How Gabriela Freed Up 5 Hours a Week in Her First 7 Days (Gabriela Krawczyk​​​​​​​)
 

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Gabriela Krawczyk

Thanks for having me, Jesse. It's very nice to be in the podcast. Well, the big win right in the first week of completing the free up founder challenge was that I was able to essentially free up up to five hours a week of time that was going into reactive work. Like we're just responding to messages, emails, or admin work that can be scheduled to be done later in the day so that I can protect the first two hours of every day, Monday to

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Gabriela Krawczyk

Okay. So

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Gabriela Krawczyk

during the first week, the only. The first day was the day that kind of took me about an hour and a half because it's kind of like an audit of, you know, what the previous three days looked like, what was in your calendar. So I like to be very detailed in those type of audit. So I looked at through my time tracking spreadsheet, my calendar, stuff like that. But other than that, days two through seven, it really was like the video. It's like about two minutes and then the exercise that you need to do, like the action item that you give us in the challenge. It really takes about 15 to 20 minutes to implement. So that was really nice. So it didn't actually take that much work to free up those five hours.

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Jesse Gilmore

you're saying two minute video, actions that are 15 minutes per day and then it frees you up five hours per week

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Gabriela Krawczyk

Yeah. Okay.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

So.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

would say the skepticism is fine. I also went in into the program a little bit skeptical. But. When it comes down to it. There are minor shifts that sometimes we're just blind to.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

But when you're going through the exercise, it's very guided.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

It gives you examples of what to do. And the community side of things is very good too, because. If you're going into the program after a couple of people have already been in it. You can see kind of like, well, where the shifts that other people did. What were the type of boundaries that he did? I actually went through that. When there were days where I was like, oh, I don't know how I can complete this. I would look at the discussion board and see like, okay, what other people did. You know, so it's like, it was about seeing the example of like, oh, this person said that they don't check emails before 11 a.m. So I'm like, that's a boundary I can put for myself. So I kind of, I kind of like copied it and it's been working for me.

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Jesse Gilmore

about a little bit more. But you talked about in that day number one, kind of like that big audit.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

That. Yeah.

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Jesse Gilmore

what was the experience kind of using the audit and then what it did for you from like a clarity side to freeing up some time?

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Gabriela Krawczyk

if I'm not mistaken, this is definitely, this is something that you say in the video and in the video that says, something that you say in the video and that first day where you can't fix what you can't see. So awareness is the first step. So during that audit the exercise really was becoming aware of how I was actually managing my time or the lack of managing my time and like what I was actually doing. So during the audit it was a lot of moments of like yes there's a little bit of guilt and shame that you because you were like I can't believe I spent it this much time like in this rabbit hole or I can't believe I spent it this much time like writing emails like that sounds so like non-important on work sometimes

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Gabriela Krawczyk

but you just got to get through that like like forget about the guilt forget about the shame like if you're in the program is because you are taking an action to do something different

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Gabriela Krawczyk

and I think the lesson there is just like learn from your mistakes you're gonna make mistakes again but just try to learn from them right so it's but again without the awareness of what you're actually doing you don't know where to begin

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Gabriela Krawczyk

to see what you can fix or what you can change what small you know shifting your and how you prepare your schedule or how you're going to organize the tasks that you need to do

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Gabriela Krawczyk

so that you're prioritizing what's important to you first and not letting other people dictate how you manage your schedule

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Jesse Gilmore

And

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Jesse Gilmore

And then from there, you're able to understand it. And there's something very specific that happens in that audit. And I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts on it, which is this idea of an hourly wage bleed.

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Jesse Gilmore

What did you like, what was that, what kind of came out of that? And can you describe what that is? If you can remember, I can always do it, but I'd love to hear from you.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

think it was like the average, the hourly wage bleed, it was kind of like how like putting a dollar amount to the amount of time that was being spent on something that I can either eliminate or delegate or automate. Right. That was a little scary. Like when you put that because like, we all say that saying like time is money, right? But like it's sometimes hard to like figure that out if you're not like a lawyer where you know you charge by the hour or something like that. But

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Gabriela Krawczyk

that calculation really, I think, is the impactful thing that's like, okay, I don't want to be losing more money anymore. So like, I have to figure it out. What do I eliminate? What do I delegate? What do I what can I automate so that I can actually spend more time doing the work that I'm best at?

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Gabriela Krawczyk

And that pays me for my time based on the value of the outputs that I create with my work. So that was definitely very impactful. And that's definitely part of kind of like the realization that I just need to take time management more seriously.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

Because it is the foundational thing of how I put myself on a better path to scale the business and continue building and you know be able to serve more people and

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Gabriela Krawczyk

just overall like make like make the change like rip rip off that band aid.

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Jesse Gilmore

I think

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Jesse Gilmore

up to

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Gabriela Krawczyk

Reactive work really is the thing that's costing me the biggest amount of time and the biggest amount of money. And when I say reactive work is like, it's like, responding to every ping that comes in from like slack or from emails from vendors and partners and client emails like I was, I have people pleasing tendencies and I think a lot of people in our industry as agency owners kind of deal with that too. Certainly a lot of people in the Alliance,

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Gabriela Krawczyk

like share the same

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Gabriela Krawczyk

challenge. And I always thought that like, oh, if I reply to this client within five minutes of receiving their email, they're going to think I am the best person ever to work with because I'm so responsive.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

So that was something that was a mindset shift during the first week of like, no, it's okay to not reply right away.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

As long as I have kind of like an SLA for myself, like if I'm replying to non urgent requests, non urgent questions, non urgent emails within, let's say 24 hours. That's still an acceptable response because

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Gabriela Krawczyk

I am these people didn't hire me just so that they could get a response fast enough. They hired me to do a very specific job to then help them grow their business. If I'm more worried about replying to their email than ensuring that the work that needs to be done gets done. I'm actually not doing my work. So definitely setting boundaries and kind of like standards for myself of when do I check emails, how much time I want to allocate to answering emails per day. Right. So I

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Gabriela Krawczyk

did this where it's like, okay, up to an hour per day should be an acceptable amount of time for me to kind of see what emails came in, triage them real quick, see which ones require response now. See which ones I can actually delegate and tag in someone in my team

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Gabriela Krawczyk

to answer them for me because they actually don't require my attention.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

Other lessons learned also included

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Gabriela Krawczyk

making sure that my morning time, like using some time blocks to kind of like figure it out when to do things. So my morning time is usually focused for either internal meetings with our team or focus work. So work that I need to be like have 100% of my attention.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

One very easy, very quick thing to do that was insane, the impacts of it and to this day I'm like, oh my god,

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Gabriela Krawczyk

it's turning off notifications. I do not have any single banner on my desktop screen anymore. I have some that appear on my phone, but during work hours, I usually set my phone to either sleep mode or do not disturb. And then when I have myself a break or during my lunchtime and stuff like that, I go to the apps that I need to go to to intentionally communicate with the people that I need to communicate with, whether it's internal team, a vendor, a client, or even like my, you know, personal family, personal friends and stuff like that. So

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Gabriela Krawczyk

the notification blackout really was like mind blowing because I did it right after I did like the challenge. I can't remember which one was the date right now, but yeah, day four.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

But after I did it, I'm like, wow, that is insane. The

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Gabriela Krawczyk

result of it is limiting distractions, right? And then the other thing as well that was a big lesson learned from me for me during that first week was just reinforcing some behaviors that I was already trying to put in place. Where it's kind of like that thing of limiting distractions, which I never thought about turning off my banner notifications on my desktop.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

Making sure that other apps that I end up scrolling, whether that be LinkedIn or Instagram or Reddit or whatever, it's not on my phone anymore. If I want to see them, I can open them on my desktop, but then it's a lot harder to like doom scroll on your desktop.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

So trying to, you know, change some habits as well that take my time and ultimately

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Gabriela Krawczyk

the biggest impact of allowing those distractions to remain in your daily life is that it takes away from the balance that most people are trying to find. So when you said that most people when talking to agency owners, usually the main results that they want is that freedom, right? I would even

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Gabriela Krawczyk

say that like a lot of people also don't have a balanced daily life where, you know, you wake up, you take care of yourself, you exercise, you journal, you have breakfast, you remember to eat so that your brain has enough nutrients for your body to function. Then you start your work in a very intentional way and then you have a stop time so that you can have time to rest at night and sleep and feel better the next day. Like I feel that

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Gabriela Krawczyk

out of that with balance comes freedom. And that's that freedom of, you know, having a very intentional day. Of course, like life sometimes does some life-ing and, you know, unexpected things happen, but as long as you kind of have an ideal standard for yourself, you can always just work yourself back into it if something throws you off from routines.

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Jesse Gilmore

challenge.

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Jesse Gilmore

starts naturally

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Jesse Gilmore

And so when they're going

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Jesse Gilmore

And I think

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Jesse Gilmore

there's the business

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Gabriela Krawczyk

right now, I'm still the bottleneck on client delivery, so that we can consistently deliver, you know, our what we do on a consistent basis. I mean, usually because of the historical knowledge that I have and the lack of systems for a long time, things just naturally started funneling through me and there's only so much I can do. So

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Gabriela Krawczyk

that then leads me to feeling like I'm just juggling things from week to week without actually feeling like we're making progress. So that's the reason why I joined the program, Alliance and FreeUpFounder, to

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Gabriela Krawczyk

learn from you as a coach, learn from peers that are going through similar things of what can we do? What can I change? Like, what is the best next step to kind of get me out of the client delivery so that I can stop being a bottleneck in the business and we can actually scale.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

And so that I can, like, I would like to move into a role where I have a hand into helping scale the business and a manageable way, making sure that the people that were hiring the team that were growing have the resources that they need, have a system

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Gabriela Krawczyk

that's easy to manage and that, you know, the system then reflects back to us. What is the progress that's being made so that we don't have to think about it, which then frees up your mind to then do your best work.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

So that's kind of like the reason why I got into it and kind of where I see myself going.

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Jesse Gilmore

Lil Jack.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

Whether it's like a daily adjustment, something that can be done quickly, or it's something that I might just set up like a quick project to tackle within that week. I'm very excited about updating our terms of service so that we actually have contractual boundaries that we can fall back into to hold those boundaries and expectations with clients because I feel that it's a lot easier for me. I mean, again, have people pleasing tendencies. So it's very easy for me to be like, if I like you, I'm like, okay, yes, no, let's do this. I can help you out because if in my head, I see a way that I can figure it out. I'll do it. But if I have a contract, but I'm also a very detailed person and a huge rule follower. So I feel that if I have contracts that are very clear, human readable so that, you know, both me and the client can understand right off the bat when the engagement starts with, you know, basic expectations for the client with us and then with us to the client so that the partnership works. I feel that that is a huge thing to kind of start the relationship off in a healthy way and in a manageable way.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

Because the same way that we respect all the clients that we work with, we also want to be respected and we're like, I feel that like at the end of the day, a lot of people forget that everyone behind a business is a human and humans have lives and stuff like that. So like our treatment with clients, it's like, oh, you know, you can't attend this meeting today or things are delayed because you know, a family thing happened. That's fine. But like that goes both ways.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

So I'm very excited to get through the days of the challenge that talk about contractual changes and kind of like examples of what we can put it into our contracts that actually ended up being one of the projects that we already had coming out of our quarterly workshops from the Alliance that we wanted to kind of standardize our terms of service and then have conversations with existing clients to kind of like do a little reset of expectations going into the new year. So this is a good time to do that. And

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Gabriela Krawczyk

very excited as well to kind of like just being the free up founder being the challenge. Like you said, it's kind of a sprint, but habits take time to form. So I'm, I'm excited to continue having weeks three weeks two, three and four to make sure that I'm still exercising the habits that I'm putting in place. And then I have one page where I'm listing all the commitments that I'm making each day so that I can return to them and see like okay what's working what can I tweak.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

Okay, this hasn't been implemented at all like I put it in my calendar but I'm not following to again create that awareness, so that, again, it's, you know, we're always flowing or we're always in movement, and we have to check in with yourself every now and then. And I think that the challenge will help me do that now through the end of October and then hopefully just like cementing some of those habits and making sure that they kind of stick with me long term. And then going into 2027 with little Jack, we're excited to get more clients.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

Continue improving our systems we're at a very good spot right now, systemizing a lot of things and it's exciting for me to be working on something and then deploying something to someone in our team and then training them on it and being like okay this is the last time I have to do this. So like, I'm celebrating those milestones of like okay this is the last time I do it, because now, both my someone in my team is gaining a responsibility for them to own. And I'm also growing and evolving into the next role that I'm going to own of being a like whatever you want to call it like supervisor manager whatever but like, but to be that person that supports the team instead of just like shouting orders at them.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

So I'm excited to kind of like continue evolving into that role.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

Getting more clients, helping more people succeed.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

And, yeah, seeing our clients businesses grow so that if because if they're growing. We're growing with them.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

That's at the very core of why I'm still in this business of, you know, just working with small business owners they're not huge corporations and then just, you know, seeing how they evolve and the milestones and the wins that they get. Because it feels good to be a part of their journey too.

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Jesse Gilmore

being a partner

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Jesse Gilmore

which

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Jesse Gilmore

and you're

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Gabriela Krawczyk

What I would say to myself.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

Six months back, or to anyone that it's in kind of that situation of feeling trapped in the business that they're doing is that one just take a breath.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

Things like if everyone like there's a lot of people that get out of it. And if you just have the will to

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Gabriela Krawczyk

accept that changes have to be made. Then that's the first step.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

Then the step next after that is you need awareness, like you need to to be aware of where your time is going

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Gabriela Krawczyk

without the shame and guilt.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

Because, again, we're humans. We're not AI. We're not robots. And sometimes our output is through the roof on one day and we're extremely productive and we, you know,

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Gabriela Krawczyk

do amazing in our task list at the end of the day is empty. Some days, one task that you thought would take you 30 minutes takes you the entire day.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

And that's okay. That happens. Right. The most important thing is to just not lose sight of where you're going. So I feel that like six months ago I just really didn't have clarity of

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Gabriela Krawczyk

what the next version of myself should be. So then the realization that like, okay, it's also not like I go from here to here. Like, no, there's like steps three, two and three that I kind of should go through for my own sake.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

Which is what you mentioned about going from, you know, being someone who does everything executes everything delivers the service to someone who trains someone else to deliver the service and then being someone that then manages a team that then delivers the service and then being someone that then leads the vision of the service that gets delivered and then leads a team that delivers that work.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

It's just it's one thing at a time.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

And I feel that

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Gabriela Krawczyk

being in the program,

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Gabriela Krawczyk

having someone to talk to that, meaning you, that works with hundreds of other agency owners and has been working with hundreds of other agency owners for many years. You've seen other people struggle with very similar things that then you're able to help out with that clarity, help out with the path to that vision of okay, if right now.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

The main thing is that like I do not manage my time at all. Start there. Start with like getting your calendar under control, putting some boundaries in place. Emails don't have to be responded to within five minutes.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

It's okay to turn off your notifications.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

And

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Gabriela Krawczyk

I would say to like wrap it up is everything comes down to intentional intention, wanting to be intentional about how and when you do things and like coming down to the communication about how and when you communicate with people and how you use your time to build the things that you want to build. Whether that is a business, whether that is, you know, you

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Gabriela Krawczyk

know, building your personal life, getting to a point where you have freedom to, you know, have a family or financial stability, travel more and so on and so forth. If

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Gabriela Krawczyk

you have the intention that you want to get out of the situation,

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Gabriela Krawczyk

I feel that joining a program with like minded people that are in the same journey as you is a great first step.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

And I think to wrap it up, this

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Gabriela Krawczyk

brainstorming of an answer,

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Gabriela Krawczyk

just to say that like

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Gabriela Krawczyk

there's a great book also that I recommend everyone to read, which is Be Your Future Self Now. That's also a very easy, very easy read that kind of sheds light on mindset and habit changes and stuff like that about how do you go from someone that feels like life is just doing everything to you to being someone who takes control of everything you do and then you build the life you want to live. So reading that book was also great. And just a reminder that like you are the average of the people you hang out with. So if you're hanging out with people that are not in the same path or that are not seeking to grow and be better and live a more balanced life, you're probably not going to get there yourself. So that's why I feel that a coaching program like yours, Jesse, is so impactful because that community aspect is very important

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Gabriela Krawczyk

because then maybe you click with someone and then you are just reinforcing the good habits in each other and then reminding each other that like, okay, if you have a slip up, it's okay. Let's get back up. Let's focus on what is the most important thing.

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Gabriela Krawczyk

I would love to be a repeat guest. Totally okay with that.

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(Music)

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