Episode 449: [Stop Procrastination] Power Planning + How To Use It To Feel Safe Showing Up Consistently

This is part 3 of my 5-part series on how to *actually* stop procrastinating. You don’t need more motivation or discipline in order to stop procrastinating. To be able to implement the decisions you make effectively, you need productivity tools that work for your perfectionist brain.

80% of your procrastination will vanish when you get the right productivity tools that calm your perfectionist brain down so you can consistently show up. Power Planning is the secret to taking consistent action without burning out or freaking your perfectionist brain out.

If you’re a perfectionist entrepreneur and you want to show up consistently and confidently put yourself out there, Power Planning is the answer. 

It’s a simple 3 step process that anyone can learn. And I walk you through it in this episode (which is part 3 of the 5-part stop procrastination series).

Here’s a brief overview of how Power Planning works but be sure to tune into this episode to get all the details!

Step 1. Power Hour – in your weekly Power Hour you’ll put your needle moving tasks in your digital calendar and create simple contingency plans that make it easy to get everything done without feeling overwhelmed.

Step 2. Little Tweaks – every day you’ll spend a little bit of time tweaking your calendar so you can get everything done without ever feeling behind or burning out, even if something unexpected comes up.

Step 3. Weekly Review – at the end of the week you’ll do a brief weekly review to discover what worked, what didn’t work and what to do differently so next week’s plans are even easier to follow through on.

After listening to this episode, you’ll know how to make the kind of plans that get you out of your own way – even when you’re scared to show up.

Listen to this episode now!

This 5-part series is for perfectionists who:

  • Get stuck in research mode when it comes to your niche, messaging and branding
  • Buy cameras, domains and planners to try to motivate themselves to show up
  • Push important tasks off until the last minute because you need the pressure

Everything you’ve learned about how to stop procrastinating doesn’t apply to perfectionists!

During this 5-part procrastination series I’ll be teaching you the surprising truth about procrastination, the hidden reasons you haven’t been able to stop and the simple process you can immediately start following to actually stop procrastinating. 

I won’t be telling you to delete social media apps or write a reminder on a post-it note to remind you ‘done is better than perfect’. 

This series is going to help you create emotional safety and feelings that are going to allow you to actually have the confidence to stop procrastinating and put yourself out there.

Tune into this series to learn how to stop procrastinating so your business can finally get off the ground.

Find the full episode transcript and show notes at samlaurabrown.com/episode449.

In This Episode You’ll Learn:

  • The productivity tool that calms your perfectionist brain down so you can show up consistently and put yourself out there
  • Why you procrastinate on specific tasks and how to use power planning to help you move forward
  • Goal setting for perfectionsts
  • What it looks like when perfectionists follow the same planning advice as everyone else
  • What needs to happen during your weekly Power Hour
  • How to update your calendar so your plans stay workable
  • How to do your weekly review
  • How Power Planning has you doing more in less time without burning out

Featured In The Episode:

PGSD is opening to new students on 14 March 2024:

The PGSD Process will get you out of your own way in your business and have you making more money more easily. The doors to Perfectionists Getting Shit Done will be opening at 6am New York time on 14 March and closing at 11:59pm New York time on 21 March 2024. Find out more about the program and join the waitlist here: samlaurabrown.com/pgsd.

Take The Perfectionism Quiz To Get Your Personalised Perfectionism Score

If you’re not sure whether perfectionism is what’s making you get in your own way, I invite you to take The Perfectionism Quiz. 

After working with over 1,000 perfectionist entrepreneurs, I created this free quiz so you can get your personalised perfectionism score and discover which of the 5 areas of perfectionism you would most benefit from working on overcoming the most: whether it’s overthinking, procrastination, burnout, all-or-nothing thinking or fear of judgement.

It takes less than 3 minutes to get your unique result and be one step closer to getting shit done without burning out. If you love learning about yourself and you’re ready to get out of your own way, go to samlaurabrown.com/quiz to take the quiz today. 

Work With Me:

My coaching program Perfectionists Getting Shit Done (aka PGSD) teaches you how to plan properly as a perfectionist so you can get out of your own way in your business. To find out more about the program and be the first to know when the doors open, join the waitlist today: samlaurabrown.com/pgsd.

Listen To The Episode

Listen to the episode on the player above, click here to download the episode and take it with you or listen anywhere you normally listen to podcasts – just find Episode 449 of The Perfectionism Project Podcast!

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Introduction
Hi and welcome to another episode of The Perfectionism Project, a podcast full of perfectionism advice for entrepreneurs. My name is Sam Laura Brown, I help entrepreneurs release their perfectionism handbrake so they can get out of their own way and build a fulfilling and profitable business. I’m the founder of the Perfectionist Getting Shit Done group coaching program, which is otherwise known as PGSD. And for even more perfectionism advice to help you with your business. You can follow me on Instagram @perfectionismproject

Sam Laura Brown
A massive welcome to episode three in this five part series on how to stop procrastinating. If you are a perfectionist entrepreneur and you are making less than six figures a year, this series is going to help you understand why you procrastinate. We talked about that in part one, it’s going to help you get unstuck with important business decisions like your niche, we talked about that in part two. In part three, today, we are talking about how to plan properly as a perfectionist, so you can take consistent action, and do that without freaking yourself out. So that’s going to be talking about three steps of power planning and having a growth goal.

So I’m going to share that with you today. In part four, I’m going to be sharing with you how to use a create positive time pressure, so you can do your best work without burning out. So if you are currently relying on deadlines, and the last minute rush to get shit done, or you’re crowding your day out with lots of little things. So pressure is there to come to do the big things that that is going to be insanely helpful for you. And in Part Five, I am going to be recapping and giving you an overview of exactly what you need to do to stop procrastinating what’s actually going to work as we’ve already discussed, blocking social media doesn’t work. Using to do lists doesn’t work, motivated yourself by buying website domains, or new equipment, new cameras and microphones and things like that, that’s not gonna work, you actually need to just make decisions like a real business owner, you need to plan your week probably as a perfectionist, you need to confidently and consistently put yourself out there and know exactly how to do that.

So that’s what this series is helping you with. In that part five, I’m going to be telling you more about my program called perfectionist getting shit done, aka PGSD, that is going to help you implement everything that I’ve shared with you. In this series. This is designed to have you have so many actionable takeaways. But I want to help you and support you with actually turning this intellectual knowledge that you will have from listening to this series into actual results into having your business actually get off the ground and you’re not procrastinating. And that feeling safe to do that you don’t stop procrastinating, then you freak out. And then you go back into procrastination mode, which is probably what’s been going on for you and you’ve been in those spurts of motivation, then you scare yourself with the action, you’re taking the trajectory of that.

So you hold yourself back again, we want to create that safety there. And so my program is really designed to support perfectionist entrepreneurs, who are making less than six figures to actually have the environment and the support and all the tools and everything clearly laid out in very simple steps for you to follow. So that you can actually perform at the highest level as a entrepreneur, so you’re actually able to develop the skill set of entrepreneurship. So that it’s not just you have to hope that you have a reel that goes viral. And then you’re able to have this overnight success, that you have the skills of entrepreneurship, which gives you the ultimate security, because it means that even if something were to happen to your business, or social media was to change if the algorithm was to, if there’s another world event, like the pandemic, that you would be okay, because you’ve got that skill set there.

So as your coach, I help you actually grapple with the reality that business is a mental game, you need to be able to overcome that fear of failure and bounce back from failures you will experience. So perfectionist getting shit done is really designed to support you with that, like how elite athletes, they don’t try and go it alone. They invest in that support so they can reach their potential. So I want to invite you into PGSD. I’ll tell you more about it in part five, so that you can do that as well, because I know for me at least like I just the ultimate frustration was me feeling smart and intelligent, but knowing that I wasn’t actually living into that potential. And I had always this kind of conflicting interest in completely. And I had this conflicting thought pattern that I tried so hard to reconcile that.

I deeply believed in myself. And I also had all this impostor syndrome and fear and self doubt. And once I figured out what I share inside PGSD and what I’m sharing an overview of in this series, I’ve been able to create a successful business that also means I only work three days a week, I spend lots of time with my three little ones. I’ve made over $2 million in my business instead of having to work in the accounting job that I was able to leave and actually able to do what I love, do it in a way that actually works to me and have success doing it. So I want that for you as well.

So today we are talking about power planning. We are talking about your growth goal and these been tools to actually help you take consistent action. We’ve discussed how to do lists, time blocking SMART goals. They don’t work for perfectionists. I’ve got to go into that in more detail but really what I want to tell you with this episode is what to do instead, that I’m not just going to say those things don’t work all the best. What I want to share with you in this episode is exactly what you need to do to plan your week properly as a perfectionist. So your perfectionist brain doesn’t freak out, when you start taking action.

And mean that you fall off the wagon after a few productive days or weeks, that you’re actually able to do the things you want to do when you want to do them, you’re able to rest when you want to rest and do that without guilt, you’re able to show up when you want to show up, and do that confidently. Even when you’re doing something you’ve never done before. Even when you’re going live, putting yourself out there recording a video for a cause, even when you’re doing something that feels scary, you’re able to do it, you’re able to feel so proud of yourself. Like I know you’ve had that feeling before, when you did the scary thing, instead of avoiding it. How amazing that feels.

I think with entrepreneurs, we want that freedom of entrepreneurship, we really want to be able to do what we want to do when we want to do it. But we often do that at our own expense and at the expense of our self trust that we’re in this mindset of I just want to feel in flow aligned and that I’m never having to feel like I’m working like I just want to feel like it’s my passion and that I’m inspired. And then I’m doing my thing. And the way we approach it even though that sounds like a lovely thing to do. It means that we’re not able to trust ourselves. And then we’re having to just rely on these inspiration hits to get anything done. And then we don’t feel any security over the growth of our business. And it feels like the growth of our business is out of our control.

Because we have to wait for these intuitive downloads and ideas to come up rather than having the self trust. And this is what I teach my clients to do in my program. And these are the tools to help that I’m sharing in this episode is that if you can develop the self trust to do what you said you would do when you said you would do it, even if it’s a scary things, and also the self trust to know when to change your plans. Because that’s a really important part of this. We’re not making plans that never change, we are adjusting them. As we go. We are also honoring how we feel and doing all of that too. We’re not working at our own expense. But just know that if you are trying to be so in alignment all the time, that is coming at the expense of yourself trust, I want you to be able to rely on yourself, to be able to be accountable to yourself, even when no one else is there telling you it needs to be done.

And even when you have friends and family saying hey, I could see you know, you’re really worried today you have your own business, your own boss, you want to go get a coffee, do you want to meet up? Hey, can you help me move like all of these requests that you will have coming in, especially if you haven’t left your job yet? Once you are full time in that business, you will have people coming to you and saying hey, can I have your time. And you will need to say to yourself at least no, because I have planned with myself that I’m going to honor and that are important. And you might say something else to them. But you are going to be able to honor the plans you have with yourself. If you want to feel like you are in control of the growth of your business.

You aren’t having to wait for inspired ideas to come. You don’t have to hope clients or customers find that you actually are able to control the growth of your business. You need to be able to trust yourself. So the tools I’m talking about today, I’m going to be showing the steps with you your growth goal, and your power planning. Those are the tools that allow you to work in an aligned way whilst developing yourself trust instead of diminishing it. I love manifestation I love all of that side of things. I also love respecting myself. And being able to rely on myself being able to trust myself, I love the feeling of doing hard things.

I love the feeling of doing the courageous thing. I love the feeling when there was something that I had so much resistance to. And I use my brain to overcome my brain and actually do it. I love that feeling as someone who loves personal development, that to me is the best. And I’m trying to be so flowy about things and like too much in that feminine, then I’m not able to actually really get that feeling. And if I’m trying to be too strict and structured. Like when I’m doing for example, I used to do time blocking in my calendar, and I abandoned it after a few days because I had to stick to that plan and I’d planned it like I had to be this robot and it was too masculine and approach that it just meant if I couldn’t do it perfectly, I went into an all or nothing mode to want to find that sweet spot where it’s that masculine and feminine coming together. You’re able to have structure and flow.

So that’s really what the growth gone. palpating help you to do. It’s designed for your perfectionist brain. It calms it down. It calms your nerves. Have a system down, it helps you show up. And it helps you feel safe showing up and actually implementing those decisions that we talked about in part two. So I’m going to start by talking about the growth goal, because this is the context for your weekly plans. And then I’m going to be talking to you about the three steps of power planning, and what that practically looks like, and really give you the opportunity to try on what that would be like for you. Is this something you want to try? So when it comes to goal setting, SMART goals don’t work for perfectionists. I know that we want them to we want to actually have these goals that are specific.

That’s the s in smart goals. Measurable, I think it’s like achievable, actionable, realistic, is the art and time bound. It doesn’t work for our perfectionist brains. And here’s why. When you have a realistic goal, that means not that the goal is actually realistic. Like, we think that that’s a smart thing to do. I don’t want to be delusional, you know, I’m a realist. They’re the kind of things we say to justify setting these realistic goals. That what that goal actually is, is just a goal we can achieve without growing, it feels realistic to us. Because we are the person already who can achieve that goal, we might need to be a little more disciplined or maybe a little more motivated. But ultimately, it feels realistic because our present day self is capable of achieving it.

That means also it’s our present day self without perfectionism handbrake on who is getting in their own way who is procrastinating. It’s that present day self. So when we set a realistic goal, it doesn’t actually allow us to grow because we don’t need to. And also, we’ve already talked about how your brain doesn’t want you to grow. It just wants to stay in what’s familiar and safe and comfortable. So our brains love this love that idea of like, don’t be unrealistic, you’re just going to disappoint yourself. And one of the biggest things that comes up, if you go to Google or ChatGPT and ask about how to overcome perfectionism, for example, it’s going to tell you to set realistic expectations. And I don’t agree with that when it comes to goal setting. There’s nuance here that we’re not going to go into, we don’t want the goal to be so unrealistic that it’s in that fairytale thinking. And then you’re constantly thinking about.

Okay, well, in the future, yes, I can definitely have a $20 million business. And even though you’ve never made $20 in your business, we want to actually have you have an unrealistic goal that set at the right level. I teach this in my program, but I’m going to tell you a bit about it here. So you can really conceptualize what this is like. But you have a goal that invites you to grow, we call it the growth goal. And this is a goal that is set above what you currently believe is possible. It’s not so extreme that it’s in this fairy tale thinking you can say so positive and optimistic because it feels so far away. And so out of reach, that it doesn’t have your brain actually bring up that perfectionist thinking that we want to work on.

So we want to have that goal be just above what feels realistic for you. And I love this and this specific things we do to help you actually get there and not just freak out. But I love this so much as a perfectionist entrepreneur, and it works so well for my clients. Because when we’re in that trap of setting realistic goals, because of fear of disappointing ourselves, we only end up disappointing ourselves. If you are someone who wants to learn if you’re someone who wants to grow, you are going to be disappointed, even if you do achieve that realistic goal. Because ultimately, you know, you are not reaching your potential. You want to experience change, you want to when you catch up with your friends, and they say How you going, you don’t want to say same old, same old, I’ve just been doing the same thing. And nothing’s new with me. You want things to be new with you, that’s the person that you are having realistic goals doesn’t actually help you to do that.

So here’s a bit about how your growth goal works. And also just know there are other practical reasons for having a goal we’re talking about when it comes to power planning. For example, you can’t prioritize your week, if you don’t know what you’re working towards. If you don’t know your destination, you don’t know which Street to drive on to get there. So you need to really understand goal setting from his perspective of prioritization and things like that. But we want to have this goal so you know where you’re working towards, you know, what’s important and what’s not. And also, we have this goal setter in a way that invites you to grow over time, and acknowledges that you’re not going to wake up to date as much as we want to like have that fresh start and be different as of now that you are going to need to grow into this goal.

So the way that we do it the way that I teach it, and developing this concept really was coming from working with over 1000 perfectionists entrepreneurs in all different industries from artists to ecommerce store owners, to real estate agents, to dances, to therapists, to nutritionists, so many different entrepreneurs, and just seeing how our brain wants to go into an all or nothing mode, and just get to that goal right away. And we can actually just instead create a mental staircase to get us to that goal, create those steps that we can step up on, we’re able to actually wrap our mind around it, our brain doesn’t freak out, and we’re able to take action. So the way this works is that you will set a goal a 12 month revenue goal for your business, we don’t want to have a goal around showing up consistently on social media, that might be an action step to get to your goal. But if that’s the goal, you could end up with a million followers, and no money, and no real impact in your business either.

So you want to actually have you have a revenue goal, you have a business revenues, the oxygen for your business. Also, if you had a charity, like if you really just want to help people, if you had a charity, you would still be fundraising, making money would be one of your main activities as a charity, because that money is the oxygen for your business. So we set a revenue goal, we don’t get specific about exactly what product or service it has to come from, or what the price will be. We do some math later on. But you have that goal, to just have your brain have something really clear and specific said a bit above what you believe is possible, like it through the exact steps in my program, but you have this goal. So your brain can start thinking about new ideas can start entertaining new possibilities in a way that doesn’t freak it out. And then we break it down.

So for example, if your goal is 100k, your first quarterly milestone for the first three months is 10k. And then for the next three months is 20k. Then the next three months after that is 30k. Then in quarter four, it’s 40k. That totals $100,000. Rather than saying okay, get $100,000 divided by four, that’s $25,000 per quarter. When you do it that way, you’re expecting yourself to already be the person who’s making 100,000, which you are not you need to grow into that. And giving yourself space to do that. And giving yourself this staircase towards your goals is going to allow you to actually be able to get shit done. And achieve big things as well and not go into that freakout and freeze, perfectionist a lot of us we just freeze. And so you want to make sure you’re not setting up your goals in a way that they’re so big, they make you freeze, or they’re so small, you feel like what difference will it make anyway, like you’re someone who you just want to grow, that’s something that’s really important to you.

You love learning you love your own evolution and feeling that so we want to have that goal that’s really going to support that. And then when it comes to what you do each week, you’re going to be taking that growth goal that you have. And instead of thinking about the whole thing, you’re just gonna be focused on the first quarter. So I know that depending where you’re at in your business, but for a lot of the perfectionist entrepreneurs that I work with, thinking about a 12 month goal is a lot. And you haven’t yet built up that self trust, to be able to really trust your future self, to figure that out, and to figure out the how along the way, and exactly what that will look like you’re going to be in this space right now where you just want to know exactly how that will work in order for you to believe in it.

And so what we want to do, if that’s you, as you have that 12 month goal, you want to have that but you’re just gonna then focus on that first quarterly milestone, and forget about the rest of it for now. And just break it down in those chunks. It’s like for example, if you’re going for a run, instead of saying I’m going to run five kilometers, you say, Okay, I’m going to run to the next tree. Once I get there, I’m going to pick another train, I’m going to run to that one. That’s what we want to do with our goals, we want to break it down. And we do it with our week to kind of break it down. So our brain doesn’t get freaked out or overwhelmed. Knowing our perfectionist brain wants to go into that mode, to protect us from putting ourselves out there and experiencing the shame that might follow with being a failure or being successful. And we don’t want to experience that.

So we want to actually just support our perfectionists brain and be able to allow it to show up fully and for us to put ourselves out there. In my program, I teach exactly what to do when you have that quarterly milestone what you need to be focused on, but just know for now you need to have that goal that’s going to work for your perfectionist brain. Perfectionists love to make vague goals with like one day I want to go full time in my business or have a 10k month and I don’t know exactly when but I definitely want to do it you know, the sooner the better. Or we have 17 goals you might have like for every area of your business, you have a goal for every area of your life. You have three goals, you just have so many goals. And that’s when we we sabotage ourselves and get to feel like we’re really smart and intelligent and have a lot of potential without having to actually test that.

That we can say well you know, I would have been doing better my business if I wasn’t so busy trying to be consistent with working out and I would have been better at that if I wasn’t so busy. Just trying to eat healthy and doing all this research on that and like, we just end up getting out of being committed and accountable to our goals by having so many of them. Or we just have no goals at all, because we don’t want to disappoint ourselves. Those things don’t work. When it comes to business, you need to know where you’re heading. And you need to have that set up in a way that inspires you without freaking you out. So then let’s talk about power planning. Because this is how you actually get yourself to lift up one foot and put it down in front of you, and then lift up the other one, and put it down in front of you and get yourself moving, you need to have a way to actually plan out your time. So we’re not going into this over planning where it takes us so long, like a full day to make this beautiful color coded calendar.

I do love a color coded calendar, with power planning you will have one, but we don’t want it to take all day you need to be getting shut down, especially if you’re like me, and you have little ones or maybe you have a chronic illness that many of my clients do. You’re looking for an aging parent, you have a full time job like you don’t have the time to be spending so much time planning. But we don’t want to just be under planning when we have this to do list or we’re like time blocking our calendar like we’re a robot and then abandoned after a few days and then having to do it again. You’re constantly consolidating your To Do lists and writing them and rewriting them and planning and organizing. Like I love a stationery store. I love doing that. But you don’t have time for that you actually just need to be able to plan your time and do it in a way that you can trust your follow through on it. And then you follow through on it. You do that with your goal in mind. You have the support and the environment around you so you can do courageous things. And then you’re able to actually get yourself to that goal.

So there are three steps to power planning. And these are steps you can start doing right away. I obviously teach it in detail in my program perfection is getting shit done. I provide the coaching and support to help you do this are so many clients in PGSD, who have been able to double their income while working less like my client, Natalie, for example, who she is a software that and crochet has a YouTube channel. But when she came into PGSD, she wanted to launch an online course she had signed up for a program to do that. And to help her do that, but she couldn’t actually get herself to pull the trigger and launch it. And of course, she didn’t, that program wasn’t helping her with a perfectionist mindset, it was just giving her the technical thing she needed to know to launch that course.

So she came into PGSD, she said her growth goal, she started power planning. And she was able to double her revenue and make over six figures in a very short space of time and actually not freak yourself out from doing that. And go on to make even more money and be working less actually having vacations with her husband, be able to go on a vacation in a van. And actually do that without this looming guilt of all the things that hadn’t been done. And just being in chaos all the time, and like feeling overwhelmed before you even open your eyes. That’s how she described it. I have interviewed her on my podcast as well, I think it’s episode 334 of the perfectionism project, if you want to listen to that, but there are so many clients stories like that, when they said their growth goal and started power planning.

It was just those missing tools and support that they needed to be able to show up and get shit done. I have so many clients who listen to this podcast, and they have been able to start changing their lives and then they come into PGSD. And it’s like, the next level of growth that they are really, really, really are able to actually be showing up consistently. They don’t just have little improvements here or there. They are able to go full time in their business, they are able to be posting consistently. And like my client, Kristen, who I’ve interviewed on the podcast as well, I think it’s episode 312. But she was able to go from having about a decade where she was just stopping and starting with her social media. She’s a stylist, she had a YouTube channel, and she had a video that went viral and blew up.

But she wasn’t actually able to translate that into clients, she’s now able to sign 2000 other clients directly from YouTube videos, because she was able to set her growth goal and do power planning to actually support herself, to be able to show up consistently and to confidently put herself out there. And so this is possible for you too. And just knowing remembering that me, I took three years to make my first dollar, because of my perfectionism. And because I didn’t have these tools. And it took me six years to make my first $100,000 and have that first $100,000 year, I’m now going on to make over 2 million in my business. But it was these tools that made the difference for me. And that’s why I’m so passionate about sharing it with you about sharing the steps here. So you can start training on to invite you into PGSD. So you can have those same results to clients have come in, they haven’t yet started making money from their business. And they’re able to start making that first dollar. And then beyond that, because they actually could make those decisions and get themselves moving and feel safe while doing that.

So these are the steps of power planning, you have your power hour, you have your little tweaks, and you have your weekly review. And those are the steps you will repeat each week. So your power hour is how you begin the week, it’s gonna take an hour, it’d be and it might take a little bit longer than that maybe 90 minutes, maybe two hours. But within three months of doing it, you’ll be having an hour an hour, then every day, you’re gonna set out five minutes on little tweaks, your weekly review will take about 30 minutes. So all in all, here we’re talking about less than two hours spent planning in a week, that’s a lot less time that you’ve probably spent writing, rewriting the to do list, feeling overwhelmed scrolling social media because of that overwhelm. This is something that is going to fit into your busy life. I knew that as a professional entrepreneur, you like getting shit done, you like keeping yourself busy.

So this is something that’s really designed to fit into that and you’re going to replace whatever you’re doing the time blocking the to do list, all of that the post it notes, the calendars, the whiteboards, all of that with power planning, it’s going to become your to do list that you work from. And you’re going to make the three month commitment to this, which simply means and we talked about that. In part two, when you have a three month experiment, we do that with power planning as well. So it’s not going to be this forever. If you don’t want it to be just try it on for three months. And have this be something that you allow yourself to develop skills around. You’re going to be a beginner in the beginning, have a three month experiment with it. You can always go back to the to do list. You can always go back to the To Do lists. You can always go back to the time bucket You can always go back to what you’re currently doing right now that it’s not working. But it’s not horrible either you do sometimes get things done when you feel motivated.

But ultimately, you are stuck, you are frozen, you are not able to move yourself forward, you are not able to show up consistently and confidently put yourself out there. So I want to have you start doing these three steps, all you’re going to need is a digital calendar. And it’s free. So you can use iCal, we can use Google Calendar, and you are going to have either with it a notebook and pen, or you are going to use something digital. So you could use your Google Doc, you could use your iPhone notes, because there’s going to be a mindset portion with this as well. So you need to have somewhere to write things down. And you need to have a digital calendar to plan. So let’s go through the steps. The first step in power planning is your power hour.

So in this step, you are putting your needle moving tasks into your digital calendar in a way that you can actually follow through on. So when you look at your calendar, after doing your Power Hour, you will actually feel like you can do it and I’m like, Okay, well, if everything goes to plan, and there are no hiccups, and nothing disrupts me, and the kids don’t have to come home from daycare, like I could actually maybe do this, if I feel motivated the whole time. And you have all that pressure and expectation, you’re not going to feel like that, instead, you’re going to feel like I could actually do this. And if life happens, I can adjust this plan to have it be something that works for me, in your power hour, you’re also putting in your claim rest, which is when you’re resting without guilt.

So in a second, I’ll talk a bit more about what to do with your power. The second step in your power planning is your little tweaks. This is huge, this is really important. You need to have adjustable plans that get updated as you go. There are a couple of reasons this works super well, for the perfectionist brain. So the first is that when your brain which wants to be an all or nothing mindset, sees the calendar, it’s really hard for you to trust yourself, if you think those plans can’t change. And it’s also really hard to plan if you think those plans can’t change. Because you don’t know what’s going to happen during the week, you don’t know what your motivation levels will be like you don’t know if your kids will be well, you don’t know what will happen in the week.

So it’s really hard to trust yourself. And this makes it take ages to plan you avoid planning all together and just end up doing that to do list. Because you feel like well, I don’t actually know what will happen, I actually can’t plan. So having this step of having little tweaks, allows your perfectionist brain to actually get on board with planning out things and putting in there some courageous tasks, those little movers that actually gonna move your business forward. If you have some flexibility in that plan, we want to have flexible structure to support your perfectionist brain this little tweak step is going to give you that flexible structure. So you can make plans, you don’t have to spend so much time on them. You can adjust and adapt as you go. And you can really as well when you’re doing these little tweaks. The second reason this is so powerful for your perfectionist brain is that you can see now when you’re getting in your own way, you will be updating your calendar to reflect what actually happened in your day, using a little check mark emoji to signify that so you still get that satisfaction of ticking things off.

But you will be adjusting your calendar and keeping things workable as you go. So that you never fall behind and have to abandon your plan or pretend that you forgot to look at it, you can actually just keep things moving. And this is such an important skill set when it comes to entrepreneurship. If you don’t know how to adapt a plan, you are not going to be able to get anything done. Because shit isn’t going to go to plan you need to learn this skill set as an entrepreneur as well. So there are so many benefits to this, and doesn’t take long, it only takes a few minutes a day. I work with my calendar open on my laptop. And I’m using that as my to do list. And it feels great doing that as well. Because there’s a clear end to my day, I’ve actually taken into account how I work when I work best when I like to rest how much time I like to have for things.

Of course, a lot of things I need to guess how long they will take, because I haven’t done them before. As an entrepreneur, I’m always doing new things. But I’m able to actually work from that to do list in my calendar work from that plan. And feel like okay, I’m going to need to be focusing creators to do some of these things. But I have buffer time where I’ve planned time off after the courageous tasks, so that my nervous system can calm down and I can reset instead of thinking I now have to go right onto this other scary thing I need to do. So all of that makes it so workable for your perfectionist brain and allows you to really follow through on it.

So then when it comes to the third step, this is your weekly review. And you’re going to be able to see what went on with your week by comparing the screenshot that you took at the beginning of your week. After you finish your Power Hour. You’re going to have that screenshot. And you’re going to compare it with what your calendar looks like now. And when it comes to looking at how you got in your own way, throughout the week, you’re going to be able to see that but when you’re working from a to do list, you can’t, you can get stuck in procrasti-research mode. Oh, just stuck in the editing phase of a reel. And it feels really smart and responsible to do that. That’s one of the things perfectionists have is that when we’re overthinking, it doesn’t feel like overthinking, it just feels like thinking, because of course, you have to do something perfectly.

So when it comes to doing this Weekly Review, you are able to compare your power planning at the end of the week with it at the beginning of the week, to see what those wins were what did you actually accomplish. If you go to the end of the week, and right now you feel like I don’t even know where the time went, and I’m exhausted. But I don’t even know what I got done this week. This is really going to help with that it’s really going to give you that sense of accomplishment. We perfectionist we have a hard time celebrating wins because we’re in that all or nothing mode. And unless we’re all the way to our goal, there’s nothing to celebrate. And I don’t want to celebrate anything because I’m going to demotivate myself. But you actually need to celebrate things to be able to step into the new image you’re creating for yourself, the new identity you are having for yourself as a real business owner and entrepreneur.

If you don’t celebrate wins, you’re not going to create a new normal for yourself. And because of the way our brains work, you will sabotage yourself. So you can always do what is normal for you. Our brain loves certainty, we love being certain about ourselves. So celebrating wins is what actually allows you to create a new identity so that it feels normal to follow through consistently, it feels normal to make decisions and actually action them and execute them. It feels normal to be making money, it feels normal to have clients and customers reach out to you. All of that feels normal that happens through celebrating wins. So in your weekly review, you’ll be celebrating those wins, you’ll be looking at aha moments and realizations because this power planning and having it set up in this way.

Not only are the benefits that I’ve mentioned, but one that’s so powerful, it can be a little bit confronting, but just knowing it can be confronting helps with this. So I want you to think about if you’re doing a workout, and you aren’t doing it in front of a mirror, so maybe you’re doing some weightlifting. And there’s no mirror there to see what’s going on, that you might think like, oh, you know, I really have the best form here. When you don’t, if you were to look in a mirror, you’d see actually I need to bend my knees over way more. And maybe you have a coach or someone who helps you see like, Hey, I know you think you’ve got the best form here. But actually, let’s make these tweaks.

So coaching, so powerful, but let’s just say the mirror alone, because we want to have you been able to coach yourself as well, you have the mirror that helps you coach yourself, your power planning is your mirror. So when you look in the mirror, you can say okay, I’m going to have a relationship with myself where I’m willing to look in that mirror and see what’s going on. So I can improve it instead of me wanting to the workout, never in front of a mirror. And just living in my own head about how good it’s looking and how good it must be, I’m actually willing to look at myself and see what’s going on and know that I don’t have to fix everything at once. I’m never going to do that. And that’s never the goal, I can just make one simple trick and dramatically improve things.

So we have you with your power planning, you are really creating a mirror for yourself to see what’s going on with you. And if you’re like me, and you love understanding yourself, and studying yourself and you love psychology and personal development, you are going to love power planning because it is your coaching tool, it is creating that mirror for you, for you to actually see what’s going on. So there are prompts that you will follow in your weekly review that will help you uncover what is going on for you without it becoming this overwhelming laundry list of oh my god, there are 20 things I did wrong this week and things that I need to improve and I procrastinated here and I overthought this and I was scattered about what I was doing that it’s none of that. It’s really about understanding, okay, there are so many things at any point in time any human could do to optimize and improve.

And the most strategic and smartest way to do that is to just pick one thing, and actually make that change, and then pick another. So when navigating to this idea of you need to fix yourself. Personal development isn’t about fixing yourself. It’s about loving who you are, and changing because you want to do that. Power planning really helps you to actually do that. So you have that mirror. In your weekly review. You’re looking at what’s working for you. What were the wins and aha moments and realizations. What isn’t working for you just find it a couple of little examples. Okay, procrastinate on this I can see when I look at what I planned. I had this task here to publish my sales page. And then I can see at the end of my week, that’s nowhere to be seen on my calendar. I deleted it. I pushed it off to the next week. I wonder what’s going on there.

And you can use the tools that we share inside PGSD to unpack that and see what’s going on and that’s enough you don’t need to then go into Okay, what about this overthinking but We want to do that and perfection is very well like I want to get to the root of everything. It’s not about getting to the root, your present day thinking is creating your present day feelings, actions and results. Your calendar is showing you what you’re doing. Because our brain doesn’t want to see what we’re doing. We don’t want to see that we’ve been scrolling, we don’t want to see all those things. Just know that as well. When you’re doing a Power Hour,

you’re going to plan your week in a way that really supports you. So automatically, your desire to scroll social media or be on TikTok is going to decrease because you’re not going to be trying to escape your own plans, you’re going to have plans that have built in support, buffer time, clean rest, so that you actually can follow through on them. And if you are on TikTok or Instagram, is because you want to be not as a form of escape, who is in a to do list if you’re doing time blocking? If you’re texting things to a friend saying, Hey, can you make sure I do this today, of course, you want to be scrolling, you are trying to escape the pressure and expectations you have for yourself to do things perfectly. And so we want to create for you a structure a flexible structure for your week, that allows you to show up fully and confidently in a way that doesn’t freak you out or burn you out.

So whether your weekly review as well, you’ll be looking at a couple of other questions within there. But ultimately, what you were doing is learning about yourself, you are studying yourself. So that next week, when you do your Power Hour, you were actually able to bring that with you, instead of trying to be like, Okay, I just need to be more motivated. I just need to have more discipline, it’s understanding, that’s not actually the problem. That’s way too vague to even do anything about. But understanding this is exactly why I procrastinate on this specific task, I can see the thoughts that were going on, I can see what I need to think differently, or what I need to allow myself to feel in order to actually get it done, I can see that I keep planning for the end of the day, that doesn’t work, I don’t have courage at the end of the day, I need to put that at the beginning.

And then give myself two hours afterwards to go for a walk or have coffee with a friend. And then you try that. And you see how that goes. And over time you just start to get this really deep understanding of yourself. It helps you create more self trust, because then you’re actually planning for you not this ideal self. That’s a robot that you hope will be perfectly motivated. But imagine if you went to work, so you’re working for someone else. And your boss comes to you. And I say here I have this plan for you for your week. You know exactly what you’re working towards. And everything here is actually important. I prioritize it. So you haven’t got busy work on here, you’ve just got a few things that are really important to do, they’ll take a bit of courage.

But I’ve really supported you with this. I’ve put a lot of rest and time off in your calendar. So you can read books, you can watch Netflix, you can do whatever you want to wind down between things, you can have breaks during the middle of your day, go to yoga class, if you want to do you can have a full day off, I have taken into account maybe things like your cycle, I have taken into account things maybe like your human design, I have so many clients who take those two things into account, or astrology when they are doing their power planning, I have taken you into account and created a plan you can follow that will get you to your goals. That’s what you were doing when you have your growth goal, and you have your power planning.

So I hope that’s been helpful to just mentally try on power planning. It’s something you can start doing, I’ve gone through the steps here, you can really begin to do this in PGSD. I teach how to do this and go through all those little steps of exactly how to do that power hour, and how to decide what is a needle mover and what’s actually important, what needs to go in your calendar, what doesn’t, because you’re not going to have enough time to do everything that you want to do. So if you’re trying to squeeze it into this into your calendar, it’s going to be really frustrating for you. So know that there is a bit more to it. But I’ve shared here the basic principles of it. So you can really just start trying it on and feeling into it. And thinking about is this something that I might want to try? Do I really think this could help me because I have helped so many people, just by sharing this and developing this tool myself, along with the growth goal.

I practice and preach power planning. Anyone in my life knows I do power planning we use it as a business behind the scenes. Everyone who works for me, does power planning as well. So just understand that this is something that you can start using. You don’t have to wait till you’re more motivated. And more discipline, it’s come as you are and it will work for you. And when you take into consideration that three month commitment to power planning, and knowing that it’s a skill set you’re developing. So when you first approach it, you’re going to approach it like a perfectionist, you’re going to want to be good at it. You’re not going to want to feel new at it, you’re going to want to feel like you know exactly what you’re doing. But if you can be in that growth mindset around it, get yourself into that experiment of this is a three month thing that I’m going to try on and I invite you to come into PGSD to do that.

We really support you with that with setting your growth goal and everything I’ve talked about here going through all the steps having a community of like minded people around you who are also doing it, you can also answer really specific questions about it. So I want you to really try that on, and know that you can start doing it as you are today. You don’t need to be more motivated. You don’t even need to have made the decisions yet you can start putting decision making time into your power planning. This is how you actually get yourself to show up consistently and to confidently put yourself at that. So I want to invite you this up, how can you set your growth goal and I want to invite you to do that inside PGSD, you can go to samlaurabrown.com/pgsd, to sign up for the waitlist, we are opening for enrollment at 6am, New York time on the 14th of March 2024. And closing at 11:59pm, New York time on the 21st of March.

So if you haven’t already mark your calendars get on the waitlist is really the best way to make sure you don’t miss those dates, and you have all the information you need to find out more about it and sign up to join us inside because I really want to make sure as well with this year for you like you might have been really motivated in January and really just feeling like this is your year. And maybe now we’re in March, it hasn’t panned out that way. Now you know why you got a human brain also that perfectionist mindset and you haven’t been using the right productivity tools, you haven’t got that support that you need. And that flexible structure in your week, that clear goal that works for your perfectionist brain.

Of course, it hasn’t been the way you want it to be yet, but you can do something about it. So I’m going to invite you into PGSD and join all of the other clients I have had been able to create amazing results and being so stuck in so in their own way and so frozen. And actually just with a couple of changes to the way they’re thinking the tools they’re using being able to change that forever, and get the compound of that forever. So yeah samlaurabrown.com/pgsd I hope you found this helpful and I will talk to you in part four, where we’re going to be talking about how to create and use positive time pressure so you can do your best work without burning out.

Author: Sam Brown