How to Finally Win with your Website or Achieve Any Goal That’s Been Un-Achieved For Too Long!

“I don’t think I’ve been setting realistic goals in trying to build my online business.”   

“I feel very stuck because I have this big vision, I know I have to start step by step but I start to get into it and then something happens and I fall back.“ 

“I have a really busy offline business. So I don’t have much time daily to spend building my online business and I just feel stuck on how to set realistic goals for building my online business.”  

“I want to have my website up and running in about two months’ time and I feel that’s very realistic but then I get into the day-to-day business of life it doesn’t work out. I’ve been trying to really launch my website for 2 years.” 

“I’m tired all the time. I don’t have enough staff.”  

What are the “busy things interrupting your day?”  

• Employees call in sick or worse yet, move on to another job so I have to fill in. 
• Short staffed
• Taking care of customers
• Helping with intake
• Admin work
• Doing Social Media
• FB LIVE shows – prepping, doing them, shipping because I’m short-staffed
• Talking to Customers or Consignors who want to talk to me
• Helping staff
• Then I get tired  

Ask yourself:  

What time are you getting up in the morning?  How often are you exercising?  

This is not to create negativity or judgment, it’s just getting a truly realistic snapshot of your days.   

When we’re not achieving what we want to achieve, we start to re-think our goals. We set smaller and smaller ones and I just want to yell STOP IT! That’s not the answer.   

Instead, we need to take a step back and look at a couple of things:  

Firstly and this is what my Coach said to me, “You haven’t fully decided.”   

YOU HAVEN’T FULLY DECIDED.  

Wow. OK.  

I call it a defining moment. Usually, a defining moment is when something happens that then moves us into action. But a defining moment can also be when you have an Ah-Ha moment. Maybe this is your Ah-Ha moment because, like me, no one ever told me, the reason you aren’t doing this thing is because you didn’t fully decide. I thought I had decided. I’ve been thinking about it, talking about it, and writing it on my darn Goals List every year but writing it down, talking about it, taking teeny tiny baby steps towards it, isn’t really deciding.  

When you make a concrete decision, you take action. You take definitive action and you keep taking all the definitive actions to accomplish the goal.  

The second thing goes along with that decision and it is

How you’re designing your day and how you can set yourself up for success on a daily basis.  

It’s about being intentional.  

You have to intentionally schedule changes in your day and in your systems to make your BHAGs happen.  

For example, if you have looked at my Calendar recently to book a time with me, you will notice there are no meetings available on Mondays & Fridays. Consequently, my staff knows that on Mondays I am not available for conversations or approvals unless it’s an absolute emergency which we have listed Friday afternoons as the same and I’m looking to claim all of Fridays as well in the future, once we get more staff hired, that will give me two full days to work on this goal of mine.  

So I work in my business Tuesdays – Friday mornings and on my business Mondays and Friday afternoons.  

That also means my staff has to adjust their production. So we had to put some new systems in.  

I also have those days scheduled with goals on what I aim to get done for each day of my project.  

But there’s more to this:  

WHEN you start your day, HOW you start your day and SCHEDULING your day so you’re not jam-packed are key.  

We’re human beings we’re not computers. Computers are made to run non-stop, you can hammer away on them all day long without giving them a break.  

If we don’t build in rest, exercise, hydration, and give ourselves open space or free space or white space, whatever you want to call your space, to meditate, dream, think, or play we are going to put ourselves in prime position for burnout.  

When you reach burnout or just prior to burnout, you’re facing bad eating habits, even more tiredness, more colds, more illnesses because your immune system isn’t at its peak. When you reach burnout, it can take you 10 times the effort just to get back to your starting point again let alone making headway towards your dreams and goals.  

The advice you’re getting here is totally not what you might think. I’m not going to tell you to change your goals, I’m going to tell you to change you.  I’m telling you, first … truly decide on each goal. And don’t give up because it’s hard or costly or it’s time-consuming, that’s wimpy. You’re a goal-getter you thought of your crazy cool goals in the first place.  

So really decide on it. This IS your defining moment right now.  

Then…  

Change the way you are designing your days. BE INTENTIONAL and BE STRATEGIC!!  

Create your day into the most inspiring day and the most inspiring week you could possibly have so that you are optimizing who you are and optimizing what you can contribute to the world. When you start focusing more on becoming the best version of yourself then you start to conquer it all. Literally.  

I told you this wasn’t going to be the advice you thought… but stick with me.  

There’s a philosophy called Simplify to Amplify. Less is more and it’s one of the secrets of super-successful people. Those people that you look at and wonder how they accomplish all that they accomplish. This is how they do it.  

Simplify to Amplify will allow you to actually do more and accomplish more and live your dream life without being tired all the time and without fear of reaching burnout.  

Design each day with intention.  

Be really really clear about when you’re going to bed and when you’re waking up.  

For example, it is Book Club night, there’s fabulous dessert and wine but you know if you have a dessert too late or an extra glass of wine, it makes you sluggish the next morning, so you have a small taste of the dessert and one glass of wine and you leave immediately when book club is over and you’re in bed even though you know your book club is probably opening up another bottle.  

But when you wake up the next day, feeling great and energized and you’re working on creating your best life, you start your day with yoga or a walk or a workout.  The more you start being very intentional about your decisions, the easier it is to start making more and more of these good decisions. Be intentional.  

Write out your most perfect day. Then, write out your perfect week and month. What is your most perfect, ideal schedule?  

When can you work in your business? When can you work ON your business and when can you have your own time for yourself?  

Look for little pockets of time suckers. Little habits that have developed over time. Like, do you wake up and look at your phone on SM and email? In reality – when you first wake up, are you in a position to even do anything about the emails?  

If you have to scan emails for messages from staff, create a Slack or WhatsApp account and set your staff up there for messaging. You can create different channels for communication.  

The same for SM – yes you probably have messages from customers but you’re probably not going to handle them in bed, right? You’re just reading them, and they are dictating your day. You will probably skip yoga or your walk because you’re already thinking… oh man I have to handle this. 

When I lived in CA, my girlfriend that I lived with, and I hired an efficiency expert and one of the things that resonated with me the most was only touching things one time or the least number of touches that you can. This was back in the day when we had in-boxes and out-boxes. She would teach us that what you touch on your desk, you have to handle all the way through to a done.  

I think about this when I’m doing all kinds of things, like even emptying my dishwasher – what are the fewest amount of steps I can take, the least amount of touches to any one dish or silverware… I’ve made it into a game that I’ve been playing for over 15 years now.  

Think about that concept when it comes to email. For me, I don’t read emails unless I’m in a position to handle my emails. Also, I only look at emails 3 times per day and in the morning, I scan for important emails from clients or sales emails. That’s it.  

We have also set up a system that alerts me when a sales lead comes in from Liberty or Simple Consign so that I don’t miss those. Zapier is a wonderful wonderful software that can create all kinds of connections for you to streamline your day. For example, for every lead that comes in, an email fires out immediately so that even if I don’t call that person right away, they’re hearing from me.  

There is a lot of customizing you can do with DMs. DMs on your end need to be responded to right away. Think about how you could handle them and by you, I’m not talking YOU personally, what staff or systems can you put into place. Because I’m sure when you design your most perfect day it’s not answering the DM’s that come in. You’d probably rather be doing something else, right?  

I have trained my staff on what they can bug me during the day and what needs to be communicated to me on our project management board. We use Slack as our communication portal, and we use Monday as our project management software. Slack is like every time someone comes to you in person to ask a question or tell you something. So, I limit that. But they are healthy limits that both increase their productivity and mine.   

Are you ready for another piece of “wow, didn’t see that coming,” advice?  

The most important thing to incorporate into your day is to move your body and I’m not talking about moving it around your store. Moving it with the intention of being healthy. It can be a walk at the same time every day, a run or yoga or your Peloton bike or rower.  But moving your body is good and healthy for about 100 different reasons. 

When you move your body in some form of exercise it doesn’t have to be strenuous, it just has to be intentional … movement energizes you and helps your mind to be able to focus more clearly and succinctly and you actually can accomplish more in less time.  

I used to be the worst about this. Especially around the holidays, I would be up and in my office by 6 am working on all the holiday stuff we have to do and I’d work straight through. When my Coach and I were talking about that, she had me really reflect on, whether was I the best version of myself during those times and the answer was flat-out “No!” I didn’t even have to think about it for a minute.  

I was making unhealthier food choices during the day, and unhealthier drink choices like more coffee and at night more wine because I thought I needed to relax but it turns out wine adversely affects your sleep. Dang it, I know. I still enjoy wine but I’m more intentional about it now.  

I can hear you right now, “That’s all well and good but so many things happen during my day…” I get it. But the idea is to architect your dream day and have non-negotiable – like – during this time, no matter what, I’m only doing this task. If you went to a doctor’s appointment, that’s what you’d have to do right? Or the dentist. When I’m getting acupuncture, I absolutely cannot check emails or text or do anything but there because I’ve got needles in my arms and legs. It’s a non-negotiable.  

So, you know you can do it we just don’t. We let other people and other tasks creep in because we don’t take control, we don’t take ownership of our time, we give it away. We’re not intentional about it.  

If you were building your dream house, you wouldn’t do it haphazardly. You wouldn’t just start slapping wood up and hammering planks together. You’d be intentional about it. First, you would design it on paper. And once you saw it on paper you would have much more likely of a chance to have that dream house built than if you didn’t have it on paper.  

Designing your dream day is the same as designing your dream house. And guess what… when you start designing your dream days, your dream weeks, your dream months…cumulatively, these add up to your dream life.  

Delegate to others. Ask for help. Take the time to train. You’re training with intention now so that you have highly trained staff. Oftentimes we don’t train people because we think they can’t do it or because training takes longer than if we just did it ourselves, but I’m here to tell you… taking the time to train up front will open up your schedule down the line.

When I was hiring our very first staff member, I thought, oh my gosh how am I going to teach her how to do emails as well as I do them and graphics as well as I do them, and how can I teach her to understand the differences in each client’s branding? Because working for a marketing agency isn’t easy – we’re doing graphics and headlines and content for multiple brands, not just one. And what works for one brand doesn’t work for another.

But I did it… and I didn’t do it once, I did it multiple times. I also recognized the strengths of my team, and I replaced team members who weren’t working out. I felt badly I gave them lots of chances but you have to build a competent team, not a semi-competent team. Do you want competent people building your dream house or semi-competent people building your dream house?

I was talking with a store owner the other day who has some special needs staff members and she’s so tired because she has to pick up their slack. I recommended she hire a store manager and another fully competent team member and then feed in the special needs staff members to do jobs that they can perform at their levels while freeing up more of her time to live her life on her terms and work on other things that she wants to accomplish.

You are your most important asset in your company and you are also important to this world. You make a difference and you need to be your best self to keep making a difference. So, taking the first part of your day to take care of yourself is taking care of your most prized possession and most prized asset – you.

Take time to move your body and clear your brain. Prayer, meditation, journaling, going for a walk – these are all things that will really energize and inspire you for a successful and highly productive day.

Choose the 3 most important things to get done each day. Make sure they are in the direction of your dreams such as your website or whatever goal it is you’re working on. That way if you have to put out a fire or handle something you still can stay on track because you have identified 3 non-negotiable things that you have to get done today that are in the direction of your dreams.

Let me reiterate – that’s not 25 things… it’s 3. No more than 3.

Damon John, the creator of FUBU clothing and of Shark Tank fame, uses the Best Self Journal which I have started using and you set annual goals and break them down into quarters, months, weeks, and days.  In the Best Self Journal, you only list 3 things that are directly related to your overall goals. This keeps you intentional about how you schedule your day.

Lastly – don’t be so hard on yourself. Be kind to yourself. Being kind to yourself is the secret that allows everything else to unfold. It’s going to permeate your relationship with your staff and your customers, it’s going to allow you to do higher-level work and you’re not going to feel so tired all the time. You won’t feel like you’re constantly chasing your dreams, you’ll feel like you’re actually working towards them and you’ll find more joy in your days and more joy in the tasks that you’re working on.

When you’re on purpose in your life, when you’re creating the best version of yourself when you’re intentional about your days, when you carve out time to move your body, meditate or pray or journal …. You are sick less, energized more, so much more full of joy and your productivity is through the roof. You will be reaching so many goals you’ll have time to think of more goals… which by the way could include a three-month vacation on an island. 

Don’t downsize your dreams. Reorganize your life so you have more energy and more intention to achieve them. I promise you if you do everything we just talked about, you’ll be calling me in a couple of months’ time so excited about everything you have accomplished. You’ll start achieving things that have been on your goals list for maybe a few years or longer.  

I hope this is a defining moment for at least one of you watching or listening. Share your comments, thoughts, or questions below. I’d love to hear from you!!  

Interested in the condensed video version? Click here.

For the complete training video, tap here. Note: To access, you must join the Consignment Marketing FB Group.