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Welcome back to the Remodel Your Reality Challenge!  A key part of time and schedule management is the clear-minded evaluation of the opportunities that come your way. Ideally, your priorities will help you make decisions about what to commit your time to. When considering a new opportunity, evaluate whether or not the invitation sounds interesting to you. If it doesn’t, reserve the right to say no!

One Thing To Think About
There are two keys to keeping your opportunity load on track and reflecting your priorities:

1. Reserve the Right to Think About It – Instead of immediately agreeing or saying no to any type of invitation you receive, decide that you will not commit to anything on the spot. Instead, when you receive a request or invitation, let the requester know that you’ll need to check your schedule and get back to him or her. This allows you to thoughtfully evaluate the situation and provides you with a buffer in the event that you decide to decline.
2. Do Away with Elaborate Excuses – Remember this maxim from the Oprah Winfrey show: “No is a complete sentence.” The next time someone asks you to take on a project or attend an event that doesn’t support your priorities, simply respond with “No, I can’t do that, but thank you for thinking of me.” Breathe deeply to quiet your thundering heart and move on to another topic of conversation.

One Question To Answer
When considering a commitment or opportunity, ask yourself these questions: Does this opportunity fit in with my priorities? If not, does it detract from them? If you feel that the opportunity fits within your priorities, and it’s interesting, consider committing yourself. Make sure to understand why you find the opportunity exciting, and clarify any expectations the inviting party will have of you once you throw your hat into the ring.

One Challenge To Take
Pledge yourself from a clear and positive place. If you feel any misgivings about saying yes, stop! From this point on, decide that you will only make commitments that compliment your priorities and feel good to you.

• Identify at least five commitments or scheduled activities that are wasting your valuable time. Examples could include volunteering for an organization you no longer enjoy, running errands for others, attending social events with people you don’t care for, participating in water cooler gossip, or failing to commit your day to activities that are important to you.
• Name your alternative. Could one of your priority areas move into the timeslot that one of your time wasters currently occupies? List the five commitments you would prefer to make in place of your current time wasters.
• Conclude your commitment to non-priority activities. If the item is a one-time engagement, contact the host or requestor and let him or her know you have a conflict. If your commitment is ongoing in nature, let your contact person know you cannot participate any longer.
• Schedule something from your priority list into the open time that appears as a result of allowing yourself to say no.

Every time you make a decision to say yes to one thing, you are saying no to multiple others simultaneously. You may not be aware of this, but it is fact. Until you are able to say no to the demands and requests of others, you will never be able to say yes to you.

Ultimately, it is better to disappoint the requester whom you will not remember forty years from now, than to look back at your life and realize that the person you disappointed was yourself.

Until next time, take care!
Kim

Welcome back to the Remodel Your Reality Challenge!  Time management is a subject that many women struggle with. In the Remodel Your Reality program, there are four rules to effective and empowering time management: Be Authentic, Place Yourself on Your List, Know Your Own Worth, and Say Goodbye to Takers.

One Thing To Think About
You will succeed or fail at time management based on your willingness to consistently invest your time in support of the priorities you’ve established. This becomes possible when you remove requests and commitments that fall outside of your priority structure. In short, this means you’re going to have to get very good at saying the dreaded “n” word—no.

One Question To Answer
Do you have trouble saying no to others? Due to the desire to avoid disappointing others and their aversion to feeling uncomfortable, many women do. To preserve your time for things that matter to you, you must be willing to experience temporary discomfort. This requires dedication to the focused management of your schedule and calls for you to develop the courage to risk upsetting or disappointing others.

One Challenge To Take
Integrate the Four Rules of Time Management into your daily life. Use them as a guide star to give you direction and keep you on the track you want to take.

1. Be Authentic – Your priority list must reflect what you authentically hold in esteem versus what you believe should be important to you. Be honest when creating your priority blueprint. It can serve you, acting as a compass to support you in making decisions about where to invest your time and energy. If you don’t define your list based on your truth, you will be living someone else’s. I know you don’t want that reality or you wouldn’t be reading this book. Creating a list based on what you believe is expected of you, or out of fear about what others might think of you, is a recipe for stress and failure.
2. Place Yourself on Your List – When you commit to taking care of yourself, you become more powerfully able to take care of everyone else in your life. While you may feel an initial resistance to placing yourself on your own list, believing it would be selfish to do so, I strongly encourage you to invest in taking care of you. When you do, you will be able to give more to every area of your life. I challenge you to take care of yourself at least as well as you take care of everyone else!
3. Know Your Own Worth – If you don’t believe you’re worthy of acceptance and friendship, you will try to earn your way into both. The fear of unworthiness is at the root of many unproductive behaviors, such as accepting invitations you aren’t interested in, agreeing to requests that don’t compliment your priorities, and taking on responsibilities that detract from your own well-being. The disease to please may not kill you, but it will significantly detract from the quality of your life.
4. Say Goodbye to Takers – If you’ve been living as a pleaser, there are undoubtedly takers around you. A taker is a person who uses your time, energy, money, and resources without giving anything back in return. I liken these individuals to parasites, and they will begin to disappear when you start saying no. Make a commitment to stand your ground and invest yourself in only those requests that meet your priorities or interest you. Prepare yourself in advance to decline invitations or requests that don’t. Anticipate the inevitable shedding of the takers in your life and celebrate the opening you’re creating for a higher quality of person to enter in their place.

Until next time, take care!

Kim

Welcome back to the Remodel Your Reality Challenge! Now that you’ve identified the priorities you’d like to invest in, it’s important to evaluate how you’re currently spending your time.

One Thing To Think About
The potential to experience joy, satisfaction, and happiness lives in your calendar. If your calendar does not reflect the priorities you’ve defined for yourself, it will be necessary for you to make some changes in order to create room in your schedule. In doing so, you will begin to experience more of what matters to you when you schedule less of what doesn’t.

One Question To Answer
Open your calendar and look at the commitments you’ve made for the next two weeks. How many of your commitments support the priorities you just established? How many do not?

If you’re spending more than half of your time catering to the demands of others, doing things because you think you should do them, or making commitments because you aren’t comfortable declining, it’s quite likely you’re unbalanced, overwhelmed, resentful, and unfulfilled at the end of most days.

It’s time to change that! You can support the people in your life, fulfill your responsibilities, make time for things that are important to you, and create a sense of balance in your life.

One Challenge To Take

1. Track your activities for one week. Compared your personal and professional priorities against your activities. How many of your priorities have made it onto your schedule? How many items on your schedule have nothing to do with your priorities? How many activities actually serve to defeat or oppose your priorities?
2. Make a list of all of your current commitments and evaluate how they either support or detract from your ability to live within your priority framework. (We’ll talk more about evaluating opportunities in another post.)
3. Make a commitment to get free of commitments and activities that do not support your priorities. Decide what activities and commitments you’re going to remove, then create a plan to move them out of your calendar. Create a script for talking to other people around these issues, if it helps. Chose the first item to go and TAKE ACTION!

Until next time, take care!
Kim

Welcome back to the Remodel Your Reality Challenge! Now that you’ve started to reclaim your energy, it’s time to decide how you’re going to use it. Over the next few posts, I’d like to challenge you to stop managing your time. Instead, I’d like you to consider managing your priorities.

A priority is something that is important to you, or something that needs your attention in the present. Your personal priorities define how you invest time within your life. Your professional priorities guide your allocation of the time committed to your work.

Making the decision to invest your time according to your priorities not only supports the effective use of each moment, it also paves the road to a high-quality life. It creates a structure for you to make decisions that help you experience life on your terms and gives you permission to turn away from requirements that don’t support your aspirations.

One Thing To Think About
It’s easier to use your time effectively when you begin to view it as a finite commodity that you have the choice to spend—or invest. Establishing a list of priorities for your life and work, and making commitments based on that list, allows the things that are important to you to exist in your life.

One Question To Answer
At the end of each week, do you feel exhausted, frustrated, and burnt-out? Do you sometimes wonder why you can’t seem to get control and question what is wrong with you? If so, you have not proactively decided how you’d like to use your time, and it’s possible that a good deal of your day is committed to other people’s demands, to items that seem urgent, or in response to what you believe is expected of you. If you’ve taken this approach to managing your calendar, you probably have very little time left over to invest in what matters to you.

One Challenge To Take
Set aside twenty to thirty minutes to move through this activity. Try to arrange for an uninterrupted period of time, which allows you to consider the areas of your life and work that are truly important to you.

Create a list that reflects who you are, not a list that reflects what you think other people expect of you. Some examples include:

Personal Priorities: Spending quality time with my family, taking time out for fun and recreation, taking care of my health.

Professional Priorities: Leading and mentoring my employees, developing new business, continuing to learn and grow my skill base.

When you make the choice to honestly define what matters to you, the possibility for life and work balance is created. It’s quite likely that your schedule will remain full, even after moving through this exercise. The difference is that you will be busy with things that matter to you. You’ll be living your priorities. As a result, you’ll have the opportunity to experience a much greater level of joy, satisfaction, and happiness each day.

Until next time, take care!
Kim

What would be possible for you if every action you took, every habit you had and every goal you set were dictated by your own personal priorities and values? (more…)

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Join us as expert and coach Joan Jesion shares tips on how to invest in and prioritize self-care around the pressures of what is expected during the rapid success of holidays and celebrations:  Halloween, Thanksgiving(US) and ultimately the December holidays.