Well good morning friend, well, whatever time it is that you're listening to this. I am on my morning walk yet again thinking of you, wanting to record this quick episode. We are at episode 99 which means we're celebrating 100 this week with a special treat with Jill Stanton from the Screw the 9 to 5 coming on Wednesday and we're talking about things I've never heard her talk publicly before. You're going to love it but first I wanted to share with you a quick response to some questions I got over the last few weeks. Also, again you might hear some birds in the background, my mild congestion I'm getting over a cold. But hear this Monday Motivator, just me being real, me and you, just a couple minutes to start your week.
It's Saturday at the time of recording this, right before it airs on Monday and I just wrapped up the 75 Hard program. I'll do a debrief on that here in the next couple weeks. I've gotten lotta questions of the craziness I've done over the last 75 days were I fully committed to my health, into my own growth and development and recently I had post the question on my social media platforms, hey I have my hundredth episode coming up, I wanna do some Q&A with y'all, what do you want to hear?
The overwhelming theme of the questions was around how is it that I am able to do something like 75 Hard and still show up for social media consistently. It was like how do you do all the things and make it look so easy which made me giggle because I feel like I'm not doing all the things nor do I feel like it's easy. But I wanted to have a quick conversation around this idea of letting go, of thinking that we need to do everything perfectly. You know, years ago when I was in corporate, I told you this before. I had the executive position in a management firm. Corporate moves really fast pace, right? There's always so many meetings, always so many emails, oh my gosh I just couldn't stay on top of it. There was this thing where it when it came to email, that was how the primary method of communication. My inbox was out of control. I always felt like I was behind. I always felt like I was dropping balls. People would stay up and email until midnight and there's another group of people that would wake up at four and start emailing. I always felt like I was behind and lost on it.
One day, I was so up to my ears and emails that I was just done with, and I asked the question what would happen if I just said no. No, to this frenzy, no to this idea of trying to dig myself out of the email hole that I was in. I just thought what would happen if I just deleted it all and start it over, and so I did that. I deleted my entire inbox. Personally, I declared email bankruptcy and told my team, hey this is what I'm doing, I didn't tell anybody. I told my team this is what I'm doing and let me know if there's anything important that you need me to get back to you on, let's talk through it.
But I created a different level of expectation with my direct reports, in my team, and just decided if anything was important people would circle back anyways. Nothing broke, nobody ever noticed. This was a big critical point for me when I realize it’s just that you know a lot of times people shove things on your plate and there's this feeling that things are so critical and necessary and a hell a lot of times we put our own things on our to-do list, our own plate and we we think we have all these things to do but if we got real with ourselves and question do we actually have to do all these things? Most likely the answer is no. We're making our lives difficult for no reason at all.
So back to the Heather how do you do it all, the truth is I don't. I don't do it all nor do I try to attempt to do it all. What I focus on is consistently asking myself do I really need to do this? Is this really that important? What can I cut from my to-do list, my usual self imposed to-do list? But I'm constantly just letting things go. That means some weeks I don't have my sh- together for social media and I'm a little bit more on the fly. Some weeks, totally have it dialed in and planned. Some weeks, I had this vision of what I wanted to do and it just wasn't in the cards, so I had to take a shortcut. But a lot of times, it means you know what I wanted to show up on a lot more lives, but I didn't and that's OK. It might mean recording a podcast episode two days before it goes live, might be doing it breathlessly sounding like a, I don't know whatever person. It's just, I've let go of this vision of needing to get everything perfect and focused on what are the most critical things that need to get done to move my business and my life forward.
So maybe that's not the productivity answer that you wanted to hear, maybe you wanted to have some secret roadmap of how to do all the things. Let me fill you in on the secret. There are so many road maps, so many swipes, so many templates, so many tools available to us all and I'll tell you I bought a lot of them. They're not gonna fix the problem The problem is each one of us trying to figure out how we show up in our best way, living in our most intentional groove to build a life in business we want and I know that sounds a little bit fluffy but it's this idea that you have to figure out what it is that you want and figure out how you can make it work for you. So if you find yourself looking at other people, admiring how they do things, ask the question around how they're doing things. Take a note of what they're doing but then really internalize it for yourself and ask how can I make this work for me and how can I make it simpler. That's my message for you as you head into the week. I appreciate you so much. It means so much to me that you have stuck with me here for 99 episodes and cheers to the next 100. I’ll see you for my incredible interview with Jill Stanton on Wednesday.