how to find more time for your business and create a life you love w/ceri payne

In the past few blog posts, we have been discussing giving up on your business. What do we do when we feel like giving up on our businesses, even though we feel called to be here, how do we handle that?

I have given my insight and my thoughts from my own personal experiences, but I wanted to wrap up this series by talking to an expert. Somebody who helps women with this all day everyday, and who has been doing this for some time.

Her name is Ceri Payne. She has a Master’s in Education and is also a certified life coach from the Life Coach School. She uses those skills to help business women streamline their home, their business, and their schedules so that they can create a family life and a business that they love.

Who is Ceri Payne?

MISTY: She does this by helping them create more time, through structure and strategy, in their business and as mothers, so that they can rock being moms, wives, and business owners. She’s actually a really good example of this. She makes over $100,000 working part-time, without sacrificing relationships, sleep, health or other things that we all value most. And she’s a firm believer that you can do the same. So, welcome Ceri.

CERI: Oh my goodness. Thanks for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

MISTY: We are really, really excited to have you. I told her what questions I had beforehand and she even submitted the answers back to me. So I know what’s coming and I’m really excited for you guys to meet her and to hear from her. So, Ceri, will you tell us how you got started in business? Did you have businesses before this one? How did you learn what it is that you teach? Tell us your story.

CERI: Prior to becoming a Certified Life Coach, I was a special education teacher and I taught for many years. And while I started my life coaching business, I also taught school for a time and I served as our ward’s Relief Society President. So during that time, when I was focusing on my life coaching business, I was helping parents of special needs children.

But that’s when other entrepreneurs started asking me to coach them on things such as time management, business-building strategy and schedules. Basically, I was working two jobs, I guess three if you count motherhood, and I was building a successful business.

How an IEP is like a business plan

I kind of just put two and two together. I guess to answer your question, No, I have not done a business before. But as a special education teacher, my very favorite part was writing the IEP, which is the individualized educational plan for the student. It really takes their specific needs and allows them to have a plan for strategic growth and for their growth and learning.

So, essentially, what I’ve decided is I get to do the very same thing, but I work coaching women with their mindset, with their confidence, but I also help them develop their individualized plan for their specific business goals and their motherhood needs so that they can have the strategic growth and the results that they want in both their motherhood and their business.

MISTY: Wow. That is such a cool job. Do you find,  both in the special education realm and then in this business realm, do you find that those specialized plans are individual and unique for each person?

CERI: I think they should be or could be. I guess should isn’t always the best word to use, but I think that’s what sort of sets me apart from your typical business coach and why I call myself a motherhood business coach. Because I have some clients that do really well and so they were maybe coming to me originally more for the motherhood, the time management, scheduling.

And then they had this business coach that was giving them all of this advice in that business world of like, “Oh, you should do this. You should do this. You should do this.” And then we would spend more time coaching on some of the things that coach told them, but they didn’t see how that would work and how they would contribute to their business.

So that’s kind of where the business coaching really took off for me is because I see it as an individualized plan because you have a different family than I do, and you have different time constraints than I do and different results and  different targets. Sometimes business coaches forget to ask, “what is your results? What are your targets?”

They just all assume we want to make a million dollars and maybe we do. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you’re only wanting to make $100,000, then maybe what they’re telling you isn’t necessarily your steps, your strategic plan to getting you what you want.

MISTY: I love that. That’s actually one of the things I just briefly touched on in the last podcast episode about how sometimes we lose motivation simply because we have no idea what the result is that we want. And we’re just shooting for, “I want more Instagram followers,” but there’s no real end game.

If we have an end game and we know what that is, maybe yours is “I would like to make six figures so that I can XYZ and I don’t want to take away from my family in ABC ways,” then it becomes much more motivating, I believe. So I love that you do that, that you take each person’s individual situation into account.

A lot of my followers are feeling particularly overwhelmed and exhausted in this balance of being a business owner, a mom, a wife, we have callings as Latter-day Saint women. What if you could give them just one tip that you could tell them, what would you tell them?

Tips for when you feel overwhelmed

CERI: All right. I want to give them one word and then I want to give them one action item. The word is priorities. And we’re going to talk a lot about that, but knowing your top five priorities is what really helps you stay focused on your true desires and the results that you want out of your motherhood, your business, your life, your calling, whatever it is.

And this other thing, the other tip I want to give you is the action tip: planning your days, your weeks, your business growth or whatever it is that you’re planning. You’re making those goals. You’re planning from those priorities because when we often feel too overwhelmed and too exhausted to plan, then I can almost guarantee that you have too many out of target priorities, which are usually your ‘shoulds.’ They’re usually like those ‘yeses,’ when you really wanted to say no to something on your schedule.

So whether you actually schedule physically or it’s just in your head, if you have too many shoulds and yeses, that will often lead to overwhelm and exhaustion quicker than if you really knew, like you said, those results that you were desiring.

MISTY: Okay. So. Let’s go back just a little bit. I love the idea of priorities. I have a course it’s called the Good Start Game Plan. One of the very first steps is setting priorities so that you can make quality decisions. And I love that. But what I had never really thought about before, that you said, is the idea that if we’re feeling overwhelmed, that’s the red flag that  we’re saying yes to things that are outside of those priorities.

Whether we’ve actually taken the time to write them down or not, we know what they are. And when we’re feeling overwhelmed and scared and frustrated, that was that red flag. Have you seen that with your clients often?

CERI: Well, yeah, that’s usually what brings them to coaching. They feel overwhelmed. They feel exhausted. They feel defeated maybe. And so what we do is a little bit of priority work.

I just worked with a client right before this and it was her first time doing the priority work. And she said, “this is going to take a long, long time.” And I told her, “It might take two hours to really figure out these priorities and really hone in on them, to get really good clarity.” But I said, “just in this week, it will save you the two hours and then 10 X that, because you’re going to have those priorities for the next six months to a year.”

You get rid of that mental overwhelm, the should I could do more? Should I be doing more? Am I doing good enough? All of that drama, all of those things we tell ourselves. So if you’re really clear on your priorities, it’s worth the time it takes to do it because you’re going to save that time just in mental energy alone, as well as physically on your schedule.

MISTY: Awesome. I love that. I think our mental energy drains our physical energy too, at some point, so I love that. Okay.

I think that in a lot of ways, we all know  different things we could do to be more organized. We know we could say no more often. We know that we could ignore the shoulds. We’ve heard these ideas kind of floating around, but it’s really hard for us to put them into action. And especially as women, especially as Latter-day Saint women, to take control of our lives in the way that you teach people to do. Why do you think that is? What makes it so hard for us?

Change the way you think about schedules

CERI: I think a lot of it is our own thoughts, unfortunately, right? That we should be doing those things, that good moms do these things, that good Latter-day Saints should be doing these things. It’s really hard for us to take control of our lives when we’re not aware of our thinking and we’re not aware of our thoughts and we’re not aware of what we are doing because we think we should.

When you uncover those, then you’re able to decide, “okay, if I know what I want to be doing, if I know how I want to design my life, how I want to create my life,” then what I teach is really simple, flexible schedules with these intentional action steps so that you can reach those goals.

When you’re really intentional, you’re free of some of those ‘good moms do this’ and some of those shoulds. What I like to do is uncover what you believe about schedules. So lots of times if we’re not following a schedule,  because it feels too overwhelming and things like that, well then maybe we need to free up of some of those shoulds and coulds. But, ‘what do you believe about schedules’ is the first thing I ask my clients.

Do you believe that a schedule feels too rigid? Do you believe it feels too restrictive? Do you think a schedule will take away from your creativity? That it takes away your freedom? Or  that you don’t have enough time to stop to plan and to think about a schedule because you’re already too busy?

I believe that also sometimes you might think there’s no point to a schedule. It never goes as planned or your schedule always falls apart or your kids or your husband or whatever is always needing you.

So those are some of those thoughts that I really help my clients uncover because I call these the never start thinking errors or the I don’t have control of my time errors. And when we think those ways about schedules, then of course, it’s going to become way more difficult for us, as you said, to take control of your life and your business.

MISTY: That’s awesome. I hope that that if you’re listening to this and heard yourself in some of those thoughts, I’ll raise my hand here. When she said the phrase, flexible schedules, I internally giggled a little bit. I was like, is that possible? That’s kind of an oxymoron. So I like that you clarified what you meant about that. My own thoughts are that a schedule can’t be both flexible and scheduled so I love that you called that out.  

When Ceri was talking about priorities and then kind of went into scheduling and how, when we know our priorities, it allows us to make better decisions and to eliminate the shoulds and all of that from our schedules. I experienced this when I felt called to start this particular business. I had spent years beating myself up, comparing myself to my best friend, because she served all the time at the school. And she was the one who was in the community. And I felt like I should be doing that.

And when I really dug deep and realized I really felt called to help women online, it became so much easier to let go of those things and to not feel like I should be volunteering at the school because I knew I was being called elsewhere.

I think that really digging deep into what it is we’re meant to do, or what we want to do right now in this moment, and setting up those priorities, can really make our schedules far less scary, far less difficult to manage because all the shoulds filter out automatically when we do that.

How to push past thought barriers around schedules

So what are your top two to three tips for helping women push past these thought barriers that they have around schedules? I just said a schedule can’t be flexible. How do you help them push past those barriers?

CERI: If the word schedule turns you off, if the word schedule doesn’t sit well with you, then rename your process. It doesn’t really matter what you call it. You could call it a loose plan to keep you moving forward or maybe call it your focus list or the top three things you do each day. It doesn’t matter what you’re calling it. So if schedule is really an aversion, you don’t like it, then just do something every day.

I encourage you to start making a very simple skeleton plan each day, to help you move forward toward your goals and your desires, and then really build your confidence that you can follow a schedule. You get to make it what it is. That’s all I teach is simple, flexible schedules. And then you can also build that confidence that a schedule actually can benefit you in your life. So that’s the first thing.

Number two, is define your priorities. This is a process that I take my clients through, but it really brings so much clarity to their home, to their schedules, to their business, to their life, all the roles that they have. When you know your top five priorities, and then you only plan things on your schedule that enhance or contribute to your priorities, your schedule will naturally become less busy.

It will become more open and it will be available for the freedom and the flexibility that you think your schedule is actually taking away from your life. So when you really are planning from your priorities, you actually are breeding more freedom and flexibility.

And then the third one is if you’re feeling overwhelmed and over-scheduled, then here’s what I want you to do. Spend some time looking at all of the things that you do on a typical day. I really encourage you to write down those things and then ask yourself, “Are there any shoulds?”

Are there any things on the schedule that you are not 100% in on? Are you doing it because you think you should, are you doing it because you think your kids need you to do that, to be a good mom or whatever it is.

If there are things that you’re not 100% all in, then those things tend to not get done regularly or consistently. And then you’re beating yourself up for not getting them, but you didn’t want to do them anyway. So, of course, they’re not getting done regularly. And then we just beat ourselves up for them.

So look at that. See if you have any not 100% all in, in your schedule and then ask yourself what you wrote down. Ask yourself some questions like, does your schedule have anything on there that you don’t want to do, but you think you have to do? It doesn’t mean that maybe you let it go, but just be honest with yourself.

I don’t really want to do that thing, but I don’t have to do it either. I could choose not to. Just the thought that you have to do something, that’s going to lead to more overwhelm and more exhaustion, just because of the mental thoughts about having to do it.

And then finally, on your schedule, are you adding things that seem to be important but they’re not aligned with or giving you the results that you desire?

For example, I had a client that wanted to really develop deeper relationships with her children. She decided she was going to wake up early every morning and get them breakfast. And in her mind, making them a home-cooked breakfast and being there while they’re eating breakfast was really going to connect and really build a relationship with her children.

Well, what she found out as she was embarking on this journey, is that she was getting up early and making breakfast for her children and some of her kids weren’t eating. Some of them would complain or they’d rush out the door. Her little kids would say they didn’t want what they had.

So she found herself getting a little frustrated, feeling resentful, feeling like she wasn’t getting that connection. And then all her kids left for school and then she spent another hour cleaning up the breakfast mess.

She was trying to get connection with her children, but she was spending almost two hours creating breakfast and realizing the result was not getting her what she desired. And it was such a simple fix.

What she started to do is just get up when her kids got up. She didn’t get up early, she just went and checked in on them and said, “Hey, I’m up? Do you need anything? Let me know. I’ll just be in my room, getting ready, if you need anything.” 

That action took about 5-10 minutes and she actually felt more connected to her children. Her kids felt more connected to her. They felt like mom was there if they needed. And it was interesting how we actually shaved two hours off her day and replaced it with a 10 minute activity that was then bringing the result that she desired, which was producing more of a connection with her children.

MISTY: That’s awesome. That’s so awesome. So let me summarize then what you’ve said and tell me if I’ve heard you right.

1. The very first step is to prioritize. What are your thoughts about your schedule? Like when you think about your schedule, what can we change? Can you call it something different? Can you use different words? So we’re going to change our thoughts about scheduling in general.
2. Then identify top five priorities.
3. And then question our schedule based on those priorities. Are we actually meeting our priorities? And then if we are intending to meet a priority, but it’s not bringing the actual result, we’re questioning that.
4.  

Okay. So tell me this phrase that I see on your website and in your social media sometimes, is “I can help you find more time.”

Can you really find more time?

I personally kind of believe that it is really possible that God has more  control over time than we think he does. And that we’re able to stretch it, but tell me what you mean by that, because it really seems like “we’ve all got 24 hours in a day, Ceri. Really? You’re gonna help me find more time?”

You just kind of gave an example of that with the story of the woman and breakfast, but tell me a little bit more about what you mean. How do you help people create more time?

CERI: So, yeah, you’re right. We all have 24 hours in a day. One of the things is just noticing our thoughts. “I don’t have enough time.” Well just that thought alone is going to create mental energy that you’re actually wasting time, taking time away. So just that alone. Noticing your thoughts about time. Do you live in scarcity or do you live in abundance? It’s one of the really cool resources we’re going to get, 24 hours of, the next day.

We always get plenty of extra more time. Every day, without even doing anything, which I think is a beautiful way to live – in more of that abundance with our time. But we can actually create more time and do those things that we want to do and create bigger results when we plan our time from our priorities and results that we desire.

I know I really sound like a broken record. What it sounds like is not planning for the time spent, but planning the results that you want to create in a certain amount of time.

MISTY: Okay. You have to stop and say that again, because this is one of the other things that you sent me in this email that I’m like, okay, mind blown. I’m a schedule person. I live and die by my schedule. And it’s very rigid. I try to be more flexible and I’ve gotten a lot better, but this concept was huge to me. So state that again.

CERI: So instead of planning for the time spent, plan for the results that you want in that certain amount of time. So what I call this is just results based planning. You plan for the results you want.

So you might block off an hour, and you’re going to tell yourself, I want to sit outside with my children and have lunch for an hour. Sounds like a beautiful thought, right? But if you’re results-based planning, your real wants possibly could be, I want to sit outside and have lunch while connecting and/or playing with my children.

So the result that you desire wasn’t an hour spent with your children. I mean, it might’ve been, but most of the time, it’s not the hour, right? The result is to connect or to bond or to play or to engage or whatever with your children. So if you know the result you want, in this case, it could be completed in 30 minutes.

If you give them really focused attention and you actually engage in play with them, you’ve potentially then gotten the result you wanted. They felt heard, they felt loved. They got the result they wanted. Then you’ve saved 30 minutes and you have the real result, that you accomplished, was to bond with your children.

MISTY: I can see that in my life, “okay, I’m going to have an hour date with one child every single day.” And it’s like, we get 30 minutes through or 45 minutes through and we’ve connected for sure, but I’m starting to feel a little bit resentful and I’m starting to think of the volume of things that I’ve got to do. And those last 15, 20 minutes they aren’t connecting with us. There are times where I need the whole hour for sure. But, I love that concept.

It reminds me of something the therapist said to me a while back. I was getting frustrated with chores getting done around the house. And he said, “Misty, why do you want your son to load the dishwasher? Why do you want him to do that?” I was like, “so he knows how to load the dishwasher.” It’s not so that the dishwasher gets loaded. So that he has that skill.

And that completely changed my thinking about why that wasn’t my schedule. In that case, it actually increased the time a little bit because it wasn’t just getting it done. It was me teaching him, patiently, how to do it correctly. And in the long-term it probably decreased the time because now he does it correctly. Anyway, that’s just what I thought of when you said that. If we did that, that could be truly life-changing. I love that concept. Thank you.

Re-evaluate your Why every 6 months

CERI: You’re welcome. And when you heard that, I thought, ‘But he already knows how to unload the dishwasher. Then what’s your reason going to be?’ It’s going to be, because I want him to contribute to the house in a certain way. So sometimes the why will change and then what happens?

I encourage my clients to go through their priorities and their whys every six months, because that same why isn’t going to really impact you in six months. If he’s learned how to load the dishwasher, if that’s all you wanted him to do, then he never needs to do it again. So now you need a new reason.

But the beautiful thing is this, this doesn’t just apply to your motherhood. You can do the same thing in your business. So instead of blocking out one hour of your time, say from 8-9, I’m going to write social media posts. What you need to do is define the results and say, during this time I’m going to write and design three social media posts. Then in the hour you have the three posts written and where, and how you save that time is kind of the same thing.

You either get done early because you’re very focused on what you want to do and what you want to accomplish, which motivates us. It keeps us really on task. Beause your brain is like, ‘Nope, I’m going to write these three social media posts.’ We don’t get interrupted by the dishwasher or by social media or something like that. It really helps us stay focused in results based planning.

Another way that you can save time is not only do you honor that, but it’s kind of like a timed test. When you’re done, you’re done. You don’t get more time for your tests. So when the time is up, you’re not going to go over that hour. And so if you didn’t finish, you’re going to maybe only do two media posts, or maybe you turn in what we call B-minus work.

You don’t take more time because you  have your stuff done in that first, like 80% of the time. Sometimes we spend double the amount of time to go from that B+ work to that A+ work. And it necessarily doesn’t always create the impact it would create in the amount of time that you’re given.

So that was really wordy. But basically, if you honor that time, then you won’t work past that time, which saves you time because you’re not then bleeding into what you were going to do the next part of your day.

MISTY: I have definitely seen that, when I have a public deadline that I’ve committed to, I start to accept B+ level work far more easily because I’ve committed to that publicly. And it’s more important to me to commit to the deadline than it is to make the work perfect.

I preach all the time that done is better than perfect, but it is really hard for me to live. And I love practical skills that help me to really do that. Because you’re right. If I put out a B+ product and I compare it to an A+ product, won’t have as big an impact.  Going from no product to B level product is going to have a much bigger impact on my business than going from B to A.

So that’s a great tip. Thank you.  I have two last questions for you. First, I want to know about the other things in our lives that are important that we tend to sacrifice as moms. We really think, “okay, I’ve got to be a good mom, a good wife, a good business owner, and do a good job at my calling.”

I think, in general. for Latter-day Saint women it’s fair to say we kind of focus on those four places. My family, my business and then my church callings. But we sacrifice our sleep and our health and sometimes our relationships. Even though we say that we’re putting our families first, truly we’re often just checking boxes. And I think that goes back to time-based versus results-based.

How do we make sure that we’re putting those other priorities first? Because if we aren’t healthy and we aren’t sleeping and we don’t have good relationships, we’re not going to be happy and we’re not going to get other things done. So how do you help coach women around those specific issues?

Defining your priorities

CERI: Basically what I try to do is keep my clients in ‘math’ (is what I call it) versus drama. So we have the drama. We’re not doing good enough. We’re not getting enough. And that’s the drama that we tell ourselves. And so if we can stay in math, then we can really evaluate and make sure life’s going the way you want it to go. And if it’s not, we have data to show what we can do differently.

So when we define what helps – what sleep, what a meaningful relationship means to you – then you can take that definition and you create simple action steps that you’re going to do daily to show that thing as a priority. So not sacrificing your health, it’s going to mean different things for everyone. And this circles back to defining your priorities. And then what is the result you want for making that a priority?

So it may sound like if you want to lose weight, then your health is a priority. And the results for making your health a priority for you would be weight loss. And then once you know the results, then you can define what those three simple action steps are that you want to do to create that result of weight loss.

But if your priority is health, and your result is a healthy mental mindset, then your action steps will look much differently than the health priority which is to lose weight. I call that your target. So if you know your result, you know your target.

What that thing is a priority for, then you can focus and you can  schedule those few actions. And then at the end of the day, kind of that same thing, math versus drama. You’ll know it at the end of the day, if you stuck to your priorities and if you didn’t you’ll know what you let get in the way.

So you just take a simple evaluation question like, ‘why didn’t I complete X task?’ And then you could say, ‘did I allow something to get in the way? What was it? Was that thing fulfilling another priority? Are you okay with that choice?’

So let’s say you you didn’t do your workout that day. Did you use that time to fill another priority? Let’s say your Bishop called and there was a sister in need and needed to go to urgent care or something. Being available and helpful is one of your target priorities. Then you can say, ‘yeah, it did. Am I okay with that choice?’ And then you just get to decide. You’re staying in math and you’re like, ‘yep. I’m okay. I’m glad I did that. Or you’re like, ‘no, I really want to make my health a priority.’

Then you can ask yourself, ‘is there something else I could do differently to make this task happen more frequently?’ And so you may just say, you know what, I’m really going to honor this workout. And so even if the Bishop needed something or whoever, you could say, I am willing to take them in one hour. It’s still an offer, but you consider your priorities. There’s not one that’s more important. They’re equally important. And we just hit them at different times throughout the day.

With this simple evaluation, then you get to identify your obstacles. So if you start noticing you’re not doing something over and over and over many times throughout the week, then you’re ask ‘what are my obstacles?’ What are you sacrificing? Then you can develop a strategy to make them happen.

MISTY: I love that. It makes me think of two different talks from Elder Bednar. One is recent where he talked about how a test just tells us what we need to work on. That’s the only point of taking the test. It helps us figure out where our strengths are and what we still need to work on. That’s it. But we get caught up in the drama and really we’re just here to figure out, to train ourselves, how to become like Him. So I love that.

And then in another talk Elder Bednar talks about the spinning plates. Have you ever heard that one? He talks about how balance is not something you achieve. When we have priorities we can’t do two at one time. We can’t spin one plate and not spin another, so the choice we need to make is am I willing to stop spinning this plate to go spin this other one?

And I love the example you just shared, “am I willing to give up my workout in order to go help this woman, whatever the Bishop’s need was? Or do I need to spin the workout plate and let someone else picks up that plate or I spin it later and I let it wait for awhile?”

And I love the idea that one’s not more important than the other. It’s just that we focus on one at a time. They’re equally important.

How to make decisions quickly and confidently

Okay, last question is how can we make decisions more quickly and be confident in them? Because I believe this is a huge time-waster for my clients. Many of them are like, ‘Oh, should I have my colors on my website be red or purple?’ And I’m saying, ‘just pick a color and move forward.’ So how do we make decisions more quickly and be confident in doing so?

CERI: This is a really good question. As you mentioned, the first thing we do is as we get caught up and I would urge you don’t get caught up in thinking that there’s a right decision. We just need to remember that making mistakes or trying things out, such as red or purple, is part of the path to reach your goal.

You can make it purple. It’s not that hard to change it to red if you just decide you don’t like it purple. I know sometimes we feel like decisions are more life and death, but really most of them aren’t, we can really course correct, or we can change your mind. We can start over. It’s just part of how we learn from. So don’t believe that there’s a more correct choice.

We will never really know the correct “choice” because can’t live out both decisions in the end. So just make a decision.

And then the second thing is, trust yourself. We have that intuition, we have that faith, we have that guidance, we have the spirit for a reason. So even if you can’t trust yourself, in all parts of this decision, what can you trust? Can you trust that you’ll stay focused on one decision? Can you trust that you’ll figure it out? Can you trust that you’ll keep going? Where can you trust yourself in the decision, even if maybe you can’t trust the very end result.

And then the third one is take the information that you have at the time and then let your intuition or your heart or your excitement guide the decision. So in the example of choosing colors for your brand, think ‘I’m really excited about purple. I’m going to go for it.’

Trust yourself then take that information, make the decision. And then, this is the key, once you’ve made your decision don’t go back on it. Make a powerful decision and then you’re going to put all of your effort into making that the best decision instead of wasting time second guessing.

What I like to tell my clients is if you have a plan B that if your decision doesn’t work, then you can do this, this or this, then you are not putting all of your effort into making that thing, your decision, making it the best decision. 

I was working with a client who was starting a mastermind and it wasn’t looking as if like it was going to get as full as she wanted it to be. And she’s like, ‘okay, here’s the decision. If one more person doesn’t sign up, then I’m going to do this.’ And I just went back to her and said, ‘there is no plan B, you’re going to make plan A work.’

Because if she spent so much time thinking about what she would do instead, instead of thinking about how can I get one more person to sign up or what can I do. So if you’ve got a plan B for your decision or for your business or for your motherhood or something, then you’re not making that a powerful decision.

MISTY: So cool. That is so spot on, but hard. That’s some tough love. I have an example of this, I have a workshop happening in late July and just the week before we were supposed to start pre-work I had two people signed up. I was not even going to come close to breaking even. And I went through that process of, ‘am I backing out of this? Is that even an option for me?’

I decided, ‘no, I’m not. I will move forward with two people and I will lose money on this if that’s what it takes, because I know there are people who need this and I’ve got to do it at least once in order for it to move forward.’ And I ended up having more than enough people join, but it was a scary decision point. 

CERI: Yeah. I think that really shows your hope and your faith and your trust and all of those good things. If that’s the only thing you learn by living in plan A then that’s maybe the stepping stone that Heavenly Father wanted you to learn. I don’t really feel like our paths are always the straight line that we think.

I always think it’s more like rock climbing. Sometimes we’re over here and we’re moving around this way and then we’re moving up. But then sometimes we move sideways and eventually, if we don’t stop, we’re going to reach the top. But we’re going to be strengthened along the way with different grips, different knowledge. I’m not a rock climber, so I don’t know if this analogy really works, but your arms are going to get worked out and then your legs are going to get worked out and then your brain and your faith, your trust, all of that.

And so if you just don’t have a plan B, you just go with your plan A and you don’t stop, then you’re going to get to the top eventually.

MISTY: I love that analogy. Well, Ceri, thank you so much for your time. It has been such a pleasure to have you here today. You are a wealth of knowledge. I am thrilled that I had you on as a guest, and I hope that all of you are listening to what she’s teaching and that this gives you some hope and helps you to move forward in your business. Ceri, how can people reach out to you if they want to get to know you.

CERI: I am more active on Instagram. So if you are on Instagram, you’ll find me at Ceri Payne Coaching. I’m also on Facebook under the same name, not as active there but I do show up every day. If you’re a huge podcast listener, I don’t have my own, but I do guest podcasts. You can type my name into the app and some of the different things will come up. It’s all the same stuff, but in different ways. So you might need to hear it a bunch of times to really figure out how it works for you.

MISTY: Awesome. Thank you so much.  Ceri also has a website where you can find her at CeriPayneCoaching.com. I would love for you to get more information from her. She is fantastic. Anything else that you would like to add before we sign off?

Don’t make decisions based on fear

CERI: You know, I think we did a really good job. You know what I do, I have one more thing. When you’re making your decisions or when you’re making your priorities, make sure they’re not fear-based because if you’re doing something because of the fear of what might happen, it’s not going to last long-term and you’re going to end up being more scared and more resentful. So just make your decisions, make your priorities, not fear-based and I think you’ll be much more successful and happy with what you’re doing.

MISTY: Thank you again for being here.