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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
Embracing Your Journey: You're Not Behind, You're Preparing for Your Next Level
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Stuck with that feeling of being "behind" in your business? It's one of the most common struggles among entrepreneurs, especially women. We look at others who started after us yet seem miles ahead, and wonder where we went wrong.
But what if that feeling is actually giving us the wrong message? What if you're not behind at all, but exactly where you need to be, gathering the precise experiences required for your unique breakthrough?
In this deeply personal episode, I share my own journey through the challenges that initially made me feel like a failure but ultimately prepared me for success. From my "dead course graveyard" of investments that didn't pay off to hiring decisions I regretted, from launches that completely flopped to offers I hated delivering—each apparent setback contained a lesson I couldn't have learned any other way.
These challenges taught me exactly what learning formats work best for me, what qualities I need in team members, how to structure my offerings in alignment with my strengths, and how to balance business growth with family priorities. The seemingly wasted time and money weren't wasted at all—they were investments in my growth that prepared me for my next level.
The most beautiful part? When we reframe our challenges this way, we transform them into wisdom we can share with others, creating a ripple effect that extends far beyond our individual journeys. Your "failures" aren't just teaching you—they're potentially teaching everyone you touch.
Next time you feel that painful twinge of being "behind," pause and ask: "What is this trying to teach me?" Lean into the lesson with curiosity rather than judgment. You're exactly where you need to be, and your breakthrough is waiting on the other side of these challenges.
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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 today's episode of Effortlessly Productive. This episode is deeply, deeply important and meaningful to me and deeply personal as well. I'm going to share a little bit of my story with you and how this has played out for me. So we're going to be talking about that belief of feeling behind. I coach so many women, especially women in business, who feel like they are behind. They see somebody who started way after them and is skyrocketed in their success. They see the years of work that they have put in and they look at all that effort and all that time and all that energy and they feel like I should be a millionaire right now. And they look at all that effort and all that time and all that energy and they feel like I should be a millionaire right now and they aren't.
Speaker 2:There are so many reasons why we might feel behind in business and I think that's a normal part of the process. That can be a normal part of just general life too. Right, I know I had kids a lot later than other people my age and there were times where I'm like, oh, I just feel behind, like they have all these babies and I'm not there yet and like I know that we will have a family, but it just was not the season for us. We wanted to wait until a little bit later, and that was okay, but there is that pull of seeing other people have these things and feeling like we're behind, right. So that's what we're going to be talking about today and just having a little bit of a perspective shift on this, and I want to share again some of my very personal stories with you to help you see how you are not behind. You are not behind, my friend. You are being prepared for your next level.
Speaker 2:Anywhere in your life, and especially in your business, where you feel like you are behind, there is a lesson in there. Right, there is a reason, there is a purpose for this growth. We are going to our next level, and that is okay. That our path, our growth journey, does not look the same as everybody else. What if every single lesson that you learn, every single challenge that you face in business and in life, every single investment that doesn't pay off for you, what if every single one of these things was actually preparing you for your biggest breakthrough? Right, oftentimes we forget that there is that next level waiting for us, that next version of ourselves, that huge breakthrough that we are about to have and when we start to feel behind, we tend to back off and we tend to maybe not learn those lessons, not face those challenges, not invest again, and that only pushes that breakthrough further and further and further out. So I'm going to share some lessons that I have learned, some challenges that I've faced, definitely some investments that I've made that didn't pay off, and I want you, when these moments come up, to remember to lean in, to be excited. Right, we can be excited about the challenges that life throws our way and business throws our way, because we know we can trust that our next level is waiting right behind that challenge or that lesson.
Speaker 2:So there have been so many courses that I have invested in that it sounded great in the moment I'm sure you have those too. I literally have my like dead course graveyard where it's stuff that in that moment I was like this is for me, this is what I need right now, and I've had sometimes, where I invest in something and my season of life or of business shifts like that, it shifts instantly and I didn't know that shift was coming and all of a sudden that course that I had invested in it was not for the season that I was entering, and that's okay, right. I know I have bought courses and gone through them and I was like, well, that was a waste of time and money. Maybe it wasn't what I expected, maybe it didn't go in depth enough, maybe it was too in depth, maybe it was too long, maybe it was too short. There's so many different courses that I've paid for and, for whatever reason, it just didn't pay off. It wasn't what I needed in the moment. But what came out of that is I now know better what kind of courses work well for me. What kind of courses work well for me.
Speaker 2:I have found, honestly, certifications are something that skyrocket me into the next level of growth. I lean so much further in when I am getting certified in something and it's not that every single thing I do has to be a certification. But I know if my heart is telling me and my intuition is telling me this certification is right for me. I know a lot of the time that is going to be that huge breakthrough. It's about learning what works well for us. Sometimes we have a teacher or somebody we're learning from where maybe it's not the best fit. So I've learned. Let's do maybe something free with them. Maybe let's do a little bit smaller of an offer or a container with them instead of doing something huge, because then I can see if we are a really good fit. Even sometimes in a masterclass you don't get a really good fit. Even sometimes in a masterclass you don't get a really good picture of somebody. So maybe make a little bit smaller investment, or maybe it's you're leaning more into your intuition.
Speaker 2:I know I have invested in some things where, if I had really listened to my intuition, it was telling me, no, like this is not the right thing. But I got caught up in the excitement. I got caught up because a friend of mine was doing it and I wanted to do it too and it sounded so fun and exciting and I didn't really think about am I in the season where this is going to be the best fit for me? This is the right. Next thing that I need to learn, not my friend that I need to learn, and that's okay, because I've learned lessons and learned things to tune into right. I figured out more questions to ask myself before I pushed that buy button, and I also have had times recently where I've made a super huge, really scary investment, but my intuition, my gut and my heart was telling me go for it. This is for you and because I have learned to listen to that more, that has paid off. So buying a course or investing in something like that it's not actually a mistake. It was helping you learn. What is your way of learning? What is the best instructor or coach or trainer for you? What is the best format for courses? I know for me, having a course where I tune in live is way better than doing a course where I just watch videos, but there are some topics actually that watching on video is better than doing it live. So it's just about learning. Every single one of those was a lesson that I learned, and now I know, when I make an investment in a course or a certification, nine times out of 10, or maybe even more than that, 99 times out of 100, it is what is going to be good for me, because I have learned so many lessons along the way.
Speaker 2:When it comes to hiring people, too, this is something I get asked so much. I have a lot of experience with hiring people. At this point, my husband's business has been around when I am recording this for over 21 years. We have had many employees. Over those 21 years I also, in my businesses, have worked with a lot of different VAs and freelancers and subcontractors, and not every single one of those works out great.
Speaker 2:Sometimes we hire people because we literally couldn't find anybody else to do the job. At the moment. The job market has a huge, huge bearing on that right, and so sometimes we hire somebody because we're like I've been looking and I really just need somebody to do this, and maybe it's not the exact right somebody, but it's who you have at the moment. That's just a lesson that we can learn, right, that sometimes we need to wait around for that right person, or maybe in that moment it was the best decision for us, but later on we want to make a different decision. It doesn't mean it was a mistake.
Speaker 2:Sometimes you are going to hire people who seem like they're going to be a perfect fit for you and it just isn't, for whatever reason. Maybe it's a personality mismatch, maybe it's the way you work together. It just doesn't mesh quite right. You don't jive, they're not picking up what you're putting down, right, and that's okay. Maybe it's that they were too expensive or maybe they didn't have the skill set. But now I know from making so many hiring decisions that maybe ended up not being the right decision. It's not that it was a mistake. It's not that I wish that I had done something differently.
Speaker 2:Now I know who to hire better. I know what questions to ask when I am hiring. I know who I want to work with. I know what kind of person I want to work with. I prefer to work with people who are very self-motivated and self-driven. They don't need a lot of feedback and input from me. And I've hired people who need a lot of input from me, and it's not that they were a bad VA, it's not that they did a bad job. It's just that we had that mismatch. So I tend to do better with people that I can just be like here's an idea, I have run with it and do it and I'll look at it on the back end and we can make some tweaks from there. If somebody needs an instruction every step of the way, there are other entrepreneurs out there, other business owners, who want to be giving those step-by-step instructions, and so they're going to be the perfect VA for them. They just weren't for me. So again, now I know what questions to ask. I know who I'm looking for. Those were such important lessons for me to learn. Imagine if I hadn't learned those. I would still be back where I was 21 years ago, hiring people that weren't the best employee or VA or contractor for me. So those are all super important lessons.
Speaker 2:I've had launches that totally flopped. I have held masterclasses that I promoted for weeks and weeks and weeks that had only five people register and nobody show up on the masterclass and rather than looking at that like, oh my gosh, I suck and what I do sucks, I must be a terrible coach. I must be a terrible mentor. I must be a terrible mentor. I must be a terrible trainer. No, maybe the subject that I was doing the masterclass on wasn't what my people were looking for. Maybe my messaging was just off and it didn't hit with them. Maybe I didn't promote it to the best of my ability. Maybe I didn't promote it on the right platforms where my people were. Maybe I forgot to set up reminders that the call was coming.
Speaker 2:There's so many different lessons that I've learned along the way by launches actually completely flopping. I learned so much more when things flop than when things skyrocket. Imagine the first thing that you put out there. Let's say you had 50 people sign up for it. You might not have learned lessons from that, right, but when we do things that don't work, we actually learn more lessons from it, and that way we can make so many more changes and do things so much differently the next time. It gives us so much more data than when things work and we don't know why it worked. It makes it really hard to duplicate and replicate the next time we want to launch something. So those are all just lessons.
Speaker 2:I have sold offers that I ended up heating, heating, delivering on the back end, and there is almost nothing worse right? It's a terrible feeling when you sell something and then you're like, oh my gosh, I seriously dislike showing up for this call every single week. Or this was an ongoing container and now I don't want to continue it, and I have to tell everybody in this container that it's not going to be ongoing, that I am going to end it. I've done that before and it was really hard. That was a huge, huge challenge to show up to a mastermind and tell people that my business direction had shifted or that my heart wasn't in that anymore and that I wanted to go a different direction. But I did it and that was a challenge that I learned from.
Speaker 2:Some people love offering things that are ongoing forever and ever and ever. For me. I tend to like to do shorter things and again, that was just something I had to learn by offering that and realizing I didn't like that container, I didn't like that container, I didn't like teaching in that container. But that's okay, because I will never make the mistake of offering that again. Again, it wasn't even a mistake. It was a huge lesson that I learned.
Speaker 2:So there are things that I have sold that I ended up not liking delivering on on the back end, and you know what. That was just that learning moment of I don't have to do this in my business. This way, I am my own business owner. I get to decide what I offer. Just because that works for somebody else does not mean that works for me. Just because somebody else loves building this for people doesn't mean that I also love building it. There are so many different lessons to take out of that. Then we also have a lot of challenges. There are so many challenges that I have faced.
Speaker 2:I have had times in my life and in my business where I have just packed my schedule way too busy to the point where I had no room for creativity, where I had no room to actually go and work on my business because I was so stuck in working with my clients and I love working with my clients but when I don't even have the ability to bring on new clients because my entire schedule is consumed with serving the clients I already have, we start and stop right. Our momentum in our business start and stop that was something that I have had to experience is I have so much of my time going to my client work and delivering what I've promised to clients that I don't actually have time to work on my own business to find more clients. And when those contracts end, when those containers end, then the business is stopped because I have not continued to build the momentum and I did not continue doing what was working for me because I literally didn't have the time or energy. So packing my schedule too full or packing it full of other kinds of appointments that were not paying clients that is a pitfall that I have fallen into and I have learned a huge lesson, thank goodness, from those challenges, because now I know what my optimum schedule is of making sure I'm capping the number of calls and appointments. I'll take every single week of building containers where I can serve more people at the same time instead of a limited number of clients. There's so many solutions that I have come up with to that, but I wouldn't have come up with those if I didn't have those challenges in the first place.
Speaker 2:I also have had seasons where the kids were home. Covid was a huge learning lesson for me in business with that of all of a sudden, in blink of an eye, everything changed and I suddenly had three kids at home with me, 24, seven, and the time and energy that I had for my business looked very different than it had even the week before and I had to make some shifts and that was a huge challenge. But you know what I learned? To be adaptable. I learned to be flexible, I leaned in to what was the most important thing to me at that time, in that season of my life. And we are all going to have seasons that we walk through where the unexpected happens, our life changes in the blink of an eye and our priorities and, what's most important, shifts, and that's okay, but going through that challenge helped me understand how to cope with that. So the next time that happens in my life, that will not be an isolated case, I guarantee. The next time that happens, the next time I have a challenge like that. I've been through it, so now I know how to better shift my business and shift my focus and my attention to make sure that I am staying aligned with my priorities and what's important to me.
Speaker 2:I've also had times where I just literally stretched myself too thin like not even with clients, with volunteering for certain things for field trips, for example, for my kids or for serving on the board of their lacrosse club and I've had to realize that that didn't align with my business goals and it didn't align with my personal goals and it wasn't how I wanted to be spending my time. So I've gotten very, very clear on what I do and do not want to put my time and energy into, and so I have now been able to set up expectations with my kids of I will go on one field trip a year with each one of you, so that's three field trips a year and I will do your field day at the end of the year, but I'm not going to all the million other school things in between. I'm not going to sign up to chaperone every single field trip that your class takes, and that is okay. And I actually sat down and had a conversation with my kids about this and asked them what's the most important thing to you that I come to? I can come to your education week where parents can come into the classroom. I can come into class parties. I can come in to read to your class. I can do field day. I can do field trips, but we need to pick like one or two things.
Speaker 2:I'm not going to come to every single thing because I literally would spend my entire time with three kids and the ages they are. It would literally be every single week would be chunked up with things going on with their class and that just doesn't align with my business goals or my personal goals, and that's okay. And it makes those times that I do get to chaperone their field trip or help with their field day even more special and even more meaningful. So I get to lean all the way into those and they get to lean all the way into those, instead of me showing up scattered and chaotic and just running all over the place and distracted, because I know that there are things in my business that I'm missing. Doing that I really want to be doing Having that conversation with my kids about why I do what I do, why it's so important to me and why I want to make this impact. They understand better. And now you know those times where the kids will fill out like the Mother's Day cards or whatever write a sweet little note that their teachers are like let's write somebody a letter, like they talk about the people that I help and why that's so important, how I'm making a difference in the world. They understand what I am doing and why I'm doing it and why that's important to me. And it now has become important to them because they can see what a difference and an impact I am making in the world and that's special to them. But they wouldn't if I hadn't learned that lesson, gone through some of those challenges and then actually sat down and had a conversation with them about it. All these personal challenges. I also, because I've walked through them, I now get to help teach other people from these.
Speaker 2:You listening here on this podcast today, maybe there was a little tidbit that you got to take away and you're like, oh, that's such a good idea, that's a whole change of perspective. Maybe I'll try taking a different approach to this. Maybe I'll think about and ask myself different questions before I invest. And you got to learn that lesson because of the lesson that I learned and the challenge that I went through, and rather than looking at it like, oh my gosh, like I'm such a failure, I didn't do this right, no, you got to learn from me.
Speaker 2:Think about how powerful that is when you get to learn from somebody else because of the challenges they went through and the lessons they learned from it, and you get to learn from that and not have to have your time and energy going to going through that challenge or that lesson. You get to just learn from them. That's huge. You know what you get to do that for people too. You get to learn these lessons and go through these challenges and save other people the time and energy.
Speaker 2:When you share those lessons, when you share those challenges, when you share those growth moments with people, they get to learn vicariously through what you have gone through.
Speaker 2:Think about that ripple effect that you get to have in the world, that impact that you get to make because of the lessons that you get to learn.
Speaker 2:So you're not behind, you are exactly where you were supposed to be, and when you can share that journey, when you can share that journey to that next level, that journey to that breakthrough with other people that gets to ripple out across the world I have learned so much and grown so much from these lessons and challenges, and now I get to share that with other people, you are making a huge impact.
Speaker 2:Remember that. Remember that every single lesson and challenge you go through, and every time you share that with somebody else, they get to have that growth moment with you as well. So go out there, continue to put one foot in front of the other, continue to ask yourself what is this trying to teach me, when we can follow what our lessons and our challenges are trying to teach us. That is our path. That is how we know the next thing that we need to learn, the next growth moment that we get to have, and lean all the way into it, and we are one step closer to that huge breakthrough that is there for you. So lean all the way in. My friend, I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day and I will catch you on the next episode of Effortlessly Productive. You got this.
