What is your ideal lifestyle and how are you logistically going to make it a reality…  

Two parts to this:  

FIRST…You need to ask yourself, what is your Ideal Lifestyle.  

The first time I was confronted with this question was in 2015, and my initial reaction was to burst into tears. I sobbed.  

2.5 years of juggling a full-time job, and setting up in property, I’d been working 80+ hours a week non-stop and I was EXHAUSTED. The ideal life of more holidays, time for family, exercise and cooking lovely dinners with my husband Dave was SO FAR from my reality. I felt crap. I couldn’t even find 30 mins each week to myself to sit and paint my nails (which may sound a bit superficial, but really it was just indicative of how far away I was from having the TIME I craved when I started).  

Perhaps you can relate to some of the above.  

So how do you change this.  

Well, you start by taking yourself forward in time 10 years, and imagining that everything has panned out exactly how you wanted it to… you have to imagine exactly what your IDEAL LIFE would look like.  

Some key questions to get you thinking about this:  

– How many hours per week / month do you want to be working on your business?  

– What do you want to be spending your time on when you are not working? e.g. Holidays, Family, Friends, Hobbies, Giving Back, Gym, Family Meals…  

– And how often do you want to be doing these things? (Times per day / week / month / year)  

Be really SPECIFIC and DETAILED when you answer these questions, and really dream big, aiming for your idea of perfection. This may be hard to do, but challenge yourself because this is the first step to creating your Ideal Lifestyle and making it a reality. FYI, it may well seem a million miles away from the life you are living right now -This is ok.  

Now, you don’t just keep your head down and work really darn hard for 10 years, and then one day magically wake up to this amazing life you’ve dreamed up… The reality is that it’s a gradual process towards making your life work this way OVER the next 10 years. I didn’t go from working 80 hours a week with no holidays planned, to suddenly overnight going on holiday every 6 weeks, having all weekends and evenings off, cooking lovely dinners 3-4 times per week, and getting to the gym 3 times per week… far from it. I started small – I started by MAKING TIME for half an hour of NAIL PAINTING each week.  

So once you’ve written down your ideal life, choose a few elements from it to begin prioritising straight away, and decide your first step to making it happen.  

As an example, your ideal life may include:  

Your Ideal: ‘Go to the gym every day’  

Currently: You are not doing any exercise at all  

First step: Go to the gym once a week  

Ideal: ‘Have weekends off with the family’  

Current: Working 7 days per week  

First step: Take Sunday afternoons’ off  

Ideal: ‘Go on holiday every 6 weeks’  

Current: Haven’t been on holiday for a year  

First step: Book in a long weekend away this Summer  

You get the idea!  

Once you’ve done this and come up with some ‘First Steps’, then here’s how you can LOGISTICALLY make it happen…  

1- Use an online Diary (like Gmail Calendar) so that you can set recurring events (e.g. Mondays 8am-9am is Gym Time, and it automatically recurs every week)  

2- Using the decisions from the process above, block out time in your diary for your ‘First Steps’. By doing this first, you can then plan everything else around these calendar events to ensure they actually happen and don’t just get sidelined.  

3- Only after doing this should you then block out time for working on your business, e.g. Calls and Meetings (current / potential investors, partners, team members, trades, etc.), Networking Events, Strategy Time, Travel Time (to get to events/ meetings), etc.  

This is Time Blocking – so simple but so effective! Using this process can change your life. Things that sound crazy to you right now will become possible, and many of them will happen much, MUCH sooner than 10 years. The business doesn’t have to rule your life, and this process will really help you to start running your business, rather than it running you.  

SO please, block out some time to do the above and start that process towards crafting YOUR ideal life!

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