In this episode of the Be More Business Podcast, I break down the five places entrepreneurs tend to make things harder than they need to be: time management, follow-up, marketing, networking, and even personal self-care.

Instead of forcing yourself into systems designed for someone else’s brain, Kim walks you through how each temperament type — structured, spontaneous, meaning-driven, and strategic — can work with their wiring instead of battling it.

You’ll learn practical shifts that bring ease, reduce burnout, and help you create a business that truly supports the life you want to live. From capacity-based planning to automation to reframing marketing resistance, this episode is your permission slip to stop forcing and start aligning.

This is the Be More Business podcast, where wisdom and innovation merge to create a business that supports the life you want to live.

Here's your host, entrepreneurial wise woman and cyber sorceress, Kimberly Beer.

Do you ever wonder if there are times that you make things harder in your business than you really need to make them?

I don't know about you, but that is something that comes up in my mind a lot.

And over the years, I have learned about a lot of things in my business that I was making a great deal harder than they need to be.

And today in this episode, I want to talk about five different areas that I recognize that a lot of my entrepreneurial clients seem to want to make harder rather than easier.

So we're going to talk about a way that we can kind of flip that script and use our knowledge around our temperament in order to create systems that make these five things easier versus more difficult.

So in the context of this discussion, I do want to set a quick parameter because we are talking about temperament.

I don't know what sorter you chose to take, I don't know what ones you have taken.

I don't know what ones you're familiar with.

So rather than try to dive into one specific one, because again, I'm really open to any sorter that you take being the one that is right for you.

But we have to have a way to frame this conversation.

And so I'm going to frame it from the perspective of four different temperaments that are very generic and really focused on how you show up in work.

The first temperament is the structured worker who thrives on routine, predictability, and order.

The second temperament is the spontaneous worker, which is pretty much the exact opposite.

They thrive on flexibility, energy shifts, and sensory variety and freedom.

That is a very key word for this type of worker.

The third worker is a meaning driven worker.

This is somebody who has to work with their intuition, who has to resonate with what they're doing, and also is very driven by the big picture and altruistic possibilities of what they are doing in their work.

And then the fourth type is the strategic worker.

So this is the individual who thrives on analysis and systems and problem solving and who tends to look at things from the perspective of competency.

So it's very important to them to be competent.

And it's also important, also very important for them to recognize where things are failing or not succeeding as well as they should be and make those corrections.

So let's keep those four types in mind as we process through these five things.

So the very first one I want to talk about is time management.

So this is an area that I know a lot of business owners struggle with.

As a matter of fact, some of the best attended lectures that I see, in any event that I go to deal with exactly this topic, time management.

And there are literally dozens of different ways that you can manage your time and time management for structured workers, and many times for those strategic workers, it really kind of comes naturally.

The people who are doing the most purchasing of the planners and also the time management systems tend to be those meaning driven workers and also the spontaneous workers.

Because our perception, and I include myself in that I'm a meaning driven worker, our perception is that the people who get shit done are the people who are using those systems.

However, we tend to burn out from them.

So when we look at what time management system we're using, what happens is we may be making that harder in our business than we need to.

So for most of us, the people who are making this harder are those meaning driven workers and the spontaneous workers, because the world tells us that we should show up a certain way.

So for a structured worker, and I'm going to include all four types here just because I want to include it in case you are struggling with it and you are a structured worker.

But if you are a structured worker, a couple of techniques that I think work really well and that I've seen people have good success with are time blocking, using the rule of three, in other words, picking three things that you want to get done for that day.

I happen to use a modified version of that because I don't do well with the structure of it.

But that rule of three is really, really powerful for somebody who does well with structured deep work.

So for structured workers, all of those things really help you be predictable, which settles your nervous system down and makes things much easier for you for spontaneous workers.

And again, you guys tend to be ones that want to buy a lot of these time management systems.

And you are one, a group of people that may find yourself making this a lot harder because you're actually working against your temperament.

So for spontaneous workers, it might be better if instead of trying to do time blocking, you did sprints and you did batching systems and systems that are really flexible.

So if you choose to do sprints and you choose to do batching, make sure that you have some flexibility built into that.

So here's the thing.

Gamification and short bursts will help keep you engaged.

So they'll help you stay focused on what you need to get Done for meaning driven workers.

And this is what I found for myself is that capacity based planning works really well.

So I am not the type of person that can sit down on a Sunday evening and plan out my entire week because I'm going to tell you that's going to go off the rails by probably about 8:30 on Monday morning.

So what I tend to do is wake up every morning and I even start as I'm getting ready to think about what my capacity is for that day.

Some days I have more capacity than others and this is another thing that I learned in working through living with chronic depression which I have had for my entire life.

So when you are depressed on a regular basis you have a certain capacity for what you can do in a day.

There's good days and there's bad days and some days I have a capacity to get a lot done.

Some days I have more capacity to do certain projects than other projects and I take advantage of that by using capacity based planning and also thematic time blocking versus I'm going to rigidly block this time off for this specific task or set of tasks to use something that's more of a theme as I'm going to work on this day on building my business and whatever that happens to look like.

Maybe it is social media, maybe it is working on my email list, but I can thematically work on something what happens in this particular type of worker and I'm including myself here, so I'm speaking in the word I is I need to be able to set structure without suffocating myself.

And then the fourth type is the strategic worker.

So these individuals do really well with very deep work sprints, things that they can have that have a lot of data driven systems to them, things that utilize a lot of data that they can analyze and take a look at.

They do really well with data analytics.

They also do really good with the rule of three.

So for these individuals it is give me a problem and give me a space to solve that problem in it and I can get it done.

So those types of type management systems work.

Now I mentioned that I personally use the rule of three even though I use capacity based business planning.

So for that, for me it means that when I sit down on my desk first thing in the morning, I think of three things that @ the end of this day, if I accomplish those three things, I will consider this day successful.

Now I'm going to be really blatantly honest here.

Some days those three things are pretty lofty.

Some of them are like I want to finish my podcast recording for X month or I want to create a brand new system for something.

Other days they will be as simple as I want to have good meetings with my clients and leave on a positive note.

I want to take a moment to walk around my ranch and settle myself and I want to be able to leave my office by X hour.

Those things don't seem like they would be high productivity time hacks, but at the end of the day, what that is is that's the capacity of where I can be for that day.

All right, so that's number one thing.

I see people making a lot harder in their businesses than they probably need to.

Number two on this list is follow up.

Now here's the thing about me.

I absolutely love automation because I am not the person who has the greatest attention to detail.

I do not track details really well.

I am not a structured worker.

I am not a strategic worker.

I am that meaning driven worker.

If I have to have a second type, it's going to be the spontaneous worker.

So neither the spontaneous worker nor the meaning driven worker frequently is really good at details.

One of the things that I utilize to help me keep up with that is automation.

Now, for all four types of workers, automation is going to be hugely beneficial in keeping you on track.

Anything that you do in a repetitive manner is an amazing thing for you to be able to automate those systems that you create will literally save you from yourself.

This is an opportunity for you to create things that even when you don't have time, even when you forget, that system is there to support you.

So take a moment to look about how you could embrace follow up better utilizing automation.

Because follow up is where the millions are at.

It is where you will pick up clients where other people fail to pick them up because they fail at the follow up.

So follow up and follow through are two problems that I see.

A lot of business owners struggle with that if they were to embrace automation and technology to be able to support them in this process, they would find this much, much easier in their businesses instead of being difficult.

Number three on this list is probably the number one answer.

When I ask people the question of what is not going well in your business or what do you find super hard, and that is marketing.

So marketing has been my jam for the last 30 years and I know small business owners struggle with that.

Otherwise there wouldn't be marketing professionals making a living.

And even with all the AI, with all the technology, with all the ability to DIY things, there are still a lot of people who make a very good living helping business owners market their business.

And the reason for that is, is that we sometimes make this a whole lot harder than it has to be.

Marketing can be very emotionally uncomfortable for people and you may find that you struggle with that aspect of it.

Sometimes it is the just simply the time management piece of it because marketing is time consuming.

So if we break down each of our four types of workers, let's take a look at how you can make marketing a little bit easier for structured workers.

You guys tend to want to be overly perfect in your marketing and you sort of get into a paralysis from that.

It happens a lot.

And the shift that you need to make to make this easier and to get the momentum moving forward and is that you want to strive for excellence versus perfection.

Perfection is a very, very high bar to reach.

Excellence, however, is usually within the reach of wherever you are in that moment.

And that is another big key to this is where are you right now?

Because excellent today may mean something really different than excellent two years from now.

And you can only be as excellent as you can be today.

So let you cut yourself some slack, let some things go and get things out there.

Don't let the perfection side of things paralyze you into not making movement.

Spontaneous workers tend to be really inconsistent in their marketing and that is where they make it a lot more difficult.

Because when you're inconsistent, you don't tend to get results.

And also consistency can feel super rigid.

This is again where technology can really come in and help you if you are a spontaneous worker.

Create sprints.

Utilizing the time management tool that I talked about above, Create sprints where you create a batch of social media at a time, or a batch of marketing, or a batch of emails.

Whatever marketing means to you, I don't mean to just pigeonhole it as to social media, but consistency is what is important to get the result.

But that consistency may feel rigid to you.

So look at ways that you can rubber band flex your time and skills in order to get the consistency in appearance.

Even though you may not be consistently creating your marketing on a day to day basis.

For meeting driven workers, we get tangled up in the emotions of marketing, right?

And so we've got to start looking at marketing as a vehicle for being able to get where we really want to go.

It is a quote and I don't want to call it evil because marketing is definitely not evil.

But we're going to use the cliche here because I think it makes sense.

Marketing is a necessary evil in order for you to get where you want to go and it can feel like a drag.

So just be super aware of that.

And again, like the spontaneous worker, use your capacity based work schedule in order to be able to really get in tune with your marketing and move with it in a flow.

And for our strategic workers, you guys love to analyze things and sometimes that means you over stratege that over strategize.

Let me say that again.

Strategic workers often over strategize and that ends up causing a delay in your marketing, which can be really, really frustrating.

So here's the adage for you guys.

Publishing imperfectly is better than never hitting publish at all.

And utilize that across the board.

Whether you're buying an ad or whether you're putting something out on social media, you have to put it out there, otherwise no one is ever going to see it.

So be careful of getting caught in analysis paralysis here.

Whereas the structured worker tends to get caught in perfectionate paralysis, the strategic worker tends to get caught in analytic paralysis.

All right, number four on the list of things we tend to make harder in our business than we need to is networking.

So when new clients come to me and they tell me what they want to do with their business, one of the very first things I do is encourage them to start building their network around whatever it is that they want to accomplish.

Your network's quality is as important as its quantity, if not more so.

But networking for some people is difficult.

And I'm going to wager that you may be an introvert or an extrovert.

That tends to be where we sort of rub up against things with our networking.

But I would say even if you think you're good at networking, you may want to go back and analyze your networking for where you may be making it harder or where you may be not being as successful as you could be in your networking ability.

So again, this is going to break along lines of introvert versus extrovert.

And this is usually a very comfortable place for most people to talk about their temperament.

They're very aware of whether they're an introvert or an extrovert.

But both come with positives and both come with negatives when it comes to networking.

And to make networking easier and more productive for you, understanding how you show up as an introvert or an extrovert really, truly helps.

So let's talk about the obvious elephant in the room.

Introverts not liking networking or not being good at that.

I'm not going to buy you're not good at it.

I know some very High introverts that are outstanding networkers.

What they do though is they have a lot of safeguards and protections built in for their introvert into the networking activity.

Networking can feel super uncomfortable to an introvert.

I will not sugarcoat that at all.

I am not an introvert, but I've watched introverts in networking and I know that it cannot, it sometimes does not feel as natural as they would like for it to be.

However, if you can approach it in a way that feels humane for you, you will be able to basically encourage yourself and inspire yourself to continue to network over time.

And it will get easier because you're not trying to force yourself into something that is really rigid, that doesn't work for your specific temperament.

This is another place.

Just like that time management block is really geared towards people who like the very, very rigid systems of time management.

Networking is really designed, the theories and the advice is, tends to be designed for extroverts and sometimes it can be really hard for introverts.

Recognize that and find a system that really works for you.

Work with your superpower of being an introvert instead of against it.

Introverts tend to be amazing networkers once they finally find their groove in it because they tend to have very deeper conversations.

They tend to approach it in a much more mindful and meaningful way, which is where the extrovert sometimes gets themselves in trouble.

So extroverts love networking.

But, and this is me, we tend to sometimes talk when we should be listening.

So that means we need to learn to listen as much as we talk.

And that means our productivity and our connections will go up.

Everyone's favorite subject is themselves.

And as extroverts, we love to talk about ourselves, but we also need to learn to listen.

To everyone else when we are networking.

So we also tend to have a lot of surface level conversations where we need to deepen those conversations.

And we may go to a networking event and think, wow, I talk to a lot of people.

But at the end of the day, maybe the result isn't what we wanted because we're making it harder, we're not listening and we're also doing a lot of floating, which is means we're not going to make those deeper connections that will actually turn into opportunities in a networking scenario.

All right, you ready for the last one?

This one is probably one of the most important ones that I can almost guarantee you are making harder in your business than you need to, and that is personal self care.

Entrepreneurs tend to put self care at the bottom of the list.

Right, there's the business and the family.

And some people put family first, some people put first, some people put them there together.

But I can guarantee you self care likely comes after that for a lot of you.

So we need to not overcomplicate this.

Self care can look really, really simple.

And I'm going to give an idea for each of these types of workers that we've been talking about.

So everyone has something that sort of fits with their temperament.

But my big encouragement here is to look at how you can incorporate in microhabits and micro movements within your day self care so it is baked into the system.

So for structured workers, predictability is a really comfortable warm blanket.

So having a predictable pause every single day where you can utilize that routine to steady yourself and to take a moment for self care, put it on your calendar, bake it into the system.

Spontaneous workers tend to need a sensory reset.

Overload can happen super fast in a spontaneous worker's nervous system.

So self care should be flexible and it should be quick.

And energizing.

A reset in between tasks, like going for a walk or in my personal favorite, which sort of life feels into this, is to just simply take a moment to breathe in between tasks and make that mindful.

It doesn't have to be on a calendar.

It can feel really freeing and it can fit into how your day wants to go.

As a matter of fact, I would have a toolkit miles deep if I were a spontaneous worker type to be able to pick from if I needed it.

For meaning driven workers, having a 60 second emotional check in is really handy.

That's what I'm talking about when I said spontaneous reset.

That's what it is for me is taking a 60 second reset in between projects or when I need to switch gears so that I can take a mindful moment to be able to do that.

I only need a moment to realign.

But that moment really matters.

For strategic workers, oftentimes all of the things that they encounter in a day, all the problems that they see, all of the things that really are, that they've spent all of their time analyzing, those things can sometimes collect a little bit like dust in their brain.

So a minute, if you are a strategic worker to take a moment to mentally declutter, to sort of clear off your mental desk so that you can sharpen your awareness for everything else around you.

The basic premise here is to honor your wiring instead of forcing yourself into a system that doesn't work for you.

And that tends to be the exact way we make things harder in our business than we really need to.

So I hope this episode has helped you and given you maybe a little enlightenment in one direction or another of something that you might want to try.

Thanks for hanging out with me and I'll see you in the next.

Episode.

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