I’m Rebranding the Podcast

“If you are in a place of struggle right now with your business, it doesn’t need to stay that way, but the changes that need to be made need to start with you.” -Kim Sutton

Holy Moley! I did something BIG! 

I rebranded the podcast. 

This is the first episode under the new name and shares an explanation for the rebranding and what you can expect from me and the podcast in the future. 

Thank you, as always, for supporting me and the work I do through your continued engagement. Your downloads, comments, and feedback mean the world to me. 

XOXOXO

Kim

Highlights:

01:55 Work Smarter Not Harder Podcast with Kim
04:43 Why Rebranding Was Needed
07:13 Permit Yourself to Take a Time Off
11:45 A Change Happened!
14:34 Framework L.I.V.E.B.E.T.T.E.R
18:22 Change Starts with You 

Resources

• Sign up for the  10-Day Work Smarter Not Harder Challenge

Books 

• Dotcom Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Growing Your Company Online with Sales Funnels by Russel Brunson 
• Traffic Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Filling Your Websites and Funnels with Your Dream Customers by Russel Brunson 
• Expert Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Converting Your Online Visitors into Lifelong Customers by Russel Brunson

Inspirational Quotes:

03:53 “I need to be conscious about sharing the scars and not the wounds… Life isn’t always positive. ” -Kim Sutton 

05:33 “We can’t always be pushing. We can’t always be ‘productive.’ Sometimes, the most productive thing that we can do for ourselves is to give ourselves some time off.” -Kim Sutton 

09:50 “Pushing really hard does not promote productivity.” -Kim Sutton

15:55 “Building our business was supposed to give us more freedom and happiness and time to spend with our families, it wasn’t supposed to make us feel miserable.” -Kim Sutton

16:53 “ I want to achieve my dreams. But without my family by my side, it’s not going to be worth anything.” -Kim Sutton

19:11 “If you are in a place of struggle right now with your business, it doesn’t need to stay that way, but the changes that need to be made need to start with you.” -Kim Sutton

Meet Your Host!

Kim Sutton is a Business and Marketing Automation Mentor, Speaker, and Author. She is the host of the Positive Productivity Podcast. Having been through so much including depression, domestic violence, and lack of self-care, Kim’s mission is to help her clients be positively productive by empowering them to achieve success without the burnout. She believes that positive productivity stems from system+support+self-care. Positive productivity is not about perfection, it’s about having Prioritized Purposeful Actions. Today, Kim is out to help fellow entrepreneurs reclaim their lives and make their business work. 

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Holy moly, I am 731 episodes into my podcast, and I have decided to change the name. In this episode of the podcast, previously known as Positive Productivity, I’m going to talk about why I’m rebranding the podcast, and what it’s going to look like for you, a valued member of my community. Stay with me and hear all about it. 

Welcome to the Work Smarter, Not Harder Podcast. I’m your host, Kim Sutton. In July 2016, after spending 18 months working 20 to 22 hours a day, seven days a week in my business, I found myself extremely sleep deprived, anxious and depressed. My family hardly saw me, and I was falling short on my commitments to myself and my clients. Something had to change if my business, my family and I were going to become financially, emotionally and physically stable. And many things did change. Now, I’m on a mission to ensure purposeful parent preneurs like you never go through pain like I did. 

Here on the Work Smarter, Not Harder Podcast, my guests and I are eager to empower you with the strategies we’ve used to work smarter as entrepreneurs. We don’t want you to be broke, broken or burnt out. We want you to set up the systems and support your need to get away from your business and back to the people and activities you love. Ready to hear more? Let’s hop into today’s show.

Dear friend, I am nervous as heck to be sharing with you this news today. The podcast which I launched in October of 2016 as Positive Productivity is now going to be called, Work Smarter, Not Harder Podcast with Kim Sutton. And I feel that I owe you, my listeners, an explanation for how and why this shift came about. The name Positive Productivity honestly hit me out of nowhere. It is the name of my company. It’s an LLC, and I have it all over. I’m still going to be keeping Positive Productivity. But over the course of the last 100 episodes or so, I’ve realized that I have great resistance to the name. For starters, positive. I am a believer that we should do our best to stay positive through whatever life throws our way. But let’s just be honest for a moment, life is not always positive.

This year, and I’m recording this episode in 2021, this year has been a bit of a challenge for me, not in my business, my business has done better than ever. I’m working far less than I ever had before and making far more (I’m not sharing that to brag, I’m just stating it as a fact). But personally, this year has been a challenge. My husband and I have been dancing around the idea of divorce a few times. And honestly, as of the date that I record this episode, we’re dancing around that topic again. I don’t want you to feel bad for me, I’m going to be sharing more of that journey as time goes on, but I really need to be conscious about sharing the scars and not the wounds.

I don’t want you to think that I don’t love my husband because I always will, but there are some things that I am no longer willing to settle for. I don’t want to throw him under the bus though, so I’m going to continue praying that we can work our way through this. But the point of me sharing this with you is… Life isn’t always positive. And I feel like with a name, like Positive Productivity, that I should have only been sharing the positive stuff. I know that might have been a limiting belief of mine, but it was causing resistance and I wanted to move past it.

Then there’s the issue of productivity. I am a firm believer in setting up the systems and strategies that help us focus on the work that we need to do get it done, get back to our families, but I found myself working. I should actually be more honest, I find myself working around the clock all too often. Not because I’m up against hard deadlines or I’ve over committed to work, but I’m too attached to this word productivity. I was speaking need to feel guilty when I was spending time off of work. 

And if you don’t know this about me already, I’m a gamer. I love to play video games, especially on my PC! And when I would be playing games when I would be, you know, done with work for the day and spend an hour or two playing a game, I would feel guilty because I wasn’t continuing to push forward in my business.

Dear friend, we can’t always be pushing. We can’t always be “productive.”

Sometimes, the most productive thing that we can do for ourselves, is give ourselves some time off. Go take a bubble bath, go play video games, take a bike ride or walk around the block, take a vacation, go out to eat, play board games with your kids, binge watch your favorite TV show. I don’t want you to ever feel like I am going to judge you for taking time away from your business. I’m actually expecting you to, because taking time away from my business has been a sanity saver for me.

Just prior to launching this podcast in 2016, I went through a major struggle with depression and anxiety caused by sleep deprivation. I was working 20 to 22 hours a day, seven days a week for 18 months. And that extreme work schedule put me into such a serious dark place that I was nearly ready to end everything. With the word Productivity in my podcast name, I felt like I was not providing space for you, or myself, to take time away from work.

So, I hope you’re listening: You have my permission to give yourself permission. I’m going to say that again. You have my permission to give yourself permission, although you don’t need my permission, all you need is yours to take time off! If you’re like me, though, you might experience a downside, or an upside depending on how you want to look at it, to taking time off. 

Here’s an example. I decided mid-morning earlier this week, to take a bubble bath. I was stressed, I stinked. Yes, admittedly, I stinked, and I needed to get cleaned up so I decided, you know what? I don’t have any calls this morning. “I don’t have any pressing deadlines. All my work is in good shape, I’m going to take a bath.” So, I went up to the bathroom, ran the bubble baths, got in. And all of a sudden, bam! new idea. Bam! Another new idea. Bam! another idea. Now, between you and me, those ideas were the intro, the outro in the mid roll script for this rebranded podcast. But the ideas came to me because I wasn’t forcing myself to work.

That bubble bath was cut short because I wasn’t prepared for ideas. I don’t know what I was thinking. I have Chronic Idea Disorder, I should have gone to the restroom, to the bathroom with a notepad ready to take notes. Yes, I had my phone in there, but I have such a fear of dropping my phone into the tub that I won’t even try to use a notepad to write down scripts like that. And Siri and I do not get along, I can’t say her name that loud because she always likes to chime in and she’s right next to me right now. We are not Kimpatible, (Get it? Kimpatible). It takes more time for me to correct her typos than it does for me to just write it down myself, so I won’t.

The point is often relaxing, getting away from work helps me find the creativity and the ideas that I was looking for at my desk. But I found that pushing really hard does not promote productivity, at least for me. 

So yeah, Positive Productivity was not a name that was working for me anymore, and I was experiencing great resistance to recording any new episodes. This year 2021, I have set up a theme of the month every month. And although I thought it would be easier to come up with content ideas, I was just really struggling. There have been so many months this year where maybe one episode go out, or two, but I was always behind the eight ball. I was creating content because I felt I needed to create it, rather than because I wanted to create it.

But then something changed. In September of 2021, I attended Funnel Hacking Live. One of my clients really wanted to go, they had bought two tickets, one for me, one for them, paid for all expenses, it was amazing. I had been wanting to go for years, so of course, when they offered me a ticket and all expenses paid, I said: “Heck, yes. Sign me up.” And then they cancelled out so I got to go by myself. Which although I love my client, I loved being there by myself. I could eat what I want, sleep when I wanted. You get the picture? But most importantly, I loved the event.

I had had Russell Brunson books, expertsecrets.com, Traffic Secrets on my shelf for years, but I had never read them. When I got back from Funnel Hacking Live, I started reading Expert Secrets. And there was a day that I was driving to pick up my oldest son from college. He was coming home for a weekend and I was listening to Expert Secrets in the car. Russell Brunson was talking about having a framework and I remember driving down Interstate 70 from Dayton to Columbus just thinking, “What is my framework?” What are the steps that if anybody interrupted me while I was giving a presentation, because that was a story that Russell had told in the book, that I would have no problem going back to my framework and picking up exactly where I left off? 

Now, I know there’s some spiritual and woowoo people who will say that they got an instant download from the universe, or whoever out there gives them their ideas. But I want to say, in this case, I received a download from God. Immediately after I asked that question to myself, it hit me what my framework was: Live better.

I want you to write out Live Better on a sheet of paper and put a period in between each letter. Now, know that if you write this on your computer, once you get to the double T’s and put the periods in between, it’s going to turn it into an emoji. It’s like a sobbing cry emoji and that’s not what this is supposed to look like. So that’s why I want you to write it down on a piece of paper and not on your computer.

This is my 10 step framework for working smarter, and not harder in your business. And in the next 10 episodes of the Work Smarter, Not Harder Podcast with me, Kim Sutton, I’m going to be going over a little bit of each step of this framework. I can teach you what I’ve learned over the past five years so that you can implement the same into your life. 

Dear friend, I don’t want you to wind up in a deep dark place like I did in 2016. I don’t want you to be contemplating ending it all because you’re so broke, broken and burnt out that you don’t know how you can continue another day. Building our business was supposed to give us more freedom and happiness and time to spend with our families, it wasn’t supposed to make us feel miserable and drive us to working 80 hours a week.

If building our business is going to drive us to the brink of insanity and to that darkest, lowest point, and if you’re not willing to set up a few systems and strategies in your business to bring you out of that deep dark place, then please, do yourself, and your family, and your loved ones a favor and just shut down your business today. Go find a job that you can work 40 hours a week, shut off your computer at the end of the day and go home and enjoy your nights and weekends with your family. Because your family is, I’m guessing, who you’re doing this for? Yes, you have dreams, I have dreams, and I want to achieve my dreams. But without my family by my side, it’s not going to be worth anything. I don’t want to see that be the case though. 

So, one more time, write down Live Better on a sheet of paper starting later this week. So episode number 732, we’re going to start working our way through the live better framework. I’m going to teach you these 10 steps, and I’m hoping that by the end of the 10th episode, you will start to see immediate changes in your life. You will also start to see immediate changes in your business. I want to see your life in business turnaround, like I have seen my business turnaround. I might be going through struggles right now in my marriage, but they’re not related to what’s going on in my business. 

Again, I’ll share more about that as future episodes go by, and when I’m not sharing from my wounds. But I could have never imagined two years ago, when my house was in a place of foreclosure or utilities were continuing to get shut off constantly, that financially and confidently (Confidently is not the right word, but I don’t know what better word to use), that my business would look like it does today. 

At the end of 2019, I was working 80 hours a week for a client who didn’t respect me and was not paying me as I deserve to be paid. Underneath that client, I had 20 clients that I was subcontracting for and they didn’t necessarily respect me either. Today, two years later, I’m making four times as much as I did then, and I’m working 10 to 20 hours a week instead of 80. I am not a bragger, I am not saying any of this to try to boast to you or to try to put my success in your face. I am sharing this with you because I want to give you hope.

If you are in a place of struggle right now with your business, it doesn’t need to stay that way, but the changes that need to be made need to start with you.

So come back in a couple days, tune in to episode number 732 and let’s get started on this Live Better framework of Work Smarter, Not Harder. I would love to hear what your thoughts are about the change in format to the show, so head on over to the show notes page at thekimsutton.com/731, and let me know what you think. Until the next episode my friend, Work Smarter, and Not Harder.