Why You Should Break Up with Your Phone

We did do the annual goal setting like I talked about in the last episode, but there were some challenges in terms of having to stay on top of the work, which actually is a really good connection for today's episode. As promised last week, one of the additions I making to this show is every few weeks or every other month, I don't quite know what the schedule is yet, but every so often I'm going to bring you something called Backwards Book Club.

That's why I'm a huge fan of podcasts, but going back to it, when I was in the corporate world, one of the, you know, I talked about this before I used to work with medical professionals and running their businesses, so private practice physicians. One of the specific audiences that I worked with was grad students in the medical field who were the epitome of not having time for any kind of reading, if it wasn't a textbook.

My team and I started this thing that we called Backwards Book Club, which means we'll read the book for you and give you the shortcut notes, so you can book club with us on this podcast or in the episode that we were doing in our old life, but then give you the tools you need to move forward. And if you want to prioritize another book reading into your calendar, you now know whether or not that's a book you want to invest in. It's kind of like going backwards. We're going to book club it.

I'm going to give you some prompts, some questions to start asking yourself to make traction on the topic, but give you enough that if you do want to invest the time and money to read the book, well, you now, you know, it's a topic that you actually want to consume.

We sneak into our bathrooms and we hide this thing under our sheets, or we hide out in the pantry pretending to find our kids' snacks, but really we're on our smart phones 'working.' I'm saying 'working' with very aggressive air quotes around them, because if I'm being super honest, I can't intelligently call it work and neither can you. Quite frankly, for me, it's an escape being on my phone from what, I don't know, to where I have, I mean, I'm not entirely sure.

But my smartphone takes me to another world. One filled with strangers, doing exciting things and it makes me somehow feel better, but worse about myself at the same time. It goes a little something like this. You'd probably been here. You sit on the couch next to your family at night, maybe with some popcorn to watch a movie, and you feel that pull of your phone.

It's like, I like to think of it as that super annoying drunk person that sits next to you at a function who doesn't quite know how to whisper, and they just have obnoxiously slur, loud noises. In this situation, it's your phone slurring, 'Instagram.' You're able to bat it off saying, 'Oh, not right now. I'm spending time with my family,' but then that little drunk person just persists.

And finally you find justification thinking like, 'Oh, I have to check in with my followers,' 'I, Oh , I haven't posted today. I got to post something,' 'Oh, let me do a little Instagram story.'. Watching movies with the family, so you'll sneak into the app, which triggers you into what I call the obligatory smartphone round-robin, which is open up Instagram. Try to do your posts , but then you get distracted 'cause you want to check your DMs.

Then you want to check, 'Whoops, let me just scroll through and see whose stories are up. Nope, nothing there. Okay. Let me scroll through the feed. Oh, just kidding. Nobody cares about the feed. What's going on on Facebook.? So you jump over to that app to see, Oh, do you have any legit notifications versus like the random updates you can't figure out why, or why you get them, or how to turn them off.

And then you see that, that gal posted again in that group, and then you're like, 'wait, there's 108 comments. 'And then you want to know what are people saying? You dive in just to review all the comments and then the comments on people's comments.

Then you find yourself in a rabbit hole where 25 minutes later you come to and realize, 'Oh my God, I don't know what just happened,' and the movie is over, Your husband is giving you the side eye, and then you sit there on your tower saying , 'but I was working.'. You totally weren't working. We're not working when we're on our smartphones . Let's be honest people. We don't even know what the hell we were just doing for the prior 25 minutes.

We put on this mask or this disguise saying, 'we're online business owners. We're quote-unquote, 'working.' We have to be connected.'. Maybe I'm being a little ridiculous and dramatic here, but I think you might be resonating with what I'm talking about today, which is why we're talking about the connection we have with our smartphones because I don't think it's a conversation that enough of us are having.

As an online business owners, I think our relationship status with our phones is hashtag complicated, and we have to untangle that complication if we want to create capacity to make meaningful change. Listen, you're smart. You're resourceful. I think you're highly competent, so am I. We together have some pretty kick ass accomplishments in our lives and in our businesses, but we have a freaking serious problem and it's holding us back. It's preventing us from reaching that next level.

Now I knew that I had a bad relationship with my smartphone, quite frankly. I know that most of you have a bad relationship with your smartphone because just for kicks, over the last, I don't know , 18 months, I've done some Instagram polls on my stories. Anytime I take notice of what's going on with my phone, I just throw out this idea. I wonder how many other people struggle with this.

Anytime I put out a poll and my most recent one, I asked the question, I was reading this book, 'How to Break Up with Your Smartphone,' which we're going to talk about today. It's an amazing book by Catherine Price . I'm going to tell you all about it. But I asked the question around, 'Mmm..might you too have a phone addictions? ' On the poll results, 83% of you responded as guilty, and 17% said, they're in denial.

No, obviously that's a bias poll that I was like, yes, yes, you have a problem, but it's true. Any pole that I have put out, people have said, 'Oh my gosh, it is a problem.' But just like so many Americans, and online business owners, and just people in general, so many people acknowledge that our smartphones are making us dumb-dumb and distracting and they're not adding a ton of value in our lives yet. We don't do anything to change it.

As online business owners, I really think this line gets really blurry because we use this mask saying that, 'Oh, we have to be connected. We have to be available on Facebook. We have to be on Voxer, of course, for our office hours or for our client work. We have to be on Instagram. Oh my goodness, like the only way to post.' IGTV is on Instagram, which by the way is not true but you can do all those things on your desktop computer, but still we feel the need to be connected.

Here's what I want you thinking about. Yes, in online business, it is so important for us to show up on social. It's so important, but our impact has to go beyond that. You see, here's the thing I learned reading this book, but it's common sense. We know this to be true, but I want you to get really present with this for a moment. When we're on social media, we are hounded with so much i nformation.

Our phones and these apps are designed to be addicted, to hold our attention, so the novelty, there's another newness, there's always something flashing, always something to look at, always somebody to catch our attention, which means we're constantly moving from thing to thing, to thing, to thing, which is why we go down those rabbit holes. What we lack in those moments when we're on our phone is any kind of intentional focus. We don't really dive into something very deep.

And when we do, usually we're still distracted by all the peripheral around it, that it doesn't hold our attention and we don't retain what we just watched or read. What I want you to think about, number one, as a consumer of social media, we're just passively scrolling and looking at things, but not really absorbing it. Also, I want you to think about as a content creator, it means people are consuming your content like that.

If you want to cut through the noise, you have to have a voice and a message that's going to pierce through and hold someone's attention. It's has to pull them out of that trance of the smartphone dance. I didn't mean for that to rhyme, but it just works. You have to be able to cut through that to engage people and move the conversation and relationships out of the smart phone . But if we're going to plan social media, which most of us are going to do it, we have to know how to cut through.

I think it starts with us being able to cut through, so we actually can focus. Today is about recognizing whether or not you're showing up fully for yourself, your business and your life because I am a big believer that our smartphones are holding us back from showing up as our best selves.

Showing up as our best selves online, which means the common phrase, 'consuming before we create.' I think a lot of us are too guilty of just scrolling and consuming and not enough thinking to actually put quality content out there. That's not just a regurgitation of what we're pulling into our eyes and ears every single day. You have to create space for yourself. You have to create space for you to think.

You have to create space for you to actually be present with the physical, real life people in your world, not just the virtual ones.

What I want to share with you, I'm not asking you and this book is not asking you to get rid of your phone. What I want you to think about is how do you take back control of your time? How do you take that back control of your mind? How do you take back control of your intentions, your creativity, your output, your outcomes. How do you take ownership of your actions? Because this thing that we all love, it's wonderful.

It tracks our calendar, our projects, our cycles, without it, we wouldn't remember birthdays or phone numbers or people's last names. We wouldn't know how to get across town. I mean, thank goodness for 'Ways.' I don't ever sit in traffic anymore. I mean, we use these phones to meditate. We sleep together. We pee together. These phones are probably the most intimate relationship we have in our lives and it's ruining us, not because the device is bad.

As Catherine talks about in this book, it's not the phone that's the issue. It's exactly what I just said. It's the relationship we have with our phones that is becoming the issue. That's what's making us unfocused, ineffective, caught up in the imposter syndrome and self- doubt, and all the negative swirling things that contribute as gasoline on the fire of the entrepreneurial roller coaster.

I don't think our relationship with their phone is helping, so today I want to give you a nudge to start thinking about how do you shift your relationship with your phone and use it as a tool in your business where your not the tool in your business. I want to share with you just a few of the nuggets from this book to give you a little hit to start thinking about how your relationship with your phone now, and then also give you some encouragement of some tangible things you can do.

I highly recommend that you don't just cliff note this book, that you get it to go through the 30-day challenge that Catherine outlines in her book. This is most likely going to be one of the rare books that I highly recommend that you read, not just take the shortcuts. It is really, really that good. What Catherine outlines in the book, let's dive into it. She slits the book into two sections. It's called the "Wake up" and the "Break up." Now this book is a really fast read.

I think it was just a few hours, maybe three or four hours. It is not long at all. What she talks about the first section of the 'wake up' is helping you understand our relationships with our phones, understand what's actually happening. She talks many of the things I just mentioned around the positives of our phones, but also some of the things that are happening, that when you see it, you're like, Oh, logically, I understand this, but still we don't make any behavioral changes.

I'm going to give you a couple of those from the 'wake up' section, and then I'm going to outline for you what she constitutes of the breakup and why we need to break up with our phones.

O h, I got an email,' whatever happens when we're rewarded by getting something. What I think is fascinating is eventually those dopamine hits happen not when we take the action, but just at the thought of taking action. That dopamine comes in, that excitement comes in and just the thought of our phone , just the idea that something might be there, we get that hit, which is what feeds that craving of wanting more.

I also want you to think about, and she outlined in the book that as humans, we're novelty junkies, which means we love newness. We love fresh and exciting new things.Our phones are designed to provide us with constant novelty. Social media apps, and any other apps on our phone, they are designed to provide us with constant novelty.

In the book, she outlined there's some studies that actually show liking the addictiveness of our phones to studies related to the addictiveness of slot machines, which I thought was fascinating that I'm like, 'Oh my goodness.'. What's interesting, I'm not going to get into the idea of addiction, that's not a conversation I want to have today, but there are a lot of similarities between gambling and slot machines.

Just a lot of things, that there's the pull that happens that immediate dopamine hit, there's so many similarities, and it's fascinating, the studies in this book that showcase that. It's almost like the pull of our phones is an autopilot without conscious thought. There's this thing that's happening, where our smartphones specifically are starting to rewire our brains. I w ant t o read you this passage from the book, which I thought was really fascinating. She quotes another book in here.

She goes, "In his book, 2010 book , 'The Shallows,' what the internet is doing to our brains written by journalists, Nicholas Carr. He wrote that, "if you were to set out to invent a medium, that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks a lot like the internet." Catherine goes on to say, "Today, I'd argue that we can take this even further."

She says, "if you wanted to invent a device that could rewire our minds, if you wanted to create a society of people who were perpetually distracted, isolated, and overtired , if you wanted to weaken our memories and damage our capacity for focus and deep thought, if you wanted to reduce empathy, encourage self-absorption and redraw the lines of social etiquette, you'd likely end up with a smartphone ."

I know that when you hear some of these things, it's easy to roll your eyes and be like, 'Oh my goodness, these people are so dramatic.' But also I want to encourage you to ask yourself what truth you can find in this. What truth can you find where your phone is eroding your mental capacity, where your involvement with your phone, your connection to social media is hindering not helping you. You can put into two buckets, right?

You can talk about personal so your relationships, your mental presence with your family, those types of things. Or you can put it into your business buckets, meaning how is your connection with your phone truly helping your business? Are you really using it for deep, meaningful connection to put out quality content? Or are you spending the majority of your time absorbing other people's stuff?

Or are you just mindlessly checking without any ownership of saying , how did I spend the last five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes? In fact, just this morning guys, I was reviewing my time where I spend my time every day on my phone, and I was just reviewing my time from yesterday. It tells you which apps you're on. I had this glaring, Oh, embarrassing moment. I'm gonna tell you this.

I spent 17 minutes yesterday on a website, which was reviewing someone's sales page, not because I was interested in the product. Quite frankly, I already bought the product, but they were launching and I was curious about it. I was told I was on there. I'm on the, you probably know what this is if you follow anyone I follow. I'm on the sales page as a testimonial. I'm like, 'Oh, I should go check it out.' Guys, I spent 17 minutes reading the sales page for a product.

I have no interest in buying because I already have it - 17 minutes of my day! How ridiculous is that? In the moment, there is no way that I would have noticed I vacuumed 17 minutes of my life into that, but it happened even someone who's cautiously doing work to reduce time on my phone still get sucked in. We would be ridiculous to say that we're not affected by our smartphone . So again, I'm not here to preach and tell you that smartphones are evil and that we're all dummies for using them.

I want you to start bringing more awareness and intentionality to how you're spending your time, take ownership of your time so that you can do the things you want to do to move the dials in your business. That's what I'm talking about today. Another specific things that she talks about in the book under the 'wake up' section, Catherine talks about that the smart phones are killing our attention spans. That's the name of one of the chapters.

This specifically is one of the things that resonated with me, which is why I wanted to share with you today. She talks about that our smartphones are messing with our memories. I may get a little science- y here for a second and talk again about our brains and how our memory system works.

You're like hanging out there, but nothing's really happening yet. Then when you get approved into the room, well then you're in your short term memory. The long-term memory is, you actually have, there's like some intentional things that have to happen for that long-term memory. I want you think about zoom. It's like when the meeting becomes a recorded meeting saved on the server. It's like the working term, the short term, and then committing it to long- term.

Let me tell you how the brain works for just a second. With working memory, the more information you cram in, the less likely you'll remember it. I want you to think about if you're juggling your to-do list, if you're juggling multiple projects, multiple tabs open at one time, if you're on your smartphone and you're jumping from app to app to app to app, your brain's working memory is on overdrive. You are far less likely to remember any of the things.

This is going like super geeky here, but let me back this up and say, the reason why this stood out for me, and by the way to understand all of this, this is where the book will be really helpful. Thank gosh for the book. Here's what I wanted to share with you. I realized that when I think back over the last 10 years of my career, I've touted of humble brag because I had a really phenomenal career.

I've had a phenomenal opportunity to travel around the world, do a lot of really incredible things. Also, I had this really embarrassing thing that I don't talk about, which is, I don't remember things. My husband, phenomenal memory. Him and I argue all the time that like, Oh, I'm so annoyed that he remembers things and I don't.

But when I remember something, I will fight tooth and nail because I remember it, but there are so many memories that I don't have --trips taken with friends, outings, with friends, dates with my husband. I don't really remember a lot of things. When I read this chapter, I realized why. I rendered a really, really fast pace. I've always prided myself on this idea that I can juggle a lot of things at one time.

I am the person at the airport with a smartphone i n hand, checking my email, having a conversation with a person, doing all the things at one time, quote-unquote 'multitasking,' even though I know multitasking is not a thing. We all know that to be true. I juggle a lot of things and I move really, really quickly. What I realized reading this section of the book is my working memory is on overdrive. Well, I am a high functioning, high working memory person.

I can do a lot of things, but those things, those experiences were not being translated into my long-term memory. I don't have a good memory of the experiences I've had the last decade of my life, which has been the most phenomenal decade of my life. Got married. I've had two childrens . I built an incredible career. I've traveled around the world. I have all these things and yes, sure, I remember bits and pieces. I remember a lot of it.

I'm not saying I don't have a memory, but I don't remember some of the phenomenal, just everyday moments when my husband will mention something . I'm like, man, I forgot about that. It's just not there. It's because I'm a firm believer, it's because I've crammed my working memory and I know that my smartphone in connection, that deep needed connection in my old corporate job of having to be on my phone all the time. That has a big piece of it.

I want to share this with you today because as business owners, we are creating experiences for our communities. We're not just selling a product or a program. We're creating an experience, and a big part of an experience is you have to be present and have other peoples present with you to create said experience. When our working memories are distracted and over crammed, they're not going to remember the experiences and neither will you. You're working your tail off to build something great.

I want you to be able to remember it.

In the book, the 'wake up', what I talked about here with memory, what I talked about with the brain chemistry, what I talk about with focus, relationships, all those things, she'll dive into each of them in the 'wake up.' Then the second section of the book is about the 'breakup.' Now she's not saying that you should get rid of your smartphone and replace it back with a flip phone or a rotary dial if you remember what those were.

What she's asking to do is to change the relationship with your phone. This is what caught me of why I am such a huge fan of this book. I am now on my second read of it. My husband and I are doing the 30-day challenge together. This is why I want to encourage you to get the book if this is a topic that's interesting to you.

Just doing some tips and strategies, you've probably done some of these in your phone where you set, like you set a timer on your phone, where you track your habits, or maybe you place your apps and folders. For a day or two or maybe a week, you notice a change, but guys, the persistence of these things they creep back in.

Now all of this goes under this umbrella that, I'll call it, it's awareness to your cravings without judgment. If you've ever done any kind of meditation earlier this year, I have been reading a lot of Gabby Bernstein books, where she talks a lot about meditation and really important that when your thoughts floated into your mind, you don't berate yourself for having thought through your meditation.

Catherine talks about this idea that our lives are what we pay attention to. The big million dollar question that she keeps coming back to through the 'breakup' is, what do you want to pay attention to in your life right now? What do you want to pay attention to in your life right now? You can use that as a general question. You can use that as an in the moment question, but this question helps you get present and take ownership of your time.

Now, because I love the tangible, I'm going to get with you a couple hacks here. If you do want to start taking some ownership of your time right now, so I'm going to give you the hacks. But remember, without these little hacks or strategies, you're going to slide back. You're not really going to change the relationship. They're going to be band-aid fixes, not core fixes for what the true issue is, which is the relationship piece, right?

Let me give you some hacks here and then I'm going to send you off with another, just a reference point that I felt was really powerful in looking at how I spend my time with my phone.

What does that look like? Is it Instagram? Is it Mail? Is it Voxer? What is the first app? Because when I look at that, it can help me understand, why am I really picking up my phone? Is it out of boredom? Is it truly as a business reason or whatever else? Right? So track your time, but track it and actually start looking at it. Number two, I'm sure you've done this before. Set limits.

Don't set limits and be like, 'yeah, but I'm going to just like go around them.' Set limits and be serious about what they are. Don't just set them thinking about what other people like, what you should quote-unquote, be setting them at, set them real for you. I wouldn't set limits until you track your time to understand what you're actually doing. You can do that again on your phone. You don't have to download anything special there.

You should have with limits embedded into the tracking app that you use.

Plug it into my office and then when I wake up in the morning, the only thing I have to do is get out of bed because my phone is not there to keep me under the covers in the comfy comfort of my bed, so plug your phone in another room. That'll immediately help you, one, get to sleep at night and, two, not be connected right out of the gate in the morning. You can start your day with you, not with other people. Number four, delete apps.

I want you to really think about what apps you need on your phone and what you don't need. Now, by the way, on all of these, she goes into detail about how to do these things with some specific recommendations. I'm making blanket things here based o ff things that have helped me. But let me give you an example here. I started paying attention based on the prompts that Catherine gave in the book around, which apps were time suckers and clearly social media is a time sucker.

If you're not a time sucker like in social media, high-five, kudos for you! You are a unicorn in this world right now. I am so excited for you, so just give yourself some praise and say, what else could you cut back? One of the apps that I noticed that I would get sucked into for realestate apps like Zillow and Redfin, or I like this, a hobby of mine. My husband and I like to look at real estate. We like to look at million dollar homes.

We'd like to go on house tours, which we haven't been able to do for a long time because you know, quarantine. Once if I would just look at a house real quick on Redfin, I would find myself sucked in for 15 minutes and that might not sound like a lot of time, but also why do I need to do that? So I uninstalled the app from my phone, that was a simple one of going.

Last year, I did completely uninstalled Facebook from my phone, which was a wonderful thing. But habit slide, and you will figure out how to log in through your Internet browser. You'll find a workaround, so that's where you need to have a rooted strategy for changing relationship, not just the convenience of an app. Deleting the app can work for a short time period to get you into a new habit. Okay? The last one here, number five, this one was a big one for me.

You need to put a physical disruption on your phone to force yourself to think before you open. What happens here? I'm going to give you the bonus thingy right now. And then I'll , I'm gonna describe number five a little bit more here. One of the prompts that Catherine gives in the book is she says, 'when you are tempted to grab your phone, I want you to ask yourself 'WWW' - what for, why now, what else. So what for, what are you grabbing your phone for? Why - why are you grabbing it right now?

And what else could you be doing with this time? This was a really powerful thing for me - what for , why now, what else. Because 9.9 times out of 10, when we grab our phones, it's not really for a real true purpose. It's out of boredom . It's out of anxiety. We're standing in line or you're at a traffic light, like naughty, naughty, naughty. Like you don't need to be grabbing it, but we do. We need to have a trigger to remind us to go, huh? What for, why now? What

else?For me, number five, I set up a physical barrier on my phone. You can figure out how to make this true for you, or even if you want to do it for you. I have like a little, it's like this little case, not a phone case.You know, those little bags for sunglasses like a little neoprene or little cloth baggie that you would slide a pair of sunglasses.

I just need to push through this difficulty outlining this, this whatever piece of content or, you know, no I'm just bored or I just need some water. Something to tell me, Nope, not now I don't need this. Choose better. Or I might go, you know what? I really do want to break. I'm going to binge and then I'll pull it out of the bag, do whatever I'm going to do and put it back.

Placing a barrier, she recommends in the book, what if you put an elastic around like a rubber band around your phone, that could be something. Something that were a physical touch, when you touch your phone, it feels different. Some people I've heard, put it in a drawer, whatever works for you, but here's what I want you to notice. When you develop these habits, you will get used to them pretty quickly. You will push through them on autopilot.

I will be adjusting my habits over time so it's always a new idea, that novelty. I need a new distraction. I'm doing the bag for now. I might change to rubber band. Something I'll do, maybe put a post-it note on my phone, whatever I have to do to keep it new and fresh to remind me that prompt. what for, why now, what else?

I'm actually in the midst of the 30-day challenge. I had this thought of , do I wait and share this with you on the other side of it, where I'm quote-unquote successful and I've broken up with my phone. And then I realized, no. No, I think this is a challenge that is a lot of us struggle with some more than others. I want to be real that this is something that I really want to change. I think that you also might too . Now coming back to all of it, I thought about this.

I'm like, you know, this is an interesting topic to have on Finding Your It Factor because it's this a speaking topic, but here's the thing friend, like if you want to show up in a magnetic way, if you want to be fully present with your audience, you have to give yourself space to think and do your best work.

What I want you to get really present with is why are you doing all of this? What is the message you have to share? How can you get comfortable showing up and just speaking what's from your heart? Just getting more confident with that and allowing yourself over time to build that resilience and that confidence. If you're constantly comparing yourself or consuming other people's content, it's really going to hinder your ability to shine.

That's all I want for you is you to shine with confidence, and enthusiasm, and vibrancy where you love what you're doing and it's infectious. In order for that to happen, I think we have to cut some of the clutter or at least cut it back. I think your smartphone is incredible tool. One, that I'm going to continue to use my business, but I am actively changing how I use it based on the relationship I have with it. I highly encourage you to do the same.

If you would like to check out this book, I highly encourage you to download it. It's "How to Break up with Your Phone: The 30 day Plan to Take back your life," Catherine Price . I have no idea how I stumbled across this book. It just showed up in my good reads suggestions feed, and I'm so glad it did. C atherine is an exceptional writer, right from the beginning. You're going to get so many l aughs from her letter to her phone. I think you're g oing t o like it.

And C atherine, in the off chance that you ever listened to this show, thank you so much for having the bravery to face this issue, talk about the issue and t o help us take back our lives. Alright, friends, I will see you next week for another episode. If you l iked this episode, please please share with your friends and shout out on social media. Tell me about your relationship with your s martphone and whether or not this episode led to any decisions or changes in your life.

I'll see you back next week. Same time, same place.