Welcome to Happy Productive episode #11 and today I want to discuss managing our time AND our minds…
I absolutely love time management, let’s face it, time is the only real asset we have. You can always make more money, but you can’t really make more time.
But here’s the kicker, if you don’t manage you mind, along with your time, you may find yourself is a situation where your time is just creating the same old same old over and over again. If that’s you, listen in…
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WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER
If you are not managing your MIND along with your time you could be suffering needlessly
When we want to change, our mind and body will put up a lot of resistance
Closing down your heart to pain, also shuts out the joy and gratitude
Awareness and choice combined with time and mind management are our only real tools
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Hello hello hello, welcome to Happy Productive episode No. 11. And today, I would love to discuss the managing our time, and our minds, not individually but together. And here’s what I mean. I absolutely love time management and let’s face it you guys, time is the only real asset that we have. We can always make more money but we cannot really make more time. But here’s the kicker if you don’t manage your mind, along with your time, you might find yourself in a situation where really the time that you’re putting into it is just kind of creating that same old, same old over and over again.
And if you find yourself maybe thinking or feeling or saying things like this, “I work so hard but I never really get anywhere” or “maybe gosh isn’t there like more to life than this,” or maybe it’s “I’m not that good at time management,” or maybe you’ve even labeled yourself a procrastinator or a perfectionist which honestly, are just labels that we attach to kind of explain why we’re not really getting the resu lts we want. Or if you find yourself thinking like anything else along those lines, then this episode is really going to be for you and you really want to listen to this.
Now we have so many excellent productivity tools out there, books and planners and courses and different teachers and I gotta tell you, I love them all you guy is. I have like a bookshelf full of productivity and time management books and I love them. And if you know me or have been part of my community, you know, I teach time management all the time because I just love it so much and it’s so foundational to living the life that you want is getting in there. And like managing time, and you may have heard me talking about, you know, time blocking, or if you want to get something done like committing it to your schedule, or working from the ABCs of productivity, right? All of these things are just great tools to get the most from our time.
But if we’re not managing our minds, and our minds are kind of like, I think about like a two year old hopped up on sugar, who’s gotten ahold of the kitchen scissors, and they’re like running around the house, unsupervised, like a mad person, right? And that’s our minds can be like that they can just be running away from us and away with us. And what happens is that when we don’t manage our minds with our time, we’re going to find that the time that we’re investing, it’s not going to be as powerful or as effective as it could be, if we’re managing our minds along with it.
And what I mean by this is when we think about our time, right, so we could be doing doing things. That’s fine. But when you like wake up first thing in the morning, and what are those first thoughts that come into your head? Right? And is it something negative? This is time that we’re spending in negative thinking, even though we might not be intentionally doing it, it’s very easy to just fall into the same old thinking thoughts and patterns that are with us each day. And as we go through the day, how much time do we spend, you know, not being in a great place or giving our fears or worries or feeling guilt or beating ourselves up, right? How much of our time do we spend not allowing ourselves to feel joy?
This was a very personal one for me, you guys. And the thing is when I really started diving into it and looking at this stuff, and making the choice to be aware, and we’re going to talk about awareness and choice because really, those are the only two things that we have. When we’re talking about, you know, time management, okay, well, where our time is going to go, awareness and choice are what we have at our disposal to make those decisions. But when I started to be more aware, one of the things I discovered was that I was going into a lot of situations preparing myself for disappointment. And as I looked back at my life, I realized there was a lot of times in my life, where I was really, really disappointed.
And I’m a fairly sensitive person, I really feel my emotions and so sometimes things really feel harder than maybe they do for other people, but I really feel pain and I feel sadness and when I’m around other people, I can pick up and I can feel their pain and their sadness and their grief and their anger as well. And so it always kind of was like I would just like go into situations sort of like preparing myself to feel disappointed.
Another belief that I found I had and this actually went all the way back to my childhood is that if I got too happy, it would be taken away. And so anytime things are like too good, you know the saying it’s too good to be true. Like that was totally me. Like I wouldn’t trust it. And it took some real time and exploration to go all the way back to my childhood, when times in my childhood where things were really, really good, they would get taken away from me.
And if you don’t know my story, and I won’t go all the way into it, but I grew up with a lot of abuse. And I had a father who was sexually abusive, and a mother who did nothing about it. And it’s a very toxic person. I did, however, have grandparents that were wonderful. And so I would go to my grandparents house over the summer and I would just have the most amazing time. And then when the summer ended, I’d get yanked back into the normal day to day childhood, which was really pretty awful experience and we moved a lot and I just stopped making friends because it was just easier. Because I knew we were going to move again, I had been in 13 different schools by the time I hit seventh grade.
And so you guys, it’s not that this stuff wasn’t legit for me to like, cope and be able to survive. And so I saw these things as really good survival tools. The problem was, it really kind of shot me down. And I found myself really shutting myself down as a coping tool survival. And it was almost like I was kind of feeling numb most of the time.
Now, it wasn’t that I was walking around in a bad mood, because I’ve always just been a naturally happy, optimistic, you know, smiling person, I just kind of that’s my personality, I tend to be up and I tend to usually be in a good mood. And so that’s just kind of my natural personality. So it wasn’t like, you know, you would see me and go, “Oh, wow, she’s really suffering.” In fact, most people didn’t know or they wouldn’t see this at all. But what I had done was I was just really shutting my heart down because I was protecting it from further pain and trauma. And so when I would go into situations, I wouldn’t get my hopes up. I was always prepared to be disappointed. So when I got disappointed, it’s like, “oh, well, that didn’t bother me at all.”
The problem was, is that when you kind of shut yourself off to the pain, you also block out the joy. And the way I discovered this is that I was doing a lot more gratitude. I was doing gratitude practices and more gratitude meditations, I noticed again, again, through awareness. I just wasn’t really feeling it, right. Like, “oh, I have all these things to be grateful for.” But I was like, “but why don’t I really feel it? Why don’t I feel it in my heart? Why don’t why don’t I feel it in my body?” And that’s how I started to become more aware that I had sort of just shut myself down and shut my heart down a little bit. And then when I started to ask questions a little more, it’s like, “well, why, why don’t I do this?” It’s like, well, to protect myself from these very real things that happened in my life.
And so that’s when I had to make the choice to get that heart of mine, you know reopened, because here’s the thing with the universe, you guys. So we send a thought out as to what we want in our lives and it goes out with the thought. But to bring things back to us requires a feeling and the feelings of gratitude and joy and love. That’s what brings these things back to us. And so when we’re feeling anger, or resentment, or bitterness or disappointment, well, we’re gonna bring that back to us. And if that’s the kind of stuff that you don’t want, this is why it becomes so important to open our hearts up so that we can feel the gratitude and the love and the joy.
And this is where I started to kind of discover all of this was through the process of awareness. Okay, so I’ve mentioned this that we really need, we have two things, we have awareness and we have choice, okay. And even as we start to make the decision that we’re going to manage our mind and our time together Gather, we still just have those two things which are awareness and choice. And I’m going to dive into that a little bit deeper.
So awareness is simply, you know, the decision that we’re going to pay attention. We’re going to pay attention to how we’re thinking. We’re going to pay attention to how we’re feeling. We’re going to pay attention to those things in our life that we want to change. And then once we notice them, that’s really all it is, once we’ve noticed it, and hopefully we’ve done this without guilt or shame or beating ourselves up, right, we’ve just noticed it, then we have a choice.
And this is where our choice is so so important, because we can absolutely choose when we have an awareness of things we don’t really care for. We can choose to ignore them. We can choose to bury them deep down. W e can choose to distract ourselves so that we don’t have to deal with it. We can choose to make a whole lot of excuses, of why it’s not our fault that they’re this way. Trust me. I went through years of that of blaming right parents for the things that I didn’t get when I was a kid but there’s a point where you gotta, you got to turn that off and stop pointing the finger at everybody else, because it’s really just pointing to a bunch of fingers back at you.
So we can choose to be a victim, right, we can choose to give away our power and feel like things are happening to us and we don’t have any control over it. Or On the flip side, we can choose to make a change, we can choose to get some help, we can choose to surround ourselves with others who have succeeded in whatever area we’re struggling with. We can choose to listen, we can listen, and you guys, we can choose to listen with our ears, but we can also choose to listen with our hearts. And we can choose to try, right. We can also choose to show up and we can choose to let ourselves off the hook and accept that we’re not going to be perfect at this stuff at first, we can also make the choice to commit and we can choose not to stop until we get that desired result.
And then once we’ve made the choice and hopefully it’s an empowering one but that’s the beauty about choice. It can be whatever we want it to be. But once we’ve now made a choice that comes right back around to our time, because now that we’re aware of something that we’re thinking feeling, or going on in our lives that we want to change, great, so then we can make the choice to change and do something different. And once we make that choice comes right back around to time, right? Am I going to set time aside each day to build a new healthy habit or go work with that coach or therapist or healer? Am I going to set my time aside each day to focus on gratitude, maybe do a meditation, sit quietly with myself, right? Am I going to take my time each day to move myself forward or not? It’s choice. And when you make that choice to change, to do something new, it will change where time goes. And that, my friends, is where when we start making change, and we start spending our time in different places that it quite possibly could kind of like flip out our minds.
And here’s what I mean. We run every day on these unconscious programs. And so when we decide that we’re going to change or we’re going to do something different with our time, we might experience some resistance from our minds or from our bodies. And I don’t know about you, but I have felt this many times where you try to make a change and you, you dip into your willpower and you’re like, go go, go, and maybe you make it a few days or a week or two and then you just sort of like slide back down into these old habits and right back to where you started. And that’s because willpower I love willpower, but willpower alone may not get the job done.
And this was very, very hard on me throughout my life because you know, I would dive into willpower be good for a little while and then slipped back and then beat myself up and I was just so angry at myself. It’s like “what is wrong with me, you know? Why can’t I get my act together?” And that’s when I learned that it really wasn’t my fault. It was just this unconscious programming. And when I learned how to change that programming by managing my mind, it changed my entire life. And so this is why I wanted to share this topic with you guys today. Because when you try to manage your time, without also managing your mind, you might find that you’re not really getting those results that you really want, right?
You might find that you’re really exhausted from tapping into willpower. So willpower is usually strongest in the morning. It’s almost like a muscle, and it’s strongest in the morning. But as we go through the day, and we get tired and we get a little stressed out, the willpower will go down will go down. So if you’ve ever experienced where you get up in the morning, and you’re like, “I’m going to do all these things today!” And then as the day goes, progresses on, you’re just like, “Oh, never mind, forget about it. I don’t care anymore.” Right? That’s your willpower and it just naturally declines as the day goes on, it’s just a natural thing.
Or you might find that like your energy is super drained, because it’s almost like you’re battling yourself all the time. It’s like, this is what I want, you know, in this part of my mind, but my body and the other part of my mind is just like this battlefield all the time back and forth, back and forth, and it can be really, really exhausting. So again, that’s why this is such an important topic and I wanted to share with you because you’ve got to pair time management and mind management together. Or you could be suffering a whole lot unnecessarily. Because as we’ve gone through this life, we pick up lies and we pick up limiting beliefs and we pick up fears and we pick up all kinds of stinky thinking, right? And when these things are left unchecked, this is where you get into the rut and you just find yourself being on the rat wheel and it just feels like you’re just repeating the same day every day. And for many people, this is their entire lives.
And so this week, what I want to challenge you guys to do is, you know, listen to this and really let it in and look at how it might be applying to your life. And let’s just start with some simple awareness this week. And this is the challenge I want to put out there to all of you. Just start to be more aware of where your time is going. Now, yes, you can look at you know, where your time is going in meetings or errands or projects that you’re working on. And that’s all great time. But I really want you to pay attention to where’s your mind going? Where’s your mind going? Right? Where’s your energy going? How much of that thinking is happening that’s taking you down a negative path? How much thinking is taking you or spent on fears or worry, or guilt or shame, right?
When you look at where your time is going. I also want you to look at where is your mind going and just be aware? How much of your time are you spending each day feeling great. Feeling joy, feeling love feeling gratitude. If it’s not enough, well then let’s just be aware of that. And maybe even just kind of take some notes if you just step outside yourself almost like you’re watching yourself on a movie. And just be aware that’s not about judgment, but just kind of pay attention. When I started paying attention, it was like, wow, I was this happy, positive, optimistic person. But I realized that a lot of my thinking was kind of negative and going to these yucky places where I was sort of always being prepared for disappointment.
And I remember one day I woke up and it was a Monday morning, and my first thought was, “what crappy things going to happen to me today?” And because I was being aware, I was like, “Oh my gosh, ding ding ding like this is terrible thinking!” And so because I was aware of it, then I could make a choice to change it. And then from there, I was able to like eliminate that limiting belief and replace it with something much, much better. Okay, but it started with the process of being aware, taking some notes like, “Hey, I had this thought that popped in, maybe I want to work on that.” And then from awareness, we can start to make a choice and decide what do we want to change.
Now, I want to encourage you to keep the bar really low. If you haven’t done this, or you’ve done it a lot, and you have a lot of things that are popping up, that’s okay, just jot them all down. But then just pick one, focus on one thing this week, and then grab a tool to help you along. You know how I love the tools. So maybe you identify a limiting belief or you identify some places in your life where you could use a little more gratitude or maybe you’ve picked up on a lie or you’ve programmed yourself to just always be working hard because that’s where your validation comes from. You know any of these things but just grab one that comes up for you as you start to be more aware and then use a tool to help you move through it.
So for example, if you notice that you have a really bad habit and you want to change it into a good healthy habit, you could use the momentum grid. I gave this away on last week’s podcast episode if you remember Goal Achievers are in my Inner Circle you have access to the momentum grid or even if you have a Best Planner Ever there’s one on every My Week page okay, in the momentum grid is just about small daily right showing up every day a little bit to change a habit. Let’s say that you are working always in a state of overwhelm, well do the Brain Dump Exercise they’re included in every best planner ever. Maybe you are become aware that you have a lot of negative emotions like anger or fear or worry, bitterness, anything like that. You could journal that stuff out right in the Best Planner Ever, or just a plain notepad.
Maybe you have a limiting belief and you’re like “I really want to reprogram this.” You can learn how to do a clearing statement with the clearing lies and limiting belief training. So it’s just about being aware of where your time and your mind are going, identifying one thing and then grabbing a tool, right, to help you through this, and then showing up and trying. These are just a few of my tools. But honestly whatever tools that you have at your disposal, use whatever works for you.
And if you’re struggling with this and you’re like, “Hey Jen, I really need some more help managing my time and managing my mind,” then I would absolutely love to work with you. Come join us in the Goal Achievers or if you’re a business owner. Come join me in the Inner Circle. You can find out more about these programs on either of my websites, bestplannerever.com or jenniferdawncoaching.com.
All right, you guys, that’s it. But I would really love to encourage you to look at where your time and your mind are going each day. Identify something that is holding you back or keeping you stuck in a pattern. Grab a tool, use a tool, and this week, just make the choice that you’re going to show up and you’re going to do a little bit to change it. Alright if you need help, of course, reach out to me. I’d love to work with you. But that’s it, get out there and have a Happy Productive day!
xo
Jennifer