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Hello and welcome to the Business of Executive Coaching podcast. I'm Ellie Scarfe. I'm a senior executive coach and now coach and mentor to other executive coaches.
I have over 17 years experience coaching, running my own coaching businesses and now I get to work with coaches who focus on executive or leadership coaching but who want to work with more corporate clients. If this is you, listen in as this podcast is all about me sharing practical tips from my experience tailored to the reality of growing an executive coaching business today. So I wonder, are you an all or nothing person? I think I am.
I have a tendency to like to go all in on things. I can sustain a huge amount of energy for a limited amount of time and periodically I will decide that I should be better at moderation, right? And where I've landed with that is that rather than moderation, I prefer to focus on consistency that lands better for me than moderation. But the truth is I'm still really energised and I work best in oscillation, right? Highs and lows.
I like to sprint and then rest. I like to go hard and then I really like to go home and not in a partying sense, by the way, I like to go to bed early and I get up early. And I've had a story that I've told myself over most of my life, which is that when I'm in those down periods, I tell myself that I'm lazy.
And when I look back on where that came from, I think it's because my brain has always worked a little bit differently. So like when I was at school, I was never the person who did a little bit of study every day. I was the person who could write the assignment in the weekend before it was due or even the day before it was due.
So my brain needs pressure, it needs accountability, but that can be really stressful, right? So whereas now, rather than thinking about myself as a procrastinator, I think about myself as an incubator. And sometimes I feel like I'm just really lying to myself with that, but I do, I genuinely do. But it can still be very stressful to only be able to work that way.
So I've had to come up with creative ways to get out of my head and get into action, even when the urgency is not there and the deadlines are entirely self-imposed. So, and really in business, all of our deadlines, except for our client deadlines, are self-imposed. So if you are anything like me, or even if you're not, you just want some creative strategies on how to get into action, how to use some different strategies to get into work, then this is for you.
So what I'm going to share is five ways that you can use sprints, streaks, or batching to maintain momentum and get into action in your business. And I do, just before I start, I do really think that action is the solution to many of our problems. A lot of the time we get really caught up in our heads, particularly as coaches, and we, we can really, you know, and reasonably, right, very normally, feel very stressed about either what we're doing, if we're doing the right thing, how our business is going, what we can do to grow our business.
When the truth is, getting into action mode will solve most of those problems. It will solve a lot of the problems in terms of getting movement, getting clients, getting things happening. And it also solves a lot of those problems that exist really more in our felt sense of how our business is going.
Because when we're in action, we tend to be more optimistic because we can see the possibilities. We know that we've got things out there. We're doing those things that, that support our business.
And so we generally feel a bit better about it. So hopefully some of these help. So the first one that you will have heard me talk about before is having a marketing hour of power.
It doesn't even have to be a marketing hour of power. It can just be an hour of power of the things that you most need to get ticked off on a daily basis. So think of it as a one-hour sprint that occurs most days where you tick off your big needle turning activities or your priority activities.
So that could be anything from doing your warm outreach to your network and audio growth. You really build the hour of power that works for you based on your priorities. So I've shared a whole episode on this, which I'm going to link in the show notes.
So you can go and listen to that one, but you really get to make it very customised, very specific for you. But you know, the, the head down task checking off vibe of an hour of power is absolutely magic. And you know what, if you find someone who can body double with you to do that in the same time zone with similar goals, where you can come into your hour of power, share what your tasks are, get down to it with, with your colleague on Zoom or Teams or whatever you prefer, that is magic as well.
So that is the first suggestion. The second suggestion is to create a, like a content sprint. So a posting content sprint.
So if you have a hard time staying consistent with posting, showing up on LinkedIn specifically I'm thinking about, then you might want to consider giving yourself a bit of a challenge. And it could be that every year you do a challenge in one or two months of the year. And what it could look like is that you do a 30 day sprint where you post every day, right? Or it could look different.
You might do a 90 day post every business day sprint, right? If you really want to get into it, you can figure out what works for you, but if you need a push to get into momentum or action, and you really want to, you know, focus on showing up consistently, then this could be for you. Again, to really turbocharge it, find an accountability buddy and do it together. It is much easier when you have a friend, not just for support, but also someone to check in with, someone who's watching, someone who knows whether you do or don't post.
Of course, you know, if you hit 90%, fantastic. If you hit 80%, fantastic. You have to manage your perfectionism through this, if this is something that applies to you, but remembering that these sorts of challenges, it's not about posting a, you know, war and peace every day.
Your post might just be a photo with one sentence. It might be a single idea that you capture in three sentences, right? You need to be really, it's really focused on the consistency, not on the content necessarily, but it is a really great way to get out there. My third suggestion on using sprints, streaks, and batching is to give yourself CEO time on a regular cadence.
Now this could be a, it's sort of a variant on an hour of power, but it is about giving yourself dedicated time to work on your business and take the helicopter view as you go. So this could look, you could do this in a weekly hour. Like maybe you do that on your Friday mornings, or maybe it's a quarterly offsite where you review your strategy, you write your content strategy up, you reconcile and review your financials.
You take yourself out for a celebratory lunch, right? Or you do something that inspires you to be the best CEO that you can be. But it's really about saying, Hey, if I was running a business in corporate, I would take a quarterly offsite, right? With my team. And so maybe we think about a way where you can do that in this business very intentionally.
So whereas every day, it may not occur to you to sort of sit in that CEO role when you're in the deep of delivery, in the depth of delivery, I should say, but it may be that if you can say, okay, well, every quarter I take two days, maybe you go check into a hotel nearby or far away if you prefer. Maybe I should set up a retreat in Bali for us to all go and do this together. But that is a way to really batch and focus on this time if it's not something that comes naturally for you to do on a daily or weekly basis.
Sort of related to this is my fourth suggestion, which is theming your days of the week. And I've had varying degrees of success with this, but I know that other people have a lot of success. So I wanted to share it as an idea.
And I think themed days are really a type of batching, but it's about saying, okay, well, here are the days that I work in a week and whether it's five days or four days or three days or whatever that is, you give those days a job. So you might say, so if we think about coaches, facilitators, those types of roles, we might say, well, the biggest time commitment is going to be delivery, right? Delivery of coaching, delivery of training, preparation of materials, all of those sorts of things. So I'm going to say that Tuesday to Thursday are my delivery days, right? That's where I'm going to be really focused on delivery.
I might do some extra coach training on those days, right? I can do, I might read a book if I have time available, but really I'm focused on being the best coach I can be, being the best facilitator I can be on those days. But then I might say, okay, well, if that's Tuesday to Thursday, then on Monday, Monday is my business development day. And so on that day, I'm going to write content.
I'm going to do my outreach. I'm going to grow my network. I'm going to do all of those things.
And we talk about those a lot inside the Corporate to Coach Accelerator in the sort of, how do we build our five hours a week marketing system? So that might just be how you prefer to implement it. So a little bit, rather than a little bit every day, you might want to do all of it one day of the week. And then on Fridays, you might say, well, Friday is going to be my business day or my CEO day or whatever you prefer to call it.
And that might be where I do my invoicing, my admin, I track my metrics, I do my financials. I do all of those things that don't fit easily into the flow of a regular day where I'm doing delivery, right? So we pull it apart. And like you might say, well, actually, that day is going to be a half day and I am not going to work Friday afternoons, right? So you have some clear boundaries there, but you also have a buffer then for anything that needs to happen.
So theme days really are a type of batching. And so that may be a strategy for you. The fifth strategy that I find works extremely well for me is imposing unrealistic time constraints.
And so if you are anything like me and you have time available to complete a task, the task will take the time that you have available, right? And so if I have a, if I look at my calendar for the week, for example, and I've got my priority things that I need to get done, if I don't put those things into very specific time blocks, then what happens is that those tasks will take the whole of the week, right? It will, I will procrastinate a bit. It will become a week long, epic, painful process rather than something that I just check off. And so if you are in that category, you might, this might be for you.
So I guess the first strategy is time blocking. And that means actually not just having the task as something you need to do during the week, but actually giving it a actual time in your calendar where you will do that. So for example, today is a Monday and I wanted to record two podcasts.
And so I've allocated that time from 10 until 12. And so that is two hours to write and record two full podcasts. Now, if I didn't put it into this time batch, what would happen is I would probably do one on Wednesday and then maybe one on the Thursday and each one would probably take me three hours.
But by putting some constraints in place, I get it done. I actually generally have a better outcome. So the first thing you need to do is give yourself a real time limit and you generally need to have a consequence for that or like a real thing at the end of that time limit.
So for example, my cutoff of why I need to get that done is that I have a coaching session that I'm running at 12 for one of my members and my virtual assistant who takes the podcasts and loads them up and puts them into, you know, create show notes and graphics and all of those things. She needs those by the end of the day. And, you know, could I stretch it out to tomorrow? Yes, but I've made that commitment that I'll do it.
So that imposing that time limit means I'm much more likely to get it done. And so we use the fact that a time take a task takes the time that it has available, right? It will expand to the time available. We can use that in our favour, which is that we can often also accomplish things in a much shorter time than we think we can.
So that is what I would say. Now, a really good way to amplify that is to use body doubling. So if you haven't used body doubling before, it's a tool that exists, I think, coming out of some research into how to neurodivergent people work best.
And what that means is you literally hop on Zoom or hop on something in real life, even with somebody else. You have a limited time available to you. You each commit to what you're going to achieve during the time that you'll be together, whether it's an hour or two, half a day, whatever it is.
Then you go on mute. You put your headphones on. You work with yourself, keeping the video on.
And then at the end of the time, you share what you completed with the other person. And it is, you know, particularly if you're someone who responds to external accountability, it is magical. So I highly recommend that.
Okay. So those are just five ideas. Look, I probably have another 10 of them just sitting in my brain.
But these are the ones that I have implemented most successfully. So those are the ones that I enjoy and I think are helpful. I would really love it if you would share your ideas or any other ways you apply sprints, streaks, or batching successfully to your work.
Send them to me. So I reckon the best way is on LinkedIn. So add me if we're not connected, send me a message and give me all of your ideas.
I would love them. And I will share them on LinkedIn if we can get a good collection of them. And if you are interested in having a chat about whether my group coaching programme, the Corporate to Coach Accelerator could be a good fit for your business.
And if you sort of, you know, really relate to some of the things I'm sharing, then you will relate to a lot of the conversations we have inside the accelerator. So if you'd like to have a chat, head over to the link in the show notes to book a call, or just go to ellyscarf.com forward slash book a call. And I will really look forward to speaking with you because I think a lot of us in coaching business, we need to think creatively about the way we do this work, because we've gone from these corporate environments with so much scaffolding, so much structure, so much accountability.
And suddenly we're in charge of everything for ourselves, right? Suddenly we are free. And there's so much joy to that. But there's also for many of us, a downside of that, which is that we have to be entirely self motivated.
So I hope that's helped. And I'll be back to talk to you next week.
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