121: Clean Slate featuring Lisa Jacobs

Hi everyone. We're back with Lisa Jacobs to check in with you on your 2024 goals.

I'm Bonnie Christine and this is where all things creativity, design, business and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life. But when I first set out to become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today. I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast.

It's about the third or fourth week into January. How's it going?

It's such a great time to check in. You. You know, I am a New Year fanatic. I just love the season for all of the rituals and all of the clean slate that it provides. And I think it, it provides a fascinating look at our own behavior, just human behavior, because it's a great time to check in with yourself. Are you on track for what you set out to do this year? Are you exactly where you thought you would be or have you veered course yet? Because it's bound to.

I don't know what you're talking about.

Okay.

I'm just kidding.

I was like, okay, let's start over.

We we veer track. We veer tracks. I always come in just like a little hot into January, like very confident in all of my goals and visions because I too just love this time of year. You know, I get to wipe the calendar clean. I get to re envision and you do it like no one else. And so I wanted to have you on today to talk about this kind of clean slate energy and what happens in January and what happens if we misstep in January as well.

Yes. I love it. I've got chills. It's just my favorite topic. And New Year, we're talking a little bit about New Year, but as you know, that has passed. What we're really, what we're really going to be talking about today is the phenomenon behind New Year, why it creates that energy, why we get so excited about it. And New Year is one of many examples of what you might where you might reset in your year or where you might be able to start over. We do it throughout the year. It's just not as noticeable as it is January 1st. And the reason that it happens is because we're all abiding by the same date. We're all extremely excited. The energy gets extremely frenetic, meaning it's hyperactive, it's unruly, it's wild. We are almost vibrating with possibility and ambition. And it's fueled by the unlimited potential that we see in the clean slate of a fresh calendar. It's our chance to start over. In some cases, we feel like it's our chance to reinvent ourselves. And while there's a lot of good intention behind it, the energy that comes with the new year has a short lifespan. And it quickly feels more agitating than motivating. It can start to feel almost like a burden if you start to feel it in the third, fourth week into February. And there's a reason that many efforts fail by January 15th. You can just think of your gym, if you're a gym go goer, what it looks like on January 3rd compared to what it looks like on February 3rd. There is a lot of fall off. They call them the, the noobs. They're coming in and they have ambitious goals, but their habits aren't yet aligned to them. And it's just likely we are likely to forget or give up on our goals by January 15th. Most people, that's what happens. And I often tell my own story about a downfall that I had on January 23. After setting the very best intentions and not for lack of effort, I absolutely 100% abandoned all my best behaviors and came crashing down January 23rd. This is just three weeks after I'd set the very best intentions for myself. And that happens more than we know. Because what's worse, if you're not actively and consciously working on the changes you wish to create and the habits that you're trying to form, you'll quickly fall back into your old routine. We're very much creatures of habit. We very much repeat the same cycles or the same patterns over and over again. So it's easy to set out. It's easy to forget what you set out to accomplish. It actually takes an extreme amount of vigilance.

Yes, it takes vigilance and, and this consistency. I. I'm reading a book right now that talks about habit formation. Right. But like, we always think about new habits as consistently doing something good, good behavior. But really this book highlights how your bad behavior is. Are the easiest habits to create as well. And I'm great at consistency with my bad habits, my bad behavior that becomes new habits. You know, it's, it's difficult and it create requires so much vigilance.

I have actually, I don't like admitting this. I have actually sat down in a new year and written out an entire set of goals, complete in details, worked back for, worked backward from the goal, did all the things, had the milestones set up, and then came back to my same materials two weeks later and did it all again without remembering that I had it already on paper. Those type of things really always fascinate me that I could have forgotten and, and I repeated myself so good. I was on the same track. Yeah. Yes, it was, it was almost word for word, verbatim. I knew what I wanted, but I just didn't have that plan and it wasn't concrete yet. And so, you know, there's also been years and we spoke about this, is that it doesn't have to be January 1st, where you have all the plans set up. You always need a Runway and more Runway than you think to make a really concise plan and know that that now is actionable. That takes quite a bit of, of research, insight, reflection and those type of things. And so there's been years where I've come in and spent the entire month of January still harvesting last year to make sure I did it right. And it's worth that extra time of thinking to make sure you're right on track. You don't want to miss the mark when you really start to put action and effort into what your intentions are.

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I absolutely love you. Just gave us the best analogy too. Because the. The idea of I'm going to be on a clean diet, but there are no materials in my refrigerator to support that intention does not make an excuse for me not to actually follow through that on that intention and do it tomorrow, start it tomorrow. And not getting off the. Not getting off the starting line as soon as the gun goes off is no excuse not to finish the race. That's absolutely excellent. I'd like to add my pattern that I know to be true and your example of eating right and stocking with the right supplies. I'll typically tell myself at the start of the year, this is the year that I am going to set the pace for a marathon, not a sprint. This is the year I'm going to nail my productivity with my breast cycles. And I'm going to just feel like the pendulum is not going to swing to the extreme of burnout and then swing again back to like, turn, turn, turn, get it done. And so that is my pattern. I will set that intention. And then the cycle that I know, high pressure cooker, do make, sell, do create, create, create, push, push, push will come back, it will overwhelm me, and then I'll end up before I know it with a stuffed timeline, an overbook calendar, all of these internal expectations that I have on that the next day, the next cycle of the pattern is financial panic because I'm not doing enough suddenly. And then I'll repeat. So I'll be like, financial panic. Okay, do make so. And it's just. That's kind of a vicious cycle. Anybody who's run their own business knows that cycle. And so even if I said it January 1, that this year is going to be different. Yes. By January 23rd at the latest. I have probably broken that habit or, or worked against that intention a little bit.

I think it's great to just be clear that that happens to everyone. And so today we're talking about, what do you do when you fall off track?

Yes. And it's such great news because the new year is not our only saving grace. It's the one we know. It's the one we all agree to for the most part. But New Year's is known as a temporal landmark. And I learned this from my research in reading the book when by Daniel Pink. He taught the concept of temporal landmarks. And what a temporal landmark means is that it helps us forget the past. And we put ourselves with the new me, does things like this. And so we set ourselves up with all these behaviors and these new habits. We're trying to form. And we forgive ourselves the mistakes that we've made in the past, we forgive that past self, and we're all about this new self. And so that's called a temporal landmark. And I quote from the book, New Year's Day has long held a special power over our behavior. We turn the page on the calendar, glimpse all those beautiful empty squares, oh, they're so beautiful too. And open a new account book on our lives. But we typically do that unwittingly, blind to the psychological mechanisms we're relying on. Constructing our own temporal landmarks, especially those that are personally meaningful, gives us more opportunities to recover from rough beginnings and start again. And I end that quote there. So in other words, it's never too late to make the most of a new year. You can use temporal landmarks throughout the year to your advantage. So there's two types of temporal landmarks. And again, this is anytime we reset the pace. So what you're thinking about here is Mondays can be temporal landmarks. The day after a vacation is often, you know, I'm going to start that diet again the day I get home. That's often a temporal landmark and then some. For some people, your birthday or other special events throughout the year will reset a portion of your year. You'll feel the opportunity to start again. So there's two types. One is social, and that's something that we share amongst ourselves as a society. So Mondays, first of the months, national holidays, those are all considered social temporal landmarks. Second type is personal needs are birthdays, anniversaries, job changes. The new me at this job is going to be this career, professional or whatever, whatever you, what, what have you. But both of these types of temporal landmarks serve two purposes. They're going to help you create a new mental account, a clean slate, a fresh period that resets the old you and sets yourself up for the new you. And then the second thing that that really serves to do is it slows you down, it helps you see the forest for the trees. So this is your chance to reflect of your last time you set goals. Are you on track? If not, why not? And helps you then equip yourself with some safety with the toolbox that will help you further progress in this set of goals with your next temporal landmark. So it allows us to see the bigger picture, it gives us the 30,000 foot view and we start to pay attention to the day to day where typically that day to day inertia can take over. And when it does, it throws us greatly off course. So overall, a temporal landmark can be a reset It's a biological hack. It's a reset in your own human nature. And it's good to know because you don't just want one New Year planning session. You want eight sessions like this or 18 sessions like this, and you want to schedule them into your annual plans on purpose.

Yeah. Because what I know is that I love that frenetic energy building. It feels good. What I don't love is the pressure cooker almost the anxiety of we gotta start now and we gotta nail it. That really does a disservice. It sidetracks, really, the focus of the new habit creation or the new goal progression. And so giving yourself permission to move that temporal landmark if you need to, because it's just, like you said, it's just a psychological mechanism. And we can create those ourselves as well.

Yes. And so if we keep with the idea of you're setting the pace for a marathon, not a sprint, it's almost like New Year energy. We can't help it. We hit that marathon at a sprint, which is not good for endurance. It's not good for the long game. It's likely going to get us in trouble. We. It's. It's more dangerous than just starting out slow and easy. But who starts out slow and easy at the start of an exciting new year? So that makes for February to be a great reset period. Schedule one in at your own convenience or whatever makes sense for you. But question the pace. Does it feel good? Are you feeling empowered? Are you feeling like it's taking everything out of you? Did you push too hard? Just adjust. We're all doing it together. So just go ahead and make those micro adjustments and make it feel better and tweak it and make it feel good for you. That's what's most important. It's the progress. It's not the it. Wait, I don't. I feel like I'm going to contradict myself. But it's the progress and the pace that combined will create a success that's not only the win, but also deeply fulfilling, deeply meaningful, because you'll take the time to make sure you not only get it done, but you enjoy getting it done. The journey is as in important as the destination.

Lisa, this is exactly what we needed. Thank you so much for just bringing this conversation to light. It's the perfect time. I know I needed it, and I hope you did too. My friends, create the beauty that you want to see come alive in the world, and remember, there's room for you.