Market, Scale, Grow: Facebook Ad Marketing Strategy for Teacherpreneurs

186 | Using Urgency In Life & Business

• Jenzaia • Episode 186

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Ever feel like you're racing against the clock, only to find yourself scrambling at the last minute? Hi it's me! 🙋‍♀️

Come along with me as I learn how cultivating a sense of urgency in my life and business.  Today, I'm sharing some tips that I'm personally using to become better at this important skill!

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to Market Scale Grow. I'm your host, jinzea, and this is a Saturday Strategy Session. Hello, today we're going to be talking about urgency and why it is important, how you can build it if you are not naturally an urgent person. If you will, hey, I'm Janzea. If we've never met, I'm a Facebook ad strategist. I help teacher business owners build their businesses using lead generation ads, and today we're going to be talking about something that my husband does really, really well and I kind of suck at it, and that is urgency.

Speaker 1:

With everything that he's doing, there is urgency. If he's washing the dishes, it needs to happen now. It can't happen after we sit down and we relax. It can't happen later. We need to wash the dishes and then we can relax. Folding laundry same thing. If he doesn't do it right away, it just like spins in his head and it bothers him. So he gets it done and then he doesn't have to worry about it, whereas I'm'm the opposite if I have the choice between doing the dishes or folding the laundry, and which actually reminds me that it's laundry day today and I haven't started anyway. I'm the opposite. If I have laundry to do, or dishes or whatever, I often will want to sit down and have like a 10-15 minute break, which ends up being the rest of the evening. I forget about it and then I'm going to go to bed. I put my glass in the sink, I'm like, oh, I haven't done any of this, and then I have to spend half an hour 20 minutes, when I'm two hours more tired doing the dishes. So I'm really really working around the house on having a sense of urgency.

Speaker 1:

But I also see this how important it is in business and as a teacher too. So report cards isn't something that I have always, always struggled with. We get a PD day, half of a day for writing, and I in my head that PD day is the starting day. It's not when it's due. So I don't even think about report cards until that PD day. And then it rolls around. I'm like, ah, now I only have a week, whereas some of my co-workers are done at the PD day, and so something I really want to work on there is like having that urgency, having that sense of like okay, I know, report cards are coming. I need to get them done before the actual deadline so that I'm not scrambling the night before In your business. Same thing If you have multiple projects on the go, leaving them to the last second. Now you're scrambling and, for whatever reason, it always happens that even if projects are nicely spaced out, they all end up crashing onto each other. There's delays in some, others go faster than expected. I don't know what it is, but I have absolutely a thousand percent noticed that this happens right.

Speaker 1:

So what I've been trying to do in my business is when something is given to me like hey, here's a new ad campaign. Back in November, in October, I was given an ad campaign with the directions to get started on it. Like we wanted to start running it the week before Thanksgiving Instead of leaving it until the week before Thanksgiving. I got everything set up and ready to go. All I need to do is hit publish. It's sitting as a draft right now, only because I don't know exactly which date we want to start it. Otherwise I would have scheduled it and hit go, so that it's sitting there waiting and I don't have to remember.

Speaker 1:

I'm a busy mom, I teach, I run Facebook ads. Like I have a lot going on right now, having to remember to hit go on an ad, or like have to spend 30 minutes, probably on a day when I have 83 other things that I need to get done. No, thank you, but I was able to find half an hour to do it. I did it and now all I have to do is find 10 seconds to press go. Finding urgency is so, so, so important, because that allows things to no longer be an emergency. If you let things go, emergencies tend to happen more often. It's similar to your money, when you are constantly spending every single dollar on all of the things whether it's housing and food and gas and other essentials or you're shopping and shopping and shopping, and you don't have any extra cash left over. When something happens like your roof collapses or your furnace breaks or a tire blows, those become emergencies.

Speaker 1:

When I was in university, I knew that it was important to save money and I was not making a lot of money at all but I built up $500 in an emergency fund. I didn't know what it was for. And then one day I was driving a friend's car and I hit a curb and blew both tires the front and the back tire on the passenger side. Do not know how this has happened. I have no idea what kind of spikes were on that curb. I have no idea. He was really upset, obviously, but I had that $500 sitting my bank account for an emergency. I really, really really wanted to spend it on going out or a new going out top, if you will or shoes, or dinner or whatever. But I just left it there and I'm so glad I did, because when I blew those two tires on his car I was able to just take the money and be like here here, go buy yourself the new tires. I didn't have to worry about it. I didn't have to think.

Speaker 1:

Now that I'm older and I make it more of a salary and we have more expensive, our goal is to have three to six months of expenses saved in our tax-free savings accounts so that if this emergency happens like our roof falls in or our tire blows or whatever, if this emergency happens like our roof falls in or our tire blows or whatever we don't even need to think about it. We just can do it. Anyway, back to the sense of urgency when you like saving money and you have that emergency fund build up, when you do things right now instead of later, that gives you time so that if the projects do all end up falling on top of each other, because this one was delayed and that one is going ahead of schedule. Then you have the ability to breathe and spend the time that everything needs to. So what are some things that I'm doing to improve my sense of urgency now? Because, remember, I struggle with this? The first one is reminding myself of future self, especially for things around the house, like the dishes or laundry or whatever. I know future Gen Z is going to be so, so, so appreciative if I've just done the thing, so I suck it up. Sometimes I'll put whatever TV show is going to go and lay on the couch and watch on and do the dishes. Then Same with, like laundry, whatever it is around the house, I just suck it up.

Speaker 1:

Business is the same thing. If there's a task that I'm like avoiding or putting off, I just get started Five minutes. If, after five minutes, I still feel like I need the break or really don't want to do the thing or whatever it is, I give myself that ability to just stop. But I get five minutes of work done. It's crazy, amazing, what you can do in five minutes, because, well, my five minutes always end up turning into like 25 minutes, because once I've started I don't want to stop, I just want to get it done.

Speaker 1:

Starting is the hardest part. This really helped me in university too, when I was writing papers and stuff. I would just say, okay, you're just going to write one paragraph or whatever, just like a tiny, tiny little bit, and then you can put it back down, and I never wanted to stop. Once you get started, you're just going to have the ball rolling, and it is so much easier to keep going, number whatever the next one is. I don't have a numbered list in my head. The next one is to not multitask. If you're multitasking, your brain is like, ah, it's like a ping pong bat you can't see me, but my arm was like waving back and forth, as if like a tennis match or a ping pong game, to like table table tennis, just like the back and forth. When you're multitasking, your brain can't focus on one thing, and so everything seems more overwhelming, and so it's really, really important that you just focus on one thing and you get that thing done, and then you can move on to the next thing and get that next thing done.

Speaker 1:

My next tip is to prioritize. Knowing your priorities, knowing what's most important, helps you to recognize when you're doing task avoidance, so I absolutely love playing with our budget. We use YNAB, so that's it's. You need a budget and when I am avoiding a task, I will often open up YNAB and play with the numbers and the budget categories and future projections and and and I can get lost in there. It is absolutely my favorite thing oh I when I do that and I'm mindlessly allotting categories. Obviously, part of it is necessary on Friday or Saturday after we get paid, because we both get, we get paid on Fridays, so after we get paid, I always go in there and I like fiddle with the numbers and update the budget obviously necessary. But when I am on like a random Tuesday, putting in my business income and my paycheck and my husband's paycheck for the next week or two weeks or three weeks or four weeks to future project and play with the categories and how to make this work and that and blah, blah, blah, I start to realize I'm task avoiding. Knowing what your priorities are is super, super important, because then you can say, okay, this is the most important thing the dishes, and then this watching the dishes, and then this watching the TV show, and then shower and bed or whatever it might be right, like knowing the order of importances and order of priorities helps you to like move on and do the thing. And then I also kind of said this one already, but task avoidance If you have a specific thing you do when you're avoiding a task like for me, playing with the budget being aware of that, similar to being aware of triggers if you're going to have, like, a panic attack or something bad is going to happen, or if you have an allergy, right, being aware of these things is one of the first steps so that you can recognize it. And if you can do anything once like I can do the dishes first before I go on and have fun or whatever I'm going to do with the night, I've done it before so I know I can do it again. And every single time that you do it, the quote, unquote, right way or the way you want to it makes it easier.

Speaker 1:

The next time I used to bite my nails, I used to bite them down to the bleeding, bloody, gross, yuck. I stopped. And then I started again. Like by stopped, I mean one time I was biting my nails I was like, stop doing that and I stopped and then 10 minutes later I realized I was biting my nails again. But I knew, because I did it, that one time that I would, I could do it again.

Speaker 1:

And what ended up happening is I would completely forget that I was trying to stop biting my nails for like weeks on end. And then I would okay, you're not biting your nails, and I'd stop, and I'd recognize it, and then I wouldn't bite my nails and I wouldn't buy my nails. And then all of a sudden, weeks would go by and be like oh, you're biting your nails again, and slowly over time, I extended the periods of time that I wasn't biting my nails and became less and less frequent that I was and honestly, I don't even remember the last time that I bit my nails now. So that's how it needs to happen. That's how you change something is slowly, over time. And when you do it once, then you know you can do it again. And anything that you do again, you can do it again and again, and then again and again and again that you do again, you can do it again and again, and then again and again and again. And then all of a sudden, before you know it, you're always doing the dishes before you sit down and watch Love is Blind because you are a superhuman like my husband.

Speaker 1:

Okay, I hope that this was helpful. This was definitely more of like a business life advice podcast. Don't know your vibes about that. Hope you like it and I will be back in your ear with another Saturday strategy session next week. Thank you for listening to this episode of Market Scale Grow. Every week on Saturdays, we release a new Saturday strategy session, sometimes with amazing guests, and I'm so thankful that you've taken some time out of your busy schedule to make me part of your journey. If you love this podcast, don't forget to share it with your friends and then head to your favorite podcast app to subscribe so that you won't miss next week's episode or any of the upcoming ones. And if you loved it, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcasts so that other people can find this podcast and we can impact teachers and teacher business owners around the world. Thank you so much for listening and I'll be back in your ears next week with another Saturday Strategy Session.