37. Reclaim 5 Hours Per Week - Part 2
Last week, you heard how, in the past four months, I managed to reclaim five hours per week, even though my business was already in a very streamlined position. I didn't think it would be possible to cut that much extra time every single week, but I used the tools I teach my clients, and I surprised myself.
In the last episode, I covered the specific time management tools I used to reduce my hours worked. Today, I'm sharing who I had to become in order to actually decrease those hours. Before you think this is going to be too woo-woo for you, stick with me because I promise, even if you apply one piece of what I'm sharing today, you'll see great results.
Tune in this week to discover the three things that needed to shift internally for me to reclaim five hours per week while continuing to serve my clients, produce weekly content, and execute a full launch for Out of Overwhelm. You'll hear why you have to combine the strategies with the mindset to effectively reclaim more time and how evaluating your self-concept and your relationship with your business will create huge ripple effects.
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What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
3 things that needed to shift internally for me to reclaim 5 hours per week.
What is required to implement the time management strategies I offer.
How to shift the way you show up in your business.
What radical honesty in action looks like.
How to strengthen your relationship with yourself and your business.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Hey designer, you’re listening to episode 37. This is going to be part two of how I reclaimed 5 hours per week in my business.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you’re ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you’re in the right place. I’m Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let’s go.
Hello, designer. Welcome back to the podcast. As always, I’m so glad to have you here, whether you’re new or you’ve been listening for a long time. This is a Monday for me that I’m recording this, and it’s the Monday following the Taylor Swift concert I went to. And I don’t know, if you’ve been to it, it is something else. I mean, I kind of felt like – I do like her music, and that was one of the reasons I wanted to go. But I also felt like this is just an event to go to.
And it delivered. I’ve never seen anything so well produced. Everything was just so spot on with the dancing, the sound, the stage, all of it. It was just incredible. I’ve also learned that I cannot stay up till all hours of the night anymore. I can’t remember the last time that I was up this late, it was probably about 2 am by the time I was actually home and settled and asleep. And I tell you, I feel like I’m still feeling it this Monday. What is going on? That’s age, I guess.
But I’m really excited to dive back into this topic of how I reclaimed five hours per week. If you haven’t listened to episode 36, the one from last week, you can go back and listen to that. It’s the full backstory on where I started with reclaiming the five hours. But essentially, in the last four months I’ve cut five hours of work from my week. And my business was already in a really streamlined position and I thought it would not be possible to cut that much time from my week. But I used the tool that I’ve been using for years and the tools that I teach my clients, and I did it. I surprised myself.
In the last episode, I covered the specific time management strategies I use to reduce the hours worked. And this episode is going to be more about who I had to become in order to reduce those hours. Now, before you think this is going to get too woo-woo, when you become someone new, you still take action. So you’re going to be hearing about the mindset and the strategy still here. And this is why I always say personal development really is business development and vice versa.
And that’s why when clients work with me, they learn that time management isn’t just about time blocking, it is about so much more than that. And the internal work we do together to create the external shifts in the business begins to impact every area of their life. In order to take the actions and implement the strategies I shared in the last episode and the other actions that I’ll share now, I really had to shift the way I was showing up in my business.
And that always starts with what I’m thinking and believing about myself as the business owner, what I’m believing about my team, my clients, and the business itself. This is the same for you. So I’m excited for you to hear some of these shifts that I had internally and how you can apply this to yourself.
Before we dive in, I do have a request. If you’ve been loving the podcast, please, please, please take a moment now and rate and review the show. I’ve really been enjoying sharing with you on this platform and also, there’s a lot that goes into creating this show weekly. So it would mean so much to me if you would just take a minute, it really does not have to take long, and write a review. Tell me what you’re loving, why you look forward to the show, or why other designers should listen in too.
It really makes a difference to me, yet it makes a difference for the algorithm and getting these tools in the hands of more designers. Let’s dive into part two of the conversation and what needed to shift in me internally to reclaim those five hours per week while continuing to serve my current clients, produce weekly content, such as my newsletter and podcast, and execute a full launch for Out Of Overwhelm that included several new workshops and lots of moving pieces.
There are three overarching categories I want to share with you today. And as you listen, I encourage you to reflect on where you are or aren’t showing up in similar ways. And if you’re seeing yourself in what I share and how you could take even just one piece of what you hear today and apply it to your business.
The first shift really is all about radical honesty and becoming someone who is willing to be even more radically honest with myself. And to start with, I really had to get clear on what strategies were working best in my business, and being willing to cut the things that were producing marginal results or that I wasn’t really enjoying all that much anymore.
A great example of this is Instagram, I’ve talked about that in a previous episode. When I say working best what I mean is producing the desired results, which for me is working with more clients that I absolutely adore and are best suited for the type of coaching that I do in a way that aligns with how I want to run my business. And with this radical honesty came the need to further deepen my trust in the principle of constraint and focus that I use to create value for myself and my clients.
This meant really leaning into uncertainty, of course, everything’s always uncertainty. But I have a tendency to like to try and create false certainty through more action. I know a lot of my clients think this is true as well. This is just a thought error that I still sometimes catch myself in. And the thought error being that if I take enough action, I will guarantee some outcome. But this just isn’t possible.
And in this case, it was bringing together my next group of clients for Out Of Overwhelm. And yes, you absolutely have to take actions to produce results, but actions aren’t the most important part. There’s lots of ways to hit a goal, lots of strategies, lots of actions, and it starts with how you’re thinking and feeling. That’s what drives your actions and produces results. And that’s why I’m always focused on the mindset paired with the strategy, whether that’s I’m working with my clients or I’m working with myself as my own client.
The other way that I had to get even more radically honest with myself was about my capacity, both the hours required to complete something and my emotional bandwidth. And let’s be honest, I did not always like what I was presented with when I was honest. And I had to learn to be honest with myself regardless.
And this really meant being more aware of when I would tell myself it won’t take that long. It’s a sneaky little phrase, but my brain loves to offer it up. And I know that so many of you are having that thought too when you say yes to things. But guess what, it always takes longer.
This also meant sometimes having to say no to a few things that I would have liked to have said yes to in the moment, but that weren’t ultimately moving me closer to my goals, both in terms of my time goal of reducing the five hours and my business goals, which is attracting those best fit clients who I want to serve in my business.
Another place radical honesty showed up was being honest with myself about when I was sneaking in work. Those little moments where I’m like, “Oh, I’ll just check my email,” or, “I’ll just respond to this one thing, I’m just going to write this one thing down.” And sometimes this was just I had the thought loop of I want to get more done, I want to get ahead, right? So I had to manage that.
But sometimes the sneaking in work was because I was trying to avoid doing something or being present with something in my personal life or feeling some type of discomfort emotionally with newly open space in my calendar. This is something I see clients go through regularly when we start to reduce their hours. It can be kind of uncomfortable to have that open space when you’re used to being busy.
In my case, I wouldn’t have said that I was super busy, I was really focused and would get a lot done during the week. But I was used to having a certain amount of time filled. And so when I was reducing, I had space that I hadn’t fully navigated how I wanted to utilize and what that would feel like to have that new space.
And what that means, really, is I had to be willing to feel urges to work and not respond to them. And also not use work as a buffer against restlessness or boredom and really starting to be present and allowing that experience to be there. So I’ll just highlight that even though reducing the hours was something that I wanted, there was still part of me that resisted reducing the hours because of that discomfort. And nothing had gone wrong there, it just was part of the process and I had to be honest about it.
The last thing I want to share about this radical honesty is that I had to be someone who could create honesty and awareness around the rules that I created, both in my life and business. I love to create rules subconsciously and then I see myself doing it and I go, oh, who said that? Like where did that come from? Why does it have to be that way? And I continue to find different ways that this is showing up.
And so with the goal of reducing the hours, I found more of these rules about the way things had to be done. Whether that was the amount of prep that I allowed myself for the podcast, or the number of events that I was going to do for the launch. Some of these were rules that I picked up from other people, or just some that I created for myself. So it was almost like I had to create some of these rebel vibes in myself, to break my own rule.
The second area that I want to talk about is perfectionism. Reducing my work hours highlighted areas where perfectionism was still very much present. Now, because this is something that I worked on a lot over the years, perfectionism wasn’t holding me back from creating my goals and going after what I wanted in life and business the way that it used to. But as I fine tuned the hours I was working, this definitely was showing up.
And this really required me to become someone who was willing to tweak and prepare much, much less than I had been doing. And that also meant being someone who trusted that what I had done was enough and great as is. I find so often for my clients, when we think we’re doing C work, like on an A to F grade scale, our C is really like everyone else’s A. And this was such a great example of this playing out for me in real time.
And on the backside, if it ended up not being that great, I had to be someone who trusted myself enough that if I did mess up something or I missed something I’d be kind to myself and proud of myself no matter what. One of the big areas I saw this showing up was with edits and approvals of things that would be produced by my team and then come back to me.
And I really had to be willing to release that tight grip on the edits and approvals for things that I was being picky about, but probably wouldn’t make a measurable difference. I really had to lessen that control and replace it with trust to become someone who can feel good about deciding what good enough looks like, and really redefining good enough.
And for those of you who just got kind of twitchy when I mentioned the words “good enough,” I’m not talking about settling or making radical errors in your business and overlooking them. I’m talking about little things like where the text spacing wasn’t quite right. Or I’d be reviewing an email where I was really rethinking and rethinking which lines would be bolded for easy scannability.
You don’t have to get sloppy with your work to still reclaim the time from addressing perfectionistic tendencies. I also had to become someone who was willing to not hit my goal of reclaiming five hours immediately. Pretty soon after I got started on this journey, I realized that even in my goals there was perfectionism. This whole process started about four months ago and it’s only been about one and a half months that I’ve been consistently at the five hours less.
What I realized was that I had this perception that I would just magically drop time from my week and I would say, “Oh, I’m going to cut five hours.” And then it would just happen. And this is so funny, right? And it was such a great experience for me, as a coach, reminding myself of where clients are when they start this journey for themselves.
And when I didn’t magically drop that time, this is really when I could have given up. It’s where I see clients want to give up. When we don’t see those immediate results, or we don’t see the full results right away, and then we make that mean that we aren’t capable or it’s never going to happen for us. That’s not how goals actually work, but for those of us with perfectionistic tendencies, that’s what our brain tells us the process is supposed to be like.
And with that, we have to allow for feelings of frustration to bubble up of not getting it right the first time or for many weeks after that. And really being committed to continuing the process of evaluating and implementing what you learn and keeping those evaluations going until you hit the end result. Because that’s what gets you there, is the commitment to the end result, not getting it right the very first time.
The last area I want to highlight for you is about relationships. I had to become someone who further strengthened my relationship with myself and also reevaluated the relationship between me and my business. This is something that, again, has been a work in progress for years and I know that it will continue to be so. But reducing my hours gave me a circumstance, really, that brought up more of this to explore and work through.
This was definitely work I had not done when I was running my interior design business. And I can look back now and see how I really used my business and all the certifications, you know, passing the NCIDQ, the LEED AP, being on the board of ASAD, how I used all of that as a source of validation to justify my self-worth, and then asking my business to fulfill all of my needs, right? No pressure there.
Oh my gosh, if that was a person and I was like, you need to validate me, tell me I’m worthy, fulfill all my needs. That is a heavy burden to bear, but we do it to our businesses. When I was looking at my relationship with my business and the internal work that I’ve been doing over the last several months, it’s really been this time focused on seeing myself as a separate entity from my business. Just like the work you do as an interior designer, and the work I did when I was practicing, and even now in my coaching business.
It’s very personal work that we do. I put my name behind everything I do, just like you do. And that has the potential to create a lot of pressure, which then feeds into overworking, over controlling and over obsessing, which all takes a lot of time. I want you to think about this, if your worth as a person is dependent on you doing things perfectly and always hitting your goals, there’s a lot on the line. It makes complete sense that your subconscious brain would want to work against what you outwardly express as a desire to work less.
It’s in a protective mode, right? Because of that thought error, if I do more, if I achieve more, then I will be more. I will be better. So it’s trying to protect you from something that isn’t actually linked. I talked about that a little bit in the episode where I shared about how you aren’t charging for your value as a human, you’re charging clients for the value that you bring through your services. It’s very different.
The lesson that I repeatedly learn over and over again, and that my clients begin to learn as well, is that when I am nice to myself and I believe in myself independently of results, the need to hustle goes away. I enjoy my work more. I’m more efficient because I’m not overthinking. There really is this huge ripple effect with this one, and it has everything to do with who you’re being and how you treat yourself as the CEO and employee in your interior design business.
If this concept of having a relationship with something like yourself or your business, someone that’s not outside of you, like a partner or a friend or a family member is intriguing to you, you’ll definitely want to check out my latest interview with Luann Nigara on your relationship with time. I’ll put the link in the show notes so you can listen to that one.
All right, those are the three areas that I wanted to highlight for you; radical honesty, perfectionism, and relationship to yourself and your business. What I wanted most in sharing these two episodes on how to reclaim five hours of work per week, is that it’s not just about the strategy, it’s not just about the mindset. It’s both. When you combine these two things, the mindset and the strategy, this is really where lasting, sustainable change is made and goals are achieved.
This is the work I do with clients and you can do with me with my support inside Out Of Overwhelm. This is your last chance to join before 2024. I’m shipping out the planners and workbooks to clients this week, and I have a space for you. To get started this month, all you have to do is go to the link in the show notes, fill out a quick form that I use just to ensure it’s the right fit for you. And then we can get started.
In the next episode, I’m going to be sharing three different ways to get work done efficiently in your interior design business, both on the back end and for your client work. Until then, I’m wishing you a beautiful week. I’ll talk to you in the next episode.
Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you’re ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you’re in the right place. I’m Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let’s go.
Hello, designer. Welcome back to the podcast. As always, I’m so glad to have you here, whether you’re new or you’ve been listening for a long time. This is a Monday for me that I’m recording this, and it’s the Monday following the Taylor Swift concert I went to. And I don’t know, if you’ve been to it, it is something else. I mean, I kind of felt like – I do like her music, and that was one of the reasons I wanted to go. But I also felt like this is just an event to go to.
And it delivered. I’ve never seen anything so well produced. Everything was just so spot on with the dancing, the sound, the stage, all of it. It was just incredible. I’ve also learned that I cannot stay up till all hours of the night anymore. I can’t remember the last time that I was up this late, it was probably about 2 am by the time I was actually home and settled and asleep. And I tell you, I feel like I’m still feeling it this Monday. What is going on? That’s age, I guess.
But I’m really excited to dive back into this topic of how I reclaimed five hours per week. If you haven’t listened to episode 36, the one from last week, you can go back and listen to that. It’s the full backstory on where I started with reclaiming the five hours. But essentially, in the last four months I’ve cut five hours of work from my week. And my business was already in a really streamlined position and I thought it would not be possible to cut that much time from my week. But I used the tool that I’ve been using for years and the tools that I teach my clients, and I did it. I surprised myself.
In the last episode, I covered the specific time management strategies I use to reduce the hours worked. And this episode is going to be more about who I had to become in order to reduce those hours. Now, before you think this is going to get too woo-woo, when you become someone new, you still take action. So you’re going to be hearing about the mindset and the strategy still here. And this is why I always say personal development really is business development and vice versa.
And that’s why when clients work with me, they learn that time management isn’t just about time blocking, it is about so much more than that. And the internal work we do together to create the external shifts in the business begins to impact every area of their life. In order to take the actions and implement the strategies I shared in the last episode and the other actions that I’ll share now, I really had to shift the way I was showing up in my business.
And that always starts with what I’m thinking and believing about myself as the business owner, what I’m believing about my team, my clients, and the business itself. This is the same for you. So I’m excited for you to hear some of these shifts that I had internally and how you can apply this to yourself.
Before we dive in, I do have a request. If you’ve been loving the podcast, please, please, please take a moment now and rate and review the show. I’ve really been enjoying sharing with you on this platform and also, there’s a lot that goes into creating this show weekly. So it would mean so much to me if you would just take a minute, it really does not have to take long, and write a review. Tell me what you’re loving, why you look forward to the show, or why other designers should listen in too.
It really makes a difference to me, yet it makes a difference for the algorithm and getting these tools in the hands of more designers. Let’s dive into part two of the conversation and what needed to shift in me internally to reclaim those five hours per week while continuing to serve my current clients, produce weekly content, such as my newsletter and podcast, and execute a full launch for Out Of Overwhelm that included several new workshops and lots of moving pieces.
There are three overarching categories I want to share with you today. And as you listen, I encourage you to reflect on where you are or aren’t showing up in similar ways. And if you’re seeing yourself in what I share and how you could take even just one piece of what you hear today and apply it to your business.
The first shift really is all about radical honesty and becoming someone who is willing to be even more radically honest with myself. And to start with, I really had to get clear on what strategies were working best in my business, and being willing to cut the things that were producing marginal results or that I wasn’t really enjoying all that much anymore.
A great example of this is Instagram, I’ve talked about that in a previous episode. When I say working best what I mean is producing the desired results, which for me is working with more clients that I absolutely adore and are best suited for the type of coaching that I do in a way that aligns with how I want to run my business. And with this radical honesty came the need to further deepen my trust in the principle of constraint and focus that I use to create value for myself and my clients.
This meant really leaning into uncertainty, of course, everything’s always uncertainty. But I have a tendency to like to try and create false certainty through more action. I know a lot of my clients think this is true as well. This is just a thought error that I still sometimes catch myself in. And the thought error being that if I take enough action, I will guarantee some outcome. But this just isn’t possible.
And in this case, it was bringing together my next group of clients for Out Of Overwhelm. And yes, you absolutely have to take actions to produce results, but actions aren’t the most important part. There’s lots of ways to hit a goal, lots of strategies, lots of actions, and it starts with how you’re thinking and feeling. That’s what drives your actions and produces results. And that’s why I’m always focused on the mindset paired with the strategy, whether that’s I’m working with my clients or I’m working with myself as my own client.
The other way that I had to get even more radically honest with myself was about my capacity, both the hours required to complete something and my emotional bandwidth. And let’s be honest, I did not always like what I was presented with when I was honest. And I had to learn to be honest with myself regardless.
And this really meant being more aware of when I would tell myself it won’t take that long. It’s a sneaky little phrase, but my brain loves to offer it up. And I know that so many of you are having that thought too when you say yes to things. But guess what, it always takes longer.
This also meant sometimes having to say no to a few things that I would have liked to have said yes to in the moment, but that weren’t ultimately moving me closer to my goals, both in terms of my time goal of reducing the five hours and my business goals, which is attracting those best fit clients who I want to serve in my business.
Another place radical honesty showed up was being honest with myself about when I was sneaking in work. Those little moments where I’m like, “Oh, I’ll just check my email,” or, “I’ll just respond to this one thing, I’m just going to write this one thing down.” And sometimes this was just I had the thought loop of I want to get more done, I want to get ahead, right? So I had to manage that.
But sometimes the sneaking in work was because I was trying to avoid doing something or being present with something in my personal life or feeling some type of discomfort emotionally with newly open space in my calendar. This is something I see clients go through regularly when we start to reduce their hours. It can be kind of uncomfortable to have that open space when you’re used to being busy.
In my case, I wouldn’t have said that I was super busy, I was really focused and would get a lot done during the week. But I was used to having a certain amount of time filled. And so when I was reducing, I had space that I hadn’t fully navigated how I wanted to utilize and what that would feel like to have that new space.
And what that means, really, is I had to be willing to feel urges to work and not respond to them. And also not use work as a buffer against restlessness or boredom and really starting to be present and allowing that experience to be there. So I’ll just highlight that even though reducing the hours was something that I wanted, there was still part of me that resisted reducing the hours because of that discomfort. And nothing had gone wrong there, it just was part of the process and I had to be honest about it.
The last thing I want to share about this radical honesty is that I had to be someone who could create honesty and awareness around the rules that I created, both in my life and business. I love to create rules subconsciously and then I see myself doing it and I go, oh, who said that? Like where did that come from? Why does it have to be that way? And I continue to find different ways that this is showing up.
And so with the goal of reducing the hours, I found more of these rules about the way things had to be done. Whether that was the amount of prep that I allowed myself for the podcast, or the number of events that I was going to do for the launch. Some of these were rules that I picked up from other people, or just some that I created for myself. So it was almost like I had to create some of these rebel vibes in myself, to break my own rule.
The second area that I want to talk about is perfectionism. Reducing my work hours highlighted areas where perfectionism was still very much present. Now, because this is something that I worked on a lot over the years, perfectionism wasn’t holding me back from creating my goals and going after what I wanted in life and business the way that it used to. But as I fine tuned the hours I was working, this definitely was showing up.
And this really required me to become someone who was willing to tweak and prepare much, much less than I had been doing. And that also meant being someone who trusted that what I had done was enough and great as is. I find so often for my clients, when we think we’re doing C work, like on an A to F grade scale, our C is really like everyone else’s A. And this was such a great example of this playing out for me in real time.
And on the backside, if it ended up not being that great, I had to be someone who trusted myself enough that if I did mess up something or I missed something I’d be kind to myself and proud of myself no matter what. One of the big areas I saw this showing up was with edits and approvals of things that would be produced by my team and then come back to me.
And I really had to be willing to release that tight grip on the edits and approvals for things that I was being picky about, but probably wouldn’t make a measurable difference. I really had to lessen that control and replace it with trust to become someone who can feel good about deciding what good enough looks like, and really redefining good enough.
And for those of you who just got kind of twitchy when I mentioned the words “good enough,” I’m not talking about settling or making radical errors in your business and overlooking them. I’m talking about little things like where the text spacing wasn’t quite right. Or I’d be reviewing an email where I was really rethinking and rethinking which lines would be bolded for easy scannability.
You don’t have to get sloppy with your work to still reclaim the time from addressing perfectionistic tendencies. I also had to become someone who was willing to not hit my goal of reclaiming five hours immediately. Pretty soon after I got started on this journey, I realized that even in my goals there was perfectionism. This whole process started about four months ago and it’s only been about one and a half months that I’ve been consistently at the five hours less.
What I realized was that I had this perception that I would just magically drop time from my week and I would say, “Oh, I’m going to cut five hours.” And then it would just happen. And this is so funny, right? And it was such a great experience for me, as a coach, reminding myself of where clients are when they start this journey for themselves.
And when I didn’t magically drop that time, this is really when I could have given up. It’s where I see clients want to give up. When we don’t see those immediate results, or we don’t see the full results right away, and then we make that mean that we aren’t capable or it’s never going to happen for us. That’s not how goals actually work, but for those of us with perfectionistic tendencies, that’s what our brain tells us the process is supposed to be like.
And with that, we have to allow for feelings of frustration to bubble up of not getting it right the first time or for many weeks after that. And really being committed to continuing the process of evaluating and implementing what you learn and keeping those evaluations going until you hit the end result. Because that’s what gets you there, is the commitment to the end result, not getting it right the very first time.
The last area I want to highlight for you is about relationships. I had to become someone who further strengthened my relationship with myself and also reevaluated the relationship between me and my business. This is something that, again, has been a work in progress for years and I know that it will continue to be so. But reducing my hours gave me a circumstance, really, that brought up more of this to explore and work through.
This was definitely work I had not done when I was running my interior design business. And I can look back now and see how I really used my business and all the certifications, you know, passing the NCIDQ, the LEED AP, being on the board of ASAD, how I used all of that as a source of validation to justify my self-worth, and then asking my business to fulfill all of my needs, right? No pressure there.
Oh my gosh, if that was a person and I was like, you need to validate me, tell me I’m worthy, fulfill all my needs. That is a heavy burden to bear, but we do it to our businesses. When I was looking at my relationship with my business and the internal work that I’ve been doing over the last several months, it’s really been this time focused on seeing myself as a separate entity from my business. Just like the work you do as an interior designer, and the work I did when I was practicing, and even now in my coaching business.
It’s very personal work that we do. I put my name behind everything I do, just like you do. And that has the potential to create a lot of pressure, which then feeds into overworking, over controlling and over obsessing, which all takes a lot of time. I want you to think about this, if your worth as a person is dependent on you doing things perfectly and always hitting your goals, there’s a lot on the line. It makes complete sense that your subconscious brain would want to work against what you outwardly express as a desire to work less.
It’s in a protective mode, right? Because of that thought error, if I do more, if I achieve more, then I will be more. I will be better. So it’s trying to protect you from something that isn’t actually linked. I talked about that a little bit in the episode where I shared about how you aren’t charging for your value as a human, you’re charging clients for the value that you bring through your services. It’s very different.
The lesson that I repeatedly learn over and over again, and that my clients begin to learn as well, is that when I am nice to myself and I believe in myself independently of results, the need to hustle goes away. I enjoy my work more. I’m more efficient because I’m not overthinking. There really is this huge ripple effect with this one, and it has everything to do with who you’re being and how you treat yourself as the CEO and employee in your interior design business.
If this concept of having a relationship with something like yourself or your business, someone that’s not outside of you, like a partner or a friend or a family member is intriguing to you, you’ll definitely want to check out my latest interview with Luann Nigara on your relationship with time. I’ll put the link in the show notes so you can listen to that one.
All right, those are the three areas that I wanted to highlight for you; radical honesty, perfectionism, and relationship to yourself and your business. What I wanted most in sharing these two episodes on how to reclaim five hours of work per week, is that it’s not just about the strategy, it’s not just about the mindset. It’s both. When you combine these two things, the mindset and the strategy, this is really where lasting, sustainable change is made and goals are achieved.
This is the work I do with clients and you can do with me with my support inside Out Of Overwhelm. This is your last chance to join before 2024. I’m shipping out the planners and workbooks to clients this week, and I have a space for you. To get started this month, all you have to do is go to the link in the show notes, fill out a quick form that I use just to ensure it’s the right fit for you. And then we can get started.
In the next episode, I’m going to be sharing three different ways to get work done efficiently in your interior design business, both on the back end and for your client work. Until then, I’m wishing you a beautiful week. I’ll talk to you in the next episode.
Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
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