Do you have big dreams for your business, but then find you get distracted easily and your focus gets scattered?
Do you feel under pressure that you are behind with the day-to-day tasks and can’t ever catch up enough to work on the projects that you’re passionate about?
Have you thought about working with a planner to help you intentionally create your ideal life and business, without the hustle and overwhelm?
Working with a planner can help you to be more strategic, break down your big goals into easier to manage milestones and give you the accountability to complete projects – and receive the rewards from all your efforts.
In this guest blog Sarah Sienkiewicz, author of My Fulfilled Life Planner is going to share with you how you can plan your way to success by developing a planner practice, even if you aren’t organised and have tried planners before but you struggled stick with them.
Practice over perfection
Perfectionists can have anxiety about messing up their favourite notebook, having big gaps in planners or starting a new system and not following through.
If you can relate to the fear of getting started in case you mess up, I have the perfect remedy for you! By approaching your planner like a practice, rather than having ridiculously high standards about doing it perfectly 100% of the time, it can ease up on that relentless pressure you put on yourself. Even if you miss a week, or a month, or a quarter, you can simply pick your planner back up and reconnect with your vision. Stuff happens. We get busy. We let our good habits slip sometimes. It’s normal!
By simply picking up the practice again, being kind and forgiving with yourself, and connecting with your positive habits, you get to receive the benefits. Your meditation mat or planner aren’t judging you – they are tools and happy to help you!
When I first started using planners, it took me a while to find the right one and get into the habit. Give yourself time for your practice to develop.
Be strategic
In your business, you have so many roles to fill – client delivery, marketing, admin… all the things! It can be overwhelming but working with a planner can help you stay tuned in to your strategy.
The most important role, aside for wowing and delighting your clients, is to be the CEO in your business. Knowing the big picture vision for your life and business, the mission that drives you forward, combined with a plan to make it happen is key to your success.
A planner can help you set goals that are aligned to your vision and keep you on track all year. You can use your planner practice to have “CEO time” where you can work on your business not in your business.
Click here for more tips on being the CEO in your business.
Measure your metrics
Being able to regularly reflect on what’s going well and what improvements can be made is useful in making those little changes that add up to big results over time.
We often think we need to make big dramatic changes to get results – which can put extra pressure on you and require more time, energy or financial resources than we might have access to. Typically, these types of “big” changes set us up for more stress and aren’t sustainable.
A simpler way to get big results is to do lots of little things regularly in the right direction and use what Einstein called “the eighth wonder of the world”: the compound effect. Using time to your advantage is a powerful way to create change and is more sustainable in the long run. Working with a planner helps you to map out the actions you can take (including saying no to what isn’t going to be useful) and break down your goals into smaller milestones that guide you towards your vision over time.
Be organised and stay focused
Your planner can help you to be discerning about any new opportunities or projects that pull at your focus. You can decide whether you want to stick to your plan or make changes – yes your plans can be flexible!
Your planner practice can also give you an objective way to see how often you may be getting distracted, or if there are any patterns about when you decide to change direction. Sometimes these changes feel very logical and make sense at the time, but can be a result of fear and self-protection. Like suddenly deciding you need to take three months out to rebrand or fiddle behind the scenes, when it’s actually time to be visible and launch your thing, for example.
Being able to see your plans written down gives you extra accountability and can reveal any self-sabotaging, self-protecting habits that you might not be aware of.
Knowing what your goals and plans are can help you to make strategic decisions about what products and services are going to help you too. It can be easy to get sucked into other people’s launches and make decisions based on their “limited-time offer” rather than your timeline.
You can use your planner to set your goals, create a marketing plan, map content themes, launch dates and add reminders so you can follow up on every lead and opportunity in a timely way. You’ll know what resources you need to help you as well as foresee and remove any barriers that might get in your way.
Celebrate your wins
As ambitious business owners, we are often driving our business forward and rarely take time to celebrate our wins. Especially in the first few years of business, we’re on such a learning curve, it’s hard to celebrate because we don’t always feel like we’re achieving the “big wins”.
The cliché is true – enjoy the journey! When you can celebrate every single win, big and small, along the way, it will boost your confidence and give you courage. Your planner can help you collect evidence along the way of what’s going well. If the mind monkeys start sewing seeds of doubt, you will have a varied list of proof that reminds you of all the positive progress and achievements you have made so far.
Check out the My Fulfilled Life Planner
The My Fulfilled Life Planner is designed to help you intentionally design and create your ideal vision for your life and business and stay focused on manifesting it throughout the year. Being consistent is key to success in anything, and it’s also one of the hardest things to do especially for creative, multi-passionate people!
The planner helps you to spread your projects out over the year so you can take the pressure off everything feeling like it needs to be done yesterday. That way you can still do All The Things you’re passionate about, but instead of scattering your energy and focus by doing them all at once, you can do one at a time over the course of the year and get bigger results.
Find out more and order yours today at healingbusiness.co.uk/planner
There is an undated one available, so you can start any time throughout the year and
international shipping is available.
Imagine what passion projects and big goals you could achieve with the help of a planner!
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