Time is not on your side, and it can be!

Do you ever wonder why time isn’t on your side and it feels like it gets away from you?

Have you looked at the time and thought “gee, I thought I had more time” or “where did the time go?

There are a lot of reasons for this. One that I wanted to talk about today is that things often take way more time than you think they will.

Something you think will take you five minutes actually takes you three times that amount. And that means the other things you planned on doing, can’t be done.

Getting things done, actually takes longer than you plan.

Recently I was registering for CPR training on the American Red Cross site. I thought it would take me five minutes, it took me 20 minutes to complete.

I was so surprised at how long it took after I completed my task I went back and documented the exact steps I took in order to see why it took that long.

It took me about 21 steps to actually complete registering.

In a nutshell, the website is not set up to retrieve data effectively. It took me several narrowed searches to finally find what I wanted.

I could not check out easily. Because I had an account I had to log in. To which, it told me my password was incorrect and I needed to reset it. That took longer than expected and I had to open my email to retrieve that data.

Thankfully though the site did hold the info I had filled in when I began this journey – yes it has been a journey. 

I began this adventure at 12:55 and I finally ended it at 1:15. Really? 20 minutes?

It took a lot of steps, some that I thought were annoyingly long. It’s definitely not the three licks to the Tootsie Pop!

And so this is one of the reasons that time is not on your side.

When planning, make sure to add two to three times the amount you think it should take.

And because things always take longer, this is why we feel we never have enough time.

If we keep in mind that things will take longer than we:

1. believe it will take
2. think it will take and
3. want it to take

We’ll be getting things done in the appropriate time frame and keeping ourselves out of frustration and overwhelm.

One of my early mentors used to tell me to not only double the time you think it will take, but triple it.

I was completely freaked out when she told me that. YET, she is so right. When you do, you have allocated the right time to get the work accomplished and you don’t have to freak out because “oh no I’m running out time” – it just doesn’t happen and often what will happen is
that you’ll very happily have more time on your hands and isn’t that a wonderful thing?!

I think so.

If you struggle with losing time, I’m happy to help.

I offer a free 30 minute Design Your Success with Purpose session. I work with business owners to elevate themselves in order to excel at organizing their thoughts, to-dos and things to accomplish what they set out to do with great confidence and competence. In this session, you’ll get clear on all that you are doing and allocate your time appropriately so that you never feel that times gets away from you again. Schedule your free 30 minute session now. 

 

Your year-end review serves a valuable purpose.

As someone who wishes to succeed, it’s important for you to do a year-end review. It serves a valuable purpose.

It’s so easy to not see the forest through the trees and just keep plugging along, thinking you are moving forward and headed in the right direction, but…are you?

How often do you take the time to look back over time to see your successes and your not so successes?

1. Always
2. Sometimes
3. Never

If you answered C, you are not the only one. My clients have told me that they never do it for various reasons. They don’t have the time, they haven’t really done anything yet, and many more.

Of course, you know when they tell me that it’s the very next thing we end up doing.

Once they do a year-end review, what do you think they discover? YES! They discover that whatever reason (ahem, excuse) they have told me why they haven’t done it was because they were afraid that they didn’t have any successes and didn’t want to look at their “failures”.

We all have successes.

No matter what, you have had successes along the way. Since it’s the end of the year, it’s a great time for you to take 15 minutes (see, not long =) and list out your successes.

List out big and small. They ALL matter.

My last blog was questioning whether it was confidence or competence to succeed in your life and in your business. Read it here.

It’s both actually but how do you know you are confident or have competence?

You pay attention to your successes. You have more of them than you know.  And you pay attention to your failures.

Failure only means you took action.

A failure isn’t something to be swept under the carpet. Just like your successes, failures give you information. 

Let’s say you wanted to land a new client. The client chose another person to work with. You can certainly ask the client and gather feedback, but if you think of failure as bad, you probably won’t.

Knowing how and what to improve in your business is paramount to success.

My suggestion to you is to look at failure as a means to growing and reaching the successes you want.

You can’t move forward if you don’t get out there and if you don’t get out there you can’t have any results. Reframe how you look at “failure” as you are taking action and moving your business (and yourself) forward.

View your results impartially.

When you look at your results, it’s easy to first feel good about those you like and bad about those you don’t like.

Look at both the good and the bad as a way to help you improve. By doing this you are better able to lay out your plan for the future.

As the end of the year approaches, as a business owner, it’s important to know where you are going next. To plan for the new year and more specifically to plan quarterly.

All of your results over the past year will give you guidance and inside knowledge to formulate a clear picture for what is next to come.

When you are attached to the results, you are back to not being able to see the forest through the trees. Give yourself a head start. Imagine you are looking at someone else’s business and be impartial with what you see. Not good nor bad, just information for the future.

Celebrate your successes.

Of course you want to celebrate those successes you’ve had! Why not. That’s am important part too. To say “YES! I did this and I’m so excited for myself.”

You’d celebrate someone else, why not yourself?

In fact, do that right now, what is one success you are really happy about (business or personal) that you want to share? Go ahead and comment or send me a private email at kim@kimravida.com and tell me what it is.

I’m excited to hear about it. And I’ll go first so you don’t feel funny doing it. One of my successes in business is that I let go of a lot of old training materials from coaching programs I took as professional development and helping me get started in business.

It was hard, because well, you know, “what if I needed those.” Yet, I’ve not ever looked back at them. Not only did it help me clear space in my office but it gave me even more confidence that I had the competence to do what I love to do, coach my amazing clients to reach their successes and work through anything they view as failures.

So what is the success that you want to share?

And of course, if you want help with your year-end review let me know.

I offer a free 30 minute Design Your Success with Purpose session. I work with business owners to elevate themselves in order to excel at organizing their thoughts, to-dos and things to accomplish what they set out to do with great confidence and competence. We can use that time to help you get clear on your successes, not so successes and how to use them to get a head start for next year’s successes. Schedule your free 30 minute session now. 

 

Confidence and Competence go hand in hand.

Have you ever felt that in order for you to succeed in your life and in your business all you needed was to feel confident?

I have. And so have many of my clients.

Yet, for myself and my clients, often what we needed in addition to confidence was competence.

Confidence is definitely a skill you can learn to excel at. And so is competence.

Having confidence is a feeling or a belief that you can rely on and trust yourself or someone/something else.

Competence means having the ability to do something successfully or efficiently.

Why it’s important to have both confidence and competence.

Being a small business owner in any way, shape or form is challenging. There are lots of moving pieces and lots of things to consider.

There is a saying “you don’t know what you don’t know.” Sometimes you can have confidence doing something because you don’t know all that could go wrong with it.

And sometimes you can have competence because you know what will go wrong and can put the necessary pieces in place to successfully reach your end result.

It’s important to have both. They go hand in hand. Confidence and competence are best friends. And we need them both because in being, doing and having what we want we always have to take an action.

Getting to where we want to go.

In business and in life we are constantly doing things to get to where we want to be. Sometimes we are also not doing things (but that’s still doing an action).

When my clients come to a session telling me that they “just need to be more confident” my first question is: more confident about what?

This is where they usually say something about being a better networker or closing more sales or writing copy. They may also say being more assertive, standing up for themselves, or saying no.

Can you see that the first examples are connected to having to do something? And the second are connected to being a certain way?

Do you see that in both instances you can learn to do and be what it is that is wanted?

What about the correlation between confidence and competence. Technically, in both you need competence first and then confidence. That said, for being a better networker you can attain skills that will help you. Having those skills will lead to you “do networking” better and “be confident” because you now know what to do and will feel good about it.

And that more than likely will lead to you actually doing it rather than procrastinating.

In the being more assertive, you still need skills and once you have those, you’ll feel more confident.

I argue that while they do both go hand in hand, that it’s actually competence that is the leader because when you know how to do something, confidence follows.

Do you agree? I’d love to hear your side of this in the comments below. It’s an important topic for business owners, especially women business owners.

Want help with your own confidence and competence?

I offer a free 30 minute Design Your Success with Purpose session. I work with business owners to elevate themselves in order to excel at organizing their thoughts, to-dos and things to accomplish what they set out to do with great confidence and competence. Take a moment to schedule your free 30 minute session now. You’ll walk away with specific ways to increase your confidence and competence immediately.