Andrea Nordling 0:00
Welcome back to the podcast. It is all the time management conversation around here, especially today when I just recorded this episode. And at the very end, our power went out. And it was a very bad use of my time do you have to spend 40 minutes recording this episode for you and then have the whole thing deleted? And now I get to redo it. So I let’s have this time management conversation for the second time, of course, not for you. But for me, let’s talk about how I just wasted my time and we’re going to streamline our time. It’s so good, okay, are you feeling like this is the time of year where you’re wanting to get all your ducks in a row with your business life so that you can maximize all of the sunshine and the socializing and the fun stuff in your personal life over the summer, because that’s exactly how I am feeling which brings us to our topic today. It’s basically the difference between a 10 hour workweek, and a 50 hour work week for you. Now a 10 hour work week spent on the right things can yield so much more for your business and for your clients than a 50 hour work week spent on the wrong things. And for your health. What will be reflected here is a business that feels light to you. It feels fun, you’re thinking it’s working, it’s working. You lay your head on the pillow at night knowing you did everything you needed to do checked off all of the items on the to do list. And there’s nothing hanging over your head with that icky, Oh, am I forgetting anything or I’m dropping the ball or I didn’t do what I said I was gonna do I let myself down feeling that is not what we want. We want the killed it today cannot wait till tomorrow, feeling this concept of massive action versus passive action, which is how we’re going to quantify this today and all of the strategies for executing and automating those two types of actions is a core component of what I teach in the profitable nutritionist program. And once a year, in May, I release a paid training module from inside the program all about time management for health and wellness professionals and I do it for free for a limited time. It is called the summertime training. And this year, the free five day series is going to take place May 15 to the 19th. So registration for the free summertime training 2023 is open right now, for you to register and reserve your spot you can go to build a profitable practice.com/time t i m e and save your seat right now. So during those five days that we are going to spend together, you are going to learn the exact process for defining your 90 day business goals and priorities, which will likely result in you taking 80% of your to do list off right off the bat because of everything we’re going to talk about today. And then I’m teaching you the calendaring system I use including the color coded beautiful calendar template that you can immediately copy and start using for yourself. And then we are going to finish up the week procrastination proofing your plan with a live q&a session for anything else that you need help with in regards to time management in your business, any questions you have come to the live q&a Ask them, I will make sure that you are all set moving forward for the summertime with your plan. Again, this is actual paid content from inside the TPN program. So it’s a little sneak peek and an opportunity for you to test drive the curriculum and the resources for a limited time. Remember to register you go to build a profitable practice.com/time. And when you do, I will be in your inbox bright and early on Monday, May 15 with the day one training, so excited about it. Okay, so let’s foreshadow that training a little bit by talking about this concept of massive action versus passive action, what the heck does that even mean? Now, like I said, this is the difference between a 10 to 20 hour focused work week where you are killing it, and a 50 hour work week where you feel like all you’re doing is working, but you are exhausted and you have nothing to show for it at the end of the week, or your business is completely unsustainable. And you know, I can’t keep doing this. So I’m going to do a throwback to a concept that we haven’t talked about for a while here on the podcast, although students in my program are very familiar, because we talked about it a lot in there. And to for reference, you could go back to episode number four where I went into this in detail. This is the three step process for building your business. And it is three very simple steps that hopefully you also teach to your clients because it’s the same three steps that they’re going to need to be successful in their health goals, just like you are going to be successful in your business goals. When you realize that it’s one decide to take imperfect action, and three, evaluate. That’s it. That’s all we need to do as entrepreneurs decide, take imperfect action and evaluate. And then we go back and we take more imperfect action and we evaluate and we take more imperfect action and we evaluate, but we don’t go back and re make all of our decisions, which is what the crux of passive action is. So for the purpose of this conversation, I’m going to give an Example kind of a visual that I think is a really good way to explain passive action. And the tendency to go back and re make decisions instead of figuring out how to make the decision that you already made work for you and for your business. Okay, so think about building bridges, you’re on one side of a ravine, you want to get to the other side. The other side is the metaphorical land where your business is exactly where you want it to be. It’s perfect. It’s making the kind of money that you want it to make, it’s working the exact hours you want to be working, it is creating the freedom in your life that you want to have, it is impacting your clients at the level that you want to be, it’s just, it’s that perfect land that you are aiming towards. It’s like your north star that you’re getting to in your business. And to get there, you have to make some decisions about what kind of bridge you’re going to build to get to the other side. So you make those decisions might take you a while, we’re going to talk about that some of my students, some people I work with, have a real hard time making those decisions. And that could be YouTube. So let’s see how long it takes you to make the decision about what kind of bridge you’re going to build. That’s an it’s a separate consideration here. But let’s say you make the decision. And now it’s time to build the bridge. This is where you’re taking imperfect action, and you’re doing the things to build the bridge. Now what a lot of entrepreneurs do is they start building the bridge, and it gets hard, and they don’t like it and they look down. And it’s scary. And it’s a long way down to the river at the bottom. And they say none, and I’m gonna, I’m gonna go back to where it came from on this side. And then we’re going to build a different kind of bridge. And then they go make a different decision. And they build another type of bridge, meaning they take another kind of action for a lot of people, this is different types of marketing, they start free Facebook groups, they start a newsletter, and then they don’t, they don’t continue on it, they go back, they started something else, they go, Okay, I’m gonna get my website going, and I’m gonna really focus on SEO. And they do that for a hot minute. And then it gets hard, they get uncertain, maybe not getting the results that they want, or it gets uncomfortable because they’re having to then do the next step, which is take massive action, which we’re gonna talk about. And that is very foreign and uncomfortable. And so they retreat and try something else. Because really what our brains love to do is to learn and to take passive action. Passive action is not actually writing the newsletter that you said, you’re going to write every single week and pushing send on the day that you said you were going to send it and putting yourself out there that is massive action, it produces a result, the passive action is learning about newsletters, and learning about different email service providers, and learning different workflows for sending emails and learning strategies for deciding what to write in the emails, and learning about writing better copy and emails, but not actually writing the copy. See what I’m saying? Our brains love that sort of passive action. It’s very familiar. It’s very comfortable. There’s no risks involved. We don’t risk any vulnerability from judgment of anyone else, when we’re learning something new. Or we’re researching, or we’re getting a new certification. Do you see where I’m going with this, it’s all very, very comfortable. And that’s passive action. So when you do this 10 times in your business, you have 10 partially constructed bridges, but you are not at the other side of the ravine, you just keep building new bridges, instead of finishing the one bridge. Now massive action is what is producing results in your business, it’s what’s going to actually get your business to build the bridge all the way across to the other side. And the first version of the bridge might be kind of a, I don’t want to say rickety, sounds scary. Let’s not say that’s a rickety, it might be a primitive was the next word I was going to use. Maybe that’s not what I want to say either. It’s going to be slightly less sophisticated of a bridge, I don’t know what a sophisticated bridges versus whatever this other word is, but it’s going to be, it’s going to get the
job done. It’s not going to be fancy, okay, then you’re going to evaluate that bridge, and you’re going to decide what you want to build on. And you’re gonna decide what how you’re going to want to renovate it, and what you’re gonna want to add. And that’s the evaluation stage. And then you go back and you improve the bridge, you didn’t go build another bridge, you just are improving the bridge and you’re making it better. And that is my friend. How we get really, really massive results in our business is by taking the chances doing the things that are uncomfortable taking massive action things that are going to produce results. And spoiler, that’s probably the things that you don’t want to do when you sit down to get to work. And you look at your to do list for the day or for the week. The massive action items are probably the ones that you find yourself going, Yeah, I’m gonna do this other stuff first, and I’ll do that tomorrow. I’m gonna go tinker on my website first. Before I do that, I’m gonna go watch something on a course. First before I do that, that thing that you’re not wanting to do. That’s probably the mess Have action. And when you take the massive action, you’re going to get the results. And you’re going to have data to evaluate. And that is a beautiful thing. Because when you have data, and you’ve actually done the thing, you have some sort of evidence that something is working or not working, and then you know what you can change. So in the, I mean, in our example, about our bridge, then you know, like, where it’s wobbly and where you need to go reinforce it a little bit. But if you never get the bridge all the way across, if you only have partially started bridges, and you have 10, or 20 of those in your business, of course, you’re not seeing the type of momentum and the type of growth that you want to see. Exact same thing is happening with your clients. Remember, your clients are always going to be mirroring your thoughts about your business they’re going to be having for their health. So for our clients in the health and wellness space, this is always starting a new plan, always researching the new plan, starting the new plan kind of getting going with it, then it gets hard stopping and doing more research. Going back to that familiar place where we’re going to learn a little bit more, we’re going to listen to more podcasts, we’re going to do some courses, we’re going to read some books, we’re going to talk to some new practitioners, we’re going to start new protocols. And that’s a partially finished bridge, right. So you can see how this shows up all over the place. And I want to just really plant this seed for you. So you can think on it about all of the things that you’re doing that are passive action in your business. And there’s a time and place for the passive action, I’m going to suggest to you that the time and place for that type of action in your business is as a reward after the massive action is taken. Remember, massive action is what produces results. For your business, those results are going to be anything that is going to be making you money getting results for you and your business or getting results for your clients for the most part. So this is making sales, making offers to people writing copy, publishing an email and sending it creating assets for your clients, the deliverables, the things that are going to make them get results better solidifying your processes making your onboarding work better for your clients, not for fictitious clients that might come someday, but actually shoring up a weakness in a bridge that you’ve already built. Because you have data. And you’re running off of some actual information. And not just hypotheticals, I don’t want you to hear anything I’m saying here in massive action, as planning ahead for the future borrowing problems that don’t exist from the future. That is very much passive action, because passive action doesn’t produce anything. It’s the learning, it’s the scrolling, it’s the market research, or researching tech platforms, or watching course videos or listening to podcasts, even this one, this is passive action, my friend, I hope it’s going to be helpful for you. But I would much rather that you push pause on this podcast, and you go reach out to a client or you go send an email you’ve been meaning to send or you go follow up with someone that wanted to collaborate with you and promote you in some way, whatever that is that you’ve been like, Oh, yeah. Whatever that is, that is the massive action I want you to be taking and said, reading books, anything that is getting ready to get ready. That’s kind of how I think about it getting ready to get ready, is in the in my program. I have the example of somebody packing up their parachute and getting into the plane, and they’ve packed the parachute and they’re ready and they get up in the air. He’s like, no, no, no, let’s go back down. I want to just do this one more time, and they unpack the parachute, and then they repack it. This is all the passive action that’s so familiar, it’s so comfortable to do that, and it feels prudent, and it feels productive. And it’s not. So don’t fool yourself, you can work full time and more doing lots of passive action, that is not going to move the needle in your business, it’s not going to get you more clients, it’s not going to get the clients that you have better results. And it’s for sure not going to make you more money, which means you’re going to be wasting your time, you’re not going to have the time freedom that you want either. So the difference here is that you’re going to do with the passive action, you’re going to prioritize the things that make sales and the things that create clients and the things that make a better experience for your clients. Remember, you’re never going to have anything to evaluate or tweak or make better. If you don’t take some massive action that’s imperfect in the beginning, it’s always going to be imperfect. It’s just the way it is we try to avoid that we want it to be easy. We want to know that it’s going to be successful. We want to know that we’re not going to fall on our face. And for that reason, a lot of people never take the imperfect action, because it’s a fallacy. It’s never going to happen. When you’re doing something for the first time. You’re never going to be good at it. Well maybe not never but for sure in business your there’s going to be a lot of times when you are not good at something the first time that you do it doesn’t mean you don’t get results. It doesn’t mean that you still aren’t succeeding, but you’re not going to feel like you’re crushing it. That’s just the reality. I know I use this example a lot but I’m gonna learn it again or I’m gonna say it again. You can’t learn how to ride a bike by watching videos. About bike riding, and listening to podcasts about bike riding, and talking to other bike riders and asking them about their experiences, gay dating certifications and bike riding. That’s not how you learn how to ride a bike, you learn how to ride a bike, by getting on the seat, wobbling around trying to pedal the pedals, getting your balance falling over, and then figuring it out. That’s really the only way to ride a bike, you can’t learn your way to being a bike rider. Same thing in your business. So I highly suggest that you are thinking right now about the things that you think you need to be doing this week, or this month, for your business, for marketing, for selling for delivering to your clients, for creating back end systems and processes, whatever that is that’s on your to do list right now. And I hope that you are asking yourself is this passive action that feels really safe and comfortable, and I’m deluding myself that it’s productive, or is this massive action, and then just getting it done, and it’s going to create, what I want in my business is going to be the imperfect execution of these actions, so that I can then evaluate them afterwards and figure out what I can do better next time. Hopefully, you have a lot of massive action on your calendar, and I want you to just ruthlessly take off the rest of it, it doesn’t have to happen or it can happen. As a reward for after the massive action is done. This is going to give you so much momentum in your business. And if you are like me, and like a lot of people that I work with my students and colleagues, you probably feel like something has gone wrong, if you aren’t super motivated to do these massive actions. So can we just call out the elephant in the room, you don’t have to be motivated to take the massive action, I did not want to record this podcast. I didn’t want to sit down and record this podcast for the first time. And then the power went out and the whole thing got erased. And I for sure did not want to do the second time I’ve seriously considered bailing on it until tomorrow. But the bottom line is, I probably won’t be motivated to do it tomorrow either. And I don’t have to be motivated. Because I can give you this information I can teach you I can show up for you and serve you as a podcast listener without feeling motivated. That’s called discipline. It’s just it’s when you do the thing, even when you don’t want to do it. And nothing has gone wrong if you’re not in the flow. Or if you don’t feel like you’re in alignment. Or if you don’t feel like you’re just ready for whatever that massive action is. A lot of times you don’t feel like it. A lot of times you would rather do anything but I don’t have social media anymore. But if I did, I guarantee it would be one of those times where I would have picked up my phone and started scrolling instead of pushing rerecord on this podcast episode, but that’s okay. That’s just what our brains do that we’re humans. We don’t like to do the uncomfortable things most of the time, but we do it anyway. I bet that there are a lot of instances in your life where you do hard things that you don’t want to do. I remember, as a parent of young kids, when they would wake up in the middle of the night and I didn’t want to wake up, I still woke up, I You just have to there are things you just have to do. And as a business owner, these uncomfortable things like writing the emails and sending them and following up with leads and making offers to people and telling them how you can help them literally saying the words I can help you and having as many conversations as you can, or you say the words I can help you. Those are massive actions. Those are things you might not be motivated to do. You might not feel like it, you might want to do anything. But of course, because you’re a human. And that stuff’s uncomfortable, especially in the beginning. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. In fact, it means you should do it. Those things that you want to put off till tomorrow, those emails that you want to send tomorrow. Those follow ups you want to do tomorrow, instead of today are the things you should be doing today.
I recently got a fantastic question from a student in the profitable nutritionist program about this. Here is what was posted he said quite often I feel overwhelmed with everything I could or should be doing to grow my business. I’ll sit down at the time I scheduled to work and find myself almost frozen with I don’t know what to do, or I just don’t feel inspired. I don’t feel focused, I don’t feel ready to work on this. Maybe I should find something else to work on. Have you ever had those thoughts? Of course you have. He said before I know it an hour has flown by when I give myself a long runway three to four hours of in of uninterrupted time, I can usually work through these blocks and then start making progress. Still, I feel my biggest obstacle is the length of time it takes me to get into the right headspace to not only focus on the business, but also to produce something worthwhile. So something that we employ in our TPM program is when you ask a question, you have to also have answered the question. So he posted this question that I’m going to get to but he also had a proposed solution. He said, I feel almost as if I should allow myself 10 to 15 minutes at the very beginning of each work session to journal freely about whatever’s on my mind. Do some useful belief creation. That’s a tool, a thought work tool that we have in the program and amp myself up per haps during this process, I’ll feel inspired and gained clarity of how to approach whatever task it is that I’m focused on. Okay? Let’s unpack that a minute. First of all, genius. Second of all, acknowledging the elephant in the room that we already acknowledged, which is sometimes you don’t feel inspired, you don’t feel focused, you don’t feel ready to work, you don’t feel motivated. And that’s okay. So first of all, you can just grin and bear it. And you can just get the work done without having to have any of those emotions come up. And we also have tools that can help get those emotions generated in your body. So you do feel better about the work that you’re doing. And that’s what he was proposing here in the second part, which is what his solution was, I feel like I should allow myself 10 to 15 minutes at the very beginning of the work session, to journal about whatever’s on my mind and amp myself up, I find a really an he’s referencing the useful belief creation tool that I have in the program. But I’m going to just offer to you that if you spent five minutes at the beginning of a session where you are going to crank out some massive action and you’re feeling resistant to it, and you would way way way rather, go listen to a podcast or watch a YouTube video or read a blog post or something like that. Instead, I highly recommend that you spend five minutes journaling about the results that your clients get when they work with you. Go read some past testimonials, go read some past email feedback that you’ve gotten from clients, go and revisit some results somewhere that you have in this way, I always recommend keeping a file called it’s working and keeping those things at your fingertips. So you can go read this and you can go remind yourself, why it matters, that you’re going to take massive action on whatever it is you’re working on whatever it is you’re doing, that you’re resistant to doing. Remind yourself why that matters. Because it does matter. It matters a lot to whoever is on the receiving end of whatever massive action you’re taking. And that my friend, I guarantee you will motivate you, it will inspire you, it will flip your entire headspace and your mindset around whatever that task is. And it will make it so much more doable. And your resistance will probably fade away instantly. This works for me really well. I know what works for my clients, I hope it’s going to be something that you are going to also employ because it will work really well for you. Okay, so let’s circle back to the two types of students that I work with. And the two personality types that I see. Which is one having a hard time making the decisions. Remember, the process is step one, make decisions. Step two, take imperfect action, action. And step three, evaluate, I really see a lot of people that have an issue with one and three, I think we all to a certain degree resist taking Imperfect Action sometimes, which we’ve talked a lot about already. But making decisions for some people is really their sticking point. So if that is you, you likely want to keep getting ready to get ready. And you want to watch one more video and unpack the parachute again, before you pack it back up again, before you jump out of the plane and over and over and over again, which feels very necessary, it feels very prudent and if that’s your pattern, and you struggle with making the dishes decisions and sticking to the decisions. Now switching metaphors here so that you can build the bridge all the way across the ravine, your growth is probably to go faster. So in that scenario, and we’re gonna be talking a lot about time management over the next few episodes. So take this with you into the the following weeks as we go even deeper into strategy around this. Your growth, if you have a hard time making decisions is probably to go faster, to take the passive action off of your calendar altogether, fill it up with massive action, even if you’re not spending as much time working, but you are getting those things done. And just go fast. Just rip off the band aid and take the imperfect actions. Okay, make the decisions, take the imperfect actions and go because the indecision and the remaking the decisions and rebuilding bridges and having 20 unfinished bridges is what slowing down your business. If that is your struggle, that making decisions and sticking to decisions is a problem for you, you got to go faster. Now there’s another group of people. And I happen to fall into this one that has no problem taking action or being decisive, to be honest. But I tend to hustle and do more and more and more and never evaluate. So I have had to train myself to evaluate results and systematically go back and tweak and streamline my actions, instead of just doing all of the actions, even things that aren’t even working. But I don’t know that they’re not working because I’m not taking to second Steven evaluate what I’m doing. So if you throw all this spaghetti at the wall and you take action on all of your ideas immediately, your growth is the same as mine, which is to slow down so that you can speed up. And still the thought process is the same here. Take off some of the actions off of the to do list. Let’s figure out and evaluate what things are actually moving the needle here what is getting the results and let’s be very intentional about doing those things by better instead of just trying to do all of the things. So do you see how there’s two different ways to waste time here, waste time researching and thinking and redoing decisions, but not actually taking the action or wasting the time taking all of the actions and not being intentional and even strategic about the things that could just be eliminated altogether, because they’re not getting the results. Both are a huge waste of time. And I told you at the beginning of this episode, I want you to see the difference between a 10 to 20 Hour Work Week that just kills it, and a 50 hour work week that leaves you exhausted, you can see the difference, right? Hopefully, from those two examples, you can see what your growth is, is it to slow down and evaluate so that you can speed up? Or is it to go faster, and just make the decisions, rip off the band aid and do the things? And as you’re thinking about that, I would actually put pen to paper and do a little writing on this for yourself, I would ask like, what is my growth going to be? Is it going to be to slow down to evaluate and simplify and not Hustle so hard? Not feel like I have to fill every minute of every day? If you know, you know if that’s you? Or is it going to be for you to take action and trust your decisions and just move forward? Let your brain go nuts and just tell you what comes up. Ask that question blank sheet of paper like what is my growth here? Which one? Is it and write down? What thoughts come up for you? I bet it will be very insightful. I can end this episode without just emphasizing that all of the work counts. When I was thinking about this and thinking about doing this episode. For the second. No, I’m not bitter at all. It’s fine. What I was thinking about this episode, I was thinking in the shower about it. And then that was very meta because it was like, Oh, I’m, you know, I’m like kind of thinking about my business when I’m not working on my business. And it got me really reflective on how all of the work counts, massive action, passive action, it’s all moving the needle forward. So you can’t do this wrong. Don’t shame yourself about it. Don’t feel like you’re doing it wrong. If you are prioritizing the passive action, because all of it counts. When you’re listening to your go to health podcasts that you’re really interested in. And you’re learning about new developments and new technologies and new tests, it counts that’s great for your clients, that’s great for your business that does count, it maybe isn’t going to get you results quickly. And you probably shouldn’t prioritize those actions, but it counts, it’s still a good use of your time, it’s still filling you up as a practitioner, and it’s good, it counts, okay, when you’re in the shower, and you’re thinking about marketing ideas, or you’re troubleshooting for your clients accounts, all accounts. But I think I’m getting this point across most health and wellness business owners prioritize those passive actions before the massive actions that are actually going to be moving the needle and getting them better results and their clients better results. So you just need to be ticking off the massive action items first. And then using those passive actions, like the podcasts, and the extra certifications, and the books and all of those fun things, which are still actions that matter. As a reward for a job well done. Your business will skyrocket, your time will open up and you will see so much more whitespace than you ever have before. And you’re I promise going to enjoy your business so much more. Okay, so for next week, like I said, we are going to build on this concept. We’re going to talk more about time management. And we’re going to actually start creating your massive action plan for the next 90 days. So my friend I will see you then
