Flow Downstream: The 3-Step Process
to Solve Any Problem with Ease

The 5 AM Miracle Podcast, hosted by Jeff Sanders

Episode #574: Flow Downstream: The 3-Step Process to Solve Any Problem with Ease

Jeff Sanders
I attended a meditation event recently where the guide played singing bowls and led us through one of the most peaceful experiences of my life.

You know, during the 30-minute meditation, I kept reminding myself, don't force this. Just relax. Be here. right now.

And in that experience, in many thoughts, passed through my mind. One of them was the simple reminder to slow down.

An additional one kept showing up, thought about my future, which was that your time will come. You know, sometimes the best solution to a problem is not to force the solution, but rather to let the solution appear when the time is right.

In other words, as a high achiever, I tend to believe that I am the solution to all of my problems and that all of my problems must be solved now.

Since that philosophy is a logistical and emotional nightmare in the making, I can relax, knowing that some solutions will show up when they will. I don't have to do it all, and I certainly don't have to do it all now.

I can pause. I can relax. I can flow. I can turn off my type A brain for just a minute and just B.

This is the 5 AM Miracle, episode number 574: Flow Downstream: The 3-Step Process to Solve Any Problem with Ease.

In the episode this week, I'll break down a simple process to help you

solve problems by going with the flow, especially if you are anything like me,

a hard-driving high achiever who really just needs a few minutes of calm.

So I don't think this week I actually,

introduce myself. I am Jeff Sanders, host of the 5A Miracle Podcast. And the episode

this week, like the last few episodes of this show, is a bit different. On purpose.

I'm experimenting with some new styles and new content, and I would love to hear your

feedback on that. You can email me, jeff at jeffsanders.com. And speaking of singing

bowls, about a year ago, I found a meditation video on YouTube that

has profoundly benefited me in my own meditation practice.

I don't know if it uses the same principles or frequencies as the singing

bowls, but I do know that when I hear this specific set of sounds,

I instantly calm down.

I find a flow that otherwise would be nearly impossible for me to tap into.

And I will link to this video in the show notes this week at jeffsanders.com

slash 574. It will include a one-hour meditation track there on the YouTube

video. And I recommend listening to it without ads, which you can get with the

YouTube premium subscription. Honestly, it's probably the best 15 bucks I spend every

month. I watch YouTube quite a bit. For all kinds of reasons, one of them are these

meditation tracks in addition to how-to videos and whatever else I watch on the internet.

But at the end of the day, I am looking for the best audio, the best connection that I can get when I am trying to call myself down.

You know, as a high driving, high achiever, this phrase I've used now a few times, I find that stress is my default state of being most of the time.

I can change that and I actively work on that and I can make very different choices and how I live my life and what.

the end results of that may be in terms of my emotional state.

But one thing that has been undeniably true is that in the middle of stress,

when things are complicated, when there's a deadline due,

when there's something that is pressing and difficult and stress-inducing by default.

Overwhelm has kicked in.

My go-to response as a productivity coach is always to cut.

And by that I mean to just simply reevaluate as quickly as possible in the moment.

What can I not do?

What can I let go of?

What can I take off my plate because it's possibly important but not urgent?

It's possibly necessary but not right now.

If you're able to identify and filter the inputs in your life, the to-dos, the calendar events, the meetings, the schedules, the chaos,

If you can find a way to filter all of that noise down to just a few select actions that are urgent and important that do matter now, you can find yourself at a much more peaceful state of existence and to help clarify that process, one of the best ways to do so is to calm down first.

If you know the world of cortisol, the hormone in your body that is the stress hormone, one thing that you will know is that when you are stressed out, you make poor decisions.

It's just what happens.

Cortisol is really great for taking action.

It's really great for emergencies.

It's really great for, you know, the house is on fire, run.

It's not really helpful for creative work.

It's not really helpful for trying to de-stress and to make a very very good.

intelligent next decision, it just backfires on us, especially. This is the key thing,

if it's chronic, if you are in that fighter flight mode all the time, if cortisol

is just pumping through your brains and adrenaline is going all the time,

you're going to exhaust yourself and it's not going to work. But the opposite is also

true in a way that gets my attention, the opposite meaning that when you are calm,

When things are chill, you are more creative.

You can make better decisions and you do.

And one of the things or philosophies that I like to adopt and remind myself of is not to make any important decisions when I'm stressed out.

Like don't ever sign a big contract or cancel a big deal or jump into something or jump out of something when you're stressed out.

Do so from a state of calm, a state of peace, a state of chill.

because that's when you're going to have your wits about you, right?

That's what you're going to be mentally at your best is when you're not forcing whatever is going to be happening.

I've had a lot of bizarre, weird projects going on in my life recently, some household stuff I just discussed last week on the show and all kinds of movement in my life that's new.

And one of the things that happens when things are new, they can be stress-inducing, it can feel overwhelmed.

just by the sheer nature of you not knowing the next steps because it's new to you.

And if you're in that same position, whether you just started school for the first time or a new school or you moved to a new city or started a new job, a new relationship, things that are new can be stress inducing.

And one of the things that helps me to kind of re-center myself is this idea that I don't want to fight the process.

I want to flow with it.

The episode this week is called Flow Downstream.

It's a concept I have discussed previously on this show, but not in great depth.

So I'm going to attempt to discuss more of that this week and discuss essentially the three-step process that I use to solve problems, especially and intentionally through the lens of a stress reduction lifestyle, a chill, flowing lifestyle.

And I want to just kind of caveat all that to say, I am a stress first person.

I am a high achiever to a fault.

I am one of those, you know, the sword cuts both directions, right?

I am, that's kind of a bad analogy there, but I'm one of those guys who, because I am so productive, I'm also the type to push too hard.

And I have a whole backstory of panic attacks and going to the ER that I'm not going into now.

But the long story short here is that meditation for me is something I struggle,

with. It's something that I desperately need because I am bad at it. And I think that

that realization, that sense of awareness may be where you are as well in terms of

acknowledging something that you don't view as a strength, but it's a necessity.

You need to have this skill set somewhere in your life because without it, that stress

that's in the back of your mind or possibly in the front of your mind, it just keeps

mounting and you're not going to see yourself getting any better until either you

slow down that train and chill out or that train crashes.

There's no train crashes here.

We're trying to avoid that.

So let's dig into these core concepts here of helping you and myself, hopefully, to flow downstream.

And we're going to start with the first step that I think is one, well, I've discussed before,

But I think it's just, it needs to be repeated over and over again, which is to identify the problem you're trying to face, but by doing so in as a specifically a way as possible, you cannot solve a vague problem.

People have so many vague goals, vague problems, generic, just nebulous things in their mind of, oh, things are bad.

What things exactly?

Like, let's be specific here.

You know, stress comes from the vagueness.

When you don't know what a problem is, it can actually seem a whole lot scarier and a whole lot more intense because we haven't yet nailed down what the thing even is.

Fear comes from the unknown.

And so our goal is to make it known.

Overwhelm comes from doing too much at once.

And so the very simple action step there is to do one thing at a time.

Being vague is an avoidance tactic.

And so our goal is to break that down.

You know, being healthy or wealthy, those aren't goals.

Your health or your wealth are not problems.

Those are vague groups of smaller problems, very specific problems.

And when you solve all of those specific problems one by one,

then the general nature of your health or your wealth will improve.

When you are specific, you have an opportunity.

to actually do something.

Vague problems are an opt-out solution.

They are a procrastination tactic.

If someone were to ask you how you're doing and you say,

you know, I'm doing okay, but my health is bad.

Well, the very next question that person is going to ask you is,

what about your health?

Tell me more.

Be specific.

Are you sick?

Is there an illness?

Did you break your leg?

Like, what happened here?

Right?

No one's health is bad in a general sense.

You have specific issues.

We all do.

We're all trying to solve these things and be healthier, be better off.

But none of those big, nebulous terms are helpful.

They're never helpful.

There's an example I've given before on this podcast about how when I wrote my first book, the 5 a.m.

Miracle, the first one of those published anyway, I had this mental challenge,

which was that I kept trying to write a book.

I kept trying to sit down and write a book.

but that's not how books are written.

You don't write a book.

You sit down and you write a sentence, maybe a paragraph.

By the end of that session, maybe a whole chapter if you're really ambitious.

But you never write a book.

You only ever write sentences, words, individual letters that add up to a book in the end.

And if we approach our goals and our lifestyle with this perspective of, I'm going to be healthy,

write a book, finish school, right, fill in the blank, whatever the thing is you're doing, you're not doing that.

It's a lie to yourself.

The truth is you're only ever doing a specific action and that's where the energy comes from is the clarity on being specific.

Then you can see the path forward.

No one sees a path forward on a big, vague goal because it doesn't exist.

It's impossible to navigate that because it's not anywhere.

It's a cloud.

You can't navigate a cloud.

You just kind of fly through it.

It's nonsense.

Being specific gives you clarity on what you're working towards.

It also gives you a tangible and practical solution to work on.

It can, in many instances, give you an example of who to model after,

which is a thing that I have never done enough in my life.

I've talked about it, but I don't do it enough.

Which is that if your intention is to nail down a problem and then to flow through a solution,

oftentimes the best solution already exists from someone else.

All you have to do is model after them.

The person or persons or groups who have been successful in the arena where you also want to be successful, just do what they do.

But do so in a specific way, a very tangible, clarifying way.

Being specific also gives you action items you can schedule on your calendar or task manager.

Imagine that.

Imagine the ability to write something down.

Let's go back to that book example.

If I were to schedule a task for tomorrow morning, say, Jeff, at 5 a.m.

you wake up and by 5.30, you're going to write a book.

No, I'm not going to do that.

At 5.30 a.m. tomorrow morning, I can guarantee you that's not what I'm doing.

But I might, just might, spend 30 minutes or an hour working on the next chapter, doing some research, outlining something, writing.

a paragraph. That's what the action will be. So that's what the goal is. That's what

the task needs to be on your task manager, on your calendar. That's the next action.

The generalized long-term finish line goal, sure, that can be to run a marathon,

write a book, finish school, get married, et cetera, et cetera. But the next action is

always something you can tangibly do. And if you told someone else, I'm going to go

write a sentence tomorrow morning, they should be able to say, number one,

I know what you mean, that's clear, and number two, that sounds easy.

Yeah, it does.

Being specific, that's the point, is that it's so clarifying, so direct, so obvious,

it makes it easy.

We're not trying to solve problems by being stressed out.

We're trying to solve problems by solving problems, taking the actions,

and if making it easy is the path forward, why not?

that sounds a whole lot better than making it difficult.

It sounds a whole lot more effective and tangible and progressive and momentous.

It will build momentum for you to move forward because the next thing to do is easy.

Being specific also gives you resources to leverage to make the job a lot easier as well.

One of the stories I'll probably tell the episode this week, if I get to it, is about all the household work I've done recently.

And one of the things I noticed there was when you have the right resource, it makes all the difference.

The right tool makes all the difference.

When you have a fear about money, let's go back to the wealth example, your fear about money could be job stability, it could be rising expenses, lack of adequate income, or many other factors.

But which ones?

Being specific allows you to identify the biggest contributing factor and then focus all of your energy on it while ignoring just about everything else when possible.

The goal here around, let's say for example, I have a goal of being wealthy, I have a goal of not being poor, I have a goal of feeling financially secure, right, fill in the blank for your personal financial goals.

If you have a fear surrounding money and you don't specify specifically

what about your fear brings about those negative emotions, exactly why you feel

that fear.

Without specifying it, the fear will never go away.

Without being clear on what the actual problem is you're trying to face,

it will just follow you around wherever you go.

You'll be with it.

You'll be stuck with it because it doesn't mean anything besides a negative emotion.

But when we label it, when we name it, the thing I'm looking for is,

more income. Okay, great. We can go find revenue sources, start a side hustle,

build a business, change your job. There are opportunities. There are solutions here.

We can go make that happen. But we can't generically fix money. We can't fix wealth.

Those are just words. They don't actually have any tangible action steps attached to them.

And when you give all your energy to one area, when you identify the biggest contributing factor,

to the issue at hand and focus all your energy there, well, then you are doing

essentially what is Gary Keller and J. Pappazan's concept of the one thing,

which is what is the one thing such that by you doing it, everything else is

easier or unnecessary.

Well, if you identify the biggest contributing factor to your fear about money

and you decide that it's a lack of income, well, then you can focus all your energy

right there.

And for the meantime, you can ignore the other financial mishaps going on.

while you really dig into one area.

And then, of course, over time, be able to address all of them,

but in any given season, your energy goes in one direction.

Another example where you might be too vague and your goal is to be more clear is around your health.

And specifically around the concept of feeling sick, right?

Feeling sick could mean you have a headache, a broken bone, a chronic disease.

But once again, which one?

We want to solve the problem at hand instead of identifying with the vague moniker of being sick.

And I say identifying as a personality trait, a characteristic of who you are.

I said before that if you don't identify and label the fear around money, it follows you around.

Well, in this example, with being sick, it's very common to identify as a sick person,

to literally think of yourself in the way you portray yourself to the world as I am sick.

As opposed to, I currently have, name this illness or disease, and I'm working towards it, but I as an identity am not the illness.

I as an identity am not my allergies or sinus problems, right?

I'm not my broken arm.

That's not who I am.

That happens to be one thing that's true about me, but that's not who I am.

And that identity shift will also change your behavior, which could then change

your results.

When you identify as a person who has an illness, well, then the illness is separate

from you.

It's a thing you can solve.

You can work on.

You can tangibly knock down piece by piece.

And it gets specific in the naming of the condition.

And then you might have a medication.

You might have a health protocol.

You might have literal action steps every day, healthy habits, to bring about the

that you're looking for. And that level of clarity, that

tangibility, that separation from your identity is extraordinarily powerful.

Because if you don't do that, if you keep it attached to yourself, well, then

what are you fixing? You're not broken. The illness exists. It's a part of you,

but it's not you. We solve problems. We don't fix ourselves. We are not broken.

And that's a big shift in how you tackle things and separate them from who you are as a person.

So as a first step here in our goal to flow downstream, identifying that problem and doing so specifically is the best first step.

The second step is to find the exact right tool or tools to tackle the problem.

You know, finding the right tool for the job can literally be the difference between success and failure.

Make something easy in many cases means leveraging tools that already exist.

If you have a problem, it's likely that many other people have faced the exact same scenario or something very similar.

And you can use the exact same tools and strategies that they have used to solve their problem.

This is modeling.

This is copying.

This is cheating.

This is taking someone else's solution and you just do it too.

And then you get the results too.

Great. I say that because a big part of my journey, especially early on in my career, and even to today, is that I constantly believe that I am the solution to my problems, that I have to solve them, and that for whatever weird reason, I have to also create the tool and create the strategy that I can't just borrow or steal from someone else. But that's silly. Of course you can. Then you should because it makes things easier.

You don't have to reinvent how to run a marathon.

There are books on this.

There are experts on this.

There are people who have done it.

I have done it.

People have done it.

You don't have to reinvent how to do it.

You just go learn how others have done it and do what they did.

That's the faster, easier path that involves using the exact right tools and strategies to solve the problem.

And that's a flowing downstream scenario.

flowing downstream means you are not fighting upstream, right?

We are intentionally saying that going upstream is harder.

It's worse.

It's painful.

It's a struggle.

It's a frustration.

It just causes tension.

I've done it so many times.

I have so many examples.

I'm not going to discuss all of them because I'll just exhaust you.

There's no point doing that.

But I can tell you that when you fight upstream, you just get tired.

You don't get a solution out of that.

And even if you do, it takes a lot longer and it's a lot harder and your results are worse.

Where's the advantage there?

It's just not it.

Unless your goal is to build discipline, maybe you could be using that strategy just as a one-off basis, like a boot camp or something.

But for the sake of argument here, let's just imagine that that's not your intention.

You're not just trying to torture yourself.

You're actually trying to get results.

So flowing downstream means you're not fighting upstream.

It also means you are not reinventing the wheel to the example from before.

We're not trying to create something that already exists in the world.

Flowing downstream also means you're not doing a project alone.

I have used the word I many times, and I have not used the word we.

And that's a problem.

And if you've not noticed that in the last 11 and a half years of this podcast,

I use the word I a thousand times to one over the word,

we. And that's a problem that I have. There should be a we. There should be a group.

There should be a partnership. There should be an effort that is done in a social

environment. If your intention is to flow downstream and make things easier,

I can tell you 99 times out of 100 that will take place with other people.

We are social creatures. We get energy from others. We get ideas from others. We get

reinforcement from them when we fill down.

We get all kinds of benefits of being with other people.

Now, I'm assuming you like these people.

If you don't, being alone could oftentimes be better.

I do a whole story here of when I left my last day job.

I was laid off and became an entrepreneur overnight.

And one of the things that I felt very strongly at the time was I was better off alone.

Now, it doesn't mean that I didn't like my coworkers.

What it means was that I had this belief at the time,

that has stayed with me for a long time, that I am better off alone,

that I can be faster, I can be more creative, I can really tackle things.

And there are plenty of examples where that is true.

Plenty of examples where focus is best achieved by yourself in a dark corner of the world where no one can find you.

In a very specific sense, that can be true.

But in a big picture life sense, of really moving in a way that is fulfilling at the deepest levels of who we are.

We're not going to get that fulfillment by ourselves.

You might find success, in quotes here,

success, financial, career, otherwise,

by doing things by yourself.

But you're not going to find fulfillment there.

You're not going to find joy there.

You're not going to find social engagement and connection there.

Doing things alone, for the most part,

the general rule will only produce results that go so far.

And there's going to be a hard line that you're

you cannot cross. There's going to be a limit to that. And you can bust through

that limit and flow downstream, make things easier by being surrounded by people

who you love and respect and who challenge you and make you a better version of

you and you to them as well. And if that exists, everything is better.

And flowing downstream also means you are not seeking distraction as a means of

execution. You know, one thing that I've noticed about me when I'm trying to do something

don't want to do is I seek distraction. If my intention is to avoid hard work,

I seek distraction. But ironically, flowing downstream means I just engage with

the thing in front of me. The easiest path is just to say yes. Yes to the fear. Yes to

the task at hand. Yes to going to work this morning on time. Yes to doing whatever the

thing is. Flowing downstream, the easy path here, the effortless path, is to say yes to

the thing that you are running from. It is actually harder to run away. It is more

difficult. It takes more energy to avoid the thing. Now, I just watched a documentary

recently that was based on a podcast called Scamanda. You may have heard of it.

It's very popular right now. And it's one that's based on a scam that's done by someone

who fakes that they have cancer. And I don't know the psychology behind this woman and why

she decided to make these choices for so long. But what I do know is,

knows after hearing the podcast and watching the documentary and seeing these kinds

of stories played out in many documentaries over many, many years, is that the

kinds of people who make these kinds of choices, the ones who say, you know,

I want to get wealthy or I want to get attention or whatever it is they're going

for, or whatever the motivation happens to be.

The amount of effort they put in in the scam itself is oftentimes significantly more

than just doing the normal path that's not a scam, that's not illegal, that's actually very standard.

In other words, you may say, well, I don't want to work a nine to five jobs, so I'm going to go scam people on the internet with, you know, awful emails.

The work you're going to put in to try to scam someone on the internet is likely more work and pays less than getting a regular job.

It's just there are so many examples of this where the criminal, the con artist here, is exhausting themselves trying to keep up the con.

And you don't want to be that person.

I'm not saying you're a con man, but I am saying that we might accidentally find ourselves trying to avoid doing the simple thing, the direct thing, and we find all these tangents and ways to get around it.

But all those tangents are exhausting and they're harder and they take longer.

and they oftentimes have poorer results, and you might fight yourself as a criminal.

But that's an all the other side story.

Well, the simple answer here is clear.

Just go to the thing you're trying to do.

Just do it.

That's it.

Just say yes.

Get on stage, give the speech, right?

Apply for the job.

Ask out the girl.

Do the thing.

But you got to just do it.

Not dance around it, not postpone it, not scam somebody.

Just do the work.

Now, flowing downstream has additional meanings and things I think will help clarify this concept,

which is that flowing downstream can also mean taking the worn path.

And by that I mean, let's say you're going for a hike in the woods.

And your intention is to just, you know, hike three or four miles.

And there's already a path that's right there.

There's one for the trailhead.

And there's a whole, you know, there's signs of where to go, turn left, turn right, over this hill.

If you follow the path, the worn path that's been done thousands of times before you, you can follow the map.

You know where you are.

You can enjoy your hike.

And then you come home and you feel great.

If you don't do that, if you veer off the path, you take your own path.

Right.

You're going to get poison.

Ivy. You're going to get cut. You're going to fall. You're going to hurt yourself.

I know this. I've done this. It is physically painful. It is awful. You get lost also. Really, really bad.

You get bee stigs. Oh my gosh. I had the crazy story of years ago. Anyway, I'm on a tangent.

Taking the worn path means doing the thing that others have done because that's the path that's available. That's flowing downstream.

Yes, you can flow upstream, fight upstream by going off the path and trying to

make your own, but that is going to come with a whole sloth of risk.

I'm not sure the sloth is right word there.

It's going to come with a whole slew of risk, a whole bunch of new challenges.

Sometimes in life, taking that path that no one else has is the right call.

But if your goal is to get the simple answer, the easy answer, taking the worn path is the right one.

And then also, flowing downstream means that you are seeking methods to,

aid in your ability to focus and execute on the task at hand. In other words,

you are looking for excuses to focus, looking for excuses to do the right thing.

A great example of this is a dietary change. So let's say, for example, you're kind of

like me, you love chocolate, and you get addicted to eating chocolate all the time in every

meal because it's just always available because you always keep buying it. It's just

always there. Well, let's imagine that you decide, you know what, I don't want to be

addicted to chocolate. I would rather be addicted to health food. Like, wait, is that

possible? Yes. And the key thing here is that you swap out the unhealthy food

with a healthy one. And over time, your body will crave the healthy food. It will

actually reject the unhealthy choices and seek out those that are better for you.

You can help yourself in this journey. You can seek out methods to aid in your

ability to grow by making these kinds of swaps.

and flowing downstream means leveraging those tools that already exist.

One of those tools is your own body.

Your own body wants what's best for it.

And so if you give your body what it needs, it will then crave more of that,

which will then give you another bigger advantage to continue down that path of being healthier,

having more energy, being your best self.

Don't work against your own inclinations here.

Like work with the flow, and the flow here is to do the thing that your body already wants anyway.

your body already wants success for you.

It wants health for you.

So give it what it needs.

And everything else is easier from there.

So in this conversation around finding the right tools, I do mention that story or go into more details around what I discussed last week on the podcast about my massive home improvement projects and chaos there.

And one thing that became very clear to me in the process of not only the teams that I hired the crew that actually worked on.

in my house and fixed problems, but then all the follow-up work that I have done

as DIY stuff where I am really in it now, and really today, I'm still actively

working on fixing my house, is that I'm using physical tools to do this work.

I am actively engaged in fixing problems and patching holes and all kinds of

things.

And one project I just did literally last night was replacing what's called the shower

valve trim kit. Fancy word for saying the little nozzle you turn for hot or cold water in your shower. Now, I replaced my old one with a brand new one and had to do a bit of plumbing to make that happen. And the issue that I ran into is that the socket that I was trying to kind of unhinged was stripped and messed up. I had to drill it out and all the drill bits I had failed. So I had to buy a bunch of brand new ones. And then I finally, at the end of this really chaotic project, I found the one that

worked. And when I found the right one, it worked immediately. All the things I had

tried up to that point didn't work. And so my project felt like a failure because here

I am not very experienced in plumbing. Let's not get ourselves here. And I'm in the

middle of doing this thing trying to save myself some money, trying to not call a plumber.

And so I'm doing this work myself and I'm frustrated and I'm mad and my tools aren't

working. But then I found the one that worked. I did some research.

I took some experimentation there and I tried it and it got the job done literally

instantly and boom, I've got a brand new shower valve trim kit, right?

Fancy little handle now in the shower.

It looks fantastic.

But I got there because I found the thing that worked.

Had I continued down the path of using the wrong tools, it was never going to work.

Literally, I would have been there for hours and hours and hours, sweating and

yelling and being very angry at my shower. That's not helpful. It's not the answer.

Finding the right tool is, and the path is so straightforward. Now, I go to Home Depot

all the time. It's literally a couple miles from my house, and so I'm there constantly

buying all kinds of stuff. And there's a section they have that's filled with

sealants, glues, spackle, all these tools to help with painting projects. And one thing I

have discovered recently in this massive home painting thing I'm doing is that in this

particular section there are a lot of choices so many products and they all look

the same and yet all of these tools are very different and the wrong choice can literally

ruin your project and the right choice will make it simple and so the biggest challenge

that I have faced in this quest to identify the right tool is this acknowledgement that

flowing downstream does have a bit of a caveat. That's a bit of a challenge,

which is that how do you know which tool to use? How do you know what the right one is?

And so I've already listed a few of those examples, a few of those answers to that

question already. One of those being experimentation to try some things and see what

happens and learn from experience. And then, of course, the other is just to talk to an

expert who's already solved the problem and do what they did. And that's how I found the tool

to fix my shower. I saw a YouTube video of a guy walking through the process and his

tool was the exact one I needed. And when I used it, I got the exact same result.

Bingo, that was it. So you're looking for the simple path. And the simple path here

sometimes is trial and error, but oftentimes it isn't. And especially in this world where

you knew it's something and your goal is to not stress yourself out, to not be yelling at your

shower is to find what that easy answer would be. This can also apply to other areas

of life, not just home projects. One thing I've shifted to recently in my business is

trying to find new sales avenues and strategies and tools and platforms. I've tested

cold email strategies and using different agencies and platforms. And what I discovered

is that all these tools are different. All these strategies produce different results.

Some are terrible, some are great, some are mediocre, some are hit and miss.

But I have to go through the motions to personally experience a few of these to know if they work or not for me.

So I just discussed how experimentation can be a lot of work and to find an expert is faster.

But there is another nuance to this, which is that we're all different.

My business is not yours.

My goals are not yours.

We don't share identical everythings, right?

a YouTube video I might find could be helpful or it could be the wrong answer for my problem.

So a big part of the acceptance of flowing downstream is the acceptance that part of that path is trial and error.

And part of that path is to identify the best solution that is customized for you.

That feels like it was built for you.

And oftentimes that takes time.

I just gave this speech recently to some young professionals with career advice.

And one of the things I was talking about was that in my 20s, I viewed my life as a personal growth experimentation lab, that I was just constantly testing things, which is necessary.

We have to know who we are by sometimes personally physically experiencing them.

Sometimes to read a book or learn from an expert isn't what we need because we actually need to live through it ourselves.

We need to almost fail ourselves.

Yes, actually fail personally to feel it, to have the.

emotion behind it, to be able to live through it and then fight to do something

smarter and better than next time around.

Whether that's for a home project, for a business sales strategy, or whatever

the case is that you're doing, sometimes we have to bite the bullet and just be in

it to really learn the best path forward.

All right, now we're on to the third and final step to flow downstream and solve

our problems with ease.

And the third step is to execute with focus until you are successful.

So once you have identified your problem specifically,

and you have a few well-chosen tools,

and possibly you've modeled it for those who are more successful than you are,

it is time to actually focus and do the work.

And this is where focus blocks of time excel.

I've discussed FBots here in this podcast a billion times.

I'll do it a billion more.

Focus blocks of time are everything.

And most importantly, they are optimized.

when you know what you're working on

and you have everything you need to get the job done.

With all the distractions blocked,

you are ready to actually work

with the thing you know you're working on

and your little bag of tools to do the actual work.

If we go back to the story of me working on

painting my house recently,

I made a list of every room that I planned to paint.

I got really specific on which parts of the rooms I wanted to focus on.

I bought all the paints and other supplies.

I needed, including those things at Home Depot, they're very confusing.

I scheduled time to paint in the evenings, and I turned on some music and got to work.

In other words, I just simply set up the tools and the list I needed to say,

here's the flow.

Here's how to make this easy.

I know what I'm doing.

I know what I need to get it done.

Here's the time on the calendar to make that happen.

Turn on the music.

Let's get this thing done.

So in this sense, my evening painting sessions are my focus blocks of time,

and in those focus blocks, I know what I'm doing, and I have all the tools I need to get them done.

I've done this now for the last few weeks every single night,

and every single night I am making significant progress on this project.

It absolutely works.

Focus is effective.

Another example, this is in the world of speech prep.

I give speeches frequently, and one of the things that I have started doing is getting much more serious about

the tools I bring with me when I speak.

And I have now a backpack that is full of all the supplies that I need to actually

execute on a speech.

And so that's all the adapters I need for my laptop.

It's, you know, extra bottles of water.

It's all the extra supplies necessary.

So when it's time for me to perform, you know, do the work, I've got all that I need.

There's no fear of lacking something.

There's no back of my mind concerns.

I can be present.

I can be fully in the moment.

That's what flowing downstream means.

I'm not going to fight.

I'm not going to worry.

I'm not going to have fear because I did the work.

You know, David Allen in his book, Getting Things Done, talks about closing open loops.

And that concept really means that if you have an open loop, you have something that you are still thinking about, something you can't let go of, something you're not confident in yet.

And when you close the loop, well, that's your process of saying, I've thought through this fully.

I'm confident in this, it is good to go.

We're trying to get to that emotional state of being fully in and having closed those loops because then you can be present and things really can flow beautifully.

That's the intention.

Okay, so those are our three strategies to flow downstream and solve your problems with ease.

Once again, be intentional and specific on the problem to solve, get your tools in order, and then schedule your focus blocks of time.

I have two bonus strategies for you this week as well, because why not?

And these are things that should help you with whatever it is you're working on.

The first bonus strategy is to listen to the best music while you're working.

I love focus music.

I love meditation music.

I mean, you heard some of the top of the episode this week.

My favorite focus music is from a service called brain.fm.

You can learn more about them at my affiliate link at jeffsanders.com slash brainfm.

What they do is craft music that is based on neuroscience.

It's literally neuroscientists craft music together designed to optimize your brain so you can focus and block distractions.

It absolutely works.

I love it.

I've used it for years.

And it's a phenomenal way to tap into study sessions, creative sessions, deep thinking sessions.

It's a really, really great music service.

I also love the videos on meditation from YouTube.

YouTube Premium does help a bit with this to bl

block the ads, but anything that's going to help you to calm down while you're

working, I tend to find to be great because my natural state is to be stressed.

If you are a calm person by default, you may want to find some music with

energy.

Either way, try to avoid music with the human voice in it.

People singing is distracting.

We're looking for music that sounds kind of dull on the surface.

That's actually going to be better for you to calm down, find your clarity, to focus

task at hand and to not focus on the music. The music is background noise,

just to aid in your ability to do the work. So don't let the music become the

focus, if that makes any sense. And the second bonus strategy is that if you

catch yourself stressing out, walk away. One thing that is true about trying to go upstream,

to fight upstream is the tension that is created in that environment. And I catch myself in

those moments fairly often, probably too often. And one thing that I know that I

struggle with is not walking away soon enough. You know, cortisol, once again,

being that stress hormone, it can run amok in the middle of a bad moment.

And if you're in that moment, one of the best things to do is to switch your tasks.

So walk away for a bit. And I don't just mean like take a walk around the block.

You could do that as well. But I actually find to be more helpful to stay focused

and productive, but on a different type of task.

So if you're doing something on your computer, go physically move your body and,

you know, do some laundry.

If you're doing some kind of task that's just a certain area of your business,

shift to another one that really kind of get out of that groove you've been in that's

not working and find a new groove that's different, but still effective, still

productive, because that will help you get that positive emotion of I'm doing something

that's worth my time, but I'm not just bashing my head against the wall

because I'm mad and stressed about the thing that's failing.

Because once again, cortisol is a bad hormone for creativity.

It's a bad hormone for breakthroughs.

And so we're trying to tap into our best abilities to have those breakthroughs

and those creative moments, and those are going to happen when you're calm.

They're going to happen when things are chill.

So seek out those moments and actually create them whenever possible.

And now for that action step this week, yes, of course, go with the flow.

Don't fight it.

Whatever you're resisting, don't.

Whatever you're holding on to, let it go.

Whatever you're afraid of.

Just embrace it.

Tension is destructive.

And the antidote is acceptance, peace, and flowing downstream.

Solving a problem is nothing more than facing it.

Of course, you can subscribe to this podcast in your favorite podcast app.

Or if you'd like to, you can go to 5am MiraclePremium.com to become a VIP member of this podcast.

You'll get bonus episodes that are exclusive just for you.

Of course, there's no ads and other fun freebies as well.

You can learn more once again at 5am miracle premium.com.

And that's all I've got for you here on the 5 a.m. Miracle podcast this week.

Until next time, you have the power to change your life.

And all that fun begins bright and early.

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