Today is our monthly CEO Debrief episode where you can grab a cup of coffee and imagine us sitting across the couch from one another. Imagine that we’re in a coffee shop or we are on one of my retreats and we are sitting down and I am holding you accountable to doing some reflection and review on your business and on your life. The reason why I’ve decided to host these monthly debrief episodes for you is a few reasons.
One, your accountability. When I did my end-of-year debrief last year, I was able to identify times of the year where I drifted and lost sight of my priorities. If that is happening for me, it’s most definitely happening for you too. When you see my monthly debrief come up, I want this to trigger you to do your own.
Two, this really leverages my strengths. Some of my gifts are the ability to stay focused, organized, and put structures in place for consistent action and habits. This is one of the best ways I can share those gifts with the most amount of people and potentially have the greatest impact.
And three, transparency is a core value of our business and I want to continue to take you behind the strategy and share more of myself with all of you. I’m here creating more intimate spaces in the vastness of the internet. Places where small business owners can land during challenging moments as well as those times of joyful celebration.
NOW LET’S GET INTO IT. WHAT WAS YOUR AREA OF FOCUS THIS MONTH?
In the beginning of the month, on February 1st what did you sit down and write in your journal? What were your goals? What was your area of focus? January’s focus for me was slowing down and exploring what my next level boundaries looked like and holding firm when required.
February’s focus and goals, which I shared in a Facebook live inside The BRAVE Society, were a little different. We were starting to pick up some pace. I set out to book one or more on demand sessions with me. This is a new offer that we created to allow people to receive coaching from me without being committed to a longer term coaching program. Two, claim my power hour times two, so that means two hours every morning to read and write, continue to up level my self care, continue to cultivate my next level boundaries and to record four to six podcast episodes.
NOW, HOW WOULD I KNOW IF THESE GOALS WERE MET?
How would I know if we were successful? So I want to break this down for you. We would have had one on demand session with me booked. I would be able to say I have claimed my power hour times two every morning and as a result, I have posted two Instagram posts to my grid. That was the outcome of this power hour that I wanted to have, was I write every day for at least 30 minutes to an hour and not all of it gets posted. It’s really for me to help me process and organize my thoughts and to help me plan and to help me get into creation and vision mode.
However, I do like to post from my journal. And so I was going to challenge myself to post two times this month from my journal. Continue to up level my self care, that looked like I was hitting my habits and that energetically I was taking care of myself. Continue to cultivate next level boundaries that I wanted to have something tangible that I could say this is a boundary now. And recording four to six episodes of the podcast that is already tangible, four to six episodes.
So what was your focus for this month? What were the goals you set down?
NOW HOW DID YOU DO ON THOSE GOALS? HOW DID YOU DO?
Did you meet the metrics that you set for yourself and how you would be successful and how you would know you’d been successful? So how did we do on goals? Looking at this retrospectively, these are super aggressive goals considering we were delivering the first retreat of the year that required prep energy leading up to it and recovery on the back end. So that was one of my takeaways from the month of February. And I want you to really consider, did you overestimate your bandwidth? Did you overestimate your energetic capacity for your goals or did you underestimate your energetic capacity?
Do you feel like you could have done more? Were the goals you set really easy to knock out?
At the time I’m recording this, we haven’t completed the month so I’m going to have to do some projections here. We have just started promoting the new on demand coaching sessions and I feel good that by the end of the month we’ll have booked one in. And if we don’t, I’m not going to freak out. If we don’t book one on demand session in, that means that I have made no sales in the month of February and that’s okay.
And I want to tell you why that’s okay because I want to have a little sales chat with you right now. It’s okay if I didn’t book any sales this month because I didn’t intend in my sales plan to book any sales this month. The one call that I was looking to book for our on demand sessions is a test and it is not needed in my business for ongoing and consistent revenue. It’s not needed for cashflow. We have a planned sales cycle and this was a proactive sales activity that we took on outside of a planned sales cycle.
The other reason why I’m not worrying about not making any sales this month is because I don’t worry about making sales. Because as a business owner, while sales are your primary function, I say this often that as the small business owner you are basically a commissioned salesperson we can always worry about making more sales. It’s that important, right? We can always find a time and a reason to worry about making another sale and so therefore there’s no point in worrying about it. Otherwise, you will be worried all the time and if you are going to focus your attention on worry that does not lead to sales.
I have not yet had a single client tell me when I asked them what works, what leads to revenue, what leads to sales? I have yet to have a client say to me worrying about it led to sales.
Worrying so much about it, having anxiety about it led to more sales. That’s not how this works. So if I make no sales this month, I’m not concerned. I have a plan. I have a 3000 foot view of what’s happening in my business for the year. My business does not hang on one sale and I’ve been in this game long enough to know that worrying about it isn’t effective.
So if you too might not have made any sales this month, I want you to ask yourself why. Why didn’t I make any sales this month? So if I don’t sell this one on demand session, I need to look at why. And if we do, it’s most likely because I failed to talk about it enough, because I failed to do enough outreach to fill it, because I might not have conveyed it’s value to somebody to buy it. But it doesn’t mean that I have failed or that I’m a failure or that the product itself is a failure. It just simply means we need to make some tweaks and adjustments.
SO HAVING VERY HONEST AND OBJECTIVE CONVERSATIONS WITH YOURSELF AROUND MONEY AND SALES IS IMPORTANT.
Doing our best to leave the punishment and the shame and the guilt out of the conversation is helpful. We’re allowed to have our feelings, but we also have to look at the facts, right? What are the facts? How am I doing on claiming my power hour times two every morning? The tangible goal was for me to post two Instagram grids from this time, and I did. I did one on Valentine’s day. It was called 20 things I love about myself for Valentine’s day 2020. It shockingly got very little engagement probably because more of how Instagram shows its posts in the content itself.
The reason I posted this is because I’m realizing how much women struggle to love and accept themselves and how that ties to their money and their business. And it’s something that I’ve struggled with and as a matter of fact, I had a coach challenge me once to write a hundred things I loved about myself and it completely took me out. It’s something I’ve practiced ever since and finding the value in myself, so my need to be externally validated diminishes is critically important.
And so that’s why I posted this post on Valentine’s day because while I love my husband and I love my family, as a woman, I want a role model, what loving myself means, what loving ourselves means and what loving ourselves can do to our businesses. So if you haven’t checked out that post because Instagram’s algorithm didn’t show it to you, go find it on my grid and I would love to hear what you love about yourself. Let’s be the role models for other women and celebrate our own self-love. That was one post. I still have one more post to go and like I said, it’s not quite the end of the month yet, so I will get that done.
CONTINUE TO UP LEVEL MYSELF CARE.
In 2014, I collapsed with pneumonia and I knew something was very wrong. I hadn’t felt well in a long time. I had been to half a dozen doctors and none of them could articulate anything that made sense. By this point, I had studied every diet imaginable, veganism, vegetarianism, paleo, keto, macro counting, and nothing seemed to make me feel better. All the catchphrases were thrown around like chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia and adrenal fatigue. And that’s been my life ever since.
I will have stents where I’m so fatigued, I can’t get out of bed and showering feels like a crossfit games workout. And other times I’m truly feeling my best. Sometimes I get long periods where I feel invincible like a year or more and then I cycle through these highs and lows more quickly, like every six months. And I continue to dig and get more answers. And I find that I have active Epstein–Barr and the MTHFR gene and two and a half pages of food allergies and blood work that shocks me that the human body can function in such a depleted state. But what this has really taught me is that my health is not negotiable. It comes first. It’s the penultimate boundary for me. And when I hold this boundary for me, I hold this energy for all of us.
If you take nothing away from this episode, please know that you can build a business that is in service to your health and doesn’t deplete you.
We all deserve to put our health first. And if you take nothing away from this episode, please know that you can build a business that is in service to your health and doesn’t deplete you. If your business feels draining, this can be remedied, you’re most likely building someone else’s business based on someone else’s energetic capacity and not allowing yourself to explore what’s possible for you.
Things I’m particularly tuning into right now from myself care that I want to share with you because I think the conversation around self care these days is getting a little toxic, right? So we have the people who are showing self care as very unattainable. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of money, spa visits, manicures, pedicures. And there was a time where my self care took a lot of time and it was draining. I was going for Reiki and I was throwing everything at it. I was going for Reiki, I was going for acupuncture, I was going to the chiropractor. I had hours and hours a week on my calendar for my self care and that became overwhelming in itself. And then we have people on the other side of the aisle who are like, “Well, self care has become this thing and we need to use a different word or talk about it differently.”
It really doesn’t matter. I don’t want to debate the term self care because I think that’s a distraction from what we’re really trying to do, which is to nourish and nurture ourselves as human beings. And so for me, what that looks like right now is offloading my nervous system and the way I’ve been offloading my nervous system is by breathing.
I’ve been doing a lot of breath work and nothing too complicated. On most days it’s practicing diaphragmatic breathing because most of us don’t breathe from the diaphragm. We breathe very shallowly from the chest and this is a trauma response. Shallow breathing, not breathing is a trauma response. And really training our bodies to breathe diaphragmatically, if that’s a word. Diaphragmatic breathing is a gift and it’s something that doesn’t cost any money and it’s something that could be done, believe it or not fairly easily.
The other thing I’m doing to take care of my nervous system is journaling and sleep, making sure I’m getting enough sleep and hydration and intentionally uncommitting from things. I’m also trying a new doctor to see if I can build a better long term, high touch relationship with someone. I’m really looking for another level, a next level of care from my medical professionals that has been hard to find and so I’m on a quest. I’m choosing to hold the belief that it’s possible to have this relationship with somebody despite the state of our medicine in the Western world and in the United States specifically, and I’m testing this out.
So that’s really some of the things that I’m looking at from my up level in myself care. When I say diaphragmatic breathing, I mean every day, multiple times a day. I’m taking three breaks in my day to ensure that I am breathing and that is really what I want to be sharing with you. Also in line with self care is next level boundaries. And I decided that I am completely unavailable for certain types of energy and I’d like you to consider the same. Anyone portraying perfection as the way to make money.
For example, if your three part video sequence is perfect enough, then you will get all this sales. Or the reason your business isn’t scaling or isn’t working is that you’re not working hard enough, right? So I’m becoming unavailable for some of these messages. And yes, effort is required in business. I’m the first to tell you that it won’t be easy, but the energy I want to watch for is when people say hard. When they say hard, I think they’re really meaning painful and sacrificing your energy, your time, your family, and ultimately your joy and fulfillment. And I’m not here to support that vibration at all.
I’M ALSO COMPLETELY REJECTING SUCCESS BEING SOLELY DEFINED BY TANGIBLE OUTCOMES, BYPASSING INTANGIBLE OUTCOMES LIKE FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS AND ENERGETIC SHIFTS IN BEING.
And I’m also completely rejecting success being solely defined by tangible outcomes, bypassing intangible outcomes like feelings and emotions and energetic shifts in being. So that is a boundary that I am looking at right now. And the other place where I’m looking at a tangible boundary is we have hired an attorney and we are going through all of our paperwork and trademarking certain things because that too is going to provide a physical boundary, a tangible boundary as well as an energetic boundary in the fact that I am taking my work serious enough to protect the asset.
And those are the two areas where I have, this month, really up-leveled my boundaries. One area is what I am not here for, what I’m completely unavailable for, what I am removing from my presence in all ways, shapes and forms, mostly through unfollowing certain things that are happening on social media or in email or my Facebook feed or whatever have you. As a matter of fact, I have news feed eradicator on my Facebook and I am only going on Facebook to support the communities in which I run on Facebook because it’s still a good place to gather people in a virtual setting. But so I’m really looking at that and then hiring the attorney.
So I would love to know from you, what are your next level boundaries?
What do they look like for you right now? Are you setting boundaries from who you are today or are you setting boundaries from who you want to become and the goals you want to achieve? What are you most proud of this month? And feeling proud is tricky. I asked this question in a group coaching program that I was wrapping up yesterday and I asked them what are they most proud of? And then they flip the question and they wanted to hear my answers to the questions and they wanted to know what I was most proud of and I was like, “I kind of feel like I’m bragging,” right?
You start to second guess yourself, but I want you to be proud. I want you to brag. I want you to really own your successes. So the thing I’m proud of this month is prioritizing my life. Three years ago I set the intention to be done with my work day by 3:00 PM so I can be present to myself and to my children. There was a time in building my business that I would use my kids as an excuse. I couldn’t do X, Y, or Z because I had to be there for my children. Now I do both. I do the thing and I’m there for my children. It’s not either, or.
It’s not just important to be there for my children with time, but also know that my business provides for them in ways I could never have even imagined. And one way that this has happened, and I want to share this very personal story with you so that you can see this play forward in reality in something that you can borrow from. So in September, my daughter, Avery, she’s 11, she witnessed a traumatic event. A child on her bus attacked the bus driver, which resulted in an emergency response scene.
There was blood, there were ambulances, the police, school administrators, and I was one of the first people on the scene. So I know firsthand what the chaos in that moment was and what the fears were and how scary it was for the kids to see their bus driver being assaulted, and not feeling like they had any control, and really feeling like they were victims. And afterward we talked about it, we talked about what happened and within a few days things seem to have dissipated. However, in January, the child that assaulted the bus driver returned to school and when I let Avery know that this child would be returning to school, I started to see things through a different lens.
All of a sudden Avery’s fatigue started to make sense. I had chalked it up to her adjusting to middle school because when this happened, it was in September, she had just transitioned to middle school and she was coming home from school so exhausted and not really feeling rested. And we got her a Fitbit that was tracking her sleep over Christmas and when I looked at her sleep tracking, I was like, “This is just so strange.” I would think that a child that was 11 would be sleeping better or sleeping more deeply, what have you, and I didn’t connect the pieces until I had informed her that this child was returning to school.
And it started to make sense. As I was having this conversation with her, she started having flashbacks and started hyperventilating and was having a hard time focusing and concentrating through the day. And as someone who considers herself a student of trauma work, I recognized the signs and was able to find her an expert in EMDR therapy that I knew would be the exact right therapy for her in this moment. And they were sided in our town, except this doctor doesn’t take insurance.
ONE THING WE WORK ON WITH THE WOMEN WE COACH IS THIS CONCEPT OF HAVING MORE THAN ENOUGH.
So one thing we work on with the women we coach is this concept of having more than enough. More than enough when the boiler breaks, more than enough when the washing machine explodes, more than enough when the dog’s ear gets infected, more than enough when your kid is most benefited by a therapy not covered by insurance, more than enough, ladies and gentlemen. I know it’s hard to wrap our brains around having more than enough when you already consider yourself privileged and way better off than most, but nobody is served by you holding yourself back from fully receiving the abundance, financial and otherwise.
Having more than enough love, having more than enough time, having more than enough money, right? It’s just this concept of you can have what you need and more than enough. So that is one thing that I am really focused on owning is that not only does my business provide the time that I want to be present with my children, but it also provides the financial means to provide for them in ways that I never could have imagined and this is why I want more than enough. The second thing I’m most proud of is making the ask.
And it wasn’t asking for the sale. To be honest, I don’t really have problems asking for the sale. As we grow this business, I can see what is coming and I’m certain that it will happen. 2020 is all about exploring what’s possible for us over the next few years. And in the beginning of the month I realized I was completely in my head about this, I didn’t have to be. I was really kind of turning the wheels around what this looks like and how has this been done? I’d love to see some examples. I’d love to know what other people are doing.
And I have all the resources I need. I’ve hired people to help me. I have colleagues who could point me in a direction and/or could share from their own perspective, but I wasn’t asking. So why was I sitting there allowing all this pressure to build up and to let that weight of uncertainty and non-clarity hang over me when all I needed to do was ask. So first I went to my journal to start sketching out the situation and to really understand what was working, what was known and then what was unknown. And then who might know what I don’t know. Who might know someone who might know what I don’t know?
And then the second thing is I was able to then go after processing it for me in my journal, sketching it out of my journal. It made it a lot easier for me to release the pressure so I can go and ask that I don’t have to hold this all on my own, that I have a deep bench of support. Also, releasing the need to have it all figured out is always a great belief to release, release, and release some more. Here’s the next question. Have you embodied your word of the year? I am not going to let you forget that you intentionally picked a word to guide you this year.
Some people don’t pick a word because they’re like, “I can’t be reduced to a word.” That’s fine. I have three words.
Your intuition has spoken to you and it has given you a word or like me, maybe three words. So some people don’t pick a word because they’re like, “I can’t be reduced to a word.” That’s fine. I have three words. My words were: Slow, Heal and Teach. And just when I thought about picking up the pacing for the year, my body forced me to listen. I now have sciatic nerve pain for about four weeks and it’s very much slowing me down physically. I knew the second I got that sciatic nerve pain, I was like, “Of course.” Because I picked the word slow and on most days now I walk with a limp.
So it is slowing down my workouts. It is forcing me to stretch. It is forcing me to breathe. It’s forcing me to take care of my body on a micro basis. Anyone ever do any nerve flossing? It’s the exercise equivalent of watching paint dry, so this is how slow I am taking my year now because I’m wanting to give this injury or this nerve pain, whatever you want to call it, I don’t really know how it happened so I don’t know if it’s an injury. But this occurrence in my body that’s calling me to slow down, I’m really honoring it.
I’ve gone back to my Reiki training and have started rereading the materials and exploring other teachings on energy, especially around energetic boundaries. If I’m talking about next level boundaries, I need to be tuning into my energetic boundaries. And so slowing down and focusing on healing, boundary setting is a part of healing. That is like the physical manifestation of the inner work that you’ve done is to set boundaries and to uphold them for yourself, right? That is you showing up at your highest level of healing for you.
So I have gone back into my Reiki training and I’ve started rereading the materials and I’m using it to help me set some energetic boundaries. In February, I hosted a training in The BRAVE Society on creating your boldest offer, something I’ve been walking people through in our on demand sessions as well. So I am focused on my word: Teach. We are also continuing to brainstorm new ideas for the podcast that would enhance its value from a learning and development perspective and make it a more useful tool for you, the listener. So those are a few ways that I have embodied my word for the year.
NEXT QUESTION. HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT MONEY, REVENUE, PROFIT, SALES?
All right. So I said earlier on that I may not make any sales this month and I’m also not going to be worried about it. However, while last month I had never felt better about money, this month I’ve been hit with some money fear that is testing my ability to choose faith over fear. Faith that everything will work out in my favor over the fear that laying out all this money for retreats will leave us financially vulnerable, which is not true. We have the money, we are managing a budget. We have buffers in place.
What is actually happening here with this fear is adaptation to something new. Something I haven’t been through before. So there is uncertainty. This is normal and it’s also why I’m sharing it with you. We need to stop talking about normal things like they’re problems. What if that thought you’re having is normal and it doesn’t mean that you are bad or wrong or messing this up? That it’s just there, it’s a normal thought and it’s giving you some awareness around where you might want to be present and you might want to tune into.
And everybody says, but we have to do mindset work, right? We have to change the way we think, right? Yes we do. We do have to be mindful of the thoughts that we’re thinking, the beliefs that we hold and it doesn’t have to make us crazy or keep us in our head, which is how I feel a lot of mindset work is thought of today. So if you are trying to process through all of your thoughts and trying to identify all the thoughts that you want to change and all the beliefs that need to change, that’s not helpful. Start using a filter.
First start by thinking of this as, “Hey, it’s normal.” This is just a normal thing that happens to business owners, to leaders. We pretty much all have the same thoughts regardless of how large or small your business is. This is the fun part when you work with lots and lots and lots of people, is you see how similar we all really are. But start by looking at it in terms of what is the one thought that is most pervasive and persistent. The one that keeps coming back and mucking up the flow of how your goals are being achieved or the results that you’re getting or the thing that is keeping you feeling immobile or frightened or in one place. What is the one thought that is persistent and pervasive? Not all the thoughts.
Start by looking at it in terms of what is the one thought that is most pervasive and persistent.
What do you want to improve financially for next month? This is an important question as a business owner because we need to be able to hold space for the strategic, for the money piece, for the finance piece that keeps us building, it’s a lifeblood of our business is when we have sales coming in. And we also need to navigate the emotional, the intuitive pieces of our business. So I don’t want us to lose sight of that strategic piece and really helping you hit those financial goals that you have.
So what do you want to improve for next month financially? For me, despite my blip in how I’m feeling about money, we’re still hitting our financial goals, right? So this is my, I’m feeling a certain way about money, but the facts are that we are still hitting our financial goals because I have them clearly mapped out and what that means. Because a lot of people are like, “Outside of a revenue goal I don’t know what kind of financial goals I should have.” So I have a goal that every month X amount of money needs to go into our retreat fund so we can pay for the retreats.
I need to make sure that it is earmarked and separated from my other funds. I have a goal around what I am investing in my retirement and in my future savings. I have a goal around how much money I need to be saving for taxes. So these are some of those financial goals. We have personal financial goals as well, so personal and business financial goals. So right now we are really creating, personally, a level of mindfulness around our money through doing these no spend months or setting a more concrete budget around our thrive list than we have ever done before.
Really kind of identifying what it is that we need to thrive and are we spending money on those things or are we spending money on things that have no meaning to us? So really bringing a deeper level of intentionality to our personal finances because believe it or not, whether you like it or not, your personal finances to some extent do and will dictate your business revenue. The other thing that I’m going to focus on financially this month is I’m going to focus on experiencing positive feelings and attitudes around my money, but also finding the joy and abundance in other areas of my life.
Because when I find joy and abundance and other areas of my life, I then find joy and abundance in my money and vice versa.
So those are the three things that I want to improve financially for March, right? I’m going to continue to hit my financial goals, which by the way, I established with my accountant. So having somebody who can help you project your taxes and help you do some projections in your business is really a must have. Handling your financials alone, if you don’t have an accounting background, I don’t advise. Really hire someone who can support you in this.
And even if you just start with hiring somebody who can do your taxes for you and then it becomes somebody who does your taxes and meets with you on a quarterly basis or to what I have in my business where I have somebody who I work with on a monthly basis to help me manage and project my money and my taxes, who is a CPA. I’m going to focus on experiencing positive feelings and attitudes and I’m going to continue to refine our version of no spend month by bringing more mindfulness to our money. What habits helped you perform your best in February? I’d love to know. I’d love to know what habits are yielding you your best results.
WE HAVE HABITS THAT HELP US GET TO OUR RESULTS AND WE HAVE HABITS THAT KEEP US FROM GETTING TO OUR SPECIFIC RESULT.
Because we all have habits. We have habits that help us get to our results and we have habits that keep us from getting to our specific result. And that result might be a feeling or that result might be something more tangible, whatever it is. What are the habits that you have? And probably they’re few, they’re probably 20% of your habits that are leading to 80% of your results right now.
What habits helped you perform your best? For me, it’s getting in bed early, at the latest by 9:15. I went in on the last episode and I talked about my skincare routine. It’s keeping no gluten or dairy and eliminating the things that I have intolerances to out of my diet. It’s an hour of reading and journaling for me. These are my few habits that lead to the majority of my success, so this isn’t a really long laundry list of things that I have to do. Again, like we were talking about self care is your self care doesn’t have to take all your time. Your habits don’t have to take all your time to lead you to getting the best result.
SPEAKING ABOUT TIME, WHAT WAS TIME WELL SPENT IN FEBRUARY?
What was your time while spent? For me, I had a makeup tutorial and it allowed me to do something fun and play and it was just for me and there was no outcome that I was looking for other than really learning how to play with putting makeup on. And that was such time well spent. It was money well spent.
I’ve been practicing almost every day with my makeup and it has been allowing me to play in a way that I didn’t think I could play as a high achiever who struggles with play. Time well spent has been resting and doing less, reading more, writing more. And also time well spent was the time I spent prepping, hosting and recovering from our mastermind retreat in Atlanta. I still haven’t fully processed the retreat from Atlanta. I mean, I’ve debriefed it from a mental and a logical perspective and at the same time I haven’t fully integrated into the fact that I get to do this work that brings me so much joy and that fills me up and is my most important work in the world.
It’s truly joyful to have prepped, hosted, and now recovering from this mastermind retreat. What were your best lessons in February? Here’s some of mine. Atlanta retreat was our third retreat that we’ve held in the last year. This is 100% something that brings me immense joy, like I was sharing, and aligns with how I want to be serving and it’s still new in the business, so there are growing pains. It is not perfect. I’m sure it looked fantastic on Instagram. I know it looked fantastic on Instagram. People told me it looked fantastic on Instagram, but behind the scenes there were 100% growing pains there as we create systems and processes around this offering.
So it can be both and, it could be both joyful and it could give you growing pains. And what I really want everybody to hear because I think that there’s this illusion that happens in the online space set. If you do it once, you’re an expert. And you’re not, that’s not what makes an expert. Being able to do it over and over again consistently and sustainably is what makes you an expert. And so this was only our third retreat and we have a lot to grow here. We have a lot to continue learning as we evolve this in our business and we’re excited to do it. It’s fun. We can’t wait to learn.
But if we were so worried about it having to be perfect, if we were so concerned with it having to be a certain way, we would not be doing this. So where in your business are you holding yourself back from serving at your highest level because you need it to be perfect or because you need it to look a certain way? And the way you want it to look is the way it’s meant to look a thousand times from now and not on the first time around. And along these lines, the lesson learned here is the importance of doing things multiple times to hone the process and expand your energetic capacity around something.
So the best example of this for me is travel. When I went on my first retreat for a mastermind I was a part of in 2016, I hadn’t been on a plane in 14 years. Travel would trigger the hell out of my fatigue and I would be on the floor for the longest time. But through a series of travel plus CEO Debriefs, I’ve specifically been able to focus on improving my energetic capacity around travel. I’ve been able to build myself a process from way before travel starts to well after I get home that allows me to travel and feel good. And not just good, but pretty amazing.
I WOULD HAVE NEVER REALIZED THAT THERE ARE THINGS THAT I COULD BE DOING TO HELP ME FEEL GOOD.
And if I simply went with maybe the first three times I’ve traveled and then decided to quit because it felt draining, I would have never found a better way of doing this. I would have never realized that there are things that I could be doing to help me feel good. So how can we have this belief that you can do the thing and it can feel amazing and energizing and it just takes some time in practice? So the things that I’ve been working on around this is how, and when I communicate that I’m traveling and lining up support, how and what I’m packing, creating an itinerary for the time I’m away.
From the minute I get off that plane to the minute I get home, I don’t have to think about where I need to go and what I’m eating and what I’m doing. It’s all planned out ahead of time including what to bring with me to ensure I’m prepared for the little things, like Aleve because I had sciatic pain, or Imodium for when I’m in Mexico, or Tylenol PM for the red eye, and having travel supplies well-stocked and already in my suitcase, having a separate set of chargers already packed in my suitcase.
And a month before a trip I’m already making appointments for IV vitamin therapy, massage, my own coaching and workouts adjusted to my travel for when I return so that I know that, “Okay, I’m sandwiching this thing that potentially drains my energy in between two things that strengthen me and that strengthen my energy.” So how can you do a better job at creating that system where you have strengthening activities before, you have the activity that could be an energetically depleting and then you have strengthening activities when you’re done?
This goes for anything in your business. This goes for sales calls, this goes for coaching calls. This goes for doing the admin work that you might not love in your business. Anything that could deplete your energy, sandwich between two things that recover your energy. Now, some additional notes because I always think it’s important to be a good documentarian of your life and in your business. Some additional notes that I made for this month for myself were that February was a great month for our retreat.
My energy was good, I liked getting away, it worked well. But also February feels super short and it’s easy for me to feel like I’m behind. And so I want to remind myself that next February to breathe. It’s only one month and time expands to meet my needs. My daughter, Avery, went skiing with my dad for a week which made winter break really easy on this mom. And if I can plan that again for next year, I’m definitely going to take that on and get that planned to make my life a little easier and to make her life a little more fun and to make my dad’s life a little more rich during winter break.
Now I want to turn it over to you and hear your debrief from February. Come share your thoughts with me over on Instagram. You can tag me in your debrief posts. I’m @thetaranewman. I often share lessons learned on this podcast. It’s one of my favorite things to be able to do and I’m able to do this because of a strong commitment I have to radical self reflection. This commitment means that every week I’m looking at what’s happening in my business and in my life, the good, the bad, and yes, occasionally the ugly.
Doing this work allows me to look at my months and even my years with real data, even for the less tangible parts of my business and life. I call these weekly meetings, CEO Debriefs, and I do them twice per month inside The BRAVE Society. We do them together. I have pulled together some of the highlights from CEO debriefs that I’ve done inside of BRAVE and I’m sharing the best of the best with you. You might’ve heard a couple of these on the podcast, but I want you to take it a step further and feel what it’s like to do these with us inside of The BRAVE Society.
So head on over to my show notes and sign up now to receive 10 CEO debrief questions you will want to ask yourself. Plus all listen in on some of the most popular shares that I’ve made. Listening to someone else’s debrief is a great way to find the language for what you’re experiencing, get a concrete example of radical self reflection and learn how to grow your business because it’s oftentimes not what we think. If you found this podcast valuable, help us develop more bold leaders in the world by sharing this episode with your friends, colleagues, and other bold leaders.
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