This week, I want to welcome Deana Kalakay who owns the company Be Powerfully Productive. She is a business and productivity strategist who helps recovering perfectionists with systems and processes that help them become more productive in both business and life.

In our interview, Deana and I chat about what prevents people from being their most productive. You might be surprised that it has a lot more to do with mindset than anything else.

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1) Deana found a knack for creating systems from a need in her family, and her company grew from there.

Before Deana was a productivity strategist, she was just a woman who wanted to have a more organized life.

Organized chaos wasn’t working for Deana, though. She knew where everything was, but it wasn’t in any real, systematic way. “It was a lot of effort to operate that way,” Deana said.

In fact, she didn’t realize she needed to make the shift to look at things from a systematic framework until her life got too full. While Deana finished up school, she and her husband ran a consulting business, and she had her second kid. It was really important to stay organized to handle everything in her life.

In addition to a time crunch, they were also on a limited financial budget. They only had $50 each week to feed four people! So Deana needed a plan to succeed on such a limited budget of money and time.

To do this, she created a monthly food calendar that organized everything for her from the grocery list to what meal they were going to eat. It was so impressive that friends and family who visited her house became enthralled with it. They wanted to know how Deana made her system in hopes they could replicate it on their own.

It surprised Deana because she thought everyone could think about the world in that way. After she created the food menu, she moved on to other areas of her life to simplify the work into processes that needed attention in some way.

She soon found out that other people wanted the same processes in their own lives, and they wanted Deana to help. She began teaching others the same framework she designed for herself.

After Deana graduated from grad school with her Master of Business Administration, organizations approached her about applying similar frameworks to their own companies. Be Powerfully Productive was officially born.

2) Confidence is necessary to be more productive.

In the beginning stages of her business, Deana spent a year as a business coach for entrepreneurs. She saw that a lot of hurdles many entrepreneurs experience are less about business and more about personal challenges that bled into their business.

“We invest a lot of energy of thinking about our thinking,” Deana said.

So many people invest so much effort into their own thoughts that they’re exhausted once it’s time to actually work.

However, “you have to build the confidence in order to take action,” Deana said.

To build confidence, you need to create boundaries so you can control your time in the way you want. This takes a lot of mental work to reframe the way you think and act.

“Building confidence is messy and requires you to be insanely vulnerable,” Deana said.

In order to grow as a person, it’s important to let people in and help you. Of course, it can be hard if you’re a closed-off person, but if you can’t be vulnerable, then you can’t grow as a person. This applies to getting help with small things in your life too.

Deana knows how detrimental this is because she was that closed-off person for so long.  She thought she couldn’t accomplish anything if she didn’t do it herself. “I worked and tried to be perfect for so long, and it wasn’t sustainable,” Deana said.

Early in her career, she would spend so much time staying guarded and attempted to do everything on her own. This behavior made her defensive whenever she made any mistakes.

Now Deana knows how important it is to admit your mistakes. It helps you build confidence and become stronger in your ability to cope so you can move on more quickly.

Once you admit your mistakes and shortcomings, you can start to improve them in your life. The act of vulnerability creates the space for change. As you become more in tune with what you feel, the more you can judge why something might make you uncomfortable.

Because when you constantly feel hurt, you damage your productivity. Ruminating in negative emotions takes a lot of mental energy. If you want to do more, the key is to learn how to manage those feelings better.

3) Focus on WIN: What’s Important Now.

Deana sees a lot of people focus too much on the past or the future.

When you focus too much on the past, it can make you feel depressed and sad. When you spend too much time in anticipation of the future, anxiousness can arise. Both of these emotions are totally OK and natural to feel, but if they seem to constantly disrupt your life, you might want to seek out a mental health counselor.

The cycle of only focusing on the past and future means you straddle the present instead of it being your focus. That’s why Deana teaches her clients to focus on the WIN: What’s Important Now.

“The only thing you have literally in front of you is right now. You don’t have future – it’s not here, and you don’t have the past – it’s gone. You have to focus on what’s important now,” she said.

When you are able to refocus on the immediate priority, you can cut through all your worries to help to bring your mind back to the present. It allows you to focus on what you have control of at the moment.

4) Procrastination is just another form of perfectionism.

There are a lot of people who might identify as either a perfectionist or a procrastinator. So, Deana created a support group for both because “procrastination is a symptom of perfectionism,”  she said.

However, many procrastinators don’t know they’re actually perfectionists. When they try to evade a project, it’s usually because of a lot of perfectionist tendencies. Just like perfectionists, procrastinators don’t want to start something because it’s not good enough, or perfect yet, or they don’t want to deal with it for whatever reason.

This is why Deana works with both types of people. Perfectionists can be more productive when they’re able to stop limiting belief that everything they do needs to be done perfectly. This allows them to work and finish projects sooner instead of waiting until the last moment because of fear.

Nobody really works well completing work last minute.

5) Creativity and productivity can work together.

Deanna is both creative and analytical, so she can relate to both sides of the spectrum when it comes to the push and pull between the two.

Deana realized that she was most creative when she was structured with her time.

Identify your most creative time so you protect that and build your day around that creative time.

Deana believes that everyone is creative, they just express it in different ways. For example, planning and strategizing is actually a creative process for Deana. For others, that creativity might be cooking, art, or something else.

If you don’t believe you are creative, just ask your friends and they’ll reaffirm that you are. Many times we’ll tell ourselves something isn’t true about ourselves.

The rules we create for ourselves come from authority from when we were younger, and they manifest as absolutes in adulthood. However, those rules can be changed if you want to change them.

“Reframe everything!” Deana said. “If there is anything I can share that is tangible, it’s WIN and the reframe. It’s so powerful because it has so many positive implications and phenomenal results to it.”

Be patient with yourself as you work on reframing your situation. It can take dozens of times or more to work through the reframing process. It’s OK because you are still working and making an effort.

“What you tell yourself is so powerful because you’re the primary listener. You’re the primary integrator of anything that you speak. What you speak is your truth.”

About Deana Kalakay

How I became a productivity, strategy, organization and operations expert.

OK, so I’m not really a productivity, strategy, organization and operations expert but the hundreds of talented but frustrated professionals and business owners I have helped go from overwhelmed with tasks to being confidently productive, actually think I am.

I think it’s a nice side effect of helping so many people overcome their struggles after they have been floundering around & getting desperate for so many years.

I started this business because I was sick & tired of people struggling with productivity and workflow and not finding a solution, and also because I wanted people to know that there is one…their solution, their salvation and their chance to forever say adios to perfectionism forever and ever, amen.

Before I dedicated myself to helping people say adios to perfectionism, I was an Operations Manager and it took a lot of inspiration & a truck-load of guts to get to where I am today.

I also wanted to work for myself and make money because food and bills and life. Here are a few achievements/humblebrags I have managed to collect in the few years:
• I have an MBA with a concentration in Organizational Behavior from the University of Texas at Dallas.
• I’m a Professional Certified Coach with the International Coach Federation and have coached professionals and businesses around the world.
• I’ve taken clients who left corporate jobs to start their own businesses from zero to maxed out in client capacity in 90 days.
• I’ve helped clients tell their mafioso mindset to hit the road jack- for good.
• Turned around struggling businesses and saved them from closing doors.

I am incredibly proud of the results I have gotten for my clients, however, my passion is helping clients build confidence so they could take MASSIVE action and be confidently productive!

Links from the Show

Visit the Be Powerfully Productive Website
“Like” Be Powerfully Productive on Facebook
Follow Be Powerfully Productive on Instagram

The post Be Powerfully Productive with Deana Kalakay – Episode #57 appeared first on Orlando Lady Boss.