Making December Work For You By Design Not Default

TRANSCRIPT AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED [00:00:00]Hey, Hey, so this is it. We're in the final month of the year. But I want to have a chat about how you're going to make December work for you. Now I know that we have just got through. Black Friday and cyber Monday and Thanksgiving. If you celebrate it. And I don't know about you, but I am exhausted just from deleting and unsubscribing from emails. With the little shopping thrown in on the side. And so coming into December, the urge to kind of coast your way to year in feels really strong. And if that's you. You do you, but I do want to challenge you on something. When you created your plan for 2023, which I'm hoping most people have done by now. I want to know how many months you gave yourself to hit that revenue target. I'm willing to bet that most people with small businesses took the annual goal, divided it by 12 and thought that's roughly how much I want to make a month. So why then all we discounting December. Why are we deciding in December? You know what actually it's an 11 month year. If this is something that you know that you do or that you want to be able to do. If you know that post black Friday. Post Thanksgiving. With the holidays coming up, you just, you're in a different frame of mind and you want to focus on family and traditions and eating all the good foods and watching all the cheesy movies. Awesome. What I'd like you to do is go into a 2023 plan and change that 12 into an 11. So aim to hit that goal for next year. In 11 months so that you can take [00:02:00] December off. Plant actually take December off. Don't default into discounting December because you're feeling tired from last week's festivities. If you don't want to do December, I want that to be a conscious business decision for you. Now let's talk about what your December will look like. If you still have something big that you need to get done, versus if you don't. If you've still got something big to get done. December is a great time for you to use our natural human reaction to deadlines. We're all huge procrastinators. Some of us have hit a new level where we're even procrastinating, what we know we need to do by posting about procrastinating, what we need to do. So why does an arbitrary date, like the 31st of December work for us as a deadline? So deadlines work because they increase our arousal state. And arousal can be good or bad. And in this case, we're using stress and. when we are in that slightly more aroused state, we perform better. as the deadline looms, we get a little kick of fear, a little stress, a little anxiety, and we perform to get away from that fear, stress and anxiety. Now I want to be really clear that I am not recommending you use this as a long term strategy. You should not be procrastinating everything to the last minute to ride that adrenaline, to get that hit. When you, when you finish the thing just on time. Think of adrenaline, like any other kind of drug. Eventually your body needs more and more and more of it. To get that same hit. Right? So if you keep riding that stress wave to get things done in your business, it's going to have some very serious longterm consequences. But December being a year-end, it already feels a little bit like a deadline so we're using this as a deadline to get you a little bit. Aroused a little bit in that. Ooh. What if I miss it FOMO state to actually get things done. If you've already hit all of your bigger projects [00:04:00] for 2022. If you're just counting down to the holidays. Here's what I suggest you use December four. You know, all those things that are on your to-do list that are maybe a little bit boring. That you constantly say, oh, I'm going to get to that. I'm going to get to that. I'll get to that. December is the perfect time for you to get to that. If all your big projects are out of the way, you can focus on the tiny little things that kind of live at the back of your mind. Flick on a hallmark movie, grab yourself a cup of hot chocolate snuggle into a blanket and get working on them. The reason I want you to clear these, even though they seem small and maybe unimportant is they are still taking up space. In your mind. You're still thinking, oh, I have to do that thing. If you're going into the holidays with your family or your friends, and you want to be a hundred percent present. These little things. Or taking a little bit away from that. Clearing your plate clearing as much of that, as you can, out of the way, allows you to enjoy those holidays and be present with your friends and family. But B allows you to come in in January and be fully focused on the next big thing. Without worrying about all those little things that you eventually got to get to because eventually those little things become bigger things. And by that they are the snowball or they become really urgent. And suddenly you do have to drop the big thing to do this really irritating little small thing. So You really want to sit down quickly and just brain dump everything that's in your head. It can be personal, it can be business, just get it all out of your head so that your brain can stop trying to remember all of it . Here's a couple of ways. I like to tackle the small things the first is the two minute rule. And I believe I got this. From David Allen, he wrote getting things done He talks about the two minute rule. So if you come across something and it will take you less than two minutes to do it, you just do it. You don't think about it. You don't consider what else you could be doing. It's under two minutes, you just do it. So you going to cost you, I, down that brain dump that you did. And if you [00:06:00] are catches anything that you could be doing in two minutes or less, you're just going to do it immediately. It's clear all the really tiny items off the to-do list. And this is a great one as you walk around the house and you see something that needs to get done, if it's a two-minute or less job, just do it immediately. You won't have to come back to it. So that clears out all the small, pretty easy to tick off ones. What this does is gives you that little bit of momentum that actually you can tackle this. You've crossed some things off your list. I mean, who doesn't love crossing things off the list. If you want right. Brain dump. And cross it off. Now the other stuff is looking at you. Yes, you have a year-end deadline looming, but you're not really feeling any fear or anxiety about the thing. You might be feeling some fear about your ability to do the thing. And that might be stopping you or you're not just not that interested. And so that's stopping you from just ticking off these things on the list. So I like to use what I call my five minute rule. And that's I take the task. I set a timer for five minutes. And I just work on the thing for five minutes. If I get to five minutes. And for you, this could be 10 minutes. It could be 15 minutes. I just pick a time on what I'm feeling, but five minutes is my absolute lowest. And if I get to five minutes and I want to stop, I can stop. There's no guilt. There's no shaming or anything. It's fine. I'll move on to something else. But most of the time, Once you've started the thing that you've been avoiding and you've been doing it for five minutes. You're kind of starting to get a bit of a meantime. You're getting into flow. Chances are, you will finish it, but you have to start it knowing that it's okay for you to finish at the time that you've sat, whether that's five minutes or 10 minutes. Without shaming yourself without any self criticism. You're using that rule to get yourself started. Yes. You'll probably finish the task and you know that, but also you haven't out at five minutes, if it is as awful as you have made it feel in your mind to do this task, right. You've been looking at this task, you've turned it into this. Elephant of a task that is going to suck the joy out of your soul to do it. And so you've been [00:08:00] procrastinating. It. If you try it for five minutes, you might realize actually it's more of a hamster of a task and that's pretty easy for you to control and get finished. So we've talked about. Whether or not, we're going to consciously choose to work in December. And how we need to adjust 20, 23. If we've decided that we don't want to work in December. We're now defaulting into an 11 month. Yeah. We're actively choosing it. We've talked about if you've got a really big project using that little bit of stress around the perceived deadline of the 31st of December. To get you to completion. And we've talked about, if you don't have anything big, how to start clearing a plate for 2023 so that you can be present for the holidays. And come in and focus on the big things right away in January. And I want to give you a bonus tip for December. If you are feeling this way about December, if you were feeling like December feels like a time to coast, because we all feel it. Like, even if we're trying to push through it, we're still feeling that like, oh, it's been a long year. It's been a tough year. We've just got through a really hectic season. It would be nice to take a foot off the gas. Right. Your clients are feeling that too. So I want you to think, even if they have signed up to work with you starting January 1st. I want you to think about how you can give them a little win. In December. Maybe you want to suggest one of these strategies to them, or you want to share the podcast with them? How can you give them a little win so that they end the year a having a really positive experience be associating that positive experience with you. So that as you go into your working relationship in January, they're already feeling like you've helped them. They've got that momentum and they are ready to go. And as a final word on December, I want to encourage you to find ways to app your self care game. You want to [00:10:00] come into January raring to go, whether that's finishing this year on a high, whether that's clearing a lot of space, whether it's helping a client's had a win for the year end. The last thing you want to do is come in January 20, 23, already feeling burnt out. So whichever path you're on in December. Make sure that their self care rest and recovery built into your schedule.