You Have Time with Nikole Stanfield

Today's guest is Nikole Stanfield, intuition coach whose goal is to help entrepreneurs reach a work-life balance that allows them to work through, and even avoid, burnout.

Nikole realized she had to change when even after making herself take a week off from working, she didn't feel any better. She was irritable, anxious, distracted, constantly working, and unable to enjoy the lifestyle she was trying to create for herself.

Burnout can look different for different people, but you are not alone.  The key is learning to listen to your body and do what you need, giving yourself permission to take care of yourself.

Connect with Nikole and take her Balance Quiz on her website: https://www.myintuitioncoach.com/balancequiz/

Connect with Magic:

A Magical Life Podcast on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/amagicallifepodcast/

On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wholisticnaturalhealth/

Online: https://wholisticnaturalhealth.com.au

A Subito Media production

Transcript

Magic Barclay: 0:59

welcome back to a magical life. I'm your host magic Barclay. And I'm again, joined today by Nicole Stanfield. Welcome back, Nicole.

Nikole Stanfield: 1:09

I'm so excited to be here, uh, and continue conversation about balance and how that shows up in our.

Magic Barclay: 1:17

Terrific. Now we've titled this episode. You have time and there'll be a lot of people out there shaking their heads while they're listening to this and, you know, multitasking and, uh, they're probably going, no, I don't. So can you tell the listeners how they find time, how they make time and realize that they have.

Nikole Stanfield: 1:42

There's two parts to this. Before I burned out, I felt like I was always running and my calendar would be totally full. So if you're listening to this and you pull up your phone and you look at your calendar and you've got 10 commitments and three more today that you have to do or whatever that is, then. You probably you're probably right. You probably don't have tons of time. So after I burned out, I had to make a shift personally, that I got to acknowledge. There were only so many things I could do in my day and that I choose. Not to fill it with tasks and things to do. My brain is really good at coming up with more things that I should be doing. And so after burning out, I am wanting to be in more balanced with myself. I acknowledge when I hear my brain telling me those things, that voice inside your head that says, oh, you're out. You were just gonna eat groceries, but you should. Go to the dry cleaners and you should also take the dogs for a walk and you should also go do this thing over here, right. Because it'd be useful. And then you could get all that stuff done. But by the end of it, I was so exhausted and tired and I'd be grumpy, really frustrated and angry the next day. And so I realized that I was trying to do too much and I was spitting too many things into my day. So I had to take a step back and I didn't wanna burn out again, and I wanted to shift into balance. So I had to be very specific about the things that I put into my calendar. And so when I pulled up my calendar, if someone said, Hey, can we meet? And I pulled up my calendar and I would look at it. If I saw all that white space in my Google calendar, I would be like, oh yeah, sure. I'm. But every time I said yes to that, I was saying no to downtime free time, me time, do whatever I want to time. And so what I found was that, and this sounds very silly. So just stick with me is if I scheduled a recurring event for certain things that were really important to me, that I wanted to make sure I held capacity for time around. So this is something like lunch. As entrepreneurs. A lot of times we forget to take lunch consistently. And whether you take it at a time or you just take a break or you're like, oh, it's a reminder. I need to take it in a little bit. Cause I'm in the flow right now. That's fine. And we need to remember that we have to take care of our needs and that we have to take care of the things we have to take that mental break so that we can take that pause. In between our day and then we can come back and be more effective and productive, et cetera. But another place where I schedule a recurring event is the end of my day. I try to have an hour of time. That is up to me to do it, whatever I want to, I can plan something for myself personally, I can do self care. I can be sporadic and do something random during that time. But it means that when someone is like, Hey, can I talk to you at blah, blah, blah. That's his time? Or do you have time to do with part of this committee or come to this meeting or whatever it is if I pull up my calendar and I'm like, no, I'm already booked. I do have a legitimate booking right there. Yes, it is for self care time or me time, whatever that looks like for you. And they don't know. You can call it whatever you want. So no one else is looking at your calendar unless you have an assistant, then they might be. But looking at your day and intentionally planning out things in advance and recurring events really helps build that habit of saying, oh, here are some things in my day. And then the third part of that is once you've set some limits to your day, this is when I wanna start this. When I wanna end. This is when I wanna have lunch. this is when I wanna have some free time then also saying, okay, in these days, in my week, I choose to have client conversations or times when clients can ask me anything or they can call or they can email me and I'll be there. But then these other times are like dark times and I just do work and I don't check my email, whatever that looks like for you, but choosing how many meetings am I gonna have in a day? If I already have two in a day? Then, if that's my commitment, I'm gonna have to reschedule the third meeting for the next day, another week, whatever that looks like. And I found that when I set those boundaries, then I have a lot more time in my life. And I really enjoy having free time, time to do whatever I want to in it, that nobody's telling me what I have to do. And so this can seem. Maybe hard right now. So it's small steps that you can take, like starting with your lunch, then maybe planning some self-care time or some free time setting up your day, how you want and building on it. And then you get to a point where you're like, oh, I have all this free time. I've created it for my myself. I've set up boundaries of saying no to other things so that I can protect my time.

Magic Barclay: 6:58

I love that. And I have spoken on this podcast before listeners about scheduling time for you. So I have a Google calendar we've spoken about this before and everything's color coded. So my business stuff is in blue. My personal is in yellow. My travel time is in pink and my kids and family stuff is in green. And so what I do, if I have something in yellow or green or anything like that, that's not business. I also put a simultaneous event in blue in business and it says. So that way, it actually syncs up with my booking calendar for my business. It syncs up with my podcasting calendar. So all these calendars feed into my Google Cal, but as long as I've got it as personal in the blue, no one else can book that time. It's completely booked out. So everything comes back to a central calendar. And for me, I find, you know, just going out for coffee with the girls. Obviously I'll put that in yellow because it's a personal thing, but blocking it out is this is the business of me. This is the business of me rebuilding myself. So it is a business event as well. And that has just been miraculous in freeing me from my desk in freeing me from my business. So I don't. Hating my business because I never have time. And you know, you need to do these things. You really do need to schedule for you. So there's some great tips. Thanks, Nicole. What else can people do to make sure that they have time? So we've touched on, you know, the things that they can do, but sometimes there's that mental tug of war with. You know, my business must come first. I'm building my business. So how can people get around that little voice in their head that says, no, you have to put this first.

Nikole Stanfield: 9:13

When we're, when we're building our business, I talk with a lot of entrepreneurs and they're like, it's like my baby, like my business is like my baby. And I get that because you make sacrifices for it and you are focusing on it and you really want it to be successful. And when you're first starting it in your startup, I find that it's really easy to give the one thing that you have in abundance. The one resource that you have in abundance, and that is time. And so you may not have money. You may not have clients. You may not have work, but you've got time. So you give, you give all of your time to it. You focus on it. That's great. You make your business successful. Perfect. What happens is that you're still running it like a startup. So you're running it. Like you have to give it that same amount of time as you did when you were first growing it. And I think that there's an opportunity to shift and an opportunity to say it can look different and that you can still be successful and you can focus on your needs. So this can be, uh, helping you get support, like having a virtual assistant or having someone who can help you do a really specific task that you don't like to do. So recently I've worked with several different people and it's been an amazing experience because there's something that I don't really like to do. And I found someone who was good at it, enjoyed it, and that they could. Task off my plate and it completely shifted how I view it. My impression of that task, all these things, made it a lot easier to complete. I don't hate it like I used to and they freed up this time for me. So instead of having this virtual assistant do. Your email or like all these, these big concept things. If you can drill it down to like this task that you don't like to do, then that can be really helpful and you can get support. You can get specific support quickly in order to help take that task away. And then you have an opportunity to say, okay, so if I'm getting support here and I have more free time, what am I gonna fill that time? A lot of times at vortex, we'll fill it with more. Because that's what we're used to because that's the habit that we have and that's the habit that we've been doing in the past. So moving forward and shifting into having more balance and more free time means that you have to do something different than what you did previously. And so whether that's scheduling your time, so you remember it getting support from a virtual assistant, you can also, if you have employees around you or people who work with you. Freelancers. Normally they can take on more responsibility. Then you have given them up to this point. That a lot of times we view ourselves as the. We have to be there. We have to own all aspects of our business, but we may not be good at all aspects of our business. So asking for support, getting support, and then actually giving Some of those tasks away, some of that authority away to someone else not saying that you can't still be the business owner, but you probably don't have to manage all of it. And I worked with someone before and they were like, I'm so afraid of missing out of missing something and not being able to solve that problem right there. And my feedback to them was why can't your employee or your freelancer solve the problem when they're in that position? Why does it have to be you solving that problem for them? And that's probably a habit. Right that we build around always solving the problems because for a while, we were the only person. And if you are the only person still right now, that's fine. There are other ways that you can get support from other freelancers in your space to taking vacations, to taking some other time, free time, whatever that looks like for you. So a lot of times when we're looking at our businesses, we are so focused on whatever those metrics are, whether it's sales or money or new clients, or et cetera. And if someone was to come up to you and said, Hey, I want you to work for me. you only get like one break a day. I, you don't know when your day will end, you're gonna be answering emails at nine and you don't get a vacation and you might be working on the weekends. You probably would say no to that job offer that doesn't sound very enticing. And yet as entrepreneurs, that's the position we put ourselves in frequently. So there are resources around you and it's a mental shift to acknowledge. How can I utilize these different resources that I already have in other ways, so that I can create the opportunity to take a vacation, to take a long weekend, whatever that looks like for you for this person that I was working with, who was afraid of missing out? She used to not take vacations because she couldn't do it. She couldn't run payroll when she was on vacation. And so then I asked her if maybe it could look a different way and she recently took a vacation in between payroll runs. So it was this really cool way for her to acknowledge that there was an opportunity. It just needed to look different

Magic Barclay: 14:58

so I love that you were talking about, you know, making time. I certainly did that yesterday, so I went out. With my friends for coffee, I ended up spending the whole day out. Coffee turned into lunch, turned into bit of shopping, turned into, oh, whoops, I need to go home. I have a family and the whole day my, uh, freelance marketer was working. And so I was getting all these notifications on Facebook that my page was being shared all around the world for a competition that she ran. And I didn't have to do anything. At the start of the day, I went to coffee thinking, wow, I'm so tired. I just need a day out of the office because I'm starting to resent my business. And at the end of the day, My personal cup, my emotional cup was filled, but my business was taking off because I let the rains go. So definitely there's some great tips that you've shared there and, and I can personally vouch for those. They definitely work, reach out to a freelancer. You don't necessarily need a full-time team member. You just have to let go of the rains every now and then. And it's so freeing when you can do.

Nikole Stanfield: 16:16

Absolutely. I love that story because your business was moving forward and it is so important to fill up our own cups. A lot of times we. Try to give from a cup that's empty. We try to give from a cup that doesn't have much left in it. And I know that when the time's leading up to me, burning out, I was just giving from the drags. I didn't have anything left and yet I kept trying to give to my clients and to other people and et cetera. And the only person who's responsible for filling up my cup is me. So if I don't take that time to fill up my. No one else can do it for me. I would rather give to other people from a cup that's overflowing because I took that time. I took a day off or I took a weekend and I treated myself. Like I was sick. Like I didn't take medicine, but I took the time and treated myself very gently. Like I would, if I was sick so that then I have more energy for my week. I'm excited to come back to my work. I feel refresh. It doesn't always work. It's not beautiful sunshine all the time. So don't hear me say that. And it's much better when I can acknowledge, oh, I'm feeling really low. I need to take some time for myself. I need to make sure that I'm not giving my time away because I know how important it is to fill up my cup and to make sure that it. I do what I need to do to take care of myself so that then I can give to others. In a easier way, better way. However you wanna look at it. But I have so much more to give to my clients, to my freelance people than I do. If I'm just, I did all this stuff and I tried to do all these things and I tried to push through and I didn't take any breaks and I didn't take any time. And what did I accomplish in the end? That's some of the toxic productivity that's around entrepreneurship that can show up is like, I have said this in the past too. I'm so exhausted. I'm so burned out. I'm so tired. This was before I burned out. I'm so tired of all these things. But I got the website done, or I got this done, or I got that done and we don't really acknowledge each other for saying I'm so well rested. I feel great. I have all of my sleep that I need. You know, we don't go up to people and say, yay, I'm so proud of you. And I feel like we need to shift that if we wanna. Successful entrepreneurs and have really successful businesses. And we're modeling this for the people around us. When we're working with clients, whoever's seeing us, then it's an opportunity for us to show up in a way that's saying I have balance. That doesn't mean I have to take from one area of my life and give it to another. It means that within. The tapestry of my life. I can find areas and fill in blocks and spaces. That will make it more full. That will. Make it more wealthy, whatever that looks like for you and my version of work life balance. Doesn't look like your version of work, life balance, but what makes it sustainable is if it's something that gives you the opportunity, things that you care about and that you like, if you are motivated and it's yours, then you can take those next steps to have something that can be flexible depending on. Where your business is at what time of year it is, et cetera, but also sustainable because you know that you wanna get back to that spot. Even if you have to shift it, move it, change it, it can always look different. And I think that that is part of having that balance is having the capacity to say that it can be fluid and it can be flexible. And this is important to me, so I can communicate that to other.

Magic Barclay: 20:29

100%. And whether you are running a business or running a family or a household, or you work for someone else, no matter what your time is invested in, it's. Not going to be productive and it's not going to be respectful if you can't respect yourself. So giving yourself that time for self care is so important, especially if you're teaching children or you're running a business, you're coaching clients, no matter what you're doing, even in a service. Based business. You can't expect to give clarity and commitment to other people or teach them that if you can't do it for yourself. So you do have time. Fantastic. This was a great episode. Thank you so much for sharing so much information with us listeners. This was your episode 134 with Nicole Stanfield. You can find Nicole at Facebook. My intuition coach also on Instagram, my intuition coach. She's on LinkedIn, Nicole Stanfield. That's Nicole with a K and your website is my intuition.com. Thank you so much, Nicole, for your time. I really appreciate the fantastic information you've shared.

Nikole Stanfield: 21:53

I really enjoyed being here magic, and I appreciate the opportunity to share my experience and thank you for your feedback as well.

Magic Barclay: 22:01

Pleasure listeners. Thank you so much for your time. Coming up in episode 1 35, we have Eric TZ talking about an enthusiastic life, but for now go forth and create your magical life.