S3E10: How to Be Unstoppable with Your Flow
Welcome to Women Rocking Business, where we are here to help you rock yourself, rock your life, and rock the world as a woman entrepreneur, because the world needs you and the time is now. I’m Sage Lavine, CEO, trainer, unretired camp counselor, and best-selling author of the Hay House book Women Rocking Business. We’ve had the honor of serving over a hundred thousand women entrepreneurs around the globe just like you, who are here to do more, be more, and have more by giving your gift to the planet. I’m so honored you’re here. Let’s dive in.
Sage Lavine
00:00:43
I’m here to talk with you about this concept of time.
How do you create more time in your schedule to launch your business? Time is the one thing we all have the same amount of, and yet it’s the thing that stresses so many entrepreneurs out so much that it takes them out of the game.
So I have a question for you. What is your relationship like with time? What happens when you feel like you don’t have enough time? What’s your biggest challenge with time? Are you juggling the kids? Do you have another J-O-B? Do you feel like you’re just overwhelmed and spinning out because there’s so many things that you could be doing to start your business you honestly don’t even quite know where to start?
Sage Lavine
00:01:23
I’m curious… What is the biggest challenge for you in regards to time what’s holding you back in terms of getting to the front side of your schedule? What’s holding you back in terms of you confidently going about your days and going about your weeks, building your business, like the queen you are, so that I can keep teaching into the solutions that you may need.
So number one time saving trick: Be where you are, calm down, stop comparing yourself to other people who are playing this game, right?
Sage Lavine
00:02:04
It’s very easy to look out into the world and see a bunch of polished, successful, shiny looking people and to not have any idea what’s going on behind the scenes. And now we’re comparing our insides to other people’s outsides thinking we’re never gonna measure up. Spinning our wheels. And now we’re not in right relationship with time. We’re, we’re trying to swim against the current, right. Or push the current faster than it’s even wanting to go. So number one, mindset shift for you today is to be where you are. If you’re just starting your business out, let yourself be a beginner, take a breath into that.
Sage Lavine
00:02:49
Can you feel some of the relief in that? Right? Like stay in your lane, right? Because it’s so easy to think it should be going faster. We should be further along. You know, but I think back to when I was a school teacher and I’m wondering, what was your career before this business? Right. Have you always been an entrepreneur? Did you used to have a different kind of a business? When you are on a mission and launching a message based business, this is like a totally different kind of business to launch. There’s a lot of new muscles to learn. And when you think about what you went through, getting settled in that last career… I know for me, it took me several years to feel like I found my stride as a teacher.
Sage Lavine
00:03:35
What part of us thinks we should start a business and all of a sudden just like, know what’s going on? Like, of course we don’t know what’s going on. Like it took me several years to figure out anything in my business. Right. I tell my clients, I’m like, “The first year, you’re just figuring it out the second year, you can start to plan it out. And the third year you can start to rock it out.” And that’s awesome.
But still depending on how big you wanna get and how many people you wanna reach. There’s so many new things to learn every single year. I mean, when I was a school teacher, you guys, I used to get so overwhelmed. Oh my gosh. I wanna hear like in your last career, right? Think of a time when you didn’t actually have it dialed in.
Sage Lavine
00:04:18
I mean, my first day teaching seventh grade, I had 37 seventh graders. 37 of them. True story. And then they announced the very first week of teaching seventh grade, they came into my room and announced to me, we’re gonna need you to teach PE. I didn’t even attend PE as a junior high student. I got a waiver so that I didn’t have to go because I had scoliosis. I didn’t wanna have to like wear those little uniforms and like shower in the locker rooms.
Sage Lavine
00:04:59
I mean, I am not cut out to teach PE. So literally 37th seventh graders, here’s Ms. Sage Lavine, teaching PE. Here’s what I do. I open up the equipment closet. I say, “Why don’t you guys go in and grab a basketball?”
Now, 37 seventh graders are going into the equipment closet, grabbing basketballs. So I turn them loose out on the basketball court, not 10 balls, not 5 balls… 37 basketballs, 37 seventh graders. And one of them goes, “Let’s head out onto the playground under the outdoor courts.” And they go running for the door.
Sage Lavine
00:05:39
Now I have 37 seventh graders outside with 37 basketballs and I can’t get their attention. First day teaching seventh grade, I have my whistle around my neck, my trusty whistle. I’m overworked. I don’t know what the heck’s going on. I blow my whistle as loud as I can. And I say, “Hold your balls!”
Can you imagine…. there were like six other classrooms out on the playground for recess. The entire playground went quiet. Little Ms. Sage Lavine is blowing her whistle like a drill sergeant screaming into the sky, “Hold your balls!”
Sage Lavine
00:06:20
The entire playground erupted in laughter. I had a steady flow of shame sink over my being. One of the most embarrassing moments of my life. But I’m here to remind all of us that it takes some time to master a new career. It took me a few weeks to figure out how to manage 37 seventh graders without making a total fool of myself. And it’s gonna take you a few weeks to figure out this business. What is it? How do I get to the front side of it? How do I manage my time as an entrepreneur? If I’m not reporting to a boss, if I’m not reporting to a J-O-B, right?
Sage Lavine
00:07:01
If I don’t actually have a time I have to show up, how am I managing my time? And so that’s my first question for you, right? First of all, how are you being gentle with yourself? Because you’re certainly gonna go a lot faster in terms of ma mastering this thing than I did with my 37 seventh graders. But more importantly, are you setting normal work hours for yourself? Are you actually creating a container in which you can rest to build your business? Because when we don’t have that container set for us, we’ve got to create the container ourselves, right?
Sage Lavine
00:07:42
And so that looks like setting normal work hours, joining a community of other women who are starting businesses, other like-minded entrepreneurs who are starting or growing their businesses so that you’re not alone. Isolation and overwhelm are the two biggest show stoppers for women entrepreneurs. That’s what they report: isolation and overwhelm. So you have to become masterful at not letting isolation or overwhelm take you out. That’s the name of the game, right?
Sage Lavine
00:08:24
There’s this concept of creating a container for your life.
Without that container, we tend to spin out. And this is what happens to a lot of entrepreneurs because we don’t have the same structure that we might have had in other careers or other parts of our lives, right? Nobody’s holding us accountable in the same way.
So we have to create that structure for ourselves. So that looks like setting normal work hours, right? A lot of our clients are doing accountability calls with each other two mornings, a week, three mornings a week, sometimes every morning, just to have that quick check in with somebody who’s doing the same thing, that you are. The accountability, the comradery that happens when you can really let your whole system know I’m not alone in building this business. Right?
Sage Lavine
00:09:09
So number one: set regular work hours.
Have a time in the morning when you know, I’m gonna be sitting down, getting to work by this time. And then in those regular work hours, be sure that you batch your time, write this down. You wanna batch your time so that you’re not just like seeing a client here, you know, seeing a client over there, right? If you open up your schedule wide open and you have a handful of clients, you may end up seeing a client Monday morning at 9:00 AM, Monday evening at 5:00 PM, Tuesday at 11:00 AM. And now you’re all over the place. Cuz you’re having to switch gears.
Sage Lavine
00:09:50
“Now I’m serving clients. Now I’m working on my website. Now I’m working on my marketing. Now I’m over here on Facebook. Oh, there goes two hours.”
Right? Come on. Right? For some of you that’s you, I’m describing you for some of you, tell me if I’m busting you right now. But in all honesty, our brains have to have some regularity in order to operate at their maximum efficiency. So that’s what we call batching time. Right? So when you see clients, I recommend that you decide which days you wanna see clients, right? You wanna have days where you’re working “in” your business and then you wanna have days where you’re working “on” your business.
Sage Lavine
00:10:34
So what I mean by that is when you are working “in” your business, you’re seeing clients, you’re doing your website updates. You are sending out emails, you’re taking care of your clients. You’re training your assistant, right?
When you’re working “on” your business, that’s when you can get to the front side of it, you can be more of the visionary, right? You might sit down with your assistant and map out the rest of the year. Where are we going? How do I want my weekly schedule to look asking yourself the bigger questions? What am I doing next? Am I gonna plan an event? Right? What are the creative things I’m going to put into place to attract endless clients my way, that’s what you’re doing when you’re working on your business.
Sage Lavine
00:11:15
So for me, right, I have most of the day on Monday to work on my business, which is great because it’s a flexible day for me, most days. I oftentimes do events over the weekend, so it’s nice for me to have Monday to just kind of get back into the office. I do have a meeting with my team at least two Mondays a month. And that’s again where we catch up on things, but we also do some visioning together. Where are we going? Right.
Then Tuesday and Wednesday, I’m working in my business. I’m meeting with my marketing team. I’m leading conference calls for my clients. I’m meeting with clients on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Most of the work happens on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
Sage Lavine
00:11:56
Then Thursday comes along. And most Thursdays I am meeting with joint venture partners, visioning about my business meeting with my leadership team to think about what’s coming next. What do we wanna do next? I have some creative writing time, time to make videos if I want to.
Then Fridays are flexible for me. Then I take the fourth week of every month off. So I call it my freedom schedule. I work about 12 days a month or less. I work the first Monday through Thursday of the first three weeks of the month. And I batch my time. I get really smart about how I’m spending my time so that I can play full out when I’m working.
Sage Lavine
00:12:40
And I always know there’s these chunks of time where there’s just no appointments on the calendar. Like if you’re not Oprah, you’re not getting in my calendar, right? Like on Fridays or the fourth week of the month, like you’re not getting on my calendar unless it’s like a huge opportunity, and then I can kind of shift things around and create pockets of spaciousness in other places.
So I ask you the question, what are the regular work hours you want to set for yourself, right? What are those structures that you can put into your calendar that allow you to really rest into this is the time I have to work and this is the time I have to play.
Sage Lavine
00:13:21
That allows you to really get on top of it that allows you to get to the front side of it. Right?
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You know, I went to the water slides yesterday with a couple of my girlfriends, a couple women that work for me and some of them are single moms. We were talking about how it’s just impossible for them to compare themselves to women that don’t have kids. It is just impossible to look out in the world and see the shiny, happy, successful people and compare your life and your business success to their business success because you have your own unique set of gifts and talents and circumstances and challenges.
Sage Lavine
00:15:10
So your job is again to stay in your lane to think clearly enough to be getting to the front side of your schedule and to love yourself enough into taking the scary actions that you’re taking to grow your business. The very nature of growing your business is going to be confronting to your comfort zone, right? We all have wounds and traumas that we’ve been through and getting visible and getting out there and making videos and taking all of these action steps. It’s scary. And rather than trying to push ourselves through that, right, the woman’s way is to love yourself through it, right?
Sage Lavine
00:15:51
To show up, call upon your stamina, call upon the sisterhood, get the support and then get out there, right? Because it’s in that loving yourself into taking the actions that you’re gonna wanna take more actions when you’re pushing yourself and driving yourself, right?
So many people think it’s about pushing through, but when you’re pushing yourself and driving yourself, what are you telling your nervous system? Right? Write this down, the consciousness that obtains sustains, right? So if we’re constantly pushing ourselves and driving ourselves, we’re essentially telling our systems that we can’t go at our own pace or that it’s not safe to take a breath and slow down, right?
Sage Lavine
00:16:40
Like we have to find our own pace. We have to find our own flow and yes, put some structure into your calendar so that you can rest and, you know, choose mentors and find pathways that you, you trust are going to work for you and, and choose mentors who have plans and who have businesses that you admire, that you can learn from so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. But please, for the love of the goddess and the universe, trust that you have your own flow and your own pace. You know, I’m reading this book called Relentless by Tim Grover. It’s an incredible book about the mindset of being relentless.
Sage Lavine
00:17:23
Tim Grover was Michael Jordan’s coach. So you can imagine he’s got a few things to say about being relentless and being Unstoppable and being freaking awesome. And so there’s on like this one hand, there’s like this high performance sort of relentlessness, right, that we can tap into in business and to create and to grow our dream careers.
Then on the other side of the spectrum, there’s this more being based way where we may meditate two or three times longer when we’re busy, just to get clarity on what actually needs to get done first, second, and third, and what we could delegate and what we could give away.
Sage Lavine
00:18:12
One of the things I’ve noticed for myself is that when I try to live just in a relentless state of mind, the pushing and the driving can actually take me away from the clarity and the intuition that will allow me to have “aha” moments that actually save me days of work, because I see a shortcut or I see who I need to hire next, or I see one of the unique ways I could stand out in the industry. You have to have time to work in your business and do the nitty gritty. And then you have to leave yourself time to be working on your business, to be this spacious, feminine channel of creation that you are.
Sage Lavine
00:18:59
I know I sound all “woo woo.”. But you have to have that time to get the million dollar, the multi-million dollar ideas. So yes, you know, just like the Michael Jordans of our world, like we’ve gotta learn to be strong and freaking just go for it and stop thinking so much. We’ve gotta learn that. But we also, for many of us, as women, as high powered high achieving women, we have to learn to go at our pace and to trust our flow. I see those two ways of being as this double helix, right? Almost like DNA, like the infinity sign weaving in and out, right? We need our sacred masculine energy.
Sage Lavine
00:19:41
We need our sacred, feminine energy, right? We need it all.
When we can actually weave those two inside of ourselves, we become these body based leaders who are not leaving our nervous systems behind, but we’re integrated. We’re standing for something. We’re magnetic. We’re lit up from the inside out. We actually love our lives in the same way that we love our businesses…and that’s what’s going to attract our clients. That’s, what’s gonna attract your clients. Your clients are out there waiting for someone to come and to provide the transformation that they’re looking for.
Sage Lavine
00:20:22
Your clients are not gonna hire you because you’re working harder. Your clients are gonna hire you because you have created a life and a schedule and a business that you love showing up for every day. And that you’re standing for something on this planet. That’s bigger than just your clients, right? That you’re partnering with philanthropic causes that you’re able to make a difference in some of the world’s problems because of who you are because of fundraising efforts that you might be able to do, because you’re aligned, your business is aligned with your innermost values.
Sage Lavine
00:21:02
That’s what’s going to speak to your ideal clients… that their values match up with your values, that you’re standing for something that they wanna stand for.
So beautiful woman who is on a big mission, I invite you to absolutely commit to getting to the front side of your schedule, getting to the front side of your thinking, catching yourself when you spin out, catching yourself when you’re in overwhelm. Come back to your center. Seek out the opportunities that give you guidance. Seek out the mentors who, who you can trust so that you can get those proven plans to rest into so that you have ample time to let your intuition do its thing, right?
Sage Lavine
00:21:52
When you partner strategies and plans that work with your authentic alignment, most deepest well of intuitive guidance and your authentic expression, you bring all of who you are to your business. You will be relentless and you will be unstoppable in a way that allows you the balance and the ease of knowing that there’s enough time in life for everything that you choose to be most important. There might not be time for every single thing you ever wanna do ever, but there is certainly enough time for everything that is most important to you and your heart.
Sage Lavine
00:22:37
You get to choose. You get to create this thing. You didn’t start this business to just build yourself another job. You started this business so that you could be the queen of your life. Let’s make sure that you have a business that fits into your life rather than having to fit your life around an overly busy business schedule because your clients are waiting for you. They’re not just waiting for someone like you. They’re actually waiting for you. And thank you for being the very, very best part of Women Rocking Business. Mwah!
You’ve been listening to Women Rocking Business. I’m Sage Lavine. The next step is to join our private Facebook group, The Women Rocking Business Sisterhood. Introduce yourself over there for the real and vulnerable conversation of what it really takes to launch and scale a business you love in that Sisterhood group. We have each other’s backs, each other’s sides and each other’s fronts. This is true collaboration. So go grab a seat in the Sisterhood because we can go so much further when we go together, you’ll find a link to the private Sisterhood group and to our upcoming events in the show notes.
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