Are you caught in the endless loop of decision-making, spinning your wheels and feeling overwhelmed? Do you find yourself losing sleep, consumed by the fear of making the “right” choice? If this sounds all too familiar, you’re not alone.
While I excel in my business decisions, even I falter when faced with a tantalizing menu at a restaurant. The love for food can be both a blessing and a curse, leaving me paralyzed with choices. And it’s not just trivial matters like dining options; significant life decisions, like selecting the perfect school for my son, have also left me feeling lost in a sea of possibilities.
We encounter decisions every day, ranging from minor choices to life-altering ones that hold the power to overwhelm us entirely. But what if I told you there’s a way to alleviate that burdensome weight on your shoulders and make decisions with newfound ease? Enter the realm of your menstrual cycle and the remarkable influence of hormones.
Harnessing the Power of Your Menstrual Cycle: Tune In to Your Body’s Rhythms
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to decision-making because we are beautifully diverse beings. However, the key lies in understanding the natural rhythms of your body through your menstrual cycle and being aware of where you stand before embarking on any decision-making journey.
Recognize those moments when you feel less than optimal during specific phases of your cycle. Acknowledge that it may not be the opportune time to make critical choices. Moreover, be cautious about making decisions around ovulation, as they may need to be followed through during the luteal phase when premenstrual symptoms arise.
Discover the Seasons Within Your Cycle: Navigating the Path to Clarity
Within your menstrual cycle, distinct seasons emerge, each carrying its own essence and guiding you in decision-making.
Winter (menstruation, your time to bleed): Embrace reflection
Dive deep into introspection through meditation, journaling, or immersing yourself in nature. Stepping away from the noise of social media can work wonders, allowing the pieces of your puzzle to effortlessly fall into place.
Spring (pre-ovulation): Embrace experimentation
Follow your intuition and act upon what feels good. It’s a season of testing, where you can embrace new possibilities and make decisions from a place of authenticity.
Summer (ovulatory phase): Embrace boldness
Harness the daring spirit that accompanies this phase. Seize the moment to make courageous decisions and take transformative steps that propel you forward.
Autumn (post-ovulation): Embrace evaluation
Slow down and assess what serves you and what doesn’t. While decision-making during this phase can be easier for some, it can also be overwhelming. Find the balance that aligns with your unique journey.
Fuel Your Body, Empower Your Decisions: Nourish for Clarity
The fuel you provide your body directly impacts your decision-making abilities. Skip the sugar and caffeine rollercoaster, and make a commitment to regular, balanced meals. Protein-packed nourishment empowers decisions rooted in gut instincts, allowing your true self to guide the way, free from the constraints of the mind and ego.
If this resonates with you, dive deeper into a world of inspiration and insights by subscribing to my newsletter. Sign up at the bottom of this page and embark on a journey towards empowered decision-making.
Transform your decision-making prowess, bid farewell to indecision, and welcome the clarity you deserve. It’s time to embrace the art of decision-making and sculpt a life aligned with your authentic self.
Are you caught in the endless loop of decision-making, spinning your wheels and feeling overwhelmed? Do you find yourself losing sleep, consumed by the fear of making the "right" choice? If this sounds all too familiar, you're not alone. While I excel in my business...
In today's digital age, harnessing the power of AI has become increasingly important for businesses. One such AI tool that has revolutionised my own creative process and productivity is ChatGPT. Since I started using ChatGPT in November 2022, I have discovered new...
Yesterday marked my 39th birthday, a milestone that compelled me to pause and reflect on the wisdom I've gained over the past 10 years. Life's experiences have a way of shaping us, the saying "what doesn't break us only makes us stronger" definitely rings true,...
In today’s digital age, harnessing the power of AI has become increasingly important for businesses. One such AI tool that has revolutionised my own creative process and productivity is ChatGPT. Since I started using ChatGPT in November 2022, I have discovered new ways to leverage its capabilities and witnessed a significant transformation in my content creation efforts.
Dispelling Misconceptions
Despite some skepticism surrounding AI’s potential to replace human creativity, I believe ChatGPT serves as a complementary tool rather than a substitute for human expertise. While personal interactions and human touch will always be paramount in service-oriented businesses, ChatGPT surpasses individuals who lack profound knowledge and insights. It challenges us to upskill and excel in our respective fields, ultimately enhancing the customer experience, which is the ultimate differentiator.
Embracing Change
The world is evolving, and it is essential to embrace the changes brought about by AI. Ignoring these advancements can be detrimental to the growth and success of our businesses. As someone who struggled with self-doubt and procrastination, ChatGPT has been instrumental in helping me overcome these obstacles and unleash my creativity. Perhaps you can relate to this struggle, too.
Improving Productivity with ChatGPT
I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT and here are some of the ways I use it to help me get more done without the overthinking:
Summarising Long Texts into Bullet Points: In today’s fast-paced world, time is of the essence. ChatGPT can efficiently summarise lengthy and complex texts into concise bullet points. This feature is particularly useful when trying to extract the main ideas and key takeaways from articles, books, or industry-related texts. By saving time and effort, ChatGPT empowers us to stay updated and informed without compromising on other pressing tasks.
Generating Ideas for Blog Posts: For those who find writing a challenge, like myself, ChatGPT serves as a valuable brainstorming tool. Simply provide a topic, keywords, or a brief overview, and ChatGPT will generate a list of engaging blog post ideas. This functionality ignites inspiration and helps overcome writer’s block, enabling us to consistently produce compelling content.
Creating Outlines for Blog Posts: Maintaining structure and coherence is crucial when crafting impactful blog posts. ChatGPT can assist in creating outlines based on provided keywords or working titles. By receiving an introductory paragraph, a middle section, and a concluding paragraph, we gain a solid framework to develop our own ideas and insights. While ChatGPT can provide guidance, it is our unique perspectives that shape the final outcome.
Asking Questions for Clarity: ChatGPT’s question-answering capability is immensely beneficial for gaining clarity and refining our ideas. By inputting course or program notes, we can transform them into well-defined frameworks. Furthermore, ChatGPT can suggest enhancements to enhance clients’ experiences and deliver exceptional results. Utilizing this feature streamlines our content development, ensuring our frameworks are comprehensive, actionable, and tailored to our clients’ needs.
Creating Headlines and Hooks: Crafting attention-grabbing headlines and hooks is crucial for capturing audience interest. ChatGPT excels in generating compelling headlines that surpass my own abilities. By pasting in an article and requesting headline suggestions, we receive a range of options to choose from. This tool significantly improves content engagement and increases the likelihood of readers diving into our articles.
Conclusion
In conclusion, ChatGPT has become an indispensable tool for unlocking creativity, improving productivity, and enhancing performance. Its ability to summarise texts, generate ideas, create outlines, provide clarity, and suggest headlines makes it an invaluable asset for content creators. By streamlining various aspects of the content creation process, ChatGPT empowers us to bring our ideas to life and overcome the barriers that hindered our progress.
Yesterday marked my 39th birthday, a milestone that compelled me to pause and reflect on the wisdom I’ve gained over the past 10 years. Life’s experiences have a way of shaping us, the saying “what doesn’t break us only makes us stronger” definitely rings true, imparting valuable lessons that propel us forward on our journey. In this blog post, I want to share with you 15 profound lessons I’ve learned, hoping that they resonate with you and inspire your own reflections on personal growth:
1 – Stand in Your Truth and Embrace Integrity: Amidst life’s chaos, remember the significance of remaining true to yourself and holding onto your integrity. It serves as an anchor during turbulent times and empowers you to navigate the challenges with resilience and authenticity.
2 – Self-Care is Essential: As a mother, prioritising self-care may seem selfish at times, but it is a vital aspect of maintaining your overall well-being. By nurturing yourself, you ensure that you can show up fully for the ones you love the most.
3 – Embrace the Present Moment: In a world teeming with distractions, it’s crucial to put down our phones and embrace the beauty of the present moment. Cherish each experience, for life passes by swiftly, and if we blink, we may miss its fleeting wonders.
4 – Embrace Failure as a Learning Opportunity: Failure is an inevitable part of life’s journey, but it is through these setbacks that we gain valuable insights and grow stronger. Embrace failures as learning opportunities, recognising that they pave the way for eventual success.
5 – Cherish Family Above All: Family holds a sacred place in our lives. Nurture and cherish those relationships, for they provide us with unconditional love, support, and a sense of belonging.
6 – Express Love Freely: Never underestimate the power of affectionate words and gestures. Shower your children with love, kisses, and heartfelt expressions of adoration. These moments create lasting bonds and strengthen family connections.
7 – Prioritise Intimacy in Relationships: Intimacy, both emotional and physical, is a vital component of a thriving relationship. Cultivate a deep connection with your partner, as it forms the foundation for enduring love and understanding.
8 – Embrace Discomfort for Personal Growth: Stepping outside your comfort zone is where growth resides. Embrace discomfort, challenge your limits, and embark on new experiences. It is through these moments of growth that you discover your true potential.
9 – Progress Over Perfection: Perfectionism can hinder progress and stifle creativity. Embrace the mantra of “done is better than perfect” and take action. It’s in the pursuit of completion that we learn, improve, and make a tangible impact.
10 – Motherhood’s Challenges and Fulfilment: Motherhood is an incredible journey, filled with challenges and immeasurable rewards. Embrace its ups and downs, for it is one of the most fulfilling roles we undertake in this lifetime.
11 – Trust Your Intuition: Your intuition is a guiding force, an inner compass that knows what’s right for you. Learn to trust it implicitly, as it will lead you in the right direction with remarkable accuracy.
12 – Take Control of Your Thoughts and Feelings: Life presents us with various circumstances, but we have complete control over our thoughts and emotions. Reject the role of a victim, rise above challenges, and keep moving forward with resilience and determination.
13 – Relationships and Lessons: People enter our lives for a reason, and sometimes they also leave. Even when friendships dissolve, remember that no relationship is wasted. Each connection teaches us valuable lessons, contributing to our personal growth and understanding.
14 – Believe in Yourself: You are your greatest ally and advocate. Bet on yourself and your abilities, for if you don’t, how can you expect others to do the same? Embrace your unique qualities, talents, and dreams, and pursue them with unwavering belief.
15 – Free Yourself from the Fear of Judgment: The fear of what others might think can be a stifling prison that holds us back from true self-expression. Break free from this fear, embrace your inner rebel, and become a trailblazer and leader in your own right.
What have you learnt in the past 10 years? I’d love to hear more about the wisdom you’ve gathered. Share your thoughts in the comments.
Have you heard about Notion.so, if not I’m here to explain to you why I think it should be your Go-To Business Tool in 2023.
Notion has actually been around since 2013 when a small team of college students initially set out to improve personal productivity and note taking. They quickly realised its potential and that it could be used for so many other things that it quickly evolved. They continue to improve and evolve the product and today it is used by many businesses and individuals who are keen to improve their business operations, performance and productivity.
I first found out about Notion in 2021 and I’ve spent the past year playing around with it myself. Building data bases and templates for myself, testing it with clients. I am obsessed with it. I can just see how it can help so many people who feel overwhelmed with all the tech required to run an online business.
Over the past 7 yeas since I launched my own business and have been deep into the back-end of many 6 and 7 figure online coaching businesses, Notion for me is hands down the best thing I’ve seen. It’s the fact you can run your business all-in-one place. No need for numerous excel spreadsheets to track sales, finance or social media numbers. No need for hundreds of note files in your phone, or multiple physical notebooks (if you happen to be anything like me and start a new notebook just because it’s pretty). The features inside of Notion make it possible to use it for task management, project management, note taking, team communication and much much more.
5 Reasons Why Notion.so Should Be Your Go-To Tool in 2023
Reason #1 – Customisable Interface
Apart from the simple aesthetic in Notion, the customisable interface is what does it for me. It just works for my brain. The fact that I can build something that REALLY works for ME is what I love the most. You can create your own personalised workspaces and dashboards, so you can organise yourself and your business in a way that works best for you, reducing distraction and overwhelm and boosting your productivity and performance at the same time.
Reason #2 – Integrations
Notion integrates with many third party tools and services such as Google Drive, Trello, Slack, Zapier and much much more making it easy to connect all of your business workflows and systems together.
In fact many companies have sprung providing tools that enhance Notions capabilities even further, such as forms, graphs and even the possibility to turn Notion pages into a membership site.
Reason #3 – All-in-one Tool
As I’ve already said and I cannot emphasis this enough, the fact that you can have everything you need to run your online coaching business in ONE single place is the biggest appeal of Notion. It isn’t just limited to task or project management, you can create knowledge databases, an internal wiki (which is how lots of Startups use it), build a CRM and so much more. The functions and features inside of Notion make all of this possible.
Reason #4 – Mobile and Desktop Apps
I know many applications and tools offer Mobile and Desktop apps nowadays, so this is just another reason why Notion is great, it makes collaborating with freelancers, team members and even clients so easy, keeping everyone on track and productive.
Reason #5 – Collaboration
Because of the way you can build Notion to suit your unique wants and needs, plus the strong focus on collaboration inside the tool itself with the ability to comment/communicate inside of Notion it’s self, helps teams to effectively work together in real time and share information easily. The same applies for clients, because I think this would be an awesome way to manage 1:1 clients and even group programmes.
So while Asana and ClickUp are also great, they are predominantely project management tools and are limited to project and task management in comparison to what you can build inside of Notion. It’s the flexibility and all-in-one aspect that is the biggest advantage to me.
I honestly can see more business owners moving to Notion in 2023, so if you’d like to find out more or need some help to get your own Notion space set up, I would love to help you. Book a discovery call with me here. I would love to help and support you on your journey to streamline your operations and achieve your goals in 2023.
You’ve probably heard the term Online Business Manager (or OBM) and are wondering who they are and what they do? So, let’s get started.
An online business manager works with other online entrepreneurs to run the day to day operations, although some OBMs don’t work exclusively for online businesses, some work for bricks and mortar businesses as well.
As an online business manager is a partner, sounding board and your new business BFF. We work in the back end of a business, making sure it all runs like a well oiled machine and typically manage a team (even if that happens to be just 1 other freelancer), whilst our clients focus on serving their clients and creating a bigger impact in the world.
Who hires an Online Business Manager?
When you first start out in the world of business, you end up doing all the things and wearing all the hats. You are the manager AND the employee. In the first instance, business owners will often hire a VA to take over some of the tasks for them, so they can stop being the doer. Continuing to try to do it all can become extremely overwhelming and we risk burning out if the situation continues for a prolonged period of time. At the end of the day, you didn’t start your business to work 24/7, did you?
So, at what point do you need to hire an OBM? I’d say most online business owners typically hire an OBM when they have less than 10 team members (15 at the most, but you really don’t need a big team to run a business effectively, more on that another day) and are generating roughly between £150,000 to £750,000 (200,000 USD – 1,000,000 USD). Once you hit over the 1 million mark, its probably better to consider hiring a full time employee in a Director of Operations role.
What does an Online Business Manager do day to day?
When you embark on hiring and working with an OBM, you are hiring your second in command. The one who is going to take over in your abscence, so it is really important that the business owner’s number communicates very clearly what their vision, mission, values and goals are. An OBM cannot help achieve the vision, mission or goals, if the client is unable to communicate where they are right now and where they want to be.
I would say it takes a good 90 days for an online business manager to get up to speed as well. We need to get inside the business, see the back-end to be able to fully understand the business model, what the team are doing, who is responsible for what, the income generating activities and most importantly the client, how he or she works. It gives us a chance to figure out what needs to be tackled first and to see what the client likes to do, doesn’t like to do and where the best use of their time really is.
Here are some of the business activities we tend to get involved in managing:
A huge part of our role as an OBM is implementation. If you have read Traction by Gino Wickman, we are integrators. We do a lot of the doing. For example, perhaps there is no project management system in place. Perhaps the onboarding and offboarding process is done manually, sporadically with no defined process in place. We would jump in and take that over, document the processes, put the systems in place, implement the tech needed, manage the team members and generally make sure shit gets done without any issues. We make sure everyone knows their role and responsibilities as well as managing any other projects.
Our clients bring the strategy and the goals and we bring our experience of working with other clients. We love to strategise and share our knowledge and experience of what has worked well for other clients. Using our experience, we make suggestions for improvements and then focusing on turning the strategy into a plan of action.
More often then not we are the person to hold space for our clients, so you can share your ideas and get clarity on them. I love being a sounding board to my clients, alongside the strategy part, it is the most enjoyable part of being an OBM because it enables me to solidify my relationship with my clients. I get a deeper understanding of where the business is going and our relationship then becomes one based on complete trust. This in turn creates a bond that serves to improve their business through a partnership.
An OBM’s job is to understand the vision, to be the keeper of the vision and goals. To steer the ship in the right direction. Understanding the vision and goals fully is very important, because sometimes we may be required to make decisions on behalf of the client. If we aren’t clear on the vision, it can be very hard to make a decision. Sometimes what can happen is that we actually end up being clearer on the vision and direction than the client! In that scenario, we need to have the confidence to speak up and say, actually no I don’t think you should focus on that because it isn’t aligned with the vision right now.
We are not just an OBM, we are entrepreneurs ourselves and with that comes the need for excellent soft skills. We need to fully step into our leadership role, bring the right mindset, have great communication skills and be able to manage things with a cool calm head when things go wrong. In some cases this may even goes as far as creating a company culture for our client by putting things in place to create the right environment.
What makes a fantastic OBM?
Helping to get clients out of reactionary mode and freeing up clients from the day to day operations. But what does that really mean? Let’s explore this a little more.
Getting out of reactionary mode
Reactionary businesses are those that are in chaos for example, an email went out with the first name tag missing or the wrong link. People may be running around like headless chickens trying to constantly fire fight issues. OBMs help to banish the need to fight fires. We create and define the systems needed to implement structure, so that the business spends more time running on systems and not on people. We will also be proactive in assessing any gaps and bringing the right team members onboard to move the business in the right direction.
Free up clients from day to day
Sometimes we may walk into a clients business and see that there is no project management tool, 5 team members who have no idea what they are supposed to be doing, let alone what anyone else is doing, they haven’t had a team meeting in forever, mistakes keep happening and its just a complete and utter mess. An Online Business Manager’s role is to work their magic and release the client from this chaos so they can focus on the tasks that only they can do, such as writing a book, creating a new course, jumping on sales calls, serving clients, nurturing their own community etc… Enabling you, the client, to breathe a huge sigh of relief.
If after reading all that you are sat there thinking, god I really need to get out from under my business, and you feel like you may have reached the point where you need to hire an Online Business Manager, I’d love to hear from you. My DMs on Instagram are always open or you can book a discovery call here.
