One of the things I do for my clients is listen to their every podcast episode to write persuasive show notes for them (and turn it into marketing assets for them).
And yesterday, one of my clients had two guests from Gallup, an analytics and management consulting company, who proved—and I mean proved with cold, hard evidence baby—that I have the power to make you happier.
Since Gallup cares about the trends of the workforce, overall happiness, and getting the biggest productivity boost for organizations, a topic that got brought up is something they call their “Composite Happiness Metric,” which is a fancy way of saying: How happy do certain activities and mindsets make you?
And since I’m hitting the road at 11 am today to travel west to Indy with Peanut for a few days, I figured I’d share their #1 correlate for boosting happiness since I’m actively practicing it. Well, I will be actively practicing it once I’m on the road. I still have three or so hours (and a quick yoga workout) between me and the road.
Anywho:
Can you guess what their most important metric was for overall happiness?
No, it wasn’t moolah.
No, it wasn’t a marriage or kids.
No, it wasn’t having millions of active followers on social media.
Their data-backed key to happiness was this:
Freedom and autonomy.
Y’see, one thing that Gallup as a company has as one of their values is that the best way to improve someone’s life is to improve their life at work. We spend some 81,000 hours working throughout the course of our life. And they’ve found that improving someone’s experience at work directly improves their experience at home, and vice versa.
So one of the things that Gallup’s most interested in doing is improving folk’s productivity, happiness, and contentment at work.
And through their extensive research (I’m not entirely sure what’s all involved in this data collection, but their records go back 89 years), they’ve found that having freedom and autonomy is the single best predictor of life happiness.
When you have freedom and autonomy in your career, you’re more present with your family. You become a better dad and husband (or mom and wife). Having freedom and autonomy also comes with at least a little bit of financial freedom. And when you lay on your deathbed, you’ll have fewer regrets and look back on your life with more pride.
But most business owners, despite creating their business to experience freedom and autonomy, accidentally enslave themselves to their business. This is a trend that usually requires professional coaching to help biz owners get out of their own way—because they feel like their business is their baby (and rightly so), but this comes with a lot of cons that devour your free time, sabotage your family life, and even slow down growth of your business.
(It also doesn’t hurt that a different Harvard study found that joy is more important to longevity than the quality of your genes.)
Here’s why I bring it up:
Since my business was just a thought in my head about five years ago now, I’ve been intentional about setting my business up to have freedom and autonomy. Peanut played a big role in this too (we started dating about eight months into the creation of my business).
That’s why I can travel as freely as I do, where sometimes I still work, other times I completely take off and don’t even do so much as check my email.
That is the point to business after all: Freedom and autonomy.
But again, most business owners don’t experience freedom and autonomy.
That’s where I can help—and mayhap even help you live a happier, longer, and better life.
Most of my clients are busy as heck, who isn’t?
But y’know what?
In every one of my client relationships, I have made them less busy, less focused on the day-to-day of their business, and have made them worry and fret less because taking their entire email marketing strategy and implementation off their hands lifts a weight from their shoulders.
Best part?
Since I’m great at what I do, my clients make more money by working less when they outsource their email to me.
And since they make more money by doing less, they naturally have more freedom and autonomy than they did when we first started working together.
Are you next?
If so - hit reply.
Catch you on the flip,
John
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