How to Own Your Time and Energy and Reach Your Someday Goals

What if your someday goals could happen this year instead? I sat down with executive coach, speaker, and creator of the Badass Planner, Janell Karst, and I'll tell you what I told her before we hit record: mark my words, everybody is going to want Janell on their stage and on their podcast, and I got her here first. If you have ever said "I don't have time," this conversation is your permission slip to take it back.

🎧 Prefer to listen? This post began as Ep 605 of the My Aligned Purpose podcast. Listen on Apple Podcasts or listen on Spotify.

From Survival Mode to Someday Goal Smasher

Janell will be the first to tell you this life was not on a vision board, because she didn't even know what a vision board was. She was on her own from a very young age, living pretty much on the streets, and success wasn't a dream, it was pure survival. What she did have was a knowing, deep down, that she was meant for something great, and a dad who told her, "Girl, you've got expensive taste, you better get a good education." Not marry well. Not get a good job. Get a good education. So she went to business school, found mentors, and started magnetizing the right people, the ones who let her see that a different life was possible.

Then came rock bottom at 38. Her daughter was about a year old, and Janell saw a photo of herself and didn't recognize the woman in it. She had hit all the markers of success, the corporate job, the sheepadoodle, the white picket fence, and felt completely empty. As she pulled herself out of that season, the old someday goals started sparking. Lose the 50 pounds. Find a community of women who put their health first without being boring. Start her own coaching and consulting business. Get the executive coaching certification. She started smashing them one by one, studied her own process so she could repeat it, and realized that not all of us get a someday, so the time to go after these things is now.

Why Quiet Time Is Where Your Best Ideas Live

Here's the part I really wanted our listeners to hear. The Badass Planner itself came out of a solo retreat, one of Janell's own someday goals. Two nights oceanfront, no agenda to invent a product, and on the way out the idea arrived in a flash: the logo, the star, "where strategy meets soul, be the CEO of your life." She came home, told her husband while he mowed the lawn, and thankfully did not do one moment of logical research on how many planners already existed, because that would have stopped her before she started.

Janell's most profound ideas come from her daily walks in the forest with no podcasts, from retreats, even from the shower. She takes her Apple Watch off in there because notifications interrupt the flow. Hearing your own whispers is a muscle, and the more you practice being quiet, the faster the ideas come. So what stops us? Janell named two things: permission, because we've decided quiet time is lazy and unproductive, and OPP, other people's priorities. The women and leaders she works with put everyone else's priorities on the front burner, and the nice-to-haves for themselves are the first things out the window.

Put the Someday Goal in Your Schedule

Wanting a goal badly is not enough. Janell's take: you have to set up your environment for success, get ready for the messy middle, and be prepared to dust yourself off, because a someday goal is by definition something you haven't achieved before. And then comes her love language, owning your time and energy. Your schedule doesn't magically make room for the dream. As she put it, quoting Dan Martell: show me your schedule and bank account, and I'll show you your priorities. If the someday goal isn't in your schedule, it is one hundred percent not happening.

She also shared the weekly question that changes everything: "What can I delegate, outsource, or cancel to create more space in my week next week?" Sit with that one. Meal prep, the cleaner, the tasks at work you don't need to be doing, and increasingly, the things a well-trained AI can take off your plate.

AI for Real Humans: What Do You Want Your Time For?

Janell was facilitating AI workshops long before it became the cool girl at the table, including rolling out an internal AI program to 10,000 people in her corporate role. Her body of work is called AI for Real Humans, and there's no techy bro talk in it. The starting question is never "which tool should I use?" It's "what do you want your time for?" More present time with your family? One of her clients realized after 20 years of saying yes to everything that his daughter was leaving for university, and what he wanted was to be present. So they delegated the repetitive, soul-sucking tasks that had nothing to do with his gifts. It's not about freeing up Monday from 2:00 to 4:00. It's about the energetic capacity that becomes available.

Practically, Janell helps clients build out their own Claude AI empire, live and side by side, in about a month: onboarding, master documents, settings, then the infrastructure of projects and departments, with guided practice in between. No DIY YouTube rabbit holes, no "I'll figure it out at night when I have time." And the results from her Bold program speak for themselves: 17 entrepreneurs challenged to 52 bold moves in 52 weeks, a woman who went from "someday I want to be on stages" to a speaking intensive in Nashville, a finished keynote, and three bookings inside 90 days, and a full-time operating room nurse who built an entire organizing business, logo, website, and first paying client, in the same window. Her new someday goal is HGTV, and I have no doubt.

Connect with Janell Karst

Everything Janell is up to lives at janellkarst.com, and she's @janellkarst on Instagram. Her Bold Soul event is at boldsoul.ca, and the Badass Planner is available on Amazon. Slide into her DMs and tell her your someday goal, with one warning she gave you herself: tell Janell your someday goal and it's probably going to happen.

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