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:
- The belief that we won’t succeed in anything – in work, or in play.
- 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.
- 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!
- 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.