Hey fellow entrepreneurs, welcome to the Buckets and Boone Gates Studio with Kim White, Jill Olish, and many other brilliant entrepreneurs. Determined to solve world problems for entrepreneurs, this community is changing how we look at the big things we do on our business adventure and sharing from their own lives ways to protect our time, money, and bandwidth. This show is designed for you, the entrepreneur to hear behind the scenes stories of real business people across the globe and learn what is possible for you. Keep listening to join today's juicy conversation with Kim and Jill. Welcome to the Buckets and Boongates studio. I am Jill Olish, and I am thankfully joined by the fierce Kim White today. Kim, thank you for joining me today for this episode. Oh, Jill, I'm always thankful when we get to do things together because I think magic happens. I agree. I agree. Well, if you've been listening for a while, you have heard us say Buckets and Boongates a lot. It's in the name. But today we are going to be breaking down what those actually are and how they keep you out of burnout. If you've ever wondered how to prioritize when everything feels important, this is your roadmap. So Kim, can you please take us through what exactly buckets and boom gates are? I will do my best, Jill. Okay. So buckets are, you know, when we're talking about buckets, it's anything big that we need to break down in smaller pieces. That's where buckets comes from. But for this episode, we really want to talk about buckets as your big life. So everything that is your life has a bucket. It has different pieces. And some of those buckets are priorities. They are buckets for our health or our family or our marriage or our faith or our creativity, our rest, our legacy. And I could go on and on and on. They're pieces of what makes our whole world what it is. And I'm talking about our personal worlds, right? Boom gates are the hard stops, the boundaries that we protect those buckets with. So just like you're sitting in your car at a railroad crossing, when it's down, that boom gate comes down, everything stops. You're stuck in traffic. You are going to sit there because that boom gate came down. I think if you can imagine your life, like a row of buckets, your business is just one of them, not all of them. I think a lot of, especially new entrepreneurs come in feeling like everything has to be about business and there are ways to tie in things, but it's very important that you recognize that You're building a business so that your life is supported, not taken from. So boom gates are the moments or rules that stop you from pouring too much into one bucket at the expense of the others. That is really good. And in the beginning, you were saying, Kim, you know, buckets are a way to make the big things smaller. And that's really what we're doing. We're talking about this. Our life is huge. We play so many different roles as a human, but they do intertwine, right? So like I'm a mom and I'm an entrepreneur. You're a mom and entrepreneur. You're a wife. I'm a wife, like all these things, right? They still have their separate pieces, but they need to be seen as a whole as you as a human. So it can be a little confusing, but I love that we're breaking it down this way because those boom gates are going to help us even more, especially for the control freaky person like us. This is going to help us do what we got to do and not overdo it. So how do we start applying our buckets? Well, I'm going to giggle and put one out there about the control freaky part. I believe when you can label yourself a control freak, that is no possibility of changing anything. And buckets and boom gates can change how we feel about the control freaky parts of us. So being control freaky is just a symptom or it is a characteristic. It's not who we are. So I want to make that clarity right out of the gate because when we start setting up buckets and boom gates, buckets so that we have things understood what we're doing, boom gates to protect those things, knowing you're a control freaky person is important. So one of the things is you start with life, not business. Yeah. So if my life is not honored in the process of building a business, it will show. You will not, you know, you will not be well. You will not have relationships that you want to have. There's a lot of signs if you are building a unsexy business that does not support your life. So most entrepreneurs build the business first, then they try to squeeze. life around it we do it the other way around here now way back in the day let's just say this because my first business was at sixteen I did not do this and that's why I can tell you you know truly examples of doing it the wrong way we're here to help you do it the right way So if everything crashed tomorrow, except three parts of your life, so, you know, buckets, what would you fight to keep? I'll give an example for my life. I would fight to keep my husband like he's, he's a priority to me. My family is a priority to me. So that is one of my buckets just to give an understanding of that's just a piece of my life. But how you name these buckets is actually important because you're giving yourself a instructions, I'll call it. This bucket is called this, and I make decisions about that bucket differently because I'm naming it a priority. So it depends on, you know, it makes me different in my yeses and nos. I'll say it that way. What I'm saying yes to about that bucket, what I'm saying no to about that bucket. And I also design my schedule around the important buckets. So I start with my life first and then I add my business in. I also think we need to talk about, you know, protecting those buckets, Jill. And I'd love for you to, you know, give an example of a type of a boom gate. Yes, because once we have all of our buckets in a row, we need to start protecting them. The type of boom gate that I think of first is our time-based boom. A boom gate. And we talked about that in our boundaries episode just before this one. So if you want to talk, listen more a little bit about time and boundaries, you can go head back after this one and listen there. But the time based boundary is something I implemented very early on. Like I have a do not disturb on my phone for ten p.m. So that way I don't get any notifications. And that's like the time that my phone is off. I know you have a pumpkin o'clock after a certain amount of time, your bandwidth is shot and you are no good to anyone. So it's bedtime only. But even taking that a step further, I have time that I work and time that I'm with my family. So that time boom gate is very important for me as a way to make sure I'm honoring my family. And I love witnessing that. I'll just say that. Well, there's a capacity-based boom gate that I want to share too is, you know, our client roster right now is closed. We're not taking on new clients. And that is because we believe in fully serving like with our A game and giving all that we've promised and doing the things we need to do. Well, we know right now we're maxed. We are at the max of that. And if we took on another client right now, we wouldn't do a good job for the ones we already have or for the new one based on our capacity. We need to add team to increase. And we've done this over time. But we need to make sure we're honoring what we really can show up with with us. Because if you want me to do something after pumpkin o'clock, as Joel mentioned, there is no capacity for it. There's also an energy-based boom gate or what we like to call bandwidth also. And this has been, I think, probably one of the more trickier boom gates for me to put into practice because I like to think that I have more bandwidth than I actually do. But having a five-year-old does suck the life out of you while you are pregnant also. So I am honoring that boom gate quite a bit lately because, you know, when you're doing this work and you come to a point where you're stressing out and crying over the fact that you have to go to work, you know, you're doing things that you don't love all of a sudden you, you really got to change it. Like there's just, there's, there's no need to be stressing out that much about it. So there's, your energy is misplaced someplace here and figuring that out is a great way to honor, your boundaries and your boom gates in this energy based one. Well, as an entrepreneur and a business owner myself for most of my life, I have wanted to do more than I could realistically do. That's a pattern for me. And I know this. I know I want to do everything. I have these ideas and let's do this and let's do this. If you're like me in the fact that you have more ideas than you have energy or bandwidth, you're in a good, you know, you're in a good place because that's how I am. Problem with that is I can't. So being realistic actually takes away the stress. So I just want to add that to that is you can take away stress by honoring the most important ideas, not all the ideas, but the most important ones. So relationship-based boom gates also are extremely important because we can come to the end of our lives and have built a hugely successful business and have no family around us, have our kids don't want to talk to us. There's a lot of things that can happen. Here's what one of my... pay attention here, boom gates are, is if I have to miss date night with my husband, we do date night once a week. Jill, I know you and Bobby do date night once a week. If I have to miss that date night, what is actually more important? I'm telling on myself, the evidence tells he's not as important as whatever else it was. So occasionally a date night, when you both agree to missing it, you know, there are circumstances where, But if I am missing date night every week and I am not honoring my relationship with my husband in that way, that's our time to get away. I don't have the right boom gate up. I've got to put a better boom gate up. Yeah. Can this all making me think about something that we weren't planning on talking about? And that's seasons and the shift that these can take. In earlier as we were talking and you were telling us about the different kinds of buckets we can have and like the priority wise what we're making a priority and how we set up our boom gates and Thinking as myself as you know, I'm twenty something weeks pregnant. I Did not put some of the buckets that I have as a priority on until I got pregnant, like specifically my health, right? It's always been a bucket of mine and it's always something I do have on top of my mind, but now it's like the forefront of my mind is making sure my body is healthy and ready for this pregnancy and for everything that comes after that. So there is the flexibility of shifting our buckets and the boom gates that go with them based off the seasons that we're in. So I think that helps a lot with our sexy business in life also. You know, just comparison wise is Jill, you're pregnant. I'm actually an empty nester. Those are two very different seasons that require different kinds of boom gates, different kind of activities, different kind of whatever I can work in some of the spaces you can't work right now. Yeah. Based on the fact that I don't have a little that I have to, you know, get in bed on time and feed dinner and, you know, and well, I do have to feed my husband, but, you know, there are different, there are different seasons. And I think that's a really great ad to, you know, just to think about because boom gates are actually how we prevent burnout before it comes. Yeah. And those boom gates force us to pause, reevaluate and adjust. And I think when you're going into a different season, it's really important to pause and reevaluate and adjust. Yeah, definitely. Well, we want you to have a win by the end of this episode as we do each episode. So Kim, what can we do today with our buckets and boom gates? Here's your buckets and boom gates homework for the week. How's that? Write down your top three life buckets. So for each bucket, choose one boom gate that would protect it. Be very clear about what your priorities are because these are the priorities. And what would you do to protect it? So one sentence for each one of those buckets and keep it simple and clear. I don't want to neglect my husband. And one of those ways is I don't miss date night. Like that's just very simple. but sweet listener I'm going to say put these somewhere visible you know we do the vision board party and we understand reticular activation and all the science behind being able to see something put it on your fridge put it by the computer put it in your planer whatever it is you need to do but keep these somewhere what are your three life buckets and what are you doing to boom gate them I love that. That's great homework. So let's recap what we talked about today, which was homework now, right? Your business is just one bucket, not all of the buckets. So I'm glad we have this homework to figure out what three of our buckets are. And then our boom geyser will stop you from pouring your whole self into just one bucket and burning out. So keep that in mind as you're doing your homework as well. Don't miss out on what's coming up next. And if this resonates with you or you see someone else showing some signs that they're about to burn out, share this episode with them and tune in for our next one where we're going to be talking about marketing that feels like you matching your energy and strengths. Of course, as always, thank you so much for listening with us. And we couldn't make this podcast better without you. So we hope to see you next time. Love y'all. Thank you for joining Kim and Jill in the Buckets and Boomgate studio for today's conversation. Don't forget to follow the show for future juicy episodes, and they can't wait to chat with you next week.
