Welcome to Visionary’s Pursuit, a podcast where we explore what it takes to turn your bold and inspiring ideas into reality. I'm Carolina Zuleta. I'm a life and business coach and your host for this podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here.
Hello and welcome back. This is episode 80 of the Visionaries Pursuit Podcast.
Episode 80. Oh my god, I can't believe we've done 80 episodes. This is so fun. today we're gonna continue talking about time management.
The way I've been talking about time management is not just simply how to organize your calendar, it's really about using your brain and paying attention to your life and being intentional in how you use your time. Because time is the most valuable resource we have.
Whatever we decide to do with our time is the life we have. So it's important to pay attention to be intentional. in the last episode we talked about the bigger picture, your goals, your values, your zone of genius. If you haven't listened to that one, pause here, go back, listen to episode 79, and then come back.
Because we need to start with the bigger picture, with the reasons why we're gonna use our time in the ways we choose to use our time Today. We're gonna get a little bit more practical, but also more human Because the real challenge of managing our time is our emotions. So today we're gonna talk about what I call the mathematical problem of managing your time, which is you have 24 hours, how are you gonna organize them? And how we navigate our emotions as we decide what to do with our time.
And I Just wanna mention that what I'm going to share today is. Mainly what I learned during one of my coach certifications, this one was at the life coach school. So it's not simply that I'm making it up, it's really what, as coaches, we've learned to help our clients manage their time.
So let's talk about the mathematical problem, right? We all have 24 hours a day and we can easily see how some people accomplish a lot in those 24 hours, and some people don't accomplish anything or very little.
In fact, I think all of us, can look at our lives and see those days where we felt accomplished, fulfilled, that we really lived that day the way we wanted. And other days that we are going to bed thinking , but what did I do today? I was so busy all day, but I don't know what I did. And that is not a very good feeling.
So the first thing is that we need to be intentional and decide what do we wanna do with those 24 hours. Instead of simply letting them show up by default and not being. Conscious of how are we using that moment, that time? So how do we use this? Going back for a second to part one of this time management series, I spoke about it there, but I wanna mention it again here. All of us as humans have an inner battle between our amygdala and our prefrontal cortex.
Our amygdala is constantly trying to move us towards pleasure to those things that are known, that we feel we can do them really well, that have a quick reward, and it's trying to move us away from. Anything that we perceive as uncomfortable. Those things, when we feel the resistance, when we have to do more thinking where there's emotional risk.
If we allowed our amygdala to be driving how we manage our time, it will tell us, hey. Binge Netflix, eat chips and stay at home because for the amygdala, that means safety. On the other hand, our prefrontal cortex is where we can think about values and goals and it's where we can look at a calendar and understand that the little boxes mean hours and that if we can cut them to 15 minutes or 30 minutes, right? Like that higher level thinking is happening in our prefrontal cortex, and that's the part of the brain we want to use when we're going to be intentional about organizing our time.
So how do we do this? We first do what I talked about in part one, which is values, write goals, all that. And then we come to our calendar. Let me give you a quick tip here, because I've noticed some of my clients have multiple calendars, they have a calendar for their office or work, and they have a family calendar.
And my recommendation is that you use only one type of calendar. One calendar in which you can see everything you're doing, things that are related to your personal life and things that are related to your professional life, having more than one calendar is gonna open up a lot of confusion and make it harder. That's a quick tip. Have only one digital calendar that you can check it from your phone, your computer. Yeah, most of us do that anyway, so what you're going to do is you're going to decide what are you going to put in that calendar.
Here's my other tip. First, put in that calendar, all the things that are related to taking care of yourself, your hobbies, your relationships with your friends and your family.
Those are the things that have to go first in the calendar, especially when we look at our values and we see that taking care of our health is important. Being connected to our family is important, so we need to put those things in our calendar.
The first thing that goes in my calendar is my time off if I'm going on a vacation Put that in the calendar and I will block full days because I know that is how I recharge.
And I want that all of us, as entrepreneurs, think of ourselves as the most important asset for our business. And if we don't take care of this asset, then what is gonna produce the business? Grow the business. And also let's just do it because we matter and because we have one journey through this life that we know of so let's make the most of it.
So anyway, put the things that are you know, time off, you're gonna work out. In my calendar you will see my blocks for my workouts. I even put in my calendar that time to get ready to shower, to do my hair, my makeup.
I have my lunchtime also scheduled there because for many, many years I wouldn't do that. And then I would book coaching sessions during lunchtime, and then I would end up eating lunch at 4:00 PM and I know that's not good for my body and I wanna take care of my body. So block off self care, time off, hobbies, if you're gonna have dinner with some friends, if you are invited to an event at your kids' school, all those things that give meaning to your life, that's what goes first. And then look at your goals.
When you look at those goals, what are the things you need to do this week or this month that you have to put in the calendar in order to achieve those goals? I'm a coach. So the second thing that goes in my calendar are my appointments with my clients and with potential clients.
The second type of activities you're gonna put in your calendar are those that are directly correlated to your goals.
For example, revenue driving work. Anything from prospecting to pitch calls, to networking, to follow ups, all the things that we do in order to get clients. Also very important, is strategic work the time we take to think about our future, to work on those bigger projects that is not putting fires out today, but it's actually building and creating for the future.
Then the third type of activities you wanna put in your calendar are any of those meetings that are related to your team. Maybe you are doing. You know, one-on-ones with the people that report to you, or maybe you're hiring new people and you need to interview them, or maybe you're doing a meeting with the entire company to motivate them, to connect them to your vision.
That's the third like level of activities you wanna include in the calendar, and then everything else. I want you to look at your calendar right now and see if, first you have all the things that are related to your personal life to taking care of yourself.
If you have booked time for revenue driving work or strategic work, or if your calendar right now is consumed by other people's demands. I know that what I'm saying. Sounds very simple, but it's actually hard to do.
That's the mathematical or numerical part of organizing your calendar, deciding ahead of time, not in the moment, but ahead of time. How you're gonna organize your calendar and why I am mentioning that it has to be ahead of time is because the prefrontal cortex gets engaged. When I am seeing the future, the amygdala is driving more this present moment.
So you wanna plan ahead because then you can plan from your higher level of thinking, from your values and goals, et cetera. So now the other part that I wanted to talk about is our emotions and how our emotions affect our time management.
Listen, I know all of us have said I am going to do. X project at 3:00 PM and 3:00 PM has come and we have not done it, and the day has gone by and we haven't done it. And then maybe the next day the same thing has happened. And the reason why we do this as human beings is because in the moment we're going to sit down to do something that feels uncomfortable, that feels that it has emotional risk, our amygdala is going to start presenting us all kinds of ideas to deter us from doing that.
All kinds of ideas can mean that all of a sudden we feel other things are urgent. I need to respond to this email. I need to send this message to this person, or I really need to go get coffee because all of a sudden I'm feeling very tired.
Our amygdala is brilliant at keeping us safe. Remember that the only thing the Amy Amygdala wants is to protect us, to help us survive. It doesn't care about the project in the long term or the vision we have. It cares about right now how I perceive my comfort level. So emotions is what gets in our way when we are wanting to do the things we say we're going to do.
And the solution here for emotions are one, I think it's good to understand simply so we don't judge ourselves, we don't beat ourselves up. Simply understand that we're humans and we have this brain, and we have these emotions they're gonna show up in ways that are not helpful for our bigger vision.
The second thing is I do believe that self-talk in those moments is super helpful and that way I explain it to my clients and, and it might sound a little bit, I dunno, silly cheesy, but, but I think it works. It's developing inside your brain a voice that is loving but firm. The voice may be a really wise parent has with their children.
If your kid is at 7:00 AM saying, but I want ice cream. I want an ice cream, you're not gonna give them ice cream, but also, you're not gonna be rude or disdainful or yell because they're wanting ice cream. You're probably gonna have a very assertive but kind voice saying, no, we're not gonna eat ice cream right now. This is not the time to eat ice cream. We are gonna have breakfast. Period. That is ideally the voice we have with ourselves.
So when we have to sit down and do this project that we know it's hard and it's challenging, the way we talk to ourselves is, this is the time to do this. Here are the reasons why I do wanna do it, involve desire, because desire is a powerful force. Remind yourself why you do wanna make those prospecting calls.
Why you do wanna do those lives in Instagram or YouTube or whatever, even though it feels so uncomfortable, remind yourself that you're doing this because you have a bigger purpose. Because you have a bigger goal. And then tell yourself, this is the time I decided to do it. I am going to do it. So if you're looking for a way to manage your time, that doesn't produce discomfort, I'm going to tell you it doesn't exist when you're living intentionally.
We need to learn to be with discomfort. We need to allow ourselves to feel the fear, the embarrassment, the tension that happens when we need to use our brain to do higher level thinking, or when we need to become more visible so people can buy our products or services, or when we have to have the difficult conversation with an employee or a client.
Those things are not gonna go away and we need to train ourselves. To feel the discomfort and do it anyway. when I was growing up as many kids, I would tell my mom, no, I don't wanna do that. I don't feel like it, it feels so hard. I just don't have the motivation to do it. My mom would always tell me that laziness is a fence, and if you allow laziness to stop you, that fence grows and becomes taller. And with time, you're gonna require a lot more energy to cross the fence to the other side.
You are going to become lazier. You are going to allow the discomfort of not wanting to do something to be stronger in your life. If right now you do your homework, if right now you read the 10 pages in that book, you have to read and you cross that fence, which is gonna feel a little bit uncomfortable, which is gonna feel hard at the moment.
The fence will go down. And this is gonna be your relationship with laziness and with procrastination, the more lazy you are, the more you procrastinate, the more you'd say you're gonna do tomorrow what you can do today, the fence is gonna get bigger and bigger. And that has stayed with me every time I need to do something that I don't feel like doing that I don't wanna do. I remember when my mom would tell me, and I tell myself, if I don't do it now, tomorrow is gonna feel even harder because not only I need to do it or I want to do it because it's important for my business, but because tomorrow I'm gonna feel guilty that I didn't do it today, and that guilt makes it even harder and it can even become shame of like, oh, I keep procrastinating. What's wrong with me? And then that fence keeps growing and growing and growing. So the best way to manage our emotions is to be kind and assertive with ourselves, but also move towards discomfort.
We all know this when we don't do this project, this task that we need to do, it owns us. It starts taking a lot of space in our brain. Those are the things that wake us up in the middle of the night and we think, oh my God, I haven't done it. I need to do it. And we feel anxious because we haven't completed it. This is a practice. this battle with your emotions, with your discomfort, with the crossing, the fence will always be there, but the more you practice honoring your word, the more you practice doing the thing you said you were going to do at the time you said you were going to do it, the stronger you feel and the easier it becomes to keep doing it that way.
And here's another thing that I think it's so, so important when we don't follow through with what we said we're going to do, when we procrastinate, we start losing trust in ourselves. The relationship we have with ourselves deteriorates and the opposite is also true. The more we follow through, the more we organize our calendar and we do what we said we're going to do at the time we said we're going to do it, we start building trust within ourselves. We start believing in ourselves.
The most important relationship we have, which is the relationship we have with ourselves, strengthens. I think it's good to remind ourselves about this when we're wanting to procrastinate, that we can tell ourselves, listen, I know this feels hard I know I don't wanna do this. I know I would much rather clean my house, get coffee, go to the bathroom, do 100 other things before doing this task.
But if I do it right now, one, I'm gonna be done. And that's good to check one thing off my list. And two and more importantly is I am going to build this relationship with myself, one in which I can trust myself. I believe in myself. I hold myself with very high regard.
So, I know this is not the best news to tell you that the way to be great at time management is learning to be with discomfort. But I think it is the truth and I think it's something we can all do, and the more we do it, the easier it gets.
So to summarize what I've shared with you today, when you're looking at time management, you have to see it as a math problem in which you are using your prefrontal cortex and deciding ahead of time what's gonna go in your calendar and those things that are gonna go in your calendar have to be aligned.
To your personal self care and your goals and that all of us, because we're humans, we have emotions and we have resistance to those things that feel hard or that involve emotional exposure of some type, but that the answer to that is to get really good at feeling uncomfortable to become masters at doing hard things.
Time management. I think it's challenging for many of us, especially in today's life, where everything is competing for our attention. if you are an entrepreneur and you are seeing that time management is being a challenge, is holding you from achieving the goals you want, please book a call with me.
We can do one hour for free. I can help you with that, and we can talk about how we can continue working together.
But just remember that your time is the most valuable resource you have for your business, yes, and also for your life. All right as always, I really love being with all of you here, and I'll see you next time. Bye.
If you're currently pursuing a big, bold idea and would love some support, let's talk. In my coaching program, I'll teach you how to manage yourself, your own thoughts and emotions. as well as your team and your money so you can turn your beautiful idea into a reality. Go now to carozuleta.com slash consult that is c a r o z u l e t a dot com slash consult and complete the form to book a complimentary call with me.
See you there!
