This episode might feel like a bit of tough love but you are going to feel so empowered by the end of this episode. It’s all about being responsible for your time – and how to take responsibility for how you use your time without beating yourself up, feeling ashamed for how you’ve been using your business time until now.
Tune into this episode to learn how to be responsible for your time even when you’ve got big life circumstances that reduce how much time and energy you have for your business. And how to do that without then trying to force yourself to wake up at 4am, be hyperproductive and do all the things.
I also share lessons I’ve learned the hard way, how I see this come up for our PGSDers and how Power Planning helps me to be responsible for my time in a way that I love so I can achieve what I want to in my business, in the work time I have.
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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
This is the Perfectionism Project, the only podcast created specifically for perfectionists who are building businesses. I’m your host, Sam Laura Brown, perfectionism expert and entrepreneur. I teach perfectionists how to plan properly, consistently follow through and rest without guilt so they can build profitable and fulfilling businesses without burning out.
I’ve helped over a thousand perfectionist entrepreneurs do exactly that inside my program, Perfectionist Getting Shit Done. If you’re tired of procrastinating, overthinking and half finishing your ideas, you’re in the right place. Now, let’s dive in.
Sam Laura Brown (Start of the episode)
Okay, so welcome to this week’s episode. Today, I mean, this episode might feel like a bit of tough love, but if you clicked on it to listen to it, I want you to stay with it all the way through the end because you are going to feel so empowered hearing what I’m going to be sharing with you today. So today’s episode, this week’s episode is on being responsible for your time.
And as perfectionists, we tend to, it’s kind of like this duality. We tend to avoid responsibility in certain subtle ways, or sometimes just blatant avoidance, but we tend to avoid responsibility because if you are responsible for something, you can make a mistake, you can be blamed, you can be criticized, like it feels safe not being responsible because if you’re not responsible for something, you can’t mess it up. And on the other side, we tend to, at the same time, take too much responsibility, blame ourselves for things that weren’t actually our fault and beat ourselves up and not be kind to ourselves in an effort to try and finally be better so we can finally be good enough and finally be loved by ourselves and by others.
So this topic of responsibility, and I mean, there’s so many other episodes on responsibility I want to record, but today I want to speak specifically about being responsible for your time because this is a real area in business that you can really become powerful. And obviously I’m obsessed with this topic. It is what PGSD is.
It is what power planning is. It is essentially the topic I’ve been talking about since 2013, and it’s figuring out, this is what I’ve been trying to do, figure out how can I be responsible for my time and in control of it without going into rigidity, forcing myself, pushing myself, abandoning myself, being hard on myself, like overly hard, and then without trying to go into this like, okay, let me just not be responsible at all. And this is something really interesting as well that came up on a PGSD coaching call a few weeks ago now.
I was coaching one of our PGSDers and she was talking about how she wasn’t yet at the revenue that she wanted to be at. And that’s what I was coaching her on. And something that came up that was really interesting during that coaching was that I was talking about, like as the coaching went on, I was talking about how when you are in business, which many of us start for freedom.
For me, it was really about freedom of expression and freedom to have a professional life where I could be me. But for many, it’s also time freedom, location independence, like all of this freedom. But it’s really important to know that it’s not freedom from responsibility.
That’s not why we start a business. If that is why you started, you will be sorely disappointed because there is a lot of responsibility to step into to be successful in business and to enjoy it, to have your mind managed around it so you can actively enjoy the challenges, enjoy the setbacks that come up, be able to be with the success and not self-sabotage when that happens, be able to process the feelings that come up. It’s not just about being happy and positive all the time, but to be able to actually let feelings move through you so they don’t fester, so they don’t impact every single area of your business without you knowing and to be able to ultimately just feel like business is fun.
I enjoy having a business and I feel free in my business, but not from this sense of, I don’t have any responsibility. I don’t have any accountability. I can just do whatever I want, whenever I want with no consequences.
It is really important business. There is so much responsibility and I love that about business. I bet you love it too.
I bet you love the fact that your business invites you to rise to an occasion. It invites you to see all of the ways you’re getting in your own way, to see what’s really going on and to solve that. I talked about this in the episode I did on mistakes, failure and the courage to keep on trying.
If there is a way that you are making a mistake and it’s not helping your business grow, that will keep repeating until you solve it. That is a consequence of the fact that you have responsibility in your business to do certain things in order to grow it. If you don’t do those things, there is a cost that will be reflected in the business, either immediately or longer term.
I love that about business. It’s such a mirror. It is such a way to grow as a person.
For me in business, that is such a core driver for me. Yes, I want to make money. Yes, I want to help a lot of people, but I love and am deeply driven by the way that my business develops me as a human and as an entrepreneur.
I love the game of business. I love talking about business and I love how it brings up the stuff in me that I want to work on. So much of that, so much of the growth for a perfectionist entrepreneur is improving yourself not to be better, but improving in a way where you become more skilled and more experienced and more resilient and more persistent, but you’re not trying to improve so you can be someone else other than you.
You’re improving in a way that helps you become more and more you, more self-trusting, more decisive, more able to take on responsibility and hold that responsibility even when there is pressure there instead of crumbling over it or instead of overworking to try and not even like, I was going to say outrun it. As I’m saying, I’m like, is that it? But we try to really, when it comes to responsibility, we either get really tense about it or we just try to avoid it altogether and we’re kind of in that all or nothing. So what I want to do in this episode is invite you into a different way of being with time and being responsible for your time without being tense about it, but you are on the hook.
You have time. We all have time and you can allocate that accordingly. And in this episode, I’m going to talk about what it’s like when other people are impacting your time and how you spend your time because we want to go straight into and just notice if your brain went straight into, oh yeah, but here are these things I have impacting my time.
Like just notice your brain immediately wants to get out of responsibility by saying, yeah, but I have this and that. I get it. I have been through so many deep lessons with this, especially over the last few years, becoming a mom of four and having four kids within four years, including three pregnancies since we have twins.
So I had three pregnancies and just a lot of demands in my personal life that I wanted, but also I really had to step into and like my personal growth with that. I mean, that was a lot, so many ways, so many areas, but I think overall, one of the biggest areas is really instead of resenting the responsibility, and I definitely don’t resent having kids. I very actively wanted to have kids.
I love my kids. I’m obsessed with them. And also my brain was just having these thought errors thinking that they’re taking away my time.
And if I could just have more time, which they’re taking away, then I would be being more successful and feeling more successful. That wasn’t what was going on, but my brain kept offering me this thought error, this perfectionist thought error that had me feeling resentful at times where I didn’t actually resent the situation. I actively created this.
And I thought this so often during that period where I was having a challenging time and it was such a hard season of life and also the best, like having four kids and having our little ones, like the best, and also super hard. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that those two things coincide, but really so many times I was actively just thinking if I wasn’t… I remember one day standing in the bathroom and Jack and James and Lydia, Liam wasn’t yet born. I can’t remember if I was pregnant with him or not, but we were in the bathroom.
They were having a bath. It was the middle of the day. It was just an entertainment bath.
And I just remember looking out the window with such a sense of longing and also feeling trapped that I felt like, and I was having thoughts. It wasn’t my situation. It was my thoughts that I can’t just leave.
I can’t just go. I have essentially, I have two very small kids. They would have been like maybe six months old at the time when I’m thinking back to this.
So I wouldn’t have been pregnant yet with Liam. And then Lydia, who was a toddler herself, she would have just turned two, that I was just had all these thoughts of like, I can’t just leave the house. I can’t just like, it’s so hard.
I can’t even contain them all. Like between feeding and all of this, it just felt so hard logistically. I have had to do so much capacity work to be bigger than the circumstance of having so many little ones close together.
And I’m so grateful for that work. I’m a better human and a better mom and a better business owner for it as well. But I just remember like feeling such a sense of longing and trappedness from that in that moment.
And then also being like, and this wasn’t in that same moment, but later just being like, and if I wasn’t doing this right now, I’d be figuring out how the hell to get pregnant. Like if I didn’t have my kids already, I would be trying to figure out how to have them. But we can have these thought errors that have us feeling resentful or bitter.
Like when I was, and this isn’t just in parenthood, when I was working my job while building my business, I worked a full-time accounting role. That was one of my main jobs I had during that time. And I felt resentful that that job was taking time away from my business instead of the fact that I was actively choosing to work that job so I could have financial backing for my business.
And also because I wasn’t yet ready to go all in on my business. I wasn’t there emotionally yet. That felt so risky, so scary.
So I was actively choosing to be there, but my brain was presenting me with this thought error that if I only have more time, then I’d be more successful. But I don’t have more time because this job is taking it away from me instead of like, I’m choosing to be here. Like I’m actively choosing it.
So anyway, all of this to say, our brains will offer us all these different ways to get out of responsibility. And the most powerful place to be is in responsibility in a connected way. So I’m going to talk about that, but I want to talk about first three ways this can come up.
This is three of many ways, but I just jotted down the top three ways I see this, top of mind, three ways I see this coming up in myself, in our PGSDers and the people that I talk to, how we can be irresponsible and what that looks like. And this might be uncomfortable, but I don’t know, I’m willing to be uncomfortable in order to get what I want. So the first, and I’ve kind of mentioned this, is we want to blame lack of time for lack of results or slow progress.
So for me, as I mentioned, full-time job, kids, like, especially during that season of life as well, having our little ones, the first, I don’t know, year and a half. No, I’m trying to think of when, basically first couple of years of parenthood business, I felt like I was killing it. The business was growing.
And then I had a really hard season after that in my business. And especially during that time of the hard season, I really just felt like I wish I could just, and I’ll talk about this as number three, but like, I wish I could just work more. And essentially like I wanted to throw time at the problem and it wasn’t time’s problem to solve.
But I really felt like it was, but we can blame whether it is your parents and you’re looking after them, whether you have employees, sorry, my English is not Englishing today. In my head, it’s feeling hard to speak, but I will carry on. Whether you have employees or a team or anyone else, like in your vicinity, when you’re working, you can either message you or like physically come into your office or be in the house that you feel like there are interruptions.
That there’s just like all of these reasons that you can’t use your time well. And it’s not your fault. It’s that you have this circumstance going on that is stopping you from being able to use your time well.
That is us when we are not in our responsibility. What I’m not saying is to ignore the circumstance. This is so important.
I really learned this so deeply in pregnancy, in my three pregnancies, that my perfectionist brain wanted to swing to the other way and be like, I should just be able to operate as normal. Even though I’m pregnant and I’m nauseous and I’m very fatigued and I’m growing a human, I should just be able to operate as I normally would. And so I was pushing against the reality of what was actually going on for me.
And that didn’t help me to be responsible and connected with my time and use it well. It meant that often I would end up not burning out, but like essentially trying to get myself to do stuff, coming up with so much resistance to that, like so much more than I normally would. And then beating myself up for not overcoming that resistance and then just feeling like, why can’t I just do the things I would normally be able to do? Like things that I would normally just follow through on.
At that point, even in my first pregnancy with Lydia, at that point, I’d already been doing the work we do in PGSD for at least five years. I had been deeply, deeply in this work of mind management, time management, being responsible for the results I’m creating in my life and my business. So I was in a pretty good starting point in pregnancy to be able to be met with the circumstantial changes.
And yet my brain, my perfectionist brain was just trying to force me to operate as normal. And when I coach, we have PGSDers and I’ve had private clients as well who are pregnant. And one of the main things I see coming up when we have a legitimately challenging circumstance, whether it’s pregnancy or anything else, is our perfectionist brain either wants to blame it or completely discount it.
To not be connected, to either disconnect through blame or disconnect through dismissing it and being like, well, I should just be able to do what I normally do. This shouldn’t have to impact how I’m doing my business or how I spend my time. And the one that comes up the most often is, well, if I was working in a normal job, I wouldn’t be able to just not follow through with my plans.
It’s kind of like using the gifts of entrepreneurship that we have the ability to work in a way that’s in flow with ourselves, to take ourselves into account a whole lot more than if we’re in an employment situation, but then making ourselves wrong and going, okay, but my friend, when I was pregnant, especially my first and my third pregnancy, I had many friends who were pregnant at the same time. And I would find myself thinking, especially in the first pregnancy, I’d sold for that by the third, but in the first pregnancy thinking, yeah, my friend, who’s also feeling nauseous had to go to her job and doesn’t get to just not follow through and not do things because she’s feeling that way. But also like she would have killed to be able to work in tune with herself in the way that I was able to do that.
But our perfectionist brains love to make us wrong in the hope that if we make ourselves so wrong, we’ll finally get it right. And so just, and this is a, it doesn’t matter if you’re pregnant or not, like not relevant, but I hope just hearing about an example of how our perfectionist brains can either want to blame things or just completely dismiss what’s actually going on. It’s not helpful.
It doesn’t help us to make the most of the time we have. If you find that you really struggle to make the most of the time you have to grow your business, there is something going on there for you with responsibility and time. So one of the reasons as well that we do this is we blame lack of time for lack of results or slow progress or for being behind is that it protects our potential.
We get to think, so say me in the full-time job, I got, I got to think like, I literally remember sitting at my computer in Steve’s parents’ house. We lived there for a few years that when I was there, I was thinking like I started as a blogger. So I was looking at these other blogs and I was thinking like, well, if I was full-time in my business, I would be able to do something like that too.
That was not the reality for me. When I left my full-time job, I went to a part-time job that was in the afternoons where I essentially could work full-time hours on my business. I spent five months procrastinate working.
Five months. Lack of time was not my issue. Perfectionism was.
I didn’t know how to work with my perfectionist brain. It felt so scary to go all in on my business and have it not succeed that I had all of these. I mean, I was working hard.
Like I was, I used to still, I worked in the city as an accountant. So I’d still get on the train. I kept in my normal routine.
I also went to a gym in the city. So like get on the train, go work from a cafe, go to the gym classes. Then I go get the, the bus from the city to the hospital that I worked at as a receptionist.
And I’d work on my laptop on that. And then I’d work that job. And then I’d come home on like the eight o’clock train that evening.
Like I, like, if you looked at me, you’d be like, she is working hard on her business. I was, but, but I had those perfectionist thoughts that were coming up and just like very persistent. I wasn’t even aware of them, but like, I was so scared to, and for me particularly, it came up around selling and this is where it comes up.
Like the perfectionist thoughts around taking action and then around selling and then around team. So for me, when I was selling that, I was so scared to like set up, for example, an email, like a seven part email sequence that would sell the online course that I was selling. I was so scared that if I actually did that, that then it wouldn’t work.
And then I’d feel completely helpless because, well, that was what should have worked and it didn’t work. And like this all or nothing of the reality is you troubleshoot it, you figure it out. You like, it’s not, it’s probably not going to work instantly, but that perfectionist thinking of like, I don’t want to be wrong for having left my job.
It would be so embarrassing if I am really doing all the things I know I need to do and they don’t work. It’s better for me to be like, oh yeah, you know, like I’m trying this other stuff. Like it felt easier for me emotionally, even though it was very painful.
It felt more familiar emotionally to be having more time, but then having that time go to things that didn’t really matter so that I could still, now the job was gone. The thoughts were still there of, yeah, but if I just could do these certain things, then I’d be more successful. This is one of the reasons you really want to, I highly recommend it, take it or leave it, but I highly recommend learning to love your job before you leave it and being able to be in a place of not resenting it for the time it’s taking away.
Because I, you can see in this situation, I was in this sort of, if I just had more time, I’ll be more successful. But that wasn’t the reason I wasn’t being successful. It was perfectionism.
So then when I got more time, it didn’t solve the problem. It wasn’t a time problem, even though it really felt like it was. And I feel like I really had to get that hard way of like, I was so convinced that it was a time problem.
And if I just didn’t have this job taking up all my time, then I’d finally be able to do the things I needed to do. But what actually was the case was I needed to learn how to actually follow through with the scary thing I needed to do that felt like if I actually did that and it didn’t work, then all my hopes are going to be dashed. Like I’m never going to be successful.
I shouldn’t have left my corporate career and gone back to this job I had as a receptionist where I’m not using any of my degrees that I have. Like it just felt like if I really, really went for it. And I did an episode recently on the ultimate perfectionist fear, which is about this fear of I’ll try my best and my best won’t be good enough.
And then what we make that mean is perfectionist because we don’t see things as being improvable. We just see it like it is what it is and it can’t get better. So if it’s not good enough the first time, it never will be.
So that was what was going on was those perfectionist thoughts, but I wanted it to be a time problem. I’m so grateful time didn’t solve it because I needed to get out of my own way and get those perfectionist thoughts shifted into more powerful thoughts. But it’s one of the ways we protect our potential.
If we blame time, lack of time, then we’re off the hook. If only I had more time, if only the kids weren’t so sick all the time. Like I have four kids in daycare.
I get it. I get what it’s like to have sick kids. And also that if that is part of your reality, then we must take it into account without lamenting it and without discounting it and trying to pretend that it’s not actually part of your circumstances because that is part of your circumstances.
But if you find that when you have more time, you waste it, you do busy work, you aren’t productive with it. You don’t make an equal amount of progress given how much more time you have, then there’s an issue with you not stepping into responsibility with that time. And the other way I want to mention too, that this can all come up as well, because, and I still need to do this episode.
I’m going to put on my list to do this year, all my thoughts about how we perfectionists think we’re behind and all the different reasons that that can come up. But you might also be giving time too much responsibility. Like I’ve been in business for so long that I should be successful by now.
Business, business success isn’t time’s responsibility. But we think our perfectionist brains, again, this lets us off the hook and also puts us on the hook in a way that doesn’t actually make sense and puts time on the hook. It’s just very interesting.
But we go into this like, well, I’ve been in business for so long, or I started so long ago, I should be successful by now. That’s perfectionist entitlement. I also did an episode on that.
Highly recommend listening to that one as well. If you are feeling behind and being behind is one of the things we coach on so often inside PGSD, because when we are feeling behind, we are not in our responsibility and it is very hard to create change. So if you are behind, you are giving time too much credit.
That’s one of the reasons. There are others as well, but one of the reasons that you are behind in your business, you constantly feel behind no matter what you do is because you are giving time credit. Like time should be moving you along.
Time should be moving you along the board. And it works like that in school. You get moved up every year to the next grade, but it doesn’t work that way in business.
Time is not responsible for your success and it is not the cure. It’s not to say it is never helpful to have a certain amount of time or more time or less time. And I’ll talk about positive time constraint in a second because it’s super helpful, super important.
Our brains like to think, I just need an endless amount of time. Like if only I could go, this is my brain, if only I could go to a cabin in the woods for a week, I could finally get it all done. But then when I’m in that line of thinking, what’s going to happen if I take that line of thinking with me is I get to the cabin in the woods and I feel so overwhelmed by the pressure of using that time perfectly and making perfect progress that I then either do blatant busy work or I just create a whole new project out of thin air to try and be busy with something that isn’t the actual needle mover for me.
So there is that, that was number one, that we want to blame lack of time for lack of results and slow progress. And that is not us being responsible. Number two is that we want to avoid looking at time realistically.
When we are not being responsible, we take an unrealistic view and this can show up in a few different ways. So number one is if you have a really long to-do list or you’re working off your head, like you’re just kind of in this mentality. And I was doing this literally last week.
I didn’t do my power planning. It happens. I just want to share that like part of the tool of power planning is it is a mirror to show you what is going on for you.
And when you are not power planning, when you avoid power planning, you are not wanting to be responsible. You’re not wanting to look. It’s like if someone’s got a plan to lose weight and they are looking at the scale each week, if that’s part of their plan and they stop looking, like that’s the same with power planning.
So last week I wanted to stop looking. Super helpful information, super helpful that I have a tool that allows me to know what is going on with my brain. Oh, I’m avoiding responsibility.
I’m not wanting to look. And there’s so many reasons for that. I’m not going to get into it in this episode, that that can come up.
And we do a lot of coaching on that in PGSD. It’s not the expectation that you come in, you perfectly power plan, like your perfectionist brain wants to avoid responsibility. So part of it as well is getting your perfectionist brain on board with power planning, which I do have to say, it is set up in a way to make it easy to get your brain on board.
So most of the coaching isn’t around like how to stick to power planning. It’s looking at what comes up when you’re power planning, the following through, how to power plan in a way that has you working more in alignment with yourself rather than against yourself. But it’s really important to know like that even just not power planning is part of how the tool works.
It gives you an insight into when you’re not wanting to look at the mirror. You’re not wanting to be connected to reality. So last week, for example, and I still did my little tweak.
So I updated my calendar to reflect where my time was going, but I had all these reasons that I didn’t power plan out my week. They felt very like good reasons at the time, like I was being a responsible business owner.
Okay, so welcome to this week’s episode. Today, I mean, this episode might feel like a bit of tough love, but if you clicked on it to listen to it, I want you to stay with it all the way through the end because you are going to feel so empowered hearing what I’m going to be sharing with you today. So today’s episode, this week’s episode is on being responsible for your time.
And as perfectionists, we tend to, it’s kind of like this duality. We tend to avoid responsibility in certain subtle ways, or sometimes just blatant avoidance, but we tend to avoid responsibility because if you are responsible for something, you can make a mistake, you can be blamed, you can be criticized, like it feels safe not being responsible because if you’re not responsible for something, you can’t mess it up. And on the other side, we tend to, at the same time, take too much responsibility, blame ourselves for things that weren’t actually our fault and beat ourselves up and not be kind to ourselves in an effort to try and finally be better so we can finally be good enough and finally be loved by ourselves and by others.
So this topic of responsibility, and I mean, there’s so many other episodes on responsibility I want to record, but today I want to speak specifically about being responsible for your time because this is a real area in business that you can really become powerful. And obviously I’m obsessed with this topic. It is what PGSD is.
It is what power planning is. It is essentially the topic I’ve been talking about since 2013, and it’s figuring out, this is what I’ve been trying to do, figure out how can I be responsible for my time and in control of it without going into rigidity, forcing myself, pushing myself, abandoning myself, being hard on myself, like overly hard, and then without trying to go into this like, okay, let me just not be responsible at all. And this is something really interesting as well that came up on a PGSD coaching call a few weeks ago now.
I was coaching one of our PGSDers and she was talking about how she wasn’t yet at the revenue that she wanted to be at. And that’s what I was coaching her on. And something that came up that was really interesting during that coaching was that I was talking about, like as the coaching went on, I was talking about how when you are in business, which many of us start for freedom.
For me, it was really about freedom of expression and freedom to have a professional life where I could be me. But for many, it’s also time freedom, location independence, like all of this freedom. But it’s really important to know that it’s not freedom from responsibility.
That’s not why we start a business. If that is why you started, you will be sorely disappointed because there is a lot of responsibility to step into to be successful in business and to enjoy it, to have your mind managed around it so you can actively enjoy the challenges, enjoy the setbacks that come up, be able to be with the success and not self-sabotage when that happens, be able to process the feelings that come up. It’s not just about being happy and positive all the time, but to be able to actually let feelings move through you so they don’t fester, so they don’t impact every single area of your business without you knowing and to be able to ultimately just feel like business is fun.
I enjoy having a business and I feel free in my business, but not from this sense of, I don’t have any responsibility. I don’t have any accountability. I can just do whatever I want, whenever I want with no consequences.
It is really important business. There is so much responsibility and I love that about business. I bet you love it too.
I bet you love the fact that your business invites you to rise to an occasion. It invites you to see all of the ways you’re getting in your own way, to see what’s really going on and to solve that. I talked about this in the episode I did on mistakes, failure and the courage to keep on trying.
If there is a way that you are making a mistake and it’s not helping your business grow, that will keep repeating until you solve it. That is a consequence of the fact that you have responsibility in your business to do certain things in order to grow it. If you don’t do those things, there is a cost that will be reflected in the business, either immediately or longer term.
I love that about business. It’s such a mirror. It is such a way to grow as a person.
For me in business, that is such a core driver for me. Yes, I want to make money. Yes, I want to help a lot of people, but I love and am deeply driven by the way that my business develops me as a human and as an entrepreneur.
I love the game of business. I love talking about business and I love how it brings up the stuff in me that I want to work on. So much of that, so much of the growth for a perfectionist entrepreneur is improving yourself not to be better, but improving in a way where you become more skilled and more experienced and more resilient and more persistent, but you’re not trying to improve so you can be someone else other than you.
You’re improving in a way that helps you become more and more you, more self-trusting, more decisive, more able to take on responsibility and hold that responsibility even when there is pressure there instead of crumbling over it or instead of overworking to try and not even like, I was going to say outrun it. As I’m saying, I’m like, is that it? But we try to really, when it comes to responsibility, we either get really tense about it or we just try to avoid it altogether and we’re kind of in that all or nothing. So what I want to do in this episode is invite you into a different way of being with time and being responsible for your time without being tense about it, but you are on the hook.
You have time. We all have time and you can allocate that accordingly. And in this episode, I’m going to talk about what it’s like when other people are impacting your time and how you spend your time because we want to go straight into and just notice if your brain went straight into, oh yeah, but here are these things I have impacting my time.
Like just notice your brain immediately wants to get out of responsibility by saying, yeah, but I have this and that. I get it. I have been through so many deep lessons with this, especially over the last few years, becoming a mom of four and having four kids within four years, including three pregnancies since we have twins.
So I had three pregnancies and just a lot of demands in my personal life that I wanted, but also I really had to step into and like my personal growth with that. I mean, that was a lot, so many ways, so many areas, but I think overall, one of the biggest areas is really instead of resenting the responsibility, and I definitely don’t resent having kids. I very actively wanted to have kids.
I love my kids. I’m obsessed with them. And also my brain was just having these thought errors thinking that they’re taking away my time.
And if I could just have more time, which they’re taking away, then I would be being more successful and feeling more successful. That wasn’t what was going on, but my brain kept offering me this thought error, this perfectionist thought error that had me feeling resentful at times where I didn’t actually resent the situation. I actively created this.
And I thought this so often during that period where I was having a challenging time and it was such a hard season of life and also the best, like having four kids and having our little ones, like the best, and also super hard. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that those two things coincide, but really so many times I was actively just thinking if I wasn’t… I remember one day standing in the bathroom and Jack and James and Lydia, Liam wasn’t yet born. I can’t remember if I was pregnant with him or not, but we were in the bathroom.
They were having a bath. It was the middle of the day. It was just an entertainment bath.
And I just remember looking out the window with such a sense of longing and also feeling trapped that I felt like, and I was having thoughts. It wasn’t my situation. It was my thoughts that I can’t just leave.
I can’t just go. I have essentially, I have two very small kids. They would have been like maybe six months old at the time when I’m thinking back to this.
So I wouldn’t have been pregnant yet with Liam. And then Lydia, who was a toddler herself, she would have just turned two, that I was just had all these thoughts of like, I can’t just leave the house. I can’t just like, it’s so hard.
I can’t even contain them all. Like between feeding and all of this, it just felt so hard logistically. I have had to do so much capacity work to be bigger than the circumstance of having so many little ones close together.
And I’m so grateful for that work. I’m a better human and a better mom and a better business owner for it as well. But I just remember like feeling such a sense of longing and trappedness from that in that moment.
And then also being like, and this wasn’t in that same moment, but later just being like, and if I wasn’t doing this right now, I’d be figuring out how the hell to get pregnant. Like if I didn’t have my kids already, I would be trying to figure out how to have them. But we can have these thought errors that have us feeling resentful or bitter.
Like when I was, and this isn’t just in parenthood, when I was working my job while building my business, I worked a full-time accounting role. That was one of my main jobs I had during that time. And I felt resentful that that job was taking time away from my business instead of the fact that I was actively choosing to work that job so I could have financial backing for my business.
And also because I wasn’t yet ready to go all in on my business. I wasn’t there emotionally yet. That felt so risky, so scary.
So I was actively choosing to be there, but my brain was presenting me with this thought error that if I only have more time, then I’d be more successful. But I don’t have more time because this job is taking it away from me instead of like, I’m choosing to be here. Like I’m actively choosing it.
So anyway, all of this to say, our brains will offer us all these different ways to get out of responsibility. And the most powerful place to be is in responsibility in a connected way. So I’m going to talk about that, but I want to talk about first three ways this can come up.
This is three of many ways, but I just jotted down the top three ways I see this, top of mind, three ways I see this coming up in myself, in our PGSDers and the people that I talk to, how we can be irresponsible and what that looks like. And this might be uncomfortable, but I don’t know, I’m willing to be uncomfortable in order to get what I want. So the first, and I’ve kind of mentioned this, is we want to blame lack of time for lack of results or slow progress.
So for me, as I mentioned, full-time job, kids, like, especially during that season of life as well, having our little ones, the first, I don’t know, year and a half. No, I’m trying to think of when, basically first couple of years of parenthood business, I felt like I was killing it. The business was growing.
And then I had a really hard season after that in my business. And especially during that time of the hard season, I really just felt like I wish I could just, and I’ll talk about this as number three, but like, I wish I could just work more. And essentially like I wanted to throw time at the problem and it wasn’t time’s problem to solve.
But I really felt like it was, but we can blame whether it is your parents and you’re looking after them, whether you have employees, sorry, my English is not Englishing today. In my head, it’s feeling hard to speak, but I will carry on. Whether you have employees or a team or anyone else, like in your vicinity, when you’re working, you can either message you or like physically come into your office or be in the house that you feel like there are interruptions.
That there’s just like all of these reasons that you can’t use your time well. And it’s not your fault. It’s that you have this circumstance going on that is stopping you from being able to use your time well.
That is us when we are not in our responsibility. What I’m not saying is to ignore the circumstance. This is so important.
I really learned this so deeply in pregnancy, in my three pregnancies, that my perfectionist brain wanted to swing to the other way and be like, I should just be able to operate as normal. Even though I’m pregnant and I’m nauseous and I’m very fatigued and I’m growing a human, I should just be able to operate as I normally would. And so I was pushing against the reality of what was actually going on for me.
And that didn’t help me to be responsible and connected with my time and use it well. It meant that often I would end up not burning out, but like essentially trying to get myself to do stuff, coming up with so much resistance to that, like so much more than I normally would. And then beating myself up for not overcoming that resistance and then just feeling like, why can’t I just do the things I would normally be able to do? Like things that I would normally just follow through on.
At that point, even in my first pregnancy with Lydia, at that point, I’d already been doing the work we do in PGSD for at least five years. I had been deeply, deeply in this work of mind management, time management, being responsible for the results I’m creating in my life and my business. So I was in a pretty good starting point in pregnancy to be able to be met with the circumstantial changes.
And yet my brain, my perfectionist brain was just trying to force me to operate as normal. And when I coach, we have PGSDers and I’ve had private clients as well who are pregnant. And one of the main things I see coming up when we have a legitimately challenging circumstance, whether it’s pregnancy or anything else, is our perfectionist brain either wants to blame it or completely discount it.
To not be connected, to either disconnect through blame or disconnect through dismissing it and being like, well, I should just be able to do what I normally do. This shouldn’t have to impact how I’m doing my business or how I spend my time. And the one that comes up the most often is, well, if I was working in a normal job, I wouldn’t be able to just not follow through with my plans.
It’s kind of like using the gifts of entrepreneurship that we have the ability to work in a way that’s in flow with ourselves, to take ourselves into account a whole lot more than if we’re in an employment situation, but then making ourselves wrong and going, okay, but my friend, when I was pregnant, especially my first and my third pregnancy, I had many friends who were pregnant at the same time. And I would find myself thinking, especially in the first pregnancy, I’d sold for that by the third, but in the first pregnancy thinking, yeah, my friend, who’s also feeling nauseous had to go to her job and doesn’t get to just not follow through and not do things because she’s feeling that way. But also like she would have killed to be able to work in tune with herself in the way that I was able to do that.
But our perfectionist brains love to make us wrong in the hope that if we make ourselves so wrong, we’ll finally get it right. And so just, and this is a, it doesn’t matter if you’re pregnant or not, like not relevant, but I hope just hearing about an example of how our perfectionist brains can either want to blame things or just completely dismiss what’s actually going on. It’s not helpful.
It doesn’t help us to make the most of the time we have. If you find that you really struggle to make the most of the time you have to grow your business, there is something going on there for you with responsibility and time. So one of the reasons as well that we do this is we blame lack of time for lack of results or slow progress or for being behind is that it protects our potential.
We get to think, so say me in the full-time job, I got, I got to think like, I literally remember sitting at my computer in Steve’s parents’ house. We lived there for a few years that when I was there, I was thinking like I started as a blogger. So I was looking at these other blogs and I was thinking like, well, if I was full-time in my business, I would be able to do something like that too.
That was not the reality for me. When I left my full-time job, I went to a part-time job that was in the afternoons where I essentially could work full-time hours on my business. I spent five months procrastinate working.
Five months. Lack of time was not my issue. Perfectionism was.
I didn’t know how to work with my perfectionist brain. It felt so scary to go all in on my business and have it not succeed that I had all of these. I mean, I was working hard.
Like I was, I used to still, I worked in the city as an accountant. So I’d still get on the train. I kept in my normal routine.
I also went to a gym in the city. So like get on the train, go work from a cafe, go to the gym classes. Then I go get the, the bus from the city to the hospital that I worked at as a receptionist.
And I’d work on my laptop on that. And then I’d work that job. And then I’d come home on like the eight o’clock train that evening.
Like I, like, if you looked at me, you’d be like, she is working hard on her business. I was, but, but I had those perfectionist thoughts that were coming up and just like very persistent. I wasn’t even aware of them, but like, I was so scared to, and for me particularly, it came up around selling and this is where it comes up.
Like the perfectionist thoughts around taking action and then around selling and then around team. So for me, when I was selling that, I was so scared to like set up, for example, an email, like a seven part email sequence that would sell the online course that I was selling. I was so scared that if I actually did that, that then it wouldn’t work.
And then I’d feel completely helpless because, well, that was what should have worked and it didn’t work. And like this all or nothing of the reality is you troubleshoot it, you figure it out. You like, it’s not, it’s probably not going to work instantly, but that perfectionist thinking of like, I don’t want to be wrong for having left my job.
It would be so embarrassing if I am really doing all the things I know I need to do and they don’t work. It’s better for me to be like, oh yeah, you know, like I’m trying this other stuff. Like it felt easier for me emotionally, even though it was very painful.
It felt more familiar emotionally to be having more time, but then having that time go to things that didn’t really matter so that I could still, now the job was gone. The thoughts were still there of, yeah, but if I just could do these certain things, then I’d be more successful. This is one of the reasons you really want to, I highly recommend it, take it or leave it, but I highly recommend learning to love your job before you leave it and being able to be in a place of not resenting it for the time it’s taking away.
Because I, you can see in this situation, I was in this sort of, if I just had more time, I’ll be more successful. But that wasn’t the reason I wasn’t being successful. It was perfectionism.
So then when I got more time, it didn’t solve the problem. It wasn’t a time problem, even though it really felt like it was. And I feel like I really had to get that hard way of like, I was so convinced that it was a time problem.
And if I just didn’t have this job taking up all my time, then I’d finally be able to do the things I needed to do. But what actually was the case was I needed to learn how to actually follow through with the scary thing I needed to do that felt like if I actually did that and it didn’t work, then all my hopes are going to be dashed. Like I’m never going to be successful.
I shouldn’t have left my corporate career and gone back to this job I had as a receptionist where I’m not using any of my degrees that I have. Like it just felt like if I really, really went for it. And I did an episode recently on the ultimate perfectionist fear, which is about this fear of I’ll try my best and my best won’t be good enough.
And then what we make that mean is perfectionist because we don’t see things as being improvable. We just see it like it is what it is and it can’t get better. So if it’s not good enough the first time, it never will be.
So that was what was going on was those perfectionist thoughts, but I wanted it to be a time problem. I’m so grateful time didn’t solve it because I needed to get out of my own way and get those perfectionist thoughts shifted into more powerful thoughts. But it’s one of the ways we protect our potential.
If we blame time, lack of time, then we’re off the hook. If only I had more time, if only the kids weren’t so sick all the time. Like I have four kids in daycare.
I get it. I get what it’s like to have sick kids. And also that if that is part of your reality, then we must take it into account without lamenting it and without discounting it and trying to pretend that it’s not actually part of your circumstances because that is part of your circumstances.
But if you find that when you have more time, you waste it, you do busy work, you aren’t productive with it. You don’t make an equal amount of progress given how much more time you have, then there’s an issue with you not stepping into responsibility with that time. And the other way I want to mention too, that this can all come up as well, because, and I still need to do this episode.
I’m going to put on my list to do this year, all my thoughts about how we perfectionists think we’re behind and all the different reasons that that can come up. But you might also be giving time too much responsibility. Like I’ve been in business for so long that I should be successful by now.
Business, business success isn’t time’s responsibility. But we think our perfectionist brains, again, this lets us off the hook and also puts us on the hook in a way that doesn’t actually make sense and puts time on the hook. It’s just very interesting.
But we go into this like, well, I’ve been in business for so long, or I started so long ago, I should be successful by now. That’s perfectionist entitlement. I also did an episode on that.
Highly recommend listening to that one as well. If you are feeling behind and being behind is one of the things we coach on so often inside PGSD, because when we are feeling behind, we are not in our responsibility and it is very hard to create change. So if you are behind, you are giving time too much credit.
That’s one of the reasons. There are others as well, but one of the reasons that you are behind in your business, you constantly feel behind no matter what you do is because you are giving time credit. Like time should be moving you along.
Time should be moving you along the board. And it works like that in school. You get moved up every year to the next grade, but it doesn’t work that way in business.
Time is not responsible for your success and it is not the cure. It’s not to say it is never helpful to have a certain amount of time or more time or less time. And I’ll talk about positive time constraint in a second because it’s super helpful, super important.
Our brains like to think, I just need an endless amount of time. Like if only I could go, this is my brain, if only I could go to a cabin in the woods for a week, I could finally get it all done. But then when I’m in that line of thinking, what’s going to happen if I take that line of thinking with me is I get to the cabin in the woods and I feel so overwhelmed by the pressure of using that time perfectly and making perfect progress that I then either do blatant busy work or I just create a whole new project out of thin air to try and be busy with something that isn’t the actual needle mover for me.
So there is that, that was number one, that we want to blame lack of time for lack of results and slow progress. And that is not us being responsible. Number two is that we want to avoid looking at time realistically.
When we are not being responsible, we take an unrealistic view and this can show up in a few different ways. So number one is if you have a really long to-do list or you’re working off your head, like you’re just kind of in this mentality. And I was doing this literally last week.
I didn’t do my power planning. It happens. I just want to share that like part of the tool of power planning is it is a mirror to show you what is going on for you.
And when you are not power planning, when you avoid power planning, you are not wanting to be responsible. You’re not wanting to look. It’s like if someone’s got a plan to lose weight and they are looking at the scale each week, if that’s part of their plan and they stop looking, like that’s the same with power planning.
So last week I wanted to stop looking. Super helpful information, super helpful that I have a tool that allows me to know what is going on with my brain. Oh, I’m avoiding responsibility.
I’m not wanting to look. And there’s so many reasons for that. I’m not going to get into it in this episode, that that can come up.
And we do a lot of coaching on that in PGSD. It’s not the expectation that you come in, you perfectly power plan, like your perfectionist brain wants to avoid responsibility. So part of it as well is getting your perfectionist brain on board with power planning, which I do have to say, it is set up in a way to make it easy to get your brain on board.
So most of the coaching isn’t around like how to stick to power planning. It’s looking at what comes up when you’re power planning, the following through, how to power plan in a way that has you working more in alignment with yourself rather than against yourself. But it’s really important to know like that even just not power planning is part of how the tool works.
It gives you an insight into when you’re not wanting to look at the mirror. You’re not wanting to be connected to reality. So last week, for example, and I still did my little tweak.
So I updated my calendar to reflect where my time was going, but I had all these reasons that I didn’t power plan out my week. They felt very like good reasons at the time, like I was being a responsible business owner.
And the reason I say, dare I say, is because so many of the perfectionists I coach, I feel like I’m yet to come across one that resonates with what I do and how I teach and all of that that isn’t like this. I don’t think I’ve come across anyone. But you probably have an identity that you are a responsible person.
Others can rely on you, especially when it comes to others. You can be relied on. And yes, you get avoidant with your own stuff and all of that, like ultimately you come through for others.
And maybe you’re responsible in the sense, like for me, I went to university, I got a law degree and a finance degree, very responsible. I worked jobs, like I’m making smart, responsible decisions, saving money, like, do you know what I mean? All of that kind of stuff. I didn’t have personal debt, like all of those things we tend to identify as responsible, i.e. thinking we’re good, lovable.
But if you have an identity around being responsible, we tend to not even want to look at the areas where we might be being irresponsible and just get extra avoidant there. So just be aware of that. And it’s so powerful, like this has been such a revelation for me in the last, since becoming a mom, a parent, is seeing all the ways that I haven’t been in responsibility and then rectifying that.
And I’m not perfect, I’ve still got responsibility to take on, but like just going responsibility by responsibility, really stepping into like a good example, just briefly, was my experience of the weekend, solo parenting on the weekend. And having many little ones, all needing me at once, and not having a break at all, and just feeling like, especially when the twins, once they were out of their cots, and they just like, it felt like getting for their daytime nap, just like monkeys in a cage, like trying to pin them to the bed, both of them at the same time. And then like Liam would wake up from his nap as soon as I got them to sleep after like an hour and a half of trying to wrangle them into bed.
Oh my God, it was, it was really hard. And also my experience of the weekend was being caused by my thinking about the weekend. And I did a lot of intentional work on that thinking, so that I got to the point where I was like, I actually enjoy the weekend.
It’s hard, that doesn’t mean something has gone wrong. I can have a different relationship with the hard, instead of having to feel like the circumstance is bigger than me, I can be bigger than it. But that was real work to step into responsibility because everyone was agreeing that like, yeah, that is so much, that is too much.
Like you’ve had too many kids, like what are you, like, of course, it’s going to be like so overwhelming. You have no time, instead of like, I do have time, like I did have time and I was making choices how to spend it. But like I, the only way I was really able to transform my experience on the weekends with the kids and really enjoy that and not feel like it was something that was happening to me was by taking responsibility for my experience and that it wasn’t the kids creating the experience.
It was me and I could therefore change it. I could step into owning that my experience of the weekend and my feelings were being caused by my thoughts. Life-changing, absolutely life-changing work.
So I want to wrap up by just talking about what the solution is. And I’ve mentioned power planning throughout this, and that is for good reason because power planning is a solution because of what it does. And so I want to talk a bit about that in, and I might’ve touched on some of these things already.
I’ve just got a few notes here about what we want to do to step into responsibility because we can just, as perfectionists, think that responsibility means getting really tense, overworking. Okay, if you’re going to be responsible for your time, you need to wake up at 4am, then you need to like go do a hard workout and like kind of like this very masculine approach to responsibility of like pushing and forcing. And it’s not to say there isn’t some masculine energy in taking responsibility for something.
However, we know if we are tense about it, we can’t be tense for long without that causing harm. If we can’t be tense for long, it’s not sustainable. And so if you think about, okay, I’m going to take responsibility and you feel yourself like tensing up, that’s not the energy of responsibility that I want you to step into.
I want to invite you into something different. It’s a much more calm, grounded, relaxed, knowing, being willing, being willing to look, being willing to see what’s going on and not going into shaming yourself. When you are taking responsibility for your time, it’s not about, oh my God, because this is where we go, right? I don’t want to look at all the time I’ve wasted.
I don’t want to actually see what has been going on for me. And I love this about power planning. I just did an Instagram story about this before that I was reviewing, like I love doing this all the time.
I’ve been power planning in some way, shape or form. I think I started calling it power planning in 2020, like since 2020, 2019. So I have many, many years of roughly speaking where all my time has gone.
And I have a relationship with myself where I can look at that without being ashamed about it. It’s so important because your perfectionist brain will go into, I don’t want to look at time because I will beat myself up for how poorly I am spending my time. But if that’s us not wanting to be in responsibility, I can’t look because I’ll just feel so ashamed.
I’ll feel worse if I look than if I don’t. And maybe temporarily, yeah, there might be some feelings that come up and also you can handle those feelings and also you can learn how to think differently. So those feelings don’t come up and they do come up.
But we so often just keep going on with something that isn’t working because we don’t want to admit that what we’re doing hasn’t been the smart responsible thing to do. This is where that identity of being a responsible person isn’t helpful because if you view yourself that way then you won’t want to look at and study yourself with how you might have been using time in a way that actually isn’t how you want to use it. So we want to step into the kind of responsibility that’s not rigid, strict, tense.
It’s really this willingness, commitment. Like when I think about when I’ve really taken responsibility, I feel empowered but also in this kind of like uncomfortable way of like okay I like no more excuses and not from this like not from a dismissive place of like no more excuses you’ve been making too many excuses or whatever and like beating yourself up about making excuses. But like really legitimately being like coming to this place of I made the best decisions I could with the thinking I had at the time and the feelings that were going on for me and the circumstances that were going on for me.
And so I can just look and study myself and be curious like oh that’s so interesting like this morning I was like oh that’s so interesting. I spent like six months in this certain kind of work pattern that wasn’t working. It just wasn’t in in tune with how I work and then I sold it and like power planning really helped me solve that.
So it did go on for like six years it was just six months and also you have to be willing to look and willing to see without shame or it won’t work but also power planning will teach you how to do that. The weekly review is set up in a way that helps you to not go into shame as our perfectionist brains want to. So with that in when you are power planning and really being connected to the reality of you, your life, the goals that you have for your business.
So one of the things you’ll do before you start power planning is you’ll set a growth goal for your business a three-month growth goal. You’ll learn that inside PGSD. So you’ll set your growth goal because you need to know what you want to accomplish to figure out what to do with your time.
If you don’t know what you want to accomplish you really can’t figure out what to do with your time. So you need to be really clear about that. You’ll figure out your needle movers.
So this happens in your power planning and your power hour at the start of the week. You’ll identify your needle movers. You’ll learn how to do that in PGSD.
When you’re learning how to power plan it’s super simple. You’ll know what tasks will get you to your goal and you won’t have more than will fit in your calendar. If there’s too many to fit in your calendar you will refine because you need a workable plan that works with reality and works based on where you are now with the skill set you have right now.
So you will have your needle movers and you’ll plan out in your week. You’ll plan in clean rest. You will plan in buffer time.
We do it all in a very workable way. Again we’re not trying to be tense about it. We’re being connected about it.
Connected to ourselves, to reality, to our business, to our life. Power planning is how you connect everything in together. It is my absolute rock even when my brain likes to try and forget that and be like don’t look, don’t do your bowel planning.
But you will when you are doing that you will have positive time constraint that you’ll create for yourself. Rest helps create positive time constraint. If you’re in the camp of a rest when everything is done, yeah why do you think everything’s never done? Because your brain is too tired to do everything.
Your brain is too tired to make great decisions. We often are just in this place as perfectionists of I’ll just work until I’m too exhausted to keep working and then I’ll have a break. There’s I could I mean I’ve talked about on podcast before we create that BGSE like our perfectionist brain is just like let me just do more and more.
Let me throw time at the problem and work more time. It’s more comfortable in lots of ways than being more trusting that our simple plan that we have well executed will get us to the goal and we’ll be able to troubleshoot that and handle the emotions on the way. So when you are power planning your week and doing your power hour, you will have an intentional plan for a week that takes your life into account and you and gets you to your goal.
And we teach you how to reverse engineer that. You will adjust your plans so this is staying connected to reality. You will adjust your plans throughout the week.
It’s a flexible planning method. You’ll have flexible structure. It works so well with your perfectionist brain to have flexible structure.
Instead of getting derailed you just make adjustments. And this is also how you come to learn how long things take, what it looks like in your week when you’re getting in your own way. Like if something takes you three hours instead of one hour that could be a reason and you’ll understand this in your weekly review.
There could be a legitimate reason you love for that and you’re willing to take that into account for next time. Or it could be that you just started polishing, polishing, polishing, polishing. Like say doing an email newsletter.
You plan to an hour and then you’re writing the same sentence over and over and over and over and over again. So then you can learn through that self-study that comes with power planning. You can learn what happened there and then solve for it and have that feedback loop of the power planning.
It’s so incredible. So then at the end of the week you will reflect, you will self-study, you will learn about what is going on for you. Part of taking responsibility is reflecting and not in this like beating myself up kind of way or like now I have a list of 17 things to change kind of way.
Because when we are over committing ourselves we are not being responsible. If you put too much on your plate you can’t be responsible for everything on that plate. That’s one of the ways we perfectionists avoid responsibility.
We put so much on our plate that we can be like well yeah I didn’t get that thing done because I’m so busy with this other thing and I didn’t get that thing done because I’m so busy with that. Instead if you actually just have a plate with an amount of responsibilities you can actually be committed to and responsible for, that feels more uncomfortable because we’re on the hook and our perfectionist brain doesn’t want us to find out that we don’t have as much potential as we think, that we aren’t as lovable as we think. So we have all these subtle sneaky ways that we try to avoid taking responsibility.
Disconnecting from your goal is another way. You set a goal, you’re committed to it and then you stop paying attention to it, you stop looking at it, you don’t really know what your goal is. Even though you’re working so hard every week to achieve a goal you don’t really know what that goal is because it feels so uncomfortable to be responsible for that goal in case you don’t achieve it and then you’re going to beat yourself up.
You’re perfectionist brain well. You can learn how to change that, you can learn how to relate differently to a goal. We teach you that in PGSE, super important in business.
You can have a goal and have a different kind of relationship with it so you can stay connected to it and achieve it instead of forcing your way through it and hustling to get there and achieving it or just like disconnecting from it all together and not wanting to look and starting over from scratch. So I hope this episode has been really helpful. Power planning, as I mentioned, so that’s the core tool we teach in PGSE.
The day you sign up for PGSE, the first thing you’ll do, the first email you get besides like your receipt will be you want to start power planning today. Here’s exactly where to go to learn in PGSE. Here’s where the lessons are and it takes less than three hours to watch all the lessons, like all the core curriculum of PGSE.
You can watch that in one afternoon. That is by design. I know that if it was like okay now you need like three months to watch all the lessons that you’re going to not even be able to watch all the lessons.
Your brain, I mean I know we all procrastinate learning and like our brain like we love learning. I love personal development. I love learning stuff.
I’m excited to have something to watch but ultimately the goal of perfectionist getting shit done is to have you getting shit done. So you can’t be spending all of your time consuming stuff. The goal is to, in the most essential concise way, teach you what you need which is power planning.
Everything you need to step into responsibility with your time to be able to make great use of it, not from this pressure beating yourself up place but from a place of calm, committed willingness to take responsibility, to take control of your time and to not be an excuses not from a place of like being dismissive like it shouldn’t even matter anyway but being like well I want to achieve a certain goal that I have whether it’s a full-time income goal that you’re working towards or something else. I want to achieve it. I’m responsible for achieving it and these thoughts aren’t helping me get there and so I’m gonna be willing to do the uncomfortable thing of redirecting my brain away from complaining, thinking different kinds of thoughts instead.
Like if that is you, you want to join PGSD. If you’re like oh my god I love personal development, I’m growing my business, I’m getting in my own way and I do want to take responsibility for my time. I want to be in control of my time and not be having all of these excuses rather they’re legitimate circumstances or not to not be in the energy of making excuses but to instead be in the energy of taking responsibility.
It is such a better feeling place to be even though it feels like that you know it puts us on the hook for then if you have responsibility you can mess it up, you can make a mistake but it feels so good to be in charge instead of feeling like your business is happening to you and your life is happening to you. To feel like you are creating it. It’s the best feeling.
It’s why I teach people this. It’s the best feeling. It’s the most powerful feeling to be bigger than your circumstances, to feel like you can handle whatever comes your way and not just you’re going to be positive all the time but you can handle the ups and you can handle the downs too and handle it by not being a bitch to yourself but actually staying connected to yourself, supporting yourself, being willing to take responsibility to have hard conversations with yourself and with others as required to do what’s needed instead of when we go into this place of entitlement of I shouldn’t have to do that, I shouldn’t have to like we just go into all this I shouldn’t and I should, I should be further along and I shouldn’t have to do that.
By taking responsibility I have a goal that I want to achieve. I have time that I can work on my business whether it’s half an hour a day, whether it’s full-time hours in your business. I have time.
I have willingness and I believe that I can figure out how to become the person that in this amount of time can achieve my goal. Like that’s what we’re solving for. It’s so fun.
I love it so much. So power planning is really and I was literally this episode was inspired by me. It was inspired by my power planning this morning.
When I was doing it I was like this is just me stepping back into being responsible with my time, for my time, for my results and it felt so good and my brain also didn’t want to do it. It wanted to just not look but I got it to look. I could direct it.
I could consciously direct my brain. We’re going to do power planning first up even though my brain was like let’s just start with this other thing and then once I’ve figured out that then I’ll come back and do my power planning because then I’ll know what the actual plan needs to be. But if that’s the case, so like it is for me, I did my power planning and then when there’s something to decide this week I have a task for that decision and then I have buffer time where I can go in after I’ve made that decision and adjust the plans to include extra things that might need to be included.
You don’t have to have perfect certainty to be able to plan. We don’t need that. It’s not how it works.
Then we always just put off the planning or we try to make things overly certain so that we can plan them in. You don’t need certainty. You need flexible structure.
You need responsibility. You need accountability. There are, because this is a reality, there are consequences for how you do and don’t use your time.
That is the reality. If you are feeling behind, it could be you just have a thought error about where you should be by now but it could be because you’re not using your time well. If you’re getting in your own way, if you’re like me in the early days of your business and getting to that full time income, like my perfectionism handbrake was coming on like nothing else.
I wasn’t using my time well. It wasn’t for lack of trying. It wasn’t for lack of intelligence or for lack of capability.
My brain, my perfectionist brain was so scared, was so scared. I didn’t use my time well to help me be feel protected from those fears. When you learn how to take responsibility, you use power planning to do that.
It helps you work with your perfectionist brain which makes those perfectionist fears come up less often and have them be less scary when they do come up so that you don’t keep turning your perfectionism handbrake on. Instead, you can show up when you plan to show up. Do what you need to do 80% of the time.
Rest without guilt. You repeat that each week. That’s how you achieve your goals.
You come in. You learn power planning. You start power planning.
You get coaching. You get support. You have our community of incredible perfectionist entrepreneurs that cheer you on and be your friend and answer any questions you have and share their experiences.
Weekly group coaching calls with me. You can get coached by me personally. Unlimited written coaching.
Get in PGSD. If you have been thinking about it, you got to get in PGSD. Learn power planning.
It is absolutely life-changing to take responsibility for your time in this way especially if you have a lot on your plate, especially if you feel like you don’t have enough time. That’s when we got to take responsibility the most is when we feel like we don’t have enough time. With that said, I hope you have found this episode incredibly helpful and I will talk to you in the next one.
Outro
If you struggle to build your business due to procrastination or overthinking, or maybe you keep burning yourself out, I want to invite you to join my program, Perfectionist Getting Shit Done. Inside, I will teach you my proven process for getting shit done as a perfectionist entrepreneur. In case you didn’t know, perfectionists can’t follow the same productivity advice as everyone else.
When we do, we get in our own way. So let me teach you what works inside the program. It’s simple and anyone can learn.
To sign up today, visit samlaurabrown.com/pgsd. I’ll see you inside.