What If Work Was Designed Around Life?

Work should serve life, not the other way around. In this episode of the Behind the Village Podcast, we talk about work life balance, slow living, and how we are choosing to live a life worth living. We introduce the new direction of the podcast and explain the first topic we’re focusing on which is making work fit your life, through interviews, community stories and actionable habits.

Please note that this transcript was made using AI and it may not be entirely accurate.

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You’re listening to the Behind the Village podcast,

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Where we invite you to join us on a journey to understand how to live a life worth living.

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Mikaila here for this episode of Behind the Village. I’m sure you can immediately tell that there have been a few changes. The music is different, the look is different. The vibe is different. It’s only audio. And so what we thought we would do is give you a little bit of insight as to why we’re making these changes, and what the future of the Behind the Village podcast is going to look like from here on out.

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Jiun and I started this podcast a year ago, and we decided at the time that we would jump in with two feet and learn along the way, and that’s exactly what we did.

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So now we’re at a point where we feel like it’s time to adjust the previous version of the podcast and lean into what we want the future of our content to be.

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We start our discussion by addressing some of the personal and work related issues that we’re experiencing, and how we can improve them for ourselves.

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The biggest issue we’re having right now is that we’re not able to be as fully present as we want to be in our lives,

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We really need to make a change. So we’ve decided to start with how to get our work life to fit our personal life, as opposed to just trying to fit in personal life around work.

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I think there’s a number of things that are sparking the change. I think. The first one is just simply life is busy for us. And I think we’ve heard multiple people right on. Multiple friends kind of talk about the same thing, how it’s just it’s just busy all around, right? There’s a million things you have to do. There’s a million things you have to pay attention to.

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And there isn’t enough time to do everything right. I don’t, at least it feels that way.

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And I see them all the time, these memes that are talking about how, you know, we’re living in unprecedented times.

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Right. And all these things are like, unprecedented. That never happened before in the last ten, 20 years. And you know, these memes talking about how I wish I was only going through one of these on president things right now. You know, so it’s just like an entire just scope of like, everything just feels everywhere, like it just compounding compound.

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It just feels like it’s all over the place. And, you know, it’s hard to grasp on the situation of us as we are getting older. Right? And we’re starting to kind of think about, okay, so what is that next step? What is it that we want to do? What is it that we care about? What is it that we want to focus on because our time is more and more limited?

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what should I do then? Like, am I just doing something wrong? Should I just give up? Like, should I like what what what is happening here?

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Right. So for me it’s very much seeking. Like there has to be something we’re missing, something we don’t know, which is where that knowledge component comes in. We’re looking and we’re searching for information from those or those people around us in various stages of life and different areas of life and different ways of approaching things that somebody’s got to have a nugget of information, an idea.

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Yeah, somebody’s gotta have something. Someone can help someone else. Exactly. But

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After our in-depth discussion of what totally wasn’t working for us and all of the feelings we had about all these challenges, we decided to look into some inspiration

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that could point us in the right direction.

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So the phrase a life worth living. We’ve kind of adopted it now alongside our podcast. It it’s become kind of our new pursuit in general for us personally, which is also bleeding into everything else we do in life. What does that mean?

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Everybody has things that they want to do in life. Right. Had different hobbies, different interests, different passions. And you know, how does work fit in? How do you make, you know, work, not be the center of your entire attention? How do you make, you know, social media as an example, not make the entire point of your attention? How do you make how do you fit everything?

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That’s I think, one of the main things that we’re trying to answer, and that’s what that question, the that phrase kind of goes back down to is how do we live a life worth living that gives us what we want or what we need, right? Without sacrificing too much of anything else? I think that is what we are looking for.

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That’s the actual like, the answer that we’re trying to find overall for this podcast. Right? As a whole. And I think that’s something that a lot of people are probably interested in answering as well, even if it’s subconsciously, but like how just how to how does life work? How does life work nowadays? Right. Not what it used to be or how it worked before, but how does it work now and into the future?

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How do we live the best life we possibly can?

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So for me, I think the way that I see or one of the fears, I guess potentially that I have with, my life, right, is that at the end of the road, at the end, when I have lived all the life that I have to have some sort of regret to be able to say, I wish I could have done this, I wish I would have done that, I wish I didn’t go this path or this way and just ultimately just like, have that question in my head of what if, right?

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What if I had gone this way? What if I had tried this? What if I hadn’t chickened out to, you know, go and do this? And for me, that concept of regret is what makes me want to push more and kind of learn more about what we can do, not 20 years from now, not when I retire, not when we, you know, have everything in order, but what we can’t what can we do right now?

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What can we start to learn and figure out and get better at tomorrow? Right. So that each day we can actually start kind of making better decisions, right. Because I don’t I don’t know if things can be solved in a day necessarily, but that we can start making better decisions or making or having to think better or change our mindset, whatever it is that, would help us live a life worth living,

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I think the one of the largest regrets that I have,

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for me, business has kind of taken, main priority. And it’s not something that I wanted to. It’s something that just kind of happened without me realizing it until I sat down one day and was like, why am I thinking about working and then working?

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And then after I’m done work, I’m thinking about the things that I need to do tomorrow, right? And this is a never ending cycle where then every single second that I am awake basically is spent trying to figure out how to make my business better or how to, grow it. How to you know, make it function easier, faster or whatever.

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And I think that’s been one of my largest kind of I openers, where I’m sitting here and I’m thinking, hey, what what have I been doing? Right? Like, I just I got so used to it, I didn’t see the detail that I was missing in that I spent most of my waking hours just thinking about business. And I’ve, you know, I haven’t been paying enough attention to look how big our kids are.

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Look how, you know, how quickly they grow and look at how much life we have lived so far. Right? Since we since we started dating all the way to now that it just kind of feels like it’s gone by in an instant, like in a flash and everything just seems to go by. Life seems to be going by so quickly.

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And here I am thinking about something that I really don’t care as much as I care about other things, right? I have other passions. I have other interests. I have family, I have all these things that I want to, you know, pay attention to. That I know I want to pay attention to. And yet somehow I’ve ended up spending, the majority of my time thinking about business rather than thinking about life, if you will, right outside of it.

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And that is something that I want to fix, that I want to make better. And that’s partly the reason why we ended up kind of realizing that this idea was exactly what we wanted, because it just made so much sense to us where we are, what we’re looking for, and who we know and who we want to bring in.

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Like, everything here just kind of fits. And I love that, idea.

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Of a life worth living.

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I wanted to get a little bit more vulnerable

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and hear what June had to say.

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What are the biggest pressures right now? Pulling your attention away from living the life you want?

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I.

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Read something recently.

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It was talking about how when you are a kid, when you are little, everything is just so new, right? And is so intoxicating because it’s new. You want to learn everything as a as a kid that you end up mimicking. You know, those around you or you try to do the same things or you, you know, as you’re going for a walk, they see like this rock, this really cool rock, right?

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Or they find a steak and it’s like them, the best steak ever. And, you know, like, it takes forever, you know, to go around, block with, with with your kid. But there’s a reason for it, right? The reason is they are looking at the details. They are living life fully because there’s nothing else for them right at this point in time.

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But the reason why kids do that is because everything is new for them, right? The amount of information out there is just impressive. It’s magnificent. It’s out there, right? There’s so much information to take in that they that their brain is solely focused on that on in taking that information.

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And what’s causing that is basically they pay attention to the details. That’s why you do something once and then a few days later your kid is copying it and you’re like, where did you learn that? Right? And you didn’t even notice. You might never have seen that. You did it because you did it on like randomly, right? For no reason.

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But your kids saw that and then they copied it, right? And it’s because they are paying attention to the details. And that for me is like a very powerful idea of living, let’s say a better life, right? Or a full life? A satisfied life is to actually pay more attention to the details of everything that’s happening around you.

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And the idea of living life more slowly is something that you and I have kind of researched a lot and thought about a lot and talked about a lot, but I think it boils down to that idea of details, right? If you live life more slowly, think of a kid as an example, right?

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Where they’re only focused, their only attention is to learn about the world, right? And how happy that makes them when they find this really cool stack. That’s the that’s kind of the goal. That’s kind of the idea is to slow down enough that you can start focusing on the details or how wonderful the sun is today, and how it’s a different color than it was yesterday, and how, you know, the sky looks better today and how the birds are flying in a different way today and all these kinds of things.

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And how much world, how much life there is around you that you just we just don’t notice.

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The pace of everything is so fast. We are required to work multiple jobs. We are required to pay attention to everything, to all the news around the world, to every single friend that we’ve ever had on social media. Because they’re on social media, we need to pay attention to every single thing happening around us, that we just lose the details at a certain point.

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And this is the reason why I think a lot of people say that online we have the, attention span of a goldfish is because at a certain point, I don’t care about the majority of this. My brain is tired of looking at all of this, that I just want to pay attention to the things that I actually care about.

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So after all of this, all of these ideas, all of these thoughts and musings,

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where do we go from here? What does the future look like? Not only for us, but for the podcast?

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let’s talk a little bit about this new direction. We’ve kind of identified our problems and our issues and the things we’re trying to solve and things we’re seeking. So where do we go from here?

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So from here, I think one of the greatest things that I’m looking forward to is actually not just kind of doing what we’re doing right now, which is we’re kind of discussing and going through, identifying what’s in our brains. Right, and sharing that information with, with each other and with the people that are listening. But I’m looking forward to actually also figuring out what other people are thinking and doing this type of thing with other people.

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And then just being like, I guess, asking those questions of, how are you making your life worth living for you? Right. So that I can, figure out how to live my life better. And I think that’s kind of what we have come up with. Right. And something that I’m, looking forward to is finding the different viewpoints from, not just ourselves, right.

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As we discussed, such a separate topic. So because we’re going to go through a series of topics basically. Right. And then, we’re going to be hopefully talking between us and then interviewing people within each topic, kind of dissecting in a little more and then moving on to another topic.

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And every so often we’re going to be changing topics. But within each topic we’re going to talk to all these different people, all these different members of the community or people that have something valuable to kind of add to the idea as we research and learn together

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through this idea, how do we, get those insights, basically.

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So the podcast is essentially changing from this point on. This is the first episode that we’re doing that is kind of introducing the new direction, I guess, of the podcast, but it’s still going to be very much a podcast where we’re going to be bringing in members of the community, right member from around here, that will be able to speak about not only who they are and what they do, but just how they’re living and how, you know, any insights that they can provide on how to do things better.

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Right. So it’s just going to add a, an added layer there. There’s going to be an additional layer that I think is going to make it really impactful and really valuable for everybody, including ourselves.

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So the next topic or the first topic that we’re going to be talking about in this podcast is work fitting life, and we’re going to be bringing in people that from you know, different areas, different age ranges, different businesses to just kind of talk about how they are able to fit. How do you fit, you know, life, how does life become the main point and work fits around it, not becomes the the work doesn’t become the main focal point.

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And then life just happens whenever you have spare time,

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I want work to fit my life, not the other way around. So I’m really looking forward to learning more and figuring out and talking to people about this subject,

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So this brings us to the end of the episode,

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I think we’re both really excited about moving in this direction. And now that you have the same context and understanding of what we’re planning, we can’t wait for you to join us on this journey.

00;17;28;06 – 00;17;47;23
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Thank you for listening to the entire episode. All the links and info you heard in this conversation will be featured in the show notes on our website. If you’d like to know more about anything we mentioned in this episode, make sure to check Villager Magazine Talks Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening from.

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