The importance of keeping appointments with yourself

Building a business is basically doing a series of important projects. And as you work on those projects, you learn and grow and you get better about doing them over time. And then you accomplish your marketing or your client services or whatever it is that the projects are that the pieces that grow your business. But what I've noticed a lot is that people simply don't work on those projects or they work on those projects and fits and starts and maybe they even scheduled some kind of event or program and they work on the program kind of in the last minute way. And so it's stressful, they don't make consistent progress, they don't create content unless they are feeling inspired, whatever. So basically what I found is necessary to grow a business is to continually schedule appointments with myself to work on important projects. And if I show up for those appointments with myself and do the project that I planned, then my business keeps moving forward. And it's not that every time I do a project, it's really successful. No, not at all. But at least every time I show up to do something, I get some more exposure to doing that thing. It has less emotional charge for me, less resistance, it's less of a big deal. This is actually one of those situations I've seen a lot of my clients or people who work my students, things are such a big deal before you do them on a regular basis. For example, making a Facebook live video, such a big deal, it's so scary. And of course the first time you do it, second time you do it third time, or if you only do it once in a while, it still has that strong emotional charge. But just like anything that you do continually, it loses the emotional charge and it's no longer a big deal. So you know, in fact, when I used to make a new video, when I first started making videos, I made a new video every day. I posted online every day. I took two days off per week. But essentially I made five new videos a day, posted online publicly on Facebook and other places, YouTube, five new videos per week. And when I used to do that, making videos lost its strong emotional charge pretty quickly because it became no big deal after a while. So then because it was no longer that big of a deal, I was much more able to schedule time and doing it or launching an online course the first time you do it or the second time it might be exhausting for you. Maybe you're following someone's very massive launch plan that really isn't meant for self employed people like us. It's meant for much bigger businesses. My Launches of my courses are much lighter. My plan, my launch plan is much lighter. And that's what I teach. But anyway, it's like the first couple times, if you don't launch your courses often, every launch, it's like, oh, emotional charge, big deal, you know? And therefore, because there's an emotional charge and it's a big deal, you resist doing it. Anything that you resist doing, it's because there's an emotional charge to it. There is a fear of failure. There is, oh, this is a big deal. If I don't do this right, then what does that mean about my identity? Essentially, that's what subconsciously is going on. If you don't do something right, if you make mistakes, if you disappoint other people, what does that mean for your identity? You're not as good as you thought you were, et cetera. But the more you do something, all right, the more consistently you do something, the more it loses its emotional charge. The less you resist doing it, the less it becomes about your identity and self worth. You just like, oh, just something. So, for example, like, you know, let's pick something that you do on a regular basis. I don't know, brush your teeth or something like that. Take a shower. I don't know, like, if you, if you brush your teeth and you don't do it perfectly one day, do you like, oh, something about my self worth? No, it's just like, oh, whatever, I'm tired today, I didn't brush my teeth that well, Whatever, right? It's no big deal for you anymore. So you've got to make it like that. For every other thing in your business, whether it's making content, whether it's writing, making videos, launching courses, announcing your services, writing a sales page, contacting prospective clients, or contacting people to interview you on their podcast. Whatever it is you do, you just have to do it consistently so it's no longer a big deal. And the way I do it consistently is by I schedule appointments with myself to do these different pieces in my business. So let's talk about keeping appointments with yourself to work on those projects. Okay, so there are typically two things that happen. Again, when something has strong emotional charge for you, you're resisting it. You are fear of failure. It's connected to your self worth. You know, all those things that are natural until you get exposed to it. Many, many times, two things happen. You, you schedule to do the project and you don't show up for your appointment with yourself. You don't, you either don't show up with the appointment or if you use something like focus mate and you scheduled with somebody else to work, you show up for the focus mate appointment, but you still don't work, you still don't work on that thing that you planned to do. So basically when you don't work on the thing you planned to do, there are two basic reactions. One is you ignore the fact that you just skipped the appointment with yourself or didn't do the thing you planned, you ignore the fact. And secondly, you blame yourself, maybe even self punishment for not following your plans. And neither of these are good responses. Neither of these are healthy and helpful for your self confidence and for your future appointments with yourself. So let's talk about each of these. The first situation is when you don't show up for your appointments with yourself, you planned Tuesday at 2pm you're going to write a blog post. Thursday at 10am you're going to work on your online course launch or whatever. And then the time comes and goes and you don't do the thing that you had planned. You ignored your plan that you had set in the past. Let's do a quick thought experiment on why this this is happening or how can you prevent this from happening. I want you to imagine a very important client that you have. Now this might be somebody that you actually work with or have worked with and they are very important to you. Okay, so could be an actual person or it could be an imaginary person. Maybe it's somebody you actually know. Like oh my goodness, it'd be so amazing to have that person as a client. Okay, so I want you to imagine a very important client in your business. Now once you imagine that you have scheduled with that client to work on something very important for them, you schedule time to show up and you and they will work on that very important project for them. Are you going to just skip the appointment because you don't feel like it that that day you don't feel like it? Maybe, maybe even you don't feel well at, you know, an hour before the appointment and you just don't show up. Now I'm guessing that if it's a really important client, you will do whatever you need to do to prepare yourself to make sure you show up. Now if you still don't show up for important clients, that's something else we need to talk about. You, you have, yeah, some, some emotional, you know, situation that, that you may need to work with a therapist or a counselor or healer to, to, to get over. But my guess is that for really important appointments you show up, right? Now I've noticed that, you know, with, with my clients, when they schedule with me, they show up. And I think it's because over time we have built a relationship. And of course I show up, they know and why show up on time? And I think it's over time because they built, we built a relationship of mutual respect and mutual trust. And so. So you show up for an important client, right? Of course you do. You do your best. You prepare yourself for that appointment. You don't, you just don't. Just like you scheduled an appointment, you know, even if you schedule it a day in advance, they schedule it with you. You still prepare, you're looking forward to that appointment. Appointment and you show up. So here is the truth of all this. I want to encourage you to take on this idea. The most important client in your business is you. Who else is more important in your business if it's not you? No, it's not even that super important person so called that you respect, that's your client. Well, if you don't take care of yourself, if you aren't prioritizing your self care, you aren't prioritizing showing up for your priorities. You aren't organizing your life and your business. You don't even have the capacity to show up for anybody else in your business, let alone some important client. So at the start and end of every day and all throughout the day, the most important client in your business is still you. So what are you going to do about that? I hope that you will remind yourself of this idea every day as often as you need to. Like, oh, I am my most important client. So if I set an appointment with myself, it's setting an appointment with the most important client in my business. So what am I doing disrespecting my most important client by not showing up to do the plan that I had scheduled to do with that client? That's what you're doing. Every time you miss an appointment with yourself or don't follow your plan, you are further disrespecting yourself. And of course every time you do show up for what you planned, Tuesday at 2pm you said you would write a blog post and you show up and you just try. You just try because you know that you are your most important client. You're not going to disrespect your own plans. So you show up and you try and knowing that it's not going to be perfect, but you sincerely make the effort. Then every time you show up for your own plans, you Further build your self respect and your confidence. So when people ask me how do I build my confidence? My answer is very simple. You make plans with yourself and you show up for those plans. It's really that simple. I wish someone had told me this when I was young, but I'm glad I had to figure it out as an adult. Oh, I make plans with myself. I say, Thursday at 10:00am I'm doing this. Friday at 1:00pm I'm doing that. Monday at 3:00pm I'm doing this. I put it in my schedule and I show up for it. No matter how I am feeling. No matter how I am feeling, I show up for it and I go through with it. Now you might say, George, that's so harsh. You're not respecting your own. You're not respecting your self care. If you don't feel like doing it, why are you doing. You're not respecting yourself as a creative being with no limitations. George, why are you constraining yourself so much to a rigid schedule? You don't start with one like that. I didn't start. Okay, so some of you might start thinking you're so idealistic. Oh, that's right, yes. I'm going to schedule my things in and then you start with this very rigid schedule. It's kind of like you've never run a mile in your life before. And now you've signed up for a marathon tomorrow. Of course you're going to harm yourself. Great. You're going to injure yourself and you're going to fail, crash and burn and you know, really disappoint yourself so you don't start something you haven't done before. You don't start with saying, I've always disrespected my schedule. I don't show up for my plans and suddenly tomorrow I'm going to do every. I'm going to schedule five appointments myself and show up for all of them. I mean you could, but you'll probably burn out really quickly. So doing this requires easing into it. Just like with any other skill. You don't expect so much of yourself when you are at zero. You don't go to 60, you know, in, in one second if you don't have the capacity to do so. So this is my recommendation again to build self confidence. You make plans with yourself and you show up for it. But because you're not used to doing that, perhaps if you aren't, then you need to do it gradually to say, okay, let me set one appointment with myself. I'm my most important client and my clients usually schedule one appointment per week or whatever. So let me set one important appointment with myself this week, okay? Or tomorrow or each day. I mean, depending on how much you want to work, you know, try this for. But even just one appointment each week, you set it, you show up for it, you do it no matter how you are feeling. Just like an important client. Your important client. Okay, fine. For an important point client, they might, you know, be okay if you had to reschedule last minute to say, oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, but I really am feeling terrible right now and I can't meet with you. So let's play that same thought experiment. If an important client, you know, said that to you, let's flip it around. Let's say that. Let's say that you are the client and someone was a service provider and they said, I'm so sorry I can't meet with you today because I am really not feeling well. Or I had. There was an emergency with my child and or family member, and I really, I'm so sorry I can't show up for you. I will make up for it. I will do whatever needed to make up for it. Now, you as the important, you as a client, do you berate the service provider and say, no, you're terrible, you're. Well, hopefully you won't. And you probably, as somebody who is in my audience, you are a kind and thoughtful person, caring person. You wouldn't berate somebody for sincerely apologizing and having a good reason why they can't show up for the appointment, assuming they don't do it all the time. Right? Because if the service provider continually cancels or reschedules and you're like, yeah, I'm not sure I want to work with that person. So maybe once is okay. And the same thing with you. When you have an appointment yourself, you prepare, you do whatever you can do, whatever you need to emotionally and logistically to show up for it. And once in a long while, of course, you can say, I'm so sorry I can't show up for this right now. It's a unique situation, but it's not going to be. Usually I will, and I promise I will, but this time, there's something very odd. Okay, that's fine. But to do that again and again and again is greatly disrespectful to your most important client, which is you. And no wonder you don't trust yourself when you continually do this. Now, again, let me talk about that second common Reaction to not following your plans, which is self punishment, self blame. Like I said, if a service provider that you care about and respect needed to cancel with a good reason only once in a while, but usually they show up just fine, on time and ready, then you say, okay, you know what, don't worry about it, it's okay. I'm so sorry, I hope you didn't do well. You would show compassion to that person, wouldn't you? Or let's just even say one of your clients that you, that you scheduled with had to cancel. You would show compassion to the client, wouldn't you? As long as it wasn't a common situation, as long as most of the time they show up, you would show compassion, wouldn't you? Yes, of course you would. So show that same compassion to yourself because you are your most important client. You are your most important client. So show that compassion to yourself. When you don't show up for your own plans, remembering that if you keep not showing up for your own plants, then you are trying to to run a marathon before you've even been able to run a mile. So you need to schedule fewer appointments with yourself. So to recap, this is how we build confidence, self trust, empowerment, authentic power within ourselves. I mean my life has changed. I mean I am a different person than when I was, than who I was even gosh, I would say five years ago. Certainly I'm a different person than 10 years ago when I did not show up for my appointments with myself. And so I had a lot of self doubt, I had lack of trust within myself. I didn't have as much empowerment, I had a lot of fear of failure and a lot of just limiting internal stuff. But once I started practicing this, to make plans, thinking of myself as the most important client and thereby prepare and show up for those plans. If I said, as I did that again and again and again, my confidence grew, my authentic power grew and my rely, I could rely, I could rely on myself. I could, I felt I was more reliable and I was and I am as a result. And this and your confidence and your self reliability will show itself naturally in the outside world and others will treat you with respect. So this is really, I mean a lot of people say, George, how are you able to have an audience that respects you, that trusts you? It begins with self trust. How else are you going to have somebody else trust you, let alone the whole audience who relies on you and trust you and believes you? You start with yourself and this is the simple exercise. You make a plan to work on something important in your business and you show up for it, no matter how you feel. And of course, once in a while, you know, if you can't show up, self compassion. If you continually do this, you need to start with one appointment per week, right? Just like an important client would, and then go from there. Now here is one more. This is kind of a neat trick. Okay? For doing this, that can help a little bit. I'm going to give you actually two techniques. One is that at the beginning of the appointment with yourself, you show up. And because it's an important project, like I said in the beginning of this video, you probably feel some trepidation, you might fail in this project. You have probably been procrastinating on it for a while. And so you need to calm yourself to get into what I call calm, joyful focus. I have a whole video about calm, joyful focus and I encourage you to look it up and watch that. But basically, I do my energy reboot at the beginning of the session and I do it again and again throughout the hour. I do it at least every 20 to 30 minutes. Sometimes when it's a really hard project, I do it every five to 10 minutes because the energy reboot only takes 20 to 30 seconds. So it's a very fast thing. But it calms me and brings me back to calm, joyful focus so that I continue trying. That's all I'm asking of myself and of you. Just try. That's it. You're not going to. What we need to do is detach ourselves from the results and just try knowing that as we show up for our own plans again and again and again and again, we build the skills naturally. We build exposure to that kind of project. We build exposure to writing again and again and again. We build exposure to making videos. We build exposure to reaching out. We build exposure to whatever project. You have so much, you know, emotional charge about fear of failure and making mistakes and perfectionism and blah blah, blah, blah. All that stuff is just emotional charge. And if you build exposure to it again and again, it becomes like brushing your teeth or it becomes like eating or becomes like something you do all the time or cooking or whatever it is you do. It's just normal. It's not a big deal. It's no big deal anymore. In the beginning it was such a big deal, right? To. I mean, whatever it is that you naturally do that, people go, wow, you're able to do that? Yes, I can, because I've done it so many times. So build exposure to hard Hard, quote, unquote. It doesn't have to be hard if you don't have such an emotional charge about if you don't invest your self worth in any project, it's not hard, is it? Let's talk about this, right? If you don't invest your self worth in any project, it's not hard. A hard something is hard only because you invest yourself. You think it's related to your self worth and it's because you don't have, you haven't had enough exposure to it. That's all. So make plans with yourself to do important things and then show up for those plans. And I promise you two little techniques. One is the energy reboot at the beginning and throughout the hour as needed to calm yourself and keep trying. Right? And the second technique, and it sounds counterintuitive, is not to schedule appointments with yourself at all, or to not only schedule an appointment with yourself, to schedule an appointment with somebody else. I alluded to this earlier in the video, which is FocusMate. I use that multiple times. You know, if you, if you ever find me on Focusmate, you'll see that I have over 3000 sessions that I've booked. That's over the past couple of years. So I literally use FocusMate throughout the entire day. If I'm not making a video like this, if I'm not in a meeting, if I'm not in a group teaching session, if I'm not taking a break, I am on FocusMate during my working day. I use FocusMate between three to six hours every day, Monday through Saturday, and even two hours on a Sunday. So I use FocusMate so much because I realized, okay, it's easier for me to show up for my appointments for myself when somebody else is also counting on me to show up. So this is why I talk so much about Focus Mate. I love it. It has been incredibly helpful for me to show up for my own appointments with myself. So I hope this has been inspiring for you. You are your most important client. Treat yourself with respect and with compassion and with thoughtfulness when you make plans with yourself. But please do make plans to work on important things at a specific time and day and then show up to those plans. And by doing so, you build self trust and confidence. I wish you well. I look forward to seeing if you have any updates as you try this out or if you have any questions, you can always comment below. And I look forward to seeing what those are as well. All right. And if you also, if you have any other tips and ideas, what works for you to get important projects done that were previously intimidating. That doesn't come naturally for you to do what works for you and I leave you comment below. I'm sure others will appreciate that as well. I wish you well and see you in the next video. Take care.