 One of the most foundational things for a solopreneur is to have a stable schedule of working on their business. Do you have a stable schedule of working on the various aspects of your business? Because if you don't, now you might not because you got into entrepreneurship or working for yourself because you wanted freedom, right? I understand. I am at this point of what, 20, no, almost 15 years being a solopreneur that I'm pretty much unemployable at this point because I very much like determining my own schedule, my own, what am I doing on a day-to-day basis? But if you look at what I do, it is a stable schedule. So you might say, well, haven't you created your own prison? You haven't you created your own job? You didn't want a job. You wanted to work for yourself and now you have a job. Well, yes, that's true, but it's a job that I create and keep recreating on a regular basis based on what I, based on my values, based on my strengths, based on my vision and goals and dreams. And so why is it that a successful solopreneur requires a stable schedule and you can't just go with the flow and do whatever you feel like doing because you have freedom now as an entrepreneur, why is that? Because if it was that easy to just go with the flow and do whatever you want and be a financially stable solopreneur, you probably would have done it by now. And everyone around you who is a solopreneur would be financially thriving, just doing whatever they want, whenever they want to. So next time you hear that, I suggest to you that that is an illusion. I don't wanna say it's a lie because you can get to the point where it feels. I mean, to me, it feels like I get to do what I want to do on a day-to-day basis, but it's because I've changed my wants. Because, or I should say, I have gotten wiser about what I want to do. Before, dreaming of what being a freedom lifestyle business means is, oh, I get to wake up whenever I wanna wake up and take off whenever I wanna take off. And just when I feel inspired, I'll create content. When I have this passion to sell something, I'll sell it with honesty and people will buy from me and everything will be so easy. That's probably the untrained and unwise vision for a newbie in being in business for themselves. Those of us who have actually created a stable and thriving income know that it's far from that vision. So why does it require a stable schedule? Well, it's because to become a successful solopreneur, what most of us are here, to become a successful solopreneur requires that you be way more skillful than most people around you. Skillful in a couple of areas. One, of course, is providing your own work, whatever it is that you, maybe you do some kind of coaching or some kind of healing or some kind of service, probably most of us here. And the service you provide, it's gotta be really good. I mean, it has to be so good that people can't help but talk about you. And I feel like, I mean, I'll be honest with you, I feel like I didn't really get that good until maybe 10 years into my business. Full time, I was already making pretty good money. And then I feel like every year, honestly, I feel like, oh my gosh, I'm better than I was last year. Either in my systems or in my skills or in my ability to relate well to my clients. Not every year does do all three things grow in proportion, some years, some things grow more than others and some years, some things might even feel like it's going backwards a little bit, but other areas are growing. But the stable schedule provides the practice and the reflection and the optimizations that develop skillfulness. Without, so again, success requires a lot of skillfulness. Skillfulness, I didn't finish saying, in your craft, okay, which you might think you're good, but if your clients aren't raving about you and you're getting plenty of word of mouth business, well, marketing is also needed, right? That's what I'll get to next. But if your work is really that good, you will probably be getting more word of mouth than you are. So craft, and of course it takes lots of practice to get better and better at your craft. Number two, you've got to be really good at business. Bottom line, right? You have got to become an expert in running a business because otherwise you can do your craft if someone will hire you to do it and you have one major client call an employer or two major clients call two employers, you have two part-time jobs, then great, fine. That might be how you want to do it, not easy because at that point you feel like you're, you can't really determine your own destiny not so much autonomy anymore. So again, we're back to, not only do you have to be great at your craft, which you'll keep getting better at over the years. So don't make the offers, present your services, invite people to become your clients even while you are becoming better at your craft because you'll never become as good as you really want to be because that's always gonna be a continuous improvement. Your craft, be great at business. Which, what does it mean to be great at business? It means to be great at marketing and it means to be great at systems of creating the technology, not you have to create technology but you have to use technology well. You have to be organized. You have to have skills of productivity. I call it joyful productivity. So to have this kind of excellent level of skillfulness to produce a thriving, stable income requires you to have consistent practice. Nobody who is excellent in their field will say, yeah, I just, well, okay, I'll say there are always exceptions. Some of you watching this, some of my own clients are just geniuses. I mean, I honestly feel like most of my clients they start out smarter than how I started out. I started out, I mean, I look back when I started out and I'm like, wow, I knew nothing. I knew nothing. I had a bigger ego back then maybe. And I feel like, you know, I was already trying to sell things, but I knew very little compared to what I know today. And look at, I look at most of my clients who are starting with me now, I'm like, yeah, you're better than how I started in terms of just like your ability to provide an excellent service and even their marketing and business skills were better than how I started in 2009. So there are some of my clients who are so good that they can pretty much go with the flow and still make enough ish money, not as much as they like, but okay, money. It's, and they don't have a stable schedule. They're like, George, I don't have a stable schedule and I'm doing okay. I'm like, yeah, but imagine if you did, we're able to have a stable schedule and you practice these skills on a consistent basis, you can't even, you don't even know what your potential is. So yes, there are people, maybe you, you know, you're just good enough at your craft, at, you know, net carrying, at marketing, at systems, just good enough where you can make it go. You can make enough money with it, with kind of a sloppy schedule. But the irony of it is the more you are stable in learning and applying business skills, marketing skills and skills in your own craft, the more stable you are in practicing those things, the more excellent you get and the more excellent and skillful you get, the more freedom and autonomy you actually have. Because for example, right now, I have built up such a grateful, you know, an audience who is loyal or they watch my videos regularly or read my articles and things like, and buy my courses regularly because I've been doing it for all these years, I can now take a month off if I want to. I can now, well, in fact, the reality is I take one week off every four weeks. I didn't used to do that, certainly, not even last year. Every year I'm taking more time off now. I take, like I said, I take one week off. Every four to five weeks, I take an entire week of no calls. I still do some of some work, but it's much more loosey-goosey during that week and I have no calls, no meetings. I still do co-working a bit, but I'm not teaching, I'm not coaching, I'm not doing any kind of client interaction. I'm just, you know, hi, welcome to co-working and then let's work for 15 minutes or something. So the more excellence you have in your field, the more control you have truly over your time while still making a great income. It is a fantasy to believe that you can have a great and stable income when you're so sloppy with your schedule because you're not going to have the amount of time it takes, amount of work it takes to build a system for your business, to troubleshoot when the systems don't work, to keep optimizing the systems so that at one point the systems are, and by the way, to this very day, I still continue tweaking my systems. I mean, just last year, I switched over from my very sloppy system, technology system in the past over to my current system, Simplero, and that kind of made me level up and grow up. In my systems, finally after 12, almost 13 years, I kind of finally grew up and got a better system and it's been a year later and I'm still tweaking it. It's quite good, it's quite amazing and it kind of runs on, much of it runs on its own, but I'm still tweaking it. I still need to consistently show up to troubleshoot, to optimize it, to make it better and technology is only one of the business systems that you have to become good at. You might say a soft business system is your ability to work consistently, to keep boundaries with your family, with your friends, with social media, with yourself, to keep boundaries and say, I don't want to make a video right now, content doesn't create itself. Have you noticed that? Content doesn't create itself and audience won't build itself for you, okay? They don't care until you show up consistently, then they care. Your offers, your services and your products will not sell themselves, okay? Have you noticed, all right? You have to go out there and sell, sell gently, authentically, honestly, with humility, all the things that I talk about, yes, but it's consistent. And the consistency is what gives you the data from the market to be able to keep optimizing and making better, oh, this one didn't sell any? Oh, that's interesting. Let me test something two weeks from now. Let me see how many that's, oh, that one sold too. Oh, that's interesting, okay? What's the difference between the two? All right, let me sell something two weeks from now, four weeks from now. Oh, this one sold five. Oh, that's interesting, right? Oh, next one sold two again. Oh, that's, you know, you have to keep showing up. How will you have that data? Unless you have a stable schedule of making offers because offers don't make themselves. Do you think you can work by inspiration, really? Do you think you can work by somehow the stars are aligned or some life is gonna give you the opportunities to suddenly go, oh my God, I'm inspired now. I'm on fire now. Yeah, have you noticed? It's not stable over time, is it? You get excited, maybe you take one of my classes or you watch this video or you, you know, get inspired by some something or somebody and then you're like working diligently for a week and then you crash and then you have no energy left. You have no momentum. Well, why is that? It's because you haven't yet learned how to design the soft systems in your business. The soft system is you, your body, mind, heart, spirit system in relation to the work. You haven't figured that out yet. How to design your schedule so that it fits well with your body, mind, system, but I don't, here's the thing. Your schedule, of course, does not have to look like mine, obviously, because we have different businesses and your schedule is not gonna look like someone who does the exact same business as you because they have a different body, mind, spirit system as you, okay? Your schedule is gonna look different from everybody, but if your schedule isn't consistent, isn't stable, that's the problem. So it doesn't matter to me how many hours a week or how many hours a day that you work. It doesn't matter to me, but what matters to me is how consistently you're showing up and continuing to tweak the schedule so that you can consistently, like I said, create the content, make the offers, reflect on the content, reflect on the offers, make better content, make better offers, and et cetera. That's how you develop the system in the larger sense to keep on making good money and consistently and stably over the years, over the years. Not just, oh, I had a good launch and now I'm tired. I don't have inspiration anymore. And so the last thing I'll say before I go is I have found that I've worked with many of you who are watching this in some way or another. You've taken my classes, you've been in my programs or whatnot. I find that too many of you believe too much in your intuitive guidance. No, I'm laughing as I say that because obviously, you know, who's gonna say, oh, you should not believe in yourself and your intuitive guidance and your spirit guides. Of course I want you to develop your spiritual sensitivity and your guidance system, yes. And yet, here's the problem. You have no idea how much you are deceiving yourself. Now, I'm a spiritual person, as you might know, I believe in very much in the spiritual world. I believe in angels, I believe in guardian, spiritual guides, all that stuff. But the problem that I have is a lot of you who are very heart-based, very idealistic, you don't realize you're listening to the wrong voice. There are voices talking to you, it's true, but usually the wisest, the most sublime, the most sublime voices, the highest spiritual guidance is usually the softest, so soft, you can barely hear it. And then there are many other layers of voices that are less wise spiritual guidance that are saying, you know what, you're too tired today, you're not inspired today, why don't you just show up tomorrow, why don't you just, why don't you go and do whatever, whatever. And by the way, part of your schedule, right? Ideally, what a mind does includes, I have four naps a day, I have four naps and two dog walks a day out in nature, right? Like I do plenty of self-care, I have an evening, I have several, many hours, I end work on time, I have my evening, I spend with my wife and we have personal time and we have weekends, we go. So like I have plenty of personal time, but that's because I built it into my schedule as well. And so yes, of course spend time in nature with your loved ones, doing your hobbies, having enough rest, those are all, those of you who have taken my Joke for Productivity program know that when I teach about scheduling and how to schedule well, the first thing I teach you is self-care. You gotta like put that in, that's gotta be foundation, that's gotta be stable, number one. Like number one stable thing in your schedule is enough self-care, which means, rest, renewal, eating well, exercising, time with loved ones, time in nature, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right? And then above that comes your work schedule, right? And your self-care sometimes usually is interspersed throughout your work day, right? I only work like maximum two hours before I take a break, sometimes a long break, and whatever my schedule says. But like I said, too many of you are lying to yourselves, don't even realize you're lying to yourself by thinking you're following your guidance when it's a lower level intelligence. It's a spirit, it might be a spirit guide, but that spirit guide doesn't understand paying rent. The spirit guide, if you were to follow it completely you'd be homeless, which might be okay if you lived like Peace Pilgrim, one of my heroes, she was homeless, but she served and loved everyone along the way, she walked the length of a United States, like what, dozens of times in her lifetime. Anyway, yeah, you could be a homeless wanderer like Peace Pilgrim, and I completely respect that, but many of us probably aren't called to that. I'm not called to that, right? So it's like, I always love this quote by, I think it was Jesus who said this, you will know them by their fruits. You will know them by their fruits. Now the fruits are not just your profit and your business and the success you have, but of course the fruit of love, compassion, wisdom, perseverance, grace, divine connection, da, da, da, da, da, da. But it's like, you will know a good strategy which comes from truly higher guidance, right? If it produces a life that you love, right? If it produces a life that you love, but if you look at your life and go, why am I still having poverty and these patterns? It's not a life you love. And whatever guidance you've been listening to has been a less high guidance. I mean, it might still be higher than human perhaps, but it's missing some things. Like it doesn't understand paying taxes and paying the rent. It's not high enough to understand a stable schedule. It's really smart in other ways, really wise in other ways, but the higher, higher, higher guidance knows all of it. It integrates all of it. And by the way, guidance not, doesn't only come through your voices or your tarot cards, right? And your own mind and your own voices in your head. Guidance also comes through people like me. I'm not saying I'm your guardian angel, you're your guru, no. But it comes through other people. Other people, guidance also shows, talks to you through books, other people, YouTube videos, Facebook videos, whatever, it talks to you and are you willing to listen to that? It's not just in your own head, in your own heart, right? So, and you know, anyway, I think this is enough. I really hope that this has been helpful in some way. I look forward to seeing what your higher guidance is telling you based on this video. So thank you so much for watching and thank you. I look forward to seeing you next time.