Month: June 2023

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Goal Setting Growth More time in my day Organization Planning Positive Thinking Time strategies

Counterintuitive thoughts that will change overthinking and dancing with overwhelm

Let’s get back to Whelm!

It’s summer of 2023 and…we’re back! There’s essentially no (that I can see) leftover pandemic-shut-down things that affect us. Hooray! We have a lot of pent up desire to do a lot of things, and especially to have a lot of fun. I want that for you: to have a lot of fun! I want you to enjoy your summer, enjoy your life, and to do the things that really matter to you – and to be the person that you really want to be. However, sometimes because we want to do all these things, we can over commit and then we dance with overwhelm.I love dancing, and I don’t love dancing with overwhelm. How about yourself?

Today we are focusing on avoiding overcommitting and dancing with overwhelm in the context of creating a summer that you want.

Now that it’s July, here are some tips for a No Overcommit Summer.

  1. Remember that you get to decide to have the summer that you want. You are allowed to believe that you have all the time you need. My mantra: “What if I had all the time I need?” can be shared freely! From that mindset and from that perspective, I think automatically we’re more grounded. When we’re more grounded, we make far more rational decisions. We make decisions from our gut, from our heart and from our soul, and not from a place of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) and feeling as though we have to commit to everything.  
  2. Be grounded with lists. Making sure you’re grounded means different things to different people. It may mean creating a ‘not-to-do’ list. It may mean creating a ‘nice to-do’ list. The other day, I did that:  I wrote down what I wanted to do for the week, and as I was doing this I realized I could pull out a “nice” (not necessary) list. So I made a line at the bottom of my to-do list and created the Nice To Do list. This was so empowering!

Continue reading or watch the video

  1. Be grounded with Sleep. When you look at your schedule, make sure the first thing you do is say, “okay, this is my sleep time”. That sleep time could be different in the summer, and you still need sleep, right? 
  2. Be grounded with Focus time. Ask yourself “when am I best?” or “When am I at my best focus?” Make sure you’re clear about that. 
  3. Be grounded with deciding: One overarching thing to remember about being grounded is being totally at peace with deciding. You may know about the five step UNSCATTER process starting with 1) Decide; 2) Discern; 3) Discover; 4)Practice; and 5)Celebrate. That first step, DECIDE, is in RED because it’s a really big deal!  In my group programs, that ‘decide’ is in a big red ball. In fact, if you go to my website, I’ve got an entire 10 page guide to help you DECIDE (just enter your name and email). When we keep our options open because we’re “not sure” and there’s too many options and too many ideas, and we are thinking to ourselves “maybe I’ll make this plan, but maybe I’ll cancel, or maybe I’ll make these reservations and maybe I’ll cancel, or maybe I’ll buy something and then I have to return it” that is so much scatter and so much energy wasted.  However, if you just take a moment, get grounded, and then make a decision from that grounded place, you can avoid all that back and forth and get a ton of time back. You get a lot closer to the truth: you have all the time you need (see tip number one!)

BONUS TIP: When you’re looking at your calendar and you schedule your vacations, you schedule your sleep, you schedule things that you’re already completely committed to, and one final thing. Go deep into your value system and say “what is my most outlandish desire?” Find a place in your schedule for THAT!

In fact, I did that yesterday. I had this outlandish desire that -in truth -I didn’t believe I could actually get. I would like a whole weekend completely and totally to myself, where I had no phone calls, no friends, no family members, no work, just absolutely, positively, for me and no else but me to do as much or as little as I want to. I have scheduled that, and it is the third weekend in September. I can’t even believe I’ve done it, but I have. So that is my most outlandish desire.

I wonder- what is yours? Let me know. What is your most outlandish desire that you’re almost afraid to say out loud? I’m going to have you say it and or type it below. And then- as a bonus – put it on your calendar. It took me 15 minutes to try to find this one weekend. It wasn’t easy. I’m a busy person, and I am so excited that I found this because the truth is that you have all the time that you need overcommitting, committing and dancing with overwhelm is a habit that you can break. 

Have fun and stay in Whelm!

Warmly,

Carol

PS:  I will see you again in two weeks.  I’m on vacation starting Monday, July 3rd. My next blog/video will be sent out on Sunday July 16.

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Get Organized Goal Setting More time in my day Organization Positive Thinking Productivity Time strategies

 4 practical tips for blocking out your time mindfully this summer

An easy way to focus and get things done

We are officially past the summer solstice, which in the Northern hemisphere is the longest day of the year. It is timely, therefore, to put our attention on the summertime; this season is very short and very precious here in the Northeast US.

On Monday, June 19th (which is Juneteenth in the United States: a holiday to mark the abolishment of slavery) I ran a  workshop to expand the Time Management in Summer for the Distracted Entrepreneur topic. In this article, I’ll highlight an important, practical, and immediately actionable portion of that workshop: 4 practical tips for blocking out your time mindfully.

  1. Step One:  Get a blank calendar – an old school one with squares – something you can print (like this).  Next, get several colored pencils.  Pick a color. Color in date squares for items to which you’ve already committed. For example, anything on the weekend that you’ve already committed to, any holidays you’ve committed to, your work schedule etc.  Get those all blocked out. What’s left is the time that you have to work with. Doing this visually is really powerful because you can see how much time you have left in a given month. We really just have a little more than two months as early September is culturally “autumn.”
  1. Step Two: Pick your top 3  desires this summer by category.  Sample categories: beach, work, children, fun, planning. You may start with more, and pick the top 3 categories.

Continue reading or watch the video below.

  1. Step Three: Pay special attention to the category that you wrote down in third place.  Why?  That third category is the one that you really need to place your focus on. Most likely, it lights you up the most and the one that you dismiss the most, or the one that’s perhaps the most important for your health and wellbeing. Examples of the third category might be: self care, gardening, or program creation. For that third category, create actionable items. Using the example of self care, actionable items could be ‘move every day’ or ‘make sure your body is eating organic and fresh’ or ‘allow yourself small joys like special cups of coffee’ 
  2. Step Four: Add the bullet pointed action items into your calendar. Use a new color for this. If you put it on your calendar and do not take action on it, don’t give up. Talk to a friend, talk to your coach,  talk to or DM me and say, “oh my gosh, how can I get this on the calendar AND pay attention to it?”

Repeat step 4 for each category and place it on the calendar.

There you have it: 4 steps to mapping out your summer mindfully. 

Bonus tip: allow white space. White space is time where you’re not planning anything because that white space gives you that ‘stare out the window’ time and that ‘stare out the window’ time is in fact your creative time. You are in fact blocking out creative time, but also block out some white space time because that white space time gets your mind flowing freely and it gets your creativity big. And it also helps you feel really grounded – and you can’t do any of this stuff very well without being grounded. 

If you want a lot more of this, I am running a summer program. You can start July 20 and you must sign up by June 29. Imagine:   your summer is not waste, it does not go through your fingertips, and you wake up on Labor Day (if you’re in the United States) and you feel like “I did it!”. 

That’s how I want you to feel. Let’s do this!

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5 steps to make sure that your summer is not overwhelming

Balance your time this summer, step by step

Summertime! Shifts. 

There’s gorgeous greenery around me, even though right here in New Hampshire where I live, it’s been pretty rainy lately. We do get beautiful moments of sunshine, which I very much enjoy. So if you are like me, summer brings shifts. Those shifts bring different ways to manage our time, especially as entrepreneurs, and particularly when you are an entrepreneur who considers themselves periodically scattered. It’s easy to get pulled in one direction or another direction. 

Summertime! Push and Pull.

There’s kids, and there’s this idea that you have some fun in your summer, but yet you need a plan for the fall, and you still need to create revenue for yourself during the summer.  Most of us can’t just go two or three months without having money come in so there’s this ‘push and pull’ and worry. And now that Covid is done, (thank goodness, right?) there’s a lot more opportunities and kind of a continued pent-up desire to do these things that in 2020 and in 2021, for the most part, we really just couldn’t do. 

What is behind the feeling of push, pull, lack of “discipline” and feeling of inertia?

All these “pushes and pulls and things you have to do” does get overwhelming, right? On Monday, June 12th, at my complimentary Wisdom Warriors Group Coaching, we had a lot of people to gather around and start to talk about this exact issue.

What we uncovered was that deep down below the ‘push and the pull’ and the stuff that’s happening are three things that were below the surface, not allowing us to stay focused on what we want. They are:

  1. The belief that we won’t succeed in anything – in work, or in play.  
  2. Difficulty in decision making:  At the core of some of the decisions is the belief that if we make the wrong decision, we won’t succeed. What do we say ‘no’ to? For example, I have a client and one of the very beginning conversations I had with this person was, ‘you’ve got a lot going on here. How about we just take a hard look at what’s going on and just stay with 20% of the most important stuff and take that other 80% and just push it to the side for now’. This person had a really hard time doing that, and as a result is still actually struggling with managing their time, but slowly we’re getting there.  
  3. We don’t want to proclaim what is holding us back. That’s big. Now these things do take time, of course, and in one hour we’re not going to figure all of that out – but in that one hour we had on Monday, we really did go deep and figured out what was wrong. 

My own dilemma with decision making and FOMO (number 2 above, with a little mix of 1 and 3)

Here’s a little story about myself and my children. One of them has left home now – he’s on his own, and then the other one is a teenager and he’s doing pretty well, but I do still need to parent him quite a bit.  When my kids were small, and I was a single mom (certainly for a longer time than I was a non-single mom) I really wanted that downtime but yet I never took it from myself. And I said I wanted it, but yet my actions didn’t equal what I said I wanted. 

Unless I got to crisis level, I wouldn’t take my downtime. I’ll tell you the truth, this is still something I’m working on, and I am so much better than I used to be. It’s a work in progress.  I didn’t realize most of the time that I was doing too much. I didn’t realize that, especially in the summertime, I had so much FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). I wanted my kids to have all the experiences, to do all the things, and you know what the belief was? 

The admitting, the proclaiming what’s holding me back took me years to figure this one out. I really believed that I would not be a good mother if I worked too much, and if I didn’t allow them every single experience that I thought other people would be giving their children.  I did not think about that consciously; it was very much on a subconscious level – that was a belief. These beliefs are no joke and they are part of the equation. 

This all brings us to….

Five steps to make sure that your summer is not overwhelming.

I bet you never thought I’d get to this part of the article. Here they are!

  1. Get clear:

DEEP INQUIRY: What do you want? What is getting in the way?

2. Map it out: 

PUT PEN TO PAPER: Create milestones for each month and times on the calendar to save space for your priorities

3. Stick to your plan 

PREPARE FOR THE INEVITABLE: Be wary of that push and pull…it’s sneaky!

4. Create Accountability

HERE’S YOUR INSURANCE! Buddy up with a friend or group

 5. Celebrate

OFTEN OVERLOOKED: The small wins count! Don’t ignore these!

The first step-  identifying what is what you want and what is getting in the way, was done on Monday at Wisdom Warriors..  However, because we didn’t get to the calendaring, prioritization, creating those milestones, or doing the time management part in time that we had, I am offering a pop-up workshop that you cannot afford to miss. It will be a beefy 2 hrs and packed with gold nuggets to carry you through the summer.

IT’S TOMORROW- Monday June 19th 

12 noon to 2:00 PM Eastern. 

So if you’re in Eastern Time, all you have to do is take an extra hour of your lunchtime, it’ll be well worth it for you. I’ll be sharing with you the ‘Anti-Overwhelm Solution’ as part of the 5 steps above.

What will the Anti-Overwhelm Solution do for me?

You will stop feeling overwhelmed at the idea of work and preparation, fun and the beach, and kids and childcare and that they needed some downtime – but hang on, ‘what about my business? How do I plan for these things? And how do I still feel like I can maintain that free flow?’

I believe in you. I know you can create exactly the life you want. I know that it does take a step by step by step approach and you want it all to be done in 30 minutes or 60 minutes – but the truth is that in two hours, you can really get moving. 

You are maybe also thinking ‘well, heck, I didn’t go to Wisdom Warriors, so I’ve already missed that part’, right? Here’s what I’m going to do for you. I’m going to take the teaching part of that session and I’m going to go ahead and include it in your package so that when you sign up for the workshop on the 19th, you’re also going to get that recording of the teaching, which is 15 minutes, so you are right up to speed with everybody else and so that you hit the ground running.

It’s 12:00 PM Eastern, on Monday 19th.  Rock on and sing with the birds, allow the beauty, have the wind in your hair, have the sun in your face, and enjoy your summer. You deserve it. You can have it all just one step at a time. Remember that I believe in you- and I will see you Monday. 

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Boundaries Get Organized More time in my day Time strategies

5 steps to make sure your summer is peaceful, productive and profitable

You don’t have to choose between profit and enjoyment

We are right on the cusp of the longest day of the year, and some of the kids are starting to get out of school.  Perhaps if you’ve got kids, you’re feeling it already – that the summer has started for you.  Sometimes, as entrepreneurs, we are stuck in this funky place where we want to really enjoy our summer….yet we feel the “pull” of “omg I can’t leave my company in the dust!”

Summer might look like spending a lot of time on the beach with our kids. It might be with our grandkids. It might be taking an extended trip. Yet, we need to keep the business going. We need to continue on with some basics through our work. It also may be that your work gets busier in the summer. Maybe it’s a really busy time for you and that adds another level of confusion. And then on top of it all, you might consider yourself a distracted entrepreneur or a scattered entrepreneur…which does not help with the “being pulled” feeling.

To get to a place of peace, confidently make those decisions, and ditch regrets…follow these 5 steps.

  1. Plan your time off. If you haven’t already done this, first and foremost, plan your vacations – even if your vacations are just a few long weekends. I’ve got three weeks of vacation set up (I wanted four, I ended up with three. I’m okay with it).
  1. Decide if this is enough. I was going to take the whole of July off, and due to some other circumstances that came in, I decided to go with the first two weeks of July and then one week in August, and I’m okay with it. Would I like to have four weeks? I would. Next year, I’m going to try again. I’m going to try to take the whole of July off. So, even if it’s just a week or a few long weekends, it doesn’t matter. Plan those vacations, and then be okay with it. 
  1. Ask: what are the important milestones in my work/ business this summer? Write down where you wish to be on September 1st and look backward. One way to make it personal is to write a letter to yourself dated Sept 1st. Write how you feel. For example, “wow, you had a great summer. While you took every weekend as a long weekend, you were able to work Monday through Thursday, 8am- 12pm. And you were able to create [these certain milestones for yourself that are important for you and your business].”
  1. Work backward. Create a plan for yourself so that  you’ll be able to achieve those milestones. 
  1. Review and adjust mindfully. This is something that we can often forget – to have a system that reminds us of what we said we wanted. Remember, while we love to be nimble as entrepreneurs, it’s important to be in the decision making piece of changing our minds. 

For example, say your milestone was to work Monday through Thursday, 8am to 12pm, and to do x, y, z – but something came up on a Wednesday that was a once in a lifetime opportunity. As long as you go back to what you said your milestones were, and ask yourself, “will this affect it negatively?” 

If the answer is no, it will not affect my milestones negatively when I adjust accordingly, you then make tweaks. Maybe you work a whole day for a day or two on those times. You make that conscious choice and conscious decision– versus just “kind of forgetting things” and going with the flow. You honor that commitment to yourself. If you do change your mind, you change it purposefully. 

And there you have it! Those are five steps to have the summer of your dreams with productivity, peace and profitability or whatever you decide that you want. 

What is the NEXT step?

Come to my Free Wisdom Warriors tomorrow!

We’re going to talk about how to decide and still keep your options open. So that is something that I find many people have an issue with. They want to make a decision, but they don’t want to lose their options. So it’s all about time management in the summer for the Distracted Entrepreneur. 

 It’s always free at Wisdom Warriors. 

While this is usually a monthly event, I’m skipping over July, so if you don’t come on Monday, then just know that you won’t have another opportunity to go to the Free Wisdom Warriors until August 7th, because I am taking those first two weeks of July off and I’m honoring my commitment to myself – but I’ll miss you!

Join me at 12pm lunchtime Eastern on June 12th.  

  • It’s so simple
  • It’s free
  • There’s no high pressure sales for anything. 
  • It’s all, it’s all information and community and you really get clear and you know what to do next.
  • AND you feel like, “Oh my gosh, I am not alone here”. 

See you on Monday?

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Got a Summer Distraction? This will solve it.

It’s just about summer, and what I’m hearing from some of my clients is that it’s a little hard to stay focused on their goals (aka what they “said they wanted to do”) because it’s so beautiful out. I really can resonate with that.

I remember, especially at the beginning of my business, 14 years ago, I would find it difficult to really stay focused on my work, and business. I realized that it wasn’t so much for me that it was summer, but that I wasn’t as dedicated to it as I needed to be for it to be successful – and I probably had some limiting beliefs around whether I could be successful or what I should be doing instead.  

To that end, I am going to bring you through a process. You will identify what you said you wanted, (or perhaps you haven’t even said what you wanted, but you’re getting distracted) and maybe the distraction right now is how beautiful it is out.

Read on or watch the video

As I’m recording the video which goes with this blog, there are beautiful flowers behind me and the birds are singing.  It’s a beautiful day out today here in New Hampshire, and that would warrant anybody to want to play hooky, right? When you have your own business, you really can, and so that’s hard sometimes. 

The process starts with the Unscatter Your Life guide, which is available on the front page of my website (download it and go to page four). Page 4 is about how this is all going to come down to your decision and how to stay non-distracted, and is called the Wheel of Entrepreneurial Life. The Wheel is a way for you to decide what area of your life you want to focus on to change – because we can’t change everything all at once. We want to, and we try to, and we fail – so the way to make progress is just to pick one area and pick the area that’s really calling to you the most and decide what you want and how badly you want it and where you are right now. I’m not going to go into all those details because that’s all in the guide.

Guess what! I’m going to add a bonus here. The bonus comes from the workshop I did in early May, which was called ‘Spring Into Your Breakthrough’. Once you decide what it is you want and set your goal, you will take an Extra Powerful step from the spring workshop.  Example…you want to be closer to your children – that’s your goal.  You are in the ‘family’ part of the Entrepreneurial Life Wheel.  Let’s say your children are early-teenagers and they just don’t need you or want you the way they used to (it’s hard, I know as I had two of them. One of them’s gone, and the other one right now is getting to be more of a mid-teenager!). So then you want to ask yourself:

  1. ‘What is a challenge for me?’ And you’re going to say something along the lines of, ‘Well, a challenge for me might be my sadness that s/he doesn’t want to play games anymore’. So you write that down. 
  2. ‘What else is a challenge for me?’ And you might have another answer such as ‘s/he’s so busy hanging out with her/his friends that there’s hardly any time left for me.’ So you go progressively deeper. 
  3. ‘What else is a challenge for me?’ And go a little deeper.  What’s really going on for you? Maybe when you start looking at the inside like that, there are fears there. ‘I fear that s/he might get into drugs and alcohol because I’m not there all the time’. or ‘S/he might start hanging out with the wrong people’. I don’t know. 
  4. ‘What is the real challenge?’ This is where I really want you to go very, very deep.  

I did this (asking progressively deeper challenge questions) recently one-on-one with one of my VIP clients, and that client came up with his answers  – to really dial into fear of failure and fear of success.  If your answers are anything that can be connected to fear of failure or failure of success, then you are going deep enough.  In this example, it might be that you fear failure as a mom/dad.  That could be what’s at the root of it. That fear could be saying ‘What will you do with your life?’ Or it could be saying, ‘If you have more time to work / work on your business,  that will mean you need to redefine who your are’. 

Redefinition, even though we say we want it, is really a big deal. It’s no joke to redefine yourself. As long as we’re in the loop of saying ‘I want, I want…’  we get to have that as a crutch. If there’s actually something that we like, we can actually really get it,  our whole bodies are like ‘Whaaat? Alert, alert! I didn’t really want it’.

That reminds me of a little story (I’m going off on a little teeny weeny tangent and then I’ll bring it back)

When I was small, maybe four or five years old,  I wanted an inchworm for Christmas. The inchworm was one of these toys that you rode on, you sat on it and bounced and it moved forward.  That seemed so magical and far away from me. I remember going downstairs on Christmas day and seeing that inchworm in front of the Christmas tree … I couldn’t even speak, I was so dumbfounded that I got the thing I wished for, and my parents were looking at me…they can’t wait. They got the cameras ready and they’re ready to go. I was frozen; paralyzed with fear. I remember saying, “I just wanted to pull it”. And that’s all I could do. I could just pull it because the manifestation of the thing that in my head was unretrievable – I couldn’t manifest it to get it. It had shocked my system. 

It’s quite like that for us. When we say we want something and we’ve been wanting it and wanting it, we get addicted to wanting it. And in fact, if you really dial down and dig deep underneath all of this stuff, you’ll realize that that’s what’s there: the Wanting Addiction. Through the process of asking the Challenge Questions, you are empowered to decide, is this really and truly what you want? And what do you need to overcome? What kind of fears do you need to work through and get over to truly achieve it, or- perhaps the process has allowed you to determine that you don’t want it at all. 

So that’s why I love the guide, because if you download it and you really do it, it can be in and of itself transformational. And then of course there’s an option to talk to me- send me a little message saying ‘Hey, I want to talk to you about this’ – there is a free session waiting for you because it’s important – and especially at the beginning of the summer I want you to be able to enjoy your summer, and I want you to be able to do the transformation your way in a way that is so meaningful for you. 

So download the guide, ask yourself the challenge questions, set up your follow up call and, and tell me – what do you really want? Has it changed since the beginning of the year or maybe since the beginning of the quarter? What area of life does it relate to? 

I can’t wait to see you on the other side.

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