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What if you could get more of what you want in life? But not through pushing, forcing, or pressure.
You can.
When it comes to money, time, and energy, no one’s gonna turn away more.
And Kate Northrup, Bestselling Author of Money: A Love Story and Do Less and host of Plenty, is here to help you expand your capacity to receive all of the best.
As a Money Empowerment OG who’s been at it for nearly 2 decades, Kate’s the abundance-oriented best friend you may not even know you’ve always needed.
Pull up a chair every week with top thought leaders, luminaries, and adventurers to learn how to have more abundance with ease.
When we plan our year, it's really important to look at, am I honoring all 4 seasons of productivity and creativity? Am I honoring all 4 seasons of the kind of energy that my body and my team's bodies need to function optimally as whole beings with our full creative capacity, with our full ability to bring our best selves to our work? Welcome to Plenty. I'm your host, Kate Northrup, and together, we are going on a journey to help you have an incredible relationship with money, time, and energy, and to have abundance on every possible level. Every week, we're gonna dive in with experts and insights to help you unlock a life of plenty.
Kate Northrup:Let's go fill our cups. Please note that the opinions and perspectives of the guests on the Plenty podcast are not necessarily reflective of the opinions and perspectives of Kate Northrop or anyone who works within the Kate Northrop brand. Hello. We've just passed the end of q 3 in 2024, and now is the time that so many people I know, business owners, are thinking about strategic planning for 2025. If you're not thinking about strategic planning for 2025, totally fine.
Kate Northrup:But I think that what I'm gonna share with you today is going to help you to think ahead in a way that's relaxing as opposed to stressful. So if annual planning has ever left you feeling like you have this schedule that's overly full or if you've ever had the experience where you do your annual planning and then you get a month into the year and then you throw out the whole thing, Or if you're someone who's just never done annual planning, and you wonder what would be valuable about it for me, today's episode is for you. And if you already have annual planning on your calendar, listen in for these tips on the 4 biggest mistakes I see people make, the 4 biggest mistakes I certainly used to make around strategic annual planning, so that you can plan your make more, do less year effectively by not making these mistakes. Okay. So the first mistake that I see people making that I used to make as well was not having a plan at all.
Kate Northrup:I would fly by the seat of my pants. I used to use my inbox as my to do list, and I used to use other people's requests of me as my project plan. So basically, I never knew where I was headed. I never knew what my goals were, and I would just say yes to whatever people asked of me. And on a daily basis, I would just kind of use what was at the top of my inbox as what to focus on.
Kate Northrup:And as a result, I didn't really make headway on the most important goals. So some of you might be familiar with Eisenhower's matrix, which is is like a little diagram with a line down the middle and a line across across that line. So it's like a big plus sign. And on the top, it's the urgent, not urgent. And then on the left, it's the important, not important.
Kate Northrup:Most people spend their lives tending to the urgent, not important, the dings on their phone telling them someone just uploaded a new TikTok, the text from the random friend asking you to do XYZ for them, that's not on your priorities, but it's their priority. The person in your job who is trying to rope you into their project because they didn't get it started on time, so now they're trying to make their emergency your emergency. All of those things would be in the urgent, non important category because they're not important to your goals. Most people spend the vast majority of their time on that stuff. And they wonder why they're not getting where they want to go.
Kate Northrup:They wonder why at the end of the year, they haven't hit any of their goals. It's because they're letting themselves be distracted by all of the urgent stuff that is not actually their priority. Now, the urgent important stuff, super, super matters. So that's great. But the really key place where we move the needle on our lives is in the important nonurgent stuff.
Kate Northrup:An example of that is the book proposal I'm working on right now. No one asked me for the book proposal. No one gave me a deadline. No one told me to write a new book. We actually have plenty of other things going on in our business that produce wonderful revenue, so so there's, like, nothing urgent about it.
Kate Northrup:It's important because it is the work that is kind of emanating from my soul. Like, I have to do it, but it's sourced from the inside. That's what makes it important, but it's not urgent. And that's why it's been hard to prioritize it, but I'm making amazing progress. And maybe by the time this episode comes out, I will actually be done.
Kate Northrup:I'm just gonna future cast that. The thing is, though, for many years, I never had any kind of plan. And at the end of the year, I would just be like, well, I guess what happened just happened because it was completely based on other people's priorities and just random stuff that came across my path, and I would just deal with it in the order it came to me. Not a great strategic way to live. And so if you're not planning at all, you're probably not gonna hit your goals because we do need to be conscientious about our time, and I think about time as our most valuable resource.
Kate Northrup:And so I love to have a devotional relationship to my time. I don't you know, I think discipline is a wonderful word, and I know the root word is being a disciple and all of that. For me, it's not a word that I love, but I really love the word devotional, because being in devotion to something feels really yummy and juicy to me. It has like a particular I don't know. The word has like this viscosity that actually just feels good in my mouth.
Kate Northrup:So devotional time management is really looking at, okay, my time is my most precious resource. And so how am I going to allocate it in a way that is aligned with my values, that's aligned with the truth of my soul, that's aligned with who I am now and who I wanna be in the future, that's aligned with what matters to me. And so if you don't have any strategic plan at all for your year, chances are good you will lose track because you will get distracted by all the false urgency. So number one mistake, flying by the seat of your pants and not planning at all. Number 2 is having goals, but having those goals be based on your unconscious conditioning.
Kate Northrup:So here's an example. Mike has talked about this before, so I think I think he'd be fine with me sharing this, that he always kind of had this idea when he was in his in college and in his early twenties. He always wanted to, like, you know, be a multimillionaire by the age of 40 and retire by the age of 40 and be, like, you know, on the cover of Fortune Magazine or something that was just for Forbes. And he had these these goals that were really based on the external, like how it looked. And so often, our conditioning, because of a society that focuses on status and that more is always more and making more money, being more famous makes you more valuable.
Kate Northrup:We have some just, like, very strange messaging around that in our world, and we have all sorts of assumptions that, like, people who've quote unquote made it now don't have any problems, which by the way is obviously not true, but we have these these these false ideas. And so when we set goals based on our unconscious conditioning, we end up going in a completely different direction than the direction of our soul, which of course will be the most deeply satisfying direction. There's a great documentary called I Am that was made by Tom Shadyac, and Tom Shadyac was the filmmaker behind The Nutty Professor and Ace Ventura Pet Detective and a lot of the famous comedies from the nineties. And Tom had kind of like a a a massive I think it was a midlife crisis where he just realized he was chasing all of these goals that weren't even his own and that didn't even matter. And so he devoted his life to looking at how it is that we actually find joy because he ended up divorced with this huge, like, mega mansion in, you know, in LA and and lonely and freaking miserable.
Kate Northrup:And he was like, I literally checked off all the boxes. I am hanging out with the most famous Hollywood stars in the world. I have access to unbelievable amounts of wealth and quote unquote power, but I feel empty inside. And I'm not saying that wealth makes you feel empty inside at all. That was his experience because his goals were not aligned with his insides.
Kate Northrup:So my key message here is, what do you really want from the inside? What actually fills you up? What feels good, not what looks good? What is going to feel good in 2025? Right?
Kate Northrup:I have many friends who have bigger businesses than I do who don't write books because they're like, it's not gonna grow my business. It's a distraction from my revenue generating activities. Like, I help so many people through my podcast or my courses or social media. Like, I don't need to do that. And that's really accurate for them.
Kate Northrup:I have sim a similar business model, but for me, it's true for my soul that I'm a writer. Like, I feel the closest to myself when I'm writing and then a small variety of other things. But I know for me that's an inside goal. I don't have to do it because someone is telling me outside or that I think there's some external thing I'm gonna get. It's like the writing actually is the thing, and then, of course, I know it'll have an impact.
Kate Northrup:So what are those goals for you that are sourced from the inside as opposed to your unconscious societal conditioning? That's number 2. Number 3 is planning to do too much. For years, I would write my goals out for the for the year, and by, like, January 10th, I was exhausted because I would look at them and be like, ah, it's too much. So I would get overwhelmed.
Kate Northrup:I would short circuit, and then I wouldn't do any of them. Like, I wouldn't really stick with my plan at all because the scope of it was just outsized to what's possible in a year. And so my recommendation, not surprisingly, is to plan less, to have a few key projects for your business and a few key meaningful things on your calendar for your life, and focus your energy on fewer things so you can do them better and be more present. What I used to do when we would do, you know, 35 launches in a year, I'm I'm exaggerating, we never did 35. But when we used to do more things and offer more things, we ended up cannibalizing, like, each of our promotions, each of our projects would cannibalize the other project because we weren't able to devote the appropriate amount of time and energy to each individual thing.
Kate Northrup:And as a result, we were just doing a lot of things, but we weren't moving the needle with any one of them as much as we could have. So collectively, our results weren't as good. Like, we made less money, significantly less money, when we were selling more things. Selling more things required more editorial planning, more copywriting, more email sequences, more programming, more graphic design, more content for social media, more, more, more, more, more, like every project or promotion required this whole thing. Now that we have one main live program plus a self study program, so we have our main live program, which is called relax money that I teach live, and we do one live launch a year.
Kate Northrup:And then we have our self study program called heal the way you work. Now that we have those two primary offerings, as a company, we are doing way less, and yet we are making significantly more revenue. We're growing our team. We're able to provide a wonderful place to work to incredible people. We're able to impact more and more people through this work.
Kate Northrup:I've got time to write this book. Like, it's amazing, and it is because we reined it back and fewer things go on the calendar. So we have all this buffer to make the few things we do really good and really meaningful. And I will say it took me years to get to a place where the level of spaciousness we have felt safe in my nervous system. That's another conversation for another day, and you can refer back to the episode, are is your productivity a trauma response for more information on that.
Kate Northrup:Okay. So putting too many things on your goals list, putting too many things on the calendar is for sure a huge mistake that will prevent you from doing the things that matter and will prevent you from having a really soul satisfying year and a year in which you preserve energy, but get really great results. And then number 4 is planning as though you are supposed to be in perpetual harvest. One of the concepts that radically shifted the way I work is really understanding that we are animals, we are nature. And so the very same principles that govern nature govern us.
Kate Northrup:Prior to that moment when I had this realization, that was in 2016, prior to that, I followed all the strategic planning and productivity advice from the kind of more the mainstream time management work, which was primarily created by men who were not, a, living in the kind of body that I live in, and, b, did not have the same kind of responsibilities and family infrastructure that I had. When I became a mom and then when Mike had his various illnesses and ailments and sicknesses, it was a time of radical a radical shift in how I managed my time and energy. The old strategies just would no longer work. A, my time was no longer my own. B, my body was no longer my own.
Kate Northrup:C, I in in many ways, sometimes I felt like I was alone in caregiving and running the business and making money. And so I needed to radically shift the way I devoted my time and energy resources, and I realized that I could not be in perpetual harvest. I could not work as though every single thing needed to be a production every single day. Our work culture has conditioned us to be in springtime and summertime energy all the time. So either to be planning and ramping something up or to be launching something, and then going right back to planning and ramping up to launching.
Kate Northrup:And our work culture has not historically made space for the other seasons, which are equally as valuable, but unfortunately not as celebrated. And those other seasons, that other energy is the autumn season of closing things up, wrapping things up, you know, turning within, analysis, asking what worked, what didn't work, but really slowing down, and then the wintertime energy of rest and reflection. So I created a framework that I call the upward cycle of success that uses the seasons, which are also mimicked by the menstrual cycle, which is are also mimicked by the lunar cycle, to apply to our projects in our lives and in our businesses. And so now when I look at projects and when I look at the year, I look for, is there too much spring and summer energy and not enough autumn and winter energy? Spring and summer energy is the yang energy.
Kate Northrup:It's the masculine. It's solar. It's wonderful. It's important. We just as a culture, the pendulum swung way, way, way too far that direction.
Kate Northrup:The autumn and winter energy and those seasons that in a project, I call them culmination and the fertile void, I call the spring and summer emergence and visibility. But in in a project in, like, a in a business capacity, the culmination phase is critical and the fertile void phase is critical. And just like if you were a farmer and you were planting and growing in a sustainable regenerative way that was, like, really honoring to the quality of the soil, to the planet, and to the quality of the food, you would have a season for planting. You would have a season for harvest. You would have a season for turning within, and you would have a season for cover crops, which are the things that you plant that are not meant to be sold.
Kate Northrup:That's the rest season. And so just like that, when we plan our year, it's really important to look at, am I honoring all 4 seasons of productivity and creativity? Am I honoring all 4 seasons of the kind of energy that my body and my team's bodies need to function optimally as whole beings with our full creative capacity, with our full ability to bring our best selves to our work. When we honor our actual nature, when we honor nature in the way we plan, we don't have to do as many things, but we get better results. And this is a body based approach to time and energy management.
Kate Northrup:And when we you use that as the bedrock of your annual planning, you will make more while you do less. It is an absolute game changer. So in summary, the 4 biggest mistakes when doing strategic annual planning are, number 1, not planning at all. Number 2, having goals that are based on unconscious conditioning instead of your soul, instead of what is emerging from you from the inside. Number 3 is putting too much on the calendar, just just like having eyes that are bigger than your schedule.
Kate Northrup:And number 4 is planning as though you're supposed to be in perpetual harvest. So if you do your annual planning and you don't make these mistakes and you use body based time and energy management planning strategies as the foundation, you're gonna free up so much time. You're gonna free up so much energy, and it will absolutely change the way you experience time and change the way you experience your life. If you wanna know more about this, we have a program called heal the way you work, where I walk you through body based feminine energy, annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily planning processes that will change the way and heal the way you work so you get more done in less time with less energy expended. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next time.
Kate Northrup:What if you were making great money scaling a business that you love, while having more time for the other things that matter, all while being relaxed. That reality is possible for you when you heal the way you work. For a limited time, the doors are open with special bonuses to my self study program, Heal the Way You Work, which allows you to dive into a revolutionary approach to time and energy management based on the truth of who you are. What's inside this program are the secrets that have helped me and 100 of other students be able to make more money while working less and having more time for the things that matter. Head over to heal the way you work.com to learn more.