Make Progress NOT Excuses

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QUICK NOTES:

Do you find yourself making excuses for why you didn’t get things done or why you can’t do things?

Do you find it easy to blame your kids, significant others, personal drama, clients, pets, stubbed toe, etc. for not knocking items off your Prioritized Purposeful Action list? (If this is your first time here, we don’t do ‘Get Stuff Done’ lists within Positive Productivity. We take Prioritized Purposeful Actions to consistently get us closer to reaching out goals.)

Well, if I can reach my goals, do can you.

It’s time to make progress, not excuses.

I’m Kim Sutton, a wife, mom of five, podcaster, aspiring author and entrepreneur. I work with business and life coaches on their business and marketing automation, and have a passion for helping entrepreneurs eliminate their overwhelm.

I have, in the past, allowed my overwhelm to get inbetween me and progress.

I allowed myself to make excuses to cover up for my procrastination and a long list of limiting beliefs.

My friend, it’s time to stop making excuses and instead make progress.

I would love to hear what action you will take — and complete — this week. Share in the comments!

Be sure to like this video and share with those you feel would benefit from it. And subscribe to my channel to be notified when my next video goes live!

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TRANSCRIPTION:

We’re starting off this new week. We are two weeks into the year.

Just about right now, this is when a lot of people drop off of new year’s resolutions. And, I have been reading lately, Tony Robbins “Awaken the Giant Within.”

This book has been on my shelf for 10 years and I am just now getting around to actually digging into it and reading it.

So, the section that I’m in right now is inspiring our video today and it is talking about um, the questions that we ask ourselves.

(I’m still trying to figure out where I should be looking on this screen. So I want to make sure that you can see me looking at you.)

Um, but yeah, the questions that we ask ourselves, and that is going to be the topic of our next level Monday today.

Are you asking yourselves the right questions when something goes wrong?

Are you looking for opportunity? Or are you looking at, you know, what else can go wrong?

I remember, and I have to think what year this was it was  — probably 2014 or 2015 — our… one of our cars was repo’ed. We have two cars.

My son came into the house and he said, “Where’s Dave?”

Dave is my husband.

I said, “Oh he’s, he’s in our bedroom.”

He’s like, “Well, where’s this car?”

“What do you mean? ‘Where’s this car?'”

“Well, it’s not outside.”

I opened the door and I looked outside and it wasn’t around. It was gone.

We were going through a really tough period. This must have been  well, it had to be 2015 because our twins were born by then the end of 2015. We were going through a rough period.

We, we had had children that we weren’t expecting following a whole bunch of miscarriages.

I had had some difficult clients, to say the least, and we were just having a hard time bringing money in.

But I remember this one day, it was the winter when this happened, looking up at the sky and just saying, “God, what do you want from me? What else? What else? Really like what else can go wrong?”

But, in my learning, in my personal development that I’ve gone through since then, it’s not about what can go wrong even though sometimes, let me tell you, it feels like it.

It’s “What can I learn from this?”

2019 was a PhD level year for me. I learned so much about myself, so much about other people, so much about my faith and my integrity and my value and my confidence. But a lot of that came from asking, “Is this how I want to be in my life? How do I want to be in my life?” Maybe that’s even the better question.

One of my exercises that I’ve put together for myself is my next level Kim goal sheet. What does Kim look like in 10 years?

I want you to ask yourself that today,

• What does the you of the future look like?
• What are you doing then that you’re not doing now?
• What can you do now to set yourself up for the future?
• What can you learn out of the negative situation that happened this morning?
• How can you use that negative situation to help others?
• How can you use it to propel yourself into a better, brighter future?

Stop looking at what else can go wrong: Why did this happen to me? This isn’t fair. Why did it happen? Why can’t I find any clients?

Hello?

Instead of, Why can’t I find any clients?” try “Where is the best place for me to be looking?”

So many of my clients had been looking on, well, I would even say diversifying their social media platforms too much so they were trying to be everywhere instead of being on the one or two platforms that make the most sense for them.

So instead of saying, “Why can’t I find my clients?”, say, “How can I focus on that one platform to to utilize it, to find my clients? What do I need to do?”

Instead of asking “Wow am I going to get everything done today?” Ask, “What am, what would, what activities do I need to do today that are most important?”

Let me tell you, cleaning out your inbox is not the most important task for you today. Posting to social media is not the most important task for you today.

You are the expert in your business. There is content that only you can create.

I can’t have a team member come on and pretend to be me. They can try. I don’t know that they would enjoy it, but this is something that if I’m going to be going live, it’s something that only I can do. I can’t delegate that out.

But there are so many other activities in my company that I can delegate out. Email management, social media management and editing and producing the positive productivity podcast. There’s even client work that I can be delegating out.

In case this is your first time here with me, I, I’m Kim Sutton and I’m the host of the Positive Productivity podcast and I’m also a uh, business and marketing automation mentor for 6-7 figure business and life coaches.

I work with business and life coaches to build their marketing funnels, set up automation in their businesses that handles all the, if then situations. If somebody does this, then this happens. If somebody does this, this happens.

My goal is to take my clients away from their businesses and get them back into bed and back to the people and activities that they love in their life.

But unfortunately, when we’re asking ourselves the wrong questions, when we’re not doing, when we’re not acting on the right activities, then we don’t get the right results.

So what results do you want to see in your business this month?

We still have two weeks left in January of 2020 we still have 11 and a half months left in 2020. I don’t even want to say left. I want to say ahead of us.

So what questions are you going to ask yourself to get you to that next level? If you would like some help on this, I have a next level tracking sheet. I’m going to show you my revised version in just a second. But you can look down in the description for a link or if you’re watching on Facebook, you can type next level down below and you’ll get the next level tracking sheet.

I created for myself and trust me, the one that you’ll get for free looks much better than this, but a next level tracker sheet where I look at those activities that next level Kim does on a consistent basis and I give myself experience points on a daily basis for knocking them off.

It might sound funny by even taking a shower and putting on makeup earns me points.

Let’s face it. Busy entrepreneurs who are too busy being busy instead of focusing on being productive and doing the right things can easily find 10,000 other things to do then get cleaned up.

I know because I been there. There’s been so many days that I haven’t gotten showered. I have been on a roll for 2020, let me just be honest about that, but in 2019 there were so many calls that I just left the camera off because I didn’t want people to see me.

I’m not saying that showering and putting on makeup being makes me more productive, but it does allow me to feel more confident to to assert myself in videos and on client calls, but because I can show my face and that’s what next level Kim does.

So what does next level you do?

What activities does next level you do on a consistent daily, weekly, monthly basis that you can start doing now to take you to the next level.

Just think about it.

There’s one more important question that I want you to ask yourself.

Sometimes we need to let things go.

Let people go in our, in our business, in our personal life so that we can move on. There are people who are just way too much drama. There are activities that we are only doing for money we’re not doing because we love them. So what are those activities that you are doing?

Who are those people that you are working or associating with right now who are a pain in your bum? How can you politely say goodbye so that you can free up all of the energy all of the time? All of the focus, all of the drama, everything associated with those activities and give it to the activities and the people that you love to spend time with.

Next level you is not doing drama. Hopefully next level me does not to drama at all.

There are things that you need to let go of if you want to reach the next level and it all starts with asking the right questions.

I would love to hear what you think about this today. I would love to hear what questions you are going to start and end your day with. I haven’t even touched on that, so let me do that quick.

One of the things that Tony Robbins talks about is asking ourselves questions. He has a whole list of questions in the in this book that he asks himself or asked himself when he wrote it and I decided that every single morning I’m going to ask myself what would make today a really great day?

What would make today a really great day for you?

Post it in the comments below. I would love to hear, and there might be somebody else who posts a comment who could very well help you. There might be somebody reading the comments who sees what would make today a really great day for you and might know a way that you can achieve that. So think about that number one.

And then, at the end of the day, and I don’t recall this being on Tony’s list, but I want to ask myself, what am I grateful for today?

There’s so much to be grateful for. There is, I mean, my family that gives me love every day there’s, there’s food in the cabinets, there’s lights, there’s water dripping from the faucet. I don’t need to walk across a desert to get water with baskets on my shoulders. I mean, I am a klutz. I can, I can trip over my own feet. So the fact that I don’t need to walk miles for water is enough to be grateful for for me. I’m that the tornado that hit my town this weekend did not hit my house. I don’t, that’s a thought for me. I don’t even know if we have tornado insurance. I am grateful that my feet are warm. I’m grateful that my feet aren’t hot.

You know, what can you be grateful for today? There’s, there’s probably a list of a thousand a million things that you can be grateful for at the end of the day.

And I know that for me, giving myself that time to ask myself that question at the end of the day, allows me to free up the space from whatever stress has hit me in the day and go into sleep peacefully.

So, start your day and your day and run your day with meaningful questions that allow you to lead a more meaningful life.

I would love to see your comments and I would love to also see that you subscribe, like share this video. So do all the above share comment, like whatever you can do and turn on notifications so that you find out the next time that I put a video up.

Now with all this said, go forth and make it a positive and a productive day.