Stop Chasing Time And Learn How To Make It Work For You – Q&A

We all want to stop chasing time, right?

On this podcast episode, Monique was interviewed by Tony Grebmeier (CEO, Entrepreneur, Author and Podcaster). They talked about how difficult life experiences taught Monique to stop chasing time, and how she is helping busy entrepreneurs and business owners to reduce their working hours while having a sustainable business, using the framework that she created, The T.I.M.E. Method.

You can play the episode here below or if you prefer, you can go ahead and read this article.

Enjoy it.

Q&A Tony Grebmeier & Monique Lindner

What is your definition of success?

My definition of success is when you can live free of any prejudices pre-judgment and expectations from the people in your life and live by your own rules.

You were 25 seconds clinically dead, when did this happen?

I was 19 years old and a very structured organized person. I had already worked for 6 years by that time, I started working when I was 14. I was in college and school, and I also worked full time.

I was born with two chronic illnesses and one of them decided to kick in a little bit harder than it wold usually do. I was working an average of 18 hours a day, sleeping only 2 or 3 hours a day for six years.

What is life like today and how you became free?

Germans are well known for their structure and organization, so I was very german in that sense.

Fast forwarding to today, I am still organized and structured but also very different.

Nowadays I wake up at 5 AM because I believe in chronobiology and energy types. I naturally wake up at 5 AM. I slept 4 hours a night for the past 20-something years. I’m now training myself to sleep 6 hours a day.

Other than that, I do a morning routine, this is not structured, I go by what I feel I need the most. Normally it has to do with energy recharging, some movements and nature.

I start working at 9 AM, I work 4 or 5 hours, then I have lunch, hang out with friends, spend a lot of time hanging out in beautiful places watching people and studying human behavior.

What brought you to Thailand?

I left Germany for the first time after I died when I was 19. I started traveling fourteen years ago, and I moved around the world. I have been to 44 countries, and I lived and worked in 8 countries.

Six years ago when I left Germany for good and I was traveling full time, I kept coming back to Thailand because I was fascinated by the culture which was so different from Germany and being able to live life without having to chase time was amazing. I learned this in Thailand.

This brought me to my knees. Wanting to have things on time, being impatient, and waiting for people for hours, but now I’m pretty relaxed about it.

Basically, the people and the culture brought me and let me stay in Thailand.

What was the call to write the book The T.I.M.E. Method, A No Bullshit Guide to Creating an Abundance of Time?

There are a few things that came together. A lot of people come to work with me and say “Someday I want to do this”, and I always say, “Someday is not on the calendar”.

You need to choose a day that you want to make it happen. Otherwise, You will never make it happen, unless something really tragic happens because pain is the trigger for change. I never had anyone in my life who said something like “Oh I am so successful and I have it all, now I am going to change something”. This is not how change happens. You have to be somewhere in pain or discomfort to change, so you have to put a date or a year in your calendar to achieve your goal.

I set a year in which I wanted to write the book.

My friend who is an author in Germany told me that I should write a book and share my work. And I was really confused thinking things like… “Will someone really like to read a book that I write?” and he made me open my eyes. This was 6 years ago before I left Germany.

During the pandemic, one of my friends told me that writing a book is really easy, and he shared with me the steps to do it.

And two weeks later my book coach came up with her course on how to write a book, and then I thought it was the perfect moment.

Where can people find the T.I.M.E. METHOD?

People can find my book on the website and all of the famous online bookstores. If you want to support business, try an indie store.

What can of Feedback do you receive from people using your book as a tool to have more time?

The T.I.M.E. method is the framework that I teach to my clients. There are 4 pillars: Time management, Impactful leadership, Mindset Mastery, and Energy Efficiency.

Most people say they have not been able to incorporate time management in their lives. But because I broke it down to the tiniest details but as simply as possible, they finally understand how to integrate time management into their lives very easily without having to do more things.

This is what it is really all about. I don’t want them to spend more time managing their time.

“I” is for impactful leadership, I talk about how you can be a leader for yourself, and you don’t need a team to lead. Showing up powerfully when nobody is watching.

“M” is for Mindset Mastery, and is one of the things we all kind of know, in Germany we say, if you have “ABC” you already paid half of the rent, if you have resilience and you know how to shift your brain, you already paid half of the rent. The rest is just implementation.

“E” is for Energy efficiency is really important to me, it helped me to heal both of my chronic illnesses almost by 95%. I have so much time because I am very efficient with my energy. I kind of know when the energy is not right, and I avoid these places. I spent weeks or months in solitude traveling alone and climbing mountains and volcanoes, and I feel a lot of people are afraid of their own minds, and they don’t want to face it.

Energy Efficiency has a lot to do with being efficient with your energy, but also detox from everything around: detox from people, detox from materialistic things, all these things that clutter your mind, your heart, your soul, your spirit. Get rid of them.

Time is not an asset and something that you can calculate, but time is your life. Every second that is taken away, is a second that is taken from your life. I died and I came back, and you know, I can tell you that the time in between, those 25 seconds that I was clinically dead, they were not fun because I saw all these unimportant, unnecessary, uncomfortable truths of the way how I lived my life, which is the main reason why I changed the way I am living. So you have a chance to change basically every second of your life. You don’t have to wait for Monday or Sunday, you can make the decision now, and make the time in your life count.