How To Get Things Done When You Don’t Want To
If you’re like most people, there’s probably way more than you can handle on your to-do list… so let me help you out a bit. I recorded this podcast episode with you in mind!
Here’s an example of one of my previous to-do lists:
- Attend networking event
- Write a new menu
- Redo website homepage
- Call potential client
BUT here’s how I felt about each of the above items:
- I don’t want to go to that networking event…
- I don’t feel like writing a new menu…
- I don’t want to redo my website homepage…
- I don’t feel like getting on another phone call only to be told my services are too expensive…
Have you ever had thoughts like these regarding everything you need to get done? If so, you’re normal. We all naturally resist change or something that requires work, even when things really need to get done.
Listen to this latest episode for tips, tricks, and takeaways on how to get more done in your business.
Listen to the episode to learn:
What your brain is resisting and how to eliminate the resistance
How to cultivate a CEO mindset in your business
Real-life examples of how to be a solution to your client's problems
5-minute tip to get way more done
How to work more efficiently
How to decide what’s important to you and plan accordingly
Featured on this Episode:
Ready to book your next summer sizzling client? Click here for my guide on how to get your next 5 clients!
Interested in becoming Fully Booked? Check out my A-Z program on how to market, sell and set up your cooking practice so you can become fully booked - Join the Waitlist HERE. Course is scheduled to open mid-September 2022.
Take a listen to to podcast, and leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcast, take a screenshot of your review and a surprise will be headed your way!
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Welcome, guys, to the chef with purpose podcast. With me, Stephanie Heller. Today we're going to be talking about getting things done. This is such a hot topic, and I know so many of you want to get more done and you want to feel better doing it. So I'm going to share with you some of my greatest tips, tricks, and takeaways for you to be able to get more things done to move your business forward. So, in the spirit of wanting to get things done, I wanted to start out with a story that I'm sure a lot of you can relate to. We all want to get more things done, and it really affects almost every human at some point in their lives, or at all points in their lives. And I used to think this was just like an adult thing or like a business owner thing, where there would be certain things that I don't want to do, and I would always put them off, or I'm not good at them, so I just won't do it. And I always felt like behind or not good enough. That was really funny when I had my kids. I have an eight year old girl, and right now a five year old boy, girl, twins. And every morning my son wakes up and he says the same things over and over. No matter what we're doing, he starts in with all the things he doesn't want to do. Maybe you guys have this too. If you have kids in your life or are around kids, maybe a teacher, you will hear the same things that I'm about to share. So he always starts in with, I don't want to get dressed, I'm not going to eat breakfast, I don't want to go to school, I'm definitely not going to make my bed. And the list never stops. So first we would try to answer him, of course you're going to get dressed. You have to get dressed for school. Everybody is dressed when they go to school, and we're going to be late. And then I would tell him everything that's wrong with what he wants. Like, I don't want to get dressed. But recently, we took a total different way of dealing with it, and we kind of just let him say whatever he wants and not really address it. We don't ignore him, but we don't fight against it. We don't resist it. So we let him say whatever he wants, and then we just move on to the next thing. Like, he'll say, I'm not eating breakfast, but I still go and make breakfast. And then, of course, when I put it down, he comes to, sits down, he eats his entire plate. And it's, you know, everything we want as a parent happens, even though he had so much resistance to it before. So I want you to it's funny when you see a kid do it because you think the stakes are really low. Like he has no real problems. Like if he doesn't go to school, nothing's going to happen. We still live in our house, we still pay our mortgage, but it's fun to watch it in other younger people because they don't have problems. And then when you picture yourself as an adult with real problems, you think, the stakes are so high and something is wrong with me and why am I not motivated and it's not working out. But it's really the same exact thing. I would invite you through listening to the rest of this podcast, maybe through the rest of your day or even this week, is to imagine yourself as a child when these resistance thoughts come up. Like, I don't want to go to that networking event, or I don't want to write a new menu, or I don't want to redo the home page on my website. I don't want to get on the phone with somebody else because they are going to say, this is too expensive. Whatever your brain is giving you that it's resisting, pretend you're a child looking at it from the outside and it's kind of funny. Okay, so one question that I always ask myself, because I have tons of resistance as well to many, many things in my life, including my business, why do our brains offer us so much resistance? And this could help you kind of understand a little what's going on. But the short answer is abridged version is it's basically baked into us. It is hardwired into our brains that we should resist anything new that we perceive as hard or that will require energy or that takes us away from the reward we want. And it's our hardwiring. That's what our brains are meant to do. It's supposed to keep us alive. It's supposed to conserve energy, and we're supposed to seek reward the fastest and easiest way possible. So being an entrepreneur or a business owner, this throws a huge wrench into our hard wiring. We want it to be easy and fun. And when you're trying new things that we maybe don't understand or you're feeling frustrated, your brain will offer resistance even before you get started. Because it's kind of like, I don't even want to deal with it. Like my son, he knows when he gets up, he has to put on his uniform. He comes to the table for breakfast. He's supposed to make his bed, brush his teeth, all of these things. He knows he's going to do it. He does it every morning. But his brain still offers him every single day, I don't want to go to school. I'm not getting dressed. I don't want to eat that. So it's funny to see it to ourselves in our own businesses, something that we really want to work and we want to have an impact in the world and help people and make the money we want. You will still have resistance just like a five year old child. So we're going against the grain in our brain for a long time. As entrepreneurs, it's not like you do one or two things and everything works out perfectly, and you have lots of high paying clients and no one ever asks for a refund or the food doesn't turn out good, or somebody is complaining about something. You're constantly having new challenges. This is why it's so hard for your brain to give up that resistance. So what happens, being an entrepreneur is most people give up. That's why we have such sobering statistics. Like most new businesses don't make it past year 590. Something like 95% don't make it past year five. Something like 80 something percent don't make it past year two. What happens is people psych themselves out. They believe all the resistance that your brain is giving you as complete truth, like, this is too hard. This is not working. I can't deal with this. I should be doing something else. This should be easier. All of that resistance that your brain is giving up, some people are believing, and it psyches them out and takes them out of the game. Could you imagine if Magic Johnson or Michael Jordan believed all this stuff in the beginning? That their brain was telling them about being a superstar, about doing those first few years on the court when they weren't professionals, when they were just playing their heart out, if they listened to their brain that said, you're never going to be the best, you're never going to get a contract, you're never going to be as good as XYZ. You're not as tall as this guy. You're too old, you're too young. Whatever their brain was giving them as resistance, they had to answer it with, I don't care, or ignore it, or just kind of move on and deal with it the same way we deal with our five year old son. We let him say it, we kind of don't address it, but we don't ignore him because we know he's going to do it anyway. So I'm going to give you some things that you can take with you and understanding this concept more and more. Because what's kind of annoying about it is it doesn't go away when you reach a different level. And a lot of people are surprised about this, and a lot of my new students all think like, okay, once I'm fully booked, this is going to go away. Like, I will have no resistance. I'm going to wake up every day wanting to cook, making menus is going to be easy. Charging their card, asking the price I want, showing up early, doing my due diligence, all of that will be like, easy breezy, easy peasy breezy, whatever how you say it. And it's not true. No matter how much money you make, you will still have resistance. Even when you have five clients every single week and you're making one $200 a week or more, your brain will still offer you resistance. Or if you are hiring chefs to work for you, and you think, great, I don't have to work anymore in homes, and I don't have to deal with this, your brain will still offer resistance. So it's a great skill to have regardless of where you are in your journey, and especially if you are in the beginning with your first few clients, your first, like half a dozen clients, your first five or six clients. Getting this skill, practicing it now will help you so much because you're not going to expect it to go away. You're not just waiting for the next big milestone to take you out of being a human. It won't happen. I was listening to a podcast of one of the life coaches in my circle, and she was talking about there's literally no offramp for the human experience. It's like we think when we make $50,000 a year or have five or six clients a week, that all of this hard stuff, this resistance, this frustration will go away. It actually doesn't. It changes forms. It's like a shape shifter. It will change forms right before your eyes, and it's really disappointing. So the best thing you could do is learn to deal with it. And here's a couple of ways. My answer to this type of resistance is to cultivate a CEO mindset. And we do this all the time in my program, The Personal Shop Secret, to fully book. I do it with my private clients and especially with myself in myself coaching. This is a concept that you can really apply to any area of your life as a parent, a business owner,a community member. If you're working a full time job now, or a side job that maybe you don't love, but you're still in because of whatever reasons, you're still the CEO of your own mind and your own life all of the time. So how you go about doing this is we first become I'll give you three different ways. The first way is become aware of what you're thinking and writing it down, or just listening to it in a kind of maybe a meditative, quiet space, at least for five minutes every day. And what happens is you'll start to see patterns. I'm not talking about sitting around meditating for hours on end or writing 500 pages in a journal, nothing like that. But what happens a lot with my students is I hear the way they describe themselves to themselves. And we call that a self concept. And it could be something like, I'm just in the beginning, or I am just a baby chef, or I'm not even really a chef. I just like to cook. Or I'm doing this as a side hustle, or I'm new to this. I don't get finance. I don't understand money. Look, really how you're talking to yourself about your business this is really important because a CEO mindset is having a relationship with yourself and your business. That's the relationship and that's the mindset. So look at how you're talking to yourself about your business. It really matters if you have these whispers in your head when you first get up, just like my son does every single day. It's not working. This is so hard. Nobody wants what I have to offer. You have to honestly recognize that that's the shit that you're telling yourself. It's really important because if you're trying to sugarcoat it, it will show in how you meet people and what you're offering them, and especially as the result of how much money you make. So take an honest look at that. Once you look at that for a couple of days, you'll honestly be shocked. And even like the most nice, meaning, well intended people often talk to themselves like garbage. And especially they'll talk to themselves about their business as something negative and that it won't work and that it is like a failing venture and that we should just give up. And if you can imagine saying those same things to a child, they wouldn't have anything to do. They would just want to give up. So step into your CEO mindset and think of yourself. This is what I tell myself for many years, especially starting a new business, because I'm starting from the beginning again, just like I was in the beginning. But I'm telling myself, I'm an owner, I'm the founder. I am responsible. I am connected to my business. It means something to me. My clients success means something to me. Changing the narrative in your head is going to help you tremendously. We have to change, or at least be aware of what's going on on the inside, so we can make outside changes. If you think about what I said about Magic Johnson or Michael Jordan in the beginning, they had to first learn how to talk to themselves as winners before they became these amazing, crazy winners on the court. You're going to do the same before you step foot in the kitchen. You have to talk to yourself as a CEO, as a winner. This is part of it. You also want to think about working more efficiently. Stop giving your brain so much airtime to all this negative stuff. It is not efficient. It actually slows you down tremendously. And you also want to focus that you're building something of value to yourself. This is really important because as cooks, we're producing something externally and then selling it or giving it to other people and waiting for their reply, their answer or their response to see if we have value. And that is actually opposite. We want to cultivate value. And the mindset of this is meaningful of value to me. First, it's really important that I would show up on time to my client's house because it was important to me. I didn't want to be late. I didn't want to be rushing to set up all my misunders. I didn't want to be rushing to cool stuff down because I was running out of time. It was important to me. Figure out what is important to you first. The CEO mindset will get faster and easier for you if you also plan what you're going to do each day ahead of time. This is a big one. I also teach this as almost it's definitely its own lesson. It's not its own module, but it's module one. Lesson three. In my course, planning each day ahead of time, I teach them a concept called Monday Hour One, which I learned from one of my mentors. It's an absolute game changer because what happens is you wake up that day just like my son, and you're not going to feel like it. And if you have a blank calendar and nothing to do and you're pretending to be all confused and your brain is kicking in with resistance, it's not working. I don't want to do this. We should go back to XYZ. You will get nothing done. Monday Hour One teaches you to plan on a Sunday or a Monday, the entire week ahead of time. Now, you don't have to do that right now, even though I highly, highly suggested it's a game changer. Just do one day at a time, either the night before or that morning before your brain starts kicking in and giving you all the reasons. Write down what you're going to do as the CEO of your own business that means something to you, to produce value for your clients. What you're going to do today. And it doesn't have to be big, doesn't have to be some huge project, doesn't have to be revamping your entire website. It could literally be take five pictures at my next client's house, or it could be rewrite the about section on my website. Whatever it is, write it down so you know ahead of time what you're doing. Okay, that was number one. Let's go to number two. Number two is don't expect to want to do everything in your calendar. So as you're getting more into your calendar and more choosing intentionally what your CEO mindset is, you're going to open your calendar, especially if you're planning the whole week ahead. By the time you get to like Wednesday or Thursday, and you're looking at what you're supposed to be doing, and you open up your calendar and you're like, I don't want to do this, but don't expect to want to do everything in your calendar. It's really unrealistic and it's immature. This is like when you have a baby and they need their diaper changed. You know it's going to come up. Babies are wearing a diaper for a reason. You're going to have to change it. You don't have to be excited or motivated about it. You just do it. There's going to be stuff in your business that you're not that excited or motivated about, but you're just going to do it anyway because it helps you evolve as the CEO and the owner of your business. The more you do that and the more you're willing to work on that, you increase the value that you give to clients and they pay you more and more money. So don't expect to want to do everything in your calendar. You do not wait to be motivated or excited because you won't. You're not going to be excited to redo a five page website when you have no idea how to use Wix or GoDaddy or your platform and you just don't want to pay $5,000 for a website. You're not going to be excited about it. But if you plan each day to sit down for 2 hours for one week in a row, you have 14 hours, you'll get it done, and you will have built that skill in yourself without being excited or motivated. What may happen, though, actually counts on it, is you're going to feel frustrated. You're going to feel fear. You may be embarrassed about maybe you reached out to somebody and they ghosted you. None of that matters. Just plan on all that happening and do what's in your calendar anyway. The last thing you want to do is to make fear the driver of the decisions in your business. It's a really crappy driver. Fear is like not the lens you want to be running a business through. You're going to have to pick a different one. You'll be making all sorts of weirdo decisions about fear and wanting to hide and not wanting to be the CEO. Okay, number three, if you want to feel good about doing the work that's on your calendar to move your business forward, make the decision to feel good. Everyone thinks feeling good is something that happens from outside of you and then you just magically feel good. It's actually the opposite. You get to decide to feel good and you get to come up with an amazing business mindset, the CEO mindset, on purpose. And I use the word on purpose and intentional a lot because it's really important, especially in the beginning when you have to ground yourself because you may not see the outside evidence yet. That's the part where you have to keep going. Those hundreds and thousands of hours that Michael Jordan practiced before he got an offer to play for the NBA, he had to keep believing on purpose, no matter what. What he was telling himself is going to be similar to your purpose of why you're serving people, why you want to do this so badly, why you're not going to give up. And it can't just be money. Money is not going to be enough in the beginning. First of all, you probably won't have it because you may not have that many clients right away. You have to cultivate your belief long enough to even get to that point. But also, when you do start making a lot of money, maybe you are already you'll also know that it's not enough. Money is just not enough to anchor us to all we have to do. So make your reasons and your decisions purposeful. Also, money is almost the icing on the cake. Even though we all think it's like the best part and all we want, it winds up being a much smaller part than you think. Okay, last one and we'll wrap it up. The CEO mindset is making decisions on purpose, even when so we often put off making decisions if we're confused or we don't feel like it, or we feel like we need more information. But my urge to you is to decide to make a decision every single day, whether it's big or small, and then follow through with it. You made a decision to listen to this. You made a decision to maybe take some notes, maybe to bookmark it or forward it to a friend. You may have to listen to it again if some of the concepts are new to you. But making a decision every day for the growth of yourself and your business will have such powerful effects for your CEO mindset. You have no idea. Once you do make a decision, you're practicing making decisions easy for you. They don't have to be hard or things to avoid. You just put it on your calendar. You've made a decision. And then when it comes up, you do it. That's the decision. You will feel relief, you will feel powerful, and you will feel intentional. These are all things you as the CEO need to book clients consistently, to make lots and lots of money, to have the best clients in the world who treat you so well and appreciate you and your food. So let's just wrap it up. This was a big concept. I definitely think you guys should listen to it one or two more times. Your CEO mindset will be unique to you. This isn't the stuffy. Old boardroom. When I think of a CEO, I think of like a white old man sitting in some office with like mahogany furniture in some high rise in New York City. That's not the CEO we are. You get to decide who you are. And being intentional as a business owner is one of the first and biggest parts of your identity shift. You go from being confused and not know what's going on to being precise, making decisions, and then everything you want will follow. Let it be fun. Be curious. Be interested in what unfolds. And most of all, let it be uniquely you. You don't have to copy somebody else or things that you've seen in movies. You get to be your own CEO. You get to cultivate that mindset. So many people have done it before you and weren't sure, but just started. I know you guys could do it. And your clients want that from you anyway. They want you to be uniquely you. It's what's going to set you apart in your service and in your cooking. Alright guys, I will see you on the next one. Have a beautiful week. Bye.