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Effortlessly Productive
Welcome to Effortlessly Productive with Annie Veblen McCarty, where we dive into the art and science of mastering your time and boosting your productivity without the burnout.
Join Annie as she explores practical tips, strategies, and mindset shifts to help you streamline your tasks, prioritize effectively, and get more done with less stress.
Whether you're juggling work, family time, or just trying to find more time for what matters most, our conversations will empower you to work smarter, not harder.
Tune in and discover how to make productivity not just a goal, but a way of life!
Effortlessly Productive
Eliminating: Why We Hold Onto Things That Don't Serve Us
What if you could break free from the habits that hold you back and redefine your path to success? Join me, Annie Veblen-McCarty, as I promise to equip you with the tools to master genuine productivity and fulfillment. In this episode, we explore the effortlessly productive framework—a strategy designed to identify and eliminate unproductive habits that hinder your progress in both business and personal life. Discover the subconscious forces that feed into fears of social non-conformity and limiting beliefs, and learn how to dismantle these barriers to achieve a more purposeful life.
Together, we'll examine why our brains cling to activities like doom scrolling, which feel safe but keep us from stepping out of our comfort zones. These subconscious choices can prevent essential actions, such as working with new clients or launching bold initiatives, from taking place. By shining a light on these activities, you'll gain the awareness needed to break free from the safety nets that impede your progress. Reflect on your own habits and create an elimination list to move your business forward with clarity and intention. Let's redefine what success looks like by shedding outdated beliefs and focusing on what truly matters.
Hey, this is Annie Veblen-McCarty and I'm gonna teach you how to be effortlessly productive. I've been an entrepreneur for over 20 years and I got sick and tired of experts preaching what business and life should look like and what I should be doing as a leader and to turn a profit, only to find myself wasting time, burned out, feeling inauthentic and still not making any money. On this show, we are ditching the shoulds. I'm giving you permission to do business differently. As a certified master coach, I believe that everything you need to have success and build the life and business of your dreams is already living on the inside. I'm going to empower you to lean into what you do best, help you see your path forward clearly and give you the strategy and action steps along the way to become effortlessly productive. Let's dive in.
Speaker 2:Welcome to this episode of Effortlessly Productive. Today we are diving into one of the core pillars of the effortlessly productive framework. This is the framework that I take my clients through to figure out what they can get off of their plate, how to do that so that they can spend more time in their business doing things that they do best, like nobody else, and spend time doing the things that they absolutely love doing. So when we go through this framework, there is always this category of things that we want to and I'm going to use the word need to that we identify that need to be eliminated. So an example of a very common thing that I find that a lot of clients of mine do, that they determine that needs to be eliminated, is death scrolling social media. I hear this over and over and over again, but as you go through your business and I always encourage my clients to go through their personal life as well, because I am sure we all have things in our personal life that can also be eliminated delegated, automate all those things right. So when we find those things that need to be eliminated, it's very easy to tell ourselves, well, okay, I'm going to eliminate this, I just need to stop doing it. However, a lot of clients find that they hold on to those things, that it's actually very difficult to let go of those things and stop doing them, and often it's something that they know. When I ask what in your business is literally not moving the needle forward at all it does not need to be done at all Most people have an instant answer they know exactly what it is that they are doing in their business that just needs to stop. That is literally not getting them new clients, it's not a creative outlet for them, it's not fueling their energy, it is not pushing their business forward, it's not growing them, it's not helping to create new offers or market those offers, create new products none of it. They know immediately. If we know and we have not been able to let go of it, we have to ask ourselves the question why are we holding on to this? So that's what this episode is going to be about today.
Speaker 2:Why do we hold on to those things in our business and also in our personal life that do not serve us? And this boils down to the subconscious mind. So we are going to talk a little bit about that primitive part of our brain. There is a part of our brain that is designed to keep us safe. That is its main job is to keep us alive, keep us safe. When we have that fight, flight or freeze response, that is that part of the brain taking over, and it's often a part of the brain that we are not consciously thinking about it right, this is happening in the background, it's automated and that's part of why it's so hard to stop these things, even though we know that it's something that we want to stop and need to stop. It often happens automatically and we're doing that thing before we realize. So that's one of the reasons why we hold on to that.
Speaker 2:But there's also a deeper level to this. Often that task or that item or that action is actually serving us in some way and often when I ask a client, like how is that serving you? They'll be like well, it's not. That's why you need to eliminate it. But there is often a belief.
Speaker 2:I talk a lot on this podcast about head voice beliefs. Head voice is that voice of fear and doubt and shame and judgment, all of those things. So we have beliefs, these limiting beliefs, if you will, around those topics and often these tasks that we are like. I know I need to eliminate this, but I just I can't seem to let go of it. Why am I holding on to this? It's because that's actually feeding into those voices and those voices of doubt and fear and shame and judgment that is our primitive brain trying to keep us safe.
Speaker 2:Oftentimes, I find that it is things where, in one way or another, we are trying to conform socially in a certain way, or we are trying to make our behavior align with everybody else. So take the example again of doom scrolling on Instagram or TikTok or Facebook. So you're sitting there, doom scrolling. How is that serving you? Well, often when we are doom scrolling, we are actually sitting there comparing ourselves to all these other people, being like look at the success that she has, look how pretty she is. No wonder I'm not being successful in my business. It's that self-judgment. And that self-judgment is there for a very specific reason Because 10,000 years ago, if we got kicked out of the group or the tribe that we were a part of, it was very unlikely that we would survive.
Speaker 2:Right? Humans survived because we traveled in groups. We were these societies that lived together and everybody had their part in that society and that's why it was successful and we had other people to keep us safe. If we were kicked out on our own, maybe we couldn't find food, maybe we couldn't defend ourselves. There were large animals running around who wanted to eat us and so we did not want to get kicked out of our group. Right, that was basically a death sentence.
Speaker 2:And so often what I find with business owners is that these activities that they are doing in a very tricky way, it is actually their brain working to help them conform to society, because we have this innate fear, this innate worry, this very primitive thing where we want to be a part of the group. We don't want to get kicked out of the group. That means we don't want to go outside of the box. And as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, we inherently are usually outside of the box. We have not done what society tells us is the way that we live our life, where we go through school and get good grades and probably go to college and get married and have kids and get a nine to five and get our paycheck and work for 40 years so that we can have our retirement and all of that. No, we are outside of that box already. So our brain is already like, oh my God, we are outside of the box. This is dangerous, and it's looking for ways to keep us in line. Obviously, that's just one very specific example.
Speaker 2:So I want you to look at all of the things in your business and again in your personal life as well that you may have written down if you went through my episode where we talked about the different pillars of the effortlessly productive framework that you are like. I need to eliminate this. I want to eliminate this. I know this is not pushing my business forward, this is not pushing my personal life forward, and I just want to get rid of it, but you're holding on to it so tight. I want you to take a few moments to examine what is that belief behind it when you think about letting go of that and just not doing it anymore. What is that belief when you were in there doing that action or that activity? What are the stories happening? What are the thoughts happening in your brain, and is there an element of that that is help keeping you safe?
Speaker 2:Again, when we go outside of our comfort zone you hear a lot of people talk about just push outside of our comfort zone Anytime we are dabbling there. Maybe that's launching your new offer. Maybe that is hiring an employee or a VA for the first time. Maybe that is taking on a new client who's this super high performer that you've never worked with anybody like that before. All of those situations our brain is going danger. Danger Like this is unknown, this is scary, this is fearful. We want to keep you safe back here.
Speaker 2:So we are actually going to create activities. Our brain is going to be like, oh okay, time to go doom scroll, because I know that doom scrolling is what number one gets her in that state of like, fear and judgment. It's going to help put her back in that box. Right, it's also activity that is preventing you from taking action on those other activities that would be pushing the needle forward but might be scary to your brain, right, like, oh my gosh, that's something brand new. That's a client we've never worked with before. It's a brand new offer. We don't know if we're going to be successful. We don't know if anybody's going to buy our offer. That's all scary. So we're going to go back to this activity. That feels safe, right, feels safe to our brain.
Speaker 2:So that is one of the deeper subconscious reasons why we continue to hold on to things that do not serve us, and the reason I wanted to share this with you today is because once we know what those things are, how it is actually serving us in a way it's serving us by keeping us safe we can become aware of those thoughts that we are having.
Speaker 2:We can become aware of the things that maybe we are actually avoiding, that we're using these other actions to avoid taking these things that are new or are going to push us into a new level of business. Once we're aware of that, that's when we can start to change it. So I hope this helps you today. I would love to hear in the comments or send me a private message on social media or my email. You can always go to my website. I would love to hear the things that are on your elimination list and why you think that your brain has been holding onto those, why you're going to those, maybe what you're avoiding by doing those activities. I cannot wait to catch you on the next episode of Effortlessly Productive. I hope that you have a beautiful rest of your day.
