How to create more TIME & spaciousness
I’ve been doing a bunch of sales calls for the Alchemical Business Accelerator, and there’s been a recurring theme:
Whether people are at $15 a month in revenue or $30,000 a month in revenue, there is a consistent lack of focus and using more (more projects, to-dos, social media channels) to cover up business or personal issues.
This is a problem if you want to create a business that isn’t running your life.
And it has a lot to do with time.
One example:
I talked to a woman this week who is interested in joining the Alchemical Business Accelerator who is dissatisfied with where her business is at.
She doesn’t have fully booked 1:1 session, and she’s undercharging.
So there’s this lack of revenue, resources, and influx of cash coming into her business.
At the same time, she’s launched two group programs and didn’t hit either of her goals for those.
So she’s putting a lot of energy into her business promoting all these services.
There’s a huge energy leak.
Not only does she have a wide range of offerings, but these are a bunch of different things to promote and marketing channels.
She already knows the 80% of her clients come from one affiliate source.
But instead of focusing on that, she’s spreading out her energy through all these other channels. The result is that she’s exhausted and she’s not seeing massive results.
As humans, we tend to make our life harder than it needs to be.
This is often to cover up trauma or avoid scary things.
If you’re someone who’s using business to avoid dealing with depression, anxiety, or trauma… or you want to avoid a marriage you’re dissatisfied with… or your body is in a lot of pain and you want to avoid that...
There are so many ways we can use time-sucking projects to procrastinate from addressing these.
This includes your business. That might mean putting off raising your prices or launching the podcast you know would serve you by putting energy into other parts of your business that aren’t serving you.
What you want to do instead is focus.
That looks like choosing one social media channel or one lead source.
If most of your business came in through referrals, put your energy there instead of burning out on Instagram.
Obviously, as you get fully booked and you want to continue growing your business, expanding your marketing is a great idea.
But first you have to get there.
Focus on one offer at a time
If you’re a course creator, make the course you have incredibly potent, so you give your clients incredible results every time they go through it.
Get really clear on what you and your team needs to do to make it run more smoothly.
Automate as much as possible.
Make that one offer as efficient as possible.
Think of marketing and delivery as on a seesaw.
Marketing and sales on one side, delivery on the other side.
As you put more time and energy into marketing and sales, it’s going to naturally fill up the delivery side.
But if you overfill the delivery side and overestimate how much you can deliver on, suddenly you aren’t spending any time on marketing and sales.
And then when you’re doing delivering to your clients on that side… there are no new clients to serve because you haven’t been putting time into your marketing and sales.
This is what creates the feast or famine mode.
You don’t want to be overfilled on the delivery side.
What gets you out of this is…
...making sure you’re pricing things correctly.
...becoming more efficient at delivering results for your clients.
...systematizing your online course.
When you do this,
And your offers will become more scalable.
Commit to not being busy
Being busy is a choice.
Really.
Are you being strategic in how you use your time?
Are you saying no to things that don’t matter?
Are you focusing on the things that are actually moving the needle forward?
Committing to not being busy includes ruthlessly cutting out the projects or systems or habits that you’re doing, or that your team is doing, that don’t actually matter.
Is instagram actually getting you clients? Or are you spending 10-20 hours a week on there without getting any clients?
If you do get clients from there, can you get more efficient on it?
The next step is ruthlessly delegating what you don’t need to do.
After you cut things out, delegate what needs to be done but you don’t need to do. Hand over admin and customer service tasks that are important to your business to your team.
Allow yourself to be supported and be willing to communicate what you need to the people who are supporting you.
Then, review what’s working and not working.
Get really clear on how you and your team are spending your time.
What works and what doesn’t work? What actually has a return on investment?
And get clear on why you are putting certain things off.
Maybe it’s because you’re scared, or you’re having a trauma response.
Often the things we put off are happening because there’s an underlying issue, or they don’t actually need to happen and can be cut.
Focus is a magical practice
Your attention is sacred.
When we are actually focusing on things, what will bubble up are things you need to address.
Image the sun coming down on the earth on a sunny day, hitting everything in your neighborhood.
When you take a magnifying glass, it focuses that ray of sunlight. And then you can burn an ant or a hole in a leaf, whatever… with that same sunlight that’s already dispersing around your neighborhood.
Because you are focusing all that sun’s energy in one spot.
The same goes for your attention.
If you’re choosing to focus on one project for this quarter, this big focus for the month, and you’re committed to not busying yourself with other things, like checking your DMs 100 times a day…
...what will bubble up in your free time is stuff that actually needs to be addressed.
That’s powerful healing.
And all it takes is your focused attention.
Blocking your growth
How can you grow another 50%? 100%?
If you’re already exhausted and too busy… you’re not going to.
You won’t be able to handle it.
And you’ll be too busy or tired for your best ideas to come through.
You need to give time and spaciousness for your best ideas, the divine to channel through you.
Or an extra hour to problem-solve or think about a better way to communicate your offer and get your clients results.
That’s a much better use of time than scrolling on social media or checking your email 10 times a day.
Plus…
When we multitask, it lowers our IQ 15 points.
And it takes us 15 minutes to get back to what we were working on in the first place.
So maybe don’t stop writing that blog post to check your email.
Your brain literally will not work at its fullest capacity.
Think you’re good at multitasking? Studies have shown the 2.5% of the population can process multiple tasks at once.
So maybe you are actually good at it… but more than likely, you aren’t.
And the average employee is only productive less than 3 hours a day.
Get willing to master time and cut out the distractions so you can avoid this.
Let’s take a look at the big picture
On a micro level, there are tasks like checking email, writing blog posts, content creation, all those things that need to happen in your business on a daily or weekly basis.
But on a macro level, you can focus your priorities over a month or one quarter…
...and that’s going to make you way more productive.
Because you’ll be focusing on your main goals. You’ll always be looking ahead and tapping into your big picture goals.
Do this exercise today
Set your top 1 - 3 tasks on your to-do list before bed (or tomorrow in the morning when you wake up, before you start working).
Then when you start working, turn your phone on airplane mode until those tasks are done.
That’s how you master time ;)
“MY BUSINESS IS RUNNING WITHOUT ME.
I am weeks away from a $250,000 launch, which because of my VA and the SOPs we've put in place will require... very little work on my part.
I HAVE A ROOT SYSTEM.
I F*CKING LOVE ROOT SYSTEMS.”
- Kathryn Morrison, business coach & host of the Think Like an Entrepreneur podcast
This is exactly the work we do in the Alchemical Business Accelerator, so if you’re ready to scale with ease, magic & the #realbusinessshit no one talks about, I invite you to click here to apply.
You’ll immediately be invited to book a call with me to see if it’s a mutual fit.
The doors are closing at the end of this month, and after that we’ll be starting without you.
Click here to learn more & book a call with me.
References:
Listen to the episode on mastering time: Playing with Time
