IttyBiz

Imagine for a moment that you have a friend, and that friend is very thin and very beautiful. Every item of clothing she tries on fits perfectly – she’s exactly model size, the size that all the clothing designers use as their base.

Imagine she has big, wide eyes, eyelashes that look like extensions, cheekbones that could cut drywall.

She has an amazing personal style – elegant, sexy, fun, and approachable.

(For the sake of her seeming really annoying, let’s give her a PhD and some really well-behaved kids while we’re at it.)

Got her in your mind?

Good. I have some things to say.

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I have a client. Her name is Tamara. You may know her. She’s the jewelry lady in Minnesota.

In a recent meeting with her, I assigned her a potentially challenging task, one few people would be strong enough to tackle.

I told her to take three weeks off.

She’s been doing some Marie Kondo-style decluttering, and her work doesn’t really need her all that much right now. I can tell that her heart is in her box room, not in her inbox, and I’ve assigned her the very difficult task of doing what feels good, for Christ’s sake.

Tamara, like most of us, has mixed feelings about this assignment.

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Whether or not you’re running your own ittybiz, there are three resources that often appear to be in short supply – time, money and energy. You always wish you had more. You always look forward to the future, that magical place where all three of these resources will flow to you in greater supply.

In that magical place, that’s where we see ourselves having the expansive resources to engage in lifestyle design – where we start doing more of the stuff we find fun, and stop doing the meaningless stuff we do just because we’re killing time, or bored, or low-energy. But in the now? We tell ourselves we just don’t have enough [insert resource] to engage in the things we’d “love to start doing”.

However! Life, being the funny trickster it is, often throws little bonus resources our way. A little extra cash. A free afternoon. A burst of energy at 10pm.

These surprises come our FAR more often than we realize – but we don’t notice them because we don’t have a plan for what to do with them when they arrive. It’s tragic, because we all have far more of these resources than we realize, and we could take advantage of them to great profit if we put on our thinking cap for even just a few minutes.

Today, let’s look at how to do just that, so that we can stop wishing we had more time, money, and energy, and get more of those “love to start doing” activities in place than we ever thought possible.

Shall we? I’ll begin with a (true) story.

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One day, every single part of your business is going to be easier to do, more streamlined, more organized, more easeful. I don’t know when that day is going to be – it’s different for everyone – but that day is going to come.

At some point, eventually, all the transitions will have taken place, all the new systems and fresh approaches and all that “working smarter” stuff will move from “to-do” to “to-done”, and your business and life will be unimaginably different than it is now.

That’s wonderful. But we’re not there yet, are we? We’re on the timeline, moving forward in our journey to running our business like a boss.

So let’s take a gander at what that journey is going to look like to you. We’re going to peer into the crystal ball and see your future, right now, so you know what’s in store for you.

Here’s the story of how you get from today to that final day when everything is shockingly easy compared to how it is right now.

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Lauren asks,

I know you have several virtual assistants working right now (and have had many over the years) and I’m curious as to what you do with them. Do you give them easy work, or do they really get in there and do harder tasks? And how much of the business are you personally involved in?

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