Episode 1 - Balance

In this first episode of the 'Women Doing Big Things' podcast, Sarah Dusek and Mona de Vestel discuss the concept of balance and how it relates to living a fulfilling and integrated life. They explore the idea of harmony as a better alternative to balance, emphasizing the importance of aligning different aspects of life and finding what works for each individual. They also introduce the concept of cover crops, which are activities that nourish and replenish oneself, such as writing, playing, and engaging in creative pursuits. The conversation highlights the significance of investing in oneself and giving space for creativity and play in order to increase productivity and overall well-being.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction and Background
• 3:17 The Concept of Balance and Harmony
• 8:00 The Challenge of Prioritization
• 16:49 Cover Crops: Nourishing and Replenishing Life
• 19:58 Doing Less and Yielding More
• 26:04 Stimulating Creativity and Finding Flow
• 33:00 What is Your Cover Crop?

Transcript

0:00

Hi everyone. Welcome to our brand spanking new podcast. We are so excited to be with you today. My name is Sarah Dusek and I am the co -founder of Enygma Ventures. Enygma Ventures is a venture capital fund that invests in female entrepreneurs. And prior to being an investor, I was a founder and entrepreneur and still am an entrepreneur myself, founding under Canvas. the largest leading glamping company in the US. And I'm also the founder of a new travel company called Few and Far. And we take people on extraordinary adventures around the world and do sustainability and carbon initiatives and help people travel regeneratively. And I am Mona DeVestel and I'm a writer and author, a writing coach and an editor. And I work with clients and help them write their books. I'm also a ghostwriter. I am a former college professor of creative writing at the State University of New York for a number of years. And then when I moved to California in San Diego here, I decided to launch my own business under my name. And Mona, why did we decide to do this podcast? Why are we here? we have been talking for over a year, and we decided to open up our conversations to the public because I think they happen to be interesting conversations about various topics that really help with personal growth, personal development, and creativity, and passion, and making things happen. Yeah, I think what we've discovered together over the last year is there's one level of challenge for entrepreneurs to embrace, which is the physicality of doing the work and overcoming the challenges that we face on a day -to -day basis. And there's a whole other level of challenge, which is personal. And the challenge of... overcoming and figuring out how to do life whilst you're doing hard things is kind of the juxtaposition of this conversation, isn't it? It's like, how do we do hard things? How do we make things happen? And how do we live our best lives at the same time? I think we also need to explain the context of our conversations perhaps. Why have we been having this? Why have we been having this? because I have written a book, a book that's coming out in September, 2024. It's called Thinking Bigger, a pitch deck formula for women who want to change the world. And Mona has been my guide and not just my guide for writing this book, but my guide for navigating my way through a whole bunch of sort of life challenges, big, big issue topics. And we've been unpacking those issues and topics and themes together under the guise of exploring writing and telling stories and figuring out how to, how to navigate our pathways for hopefully helping us to have better, more whole integrated lives. So our topic today is balance, which is a fantastic topic because we've been interested, you and I, Sarah, in finding out like how as women, as female entrepreneurs, do we maintain balance in our day -to -day lives, between our personal lives, our business lives? How do we juggle these various elements? I think it's a really important topic. agreed except I hate the word balance. I really loathe it because it implies somehow that we have to magically juggle everything and keep all these plates spinning all at the same time and you have to keep everything kind of like whirling and it feels impossible to me balance feels impossible it feels like having balance is really, really difficult because at any one moment in time, you're making a choice to spin this plate as opposed to spin this plate. And maybe that one's, you know, coming to the end of its spin cycle and you just have to try and catch it in time before it falls to the ground. And it feels like this, there's this very kind of pressurized sense of trying to get it all right and hold everything in tandem. So I don't love that word, but I do love the concept of like having an integrated life, like having a life that works. I mean, and that's, that's the big challenge I am constantly wrestling with is the sense of how do I do big things? How do I do the things that I'm dreaming about? How do I make extraordinary things happen and not kill myself at the same time? how do I have a life that works whilst I'm still? trying to shoot for the moon and do amazing things and make things happen? And I think that's the big question for many female entrepreneurs in particular, because that's the challenge. And so the word I love better than balance is harmony, because the idea of harmony is... It's like when you have a song that's being sung in harmony, it's like a layering. It's like a building depth, building, much more beautiful sound from putting many different things together. And I like that idea because that's what we're doing as women, right? We're putting lots of different things together and they have to be in tune with each other. in order for life to work. And if life is not in tune, it's not working. And that's why harmony for me is a much better visual. It's like this idea of can I layer the components of my life to make a better song that sounds beautiful, feels beautiful, is beautiful, and doesn't make me feel like I'm under enormous pressure all at the same time. Yeah, I love that actually. I feel like when I'm listening to you talk about harmony, it gives me like the sense of just peace and relief, you know, in terms of it's not another to do element on my list. Like balance feels like I have to eat healthy. I have to spend quality time with my children. I have to engage with my employees. I have to maintain balance in my life. It's like another to do and it like feels constricting. But harmony, feels like it's something that emerges out of different elements brought together to create a third sound, to create something that emerges and that opens up space, that opens breathing space for us, which I really like. I like it too, because it, it feels like you're creating something. It feels like I'm trying to create something with my one life. I'm trying to bring many threads together and hold them all together in a way that they make sense together. And that's, that's what I like about that terminology as opposed to balance, because balance just feels like that's a lot of pressure to try and get that right. But whereas when I think about harmony, I think about how do I bring these things together? so that they work and often you know we feel like our work lives and our personal lives and our family lives don't work together and that's the bigger challenge is how do we how do we bring all these pieces together so that they make a beautiful song and they actually work together and as you said you know you create a third a third sound there's more sound not less sound think the first most important challenge is giving ourselves permission to even have this life of balance as if... chaos or a life of hardship in terms of like balancing, especially when I'm thinking of motherhood and work, you know, motherhood and business, like allowing yourself, is that even possible, right? To have this breathing space, to thrive in both realms and to do well in both realms. I guess that's the first challenge that I see. That is my biggest question I think in life is like, how do I do all these things well? How am I a good, how do I get to be a good mother and have huge, crazy ambitious dreams? How, how do I navigate that? And how do I not burn myself out in the process? How do I tend to myself well? Tend to my family well? How does it all go together? And I think that's the real challenge of harmony and figuring out. what that looks like. And as I was journaling this last week, I, I realizing I was feeling guilty about. my child. I have two boys, two teenage boys. And I was realizing it was time to just do a check -in with myself again as to whether I'm spending my time in the right ways and thinking about what gets my time. How do I give of myself? How do I invest myself? Who's getting what? How am I integrating the things that are super important to me? And I did this really fascinating exercise this week, which I highly recommend. And it was, it's called, what's on my plate. And I drew, I drew my, I took a big piece of paper and I drew my plate. I drew a big plate and I, in the middle, I wrote my life. And on my plate, I wrote. All the things that are on my plate, all the things that I have responsibility for down to like managing the dogs and like making sure everyone takes their medication and like, you know, every bucket, I bucketed things. So I was like my household management, my family managing, making sure everyone gets birthday cards. Like I just did a big brain dump of everything. sits in my wheel of responsibility and, you know, including the different components of my work, breaking them down sort of really big buckets. And it took me a couple of hours, but it was actually a really therapeutic exercise to do. And what I realized when I was done and I looked at this page, I, you know, of course, the first thing you see is, was like, wow, there's a lot on this plate. This plate is very busy. But I have even put down on the plate things like self -care, my own wellness, health, but what I did once everything was on there. I took a highlighter and I asked myself, okay, out of everything on here, which of these things is the most important to me? Like, what do I care about the most? if I'm like, I can't do it all. I'm having to make some hard choices. What's staying on the plate and what's, you know, some things we can't get off the plate, right? But the interesting thing was, as I started to highlight what's super, super important to me or where I want to give my energy, you can then see, wow. Actually, there are some themes emerging about what's the themes that I was highlighting. And even as I looked at my work plate, my work portion of my plate. I could see the areas that were more important to me, the things that only I could do, the things that were really significant for me, as opposed to the things that were less significant. And it was a fascinating exercise just thinking about priorities. And that's, that is one of the things that I think is super important as we start to think about harmony and things working, is we have to have clarity about... what's most important to us, because we have finite time, finite energy, sometimes finite resources, right? So we have to get really clear about what are our priorities. And as I looked at my own plate and I could see the things that I could highlight, I had four big buckets. And, you know, you, maybe people have more than four buckets, but I could suddenly, I just, it gave me real clarity with like, if something's not in these four buckets, I have to put it lower down on the pecking order. I have to de -prioritize it. It can't be the focus of my day, because it's not in my top priority. And then it becomes, how do I delegate more? How do I get more help? How do I think about, giving other people responsibility for the things that I'm taking responsibility for. How do I prioritize how I spend my best hours in the day? Cause not all, not every hour is equal, right? But it was just fascinating exercise again, to figure out, is there anything that needs to come off my plate? Or how, how do I give myself to this plate in a different way? And how do I think about, how I'm prioritizing the things that are in the mix. Mm -hmm. Yeah, I think that's a really, really important question. in our discussions we discovered that actually giving yourself, giving to yourself can open up much more space to give to others. And I know that seems like obvious. And I know, you know, in airplanes, they show you the oxygen mask that you have to put on your face first. And... because if you're unconscious, what can you do for your children or for your partner or anybody, right? But it doesn't seem to, it's something for me in it anyway. I have to remind myself of this constantly of, and I'm not just talking about self care because self care is obvious, like get enough sleep, you know, take time to exercise, all these things, great. But it's also more about like, what makes me, what brings me so much joy that may not. have anything to do with giving to anybody, right? What is actually my precious thing that's going to nurture and fulfill me and fuel me? And that's where it falls into a territory for me that I think, am I being selfish? Because while I'm doing this thing, I really could be doing this other thing that really is like top priority, right? So that's something that comes up for me. I don't know if that comes up for you. 100 % because, and I think that takes us back to this whole idea of harmony being how we live in alignment with ourselves. Ultimately, that's really what we're talking about, right? We're integrating the different components of our lives and saying, this is, this is me living in alignment with myself and understanding what's super important to me, understanding what's my priority and taking care of myself. Like that, I think. You know, We can't over exaggerate how important just our own wellbeing is in terms of our own alignment with ourselves and our own capacity that that creates to do many, many other things. The more depleted I am, the less I can actually handle on my plate. The more full I am, the more, you know, The more capacity I've got within myself because I've taken care of myself, the more I can actually accomplish, which is such a paradox because what you're effectively saying, I have to give myself time to do X, Y, and Z. Whatever it is that nourishes you. And, you know, there are many different ways we can, we can be nourished and they're very personal, but the more we can do that, the more... capacity we actually have for doing meaningful, impactful, great work. And the more depleted we are as humans, the more out of tune we're likely to be with our lives and the less the output is likely to be. Yeah, I agree. I think this is where maybe we can introduce the topic of cover crop. I don't know what you think. just thinking about cover crops. Yes. Cover crops. Well, that's what you and I, that's what you and I discovered together this year as you helped me establish a rhythm of writing, and spending a few hours every day. I mean, I was writing a book, so I had a deadline, but after the deadline disappeared and after I had finished writing this book. and submitted it to the publisher. I realized I didn't want to stop writing because I realized that writing was such a gift to me. Like, you know, besides anything else that I may ever say that may be anything of interest to anyone else. What I was discovering was that writing was like a nourishment to my own life. It was like my own life was the soil and... writing was like putting fertilizer or as we coined it, we talked about a cover crop and a cover crop quite simply is this idea of, you know, farmers sowing a crop that just covers the ground, stops the weeds growing up and puts nutrients back into the soil. Its whole existence is to put nutrients into the soil and to replenish the soil. And this last year with you, I started working on this whole idea of replenishing my life and putting a cover crop on my life to stop weeds growing up and to nourish myself. And writing that way of doing things, that way of sort of nourish myself, which was unexpected and a surprise because I had not. imagined it would ever be that. But I do love the idea of the cover crops in our lives? How do we nourish ourselves? How do we make sure that we've covered our soil so that we're putting our fertilizer back into ourselves? really love this idea of cover crop because it actually pushed me to think about, of course, what is the cover crop for me, which is what is this life sustaining element in my life that nourishes me, that keeps the weeds away, that is not necessarily for harvest, right? Which is a fundamental point, right? We're not trying to, you know, how am I going to capitalize on this? What is this? Am I selling this? Am I producing this? Whatever the word is to yield a product or a result. It's more about the nourishment aspect, right? It's about the life -sustaining element. And I thought about that for myself, which of course for me, it always is writing and it's always nature and hiking and being with animals and dogs and you know. But... But really what was mind blowing for me is when I was talking to you, which was the idea that by doing more or by doing this element that is an additional element that one could argue, no, you've added something onto your plate, which is already quite full. It's actually allowing me to yield more. So I'm doing less on terms of a productive level. I'm being less productive because I'm out there in the woods. daydreaming with butterflies, or I'm writing in a journal, or I'm writing a text that perhaps is going to yield absolutely nothing for the public, right? This may not be a book. This is just me connecting and engaging with myself. So that idea that this is actually something of doing less to yield more is a mind-blowing point for me. Yeah. I mean, that's, it's the whole idea of like increasing your capacity so that you can yield more. Right. And that's the, that's why I love the symbolism of soil with this whole concept of cover crops, because it's like the more nourished the soil is, the more likely it is when you do plant a crop that's supposed to grow and supposed to have a return, the more likely it is because your soil is nourished and healthy. the more likely it is that that soil will yield a really great crop and not just, you know, a good harvest, but a great harvest. And I, I love that idea of investing in yourself in some way, you know, your own soil, not that you might not see the return from that particular investment necessarily, but you should see it come back in other ways, in other things by it producing more in some other outlet. I do know in my own life, the more I have, capacity. The more I've given myself space to think, the more I have brain, brain time, you know, free brain time, if you like, my brain's not cluttered, my brain's not over busy. My brain has had time to process other information. Those are the times when I'm most likely to solve some of my biggest business issues or my biggest challenges for example. And I was like, the more capacity I've built into my life, like the free capacity I've built into my life, which is not, which maybe you can even call it dead time, right? so it's like down, downtime and so I think of my writing time as downtime. I think of my, I go for a swim every day. I call that downtime. And it's like, it's time for my brain to decompress and it's in those moments. It's often those moments I have my best ideas. I can solve problems. I can be creative, I can look at something a different way and suddenly go, that's what we've got to do with that. That's how we overcome that challenge or that's how we deal with that. And it's like, somehow we have to build in space and breathing room and brain emptiness time. I remember this one time I was on a plane. I was on a business trip for Under Canvas at one point in time and traveling from one city to another. And I was reading a magazine. I was, I had empty, it was, I had no wifi. I had nothing. I was just, I was just reading on the plane. And some of those moments have created like the best action plans and the best, you know, opportunities and creative ideas and. You know, I came up with my best marketing plan, I think ever one time for under canvas when I was sitting on a plane and just reading and just like nurturing myself by just reading a book and enjoying reading the book and suddenly had like an amazing 'aha' idea that was really, really impactful for the business. guess what we're trying to say is Trying to be productive a hundred percent of the time. is not the best way to a) live in harmony with ourselves or have the most creative lives. Creating capacity to nurture ourselves, to invest in ourselves, to give our brain space is the best way to feed ourselves and to nurture ourselves. Absolutely. And I actually, I agree with you when you said trying to be productive is not the best way, because for me, my cover crop has to be disconnected from my understanding of like, will this yield productivity? Because if I connect that, if I have an expectation of output, it actually kills it for me. I think it's because I'm in a creative field and my cover crop happens to be writing. And of course, writing is also my business and it's my... my work, but if I allow my cover crop, my writing, the joy of writing, that moment when you feel like this, a timelessness involved for me, when I'm in my zone and I'm writing from this place of absolute engagement and connection, there is a timelessness that happens. But I always say to myself, great, I hope this is going to be, you know, know, know, know, know, know, usable in chapter three of this book or this will be a book or this will be you know, is this a bestseller or is it? that's that's not that's not what it is because really for me what it's what we're what I'm trying to do is to get in that zone of like feeling that I am being myself authentically without any expectation or burden of result or yielding and that actually ironically enough increases in yields productivity because I'm I me and, yeah, I'm happy. It's the harmony, it's flow, it's being in your flow, isn't it? As we keep coming back to this concept of harmony, it's like, how do we stay in our flow? How do we do our best work? How do we, protect our lives, integrate our lives so that we have the best possibility and, and being focused 24 seven, it's just not it. We just won't be living in harmony. with ourselves, we won't be in our flow if we're trying to be productive 24/7. It's just not possible. Yeah, it's really about the feeling that you get from the activity. I think for me, it's. how I feel when I'm in my zone. Therefore, I am, like you said, you're on that plane and you're getting your best ideas, right? You didn't sit down and say, I need to get my best ideas because I need to raise my business. Right, no, no, you didn't. I think that's the key is to disconnect the two. So we've got things like cover crops being writing, journaling, walking, being out in nature. I mean, they're going to the spa, reading a book. I mean, exercising. I mean, they're endless, right? I mean, but it's figuring out what, what could be some of those life -sustaining things for you that could effectively help you be more in your flow more of the time I think it's really for me going back to childhood. as a child, like children don't like put it on their to -do list to have fun. They just have fun. Like you watch children and they play and they, every opportunity they can, they're playing. And I think for us, it's just trying to remember like, what was it that made me so joyful as a child? Not so much the specific activity, but what was that feeling and what was happening for me? You know, how did that feeling come about? So. When you retrace your steps there, I know for me it's about freedom. That's the retracing of the steps is like, what made me feel genuinely free and that I was just me, unconfined, unfettered, and boundless, you know? And so that could be, I think, a first step is to try to answer that question. Like, what makes you feel so free? I also like the idea of tapping into our own creativity. There was a study that I just saw this last weekend, actually, was a study carried out trying to determine, this was a NASA study. They were trying to discover more geniuses. They were trying to find geniuses and try and predict genius. Because NASA wanted to hire more geniuses. So they were trying to figure out like, how do we go, how do we go find more geniuses? And they started this study and they started looking at the behavior of children and what they, they used the concept of creativity and the ability therefore to problem solve by studying how many children were able to be creative. And. And 98 % of children were able to be creative because they were able to play. And those children, because they could be creative, could solve problems. Therefore they deemed 98 % of children were geniuses. They did the same experiment, like five year intervals, and followed the same group of children. And what they discovered was that every five years, less and less people became geniuses. Because less and less people were playing and less and less people were being creative. And the older people got their creativity decreased and their level of genius therefore also decreased. And what they found by, by the time that most people reached 40, 50, 50 years old, we were down to like 2%. of the population being geniuses because we have eliminated creativity. And so I love the idea of like, how do we stay in touch with our own creativity? And you alluded to it, Mona, with like, how do we reconnect with play? How do we reconnect with having fun? And how do we find outlets? ourselves to be creative. And that's what writing did for me this last year, was it enabled me to be creative in a different way. And so use a different part of my brain, unlock a different part of myself to stimulate myself in new ways really. And I think that's why I think that's a great question to ask ourselves. How can I stimulate my own creativity? How do I, how much do I play? How much am I? able to connect with myself through play or creativity? And can that help us find our cover crop? Mm -hmm. And I think that's a secret ingredient to great writing as well is playing, having fun without wanting to yield something specific. that's the secret ingredient for everything, not just for writing. We say that all the time, you know, working with entrepreneurs, it's like, if you don't care, and if this isn't fun to you, solving this problem isn't fun. If you don't love doing this thing, chances of you being able to build a successful company are really slim. If like, if this is not fun activity, you're not likely to succeed. Right. But it's like, you know, if you tell somebody you're going to write a chapter on leadership, you know, you're going to write this very specific thing and they're they're paraphrased. It's not sound fun. They don't know where to start. They're they're, you know, stiff. But if you say to them, tell me about one of your earliest memories. the key. It's like Write about something that you love, that you remember, that brought you joy, And then essentially you're off to writing something that then can be carved and moved and shaped and edited. But that's true of life. That's the metaphor. That's the cover crop, right? When you put up, yeah, reconnect with yourself, with your true self. that's what harmony is all really about. It's connecting these dots so that they sing with each other, right? And it's like finding ways to connect with ourselves, finding ways to unleash different parts of ourselves, to create capacity for ourselves so that we can be our best version. Absolutely. So maybe that's our challenge for everyone listening today is to think about maybe what's on your plate and maybe thinking about what your cover crop might be. It's like, how could you go about thinking about what could be the nurturing, life-giving, sustaining, soil enhancing? thing that you could do in your life that could really, really nurture you and effectively, ultimately sustain you and help increase your yield. and I think, you know, thinking about your own cover crop is, would be really exciting. I'd love to hear, I'd love to hear what you think your cover crop is and have you, how you found your cover crop and what your cover crop is. That would be great. We would love to hear from you. I love that. And I think also giving yourself permission to really discover what makes your heart sing and what brings you joy and release yourself of the feeling of indulgence, like, I'm indulging myself. This is so and just allowing that to happen so that you can have fun and you can nurture yourself and you can nourish yourself. And I guarantee you that that is the most freeing feeling. And also yields the most beauty, you know, which is all I think at the end of the day is that's all I'm seeking is having fun and feeling free and feeling myself, feeling like I'm being me. That's what I hope for everybody. Yeah, me too. Being more of me. Being more me. I like that. Let's be more me. And how do we, how do we, how do we sing better songs? How do we make better music from our lives? How do we tend to ourselves and how do we, how do we have to give ourselves the best shot from making the best music out of our lives? And how do we have a whole lot of fun at the same time? I love that. Yes. So this was it, podcast number one. Super excited that you joined us and hopefully we'll have a few more of these conversations. Come back and join us again. Thanks everyone. Thank you. Bye.