Time Capacity: How to Reclaim Your Time and Focus on What Truly Matters EP 85

Time is probably the number one arch enemy that I hear about all the time. There was a point in my life when work was stealing hours from my sleep, my calendar was overflowing, and the people I loved were getting what was left of me. And that was the moment I stopped and had to rethink how I was living and working. Today, we're walking through the exact shifts that helped me reclaim my time and peace. So this session is going to pull back the curtain on what's actually keeping you stuck in time scarcity. You're going to learn why productivity tips haven't worked, what's secretly draining your hours and energy, and the one shift that instantly makes your days feel more spacious. So let's dive in. Hey, you leader, entrepreneur, business owner, solopreneur, whatever you call yourself. We know you're a visionary business builder, wealth seeker, looking to combine a passion for doing good with leading consciously. It's time to shift from a traditional focus of pure wealth accumulation to one that integrates well-being and fulfillment. You're here for a purpose, and it's time to shine your light. So here we go. Welcome back to the Conscious Edge podcast. I'm your host, Alicia St. Germain, founder of the Conscious Edge, where I help women entrepreneurs expand what they can hold energetically, emotionally, and financially so they can live a life that is joyful and fulfilling and grow a business sustainably. So this is the continuation of the capacity series that I have been doing behind the scenes. I've had a small group of people that have been joining me in the capacity series. I'm just really love this work that I have put together and I'm sharing it in a different way because so often what I have found in my life is that I figure something out intuitively the hard way going through doing the expensive seminars and lessons. When I say expensive seminars, I mean, those are all the mistakes that you pay dearly for. And I figure something out that works better. And then I tend to come back into reflective mode and I figure out how to put words and structure to what I have learned to help land it in a way that helps other people. So often in life, I think that, you know, we always wish that we could have done things differently or better. And being able to share what I've learned with other people is a way for me to get to help other people not go through the same hardships and the same things that I have. So I hope that it makes your day just a little bit easier when I share these things with you that you take a tip or you take something from this that just makes your day go a little bit easier, helps transform your life, helps you operate differently. And that is one of my favorite things to do. So this capacity series was really me sitting down and thinking about all the aspects of life and business that I, and all the lessons that I have amassed and things that I've learned. And then taking it and putting it into a structure or format that makes it relatable and makes it tangible that you can take action on and utilize practically and give you maybe a different perspective on some of the things that you might be experiencing in your life. So we're continuing on today with the element of time capacity. It is the number one thing that people tell me. I don't have time. I don't have time. I don't have time. I would do this. I would do that if I had time. And what really helped me was understanding that we all have the same 24 hours in a day. And it's a matter of what we put our energy into, where we put our focus, what we prioritize and make important, and emotionally how we regulate ourselves to navigate that focus that makes all the difference. if you are leaking energetically into misalignments if you are getting reactive and hung up on emotional things where you ruminate on something and it steals what your intention is and what you want to be doing that is a big place we leak time the other thing that happens is often so often we give our time to things out of obligation or out of fear and protection. And so today's session that I'm going to share with you that I did previously, I think that this is really going to help you understand that many of the things that are happening on your calendar are a reflection of self-protection more than you don't have time. And that's a little bit of a shift. If you are new here. I want to welcome you. I'm so glad that you are here. We put new episodes out every single week and we cover really all the aspects of being a human, building a business, and what that is like for us. Many times I have a regular co-host with me, Jonathan Duggar. He is not here right at this time. He is off traveling in Italy and having the most amazing time. I'm sure I'm seeing all the pictures and I miss him. But we also do monthly money talks with Zen Zen, which is our resident financial capacity expert. So if you enjoy today's episode and you get value, make sure you follow or subscribe from wherever you are listening so that you are up to date on whatever the newest episode is. So I'm going to let you get into it. They were doing Fueled by Focus, the new productivity paradigm. And this is about redefining your time capacity and creating rhythms that prioritize what truly matters. Who in here has been guilty of saying, I don't have time? That used to be me. And so I used to say, I don't have time all the time. And I was realizing that that was an excuse that I was using over and over and over again to stay stuck. And it was when I started redefining, I don't have time with it's not a priority, that things started to shift for me. And my whole, I would say time, time capacity is probably the thing that became blatantly obvious to me that I had a capacity challenge. And that was what started my complete overhaul of my life and it had me exploring all the different capacities that we've been talking about, time was really my entry point. Because for me, one of the things that happened was there's a couple different points where time and the way that I spend my time has made it apparent that I was hitting up against something uncomfortable. I remember very distinctly going through the COVID time, which was challenging in and of itself, right? And I was at home. My daughter was in school part-time. They did like a split part-time thing where they went to school at half the time so that they could have half the kids so they could properly socially distance. And my son is about three years old. My husband is a firefighter and a paramedic. So he is one of the essential workers who does not get to shelter in place at the time. Obviously, we had no information about what was happening at that time. And so we're all just doing the best that we can. At the same time, I was doing some contract work for another coach and servicing her clients in addition to serving my clients. And prior to COVID, she had a really strict policy about making sure that you had child care. She did not want any children making any guest appearances on coaching calls or anything like that. So I, being the good girl, as I always have tried to be, I wanted to follow the rules. And I took that same sort of standard into COVID times. And we've seen all the funny videos and everything of the babies coming in while the news reporter's on and all of those unprecedented things that happened, but like that was my worst fear. And so here I am with this three-year-old and my husband's not home and my nanny that I had at the time quit. And so I would set him up in front of the TV with snacks or I would have like a little table right outside of my office with snacks and an iPad like so many people did. And I thought he was living his best life. Looking back, I see we created some habits. I saw some behavior changes in my son, increase in anxiety, increase in this need. Anytime I was working, it was like he had to have a snack and he had to have TV. He got some patterns that were coming up. And so one of the things that has happened is we in hindsight become smarter And what I realized through that time is that I was giving control of my time to someone else I had lost that control over that time because of some really key things that had come in. So time capacity isn't about time management, Time capacity is about how we choose to focus our time with intention. And so it's not about doing more. It's about choosing what matters and when it matters. So if you want to think of the difference between time management and productivity and actual time capacity, productivity says, how much can I get done in a given time frame? Time capacity asks, what is actually worth doing? So hold that story for a second because it's going to come back as we go through everything. So I want to bring back for you the leadership rhythm. We talked about a few in session number one. I told you this was going to come back in our time session that we were doing. So just to remind you, the leadership rhythm is three parts. It's focus out, focus on, and focus in. When we focus out, we're looking at what direction are we going? What is our purpose? What's the contribution and the fulfillment that we're after? Focus on creates momentum because these are the strategies and the leverage that we use in order to do the thing. And then focus in makes it sustainable. This is where we look at restoration for ourselves. Are we taking good care of ourselves? And how do we make this sustainable so that we don't burn out? Very much mirrors mind, body, and soul. Now, what happens, we talked about focus on in session one to really give us that alignment and so that we were not leaking energetically. But what happens is when we get to focus on things, we oftentimes sacrifice ourselves when time gets tight. So as you're building strategy and systems, as you're taking on the actual mission that you're executing, especially if you're doing a lot of it yourself. And as you're growing and expanding and doing more, the place that we most often sacrifice is in the focus in part. So we let go of sleep, movement for our bodies, which if you are a woman over the age of 30 to 35, focusing on your body and strength and taking good care of ourselves really equates to longevity. And there's a lot of emerging research happening for women over the age of 35, how incredibly important it is for us to take care of ourselves and how much we really have put ourselves last. We let go of connection with family. We disconnect from our community. And all those moments that sustain us. We just get into the doing of things. And so when we ignore our human needs to execute the strategy, because that's how we've been trying to solve for it, we've got to do it differently. If we don't, we're going to end up in burnout. This is where so much burnout comes from. I listen to a podcast often called The Diary of a CEO, and there was a recent podcast episode that really went viral and upset a lot of people because there was someone who was rather wealthy and successful saying that burnout isn't a real thing. And it really, it is. And there's a lot of people who disagree that burnout's not a real thing because we can mindset ourselves right into burnout because we're physically not taking care of ourselves. So it's an important thing. How many of you have sacrificed some of these? what would you say is the thing you most frequently sacrifice when time gets tight? I'm curious. So here's the thing. Focus on, this is our strategy and our leverage. When you start sacrificing self-care and sleep and going to the gym and really taking good care of yourself, which you all know you should be doing. Like, I remember waking up at times and feeling like I could physically feel my body breaking down. And it made me sad because it was like, here I am on this big mission and I could feel my body, that tool that I'm here to do the good work with, I could feel it breaking down. And I felt sad for not taking better care of what I call my human. And people laugh. I call my body my human because I feel like sometimes there's like this soul level that I operate from. And if I'm not careful. I cannot take care of my human well, and I am tasked with taking care of this body here, and when I don't do it, it makes me sad. So everyone says, okay, here's what you need to do to expand time is you need to delegate, automate, use templates and processes, create clear expectations, and repeatable rhythms, and these strategies work when our capacity supports them. So if you have tried to hire and had a bad experience, if you've tried to delegate and it hasn't been the most successful, if slowing down to create automations or is difficult, or even just looking at repeatable rhythms, this would be like picking a specific strategy or a specific way that you bring income into your business and mastering it before taking on something new. I see this a lot of times in the real estate world is you know all these strategies for making money and a deal will come to you and you'll execute and you end up with deals of all different types in all kinds of different places. And so you never really get to build a true system or process that's repeatable with the same team members because you're doing so many different things and it can start to really burn you out. So even just narrowing down to what is it that you're really going to do in your strategies and repeating that over and over again and fighting maybe any kind of boredom or fear of missing out, those things get in the way of strategies and leverage. So why we leak time? So these are things like doing everything ourselves because it feels faster and right. Like if you want it done right, you got to do it yourself. We've been raised with things like that. Avoiding uncomfortable tasks or decisions. Getting stuck in indecision and reworking things. Saying yes out of obligation or staying available too long. Holding back on giving clear expectations or asking for support, maybe because you don't want to upset or burden anyone. So these things that we do, which mirror, if you notice, very closely to some of the emotional things that we talked about in emotional capacity and even energetic capacity. These mirror them and they're very closely linked because underneath all of these things that we do, and there was a list of like 12 that I came up with, but I narrowed it down to like the five most egregious things that I see most often. because underneath all of these habits, these things that we do that cause us to leak time is a big assumption. And what's interesting is a lot of times people who delay in making decisions where we're leaking that time and we're procrastinating a decision, there are very few decisions that can't be undone. And there's a study out there called the Human Genome Project, I believe out of Harvard, that talked about the four attributes of high performers. And one of those attributes was being a fast decision maker with the knowingness that until I move forward and make a decision, I can't get the next bit of information. I can't get clarity. And also realizing that it's okay if it's not even the right decision because it gave me more information and I can make a different decision. When we fix our alignment, it changes what time can hold. So you protect your energy with clear boundaries. And I want to be very clear, the difference between boundaries, we talked about this before, but the difference between boundaries and rules, boundaries are what you will do and not do and how you will behave. Rules are expectations that we put on other people and we try to control other people with. So it's really about what am I going to do? So for example, I no longer work after my kids, most of the majority of the time, like I'm finished up and wrapped up by 4 p.m. There are very few things that are emergencies that I cannot handle tomorrow morning, first thing in the morning So often we treat other people emergencies as our emergencies And what I have found is that if you have a true emergency you have my phone number and you can call me And if you don have my phone number it's probably because I'm not the one responsible for handling your emergencies. And there's someone else that that person needs to be calling. So it's a pretty good policy to think about and adopt when you're thinking about other people's emergencies. And that's why staying out of my email is so important. When I first started this changing up how I was spending my time, I used to teach late at night, like 9 p.m. to midnight, or sometimes even 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. I used to teach a strategy in real estate called wholesaling, and I absolutely loved teaching. But when I had my first baby, she suffered with night terrors. And so she would be upstairs screaming with my husband, and we didn't know why. Night terrors are supposed to only last like maybe 10 minutes or less, three or four minutes. This baby would, I'm not kidding you, cry for 45 minutes to two hours, and she wasn't awake. And so I'm sitting there teaching like I am right now with all of you, and I'm hearing my baby scream. They couldn't hear it, but I could. That is an energetic leak like you wouldn't believe. And it was the first time I realized that I did not want to be doing something I loved because the timeframe in which I was doing it didn't work for me. It wasn't aligned to my new life as a mom. And so I worked to change how I did my schedule. I actually let that particular contract go because it was not healthy for me to work till 1 a.m. And then she wasn't sleeping. So then I was nursing at 4 a.m. And then she was getting up at like six or seven o'clock in the morning. I was so tired. So sometimes it means doing the hard, scary thing to really step into that next level. So you start to create rhythms for work and rhythms for rest, times when you're most productive in your life and when you're not. There's a lot of times where I'll think, oh, I just want to sit down and I want to work on something late at night because I do get moments of clarity at night. The problem is it kills my next day. When I do that, I am less productive the next day and I have to focus on lower level menial tasks because I don't have the brain power to do it. So I have to be really protective of my rest time. releasing, as I was saying, releasing or realigning obligations that no longer fit. So when I was in that COVID time with my son, one of the things that I realized is that between, I told you I had the other contract that I was doing late at night. I had this other coach that I was helping. And when I stopped and looked at it, I realized I had a pattern of doing things for other people because I didn't believe in myself. I didn't believe in my ability to create the income by myself. And those things felt like safety nets or I felt like, oh, I need to do that because I need to learn to be a better coach. So I'm going to work underneath this other coach. And the truth is the amount of time or the time that things were happening like at late at night, they did not align to my work rhythms and what worked for my life. And so really doing the work to believe in myself, doing the work to realize what I needed and who I needed to become in order to fill my time more effectively because I was making way less, like the time I was spending working for these other people, I was making way less on top of it. so it's doing the work to really get yourself into that mental space to say you know what these things actually don't fit to my bigger mission to what i'm supposed to be doing in the world and i've got to either release them or when i say realign that means going and maybe negotiating a contract with a client and saying you know what i don't work outside of these times there are organizations that I work with currently where it is very aligned. We have really aligned values. We are up to the same mission and our work complements each other really well. And they've asked me, well, can you do it at 7 p.m.? And I say, I'm sorry, I don't work after 4 p.m. And working through the fear of like, well, what if they don't let me do that. You get to set those boundaries of when that happens. And if they don't fit, then maybe it's a no because of what their needs are. But what I have found more often than not is that my skills and expertise lend more to me being able to make that request. So when you're expert in whatever it is that you do, when you're really good at what you do, So you don't have to align to like bend yourself or go outside of your boundaries for other people. Now, will I work at 7 p.m. if I needed to? Yes. There are times that I do it if it makes sense for me. And because it's a win-win for both. And then not outsourcing your time to other people's urgencies, which is what I was talking about earlier. If they don't have your number, you're probably not responsible for their emergency. I love that. But your failure to plan does not create an emergency for me. It's not easy, especially when you're a people pleaser and you want to help and you're worried that someone's going to think maybe that you're not being helpful or they might make a judgment of you. It might be uncomfortable. All right. So here's your reflection time. This is what you're going to be working on this week. This can work really well because sometimes around the holiday time, people will feel obligated to do things that don't support them. I am a child who comes from multiple divorces. Both of my parents have been married and divorced multiple times, which meant that I did the equivalent of four Christmases and all kinds of gymnastics to try to make it to every holiday event because I didn't want to miss out. and what I realized was nobody was really getting the best of me. So now the holidays for my family, we go on for the entire month of December from Thanksgiving well until New Year's because I want to give everyone time. I want to be present with them. I want to have joyful moments with them. And if it doesn't happen on the day, then so be it. It doesn't happen on the day. And some of my family had to be okay with that and I had to let them have those emotions around that. So we want to reflect where is your time going? And for everything that you do in a day, whether it's personal or business, I want you to ask yourself three questions. Is this task serving my purpose? Is it supporting the people I love? Is it supporting me? So if not, can I stop doing it? Can someone else do it? Or can it be automated? So this is really taking it down to you just taking care of yourself, the people you love, and the purpose you serve. Now, obviously, there's more things that we can do. There's things that you do that you don't need to do. You're just proficient at it. Those are additional places. But really, is it something that you need to do? And the bigger thing is you're asking yourself these questions is, I want you to notice what thoughts and feelings come up because that's probably the source of your time leak. And it takes a while to get used to it. At first of it, my time now is so spacious. And I think about how I go through life and it feels like I have so much time. I just get to choose what it is that I really put my time and attention to. And if things start to feel too busy, it's usually because I've taken on more. And a lot of times it's not things that are quite in alignment. Or here's the other thing. I lacked some strategy to do it effectively. So there is a skill component to time. But before you even put any of the skills and strategy and tactics in, you have to step back and say, like, what's really truly in alignment? And what am I serving here? Why is this really important that I do this. Now, integration and next step. So integration is that next level of the, we talked about the transformational cycle that people go through. So integration is living the new pattern until it becomes who you are. So up until now, we've talked about your energetic of capacity, which is really focusing on doing things that are in alignment with who you are and what you really care about and that you want to put your energy into. Time and energy are very closely related capacities And then there a strategic component too We talked about emotional capacity which is how we are resilience Again that linked to time capacity as well because sometimes we can leak time because we're not handling our emotions properly. It is much harder to manage your emotions when you are tired and hungry and you don't feel good. So having that as part of our time strategy is crucial for keeping us on task is that we are taking good care of ourselves. As far as financial capacity goes, many times the things that you've been told to do like delegate or hire support or maybe buy a product that creates some automation, the thought process around that can be not that you don't have the money to invest. How would I pay for that? Or some fears of being able to sustain that and can you bring in enough income to be able to do that? Your financial capacity, the way that you plan and budget for growth, that becomes how you achieve those things from a strategic standpoint. So when you're looking at your time and you're saying, I really need to hire someone, that's one of the things I'm working on with Jen for 2026. So I told her, I said, Jen, I feel like I'm starting to hit my own personal time capacity. And I think that hiring someone is an important goal for 2026. I'm going through and thinking about what tasks I can outsource. And then when we build our budget for 2026, we will work in what that investment is going to be in that person. So by having that calm clarity into how you make that investment, how much runway do you have before you have to, like that person should pay for themselves. They should either pay for themselves in that they bring in and generate more revenue for your business directly, or they free up your time doing admin things that allow you to bring in more revenue in your business. So these people end up paying for themselves at the very least at a break-even rate, and if not, Even more so, they should be profitable. So whether you're buying back time for you to take better care of yourself or you're buying back time to drive sales and business into your bottom line. So if you haven't already, go to consciousedge.com forward slash assessment and fill out the conscious capacity assessment. I'm gonna review all of those personally and I'm gonna send you those capacity summary with the insights and next growth steps. I do want to mention the Exponential Entrepreneur, which is the coaching that I run. I do this in three different ways. I have a group program with individual support and I do this privately. This coaching is designed to expand your capacity, align your business with life, and help you reach financial goals while reclaiming time and energy for what matters most. So I wanted to mention this because this is an opportunity that you have. We have one more session together. That's going to be around relational capacity and talking about building some nice boundaries that are going to make your relationship so much better. In the Exponential Entrepreneur, though, we go through at a much deeper level and get really clear on the life and business you actually want. Because so often I hear this over and over again, people have built businesses that align to the strategy or training program that they invested in and not what aligns to what they actually like to do, what's aligned with their soul, what feels good. And when we feel really lit up about what we're doing in the world, it's so much easier to get there. It's so much easier to create traction. Jen talks about building a business that is sustainable and healthy. And that means that you as the CEO have good sound well-being. You have good financial practices. and we're building it, even if the growth isn't testimonial growth that you see. This is one of the things about all the training programs that teach strategy and tactic is they often put forward these really amazing testimonials and those things are 100% possible depending though on a person's capacity. And so when people don't get the testimonial results with the speed that they expected, they get hard on themselves. And so my goal is to say, everything that you've learned and invested in is all knowledge. Now we bring the capacity up to be able to meet that and we do it in a way that's sustainable and feels good and helps you enjoy the process. We also uncover whatever belief it is. You've heard me talk about big assumptions. We look at what is the big assumption that you're making that's holding you back or even tipping you into that point of burning out. We create rhythms that make life and business feel easier, build financial clarity and confidence. We focus on one shift that changes everything. So it's different for everyone. It depends on what belief you have. It depends on what your goals are. But we focus down on one thing that is gonna be the domino that makes achieving all of your other goals faster and easier. And it frees up time for what matters most. This is your family, travel, health, joy, freedom, the things that really matter in life so much more than achieving and having the accolades to brag about. It's having that full, rich life. And I wanted to let you know that for this timeframe for the holiday enrollment bonus, December is included when you join. So keep this in mind as you're thinking about, as this wraps up, if you're like, I'm ready for coaching. December, I know, is a busy month. And a lot of times people will say, I don't have time right now. This is not the right time to join. And then what happens is the right time never comes. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to include December with your enrollment. And so your official start would be January 1 and go for a full 12 months until December 31st of next year. The other thing I wanted you to know about is that I'm going to be doing a live vision and big assumption mapping workshop on January 23rd. So when you make that choice to join, what happens is you're going to be kickstarted right into your transformation. You really jump yourself forward. So I want you to be aware of that January 23rd date. And you're going to get to lock in 2025 pricing. Jen and I, Jen Boss, you've heard me mention her potentially. If you've been listening for any amount of time, she does monthly money talks on the podcast. She is joining me next year as a financial capacity coach in my coaching program. So we are going to be meeting in December and laying out my 2026 budget. I'm investing in bringing her in as a coach, which means that we're going to have a discussion about the new pricing that's going to make sense for the exponential entrepreneur in all the different ways that I coach. So I want to give you an opportunity right now to lock in the 2025 pricing. First thing you would do is you would complete your conscious capacity assessment. you're going to receive your personalized capacity summary. And then in that summary, you're going to have an invitation to book a call with me to find out what the next aligned step would be for the existential entrepreneur. And I will go through with you the different options that you have and decide what that would look like for you. Because if you've been thinking about coaching, now may be the perfect time for you to further consider that. So you can go to consciousedge.com forward slash assessment to take your assessment. If you are listening to this on the podcast, you can join the capacity series at consciousedge.com forward slash capacity. And that will give you early access to these sessions that are coming out on the podcast. I know that you may not want to wait for the next episode. And so with all of that being said, I'm sending you so much love. Thanks for listening to the Conscious Edge podcast. Make sure you subscribe and take a moment to be kind and share this episode with someone you care about. Leave a review to help us bring more compassionate leaders building businesses and creating wealth to the table. And for show notes, head over to consciousedge.com forward slash podcast. This podcast and the linked materials are presented solely for general information, educational, and entertainment purposes, and should not be taken as personal or medical advice or any kind of mental health treatment. Please consult a medical or mental health professional if you feel you need such services. Please be advised that all investing and entrepreneurial endeavors involve risk, and the use of the education and information on this podcast and linked materials is at the user's own risk. This podcast is part of the Sound Advice FM network. Sound Advice FM, women's voices amplified.