your physical body changes, who's doing that? Not you. That's what I mean, the deeper respect for life. Who's doing those things? Who is creating and allowing your heart to beat or your, I mean, 99 % of the time, you're collectively as a human experience, we're pretty healthy, right? Of course there are times when you get sick and when you get older and different things and that's part of life, but 99 % of our lives, we're healthy.

Yes, there's individual lives that, yes, but collectively, something does a really good job of keeping us pretty healthy to experience this, right? You call it consciousness, you call it God, you call it spirit. It doesn't matter. It's just a made up word. It's the same source, whatever it is, it's making all of that. It's created from a single cell you, right? And then it allows you to grow and you change and you get, you have a human brain, by the way, which is just remarkable. You do not have a chipmunk brain, which if we think about animals,

They've been pretty much the same thing for millions of years. I get it, the dinosaurs moved on and there, but as far as we can see for hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years, animals may have changed in size, but they didn't really improve much. The human experience, the human brain did. We're about to live on Mars. We've created roads and power and the fact that you can listen to this podcast anywhere in the world. You can do a YouTube video and...

15 seconds is automatically updated. The human brain did that. So where did that come from? Where did that intelligence get created? I mean, you didn't do it. Where did good looks or physical bodies, right? Yes, you can sculpt them better, but generally speaking, something created that. Again, so you just take your own experience of living in this world, which is the body that you have and 99 % of the time it's healthy. Even with putting...

a lot of times junk into it or hurtful. I just think about how I treated my body when I was a teenager at different times and you're going, man, it just worked its way through there. I mean, best guess there's 23, 24, 25 trillion cells in your body that are constantly in flux and making all of this work. What does that? So we lose this great respect and honoring of life because we want a bigger house or we need a different car or we want our kids to be a certain way.

And again, there's nothing wrong with any of those things, but we sometimes need to pull ourselves back to grounding ourselves and auditing our respect for life. The why we're trying to be here in the first place, which is to understand ourselves and experience ourselves and to extract more from those meanings of things. Then you just take the whole, you know, planetary systems. Just you're here in this small little Earth. By the way, Earth could be destroyed.

in one moment, everything you ever thought, everybody ever thought is just gone. And a couple of planets would get kicked out of orbit for like a half an inch for like a day. And that's it. And the rest of the world, you know, who knows? And there's these black holes. I mean, and there's so many different theories about them. Do they lead to other worlds? They just, you know, gobble up other worlds and where does that energy go? And what is it? Who knows, right? But it's just, there's a great respect and then we just get so caught.

in these little things like, man, I don't really like the way that person treated me. Or I didn't, you know, how come they didn't say hi to me? Or this is mundane things that we get so stressed over. You know, there's challenges. Of course there's challenges. That's the whole point. You don't really grow unless there's a challenge. And there's challenges at all different levels. I don't care if you have how much money you have in the world, the fact that you have options becomes a major challenge. I know...

When people hear that and they're going, I wish I had that challenge. Sure, you should go have that challenge if that's your thing. But I can tell you it's going to feel the same way. Once you get a certain amount of money, you don't have to do anything. There's other challenges that show up. There are. That's why plenty and plenty of people that have fame and power and more money than they ever need are more depressed or, you know, trying to figure it out more, you know, because when you're when you're have hopes and dreams of thinking that.

When I get all of this, that's when I'm gonna find the meaning of life. That's when I'll feel good inside forever. And you start getting these things and they start coming to you and you realize they don't happen. And then all of a sudden you wake up one day and you go, okay, well that didn't do it. And again, I've shared my experience many times, but that's what happened to me early on in my life. And I just, once I would get a half million dollars in income, I thought somehow there's gonna be a fruit tree and I would just be filled with this energy coming from it that I would feel good forever. And I think that's what people really are.

saying when they say, go be successful, when they say go be successful, it's like go get enough power, fame, money, you know, leverage, whatever it is that you need in order to be able to control the situations around you. So whatever's hitting your stuff feels good and then you'll be successful. It's to me, being successful is enjoying the experience of your life, regardless of what else you're doing. I don't know how anybody else would deny that. It doesn't mean you get what you want. It means you can improve your life. It doesn't mean you can improve your life.

Those things are secondary and they're important things to do. They're secondary though to you enjoying and honoring and respecting the moment that's in front of you. That becomes the gift though, this deep respect for life. And again, respect for the fact that your body's here, respect that you're going to die, respect that people around you are gonna come and go, and you're here for a hot moment and you're gone. That's what I mean by respecting and extracting more out of it. But many of us are still searching.

I'm 42, so I have a lot of friends in this 39 to 40 -ish range. It doesn't mean right when they turn 40, but people are going through this. Call it a midlife crisis. Call it like, I want to change. Certain economies are tougher. People are going through this. Really, the deeper conversations I've had with people that are willing to open up is that they're still searching for themselves and they think something outside differently is going to make that show up.

When in reality is, it's never going to, it's just gonna distract you. Sure, it'll distract you from the other three or four years and you realize you wake up and that didn't work either. Or you'll go get what you wanted because a lot of people are really driven than I know. And they, I've no doubt they can go get that certain amount of money or that car or that new house or vacation or island that they wanna get. Sure, I know you can do that. You can put enough energy in there and you can make enough money, you can add enough value and you can get all those things. But if you're doing all of that as a way to try to find yourself, you're lost already.

And that's the deeper conversation people are having. I think that's part of why people even listen to this podcast or listen to any podcast that's like this or start reading these books is because they recognize, look, I'm in this goldfish bowl. I'm just going round and round looking for a different view. It's just the same view that I keep looking, but yet I get caught because there's a little voice in there and says, well, just go around one more time. Just go around one more time. And you just keep listening to it. So it's not even like you're listening to life. You're listening to this mind that has no idea about life because it's created from those things.

You're just listening to this mind has no idea about life. Just trying to tell you what to do to make yourself feel okay. But it's just going around another fishbowl, another again, and just thinking that you're about having amnesia the last time you did it. We do at any level you do this. When you're 16 and get your car, it's all I needed. When you have your first boyfriend or girlfriend, that's all you ever needed. Your first house, your first job, your first hundred thousand dollars you make, first thousand dollars you have in your bank account, the first mountain bike you get. All of this is gonna be perfect once I have those things. Again, it.

There's nothing wrong with those things. They're fun. Enjoy them, but stop looking for yourself within them. So that's what I mean by extracting more out of the experience that you have. And this is when we audit our time. What we're really doing is we're honoring and auditing the deep respect we can have for what's around us. The fact that it rains and it's sunny and there's oxygen and we have gravity. And again,

You don't have to be a scientist. You don't need to go buy into these things. You don't need to go look into them, but we just can pause for a second and go, there's a lot that's going on that I have nothing to do with. That if one of those things went away, one cell turned upside down and created cancer. Gravity was no longer here. The earth moved a little bit. The sun got closer. We're done. It's just, there's nothing else there. So something, this great respect for life is keeping it in place. And yet we just take it for granted.

We just expect it to be there until one day it won't be at some point, right? You know, I think either last podcast, a couple of podcasts ago, I talked about there's been five extinctions with one basically going to 90 % removal of everything as the deepest ice age. And, you know, they're saying we're coming up on the sixth extinction and every time, by the way, it's improved. So who are we to say? And yes, it may take millions of years, right? Or even hundreds of millions of years going back. But time doesn't think about it in the same way.

If there is no time at the deeper level, then there is no time to compare it. It's just constant improvement. It's just constant energy and flux and creating new experiences for itself to experience itself. That's ultimately, to me, that's what life is. It's just its source creating the academy. It's just its source creating a counterbalancing effect for it to experience itself. If it's just in water, it can't experience what it's like to not be in water because it's water.

So part of this experience is for life consciousness to experience itself through all of these different ways, trees, animals, plants, and it creates a society that's, anyways, we don't need to go down that path. So we can all pause, we can audit ourselves. We're halfway through the year, approximately, and we can audit our time. And it's not insured. Go down and there's probably many, many better podcasts to teach you. And in fact, I've done some trainings on them too about how to create a better ideal calendar. That's not necessarily what I'm talking about. I'm just auditing the deeper part of our experience.

the deeper part of our time, which is to stop wishing things to go away. Stop wanting them faster. Stop wanting these things to be done just to get to another spot so you can just think the same thing. Stop going around the goldfish bowl over and over again. And so we pause and reflect on this auditing and we just go, how do I have a deeper respect for the moments that I get to have? Because at some point you're going to wish you could have the moments that you had. I mean, stop for a second. The challenges you have,

And anybody listening to this podcast, two thirds of the world would change for all of your challenges and problems you have. And a heartbeat, they just would. They would. And so, yeah, we get them and we're like, we only look at somebody else that doesn't have those and go, how come I don't have that? And really, that's just because they get to see something else and what you don't see in them and they're having their own experiences or who not. But you are in there experiencing the experience you get to have. You have this body, you have a heart, you've got a brain, you've got all these wonderful things you do. So you just deeper respect.

for what's going on in life that knows way more than you do. That becomes what you fall into. That's what you trust into. That's the experience you're looking for is to experience who you are, the deeper sense of who you are, the deep respect for life that's created all of this. And again, you don't have to go far, you don't have to be a scientist, but you already are. You're a single cell, it splits and divides, it's a genome, you become a scientist, and boom, a human is born. I mean, it's...

remarkable. You put some food in it. And by the way, you have no idea once you take food in your body, what it does. Sure. You could explain maybe the process of going and those different things. Right. But man, like you, you don't really know what really is happening. Right. We just, we eat some food and drink some water and we just take it for granted that it gives us energy. So I mean, that's the deep respect. So it's, I say it gingerly and I laugh because we forget, we get so caught up and needing to get this next goal, this next accomplishment or.

How do I find the purpose of my life or how do I do this? And you just pause and stop and go, I am the purpose of life. I don't need to find the purpose of my life. You are the purpose of life. You are the experiencer of the experience that you get to have. So experience it. That's how you extract more out of each moment. Measure your day in minutes, extract more out of it. When the mind, then the question is, how do I do more of that? First is just reminding yourself constantly.

that you're just a spiritual being having a minor physical experience, you're going to be here in a moment. You don't have to take your life so seriously. You just remind yourself of these things. You remind yourself of the greater, you just look around the totality of life. The fact that you're here when you eat, it gives you energy and food, you sleep and you feel so much better and your cells rejuvenate, right? Instantaneously, cells and they keep your body healthy and you get sick and it improves it within a couple of days.