Transcript: Fierce Self-Love & Calendar Resentment with Dina Cataldo

How does our life look different when we love ourselves and put ourselves before everything else? What I'm going to teach you about using your calendar and getting things done is going to be different than you've probably heard anywhere else. Today we're going to talk about concepts that are counter intuitive to someone who's a workaholic. Like say…a lawyer. So does it feel like a strange thought? Does it feel wrong for you to think about how you can love yourself more and get more done? Good because that's cognitive dissonance. That feeling means your brain is already starting to put different connections together. And I can hear you thinking, well, that sounds nice, but doesn't that mean scheduling massages and making it to the gym regularly? Who has time for that? Right? And how do we do all of that and still get everything done that we need to get done at the office?

And how do I even begin to make that habit anyway? I've never been able to make it to the gym. I'm too tired from working all day. I'm just exhausted. And there are always emergencies that pop up and I can't make time for myself. It's just not going to work for me. Another thing I hear coaching clients believe and do is that I seem to work better under pressure. And if you fall into this last trap, which we all have at one time or another, I want you to recognize that you're lying to yourself. How often do you procrastinate? I know you do it. If you're working under pressure and think to yourself, ask yourself this right now. How much more could you accomplish in this world if you didn't procrastinate?

When you answer these questions, you will see that being under pressure is not improving your output.
This podcast and my coaching is about designing your life with intention. It's about rewiring your brain from what you've already trained yourself to do, to open up to the fact that it's your thoughts that drive all of your results in your life. Every single thing that you've created in your life started with a thought. What I want you to do is you're listening to this training is ask yourself, how can I make what I'm in this podcast work for me? Ask yourself, how can I look out for myself more during the week instead of letting myself beat myself up for not accomplishing what I planned out? The good news is is I'm going to show you exactly how fiercely loving yourself will help you create more time in your calendar to do all the things you want to do and it will energize you to do them.

I'm also going to give you some practical tactics at the end of this podcast to implement them in your calendar strategy and if you don't have a calendar strategy, I mean why not? You've got to start right now. I'm telling you, you got to start right now because jumping into your Workday is not faster. Jumping into your Workday without an intentional thought out plan is going to have you working on autopilot and you are not creating your life with intention. If you are not thinking about how your day is being run, and I love Jim Rohn statement, which is if you aren't running your calendar, your calendar is running you. I think he says something like, if you're not running your day, your day is running you, but I'm telling you right now, if you don't use your calendar, which I know there's so many of you who have good intentions and want to use your calendar, if you're not using it, you're just letting time slip by.

You're not using your time wisely and you're going to be very disappointed when you don't create what you want in this world. Before I get into this training, I want you to know that I have a few spots available for free strategy sessions this week for lawyers with their own practice who need help in some area of their life, like staying committed to their calendar, achieving a goal they've had for some time but can't seem to make traction on in their business or their personal life. I had opened up a couple spots recently for lawyers who are over-drinking and I'll be opening a few more spots for that in the future. So this is the time right now is to do a strategy session with me to see if doing something like this. Coaching with me is right for you. During your strategy session, you're going to learn at least one tool you can implement immediately in your life, whether or not you coach with me or not to help you get closer to your goal, you're going to have me a certified coach helping you get clarity on where you can focus to gain the traction that you want.

And you're going to learn what it means to be coached if you choose. You can learn how to work with me to help you gain that traction long term. And you can schedule your ca**@di*********.com forward slash strategy session. So what can you expect during one of these calls while I do them over zoom? They are face to face in a quiet area. You'll want to be in a quiet space so you can talk free freely. And I like to be able to see you so that way I can pick up on body language because so often when we are speaking, we are behaving in a different way with our face and with our body gestures that show us that that's not really what you mean. So I love to do these face to face. So go ahead and schedule a free strategy session. They're 60 minutes long.

You can go to Dina cataldo.com forward slash strategy session to schedule your appointment right now. Now, if you are listening to this while you are sheltered in place and you're like me, you may have become overly ambitious with your new calendar because you're working from home, you're not spending a lot of time in a commute to the office or to the gym and you're in person. Commitments have decreased in some ways. So you look at your calendar and you think, “Oh, look at all the time that I have” and maybe you don't have a calendar at all right now. Maybe you've completely dropped the habit of having a calendar and you're just kind of letting things happen. And I understand that is very tempting, right? Factor in your new commitments, right? You're caring for your loved ones, you're homeschooling maybe, and you feel like you should be doing more cause you're at home.

So you think, “Oh well I should be doing more.” “I should be in the garage getting things squared away.” “I should be starting a vegetable garden. It's springtime.” And you know, this is not new. It's just a different environment.
Our brain thinks this way all the time. We're never doing enough. We should be doing more. That's the habit your brain has become accustomed to. We think we should be able to do X. Then you don't. Then you beat yourself up and you tell yourself you should be working harder or you should give up following your calendar because your calendar is not helping you blame your calendar. You blame the amount of time you have instead of reflecting on how you're using your calendar, or maybe you're not using your calendar at all, and that's what you should be reflecting on, right? So this is looking at the external world when we're blaming our calendar, blaming the amount of time that we have, rather than turning inward and trusting ourselves that you can think differently about your calendar and create the results that you want in your week.

So whenever you get frustrated that you don't have enough time, or you think the thought that your calendar isn't working for you, I want you to catch yourself. I want you to catch yourself and I want you to remind yourself of these things. First of all, everyone has the exact amount of time as you do 24 hours. Why is it that some people seem to get so much more done than you do? It is not because you're a special snowflake and you have these special issues. Yes, emergencies come up and I'm going to talk to that in a moment. It is up to you to decide how to use those hours best and want you to remind yourself of that like, Hey, I'm in control of my calendar. I'm in charge of what I create during my week. I have the ability to say no and I have the ability to say yes.

I decide what to do. I decide how much time something is going to take in my calendar. The only emergency is one that involves blood. Everything else is manageable. It doesn't mean anything about me if I don't get something accomplished. Okay? You're always going to be learning. When you do this and you implement what I'm going to share with you at the very end, you're going to find yourself loving your calendar instead of resenting it. I mean, how many times have you scheduled yourself to death during the week and then you're like, Oh my gosh, I am so tired. I'm exhausted, and you don't want to do anything on the calendar after that. You're just like, whatever. I'm done, like, I'm not going to do this. If, if you've ever had a calendar and given it up, that's probably the process you went through. Now, when we start intentionally designing our lives and using our calendar the way I'm going to be teaching you, it makes it less difficult to commit to it because you're looking out for your future self.

You're looking out for her rather than packing her calendar full of chores that aren't going to get done, and then letting herself beat herself up about it when she doesn't get them all done because you've crammed her calendar to make it absolutely impossible. Okay, I've got to have a sip of tea here so it makes it less difficult to commit. Now, if you haven't listened to my podcast three calendar mistakes costing you time, then I encourage you to listen to that. That is episode number 78 I'll link to that in the show no***@di*********.com forward slash one Oh two. So let's answer the question. How does our life look differently when we love ourselves fiercely, we protect our time. We protect our time by saying no to offered projects that are not our priority this week. By focusing time on our priorities, rather than allowing our notifications to steal our attention by knowing exactly how we're going to use our time ahead of time, we give ourselves more space in our calendar so we don't feel pressured or rushed.

We do this by scheduling when we check emails, when rather than just checking them all day long. We do this consciously by committing to our calendar ahead of time and deciding ahead of time how we're going to use the time that we have. We create the time to prepare foods that fuel us, that will give us better energy. We choose to let go of things and people that don't serve us. We trust ourselves to make the right decisions no matter what. We open ourselves up to new experiences. We think about how we are going to feel in the future and we care. We care about whether or not we go to the gym. We care about how we're going to feel if we have a thousand things on our to do list and there was no way that we were going to be able to complete them all because we didn't think it through ahead of time.

We care about that. We schedule time to talk with friends and to connect with them. We feel better overall. We have less stress and we have less overwhelm clouding our brain, making it so that we just don't know where to start because we've already decided ahead of time where to start. Most importantly, we do this by keeping our word to ourself. Well, we want to work out when we have that gym time scheduled. No, but we do it anyway. And I'm going to give you some tips in the next part of this podcast when we talk about the tactics surrounding this. So there are a hundred ways loving ourselves, more impacts our day to day life to it impacts how we treat people. How we show up in the world in little ways. And when you find yourself berating yourself for not getting something done, try having compassion for yourself.

All it means is that you're human. It doesn't mean that you're bad or that you did anything wrong. It means you are a human. Let's talk about how to practically implement these things. And these are the things I help my coaching clients work through because it's really easy to implement for a couple of days, but it's the longterm commitment to ourselves that takes work. It's the failing and allowing yourself to fail and having compassion for yourself, fiercely loving yourself when you fail so that you can reevaluate what's happening in your life and then implement again, and then allow yourself to fail at that and know that there's nothing wrong with you and have compassion for yourself and implement something else. This is all something that we have to go through if we want to design our lives with intention, if we want to create something meaningful in our lives.

And so the big thing here is commitment. And I think you already know that. And commitment is a habit. It's something we develop over time doing exactly what I just talked about. We do it with consistency. We do it with determination. It's not going to be something that we can do if we're beating ourselves up. Once we've practiced the habit of commitment, it makes it easier to rebound if an emergency pops up. Now, when my mom was sick and in the hospital, it turned my calendar upside down, but it was much easier for me to recommit to my calendar when the emergency was over because I'd practice that so often. I knew I could do it. It was so easy for me to just say, okay, and this is how I'm redesigning my day. This is what I want for my day. And then the same thing with Kobe.

It's like, okay, well the first few weeks I'm trying some different things with my calendar, but I'm noticing that I'm not getting done what I want done. Why is that? Well, let me take a look at my calendar and see how I've committed my time. I went through it, I reexamined it, I've restructured it, and now I'm getting more done. So I want you to recognize that this is a process, but once you're committed to the process and you start working the process, that's when you can recognize where you need to tweak it. If you just give up, you're never going to be able to find those opportunities to tweak your calendar so that you can recommit and you can get done what you want done. So here are the tactics I want to talk to you about. The first one is set aside an hour a week to plan your calendar.

You can do this on a Monday morning. First thing I like to do mine on Sunday night so I can get an overall view of how I'm going to start my days. Now, during that time, you're going to write everything down. You're going to keep asking yourself, you're gonna actually gonna get a piece of paper out and you're going to write it down with a pen and you're going to say, I need to buy something on Amazon. I need to make sure I call my friend Sarah, which I need to do. I need to make sure that I get focused time to work on these contracts. I need to organize my filing system. I need to create a system to make my files the simpler for me to handle because I know one client, she has a ton of files at home right now.

How can she organize those? Like those are the different commitments to make. Maybe you want to add something in there. Maybe you want to start that vegetable garden. Maybe you want to clean out the garage, which is what I've been scheduling time to do. Just like a small time block so that I get done what I want to prioritize. Make sure that when you do this, it's in a quiet space so your brain isn't interrupted when you're trying to remember things you need to do. Turn off your phone, turn it upside down so you don't see the light flashing. Make sure your email notifications are off. Don't have Facebook up while you're doing this. This is one hour of focused time for you to intentionally plan your week is your opportunity to spill everything that's in your brain and get it all down on paper and get it on to your Google time blocker.

Now you can time block with anything you can use whatever you want to use. I use Google calendar because I can physically see the chunks of my day broken up. It is very satisfying to look at that calendar and see exactly where my time is going. Make time for everything, make time for any commutes. If you're, you know this is going to extend into your non-covered period. You're going to want to schedule time in for commutes when that is applicable to you. You're going to want to schedule time for lunch so you are actually going to lunch instead of just working your way through lunch and forgetting about it, right? You want to schedule time for dinner, you're going to schedule time for yourself. Now, all of the things that we talked about, the gym scheduling, time for anything that's self care that needs to be scheduled first, that is the very first thing that you schedule.

Then everything else gets filled in. So self care for me right now, looks like this. An hour to take a shower and do makeup. 15 minutes to study my Italian class (I'm learning Italian right now). At night I have 15 minutes scheduled for me to read. Maybe I have some meditation that I'm scheduling during the day or at night, an hour walk with my mom and my dog. Yoga, three days a week, a little bit of space during my day too. So I'm not just constantly go, go, go. I want to feel like I have a little bit of space so that maybe I can, you know, do something else during that time. Or I can just kind of fiddle around and have a cup of tea if I want. I have 30 minutes or so where there's absolutely nothing planned. Now you're going to find two hour time blocks for you to do your most important work.

This means turning off your notifications, not checking email, all that good stuff during these two hours. And these are the two hours when you schedule your contract editing estate plan review planning systems for your practice, anything that is going to take concentrated time to get done. Maybe you have some marketing you want to implement for your practice. Those two hours are what you're going to do maybe to create a freebie for potential clients. That is going to be your two hours of of block time. I have been doing this a couple times a day having these blocks. So plan this time for when you have the most focused to, so most of us, it's earlier in the day than rather in the afternoon when we've had all of our energy just kind of, you know, naturally used by using it, right? So, so you want to focus it earlier in the day.

Now decide ahead of time that you are a hundred percent committed to doing what's on your calendar. If you are not a hundred percent committed, ask yourself why not? What's keeping you from being all in? Do you have too much on your plate? Does you kind of feel anxious when you look at your calendar? Does it look really hard? How can you make it easier on yourself? Maybe you don't have to do planning for your marketing this week because you have a really big project due by Friday and you want to get that done. Maybe you put the the marketing off to next week. That's okay, but I want this to be doable. It can be a stretch for you, but I also want it to be doable for you. All right?

Now I also want you to make a plan B that's awful.

You're going to have a plan B. That plan B is going to be something that you do not like. If you have a goal to complete something by Friday and you usually take Saturday or Sunday off or both, then I want you to get it done. Otherwise you got to work on the weekend to get it done. That's your plan B. You can't get it done this week. You do it on the weekend. That's why it's so important to love your calendar. Now plan ahead of time that you're going to feel resistance to this. You're going to feel resistance to doing what's on your calendar and that is a hundred percent normal. You are creating something intentionally from your prefrontal cortex instead of allowing your primal brain to create something on autopilot, your autopilot isn't intentional, so you've got to use your brain power, your conscious brain power to overcome it, pay attention and know that that is all that is going on when you feel resistance.

So here's the thing. One thing you can do is trick your primal brain to get stuff done. When it comes time to go to the gym and your brain wants you to stay at your desk a bit longer, tell yourself, okay, look, I'm just going to get up, get dressed. I'm going to put on my tennis shoes. That's it. All right, you do that and then you tell yourself, okay, I'm going to walk to the car right now. This is going to be postcode. I'm sure I'm going to walk into the car right now. And then you walk to the car and then you tell yourself, I'm just going to drive to the gym. That's it. Okay. Right now it's just I'm just going to walk to my room. That's all I'm going to do, and then you'll walk there and then you tell yourself, okay, I'm just going to put out the yoga mat.

You put out the yoga mat in postcode times, it's going to be all right. I'm just going to get out of the car, and by the time you get out of the car, you're committed to going to the gym. You're already there and you can do this little trick with all of the commitments you've decided to do ahead of time. Take a little baby step and move your way towards completing that goal. The reason these tactics are so effective is because when you've planned yourself first, when you've fiercely loved yourself, while you're planning your calendar, then you can fill in the blocks of time for your most important work. You're energized to do it because you don't hate your calendar. You're focused on your work so you get more done and your work doesn't spill into your weekend or your other planned times. You've got this supercharged focused time where you are not interrupted.

You're using the planning part of your brain to overcome the part of your brain that seeks comfort in the habits you've maintained until now. Now I want you to recognize something. We've got a lot going on right now. We've got homeschooling. We got kids at home where they've got to be entertained. We've got, I don't, I don't have kids. I've got a dog who wants my attention all the time. My point is, is that there will be distractions everywhere. You've got to plan for those distractions. Can you ask your partner to watch your child? Can you ask someone to help you? Maybe you have an an activity you can give your children to do during those two hours of focus time so that you have that time for yourself. I want you to recognize you've got to think about these things intentionally and when you're planning your calendar, plan for the obstacles, plan for there to be an issue.

Plan for there to be something that comes up that is going to interrupt your time and try to create, not try to create, create something that will help you overcome that obstacle. Okay? Have something planned for that. You already know exactly what to do. All right, you've already got this. You just need to give yourself that quiet time to do it. Now is the time to take a look at how you're treating yourself and how that's reflected in how you use your calendar. It takes conscious thought to show your future self compassion, right? When you do, you're going to find yourself not only getting more done, but you're actually going to want to follow through on your calendar so that you can reap the rewards that you're creating for yourself. That reward is designing your life on purpose and creating more of what you want in your life.

Whether that is a thriving practice or it is spending more time with the people you love most. So I hope that that gave you some food for thought, that that was something that just kind of blew your mind because it is so different than how you were treating yourself and treating your calendar. I would love to hear from you. Go to Dina cataldo.com forward slash one Oh two. You can leave a comment there. Let me know what you took away from this. Or you can find me on Instagram at Dina. Dot. Cataldo I love hearing from people in my DMS. I love getting tagged in people's in people's stories. So if you create a story that you're listening to this and you tag me, I would love to share it with my community. I'd love to hear with how you are using what you learned today, learning about fierce love to help yourself become more productive. Have a wonderful week, and I will talk to you soon. Bye. Hey, if

You enjoy this podcast, I offer one on one coaching using my be a better lawyer framework. That's where we rewire your brain to help you create the life and the practice that you want. Go to Dina cataldo.com to schedule a strategy session.