Most of what you do doesn’t matter!
It’s of no consequence and only serves to clog and clutter your mind and your schedule. What that really tells us is that doing more won’t help you unless you’re doing the ‘right’ things for you.
Is it any wonder, then, that you’re struggling to make the money you know you deserve, that you’re working way too hard and too long for the money you take home and that your business isn’t profitable yet?
At the root of this is time.
You’re already working harder and longer in an endeavour to take home the money you deserve, right? As entrepreneurs we spend lots of time on fluff, on stuff that’s not important, that doesn’t matter.
You think you have to do all the things, do more and more to make more money. Effectively you’re saying I don’t have time to stop working so hard.
The truth is you can work less and make more money.
You’re worried that stopping doing something means you’ll miss out. You’re saying, I don’t want to decide what’s important.
The truth is you can decide what you do and what you don’t.
You believe that asking for help is a sign of weakness, that you can’t afford to spend money on coaching. The truth is investing in you, investing in coaching is the fastest way to make more money and have a profitable business.
Coaching creates the opportunity for you to see possibilities
My client whose business gives her pay rises, one after another, after just a short time working with me had been trying for a year or more to do it on her own. Imagine what that cost her in terms of time wasted, money she left on the table. Effectively by not asking for help earlier, she delayed the growth of her business and it remained unprofitable until she chose to invest in coaching with me.
Where are you spending your time?
Maybe you know, maybe you don’t. If you don’t you need to find out. To do that, you’ll need to record how you spend your time, ideally for a week or more, at a minimum for a few days. Be honest, don’t try to sugar coat it, cos if you do the only person you’re lying to is you.
Once you’ve got the data, you’ll be able to see where you’re wasting, this is where you start to find your fluff.
How can you have time for everything that matters to you?
You can have time for everything that matters to you when you look honestly at how you’re currently spending your time and decide which of those things matter. And when you decide which are the fluff that bogs you down at the same time as it makes you feel comfortable, as though you’re making progress just by being busy.
In my experience, the fluff fools us that it’s essential because it feels comfortable; that’s why I call it fluff. Cutting out the fluff, stopping doing the stuff that doesn’t matter can feel confronting.
Below that there’s also a fear of missing out. What if I have my phone on silent, a prospective client phones and doesn’t leave a message?
When you know what matters to you, you’ll identify your priorities.
What moves the needle forward for you in your business? Not all work is equal. When you know your priorities, what’s important to you, you do them first.
Scheduling what’s important to you and your business, scheduling your priorities. Time blocking and batching, where you do similar tasks in a block of time. Running all your errands in a block of time.
Refusing to jump to other people’s urgents. When you allow others to intrude and interrupt your day, you’re allowing what they consider as urgent priorities to be more important than your priorities.
When you’re committed to your priorities you’ll have boundaries, lines in the sand, that you won’t allow others to cross. You can do this effectively by putting your phone on do not disturb; turning off your email notifications. If you work from home, you can put a do not disturb notice on your office door or tell your family that you’re working and you’ll be available at such and such a time.
How to identify what’s important to you and what’s not
What’s important to you determines what you need to do and what are your priorities. You get to decide what you’re committed to. As an entrepreneur you choose your priorities.
Your priorities are the needle movers for your business. Together with my clients we ensure their priorities are aligned with their values, their vision and their goals.
Choose and decide, there is no other way!
Failing to choose and decide any of this means you live by default and you run your business in default mode. Becoming profitable and maintaining momentum in your business will be more of a fluke than a certainty.
After years of running a busy café and catering business that depended heavily on knowing how my staff and I spent our time, pushing ourselves to get everything that mattered done every day and having to decide quickly what was important and what wasn’t I threw the baby out with the bath water. When I sold that business to begin my coaching business I decided I’d go with the flow after years of being heavily scheduled and time-bound. What I found was that I floated with the wind and the tide.
I didn’t make the progress I’d hoped to in the time I’d wanted to. Once I engaged a coach for me, cut out the fluff and did only what mattered, I made more money in record time. If I can do it, you can too.
If you know it’s time for you to solve the working too hard for the money you’re taking home issue let’s get on a call together and look at what’s going on for you.
