Get Back Into the Business Groove

This is an AI-transcription of episode 286 of the Purpose and Pixie Dust Podcast.

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(00:00:00) - Hey girl, welcome to the Purpose and Pixie Dust podcast. The podcast where we dive deep into our passions, our purpose, and really unlock our potential. With some pixie dust thrown in. What is pixie dust, you might ask? It's the fun and joy that gets unlocked when you're creating and owning your magic. I'm Lindsay Dllinger, Dog Mama, Disney lover and high school Spanish teacher who has used my magic to grow my businesses while also working full time. I'm on a mission to help other women create and own your magic by building not only the business of your dreams, but also the life of your dreams while still juggling life, your full time job, and all the things. So if you want more than this provincial life, let's use our glass slippers to break those glass ceilings and sprinkle lots of pixie dust into our lives. Hey. Hey. Welcome back to A Purpose in Pixie Dust podcast episode. I don't know why I put the word A in front of that, and then I was like, Oh, that doesn't really exactly sound right, because there is not multiple purpose in Pixie Dust podcasts.

(00:01:04) - But hey, I'm Lindsay Dollinger. I'm doing a solo episode today. I haven't done one of these for a hot minute on the show because I've had some amazing guest interviews that I wanted to push out to you, but it is my intention to do some more of these solo episodes just because I think a nice balance is perfection. But if you have been following me on the socials on Instagram, Facebook, if you are on my email list, which I hope we are connected in all of those ways, and if we are not, please head to the show notes. The links for all those things are down there. I have some pretty amazing email giveaways. I well, I guess they're giveaways, freebies I guess for you. If you sign up for my email list, there's a variety of them that you can choose from that are linked. And then I also try to give a ton of value on social as well. And I love to talk to my listeners, so make sure we are connected.

(00:01:55) - But if you have been following me the past few weeks, I was just in Europe with 18 students and four other adults, so there was a group of 23 of us who left on June 5th to go to London, Paris, Barcelona and Madrid. So what I'm sharing in this episode today is kind of how I have spent the last week getting back on track and also what I did to prepare for the trip before I went so that I was able to be completely unplugged from my business for those two weeks and be present on that trip, not only for myself, but especially for the students that I brought. So if you do not know full time, I am a high school Spanish teacher. I am also a business coach and I am super passionate about sharing business knowledge and helping women with full time jobs build the business of their dreams so they can either do both if they want or they can leave the full time job to be a full time entrepreneur. I love doing that. I also love traveling.

(00:02:55) - I love doing the teaching that I'm doing with my high school Spanish kids. So this trip we started planning and let's see, people started signing up. I think in October of 2021. I started planning it the end of August when I went back to school in 2021, just knowing that I hadn't traveled for a while with students due to the Covid pandemic. But before this trip I had taken six groups, so this was my seventh group to Europe and I had a couple canceled. We were supposed to go to the Galapagos Islands in 2020 and Australia and 2021. Unfortunately, both those got canceled. So this was our first time traveling. So it had been four years since I had traveled with students. So it was an experience. I'm not going to go into all the details. Overall. I think the students really had an amazing trip for me as the group leader. I'm just going to be honest, it was extremely stressful. Everything that went wrong felt like it went wrong. And I've had some trips like that where I felt that before, but this one, I just really felt we lost our bags.

(00:04:03) - We had to run to every connection that we had for our flights. I didn't end up getting my suitcase for six days. The tour company messed up like our train tickets, so we didn't have train tickets When we were supposed to have train tickets. They messed up the date of our Disneyland Paris tickets. I had some difficult students, just a small number of them, thankfully. But you know, that really plays into the whole trip. Vibe and just a million other things, you know? But I kept a smile on my face. I kept going. I used all of it as a learning lesson, not only for myself, but also for the kids. Because the whole point and the reason that I love taking trips with students specifically, but also adults who have never traveled abroad is it's a learning experience. And hopefully this is just your first trip abroad and then you will continue traveling abroad, because I think it's so important to learn about and immerse yourself in other cultures and not just learning from a book, you know, meeting the people that that live and breathe those cultures every day, learning new languages.

(00:05:07) - I'm just super passionate about all of that, which is why I became a high school Spanish teacher. But anyway, business wise, the I'm recording this on a Friday. We got home Sunday night. We landed around nine. We had to wait about an hour for our bags. Then we live about an hour from the airport. I had to go to my dad's house and get our cars from there and then we drove home. So it was well after midnight. By the time we went to bed, I guess technically Monday morning. So obviously Monday was just kind of weird. And then I spent Monday and Tuesday mostly doing laundry from the trip and also submitting all the different claims for my missing baggage. Since mine was gone almost a week, I had to buy quite. A few things and also facilitating and helping my students and the travelers do the same thing. So I didn't do a ton. I specifically did not plan anything for my business on Monday. Like my Monday calendar was completely empty. Tuesday when I came back, I had a podcast episode where I interviewed someone in the morning and I also strategically planned that in the morning because when I wanted to make sure that I was actually up and getting back into my routine, you know, jet lag can be really real.

(00:06:22) - I will say I didn't really have jet lag issues this time, which was which was really nice. I don't know if that's because we got home so late and then I fell asleep and I don't know, I feel like I slept like normal. I'm not sure. But regardless, I planned that intentionally on Tuesday and then not much else on Tuesday until Tuesday evening. And I had a one on one coaching call. I had about a half an hour before the mastermind call, which is a mastermind that I am a client in. So I'm a member of a mastermind that meets on Tuesday evenings. So I had that. And then Wednesday is really when I started having things back in my schedule. So I had I don't have my schedule in front of me. I should have had it. But my my phone's charging. But, you know, I had a few more meetings planned. I had set in my reminders to go in and start creating content for the end of June, the beginning of July.

(00:07:17) - And I did those same things on Thursday. Thursday also had a couple more podcast interviews and I did a presentation in a group that I'm a part of. So I was the presenter last night and that and I also had my small group coaching. Was a small group. Yeah. Small group coaching call for my membership ladies planned after that. So I like to kind of stack my business tasks or meetings, things I need to do in my business, especially in the summer to the morning and then like after dinner time. And it doesn't mean that I don't work my business during the day, but I like to have those days the day free and as flexible as I can so that like, for example, my dad and I were talking and we have some projects around my house that he's going to help us with this summer. So, you know, if it's a nice day, depending on the weather like today, it's raining here in Ohio. So I've been doing more of my business stuff today than I didn't have actually anything planned on my calendar for today, Friday, because also on Fridays during the summer, I don't necessarily love to do a lot of businesses, to be honest.

(00:08:26) - So I like to, you know, know when my energy is the highest, which is mid-morning, morning and evening after dinner or maybe even sometimes a little bit before dinner. So like four, three, 4:00. So actually, I'm recording this right now at 315 on a Friday because I just worked out. I'm not someone who loves working out in the morning. My energy is not the highest then because I need to eat something I can't really work out on a fasted stomach. I know a lot of people do and I know there's lots of benefits for it, but it just my energy is just not there. I don't know if it's like my blood sugar or what, but the only reason I do work out sometimes in the mornings during the summer is because then I want to shower and get ready for my day. So that's been like the one thing I'm like, I can't go live because I haven't showered. I'm like a sweaty mess from the peloton, so I'm just going to record a podcast.

(00:09:18) - But anyway, I have strategically planned my days in the summer so that, you know, I have my podcast interviews, client calls either before noon or they're after 5 or 6:00. So that that afternoon time I can run errands, lay outside and read a book, take my dog for a walk, meet a friend for a happy hour, you know, all those sorts of things. Because, again, this is a business that I'm building for me and it should look like how I want it to look and feel really good for how I want it to feel. And it's going to be different than what yours is. But I just want to remind you that you have the permission to build whatever you want, however you want, and it doesn't need to look like everyone else's business. Also, I know that I am launching a mastermind that I am so excited about. So I sat down yesterday for a couple hours and finalized like I wrote out in my Google sheets, the dates that I wanted to do and worked everything backward.

(00:10:10) - So you will be hearing about that literally super soon. But I wanted to plan that when I was in my most creative energy and I knew that wasn't going to be like Monday and Tuesday when I came back from this two week exhausting trip and I had planned some of it out before I went. So let's talk about before my trip, what I did to really prep before my trip, because being gone for two weeks, I was literally gone for two weeks. But I also, you know, there's all the prep ahead of time, like I said, the recovery time after. So I made sure to batch out all of my content for Instagram, my Facebook group, my membership and all my emails that I sent out starting. I'm trying to remember when I started it. I started it probably mid-May to batch everything out through the end of June so that I knew if I came back from this trip, sick, tired, whatever it may be, that I had enough content already planned out that my business was working for me.

(00:11:08) - And it did that job. And I had a lot of people message me and be like, Your content is still like going so smoothly. You're still showing up like, how are you doing that? And it's just batching like it just I took a couple of days and not even full days, you know, a few hours on a couple of days. And I sat and I wrote like four emails at once. So I send a Monday email. I usually send a Friday email, sometimes Thursday emails as well. Those I was just getting into the hang up. So I did not send my Thursday throwback emails for my podcast, but I made sure to schedule. I'm sending, like I said, the Monday emails, Friday emails and then one email a month explaining to people how they can work with me. Because you know, if we're not sharing how people can work with us, how are people going to know? So I saw someone else doing that and I really liked that because there were some things that she had listed on there that I was like, Oh, I had no idea that I could work with you in that way.

(00:11:58) - So I really like that once a month. I know some people even do it like once every two weeks or even once a week. These are the ways you can work with me, like an explicit email just for that. And I really liked that. So that, in a nutshell, is kind of what I have been up to. So I did a ton of prep in May and that prep also included. I planned out all the dates and times for my membership activities, free events that I've been doing, etcetera, and I went ahead and made all the groups for those graphics, for those everything was planned and set up with workflows in Kajabi, so I literally could be away. And I'll be honest with you, I got data and international phone service for the very first time on this trip. I had never had it before when we called Verizon to talk to them about it. You could get you could get an entire month for $100. And I was like, okay, just add that to my bill and I'll have service.

(00:12:52) - So I was 100% planning on going live in my stories, maybe even going live online. I did not have a spare second. It was literally, you know, I was either, like I said, being really present and interacting with the kids, interacting with my tour director, making sure that everything was planned for what was coming up in the next day, or I was actually on a tour. And obviously I'm not going to be rude and being on my phone while I'm on a tour with someone leading it or, you know, it was after dinner and we finally got to our room every night, probably anywhere between 930 and 1130, with leaving the hotels in the morning, anywhere from 430. Yes, it was awful for 430 to I think the latest was maybe eight. So by the time we got back after dinner and I checked in all the kids and got everything planned for the next day and or I packed my bags, you know, whatever needed to be done. When I tell you I was exhausted, I was exhausted, like the mental energy and capacity was just not there.

(00:13:54) - So that's why it is so important. If you can schedule posts, schedule stories, schedule emails, do all of that, do not intend. You know what I mean? Like don't go on a trip or don't go on a vacation or even take time away from your business with the intention of like, Oh, I'll have time to do, you know, hop on and do a story or I'll have time to make a post because you never know how you're actually going to feel in that moment. And I never want to show up for my followers online, not in the highest energy that I could be in. So I knew I wanted to show up super and integrity. And what that meant, thankfully, was that I wasn't showing up. I wasn't showing up in Lifetime. I was mostly just showing up from my scheduled things. Now, I did post some things about my trip as I went along and it was funny. I was talking to my assistant principal when I got back about the different things that happened.

(00:14:49) - He's like, Well, it looked like a great trip from pictures and stuff. And I looked back, I think I posted four times, which if you know me when I travel abroad, it's usually like I'm making a post at breakfast. I'm making a post at lunch, I'm making post at dinner. So people who really knew me well maybe got the the vibe that like something was off with doing only 4 or 5 posts the entire two weeks I was gone lifetime. But that is also kind of my intention. You know, we schedule this stuff out so that we are still showing up even when we're not feeling like showing up. And then, like I said, once I got back, really allowing myself that time to decompress, get my energy back the way I wanted to. I didn't work out until Wednesday. I'm pretty sure it was Wednesday. I might have done like something really small on Tuesday. Actually, I think I did. So it was like Tuesday night, but I wanted to allow my body that time for that rest and that decompression.

(00:15:47) - I'm a projector on human design. I don't know if you know human design, but projectors. Their big thing is rest and making sure that you have that time. And so I have really been stepping into my. My human design. I guess you would call it my projector. I've been really stepping into that and making sure that I am allowing myself that time, so I purposely planned it. So I was just looking at my schedule for next week and it's pretty much following what I had mentioned, except for two days. One of the other masterminds that I'm in, I'm in two masterminds right now. One is getting ready to end, which is why I joined the second one. But the other mastermind that I'm in has two things next week from 11 to 4 on Thursday and Friday, and I'm excited to be able to attend those because once I get back to school in the fall, I won't be able to do those things during the day. So I have those planned. But other than those in the middle of my day, again, the majority of my business.

(00:16:47) - Plans are before noon or after dinner because that works really well for me. So find what works for you. Allow yourself the grace when things are not going the way they need to go, that it's okay that you don't show up today. Get back into it tomorrow. So you know what I did on Monday? Tuesday? I can't even remember. The days were rolling together now, but I was just like, I don't even really know how to get back in the groove. In my business. I was just feeling very disconnected from it. After being gone for two weeks, yet no one else knew that because I was still showing up, but I just personally felt that way. So I sat down and I just opened up Kajabi, which is Kajabi is what I use for my website, my email. Literally all my stuff is through Kajabi. So I opened up Kajabi. I looked through my analytics, my stats. I saw what I still had scheduled out, what I didn't, and then I just made a list and started and I just started.

(00:17:41) - And I think that overall is a huge theme that you can get from this is just start. So plan in advance as much as you can allow yourself those moments of rest. No when your energy is the highest and plan your work around that. But you actually do have to plan the work and schedule it and then look at that ahead of time, whether it's the week before, the night before, whatever, and really get to start planning. Your work time, whether that's interviews, etcetera. When you are able to show up the best and be the best to you and then just do it like action is the other piece of that. And we just have to create that action. And I actually think that the action sometimes can come before the mindset, right? Your mind might be telling you, Oh, you're still tired or you're you don't know what you're doing, you don't know how to do it. Just do it and then see how you feel after you have done it. Because I guarantee you you're probably going to feel a lot more accomplished, ready to rock and roll than you were before.

(00:18:38) - So I hope this was helpful. A lot of this was just I know me sharing my personal experience, but you're going to have a time like this in your life, I'm sure as well. Maybe it isn't even a two week break. Maybe it's just after a weekend and you're like, I'm feeling out of jive with my business. Like, what do I do? What's the next thing to do? The next small step. Then you know the email, send the email, make the post work on and in your business, make sure you have time for both and we can talk about that more later too. What that means. But okay friend, I hope this was helpful. Happy Monday. Go out and make a fabulous into your June. I hope you make this the best June that you have ever had. I hope you are all ready for an amazing July. We're going into third quarter. Can you believe it? Like, oh gosh, I can't. But if you're looking for I do have podcast episodes in the past on on how to plan out your year, you know, planning, quarterly, monthly, etcetera.

(00:19:35) - We also do amazing trainings like this in my membership. So if you are not yet a member, make sure you head to the show notes and get some support that way. And I also do have limited VIP summer strategy calls left, so let me know if you want to grab one of those for July. I might have one left for August, but I do have a couple left for July if you want some dedicated time. They run from 2 hours to 4 hours and we can break them up. We can do like two, two hours if you would like. So but they're super customized for you. Whatever you need help with in your business, whatever strategy you want to walk through, I am here for that. And I also do have a one on one client package available as well. My my one on ones are super limited, especially since I have the mastermind coming out in August. We will be starting that in August. So so like I said, signups for that are literally so, so soon.

(00:20:29) - So make sure you stay tuned for that. But if you are interested in the one on one work, you can snag my last one on one client position as well. So give me a shout out, slide into my DMS and or head over to my email and we can chat. So go out there, my dear friend, and create and own your magic. And that's a wrap on today's episode. I hope you're leaving today inspired, Princess, to create, own and spread your magic to the world. If you found value in this episode or know a girlfriend who needs to hear it, would you screenshot it and send it to her? And if you're feeling really generous, pop it up on your IG stories and tag me at Lindsey Dillinger so I can see you loved it and tell you Thank you. I appreciate you. Now let's go do some amazing things. Bye bye.