We need to talk about lowering that resistance you have to planning. Fear not! You’re certainly not alone in this. I have many clients who come to me wanting to get better at managing their time and being more productive. And they know that when they plan, it works well for them! But even with all that evidence showing it works for them, they still have so much resistance they have to fight through to get themselves to make a plan for their time.
So we’re gonna talk about it because if this is the case for you as well, then there are 4 areas I want you to review to see what’s going on. You’re going to be able to look at each of these 4 areas and know exactly what to do to get that resistance to planning lowered. Let’s get to it then!
In this episode, we cover:
- What common mistake entrepreneurs make when problem solving
- Which problems I see my clients solving in the wrong order
- How to identify what the problem is vs the symptom
I can’t emphasize enough the importance of spending your time and money solving the right problems—or certainly the problems in the right order, particularly if you want a business making you the money that you want in the hours that you want to be working. Of course, if you need any support completing that final exercise that’s a perfect time to reach out and say hello!
Links & Mentioned Resources
Connect with Kirsty:
More about The Time & Productivity Podcast for Entrepreneurs
The podcast to help you, as an ambitious high-achieving Type-A woman, master work-life balance as a business owner.
Join Kirsty Knight each week, so she can help you create the level of success you truly desire, in a business that you love, without needing to sacrifice time for yourself, your health, your family, and your enjoyment of life outside of your business. Without hustling, without working yourself into the ground, and without burning out.
Kirsty will be sharing lessons from her own business journey, business strategies, time management and productivity hacks, and the psychology you need to understand – to help you go from overworking and overwhelmed, to mastering your time and productivity, so you can be working less, and earning more.
If you are trying to build or scale your business, but find yourself struggling with overwhelm, self-sabotage, procrastination, distractions, perfectionism, people-pleasing, hustling, overworking and always thinking “there just aren’t enough hours in the day”, this podcast is for you.
You CAN have it all. And she’s going to show you how.
The unedited podcast transcript for this episode of the The Time & Productivity Podcast for Entrepreneurs
Good morning lovelies,
So today’s episode is inspired by one of my clients. It was a topic I coached her on earlier this week. I think it is going to be really useful for you because the topic was “resistance to planning”.
And I know she is not alone in this – I have many clients who come to me wanting to get better at managing their time and being more productive, and they know that when they plan, it works well for them, but even though they know this, even though they have the evidence to show it works for them, they still have SO much resistance they have to fight through to get themselves to make a plan for their time.
So we are going to talk about it. Because if this is the case for you as well, then there are four areas I want you to look at – so we can see what is going on, and where we need to do some work to get that level of resistance lowered.
But before we dive into those four things to look at, I think it is really important for us to remember that we are human. We have a human brain that is wired to make us want to avoid effortful things, things that will take us time and energy and brain power. We have a human brain that is wired to avoid anything we don’t much enjoy or like, or feels boring, and that actively seeks out alternative more fun things to do instead. And we have a brain that is wired to fear the unknown and err on the side of caution. It has a negativity bias and so avoids things that might create a potentially negative emotion for us.
So knowing this, and knowing that planning takes at least some degree of time and effort and brain power, we are likely always going to feel some resistance in the moment to doing it – unless we LOVE it, and it feels easy and fun to us, and we feel like we have time and there’s no other more fun alternative, and there’s no chance of us creating a negative emotion in the process of it.
So unless the conditions match that, there may still be some resistance. So what you always want to be working on is becoming the person who can overcome the resistance and do it anyway. To be able to hear your brain protest, feel the urge to do something different, feel the resistance and do it anyway.
And this is one of the things that we work on inside of my Time Masters program – which is all about planning your time, and then honouring your calendar. I teach how to allow an urge to deviate from the plan to be there, and not go off track. I teach you how to step into that version of you who can feel the resistance and do it anyway. So if you want to join that – I’ll put the link in the shownotes below.
But back to the resistance, even though there may still always be some residual resistance, we can work to lower it by looking at the following four things:
1. Your level of DESIRE to plan
2. Your BELIEF that you have the ability, the time, the capacity to plan
3. The IDENTITY you hold about yourself and your relationship to planning
4. The level of SAFETY you feel around planning
Ok – so those four things – Desire, Belief, Identity, and Safety.
And don’t worry if they sound a bit odd right now. You’re probably wondering how on earth could planning not feel safe…I’ll go into each in more detail.
Ok so the first one – DESIRE.
Your level of desire to plan. So there’s a concept I use with my clients called the Desire See-Saw. And basically when we have two options to decide between, we always take action on the one that we have the most desire for in the moment. So if we want to tip the see-saw to the other side to do that instead, we need to weigh down the level of desire on that side of the see-saw.
So how do we create more desire?
Well, desire is an emotion that we create for ourselves by the thoughts we think.
So we have to first find the thoughts that are creating the opposite – less desire or no desire – which are likely going to be thoughts like “Planning is boring” or “planning is overwhelming” or “I hate planning”. And see if we can create some wiggle room with those thoughts to shift to thoughts that create more desire for planning for us. Could it possibly be true that it isn’t as bad as we think? Why DO we WANT to plan? Why do we want to want to plan? What is good about planning? What might be fun or easy about planning?
The more thoughts we have that are generating desire to plan – the lower the resistance will be. The more crappy thoughts we have about planning, the less desire, the higher the resistance. Make sense?
So take a second now to think about, maybe even write down your thoughts about planning, and then rate on a scale of 1-10, your level of desire around planning, with 10 being absolutely buzzing about planning, and 1 being I would rather have my teeth pulled out, than plan my time.
And see what comes up. And see if there is room for improvement there.
Ok, so then the second area we want to look at, if we are serious about lowering the resistance to planning our time, is our belief in our ability and our capacity to plan.
So what are our thoughts regarding this? Do I think “I know how to plan”. “I am good at planning”. “I can plan my time well”. And are we believing we have time to plan. We have the space to plan. OR are we telling ourselves “I’m not good at planning”, “I don’t have time to plan”, “I am always overwhelmed when I plan”, “my plans never work out, so what’s the point?”
And again you can rate your level of belief in your ability and capacity to plan on a scale of 1-10 to really be honest about it. And see where there is room for improvement.
Typically, our default, if we have low belief in something, is that we pull back from it. We avoid it. We don’t automatically question that belief to see if it’s even true. Or try to build on it. Yet that is what we need to do if we want to lower our resistance to doing it. We have to believe that we are either able to do it, are good at it or can get good at it AND we have time to do it.
Then the third thing we want to look at is your identity around planning.
So by this I mean the set of thoughts and beliefs you have about yourself that impact on whether or not you are the type of person who plans. For example, if you have thoughts like “I’m not a planner”, “I like to be spontaneous”, “I never follow plans”, then your brain is going to act in alignment with who you believe you are, and it isn’t going to want to step out of alignment to plan.
In fact it will go out of its way to find more evidence that it’s true, this is who you are and it will even go on to create MORE evidence to prove that it is who you are.
Consistently acting out of alignment with who we believe we are is extremely hard work. It’s not impossible. But it is effortful. And like I’ve already said, our brains 🧠 want to avoid effort.
So if you want to be consistently planning your time, with less effort, yet your identity doesn’t match up with someone who consistently plans their time, you 100% will want to do the Identity work required in order to make it easier for you. To start to become the version of you who IS a planner, who DOES follow the plan.
So that’s the third area to look at – what you believe about yourself. Who you believe you are when it pertains to planning.
And then the last area to look at is safety. Which sounds odd, right? How could it be unsafe to plan?
So there are four situations that I’ll give you that should help it make more sense
The first, is if you’ve previously been a bit over enthusiastic or overly optimistic about how much you could fit in, and you’ve overscheduled yourself, or you’ve had a tendency to overwork, and hustle, and not allocated enough time to rest and recover, and in both cases you’ve essentially worked yourself into the ground or burnt out. And so now your subconscious is actively working against you scheduling things in, because it doesn’t trust that you won’t put yourself in harms way again. It doesn’t feel safe to plan because it doesn’t trust that you will plan kindly.
The second, is where you have a negative association from childhood that relates in some way to planning your time, or having a schedule. Perhaps you grew up with a strict schedule and it felt oppressive and now you are actively rebelling against planning, even when it is in your best interests. Or maybe you were punished if you failed to adhere to the schedule. And so your subconscious is still trying to keep you safe and so is preventing you from even creating the schedule in the first place, in case you can’t follow it 100% of the time.
The third scenario where planning might feel unsafe…even without you realising that this is the case, is where you know that you are going to be planning in tasks that have the potential for negative emotion – because the brain is wired to avoid anything that it feels is a threat to our survival, and it evolved negative emotion to signal to us that something was wrong. So let’s say your business strategy involves going live on Facebook, yet you are terrified of being seen by your old boss, or you don’t feel confident that people will like what you have to say. That fear, or uncertainty, or nervousness is associated with that task. And so it makes perfect sense that in not planning, we are kind of avoiding the task. Which feels safer for our subconscious. It doesn’t want us to commit a time and date to the tasks that it feels are a threat to us.
And then lastly, where planning can feel unsafe, is where there is an immediate negative consequence to us taking the time to plan. For example, if it feels like taking time to plan, is us slowing down our progress, and progress in our business means more sales, more money, being able to pay our bills, and not be homeless…then it makes sense why it feels safer to not take the time to plan, and just get on with the task instead.
Similarly, if there is someone waiting on something from us, and if it’s late the person won’t be happy, and so we feel that would be bad for business, and we think planning our week takes time away from us just getting on with that, again, it will feel unsafe for us to plan. Particularly if our business is our livelihood and we are relying on that for our home, our food, taking care of our kids.
So that is what I mean when I say planning feels unsafe.
And the tricky thing with this, is that it’s not that obvious. It’s like there’s a silent emergency alarm going off in our subconscious, that is affecting our behaviour, and creating the resistance to us taking the action of planning. But that our conscious mind isn’t immediately aware of. Hence, why we often will think we aren’t planning because we don’t like planning, or we think we don’t have time, or we haven’t found the “right” planner or journal or system or project management software yet. Not that there is something deeper going on.
So I want to encourage you today, IF you are someone who knows that when you plan your time, you are more productive, things do go smoother, you feel more in control of your time and business…yet you have resistance to planning…take a minute to have a think about each of these four areas – your desire around planning, your belief in your ability and capacity, your identity around planning, and your safety around planning, and see if you can identify which area needs work.
And then, of course, if you don’t know how to lower the resistance in any of those four areas, I can easily help you with it. So simply go to the link in the shownotes and book a free consult call where we can discuss which one you need help with, and get started.
That’s it for this week, peeps.
Have a good one.
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