Let’s look at 2 familiar scenarios and how to harness your brain
Today, this beautiful fall day, our topic is less sexy than the fall colors: time and tasks. This cake slice lives on the third layer of the Productivity Success Cake -in the productivity layer. It’s important because there are sometimes false ideas that to do a task, you just write down ‘Jones Project’ and you get ‘Jones Project’ done in your to-do list. NOT TRUE!
I am going to show you two different methods to do this. Pay close attention.
Method One: “Okay, today I want to do the Jones Project. I want to exercise, I want to make client outreach calls, and I want to figure out my health insurance”. I would say that this isn’t bad because you’re actually doing something to plan your day.
However, a better way to do all this is to dial it down to specifics….see below.
Method Two:
6.00am, get up
6.00am – 6.15am Coffee and stretch
6.15am to 6.45am Shower and dress
6.45am to 7.00am Breakfast
7.00am to 7.20am Drop off son
7.20am to 7.45am Meditate and set intentions
8.00am Jones Project
Notice I didn’t add, “check my email.”
Pro tips:
Within the Jones Project, start a new list. “Jones Project” is not a task. It’s a project. There are many situations like Jones. Maybe it’s a client proposal, maybe it’s a letter or letters you have to send out – it’s more than just a simple ‘pick up the phone and call somebody’ and you already know who you’re going to call. For each PROJECT, there are multiple steps. Those multiple steps come with their own unknowns and their fears behind the unknowns, and that’s what causes procrastination.
In Method Two, notice that I’m adding the preparation to my day. You may want to add things like affirmations and whatever you want to do to get ready for your day. Once you look at your PROJECT, start with an outline. Scope of work? Timeline? Gather materials? Each one of these is its own little list.
Ask yourself, “to start the Jones Project, what do I need for that?” Stuck? Many times just gathering the materials will help you get going. I have worked a lot with salespeople who might, for example, want to call four prospects or four clients every single day, but it just never gets done. What I suggest is to pre-think about that list of people that you are going to be calling, the phone numbers and all the information so that when you get down to doing the task, you’ve already got the list, it’s already set up. You don’t have to wonder “Who am I going to call?”. Lets face it, nobody wants to pick up the phone anymore.
To sum up, planning ahead with steps may not feel sexy, but it sure helps to remove procrastination. How about you?
One of my community members has reached out to me about managing your time so that you have the best income within the time that you have.
They write, “I have a problem with giving my time to the projects that will bring me the income now”. What I’m hearing: this person knows that they need to change their time management, such that they are being very deliberate about how they spend their time, so that they have the best income for the smallest amount of time. This person is a parent and has a lot of responsibilities outside of their business.
As a reminder, time management falls in the 3rd layer of the Productivity Success Cake, (the Productivity layer), above health and environment. Therefore, before we do anything on our time management, we want to make sure that our health is in a “good enough” place, (doesn’t have to be perfect), and that our environment is in a “good enough” place (doesn’t have to be perfect!). You can complete the Productivity Success Cake quiz here, completely free, and see where you rate (for your own purposes) on that cake.
Now, when we dug a little deeper and the writer went into more detail about this issue, they said that they had tried different things, but that they believed what was getting in the way was:
believing that ‘everything is valuable’
The person writing in with this issue knows that time needs to get slotted to a certain kind of work (where money comes), and yet this belief ‘everything is valuable’ is preventing it. And if this is valuable, then it all has to get done. What I know about having everything needing to be done at the same time, is this is a recipe for overwhelm. When we’re in overwhelm we don’t do anything. We become stuck; we become stagnant. In flight or freeze, that’s freeze – what we don’t want to do. So going back to the beginning, we don’t want to believe that everything is important. When we believe that everything is important and therefore needs to get done, we don’t do anything.
Here’s where prioritization becomes really important.
Then there are some other things that this person wrote to me. This person found that what they know to make money (albeit inconsistent), it felt boring, repetitive, & unfulfilling. This person was thinking, ‘building my business requires many things working together in a set routine, but I can’t make myself do the same thing every day. I get bored and gravitate towards tasks that feed my creativity’. What it takes to create that momentum and build on that momentum is known, and yet there’s this yearning, this boredom, this lack of dopamine, this lack of creativity.
Behind this, there might be a belief that it’s all or nothing. Here is what it may sound like: “either I do these boring things and I make money, or I have fun and I’m creative and I don’t make the kind of money I want to”. So do you see how these beliefs start to really impact what’s going on?
Now let’s address ‘inconsistent income’. Money was coming in, but it felt inconsistent. When the inconsistent money came in, this person realized, “hang on, I need to do some automation to get more consistency.” That automation was probably pretty boring. So now we’re back to the real problem: “It’s boring to make money. I really want to be creative”.
Well, I have some really beautiful news for you. It does not HAVE to be that way.
The way I teach things and the way I run my own world, my own life and my own business is that fun, joy, and creativity are not mutually exclusive to earning an amazing living. Not just a good living, but an amazing living. These things can and will and do (and actually I believe must) coexist. Joy and income are not opposite sides of the spectrum.
I recommend that your first step to get to a joyous place and really dial in to be able to earn the income you deserve is to download your Unscatter My Life guide. What you’ll find is that there’s a roadmap.
The Roadmap: Decide, Discern, Discover, Practice, and Celebrate. The person who wrote in with their conundrum is in the “Decide” step, because the decision must be made. “Do I really want this? Why do I really want this? What do I have to gain? What do I have to lose?” Lack of decision slowly kills us and will completely put a cap on greatness. We can only operate in that kind of a situation for so long.
So- say this person decides “You know what? I’m done with this crap. I’m going to go ahead and do these steps”. The step after Decide is Discern and that’s where we really dig in to what we love, what we’re good at, what the world needs, and what we can get paid for.
Before we ever get to that Productivity Success Cake (which is Discover), we really dial in on the Discern step. When we’re so deeply discerning, then that serves as our north star. The problem is not being able to focus on the things that make us money, as that’s the presenting problem. The real issue is some beliefs that are behind here, and therefore actions that then support those beliefs (i.e. when I make money, it has to be boring. It has to be the same thing all the time, and it has to be unfun). guarantee you that you’ll stay in that loop until you die. So we don’t want that. We want you to turn that around, make a big decision, a big bold decision.
Download the guide, do the exercises and make your decision, and from there you can go into the discernment.
That was a lot. I can’t wait to support you. Once you download that guide, there’s a place where you can have a free call with me so that you get your own roadmap and should you decide to take that step now, you’ll be on the road to deeply discerning and therefore acting in your own best interest. And that’s why I exist in the world. So I will hopefully see you on that call. It will blow your mind and change things for the better. What do you have to lose?
“What’s your biggest challenge as an entrepreneur?”
This question was asked recently in one of my groups. I was looking at the responses, and what I was noticing was there was a very large percentage of answers having to do with time management, focus, consistency, and believing in ourselves.
Some of the responses were….
Balancing family time and business time;
Just plain old time management;
Managing my own time, not enough time in the day,
Getting rest; I never sleep.
For this article, I am focusing on time management: sleep because several people brought up SLEEP in their responses. In this series, time management for the distracted entrepreneur, this week we are in the health layer. Next week I’m going to move up to the environment layer, and today I’m going to stay in the health layer with a focus on sleep.
Many times I hear: “ I want to get more things done in my day.” When I’m coaching people, whether it be in my Discover Your Greatness through the Productivity Success Cake program, or high level one-to-one, what ends up happening is an “unpeeling.” We peel back the layers of what is going on. So for example if my client wants to get up earlier….we have to start with bedtime.
Get a slice of your Productivity Success Cake here
Now you can see that time management in the day actually begins the night before. Since we are talking about the night before, we want to talk about Sleep. So today, that’s why I want to focus on Sleep.
I’d like to leave you with a practical tip and a thought provoking question. First, the question.
If I say I’d like to go to bed by 10:30 PM, for example, what’s preventing that? And usually the answer is “things that are important” to you. So maybe you are spending time with loved ones watching TV or maybe you are doing projects late at night because it is light out later. Whatever it is, you value THAT THING in the moment over getting to bed.
Now for the practical tip.
You can do this with an Android, or with an iPhone. If you take that home button on the right hand side, and you do three clicks, you get a red tone to your screen, and that red tone blocks out the blue light.
The blue light keeps us awake at night. It lights up a certain part of our brain that doesn’t allow us to rest. So if you are looking to get more sleep, focus on sleep for the next week or two…the SLEEP slice of your cake.
Try it, and, if you’re having trouble with it, you can always send me an email. You can also join the UnScatterMe Facebook Community and say, Hey, I’m having trouble with the sleep slice. Does anybody want to join in with me and we can support one another?
We are all in this together…. baking our cakes! If you are REALLY interested in getting faster, consistent results, please know that there is an opportunity coming up to go even DEEPER into the cake process so you can truly level your life up beyond what you might have imagined.
So, if you are wondering “how do I really get more support with this?”
Mark your calendars for the 5th of September, because we are going to be doing Time management for the Distracted Entrepreneur in a workshop format from 11:00 to 1:00 Eastern. There is a fee for this meaty opportunity. And half goes to my favorite charity!
I will be putting the link in the comments below and you will want to sign up for that and you can start now. So start with your sleep. Try out the red light idea, and let me know your results!
If sleep is not your issue, try something else on the health layer of that cake, and see how you do.
Start with a strong foundation of health, so that I can help you with your time management. See you Sept 5!
Book your space on the Time Management Workshop here
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.
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.
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.
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 🙂
In the last blog, we looked at ways to control our energy levels and how to discover what in our life affects them on a day to day basis.
But, what about those times when our levels are at a high? How can we keep from wasting those precious feelings?
3 ways to keep your energy at the max:
Be selective. Good intentions are one thing, but if you spread that energy too thin, there will only be one loser. We all know someone, who, when we come away from a conversation or encounter, makes us feel drained. Who, when we ask a simple, “How are you?” will give us chapter and verse on every little thing going wrong in their lives. You know, the “glass half-empty” kinda gal?
These people simply suck us dry of any good vibes and leave us not only carrying our own concerns, but theirs too. Don’t let them! Steer a wide berth from these “Emotional Vampires”, these people who are just going to bring you down and say, “Not today, thanks!”
Look at your goals. Funnel your positive, light-shining energy in to what YOU want to achieve. Your goals. Not anyone else’s, – yours. Create a list of what you want to achieve and think big here – don’t limit your dreams and then focus that energy into a plan of action. Remember, little steps achieve big things and don’t let your energy be depleted by set backs along the way. You’re in this for the long-haul, remember?
Do what you love. Why are you spending time and emotional energy on those tasks that you HATE? That’s a sure-fire way of depleting your energy tanks. Instead, identify and recognise those tasks you dislike, or that you spend too long on and either find someone else who loves that kind of thing (and make their day), or eliminate them in some other way. Can they be broken down into smaller, less onerous tasks, for instance?
Lastly, remember, you’re in control. These are your energy levels, your resources, the things that make you tick that we’re talking about. You wouldn’t run a car without fuel, so why would you run your body without investing some care and long-term maintenance on it?
Pay yourself some attention and, I promise, you’ll be reaping the benefits forever after.
In December, those of you who were on the Lunchtime Love Group Coaching call decided to dream, plan, and Kickstart 2018. There was talk of vision boards and planning. In January, we overcame our obstacles.
Now, as we move through the first quarter of 2018 in full swing, we have our game face on. We are ready, we are headlong into the New Year, with new clients, and new opportunities! Right? If this is you, you may have wanted this “yesterday”- and are feeling a little impatient if it is not “quite happening yet.” Perhaps that impatience has led to not completely planning; kind of “winging it” and trying “lots of stuff.” Maybe you are busy listening to a lot of webinars, and reading a lot of things from “gurus” to help you succeed. Maybe.
I have lots of experience with this, and it’s not all pretty. For years, there I was, the Queen Of Productivity, doing lots of things and not getting very far. I was having fun, I was “organized enough” and I had clients. But I was totally missing the Real Boat…which is the boat to Success on My Terms. I’d love to share with you how I turned my boat around and how you can do the same, if this resonates with you. We can do a deeper dive into ensuring your success at our complimentary Lunchtime Love Group Coaching on Monday February 5, at high noon Eastern time.
What changed for me and how can it help you?
There were two main shifts for me to reach what I consider success.
First:
I focused. Before 2015, I was doing so many things. I was organizing. I was speaking. I was giving workshops. I was doing webinars. I was teaching. I was coaching. I was Evernote Consulting. I was even a contracted rental coordinator! Wow! Imagine the cash I was bringing in. Right? Wrong. I was spread too thin, and, as a single mother, I had a crazy amount of guilt around leaving my kids alone for too long, so I worked less, oh my goodness…not pretty. I felt like a failure when I looked at my bank account with bleary eyes from the exhaustion. At the end of 2015 I decided to focus on coaching. Each year since then I have watched my available free time increase, my income increase, and my sanity and peace of mind return.
Second:
I learned and implemented a system. While I did have a system(s), they were not as cohesive or comprehensive as they needed to be for my own success. I was the proverbial “shoemaker without good shoes.” I invested in a “back end office system” called the Coaches’ Console. Since I decided to focus on coaching (it was either that or get a job), I decided I’d better invest and get serious. It was hands-down the best move I have ever made. It took a while! I had to get trained in the system and un-do some stuff and re-do some stuff. That was not so easy. I had to say NO to the “fun stuff” on the weekends (the was really hard for me since I love fun) so I could say YES to being financially successful, as I learned and practiced my new system.
One of the owners of the Coaches’ Console, Melinda Cohan, has a saying that goes like this. “When preparedness meets opportunity, success is inevitable.” I might have that phrase “slightly wrong” but the intent is there. We must be ready for success (being prepared). Then, we must take the steps to be successful (noticing/harnessing the opportunity). If we skip either of those, we will not find the success we deserve, and we will start telling ourselves how undeserving we are…and…well, let’s not “go there”.
Instead, let’s discuss the steps to take, to insure your success in the new year; being prepared for your success.
Step One: Determine what “success” looks like for you. Dare to dream, then quantify it. Get specific. (For me, this was the Focus)
Step Two: Inventory. What’s working? What isn’t? What are the gaps? (For me this was also the Focus)
Step Three: Invest. Where do you need to invest? Do you need software, hardware, staff? Education? More hours available to work (if you are working less than 40 hrs. per week)? (For me, this was my Coaches’ Console back end office system)
Step Four: Identify milestones. Measure. (The nice part about my system is it helps me Measure)
Step Five: Hold yourself accountable. Join a mastermind. Hire a coach who is works in your industry and/or with your specific challenge to achieve the maximum possible results in the shortest amount of time. (I have both of these and they are super helpful! We cannot do it alone!)
