…is hard for me to comprehend.

I have so much to tell you, I don’t even know where to begin really.

In fact, that “WHERE DO I START?” feeling is kind of the reason I’ve been so sporadic with my emails over the last few months. There’s an entire storyline of life and business that I haven’t been able to talk about fully, and now finally…soon…I can.

If you’re the kind of person who hates cliffhangers, you will definitely hate the series I’m about to start writing…live and in real time.

I’m going to spread out the story over several posts because you’re going to need context, and I want to make sure I’m weaving valuable business and life advice as I tell you everything that’s happened this year…and what’s about to come.

But first…the annual OMG – look how much stuff happened in 2018! list.

Tip #1

I really encourage you to go through your PM tool or calendar and rack up a big ol’ list because it feels incredibly good to sit back and spend some time celebrating what you’ve done over the last 12 months.

Don’t forget to list events, meetings, ideas, and other things that might not “count” in your head at first, but all add up towards the business and life you’re building.

Here’s mine…

• Built The Funnel Builder Secrets Curriculum
• Built & Wrote Ignite Your Funnel Curriculum, Emails (this hasn’t been released because we keep changing it LOL)
• LITTLE FUNNEL PROJECTS: Involved in the building/creating/managing of Network Marketing Secrets Book & Funnel, Marketing Secrets Book & Funnel, Secret Funnel Strategy, Ladyboss Movement, Updating Dotcom Secrets & Expert Secrets, Revamp of Funnelhacker Cookbook, Funnel Fridays, Funnelhacker TV, JV Webinar Blueprint with Jason Fladlian, LadyBoss Funnel, Grant Cardone Funnel, Russell Brunson landing page, swag stuff, and I’m sure a million more I can’t remember now….
• BIG HUGE MONSTER FUNNEL PROJECT: Helped Launch The Mother Funnel (the world’s largest funnel with a zillion pages) – including combing through hours of case studies, copy editing & designing the world’s longest sales pages, etc.
• Wireframed out Funnel Rolodex, and FOUR other SaaS ideas that aren’t even public knowledge yet
• Wrote a Million Words – At Least – In Blog Posts and Articles and Projects – Do you know I have like TWO mini-books written that you haven’t seen yet? Uh huh!
• Funnel Hacking Live Event 2018
• O.U.R Funnel Launch
• 2019 Funnel Hacking Live Funnel Build
• 2CCX Coaching (Weekly)
• 2CCX Trello Boards and Curriculum Content Design
• 2CCX Systems Event Boise (Live)
• 2CCX Systems Event San Diego (Live)
• 2CCX Impact & Legacy Event (Live)
• 2 Inner Circle Meetings With Russell (Live)
• Internet Marketing Party in Austin (Live)
• Village Impact Mission Trip in Nairobi Kenya
• ClickFunnels Systems & Ops Revamp (Meeting in Boise and for the month following – CRAZY systems changes – this should be like 40 bullet points, not one LOL)
• Traffic Secrets Event in Phoenix
• (18k words into ghostwriting Traffic Secrets since the event!)
• One Funnel Away Challenge Curriculum Development and Oversight *coaching too*
• 30 Days Book Project, Summit Funnel, and Launch
• Funnel Audibles Course Curriculum
• 10x Secrets Funnel & Launch
• Affiliating for all these things with extras and bonuses
• Answered an Average of 40-50 Voxers a Day
• Built & Launched Proposal Secrets
• Oversaw the first year of my Insiders Mastermind (including two live masterminds)
• Revamped The Digital Gangsta Curriculum & Launched It Again
• Evergreened out the TDG Funnel and Ran $150k in Ads to Hundreds of New Students in May & June (before my ad account went down)
• Launched My Create Your Laptop Life Podcast & Published 27 Podcasts
• Ran a Weekly Show on Facebook for a Year
• Built and Launched Influence Masterclass, The Service Provider Webinar as Bonuses for TDG
• Co-Created & Launched Funnel Gorgeous
• Co-Created & Launched Funnel Drops

I’m sitting here looking at that…laughing to myself because it DOES NOT EVEN include the amount of group posting, commenting, responding, etc. that I did on Facebook – in CF Official, Living the Laptop Life (both free groups) + 2CCX, Create Your Laptop Life, and Digital Insides (my paid groups), any operational tasks like money stuff, organization, hiring, standup meetings, planning, systemization, etc. nor does it include any of the interviews I did.

As I looked at my list…I started to see themes and patterns of course, and you will too.

I spent the majority of the year either:

• Building/Writing New Content (Paid & Free both)
• Coaching (Both Virtually and Live)
  or…
• Leading People, Marketing Projects & Other Initiatives
• Organizing & Creating Systems

…and really? I love all it. No one could pull off that amount of work if they didn’t love it.

But here’s the other thing.

The top two bullet points are intense tasks. They take 100% of my brain power and concentration, and can’t be done for 10 hours at a stretch without draining me completely. The bottom two take a completely opposite side of my brain. I can do them for much longer stretch of time because the work isn’t as intense, there’s lot of meetings, communications, lists, spreadsheets, etc. The second type of work has ebbs and flows of craziness and down time. Toggling between the two day by day is okay. Toggling back and forth WITHIN the day is crazy making business.

Since it was impossible to separate it all out, I’ve spend the majority of 2018, waking up before the sun to concentrate on the intense writing/building, and then using the daytime hours for all the other stuff.

Tip #2

I recommend the same thing for you if your work has you toggling between the creative and the managerial. There is NO WAY I could hop into Trello and a few meetings, do some emails, and then all of a sudden whip back into building out a book or curriculum. I couldn’t, and I consider myself a champion “concentrater”.

The secret is the early morning. Get up at 5am. You’ll get more done between 5-7am then the rest of the day. Start your morning routine at 7am with that sense of, “Yes! I made great headway on…. (whatever it is you’re doing)!”

Alright…I have to now address what I know everyone is thinking…

THAT IS AN OBSCENE AMOUNT OF WORK AND ENTIRELY UNSUSTAINABLE.

You don’t have to yell, I agree! ????

I’ve known this in fact since about August. I mean, I probably knew it all along, but I put on an amazing game face the first half of the year.

I’d been hired as a writer/curriculum designer at CF, I was coaching 2CCX and my Insiders, I was CEOing my own business, but then…

You know how life has this funny way of pushing you into the stuff you’re meant to do, the stuff that comes as easily as breathing, the stuff that no matter how much you “pretend” it doesn’t have to be something you do, it happens anyway?

I am a natural born leader of people. From the moment I was born apparently, according to my mom.

As the year went on, it became wildly obvious that the biggest need I was filling at ClickFunnels wasn’t just in content, but also in a leadership role too. One day, we sat down to org chart out the company and realized that Russell was in like seventeen C-suite roles. He was CEOing, COOing, CMOing, not to mention – copywriting, funnelbuilding, video-ing, etc. It was NUTS. It was all bottlenecked.

(side note – the amount of work Russell does IN the business at CF this far into the game, was CRAZY…he was still writing some of his emails, building his own funnels, project managing, he’s so passionate about it all – it’s insane)

The project level and pace was increasing, and so to compensate for the bottleneck, I was acting as the overflow CMO/COO helper because natural born leadership looks for where the problem is, and is determined to fix it. And after devouring everything that Russell has said for the past three years, I also got really good at standing in and moving a project in the direction I thought he would want it to go. I had a similar skill set that he had as head of marketing. I could write copy, build funnels, design, and see the project from 35,000 feet…like he could. Russell and I worked together like peanut butter and jelly – with enough of the same traits that we didn’t have to explain everything out to the other person a million times for them to get it, and enough of the opposite traits that there’s a balance (i.e. he opens loops, I close them).

Whenever I would try to pull back into the original scope of what I was there to do, the universe would pull me right back out again (or maybe it was another idea from Russell HA!).

The pressure mounted.

As I looked over the landscape of what I was doing, it was so difficult to figure out what should give and where.

Has this ever happened to you?

There’s this episode of Friends, where Rachel thinks she’s pregnant. She decides to take another test and Phoebe reads the results and tells her it’s negative. Rachel then starts to cry. As she’s wondering why she’s crying about something she never had, Phoebe says, “Just kidding!!! You are pregnant!!!” and Rachel looks at her dumbfounded.

“Why would you do that?!” she yells.

“Because now you know how you really feel about it.”

It’s such a funny moment, but also really profound.

Tip #3

Walk down the path of what it would feel like to NOT have the thing you have right now, and see how it feels. No amount of pros and cons list helped me the way this little exercise did.

I did exactly what Phoebe did to Rachel…

And was shocked at what I realized.

To be continued…

xx Julie

P.S. These go out via email far before they make it on the blog. Get on my email list below!