Val 0:36 Hello, hello. Thank you for being here and listening again. I'm super excited. For those of you that have followed over to the new platform where we're at, I am excited to bring you more guests, which I have today on a very important topic and close to my heart topic of procrastination, and moving forward in our business when we're having those seasons. And thank you so much for being here. Carol Clegg, I am okay. So for those of you that might not know, I love working with midlife women, because that's what's usually coming to me as a midlife woman as well. So I'm pretty sure I'm going to be getting a lot of tips today, as well on our conversation we'll be having today. So thank you for being here, Carol. And if you wouldn't mind, would you just let the listeners know, whatever you would like to tell them about yourself? Carol 1:36 Absolutely. Hi, Val. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me on your show. And yeah, you and I both relate to midlife women business owners, I guess that we said where you're at at the moment, is where you get your strength from. And it's often what we go through in life, and we learn our lessons, or we change our seasons. And we want to share that with other people. So I am Carol Clegg, originally from Cape Town, South Africa, and hence the accent. We left many, many years ago. In fact, it's almost 30 years ago. So it's been an interesting journey. And I now live in the desert in New Mexico, and I'm an ocean girl. Not sure what happened. And this is also the longest that we have lived anywhere as a family. But I started my business in Wow, 2009. And just I guess at the time social media marketing was, I always wanted to spread the word. And I heard you talk about collaboration. And I just always felt that people needed to know when something was out there, they needed to know that I was super excited when we had Facebook and Facebook pages and you know, all the things that we had back then. And so I stepped into helping small businesses create and manage their social media marketing. And that was for many years. And then after a few years, I decided that it was time now to move on. Empty nesting, wanting to travel more wanting to change that up a little bit. Because there's a certain sense of responsibility. I used to work with one or two of those clients. But I don't know about you, but there are seasons where I get a little tired. And some of the social media platforms are not my favorite. And so you know, having to show up for clients on social media and loving them all and being on all the platforms kind of needed to shift. And so that's when I moved into coaching and working with midlife women, yes, with their small businesses. And there's a lot to that, but I love the marketing background. But I know that one needs systems. So yeah, that's where I'm at at the moment is coaching, with accountability and coaching with Positive Intelligence, which is now a new modality that I have brought into my coaching, which is incredible and super excited about it made a difference to me. So I now want to share that with other people. So that's me. Val 4:06 And this is why this is exactly why I let my guests introduce themselves because this might not have been the direction if I'd written down questions that we would go but oh my gosh, we're totally going into Positive Intelligence right now. Because what are you talking about? Now, Carol 4:23 So, Positive Intelligence is a program that was created by Shirzad Chamine, a good couple of years ago and he is a Stanford lecturer. He has written a book that has been published in, I believe, 20 different languages just to give you an idea of the reach of his training, and he has worked with many, many, many different CEOs different people, and he introduced this training concept to coaches where we are learning that positive change can happen if we build on habits and build up muscles. And it's quite fascinating. So in this process as we trained as coaches, you dig into what are the saboteurs and that judge, that negative voice that just trips us up all the time? Where does this play into? And why does it stop us from reaching happiness and having positive feelings? So we explore what that looks like. And funnily enough, each of us has a judge, that we are harsh on ourselves. We're harsh on others, and we are harsh on our circumstances. And often it is loud. And it prevents us from many things, it prevents us from performance and productivity, it prevents us from a work-life balance, there's just so many things that it robs us of, because we get sucked into this negativity. So with his process, we learn how to recognize this, how to stop it in its tracks, and how to shift into what he calls a sage perspective, which is looking at things with a growth mindset. And there's just there's so much to it, right? Val 6:16 Oh, yeah. I needed you a few years ago. Because everything you're talking about is exactly what I taught myself with bits and pieces all over the place, to just just even learning how much I mean, I always, I always had that in the back of my head that I was self sabotaging. And I became more and more aware of doing it. But being aware of it and making the change. That was really hard on my own. Carol 6:49 That is the hard part. Yeah. And this is why this is such a simple framework. And we can get there. But I would love to actually just show you or take you through it. And let your listeners do that with me. Val 7:02 Oh, yeah, if you want to go for it. Carol 7:03 All right. So you've got this emotion that comes up and you can feel your judge going this, I don't want to go into this meeting, I don't want to talk to this person. I'm feeling overwhelmed. So what do you want to do, and this ties into what we learn about mindfulness meditation. But this is the tool that you build over time, that is your saving grace. So let's just walk through this right now. Wherever you're sitting, I want you just to settle down into your seat, I want you to take a nice, big, deep breath in, feel it all the way down. Let it out. And now I want, you just to take your fingertips together. And I want you just to gently touch those fingertips together and lose yourself in the feeling of that sensation of your fingertips touching. And then you can just move your hand and slide it down one and into the palm. And once again, just focusing on the sensation of your hand, you could fold your hands, touch your hands. Now if you were in a meeting, you could be doing this under the table. And that is just a tiny insight. And the reason that we're doing that is to stop the left-hand side of your brain with its negative thoughts by doing what we call this PQ Rep. And you could do this for 10 seconds, you could do it for two minutes. You can and there's a variety of different ways, then we learned through the course, you have stopped in the tracks that negative and you're focusing on a sensation. Yeah. And then you shift into a positive mindset. And you come at this with a How can I be more empathetic about this? What about this person? Perhaps they've had a rough day today? How can I look at them through more gentle eyes? So you've stopped the PQ rep stops that negative chat. And it's so simple, Val 9:10 it is very simple. It works. It works so much. I mean, whether you call it with the woo-woo stuff, which I'm still trying to figure out another word because I'm over woo-woo being a negative word, right? Because it's just, it's all-encompassing. It's just taking ownership of where we are and our thoughts. You know, our thoughts don't have to be super positive all the time. Right? You have to deal with them and work with them. And there are times that I don't want to get on the podcast interview and I have to sit down and I'm just like, do exactly what you know. Not exactly but very much what you just said of, okay, let's just sit here. Let's just take a deep breath, right and be present and they're always always amazing interviews that I'm like, Oh my gosh, and I almost canceled on this. Carol 9:59 You know that's being empathetic with yourself that's being kind to yourself. And that's the self-care that we often don't give ourselves. It's, it's okay to have those emotions and dig into them a little bit and explore them, but then say, Hang on a minute, you know, be kind, be kind to myself, I can do this. Val 10:18 That might be one of the best things that I have learned in the last few years is, it's okay to have my feelings. Right, and I can have negative feelings. Carol 10:31 And they often can be an indicator of something that you might need to explore. Yes. So one doesn't need to sit in those negatives but there could be like an alert and then hang on a minute, there's something. Yeah, it could be something so simple as Val, you talk about, you know, coming to recording, as changing up when you record so I to host the podcast, and I'm gonna take a break with us, our daughters getting married, and I want to focus on my wedding. I'll be back in August, and I'm changing things up. I'm changing the day of the week. I'm just changing a whole lot of things. And because it's time and as we spoke about that seasons, yeah. But there are seasons in our business. And we need to recognize that and not fight them. Val 11:14 And I don't know if you find this with your clients as much as I do, as well. It's fighting those seasons that are creating the biggest procrastination Carol 11:24 Right. The fight. And yeah, I love the way you said that because it does. If you think about it, we are overwhelmed. We're over striving. We are confused. And so then we that little impostor syndrome head or the perfectionist jumps up and down and goes, well, you know, you can't get this you're not gonna do it. Right. Val 11:46 So why bother? Yeah, yeah. And just not allowing it to be okay to change. Right? Yeah. Like, the season just has to roll over here. Here we grow, you know? Yeah, totally. Oh, God, I hope I'm not going to be full of cliches today. Here we go. Carol 12:03 Yeah, destination. I think we all know, we all suffer from that. And it's not a one-size-fits-all. So that's why I invite people to just explore the reasons for the procrastination and decide, you know, Is it fear? Is it you don't have knowledge how to do this? Is it something that doesn't bring you joy? And perhaps you should be delegating that to somebody else? And then it gets done? And you're not procrastinating? Val 12:29 Or I mean, it and this is extreme, but I've even I've talked about on our previous podcasts, or are you in the wrong business? I mean, you had to move from your season of Yeah, I don't want to really do that anymore. Right? Yeah. And I don't know, did you get stuck in any procrastination in that time? Or did you feel it pretty quick? Carol 12:52 Oh, no, I knew that I needed to do something different. I didn't know what it looked like. And it kind of just morph. I hosted masterminds for about two years. And I just love bringing these women together. And then that all sort of died away. And I guess that's what the thing is, is not to beat yourself up when something that you're doing now no longer doesn't work. Yeah, yeah, I have a friend of mine who's a career coach. And she's just recognizing things are shifting, and she doesn't know what it is. And she doesn't know where to go with this, but it's not working. And so now what do we do, we need to explore. Val 13:29 And that's a scary position to be in when you are doing it alone, without a coach, or, you know, a mastermind or some really tight group of other business owners. It's, yeah, it's scary. Carol 13:43 And this is where this Positive Intelligence for me is now going to be such an integral part of my business and my coaching, because we need to learn that we can switch we need to have these you know, these more positive emotions. So with the in this company back to the sage powers, and they are so cool. So I've mentioned the empathize. But there are other powers that you can bring in those are explore that you kind of what does this look like? And you just throw out a bunch of ideas. If you're wanting to shift your business, you write them all to mind mapping, love, love, love mind mapping, but dump all these ideas down again to switch gears. And then you can go okay, innovating, what could come out of this? And what do I need to move forward with this? So you get that down to one, two or three steps and then explore, explore, explore, and before you know it, you'll be able to shift gears and you've pulled together some facts and then it's the last one which is taking action and says, let's sit down judge I don't want to hear from you. I am moving in. And because you've got to move forward. If you don't take action, you're not going to know if it's the right thing. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Just look at it on paper. You need to kind of to me, it's always take that baby step. Next one next And then before you know it, you've that's another tip for me with procrastination, because if you just start that one, get the ball rolling, whatever it might be, Val 15:09 No matter how small. Exactly, yeah, just getting it started. One major thing is that I'm, you know, teaching my clients so much more and more. When you are feeling like it's time to let something go, you need to let it go. You need to figure out how that looks for you. Because if you don't let it go, then you don't have room to go forward. And in that new season, and those new amazing things that are coming, that you don't even know yet. Carol 15:39 Right? And it's, to me, at this stage of life, it's the sense of joy that you get from your business. That's why we're doing this. For many women, now if they're empty nesters, or they're exploring something, or they've been in a career, they have not aged, they have wisdom. They have something to share with others. And so yeah, let's get into encouraging you to start this business, grow this business, add to your layers, support yourself with the right kind of people, the team, the coaching, the mastermind, but you can do it. Val 16:10 Yeah. And see where it leads. And know that no matter what, like today is not your end game. Today is still learning and possibly moving into another season. Carol 16:24 Never stop learning, love it. I guess my weakness is that one of those is like, "Carol, you need to stop signing up for the next course and the next." Val 16:35 Yes, Carol 16:37 I've tried something recently. Well, I don't know if you've tried this, this time boxing. Val 16:41 My brain fights it. Okay, okay. Brain fights it, like, "oh my gosh, there's no room for creativity," you know, kind of thing. But I know it does help that, sir. Yeah. Carol 16:54 So I'm no longer, I'm not a word. That's this week's style. And today, I have realized that I'm not putting in enough gaps in for you know, all the other little things. But that's the I guess there's two ways to look at it. One is filling up your calendar with the projects that you need to do, the meetings, the days of your week, and then "Okay, today's podcast, there's podcast production, tomorrow is admin," etc, etc. And just staying with it until it's finished. Alternatively, the time boxing going, "okay, allowing myself 30 minutes to check my email. And when 30 minutes is up, I shut down my email, not looking at it." And so as I said, different things, not one size fits all, you need to explore the theme. Val 17:39 Now this one, time boxing like that, I can 100% always be on board with just because however much time you decide it's going to take is how much time it will take you to do it. Right? That's what one of my coaches told me and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, that's so simple." And so if I write down, "okay, we're gonna work on a sales page for two hours." Wow, it takes me two hours to write a sales page breakdown. "We're gonna get this done in 45 minutes." I get it done. Carol 18:13 That's wonderful. Yeah. And then that means because that's to me. Yeah. I shared with you that creating a lifestyle business is important to me. I want to be able to travel, but I want to have my coaching business. Yeah. And so, putting time blocks on things that we need to get done. I guess the other thing is also being aware of when you are creative, when you're tired. So leave that to the admin. My afternoons are always a wreck by about three o'clock. I'm like, I'm done. Val 18:40 Oh, yeah, two o'clock, nap time. Carol 18:43 That's a good time to do the admin, the stuff that you don't want to do. Don't give away your beautiful creative mornings to admin. Yeah, being sucked into emails, because then you go down a rabbit hole. Yes, use those times to let your creative juices bubble and flow. And there's also a sense of, I guess, all the special hormones, I never know what they're called, but that we release that make us happier. Yep. So why not? Val 19:09 Yes, it is really important. And it's one of the things that I do have my clients do is pay attention to their high energy times. And just track it. What are your high energy times? Because we do, we have a certain time during the day, when we have our most productivity, when our brain is the most engaged. And knowing that it doesn't have to be mornings or evenings or whatever the latest thing you read is, you know, "Oh, you gotta get up an hour early. That's the best productive time." No, that is not for me. Carol 19:42 Right? Yeah. No, you have to explore what works for you and recognize, you once again, that's coming to self-care and empathy for yourself. And you're important. Val 19:52 Yeah. And not forcing it. Because it's really crazy how much, I mean, we're in business for ourselves to have control of our schedule. And then we're pretty good at beating ourselves up for not sticking to the schedule. Carol 20:07 Right? Yeah. Theming the days of the week have helped me. I guess I've just, I need to move them around. But knowing what days of the week belong to what kind of gives you peace at night before you go to sleep, because you've got, "Okay, tomorrow holds this. Yeah, this is what's in my bucket." And you can kind of be in that frame of mind of, "Okay, is this my marketing hat? Is this my writing hat? Is this my connecting hat? Is this my coaching hat?" Val 20:36 And I know me being more strict with myself, there are definitely times like, we're kind of probably coming into one right now we've got some family health issues going on. And I know previously, I can look back and recognize that, you know, what, when, when I had my content, Ideas set out, it really helped me during those seasons, because there didn't have to be the thought of that, when we're thoughts are already getting pulled in another direction, right? Absolutely. So it did help me to be more strict for lack of another word, because in my brain, and this is part of my own self sabotage, my brain tells me that strict and oh my gosh, rebel fight authority. Versus now hopefully, I'll be looking at it going, Okay, we're not finding authority, because it's us. Carol 21:27 Right? You use that space for what you Val 21:32 need. Yes, for the lack of having to think of, okay, get up this morning, when the heck am I gonna do today? What do I want to talk about? It's like, no, it's mapped out and just just follow the map. And know, like you said, the map doesn't have to just be the end all be all, Amen. We're doing that or ever, Carol 21:51 that give it some flexibility. Sometimes it needs to shift. And I think that's, you know, just putting in some time blocks that you're doing nothing, those spaces that they call it on your calendar is sort of you because that's, you know, if you feel like taking a nap or you want to do something different, or you want to go for a nice long walk, well, then you can do that. Because you factor that in and you're not beating yourself up, that you haven't ticked all those things off your to do list. But it's interesting that you talk about, you know, creating and doing something when you know what's ahead of you because that for me, it's also my advice that I give to people if they do love to travel is do the heavy lifting while you're at home before you head out when you know you've got good internet, and kind of getting get some of those things taken care of. So that yes, you can still touch in and check in on your business. But you're not stressed because you think, Oh, I've got everything still to do while I'm trying to travel. Val 22:49 And it makes vacation so much or the trips so much more enjoyable, just to be present. Right? And love life. As you're literally having everything that you wanted. At that very moment. You're like my business is already running, because I did a little bit of extra. Uh huh. And oh my gosh, look at where I'm at. Yeah, absolutely. Look at worried about and enjoying it, embracing it, recognizing it so important. And I know some of you might be sitting here going travel, who the hell gets to do that? And I hear you. But then there, but travel doesn't necessarily mean that you are taking off to the Caribbean or you are taking off to Mexico or traveling across the world, you know, even last week, because we are in the family emergency season. I was sitting there, I got some work done. And I went you know what, I just am going for a walk. And I just went down to the river and took a two, two hour walk. And just enjoyed the trees and the river and just all of it and just told myself, you know what, we don't have to do anything else the rest of the day. Carol 23:58 Yeah, yeah, that you can make space in your business. That's so true. What you're saying. I mean, you it can be what do they call it? A staycation? I mean, yeah. Yeah. So new week work a four day work week, because you've taken care of everything. Monday through Thursday, whatever works for you. Val 24:15 Yeah. And if if people are going through procrastination, all of that, and that was one of the things that did help me get through it was, you know what, no matter what, I'm not working weekends anymore. And then no matter what I and I had to be strict with myself because I couldn't be nice to myself immediately. Right? I'd have guilt and shame myself. All of this isn't getting done and you know, and then then I did start going to no Fridays, Carol 24:41 right? I'm with you on that one? Yeah, it's wonderful. Because then you nup you have an invitation to go and meet somebody for coffee or do something and you can get I know my Fridays are open. And yes, if there's an emergency you can jump in and do what you need to do. But it's Yeah, I love having my my food. Val 24:58 Yeah, and then I have My Friday is just like all of a sudden, if I decide I want to create something, it's wide open, and I blast that thing out, you know? Carol 25:09 Do your best work. Val 25:11 Right? And I'm not in that season necessarily anymore where I am super strict about it. But that was how I got the process in place just for myself and Carol 25:21 Well, I think it just comes back to this procrastination and just trying different things to be intentional. I think to go you know, does a four day work week work for me? Does front loading my week work for me? Yeah, but to try and some different things that then give you the space and then celebrating? Yeah, because that's the important part is celebrating what you have achieved. And I love to recommend for people get even at the end of the day before you get into bed at night, celebrate. Go, hey, I did this, this and this and celebrate it. And just yeah, yes, you did not procrastinate. You did it? Val 25:56 Yeah. I'm big on celebrations, because we don't do that enough. Mm hmm. And we especially don't celebrate ourselves enough. Of what we have accomplished. It's always the next goal. And this, and oh, my gosh, I didn't get this done. And this didn't get done the right way. It's like no got done. How about we celebrate it? Got it done? Yeah. Because there's always room for improvement. Carol 26:18 Yeah, that's back to those baby steps. You know, celebrate those baby steps. Yeah. Val 26:23 And grab a hold of them. Perfect. Oh, excellent. So Carol, is there anything that you would just like last words? For listeners? Yeah, Carol 26:34 I just Yeah, I want to just encourage you to explore what feeling happier means more positive emotions. So just digging into that a little bit is the positive emotions lead to the happiness. It's not like, I'm gonna be happy today and then go searching for them. It'll come. So yeah, just on the right hand side of your brain, the creative side that Val 27:01 lead I love that. Thank you. And, and listeners, if you were totally just feeling that, it's a lot, I don't know, I'm not gonna say it's a lot easier. It can be better if you're working with somebody as you're going through that process. Boy, me because I did it alone. I've done it alone. And it was so lonely. So if you just totally connected with Carol, all of her information is going to be in the show notes for you to go and have a chat with her and see how you can get your Positive Intelligence working for you. And what that means for you. Because that's the beautiful thing about coaching is, you know, it's not one size fits all. It's not like she's coming in with a roadmap of what you must do this, this, this, you know, she's gonna work with you, as you just heard on, on the mindset, which we know owns our business. Carol 27:59 Absolutely does. And I love to think of coaches as partnering, we partnering with you, we there to listen to you and encourage you and you'll explore you'll find your own ideas. We're just there to walk alongside you. Yeah. Val 28:12 And be your biggest cheerleader because I just talking with you, I can tell you the same thing. It's like, oh, man, if if my client has a win, I have a win. I mean, like, I am just as excited as if I did it myself. out I'm I'm happy immediately, you know, while they might be going through process, but I'm like screaming biggest cheerleaders as you're going through it. Oh, awesome. Thank you so much for being here, Carol. I'm excited that we have connected. This is awesome. Carol 28:45 Absolutely. Thanks, Val for letting me share my story. Val 28:51 Alright. Thanks, everyone, and we will be back again next week.