My Sustainable PACE “I feel like I own the time that I have”

Image credit: Instagram/ @ElaineKoeber

Client: Elaine Koeber

Occupation: Health & fitness coach, physiotherapist and entrepreneur

Location: Sydney, Australia

foundher program: Sustainable PACE & Reset YOU Retreat

Fitness instructor and entrepreneur Elaine Koeber has kicked the procrastination habit and fast-tracked her business expansion with help from Sustainable PACE and the foundher Reset YOU retreat.

Elaine stumbled across foundher at the perfect time. 

She had just been made redundant and was looking for support and guidance as she prepared to take her next steps in business and life. She also wanted to nourish herself with a retreat after what had been a stressful couple of months. 

Researching the beautiful SOMA venue in Byron Bay, Elaine came across the Reset YOU retreat that foundher was hosting there. When she discovered that foundher’s productivity program, Sustainable PACE, was included in the retreat booking, she was all in. 

“I spent a lot of time on the foundher website, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, Elana is talking about me, and all the things that I want to solve and get on top of’,” Elaine recalls.

“Procrastination and the negotiation that happens around it” was the biggest issue for Elaine, who felt that her scattered way of working was holding her back from her goal of expanding her business. 

“I felt that, if I want to build a business, I won’t sneak through like that,” she says of her default approach to work. “I will just burn out or get so frustrated that the whole thing fails. That’s what I wanted to avoid.”

The PACE program kicked off six weeks ahead of the retreat, allowing Elaine to lay the foundations of her new productivity rhythm before immersing in the Reset YOU experience.

“It was just perfect timing,” she reflects. “I could say, ‘I’m taking care of myself, but also learning a lot. I can only move forward.’”

Awareness is the foundation

Sustainable PACE begins with a focus on self-awareness to help participants get clear on where their time is really going and understand the narratives they hold about their work habits. 

This was transformational for Elaine, who struggled with overwhelm and avoidance as she juggled the many different elements of her work life, from client sessions and group classes to teacher training and admin. “Even though I tried to get on top of things, I just didn’t make it happen,” she says. “I didn’t have the tools and I didn’t know where to start to make it better.”

Awareness exercises like the Doing Diary, in which you note down your activities each hour of the day, help to take the blinkers off and train you to tune into who you’re being. 

“Even though I tried to get on top of things, I just didn’t make it happen. I didn’t have the tools and I didn’t know where to start.”

For Elaine, the Doing Diary exercise was an “eye-opener”. 

“For the first day or two, I wrote things down and said, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s quite easy. I do this and then I do that. And then by day three, I thought, Who am I kidding? I’m not doing this like I’m writing down!” she explains. 

“It was quite confronting how much I procrastinate and how much I’m trying to wiggle around. And also, the negotiating – you kind of know the stories you tell yourself [about why you can’t do something], but you let it bubble under the surface, and then you get frustrated because you’ve missed out on something again.”

Noticing and challenging these stories became a vital tool for Elaine to address her procrastination habit. And, just as the PACE program explains, she noticed the impact of building her awareness muscle extended far beyond work hours. 

“It’s interesting, because now I understand the [foundher] Ripple Effect,” she says. “I started to see things that cause hard conversations in a relationship or stress with a partner because I perhaps negotiated something with myself or procrastinated. I started to see that it’s really complex and this awareness is something I need to understand and work on.”

A routine framework

Another way that PACE teaches awareness is through routines that offer a mindful framework for people to lean on when life throws a curveball. 

Starting the day with a series of rituals that recharge your battery levels and encourage you to check in with how you’re feeling allows you to approach the day with the knowledge of how you’re equipped to deal with it.

Elaine discovered just how powerful her new morning routine was by week four of PACE. 

“I’d had a really terrible night; I didn’t sleep more than two hours,” she says. “I had to get up really early for work and even though I was exhausted, I got up a little bit earlier and I ran through the routine that I had learned and established. So for me, that was a little yoga flow, a little bit of mobility and stretching, some gratitude writing and a little bit of breathwork.”

It did the trick: “I felt really good for that day!” Elaine exclaims. “It showed me that even though I’m in an emergency state, I can get through a busy day. I was pretty proud of myself, and that was the moment that I thought, wow, this makes a really big difference.”

Another key part of her morning routine is the ‘morning meeting with self’ ritual. This is a short practice in which you check in with your own priorities, goals and feelings before diving into your workday and reactively responding to others. 

“The routines showed me that even though I’m in an emergency state, I can get through a busy day.”

“The morning meeting with myself was a massive game-changer,” says Elaine. “Usually I would start my day by looking at this long to-do list and focusing on reactive work. Like, there’s a client messaging so I need to reschedule this; or I forgot to charge this person, so I’ll do that.”

Now, Elaine is structuring her day guided by her own priorities. She uses her 90-day plan (another PACE productivity tool) to organise her important tasks into the upcoming weeks and months and batches similar types of work together each day, making room for longer stretches of time to focus on her business.

“The education we had throughout the course, especially when I learned all the different types of work, like reactive work and deep work, was so helpful,” Elaine says. “I’m also learning to put less into my day. I still schedule too much, but I’m learning that everything takes a lot longer than I think it will. This is really helpful now that I’m starting to build my business.”

Gentle guidance

 As well as small-group coaching sessions, participants in the Sustainable PACE program have access to one-on-one coaching with Elana to help address their specific productivity or work concerns. This targeted coaching experience has been really useful for Elaine, who was looking for guidance as she moves into working with business partners while juggling her PT work. 

“I found the private conversations with Elana really helpful because I didn’t know how to tackle [my business expansion], because it’s not all dependent on me – other people have their pieces to do,” Elaine says. “Elana helped me with setting priorities for all my big projects.” 

The course also uses poetry to inspire participants as they reflect on their life experiences, habits and direction. One poem that Elana shared in the program motivated Elaine to expand her network of connections and mentors, which has pushed her to grow in ways she didn’t think was possible. 

“I have a much better direction of where I’m going and what I want to do.”

“Just having my mind open to all of this has helped me a lot, because now I have set up every single week, at least one meeting with someone who has their own business, and I have learned from them.

“I have a much better direction of where I’m going and what I want to do.”

The eight-week program is transformational in many ways but it never feels like too much too soon, Elaine adds. “The progress over the weeks was really gentle.”

A new rhythm

Now that the program has wrapped, Elaine is excited to say her approach to productivity has fundamentally changed for the better. 

“When I finish my day, I feel like I have achieved things and I’ve worked through the important things,” she says. “Before, I would look at the to-do list and it still had the same length. I would add more and do the easy stuff. But the big stuff was still sitting there and there was so much time-wasting, so I was quite hard on myself.

“Whereas now I have more awareness. And I feel like I own the time that I have.”

One of the major wins for Elaine is her new ability to focus for longer stretches of time, without being distracted by everyday chores like cleaning or doing the laundry, which can often be a form of avoidance in disguise!

“It doesn’t sound like much but being able to work for two hours really focused, with my mind switched on, was one of my big goals, and I feel like it’s actually quite easy now! So I can see that my productivity has improved a lot,” she shares. 

“I can see that my productivity has improved a lot.”

Elaine adds that being able to review the course content whenever she needs a refresher is a great support now that the weekly calls have wrapped. PACE students have lifetime access to the materials in the program, including recordings of the weekly coaching calls.

“There’s still days where things are not going well and I think, ‘Oh, I just didn’t notice in the morning that I’m not feeling really energised. Maybe I should take it a bit easier’,” Elaine says. “I’m kinder to myself when these things happen, and I find I catch myself quicker, and then I’m like, ‘OK, why did I get lost in this? Let’s go back.’”

That’s the beauty of Sustainable PACE. You can’t avoid all the twists and turns that life throws at you, but you can learn to adjust your sails to find a smoother, kinder way forward.

Ready to learn how to beat procrastination and overwhelm so you can be someone who does something about that? Click the button below to learn more!