160: Delegate to Elevate: Prioritize Your Zone of Genius

Hi. Welcome back to the Professional Creative Podcast. So excited to be here with you today. No matter what you're doing, I think about you sometimes. If you're on a walk or on the treadmill or driving to work or school, I just feel really honored to, I don't know, be with you today. I want to talk about something that was prompted by a question recently. Someone was like, how do you do it all? Do you sleep? And this is one of my least favorite questions because to me it says I'm not doing that great of a job of making sure people know that I am not superwoman. And you're not superwoman either, and we shouldn't expect ourselves to be superwomen. Seriously, I have so much help. And so this episode is a little bit of a call to normalizing help. Like, let's not pretend that we can do it all well. Let's normalize getting help in our lives. And so I want to talk you through some of the things that I do personally. They're in my zone of genius. They're things that I keep. And then I want to talk to you about some of the things that I give away I let other people help me with.

I'm Bonnie Christine, and this is where all things creativity, design, business and marketing unite. I'm a mom 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.

So many of us, especially women who are working and also being moms, many of you have small children like I do. It is truly impossible to do all the things that we often hold ourselves accountable to doing. So this is a lesson that took me way too long to learn. I was, you know, a one woman show for 10 years and when I look back, it's the biggest mistake I made. I wish that I have gotten help in my life and my business earlier than I did. So before I move on, I want to tell you about A freebie that I have for you today. It's called the Task Tending Guide. You might have it. I've talked about it a little bit before, but if you haven't ever done this exercise, it's one of the best things that you can possibly do. So it's really where you spend at minimum one week, ideally two weeks, tracking what you're doing, tracking where your time is going. You're auditing your time. Now, many people have time audits. I know that Mike Michalowicz has a time auditing system and Clockwork Dan Martel has a time auditing system and Buy Back youk Time. The one that I've created is called Task tending and it's after my love for gardening. And so when you look at this task tending worksheet, you'll see that we have four options for our tasks. We're going to water some, that means keep them. We're going to prune some, which means that we're going to systematize or make more efficient. We're going to pull some, which means we're going to trash them. We're going to transplant some, which means that we're going to give them away. So when you look at the task tending sheet, what it does is call you to write down every task that you do on a 15 minute increment. Now, that's insane. I know, but it is one of the most impactful things that you can do in your business. So every 15 minutes you're going to set an alarm. You're going to just write down what it is you're doing with absolutely no judgment. You're going to catch yourself doing incredible deep work. You're also going to catch yourself doing like, really waste, like wasting time, very low tasks. So if you're scrolling Instagram, no judgment, just write it down. If you are filling your Amazon cart, no judgment, just write it down. If you are driving to the studio or working out or making coffee or attending a meeting or editing a podcast or a video or photos, whatever it is, you write it down with no judgment. It's really just observation. You really need to just get eyes on where your time is going. And then at the end of every day, so again, you're either doing this for seven days, at minimum, 14 days, to get a really good glimpse. At the end of every day, you're going to rate each of these tasks across four different columns on a scale of 1 to 5. So the first one is talent. Does it require much talent? So one is, it requires very little talent. Five is something that's a highly skilled amount of talent. The next one is passion. How much do you love this? One is I don't really like it at all. I might even hate it. 5 Is this completely lights me up. The next column is value. One is this adds very little value to my life or my business. 5 is my business or my life could not exist without this. The final column is energy. So the energy column is how much energy does this give or take away? Okay, so one is this task is incredibly draining. Okay, it drains me completely. Five is that it actually gives me energy. It energizes me completely. Okay, so then that's four columns. Five. Five points each. So the maximum score for each task is 20. Now you've got to make some decisions. Low tasks, you're going to either pull or transplant or prune. High value tasks, you're going to likely water, keep them for yourself. Okay, so this is all going to make maybe a bit more sense when you've got the worksheet in your hand. So go over to today's show notes@Propriecreative.com and download the task tending worksheet. It's a freebie that we have for you for today's episode. So from there, what I want to do is talk to you about some things that I keep. I'm going to start with some things that I personally water. These are things that only I can do. I love doing them. They give me great joy and I'm really good at them. The first one is thinking about my business. This is something that we need to give ourselves more and more permission to do. This is us stepping into the visionary role of being in our business. It is working on the business instead of in the business. And let me tell you, I spent way too long feeling guilty over the time I would take to think about my business. So could you go lay in a hammock for an hour right now with nothing in your hands, no devices, no books, nothing, Just you and your mind and think. Think through strategy, think through vision, Think through long term vision. Where do you want to go? What do you want to do next? This is so incredibly important. And it doesn't happen by accident. It has to be scheduled. Just a tip. The next thing is creating artwork. And this is something very unique to me and my business. For you, it could be whatever, creating this, the thing. But as a creator, I know that you're creating something and so likely you have a very special value that you add to creating the thing that you do the next one is the original content that I create. So any videos that I create, this very podcast, any lessons that I create, it's content that really has to come from me and I love it and it has to come from me. The next one is leading my team. I don't want anybody else to lead my team. I want to lead my team. I love leading my team. I love developing my team. I love ideating with my team. Super important that I'm there for them. The next one is to do anything I can to develop other creative entrepreneurs. That is the purpose of really everything that I do. Why I show up is to help develop and lead other creatives to, to success in their entrepreneurship journey. So the last one is being a wife and a mom. This is something that is so important that we, if we are a wife and we are a mom, that we water, that we really, really pay attention to because no one else can do that but us. And so those are the things that I think are on my number one priority list. They're in my zone of genius. They're things that I love doing and also I'm really good at, at doing.

I want you to just imagine what it would feel like to hold your very own custom fabric for the first time. Or maybe it's wallpaper or stationery or gift wrap. Perhaps you use it to wrap gifts with or sew projects with, like blankets or pajamas. If that sounds exciting. I'm so excited to tell you about my new free mini class. It's called Start Simple. In pattern design, it's called Start simple because, well, we're going to do just that. In just five lessons that are under 20 minutes each, you'll learn how to take a simple sketch or painting or picture and turn it into vectors using Adobe Illustrator. Now, don't worry, even if you've never used this program, I'll teach you everything you need to know to get up and running simply. I'll even show you how to take pictures of found objects like leaves and petals so you don't even have to draw if you don't want to. I'll show you how to create a custom color palette, design your very own repeating pattern, and order as little as one yard of fabric or some wallpaper or maybe some gift wrap Today. Once you learn how to design fabric, that's the magic, you'll be able to design just about anything you want. So do you have an hour to learn an entirely new skill for free? If so, let's get started. Head on over to bonniechristine.com startsimple Once you register, you'll gain immediate access to all of the lessons and begin learning right away. Again, that's bonniecristine.com startsimple Come on, I'll meet you there.

Now let's talk about some of the things that I transplant. So again, transplanting is giving them to someone else. Now this list is so incredibly long, but I'm gonna give you kind of like the bullet points to some of the bigger categories, right? So one of them is marketing. Things like Facebook ads I used to do all by myself, things like tags and emails and segmenting and all of that kind of marketing stuff.

And I now have a marketing team.

I've transplanted nearly all marketing even though I I'm still involved because I love it so much, but I've transplanted it to someone else. The next one is customer service, responding to emails, answering questions. I'm in the inbox a little bit and especially when I have to be. But for the most part it's not within my zone of genius. Administrative stuff. Some of these are some of my favorite hires of all time. Bookkeeping, payroll data, sorting data pulling, spreadsheet organization. That administrative stuff that we often find ourselves doing that is really outside of our zone of genius. Some content related stuff like editing videos, planning, kind of our long term strategy for social media, our calendar planning. All of that can be taken off of our plate as well. Things like design. So this one is interesting because I'm a designer so I spent a long, long time doing all of the design work and it's quite a lot when you think about a business of my size. We do PDFs and worksheets and graphics of all kinds and ebooks and many, many, many different design related moving parts. So I have a lead designer on my team. Her name's Rebecca. I love her and she does. She often takes my artwork but then she's formatting it for things like PDFs and templates that we need. The next one is commerce so we're working on something really special. I am I ready to share about it? I'm not sure, but we have we're talking about E ecommerce. I'll leave it there. We've got some really exciting things in the work, but things like inventory management, shipping, packaging and working with vendors, wholesale accounts, things like that are all things that are really outside of my zone of genius and things that I transplant. Now the last one is what I really want to talk about and that is help in our personal life and in our home, housework Meal prep, yard work, laundry, grocery shopping. The list of things that we typically do and take care of goes on and on and on and on. So my all time favorite hire has been a house manager. I love our house manager. Her name's Tani. She might be listening if so.

Hi, Tanny.

So we have a bit of a long journey with this in, I don't know, 2018, I had started with some help with my house. I had someone come once a month to just help kind of. I had two small kids and a husband in a 9 to 5 and I just couldn't keep up with all of it. So I had someone come help with my house that very slowly went to twice a month. So every other week that we stayed there for a couple of years, that finally went to once a week. That was a huge leap. So when we had weekly help in our home, that was incredible. That really meant that a lot of it was alleviated from our plate. Today my house manager is in our home every single day helping with all of the things that go into managing a home. From cleaning to housework, to house repair, to grocery shopping and meal prep, to yard work, to laundry, to all of the many, many, many, many, many things. Now I remember the first time that I heard someone had a house manager and my head exploded. I'd never heard of such a thing. And I had walked into a room where I would say half of the people, let's say 12 of the 30 people in the room had house managers and I'd never even heard of one. And so my mind just got completely expanded as to what was possible and what would be possible if I just had less on my plate when it came to managing the home. And so it has been, hands down, my favorite hire of all time. It is the most impactful hire of all time. It is the one that's most meaningful to our family. Now for me, house manager means more time with my kids. And so it's not less time with my kids, meaning she doesn't necessarily help with the kids, like babysitting or, or errands with the kids or anything like that. It's primarily so that the time that I do have can be spent with my children and not necessarily taking care of the yard and the home. So if you can start with that on any level, know that the people that you have in your life who you might not know well enough to know their situation, but they seem like they're doing more than you are, that they're capable of doing more than you're doing. Please know that you and them are the same, that sometimes people just have help behind the scenes that maybe you don't even know about, and that that same help is available to you, even if it's on a small scale. Like I started on an extremely small scale. It wasn't until just recently that we moved into a house manager role. You can start just a little bit, but what a gift it is to you to be able to use that time for something that's inside your zone of genius. My friends, that's what I have for you today. Head on over to professionalcreative.com to download the Task Tending worksheet so that you can really get eyes on where your time is going and what you might transplant or prune first, or maybe even pull. Create the beauty that you want to see come alive in the world. And remember, there's room for you. I'll see you next time.