How to Create Weekly Shifts to Stay Motivated

Today on the blog, I am sharing how to create weekly shifts to stay motivated. Now, stay with me because I am going to explain what this means. Let's talk about how to stay motivated in a way that I call “shifting” in the middle of the week.

Recognizing What Season You Are In

If you haven’t heard me talk about seasons before, I talk about it quite a bit. It's a concept I learned from a Jay Shetty podcast a few years ago and that is that your business typically works in seasons. He explains it as Winter, spring, summer, and fall. So this translates to there being a nurture season, a busy season, a growing season, and then you sort of go back around in this circle.

The way I like to think about it is that typically there is a season in your business when you are nurturing and growing. You're really trying to focus on building your audience and getting people interested in you and establishing credibility. Then you move into launch season, which is where you are trying to sell something. You’re putting it out there for you to help people and it typically goes in this circle. 

For most people, including myself, this typically is on a quarterly basis, monthly basis, or even a few weeks at a time. So as an example, you may have a launch that lasts 2-3 weeks and then after that, you are taking a break, rebuilding, and nurturing your audience, and then you are going back out and sort of launching again. If you’re old school and have read the book Jab Jab Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk, it is very much the same model. Instead of words like jab and right hook, I prefer to use words like nurture, launch, rest, and busy BUT it's the same concept. 

 So instead of thinking of things in terms of months and quarters, I want to encourage you to flip the model and think about how you can shift seasonally inside your week. 

 Why Weekly Shifts are Important

I started doing this after a really tough week. I get really bad migraines and I kept noticing that one, they come at a certain time of the month, and secondly that they would come when I would have back-to-back calls. I got on this kick of doing 100 podcast interviews in a very short amount of time. There was a week where I had probably had five podcast interviews in one day and then the next day had 90-minute intensives with my clients. Both of those things take a lot of energy. On my calendar it seemed reasonable. It fit into my boundaries of in a perfect world I only want to work 10 am - 3 pm, I was still able to get my girls off the bus, but my brain was like mush. And I got to the point of “oh my gosh I can’t do this. What is happening?”

It was because inside my week, I did not have time to recover or nurture and so I really started to think about my week in terms of how do I shift seasonally within my week so that you and I are able to recover but also deliver on what we want to deliver?

I found that it is truly impossible to be 110% Monday through Friday. So often we sit down to plan our weeks and we’re booked out. It's like 8 am -5 pm or 7 or 10 pm or whatever it looks like. 

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How to Create Weekly Shifts

What I started to do was look at my days. For example, on Mondays sometimes we have mastermind calls from 5-7:30 pm, which is intentionally in the evening to honor everyone’s schedules. If I have something in the evening, I now think about my week like ok I had a really busy “season” Monday night so come Tuesday, I need a minute to recover and to nurture. I try to think of ways that I am doing almost mini pushes and mini recoveries within a week. You can think of it like a workout. When you’ve got a really hard workout, or in this case a really hard day (aka a ton of meetings), that is your push. On the other end of it, you have a recovery period. It’s been really helpful, especially during this season, to think about when is your recovery period during the week. Why do you have to wait until Friday or Saturday to have a recovery period?

Don't Wait Until the Weekend to Rest 

So often when I was working full time, I used to say that on Fridays I would literally fall across the finish line. I was exhausted. If you asked me to do something Friday night I would say no freaking way. I had nothing left. I want you to think about how can you work in recovery periods inside the middle of the week. 

 What These Weekly Shifts Actually Look Like

Here are a few things I’ve done going into 2023. Let’s say I have podcast interviews on one day, the next day I will not do something that takes a lot of brain power. I’m not going to do one-on-one calls or intensives or because I need a minute to recover. This doesn’t mean that I’m not working, I might be working on things behind the scenes, but it's almost like I go from being extremely extroverted to the next day being more nurturing and introverted. I try to space that out through the week so that I have these recovery periods and I want you to try it.

I want you to think about what your week looks like this week or next week. And when you look at your calendar, I'm sure you have some areas where it's a long day and a hard day and you have a lot of meetings or some big projects coming up, but what are you doing to recover? So if Monday is a crazy day, come Tuesday you have a minute to reset, and then the next day, you can go into a push period. 

Recovery can literally be an hour or two a day. It's going to help you stay motivated because what I have found (which I know I talk about all the time) is when you have that recovery time, you actually can perform better on the other end. This means it's going to make your seasons of pushing and your days of busy actually become more productive. 

This is really simple, but I want you to think of planning your week with weekly shifts and how are you having seasons of busy and pushing and launching followed by an hour, two hours, a day or a season of I’m going to take a break, I’m going to go for a walk, I’m going to go to yoga, I’m going to work on something behind the scenes, I’m not going to do something so intense so that I can recover, and then on the other end be more motivated and more creative.

I am super interested to hear what you think about these weekly shifts and if they help you stay motivated and even be more productive during the week. 

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