• 3 big asks I made this week 🚀 

• The importance of 72 hours

• How to plan this week in 10 minutes

Welcome!

I played 18 holes last week for the first time since 2017 🫣 

I was lucky to jet off to La Manga Golf Course with Nigel Botterill and 30 lovely members from the Entrepreneurs Circle.

(if you don’t know about the EC and you’re a business owner then you 100% should immediately take a look here)!!

It was a whirlwind of Golf ⛳️ , helping each other with our businesses, sharing stories and dancing on the lobby piano 🍾 🎹 😅 

I also had one of the most productive hours ever on a rained off afternoon and it reminded me of an important lesson…..

So lets dig in 😉 

3 big asks I made this week instead of keeping busy 🤦‍♀️ 🏌️ 

Wednesdays weather resembled more Manchester ☔️ than La Manga, the golf was cut a lttle short and I had a couple of hours to myself at the hotel..

(A sunnier glimpse of La Manga with the ‘Blue 4 Dream Team’ below ⬇️ 😎)

After being drenched in a golf buggy, I had visions of a dressing gown and room service kind of afternoon and with laptop in hand and ‘catching up’ on work.

Instinctively, I opened all the usual stuff - emails, Asana (just to remind myself of all the tasks with my name on it 😅) Teams and started to do the usual ‘circuit’ of responding, reading, ‘liking’’ stuff. Stupid really. Just busyness.

I continued for about 15 minutes until I kicked myself - why would I spend the next 2 hours sat in a beautiful place just being busy? There we’re a million better things I could have been if I was actually going to spend time on work.

I shut everything down and thought if I’m only spending one hour on my business today - how can I make it as valuable as possible???

Here’s what I did next instead:

1. 3 of the tasks I had assigned for that day I immediately delegated to Bex my super PA and let her do a better job of them than I would.

   10 minutes.

2. I rang one of our customers - Phil, who we love to work with to catch up and see how things we’re going and whether he was free for lunch in June.

   I then asked whether there we’re any industry events or seminars that he goes to which he thought might be a good place for my business to provide value and connect with more kinds of the same businesses as his?

   Not surprisingly, when you make an ask most people love to help!

   By the end of the call I had 2 events that we’re coming up that most people in his industry go to. 24 hours later we’ve arranged to exhibit at one of them in 2 weeks time!!

   A productive phone call in my book 😄 

   15 minutes

3. I emailed a contact I’d made on a ski trip last year - I pitched a partnership and I got an email reply the next day about next steps!

   5 minutes

4. I whatsapped somebody I would love to have as a guest on my (soon to launch) podcast. (I haven’t had a reply yet but I’ll keep you posted. 😁 )

   5 minutes

5. I drafted out a free download to match my newsletter - imaginatively titled ‘How to win the week’ with the help of Chatgpt of course to get the ball rolling and in 25 mins I had the beginnings of a new piece of content which I whizzed off to our amazing Head of Branding - Joy Zarine and her team to create a first draft.

   25 minutes

It’s safe to say that at the end of this 60 minutes I felt like a productive goddess 🦸‍♀️ who had got some good shit done and hadn’t wasted the past hour.

I wanted to describe the above not to impress you, but to impress upon you how you can go through the motions and swipe through all of the notifications that keep us distracted and satisified that we’re doing stuff when actually it is just ‘stuff’.

If you want big results, to enjoy this week and make bigger things possible take a minute to:

• Make a big ask (people love to help!) - imagine what one big ask every week would create by the end of the year. Not every ask will get a reply but out of 52 in a year it is going to start creating some magic and momentum 🪄 

• Ring one of your customers, see how they’re doing, what problems have they got right now? How can you help them more?

• Content is king - the more you can create and post and schedule the more attention you get as the expert in your industry. What can you create or record in 60 minutes this week to solve your customers problems? A quick iphone video answering a question a customer asked you this week which you whizz up to Insta and youtube? a checklist? a step by step guide? Prolific beats perfect always.

Just a few ideas to get the ball rolling. Think big!

Go Win The Week 😘 

The key 72 hours ⌛️ 

Ever rolled in to work on a Monday morning or a Bank Holiday Tuesday not quite feeling your brightest and most starry-eyed?

I definitely have. It’s no mystery either is it? In the last 72 hours you know you had a few more drinks than you usually would, stayed up that bit later, opened the big bag of Doritos instead of the small one and your just a bit more sluggish on that Monday morning than usual.

I’m not about to say don’t do any of it either. We have a rare sighting of the UK sun for gods sake!

But…if you’re still feeling the Monday morning brain fog on a Friday then you must look at what you did in the past 72 hours..:

• Your Sleep

• What you ate 🥑 

• How much water you drank

• Did you move and workout?

Pretty much everything your feeling from brain fog, tiredness, lack of concentration and our ability to maintain good energy throughout the day relates back to how we’ve treated our body in the last 72 hours.

Of course I’m not including if someone has specific health concerns. I’m talking about day to day how we’ve treated our bodies.

Most of how we feel ‘now’, relates to what we did 3 days ago.

So this upcoming week - be more mindful of of how you care for yourself.

🥛 Keep the water on your desk,

🚶 Get up from the desk and move every hour during the day

🏃‍♀️ Make sure you do the 10,000 steps

🏃‍♂️ Squeeze in the 20 min youtube workout

🛌 Try and keep your bedtime consistent and wind down before

🥗 Choose the salad and steak, over the burger more often than not

Make the small good choices your body and brain will love you for.

It will help you to Win the Week x

How to plan the upcoming 4 day week in 10 minutes ⏱️ :

Grab your notebook and run through the below for this coming Tues - Fri 📆 

• Plan - What are the top 3 things you must get done by this Friday? Why are they important to you? Why must they happen? Write them Down

• Announce - Share with those who support you what you need to get done. Accountability is everything! (partner, PA, work colleague, friend - whoever has got your back)

• Ahead - Look ahead to this week - is it overscheduled? does it fill you with joy looking ahead? If not what can you do about it now? What can you push back, re-schedule, ask for a summary on instead of attending? Your time is precious - make sure you enjoy the week.

• Focus Time - you 60/90 minutes of scheduled focus time should be in your diary now. Guarded time where you remove all distractions and work on your most important projects to move them forwards

• Fun - Enjoying the week is as important as using it productively. Have you got time for things you enjoy scheduled in this week?

Win The Week Stats You Should know! 📈 

• The annual work index (US) found that people spend 58% of their day doing ‘work about work’, inc. communicating about work, searching for info, switching between apps, managing priorities and chsing updates - Don’t be one of the 58%!!!

• In one famous experiment, the psychologist Timothy Wilson found that 67% of men and 25% of women chose to press a button to electrically shock themselves rather than sit still with their own thoughts in a lab room. Before entering the room, participants had stated that they would pay money to avoid an electric shock, but once they were left alone, the inactivity became too much to bear, and people sought to fill the void 🤯 

  Busyness isn’t a badge of honour! Take a breath and focus on the important ✨ 

I hope this weeks issue was helpful and triggered some thinking and most importantly I hope you plan a minute this Bank Holiday (or 60 of them) to yourself to implement.

Much love… go win the week

Em

x

P.S. If there’s anything you’ like to see in here, a topic for me to tackle or just any feedback at all - HIT REPLY! I’m all ears 🙏 

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