Suz Chadwick [00:00:00]:
Welcome to the Brand Builders Lab podcast. I'm your host, Suze Chadwick, certified business and mindset coach, author and speaker. Each week we'll be talking about simple but powerful business and mindset strategies that will help you build a lean, clean and profitable business so you can learn to get out of your own way and pay yourself more. Forget average, it's time to level up. Hey lovely. Welcome back to the Brand Builders Lab podcast. Amazing to have you here. Today we are talking about the five things that are stealing your freedom in your business.

Suz Chadwick [00:00:37]:
Now, as a coach, I obviously work with clients all the time and this is something that I see a lot. And so I really wanted to do a podcast on it because I think sometimes we just need our attention brought to the things that are happening in our business in order for us to realign, refocus and get more of the stuff done that we want. Because the thing is, we started our business to have the freedom to have the choice to be able to do the things that we want. But I feel like it's a little bit of a double edged sword because a lot of times because we don't have somebody else telling us what we need to be doing, it's really easy to procrastinate. You know that I love that word. It's a word I made up, but it is a word that I think applies a lot of the time. And so this is my call to arms when it comes to claiming that freedom and understanding what's stealing that freedom. If you're like, I just feel like I work all the time and I'm not seeing the results that I want.

Suz Chadwick [00:01:40]:
I feel like I just never get things done. I'm never getting my to do list finish. I touch things multiple times and it just never seems to be completed then this is for you. Now, before we dive in, I do want to let you know that we are taking applications now for Amplify 2025. If you are wanting to build your personal brand, if you are wanting to become more confident in the way that you show up, nail your messaging, create your digital programs as well, potentially become a speaker, podcaster, et cetera. If you are wanting to really take what you're doing to the next level and you want to be in a community of other women doing the same thing, make sure you head to suzchadwick.com Amplify and app apply today and we kick off early next year. So wanted to let you know I'm very excited about it. And if you're in Melbourne or Australia you will also have access to be able to choose to work with Bold Vibes Consulting to help you to execute a lot of the things that we'll be doing within the accelerator too.

Suz Chadwick [00:02:49]:
But listen, let's dive into today's episode. So what are the five things that are currently stealing your freedom and your time in your business? Now, the first one is not going to come as a shock. It may be something that you've experienced yourself. I know that I've experienced it as well and that is absolutely procrastination. But I want to draw your attention to it in a different way today. I actually think that there are skills that we need to learn in business. Obviously we've got to learn a lot of different skills, but one skill that I feel like we don't talk about a lot that you have to learn in business is the skill of productivity and not being distracted. Now, as somebody who has come from a very high pressure corporate background where when I used to work for Deloitte in the UK and I was looking after consulting, I was managing up to 300 candidates as well as my client base.

Suz Chadwick [00:03:51]:
So the senior partners and I was working all of the hours, it was full on, it was high pressure. I actually kind of loved it. I'm not going to lie. I was in my 20s at the time. But when I think about that, I think about how it taught me to be so super organized and so productive that I got an incredible amount of work done. Probably three people's workload I got done by myself. Now the reason that I tell you that is because I learned the skill of productivity. I learned the skill of project managing myself, of execution, of doing the work.

Suz Chadwick [00:04:31]:
And so what that's now allowed me to do most of the time, nobody's perfect. But most of the time is be able to project manage myself. Which means that I am less in procrastination and more in productivity. And when you're a business owner who values their freedom, this is a skill you have to learn. Because if you don't, it will steal your freedom. If you don't learn to be productive, if you don't learn how to manage your yourself and really create a streamlined work process in the way that you do the work that you do, then the procrastination just takes up all the time that you could be spending with your kids or going on holidays or finishing early or working, you know, four days a week or whatever it is that you want, whatever freedom looks like to you. When we don't learn the skill of being productive, and managing ourselves and managing our workload in a really time effective and time efficient way. We steal our own freedom.

Suz Chadwick [00:05:38]:
And so sometimes I think we don't think about that, we just think I'm procrastinating. I'm just like, it's just, you know, everybody does it. But I think it's really important to know the cost of our actions. It's important to know the cost of what we're doing and not doing and what we could be doing instead. Like I really want you to think about how can I learn this skill? And so one of the things to do is to really understand yourself, understand how you work best. Because I know I've got a lot of ADHD is in my community too. I know that there's different ways that people like to work. And so you've got to work out.

Suz Chadwick [00:06:18]:
If I want to be productive, if I want to do these things that I'm really focusing on based on me, my behavior, the way that my brain works, how can I create a work environment and a work schedule that works for me? And when you can really start to look at yourself and what works for you, you can start to be a lot more proactive in the way that you manage your work day, your work week. For me, I've shared before, I am very much a morning person. I wake up at about 5:30, but then by 2:00, like my brain is like we're done. Now I'm not doing my best work in the afternoon, but from 5:30 till 1 or 2, like my brain is on fire. It is when I review a lot of my clients work, I do messaging, I think up content and create content, I write, I do the podcast, et cetera. And so I know that that is when I get the best out of myself. So in order to not procrastinate, you've got to learn how you can be productive and how you work best. And that might take a little bit of time, but just know that that is the goal.

Suz Chadwick [00:07:31]:
And I really want you to understand that cost equation. If I continue to not focus on how to be productive and work well and understand myself, my brain, my energy and how I work best, the cost is time freedom. The cost is the things that I really want to be doing and having like more space to do those things. I would rather absolutely nail my day from 8 till 1 or from whatever time till 1 or 2 and get so much done and not take a break and not worry about anything else and just power through and then be like, okay, I'm like, done for the day. That is my dream. Yeah, that's what I want to be doing more of. The last thing I want to touch on around procrastination is touching things multiple times. So, for example, when you pick something up, you start working on it and then you put it down and you go and work on something else.

Suz Chadwick [00:08:27]:
And if you're really stuck, that's fine. But one of the things that I say to my clients and if they can do it, this is a way of working, is sit down with the thing, understand what you need to do to complete the thing, and then just lock and block an hour or two hours or however long the task takes and then like, get it done. So a couple of weeks ago, I created my new mini product, which is the personal brand starter guide. You can go to sue chadwick.com forward/guide if you want to grab that. But I just sat for like two hours. I created the guide, I made it editable, I created the signup page, I created the checkout page, I created the email that goes with it, and then it was done and I put it on my Instagram, I put it in my links, and that was it. And now I create content and I'm like, if you want the guide, comment guide, and then people can obviously go and get it. But I just locked and blocked that time.

Suz Chadwick [00:09:29]:
Why? Because I don't want to be touching things multiple times. So really think about when you are doing something, how many times are you touching it? Because that is what keeps it on your mental Rolodex. That's what keeps it, like, constantly in your mind and never coming off your to do list because you're not actually finishing it, you're not completing it. And if you need help with something, then see if you can get help. Like book the time to get the help to get it done. So then it's done. I was talking to a client the other day and she's not very techie, which is all good, but I just said to her, like, we could just nail all your course material, spend half a day, record it all, get the scripts done, batch it, et cetera, and then you're done. Like, that's it.

Suz Chadwick [00:10:15]:
It's now off the table. You're now selling it and focusing on it. And so really having that mentality of locking it and blocking it. If you have been listening to me for a long time, I feel like I've talked about this for 10 years. It's still something I absolutely swear by. And I think that it gives you a Lot of productive time in your business, and it allows for more freedom. The second thing is lack of clarity. And I hear this all the time.

Suz Chadwick [00:10:41]:
Like, when you're not sure exactly what you're selling, how you're selling it, what you're marketing, what your message is, then it can feel really, like, all over the place. And so when you have a lack of clarity, it means that most of the time you're not moving forward with things that really help you to move the dial. You're not moving forward with selling what you have because you're like, I don't know. I don't know what I'm selling. I'm not exactly sure what my offer is. I don't know. And can I tell you, I feel like I got into this a bit this year where I was just like, okay, do I want things on Evergreen? Do I want, like to be running cohorts? Like, how do I want to manage these? And just being in that questioning energy really keeps you in, in action. And when you're in inaction, once again, you're going into procrastination.

Suz Chadwick [00:11:33]:
And so when you find yourself unsure of something, and this can take a little time, but when you find yourself unsure of something, thinking about, how can I make a decision? That is a question I ask myself a lot. Suze, we have to make a decision. Remember self coaching? We love self coaching. Suze, how do what decision needs to be made right now? How can we make a decision so that we can move forward and start to do more of the things that we want to be doing? How can we get ourselves out of this spinning drama and into moving forward and into action? And so really look at your business and ask yourself, is there anything that you're really unclear of? Are you unclear of what you're marketing? And when you're marketing, are you unclear on what you're talking about and how you're talking about it? Like, what exactly lacks clarity? And try and go and pinpoint it. And then ask yourself, okay, what needs to happen here? What decision do I need to make? And do I need help with this? And what is the ideal outcome here? And I think with anything in your business, pinpointing, like stopping, pinpointing, assessing, deciding is so important. Something that I teach in Brand Builders Academy as well, which is the decision cycle. And it's. And it's taking a look.

Suz Chadwick [00:12:54]:
What's the problem? What do we need to fix it? Assess what's required, implement, move on, make another decision. The more decisions you make in your business, the more momentum that you get. And so anything where you're lacking clarity and you can go through your business and say, am I really clear on my brand and what it is that we're doing? Am I really clear on my systems in the business? Am I really clear on how I'm managing money? Am I clear on my marketing? Am I clear on my sales structure and strategy? Am I clear on how I'm delivering to clients? Like those are the main things. It's like those are the core things we go through in BBA as well, which is really focusing on making sure that all the elements of your business, you've made decisions, you're clear on the outcome, you know exactly what you're doing in that, in that particular area. And as I said before, sometimes you obviously move out of clarity in certain areas. But if you can pinpoint it and try and really focus in on making those decisions and really selling yourself on the decision that you made, like, okay, we're done, we've made that decision, like, let's go, then you can obviously move forward a whole lot quicker. The third thing that we're talking about a lot at the moment is the overconsumption, which sits with procrastination as well. But I think that overconsumption actually contributes to the lack of clarity and the procrastination.

Suz Chadwick [00:14:18]:
Because when we are over consuming, when we're scrolling, when we're doing those things, number one, we lose time. Like you could get online and I find this like I scroll on TikTok at night whilst my husband's watching the news or something and I will be like, where did the time just go? And so you just go into this time vortex where it just goes and you don't know where the time went and you've just wasted all this time. Now obviously if you're just doing it for fun, when it's not work time, that's totally fine. But the point is, is that if you are consuming during business hours and you find yourself doing that a lot, that's where your time is going. But also it's just overwhelming. It's like an overload of information and you're looking at everybody else showing up and doing stuff and you're not doing it, which then kind of makes you feel really crappy too. So there's a whole lot of negative things that come from overconsumption. Now I'm going to differentiate that from specific consumption or productive consumption.

Suz Chadwick [00:15:26]:
And what I mean by that is actually going, okay, I'm just going to spend 15 minutes there's like a couple of creators I want to check out. There's some ideas I want to think about. And I'm going to use this, like, in a productive way. But you've got parameters around it. And so knowing why you're consuming, how you're consuming, and for how long you're consuming is a better way to do it. But if you just find that hours have gone in your day and you're like, I don't really know what I did with that, then you've got to really start to look at it. And I would even say to take a look at creating a diary for yourself, like a time scheduling diary. And what I mean by that is sometimes when a client says, comes to me and they say, I just don't have time to do that, and I'm like, what are you doing? And they're like, I don't know, like I'm so.

Suz Chadwick [00:16:15]:
I just don't have time. Then I get them to write a diary. I'm like, okay, this week I just want you during the day to write down just in your notebook or on a Google sheet or whatever, like where you're spending your time. Because then if you do a time audit, then you can really see what's going on and you can see what you can shift and change as well so that you're getting things done, so that you can shift from not knowing what's going on to locking and blocking and being really clear on what you're doing when you're doing it so that you're getting through the day. And then once your day's done, like, go ahead and scroll, go for a walk, go see friends, whatever it might be. The fourth thing is over complicating. So I was having a conversation with a client the other day and we were looking at all of her services and I was just like, this is so complicated. It's quite confusing.

Suz Chadwick [00:17:11]:
I wouldn't really know what to pick. I'm not really sure what the difference is between some of these. And she was like, I don't know what the difference is. So when we overcomplicate things, and I think that when you ever feel stuck, the, you know, the questions that I've given you today are really worthwhile looking at. But when you feel stuck, you've got to ask yourself, have I overcomplicated it? Like, is this the simplest thing that I can do that's going to help me to move forward? Is this the simplest thing that I can do that I know is going to help me have Clarity, not be in procrastination, not being consuming whatever else it might be. But this is simple. Like what is the simplest thing that you could possibly do at this point in time in order to move forward? And once again, going through all of those different elements within your business that I mentioned before, around your brand, your marketing, your sales, et cetera, doesn't need to be simplified. One of the things that we do in bba, we're doing a live round next year in February as well.

Suz Chadwick [00:18:14]:
But one of the things that we do in BBA is kind of doing the audit on your business to say what can be cleaned up, what can be decluttered, what can be simplified so that you look at your business and you're like, oh, like it feels good because it's clean. It doesn't feel like there's too much going on, like I don't know what's happening, but that there's clarity there as well in the simplification of what it is that you're doing. Because when it's complicated, it just nobody really knows what to do with it. So whenever you can declutter, declutter. Whenever you can simplify, simplify. And the fifth thing that is stealing your freedom from your business is fear. The fear, the fear of doing the work. So you know what you need to do, you've got a strategy around it.

Suz Chadwick [00:19:06]:
This takes me back to when I first started doing brand strategies for clients. But you know what it is that you want to do. You know what the products and services are that you've got. There's simplification around it, there's clarity around it. And you know that this is now going to help you to achieve the goals that you have put in place. But now, fear. And so when you are dealing with that, once again, what are we doing? We are coming back, we are pinpointing it, we are looking at it. We are saying, is this something I can fix myself or do I need help with this? And I had a client a little while ago who was so successful, I am talking about multiple, multiple, multiple six figures, like close to a million dollars.

Suz Chadwick [00:19:54]:
And fear was her biggest issue. And this is not uncommon. Yeah, this is not uncommon for a lot of people. I mean, I deal with fear, but it's really how you move past it that matters. It's really how you move through it that matters. And so once again, with everything that we're talking about today, we, we acknowledge it, we see it for what it is, we pinpoint it. We either ask can we do it? Or do we need help to move through it? What are the tools? What are the self coaching tools? I've talked about them so much, but what are the self coaching tools that you're using to constantly be chipping away? What are you doing to break through the fear as well? Like I, you know, talked about it so much just for me, getting on TikTok or doing other things, I'm just like, this is, this feels weird. It doesn't feel comfortable.

Suz Chadwick [00:20:49]:
I'm, you know, worried that it sucks all the rest of it. And it's just knowing that as I chip through it, as I keep showing up, as I keep doing it, that I will get better. Because the more that I do something, the better I get at it. The more I do something, the more I learn, the more I do something, the more I can work out what works for me. So if you are dealing with fear, then I really want you to think about how you've broken through fear before and how you're going to break through it now and just breaking it down into small bite sized chunks of what's one thing that you can do to start moving forward. And I was sharing this with my Amplify clients a little while ago where we were just talking about the domino. It's like fear can kind of be that domino effect where you're like, okay, I'm just going to do this one thing. Like this really one tiny thing is that I'm going to do an Instagram story.

Suz Chadwick [00:21:49]:
If showing up online is something that scares you, I'm just going to do an Instagram story. Okay, that's one thing. And so the one domino drops and then you're like, okay, I'm just going to do like a reel or I'm going to like post on LinkedIn or I'm going to start writing the book or whatever it is. But it's like, what's the one thing you're going to do? Because if every day you can do one thing, the dominoes will fall. The dominoes will fall and you will build momentum and it will have that compounding effect where eventually it's just like happening on its own. Why? Because you're now in flow with it. You now know. Yep.

Suz Chadwick [00:22:29]:
If I just do that one thing today, I know it's going to help me move forward. And all of these things that we've talked about today, procrastination, lack of clarity, over consuming, over complicating and fear, the freedom that you want in your business is being sucked away by those things. So this is where you get to make a decision. You get to make a decision about whether you're going to allow those things to suck away the time and the freedom that you want in your business and how you're going to move forward with that. Yeah, we're going to pinpoint it, we're going to acknowledge it, we're going to do the work, we're going to get the help and domino by domino, we're going to do it so that we can fix it and not touch things multiple times. Like, just do the work on that thing if it has a completion option and then move on. Because when we get rid of all of those things that are just sitting there on our to do list constantly, like things that have been on your to do list for months, weeks, months, years, they just hover over us. They're like a dark cloud that hovers over us.

Suz Chadwick [00:23:41]:
So we either need to get them off the to do list and just decide that they're not something we're going to do either now or whenever. Otherwise we need to say, okay, let me chip away at this so that I can feel amazing, I can feel good about the stuff that I'm doing. I can achieve my goals, I can get more time back, more freedom back, more ease back in my business. So I hope that that has given you a little bit of a kick, a little bit of a push. Hopefully I've inspired you to kind of take control as well. And just remember, the one skill that is going to help you with all of this is the skill of learning to be super productive in your business, which means that you're more time efficient and you're being more effective in your business. So you get through more, you achieve more in a simple way that gives you so much more time, freedom to be able to do the things that you really, really want to do.