Fake It till you Make It by restless type

Thank you guys all so, so much for being so understanding & awesome, sharing with me your experience & words of wisdom to help me work through my Overwhelm (yes, capital O). Because of it, I’ve had some Realizations (yes, capital R) in the past day or two that I wanted to share (it’s only fair. I have brown hair. Did you give me a dare?):

• I went from about a half-dozen or so sessions each week to 15-20 over the course of the last 2 weeks. That’s about triple the workload as I was used to just a month ago! While again, I’m thrilled & thankful for all the coaching I’m doing, I had to be kidding if I thought I’d be able to handle it / know what I was doing in a week’s time. There’s a learning curve, & I’m swinging in it. I’m gonna take my own coaching “advice” & experiment over the next few weeks with how I’m structuring my time, since what worked a month ago ain’t gonna work no more, and that’s OK.
• I need to go back to being very conscientious about multi-tasking, & stopping it as much as possible. Lately, I’ve been keeping my email open all day & not making the effort to finish one thing before I start on the next. While I’m really good with that if I have a focused task to complete, like writing an exercise or copy for my project with Jess, if I’m, say, “just checking email” there are 10 things that usually bite into that, & I take my sweet time. I know I can be way more productive if I, say, just carve 2 hours into each day as “email time” & only read/return email then without opening any other tabs or doing anything else. I can also chunk my time into 45-min blocks (I heart 45-min blocks of time – any less & what’s the point, any more & I get ants in my pants) & use the last 15 min to check/return email or go on twitter or respond to blog comments. Again – experimenting!
• Really, really, truly, truly committing to step away for an hour each & every day. Now that my schedule is a 12 hour day (on paper -I usually start working 2 hours before I open my calendar up to coaching calls!) up to 3 days / week, I MUST take a break. It’s tough because I never truly feel that I’m “working” (yes, this is as awesome as it looks), & because I trick myself that nothing is more important than what I have down to work on that day, but I know it ain’t true. While I do schedule a 1 hr lunch into my Moleskin every day, I take it only in the amount it takes for me to make & eat lunch (which I always do at the table, not at my desk, & with whatever book I’m reading instead of any paperwork) & then I get back to business. I’m gonna use that hour now. Just watch me.
• Schedule 1 non-coaching call every week outside of my family/friends circle. I have so many fantabulous friends that I’ve made through the Interwebs & I love talking to ‘em, but I know that, until the fall, I can only carve an hour or so each week for those catch-ups. I think this will allow me to keep up with the friends & family that I haven’t talked to as often as I like, as well as making sure I’m only talking to the peeps I really wanna be talking to. I also need to let go of feeling like an ass when I say, “Yes, let’s catch-up! How’s Sept 12th?” I’m groaning even writing it. I’ll make sure to come up with something to say that’s not, “I’m so busy“.
• Wanna hear something creepy? When I left my job, my goal was to have 20 coaching sessions/wk. That seemed to be a good number financially & time-wise, as 20 coaching sessions = 35-40 hours of coaching + back-end work, which is a “normal” workweek. Now, I’m at about 20 coaching sessions a week. When I realized that yesterday it blew my goddamn mind. But only now can I see this for the learning experience that it is. If I want to keep up my blog, & write my newsletter (next one’s out next week!) & be a good Spring co-host & work on my project with Jess & make sure my friends & family remember what I look like….well, I’ve learned that it’s craziness. 20 coaching sessions is too much. Or, I could say, it’s too much to maintain. I’m relieved that I’ll be upping my rates & expanding my packages this weekend (yes, I’m tying my hubby to the computer to update it this weekend – no excuses! And no, you can’t get an extension on my current rates unless you subscribe to my newsletter & pay attention to the Delicious Discount that’s coming in the next issue).

So, overall, I’m remembering to breathe, being extra special nice to myself, & taking this for the learning experience that it is. And let’s be honest – this is how I want my business to be. Striving. Thriving. Bursting at the seams. (That’s what she said). I gotta get used to it & figure out how I handle it. I’ll certainly be taking this nice long weekend (&, who am I kidding, the rest of the month/summer!) to figure it out.

Speaking of the nice long weekend, a Happy Canada Day to all my friends up north, & an upcoming Happy Independence Day to everyone celebrating with me in the States! Enjoy the sunshine, the BBQ, & my favorite – the fireworks!

Tags: Michelle's Memoirs

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 1st, 2010 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Encouragement for Everyone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.