Office Hours: Getting Clear on Your Commitments

Welcome to The Million Dollar Badass Podcast. I'm your host, Rachel Rodgers, wife, mother to four children, lover of Beyoncé, coffee drinker, and afro wearer, and I just happen to be the CEO of a seven-figure business. I am on a mission to help every woman I meet become a millionaire. If you want to make more money, you are in the right place. Let's get it going.

Hello, friends. Welcome to Office Hours. I’m showing you behind the scenes in my Million Dollar Badass Mastermind. Every week, I get together with a group of ambitious, intelligent, brave women and deliver a motivational pep-talk, sometimes in the form of a kick in the ass, okay. And afterward, I answer specific questions from members who need help on strategy, hiring, marketing, working with clients, getting more clients, all of the things that come with building and scaling a successful business.

So, to get access to that good stuff, make sure you join my email list on helloseven.co. You’ll be the first to know when I open enrollment for the next Million Dollar Badass cohort. Until then, grab some tea and get ready to take notes. It’s Office Hours.

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Today, I actually want to talk to you about commitment. I want you to think about, what are you committed to? So some of you may be feeling overwhelmed. I certainly was feeling overwhelmed just about the week coming up because I knew I had so many commitments and was a little overwhelmed by the amount of commitments, right.

And here’s what happens when we don’t meet our commitments. There’s usually a consequence. There’s an emotional consequence. Somebody’s mad at us. We feel like we disappointed ourselves and we disappointed somebody else because we didn’t show up the way that we were supposed to.

And so how this happens, and especially for women, is we feel like we have to commit to a lot of things. And I want to challenge you to commit to less in your business, outside of your business, everywhere. How can you be less committed?

It was so funny because, during my retreat, I presented some really amazing content that I’m actually going to present to you guys as well in our quarterly planning session, which we’ll reach out about the scheduling for that shortly, probably later today. But I presented some content and specifically a spreadsheet that I wanted my clients to fill out.

And it’s basically a place to collect a lot of really valuable data for you to see as a CEO, to see, like, where’s my money coming from, what moves do I need to make, how am I spending my time. Like, it just really helps you to see and just on a single page, like, the status of your business.

And so one of my MDB mastermind members said, “Hey, it would be really cool if you could aggregate all this data and share with us, like, what are the trends among women entrepreneurs.” And I was like, that would be really cool, but I promise nothing.

And I was really clear to say that from the stage. And I actually find myself being more and more careful about what I promise because I used to promise things all the time and just let it fly out of my mouth, “Wouldn’t it be cool, Rachel, if you could do…” and I’d say, “Sure, no problem.” But then I’d have the burden of following through on that commitment. And a lot of times, in the moment, what we’re not thinking about is all the other commitments that we’ve already made.

So here’s what I want to challenge you guys to do this week. Have a brain dump. Like even this morning, Monday morning is a great time to do this. Just spend a few minutes to dump everything out of your brain, whether it’s, “I need to go but cat food,” whether it’s, “I need to go get my kid signed up for soccer,” whether it’s, “I need to send a report to this client and I need to set up my marketing strategy for this other client.”

Whatever it is, dump it out of your brain. Dump everything that you are currently committed to that you are worried about that’s sort of rolling around in your head and making you wake up at night that you feel like is not written down somewhere and you’re just sort of overwhelmed by all of these ideas and all of these actions that you feel like you need to take.

I want you to just do a brain dump. And when you have that brain dump, you’ll probably fill up a page or two. It might even take you a full hour, maybe longer, to get everything out of your head. And then, when you look at that list, what’s the first thing that’s going to happen is you’re going to realize, there’s no way in hell I can get all of this shit done.

Like, I can’t get it all done, but not this week, not this month, not this year, you know what I mean. And so then you start to realize, like, there’s no way I could get all this done. Great, now we’re in a place to be practical and prioritize. And so then you’ll look at that list and you start triaging, what commitments can you get yourself out of that you’ve already committed to? Can you renegotiate some things and say, like, to your spouse, “Hey, could you take on this soccer stuff and could you go get the cat food so I can focus over here?”

You might say, “Hey, client, I know we had plans to do X, Y, Z this week. Are you okay with moving it back a week so that we could be more prepared?” And a lot of cases, clients will be okay. I have the conversation.

Renegotiate what can be renegotiated and then prioritize the top priorities for you, for your business, for your overall goals, for the goals that you set at the beginning of this year. Prioritize and do the first things first.

So once you prioritize and get to your top, let’s say, five things that you definitely want to get done before this year is over, then break each of these things down. Like, okay, what’s the first step I need to take on this? What’s the first just tiny step that I need to take on this?

So that might look like, okay, so I know I need to hire somebody. The first thing I could do is I’ve already got a job description. I personally need to hire an executive assistant, which is where a lot of my overwhelm is coming from.

And so I have a job description for an executive assistant, so I need to just go look at it. That’s it. That’s the first step, just look at the job description. And once I look at it, I’ll see, is this perfect, do I need to edit some things, and that will start to create some momentum. I’ll start moving forward on the getting an executive assistant.

If I know that we have a marketing promotion that we need to roll out, the first step might be just booking a call with Britney who runs our marketing department, and just getting her feedback and just starting to sort of get my ideas about this marketing strategy out to the team members who can help me execute it.

So just start to take some tiny steps towards what you want to accomplish before the end of this year. Get that brain dump out of your head and really think about the things that you’re committing to every day, when you get on the phone, when you talk to people. You will notice, throughout the day that there are all kinds of ways that people are trying to suck you in and get you to commit to shit that maybe you don’t want to commit to because you may not have time. You may have too many commitments already.

So I want you to think about, when you say yes to something, you are making a commitment. And a lot of times, we over-commit and then we think, I’m flakey, I’m this, I’m that. No, we’re just ambitious.  We’re positive people. We feel like we can get so much done and we can get a lot done. But we can get more done with structure.

And so start to create that structure by doing a brain dump and then choosing the top few things that you can definitely accomplish by the end of this year and say no to the rest. Renegotiate the rest or just cross it off your list if you’ve only committed to yourself on it and save it for next year.

Wouldn’t it be better to get a few things done, a few things accomplished that can really move the ball forward for you and for your business and your overall goals? Wouldn’t that be better than to have a whole bunch of things where you’ve just taken it one step or maybe three steps; a whole bunch of stuff that’s in progress and none of it’s done? None of it’s done and therefore you don’t get to reap the rewards for any of it.

So really trim down that list of commitments that you have, start to make some strategic decisions about it, and we will continue this conversation. I want you to be thinking about this stuff because when we do our planning session for the last quarter of the year, which by the way has always been my biggest quarter historically. So it can be a huge quarter for you.

Don’t think it’s time to throw in the towel and start thinking about 2020. No, there is lots of year left. We’ve got a full solid three months to get things done, so I want you to be thinking about what am I committed to, what can I say yes to, what would really move the needle for me, what can I say no to?

So ponder that and I will see you in our quarterly planning session very soon. Bye, guys.