In this episode of the One Small Change Podcast, Yvonne McCoy shares her quarterly Clarity Check-In, encouraging entrepreneurs to challenge the myth that summer means business slowdown. She introduces her 'Productivity Ahead' model, provides actionable ways to maximize energy and focus during the third quarter, and explores how to balance business growth with personal priorities. Through personal stories and practical tips, Yvonne reframes summer as a unique opportunity for both pleasure and productivity, offering strategies to accelerate progress and maintain momentum for the rest of the year.

Chapters:

00:00 Adjusting Summer Priorities

04:38 Prioritize: Awareness and Elimination

08:34 Summer Prioritization and Planning

09:29 "The 45-Minute Hour"

12:35 Maximize Summer for Success

17:16 "Reprioritize with Intention"

19:24 "Sustain Momentum, Adapt Strategies"

22:25 "Embrace Change, Share it"

Quote:

"Summer is the time when I think you get to prioritize pleasure and business growth at the same time and have a lot of fun doing it."

Link:

bookacallwithyvonne.com

Welcome to the one small change quarterly

clarity check in call. I'm here to give you some thoughts

about how to look at your business now that

we're going into the third quarter. So the first thing is the

biggest myth that because it's summertime, business

slows down. So I want you to be a little bit of a contrarian and

say to yourself, what if this wasn't true?

What if in fact, you know, the summer was amazing? So we're going

to take a look at that. I mean, because one of the things that I

said was, where is it not summer? And started

looking at what kind of opportunities are there. But the other thing

is July 1st can be a place where

you can have as much energy as you do on January 1st.

You know how we have all this anticipation and we are all ready to do

things. You can have that with July. It does

not have to be. It's summertime and yada,

yada, yada. But here's the thing that I want you to think about. I'm going

to, I'm going to introduce a new model for you called productivity Ahead.

And the first part of that is a, is awareness.

Awareness of the situation. Our situation is

constantly changing and you get to

define what the situation is and what

you're going to accomplish in it. So the myth is that summer

is slow. It does not have to be.

Now, part of the problem or part of the challenge

is understanding how to change

your priorities so that you get the impact

that you want. So one of the reasons we think of summer is

slow is because people are on vacation or people don't want to work or

people don't want to talk to me, that kind of thing. And also

because you want to spend time with your family, especially if you've got kids or

you have places that you go and things you want to do. And so the

issue is taking a look at this particular

point in time, especially July and August and

maybe even September, if you got back to school, kinds

of things, and say, what am I going to make

priorities? Maybe. I mean, your

kids are always a priority. But you know, and vacation

or taking time off with your spouse or whatever the case may be is

always a priority. But maybe you need to do it in a little bit different

way. Maybe there's some things that are going to go to the bottom

of the, you know, in terms of priority. So it's warm,

you know, maybe you're not going to cook these huge meals. Maybe meals are going

to take up a lot less time. Maybe you're Going to teach your kids to

cook. I don't know why I'm stuck on kids today, but apparently I

am. So the first thing is that summer

does not have to be slow. You can think of July

as your new, your second, you know, new

year to take a reality check in your business. And one

of the things that's so good is that, you know, you get to

pause, you get to evaluate, and you get to

leapfrog ahead, you know, and maybe get more done because

you can focus on things longer and other people are not

doing things. So you get a chance to actually stand out in the crowd

more. The other thing is, nobody's buying,

and that's not necessarily true. There may be a lot less choices for them to

buy from. And so your offer is going to stand out.

I'll wait till September to focus again, which

means all the momentum that you build up, you're going to lose, and you

want to keep that going. I don't want to plan

and mess up my vacation. I don't think that's true either. I

think there's a way to do all of these things and

still come out with what you're trying to accomplish if you

are focused and make an effort to do it.

Okay, so we already said you want to do the right thing for the right

reason at the right time, the right way, and especially right for you. And

so this is a great. A great way to look at this. So, for

instance, this might be a time when you have a shorter work

week so that you have more time to spend doing

other things. And a shorter work week doesn't mean that you're taking off Monday and

Friday necessarily. It could be anything that you want.

You don't have to be held back by previous false

notions about the way things work. The other thing

is, the model that I'm going to give you is called

productivity ahead. So I already gave you the A, which is

awareness of the situation. Your situation is different now

than it would be in December for a lot of different

reasons. And because you're you, I have no idea what that is,

but that's something to look at. So the next thing is, if you want to

have more time to do other things, something

has to go on hold right now. For me, a

lot of times, hold is something that's not

going to, you know, that has a long lead in, that may

not come to fruition for a while, that I can put off for a few

weeks. It also is ideas, because you don't need

to develop a whole lot of Things that you're not going to do till later.

Because information is constantly changing, right?

And so when you finally get ready to do this thing that you

developed several months earlier, it may not even be the same

thing. So what can I put on hold? What can I

eliminate? That's the E. Right? So when you're taking

a look at what you can eliminate, take a look at

not only, you know, the actual thing, but

the which of those things are draining your energy and which of those

things are giving you energy? The things that drain you of your energy

are that you're not really all that excited. The shoulds I should do this.

See if you can eliminate them. Okay. And if you're not

sure what to do with it, then put it in the hold.

Okay. The next thing is to automate. Now,

automation we think of as being something that

happens in a technical way, but it does not

have to. Automation simply means a process,

right. That you follow a process. One of the things that I did

when my kids got to be a certain age again, we're in summer and I'm

talking about kids, was, you know, I'm the queen of the

one pot meal. I like to put it together, throw it in the oven

or the soup pot and walk away. My husband, on the other hand,

is a really good cook. And so I cook Saturday. He cooks

Sunday, Monday and Tuesday we had leftovers Wednesday. My

daughter, who was the queen of pasta, we had pasta every Wednesday night,

whether it was spaghetti or noodles or ravioli or shells or

something or. Right. And it sounds funny saying this because I

haven't had this in years, but on Thursday, my son made sloppy Joe's, which was

his favorite meal. And on Friday, we went into the refrigerator and we

cleaned it out. We each picked the meal or a combination of meals that were

left over and finished everything. And then we started over again. So that

was. That was an automation. Right. And when

you can automate, go through these steps not only in your business, but in your

personal life, what can I put on hold in my personal life? What can I

put on hold in my business? What can I eliminate in my personal life? What

can I eliminate in my business? What can I automate in both

these places? Right. And now once you've done

that, now you're ready to delegate. And people have the

wrong impression of delegation. If you start with

delegation, what's going to happen is you are delegating the wrong things.

You are delegating the things that are at the top of the pile. What you're

actually doing, what Delegation actually is. Is training. It is

training people to be able to step in and do what you do.

So, for instance, in your personal life, delegation might be having the

kids do their own laundry. Okay? In your. In your

business, delegation is finding somebody else that can.

You can train to do what you do the

way you want it done. Now, be sure you understand

this. It does not mean that you are

training a mini me. That is the absolute

wrong way to go about this. Because what that if you have a mini me,

they're going to have all the strengths that you have and all the weaknesses

that you have, but they're going to be double or triple. So you

don't want a mini me, but you do want somebody who can

get you the results that you want. Now,

I want to go back to the whole idea of summertime, right?

And time constraints. Time is

kind of a. So let's start with prioritizing. You're

aware of the situation you're in and you want to prioritize it. So one of

the first things that I'm going to say to you is what are the things

that you absolutely want to get done this summer, whether it's personal

or business? And you need to put that down

and put it in your calendar, make time for it,

because those are the things if you don't, you're not

going to do and take advantage of the summertime. So

I've already got days blocked down the shore on my calendar,

and the family already knows and has reminded me. Right.

The next thing you want to do is realize

that you can accelerate your business by

changing the time constraints that

we've been brought up to believe. All right, My. One of the reasons that

I thought about this was one time I had

some kind of intestinal virus or whatever, and I could

only go about 45 minutes without having to run

for a bio break. And I was

like, you know, but at the end of the

day, I was surprised that I got more things

done sick than I did

well, because I knew that I had a hard stop. It

was like, I need. I had 45 minutes to do something, really focus on

it really hard, try to get it done as fast as I could and keep

going. And so I wrote a book with Andre Stenberg, any book,

called the 45 Minute Hour. And it's kind of like the

Pomodoro method. But the idea is, you know,

for me, 25 minutes. 20 minutes is not enough. I can't

focus that fast, I guess. But 45 minutes is

great because it's, you know, It's a short amount of time.

It's less than an hour. So you're cramming an hour's worth of work

into 45 minutes. And then you have 15 minutes to do what

I call the tiny transitional task. And that means things that

only take you 15 minutes, right?

Or it's just a break, or it's to go outside for 15 minutes, or

it's to return phone calls or send emails, whatever you want to do.

But the idea is that you can get more hours

in the day, more hours worth of work done in the

day than you can by using the regular

hour time. Now, this is really important this summer because you're trying

to carve out. Your priorities are shifting and you're trying to carve

out more personal time. The other thing that

works really well is what I call the 21

day month. So every 21 days, you

consider to be the equivalent of the month. And what happens is

then you get 15 months in the year so you can

accelerate your business because you're moving faster.

Because our mental. Our mental thing is the first month, the first week we're

really committed. The second, the last week, we're really committed,

and someplace in the middle, we move our moment, you know, we lose our

momentum. So when there's only three weeks to get

something done, you tend to stay motivated

and activated for the whole three weeks. So

that's another change in time. Construct

the third one I'm going to tell you about, and I kind of hinted to

it was your week. A week does not have to

be seven days for you. It could be four and

three. So you've got your main week and then you've got your

mini week that you're going to do things with. And I know this may sound

a little weird, but it works really well.

Now. I'm not sure you want to live your whole life like this.

You're working hard and working really fast,

but you can get a lot accomplished in the summertime in

this third quarter that is going to set you up for success in the

fourth quarter and also give you the time that you want

to be outside to do pleasurable things. It may even

give you a chance to change some of your habits. If you say, oh, if

I do this a couple of times a week, I can

easily carve out time to go exercise or take a class or go to the

movies or do something that you really want to do.

The other thing is, believe it or

not, this is a great time to make connections.

One of the advantages of making connections is

people like to be disturbed during the summertime. It's like,

why not meet somebody and have a good time, right? So

the other advantage is that when you make

connections, you have the opportunity to

learn things that are going to help you leapfrog in your business.

Things you don't have to do every single step sometimes.

The example that somebody told me that always impressed me is

for a lot of countries, poor countries, they never

got landlines for telephones. They went right

from, you know, no phones to cell phones, right?

And they didn't have to do the infrastructure or invest and stuff like that.

So you can also get ideas that can help you with that,

people that can help you learn how to do things. So

one of the things, and this was a while ago, but I really liked it.

One of the things that someone said to me, probably the easy way

to have a meeting or an event is to set it up in

Zoom, because as people register for it, you can

resend out the. The notice really simply without having to write an

email or do any of that stuff. And you can send it out as

many times as you want. It was like, oh, my God, that's a huge lifesaver,

right? That's going to help you with time.

There are a lot of tricks of the trade that you can

learn when you listen to how other people do things and

how they get it accomplished. And so I would say to you,

you know, summer is the time when

I think you get to

prioritize pleasure and

business growth at the same time and have a lot of fun doing it.

Last summer, we traveled and we made sure that

we stopped and met a couple people that I'd only met on Zoom before.

And it was a wonderful experience, actually meeting somebody in person.

And that was like a priority that I had last year. So,

again, situational awareness. Know that some

of the habits that you may change in the summertime may not

work well when we get to the fourth quarter, right?

But that's okay because you can say to yourself, I'll do this again next.

Next year, maybe I will do it for the second and the third quarter,

and I will use some other kind of thing for the fourth and the first.

So I'm gonna go back to where I started

first. And I think I said this last time is the more

boundaries, the more benchmarks you have, the faster you're going to move,

because the less you're going to have be able to. To slide back and

lose your momentum. So again, if you have the 15,

15 month year, you're checking in on yourself 15

times versus just 12. Right.

If you have break your week up into two parts

again you've got more check in points. If you do the 45

minute hour again you have more check in points. And so

you're just going to move faster just by the fact that you have to say

where am I? What have I got accomplished? What have I got left to do?

All right, so that's the first thing that time is. Time is, you

know, kind of a man made constraint.

Yes, there are some, you know, like the sun sets and

rises, that kind of thing. But the thing that we've got that there's 60

minutes in an hour. Somebody came up with that. Right.

And you'll notice that when you're really focused on something, something,

sometimes the time seems like it goes so fast or in

other situations the time seems like it goes

excruciatingly low. So you can control that

somewhat by the way that you work.

The other thing is know that

reprioritize with intention. You know,

if you don't make spending

family time or vacation time or whatever it is a priority

so that it is a goal unto itself and

you are doing it because somebody else wants you to do

it. You're not going to enjoy it as much because you're not

going to be as ready, you're not going to be as

have as you're going to have too many things that are left on hold, kind

of. So I would say to you

first, think of July

1st and this is past July 1st, but think of July

1st as an absolute way

to reset your year.

Come to it with the same energy that you have

for January 1st. The other thing is

when you're prioritizing, say to yourself, or when you

are talking about these myths or constraints, say

to yourself, what if this wasn't true? What if it

wasn't true that people didn't buy anything in the

summer? Right. What would I do?

Okay, so that gives you a different insight. What I did

was say where is it not summer? And I decided to have a

summit during the summer and it's not summer in Australia.

So I decided to make it what I call Australia friendly

time. Friendly. Right. Because I've been in a lot of networking

groups where people have been in events and stuff like that. It's like the middle

of the night for them. So this is going to be like 7 o' clock

in the morning for them. It's going to be in the evening for me. All

right, so is it, is it true?

What if it wasn't true and where is this not true

are two really good questions that you can ask

yourself so that you can get ahead on what you're doing.

And lastly, know that not everything

is going to work all the time, right?

So things that work right, you want to keep

but realize why, why they are working and when they are

working, right? So they may be a good strategy for the summer, but they

may not be a great strategy for the winter of how you're handling

your time and what you're getting done. But the whole purpose

for this is just because the

month and the week has changed, don't lose the momentum

that you've already started. Build on it. Keep building on

it. Because every time you slow down,

every time you stop, it takes inertia. You have to

overcome inertia again. And I'm not saying to you that you

shouldn't take a break or that you shouldn't take some time off. I

mean, you know, I think that everybody should, in their

calendar should put some time for creativity because

you have to make space for that. You have to be

relaxed, you have to feel comfortable, right? And

it doesn't mean that you have to take a whole day. It could mean that

you take two hours every week. It, you know, depending on

how your brain focuses, right?

But what you want to do is make sure you're working on the right

priorities for the right reason, the right way at the right

time, and they're right for you. So that's my

quarterly clarity check in call for you.

Enjoy this quarter, but it doesn't mean that your

business is going to slow down. This is the busiest summer

that I've ever had and at the same time, I've

had more time to do things with my family and my husband

because I had that intention to do that. So

that's it. So if you're listening to the One Small chain for the

first time, I'm glad you're here. I hope you will come

back. There's some wonderful episodes and some wonderful free gifts.

I will be doing this again when we get to the the beginning of the

fourth quarter. And there are lots of ways you can connect with

me. You can book a call. The one thing that I haven't

really talked much about is I have my accelerated VIP month.

Summer is great to do that. You can really focus

and really get your momentum going. If you're interested in that,

we need to book a call. It is one on one high

touch. We take a look at everything that you've got and we

streamline it and give you focus so that by the time you get to

September, you are whizzing along.

Okay. Also, you're gonna see

my monthly workshop. Also, if you're listening to

this, hopefully you signed up for the Sunday Scoop. So having said

all that, there's lots of ways that we can connect and

stay connected. I hope that you'll find something that you really liked in

this. If you're listening to this, be sure to make a comment and share it

on on social media. But until then,

change can be simple, but it's not always easy, and

it takes you out of your comfort zone. But it is so well worth it.

This is Yvonne McCoy, and I am glad you spent this time with me

today. Bye.