#19. Behind the Scenes of my Virtual Planning Event - 10 Lessons Learned
Episode Shownotes:
In today's episode, I am peeling back the curtain in my business and sharing 10 time management lessons I learned while hosting my first virtual planning event.
Tune in to hear the mistakes I made, the road bumps I hit, and the successes I had as I was creating my 2024 Planning Event.
I'm covering everything from mindset to strategy. Each lesson is something you can apply to your own time management journey, especially when it comes to tackling some of your biggest goals. Let's dive in!
Are you sick and tired of feeling overwhelmed by all the things? I can help. Schedule a free consult today to learn about how I can help you take back control of your time.
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Follow me on Instagram! @theresamharp
Learn more about Theresa Harp Coaching here.
Episode Transcript*:
This is Your Speech Path: Mindful Time Management for the Busy SLP. My name is Theresa Harp and, as a mom and speech pathologist turned productivity coach, I know a thing or two about how hectic life can be. If you're an SLP who's overworked, burnt out and feeling like you're constantly falling short as a therapist and a mom, then this is the podcast for you. I cover time management and mindset strategies so you can learn to love your work and your home life at the same time. Let's dive in.
Hello SLPs, welcome back to another episode of the Your Speech Path podcast. It's awesome to be here. I'm doing something a little bit different today. I'm going to be doing a sort of behind the scenes look at my virtual planning event that by the time this podcast episode is released, the event will have already taken place. But I wanted to do this behind the scenes kind of I don't know peak if you will because as I was reflecting on this experience, I was noticing that there were quite a few lessons that I learned throughout the process, and they are very much related to time management, and I thought what better way to provide value for all of you than to kind of share some of those insights and lessons with you all. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to talk you through what I learned by hosting my very first, or planning my very first, virtual planning event. Planning my planning event that's kind of where we are. It's pretty meta, so I'm just going to dive in. Okay, I think I've got 10 lessons. I was counting them up before I hit record and I came up with 10 total, so I'm going to walk you through each one of these. Let's just go ahead and dive in, all right.
So just actually a little bit of a backstory in case you are unfamiliar. I hosted at this point again, this episode is being released after the planning event has taken place, but recording it beforehand. But anyway, I hosted a live planning event virtual on Zoom, and it is for mostly geared towards SLPs, but planning out 2024, before the holiday season hits, when life is really crazy, and so it is a five hour event and it really goes through, on a pretty deep level, your goals that you have for all areas of your life. Okay, so, work and home life and personal life, relationships, hobbies, like all of those areas. I really wanted to create a space where we could design goals and actually start mapping them out in terms of scheduling for 2024. That would these goals. I really wanted them to be able to address all of those areas, because I think that's something that is missing in the planning world when I see lots of different planning events that are happening. Okay, and by the time you're listening to this episode again, the event has already taken place. But if you are interested or if you feel like you missed out I did, I will record the event, and so there might still be opportunity for you to sort of get more of a hands on access, if you will, to that event. So just keep that in mind. You know, it all depends on how things shake out, but more to follow on that, okay.
So, now that we got that out of the way, the very first lesson that I learned and continue to learn in life is the importance of writing down your goals on paper or on digital documents. Um, writing down those goals and reviewing them. So that is lesson number one to write down your goals and to review your goals periodically and systematically. Okay, so, with this planning event, at the end of last year, so the end of 2022, I actually participated in a planning event for 2023 and a little bit different than what I've kind of created for all of you, but in this planning event, we we did write down kind of a list of goals that we had, things that we kind of dream about and things that we planned to do at some point or things that we, you know, might want to do at some point. . This is a really big reminder to and this is not one of the lessons, but this is a really big reminder to of the importance of a good old-fashioned brain dump, where you just write down anything and you don't filter or edit yourself. Because during that planning event, I wrote down Two things. I wrote down many things, but two of the things I wrote down were design a planner and host a planning event, and so I had written those down and then, as I was reviewing the other goals that I had written down and really Deciding on which goals I wanted to tackle in 2023. I ultimately decided that I didn't want to do the planner and the planning event in 2023. I Just I knew that it was gonna be a crazy year, with my husband being away for the majority of the year, and I just thought, you know, this is probably not the year to do it. So I didn't. I didn't set the goal, I didn't schedule it, I didn't do anything right, but it was still written there and throughout the year I would go back and I would look at my Planner, I would go back and look at the at those goals that I had written down at that brain dump, and I would see it and I kept feeling like drawn to it and pulled to it. And had I Not written it down at all, or had I written it down and just sort of you know, crossed it out or erased it, or had I never gone back and reviewed what I had written a year prior, this would have never happened, this event would have never happened. This this planner would have never happened, at least not this year, right? But because I kept going back and reviewing my goals, I realized that, although it was probably not the ideal air quotes time to be working on this, I really wanted to do it, and so at the end of, maybe the third quarter, maybe, or I don't know, I think it was at the end of the third quarter of this year I decided to do it. So it wasn't a whole lot of lead time, if you will, from when I made the decision to when I actually had to execute everything. So that is the first lesson for you write down your goals and review them, okay.
The second lesson I have for you is to keep an open mind. Okay, because for me, as I started to mention a couple minutes ago the goals that I had written down, in particular of creating a planner which I did also do that, by the way but creating a planner and creating a planning event, hosting a planning event, those goals in my mind were huge, like they were big, big goals that seemed really time-consuming and like big partakings and I could have very easily stayed closed off to the possibility of doing them.
And I think that for many of us, we do this when it comes to big, either goals or projects that are on our mind that feel huge, they feel daunting, they feel overwhelming, we think it's going to take a lot longer than it's actually gonna take, or we think it's gonna be a ton of work, we think it's gonna be way more work than maybe it actually is gonna be, and we just sort of hype it up in our heads and it becomes this big, big thing and in a way. That is not in service to us or in service of us. Right and yes, it's important to acknowledge that this can work both ways. Sometimes we- it goes the opposite, right where we have a goal or a project in mind and we think it's gonna be quick and easy, and then it actually winds up taking way more time and energy than we thought. So there is that possibility as well, but I want to invite you to consider the possibility that things might not be as overwhelming as you think they're gonna be, and and I also want to offer that the amount of energy that you waste thinking about the thing, the amount of energy that you waste thinking about the thing, is actually way more than the amount of energy of just doing the thing. And so, when you think about this, from an investment of time and an investment of energy, you could very easily waste a whole lot of time and energy just thinking about doing something, and instead, what if you allocated that time and energy to actually doing the thing, doing the task? So for my SLPs who are listening, this comes up a lot with evaluation reports when we think we have what, when we have evaluation reports that we need to write and we think they're going to be big, long, complicated evaluation reports, and every time we think about sitting down to write the report, it's like I don't really want to do this. Blah, blah, blah. And how many times do you think about the report that you should be writing instead of actually just writing the report? Okay, so that's sort of like two lessons in one, but again keeping an open mind about the time and energy and the undertaking that your goal or your project is going to be. Okay, so, keep an open mind.
And, speaking of open mind, my third lesson that I learned throughout this planning events was the importance of mindset, and this is not necessarily something that I was unfamiliar with, but this is something that is so important for you to hear, because when we set a big goal or when we think about doing something that feels really big and scary, it is, I would argue, not even as much. I would say. I would argue that it is more about mindset than it is about strategy, because think about it. When it comes time to actually doing the thing, doing the goal, working towards the goal and doing the project, whatever it is, what comes up for you in your brain, what are the thoughts that you have. Are you scared to do it? Are you afraid of doing it? Are you overwhelmed by the idea of doing it? What are those micro thoughts that run through your brain that hold you back from trying or hold you back from persisting? Okay, and I just think it's really, really important for you as SLPs and for those of you who are listening and are private practice owners or business owners you got to know that it is just part of the process to have those thoughts. Nothing has gone wrong. It is absolutely part of the process. So ask yourself if you're avoiding a goal or you're avoiding a project. Ask yourself what am I afraid of? What am I afraid will happen? And another question that I love to consider is what am I going to have to do and who am I going to have to become in order to meet this goal? So, what is the effort required, what are the things that I'm going to have to do and, more importantly, who am I going to have to become in order to meet this goal? So, if you maybe want an interdisciplinary practice, maybe right now your practice is all speech, but you've got these dreams about becoming interdisciplinary right. So one of the things that you're going to have to do is go out and make connections right With people from other disciplines. You're going to have to network and market. You're going to have to connect with PTs and OTs and whatever other therapists or disciplines you are considering hiring. So you're going to have to become a confident leader. You're going to have to show up from a place of confidence, right, if you want to hire a team of therapists and one of the limiting beliefs is that maybe no one will do therapy as good as I will. You cannot run your business that way, or you could, but you're probably not going to enjoy it. You're probably not going to feel good about it, right? So you have to get really, really clear and really really aware that's probably a better word is becoming really aware of what the thoughts are that are running through your brain when it comes to working towards a big goal, right? What are those thoughts? Spoiler alert if you try to avoid them, if you try to ignore them, it doesn't work. They're still there. It doesn't work. But you have to be aware of them, right? Because they're just thoughts. They're not fact, they're just thoughts that your brain offers you. You don't have to listen to what they are, but by God, you have to know that they're there. You have to acknowledge what those thoughts are and recognize that it is just part of the process. Okay, so that's mindset. I could go on and on and on about that, but I am going to rein it in, all right.
The fourth lesson that I learned through this planning event is the order what I'm going to call the order of operations when you have a task or goal. So when I say order of operations, remember from math-I hate math-but you remember from math in school there was the order of operations when you had an equation and what has to get done first, what do you add or subtract or multiply or divide first before you move on to the other pieces of the equation, right? So for me, I started with this really broad idea just a very, very vague, broad idea of a planning event. But then I had to put pen to paper and break down the steps that were involved in a planning event so that it could go from an idea to an action plan, and so you have to break down these pieces into smaller steps and then you have to consider what is the order of operations? In what order do I need to do this, that and the other right. So I'm trying to think of an example with this planning event. But I guess I'm laughing because this is a painful lesson for me to learn, because conceptually I know this the importance of order of operations. But I totally got it wrong when I was creating the digital planner. So I created a digital planner and it goes along with the planning event, or really the planning event kind of goes along with the planner, depends on how you look at it. But regardless, I did create a digital planner and as I was creating it in Canva, I didn't realize that the tabs, the clickable tabs. I have tabs in the planner with links inside so you can, for example, click on the tab that says January and it will take you to January, which is really important because the planner is like 450 pages and so you're not going to sit there scrolling right. You need to click the tab to bring you directly to where you want to go. I didn't know that those tabs needed to be done first. In my mind they needed to be done last. So I moved forward under the assumption that the tabs were going to be the very last step in creating the digital planner, and then I discovered that actually they should have been done first, and I'll spare you all the details about why that is the case, but regardless, I wound up with a little bit, I was in a little bit of a conundrum, if you will. So I really encourage you to think about I was going to say clinically critically the order of operations. Sometimes you don't know what the order of operations is until you learn it the hard way, and that's okay. But consider it as best you can and think about what has to happen first, then what has to happen next, right, and go forward with that in mind. Okay, so that's order of operations. The fifth lesson that I have for you, that I learned throughout this process, is the importance of giving yourself a deadline if there isn't already a deadline, okay. So for me, I needed to create a deadline for the final project, which was the planning event itself, and I needed to create a deadline for the sub steps and in the virtual or in the digital planner that I created, by the way, I included space in that planner for those deadlines, so that, as you map out your goals, you're giving yourself deadlines for those goals and you're writing out the sub steps for those goals, because I think that this is something that so many of us overlook, whether it's consciously or subconsciously. I think sometimes it's easier to stick your head in the sand and you don't want to identify what the sub steps are, but you really need to identify what those smaller steps are and create deadlines for yourself. Okay, if I didn't have a deadline, it probably never would have gotten done. So I think this is so important for tasks that don't already have deadlines like if you or maybe have loose deadlines like maybe you have a loose deadline of when an evaluation report is due I would encourage you to just create a hard deadline, just create a firm deadline and stick to it. Okay, alright.
Similarly, the sixth lesson that I have for you is the importance of what I'll call backwards planning or reverse engineering. So this is probably familiar to a lot of you who are listening to this episode, and this really does go hand in hand with the earlier lesson that I had about the order of operations and with having a deadline. But it's an important strategy. It's an important lesson that deserves to be discussed. So, backwards planning, right? So at this point, I had the steps mapped out for my virtual planning event. I knew what the sub steps were going to be in order to get this project, to make it a reality, right, but I needed to backwards plan so that I knew exactly what had to happen and when. And again, this, you can kind of do this in synchrony with your order of operations and with giving yourself a deadline. But I know some people really think about things like forward thinking. They'll think about, okay, well, I've got this plan, I've got, you know, this event that I want to have, and so when do I think I'm going to be able to get the planner complete in time for the event? Like, when will that be done? And then they might think, okay, so when do I think I'm going to have the sales page complete? And then they might come up with that and they might be kind of forecasting out to decide on the event deadline. Right, like the date of the event. For me, I had to come up with the deadline first, the date of the event first, and then backwards plan what was going to have to happen when and when I was going to get each sub-task finished. Okay, so backwards planning. And I think for me what this looked like with this event was picking the date, like okay, October 27th is the date of the event, so what has to happen leading up to that? When do tickets go on sale? When do tickets stop going on sale, like when you know? When does the cart close, so to speak? When do I start promoting it? When do I promote it in the Facebook group, the SLP Support Group, on Facebook? When do I start promoting it on the podcast? And so I would sort of backwards plan all of that. When does the sales page have to be done? When does it have to be launched by? Like? All of those things had to go from the back end. They had to just go backwards in order to have a realistic and, I would say, appropriate timeline. Okay, so backwards plan, okay.
The next lesson that I have from this event was scheduling the time. It sounds so simple and so obvious, but we, most of us, don't do this Schedule the time on your calendar to work on your goals. If it's not written down on your calendar, it doesn't get done Right. So often that is the case, especially for things like this, for goals or events or projects that are beyond your normal day-to-day routine. Right, these are sort of what I would call extras. These are the things like the things that you're tacking on to what you're already doing. These are the things that are outside of your normal workload, your normal day-to-day routine. So you have to decide when you're doing it, when you're doing each task, and you have to schedule it. You have to get it on the calendar. Okay, now, there's two ways that you could do this. I'll give you two examples. Right, I'll give you two kind of two strategies. There's what I call macro planning and there's micro planning, and I don't think that one is better than the other. I think, when it comes to macro versus micro planning, it really depends on you and your brain. It depends on what works best for you. So what do I mean by macro and micro planning? Well, for macro planning, you might say on your calendar, because you're again, you're scheduling the time, right, you're writing these things down on your calendar. So, if you are macro planning, you might write on your calendar work on sales page, like that is all. It would say Sales page 12 to 1 pm. Okay, that's macro planning. So you know the general task, but you don't know the specifics of what you are doing. Or I should say you'd probably know the specifics of what you're doing, but you're not calendaring them. You're not, you know, writing down each little task on your calendar. You're just writing one generic, one generic task work on sales page versus micro planning, where you might calendar or schedule 12 to 1, pull images for sales page, write FAQs for sales page, add links to sales page right? So you're writing down, you're scheduling the micro tasks, the individual tasks that you need to do. Now, again, I don't think there's one that's right and one that's wrong. This really depends on you. When you look at your calendar, do you want to see a broad, general description of the event or the task, or do you need to see the specific things that you have to do during that time? For me, I'm more of a macro planner when it comes to count, when it comes to my schedule. So on my schedule I will put the general task, but I'll know exactly what the smaller tasks are and I'll have them written down somewhere. Usually it depends on what we're talking about, but I have them documented, outlined somewhere, so that when I go and look at my Google calendar and I see work on sales page, I know exactly where to go to see what specific tasks I have to do, okay. So this is all about personal preference here, but regardless of whether you're doing macro planning or micro planning, you are scheduling the time, okay. You're scheduling the time for the tasks, all right. Number eight leave room for the margins, okay. Remember, at the beginning of this episode, I told you that sometimes things don't take as long as you think they're going to take. Well, this is the flip side of that. Sometimes things will take longer than expected. Okay, and both can be true, right? Isn't that funny? So I will guarantee you, when you are working on a big goal or like a big project, you will hit roadblocks. You absolutely will hit roadblocks and things might take longer than you anticipate. So for me, this was the case specifically with the digital planner that I created. So, again, I created a digital planner for 2024. It's not released for sale yet, but for those that purchased a ticket to the live planning event, they will get a free copy of the digital planner once it is released. But in that digital planner I hit a tech issue and I'll spare you the details. It is pretty, probably for most people, probably a pretty simple, straightforward solution. For me it was not, and that tech issue cost me time, it held me back, it slowed me down. So my plan, my timeline, had to get adjusted, and that wasn't necessarily a problem because I had left room for the margins. However, if I'm being totally transparent, I should have could have left more room for the margins, but I didn't, and that's okay. But I think, regardless, you need to, I would say, overestimate how long some of the bigger tasks and even some of the smaller tasks might take, not because you're going to allow yourself to get caught up in overwhelm and in, you know, overanalyzing things, but you're going to allow yourself the space that you will need if something happens and you get stuck. Okay, so it's possible to leave room for the margins while still believing that things might not actually take as long as you think they're going to take. Right, okay, plus, I will also say I know that most of you that are listening your SLPs, right, you, I think most of you have kids. A lot of you are moms and for those of you that are parents out there, you know that when you have kids, life can be very unpredictable. Even though I got to be honest, these days things feel quite monotonous in my day there's sometimes it feels like Groundhog Day. It's like same routines every day. However, there is a fair amount of unpredictability. Kids get sick, schools get closed, you know someone forgets something and you got to go to school and drop something off when you thought you had, you know, work time to work on a project. So your schedule is going to be unpredictable, and that's just part of the process, which is all the more reason to leave room for the margins. All right, I got two more for you, and these are kind of short and sweet.
The ninth lesson that I learned and that I want to offer for all of you is don't be afraid to pivot. Don't be afraid to pivot, don't be afraid to troubleshoot and to change your plan when needed. So I mentioned that I had the tech issue with the digital planner and I basically I felt like I hit a fork in the road and the two choices were either persist with the digital planner and, as long as it takes, like just keep trying to figure this thing out, or and like run the risk of not figuring it out before the event, or come up with a plan B. And I really didn't want to come up with a plan B, but I ultimately decided that that was probably in everybody's best interest, especially mine. So I had to come up with a plan B and pivot okay, had a problem solve, and I will give credit where credit is due. I did not come up with the solution, although I sort of did, but my husband is the one who kind of threw out an idea of how I could modify things when that digital planner wasn't working and, as much as I hate to admit it, it was a good idea. I sort of took it and ran with it and so ultimately, that led me to create a modified digital planner, a condensed version I wanted. I knew it was so important to me to have whoever comes to the virtual planning event to have them have access to the digital planner, because the the event, it just it goes hand in hand with the digital planner and I wanted people to be able to use it in the planning event. However, that wasn't working. I wasn't able to get the planner set up the way I wanted it to. So what I did was I created, I took what I had and I created a condensed version of it and essentially I just took the pieces of the digital planner that I knew people would need for the planning event. So I pulled the pieces that were necessary for the event and I was able to get that together without any tech issues. It didn't cost me a whole lot of time at all and it's still provided value to those who would buy tickets to the virtual planning event. Okay, and again this sort of brings me back to the earlier lesson about mindset, because it would have been so easy for me to kind of just fall apart when this wasn't working the way I wanted it to and I had to basically stay. I don't know. I had to stay open to new ideas and I had to be very mindful of my mindset and be very aware of my mindset so that I wouldn't just kind of throw in the towel and give up. I allowed myself to have a little bit of a temper tantrum, if you will, and then dusted myself off and figured it out. And then that brings me to our final lesson. Perfection does not exist and in fact it is a form of procrastination. There is no such thing as perfect right, and as I was planning the event and as I was creating the digital planner, I was very aware of times when my brain would start going down rabbit holes of. Ooh, which color should I use here? Oh, but this font would look better. And, oh, do these lines match up perfectly the way that they should? Oh, and in my planning event, should I go over this, this, this, this, or should I just do this and this? Well, I think, if people are really going to love it, I should include XYZ. And so it was so easy to slip into those moments of overthinking, I guess, if you will, and getting caught up in the things that, quite frankly, did not matter. There is no such thing as perfect, and by doing that, when I started to get caught up in those things, it really was my brain's way of, I think, just sort of avoiding something that felt hard. It was my brain's way of staying in my safe area, in my safe space, instead of risking making the quote unquote wrong decision, right. And so I had to catch myself when this was happening and I had to pull myself back like rain myself in to stay on track, to get done what needed to get done, because done is better than perfect, right? We've all heard it, I say it a lot, and I needed to make sure that this was done, okay. So if you find yourself getting stuck in perfectionism. Be aware of it and catch it and course correct. Okay, all right, so that is it. Those are my lessons from this planning event Writing down your goals and reviewing them, keeping an open mind, having an awareness of your mindset, knowing your order of operations for your sub steps, giving yourself deadlines backwards planning, scheduling time on your calendar, leaving room for the margins, not being afraid to pivot and not getting caught up in perfectionism. Okay, that's what I learned, what I continue to learn over and over, but what I learned during this planning event, during this, this planning of the planning event, I should say Okay. So if you are interested in the planning event, like I said, by the time this episode is released, the planning event will have passed, but stay tuned because I will be recording it and there may be an opportunity for you to get your hands on the content. So keep that in mind. But come on over to the SLP Support Group, come join us in the free Facebook group. It's always linked in the show notes and you'll be getting access in the Facebook group to more of an inside view of this planning event, of the digital planner that I created and any events or materials that I create going forward in the future. So come on over, hop in the group. We would love to have you All right, that's all I got for this episode. I hope this was helpful and I will talk to you next week.
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*Please note that this transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors.