Month: May 2023

Categories
Boundaries Confidence prioritize Time strategies

Know anyone who tells you “life got in the way” of what they wanted?

Have you ever been going along just fine in your business and your life, and then all of a sudden an event occurs- seemingly out of nowhere?

Maybe a loved one had an accident, maybe your spouse lost their job, maybe a snowstorm came in and you lost your electricity, or another natural disaster. 

I call this “life getting in the way.”

On April 28th, life got in the way for me.  On this date, I was informed that my father got into a big accident – a fall. It is now almost a month later, and we are still experiencing issues from this fall, and like many other people my age, I am now faced with adding the needs of my parents to my already very busy life.

Many times, my clients tell me that’s their biggest problem: they were going along fine and then life got in the way. I have three tips to help.

  1. When you believe that things are going a little off the rails (you are going to laugh at this one), double down on your self-care.  There’s a lot of conversation around self-care. Maybe it’s ‘just take a hot bath’ or ‘go to a massage’, or ‘go get acupuncture.’ My version:  do what makes you feel like you. For me, I dance, I get out in nature, and I allow myself the pleasures that make me happy. This weekend I’m planning on going to the ocean and I’m going to lay in the warm sand and I’m going to listen to the surf and I’m going to go out to eat. And it’s going to be amazing. I  ask myself ‘How are you loving yourself right now?’ 

Read on or watch the video.

  1. Clear the deck. I am right now not accepting any new appointments. I’m not making any new plans. I’m not necessarily crowding my schedule. If anything, I’m removing things. I just did a live video over at the UnscatterMe Facebook community that showed that we removed our fence from the backyard about a month ago – and sometimes removing is a great productivity strategy.  It’s a way to see into the woods.  Before there was a fence – and now I can see into the woods. Removing is a beautiful thing, removing things from your calendar. 
  1. Set your expectations with reality. I am a high achiever. I get a lot done, and I get it done in a short amount of time, with work and at home. I was once called Kali, the Goddess who has many different hands, and I am Goddess Kali.  This new situationI find myself in, however, feels like an octopus with lots of different tentacles and a lack of clarity. To that end, I release this expectation to get to the goals that I had planned on before -because I am not Kali. God is Kali right now. I am simply Carol. I am able to do what I can do. To do that, let’s return to the first tip: taking care of herself. I have to love myself. I have to eat good food, drink plenty of water, and once in a while, have a glass of wine. I must stay active, stay out in the sunshine and in nature whenever possible.

Let me know what parts of your life might be getting in your way and what tips inspired you and what your next step is. I’d love to hear it. If I can do it, you can too 🙂

Categories
Uncategorised

How to break up with the ‘nice to do’ on your to do list

Today’s topic: breaking up with your nice to-do tasks. Sounds great, but why would you want to do that, anyhow?

Well, often when we are trying to get ahead of our to-dos, we put our head down and to go through the list, and doing that results in a feeling of being depleted. Or, perhaps there are feelings of working a lot and not getting anywhere. It’s very demotivational. These things are un-fun – and as a result, we procrastinate and we get distracted. All of the things that we believe are the problem (being distracted, not focused and so on) are actually because we are not engaged in what we’re doing. 

We believe we have to/ should be doing them – and they feel really, really ridiculously heavy. Let’s focus on releasing some of this weight, so that we feel happy, we feel strong, we feel light, & we feel expansive. If you go to the Productivity Success Cake, a lot of that (feeling of strong/light/expansive) is baked into the health layer and into the environment layer. However, what I’m going to focus on today is the productivity layer. 

In the productivity layer we have a piece called ‘Time and Tasks. In this is “breaking up with your nice to-do tasks”. Those tasks can be significant and we all have them!  For example, periodically I go through and I empty out bins of pages of ‘someday I’ll get to this,’ you know, beautiful ideas. Maybe you’ve got ideas from programs that you attended that ‘someday I’ll do this and the truth is that all of that physical clutter or clutter on your computer, it’s adding to your mental angst and you’re not getting to it anyway. So you just want to release it and break up with it. Not easy though, is it? So I’m going to tell you a little story about how a client of mine and I – we did just that.

Read on or watch the video.

I have a client and the tasks were on this person’s computer.  They were all nice and neat and assigned to this person, with a deadline.  We started by talking about deleting those tasks which were over a certain age – for example, they were 6 months overdue – but that didn’t seem right. So we considered deleting anything over a year (because if you have not done them in a year and nobody’s died, you can get rid of them), and most of them were able to be deleted. I was really curious why we could not just get rid of the rest. We discovered there were some deeply held beliefs around responsibility, and perhaps some worthiness. Also, the lack of global deleting had to do with how this person’s company was set up. The tasks that were assigned to this person should have been assigned to somebody else – but the ‘somebody else’ was not holding up their end of the bargain, and therefore, it didn’t get actioned.

So it’s kind of two- or three-pronged. It’s all about considering how much you take on, how much really is YOUR job and how much the needle moves.  

There were other tasks that were more ‘nice to-dos.’ For example – the head chatter may say, “Well, I should really do research for that client because if I did, it would make that client’s experience better in my line of work”. And that’s not untrue. However, it’s a little bit like my bins of ideas of things that I’d like to do someday in my practice (because most people I know that are creative geniuses like myself we’re always going to take a new personality exam etc…we want to learn more).  The truth of the matter is that there’s only so much time in the day and there’s only so much of us. So we must make choices. Concentrate on the things that you are not only just able to do, but that will really move the needle. 

I did a Facebook live in UnscatterMe, my online Facebook community (which I recommend that you consider joining!) and what I talked about in that community earlier today was how to prioritize. Breaking up with your ‘nice to dos’ is one way of prioritizing. Head over to the group and watch the video to see what that looks like. 

When you look at your to-dos in that piece of the cake, that time and task to-dos, if there is anything that’s a to-do of more than six months, really seriously ask yourself, is it that important? If it is, think about how you will shift your priorities to get it done. If it’s not that important, put it in a to-do list for next year, next quarter, next month, so that it’s not in your face, holding you down, weighing you down, not allowing you to be productive, not allowing you to live in your greatness, not allowing you to feel unscattered so that you can live your best, most confident, happy, entrepreneurial life that you deserve, so that you can actually do the work that you came into this world to do.

Categories
Accountability Confidence

How to cut your decision time from 20 days to 15 minutes and feel peaceful

Hello and welcome to ‘Nature Today’ with Carol. I recorded the video outdoors, and it is a beautiful May day here in New Hampshire.Today is about overwhelm and how it impacts decision making. When overwhelmed, decisions can be really hard. I just got off a call with a client and she was feeling rather overwhelmed with a big decision she had to make. She is in several courses right now to do several certifications. She needed to decide, do I go for my big certification in November, or do I wait till next April? And she said that she had until the end of this month to decide. Now, I pointed out that that was really only 20 days. And she said, “yes, I have 20 days to decide” but by the end of our 30 minute call, she had made her decision, she had a best-next-step that would get her to that decision. I believe we did that part of the call in maybe 10 or 15 minutes!  We identified what exactly was holding her back from making that next step to make that decision and that was that she needed to reach out to somebody and she wasn’t sure about reaching out to that person. Wow!

Read on, or watch the video

Decisions are multi-level. When we are going for something big, like a big certification or a big life change, I’m going to call that ‘hard change’. ‘Hard Change’ is a phrase coined by Michael Bungee Stainer. Hard change involves saying ‘no’ to what’s worked for you so far, for the present you. Let that land for a moment. The woman that I was speaking to realized that she’s going to have to say ‘no’ to some things so that she can say ‘yes’ to this larger certification. ‘Saying ‘no’ now enables you to say ‘yes’ to the promise of future rewards’. You’re going to be playing a harder long-term, bigger game with a constant temptation, a constant temptation to opt out for a short term win. 

I have another client that at the beginning of our engagement, said “I would like to do X, Y, Z and I would like you to help me out with it” and as this person went along he was finding that he was getting kind of pushed over this way and pushed over that way with things that he wanted to do in the moment. And what he’s begun to realize is that saying ‘yes’ to those things in the moment is not allowing him to get to that bigger, longer term goal. So it’s really important for you to dig deep into that bigger, longer term goal. Ask, ‘Is this something I really want?’ I’ll go back to my client earlier with the certifications – she put herself into that ‘future you’ condition when she was going to have that certification and that had her know from the bottom of the earth that this was what she was meant to do in the world, and how she would then feel. And she was able to say ‘yes, I can now take a step’. The other person that I’m talking about hasn’t done that level of discernment – so that’s why I offer my deep discernment course that starts today – May 11 as I record this. It starts today, and if you would like to join us from week two, there are still a few spots available because I now have two cohorts instead of just one. 

If this is you and you are thinking:

  • I know I need that deep discernment. I didn’t think I needed it.
  • I didn’t think I was a thing. But now that you’re telling me these stories about the ‘hard change’ and the ‘future you’ and what you have to do and how easy it sounds and how hard it actually is, I feel like I wanna know more about this deep discernment and how it can help me

If that’s you, please hit reply and let me know, and we’ll see if you’re the right fit. If it’s not you, I hope that this has informed you in some way, inspired you in some way, and I would love to know a little bit about what your big ‘aha’ is. I’m going to leave you with one more thing. If you over-plant a garden, what’s going to happen is the plants will crowd each other out and none of them will do really well. So that’s why when we garden, we also weed, we take out and we thin out to allow the plants that we want to grow to really flourish. 

That’s what I want for you in the realm of your decisions of what you really want and why, so that you accomplish those things and feel GREAT about yourself!

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