Show Notes

Key Highlights from this Episode:

• The difference between real values and aspirational values

• How your time and money habits reveal your true priorities

• A powerful story from the book Who’s In Your Room?

• What to do when your goals don’t match how you’re actually living

• Simple ways to audit your calendar, screen time, and spending

• Why awareness is the first step toward lasting change

• Avram and Rachel highlight the importance of closing the gap between what you say and what you do.

• The next step after awareness: making real, intentional decisions

• A peek into Rachel’s first-ever personal development course experience

Mentions & Resources

Who’s in Your Room? – A book by Ivan Misner that explores the concept of identifying your true values and how those values shape your life and relationships.

Inspirean – A personal development course by Keala Kanae that Avram and Rachel are considering as part of their journey to align their real-life actions with their growth-oriented values.

White Collar – A crime drama about a con artist and an FBI agent who team up to solve high-stakes white-collar crimes. The series blends charm, clever storytelling, and themes of trust and redemption.

Episode Transcription

Below you will find a transcript of this entire podcast episode. Enjoy!

Avram: I sat down with a young lady pretty recently and she was asking me how to overcome some of the procrastination she was dealing with but more importantly, finding the motivation to take action on things in her life that she really wanted. And I thought it was a great topic for us to talk about here at Babies and Business Podcast because I think a lot of us can relate to the feeling of wanting something in our life, business or personal, and feeling stuck in our ability to get it. You know, maybe it’s one step forward, two steps back kind of feeling, and it just might seem a little bit out of reach. Well, there’s a reason for that. There’s a reason why you feel stuck and you’re not able to fully move forward, and that’s what we wanna unpack here. The purpose of this podcast is to bring some awareness to where you are functioning from and discover what your real values versus your aspirational values.

Rachel: Yes. I love the distinction between that, I’m listening to this book, Who’s in Your Room, and they, Ivan Misner and a couple of co-authors talk about finding those values versus your aspirational values and how to, how, there’s so many things about the concept of Who’s in Your Room. So I’m not gonna go through all of it. Look up the book, we’ll put that in the show notes. But the thing that got me is, you know, how they figure out what your values are versus your aspiration.

Avram: Well, he told this really interesting story.

Rachel: Exactly. Do you want me to tell that story?

Avram: Yeah, absolutely.

Rachel: So, this author or the one of the co-authors was talking about how he went to visit this friend. He was really excited to visit this friend because, he talks about he really loves his family and family time is really important, and so he was really excited to meet the man. I don’t think they’d met in person. So he gets into town, he flies into town, and he gets met by this man, and then they go out and they play golf, and then they have dinner and they’re out on the town and he goes back to his hotel and then it kind of rinse, repeat over that weekend.

 He never actually met his family. He met some colleagues of the man’s. He met all these other people, but he never met the family. And so he mused that, oh, so family must have been an aspirational value because I never actually met his family. So that’s a really bad summation of the story so you will want to go back and maybe listen or read that book.

But basically it’s when you look at where you spend your time and where you spend your money, you get to see exactly where your values are. Now, you may have aspirational values but what are your real current values? So we’re gonna get deeper into that today.

Avram: Yeah. As I sat across the table from this young lady, I brought this topic to her and she just kinda looked back like, whoa, that’s, I didn’t realize that those could be two different things. And I said, yeah, your aspirational values are the ones that you consciously think about and that you want to be true.

Rachel: and you make true,

Avram: And you make true.
If you first have the awareness of what your real values are, the ones that you are living out and living from right now, on an unconscious or subconscious level.

So the story of the man you just described, the actions that he showed and where he spent his time showed, well, family is not the number one priority. Family would’ve been part of this at some point had it been a real value versus the one that he just liked to talk about. The one that he felt good about saying, this is me.

Rachel: I think it’s funny, we just finished this series, White Collar, and it was really fun ’cause it’s, it was a puzzle kind of, series that we watched and it makes me think about one of the friends Mozzie and if he were watching a person and he made a summary of what they do in their day. If he were to watch this man, family wouldn’t come anywhere into the review or the overview that he would make for this person.

As we view from the outside, if that is how we are viewing a person and we look at them and we make a list of the values that they have, and we showed it to that person, they would probably not be able to identify it because maybe they aren’t aware or maybe they openly talk about their aspirational values as opposed to their real values.

You know, you can say you value family, all you, all you want, but if you’re working 80 hours a week and you never spend time with your family, nobody but you knows that your family is priority.

Avram: Yeah, yeah. And and it’s not the value that you think it is if you’re doing that.

Rachel: Correct?

Avram: It’s just, it’s just not.

So, yeah. Rachel already mentioned that you can look at your time.

Rachel: Yeah.

Avram: To get an idea of what’s truly valuable for you. I think, one of the ways to kind of hack this a little bit deeper so you could look at your calendar and look at, okay, well this is how I’m spending my time, but I don’t know about you.

I don’t have my whole life mapped out on a calendar.

Rachel: No way.

Avram: I just have like the really important meetings and things on there. Everything else is a bit more freeform. But you know, what is being tracked? Your phone activity. I think this is also on Android, but you know, your iPhone will tell you every single week on Sundays the amount of screen time that you had.

And not only that, it’ll break down which apps you’re using. So that could tell

Rachel: and tell you if your screen time is up or down versus the last couple of weeks or your, you know, I don’t know what the review is when it says up or down.

Avram: Yeah, so that can give you a lot of insight into, first of all, the amount of time that you’re spending on a device, and then secondly, inside that device, what are you spending the time on?

You know, is it texting people or is it on on Facebook, TikTok and Facebook? know, like, and does that match?

Okay.

It’s fine to spend however much time you do on these things. Does it match what you want to be?

Rachel: Right? Would you like to change the ratio? Would you like to have more time off of your device with your family, with real life people?

Or are you totally okay with the eight hours you spend in a day on your phone? You know, you can become aware of what it is. And I think there’s another really great thing to actually like audit to help you understand and we use this word audit, but it’s really just viewing what it is that you do.

You’re looking at it and objectively deciding what works for you is your money. You can see where you spend your money. So, when we began, creating a budget for ourselves, we started from not knowing really much about how we spent our money or our money habits yet, like on a, big scale, we knew certain things mattered to us, but maybe at the end of the month we’re like, well, how did that not happen?

How do we not have money for this? You know? We began by looking at what we spent. So I just printed out like the last three months of statements. Maybe I didn’t print ’em out, maybe I did, but sometimes the highlighter is helpful or maybe you have online devices or online ways that you like to do this, but you look at the things and like we took it into categories.

I looked at eating out and I looked because let’s be honest, if you don’t actually have an envelope system and you don’t have a specific amount of money allotted to certain categories in your life, you are prone to spending more.

So if your money doesn’t have a job, then you’re pro prone to spending more.

So you’ll be able to find really quickly, do you love to go and watch movies in the theater? Do you love to have eating out, a lot of eating out, going on in your month? All these different things what are those things that you’re spending your money on? And that can really shed light on what’s important to you.

Avram: Yeah, and you might look at a line item like eating out and you could say, well, how does this reflect my values?

Rachel: Right. Do I like this? Or don’t I?

Avram: And you could also look at it like kind of a deeper level too. Which is obviously I value easy.

Rachel: Yeah, yeah.

Avram: I value convenience.

Rachel: Sure.

Avram: That’s, that’s important.

Rachel: You could also look and see. Huh? Were we more stressed this month than last?

Avram: Yeah.

Rachel: You know, what led to this? You could look at the different things, behaviors. It could be like, Hmm, do we need support in a different place? You know, it could lead to other questions and discoveries.

Avram: Yeah. You know, you could say it to yourself that I value personal growth and development.

Rachel: Sure.

Avram: Let’s look at your bank account.

Are you, are you spending any money on new books?

Rachel: Sure.

Avram: Are you going to any classes and courses? Are you going to some kinda education? So are there line items showing that, yeah, this is important to me and how important is it to you?

Rachel: Right. Or is it just dog-eared for the future? Oh, I’ll get to that. I’ll get to that. I’ll get to that. I’ll get to that.

Avram: Yeah. So what are the things that you say are important to you that aren’t even there?

Rachel: Right? And, and if they’re really important to you, what are the steps you’re going to take to actually put them into your line items in your time, in your calendar, and on your budget?

How are you going to make that happen? Like there was one thing for me. Um, when I looked at my time and the things that we were spending our money on, we drove through Moab, you and me together, and I said, I never want to drive through Moab again and not stop because I’ve driven through many, many times.

And the next time we drove through Moab, we actually stopped. So I made that a reality. I recognized that I wanted that and I made it happen both in my calendar and financially. So what is it that you haven’t put as a priority, both for time and with your money? That’s a question I have for you ’cause it really made a difference for me.

It was a h
uge breakthrough for me.

Avram: Yeah.

Well, you know, funny enough. We are actually looking at enrolling in a personal development course pretty soon here. I was talking to my friend Keala, who, runs a company called Inspirean and we were laughing, chuckling about these real values versus, aspirational.

And he said, well, the first thing you have to do is become aware of the disconnect between the two.

And that’s really what this episode is about. You start with the awareness in order to then have the transformation. You become aware of it, and then like Rachel’s saying, well, what’s the next step?

The next step is coming up with a plan on how you’re gonna change it. Somewhere along the line. In that transformation process, you have to make a real decision,

Rachel: Right.

Avram: That you’re going to show up a different way.

Rachel: Sure.

Avram: And there’s a lot you could unpack around that.

Rachel: Oh, yeah.

Avram: That’s why we’re gonna go to this class.

It’ll be like Rachel’s first time in a real personal development environment.

Rachel: And I’m really nervous.

Avram: It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s, it’s just, uh, something you’ve never done before.

Rachel: I feel like I’m gonna be vulnerable and exposed and all sorts of things, so I have a lot of things coming up around that for me.

Avram: Yeah.

Rachel: But I really invite you to, lean into that uncomfortability because I think that’s where we really grow and we find out who we really are and what we’re capable of.

Avram: Yeah. Yeah. So take this episode for what it’s worth for you and the examination that is due. This is episode number 80, so we’ve got some resources and some mentions, things that we talked about today. You can go to babiesandbiz.com/8, 8-0, see the show notes for this episode. Get any other additional resources and things that we talked about, we’ll put them in there as well as some related episodes that maybe we didn’t even openly talk about here, but you would find interesting based off of today’s topic.

So with that, we just appreciate you for tuning in this week. If you haven’t already, rate us five stars on Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever it is you’re listening, it helps other people understand and see the value of what’s here before they take their first listen. With that, we’ll catch you on the next episode.

Rachel: Bye for now.