Podcast

Episode 558: The Two Productivity Tools That Built My Business To Multiple Six Figures (best of the podcast)

Today I’m sharing the two productivity tools I used that helped build my business to multiple six figures as a perfectionist entrepreneur.

If productivity is something you’re struggling with because you procrastinate, you spend a lot of time feeling overwhelmed, you never feel like you have enough time or you’re burned out – then today’s episode is really going to help you.

Tune in to hear about the two productivity tools that were essential while building my business and that have been essential for my clients too.

How to get more help with releasing your Perfectionism Handbrake:

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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 Perfectionists 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.

(Custom Intro)
Today I have a best of the podcast episode for you. So at this point, there are a lot of episodes on this podcast, and I want to make sure the best episodes don’t get lost in the archives. So today I’m sharing with you an episode that is well loved and also one that I am constantly referring to and linking people to, and I want to make sure you can listen to it as well if you haven’t already. So without further ado, let’s get into the episode.

Sam Laura Brown
Okay, so what are these two productivity tools that I am talking about? The first is power planning. This is a planning method I teach inside perfectionist getting shit done. And the second is clean rest. Even if you are familiar with both of these concepts that I teach, I want to invite you to listen to this episode in its entirety, because I’m sharing exactly how they have helped me build my business to multiple six figures. My business was once where your business is right now, and I was struggling to get out of my own way. I was struggling with procrastination. I was struggling with, follow through, overthinking, burn out, so many different things that perfectionist struggle with, and these two tools have helped me to do such important work when it comes from to getting from that growth mindset.

Sorry, I’m all backwards, getting from the perfectionist mindset to the growth mindset, I wouldn’t have been able to make the progress I have and, in turn, build my business, because that was what was stopping me from building my business without these tools. They’ve been so important, so powerful. They’re more than productivity tools that they have helped with that immensely, but these are tools that have helped me to do things like untangle my self worth from my business, which has allowed me to be more courageous, to be willing to actually try more things and therefore get better results. Help more people make more money with my business. These productivity tools have really helped me learn where I was self sabotage and I couldn’t see it when I wasn’t using these tools, but they have helped me see the sneaky self sabotage and actually overcome it.

So I’m going to be sharing with you, first power planning, a bit about it and how it has helped me, and then clean rest. So power planning. I teach this in full, inside Perfectionist Getting Shit Done. But to give you an overview, this is a planning method that is for perfectionist, unlike any other planning method out there that trigger our perfectionist mindset, this planning method, this productivity tool is designed to teach you how to stop over planning, to stop under planning, which are two big productivity mistakes that perfectionists make. It is also designed to teach you how to develop self trust, how to spot self sabotage, how to actually keep your plans workable, instead of being in that all or nothing mindset about it. It involves a calendar. I prefer a digital calendar because you can, when you keep things workable, move things around, drop and drag very easily.

And I use iCal you can use Google Calendar. It doesn’t matter which one you use, and it is not a rigid planning method, though it’s easy to think that when you look at a beautiful color coded calendar and it looks like, Oh, that’s so rigid. And you might, as a perfectionist, have experience with trying to create very rigid plans and putting way too much on your plate and then not being able to follow through with it and feeling very disheartened. And determining, oh, the problem was that I was being too rigid and working from a calendar, and I just need this big, vague to do list. That’s the best option. I’m going to talk about why that’s not the best option. But I just want to mention that even though power planning is a planning method and productivity tool that involves your calendar. It does not mean it’s rigid. It is the opposite of rigid when you use it well. And yeah, I’m going to be talking about how that works, why that is and it takes one hour to plan your week.

So what you do is you sit down at the beginning of your week and you figure out what needs to get done. There’s a whole process for that in PGSD, so I won’t go into that here, but there’s certain things you need to consider, and there’s a lot of mistakes perfectionists make with this stage. So definitely check out the lesson in PGSD on this where we will prioritize the unimportant without even realizing it, and different things like that. So you need to kind of go through a bit of a checklist to make sure that the things you’re going to put in your calendar actually need to be done. Are actually important, actually needle movers. And then you will plan your clean rest. I’m going to talk about that second. That’s the second productivity tool that has been so helpful. It’s part of power planning.

Power planning gets you to actually have clean rest, which is resting without guilt. And you plan a few other things in first, and then you put your work in, and then you follow your plan. You keep it workable as you go. So if you aren’t actually able to follow through with something, because maybe something came up, or something unexpected, or you are experiencing some self-sabotage. You need to keep that plan workable, instead of just throwing it out the window and going, this isn’t for me, which we love doing as perfectionist and that all or nothing mindset, we either need to stick to it perfectly. We’re like, fuck it. What’s the point of doing this? And so with power planning, we get to unlearn that so we can actually show up consistently. Perfectionists have real issues showing up consistently because of that all or nothing mindset.

So this power planning method is really designed to work with your perfectionist mindset instead of against it. So many productivity tools annoyingly make us, make our perfectionist mindset work against us, and yes, we are focused on getting from the perfectionist mindset into a growth mindset, but while you are on that journey, your perfectionist mindset will still be at play. So we want to make it work for you and not against you. We don’t want to do things that trigger the all or nothing mindset, like habit tracking, for example, that’s a very common productivity tool that isn’t helpful for perfectionists, because we can do it for a few weeks, maybe even a few months, then you fall off the wagon and that’s it, and you feel like, oh my goodness, I broke the streak, and I need to wait now a few months before I feel motivated again to give it another shot. So that is one of the many pieces of advice out there that is proven to work, but doesn’t actually help a perfectionist.

So I’m going to be talking about specifically why power planning has helped me build my business to multiple six figures, and why working from an endless to-do-list wouldn’t have gotten me the same result, and if it did, it would have been with a whole lot of burnout, having my identity so wrapped up in my business, and not feeling like I could actually breathe. I’d always be overwhelmed, and never feeling like I had a sense of accomplishment. So here are some of the reasons that power planning has been instrumental in building my multiple six figure coaching business. Number one. This is uncomfortable. This is something that will come up when you begin power planning, if you haven’t started it already, and it’s very uncomfortable. We want a planning method, a productivity tool, that’s just gonna work from day one and make everything so easy. But there are certain things you were doing as a perfectionist that are making you unproductive, and you need to unlearn them. And how you’re going to unlearn them is first be made aware of them. So this is kind of like, if you have been working from a to do list, and you move to power planning. It’s kind of like being overweight and avoiding the scales.

So when you have the long to do list, your list is vague. It’s never ending. You can’t really see what’s going on. You get to kind of hide from yourself with that to do list. It’s like going from not getting on the scales to actually standing on the scale and seeing how much you weigh and seeing the real situation that can be uncomfortable, that can be confronted. That’s why in PGSD we have a coaching calls and a community to support you as you are going through this, especially the first few weeks with power planning, I recommend giving it a go for three months before deciding if it’s for you or not, because there will be this little uncomfortable period, especially in the beginning, when you are doing the equivalent of a stepping on the scale and seeing how you have been operating. And it’s not like you haven’t been like that before. You were just oblivious to it on purpose, subconsciously, you were being oblivious, but it was uncomfortable, so you’re avoiding it, and that’s okay, but we’re just getting a bit more awareness.

This is what real personal development is about getting some uncomfortable awareness so you can actually do something about it. And before I go on with this, I just want to mention that I have been practicing power planning for two years plus, and I still don’t do it perfectly, and even so, it’s been essential with building my business. So this isn’t a planning method that it only work if you are doing it perfectly, that’s the all or nothing thinking. Either need to do this perfectly for it to work, or it’s not going to work at all. No, even just doing this a little bit and focusing on getting a little bit better with it, it’s going to help you. You’re going to see changes in your life. So these aren’t just the things that happen when I have followed through perfectly with power planning. I’m still practicing it. I’m still tweaking it. Anyway, so I have been able to see my self sabotaging behaviors like I wasn’t able to when I was working from a to do list, which has allowed me to get out of my own way and stop those self sabotaging behaviors. And those behaviors were sabotaging my attempts at building the business I have today.

So a few of those things were prioritizing the unimportant, for example, making things take longer than they need to. And it’s crazy how sneaky our brains can get, because you can when you’re doing Power Planning, you can see how long things. Take so what I like to do, put the day, like the whole week in my calendar, and then as I’m following through with it, kind of have it open. It’s, it’s my to do list for the day. It’s what I work from during the day, and I update it as I go to reflect reality and to help me keep things workable. And so I noticed, I think this was in, I mean, I’ve had this realization a few times, because as you catch self sabotage, your brain just gets even better at self sabotaging and even more ninja like at doing it. So this is a tool that you don’t just have for a few months, and you spot all the self sabotage and you overcome it. And that’s that new level, new devil, and your brain, it is creative when it comes to self sabotage.

So I used to initially make things take way longer than they needed to take. I was overthinking. And the reason I was doing that is because if I was very busy with the things that were more comfortable and less important, I didn’t have time, and I could justify not doing the scary, courageous things that I needed to do as time went on, with power planning that resolved, I was able to work on that. But then what the way that this came up was that I wasn’t batching together things that I need to do that was similar, and I could only see this by actually looking at my calendar and reflecting on what was going on. So for example, with podcast episodes, instead of sitting down and recording a whole heap together and just getting in that groove and getting them done and being able to think at a higher level in terms of my content calendar with my podcast and what I’m going to talk about, I would it still didn’t look like it took only my calendar, but I wouldn’t batch it together.

So I just need to record one episode at a time, and I think, okay, what can I talk about tomorrow on the podcast? And I recorded that day, and it would go out the next day, and that was self sabotage, because when I was doing that with the podcast and a lot of other different little things, it would fill up my whole week and remove all those courageous things that I needed to do that would actually really build the business. And yes, the podcast helps with building the business, but other things that were more uncomfortable I was able to avoid because I was so busy having to get a podcast episode and having to get an email newsletter and all these things I was just doing one offs of so that I didn’t have to be vulnerable. I didn’t have to risk the shame that as perfectionist we are trying to avoid.

Also, it helped me see what tasks I was putting off over and over again. So with your to do list, you might be in the space with, okay, I have a master do list, maybe then I have a to do list for the day, and if everything doesn’t get done for the day, I move it to the next day. And you’d think that when you’re doing that, you would really be able to notice what keeps getting moved and you do something about it. But what happens with the to do list is that it’s much easier to miss when you keep just putting things off and putting things off and putting things off, especially because that to do list is so long, it’s never ending. There’s other things on there as well that you’re putting off. If you say, oh, tomorrow’s a better day, I’m going to feel more motivated then, oh, now, tomorrow’s a better day, I’m going to feel more motivated then. And on and on and on and on. It’s so much quicker to catch when you are doing power planning and you’re physically like, you’ve already allocated a time for doing that, and you have to actually change it in the calendar. You can be like, Huh. And this is why a weekly review is part of the power planning process. You can go, Huh, that’s interesting.

I keep moving this task about announcing my coaching services on Instagram, for example, and it’s very easy to miss that. It’s very easy to say, Well, it’s because I don’t have the right graphic. I don’t have the right captions at the right time. Yeah, my branding isn’t done. All this stuff, all these nice, little comfortable lies. Our brain tells us that why it’s a good reason to put it up. But when you are power planning, power planning, power planning, you will notice that, and so when I’ve been doing it, I have been able to pick up on when I am doing that and actually prioritize those things and get them done, which has allowed me to build the business. When I’m working from to do list, I’m not able to catch that, or it takes much longer, and the business doesn’t grow because I’m doing the things that really need to get done.

Also, another way that I had been self sabotaging was just being busy without being productive. So when you’re power planning, you need to distinguish what the needle movers are and prioritize those and really get clear on what’s going to produce results, and specifically what is going to produce the result you are trying to achieve. So this is why it works so well. Together with the impossible goal, like the impossible goal, that’s your 12 month goal. Then we have the quarterly milestones as part of that. They’re three month mini goals. They are all going to feel unrealistic, because, literally, that’s how we set the goal. It is set above what you believe is possible for yourself. So you are. You have an opportunity to evolve into the version of you who can achieve that goal. It’s not the goal is impossible. It’s that you are not yet the version of yourself that can achieve that goal.

Your power planning is the weekly plan. Do you have the weekly outcomes you need to create, not activities you need to do, outcomes you need to create that will add up and compound to equal your quarterly milestone, your quarterly goal, and if you hit all those quarterly milestones, so sometimes you might over achieve, under achieve on each of them, they are just guide posts to help you along the way and to help you see how you’re going. And they increase incrementally over time. They’re not divided evenly over the year, so you have time to ramp up and really evolve as the year progresses. But your power planning that you do are your weekly realistic plans that together will add up to an unrealistic result.

To achieve an unrealistic result, you have to show up in a different way to how you’ve been showing up before. You have to do courageous things that you have otherwise been putting off, and you have to do things that actually produce results, and that produce the results that you actually need. So for example, if you have a impossible goal about making money. And I highly recommend financial impossible goals. I won’t go into it here, but it’s a business, not a charity, and it brings up so much great money mindset, work. Say, your first quarterly milestone is $10,000 in the quarter, you would achieve that by, say, for example, signing five clients at $2,000 I’m just making numbers up here, but what I’m trying to demonstrate is when you know that’s your milestone, and that’s your hypothesis as to how to reach that milestone, and then you look at your power planning.

Okay, sure, you can post on Instagram, but if you aren’t aware of exactly what your goal is and exactly what result you’re trying to produce is it’s very easy to focus on, okay, I just want to post, and that feels productive, and I want to get likes, and you can end up focusing on a metric, like, like that does not matter for shit. Instead of focusing on, I’m doing this to sign a client. It doesn’t matter how many people like it, because I know I don’t like most of the posts that I see on Instagram, and I don’t comment, and I’m a lurker, so other people are lurkers too. So likes maybe isn’t the best metric for me to measure. Instead, I’m going to be focused on the outcome, which is signing clients, and what will add up to signing clients and putting those things in your calendar, for example, it’s easy to be feeling busy without actually being productive and focusing on the things that don’t actually matter, those vanity metrics, those things that make us feel productive without feeling vulnerable instead of doing those courageous things.

The second way that power planning has really helped me is it has given me the ability to focus. It has forced me to realize how much time I have in a work week. When you have an endless to do list, you don’t have to recognize this. You aren’t met with constraint. That’s why we love the to do list, because we can be like, Oh, look how productive I’m going to be. Look how long this to do list is. I’m so motivated, I’m so excited. And we write that long to do list without recognizing a, we’re a human, and we only have a certain amount of brain power per day. B, there’s only a certain amount of time per day, and it’s very easy when you forget those two things, not to prioritize those courageous needle movers, because you feel like there’s time for that later. I’ll warm up first with some easy tasks, with six hours of easy tasks. Then by the time you do that, oh, you know, I don’t have time anymore to announce my coaching services on Instagram. I’ll do that tomorrow.

But when you are power planning, we are planning our rest in first and our other commitments we have going on. So you really get to see exactly how much time you have and if you’re working full time. And I get it when I started building my business, I was working full time. And honestly, no, I wasn’t. I was a full time Uni student, and I was working nearly full time hours, and then I was also building my business when I was working full time in accounting. So I get it that when you do this, it can be confronting me like shit. I only have an hour a day. I only have 30 minutes a day. But when you recognize that, it means you don’t keep writing that long to do list, it never gets done. It makes you feel overwhelmed and like you’re a piece of shit, because you never do anything, and you just go home and flop on the couch and watch Netflix because it’s overwhelmed. Said to go, Hey, I have an hour. What am I going to do in this hour that’s going to move my business forward?

So it’s given me that ability to focus, and to actually focus on what matters. And also, I’ll talk about this more when we talk about clean rest, but because I actually have a break from work, my brain is so much more powerful than when I was trying to do work all the time, which is what happens when we have a to do list and we haven’t decided when we’re going to start and when we’re going to stop, and we feel guilty if we’re not being productive 24/7. Number three is it’s helped me to avoid burnout, I used to be in a cycle of burnout where I burn out at least once every six months, and now I don’t burn out, and I haven’t burned out for a few years now. That is because of power planning and the way it allows you to build your business without overworking, because you’re going to catch that overworking as a form of self sabotage, which it is. So I have been able to build my business and help more people without burning out, because I don’t plan too much or too little for myself, over planning is an issue perfectionist have with planning, putting too much on our plate, also under planning, which isn’t talked about enough.

This is something to be aware of when we have vague plans, when we have very little to and we’re like, oh, I have the whole day to do things this. We often go into this when we’ve been over planning for so long and feeling so frustrated that we can’t live up to this idealistic expectation we have of ourselves. We go, Fuck it. I’m just not even planning. I’m just gonna do what I call the fingers crossed method, cross my fingers that I have a productive day today. That leads to burnout as well. For different reasons. We don’t have time to go into that in this episode, that I have been able to avoid burnout because I’m not over planning. I’m not under planning. I’m keeping my plans workable. So if I’ve been unwell or something like that has happened, I’ve made adjustments instead of just pushing through perfection is always talking about pushing How do I just push through? Push through that is not what we’re doing with power planning.

We’re doing the work with our impossible goal to create an identity that will pull us towards that instead of having to push and with this. Yes, we’re sometimes following through with things when we don’t feel like it, but we’re not doing it from an energy of pushing ourselves, and that a lot of that energy is what creates the burnout, because we’re pushing because of the beliefs we have about not being worthy, about not being good enough. We’re in a rush to success because we just want that validation, the relief that we believe will come from that validation. We’re having overwhelming thoughts, all these different things, also avoiding overwhelm. I didn’t feel overwhelmed when I’m power planning. And you might be power planning, maybe you started. You’re like, oh my goodness, I wish I feel so overwhelmed. That’s because you are still doing it in your perfectionist way, and you’re in that early stage where it’s the equivalent of you stepping on the scale and and doing things how you’ve already done them before, and expecting different results. It’s going to take a minute.

You have to be patient with it. You have to be in a growth mindset about this. It’s not a magic bullet, but it does definitely work way better than an endless, long to do list. So when you do power planning, you get to a point where you aren’t over planning. You aren’t under planning basically, where you can look at your calendar and you’re like, oh, I don’t know if I can get that done. Instead, you’re like, Okay, I can get that done. I’ll need to be focused. I’ll need to be courageous. But that’s okay. I can do that because there’s a break coming shortly after it, but I know I can do that, and if I can’t, I can keep my plans workable and make adjustments as required. Again, this isn’t a rigid planning method, but you know exactly what you need to do, exactly what outcome you’re creating, because we plan based on outcomes, on activities when we’re doing power planning, and I just don’t feel overwhelmed, and that’s uncomfortable not to feel overwhelmed, because we love indulging in overwhelm. It gives us an excuse not to do things.

So there’s that to contend with, and there’s that that will come up. So if this is something you’ve been experiencing, you’re in the overwhelm, just consider there’s a reason you’re doing that. There’s a reason overwhelm is something that keeps coming up. There’s something underneath that, and it’s so powerful to look at that. And with power planning, you could really get a great insight into that. So I don’t feel overwhelmed when I am working on my business. I’m able to just sit down. I know my past self who really had my best interest in mind, not my present day momentary self, where I just have instant gratification in mind, but my past self who has that bigger picture in mind, created this plan, and now I’m just following through with this. It’s like my past self who sat down and did the hour of power planning the beginning of the week is my boss, who isn’t a bitch. She’s not giving me a plan I can’t follow through on. She’s not giving me a plan that’s gonna make me burn out. She’s giving me a plan that’s actually gonna help me create the life I want.

And now I’m trusting my past self and that plan is going to get me to my goals instead of what I want to do in the moment, which is always just to go and do anything other than what’s on my calendar that’s still there, that’s still going on with this. It’s not like that desire is completely gone, but over time, you build trust in Okay, I’m going to do what my past self decided to do because she had the bigger picture in mind. She wasn’t thinking about whether or not I felt like it, she wasn’t thinking about what’s this person gonna say. And again, that version of you, that part of you that planned the week, we have to make sure she’s not a bitch, and that’s a mistake that comes up a lot when perfectionists began power planning, is they make plans for themselves that they would hate if someone else gave them.

So don’t give yourself that kind of plan. Give yourself a plan you actually want to follow through on. That’s the key. That is the key. Don’t be a bitch to yourself. So I don’t feel overwhelmed when I’m working on my business, and that allows me to focus and to show up and to do things in so much less time than it would take if I’m overwhelmed and all throughout the day having to think about, Okay, now what am I going to do? How am I going to give myself to do that? Why am I even doing this in the first place? What like that’s already thought about, and now I’m just following through with that plan number five. It gives me a sense of accomplishment. This is so key. This is so key. This gives me an end to my day. And that doesn’t happen with a to do list that’s endless and never gets fully ticked off. When you have that, even if you’re like, Okay, I’m going to finish working at 5pm you, if you’re working from a to do list, will most likely have things on that to do list that are unticked, and you’re going to end the day feeling like I didn’t do enough, and that is not a productive place to work from.

That is not an inspiring place or creative place or resourceful place to work from. But by having an end to your day, and it’s not just a time, it’s these are the things I’ve committed to doing, and if I finish early, instead of punishing my brain by bringing something forward from the next day, which we love to do. Oh, cool. I’ve got this extra time I’m feeling so productive, I’m going to bring something forward. I encourage you not to do that, because when you do that, you are saying to your brain, oh, even if you’re so focused and you’re like doing your best to get this done as quickly and resourcefully as possible, if you get it done early, I’m going to give you more work well, like, Oh no, thank you. I’d rather space things out. So what I like to do, I put it on my calendar and I plan for like, I to do this in this amount of time, I’d really have to be focused and, PS, it’s not like I am just doing things all the time that I’ve done before, and so I know exactly how long they’ll take.

That’s one of the biggest things that come up. I don’t know how long it’ll take. It’s deciding how long you’re going to give yourself. I won’t go too much more into it in this episode, but that is what it’s about. Kind of like when you’re doing an exam. Say, university exam, they don’t say, Here you go. Here’s the exam. See how long it takes. You know, we’re going to have this room open all day. It’s you have two hours. That’s how long you have. And you work to that. And that’s possible to have that mentality in your business, when you have lots of clean rest, and your brain knows it has a break coming up. But if you’re sitting one exam after the other, after the other, after the other, from 8am to 10pm your brain’s like, fuck it. I am not doing this. That’s why clean rest is so important.

But it really gives me a sense of accomplishment, because I know exactly what I need to do in that day, and if I get it done early, I finish the day early, which also brings up a whole layer of like, Oh my goodness. What I like? Am I doing enough? And all that stuff which is such important work to do, I’m going to talk about that in a moment. But with this sense of accomplishment, if you have your own business, there is never a point in time where everything is done, and most likely, you always have multiple projects on the go at once, at all times of year. So there isn’t going to be this finale that’s just going to happen. You need to create it. And finishing each day with a sense of accomplishment is so powerful because you go into the next day with that sense of accomplishment there, and it only makes you want to create that sense of accomplishment again and again and again. Our brain loves it.

But if you finish every day feeling like I didn’t do enough, or you got everything done and then you added more to your plate so you still didn’t do enough, it’s not helpful. We love that, though, secretly, we love feeling like we haven’t done enough. That’s our MO that’s what we’re so comfortable with, that feeling of I didn’t do enough again today, and beating ourselves up and letting ourselves off the hook by beating ourselves up. Ourselves up. So you need to be aware of that, but this will give you a sense of accomplishment when you’re doing Power planning. It also reduces overthinking, because you don’t have time to overthink like that’s the way that you plan of okay, I need to be courageous. I need to be focused. There’s a break coming. So I can do that, but I’m not giving myself all this time to overthink. I’m giving myself time to get the task done, but I’m not going to be able to edit the fourth sentence of my Instagram caption seven times. I just need to write it. I can edit it once, and then I publish it, for example.

So give myself enough time to do this task. I keep it workable and change plans if something unexpected has come up, or I didn’t realize how long the task actually needed, and that kind of thing. But it just really reduces the room for overthinking when you are like, cool, I can work on my business 24/7 and if you had that issue when you were a student, when you were at university or college, that you felt guilty, 24/7, if you weren’t studying. The same thing is going to happen with business, even once you’re full time. And this is so important, if you are wanting to be full time in your business, you are going to need to create your own boundaries and to make sure you’re not overthinking and you get that sense of accomplishment. You’re not burning out, you’re not overwhelmed, you’re able to focus, you’re able to support self sabotage. There’s all so key, especially if you want to do that. But having this power planning method has allowed me to remove the opportunity for overthinking, which has moved my business forward way more quickly and without me burning out. It’s also taught me adaptability, resilience and persistence.

So part of power planning is to keep your plans workable, rather than ditching them the moment they can’t be executed perfectly. And that is such an important skill in business, because if we approach our business the way that most perfectionists approach their plans, which is, here’s my perfect plan that I probably spent way too long figuring out and highlighting and color coding, and I’m going to feel so confident in this plan, and I’m going to execute it perfectly, and then the moment it looks like it might not work out, we just put it in the bin that doesn’t work in business, that same mentality and so doing Power planning has really taught me, on a meta level, that skill of adaptability and resilience and persistence that has allowed me to succeed in business. It’s allowed me to keep things workable, to adapt to changes instead of like cool. Well, it’s Wednesday, and I didn’t follow through, so now I need to wait till Monday to try again. No, no, no, no, that approach does not work in business. I was like, Okay, I need this clean slate. I need this clean slate. I need this clean slate that does not work.

And through power planning, I have learned how to be more resilient, more persistent, more adaptable, and that has just had huge flow on effects when it comes to the business and the growth of the business. Now I want to talk about Secondly, the second tool, which is clean rest. This is kind of me cheating, because it’s part of power planning that you will allocate yourself clean rest and follow through with that clean rest, and it’s going to be more clean rest, resting without guilt than you want to have, because as a perfectionist right now, you’re getting your self worth from your productivity level. So of course, you’re like, I don’t want to rest, and I love my business, and I don’t need any time off. This is such an important tool, so I wanted to separate it so we could really talk about it. In the beginning, just like with power planning clean rest is going to be uncomfortable. That’s why you’ve been avoiding it. That is why you haven’t been resting.

So just expect that. Just expect and I love that in PGSD when I’m coaching on productivity and clean rest, it’s like, most people would love hearing like, take time off, but when we’re in that perfectionist mindset, we’re like, ah, if I take time off, I’m gonna be less productive. If I’m less productive, I’m gonna be less successful. If I’m less successful, less people will love me. I’m gonna be alone and abandoned and rejected and ashamed, and I would rather just work through it all. And I don’t care about burnout. I can handle a bit of burnout. Burnout is not even that bad, like that’s where we end up. And so it’s going to be a shift to get into this clean rest. So there’s a few reasons. I’m not going to go into all of them. There are so many reasons clean rest has been so huge when it comes to building my business. But these are a few reasons. The first is, it’s allowed me to create an identity outside of my business. It’s allowed me to figure out what else I like doing.

And back in the day, I used to be like, Well, I love my business so much. Like, so grateful for that. And so it’s okay for me to work on it all the time, because I love it so much. And when I started introducing clean rest and sharing with people that I was doing that in my day to day life, a lot of people like, but you love your business, it’s like, well, yeah, but I also love watching Netflix. That doesn’t mean I should do it 24/7, and have it be my entire life. And it was just so interesting to notice how when you love something, people like, Yes, do it all the time, but there’s so much power in having clean rest and having to step away from where you had been getting your self worth to really have a look at who am I? What do I enjoy doing? What I bring to the world, besides this business, this tool for validation, many of us use it as and myself included, on that front, I’m getting so much better with that, but definitely in the beginning, it was just like a tool for me to feel smart and intelligent and worthy and deserving.

So it’s uncomfortable to do that. It’s so uncomfortable, especially when you’ve gone from school university into a job, and like, there hasn’t been any time in your life to really discover who you are, what you want to do. Maybe you even had a break and you went traveling for a while, but then you probably were, like, trying to make it productive. But like, I need to figure out on this trip what I want to do with my life so it wasn’t really clean rest, because you’re like, quick, I need to find this answer. Hopefully I can, you know, have an epiphany out of the Eiffel Tower or whatever. Like so many of us are used to just having, like, productivity and success be the driver of everything that we do, and so it’s uncomfortable to take a step back from that, but it’s been so powerful, because by having clean rest, it has allowed me to be more courageous, because I’m not making the business success mean as much about me as it used to. It still does. I’m still working on this.

I’m not 100% that, but because I’ve done the work to figure out things I enjoy doing outside of business, and I have time where I’m not doing anything productive, and I’ve gotten comfortable with that just being it allows me to be so much more courageous, to show up so much more fully, because then when things don’t work out, I don’t make it mean something about me. But when we’re the whole business and we’re like, oh, I just love the business so much, I want to do it 24/7 when it’s going well, we think we’re a good person. When it’s going badly, we think we’re a bad person. It’s so, so so dangerous. And outside of the business, I’m just Sam. No one in my day to day life calls me Sam Laura Brown, that’s not what I go by in day to day life. If I was going to say my name, I’d say Samantha Laura Brown, that’s my full name. Never once before having that be my Bernie, have I ever called myself Sam Laura Brown. My friends know me as Sam or Sammy. A lot of people call me Sammy. I don’t call myself that in the business, but there’s more to me than being Sam Laura Brown.

And that’s what I’ve been forced to discover and to get comfortable with and to explore, and it’s been so powerful in my personal life, also in my business life as well. Also it allows me the clean rest to actually recharge when I’m having time off and to be present when I’m having time off. So to be present with the people I’m with. I’m not just there smiling and nodding and thinking, Oh, what’s that other thing I need to do? It’s not like when I have time off, I’m never thinking about my business. I love it, and my brain will love to chew on that. But I’m able to be so much more present, because I’m not like, oh, I should be doing something else. It’s more to thinking, Oh, this could be a good idea. And I write that down so that when I get back to work at the designated time, I can think about that some more, or look at implementing it instead of, oh, I should be doing this. I should be doing that. And feeling guilty. Guilty takes us away from being present. Feeling that guilt.

Most of us have had experience with where when you are. For example, a lot of us have this experience with study where you are telling yourself you should be studying 24/7, which, of course, you can’t do. So, like, that’s, you know, never going to work from beginning, but we have this story. And so when we’re studying, we’re like, Oh, I wish this study was done and I could just be with my friends, and, you know, be at the beach or whatever. And then when you’re at the beach, you’re like, you can’t even be present there, because you’re like, I should be studying. Oh, it just does not work. And that mentality is going to carry over into your business. And so having time off, clean rest, specifically to help you actually recharge is so powerful, because then when you get back to work, your brain has actually had a rest because it hasn’t been full of guilt. So you’re going to be more creative, more resourceful, have more ideas, be more inspired from having that break.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder. That’s like to think of it. And then my personal life is better because I’m present. I’m not thinking. I should be doing this, I should be doing that, and it helps me avoid burnout, because my brain gets a breather. It needs a minute. It needs a lot of minutes to process things. And I love the idea that I learned from Lou Neistat, that is input output, and no put. So when there’s input, you’re getting ideas in and you are consuming, when it’s output, you’re creating. And I’d always just been thinking in terms of, are you being a creator or a consumer? But there’s also no put, which is where there’s nothing going in and nothing coming out. Of course, we all think all the time, so it’s not really happening, but we can just allow yourself to just be and to just process without having to outwardly create anything, without consuming anything.

And it’s so powerful to add that into your life. It’s also decreased, and, especially lately, removed procrastination, because my brain knows a break is coming, so it can stay focused and do courageous things. It doesn’t have to create a break for itself through procrastination. And I definitely noticed this that, like over the years, I have worked less and less and had more and more clean rest when I was like, I should be working 24/7. Sure I can sit at my laptop for 16 hours a day, that doesn’t mean I’m being productive. And when I was doing that, it meant I’d spend, you know, 20 minutes here, 30 minutes there, scrolling through Instagram or doing all these things, because my brain was like, I need a break. I can’t focus for 16 hours. So now Currently, I’m working for six hours a day on a work day, which isn’t every day of the week. And when I do that, I can really be focused and courageous, and I don’t procrastinate, and I don’t scroll through Instagram at all, because my brain knows, hey, if we want to do that, we can do it later.

We don’t have to create a break through procrastination. It has also helped me get comfortable with ease and to untangle the belief that I’m only deserving of success if I’m burning out, if I’m working hard, and the more clean rest I’ve had, the more successful my business has gotten, which is 100% not what I ever thought would happen when I first started. Is like, Oh, I’m going to be less successful. And this is what we think when it comes to this question of clean rest, okay, sure, that sounds nice, but I’d rather have the success than the rest. It is not a choice. It’s not either or. It’s you can have success and rest, or you can have not as much success as you want, and burnout. If those were your two options, which would you choose? Success and clean rest or less success than you’re capable of and burnout. Because when you’re burning out, you’re not going to be able to achieve all the things you’re capable of. But we think, Oh no, I’ll have burnout and success. That’s the pairing that goes together, and we think clean rest and less success am I capable of goes together.

No, it is not the case. And I have proven that to be true in my business again and again and again, because of the focusing, the focusing on the needle movers and doing courageous things, specifically actually recharging, therefore having better ideas, and again, be more focused, having an identity outside of my business, which allows me to be so much more courageous and to not overthink things as well, because I’m not thinking that’s going to mean something about me if someone perceives something in a certain way, not procrastinating, that’s a huge time suck that a lot of us insert into our day so we can feel deserving of all I was working for 10 hours today. No, you weren’t. You were procrastinating for a lot of that, overthinking for a lot of that, and you maybe did a few hours of work. And it’s been so fascinating this year, when I have been working for six hours a day, but specifically, the thing that’s really brought stuff up for me is that I have been working from 8:30am to 2:30pm on a work day.

And last year I was working a similar length of work day, but I kind of have this longer morning routine, and kind of like ease into things and work from about midday-ish until 6pm and that didn’t work for so many reasons. I mean, it worked to some level, and the business doubled that year. But also it didn’t work. I did my best work in the morning, and I kind of had my prime time that I was doing things in the time that my brain finds the hardest to concentrate and different things like that. But the interesting thing has been, when I finish at 230 I’m like, do I even have a business? Like, What even is this that I can be finished at 230 and it’s like, it’s so obvious to me that there’s still some part of me that thinks that I need to be working from 830 or nine to five, that an eight hour work day is the only kind of valid work day if you want to be successful, and that if I’m working from 830 to 230 that’s part time hours. That’s something that people who aren’t committed do, like this is just what my brain’s thinking is obviously not true.

And so by forcing myself to finish at 230 which gives my brain like, it’s been incredible, because I can really focus during the times I’m working, because I’m like, I finished at 230 and I literally work out of my office at 230 on the dot, I finish at 230 and like, I still have hours of sunlight. There’s so much I can do instead of when I finished at six, even though it was the same amount of hours-ish that I was working, I was procrastinating a lot more because of the time of day I was working as well that that felt more comfortable because I was finishing at a time that full time people would finish at, even though I consider myself 100% full time in my business, but I really was just Like, Oh, I need to be working hard. And even though it meant I didn’t, hadn’t started working at 8am or whatever, I was still like, oh, but at least if I finish at 6pm I feel like I’m working hard. I never thought that consciously.

That was just clearly, in hindsight, what was going on subconsciously, because when I finished at 230 it’s been so uncomfortable, I’m used to it now. But initially it was like, Oh no, surely there’s more I could be doing. If I actually worked a couple more hours and I still feel so energetic, I would be able to build the business more quickly and be more successful and all the things. But the reason I was able to be so focused and energized is because my brain knew that break was coming, and I gave myself six like, it’s six hours of non stop focus work that I do, and I do my best to prepare my snacks and that kind of thing, my lunch or whatever in the morning, so I can just, I don’t have to have breaks to go. Okay, I’m gonna go make lunch, and I’ll take an hour to do whatever. And that’s in like before, for sure, when I was working an eight hour work day, have a lunch break. That’s great. But this six hour worked, I’m like, I can focus for six hours because I know I have the whole afternoon off, practically.

But it’s been interesting. It’s brought up another layer of work around, Oh, it feels like I’m undeserving if I finish at 230 when I would otherwise, if I was doing a full time job, quote, unquote, finish at 6pm or 5pm or 8pm even though the point of having the business is so I can work when it works for me, and then when I do that, my brain’s like, ah, that means I’m taking it seriously. You’re not going to succeed. Blah, blah. So it’s so fascinating. I love both power planning and clean rest for this reason, it brings up layer upon layer upon layer so you can grow and grow and grow. So that’s been the latest. I also want to quickly finish up by answering a question that I received about clean rest. And that question was, what do you do when you’re bored during clean rest so you want to work on your business in that time?

Get a life, is the answer to that. I don’t mean that in a mean way, but this is the point of clean rest. Is you are creating a space, a void, so that you are forced to fill it with something other than business. And if we just fill it again with business, we miss all the lesson. And as I said, like I love my business. This isn’t about trying to work as little on your business as possible because you don’t enjoy it. No, this is about all the other reasons that I mentioned that you’ll be able to show up more powerfully for your clients, more powerfully for your business, when you have clean rest, when you’re constrained, when you’re focused. So if you’re bored, during your clean rest, do something else. Don’t do the productive things you want to do. Figure out, oh, what else do I like? This is interesting. I’m bored.

Currently, the only interesting thing in my life is my business. Maybe that could be a problem, that that’s the only interesting thing I’ve got going on. And I need to figure out some other things that could be interesting, because that’s when our self worth and our productivity, success results get so tangled up, and that’s when it’s heartbreaking when we don’t meet a milestone, when we don’t meet a goal, that’s a good sign that you need clean rest if you are feeling absolutely heartbroken when you don’t meet a goal that is a sign that your self worth and accomplishment are basically the one in the same currently and clean rest is the most effective tool to untangle that. You can intellectually know different things about like, You know you’re not your business, but it’s about practicing that, and that’s what clean rest does.

So I hope this has been helpful. I hope this has given you a bit of insight into power planning and clean rest and how they can help you. If you want to learn how to power plan, and you will need support along the way, so make sure you get yourself into PGSD so that you can do that, and you can have the best experience possible with power planning, with clean rest to help you get out of your own way and really build the business that you know you have the potential to build. And yeah, that’s where you need to go to find out more about that. I hope you’re having a beautiful day, and I’ll talk to you in the next episode.

Outro
If you enjoyed this episode, I want to invite you into my coaching program called Perfectionist Getting Shit Done. It’s for perfectionist entrepreneurs. And inside, you’re going to learn my simple, proven process for how to get out of your own way in your business. You’re going to be taking consistent action without burning out, even if you have a full time job, you’re a parent, you have a health issue, you’ve got a lot on your plate. That’s exactly who we help inside PGSD, we teach you. We have you master how to show up for your business and stop having the productivity issues that are being caused by perfectionism that are making it so so so hard to grow your business, even though you know you have the potential to have a successful business. We teach you how to work with your perfectionist mindset instead of against it, so you can be showing up consistently and sustainably and your business can finally grow. So to find out more about the program and to join us inside today, go to samlaurabrown.com/pgsd.

Author: Sam Brown