One of my biggest concerns when I re-joined Lloyds Bank in October 2023 as a full-time, paid-up member of the 9 to 5 brigade was this:

Will I have the time to build my coaching business alongside my 9 to 5 job?

Clearly 40+ hours a week isn’t pocket change.  It’s a big old hunk of time. 

And so is the commuting time, the days I need to start early or clock off late and the mental & physical energy used up working in a high-profile team for one of the biggest banks in the UK.

So I’d be lying if I said this wasn’t a worry.

But as those first few weeks ticked by and I started to juggle my 9 to 5 job with writing these emails, building this newsletter and coaching clients, I realised I’d been asking the wrong question.

I wasn’t asking myself “will I have the time?” or even “how do I find the time?”

I was actually asking questions like…

Do I want to do this?

Is this meant for me?

Where is my nose is pointing?

Put another way, being back in the 9 to 5 shone a bright & powerful spotlight on whether or not building my coaching business was really & truly what I wanted to do.

As I sat with this question, the same answer kept coming back to me:

Yes, it was.

And the clearer I got on that answer, the easier it became to find the time.

I call this whole idea Desire-Driven Scheduling (or DDS for short).

But “scheduling” is a misnomer.

It’s not really scheduling. 

It just happens.

When I wake up, I’m buzzing to start writing.  So rather than hitting my snooze button like I used to, most of the time I hot-foot it to my screen to bash out a few paragraphs for my new book The Happy Employee or whatever article or lead magnet I’m working on.

When I schedule a 1 to 1 coaching call, it gets locked into my diary and whatever else I need to do fits in around it.

If I’m daydreaming on the bus and an email-related idea springs to mind, I whip out my phone and jot it down.  Sometimes I start drafting that email then and there.

These are just examples.

But none of this is planned in advance.  I don’t always write emails on public transport and it’s not like I’m pre-scheduling writing time when I know I’ll be riding the tube.

It’s more that I get creative with my time.  Time gets “found”. 

And this is the essence of DDS.

Maybe this sounds overly simplistic.

But perhaps you can think of your own DDS examples.  Like a book you really wanted to read and time just opened up.   An Xbox game you wanted to complete which meant nothing else got a look in.  Or a course you wanted to take and the time appeared from nowhere.

Bottom line for me is this:

It's not a lack of time which stops us from doing stuff.  It's a lack of desire instead.

I don’t know if this sounds like good news or bad news to you.

But I don’t think it’s bad news at all.

After all, why tear your hair out trying to find the time to do something which you don’t even want to do in the first place?

That’s my two pennies’ worth for today.

  - Tom

p.s. In my experience, “What do I want to do?” is a deceptively simple question.

I haven’t always found it easy to tell the difference between a heartfelt desire and a habit, an ego-based desire or a desire which has been clouded or influenced by other people.

But I have noticed the clearer I get on this, the more content and satisfied I feel.

In many ways, questions like “what would I truly love for my life” get to the heart of the coaching I offer.

If you'd like to find out more about this:

https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com