How I Do It All‏

I get asked a lot how I do it all.  How do I raise 4 kids, work outside the home full time, manage a home and family schedule, work on my marriage of 26 years, and still find time for Families with Purpose.  And my answer is always the same, I don’t do it all, only the important.  And for the important I have set up very specific systems to help manage it all.



My goal in life isn’t to do it all, but to do what’s important.  I focus my life on doing what excites me and what I feel I have been called to do.  Here is how you too can determine what's important and how to do a better job of fitting the important into your life.
 

Get Crystal Clear on Your Values, Priorities, and Vision and Be Unwilling to Compromise Them

Before you do anything else you need to get crystal clear on what’s important.

You might not necessarily know how to get there, but if you know where you are going and what is really important you will figure out how to get there.

That is why we have a family mission statement, created a family vision, and why I have my own personal mission and vision for my life.  That is why Joe and I have been very deliberate in choosing and teaching our core family values.

Clarity is what keeps you from floundering and flittering from one quick fix to another.   Clarity is what will keep you focused.
 

Keep It All in Perspective

I know it is hard when you are excited about your life, have lots you want to accomplish, but can’t seem to find time to work on your projects or accomplish any of your goals.  Babies who aren’t sleeping through the night or kids’ activities that take up all your spare time will make accomplishing your goals harder.  But the reality is that someday your kids will sleep through the night and someday your kids will need you less and you will have more time and energy to work on your projects.

So TRY to be present in the moments you have now, enjoy your season of life, and find little ways of continuing to work on your personal goals and ambitions.  Just small actions like reading books, taking short classes, or setting aside time every week to work on your own goals will help keep your own dreams alive.  Try not to lose sight of who you are or what you want to accomplish in life in the midst of the busyness of raising a family.
 

Let the Unimportant Go

I know this is easier said than done and it took me a long time to learn how to do it, but if something isn’t tied directly to your vision and values you either have to eliminate it from your life or find ways of simplifying it or delegating it.  For me I had to learn how to let go of the idea of having a spotlessly clean organized house.  Too much of my identity was tied up in how clean my house was even though nowhere in our family vision did we indicate that this was important to us.  It was something I thought a good mother and wife should do.  And though I truly appreciate a clean picked up house I didn’t necessarily enjoy doing it or sacrificing my time that I could be spending elsewhere.  So I simplified it by scaling back what I tried to do each week and delegated some of it to the kids.

And what really helped me learn how to let the unimportant go was learning how to get excited about my life and the things that were most important to me.  Things like being the mother and wife I wanted to be, being present and available when my family needed me and helping other families through the FWP community.

What in your life are you excited about?
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THE 5 CORE CHARACTERISTICS OF GREAT ENTREPRENEURS

I’ve worked with and mentored a lot of entrepreneurs over the years. And whilst we all love to analyse the theories and strategies that we can learn from others to make things work better in your business as for an entrepreneur, we often forget that there are also character traits that we could look to develop as well. You can read all the books in the world, but theories are useless unless you learn to adopt some of these characteristics:

                                Source: http://www.shaa.com/entrepreneur-characteristics/

Consistent boldness

Most entrepreneurs are naturally a little ballsy, but it’s not enough just to come up with a great idea or to start a business — you have to be consistently bold enough to stand by your idea, to keep pushing forward even when it seems like you’re making a monumental waste of effort, and when everyone around you just doesn’t see a happy ending. You also need to be bold enough to realise when you are stuck on a dead end road and it’s time to do something different.

You also have to be bold in putting yourself out there. Many people avoid doing this because they don’t want to feel sleazy or like they’re hard selling people, but unless you can get over this, nobody’s going to know about you or care about you.

Finally, you have to be bold in asking for what you want. Of course it’s totally terrifying to ask someone for something that you really want, but you will be amazed by how often people actually do help if you tell them how and if you ask the right way. For instance, Seth Godin had no idea who I was when I emailed him asking him for a testimonial for my book. But because I was bold enough to put myself out there and because I wrote to him in a way that appealed to him, I was able to get an incredibly valuable endorsement. A good sense of humour always helps too!

Speed

I know I’m surprising absolutely no one when I say that things move fast as an entrepreneur. To be a great entrepreneur, you’ve got to be able to work fast and still keep the quality of your output high.

That’s not to say that you can’t do great things if you like to think or act more slowly — but if you are like that, then you’ll probably need to get a partner or a group that will balance you out and force you to act. Otherwise you’ll likely stagnate.



Flexibility

A lot of people mix up being flexible with being flighty. I’m not saying that you should just dabble in things or totally scrap a project at the first sign of trouble. You need to be focused and unshakeable on your big goals, but in parallel with that, you have to be able to be flexible with how things unfold day to day.

Being too rigid will cause you to lose a ton of opportunities that come up along the way, because you will be too focused on following your planned steps instead of recognizing opportunities that could get you to your end goal even better. So learn to pivot, and be flexible when you need to.

Perspective

Having a sense of perspective is absolutely critical, because working as an entrepreneur usually feels a little crazy and because you’re going to fail hideously at least once. If you get so wrapped up in what you’re doing that you can’t take a step back, see the humor in situations, or dispassionately look at your failures to see what you can learn from them, then this probably isn’t the path for you.



Resilience

Finally, you’ve absolutely got to be resilient, certainly in the face of failure, but also just in terms of daily life as an entrepreneur. It can be really hard when you’re working for yourself — people don’t really get what you do every day and sometimes they might even think you’re just ‘messing about’. Resilience is what keeps you going, both when you get hit with a big failure or just the everyday crisis, so it’s essential that you learn how to bounce back.

http://www.shaa.com/entrepreneur-characteristics/