Lessons

Lesson Info

Put Yourself On The Calendar

today, I'm going to talk about a system of creating a system for you. There is no Magic one system for everybody that works to make your life work. So if that's the expectation right now, I want to get the big eraser out and say get over it. There's not just one system that's perfect, but there is a system that's perfect for you. So I'm gonna go through some ideas, but I want you to just look at them and as you hear them pick up the pieces that work for you and just start to think of your life as a system, you're stepping out of it. It's like your own personal little off site, step out of your life and look at the bigger picture of it and say, how can I make my life go closer to the way I want it to go so that I have less dress more flow and I'm getting to my goals, I'm doing those things I want to do. So it's really about system izing your attention to that. It's not about plugging into, you know, if I just go from point A to B to C to D. Guess what life isn't going to go from A to B ...

to C to D. It's about creating a way to system Eyes, your awareness of where you are, how you are and take back that choice. So that starts with starting to put you back on your calendar. Now. I work with just really top level people who have calendars that are managed by more than one assistant and we'll sit down and we'll go through and look and say, excuse me, where are you on this? I see your meeting with X, y and Z. Where are you, where is your self care? Where is your time to do the things that really make you happy Now? That sounds, you know, I'm not saying you can change everything about your job and you're going to have me time from 2-4. But there are places, there are places where you can get you back on your calendar, where you can clean it up a little bit. Like we're cleaning the plate that we did earlier, they're places where you can clean up your calendar a little bit and just feel more in control of it because if stress is feeling out of control, getting you back on your calendar is feeling more in control and you do it with compassion who do it with humor because it's not all gonna be perfect, a sense of play and a little bit of curiosity. So everybody's seen this quote before, The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, oddly, I always thought Einstein said this and I I google it and found out that it's apparently falsely attributed to him, but it is true how many of us repeat the same stress situation over and over. Sometimes. We call it the holidays. We we we have these like dances, these stress dances we do with certain people or with certain issues in our life and it's like we know that when we come across this person, I'm going to feel stressed out because she always acts like this, I always act like this and we do the dance. Um so how can I, you know, I deserve that stress because I'm doing the same dance. How can I change the dance? That begs the question them? What does it take to really thrive if you're not going to be stressed? You're thriving. I mean, you're going to really thrive. What does it take to feel like you're choosing to thrive? Well, it starts with knowing a little bit more about you, Really, knowing you self development is the part that is left out of our education systems, out of our leadership programs. But when we get a chance to know ourselves and I don't mean that obsessive sitting at home analyzing ourselves, I mean knowing what makes us thrive when we know what we really value what our strengths are. And we'll be doing this in another session. We're going to actually go through the exercises and I'll say this right now and I'll say it again, I would love for you to do the work book values and strength exercises. The strength is an online one. I'd love for you to do those before the next session. That would really be helpful. It's a lot of fun to do. Um But when you are really in touch with your values and your strength, you know who you are. You know what makes you tick and when you ask yourself why you're here, what's your purpose? Well, guess what? You just tapped your own intrinsic motivation and you're making it clear and why are you here and then how to best manage your energy to meet these challenges. We talk so much about time management and what I'm going to talk about right now is a little bit of time management, but it's really like stress management. Energy management. How are you going to manage your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual? Are you sick of me saying that yet? Energy? How are you gonna met? How are you going to maintain these forces, these life forces within you that you have enough to meet your life? And that involves thinking about how you think. Now I worked in a psychology office for 10 years, so I got to see a lot of different kinds of thinking from the somewhat rational to the, wow, that's impressive, irrational. Um, but we all have styles of thinking. We have typical reactions, we have to think and you know what it is for you. You already know that. So as you go through, starting to think about having a meeting with yourself, I want you to think about how you think so that you can support your best thinking. You know when you're doing your better thinking and you know when you're doing your less better thinking and you know when you're doing your really pit thinking things really, why am I stuck on that? You know, you know this you also know how you work best. You can think of that time when I asked you to think of a time when you were in flow, you if you think more and more about it, you can think of those moments of what set you up to get there. So you can do it more often because the bottom line is you want to know how to spend this precious time, energy and focus, that's yours. You're spending it. So do that with choice now, can you choose all of it? Absolutely not. Some stuff has chosen for you, but a lot of energy choice can be yours, a lot of it and if you just shifted a little bit you wind up feeling better. This is not black and white. This is playing in the gray zone. And as I said, you know what gets in your way, you know where you get stuck. So you can start to get a little more proactive about getting stuck. So I'm asking you to spend .0365 of your time that you're awake in a working world, on planning your life. Is that unreasonable? How many people have a financial plan or how many people should have a financial plan? We have financial plans, we have strategy plans at work, we have planning meetings for housing, we have planning blah blah blah blah, blah. We so seldom stop and plan us. We are so good at the extrinsic plan and the intrinsic plan gets ignored. And if we want to make a plan where we're less stressed, it doesn't take a lot of time, but it does take a system where we check in and that's what I'm going to talk a little bit about. So it's not much time we're going to talk about changing the balance and occurring in this model so that we can step in to these different places as we go forward. Now, I'm going to move away from the slides and into the workbook for now, because in the workbook, Um I have on page 14 meeting with yourself and this ability to put you back on your calendar, which lets you switch from that reactive living to proactive living. So yearly, I suggest you actually have a retreat now. Some people even do this quarterly and you can use this kind of a workbook for that, it's a perfect sort of thing, but I actually have a yearly map in here under the meetings and the handouts, um which I do have marked. So if you have a meeting with yourself, what would you do, what would you do during that? You're you're having an off site, you step out of your life and you as almost as if you're looking at somebody else's, you look at it and say, is it going the way I wanted to go and what parts of it are and aren't, It's really an amazing thing to do. So on page 34 is a sample of a yearly meeting template. I use the word template loosely create your own, these are ones I made up based on coaching theory and concept of what to do, But this is your own. So on page start the templates. I'm asking that you take a yearly meeting with yourself and here's something really important about it. Make it fun. This is a drudgery, This is you deciding to be in your life. It should be the most exciting and fun thing you do put on good music, maybe for the glass of one, this is you taking time for yourself because you're the most important part of your life and you're the most important part of your stress management tool. If there's no other tool that's available for you to fight stress than you. So how about looking at you? So I have some questions in here to ask yourself when you're doing these sorts of meetings, we're gonna be using something called a GPS, which we're going to really develop in. It's really well in our next session, but that's your goals, your purpose and your strengths, using those to guide your life. Because if we have, if you drive somewhere with a GPS on, we don't even need to think anymore. We put the gps on the phone and we're done, we don't need to think about what is this South or west or it does it for us. Well, when you have a Gps for your life, it makes your decisions a whole lot easier because then you're then you're deciding according to who you are and what you want. Ask yourself when you have these meetings, am I on the calendar at all? Especially the weekly meeting? Do I see me here? Do I see going to the gym or time with my friends? Is it there? Can I fit it in somehow? And I will promise you that more often than not. When I work with clients who say there is no time for me, we find it it's a matter of playing around with stuff. You gotta get creative. And this is called creative life. So I'm asking you to get creative. Is there white space? Because without whitespace we can't really function. White spaces. When we're creative, white space is when we are have room for flexibility that we need. It's when we take the pause, Do you know? Your brain needs a pause of a .2 2nd pause after a neuron fires in order to load back up the chemicals that are in the brain for it to fire again. So if you send information ahead of the pause that's required, you don't learn it, it backfires. Our brain only stays on for about 90 minutes. And then after that period of time it shuts down and has to reboot everything. But it's in the shutdown, it's in the spaces, it's during your sleep that the learning is integrated and the same is true for our life. We have to have some pauses. We have to have some white space so that all the meat that's in the not white space gets integrated into a useful way makes a huge difference. And then this next page, page 36, really truly important. What do you want? What do you want your vision of yourself to be? If you had the proverbial magic wand and you wanted to create a life maybe within the next year or maybe you want to do a five year vision? Where do you want to head? You've got the steering wheel, you don't always get to choose the road, but you've got the steering wheel. Where do you want to aim? I used to use that. I love sailing. I used to use a lot of sailing analogies. It's like which, which lighthouse you're going for? You're gonna have to tack to get there. But what are you hanging on that lighthouse? Where do you want to be? Now? A lot of people start having some anxiety at this point. I don't know what I want to be. You know, that doesn't matter. Your visions made in plato. First of all you use pencil. If that makes you feel better, you can erase, you can change it, you can edit it every month if you'd like but set it out there set a course of what you want because if stress is feeling out of control at first you have to say what do you want, what do you want to control? I think a lot of us wind up really stressed out because we're controlling things that don't even matter to us. How about we use the control energy and worry on the things that really matter like what we really want. Big stuff, really big stuff and it takes some time to set out. If you don't want to do this alone from worksheets or workbook, do it with someone, do it with a coach, do it with a friend, have the discussion if that feels better. It doesn't matter how you do it. It really, really, truly does not matter how you do it. It's that you brought your attention, all of your little neurons, your frontal lobe engaged to deciding what you want and then deciding what your mission or purpose is, because that's really your GPS and then moving forward, what's the best mindset, you know, your mindset, you know how to do this? So I I don't want you actually really completely doing this now. This is this is time alone away, john notes, that's great. But this is time alone for you to do this. I'm going to in another session talk about taking a habit all the way through and that's got a separate worksheet that you can do with your goals, you know, what gets in your way and you can make a plan for them, what's going to empower you in the, in the face of them? And then what is your self care? I'm on page 39. What is your self care gonna look like for this year? How are you going to take care of yourself physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually? And then on page 40, how are you going to hold yourself accountable to this self care? How are you going to check in and maybe even more importantly, who's on your team? Where are you going to get support for this? Because guess what? We're team players. We may try and the islands, but we are team players. So who is on your team? And I mean your true friends, I do not mean your frenemies, We all know what the friend of me does. So there's a checklist that goes with this to keep you on track with the different parts, um, kind of about your level of commitment. If you take a few hours and really poor through this, do you know what a gift you have given yourself And I walk, please contact me through my website or however, if you come up with great ideas from this, I love gathering them. I want to make this as supportive to you. So I've tried to keep it as open as possible. The values exercise is actually printed in this book on 41 so you can do that overnight and remember that you can value everything. But you're picking the ones that are your sort of signature values monthly. You're going to check in what are your winds from the last month? What are the challenges? This should look familiar. Look over your year that you set out. I'm sorry. Great, thank you for asking. Yeah, as I do the awkward foot through. Look over your year plan. What good is a plan? If you do it once you're here and you never look at it again, it doesn't do any good. So monthly, take a look at it and check in with your goals and your habits. Do yourself care, check in whatever goals you set for yourself, Note your progress this page 32, what do you need for this coming month? Where are you and what do you need for this coming month? Do you feel that the shift in that of going from I should to what do I need to be my best and that this really doesn't take that much time once you've done one, it really doesn't. It's a check in, it's just what I call the re attention to your intention. I say that a lot re attention to your intention. So the yearly one was setting up your intention and then you're giving it re attention. That's what wires up your neurons to create habits that support the behaviors that create the life you want. That's what it's about. And when you create habits that make you feel less stress, we'll go through picking a lot of those in the next session. When you create habits that make less stress than the end of the year, you're your lighter, you're happier and you're further along to your intention. So however you want this to look for you, A monthly check in is a really valuable thing. Your self care is a term we don't even throw around much. Caring for yourself is not selfish. Did you hear that? Caring for yourself is not selfish? If the biggest gift you can give is to be present for somebody else, then caring for yourself as part of the package it really is. And it's a way of nurturing, in a way of giving that's critically important. There's a, I feel for the person who wrote in about retiring and then having to deal with an Alzheimer's parent and there's an awful lot in the literature now we're finally seeing the burnout that comes from caring for others. And the answer to that is to build yourself care into it. The true answer is to give as much character yourself that you need to give to others. You gotta fill the well to be able to give the water and this is a way to make sure this is accountability to making sure you're doing that. And also, it's amazing some of the insights I've heard is people started the weekly meeting is the one that I've done the most with clients. I do the yearly meeting with them in my coaching and pretty much monthly. So the weekly is the one they have to take out on their own. And the insights that come from it after a few weeks of doing it, they'll say, you know what, I realized I probably have more leeway in my schedule than I ever thought I did. But what you're doing here is just checking in twice a day. This isn't a lot to ask. How are you? And this is another way to use questions with the 5, 5, 5 1st 1st breath in because you can multitask. I um, this is a place where you can multitask, but I call it multipurpose ng and just a quick word on that, multitasking things that are complicated our brain does not do well. We pay attention to mostly one thing at a time. Now can we have background music on and be reading? Of course we can. They're not high demands on our frontal lobe. Can we take a breath and ask yourself a question? At the same time? We can do that? I'm calling that's acceptable. Multitasking the multitasking where we're doing five things at once. Just about every study shows it's pretty darn ineffective multipurpose. Ng is using the same time period to get more than one thing done in a coordinated fashion. It's a little different than multitasking.