BONUS EP. | 3 Things You Must Do Before Attending a Virtual Summit -

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Table of Contents

Podcast Description

Do you feel overwhelmed the minute you virtually step inside an online summit? Perhaps you can relate to the feeling of being excited to learn from so many experts (for free), but also lack the time to truly enjoy the full experience.

If so, this bonus episode is for you. Today, I’ll be sharing the real reason why attending summits feels overwhelming and the 3 things you should do before the summit even starts in order to make the most of it, without burning out or feeling pressed on time. Get ready to fall in love with attending free summits all over again!

Links Referenced in Episode:

▶ Learn more about: Prep for Summit Success (as an Attendee)

▶ Listen to episode 2: “I don’t have enough time.”

Connect with me:

Website | FB Group | Instagram

Episode Transcript

(Note: This is a formatted AI-generated transcript to make it easier for you to read through, but is not an optimized blog post. Please excuse any spelling or grammar errors and filler words – it’s just how I speak LOL)

Episode Introduction

Do you feel overwhelmed the minute you virtually step inside an online summit?

Perhaps you can relate to the feeling of being excited to learn from so many experts, for free, but also lack the time to truly enjoy the full experience. If so, this bonus episode is for you.

Today, I’ll be sharing the real reason why attending summits feels overwhelming and the three things you should do before the summit even starts in order to make the most of it without burning out or feeling pressed on time.

Get ready to fall in love with attending free summits all over again.

Hey, I’m Lucy Reyes, your host of the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast, where I’m on a mission to help online entrepreneurs like you focus on all the right things and kiss overwhelm goodbye. Here, you’re going to learn strategies that will boost your productivity so that you can scale your online biz and impact lives sooner.

It’s your time to shine! So let’s get started.

Preparing Yourself Before Attending Summits

Hey, hey, welcome back to a bonus episode of the Cheerful Productive Chats Podcast. Now, today, I want to talk about something slightly different and possibly something that you haven’t even considered doing. And that’s preparing yourself to attend virtual summits.

I know,.I know. You’re probably like, wait, what? I literally just grabbed my free pass and wait for the summit to start. What else would I even do, Lucy?

Or you might even be on the whole other end saying, yeah,no. I’m taking a strike from summits because they’re just “too much”. And I say that in air quotes, “too much”.

And while right now, as I’m recording this episode, it might be a bit quiet because we’re in summer, the official summit season, actually, isn’t too far away. And pretty soon you’re going to start seeing all kinds of summit invitations hitting your inbox, something that you either get excited about or something that honestly just overwhelms you.

For me personally, I get both. I get excited and overwhelmed at the same time as I would also just, you know, grab my free pass and not do anything else. Sometimes I would grab the All Access Pass and then wait for the summit hosts to just email me once the event was starting. At least this is how I used to feel.

And while summits are super packed with so much valuable information, they can really be a bit too much for a single week. Especially if you’re short on time and weren’t able to purchase the recordings for whatever reason.

The Real Reason Why People Feel Overwhelmed When Attending Summits

But, you know, here’s where people go wrong and why the feeling of overwhelm creeps in whenever you attend virtual summits, and that’s you don’t take time to prepare yourself ahead of time.

But you know what? It’s not your fault.

While all the summits encourage you to grab your free pass and to mark your calendars for the big day, they don’t really deep dive into how you can truly make the most out of the summit.

I mean, sure, a lot of them start with a super awesome workshop on getting prepared and plan ahead for the summit, but there are things that you can do well before the summit actually starts in order to prepare yourself even more.

3 Things You Must Do Before Attending a Virtual Summit

And so after attending dozens and dozens of summits myself in trying to figure out how to take full advantage of these free, valuable online events, I learned that there are three main things you must do after grabbing that summit pass, but before the summit actually begins.

Here are the three ways that you can make the most out of attending free virtual summits.

1) Create a summit schedule organizer

First start by creating a summit schedule organizer. As soon as you grab that pass, whether it’s the free pass or the All Access Pass, you’ll want to create a summit schedule organizer in a project management system.

This can be whatever tool you already use, whether it’s a spreadsheet, Asana, Clickup, whatever it is. But for me, you know me. I do this inside of Trello, and I actually have a template available as a bonus for you inside of my Prep for Summit Success (as an Attendee) mini course.

But basically what you’ll want to do is go straight to that summit schedule page and start plugging in information into your platform. I like to create a list, a Trello list per day, with all of the speaker presentations as individual cards.

By doing this, you’re not only forcing yourself to really take a closer look at which presentations will be taking place when, but as you’re copying it over, you’ll also begin to notice which ones you’d like to watch over others.

2) Prioritize presentations

Which actually leads me into the second thing, which is to prioritize the presentations you want to watch.

Now I know that this is probably the hardest part about summits, right? I mean, they all look so good! Especially if you’re attending a really good summit and especially if you’re only attending with a free pass, you may feel like you’re missing out if you don’t attend them all.

But I promise you that not all presentations are going to be relevant for your business right now. And even if you do purchase the recordings, you’ll still want to prioritize the order in which you consume the presentations.

Or perhaps which ones you’ll want to attend during the live summit session time, because let’s face it, just because you bought the extra recordings or the All Access Pass with lifetime recording access, there’s no guarantee that you’re actually going to go back and listen or watch those presentations at a later time. Like, let’s be real right.

And without defining your presentation priorities, you’ll also either end up attending the ones that leave you feeling a bit underwhelmed, because perhaps it’s something that you already knew, and it probably feels like you just wasted your time now.

Or it might be a little bit too advanced and can leave you feeling unmotivated or with an extremely long list of to-do tasks in order to be able to catch up to what they shared you should do or work on.

So definitely go through and prioritize which presentations make sense for you to watch depending on where you currently are at when the summit takes place.

Related Post: How To Prioritize Your Weekly Biz Tasks

3) Schedule time on your calendar

Lastly, once you’ve identified which presentations you’ll be prioritizing during the event, the next step is to set aside a time to actually attend the presentation you just prioritized.

This means to add it as a task on your planner for the day and time of, or a time block it on your calendar, along with setting a reminder for yourself. Treat these as non-negotiables as if you were, or as if they were a doctor’s appointment

to ensure that you actually make the time to watch.

But not just that. You also need to schedule in time in your planner to go back, review your notes, and implement the action items that came from it.

It’s not enough to just watch a presentation and then do nothing with the information you just learned.

I hear way too often, ” I don’t have time to take this course or to watch this training,” and my friend, this is not the mentality you should have. I go over this mindset shift in episode two, so go back and listen to that one if this thought still crosses your mind.

But for this instance, as a business owner, you don’t know everything and you don’t know what you don’t know. Right.

I’m going to repeat that for the people in the back. You don’t know what you don’t know. So that means you cannot Google or go to YouTube University and search out for things that you don’t even know you’re missing out on. Right.

So that’s why it’s super important that you make time to watch trainings that could help you reach your goals faster, even if it’s just a free lesson or a free presentation at a summit.

Summary + Helpful Resource

Now if you really want help in getting the absolute most from virtual summits, I just launched my mini course Prep for Summit Success (as an Attendee) to help you with exactly this.

Inside, I’m walking you through my entire planning method from before the summit starts to during and after the summit ends to ensure you walk away from every single summit, feeling less overwhelmed and maximize your benefits as an attendee, even if you have a little to no time. And even if you choose to just stick with the free pass.

We’ll cover:

Other unique ways that you can use the bonus Trello board
How to prioritize the presentations when you just want to attend them all
What to do during the events to avoid overwhelm, but still gain massive value
How to manage your inbox once all of the speaker emails start flooding through once you have signed up to like everybody’s freebie
And more!

And the best part is that this is a rinse and repeat system that you can use for every single summit you attend for life!

So yeah, I’m pretty excited about this course because I have just heard way too much, way too much about the summit world and how overwhelming it is for everybody.

But you know what? This is going to change the way that you attend summits and make sure that you get the most value out of every single one.

So to learn more and enroll, visit www.cheerstoproductivity.com/prep. Thank you so much for listening to Cheerful Productive Chats with me, Lucy Reyes.

To view the complete show notes and all of the links mentioned in today’s episode, including more information about Prep for Summit Success as an Attendee, visit www.cheerstoproductivity.com/bonus1.

And before you go, make sure you subscribe wherever you’re listening so you know once the next productive chat is released. Talk soon and cheers to your productivity and success!

References

▶ Learn more about: Prep for Summit Success (as an Attendee)

▶ Listen to episode 2: “I don’t have enough time.”

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