Hey, I’m Sunny Lenarduzzi. In today’s video my dad and I talk about happiness and fulfillment over coffee. Fulfillment doesn’t come from a job, what you do, or how much money you make. It comes from knowing who you really are.
RESOURCES & LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS VIDEO:
Download your “4 Boxes of Fulfillment” exercise
Watch my video “5 Steps to Developing a Growth Mindset (Execute & Achieve)”
Watch my video “8 Habits that Stunt Your Success”
FUNNELYTICS – Build Better Funnels
Coffee with my dad. It seems so simple, but for years I found myself not being able to commit to having a weekly coffee with my dad.
As an entrepreneur you have to make sacrifices. I totally get that, I understand it. But if you’re sacrificing the simple things that lead to true happiness and fulfillment, you could achieve all of the success in the world and still feel empty.
And if there’s one person in my life who’s taught me a lot about balance, it’s my dad.
He is a former pro athlete, he now runs a major league soccer team here in Vancouver. So I figured, might as well go talk to him about this and bring you along for a coffee date.
I’ve learned that fulfillment doesn’t come from what I do, it doesn’t come from a job, it doesn’t come from a person, it doesn’t come from money. It comes from knowing who you really are and what you really need.
And a friend of mine recently shared an exercise with me that showed me that technically everything you need can fit into four boxes.
And that’s what I’m going to show you today. H
So, how do you live a more fulfilling and happy life? Well, it seems like a pretty tall task.
What if all of the joy you need fits into four boxes?
That’s it.
It’s that simple.
Sometimes the simplest things are the things that actually bring us the most fulfillment.
And a friend of mine recently broke down this exercise for me after he had gone through an experience in building a very successful business, he ran an agency. But he went on vacation with his wife and his daughter and he was tied to his computer the whole time. It was their first real vacation as a family and he couldn’t get away from his computer. He was constantly tied to it, he felt like he had no freedom, and it really wasn’t a vacation.
So it was his crux point of changing everything and finding a way to build a life that actually fulfilled him outside of just his work, and something that didn’t tie him to what he did for a living.
So these four boxes, this exercise, is a game changer, truly.
I did it a few weeks ago and it really was so helpful for me in creating a full life and a happier life that doesn’t just rely on my business or relationship, and it’s all coming from what fills me up as an individual being.
So my four quadrants break down into this:
Freedom, first and foremost.
Which is the freedom to create my schedule, to choose how I spend my day, to go for a walk or hop on my bike at any time that I want.
I feel really sad and low when I get boxed into a very busy schedule and something where I have to be places at all times. That’s why I can’t work in an office, it doesn’t work for me. I tried it, doesn’t work for me. So I like to be able to have the freedom to create my own day.
So freedom looks like a bunch of different things. It doesn’t mean I’m traveling the world all the time, although I enjoy that from time to time, that’s not where I get my freedom from. My freedom is just a freedom to do what I want, when I want, how I want.
The next part, the next box, on my four boxes is creativity, which is what I am doing right now as we film this video.
So as I’m filming this, this makes me feel fulfilled. Since I was a kid I’ve loved creating. I’ve loved making things, I’ve loved creating content, even if it wasn’t for a social media platform.
I started making videos long before You Tube was even a thing. And so that’s been a hobby for me my whole life, and that’s usually a big sign as to what makes you feel alive.
Again, this doesn’t have to be your job, it doesn’t have to be what you do every single day. But I have a lot of friends in my life who absolutely love cooking. And they’re not professional chefs, but cooking for them is this creative outlet and it’s something that makes them feel fulfilled, it makes them feel happier, they like to provide and create these dishes for their friends and family. That fills them up.
So what’s that thing? I want you to comment below with a hobby or something that you do that lights you up. And it has nothing to do necessarily with what you do for a living, it’s just something that makes you feel fulfilled.
And how can you integrate that into your life? It doesn’t mean you have to all of a sudden start join a professional ballet academy, but it just means integrating it in some way, shape or form, and being okay with doing it imperfectly.
The next thing is growth.
So growth for me is reading a book. I read about five pages a day. I’m not reading an entire book a day, but even reading five pages a day of a book in the morning or at night before I go to bed, makes me feel like I’ve learned something new. So that’s how I cultivate that growth in my day to day life.
So it’s learning something new, it’s chatting with a new friend or meeting a new person, having a really interesting conversation, watching a TED video, reading an article online. Whatever that might be, it’s just growing my mindset and opening my mind to new ideas, new opportunities, new things that I can learn every single day that makes me feel fulfilled.
And the fourth part, funny enough, is teaching.
I love teaching, and I never thought in my life that I would consider myself a teacher, but I think that that’s what I’ve become.
I live to teach you, guys. I live to share new ideas and the best part about this is that because I love teaching things so much, when I learned this concept (which is part of growing and that growth fulfillment), I immediately came home and I had a dinner with my family and I ended up telling my parents and my boyfriend about this exercise.
And I had them all do it at the table and we all talked about our four boxes of fulfillment.
And so my dad called me the day after we did this exercise and he recognized that one of his boxes of fulfillment that he likes to do on a daily basis is connection.
So, he wants to go for a coffee with a friend, or he wants to meet a new person, or he wants to go and have a chat with me or have lunch with me.
And the funny thing about this was, as I filled up my cup and I fulfilled what I needed by teaching this to other people (which is my family), my dad had this light bulb moment of, “Oh. I need to have more connection in my life and I’m going to now make it a priority and make sure that we’re going for this weekly coffee every single week”.
And what do I do every week when I have those coffees? Generally, I’m sharing some sort of new idea or thing that I’ve learned that week with my dad, so it fills us both up!
So how do you do this exercise and figure out what your four quadrants are?
You don’t have to do it perfectly on the first try, but just start to note the times in your day when you feel that “yes, I feel so good about this, I feel good in my body, I feel at peace, I feel lit up by what I’m doing in this very moment.”
It could be little teeny, tiny things that you’re doing throughout the day and those are a huge clues as to what makes you feel fulfilled. It’s nothing external, it’s nothing that you do in your work or in a relationship, it’s just you as a human being, what makes you feel good.
So there are two ways to do it.
Figure out what those over-arching buckets or categories are first, and then start populating the activities you want to do within the boxes.
Or write down a bunch of different activities and then figure out how they all can be organized into four different buckets.
That’s really the simple process to building a more fulfilled and happy life outside of just work and outside of what you do for a living. Because that is not who you are, and that is not going to fulfill you in the long run.
You have to find what you as a person enjoy in life and make more time for that.
If this is making sense to you, let me know that you’re enjoying this by commenting below this video. And like I said, we’ve created a little print out for you of this exact exercise.
You can grab your “4 Boxes of Fulfillment” exercise here.
You can do it on the computer or you can do it with a print out version and do it offline.
And hang it somewhere that you can see every day, so you make sure that you do feel fulfilled on a daily basis, which will ultimately lead to a happier life.
And what I would love, love, love for you to do is, as you start filling these out, make sure that you take pictures of them, screenshot them, and tag me on Instagram with your four boxes of fulfillment and I can’t wait to see what you’ve come up with, because this is such a huge component of living a much happier life.
The next thing that I’m going to show you in next week’s episode is how to find your tribe.
The people that are going to elevate you, the people you want to surround yourself with to build a bigger, better, more successful life on your own terms.
It’s so important and I can’t wait to share the tips and tricks that I’ve learned in connecting with some of the people that I’ve looked up to for years and years and years. So it’s going to be an amazing episode, can’t wait for you to see it!
And on that note, I do have to give a shout out to my friend, Mikael, who is the guy who gave me this exercise at a recent event that we went to. He is the founder of Funnelytics, which is an amazing company for anyone in online business. You want to definitely check it out.
Thank you so much for sharing this with me, and I’m so happy that I can share it with you because this fulfills me.
Also, don’t forget to join the Be Your Own Boss Mastermind group on Facebook with thousands of entrepreneurs all over the world. Join your fellow bosses in achieving the life you want to live on your own terms!
Thank you so much for watching!
-S
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