Transcription
I'm just going to say it. You've worked too hard to still be working this hard. You're accomplished. You're capable, but completely stretched. Then you've outgrown your systems and you are actually starting to really feel the pain. Lucky [clears throat] for you, in this video, I'm going to show you how to easily change all of that and put achieving even more success on easy mode.
As a neurosychologist who's helped hundreds of high achieving women now redesign an easier path to success, I know these shifts can really change everything. To start, let me show you the key to creating systems for success. So, recently in my program, Systemize Your Goals Accelerator, I had a new cohort off the ground running, and many women were already making new strides, hitting new goals within just a few weeks of being in my program. They were sticking with new habits. They were building consistent routines, and they were really on the fast track to a more efficient life.
Then, the holidays came around and when we reconvened our meetings after the holiday season, I was met with pure chaos. So many of my members were in complete panic mode because they were in sheer distress that they had fell off track with their systems over the holidays. And I say it like that because in my mind it was obvious and actually expected to fall off track during the holidays, which is what I tried to warn them before we took a break for the holidays. But my clients were still operating in the fantasy that starting new systems was about being perfect and being so consistent that you never fall off track. with love and holding their hand.
Before I help them get back on track, I had to set the record straight that falling off track is normal and actually should be expected and accounted for. It's kind of like a meditation practice. During meditation, the goal isn't to never have any distracting thoughts or never get distracted. The intention is to just notice when you're distracted and bring yourself back to the present moment. It's a practice of bringing yourself back. And systems are the same way. You should expect yourself to fall off track. You're a human. You're not a robot. The practice is just to know when you're off track and to bring yourself back. And in fact, you can systemize that.
So before we talk about these human first systems that can make success easier, I want to help you understand what a system actually is in the first place so that we're on the same page and it can make it easier for you to actually implement the systems I'm going to teach you into your life. Okay? So a teepee, think about it. It looks amazing. Woven fabric, beautiful design, a sacred creation, your ideas, your talent, your effort, that's the fabric. But a teepee only works because of those long sticks tied together at the top. Without those sticks, the whole thing collapses, and your genius is a beautiful blanket in the dirt. Systems are like those sticks. They're the quiet structure that lifts your genius off the ground and gives it shape and gives it purpose. And here's the beautiful thing about those sticks. They don't just hold everything up. They pull the fabric outward and upward, carving out a hollow inside. The space it creates is a sanctuary and a place to breathe. That emptiness inside the teepee isn't by accident. It's the whole point. A TP exists to create this space and the space is where life actually happens. The space allows you to rest, to think, to expand. That is what systems create in your life, not just order, white space.
But what do I mean when I say system? So many people are tossing around the word systems and systemizing, but few actually know what a system is. So let's talk about that. My definition is really a repeatable structure holding your decisions, your actions, and energy. A system is not random discipline. It's a structure you can rely on and it holds the work so you don't have to keep recreating everything from scratch. Okay? And that consists of first stick routines and habits. These are the repeated behaviors that reduce friction and create consistency. Routines and habits make the right actions easier to repeat. They remove the need to negotiate with yourself every day. This is where consistency stops depending on mood. The second stick of systems is tools. These are the supports, the containers, the setups that make good decisions easier. Tools hold information. and they reduce mental load and they give your work a place to live. They actually support your thinking instead of competing with it. This way your brain stops being like a storage unit. The third stick is processes. So these are the repeatable ways work moves from idea to completion. And processes they create flow. They tell the work where to go next. So progress doesn't depend on redeciding everything every single time. Progress actually gets a path through the process. And in the end the result of all these is white space that sanctuary that the structure actually creates. And like I said, the point of the teepee is not the sticks. The point is the space that it creates inside. In the same way, the point of systems is not control for control sake. It's about freedom, clarity, breathing room that lets you live and work from your elevated zone. So systems do not just create order, they create space. Okay.
So, let's dive into the actual systems that I want to teach you in this video. But before you do, I just want to quickly quickly say that I do have a free workshop coming up called Systems Reset. I'll be diving into the systems that are going to help you reclaim your time, do less, and achieve more on a deeper basis. So, be sure to sign up at the link below. It's my systems reset workshop. And if you sign up, that's the only way you're going to get all the yummy free resources that I'll be giving away during the workshop. Again, it's called the systems reset workshop and it's linked below. Okay.
Now, let me show you the first system that can help you never stress about falling off track again. Think about it like this. Imagine you had a goal of chopping the most amount of wood that you could with an axe. The most productive thing you could do actually is to pause periodically to sharpen that axe. In this scenario, when you pause the chopping and you pause the work, you're doing it not to avoid the effort, but to make sure that that effort is actually effective. And this system works in exactly the same way. And that is your reset routine system. This is a system of reset routines for different segments in your life to help you re-calibrate and sharpen your axe, so to speak, so that you can make sure that your efforts are actually effective. So, let me draw this out for you.
Okay, so this first human first system that I teach my clients or one of them is the reset routines system. And within my program, I really talk about five reset routines that are like the most pivotal ones and actually helping you to periodically sharpen that axe. And so let's talk about what those actually are. So the first one is the windown work routine. This is one that happens on a daily segment. The second one is your weekly review. Obviously, that one happens on a weekly segment. Then we have a monthly reset that we do, quarterly reset and yearly reset. Now, if I were to talk about the ones that I want to stress as the most important resets, actually all of them are really important. It's like choosing a favorite child. But the two that I would say are most important if you were to start off with two to get started are going to be your weekly review. So that includes your weekly review and weekly planning and your quarterly reset. Now the weekly review I do have a video that I did recently on all the steps and breaking it down exactly how I share it with my clients. I think the video is called respectfully I'm begging you to manage your time. So I won't go into that here. You can watch that on my channel. But I will quickly talk about how important the quarterly reset is. And one of the most important parts of the quarterly reset is doing your 12-week year goals. If you've read the book 12-week year, you know it's one of the systems that I kind of live by in my life. And I use it for my personal goals, but I also use it for my business. I've adapted it in a lot of ways to include other achievement psychology and evidence-based psychology. But the idea is the reverse goal planning. And the quarterly reset, I love it is because it gives you an opportunity to recalibrate and make sure that you're still on track with the trajectory of your yearly goals, your larger moon goals. So, I call them your moon goals and your star goals or your quarterly goals. And this is really a great opportunity to look back and how you did on your last quarter goals and your last star goals and think about, okay, what do I need to improve? What are the things that I can maybe double down on that work? And how can I improve and get better both personally or in your business or in your career? So, it's a really important segment to stop and pause and sort of recalibrate. If you think about that metaphor, a plane, if it gets like one degree off the trajectory, can end up in a wholly different city. That's kind of what we're doing in your quarterly reset. We're making sure that you're still in the same trajectory to reach those goals and to live in a way that's most important to you. And if you want help with this, I do have a quarterly planning toolkit that's for free, which comes with a 12week year goal GPT that's going to help you quickly work through setting your star goals, both for your personal life and for your business or career, as well as it comes with a quick tutorial on how to get the most out of using that GPT. I've also programmed the GPT to generate a PDF at the end of your work that you can download and you can work through when it comes to mapping your quarter. If you want to put it in notion, copy, paste, you'll have a PDF worked out for you as well. So, be sure to check that out. Like I said, I do have it for you for free linked in the description below.
So, now you have a system to make sure that you never really have to worry about falling off track. Next, I want to show you a system that can help you stop the cycle of overwhelm. So, when I was 18 and moved to Miami to attend to the University of Miami and became a hurricane, I had no idea the actual reality of living amongst hurricanes. It was intense. And every hurricane season was always scary for me. But after a couple years of living in Miami, I began to approach hurricane season differently, more like the locals. Every year as hurricane season approached, the locals knew you had to prepare for it. They knew the signs. They knew what to watch out for. They knew what to secure and they knew how to recover. So when you have an overwhelm recovery system, it's like having a hurricane protocol. It allows you to know the warning signs and to know what to secure and how to ride it without letting it wreck everything. This actually makes overwhelm feel like a passing condition, not a personality flaw. You start to understand that storms will come, but prepared high achieving women like yourself know how to respond. An overwhelm recovery system is like having a storm protocol before bad weather hits. So, let's talk about what I teach my clients to include in their overwhelm recovery system. I'm going to draw that out for you as well.
All right. So, our second system is our overwhelm recovery system. Okay. So, there's three parts and the third part has some bonus pieces. So, let's talk about each one of those. The first thing is to know your triggers. You want to get an idea and actually brainstorm and write down storm your notion your personal triggers of overwhelm. What are the usually the things that send you over the deep end? Is it being behind on reports? Is it having too many team members come to you for problems in a day? Whatever it is for you, you want to know it personally for yourself and write it down like what usually is the trigger to send you over the top or to get the ball rolling in overwhelm and sort of ask yourself those questions. Once you know those triggers, what you know is actually how to avoid them. Okay. And then the second piece of this plan is writing down your signs. So sometimes we can't avoid the triggers of overwhelm and it's going to happen. So you want to know what are the early signs of overwhelm for me? What does it personally look like for me? Do I start to get irritable with my partner or do I yell more at my kids or am I procrastinating when I'm really typically a motivated person? What are the signs of overwhelm for you so that you can have a plan for it? Which comes to the next point is to cope ahead with a plan. So when you cope ahead with a plan, you can actually apply it in real time without any stress. So you never want to be trying to recover from overwhelm thinking about how you can recover. Decide from a place with your nervous system on fire or your brain on fire because you're so overwhelmed. You want to kind of decide that beforehand. In psychology, we call this coping ahead. So you want to have, okay, this is what I need to do. This is my go-to. I've had the triggers. I noticed the signs. This is what I'm going to do to get myself back on track. For me, it's usually getting as much as I can off of my plate. I go through all my to-dos, decide what I can delegate, decide what I can let go of and decide what is just, you know, not important. And even if it is, how can I maybe postpone it? For you, it might be doing a brain dump if you're not like in my program and capturing on a regular basis. So, you're going to decide what that plan for you. Maybe it's going to get a massage or calling your mom to get the kids if you're blessed enough to have your grandparents close by. But you're going to come up with that plan and you're going to apply the plan.
Then you are going to do the conscious work because the constant chronic cycle of overwhelm for high achieving women usually it doesn't just happen by chance. It's a part of our DNA and it's usually like I said a cycle. So we want to actually do the conscious work to think about how can we stop this cycle and get in the way. There's a lot of things that contribute to that for high achieving women. Perfectionisms a lot of you are neurospicy that leads to a lot of overwhelm. not slowing down to speed up impulsivity. So adding a lot of things to your plate. There's a a whole thing, but a lot of it sometimes can be also that you are making it a part of your identity. So you're starting to identify with the overwhelm. So part of that conscious work is separating your identity from overwhelm. Remembering who you truly are, which is a spiritual being having a human experience with God living within you. You are a child of God. You are so much more your true self than this experience of overwhelm. Instead of saying I am overwhelmed, I am feeling overwhelmed and I have the tools to overcome it. So starting to separate yourself from the thoughts, the feelings and experience of overwhelm and tapping more into your true self, the divine part of you. And then another part of that conscious work is kind of figuring out what are the contributing factors that contributing to you putting so much on your plate. What's underneath the behavior of you adding more and more to your plate when you know you already have too much to do or whatever the case may be that gets you to a point of like feeling like I can't do this. This is too much. What are the beliefs? Is it this the negative belief of I'm not enough or I don't feel worthy if I'm not busy or I don't feel worthy if I'm not productive or I feel like I should be doing more to achieve these goals or whatever the case may be. What are the underlying belief? what are the contributing factors that are causing you to put so much on your plate and that's going to help you stop the cycle and make it happen less and less in your life.
So now you know how to stay on track with ease and stop the chronic cycle of overwhelm. But none of that is effective if we're not taking care of ourselves on the most basic level. So let me show you how to create a system for that now. Okay.
So the system I want to talk to you about now is having a woman coded productivity [music] system. I wanted you to think about developing systems. And this one is maybe less so a system in and of itself, but a way that you're going to infuse this into all of your systems. How can you make your systems female friendly? Sorry guys, I'm talking to the females for this last system. I'm talking to you about specifically the things that we go through biologically that impact our productivity. So, how can we account for those things, systemize for those things? So, we're really coming from a human first, woman first, womancoded way when we approach our productivity instead of toxic [music] bro culture productivity. So, let's talk about some of those things. Okay. So, the first thing that I want you to account for is being [music] permenopausal and just menopause in general. So let's talk about par menopause and the things that you can do build into your systems to account for how that impacts our productivity because it certainly certainly does. So per menopause can start as early as your late 30s and a lot of women completely are caught off guard by it which can definitely affect your productivity and in turn your success. So here's what's actually going on inside your body. As estrogen starts to drop, you can experience sleep disruptions, brain fog, mood shifts, and changes in your energy. And these aren't random. They have a real measurable impact on how you think, how you focus, and how much you can realistically get done in a day. So, let's talk about what you can actually add to your life right now that can make a difference. The first thing is magnesium glycinate. As estrogen declines, your magnesium levels actually drop with it. And that's a big part of why your sleep starts falling apart. So, magnesium helps your nervous system calm down at night by binding to a neurotransmitter that signals rest and lowers cortisol. So, the general safe range, talk to your doctor. It's about 200 to 300 milligrams, but loop in your doctor, like I said, to make sure that it's something that you can actually take or that they suggest in dealing with some of these things. Okay, let's talk about the next one. Protein. Your body breaks down muscle faster during parameopause and it rebuilds it more slowly. So, the recommendation for protein goes up to about 1 to 1.2 g per kilogram of body weight daily. Spacing it across meals, spacing your protein across meals actually matters, too. 20 to 25 grams per meal consistently outperforms like saving it all for dinner or having it all at lunch. Again, talk to your doctor, to your professionals about personalizing this [music] for you. Okay. Another thing in the research to help with pmenopause is strength training. So, two sessions a week is said to preserve muscle, stabilize blood sugar, lower cortisol, and improve sleep quality by boosting chemicals that your brain needs to actually fall asleep. And like I said, please talk to your doctor. One thing you can also talk to them about is hormone replacement therapy. A major JAMAMA study confirmed the benefits outweigh the risk for most women under 60, including real improvements in sleep, mood, cognitive function, and energy. And it said that if you're to start that earlier, it tends to produce better outcomes. So, like I said, you want to check with your medical professionals. Like for instance, for me, I am someone with the brocha 2 gene. So, I can't do hormone replacement therapy because estrogen increases my risk of cancer because I am a broka 2 highly susceptible [music] and it runs in my family. So, be sure. I'm not just saying that as a disclaimer. I really want you to talk to your doctor about these things before you just go and start adding them. So, here's how you can actually do something with all that information. Start tracking. Build a simple daily habit of logging your sleep quality, your energy, your mood, and your brain fog that you may notice. And when you walk into your doctor's appointment next, you have real data instead of like vague. I just feel kind of off or kind of brain fog. You can really start the conversation with data with that tracker. And that's really all you need to get their advice on how to cope with some of these things in your productivity system. Let's talk about the other two things I wanted to talk to you about here quickly. So the second one is cycle syncing. I will put up on the screen just some general ideas to consider when you are thinking about your cycle syncing with your productivity system that you can think about. But what I want to talk to you about is an app that I use that kind of does it for you. It's called the Phase app, PhD. That kind of just plans it all out for me and gives me alerts. It's one of the few notifications I have on my phone of where I am energetically and work-wise according to my cycle cuz I track my cycle in that as well. And then the other one is your postpartum season. You're probably noticing a theme here. These are all related to your hormones. Definitely postpartum your hormones are shifting there as well. But more than like I guess the biological factor of postpartum, what I would want to say as much as you can try to honor this season. I know as an ambitious woman myself and the many women that I work with that are having babies or had babies or both had and still having babies, there is something I call capacity grief as it relates to becoming a mother and just accepting a lower capacity that comes with now having this being outside of you that is your priority. You get to focus less on your goals. You get less time and that is a grieving process. Your identity is changing. So really honor that season because I know the pull with that grief is to just push through and keep working, working, working. And I did that myself. I don't have many regrets, but that may be one of them. If you can take that time to not focus on being productive, but to actually slow down, enjoy it, take care of yourself. It's hard to say enjoy it cuz it's really difficult season. You're not sleeping. You have this new being to take care of. There's so many yummy moments in there as well. So, I know it's not possible for everyone to not work at all, but maybe don't push yourself as hard as you would in a season that you aren't postpartum. And if you like these systems, I do also have a free human first productivity checklist that I will be sure to put in the description below. So, I have quite a few things for you guys down there.
So, now you know how to build systems for easy success. But if you want to know the actual systems I use to be as efficient, organized, and productive as possible, be sure to join me in my systems reset workshop coming up very soon. For a quick little preview though, be sure to watch this video next with my entire life organization system. And I hope to see you in my systems reset workshop. Until next time, cheers to planning, manifesting, and enjoying your dream life. Namaste.