Podcast Ep 79 | Eliminate Your Emotionally Taxing Issues: Lick Your Toads

This week Brad Giles and Kevin Lawrence are talk­ing about tack­ling the small, non-strate­gic things that can weigh you down and cre­ate men­tal clutter.

If you aren’t able to elim­i­nate these issues, you can’t do your best work and be clear in your thinking.

They detail the rule of 5 D’s — the five habits to help you declut­ter, and the con­cept of ​“lick your toads”, in order to become the most present and pro­duc­tive per­son you can be.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Kevin Lawrence 00:13

Wel­come to the growth whis­pers pod­cast where every­thing we talk about is build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies, or at least about build­ing great com­pa­nies and help­ing peo­ple to build endur­ing great com­pa­nies. And, you know, Brad and I are both very pas­sion­ate about help­ing com­pa­nies to do this. We’ve spent a huge chunk of our lives help­ing com­pa­nies to scale and grow and build endur­ing great com­pa­nies. And when things tend to go the oppo­site way, and not con­tin­ue to build and not to be endur­ing or to become mediocre. It’s we get a lit­tle fired up about it. We’re kind of pas­sion­ate about this. So any­ways, wel­come to the show. I’m Kevin Lawrence here today with Brad Giles as I am every sin­gle week. Brad, how you doing today?

Brad Giles 00:55

Excel­lent. Very, very good. Thank you. Things are good. Here. We are. Well, I tell you, we’re very lucky over here. We still haven’t gone into lock­down. The rest of Aus­tralia has been in lock­down. Well, Syd­ney has for 12 weeks at this point of record­ing. It’s Yeah, it’s chal­leng­ing sit­u­a­tion. So we’re very, very blessed where we are.

Kevin Lawrence 01:20

Yep, awe­some. Yep, same here. I was down in the US last week. And, you know, it’s inter­est­ing see­ing, you know, down there, even how seri­ous they are about not locked down, but masks every­where, being very care­ful. Obvi­ous­ly, on air­planes there, peo­ple are extreme­ly care­ful. But you know, as this thing, this thing is still kind of nip­ping at our heels and caus­ing some hav­oc. Yeah, anoth­er guy. I know, I call him a good friend that I saw on Face­book, a pic­ture of him with the old ven­ti­la­tor on and all that oth­er stuff like, you know, so he’s fight­ing for his life, he’s get­ting bet­ter, he’ll be fine, but it’s some seri­ous stuff still hap­pen­ing in the world. Alright, so Brad, what’s your word of the day today?

Brad Giles 02:08

sup­ply chain issues. So let me very, very quick­ly explain that many places that you go to now are talk­ing about we miss­ing this, or we haven’t got that we can’t get this in time sup­ply chain issues are just every­where. And that comes back to peo­ple just yeah, I mean, there’s it’s a fas­ci­nat­ing dig, when you dig into under­stand why do we have sup­ply chain issues at the moment. And it real­ly all comes back to the inap­pro­pri­ate imple­men­ta­tion of lean. So lean was pio­neered by Toy­ota, the Toy­ota way with famil­iar with that kind of stuff. But Toy­ota are actu­al­ly one of the few com­pa­nies that have good sup­ply at the moment because they’ve done their sys­tem the right way. But oth­ers have sim­ply tried to cut costs. So that’s quite a lot. But yeah, sup­ply chain issues. I did

Kevin Lawrence 03:10

hear Brad, we talked about that before I did hear Toy­ota actu­al­ly got hit in the last month them­selves. Yeah, that’s some­thing that actu­al­ly their sup­ply chain final­ly caught up with them. And they had some issues like some of the oth­er auto­mo­bile man­u­fac­tur­ers have. Yeah, inter­est­ing. Yeah, over over­do­ing the lean thing and lean and being lean on the wrong things. So my, my word of the day is demand. And, you know, hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with some peo­ple over the week­end, and you know, and look­ing at man­ag­ing the sup­ply demand curve, you know, eco­nom­ics is real­ly based on sup­ply demand and a lot of cas­es. And right now, there’s incred­i­ble demand for peo­ple to work and lim­it­ed sup­ply for lots of com­pa­nies in lots rolls, par­tic­u­lar­ly in North Amer­i­ca. I hear some in oth­er coun­tries, but I hear a lot of it in North Amer­i­ca. And, you know, to be able to man­age it, we’re hav­ing a lot of con­ver­sa­tions about you know, how to, you know, deal with this extra demand that the busi­ness hubs and lim­it­ed sup­ply of work­ers or peo­ple who do the work. It’s a, it’s like a dou­ble chal­lenge, which is mak­ing it real­ly inter­est­ing for a lot of peo­ple. Very, very inter­est­ing for a lot of peo­ple so, so sup­ply chain and demand putting more demands on the sup­ply chain, which is actu­al­ly kind of what’s hap­pen­ing today. So what are we dig­ging into today, Brad? What is our focus?

Brad Giles 04:35

So now with this week, we’re talk­ing about a con­cept from your book, your oxy­gen mask first, and the issue is elim­i­nat­ing your emo­tion­al­ly tax­ing issues or put anoth­er way, lick­ing your toads. Kevin, tell us, what does it mean to lick your toads? Yeah, and

Kevin Lawrence 04:56

it’s not what they’re going to do now in your coun­try where you Have some tones that have some psy­che­del­ic qual­i­ties that it’s a great way to have a lit­tle par­ty. That’s not what we’re taught. These aren’t par­ty toad­ss we’re talk­ing about it’s a, it’s a sto­ry in your oxy­gen mask first, and it relates to things that you don’t want to do. Often, they’re low val­ue, we’ll call them loose ends, lin­ger­ing tasks, just stuff that men­tal­ly you see it, but you just don’t get to it. And I’ll give you an exam­ple, I used to work with a guy named art, I used to work in an auto shop as a kid. And art was a mechan­ic that our good mechan­ic, and every day at the end of the day art would pull up to the air hose at the shop out­side the mechan­ic shop, and pump up his tire. And one day art I go well, art might Why don’t you just fix the tire, obvi­ous­ly, you’ve got a leak. And you work here in the shop, and you can just bring it in and fix it before work or after work at lunch. He goes. But Kevin, it’s only flat on the bot­tom. Like, what do you do? Any­ways, that was his way of being fun­ny. But um, but the thing is, every day, he would put air in his dorm tire. And it’s, it just burns up men­tal band­width. And maybe he did­n’t think about it a lot. Or maybe he did. And so the rule of thumb is there’s things that you’ve thought about doing. And you’ve thought about it at least three or four times, but it’s just does­n’t hap­pen. It’s almost like it’s some­thing that gets pro­cras­ti­nat­ed, and it starts to weigh on you. And before you know it, many peo­ple have 100 or 200 of these and it’s like a moun­tain of weight on your shoul­ders. And they’re, they’re stu­pid lit­tle things like air in your tire. Or maybe it’s get­ting to the den­tist or, you know fix­ing a scratch on your car or a squeaky door and I’ve got the door behind me that I need to do some adjust­ment on a track because if you go too far, it kind of falls off the track, it needs a lit­tle pin at the end. So it won’t come off a lit­tle things that real­ly in the big pic­ture, these aren’t going to impact you by a mil­lion dol­lars. They don’t have mas­sive strate­gic val­ue. But they cre­ate men­tal clut­ter and emo­tion­al drain and dis­trac­tion for you. And we all have them we all do them. But this chap­ter in the book is then this prin­ci­ple is about stay­ing on top of all that men­tal clut­ter and drain so you can stay focused on what mat­ters most. So

Brad Giles 07:29

is it a bit like hav­ing a real­ly long to do list?

Kevin Lawrence 07:33

It is but a lot of these things don’t even make it on the to do. It’s a men­tal To Do List usu­al­ly in the back of your brain that haunts you every time you see it makes you feel guilty and bur­dens you and you know it’s inter­est­ing. I’ve seen seri­ous exec­u­tives get­ting tak­en down by their own toads. Yeah, it gets them. It just gets them in terms of just it’s a bur­den. It’s almost like that show hoard­ers, have you ever seen that? Yeah, it’s an Amer­i­can show where peo­ple’s hous­es just get full of all this stuff, and they can’t live any­more, but they can’t get rid of the stuff. And it’s in a men­tal or emo­tion­al ver­sion of the same. You get bur­dened by these things. And, and it just is also a lot of weight and pres­sure and slows down your sys­tem. And you waste an incred­i­ble amount of time think­ing about

Brad Giles 08:25

them. Yeah, so in a com­put­er, you’ve got ran­dom access mem­o­ry and read only mem­o­ry. So that is like the proces­sor, and then the kind of the mem­o­ry that you access from so the pro­cess­ing pow­er is about the short term abil­i­ty to deal with mul­ti­ple things simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. And so what we’re say­ing is you want to free up your mind or main­tain the free­dom of your mind is pro­cess­ing pow­er the RAM.

Kevin Lawrence 08:56

Yes, exact­ly. You want to get the men­tal clut­ter out. So there’s more space, it’s almost like, you take a snow­globe and you see it like a tourist place. It’s no glob­al, you shake it up, and there’s all these things float­ing around. When it set­tles, there’s this clar­i­ty and a clear pic­ture with these things become is like a snow­globe with all the stuff there and it con­fus­es your think­ing drains your ener­gy and it’s gen­er­al­ly, you know, isn’t good. It’s like try­ing to do your job with 14 scream­ing yelling kids behind you. Yeah, except for the they’re qui­et, but it has the same poll and we don’t notice the sort of the low lev­el stress that it cre­ates. And it can cre­ate a ton of stress, espe­cial­ly for things that have a strong emo­tion­al com­po­nent to them. Where that can real­ly affect you. But the gen­er­al type can just they can burn you down. So you know we’ve got kind of a check­list in the chap­ter and some ques­tions I’ll just run through that you know, you can think about if this is impor­tant for you, but one, no, just this con­ver­sa­tion already is mak­ing you ner­vous or uncom­fort­able because you’re start­ing to think of things flash­ing through your head that you need to do. Sec­ond, it’s not unusu­al for two dues to kick around for a month or more you just can’t keep up with it and by the way, this is not about judg­ing you for not get­ting it done. Often we need a dif­fer­ent approach and a dif­fer­ent sys­tem to keep ahead of these things. Oth­er­wise, if you had a good sys­tem I’d already be done. I’m cer­tain­ly lin­ger­ing to dues can cause you a lot of frus­tra­tion anx­i­ety, maybe pan­ic attacks your heart can skip a beat because they stress you out it’s almost like you avoid them but they become like a mon­ster chas­ing you and then final­ly peo­ple repeat­ed­ly fol­low up on you and ask you to do stuff that you said you would do but you don’t and your lack of fol­low through is obvi­ous and because it’s not just the one thing there’s prob­a­bly 20 or 30 things so basi­cal­ly peo­ple end up chas­ing you

Brad Giles 10:55

Yeah, yeah. And so what is it that we can do about these things?

Kevin Lawrence 11:02

Well first you got to real­ize the men­tal toll that it has that yeah the piece so when we do have do we do work­shops just on this we get peo­ple to make a list of all those lin­ger­ing loose ends and we give you know 2530 dif­fer­ent prompts and we would go through your car some­thing that’s not right on your car or what­ev­er your mode of trans­port is any­thing to do with a den­tist a doc­tor you know a chi­ro­prac­tor any­thing to do with men­tal med­ical or phys­i­cal relat­ed things, things that you have bor­rowed from peo­ple and maybe not returned things that maybe oth­ers have bor­rowed from you that you real­ly want back legal things open legal pieces maybe it’s a will or some­thing along will the pow­er of attor­ney maybe it’s some­thing to do with your fam­i­ly mem­bers or par­ents in some sort of admin­is­tra­tion one per­son you know they they had­n’t you know fin­ished and put the head­stone on the moth­er’s bur­ial plot things like that fil­ing of tax­es are gov­ern­ment relat­ed things, things to do with con­flicts, right things to do with you know when when a rela­tion­ship is bro­ken down and going and clean­ing it up things around your house could be in your yard or your bath­room or your kitchen it could be to do with your com­put­er and some­thing that does­n’t work right or your phone and you need to get a bet­ter phone case or a mount for your vehi­cle like you can go on and on and on about just the maybe you need to clean out your garage or your attic or what­ev­er it is this it’s all these lit­tle you know we have a great busy life and career all these lit­tle things so basi­cal­ly peo­ple start to brain­storm a list most times peo­ple will have 50 100 plus yeah hope these lit­tle things so the first thing is to do that sec­ond thing is to look at your approach them and then third is ongo­ing main­te­nance. And so in the book what we’ve devel­oped in the work­shop we did for years and you know this lick the toes because there’s a sto­ry you can read about it in the book. But peo­ple remem­ber it 20 years ago I had a con­ver­sa­tion this week a guy named Mark that I knew from 25 years ago he was one of the first pro­grams we did when I start­ed the firm with a great men­tor of mine Moore and Mor­gan and Mark was he’s actu­al­ly no such an exec­u­tive that we work with I was on a call with exec­u­tives that hey I want you to say hi to some­one I’d like to talk to mark and what had hap­pened is the exec­u­tive we work with is talk­ing about lick­ing the toads and he goes lick the toads How do you know about that and they made the con­nec­tion that they both knew me it was quite fun­ny and that was lit­er­al­ly 25 years ago so so we break it down into kind of five dif­fer­ent strate­gies and all these basi­cal­ly are clean­ing up pro­cras­ti­na­tion and you know I would­n’t go I’ll go through one rot­ten and go through the oth­ers jump in but you know, this is no stuff that I’ve spent a lot of time talk­ing about. But the basic is just to do it is to decide and these are the ones where there’s usu­al­ly some emo­tion­al fric­tion and you just got to get it done. Now it could be mak­ing that den­tist appoint­ment. It could be you know, talk­ing to your boss or talk­ing to an employ­ee like sched­ul­ing, just do that nasty thing we rec­om­mend that you do it first thing every morn­ing. Don’t leave it till the end because it’ll bur­den you all day. It gives you a burst of ener­gy when you get these things done because it takes a lot of weight off your shoul­ders. So first thing is and this is the basic one it’s not the most pow­er­ful one, because these things you don’t like to do any­ways. But the basic is do it actu­al­ly just get it done. Get it first thing in the morn­ing so then you can free up the rest of your day.

Brad Giles 15:00

And then the next one, don’t do it. Say no to the per­son who request­ed it. It’s sim­ply not yours to do. So we did an episode maybe three or four weeks ago about the pow­er and impor­tance of say­ing no. And being able to, to know that no is an option to be aware that no is an option. Some­times you just don’t need to say yes, and this is build­ing up the you know, it’s build­ing up the bur­den on your mem­o­ry, it’s build­ing up the problems.

Kevin Lawrence 15:36

It is and it’s and it’s a hard one, espe­cial­ly if you’ve already said yes. Like I’ve got­ten bet­ter over the years of not say­ing yes, in a moment on things and tak­ing time, espe­cial­ly when I know I prob­a­bly should­n’t. Yeah, but this is what he BB Rob­bie already said yes is going back and essen­tial­ly chang­ing your mind and say­ing no one’s You know, I’m not going to be able to do this, or I’m not going to be able to do this for a few months, or I real­ly think you should get some­one else, what­ev­er it is. Yeah, because you’re they might even for­got that they asked you to do it, but so that get it off your plate. Um, the next one is my favorite. It’s to del­e­gate it. And I was hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with a friend today. And we’re basi­cal­ly we were, I was help­ing them pull a boat out of the lake. And so that can get win­ter­ized and stored. And all the stuff we’re talk­ing about it now I think that was say­ing is that, you know, I’m fine help­ing peo­ple do that stuff. But I got a guy or a girl to do all of those things. Like I have 50 dif­fer­ent peo­ple, I can text mes­sage and get stuff done. And by nature, pulling a boat in anoth­er lake is not like, incred­i­bly hard. But I don’t like doing those kinds of things. So I have found a way to del­e­gate almost every sin­gle thing in my world, Unless Unless I real­ly enjoy doing it, for exam­ple, on the del­e­gat­ing it. You know anoth­er good friend of mine found a place up here in the Okana­gan, where we are called Aqua. And it’s a place you could take your boat, and it’s a valet ser­vice. You tell them the time you want it, you show up, you jump in, they drop you into the water, lit­tle spe­cial fork­lift thing and drop every­thing, drop it down in the water. And when you come back in, you jump out, they fill it with gas, they clean it, they put the top back on it, they take care of every sin­gle thing, includ­ing, you know, giv­ing a bag is when you want to go out Yeah, you know and it’s so it’s look­ing for ways for the things that you don’t want to have to deal with, like main­tain­ing a boat or any of that kind of stuff. Who else would do because basi­cal­ly every­thing that you don’t want to do some­body else loves to do. But peo­ple get caught in it and obvi­ous­ly it costs mon­ey. But oth­er­wise it costs time.

Brad Giles 17:54

The hard one here is the trap that so many peo­ple fall into being I look it’s just eas­i­er if I do it, it’s just eas­i­er if I do it, you know, I’ve got to fix up the gar­den or take the boat out of the water or what­ev­er and it requires train­ing and band­width and it’s just eas­i­er if I do it.

Kevin Lawrence 18:15

Yeah and and and it is if you only had to do it once in your life. But the flowerbeds need to be done ongo­ing for­ev­er. Boats need to be put in or out of water and main­tained and ser­viced and cleaned for­ev­er. Teeth need to be done by the den­tist for ever. Every­thing that you know, unless it brings joy to your world, why would you bur­den your­self unless it’s crit­i­cal, or you’re doing it as a con­nec­tion point with oth­er peo­ple or teach­ing your chil­dren a les­son of some sort, some sort of thing for them. So basi­cal­ly, every­thing in the world can be del­e­gat­ed. The rule of thumb is, if you gen­er­al­ly put it off, it’s an indi­ca­tor you don’t like it, find some­body that does every­thing, every­thing, every­thing and because for me, there’s a lot of stuff I don’t like to do. You just got to find those reli­able peo­ple that can do it. So it’s basi­cal­ly it’s a deci­sion to find some­one that will and you always can find you can always find some­one no mat­ter what it hap­pens to be includ­ing, you know, clean­ing up after your dog or tak­ing your dog for a walk or what­ev­er the heck it hap­pens to me You can always find some­one that will do any­thing. So that is one of the most pow­er­ful ones is to make it take your pain and make it some­one else’s joy. And that’s the ide­al. The oth­er piece of it is is to delete it is and this is stuff that you put on your own to do list like I’m real­ly I’m gonna, you know, repaint my house, or I’m gonna take art lessons or I’m gonna become a yoga Mas­ter, what­ev­er it hap­pens to be. Be, it’s just to real­ize you had a moment of inspi­ra­tion. And get it out of your mind. And this could be at work, or it could be in busi­ness. But just some ideas are just for the moment, they aren’t meant to be and find ways to, it’s to real­ly know, let them go. And I do this reg­u­lar­ly because I get a lot of real­ly good ideas. And unfor­tu­nate­ly, when you decide you’re going to do some­thing, maybe it go the spy the sup­plies for the project, or the hob­by, or what­ev­er it is, and you don’t do it and guilt kicks in like crazy. So it’s basi­cal­ly just get it out of your sys­tem and off your mind and treat it as a lit­tle point of inspiration.

Brad Giles 20:41

And, and being okay with that you do not need just because it made its way onto a to do list or even a men­tal only to do list, you do not need to do it. It’s like, I am not, I’m not going to do that. And if it comes up again, in the future is, this is some­thing that I real­ly want to do. And the sit­u­a­tion is dif­fer­ent than maybe but say­ing, just let­ting it go, can be powerful.

Kevin Lawrence 21:07

What are we get­ting is and final­ly is data just decide its own? We do this a lot in our strate­gic plan­ning ses­sions. It’s not for this year, let’s put it off to the next let’s con­sid­er this in 2022, you want to do a ren­o­va­tion at your host just maybe you’re not going to put it off and say we’re not putting up it’s like, con­scious­ly decide No, no more thought process. We’ll think about it again in June of 2022, or what­ev­er, what­ev­er, you know, time­frame it is, but just push it off. Some­one wants you to be on a board and you don’t want to do it. Say Not now, but I’ll recon­sid­er it in 2023, what­ev­er it hap­pens to be, don’t let it drag and slide to a future date actu­al­ly for­mal­ly push it to a future date.

Brad Giles 21:54

Yeah, because maybe things will change, but maybe they won’t. But that means that it does­n’t con­sume your your your band­width that your men­tal band­width. In the mean­time, you can say, talk to me again, then I’ll wor­ry about it. And we’ll have that dis­cus­sion then rather than now. So what’s the key point here that you’re try­ing to make

Kevin Lawrence 22:17

is that all of these lit­tle things con­sume a lot more ener­gy than you think it cre­ates a lot more fric­tion in your sys­tem, a lot more dis­trac­tion and stress, get­ting them out of the way. And it’s very much like that Zen phi­los­o­phy of keep­ing your envi­ron­ment clean and clear. Right so that you can focus and your whole sys­tem can kind of calm down again ver­sus hav­ing you know, 47 scream­ing chil­dren behind you con­stant­ly that you don’t even real­ize that they’re so this

Brad Giles 22:44

so this is men­tal clut­ter. Least men­tal clut­ter isn’t is pre­vent­ing you from I guess, enjoy­ing your best life.

Kevin Lawrence 22:54

Exact­ly. Yep. And being the most present and pro­duc­tive per­son that you can. Awe­some. So that’s it. So that’s lick­ing your toads.

Brad Giles 23:04

Awe­some. Do you want to take us through them again, as a quick review,

Kevin Lawrence 23:07

for sure. The first thing is make a mas­ter list of them and stay on them. And the best advice is, you know, lick the nas­ti­est one you have first thing every morn­ing like one it is like a total day keeps the doc­tor away, right. And so, first of all, is to just do it, like we’ve talked about, don’t do it and just say no to the per­son like go back and say no and del­e­gate it, which is the best one find peo­ple that love doing what you love, delete it. If it’s a per­son­al project ain’t even did­n’t com­mit to some­one else. Just decide you’re not going to do it and then date it, deal with it in the future. And but not let it drag but con­scious­ly push it to a future date. Also, my chal­lenge is to go make your list and just start pick­ing them off one at a time and get them on and as you get going with this, you might find it’s a valu­able thing to do with your team as well. Peo­ple have like toads days, right? Like a Tues­day, toads days where peo­ple once a month we’ll just make a list of them and get cleaned up. Kind of like a lit­tle bit of a men­tal spring clean­ing. It’s a great thing to do. Again, like most pow­er­ful things, not rock­et sci­ence, but it works. Awesome.

Brad Giles 24:13

Well thank you Kevin. That’s a great insight into one of the key con­cepts in your book, but evi­dent­ly, from many many years ago as well, that’s that served you well. Good to know good to know. So if you’d like to learn more about the toads con­cept you can read Kev­in’s book your oxy­gen mask first. And obvi­ous­ly you can go to Kev­in’s web­site, which is Lawrence and co​.com. If you’d like to learn more about myself, Brad, you can go to evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com that a you but I hope that you’ve enjoyed learn­ing about lick­ing your toads today. And we hope that we can catch up with you next week on the growth whis­pers Have a great week!