The new year always feels spacious, don’t you think? It feels like a big white piece of paper.
I’ve been inspired by one of my Natupreneur Club members who has been calling out other people in the group who are full of excuses instead of results. So today we’re going to talk about that.
It’s so easy to excuse away why you haven’t made any progress. “But there’s not enough time to do all those things to up-level my business.”
I’m calling BS on all those “buts!”
I used to definitely do this, too. My excuses were very real to me at the time. It was essentially a story I was telling myself as to why I could or couldn’t do something.
See how I said, “could and couldn’t do something?” I can and I can’t do something.
Those two things make me make a choice between whether I can or I can’t.
When I was going through my first uni degree, I couldn’t afford to go to uni by itself. My family didn’t qualify for study aid so I had to always be working. During that time, I was working four and a half days a week whilst having a full load for university. So I was working two jobs and going to uni at the same time.
Interestingly enough, my weekly calendar has the exact number of hours that your weekly calendar does. My weekly calendar also has the exact amount of hours that Amelia Earhart’s weekly calendar had. I have the same amount of time Marie Curie and Einstein had. Richard Branson has the same amount of hours in the week as I do.
Yes, sure, they’re leveraged because they have systems, processes, and teams in place to help them, but essentially we’ve all got the same amount of minutes. We’ve all got the same amount of hours.
This is a process that we take everybody through right at the beginning of the Club because that story that we continually tell ourselves and tell other people about being too busy is, in actual fact, a story.
And I can prove it.
15-minute increments
My invitation to you this week is to actually track your time for three days. This is tiny in comparison to what we get everybody to dive deep into in the Club, but for three days I want you to write down in 15-minute increments what you are doing each day.
That’s right, I want to keep track of every 15-minute block of your day and write down exactly what you did in each block.
Some of you are already thinking that you don’t have time for that. Trust me, you can figure out a way.
To write down a quick sentence or even just a couple of words takes about three seconds of those 15 minutes. So we’re gonna write that down and then we’re going to see what those 15-minute increments look like over a whole day, and a whole three days!
Where you are spending your time vs investing your time?
You can spend your time quite quickly and easily just like you can spend money. Back in the day, instead of going to university I could have spent my time going partying or something else with the extra time I had outside of work. And the extra money I had I could have spent it.
The difference is, you get time or money back when you invest it. If you are investing your time it’s a whole different ballgame to spending it.
We could spend the next 15 minutes (or an hour!) going into the good old social media cycle or spin into the big vortex that is Instagram, the big vortex that is everybody else’s life on here. Or we could invest that same 15 minutes.
If you were to invest just 15 minutes a day, every day of the year, on your business that’s 90 hours that you just invested in your business. 90 hours! Wouldn’t it be cool?
Every time you waste or spend 15 minutes, you don’t get it back. Every time you waste or spend 15 minutes that’s 90 hours in the year that you could have invested into your business. Whether you were learning about getting clients, actually getting clients yourself in that time, or marketing yourself to get clients, then you’re actually investing to get money, traction, action, your dreams, your goals, your visions, your plans!
They all need money in the world that we live in right now. When we spend that time on things that aren’t moving our business forward – even though we say that we value our business, even though we say this is going to be a goal for the year – we are spending that time without a return.
The next time you go into the super scroll for 45 minutes, imagine what that time could have done for your business. It’s incredible what you could get done instead.
Going back to the story about my first uni degree – I had two jobs, I was teaching, I was running gymnastics programs for local schools all the way around country New South Wales, and I was going to university.
By the end of three years, I still got my degree. But I was investing my time by getting money through going to work or creating a new level of income over a certain amount of time.
Then, my second uni degree, a similar thing kind of happened. I had gotten into pathology after working at morgues and cancer research. As I was in pathology and working through hospitals, I then decided I wanted to up-level into naturopathy. To do a naturopathic degree at Southern Cross uni, I had to invest time.
Now, I didn’t have the time for that. I was working full-time. But in actual fact, I had my seven hours but then there were however many hours outside of that and because I ended up renegotiating my work schedule so I could work four days a week and I could pop things on the other end, I ended up creating time.
It’s like I made time out of nowhere but in actual fact, it’s the same time that every one of us has. Marie Curie and my favourite, Amelia Earhart – we all have the same amount of time.
Make time for the things that are important to you
You can create and find the time for things that are important to you and if this year, you have said that your business, your lifestyle, and the goals that are dependent on you making money through your business are important to you, then you need to invest time.
Unless you’ve got plenty of money to invest, but most of us have a little bit more time than money to play with. It’s time to invest time into the things that you say are important.
I’ve said this year that my health and my well-being are important. I don’t have the time to be exercising, I’ve also said that I value my family so I’d rather be cuddling my nine-year-old in bed. I’d rather be having my cup of tea. But I decided that this is important to me. It’s more important than anything that I live to 100 so that I can see my grandkids.
So if that’s what’s important to me, I need to invest time to do it. So I’ve gotten up every morning since the first doing my 20 to 30 minutes. You’ll see it on my Instagram stories because I’m trying to keep myself externally accountable because I know that about myself.
By investing in your time and being externally accountable, accountable to a group like the Nat Club, accountable to a business buddy, accountable to whoever you trust, or if you’re brave enough to go totally visible out on social media land, then you can hold yourself accountable to investing that time.
“I don’t have time” = Choosing Another Priority
So when it comes to “I don’t have time to work on my goal because all of those other things,” you’re just choosing those other things at that point in time. You’re just choosing something else.
And that’s totally okay! But you have to be okay that you’re going to get amazing results in these other areas but the thing you’re neglecting isn’t going to grow.
This thing over here is what you’ve said you want and you stated it in your goals this year, “I want a bigger business. I want a bigger impact, to help more people, that money to come into our family.” But if you don’t feed it with time and learning about how to run that business, if you don’t feed it with all of the things that are beneficial for it, then it’s not going to grow.
In those moments where you spiral into Instagram stories or Facebook or your feed, when you spiral into blog posts and random things, when you learn about things that you already have a qualification in, when you choose to spend every waking second doing something else, those things are going to grow, which is awesome – but I don’t want you to be the most knowledgeable, most family-orientated person who doesn’t have a business that brings them joy because they haven’t spent any time on it.
The Velvet Hammer
All right, I’ve given you a little bit of kick up the butt. My Clubsters call it “the velvet hammer.” I just a bit of a nudge.
It’s so important because you guys put out all these goals and you can definitely achieve them in small increments if you can find chunks of time to work on it, just like anybody else.
Having a job, having a family, just excuses really. I have a family, I have a full-time job. In fact, I have a blended family, two businesses, and just as many life hiccups as you do! I have all those big dreams and goals as well.
I have all of those things and I’m here doing it. I’m here sharing it with you because I was in those spaces and places before and I’ve seen how much crap I was telling myself and how much more I’m capable of when I shift my mindset.
I was making excuses for me not being big, for me not making the impact that I wanted to make. It’s the same for you.
You’re making excuses so that you can stay nice and small and safe.
Time is just another excuse.
Don’t do the “buts” in your head right now as I’m saying this because they’re all just stories that you got told when you were little. They’re all stories from past lives or from wherever. Even if you believe them to be, they are not your story.
You are full of potential
The truth is – you are full of absolute potential as a healer and have the potential to learn how to run your business and get people in the door, as well. The potential to learn how to run an online course or an online program is within you if you choose. The capacity to find the time is there. You found the time to get your qualification so you have evidence that you can find the time. That’s hard evidence that you can cram stuff in one night.
I’ll bet every single one of you who has a qualification, crammed study or assignments at least one night throughout your qualification to get something done. You made it happen because it was important to you!
As much as healing people’s bodies are important to you, running your business needs to be that important if you would like to be successful in it.
I want that for you because the other stuff flows from there. When you’re successful in your business, you not only have money pouring in but you have a level of confidence and a level of a presence that you can’t have when you’re worried about all of the other details.
When you are successful in your business, you are a success in your family life as well. You’re an amazing, shining example of putting work in and getting a result. The amount of work you put in is the amount that you get out.
It’s an amazing opportunity for your kids, your family, and the people around you to see that you are actually living your dreams.
I want to see that for everybody in our profession!
Are you ready?
This message isn’t for everybody.
Some of you may not be ready to hear it, and that’s totally okay.
We are all completely human, including me. Excuses will continue to come up for my health. Excuses will continue to come up for the way that I have been kind of programmed to do communication or business or that kind of thing. But then I’m gonna lean in and learn about it.
When I hear something that I know is actually for me but it might not just be for me, yet, I can lean in and learn a little bit more about it.
If I lean in and actually experience it and see what it feels like to do it a different way, then I get really different learning on the backend of it.
So it’s totally okay to be human. It’s totally okay to have “buts.” You will continue to have “buts.” You can’t just turn them off, it’s all part of being human. You’ll continue to have, “but I don’t have time,” “but the kids are doing this,” “but there’s no money for that.” And it’s totally normal.
Then there are other opportunities where you go, “Yeah, I can figure this out because this is important to me. I can figure this out because this will be the first step to the next thing, and that will be the next step to the next thing, and then will be the next step to the next thing, and then I’ll have that macro win, that big goal that I really wanted to achieve, that I wrote down and told everybody about.”
Take action
Hopefully, this has hit home for whoever needed to hear this today. If it didn’t, that’s okay, too.
I would love to hear your insights about where you are creating an awareness about your time. When you create awareness about how you are spending or investing your time and how you can get something back for the time you put in.
I’d love to see that you’ve tracked your day. There’s going to be a pattern that you might be doing something that you might not have been aware of before. When you first create an awareness, something comes after that which is a choice.
We often don’t think we have a choice until we first create an awareness about it.
Don’t just think, “Oh yeah, I do spend my time doing other stuff.” Actually write it down. Go through the experience of writing it down when you are doing those things and then truly look at the hard data. Because you can’t get away from hard data. It’s a very different thing to feel, feel, feel, feel, feel. But hard data… you can’t get away from that.
Then you can make an informed choice about do you actually have a spare bit of time to invest on something that you’ve said is important to you this year.
Shine a light on what’s uncomfortable
I’m sending this with much love to you. I am super excited about what you can create, and I’m super excited to shine the light occasionally this year on the things that might be standing in the way.
Some of those things might be a little uncomfortable but they are really important because they are the things that stretch us into a new space of growth rather than contract us into an old space that isn’t working for us anymore.
It’s all about ‘new’ at the beginning of the year. You’ve got to find new ways of doing things to get new results.
Old ways of doing things are going to get you the same old results, and you said you didn’t want those same old results this year! You want new ones, so it’s time to do it a new way.
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