Why does hearing “we’ve got visitors” suddenly make your house spotless? Avram and Rachel Gonzales experienced that when a friend came over to meet their baby. What started as a simple visit became a powerful reminder of how external motivation can push us to get things done—whether it’s organizing the house, tackling overdue tasks, or even finding clarity in business. In this episode of Babies and Business Podcast, they dive into the importance of outside influences, how it’s helped them balance life with two kids, and why sometimes a little push is all you need to step up. Ready to explore how small changes can create big momentum? Let’s dive in!

Show Notes:

Key Highlights from this Episode:

• Avram and Rachel talk about how a friend’s visit motivated them to tackle clutter they’d been ignoring for weeks.
• They discuss the power of external motivation and how it pushes us to act on things we might otherwise avoid.
• Rachel reflects on how life with two kids has changed her energy and how she prioritizes tasks.
• Avram shares how involving others, whether in your home or business, can inspire accountability and productivity.
• Practical insights on how small outside influences, like having guests over, can spark meaningful changes at home and work.

Mentions & Resources:

Profit First – a system by Mike Michalowicz that helps businesses manage money by dividing income into different accounts for profit, expenses, and taxes.

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Episode Transcription

Avram Gonzales: Something happened to us this weekend, and I want to talk about it. We invited a friend of ours, Justin, over to our house to see the babies. Because he hadn’t seen August since he was born. And then what happened?

Rachel Gonzales: Well, a lot of things got done.

Avram Gonzales: Our house has been an absolute disaster for some period of time. At least compared to Our standard of living before babies, right? And the thing I think that has been killing us the most is there’s these like couple sections in our house that just have clutter

Rachel Gonzales: Because they’re high enough for Lincoln not to reach.

Avram Gonzales: Right, so the baby’s getting into things.

He’s grabbing stuff. What do you do? You take it away and you put it up you put it somewhere. He can’t reach it We have these like three hot spots right around our Living room, family room area, just full of junk.

Rachel Gonzales: So frustrating. And, uh, you know, for me, knowing that someone was coming over, it’s like, you know,

I guess I could muster up the energy, because on a regular basis, I’m pretty exhausted. Uh, just from, you know, breastfeeding and taking care of a toddler and working in the business and all the different things that I’ve got going on. And so sometimes I feel like I’m just existing and it’s nice to have that external motivation of timeline.

There’s a timeline, there’s time pressure, there’s also just the, you know, just the pressure of somebody coming over. And it’s, it was a great opportunity for us.

Avram Gonzales: It really was. Yeah, I mean how many times have we talked about Okay, when the babies go to bed, let’s do this. I mean even last night I forget what it was that we said Oh, oh, we’ve taken all these toys out into the garage that still need to go up into the attic and last night We’re like, let’s do this when the babies go to bed

Rachel Gonzales: That’s the last thing we want to do when they go to bed.

Avram Gonzales: god, just like have like 45 minutes with each other

Rachel Gonzales: we could have some time, right, some time together and, uh,

Avram Gonzales: So you understand our plate you understand our plate sometimes it requires somebody else coming over or something else. It’s a person involved that gets your butt in gear and ready to make some moves

Rachel Gonzales: Something out of the norm.

Avram Gonzales: Something out of the norm. We were talking about before we recorded this for like, isn’t it interesting how like when family’s going to come over, you don’t bother with any of that stuff.

Why?

Rachel Gonzales: Well because I think it’s to a certain point, they just know that you’re struggling. They know that you’re in it. And when other people come over, it’s like, You can’t help but judge, I guess, maybe, or feel like you’re going to be judged. So there’s a lot of stuff like people pleasing kind of stuff going on, I think in that moment.

Avram Gonzales: Right. Yeah. And then people outside of that circle, or maybe sometimes people that you look up to, you know, like you wouldn’t go to a business meeting with somebody that you really look up to and be totally unprepared,

Rachel Gonzales: No way.

Avram Gonzales: Right? You want them to see you in the best light. And so you prepare and you’d maybe do things that you wouldn’t normally do.

Before you go to another, any other business meeting.

Rachel Gonzales: Sure.

Avram Gonzales: I think that there’s certain people in our lives in different environments. That make you want to step it up in certain people that you just don’t

Rachel Gonzales: And we thank them.

Avram Gonzales: we do, we do

Rachel Gonzales: So something simple, simple, but a big deal. Um, it gave me the motivation to kind of see past the clutter there. Like you said, there’s the bar top that we have right near our, our kitchen. That is between a transition between our kitchen and our, our living area. And it just always accumulates everything that’s dangerous for Lincoln to touch, but he found it somehow.

Avram Gonzales: Or like markers how many markers and pens are up there at this point, you know

Rachel Gonzales: Oh my god, because he just loves to write on everything. Yes, we always say paper, but Anyway, regardless, that’s, that’s another point, probably another podcast, but there are so many things up there and they just don’t belong.

So having them organized somewhere else where they actually belong, having them in that place, we actually have locks on our doors now that can only be reached by somebody that can touch the top of the door jam. So that’s really helped. We have actual like safe
ty zones from our child. He cannot enter.

So that’s really good. But having that motivation was really nice because I was able to see through the clutter and just put them back where they went.

Avram Gonzales: Yeah, there’s a couple things that we noticed coming out of you know post covid. We’re like four years now after this crap and what did a lot of people do? During that time, well, we stopped going to meetings and stuff out of the house. Like we stopped attending networking meetings that were in the morning entirely because we just so much loved our slow mornings.

 So then what, you know, what are the, some of the consequences of that? Well, here we are, right? I love making fun of people dressed in bad at Costco and stuff like that. Right. I’ve even posted about it on the internet and people are like, wow, you must be an a hole, right? I’m like, well, look, people shouldn’t be wearing, you know, their pajamas out at the grocery store.

Well, there’s also me, right, leaving the gym, going to the grocery store in my pajamas. But also, like, not having meetings much anymore out of the house. Everything’s on Zoom. Sometimes we find ourselves at lunchtime and we haven’t even gotten ready for the day. Also because having young children, sometimes they beat you in the morning, not that, not that, not that they beat you, but they, they wake up.

Rachel Gonzales: to getting up,

Avram Gonzales: They beat you to

Rachel Gonzales: You’re awake before, but they do beat you up a little bit

Avram Gonzales: Sometimes when they wake up before you, they really beat you up. And so like, showers aren’t a given.

Rachel Gonzales: No, uh, so that’s, that’s actually why our showering has flip flopped. I take shower at night. I’m not normally a night showerer. Showerer, but that’s kind of what has happened. So we switch things around, people are motivational to us, outside motivation. Um, like you said, you know, sometimes even if I have a meeting, I’ve got a great top on, but I’ve got pajamas on the bottom.

So I’m kind of, you know, Living in the both worlds of living and working at home. So there’s a lot of stuff to be said for putting a meeting in your day somewhere because you know you’re gonna have to get ready, get out of the house, go do that thing.

Avram Gonzales: yeah, similarly related. I had a conversation with our friend Andrew, Andrew Melendrez the other day, and he was talking about, uh, you know, training and going to the gym, but doing, doing that without some kind of an event or a race or something that you’re working towards can feel kind of empty. So it’s like you put that thing in place, that event that you’re going towards, and then all of the training becomes more Meaningful more important.

I think something similar can be said with putting meetings or you know having people over to your house or you know Marking out this time in your calendar for something that needs to be done all of that leads to you stepping up in meeting the challenge. Even if you’ve been totally overwhelmed at home by your children, you’re still going to rise to the occasion because now other people are depending on you.

And I think that’s kind of the point of what we’re sharing and discovering just in our friend coming over is like, well, Maybe there’s ways we could use some of this more to our advantage.

Rachel Gonzales: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean I think of it kind of like the the Profit First stuff that we’ve talked about that With Profit First, you know, they have the different bank accounts that you set up and you’re using the same kind of mentality, you’re going with the flow of your mentality as opposed to totally changing it and finding out what works for you.

So if you’re finding that you just, you’re in a slump at home because you don’t get out, you don’t see people and your house just, you turn around one day and you’re like, Oh my gosh, how did this clutter just get here? Well, it didn’t just, it didn’t just appear. It appeared over time and you just got used to it.

It just became invisible to you. And so, you know, with money, sometimes money can become invisible. So that was one of the ways that I was able to see past the, maybe the struggles that we had around money and seeing how to use it. And so speaking about time and space in our homes, um, just finding a system that works for you, finding something that.

That maybe brings awareness to the things that are invisible to you.

Avram Gonzales: Yeah.

Rachel Gonzales: So if you have a pile of newspapers in your kitchen and it’s there for a couple days, a week, it becomes invisible because you’re not going to deal with that right now. And then how many other things pile up, but it can also be in business.

You know, we can have a ton of things in business. It could be something as simple as doing this task, but you’re not the best at it. And you could totally hire for it. Have somebody else do that.

Avram Gonzales: I mean, I’ll give you a big example, right? So we hired two new team members recently and you know what I am never going to let happen. I am never going to let them run out of tasks and things to do. Right. So I am now accountable for these people in such a way that, you know, I am elevating what we are doing in our company.

In order to make sure that they have things to do, right? And that’s just where it, where that started. But now we’re also thinking different because these people are here and we’re delegating all this work

Rachel Gonzales: and it’s kind of like carving out this role, you know, now we have the person to fill this thing and now we can see, oh my gosh, we totally have the work to do this. Mm-Hmm, . And it might be work that just simply was not getting done and it was over, above and beyond what we wanted to do and need to do for our clients.

But it could also just be. The consistency. Yeah. Of getting things done.

Avram Gonzales: Well, and I think just the overall point and reason that we’re recording this podcast today is because when you involve other people in your home and in your business, You start to show up in a different way than you did before.

Rachel Gonzales: Absolutely. It forces you to be and do different things. Be different and do different. Uh, you know, this friend coming over, it forced us to decide, you know, look around, how would I feel? How am I going to feel when this person walks in? The person was here for about five minutes. That was it. But still, they came into our home and it’s a safe space.

And it can. Um, you know, it could be maybe for your business, it could be letting a bookkeeper in and the bookkeeper is going to see all the things that you do with your money or don’t do. So you could feel just as exposed in that way. So when you’re thinking, you know, you might hear this and think, well, this doesn’t really apply to me.

Maybe it does in business because maybe you’re ashamed of something. Maybe you have some taxes that you didn’t file and you, Maybe you didn’t know how to do this thing. Maybe birth receipts here in New Mexico are a thing for you. You know, there’s so many different things where you’re allowing somebody else to come into your, your sphere that you might feel ashamed of.

Avram Gonzales: Well, we got a question for you. As you’ve been hearing recently, we’re starting the discussions over on the website, babiesandbiz.com. Every single episode has its show notes attached to it. If you go to babiesandbiz.com forward slash and then you type in the episode number. It’ll take you right to that show notes.

Scroll to the bottom, there’s the comments. Here’s the community question for this week. We want to know, what is something you struggle to do wit
hout external motivation? For us, it’s like cleaning the house. Sometimes even doing the laundry can feel like it, but it’s like, guess what? I am not going to the gym wearing stinky clothes.

No way! Right, so those things definitely help keep me accountable. What’s that version for you? We’d love to hear about it at babiesandbiz.com. We appreciate you for listening to today’s episode. If you haven’t already, please leave that five star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else that you’re listening.

With that, we appreciate you so much for listening in. We’ll catch you on the next episode.

Rachel Gonzales: Bye for now.