Full-Immersion
How to Overwhelm Obstacles with Abundant Solutions

The 5 AM Miracle Podcast, hosted by Jeff Sanders

Episode #539: Full-Immersion: How to Overwhelm Obstacles with Abundant Solutions

Jeff Sanders
I almost called this episode "Drown the Problem".

Now, I didn't, but only because I thought that was a bit harsh.

The reality is that drowning a problem is at the essence of problem solving.

In other words, guaranteeing you get the result you want, no matter what.

This is the 5am Miracle, episode number 539.

Full immersion, how to overcome obstacles with abundant solutions.

Good morning and welcome to the 5am Miracle.

I am Jeff Sanders and this is the podcast dedicated to dominating your day before breakfast.

My goal is to help you bounce out of bed with enthusiasm, create powerful lifelong habits, and tackle your grandest goals with extraordinary energy.

I am a keynote speaker and corporate trainer specializing in delivering high-energy, interactive, and action-oriented presentations and workshops focused on productivity, wellness, and personal and professional growth.

If you want to learn more about how we can work together, head over to jeffsanders.com/speaking.

Now in the episode this week, I'll break down what it means to approach problem solving from the full immersion perspective.

Why you may have failed to solve some problems so far, and why you need to build intelligent productivity stations around your home and office.

Let's get to it.

Allergies - the bane of my existence.

So I have suffered from allergies my entire life.

As a kid, my parents actually bought a small trash can just for me and had it customized to say to print on the side, "Jeff's Snotty Kleenex."

I'm not kidding, they still have it in their house today.

It's been there for like 30 years.

I have been on allergy shots for over two decades, including giving myself those shots every few weeks, which yes, I still do that even today.

So my allergies have been an ongoing issue forever, and as a professional speaker and podcaster, it is a major obstacle to what I literally get paid to do every day.

Now on top of this, the allergies themselves can lead to much more severe issues like sinus infections.

I have also experienced chronic and brutal sinus infections that can last for as long as three weeks, making it nearly impossible for me to do my job, once again, as a speaker and podcaster.

So over the years, I have battled back and forth.

I have tried basically everything under the sun to figure out how do I overcome allergies, infections, sinus headaches, all the issues that come from these things.

It wasn't until recently that I took it more seriously than I have ever done before.

My solution was of course a Jeff Sanders-ish solution, which is a checklist.

My new Jeff Sanders sinus infection checklist made just for me so I could do whatever I can to overcome these issues in a more proactive and direct manner.

This is at the heart of the episode this week, is identifying a problem and tackling it with the most comprehensive checklist you could possibly imagine.

And so as a great example, on my checklist here for my sinus infections, I include all of the solutions.

We'll start at the top here.

Prescription medications, over-the-counter medications, nasal sprays, saline rinses, allergy shots, surgeries, dietary changes, supplements, natural therapies, steam therapy, essential oils, mouth taping that's used to encourage nasal breathing.

Also environmental changes like air purifiers, humidifiers, ultraviolet lights, face masks, and on and on and on.

I'm running out of breath here.

There are so many possible things that are recommended for sinus problems, allergy problems.

If you Google this, it is an endless just, oh my gosh, cascade of possibilities.

You do see the same kinds of solutions listed over and over again.

And so as you do further research, you begin to understand that people have different experiences and different solutions will work for some people versus others.

So my question was, if I've been experiencing these chronic issues for decades now, basically my entire life, well then what's the custom solution for me?

Among all these different possibilities I just listed here, what does my solution look like?

Well, the answer was, let me build a checklist of all the things that I think are the most likely candidates for helping me through these difficult seasons.

And then also a list of things that I have come to discover are less impactful for me or too extreme, like surgery is a good example of that.

I do know people who have had sinus surgeries.

I don't qualify for them, so I've not gone down that route.

I may in the future, I don't know, but that's an example of a much more extreme and probably less effective method for me.

But then what's left over?

Well, the checklist includes all the things that could be helpful.

And so what I did was I made this checklist and all the things at the top of the list are what are most likely to help.

And then when I got a sinus infection recently, I applied this new checklist and I did all the things on the list, every single thing, every single day, just full Monty, all in, I'm going to do whatever it takes to fix this issue.

And so what happened was that instead of my traditional three week long infection, this one lasted just two weeks.

I shaved off seven days or about 33% of the infection duration that normally just sidelines me and makes my life very miserable to get through.

So that was a huge win, right?

That's a massive win to go from three weeks down to two.

Well, then I got another infection a couple of months later.

And what did I do?

I brought up that same checklist and I went through it again.

This time, even more hardcore.

We're talking every single strategy, every single day on the ball, like no mistakes.

What happened this time?

I knocked that infection down to just one week, not three, not two, one week.

It was the most incredibly short infection I've ever had.

I've never in my life experienced this.

And I honestly believe it only took place.

It only happened in this way because I did all the things that I could do to minimize the impact and put myself in a position where I could solve the problem in the most direct way possible.

So what does all this mean for you?

Well, the episode this week is obviously not about allergies or sinus infections, unless you are also a sufferer like I am.

But it is 100% about the comprehensive nature of intentionality to guarantee the solution that you want, but the problem you are trying to solve.

If we go back to the episode just last week, I discussed some pretty vulnerable stuff that I don't usually discuss in this podcast, a difficult season of my life.

That one was about finances.

This issue here is about health, but the same basic orientation exists, which I'm trying to orient my life and my solutions directly towards a problem in a way that says, I'm going to tackle this thing with everything I've got.

And you likely may have a nagging problem that also won't go away.

Whether it is with your finances, your health relationships on and on, we all have challenges.

We all have issues.

Some of those issues though are not short term.

They're not one-offs.

These are chronic issues that have been going on for years, maybe even decades.

And our goal is to fix those issues, to tackle them head on with as much intentionality and a comprehensive checklist, my favorite thing in the world, and use that to solve the problem.

So let's discuss this concept of full immersion, how to overwhelm obstacles with abundant solutions.

First strategy is to specify your number one most obnoxious problem.

The full immersion solution is not for easy problems.

It doesn't really need to exist for easy problems or one-offs or short term things.

Yes, you could go hardcore and apply a comprehensive checklist to everything in your life, but it's going to be overkill at some point.

I have a lot of checklists in my business, in my personal life.

If you scan through my Google drive system, you will find dozens, if not at this point, maybe over a hundred checklists for all kinds of systems that I have that are very effective.

However, the vast majority of those checklists, I've only used a couple of times and then I basically moved on.

So what I did was I created a checklist in the moment for a problem that I thought might be chronic, might go on for a long time, might be a thing that would reoccur in the future.

And so for most of them, I made a checklist, I used it a couple of times.

And then since then I've ignored them.

But there is a core group of checklists that I rely on all the time and I desperately need them now.

They run my business, they run my habits, they run everything that I do.

And this full immersion perspective is that.

It is what the checklist embody that philosophy.

So this strategy is designed for things that are chronic, things that are annoying, things that are debilitating pestering problems that you just haven't yet found a real solid long-term solution for.

And so the goal of this first step is to specify one problem for now.

We can get to all the others later.

We all have a laundry list of problems, but let's start with the one that's the most debilitating, the most obnoxious.

If you want to use the book, the one thing is a good strategy here or a framework for this.

My great grandpa, Zan, Gary Keller wrote a book years ago called the one thing.

And they asked a question in that book, which is what is the one thing such that by doing it, everything else is easier or unnecessary.

And to answer that question through this lens of the full immersion philosophy, you could say, well, let's say, take my allergies as a good example here.

If my allergies are preventing me from recording my podcasts, from doing my job every day, from feeling healthy.

Well, that's a big problem.

And if I solve it, there are massive implications for awesome solutions and a higher quality of life.

And so for me, that one thing such that by solving it makes everything else easier or unnecessary.

It's a classic example of using the one thing in a very direct way and issues that relate to your finances and your health are always going to be top of those lists for most people most of the time.

So if you want to start there, I recommend starting with something that's really obvious, but something that also bothers you.

This has to be a chronic, bothersome problem because otherwise you're not going to have the discipline to go through the work to make this happen.

So start there.

Number one, biggest problem and write it down.

We're going to build a whole checklist based on this.

So get a document ready.

Google docs are awesome or anything like that.

Get your list ready.

I'll move on now to strategy number two.

Now we're going to brainstorm like your life depends on it.

I love a good brainstorm.

Years ago in my office, I put up a whiteboard that I specifically bought for brainstorming.

Now since then, I don't use it for that very often.

It mostly is for my goals for the week instead, but I do occasionally brainstorm on a whiteboard because it's so powerful, especially when you have difficult problems and you need a way to get those thoughts out of your head onto paper.

And then we're going to organize these things in a much more intentional way.

But I would recommend your initial brainstorm session be on physical paper or a whiteboard using your hand and a pen or a marker and writing it down physically.

Even though I love a Google doc and a digital solution, we're going to go digital second.

So start physical first.

Your brain does function better with the physical nature of writing things down.

And in a brainstorming session, you're going to find better options there.

Yes, later on you can use AI and chat GPT and go full Monty digital space.

We want to start with you first.

And during this brainstorming session, there's only one goal and that is to write down every possible solution you can think of to solve your problem.

We're not going to delete ideas.

We're not going to second guess ideas.

We're going to write down every single thing, no matter how silly or extreme it may sound.

This is where the creativity element really shows up is when you take away the boundaries, take away those obstacles that would stop you from imagining possible solutions and be willing to accept the fact that anything is possible here.

All right, this is just theoretical.

It's not real yet.

And so you don't want to stop yourself from dreaming.

Don't stop yourself from the fantasy of a solution that would be amazing.

Right?

Simple example, you have a financial problem.

One of your solutions is to become a billionaire with a B, right?

That could be on your list and that's fine.

That sounds farfetched.

Who cares?

Write it down, put that on the list.

We're going to start with the big, big solutions, everything that is possible.

All right, now you have your awesome brainstormed lists.

The third strategy here, a third step in the process is to categorize your similar solutions into groups.

So the goal here is to batch the similar ideas together.

So we're going to approach these groups as a general strategy later on on the checklist.

I have found this to be most helpful.

I'll use the allergies as a good example of this.

There are a number of solutions that I have that will target certain areas of the body, right?

They'll target the lungs or your sinus cavities or mucus that drains down the back of your throat or that's kind of gross.

But that's what the stuff is, right?

The goal is to have batched solutions together because then when you apply them, you can generally find a two or three that work best and the others are kind of a duplication and those can then later on be deleted.

So the goal of a categorization and a batching here is to ultimately get the best, most effective idea per group.

But you can't have that until the groups themselves exist.

So for this to be true, also your brainstorming list had better be long.

There better be dozens of ideas here.

So huge long list, lots of possibilities, and then we're going to group these things together into similar batched ideas.

Fourth step is to then share this list with a few trusted sources to get feedback.

You may be tempted to skip this step.

I usually am.

I'm the kind of guy who likes to work alone.

I like to solve problems myself.

I like to own the solution fully on my own by myself, but that's a mistake.

If you can incorporate someone else, do so.

Whether it's a spouse, a business partner, a friend, anybody you trust, a mentor, someone who has guidance and advice and ideas that can help you approach this solution other than alone, right?

You get help from smart and knowledgeable people you trust.

If you want to use the philosophy of it takes a village, that definitely applies here, right?

Bolster your list with more well-researched and vetted ideas to optimize what's here.

Because once again, if this problem matters to you, if the solution to this problem matters to you, you want to be willing to do what it takes to get these trusted sources and ideas.

Now, at this stage in the game, you could also read a great book, do some online research, use chat GPT or AI systems, right?

Figure out ways to incorporate more of the best and smartest solutions to bolster the list that you've already crafted.

But of course, the list starts with you, with your experience and ideas, and we're going to add to it with other resources to help build that up.

After this has been completed, we're now able to organize this into step number five, your comprehensive checklist.

This is where I get really excited because this is where I can see the actionable nature of the ideas that come to life.

And so you organize your solutions onto a checklist with the idea of being the most effective solution groups are at the top of the list and the least helpful or least likely to succeed will be at the bottom of this list.

I also think it's a great idea to include personal notes on this checklist.

As an example here, back to my allergies, I have personal notes about how specific solutions have worked for me in the past.

One good example of that are medications.

So I have this whole list of over-the-counter medications that I have taken, and I have written down exactly what my experience was while taking those.

Did it work?

Yes or no?

And why?

Did I have side effects?

What were they?

Is this worth taking on a daily basis or a one-off?

I get really specific on the use cases for these solutions, so this checklist is as beneficial to me as possible.

Because really the goal here is to say, in six months or a year, if this issue comes back up and you bring the checklist back to your life again and say, "Well, I'm going to review this list and go through it," I want the list to be well-crafted and intelligent and customized for me so it shortens that learning curve and gets me to the solution as fast as possible.

So your checklist is going to have not just smart ideas, but personal, customized ideas with the notes you need to make this your list, your comprehensive checklist for your problems and your solutions.

This all brings us to step number six, where we can finally take action on this checklist by conducting our first experiment.

And the experiment is to try the checklist and just see what happens, because there's a very good possibility that the checklist will need to be tweaked and updated and optimized and improved upon.

And so the goal is to run through this checklist at least once all the way through and jot down all your ideas.

What worked, what didn't, and why.

And this is where the full immersion approach is acted upon.

So if your brainstorming list was done well, you probably had ideas that went the whole gamut of possibilities here to solve the problem.

And the full immersion approach is just that.

It is, let's go back to this example of drown the problem.

When I was thinking of this as an example in my head and went to drown a problem, what I'm thinking of is, let's imagine you were dropped into the ocean and you're 15 feet below the surface of the water.

You are fully immersed.

There's water in every single direction.

You can't escape it.

It is all around you.

Well, that's the idea behind this.

We want to fully immerse ourselves into solutions in such a way that the problem has nowhere to go.

That the problem is going to be so surrounded by solutions, the problem is going to go away.

Right?

This is the idea.

You can use whatever metaphor you want to use that works well for you here, but find a way to fully immerse the problem in an abundance of solutions.

So it's impossible for the problem to continue to exist.

The only possible outcome is what you want is the result you're going for, right?

We are exhausting the problem.

And so in this first experiment, our goal is to figure out if our list is good enough.

Does it work?

Does it actually solve the problem?

Does it minimize the problem?

Like what's the result?

And then we jumped to step number seven, which is to repeat this checklist over and over and over every single time we possibly can.

Getting more information, more feedback, adding new ideas, take away the bad ones, make it smarter, make it better, learn, pivot, act upon it, repeat this process again and again and again.

The good news with my, uh, my science infection checklist is that I've used it a few times now, and I can tell you that it's better than it was when I first created it.

It's more effective than it was initially.

I have a much better sense on which strategies I want to rely upon in the future and which ones I'm basically going to ignore.

But I only got there through experience.

I only got there by doing the process as many times as it took to finally feel confident that I had a solution that I could work with.

And that's the intention here.

Now at the top of the show, I did reference this random idea that I had about building intelligent productivity stations.

And this has been an idea that I have been toying with for a while now, and I have found it to be incredibly effective from this very specific productivity angle of how your environment dictates your behavior.

So a simple example I've used for years on this podcast is going to the gym.

If I want to work out, I know without question that I have to put myself not only in gym clothes, but specifically in the gym itself or at the park for a run.

And that once I'm there, if I'm physically at the gym and I'm wearing gym clothes, I'm going to work out.

It guarantees the end result that I want.

But I was thinking about how to apply that to other projects, other areas of my life.

And one thing that I realized, which is, has been around forever, are specific stations or environments that are like miniature versions of a full gym or park, but in your own house or in your office or in places that you tend to be.

And so if you have like an old school house, maybe at your house now, might have a den for reading.

You might have a home fitness center.

You may have a whole room to your house devoted to a certain activity, like a kitchen is there for cooking or a dining room exists for eating.

You might have an entire space in your house dedicated to a certain activity.

I have a home office is a good example of that.

It's a productivity station where I say, when I'm in this environment, here's what I do right now.

I'm in my podcast studio, which is also my home office.

That's where I record podcasts.

I don't record podcasts in my kitchen.

I record them in the studio, in the intelligent, productive station that I have built for the execution of that task.

So you might say, well, I want to have a nook for reading.

I want to have a healthy habits corner.

I want to have my sewing machine on a desk in a certain location.

This is where I take care of the clothes.

By the way, I do know how to sew.

I learned that in college, my theater degree paid off in a bunch of weird ways, but one way was it to a class on how to sew.

And so I have that ability and I've never actually had a sewing machine set up permanently in my house.

But that is an idea that I've always thought, well, if I had it set up, I could then use it whenever I need to, mostly to fix my girl's clothes.

But that's a good example of saying, here's a problem.

Here's a direct solution to guarantee a result.

And I'll have a permanent station set up so that when it's time to do that activity, I can go to that place, have the environment that breeds success and guarantees the outcome.

And I put myself in a position where doing the work is definitely going to happen.

You know, I've given the example before in this podcast about how, when I write my books, I go to a library to do so.

It's an environment that is just asking me to write.

I write better in libraries than I do at my home office or I do anywhere else.

So you want to find those productive stations for the work that you're doing and to apply that to this checklist.

If you have a major problem and one of the biggest obstacles to your problem being solved is where you are located, this is a big one to focus on.

Now for the example of my sinus infections, well, those come with me wherever I go.

So I'm going to solve this problem regardless of my location.

But you may have a problem like health and fitness that's best resolved in a gym or at a physical therapist's office or in a park or wherever it is that's going to give you the result you want.

You're going to craft your life around being in that location or building that productive station to say, when I'm in this part of my house or in this part of my office, here's the work that gets done.

It's built for this, it's customized for this, and when I go to that place, I can guarantee the result that I want.

That's the whole philosophy behind this.

We have a big problem, we want a solution, but really we want a guarantee for that solution, not just things to try, not just tinkering and experiments and possibilities, but I want to know full out that if I do solution X, I get result Y.

It's going to work every time.

And to get to that level of confidence that your list is that effective, it'll take some time for experiments, it'll take some time to build these stations out, but once you have that customized checklist that's been vetted and tweaked and optimized, oh my gosh, the results just show up and it's just phenomenal.

On related note to this, I want to talk a little bit more about how I actually use my checklist every single day in my systems.

So I've talked a lot about Nozbe on this podcast.

That's my task manager, N-O-Z-B-E.

And Nozbe is the tool that I use for all my random ideas, little reminders throughout the day.

But one of the best ways that I integrate that with Google Drive, my home base for all of my documents and files and folders, well also my checklist live there as well.

So my checklists are on Google Docs.

And so I'll simply have the Google Doc link attached to a note or a task in Nozbe.

And then when that reminder pops up on a random Tuesday, it'll say, "Hey, today you're working on project X and here's the link for that checklist."

Well, I can just click on it, open it up, do the checklist, complete the items and move on.

What this does is it gives me a very simple technical solution to say, I have the reminder on the day that I need it through my task manager.

But simultaneously, I have a well thought through checklist that's digitized, it's in the cloud that I can access from anywhere that also is directly attached to that task.

So it's always there.

It pops back up again and again on a recurring task.

Here's the checklist.

Let's go do it again and move on.

I can't tell you how many times every day I work through checklists just like these for all of my recurring habits and systems.

That's literally how my life and business operate is this structural technical way at this point.

It took me years to get to this point where I could finally find a system that says, "This is efficient.

This is really well thought through now and it's a well-oiled machine where I can rely on it again and again."

And so any new checklist that I create will go through this same system.

I will in most cases have a Nozbe task for that checklist and usually it's a recurring task, so it'll pop up again and again on certain days, whether it's once a week or once a month or whatever the case is.

And attached to that reminder is a link to a Google doc with the checklist that I will follow.

I use this to launch my podcast, to run my website for my business, for my healthy habits every day, my morning routine, evening routine, you name it.

I have a checklist for all of these things because over time I have created the necessary reminder systems for myself so I don't have to think about it.

I don't want to have to remember every single time what to do or when to do it.

Literally every single weekend when my wife and my kids and I are hanging out at home, I have home reminder checklists as well in the same systems because I don't want to mess up my home life either.

I want to be able to make sure that the chores and the errands are done properly, that my girls' clothes are washed for school on Monday morning, whatever the thing is.

It doesn't matter what the detail is.

All of it can be intelligently thought through and put into a system where you can guarantee the reminder, guarantee the full list is there, and guarantee whatever it is you want to get done at the very least exists on a checklist that you have easy access to on a recurring basis to get back to it again and again and again.

That's how all of this stuff works.

It's intentionally thought through, comprehensively created, tested over time, optimized over time.

Then, that's where great systems produce great results.

If your life and your business are oriented around this philosophy, it's only going to get better.

It's only going to allow you to be more intentional and have more of the lists you need of the things that matter.

This might sound exhaustive and exhausting to think about, but the reality is on a daily basis when these reminders pop up, I've done them so many times it's second nature now.

I don't even need to look at a lot of these lists.

I know what they say, but I need the list to always be there just to make sure I don't forget to do it because I'm not using my brain to remember these things.

I'm using my brain for the creative thought and problem solving that it needs to be done with and the Nozbe list and these Google checklists exist to have all the data there for me to access if and when I need it.

That's the system.

I hope that's helpful.

If you have questions about this, I would love to talk to you about it.

You can always email me, jeff@jeffsanders.com.

Take this stuff seriously.

Fully immerse your problems into solutions that are comprehensive to get the best results and use checklists to make them the best they can be because this stuff works.

It works so, so well. (upbeat music) - Hey, and for the action step this week, identify your biggest obstacle right now that desperately needs a full immersion solution.

You know, maybe you need to finally lose that last 20 pounds or get your finances in order, make your business profitable, or just kill off the distractions that are stopping your progress on a daily basis.

Whatever your struggle may be, there is a way out and it likely involves a more comprehensive approach to guarantee the success you want.

Now, be sure to subscribe to this podcast in your favorite podcast app or become a VIP member of the 5AM Miracle community by getting the premium ad-free version with exclusive bonus episodes at 5ammiraclepremium.com.

And that's all I've got for you here on the 5AM Miracle Podcast this week.

Until next time, you have the power to change your life and the fun begins bright and early.

---

© 5 AM Miracle Media, LLC