382: A Guide to Productivity and Balance- with Carol Clegg

[00:00:00] Announcer: We've all heard it before. It's who you know. Welcome to Social Capital, a weekly podcast that dives into social relationships and why the investment you put into them is so important. Your host, Lori Highby, will connect with industry leading professionals and dive into their networking experiences and expert advice.

[00:00:18] Lori Highby: Hey everybody, Lori Highby here. Welcome to the Social Capital Podcast. Our show notes are found at socialcapitalpodcast. com. To you, the listener, I want you to know that I appreciate you. I'm thrilled to have you here for another episode. If there's ever anything that I can do to support you, please reach out.

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Social Capital podcast is sponsored by Keystone Click, a strategic digital marketing agency that believes in order to successfully market to your ideal customer, you have to first understand your customer. Learn more at KeystoneClick. com.

The topic of relationships ties in very closely with marketing. That's why I'm bringing on a number of marketing experts with a variety of backgrounds for you to learn and grow from.

Today's guest is Carol Clegg. She's a small business coach specializing in mindset and accountability. Partnering with midlife women, Carol's passion lies in cultivating business balance and establishing realistic goals with an effective accountability structure. A maverick entrepreneur at heart, she founded Classic Exec Marketing a decade ago, embarking on a journey to empower small business owners to share their gifts and expertise. At present, Carol integrates the transformative tools of positive intelligence, elevating overall well being and contentment across all spheres of life. Her ultimate mission is to empower clients to create lifestyle businesses that include flexibility and balance, enabling them to operate from any corner of the globe. With her origins in South Africa and her current base in the U. S., Carol extends her guidance globally, transferring aspirations into achievements one step at a time.

Carol, welcome to the show.

[00:02:09] Carol Clegg: Hello, hello, Lori. It is wonderful to be here. Thank you for that introduction.

[00:02:14] Lori Highby: Well, fantastic, lovely bio that you have here. And you've got quite a background and experience that I'm excited to learn about. And I'm sure our listeners are as well. One of the things I want to talk about is you, you preach the theming of your days of your week and, and having a working four day work week. What are some of the benefits of that?

[00:02:34] Carol Clegg: Well, I think that is what sort of ties into where I come at this flexibility and balance and believing in a lifestyle business, because I think they've always been seasons in our lives where we've all overworked, where we've all gone past the six o'clock, whatever, shut down the office, and just find yourself pouring and pouring into your business, which wearing all the hats as an entrepreneur, we tend to do. But I have found such peace. And for the last year or so, I have worked on not only theming the days of my week, which I'll give a quick overview to that, but also taking Friday off.

And if something urgent pops up on Friday, well, absolutely, I'll plan to deal with it. But just knowing that Monday to Thursday is where I will book clients, work on marketing, do whatever I'm doing. There is just a piece in that, but the theming of the days of the week comes in. I actually use Trello, which ties into, you know, I have systems in place to be productive and focused.

And I love Trello. So for visual people, I just have so much fun with the trailer boards and put beautiful pictures on them and colors and do what I, you know, want to do that's pleasing for me to look at. But within that, I put the themes of each day of the week and I break that up to a morning and an afternoon theme so that I know ahead. And, you know, one can just practice with this in a small way, starting off with, well, Mondays, I like to do this and you could just start with the whole day. I do advise blocking in some what I call white space to give you flexibility and of course downtime for yourself. But if you know ahead what your day holds, you know, when you're going to do podcast interviews, you know, when you're going to do production, you know, when you're going to do marketing.

So yeah, I just think that there is a great advantage to theming the days of your week.

[00:04:24] Lori Highby: Yeah, I, I love that. I try to do that. And then sometimes it seems like it works for me at least for about 60 days. And then I kind of start to go off track. Any advice on that?

[00:04:36] Carol Clegg: Absolutely. It's just time to reframe it.

I felt that as well. I was like, Oh, hang on a minute. This is getting a little boring. So just change it up. Okay, I'm going to do something different on Mondays or simplify it, because sometimes you want to get into all the nitty gritty and like break it down into so many, you know, steps. And then that's overwhelming.

And you kind of go that's yeah. So just change it up.

[00:04:59] Lori Highby: Yeah, I love that. For the longest time I would refer to Monday as Money Mondays. It's the day I would evaluate, you know, where we are in our accounts. It's great to do invoicing, try to collect some dollars and, you know, run payroll, anything related, you know, pay bills, anything related to money would happen on Mondays.

[00:05:16] Carol Clegg: Okay, okay, well, I just have to share. I love Mondays. It's a fresh start to the week for me. So just from a creative point of view, maybe the money stuff should go to Thursday.

[00:05:27] Lori Highby: Well, someone else called it Financial Friday, but yeah. If you're not going to work on Fridays, but yeah, Thursdays, maybe end of the week stuff.

Yeah, that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. Okay. So what systems can you put in place to be productive and focused?

[00:05:41] Carol Clegg: So, as I mentioned, Trello is my go to. I know that people use Asana and their other programs to do that, but Trello is multifunctional for me, so I use it to keep myself accountable, and I have a board that is just my whole week of planning.

I have another board with marketing, and then I have a board when I collaborate with clients, and that is so much fun. I've had a mastermind and we've had a Trello board. And so we can each put our own links, what we're doing, hold each other accountable. So there's just so many ways that one can use Trello.

The other item that is really important to me is my Google calendar. So whatever calendar you use, you know, they say, if you don't put it on your calendar, it doesn't happen. So having a calendar, perhaps sitting with that either, you know, once at the beginning of the week, end of the week, but picking a time to kind of do an overview and go, I'll put everything into my calendar once again, the colors, I guess I just love that, but color coding, putting different colors in for different things so that, you know, and then I have these four gorgeous I can't call them whiteboards because they're glassboards.

I got them from Ikea a long time ago. And so I can just write on them, you know, with the whiteboard marker. And I love them. So I've got four boards up and they're themed differently. And yeah, so. I just think that, you know, you've got to find what works for you. So some people aren't visual and they need lists and they need things to run linear.

But definitely finding something to put in place that just helps you stay focused.

[00:07:13] Lori Highby: Yeah. So how do you use positive intelligence for wellbeing?

[00:07:18] Carol Clegg: Well, so positive intelligence is something that has been on the outskirts for about two or three years, watching other people using it, curiosity. And you know how timing sometimes is just when you're ready, you're ready?

So I started the training with them at the beginning of the year. And it just, it has been absolutely life changing. So it's a training system and it's developed by Shirzad Chamine. He's written a book on Positive Intelligence. And they've been thousands of coaches who've now gone through the system, but it's, it's life changing.

And the simplicity of it is it's just a three muscle operating system. So what you're doing is you are looking at your negative thought patterns and needing to learn how to intercept that to say, stop, shift. And how can I look at this as a gift and bring in a different component? So it's much more complex than that, but the beauty of it is that not only do you get more calm in your own life, so that's been for the sense of well being, but then it spills out. So as I grow myself and become more calm and cope better with situations, I feel that I'm passing that on. And the instrumental thing, which is something called a PQ rep. And so this is something as short as 10 seconds.

It could be as long as five minutes. There is an association with a to meditation, but you're being single mindedly focused on stopping the negative thought pattern and just bringing in a sense of touch. So you could just rub your fingers gently together and just immerse yourself in that. So if you and I were sitting here now before going into a meeting, we could just be feeling our fingers getting ourselves grounded, feeling our feet, bringing ourselves back to center, and then stepping into our conversation. And then it's with a loving, joyful, happiness, as opposed to judge and feeling negative or... so there's just so much about it. I am super excited to be now sort of focusing my coaching completely on this and bringing it into the accountability side. But it's a system that you can stay with for life. So it's something that you can use.

[00:09:30] Lori Highby: Yeah, I, I love that. I've gone through some like mindset training over the years and and I, I think it's extremely powerful to look at that negative conversation that you're having with yourself. I used to call it the drunken monkey in my head. But learning how to rephrase or reposition that thought is so powerful.

And I love that you're doing this and helping others do it too. I think it's just extremely... it is life changing, like you said. There's no other way to describe it. Besides, it just has, like it's called, it has a positive impact on not only you, but everyone that you're surrounding because you're responding differently and engaging in a different way that has a positive outcome as well.

[00:10:20] Carol Clegg: Yeah, it's wonderful. So I just invite listeners... They don't even have to come to me, it's just check out positive intelligence. com on their website and just see what you can learn because it's fascinating.

[00:10:32] Lori Highby: Yeah, it is fascinating. All right. I'm going to switch it up to some fun questions now. So if you could go back to your 20 year old self, what would you tell yourself to do more of less of or differently with regards to your professional career?

[00:10:45] Carol Clegg: It's funny because when I first thought of this question, I went, nothing. I loved my twenties. It was absolutely such a free spirit time and it just, it fed into me doing so many different things over the years of growing up. And I think it just, it's all contributed to who I am today. But then I stopped and I thought, let me reflect on that a little bit.

Okay, let's do some learning from this. And I guess one thing is I would have started my business sooner. So I ended up, you know, letting everything else kind of get in the way of working for other people, which was fun along the way. You know, being a stay at home mom for a period, homeschooling my kids, which was awesome.

We also lived aboard a sailboat and cruised in the Caribbean for about six or seven years. So had this gorgeous time in our lives where we were so connected as a family, but yeah, I just think my advice to those that are sitting on the fence, start, step into it, try.

[00:11:42] Lori Highby: Yeah, what's, what's the worst that's going to happen.

[00:11:44] Carol Clegg: Exactly. It doesn't work, you shift gears, you try something else. Yeah, it's never too late, never too late.

[00:11:52] Lori Highby: Exactly. All right, I'm going to give you the opportunity to interview me with something you'd like to ask me.

[00:11:58] Carol Clegg: Absolutely. Well, from a marketing aspect, what would you advise to newbies as we talk about stepping into... where to start without spending too much money?

[00:12:09] Lori Highby: Yeah. That that's a really important question to ask. And I find that marketing is extremely overwhelming for a lot of, of newbies or new entrepreneurs? So I think what's really important is to get really clear on who that target customer is that you're trying to serve. And once you get clarity on that, focus on what is the pain that you're solving for that audience so that you can speak to them in a way that's going to easily connect and resonate with them. And the third step of that is figure out where your audience is hanging out and then start talking about that pain and that you understand how to solve that problem in that space that your audience is. So it's a really broad answer. But there isn't one magic trick. This is, you know, everyone needs to be on Facebook or everyone should be on TikTok. You know, there isn't, it really depends on where your audience is hanging out that you want to get in front of. And that's why the first step is to get clarity on who it is that you're serving.

[00:13:13] Carol Clegg: Absolutely. Yeah. I couldn't agree with you more. Identifying, I know that, you know, sort of saying identify who you're talking to a narrow down as much as you can. And I used to fight that kind of go, "Well, I want to talk to everybody," but I think it really your message isn't clear if you don't think of one person that you're talking to that you want to help and then who fits into that category.

[00:13:32] Lori Highby: Yep. 100%. And I'd say that's a probably one of the biggest mistakes that I see newer entrepreneurs making is, yeah, they're trying to serve everyone. But we need, we need clarity as consumers. Can this person solve my problem and do they understand my problem? And if we're trying to talk to everyone, we're actually talking to no one.

[00:13:55] Carol Clegg: Exactly. Yeah. And I see you're a LinkedIn girl as well, which I am. So I think what I would also tie into that is decide where you're going to show up with your clients on one or two platforms. Don't be on them all, because that's exhausting.

[00:14:08] Lori Highby: It is. Yeah, I mean, every new platform, it takes time to learn, but it's, you know, you might have to switch platforms depending on where your audience is, but it's, I would say it's best to invest in, in one platform to really kind of be considered the thought leader on that channel.

[00:14:27] Carol Clegg: Yeah. That's what I've decided is until the end of the year, I'm kind of, because I'm in marketing, I'm connected on all the platforms, but I really want to focus on LinkedIn and just put my all into it and make that effort. Cause you know, you spoke about communities and networking and to me, if you focus in on one platform, you can start to get to know, really know the people you're talking to.

[00:14:48] Lori Highby: A 100%. Yeah, it can be extremely powerful if you're being, if you're consistently showing up and adding value, that's where you're going to start to find your, your audience.

Fun question. Thank you so much for that. Carol, do you have any final words of wisdom that you'd like to leave with our listeners?

[00:15:07] Carol Clegg: I just want to encourage you to trust yourself. Trust yourself, open up, communicate what your heart feels, express yourself and don't let that pressure of I'm not good enough or I can't do this or there's too many other people doing this. So just believe in yourself.

[00:15:22] Lori Highby: Yeah, I love that. Great. And you have a some resources available. Do you want to talk about that?

[00:15:28] Carol Clegg: Thank you. I do. If you stop by my website, which is really easy. Carol Clegg at CLEGG. Well, I should spell it from the beginning. C A R O L C L E G G dot com. I have some resources. for business owners, different tools that I've used, and then I also have on my website, an assessment to find out your saboteurs with positive intelligence.

So I invite you if you choose to want to look into that and to see what's stopping you. And I'm happy to, once you've got your results to talk to you about that. So that's complimentary, happy to chat and explore what the saboteurs look like and how you can. Get in control of them. So you'll find everything on my website.

So thank you for that, Lori. And likewise, find me on LinkedIn.

[00:16:13] Lori Highby: Oh, I love that. We'll include all that information in our show notes. Thank you so much for being on the show today.

[00:16:20] Carol Clegg: It was wonderful. Love the opportunity. Thank you.

[00:16:23] Lori Highby: Absolutely. This was a great conversation. All right, this wraps up our episode of Social Capital.

A huge thank you to Carol for taking the time to connect with us. If you have a burning marketing or relationship question, reach out. I'd love to answer it on the show. And as mentioned before, let's connect on LinkedIn, connect with me, connect with Carol. We're definitely looking forward to hearing from you.

All right. Thanks so much. Go out there and get noticed.

[00:16:46] Announcer: It's all for this episode of the Social Capital podcast, visit social capital podcast. com for show notes, more episodes, and to see who will be on the show next. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next episode.