Perfect Day

An Entrepreneur's Guide to Curing Lifestyle Deficit Disorder & Reclaiming Your Business, Your Relationships, and Your Life

Cokie Berenyi

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781683504993
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Want more time in your life for yourself, for your hobbies and for your family?

Are you exhausted, stressed, overworked, and only able to give your friends and loved ones the "leftovers" of your energy and time?

Does it feel like your tasks are never ending, your to-do list never any shorter and that you never have time (or the energy) to do the things you enjoy?

If you answered yes to any of the questions above, then you are suffering from LDD – Lifestyle Deficit Disorder.

Lifestyle Deficit Disorder is common in today's world, but you don't have to continue to let it control your life and your destiny.

From work with her clients over the past decade as a financial advisor, Cokie Berenyi has developed a system that is the surefire cure to Lifestyle Deficit Disorder. Her simple to follow plan outlined in Perfect Day provides the framework you need to create more Perfect Days.

In warm, accessible language and engaging anecdotes gleaned from her client files, Cokie Berenyi takes you on a journey of self-actualization, helping you design your Perfect Day Pyramid, uncover and avoid your "wobble" and build a life-centered business, not a business-centered life.

Through simple steps and strategies you can put into place today, Perfect Day offers a powerful antidote to LDD, revealing a path away from disillusionment and dissatisfaction to a life of purpose, joy, and freedom.

Perfect Days are not hard – let Cokie teach you how to craft and simply execute more Perfect Days.

PART ONE

The Problem: Lifestyle Deficit Disorder

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

−STEVE JOBS

CHAPTER 1

What is Lifestyle Deficit Disorder, And Do You Have It?

“It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting.”

–PAULO COELHO, THE ALCHEMIST

Sandy and Fred are clients of mine. When they first came to see me, the “problem” at hand was to fix a cash flow and retirement planning conundrum. They expected a strictly financial discussion of liquidity and financial assets; instead, I had them engage in the Perfect Day Pyramid process, which ultimately led them to write out their Perfect Day. A bit perplexed, Sandy and Fred played along. In the end, they imagined themselves surrounded by their children and grandchildren in a vacation rental, a beautiful ski-in-ski-out home in the Colorado Rockies. It was their dream trip. That was their Perfect Day.

They never took the trip. Instead, years later, I was sitting with Sandy in the waiting area outside a hospital emergency room. Fred was on the operating table, undergoing emergency surgery after having suffered a heart attack.

All I could think was: Sandy, here we are in the ER. Your husband might die. Why didn’t you take that vacation?

Symptom #1: Not Enough Time

Like many professionals and business owners, Sandy and Fred rarely took vacations. How could they? They would contend that getting away, even for a couple of days, was quite difficult. Right? Being out of reach—contemplating the number of emails and voicemails that would no doubt accumulate—makes taking time off utterly unappealing.

Most people I work with are passionate about their businesses, passionate about being industry leaders, and passionate about creating the next great product or service. Unfortunately, all too often, their passion for the business takes over and they become all but enslaved to their businesses. There’s never enough time. Every minute goes toward building their business, instead of crafting their lives … and then building a business that fits around their life.

The question is, how? And what will you do with all that time?

Symptom #2: Inability to Delegate

If you’re anything like me, delegating does not come naturally. The whole reason you got into business in the first place was because it stoked a fire inside you—it lit you up, turned on your brain, and made you come alive. And if you’re like most entrepreneurs, the business was or is you—at least in the early days. Your company wouldn’t have survived without your blood, sweat, and tears. No wonder it’s so hard to step away.

You don’t have to be a control freak to have a hard time delegating tasks. But unless you learn to delegate, your business will always run you instead of you running your business. If you want freedom, delegation is the name of the game.

Symptom #3: Worries Over Money

You wouldn’t believe how many people I work with who, although they’re making great money, are consumed by fear of losing money. That’s the number one issue I hear, time and again. Once we scrape past the ego-driven “everything’s fine” nonsense, we inevitably end up in conversations about fear of not having enough: not having enough money to fund a lifestyle now, and not having enough to fund college, retirement, travel, healthcare, or whatever may happen down the road.

All these people can think about is paying the bills. Here’s a further irony—most of the time, they don’t even have a good system in place for doing so. Most of the people I work with bring in plenty of money, but they lack efficient systems regarding cash flow, bills, collecting, and other financial matters. They don’t like the idea of paying somebody to do their books, which is counterintuitive, because if they could offload some of those mundane tasks, they could be more productive in their businesses.

Or they could get a life.

The Diagnosis

Not enough time, inability to delegate, worries over money: these are the primary symptoms of Lifestyle Deficit Disorder. People suffering from LDD are sick—and most of the time, they don’t even know they’re sick. They’ve constructed their whole lives around their businesses. Work comes first, and their hobbies, passions, projects, friends, and family members get what’s left over. Their whole life amounts to a big pile of leftovers. Everything—and everyone—else suffers.

What’s included in the “everything else?” Their marriages. Their sex lives. Their health and fitness. Their relationships with their children. Community activities? You’ve got to be kidding. These people barely have time to breathe. If they aren’t sleeping with their cell phones by their beds, they aren’t sleeping.

When I tell clients to “get a life,” I don’t mean simply creating a business and a financial life that works. Of course you want to generate the money you need to survive, and then some. What I want is for my clients to find that elusive holy grail that practically every sentient business owner, professional, solopreneur, and entrepreneur wants to find but secretly doubt its very existence: a healthy, balanced lifestyle with a thriving business that makes you want to get out of bed each morning. A lifestyle in which the Perfect Day becomes not only attainable, but a frequent occurrence.

Is balance even possible? Some people bristle at the first mention of “balance.” They think it sounds hippy-dippy or unattainable. They’re afraid it means losing out on something or having to make sacrifices they aren’t willing to make. Most people, driven by fear, put every possible moment into their business. Whatever is left over—including, time, money, and energy—is rationed for themselves and their loved ones.

But they will be the first to tell you that there’s simply never enough of any of those things. For the entrepreneur who’s suffering from LDD, time, money, and energy are always in short supply.

Eliminate that Muffin Top

I’ll tell you what I think about a lot: the muffin top. You know the muffin top—it’s that middle-aged spread that people get when they eat too much, drink too much, and exercise and rest too little. The muffin top, which afflicts both genders equally, symbolizes the lack of self-love and self-care that accompany Lifestyle Deficit Disorder.

Look down—how comfy are you with yours? Our muffin tops do more than make us look and feel unattractive to ourselves and our sex partners. For those of us who are parents and grandparents, being out of shape sets a terrible example for our kids. Too often, young people are staring down a crisis of childhood obesity because, like us, they eat badly, don’t exercise, and spend their whole lives staring at their devices.

The problem with carrying extra fat around the middle is that it hastens heart disease, stroke, and—according to the latest research—even Alzheimer’s and other forms of memory disorder. We are literally killing ourselves, one muffin at a time.

But sometimes it takes a trip to the ER, as it did in the case of Fred and Sandy, to make us realize just how great a risk we’re running by putting our businesses first and our lives second. Will you wait to create your Perfect Day until after your ER moment?

People know how to take good care of themselves. Everybody knows the secret of losing weight—eat well and move more. Just about all the business owners I know and work with have gym memberships, but they often haven’t seen the inside of a gym for months, or even years. They need caffeine to get going in the morning and Ambien to bring them down at night, because they can’t shut off and detach at the end of the day. If you talk to them, they seem low-energy and frustrated. They are operating in the past or the future, but never the present.

Curing LDD: Moving Closer to Your Perfect Day

Moving to Silverton was a big part of how we cured our Lifestyle Deficit Disorder. The big move was a metaphor to live by: we honored a rather kind and gentle “ER moment” (others aren’t so lucky) to heed the call of our Perfect Day. We chose doing what was best for our children and our family—at the risk of our businesses.

True, physically moving across the country helped me get away from some of the everyday pitfalls that were holding me back. But it doesn’t always require such a drastic change. The move shifted my perspective and changed the pace of my life. And ever since, because I was able to make this move and embrace these changes, I’ve been able to help other entrepreneurs reclaim their own lives, experientially and financially, from a place of authenticity and personal experience.

I’ll be honest: it wasn’t easy. It took a lot of soul-searching and careful planning for us to successfully reset our lives. We had to first understand what our values and priorities were and then design our lives so that they reflected those values. In particular, we had to start making big changes in how we managed our time and energy, and we had to learn how to effectively delegate.

If this resonates with you, it might be time for a self-diagnosis. Do you have LDD? If so, how is it affecting your life? I don’t just mean your work life—I mean your life in every moment you live it. How often does your business intrude on your free time? Are you sacrificing your lifestyle because you’re worried you won’t make enough money? Do you find yourself tired and lacking energy? Are you frustrated that you’re spending so much time on your business that you don’t have enough time left to spend with your family and friends?

What “reset button” do you pine for? There’s one inside of all of us.

What ER moment is lurking around the corner that you can sidestep, today?

I want to catch you now, before the Emergency Room. Before the divorce. Before the muffin top. Before you spend untold discretionary dollars on your Ambien prescription. I want to show you the small shifts you can make so that you can have a life again—instead of just a lifetime of work.

Fred and Sandy’s story has a happy ending. In the hospital waiting room that day, Sandy looked me squarely in the eyes and said, “We’re going to take that trip to Colorado.”

Fred recovered, and they did go to Colorado. They’ve taken many vacation trips in the years since.

If you have Lifestyle Deficit Disorder, keep reading. As a recovered LDD-er myself—and as someone who’s helped others cure their LDD—I can relate to what you’re going through. I can also offer hope. There is a way out of the slump you’re in, and I’ve charted that journey in this book.

First, let’s talk about your happy meter. Is it broken?

CHAPTER 2

Fixing Your Broken Happy Meter

Happiness is not a goal … it’s a by-product of a life well lived.

−ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume you aren’t happy. You may be happy in some ways, sure. But if you were 100 percent happy, you’d be living your Perfect Day every day—and you wouldn’t need this book.

When my clients say, “I’m not happy,” I tell them: “The problem is, your happy meter may be broken. You’ve got a broken yardstick for measuring happiness.” The question is not, are you happier than your neighbor? The question is th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: How I Woke Up
• PART ONE: The Problem: Lifestyle Deficit Disorder
• PART TWO: The Solution: The Perfect Day
• PART THREE: Three Steps on the Path: Gratitude, Asset Inventory and Vision Focuser, Affirmations and Perfect Day Vision
• PART FOUR: Implementing Your Perfect Day: How to Make Commander’s Intent, Your You-ness, Time, Energy, and Delegation Work for You
• PART FIVE: In Conclusion: The Lasting Power of Relationships
• Afterword