Why I’m never busy

Why I’m never busy

by | Aug 10, 2023 | Mindset, Productivity, Strategy, Sustainable Business, Time saving

“How are you?”
“I’m so busy”

This is the most common line I hear in conversation especially with business people and mums. It’s definitely a thing I used to say a lot and now I try not to say it at all.

If I feel like I am about to say “I’m busy” I take a moment to reconsider and to take responsibility. Instead I say: “I’m fully engaged with my life” or “I have a lot on” or something like that.

If you like to say you’re busy please go ahead. I don’t judge you. I just know that when I was saying “I’m busy” it was a number of things. It was a badge of martyrdom. It was an abdication of my responsibility. It was a cop out and it was an excuse.

It felt good to say I was busy. It was me, as a mother, putting myself last. I was making excuses for why I couldn’t put my self care and wellbeing first in my life

It felt good to say I was busy. It was me, as a mother, putting myself last. I was making excuses for why I couldn’t put my self care and wellbeing first in my life and the problem with that is: no-one else in the world is going to put me first. They might be playing the same mothering game as me and failing to put themselves first, but they certainly aren’t going to put me first. I needed to do that.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

For me, the ability to change my relationship with busy-ness took a number of years and some tough challenges

My health declined and I simply couldn’t be busy. Plus, being busy was making me sick. I was anemic with HMB and I needed to learn a new way of being. Stress and overwork were making my condition worse and after a bout in hospital I finally committed to a new direction.

I had to learn to see the mindsets and beliefs that were keeping me stuck. I had to remind myself again and again that I am the boss and I get to make the rules. I had to release a lot of my employee mindset hangovers and step into a new paradigm aside from capitalism’s demands to do, do, do for more, more, more. I had to decide what I personally want from my life and business and redefine my goals. 

I worked with Bear Herbert on her course called Freely. It helped me to claim and define what I really need and how much I need to charge to achieve that. It aligned with my values and I changed my hourly rate easily. 

I had to ask a lot of questions. Do I really want a 6 or 7 figure business? What do I want my days to look like? What are my priorities? What are my interests and who decides how much I should do? Should I let my imagination decide what other people think I should do or should I honour my body, intuition and health indicators. It’s really helped me sit deeper into being and to release the incessant desire for more, to do more, to have more. To simply be is one of the most challenging things for me and when I can tap into it there is such peace. 

I had to get good at saying no and taking the time to discern where my energy was best spent.

I realised that I couldn’t blame my partner, his family, my family or society. I learned that even if they do think those things about me, I needed to leave those opinions and judgements with them to save my life. I had to get good at saying no and taking the time to discern where my energy was best spent. In reality that looks like a lot of mistakes, a lot of over-doing it migraines and a lot of days in bed. It has taken dozens of reiterations of my calendar and it’s something I’m still working on every week and every day. 

Ultimately I see that I need to continue to take responsibility. It’s my responsibility to take care of my wellbeing. I and only I am responsible for the hours I work and how I work. It’s entirely up to me to structure my days and commitments so that I can have the life I want. 

It’s super satisfying and it’s also very uncomfortable but when I think about being an employee I’m just not sure how I would go. I feel like I’ve learned a lot of lessons and I’m in a completely different field to a lot of people, particularly people who don’t have a business.  The level of uncertainty in business sits closely with the truth of the uncertainty of life itself and being an employee helps us forget that. It lulls us into a false sense of security with weekly payment but the truth of the uncertainty if life remains. That is a pretty scary truth for most of us. 

I’ve had to learn to emotionally regulate myself when I’m in stressful situations instead of disassociating. I’m still learning that one. I am still learning how much time I need in nature and how much I need quiet. From my perspective it’s all a big experiment and I’m still playing the game. I’ve had to grow the **** up and stop being a baby child who expects the parents/teachers/doctors/government/whoever to fix it all for me and take absolute responsibility for my life. 

We all have a choice. We all chose to be where we currently are whether we realise or not. I choose how I relate to my life circumstances and I find that very satisfying. I practice being satisfied. Satisfied with what I have. I take time to notice all that I have. I feel very lucky and grateful. And I’m never busy. 

Learn more about Online Marketing and Business that doesn’t require you to sellout on your soul.

“I pay my respects and acknowledge the people of the Yuin Nation, traditional custodians of the land on which I live and work. I also pay respect to all Elders — past, present and future.”

Read more from the blog.

Why I’m never busy

Why I’m never busy

by

“How are you?”“I’m so busy” This is the most common line I hear in conversation especially with business people and mums. It’s definitely a thing I used to say a lot and now I try not to say it at all. If I feel like I am about to say “I’m busy” I take a moment to...

Are You Creative?

Are You Creative?

by

Are you creative?  I pose this question to you for reflection. I have my own opinion about it.  If you are alive you are creative.  If you are in business you are creative. The old paradigm of our society tells us that creative people make art and then that art gets...

Spam comments on your WordPress website: what to do and why I don’t get them

Spam comments on your WordPress website: what to do and why I don’t get them

by | May 12, 2023 | Time saving, Website

Do you get emails about comments on your website that are clearly spammy? Spam is unsolicitied messages, comments with links that don’t relate authentically to what you are sharing about or inapropriate content – I usually get a good mix of Viagara, porn, gambling and flat out pointless.

Actually, I don’t get those emails or comments anymore and in this video I show you how to manage your comments, why I don’t get any and some options for what you could do for yor own website. 

watch the video

What will you do for your website? Let me know if I can help you at all – you could comment below haha. 

 

more from the blog

Design and Print Business cards on Canva + unboxing

Design and Print Business cards on Canva + unboxing

by | Apr 11, 2023 | Behind the scenes, Canva, Time saving, Your Offer

It was time for a new business card and I was running a Canva + Creativity course for my students so I thought I’d show them (and you) my Canva design process, how to order prints in Canva and then, how long it takes to arrive + the unboxing!

There are 2 videos in this set: the design and ordering and then the unboxing.
Enjoy!

designing and ordering prints

I ordered on the 5th of April and they arrived on the 11th of April. I didn’t request express post or pay for it but it has an express label on it. There were also 2 days of public holiday over Easter. 

They can and look exactly like the preview. 

In the button below is the Canva design I used if you’d like to use it too and below there’s the unboxing vid: 

the canva design

unboxing

Got any questions? 
Have you printed using Canva before? 

more from the blog

Should I start a YouTube channel in 2022?

Should I start a YouTube channel in 2022?

by | Jun 13, 2022 | Content, Marketing, Strategy, Time saving, Video

YouTube has become a large platform where some people seem to make a tonne of money making videos and doing affiliate and referral marketing. Most people say: it’s never too late to start a YouTube channel and I agree. This is as true in 2023 as it was in 2021!

 

However, I would like to make a distinction now.

There are 2 kinds of YouTube channels:

The channel is the primary business

The channel is for marketing to the primary business

One type of YouTube channel is where creating the content is the main offering and you focus on having affiliate relationships and sponsorship deals to generate your income. Some people also like to create Merch merchandise to supplement their income.

If you are a service based entrepreneur, you don’t need to have a YouTube channel at all…you aren’t looking at being famous like Mr Beast. You want to serve more people doing what you love. Right?

This will be a YouTube channel that is an add-on to  your current business – it’s not going to be the main focus of your business.

It’s a part of your marketing. 

The great thing about a YouTube channel is that it can:

  1.  increase your discoverability on a non social media platform 
  2. allow people to get to know you while you are off doing other things like feeding your family or relaxing on the beach.

The kind of account we would create is an addition to the biz rather than the main focus. It would be a marketing channel for us and a way to share our expertise with our potential clients.

 So for people like us the focus is a bit different and what is required it’s a bit less.

Whenever you are considering a new platform for your business I would encourage you to make a 3 months commitment. 

In a 3 month period you can start sharing content and trialing tags, headlines and playlists. After that period of time you will have some results to look at and decide whether it is worth continuing with the platform. 

Before you start your experiment it is good to be clear on what you want to get out of it and what kind of results you want to see.

For example, I don’t really have a massive number of subscribers and most of my content has very few views, however most people who jump on a free chat with me and eventually become clients have all watched YouTube videos of me before they book the free chat. 

This tells me that the videos are working to meet my goal: to get people ready to book that free chat with me which is how I like to intake my clients. 

For you: it will be helpful to decide what is the step that you like clients to take first. 

Is it to sign up for your newsletter list? 

Is it to purchase a small ticket item (inexpensive product) from you? 

If you can create a flow for clients to start to connect with you that is clearly a YouTube stream,  you can measure how many people came to you from YouTube. Then you’ll have a clear picture about whether YouTube has meaning for your business or not.

 If you get to this point of the blog and you have decided you want to go ahead with YouTube I’m going to give you a quick list of tips for the first steps of setting up your YouTube.

  1. Create account
  2. Create channel art
  3. Create a thumbnail template
  4. Upload a video
  5. Choose some tags
  6. Create a playlist 
  7. Create a welcome video 

Some of these actions already have instructions on my other blogs and videos. Would you like more? Ask me in the comments and I’ll make a video for you 🙂

If you found this helpful and you like, you can make a small donation.

“I pay my respects and acknowledge the people of the Yuin Nation, traditional custodians of the land on which I live and work. I also pay respect to all Elders — past, present and future.”

Learn more about Online Marketing and Business that doesn’t require you to sellout on your soul.

Do you want to make time for an Australian Bush Flower Essence session?

You can book in as part of the current course or program or you can book a session as a standalone. Email me if you are doing a course or program with me right now and you want to add on an ABFE session.

Go ahead and book a session here:

BOOK HERE

Business Building Activities

Business Building Activities

by | Feb 11, 2022 | Content, Courses, Marketing, Mindset, Productivity, Strategy, Time saving

Today, I’d like to talk to you about the way you spend your time in your business, especially if you want your business to grow and change. 

I’ll share my current business growth practices as inspiration for you to figure out what yours are. 

I have 20 hours a week that I am available to spend being in business. I basically split that in half, so that I’m spending half my time on income generating activities and then I spend the other half of the time doing things that are going to grow my business. Today, I thought I would just talk about those briefly and maybe prompt you to consider what are your business growth activities.

The Short List

Every day:

  • Email tidy up
  • Invoicing 
  • 5-15 minutes of social media connection/creation
  • Other business admin as it arises

Monday

Course creation 

Tuesday

NetCaring

Wednesday 

Ads and content creation

Thursday

Blog/book writing

Friday

Course setup

So just to be clear, in the 10 hours that I spend on income generating activities, I consider those to be things like seeing clients face to face, delivering group program calls, delivering course calls and doing work for my clients.

To make my business work, in those 10 hours I have to charge a rate so that I make enough money for my week, and then my year. So I have done the calculations to figure out how much I need to earn a year and then I’ve broken that down into how many working weeks I have, how many working hours I have per week, and then how much I need to charge per hour. All of my course prices, group program prices and one to one pricing is set to make sure that I spend my 10 hours a week, and that I make a certain amount of money in those 10 hours.

Depending on your business, those might be different but I’m talking about the activities where I am clear that I’m delivering a service to people, and I’m getting paid for that.

In the other 10 hours, there’s a few things I do every single week. These have changed a bit over time as I learn and figure out what it is that I need to do to grow my business and which activities are the most important. I’m going to talk to you about those now.

Monday

In my business growth activities, I have two hours each day. On Monday, I have one hour for admin, which is sorting out my inbox and doing my invoicing, and any other little admin things that might come up for my business.

LISTEN ON THE PODCAST

That tends to be just enough time for tidy ups.

In the other hour I spend time doing what I call course creation. In that hour, I am creating new course materials for whichever course or group program I’m delivering that week. That tends to be enough time for me to create the content and sometimes do some of the setup of the actual tech part of my course creation. 

It also means that I can work really week to week, I don’t have to have planned out a whole course. If it was a six week course I don’t have to have all of that six weeks of material ready before I go live and sell because I know how long it takes to teach something and I know that I’m capable. I just trust that each week, I’ll be able to look at how much I got through the week before what my overall goals for the course are and just be agile and create the course content the week of the course. Sometimes I might be delivering a course that I’ve taught before, in which case I would review the content from the last time I ran the course and just see what I want to add to it or add new fun resources.

Tuesday

Is my day for what I call NetCaring, which I learned from my mentor, George Kao. That is the act of focusing on my referral network. My other hour is again, just email invoicing and admin stuff and then I have one hour for this thing, net care. I’m pretty sure George has some blogs on his website about net caring where you could read a bit more about it and he definitely has a course about it that I did. 

NetCaring activities can be as simple as connecting with my referral partners on social media, cheer squatting them, sharing their posts on Instagram or sharing their content on my story. It can be reaching out to new referral partners. So, thinking about who are people who have referred to me in the past, can I connect with them and thank them? Also thinking about how I can deepen my relationship with that person? Is there something I can do or share of theirs with my audience, if that makes sense. NetCaring can also be interviewing my colleagues and publishing that as a podcast, or a video interview. Really just working really on relationships with colleagues is my Tuesday activities. 

Wednesday

Is all about my own ads. I have an hour for admin, same again, just invoicing emails, and catching up on little things that just all add up. On Wednesday, I like to focus on checking out my ads and creating more content for my business. So each day in my little admin session, I always like to spend five minutes doing my Instagram posts. That way, when it comes time to do ads, I have something to promote. So Wednesday is ads, and then making a bit more content. I might make a longer video, I might polish a draft of a blog that I wrote another day, or any kind of content creation, making carousel posts for Instagram, all of that.

Thursday

I spend my usual hour doing email, invoicing and admin. And then my business building activity on Thursday is to do an hour of writing. I spent an hour either writing a blog post, editing a draft, publishing it on my blog, and I’m also writing blogs currently with a view to turn them into a book. Sometimes my writing or my creation is more like a how-to video and sometimes my blog is created more with a view towards a book. So this is a really nice easy way to write a book where I basically just write a chapter a week by writing a blog a week. 

Friday

My business building activity is just working on my courses that already exist. So going back and turning any past course into an Evergreen course. Also just cleaning up any systems and processes that I have that aren’t feeling great. For instance, at the moment, when people buy my podcast course, they are meant to be immediately added to my email list but that’s not working, so I would go in, and troubleshoot and fix so that people can get automatically added into the email list and be delivered the information about the course. I often deliver my course live with live calls. And then afterwards, I like to set it up as an evergreen course. So that hour on Friday is all about setting up my courses with Evergreen, and perhaps doing other course focused activities. So similar to Monday was the course prep, then Friday is more of the tech side of the course setup.

The thing with these activities that is different from how I used to run my business is: I used to let my clients fill me up, and then maybe I would get to these business building activities.

What I’ve done now is flipped it on its head so that I put in my business building time first, and then I let clients fill up my calendar after my business has had its turn.

I’m interested in what kind of business building activities you do. 

Have you thought about these? 

Have you committed to them? 

Are they in your calendar so that you do them every week, and if they’re not, I would highly encourage you to do that.

It’s really important to feed and nurture your business and help it to grow. 

I hope this was helpful and I really look forward to connecting with you another time.

If you would like to get these healthy business growth habits going in your business, the Group Program might be for you. Learn more about the Group Program HERE

“I pay my respects and acknowledge the people of the Yuin Nation, traditional custodians of the land on which I live and work. I also pay respect to all Elders — past, present and future.”

Learn more about Online Marketing and Business that doesn’t require you to sellout on your soul.

Do you just want to talk to me about your business and website?

I’d love to chat. You can book a free chat and we can discuss website set up and all of the other things I mentioned here. We can even set it all up of ryou and save you the headace. 

Go ahead and book a free chat here: 

BOOK HERE

Easy tools to run an online business: Zoom

Easy tools to run an online business: Zoom

by | Nov 25, 2021 | Marketing, Productivity, Sustainable Business, Time saving

What do you REALLY need to start serving clients online?

I have talked about this a bunch in a couple of other blogs – like “Do you need a website” and “Easy tools to run an online business: Acuity” so today I’m going to talk about Zoom.

If you aren’t familiar with Zoom now I would be very surprised.

Before the global lockdowns, I was using Zoom daily and running my business online with people having a variety of experience with Zoom.

But now we have all been connecting digitally a bit more, even my in-laws can use Zoom!

I do still want to talk about it in the online business context though. Because I really want you to know how I ran my business in the early days particularly without a website. 

And I want to give you my opinions about Zoom 🙂

Zoom is an online video conferencing software service. Basically: this tool lets you meet up with people online. Yes! There are loads of other ways you can do this: Facebook calls, Facetime, Google hangouts and on and on. 

I actually use the free plan of Zoom for 1:1 calls and LiveWebinar for group calls because I don’t like monthly payments. I managed to buy LiveWebinar with a single payment for lifetime access. It’s worth checking if that deal is still available with AppSumo if you are interested (it says sold out but just search in their search bar in case there is a different version of the offer – valid till November 26 2021). 

So the steps I recommend for setting up your business to serve people online are:

  1. Get your ABN 
  2. Create a bank account just for your business
  3. Create a PayPal business account
  4. Get your Acuity set up 
  5. Get your Zoom set up
  6. Choose a Social media platform
  7. Creating content
  8. Doing some market research 
  9. Starting to share offers

You can go deeper with setting up your Acuity in this blog.

LISTEN ON THE PODCAST

At some point you hopefully find yourself setting up your Acuity emails that are delivered to  your client by the robot to confirm the appointment/session. This is a great time to share information about how to connect with you on Zoom for your session. 

The ability to pop your Zoom details into the Initial Confirmation email  is only available on the paid plans of Acuity. If you only pay for one tool, let it be Acuity at first. It will let you take payments, synchronise your calendar and customise these emails. In my opinion, it’s worth it.

Two things I’ll address here are:

1. What kind of Zoom plan do you need? 

and 

2. What info goes into that Acuity email confirmation? 

Zoom has a perfectly good free plan if you only want to do 1:1 sessions. So you can get away with the free plan for a very long time. 

You might like to upgrade your plan if you want to deliver group calls that last more than 40 minutes. This would be helpful for webinars, live course calls and group program calls.

There are loads of other options for what Zoom can do for you but for now, let’s keep it simple. And affordable. If you are just wanting 1:1 sessions, stick with the free plan. 

Now that you have your account you can create “Meetings”. My favourite thing to do is create “recurring” meetings so that I can have a URL I use to access the meeting space. I can also give that URL to clients so they can join the meeting with me. 

You can do that following the instructions in this video. 

Now you have the URL of your recurring meeting, it’s time to pop back into your Acuity and tell the client what they need to do to prepare and how to join you on the call.

On the free plan of Acuity, you will only get the immediate email sent out to confirm the appointment at the time of booking and you can’t customise your emails. If you’re sticking with the free plan, you will need to send an email the hour before your meeting with this info manually. 

If you are on the paid version you can customise your initial confirmation and send an email an hour before using the robot.

Here’s an example of the default email that gets sent out to clients once they book: 

You can find it in Notifications > Client Email > Initial Confirmation 

I recommend that you pop in and edit that email. You can include your Zoom link, and any other specific preparations you would like them to have done like sign terms & conditions or do a specific journaling practice. I show you how to do that in this video

The beauty of this is: now you have a URL you can share with people so that they can book, and get automated information for how to see you in the session. 

BOOM.

You are ready to share your Acuity booking link on social media now. So the next step is to decide which social media platform you want to play on for now. 

Here’s a quick tip on that: where are your people and where are you happy to create content? 

Start with one social media platform at a time. 

Facebook business page: share your Acuity booking link in the spot called “website”. You can also pop it in the blue call to action button.

Instagram account: share your Acuity booking link as your “Website” in your bio.

Zoom settings

I recommend going into your Zoom settings and seeing what you want to change. The main things you might like to change are: 

Turning off that woman that announces the session is being recorded 🙁

Checking whether you want a waiting room or password protected 

And just have a poke around and see if there are things you want to change to make it suit you better. 

Do you have more questions about Zoom and setting up your online business? 

I’d love to hear them – hit me up in the comments 

If you found this helpful and you like, you can make a small donation.

Learn more about Online Marketing and Business that doesn’t require you to sellout on your soul.

“I pay my respects and acknowledge the people of the Yuin Nation, custodians of the land on which I live and work. I also pay respect to all Elders — past, present and future.”

Do you just want to talk to me about your business and website?

I’d love to chat. You can book a free chat and we can discuss website set up and all of the other things I mentioned here. We can even set it all up of ryou and save you the headace. 

Go ahead and book a free chat here: 

BOOK HERE