WEBVTT
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All right, friends, since the middle of June, I have been on 22 airplanes.
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Three of the trips that I booked were booked within only about a 48 hour notice.
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And three separate times, I had to completely disappear from work completely and hand this business over to my team.
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Now, I teach planning for a living, and almost nothing I mapped out for this summer actually happened as planned.
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And the goals that I mapped out during my annual planning session, well, none of them are going to happen the way that I planned.
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And that is the whole reason why I'm sitting down to record this podcast.
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Welcome to the Work Life Harmony Podcast.
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Guess what?
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You don't have to feel constantly overwhelmed, exhausted, and stressed out.
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There is another way.
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When you have the right systems and tools to plan and manage your time, you can live a life of harmony.
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If you're ready to stop feeling overwhelmed, this is the show for you.
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Welcome back to Work Life Harmony.
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All right, friends, I hear women call themselves failures all the time if they don't hit their goals or follow their long-term strategic plans.
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And every time I hear themselves blame themselves or call themselves failures, it breaks my heart.
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Because when we think about long-term planning, there's so much unknown, there's so much uncertainty the farther out we plan.
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Unfortunately, when we create our plans, we can't make the outside world leave us alone, right?
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Curveballs are going to happen.
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Life is going to life.
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And if you have ever watched your goals or your long-term beautiful plan kind of go up in flames because things happened.
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And then maybe you thought, why do I even bother?
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Why do I bother setting goals?
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Why do I bother planning?
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This episode is for you.
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And if you know someone that is dealing with a lot of chaos and uncertainty in their life right now, please share it with them because this message is a really, really important one.
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Now, I've realized over the years there is this belief out there, especially for the women inside of my community, that because I am an expert in this space, because I have a planning framework, because I teach planning and productivity, because from the outside looking in, I do look like an extremely productive person.
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I am a productive person.
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There is this belief that everything goes exactly as I plan.
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And friends, I am here to tell you categorically 100% no.
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Not even at the weekly planning level.
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I can't remember the last time when I completed my weekly plan and then followed the next week that it executed exactly as I planned out, right?
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I have a lot of uncertainty and a lot of unpredictability in my life.
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Yet planning is an essential part to help manage the chaos.
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Plans changing is normal, especially the further out you plan, right?
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Because there's so many unknowns.
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If you're planning out the next 12 months of your life, you don't know what might pop up six, seven, eight months from now that might make what you're planning not be able to become a reality.
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And the fact is, if you have a really hard year or really hard season or really challenging 12 weeks like I've had, that is not proof that planning doesn't work or planning is failing you.
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I just went through three of the most challenging months I've had in a very, very long time in terms of planning and scheduling.
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And the fact is, if I had not built my annual plan for this year, and I built this plan eight months ago, right?
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Because I start planning in October for the upcoming year.
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If I had not built my annual plan, these last three months that I just navigated would have been an absolute disaster.
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And when I talk about an absolute disaster, what would have happened is a million things would have fallen through the cracks, things that couldn't have afforded to have fallen through the cracks.
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The business would have probably just kind of come to a screeching halt.
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It did not.
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Things would have been very chaotic both professionally and personally.
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What I want to share with you guys today is two incredibly important ways that annual planning, that longer-term strategic plannings actually support you when everything seems to kind of blow up.
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Because it certainly did for me.
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So let's break down what these two things are.
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First off, is if you do not have, I'm just gonna call it your annual plan, but think about it as just a long-term, more strategic plan, right?
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A more high-level plan.
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And when I'm talking about this annual plan, it needs to include all aspects of your life.
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All right.
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I'm not talking goal setting, I'm talking true annual planning, where you're looking at what am I doing personally, what am I doing with my family, what's going on with work, what's going on with business, right?
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All the hats that you wear.
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We've got to have a plan that integrates all of it.
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And if you do not have that put in place, when life starts lifing, when chaos happens, what happens is that the chaos runs the show and it runs the show indefinitely.
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Because without a plan, again, life happens, chaos comes up.
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Once you work through that chaos, and I am, you know, just as the time I'm recording this, I'm almost through, I think, the end of this crazy season, there is nothing to come back to.
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And so what happens is you stay in chaos mode endlessly.
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Let me explain a little bit more detailed what I mean by that.
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Let's say all of a sudden, so you know, an emergency happens and it's a big one, and it's derailing everything that you thought you were going to be doing for the next couple of weeks, right?
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If you don't have an annual plan in place and all of a sudden you're pivoting, you're like, oh, I've got to do this thing, you kind of enter into firefighting mode.
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What starts to happen is the things that aren't getting done, that that are kind of part of your routine life, they start to build up mentally.
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That list starts to grow in your head, and that list snowballs.
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And the more it snowballs because you don't have a plan, you don't have structure, you don't have systems in place, right?
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You start to feel more and more and more out of control.
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Then you also typically don't have the container to hold the stuff that's not getting done right now because you've had to pivot.
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So the container ends up being your brain and it builds and it escalates and your brain floods.
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And now you're waking up at 2 a.m.
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and you're going into list making mode, you're writing a list at 8 a.m., you're rewriting it at noon, you're revisiting it at the end of the day.
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Even when that chaotic season passes, because you've been operating at such a high level of stress and anxiety, and you haven't had the space or the containers or the systems to hold the things that had to go on pause, you continue to stay in that firefighting mode.
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There typically is no end in sight because you had nothing to ground yourself from the beginning.
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Let's look at the flip side of this.
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So we just talked about, you know, number one is that the chaos continually runs the show.
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Now, when you have an annual plan in place and the chaos hits, what you get to do is now you get to see visually what the impact of this chaos is.
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Meaning, when chaos hits, you have a tool, you have this plan to look out to say, okay, here's what I thought I was doing for the next two, four, six, eight weeks.
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And I'm now seeing there is no way to make this happen because something more important has come up and my time must go there.
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And because you can see it in that moment, you get to make intentional decisions about what you're going to do with that information.
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It's usually going to be one of three things.
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You are deciding to either reschedule it.
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Okay, yes, I'm doing this, but I'm moving the dates.
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All right, I'm not working on that this month.
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I am rescheduling it and I'm now moving it into my monthly plan for a later month.
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Or you get to choose to create a whole new plan around it.
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Maybe you're saying, yes, I still want to be working on this goal or project, but I now see that the milestones and the timetable I put in place is no longer realistic.
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So I'm gonna completely change my plan for how this is gonna happen.
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Or you're just gonna let it go.
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You may say, nope, you know what?
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I don't even see a way to come back to this.
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So I'm I am releasing it.
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I am saying this is no longer part of my plan and I'm doing it guilt-free because reality is showing this is not going to happen.
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For me, what this has looked like over the last couple months is the minute, you know, emergency number one kind of hit, I was able to look at, okay, well, here's, you know, this first, these next three weeks, what I had planned on doing is not going to happen, right?
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And instead of working on what was most important, and then in the back of my mind, constantly stressing out and wondering, when am I gonna get that done?
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When am I gonna get that done?
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Right.
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That causes anxiety.
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It keeps you in panic mode.
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Instead of doing that, instead, I saw, well, what I was gonna do for the next three weeks is not going to happen.
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So what am I going to do about that?
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I rescheduled some things, I completely replanned others, meaning, nope, not for the next two months.
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I'm not gonna pick this back up again until maybe September or October.
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I transferred some things, right?
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Full transfer of ownership.
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This needs especially this more so in the business side.
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While I was going to do this, I no longer am, and now someone from the team is doing it.
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And then other things just got let go.
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I have a personal goal that I had set for myself this year.
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And as part of my replanning during all of this chaos, I realized I couldn't even replan it, right?
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Just moving it to a later month wasn't possible because of the other things slated for those months.
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So some personal goals that I had are now off my annual plan.
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They're going on to what I call my backlog for things to consider that maybe I'll want to revisit in 2027, but I'm doing it without any guilt, right?
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Because intentional choices and decisions were made about what was most important and what was most deserving of my time.
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The fact is, as soon as the chaos started and it kind of was one hit after another, I could see exactly what those pivots were going to cost me.
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And I got to choose what changed.
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And this is what helps us still have a semblance of control, if you are a control freak like I am, but not from a control freak standpoint, but from a quieting the anxiety and the stress and the panic that comes when we're handling chaos.
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Right.
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This is the difference of navigating a lot of uncertainty, a lot of chaos, a lot of emergencies in an intentional decision-making mode versus sheer panic firefighting mode.
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What I got to witness play out over these last three months.
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First is I got to watch my amazing team here at the Pink B, right, keep everything running because the planning systems were in place, right?
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Because our infrastructure is in place.
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I was able to completely walk away multiple times, and there were no negative consequences for the business.
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How this also looked for me is for a three-month window, absolutely zero progress was made on the majority of my personal goals.
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That was an intentional decision of mine to have to pause on those because my time was needed elsewhere.
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Milestones have changed for all of my personal goals, and I don't feel bad about it at all.
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This was the choice I got to make.
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This wasn't something that happened to me.
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So I already know when I'm doing my reflection for this year that I am not going to end the year where I had planned on ending it.
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I don't feel one bit bad about it.
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And more importantly, I know when I'm going to be jumping back in and resuming progress on those goals, right?
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They're not just thrown away forever.
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And if I did not have the annual plan in place, two things would have completely fallen through the cracks that were really, really important to me that I did not want to fall through the cracks.
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Number one is I've shared on the podcast, I'm working on a book.
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I have a book deal.
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My manuscript would not have been done on time, all right, which would have had a slew of negative consequences.
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And secondly, Plantapalooza, our biggest event of the year, the thing we only do once a year that everybody looks forward to, Plantapalooza would have been canceled.
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Now, don't worry, friends, it is not canceled.
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And you already know that because I know so many of you have already gotten your tickets to come to Plantapalooza, which is exactly where I teach you how to build this annual plan that I'm talking about, and more importantly, how to use it, just as if I have had to cling to that and use it as a way to ground myself, replan, kind of assess impacts of changes and make very thoughtful, intentional decisions and determine what to let go of without any guilt.
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Women so often end up feeling continually like failures when they look back and reflect on their year.
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And they do that because they don't have the tools that show them what happened and what decisions are made.
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When you don't have that annual plan in place, you can't remember what you had planned to do, and then you can't see why you had to make those changes, right?
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So you're left with this very uncomfortable, vague feeling of like that you fell short somehow, that you didn't do enough.
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When you have this annual plan in place, you get to look at it and you get to say, hey, I know what I intended for this year.
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And then I know why I had to make the changes that I made.
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And those were choices that I, while things may have happened to me that I didn't have control over, I did have control over how I responded and the choices that I made.
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And this is why I will end my year guilt-free on the stuff that I plan to do that is clearly just not going to happen.
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Nor am I going to try and double down and hustle and wake up earlier and stay up later to quote catch up.
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Nope, I'm just letting it go.
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So this annual plan that is that really has been my lifeline through these absolutely insane last three months.
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This is exactly what I will be teaching you how to build at Plantapalooza.
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This is why the women that attend it come back year after year.
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So, yes, don't worry, it's not canceled.
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It is happening again October 22nd and 23rd.
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You can still grab your tickets at MeganSarmel.com forward slash plan.
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I cannot stress how important this is.
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We were actually on a team call here at the Pink B and I was sharing a lot of the details with this with my team.
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And this is why everyone on my team is essentially required to come to Planet Palooza and belt out their annual plan because I know how impactful and grounding it is to have one.
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The value of creating this plan is not because it's going to be executed exactly as you mapped it out.
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It most likely will not.
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The value is that it gives you something solid to pivot from and make intentional choices.
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All right, I can't wait to see you all at Planet Palooza.
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And as always, friends, happy planning.
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Getting on top of all things, time management, organization.
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Getting on top of all things time management organization is over.
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Doesn't have to say you are feeling overwhelming is over.
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Calendar's out of the way.
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You are feeling overwhelming and erased.
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Calendar's never ended in terms of just running an erase that will never end.
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I put an apple in both the app store and in the Google Play.
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Includes my signature and introduction to my training framework.
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And introduction to my framework.
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So open up either your app or window play.
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Open up to app on the word Google Play.
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All one Twitter, download the app to get started today.
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All one word, and download the app to get started today.
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All right, friends, since the middle of June, I have been on 22 airplanes.
00:02:16.659 --> 00:02:20.900
Three of the trips that I booked were booked within only about a 48 hour notice.
00:02:21.060 --> 00:02:27.939
And three separate times, I had to completely disappear from work completely and hand this business over to my team.
00:02:28.180 --> 00:02:35.939
Now, I teach planning for a living, and almost nothing I mapped out for this summer actually happened as planned.
00:02:36.099 --> 00:02:43.460
And the goals that I mapped out during my annual planning session, well, none of them are going to happen the way that I planned.
00:02:43.539 --> 00:02:48.019
And that is the whole reason why I'm sitting down to record this podcast.
00:02:51.620 --> 00:02:54.099
Welcome to the Work Life Harmony Podcast.
00:02:54.340 --> 00:02:55.060
Guess what?
00:02:55.219 --> 00:02:58.819
You don't have to feel constantly overwhelmed, exhausted, and stressed out.
00:02:58.979 --> 00:03:00.419
There is another way.
00:03:00.659 --> 00:03:06.259
When you have the right systems and tools to plan and manage your time, you can live a life of harmony.
00:03:06.419 --> 00:03:10.659
If you're ready to stop feeling overwhelmed, this is the show for you.
00:03:12.419 --> 00:03:14.740
Welcome back to Work Life Harmony.
00:03:14.979 --> 00:03:26.420
All right, friends, I hear women call themselves failures all the time if they don't hit their goals or follow their long-term strategic plans.
00:03:26.659 --> 00:03:33.300
And every time I hear themselves blame themselves or call themselves failures, it breaks my heart.
00:03:33.699 --> 00:03:41.379
Because when we think about long-term planning, there's so much unknown, there's so much uncertainty the farther out we plan.
00:03:41.699 --> 00:03:46.259
Unfortunately, when we create our plans, we can't make the outside world leave us alone, right?
00:03:46.420 --> 00:03:47.780
Curveballs are going to happen.
00:03:47.939 --> 00:03:49.620
Life is going to life.
00:03:49.860 --> 00:03:58.819
And if you have ever watched your goals or your long-term beautiful plan kind of go up in flames because things happened.
00:03:58.980 --> 00:04:01.780
And then maybe you thought, why do I even bother?
00:04:01.939 --> 00:04:03.219
Why do I bother setting goals?
00:04:03.379 --> 00:04:05.219
Why do I bother planning?
00:04:05.539 --> 00:04:08.180
This episode is for you.
00:04:08.819 --> 00:04:20.259
And if you know someone that is dealing with a lot of chaos and uncertainty in their life right now, please share it with them because this message is a really, really important one.
00:04:20.819 --> 00:04:41.939
Now, I've realized over the years there is this belief out there, especially for the women inside of my community, that because I am an expert in this space, because I have a planning framework, because I teach planning and productivity, because from the outside looking in, I do look like an extremely productive person.
00:04:42.100 --> 00:04:43.779
I am a productive person.
00:04:44.100 --> 00:04:49.860
There is this belief that everything goes exactly as I plan.
00:04:50.419 --> 00:04:56.100
And friends, I am here to tell you categorically 100% no.
00:04:56.579 --> 00:04:58.819
Not even at the weekly planning level.
00:04:58.980 --> 00:05:10.100
I can't remember the last time when I completed my weekly plan and then followed the next week that it executed exactly as I planned out, right?
00:05:10.340 --> 00:05:14.899
I have a lot of uncertainty and a lot of unpredictability in my life.
00:05:15.139 --> 00:05:20.579
Yet planning is an essential part to help manage the chaos.
00:05:21.060 --> 00:05:26.180
Plans changing is normal, especially the further out you plan, right?
00:05:26.259 --> 00:05:27.699
Because there's so many unknowns.
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If you're planning out the next 12 months of your life, you don't know what might pop up six, seven, eight months from now that might make what you're planning not be able to become a reality.
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And the fact is, if you have a really hard year or really hard season or really challenging 12 weeks like I've had, that is not proof that planning doesn't work or planning is failing you.
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I just went through three of the most challenging months I've had in a very, very long time in terms of planning and scheduling.
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And the fact is, if I had not built my annual plan for this year, and I built this plan eight months ago, right?
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Because I start planning in October for the upcoming year.
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If I had not built my annual plan, these last three months that I just navigated would have been an absolute disaster.
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And when I talk about an absolute disaster, what would have happened is a million things would have fallen through the cracks, things that couldn't have afforded to have fallen through the cracks.
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The business would have probably just kind of come to a screeching halt.
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It did not.
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Things would have been very chaotic both professionally and personally.
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What I want to share with you guys today is two incredibly important ways that annual planning, that longer-term strategic plannings actually support you when everything seems to kind of blow up.
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Because it certainly did for me.
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So let's break down what these two things are.
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First off, is if you do not have, I'm just gonna call it your annual plan, but think about it as just a long-term, more strategic plan, right?
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A more high-level plan.
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And when I'm talking about this annual plan, it needs to include all aspects of your life.
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All right.
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I'm not talking goal setting, I'm talking true annual planning, where you're looking at what am I doing personally, what am I doing with my family, what's going on with work, what's going on with business, right?
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All the hats that you wear.
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We've got to have a plan that integrates all of it.
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And if you do not have that put in place, when life starts lifing, when chaos happens, what happens is that the chaos runs the show and it runs the show indefinitely.
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Because without a plan, again, life happens, chaos comes up.
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Once you work through that chaos, and I am, you know, just as the time I'm recording this, I'm almost through, I think, the end of this crazy season, there is nothing to come back to.
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And so what happens is you stay in chaos mode endlessly.
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Let me explain a little bit more detailed what I mean by that.
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Let's say all of a sudden, so you know, an emergency happens and it's a big one, and it's derailing everything that you thought you were going to be doing for the next couple of weeks, right?
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If you don't have an annual plan in place and all of a sudden you're pivoting, you're like, oh, I've got to do this thing, you kind of enter into firefighting mode.
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What starts to happen is the things that aren't getting done, that that are kind of part of your routine life, they start to build up mentally.
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That list starts to grow in your head, and that list snowballs.
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And the more it snowballs because you don't have a plan, you don't have structure, you don't have systems in place, right?
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You start to feel more and more and more out of control.
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Then you also typically don't have the container to hold the stuff that's not getting done right now because you've had to pivot.
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So the container ends up being your brain and it builds and it escalates and your brain floods.
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And now you're waking up at 2 a.m.
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and you're going into list making mode, you're writing a list at 8 a.m., you're rewriting it at noon, you're revisiting it at the end of the day.
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Even when that chaotic season passes, because you've been operating at such a high level of stress and anxiety, and you haven't had the space or the containers or the systems to hold the things that had to go on pause, you continue to stay in that firefighting mode.
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There typically is no end in sight because you had nothing to ground yourself from the beginning.
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Let's look at the flip side of this.
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So we just talked about, you know, number one is that the chaos continually runs the show.
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Now, when you have an annual plan in place and the chaos hits, what you get to do is now you get to see visually what the impact of this chaos is.
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Meaning, when chaos hits, you have a tool, you have this plan to look out to say, okay, here's what I thought I was doing for the next two, four, six, eight weeks.
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And I'm now seeing there is no way to make this happen because something more important has come up and my time must go there.
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And because you can see it in that moment, you get to make intentional decisions about what you're going to do with that information.
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It's usually going to be one of three things.
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You are deciding to either reschedule it.
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Okay, yes, I'm doing this, but I'm moving the dates.
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All right, I'm not working on that this month.
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I am rescheduling it and I'm now moving it into my monthly plan for a later month.
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Or you get to choose to create a whole new plan around it.
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Maybe you're saying, yes, I still want to be working on this goal or project, but I now see that the milestones and the timetable I put in place is no longer realistic.
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So I'm gonna completely change my plan for how this is gonna happen.
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Or you're just gonna let it go.
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You may say, nope, you know what?
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I don't even see a way to come back to this.
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So I'm I am releasing it.
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I am saying this is no longer part of my plan and I'm doing it guilt-free because reality is showing this is not going to happen.
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For me, what this has looked like over the last couple months is the minute, you know, emergency number one kind of hit, I was able to look at, okay, well, here's, you know, this first, these next three weeks, what I had planned on doing is not going to happen, right?
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And instead of working on what was most important, and then in the back of my mind, constantly stressing out and wondering, when am I gonna get that done?
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When am I gonna get that done?
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Right.
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That causes anxiety.
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It keeps you in panic mode.
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Instead of doing that, instead, I saw, well, what I was gonna do for the next three weeks is not going to happen.
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So what am I going to do about that?
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I rescheduled some things, I completely replanned others, meaning, nope, not for the next two months.
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I'm not gonna pick this back up again until maybe September or October.
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I transferred some things, right?
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Full transfer of ownership.
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This needs especially this more so in the business side.
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While I was going to do this, I no longer am, and now someone from the team is doing it.
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And then other things just got let go.
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I have a personal goal that I had set for myself this year.
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And as part of my replanning during all of this chaos, I realized I couldn't even replan it, right?
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Just moving it to a later month wasn't possible because of the other things slated for those months.
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So some personal goals that I had are now off my annual plan.
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They're going on to what I call my backlog for things to consider that maybe I'll want to revisit in 2027, but I'm doing it without any guilt, right?
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Because intentional choices and decisions were made about what was most important and what was most deserving of my time.
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The fact is, as soon as the chaos started and it kind of was one hit after another, I could see exactly what those pivots were going to cost me.
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And I got to choose what changed.
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And this is what helps us still have a semblance of control, if you are a control freak like I am, but not from a control freak standpoint, but from a quieting the anxiety and the stress and the panic that comes when we're handling chaos.
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Right.
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This is the difference of navigating a lot of uncertainty, a lot of chaos, a lot of emergencies in an intentional decision-making mode versus sheer panic firefighting mode.
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What I got to witness play out over these last three months.
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First is I got to watch my amazing team here at the Pink B, right, keep everything running because the planning systems were in place, right?
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Because our infrastructure is in place.
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I was able to completely walk away multiple times, and there were no negative consequences for the business.
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How this also looked for me is for a three-month window, absolutely zero progress was made on the majority of my personal goals.
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That was an intentional decision of mine to have to pause on those because my time was needed elsewhere.
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Milestones have changed for all of my personal goals, and I don't feel bad about it at all.
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This was the choice I got to make.
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This wasn't something that happened to me.
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So I already know when I'm doing my reflection for this year that I am not going to end the year where I had planned on ending it.
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I don't feel one bit bad about it.
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And more importantly, I know when I'm going to be jumping back in and resuming progress on those goals, right?
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They're not just thrown away forever.
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And if I did not have the annual plan in place, two things would have completely fallen through the cracks that were really, really important to me that I did not want to fall through the cracks.
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Number one is I've shared on the podcast, I'm working on a book.
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I have a book deal.
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My manuscript would not have been done on time, all right, which would have had a slew of negative consequences.
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And secondly, Plantapalooza, our biggest event of the year, the thing we only do once a year that everybody looks forward to, Plantapalooza would have been canceled.
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Now, don't worry, friends, it is not canceled.
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And you already know that because I know so many of you have already gotten your tickets to come to Plantapalooza, which is exactly where I teach you how to build this annual plan that I'm talking about, and more importantly, how to use it, just as if I have had to cling to that and use it as a way to ground myself, replan, kind of assess impacts of changes and make very thoughtful, intentional decisions and determine what to let go of without any guilt.
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Women so often end up feeling continually like failures when they look back and reflect on their year.
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And they do that because they don't have the tools that show them what happened and what decisions are made.
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When you don't have that annual plan in place, you can't remember what you had planned to do, and then you can't see why you had to make those changes, right?
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So you're left with this very uncomfortable, vague feeling of like that you fell short somehow, that you didn't do enough.
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When you have this annual plan in place, you get to look at it and you get to say, hey, I know what I intended for this year.
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And then I know why I had to make the changes that I made.
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And those were choices that I, while things may have happened to me that I didn't have control over, I did have control over how I responded and the choices that I made.
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And this is why I will end my year guilt-free on the stuff that I plan to do that is clearly just not going to happen.
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Nor am I going to try and double down and hustle and wake up earlier and stay up later to quote catch up.
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Nope, I'm just letting it go.
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So this annual plan that is that really has been my lifeline through these absolutely insane last three months.
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This is exactly what I will be teaching you how to build at Plantapalooza.
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This is why the women that attend it come back year after year.
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So, yes, don't worry, it's not canceled.
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It is happening again October 22nd and 23rd.
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You can still grab your tickets at MeganSarmel.com forward slash plan.
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I cannot stress how important this is.
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We were actually on a team call here at the Pink B and I was sharing a lot of the details with this with my team.
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And this is why everyone on my team is essentially required to come to Planet Palooza and belt out their annual plan because I know how impactful and grounding it is to have one.
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The value of creating this plan is not because it's going to be executed exactly as you mapped it out.
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It most likely will not.
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The value is that it gives you something solid to pivot from and make intentional choices.
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All right, I can't wait to see you all at Planet Palooza.
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And as always, friends, happy planning.
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Getting on top of all things, time management, organization.
00:19:14.980 --> 00:19:18.180
Getting on top of all things time management organization is over.
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Doesn't have to say you are feeling overwhelming is over.
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Calendar's out of the way.
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You are feeling overwhelming and erased.
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Calendar's never ended in terms of just running an erase that will never end.
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I put an apple in both the app store and in the Google Play.
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Includes my signature and introduction to my training framework.
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And introduction to my framework.
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So open up either your app or window play.
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Open up to app on the word Google Play.
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All one Twitter, download the app to get started today.
00:19:55.380 --> 00:19:58.100
All one word, and download the app to get started today.
