How Coach Athena Sayaka is Using Neuroscience to Help Entrepreneurs Reach Goals

Are You Stuck Professionally?

Athena Sayaka, creator of the neuroscience based Prioritization Intensive, says that her idea client is a WOC who is multi-passionate and struggling to prioritize her projects and is having issues reaching her goals. She tends to have abstract and/or large goals and she needs help distilling these down into actionable and measurable actions she can do on a daily or weekly basis.

Example: Someone came to me with the goal of “making more joy than money”. Sis, what does that look like behaviorally? We broke that down into several weekly actions she could literally put on a calendar.

“My ideal client is someone who’s tired of being stuck and needs someone who can help take the messy, underdeveloped ideas and convert them to actions that make sense and are easy to do.”

If you have too many goals and don’t know where to start or you’ve been doing too much and not seeing results, read on to find out how using neuroscience and the Clarity and Prioritization Intensive can help you make your life and business goals a reality.

Q&A with Athena Sayaka

What is the biggest issue/bad habits that entrepreneurs have when they come to you for help?

The biggest issue entrepreneurs have when they come to me is they’re stuck in the gap between desire and action. They don’t know how to break down their goal or project into actionable steps to actually start it, let alone achieve it. 

Do you find that people are more or less organized in their business during the pandemic?

I’ve found that more people are finally starting their business or turning a bad circumstance to an opportunity to leap into full time entrepreneurship. Now that people have more time, they have more awareness of what changes they want to make, but it’s still hard for folks to translate that knowledge into action. Most people know what they need to do to grow their business, but there’s a lot less clarity on HOW to approach those goals. 

Can you share details on your personal framework that has helped to increase your income during the pandemic?

My framework has 4 parts: Investigation, Interrogation, Intention, and Implementation. I handhold through the stages of clarifying a goal and the intentions behind it then we go on to create an action plan. An invaluable part of this framework is the Importance/Difficulty exercise that forces me (and anyone does the exercise) to look frankly at what projects to prioritize and how hard it is to actually accomplish that goal. 

For me, prioritization is key here. I used to be the queen of doing the most. I was constantly burnt out and not seeing any results for all the work I was doing. I realized I had to take a step back and focus on what mattered most. 

I was able to increase my income because I dug deep to evaluate what I needed to pour into most for my own mental well being and the business. Candidly looking at all aspects of the business, forced me to realize I was doing too much and helped me return to the lifeblood of the business: coins! After I reminded myself of the focus, I was able to put my systems in place to increase cash flow and I did just that!

You use neuroscience to change your clients behavior. How does that work?

Neuroscience was a huge part of my studies at university. I fell in love with neuroscience because I loved how one could directly point to the physiological reasons behind psychological phenomena, like personality, fear, and behavior. I love the body to brain connection because it feels actionable and a bit more in my control than just chalking up my behavior to genes I didn’t choose and can’t change. 

With my clients, I use those same insights as well as outcomes from professional studies I’ve conducted to make developing habits easier. I help by first explaining our brain’s most primal tendencies, and then we work together to create systems that use those tendencies to their advantage and take most of the hard work out of developing  habits. 

How long should it realistically take your clients to implement what they have learned from you then see results?

Every client walks away with actionable habits and routines that they can implement right away. People have reached out to me to say they saw a huge difference in behavior after consuming just my Instagram content. It’s very important to me that I tie every piece of advice I give to an action that someone can test right away. 

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