Talking Shizzle

Unlocking Entrepreneurial Success: Time, Story, and Goal Integration

• Taylor Shanklin

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About the Guest(s):

Paul Kuthe
Paul Kuthe is a dynamic business coach with a decade of experience in helping entrepreneurs and leaders achieve transformative growth. With a background as a professional kayaker, Paul brings unique insights into human performance and psychology, blending this with business acumen to guide clients towards success. He is the founder of Tributary Coaching, a firm dedicated to integrating storytelling with business strategies to foster impactful change in organizations. Paul is also a StoryBrand certified guide, leveraging narratives to redefine business communication and culture.

Episode Summary:

In this episode of Talking Shizzle host Taylor Wilson features business coach Paul Kuthe from Tributary Coaching. In this conversation, they chat about the misconceptions of work-life balance and explore the integration of storytelling into achieving personal and professional goals. Paul Kuthe shares real-life metaphors and actionable strategies from his experience as a kayaking professional and business coach, to support entrepreneurs in navigating their business rapids.

Taylor and Paul talk about work-life balance (or the myth of it), goal setting, and storytelling for business growth. Paul breaks down why work and life aren’t meant to be perfectly balanced—but instead, integrated. He also introduces the "goal story" technique, a method that blends neuroscience and storytelling to help turn dreams into reality. Plus, he shares his WOOP strategy—a powerful way to tackle obstacles and make big things happen.

Key Takeaways:

  • Work-Life Integration: The myth of work-life balance is dispelled in favor of a work-life integration approach, allowing a seamless blend between professional and personal aspects.
  • Goal Storytelling: Crafting a vivid narrative of future goals set the stage for remarkable personal transformation and business growth.
  • WOOP Framework: Utilize the Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, and Plan technique to visualize success and overcome internal barriers.
  • Time Investment: Instead of managing time, focus on intentional investment through detailed planning, combining digital and analog methods to optimize productivity.
  • Reflect and Adjust: Constant reflection on one's methods, obstacles, and triumphs aids in personal and professional development.

Resources:

Tune in to uncover how harnessing stories can transform your business approach, and stay tuned for more enlightening discussions on the Talking Shizzle podcast!


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0:00:03 Taylor Wilson: Hey, hey, hey, all you lovely people out there. I know you’ve got a lot going on in your day and you have big dreams for your brand. Are you ready to talk some shizzle and learn some shizzle from entrepreneurs, leaders, change makers and overall interesting people who like to shake things up? I’m your host, Taylor Wilson, founder of Creative Shizzle, and I’m stoked to bring you a fresh episode of Talking Shizzle today. 

0:00:33 Taylor Wilson: This show is all about helping you think differently so that you can grow your business or your cause. Check us out on the web@creativeshizzle.com now let’s get into it and talk some shizzle. All right, we are here. This is the first episode of the year for Talking Shizzle. What is up, Paul? 

0:00:57 Paul Kuthe: Oh, so good to be the first one. It’s so good to see you. Happy New Year, Paul. 

0:01:02 Taylor Wilson: We actually met in person not that long ago at the Business Made simple and Story Brand Summit in Nashville and clicked. And I thought I gotta have you on the show to talk about some of the things that were coming up in our conversation. 

0:01:19 Paul Kuthe: It is so fun to be able to connect with folks like you. It’s one of my favorite parts about being connected with storybrand and being a coach and traveling to that event is just connecting with folks from all over the world really like yourself, who get it and who are out there helping businesses every day. 

0:01:36 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. I love it too, and I get a lot of energy from it. So tell me a little bit. Let’s. Before we get into the meat of today, we want to talk about a lot of like, entrepreneurial myths. Tell me a little bit about your business and like what you coach, what areas of coaching you specifically really like to get into with your clients. 

0:01:53 Paul Kuthe: It’s been 10 years now I’ve been in business coaching folks and I really got my start in the world of athletics. I was a professional kayaker before this and so I really dove deep into human performance and the psychology behind coaching and learning theory and just fell in love with transformation. And so when I decided it was time to take my adventures into the, into the boardroom, into businesses, I had already been promoting some, some pretty big time national brands in the outdoor industry and really telling stories and being a part of a community that was sort of living an integrated work life style as it was. 

0:02:31 Paul Kuthe: And when my business started to move more into the indoor space kind of Monday through Friday 9 to 5, it was beautiful things. I could take my family and my kids out on all the adventures that I was used to taking other people out on. And it really turned into what started as kind of an executive coaching, life coaching for business owners sort of business into a full fledged business coaching, full service package of really working with leadership and developing the story from within the business to how do we communicate that and position ourselves in the marketplace, which is where a lot of the marketing and story, branding, brand sort of coach materials really entered the business for me. And then really looking at the overall operations and how do we keep people motivated around the culture of what it is we’re doing. And underneath all of that is storytelling and the message behind what it is we’re trying to accomplish in the marketplace. 

0:03:26 Taylor Wilson: Okay, so I can’t help but think about this. You’ve probably seen this Instagram reel a lot. It’s out there. It’s that kayak that’s going. Have you seen the kayak? 

0:03:35 Paul Kuthe: It’s hard because full of kayaks being in this world. But tell me more. 

0:03:41 Taylor Wilson: There’s this one where it’s like this guy in a kayak, he’s like just going in this ridiculous rapid. 

0:03:50 Paul Kuthe: Yeah. Yep. 

0:03:51 Taylor Wilson: And it’s like, this is what it’s like to be a small business owner. 

0:03:55 Paul Kuthe: It’s coming at you quick. The river presents so many good metaphors for life and business. There was a lot of the same. I mean, you’re just as committed, you’re going off into a blind horizon line. You’re, you know, in what feels like a critical environment where if you make the wrong turn, certain death is waiting for you around every corner. It feels that way right in business sometimes. And all the while you’re needing to stay composed, needing to make the best choices. 

0:04:19 Paul Kuthe: You don’t get a second chance to go back upstream and catch that wave again. And so, yeah, it can feel that way. Like you’re just going a million miles an hour. I get it. 

0:04:27 Taylor Wilson: Yeah. Well, now I think maybe you’re the man behind that reel that I’ve seen. 

0:04:31 Paul Kuthe: Many times on that boat. That was. That was a fantastic. He’s a buddy. He’s a buddy of mine. Dane Jackson’s probably one of the top two or three kayakers in the world, if not the very top. And. Oh, really? I’m glad to know him and have gotten to paddle with him. When he was just a little guy. When I was running an event out here in Oregon, he, him and his dad came out and they of course won the entire event. 

0:04:56 Paul Kuthe: And it was really fun to be able to watch his whole career progress. And I Feel like he’s in some sort of viral clip about every, every week or two. 

0:05:04 Taylor Wilson: Okay, well, now I know a lot more about that than I ever did before. I always just thought it was funny. 

0:05:10 Paul Kuthe: Yep. 

0:05:11 Taylor Wilson: Now I know a friend of a friend for, you know, like the guy in that clip. 

0:05:16 Paul Kuthe: You, could you come out, come out here, we’ll, we’ll take you on a kayak lesson with Dane. 

0:05:20 Taylor Wilson: I. Maybe, maybe. I don’t know. We’ll see. I do like I’m a swimmer, but I don’t know. I’ve always been kind of scared of kayaks. 

0:05:26 Paul Kuthe: The whole kayakers are swimmers all between swims. We’re all going to, you know, it’s just one of those metaphors for life as well. The kayaker terminology is. Or the saying is that we’re all just between swims. Kayaking, you try your best to stay in the darn thing. So if you swam, you mean you did something wrong. But many business owners find themselves swimming next to their kayaks as opposed to sitting in them. And metaphorically speaking, it helps to have a coach or someone else there to help pick them up, put you back in and keep you going downstream. 

0:05:55 Taylor Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. Well, that’s a good segue into the first thing I wanted to talk to you about. So one of the things you were telling me previously in a conversation was that work life balance for the entrepreneur, the modern entrepreneur is a myth. 

0:06:11 Paul Kuthe: It’s a cruel myth that crushes dreams every day. Yeah, well, there’s a lot of problems wrong with it. And one of the, one of the things I write about in activate your life is the importance of a goal story. And I always have clients write a goal story, a very vivid first person depiction of a future state that they want to be in. It’s a practice that really gets your mind there and starts laying those kind of pre neural pathways for what you’re looking for and setting, setting that sort of reticular activating filter in your brain and puts it out there to the universe. 

0:06:43 Paul Kuthe: And I always encourage clients to write an integrated goal story. Not just work goal story, not just a goal story about your life, but to bring them together. Because that’s the reality of it. We don’t have separate work life lives anymore. It’s not sort of a, it’s sort of an out of date paradigm from a time where the factory whistle blew and you could check out and leave your work at work and when you went home they were completely separate. And I think one of the cruel things about it is it sets up this false dichotomy of, well, one sucks, one’s good, and hopefully they balance each other out. 

0:07:19 Paul Kuthe: It shouldn’t be that way, right? Work and life could both be really amazing. And in that same way, they don’t always have to be separate in the traditional sense. Now, with technology, it can be that you can work when you need to work and integrated that into your lifestyle even more than you used to be able to. And as a. In my professional kayaking days, my work and life were the same. I was literally living in a van down by the river. Right. And so there was no separation from that. And there’s some things you have to be careful of with that. 

0:07:47 Paul Kuthe: It takes building really good boundaries and really having good communication with your people you share your life with. And it takes planning ahead and using your time in an intentional way. But I think the idea of work life balance is so tenuous and so delicate that something shifts and suddenly it’s out of balance, and that’s a bad thing. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a teenager move or grow like. 

0:08:09 Taylor Wilson: That one in my house. 

0:08:11 Paul Kuthe: Right. How balanced are they, like, physically or emotionally? They’re not, but so they’re growing. They’re growing and improving and changing. And isn’t that what we all want? They’re transforming. And that’s what stories are really all about. And so sometimes in transformation, there is an inherent need for imbalance, for things to grow. And so maybe work life integration is a better goal for us to strive for as opposed to balance. 

0:08:35 Taylor Wilson: How do you think about that then? Okay, so, like, what does work life integration mean to you? 

0:08:42 Paul Kuthe: Yeah, I mean, I could go in. 

0:08:44 Taylor Wilson: A lot of different places with. 

0:08:45 Paul Kuthe: It could. It could. And it could mean something a little different for everybody, but for me, it means everything from including my family in business decisions and explaining to my kids and wife at whatever level makes sense to them what it is that I’m going through and business context and also sharing a little bit of my life with clients or with fellow business referral partners. And when you go out on that fun river trip or camping trip, do you invite that work friend with the family as well and try to integrate your lives and try to bring some of that social gathering time together as well. 

0:09:22 Paul Kuthe: It might look like communicating to my wife my goal story and reading her my goal story so that she understands why I have to go in early to record a podcast or stay a little bit late and help a client who’s having a hard time. Because you know what it Serves that goal, that shared story that we both really want. I think for me, the work life integration piece is having a successful and growing and integrated goal story that is congruent with what you really want and authentic so that when you’re there and you achieve it, you actually feel fulfilled. Which is something everyone’s really hard at doing. We’re not so great at knowing what’s going to make us happy later. We think we do. 

0:10:01 Paul Kuthe: So yeah, those things, bringing those that, that healthy integration in so that you can have successful, fulfilling areas in both life and business and not have to have them completely separate and alien from one another. 

0:10:13 Taylor Wilson: I dig that. You know, I saw another coach recently talking about cut the chit chat at the beginning of meetings. Just get right into it with clients. And like, to be honest, there was a part of me while I’m listening to this and I’m thinking, oh yeah, maybe I do chit ch chat a little bit. I can get right into the work. But then I’m like, no, I actually think it builds like a friendship with your client, getting to know people. 

0:10:39 Taylor Wilson: You don’t have to go into all the gory details of your personal lives with clients. But I also think that there’s a level of friendship that is important in building strong and long lasting working relationships. Like, a lot of my best friends are people that I have met in my professional world who I wouldn’t have known otherwise. And I got to know them through work and we’re great friends and we work together too. 

0:11:05 Taylor Wilson: So I just think that there’s like this like people who feel like they have to be so separate, but you don’t have to intertwine every little piece about it. But I definitely think too, like, there’s a healthy balance of like, it’s okay to talk to your clients about like their personal lives and to be friends with them. Like, that’s probably a good thing. I think it’s a good thing. 

0:11:26 Paul Kuthe: Relationships are so key. People work with people they know. And so if you’re going to really know somebody, you’re going to know different parts of their world, not just their work. And if you look at story right, we’re both passionate about story and story brand. And why does it work? Well, stories move us on an emotional level. And so if you’re not going to dive in, connect with somebody on an emotional level, the chances of you persuading anybody or inspiring anybody or having any sort of action shift or change or teach anybody anything, and without that, it really reduces that impact. And so it’s important. It’s important to know the story behind what someone’s trying to accomplish on a deeper level, because you’ll know what motivates their true actions and behaviors on a level that’s maybe even outside of their awareness. 

0:12:14 Taylor Wilson: Ding, ding. Exactly. I like that. So, okay, so let’s dig a little bit deeper, looking over my notes here, because I want to talk to you about how do you use the power story to fuel your biggest goals? So I think this is relevant as we talk about any sort of professional or life goals, not just like brand goals, because we think about story a lot of times with story brand, but let’s talk about any goal. How do you use story to help fuel that? 

0:12:41 Paul Kuthe: Yeah, so there’s an interesting positional shift that happens with the story. Right. We are really strong advocates for people playing the guide in the story and finding heroes to serve and solve their problems and help them win the day. But this is a chance, a rare chance for you to position yourself in this story as the hero. When we’re setting goals and we are thinking about our own story and our own path, we can sometimes fall into what story creators call the narrative void. 

0:13:09 Paul Kuthe: That narrative void is sort of when you get caught watching the credits roll on a film and then the credits wrap up and you’re still just sort of sitting in the theater awkwardly waiting for the next story, but really you’re just in the way of the guy cleaning up the popcorn, and you need to move on to another story. And it happens at different points in life. It happens in our teen years when we’re not sure what to do with ourselves. It happens later in life, maybe hit the typical career goals, but now what? And so the importance of having a goal story for me is always having a purposeful narrative to play into our brains. Need it. We need it for our emotional health. 

0:13:45 Paul Kuthe: And so what if we took this power of story and this power to move ourselves emotionally? What if we use that for our own goal setting and intention setting? And so when I was asked to contribute to the book, activate your life, and we wanted to get the best exercise we could out of every coach, there’s. There’s 50 different transformational exercises in there. And it ended up doing really well, I think, because there’s exercises like this that. That have a strong impact. And what we would ask people to do is write that goal story, write that narrative, that first person perspective story out into the future as though it’s happening now, and bring in all of those emotional moves, all of those sensory elements that that really help bring you into that place both in the process of creating that story. It does important things psychologically for setting our intentions and puts your brain to work creating that story. It creates cognitive dissonance, right? You have this vivid depiction of a story out in front of you and now your brain works on making that your reality. 

0:14:46 Paul Kuthe: But we also pair that with an important exercise that’s come out in neuroscience in the past 10 years with a gal named Gretchen who’s done a bunch of research around the importance of correct goal setting and not getting caught, only imagining the outcome or destination. We actually need to think of this like athletes. When I was training athletes before on the water, we would think about the hardest part of the race, the most challenging move, the crux spot. 

0:15:13 Paul Kuthe: And we would imagine how tired we would be, what that area would sound like, what it would feel like, all the sensory elements. And we would imagine and run through mental rehearsal of hitting the move anyway, doing the hard stuff, digging deeper right at that moment instead of quitting. So that when you get to that moment in reality and you want to quit, you’ve already rehearsed not quitting and going through that action. 

0:15:35 Paul Kuthe: And by setting that goal story and looking at what she calls whooping, our goals, wish and outcome wo that’s sort of the intention setting and the goal story itself. You want to vividly imagine what you want to happen and the outcome there. But you also need to look at obstacles and plan the second half of Whoop. The obstacle is usually the obstacle within. It’s not that external thing, it’s that what’s that really holding you? You want to quit. Maybe you have self doubt, maybe you, whatever it is, that’s your obstacle within. 

0:16:04 Paul Kuthe: What’s your plan for addressing that when you inevitably will hit it when it gets hard? And so if you do those two things, create a goal story, share that with somebody, right? That creates accountability and support, but also mentally gives you another chance to rehearse it and go there, but then share with that person the obstacle and the real opportunity for transformation within that story. Because as you’re the hero of that story and you’re imagining this, you get to transform in some way and it’s to overcome that obstacle within. 

0:16:33 Taylor Wilson: I like this perspective. Brene Brown talks a lot about the stories we tell ourselves. You know, we’re like, yeah, it’s more like the negative stories we tell ourselves. And I like this. This is like writing the right story for your mind. 

0:16:51 Paul Kuthe: And I think there’s a lot of power in the visual aspect of this vision boards work for a reason. There’s a lot of reasons to create something that involves multiple senses and expanding on it. So I love to have clients write a story and then share it with somebody. Make a visual depiction of it so it’s present and up in front of you. Make a little video about it. Right. Like these days you can do more and more with video. 

0:17:14 Paul Kuthe: Create that goal story in the future. The result in the actual video or the story or the vision board is fine. It’s great to have the process of building it is what makes your brain work on it. And so that’s got the real impact of setting that. That brain of yours, working on closing the gap between the reality and what that that story really looks like. 

0:17:34 Taylor Wilson: I just came up with. I’m gonna send you one of these. You might like it too. The manifestation checkbook. Like thinking about how we have these, like, bank accounts, like goal oriented bank accounts, and one of them is like, like writing these different types of checks to yourself to then like put it in front of you every day and to like, create the mental connection to the action that needs to happen to make the things happen that you’re writing those checks to yourself too. 

0:18:05 Paul Kuthe: Oh, right. I love that. Yeah. There’s a. There’s a really fun story about Jim Carrey, I think, wrote a million dollar check to himself when he started his acting career. Right. And it’s one of those manifesting things of just. I think he signed his big million dollar deal for the first time. He was able to take that thing out of his wallet and actually cash it for himself. But there’s something about putting it into the universe. It makes it real and sharing that with other people. Whether you keep it real quiet or you put it out there to a bunch of folks to hold yourself more accountable. 

0:18:36 Paul Kuthe: The going there and really imagining it, I think is where the real power is. 

0:18:41 Taylor Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. All right, so let’s talk about how to stop managing time. Kind of goes back into the, like, work life myth, I think a little balance myth, a little bit. 

0:18:54 Paul Kuthe: It brings them together, right. Because you have this goal you want to make happen. But there’s the reality day to day of, well, how do you go and do that? 

0:19:01 Taylor Wilson: You told me that you think managing time is not even a thing. 

0:19:05 Paul Kuthe: No, it’s not. 

0:19:06 Taylor Wilson: More about, like, how do we think about our time? Like, what are we investing time in? 

0:19:11 Paul Kuthe: Time just is. Right. I mean, you can go deep on this and debate whether time’s a constant or that’s a. It’s a fact. Fabric thing or go to YouTube if you want to completely melt your brain for a few hours to figure out what exactly time is. But if you can’t even figure out what time is, how are you going to manage it? But we can invest it and we can think about it intentionally and we can use this resource which is so valuable. Right? We can’t make more of it, you can’t buy it back. 

0:19:38 Paul Kuthe: How do we use this in the most purposeful and beneficial way to make our goals and our stories real? And I had a long time progression of building out a system over the years. I know there’s a lot of great planners out there. And there’s like the full focus planner from Michael Hyatt and there are almost countless others. I think at the end of the day, no matter which one you use, whether you use a resource I have available, which we can throw the link for in here somewhere, I think you have to get intentional about how you’re using your time and if you don’t, other people will use it for you. 

0:20:16 Paul Kuthe: And because it’s such a valuable resource and because you can’t get any of it back, it really, really serves us to make the most of it. That’s where that flow of the river never stopping is always a constant reminder for me. I lost my dad really early. I was 12 years old when he passed, and he passed it at the age of 51. And it gave me a real slap in the face lesson in the brevity of life, how much time we actually have, which none of us really know what that is. It’s like the bank account balance. You have no idea what, what it is, but. 

0:20:48 Paul Kuthe: But you spend it nonetheless. So I had started off with really just trying to get ideas and things out of my head. So I do a big brain dump list and then I would, I gotta refine it a little bit, you know, so like let’s put a list down here in some sort of order and categorize it. And then, you know what you do is you just pick the easy stuff on the list to get a momentum starter, or you never get to the real things that move the needle. And there’s so much, there’s. So then I started saying, well, I’m gonna only gonna put a few things on the list each day and I’m gonna number them of the order that I’m actually gonna do them in. 

0:21:20 Paul Kuthe: And that was a game changer. That was huge. Like if you can just start doing that, if you can just limit your things to do down to A handful and then number the actual order you’re going to accomplish them in. You’re less likely to just skip to the easy ones and never really get to the tough ones. You run out of time and. But then life started, life in. And it wasn’t good enough because I would get distracted, I would get reactive. There’d be times that I would actually accomplish the things on the list. And my coach, a coach named Rob. 

0:21:48 Paul Kuthe: And Rob got real with me one day and Rob asked me, you know, if you really want to do this, well, why don’t you just actually write down what you’re going to do all day, like say, in half hour chunks of time. And that seemed really daunting and really overburdensome. Honestly, really, I’m going to write down every half hour. When you think about it, there’s not that many half hour chunks we have in our day outside of the sleeping time time. And I started giving it a shot and I got so much more done and I was able to skip all of the decision making between tasks. And it was just like, oh, at this time I’m supposed to do this. I’m just gonna do it. 

0:22:22 Taylor Wilson: Would you do that every morning? 

0:22:24 Paul Kuthe: I would. I would do, actually the night before. I started doing it so I could sleep, so I could leave all of it out of my brain. And I couldn’t turn my entrepreneurial brain off until I did this. And it helped me catch so many things like, oh, I better prep this. Ooh, I should think about that. I’m gonna need to actually build in time to put shoes on and leave the house. There’s a commute involved here, that sort of stuff. And it was so effective that I was like, you know what? 

0:22:46 Paul Kuthe: And I started having kids and we started sharing a shared calendar with my wife and trying to plan our lives together. And I was like, gosh, I got so much to do this week. I’m going to need to actually do this for the week. And that’s where I started developing my flow of the week planner sheets that actually have me mapping out what’s important to me, my anchor things. I actually had it printed off with just family time blocked out out. Mandatory 4pm to 8pm is family time. 

0:23:11 Paul Kuthe: And I would just go ahead on Friday evenings and have a little meeting with myself and have the most enjoyable weekend because I didn’t have to worry about any of the work stuff. I know exactly what I’m doing Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of next week. And I’ve thought it through. I know who I have Meetings with and it flows and that doesn’t go as perfect. Sometimes I have to circle stuff I miss or move things here and there. 

0:23:31 Paul Kuthe: But the prep allows for the freedom and flexibility that work life integration really thrives on. 

0:23:38 Taylor Wilson: Do you have like a digital version of this that you use or do you write it down? You actually write it down, you ask. 

0:23:45 Paul Kuthe: So I do. I write it down. I have a digital calendar. I have a Google calendar I share with my wife and we put all this kid sports stuff and all the meetings go on there and my assistant schedules stuff like crazy on there. But the act of taking this time to meet with myself takes half hour. It’s not a big deal. I actually do, I map out, I take the mandatory meetings off of that digital calendar and I put them on there. 

0:24:04 Paul Kuthe: And it makes me remember them in a different way or engage my brain with them in a different way where I think about things that I want to mention or I’ll make little notes and it just again lays that groundwork. It’s almost like an athlete rehearsing the performance. And I am able to see more of what I’m wanting to accomplish out of that time and sometimes prioritize differently. Sometimes in that process, I’m like, you know what, it’s too much and I got to tell my assistant to move something or I have to communicate with the family, hey, I’m going to need to miss something because this is that important. 

0:24:36 Paul Kuthe: But it gives me a chance to communicate that and not just react. So the analog digital hybrid that I find works best for me is to plan out ahead digitally shared, your team members, your partner, your life partner, whoever it is, make that accessible. But then have this meeting with yourself where you actually put pen to paper and do some of the physical movements. Your brain will just engage with it differently. 

0:25:02 Taylor Wilson: I like that. Yeah, because I like, I run my life by my digital, like by my outlook, like everything. But then I still have these days. Today’s one of them, to be honest. Yesterday I was like hyper focused. We all have this, I’m sure. Oh, I got so much done today. And then the next day you’re like, what did I do? 

0:25:21 Paul Kuthe: I remember my talking about this. She’s like, you’re going to quit your job when you start your business. At some point you’re going to walk into your office, your living room or whatever and realize that you can do whatever you want to do to grow your business today. But you’re not going to have any idea what to start with or where to go or how like, it’s almost more freedom than people are used to. 

0:25:41 Paul Kuthe: And so this gave me a way to think through that. So I had less of those moments where I’m wandering around the office or the house wondering what I should start with next. Yeah, you inevitably pick the wrong thing when you’re in that state. You almost never pick the right thing to work on at that point. 

0:25:56 Taylor Wilson: Oh, yeah, you and you definitely. I like what you said about, like, you pick the easy things. It’s definitely true. But the hard things that are uncomfortable, one, maybe they just have to get done and they stink to do. Or two, maybe it’s the thing that actually will, like, move you and, like, push you in a new way, and it’s hard to, like, start. 

0:26:16 Paul Kuthe: It’s true. You can see the pattern, the analog thing, because you get the dopamine hit of crossing that thing off, having accomplished it, and it just fuels your limbic brain system to be like, oh, let’s do more of those. The intrinsic motivation it builds is good, but also you see the patterns of the stuff you missed and you couldn’t cross. I circle stuff, and then I start to recognize, you know what? I keep putting that hard task at the end of the day. I need to do it in the morning. I got to shift where this goes or why is it that the same kind of stuff keeps getting circled? My sales calls, I don’t know why you always miss those, you know, or whatever the uncomfortable is, it gives you a chance to actually look at that obstacle within. 

0:26:56 Taylor Wilson: Right. 

0:26:56 Paul Kuthe: We talked about the woo. That’s probably the thing to work on. Talk to your coach about, Talk to your business partner about, talk to your therapist about whatever. But it puts it right in front of you. And somehow that is. It gives you some different insight, lets you separate from it a little bit and just get curious about, like, huh, how come that keeps getting missed? 

0:27:15 Taylor Wilson: Okay, the whoop recap for us again. W stands for wish. 

0:27:20 Paul Kuthe: Yep. What do you want to have happen? Outcome. Vivid, vivid imagination. Vivid depiction of that. I think it’s most effective if you write a story about it. Then you have your obstacle within the second O. And then the plan. The plan usually comes in an if then sort of format. If I encounter this obstacle, then I will do this. If I feel like I’ve got imposter syndrome or they’re all going to find out that I’m not really as smart, good, whatever as they think I am, then I will read my recent customer reviews. 

0:27:50 Paul Kuthe: Then I will have a meeting with a friend who I always feel Better when I finish talking with them then I will, whatever the plan is, have it ahead of time, rehearsed out just like an athlete would have. That moment in the marathon when their, their shoe is slipping off and they’ve their legs cramped up and they’re thirsty and they want to quit and they’re six more miles to go or whatever. What’s going to be the plan then? 

0:28:13 Paul Kuthe: Are you? I’m going to think about my kid at the finish line. I’m going to think about the car ride home and who I. How I want to think of myself. I want to think about beating the time I got last year and how much that’ll mean to my progression. Whatever the plan is, you’ll have it set so you go there automatically. 

0:28:29 Taylor Wilson: Yeah. Love it. 

0:28:30 Paul Kuthe: Whoop. Whoop. Basically increase your chance of accomplishing your goal tremendously. And most all, it’ll prevent you from self sabotaging yourself by only imagining the outcome. If you only imagine the finish line and how great it’s going to be to have that book finished or have that top sales goal met or drop those inches or stand on the podium, you’re going to actually demotivate yourself from accomplishing those things and make it harder. So you got to have both the story and the outcome and also that plan and a recognition of the obstacle within because that’s what it’s really all about. 

0:29:05 Paul Kuthe: It’s really all about the transformation. That’s what any story is really about. It’s transforming. 

0:29:09 Taylor Wilson: Love it. All right, well, Paul, if people want to get in touch with you, follow you online, get to know you a little bit more, what’s the best way to do that? 

0:29:17 Paul Kuthe: Yeah, well, if you want that time planning resource, you can go to tributarycoaching.com it’s free under the resources section there. And you can also get a complimentary coaching session to really get the best use of that time use planning sheet. The other way is to find me on all the socials everywhere to tributarycoaching.com is my website. 

0:29:41 Taylor Wilson: Cool. And we’ll drop those links too in the show notes and everything like that so people can go find Paul. I’m so happy that we met and are kind of in the same circle now in the coaching community and just want to thank you for your time, your wisdom. Think next time you see me, I might have whoop on my wall and in the back. I really like that a lot. Maybe I’ll paint a, I’ll paint a whoop sign. And I hope this has been a helpful episode. Everybody thanks for tuning in. And here is to your 2025 may you manifest and reach those goals you’re looking to reach. 

0:30:24 Taylor Wilson: Well, hey there. That was fun. I love how much mind blowing and mind opening shizzle our guests bring to us with every single episode. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. Make sure to hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcast player so that you don’t miss a beat of the Talking Shizzle podcast. And if you’re listening on Apple, be sure to let us know what you thought and leave us a review. 

0:30:53 Taylor Wilson: We’d love to hear from our listeners so that we can bring you all the good, juicy business growth shizzle that you’d like to hear about. Be sure to get in touch with us and follow along@creativeschizzle.com or shoot us an email at podcastreativeschizzle.com now until next time, we hope you go get your big Shizzle done.