The email that helps you start a business by keeping things simple.

This week:

Listen to this week’s voice note on the online version of this email.

This week’s mantra: Slow down, you’re doing fine.

Book to add to your list: The Uncomfortable Truth - Change Your Life By Taming 10 of Your Mind's Greatest Fears by Anna Mathur. Our fears are anchored in the unavoidable truths of life; all things reach an end, bad things happen, and we lack the control we crave. This book offers practical exercises, references and stories that will help you to accept life’s uncomfortable and unavoidable truths.

TedTalk to Watch: Why you need to slow down to speed up and the power of taking a pause. Watch here »

Task for the week ahead: Making space to plan the rest of year. This week I’ll be taking time to plan the rest of my year in detail. I already know at a high level what I want to achieve as well as having all my key date boulders (school holidays, work deadlines etc) in the calendar but this week I’ll be adding the detail and making a week by week plan for the rest of the year. I find if I don’t make a super detailed plan on a quarterly basis days, weeks and months can disappear in a flash and I miss key opportunities in the calendar (aka Christmas/New Year content).

Mindset Moodboard:

It’s not hard, it’s just new

My five year old son is obsessed with football. It’s the first thing he wants to do in the morning and I’m practically dragging him inside at the end of the day to eat his dinner.

This weekend we were in the garden and my son was practicing kicking his ball at a target.

He then asked me to take a shot.

Of course, I missed the target.

Unphased, he collected the ball and said, “it’s ok mum, it’s not hard, it’s just new and you need to practice.”

Of course, I immediately felt a swell of emotion that this little boy could be so wise as I realised that I’ve reached the parenting milestone of when your kids really do start to teach you life lessons.

So next time you are frustrated, upset, or annoyed at yourself that you are missing the mark or something feels difficult, scary or overwhelming - remember, it’s not hard, it’s just new. 🫶🏽

What to do when things go wrong

Yesterday I made a mistake. I shared an email with my entire email list that was meant to be exclusively for members of the Keep It Simple Club with the content for week one of our couch to £5k programme.

My immediate reaction was panic. Thousands of people now had access to something they shouldn’t and I only caught the error 9 hours later when one of the members inside K.I.S flagged it to me.

After unpublishing the link and sharing access only with members I shared what had happened with the rest of the group. Here’s just one of the messages I received in response:

This is what the Keep It Simple Club is all about - support, feedback and community.

So what are the lessons here and what can you take away from this?

• Slow down - I made this mistake because I was trying to do too much. I was solo-parenting, my kids were being kids and I wasn’t giving any of my tasks my full attention.

• It’s not as bad as you think - after the initial panic had subsided, I quickly realised that this was actually an opportunity to showcase to people how brilliant the membership actually is.

• It’s important to rest - I’d been up late on Saturday night working, something I had only just vowed not to do. But I knew Monday (today) was going to be busy so I thought, I’ll use the hours when everyone else is asleep to catch up on work. As a result I was exhausted and not concentrating. In the end, it came back to bite me as something had to give.

I’ll be taking these lessons into the week ahead… I promise.

P.S. If you did click that link yesterday and you like the content for week one of Couch to £5k and you want to take part in the full programme over the next 12 weeks then we’re just getting started!

Have a great week ahead & remember to keep it simple.

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