To-do lists don’t work. You may think they do. But they don’t.

You may prefer to use post-it note reminders; cover your desk and screen with those pesky yellow tabs that always seem to fall off at precisely 74 minutes after you’ve stuck them. But these don’t work either.

There may be many ways that you are using to-do lists or post-it notes. Some people have one piece of paper that they start on a Monday and add to throughout the week. When you run out of space at the bottom, you write vertically down the side or add speech bubbles in any white space left. And then when you’ve run out space, you start to staple extra pages together that ends up as a tattered document that looks like a prop from a Pirates of the Caribbean film.

Others diligently start a new list each and every morning, transferring everything that hadn’t been crossed out from the day before, to a new piece of paper. There are often several items that have been transferred for weeks on end; you don’t remember when exactly those first appeared but they just keep being added to the fresh list, pretending they are just as important as all the other items on the list.

And then there are the online to-do listers. Wow … never has there been so much pleasure in having limitless space to categorise, colourise and prettify your to-do list. And don’t worry if any tasks go from green to amber to urgent red … there’s always the snooze button to click to send it down a few priorities.

No matter what kind of to-do lister you are, there’s every chance that you also spend a lot of your time blaming the fact that you have no time to get things done. You sniff out productivity tips and spend money on planners and goal setting diaries but at the end of every week, you still scratch your head and wonder where the past 5 days have gone.

Why is it that you feel stuck in the busy-ness of emails, client prep work, meetings, attending events, grocery shopping, getting the car serviced and walking the dog?

And that you never really find the time to do the stuff that is going to grow your business?

If you recognise yourself in any of these to-do listers, you are not alone. Whether your list making is an addiction, where you find yourself writing things down only so you can cross them off (come on … we’ve all done that, haven’t we?), or it’s simply the only way you know how to remember the things that need doing … you need to stop.

To-do lists are fine for those 3 or 4 admin things that have got to be done before 11 am but as a way of helping you be productive and get the projects done that are going to move your business forward, then they’ll ruin you.

Here’s why:

1. No dates – without a date for something to be done by, it has a habit of never being done. You will pick the things on the list that feel easier and leave the stuff that feels harder for another day. So without any done-by dates, your to-do list tasks are filtered by emotions rather than a sense of discipline or urgency.

2. No order of priority – I know you may kid yourself that your tasks are categorised but creating headings and subheadings is usually done because of procrastination and avoidance rather than any resemblance to a plan. Pretty pens and colour highlighters are signs that you may just don’t want to do (or know how to) what’s on your list.

2. Wrong stuff – the only time I believe a to-do list is to be used is for your daily tasks and admin stuff. The one piece of paper that you have on your desk that keeps you on track for that invoice you need to send or thank you note to a client. Most to-do lists have stuff like “Do Website” or “Sort out social media content plan”. These are NOT to-do list tasks … these are projects and need to be treated as such.

Without dates and prioritisation and focusing on the wrong stuff, you will find it incredibly difficult to grow and build your business. So if to-do lists and post-it notes don’t work, what’s the answer?

As boring and dull as it sounds it is good old-fashioned planning.

Now I get that most entrepreneurs and creatives hate planning. Your brains are often not naturally wired to put things into logical order or be able to timeline a project. But that doesn’t mean you can’t start exercising your planning muscles, because if you truly desire growth in your business and you want to get out of the rut of your business trundle, then start exercising you must.

A good plan simply means two things:

1. Start with the end in mind – decide on a date with said project (such as the new website or develop a new programme) needs to be completed by and from this you work backwards. This is I know hard because, in theory, there is no “need to” about it. You can quite happily trundle along for months and even years without your website finished or new programme sorted. This is why it’s critical that you, as the CEO of your business, makes a decision on a specific date.

And not a “by end of April” kind of date … I mean which day and date, and perhaps even time.

2. Milestones – Once you’ve fixed your date for whatever project you want to be completed, there will usually be 2 or 3 milestones along the way. With your website project, it could be along the lines of copy & site architecture created and the first draft. For your new programme plan and smaller projects, it could be mapping out the content and being clear on what you’re offering, then opening up invite list and having content ready for new clients. Don’t over complicate this process but you simply can’t avoid finding the space and the time to do this. It will only be hard because you’re in the to-do list mindset and you’re thinking in vertical lists. Exercise and stretch out your planning muscle and you’ll get better at thinking at horizontal timelines.

Every time one of my GID School students or Momentum members feels overwhelmed or frustrated by the lack of time they feel they have, taking the time out to plan out their business growth projects, put dates in their diaries and create a timeline of tasks, the sigh of relief is huge.

The weight of busy-ness is lifted off their shoulders and they actually realise how much time they do have to spare, compared to the frenetic chaos of running their businesses from to-do lists and post-it notes.

It’s why I run quarterly 90 Day Planning Mornings for my clients, to help give them not only the process and structure but also space and time to get it done.

If you would like to know about the topic of planning and get a practical lesson on how to turn your business vision into do-able and highly achievable 90 Day Plans, then check out my next Playing Your Bigger Game event happening on the 24th November. It’s one of the topics that I am focusing on during the day.

How long do you keep on pushing?

This was the question I asked myself a few years ago. It was the start of 2014 and I realised I couldn’t keep going the way I had been.

From the outside, I had a successful coaching business. I had a steady flow of 1-2-1 clients, had launched several successful online programmes and was running a membership site teaching social media to 100+ members.

But inside, I was knackered.

Worn out running a treadmill business.

Although I could make money, it was transient; as soon as money came in, it went straight back out again. So if I wanted to make more money, I thought I had to create another programme and get promoting again. And then again the next month. And the next.

I wanted to grow. I wanted to play a bigger game.

But I was using a push energy that meant I felt I was working harder and harder just to stay in the same place.

I know now that I wasn’t alone in feeling like this. The marketing treadmill is an easy place to get stuck on and yet can be incredibly tough to jump off. And this is why I want to share some of the lessons I’ve learnt over the past few years that have helped me get off the treadmill and start growing a scalable business, whilst making my health, wellbeing and downtime a priority.

1) It’s not your fault, it’s the fault of your marketing system

When you sell yourself – your IP, expertise, time or knowledge – it’s easy to get emotionally caught up with the whole selling aspect of business. If you put your heart and soul into your marketing, each rejection can feel like a personal insult.

Are you really as good as you say you are? Should you be charging those prices? There are bigger and better businesses out there … who am I to be offering what I do?

Now imagine if you had a process to attract new leads and a system that helped those people to buy from you. You would still be personally involved and ensuring that these people felt connected and engaged with you throughout the process but you didn’t have to think about what to do at each stage.

You had clear steps laid out, personalised scripts and follow-up communications all ready to go. All you had to was to trigger each part of the process depending on what action your prospect took.

Without a system in place, your marketing is random at best. And random means you have no idea what works and what doesn’t. So when you don’t make the sales you expect, the only thing you can do is to blame yourself.

2) Stop generating leads and focus on the follow-up

Your marketing system is broken down into 5 core stages: lead generation, nurturing, sales conversion, delivery and repeat referrals. Most business owners focus their marketing efforts in the lead generation stage, spending time on social media, at conferences and networking events and maybe even paid advertising. But they rarely go beyond this first stage and give no thought to the follow-up; the nurturing process, the sales conversion and beyond.

When you are stuck on the marketing treadmill the only thing you do is to lead generate. You have to make sales so you have find new clients … find new leads … got to find new people to sell to.

It’s inefficient and highly exhausting. I have the adrenal fatigue hangover to prove this!

If you are in start-up mode then this is the place to spend your time and energy. But there comes a point that you have to get your head out of your to-do list and look strategically at your marketing.

Stop running on that treadmill. Stand still for a day or two and you’ll see the leads dripping through the holes in your lead bucket. That person who messaged you on LinkedIn about your proposal, still waiting to hear back from you. The dozen or so emails you sent out four weeks ago but never got a reply. The pile of business cards sitting in a pile that you collected at the conference two months ago.

Contacts and leads all waiting for you to do something with; to start nurturing with articles of interest or a video you’ve just recorded.

3) You can’t do it all yourself

No matter how small and beautiful you want your business, you can never and should never try to do it all yourself.

I have been a control freak in the past. I think it goes hand in hand with the push energy, seeking perfectionism and an urgent desire to get things done. I know that when I have been in this mode, I find myself too busy to delegate.

It’s quicker to do it myself. I need to learn this first before asking someone else to do it for me. I haven’t go the money right now to pay someone else.

All lies.

It may not be quicker to delegate first time round but take the time to document your request for help, give clear instructions and make it a repeatable task, it will save you hours and hours in the future.

You don’t need to learn something to enable you to delegate, particularly when it comes to online marketing. Understand what you want to achieve and how it fits into your overall strategy but don’t waste your time watching a tonne of how-to videos on YouTube when someone else could do it for in a tenth of the time.

You can’t afford NOT to pay someone if you want to get off the treadmill and step up your game.

My advice is always to hire someone BEFORE you need them. Wait until you absolutely have to hire and you’ll find the time pressures you are under mean that you often abdicate rather than delegate, which often leads to frustrated cock-ups and the other person not delivering to your expectations.

If you want to play a bigger game, you have to have a team, even if that team is just a +1 to begin with.

4) Your vitality is critical to your business success

I’ve learnt to my detriment that push energy is not good for my health and wellbeing. And particularly for a woman-of-a-certain-age. I was blaming my fatigue and brain fog on menopause. I hit the wall two years after my dad’s death in 2012 and knew adrenal fatigue was probably to blame. But it wasn’t until this year that I realised I wasn’t taking my health as seriously as I should have been.

Re-engineering my business, putting in systems and building a team have all been important changes to helping me take a more strategic approach to my business. But a missing piece of the puzzle for me was the importance of vitality.

To make changes such as the ones I’ve made in my own business, you need stamina. You need a clear head (God, how I hate my brain fog & fatigue … sometimes weeks of frustration of feeling I’m living in an 80-year body!). And, most importantly I believe, you need to love what you do. Without a joie de vivre, your business is just a job. And I know you didn’t go do all this just to have a job, yes?

When so much marketing advice and courses are focused on push, promotion, getting the next lot of clients, it’s no surprising that so many of you get sick (and yes, quite literally) of following the “get clients now” approach month in and month out.

5) Successful marketing is an inside out job

The best systems and marketing funnels in the world will not work if you are not aligning yourself to the level you want to go in your business. My clients come to work with me because they want the practical, down to earth advice that I give. I teach marketing systems that incorporate digital alongside in-person conversations and traditional, offline communications (yes, stamps on a letter do work!).

But over the past year or more, my work has become transformational because of the inner work that we now do together. Understanding how your inner critic works and how your resistance kicks in as you start to charge more or work with a different level of clients. Your inner game is just as important – and sometimes more so – as the outer work that you put into your website, social profiles, content creation and marketing systems.

When you are pushing to get your marketing to work, you simply don’t give yourself any space to discover this power you have within you. And, believe me, this power is incredible once you begin to slow down.

It feels counterintuitive but when you allow yourself to slow down, you speed up and grow.

Having been in control of my own career and income for the past 13 years, there’s one thing that I am absolutely sure of.

Being your own boss is an exhilarating and fun roller coaster ride and yet, at times, one of the most emotionally sucking jobs that you can ever hope to hold down.

I wouldn’t swap what I do for anything. I’m basically unemployable now, but I have the ability to do anything and be anything I want in my business. I hold the budget strings. I decide on my targets. I can do anything I want.

And there’s your bitter sweet pill you take every day.

Freedom. Yeah!

Oh shit … it’s all down to me. Not yeah!

There are two facets to running your business. There’s the external facet that encompasses the financials, sales, marketing and operations. All the practical, logical and process aspect to setting up and growing a profitable business.  

And then there’s the internal facet – the inner game of business.

My first 20 or so years of working was spent in full pelt Superwoman mode and not surprisingly, I’ve struggled with the odd system crash here and there. Working hard, pushing through, smashing SMART goals … we’ve all done it, haven’t we?

And I’m a natural mechanic. One my ninja skills, which is why a lot of clients come work with me, is that I’m good at the systematic side of business; putting in processes, platforms, tech and teams to enable a business to grow as simply and profitably as possible.

However, for the past few years, I’ve been working in more depth around the inner aspect of running a business and discovered that, despite having the best sales and marketing systems set up in the world, there’s absolutely no doubt that your business can screw with you.

Screw Number One

“I’m not ready yet. I need to take another course before I can charge that kind of price.”

When there’s no structured career path to follow or quarterly targets to review with your boss to get your next pay rise, it’s easy to feel there’s no validation in what you can offer. OK, you need a medical degree to be a brain surgeon but do you really need a MBA or NLP Prac to be able to offer executive coaching?

Being your own boss means exactly that. Within legal and moral standards, you can do what you jolly well like. Whether anyone will spend money with you will, of course, depend on your ability to deliver the results you promise. But essentially, you do what you like, yes?

However, a big problem I see is that too many professionals question their 20+ years experience and natural talents. They worry that they aren’t good enough to be doing what they really want to be doing.

I had a conversation recently with a friend of mine who has had a wealth of experience in consulting firms, such as McKinsey. She started off as a ACA qualified accountant and went leaps and bounds in her career over the next 15 years, managing multi-currency projects and MBOs. Once she started a family, she stepped away and decided to work for herself and for the past few years, had been kept busy with project management contracts she secured through her known network.  

Recently she was able to take on more work as her family got older and a couple of the companies she’d been working with asked her to facilitate sessions with the Board of Directors and start supporting a few of the members as an ongoing coach.

But when we spoke, she was doubting her level of experience. She was asking me if she should take some form of Executive Coaching qualification before she made this official. And did she think it was ok to keep charging the equivalent of her daily project management rate of £450+VAT?

Can you see being her own boss was screwing with her mind?

Because she was going into new territory – working with clients in a different capacity than she had started with them – she felt she needed official validation in the form of a qualification before she could put her prices up to reflect the different level of service she was offering.

Her clients could see what she was capable of. But with no boss to set her targets or give her clear career guidelines, she couldn’t see for herself that it was perfectly OK to say yes to more Executive Coaching work without getting qualified first.

Now of course, there may be a point that she does want to develop her executive coaching skills but to say “No” to something that a known client was asking to take on and she was excited about the prospect of doing something more than project management … just because she didn’t have the necessary letters after her name … well, to me that’s crazy.

Screw Number Two

“I can’t double my prices for what I’m already offering. I need to add more stuff into the package so that my new clients really see the value they are getting.”

This comes up A LOT in my GID School calls. When business owners join GID School, they are usually selling by the hour and offering ad hoc sessions. They often base what they’re charging on a previous corporate salary so, for example, a salary of £75,000 equates to approximately £35 an hour. Thus anything over £50 an hour, their mind starts playing tricks on them and questions whether they can justify their fees.

And when you throw in what your local marketplace is currently charging for what you offer, it’s easy to really have the wobbles when you contemplate prices of £100 an hour plus.

One of my current GID students is a hypnotherapist by profession, which is a highly competitive market place. Most people who search for an hypnotherapist either ask their friends or go to Google. It then becomes a process of price comparison as every hypnotherapist starts to look the same so the simplest way of deciding who to call is often based on price. So it is a challenge to charge more than £60 a session if you haven’t got a reputation and platform such as Paul McKenna.

But one area she has been working in has been stress, particularly in the field of Chronic Fatigue. So by positioning herself as a specialist, there’s an immediate separation from “all the rest” and a few simple tweaks by offering a structured programme, rather than selling ad hoc sessions, you can see how you can increase your profitability and average spend of your clients.

But there’s been this burning desire to create more “stuff” to justify her price increases. It couldn’t be as simple as £60 x 6 sessions and then double it … what else could she bolt on and add to her process of transforming the client to justify this level of pricing?

Having worked with clients such as her for the past 13 years, I know there is absolutely no need to spend your next 3 months creating online modules and fancy membership sites, just so you can justify your prices to your clients.

Because the real truth is that it’s YOU that you are trying to justify your prices to. It’s YOU that thinks you aren’t good enough … rarely your clients, especially the ones who see dramatic transformations and results from the work you do together.

Screw Number Three

“I’d love to XYZ but I just don’t know how or where to start.”

One of the most crushing questions to any dreams or new business ideas you can ask yourself is “How do I …?”

Most business owners and self-employed professionals are naturally creative. Ideas are not a problem when you allow yourself time and space to download them and let them come out.

But nothing stops an idea dead that a flurry of questions all starting with a “But how would I do that?”

As soon as your mind goes into HOW mode, you’re using a different part of your brain. The part that’s logical and practical … you start to process information and start trying to find answers.

Now the problem with this, is that you rarely do have the answers; right there and then. The simple truth is that if you knew what to do, you wouldn’t be brainstorming the problem … you’d be getting on taking inspired action. You just would instinctively know what to do and the process would be energising and fulfilling.

But if your idea is to create a brand new online programme, or a community project, or a new membership site, or a new way of working … if it’s new to you, there’s every chance you just won’t know what to do.

You are NOT the person who has all the answers and yet, when you work for yourself, it’s real easy to feel that you are the one who has to fix everything. You are the one that SHOULD know what to do … and yet when you don’t, your dreams get crushed.

When you were working for someone else, you were probably working in a team. You had meetings, you had water cooler chats, you had reviews with your boss. Although you may have been responsible for projects or new ideas, you didn’t do it alone, did you?

So why is it that when you are your own boss, you try to work it out all for yourself?

And when you internalise the HOW, it becomes real easy for your logical part of your brain to talk yourself out of your idea. Your big idea is rapidly eroded away because you simply don’t know how to get started and you end up playing small once again.

I know this to be true because of the number of times this has happened to me. Being my own boss means that I have no accountability. And when I have no accountability, I can do what I like. And what that has meant over the years is that if a brilliant idea just becomes too hard, too scary, too complicated, too big … all sorts of excuses come out and the idea passes on by.

One of the misconceptions I had about being successful was that I had to be self-motivated. But boy, does self-motivation suck. It’s not only a lonely path to take but believing that you have to be self-motivated to run a successful business, means that you are relying on unnatural super powers.

I greatly admire the traits of highly motivated people but I know now that a lot of the people I once thought were self-motivated, actually aren’t.

They all use other people to help them stay on track and use as sounding boards for new ideas and project. You can’t do it all by yourself.

So reading this through, I wonder how many other screws are coming to the forefront of your mind. How many times has being your own boss screwed with you … letting thoughts talk you out of bigger plans … feeling lost and confused so you procrastinate and work hard at simply staying still?

Becoming aware of the inner game that your business plays with you is a big part of moving forward. And I love how my clients are able to laugh out loud when they catch themselves being royally screwed up by stuff that is simply not the truth.

Let me know below what this has helped you realise. I’d love to hear your stories, too.