Summary

I’m a planning and organization nerd. New tools are exciting. New tools mean new learning of ways to be effective, adapting your own style, and growing overall.

In this video, I’m breaking down the bnourished planner, which is a new and pretty impressive product.

Transcript

Hey guys, David Bradley here. And I want to share a tool with you today that I think is going to be super helpful. It’s very well put together and it’s created by a friend of mine. So this isn’t something I’m just trying to promote. There’s no affiliate kind of a relationship here, but there is a relationship with someone who I find fascinating as an individual. I think she’s super smart, super intuned, and super practical all at the same time. Her name is Katie Mcdonald of bnourished. So we’re going to go into the bnourished planner that she recently created and launched. And I’m not going to just show you the planner and how it can be useful as a tool in your life. It certainly can be, but I’ve always found Katie to be exceptional in her branding in her presentation. And I think there is so much value in the packaging of what we provide, the positioning, the presentation that I really want to take a moment to look at what she’s done here.

Now I have the original mailing here. And one thing is the box. Isn’t just the standard shipping box that the standard Brown tone of a shipping box that you might get. It is the solid black, which fits in with her branding, which we have her new logo here. Very cool, but her typical white and black base of branding. So we’ve popped that open and it continues. We have a black envelope as an introduction, and this is good quality. This isn’t a cheap piece of paper. It’s gut inside a bag of tea because she provides tea to her clients. It is another product of hers as a, a coach, a life coach, but really performance oriented coach. She takes a holistic approach. So taking care of your mind, your body and inherently your performance accordingly. So that’s a cool little addition. She has again, some great visuals here or logo and printed.

This is a good card stock. I have no idea what card stock it is, but it’s a good quality. This isn’t a slip of paper and she has a little introduction on the boat, how to prepare the tea and how to think about it as something to center yourself in your day. So that is a cool step one. All of it you’ll notice is in theme and in brand the colors and the overall tonality of things. Now we get to the actual planner inside the box, and that is nicely packaged. Again, we’re staying on the beam. We have the black envelope here and we get to the planner. Now she has these in two different colors. I like the black, a little bit more masculine than the Sage green color that the other one is in, but also a very cool color to your own choice. Again, very nice clean branding, smooth this, something that you actually would want to have with you and her tagline, I suppose, is the right term is because mediocrity is beneath you, I think is awesome because mediocrity is where we will all fall if we allow ourselves to, but we don’t necessarily want to be there.

So again, some more materials in here. We have a very nice cardstock business card. We want to reach out to Katie. We’ll share more info later on in the video. So you can do that or in the description. I have a nice personalized note. Thank you, Katie. Again, great. Cardstock telling her story, telling you what you’re getting into here on this little introduction and another piece, which is basically walking you through the steps of making that commitment to yourself, with this, going through the steps of the planning process and what that’s going to be like. And she has an online program that goes along with this. So it’s not just the planner you’re buying, you’re buying the entire program. And again, all of this that I’ve shown you is in a branding scheme and you see the packaging, the presentation is very important.

It’s important, not just to justify what you’re doing in marketing, but it’s because you’re providing an experience and you’re trying to provide that holistic experience. And that experience is through that tactile feel of the paper that you used. It’s through the visual understanding of the consistency of what you’re doing here of the company or purchasing from, from bnourished in this case, the consistency in how it’s presented and how that makes the recipient feel. So getting into the nitty gritty here. Now, the table of contents, there’s a couple of key sections here. There’s reflection, strategy implementation, and then reference later on, I’m not going to go through all of this because it will be exhaustive. But essentially what you’re getting here is a 13 week program with some upfront deep work going on before that, in that 13 weeks, you map out how you wish that is the weekly planner portion.

It has some nice structure, which I’ll show you in a moment, but first looking at the reflection and the strategy portions, certain things I want to share with you here. And one of the things that Katie begins with is the whole life assessment. This wheel, where you are really giving an honest assessment of where do I fall socially, spiritually with my health, with my wealth different relationships that I have. And this allows you to see over time where you fall and track along in that path, it really gives you a good view on what do you need to work on. So I, that is important. Also, this is all again, I mentioned 13 weeks. That is essentially a quarter that we’re talking about and it’s a nice to operate in quarters. That’s how I structure my planning as well. That’s what I recommend because it’s a short enough amount of time that you can see the progress, but it’s long enough that you’re not constantly in the planning mode, but you can set these goals to move toward and they’re big enough that they are significant to achieve.

So I think the quarterly cadence is awesome. This is something that she provides a structure too. So there’s different exercises about daily routines, inventorying the people in your lives, how you how you think the words that resonate with you, and that will lead you as essentially guiding principles in your life. And this all posts together into one, I will get to in a moment, which is your daily and weekly planning. So daily reflections, daily strategy, very helpful, very important, difficult to stick with. This is why I like the quarterly cadence of how the planner is set up. Because in that quarter, you can commit to a daily plan every year, year after year, Katie might disagree with me on this. It can be tough to do daily, but I think that something I believe in is stick with it as long as it’s helpful to you.

And when it’s really a struggle to do that, let it go find something else that is going to bring you into a smooth cadence in your life and to, you know, fulfill those needs of the planning and the strategy and let go of something. If it isn’t serving you anymore, then in a quarter or a year or two years, return to it again and try that process again. Sometimes we need a break. So something that I like here is that you have the opportunity to, to plan your day in advance, but then reflect on it at the end of the day as well. And I think that is super helpful. If you can go through a day and say, these are the wins, and these are the things I struggled with a bit that can really help make your days go a lot smoother, especially for those of us who are business owners, when it’s all on our shoulders and we’re kind of alone.

Even if we have a team around us, even if we interact with a lot of people, with clients, with employees, with whatever it is still a lonely role to play as the business owner. So taking time at the end of the day to reflect, even if it’s on some of the negatives, but especially the positives and what was accomplished, I have found to be tremendously helpful. Now I want to just get into the weekly portion of things. And there is a lot here that you can go through in your week. But I think that is a great thing. That there’s a lot, because a little bit of work each week to plan the week will go a very long way. And I’ve shared before my thoughts on how to plan your week, how to plan your days and doing that. And one of the key things is that you actually go through the process of planning.

The, so Katie shares some excellent ways to think about what has been going great, what hasn’t been going so well and structuring that so that there is a reliable and honest reflection and using that to then transition into the strategy going forward, what are my main priorities? What are the projects? What are the main things that have to do? How do you break those down into primary tasks and how am I working on myself each and every day? What are the habits that I’m trying to develop? And having this structured on a weekly basis allows you to make sure it’s salient. It’s top of mind. It’s something that you’re always working on and progressing with, and it’s something that has a importance with it, and then also allocating your tasks to the week. So we might set up in advance. These are the main initiatives, the priorities, the projects we’re working on.

These are the key tasks that I need to tackle well. Now, when is that actually going to get done? And, you know, I am a faithful and probably overly so user of Google calendar and having everything structured in there. And I think that probably one of the main users or the most religious users rather of Google calendar, but at the same time, even I go back to using something tactile on writing things down and the combination of the two really works well for me. So even if you are just religious with your Google calendar as well, whatever calendar you use, having it on your phone, having the recurring events, that’s great. I still recommend that I will always recommend that, but I spend some time with just a notepad each morning and planning out my days. And on a weekly basis, I map out what the key things are, because even if they’re in my calendar digitally, for some reason, the physical, tactile nature of writing it down and crossing it off when it’s complete, that provides a little bit more to me than just seeing it passed through the calendar and checking a box or whatever digitally.

So this has been a wonderful review of not just what I can can be doing, but what I have been doing to plan my days, plan my weeks. I love everything that Katie does as far as her branding and the consistency and the power of what she does. I think, again, her tagline, because mediocrity is beneath you, is really telling to how Katie operates as an individual and where she puts her priorities and helping her clients really Excel. And, you know, not everyone can work with Katie for whatever the reasons might be, but she isn’t typically what you would think about if you said life coach, I don’t like to use life coach when talking about her. I don’t know what she uses exactly in that regard. And maybe she’s shaking her head because I said the word coach, I think performance coach is a good word.

But performance coaches for some of us are a little bit out of reach for all of us getting a planner and putting that little bit of an investment into what that coach would do for you. Having this planner with an online program, I think was brilliant on Katie’s part to make sure that you have the full view. So if you want to hack your way into having a performance coach lead you along, I think this is an excellent way to go. And as an added bonus, you’ll get in a well-rounded and complete branding, packaging positioning, a model that you can mimic and learn from as well because Katie is wonderful at that. So Katie, thank you for putting this together. Super impressive, love what it is, and I’m just happy to be able to share something that I can be confident in. I don’t take recommendations lightly.

I try to give very honest reviews, including things that aren’t so good sometimes about things, but I really think this is a wonderful tool. Everything is going to be personalized to individuals. So you know, meaning the daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly reflection and planning process is always unique to different people. But in this case, I think we cover a bunch of different tools in here. I only shared some of them, but they are enough that you can pick the ones that most resonate with you and are most helpful to you and use those over and over and over throughout your entire life. Likewise, with the different planning tools, it’s something that you can use once learn from and personalized so that it’s always working better and better for you over time. And that is a principle that I think resonates with Katie very much as well.

So thank you again, Katie, bnourished.com. You can find the planners there. You can find Katie and follow her on social. Get yourself a planner and get them as gifts. I’m thinking it makes a wonderful business gift for clients, for friends, colleagues, et cetera. So something to think about.

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