Business coaching
I had been following this coach for years. I read everything she wrote, listened to her podcast, bought her e-books and looked forward to one day working with her.
Finally – right offer, right person, right time – I jumped into her group coaching program.
It was a disaster. I hadn’t done my research and didn’t realise how large the group would be. The interaction with the coach was non-existent, instead I was put into a small cohort with one of her coaches. One small group session with the coach was done with the coach in bed, drinking wine. Disappointed, I let busy things distract me and eventually, I disappeared.
I don’t blame this coach. I did what lots of group coaching participants do – join a group full of expectations, before becoming disengaged and letting busy become the excuse why they can’t participate.
A group coaching program offers lots of advantages over one-to-one, including the lower price point, and the opportunity to learn, and benefit from, others in the group.
Here’s how to get the most out of group coaching programs.
Believe that you will get excellent ROI
First up: you need to believe that you can 10x your return on investment (ROI). Without this belief, it’ll be impossible to achieve.
However, when you believe that a 10x ROI is possible – and put yourself in rooms the normalise the beliefs and behaviours that you’re trying to adopt – then you’ll rise to meet the challenge.
Conversely, when you invest in a group program because you feel stuck and you want someone to ‘fix’ you, you’re acting from a disempowering, reactive energy.
If you’re coming into a mentorship space stressed about money, feeling like, “this ‘has’ to work”, then it likely won’t. Focusing on financial scarcity – and bringing this up with your coach (unless they’re a money coach and that’s what you specifically hired them for) will not enable you to 10x your ROI.
Instead, focus on your desires. Centre your ambitions. Bring your future self into the group. Your attitude is everything (it’s either costing you money, or making you money).
Declare your goals
So many owners struggle to declare their goals out loud. But there’s something extremely powerful when you do so, because then? Everyone and everything will conspire to help you.
Being in community with others can be a vulnerable experience, especially if you’re in a state of transition and are unsure about your next step. But vulnerability is essential to coaching.
Have clear intentions for why you’re choosing this particular group program and this particular coach. Are they modelling behaviours that you’d like to have? Do they have a particular experience that mirrors yours?
Make sure your coach knows your intentions.
Tell them:
• Why you’re here
• What you’re doing this year
• What you want to learn
• Who you want to be
• What your money goals are
• What you want to sell
• How you want to sell it
• How you want to feel in your business.
Don’t whisper your desires once – declare them repeatedly, especially when it makes you feel uncomfortable.
What you believe and what you declare out loud becomes your north star that guides your emerging future.
Come as you are
‘Cleaning the house for the cleaner’ is a very common mistake that sounds like the little voice in your head which says, “when I get my shit together, then I’ll join that coach’s group program”.
I don’t know about you, but I haven’t gotten my shit together, and I’m 45 years in.
Postponing your deep desires until a mythical time when your life, health, relationships, and business is sorted, means you’re waiting forever. But worse, you’ve convinced yourself that “the perfect future” is real.
Instead, we have the imperfect present. So come as you are. A great coaching and program framework will meet you where you’re at, draw out your genius and unique approach and hold your big vision for you, even if you’re stuck in the weeds and struggling to see it.
Turn up as your whole self, but also take the opportunity to come as your best self.
Focus on where you’re going, rather than rehashing the past
We all accumulate setbacks, disappointments, mistakes, and crappy experiences. This is universal. The challenge is to hope, trust, and believe in a better future, and act accordingly.
If you’ve been following the coach for a while and gotten results from their free content, then trust them. Believe that they have your best interests at heart.
Some clients pay me a lot of money to argue for their limitations. No matter how often I celebrate their progress, or point out their strengths and opportunities, they’re busy focuses on the hindrances and limitations.
“The reward for fighting for your limitation is that you get to keep them”.
Instead, bring each and every progress, step and breakthrough to your coach and group so they can celebrate. Emotions are contagious and celebration is fuel for joy, which powers people, which powers people.
You’re paying your coach to tell you the truth. When they give you an answer to a question, don’t respond ‘yeah, but…’
Their advice may appear basic, and you may already know it. You may have tried it in the past and had less-than-stellar results. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.
Ask better questions
Too many questions are loaded with preconceptions, which means they’re closed questions, anticipated a closed answer.
For example, rather than, ‘why aren’t people buying?’ – a better question is ‘what is my community preoccupied with right now?’
Rather than ‘will people pay that price?’, a better question is ‘how will I communicate the value of my offering?’
The same goes with having tried a strategy and it not working out for you. Perhaps it was because you borrowed someone else’s strategy without really understanding the ‘why’ behind it. Perhaps it’s because you quit too early, before you’d had a chance to build momentum. Perhaps it’s because the strategy makes no sense for you, your strengths, preferences and business model.
There are many reasons why things don’t work out. It doesn’t mean the strategy or tactic is the problem. With a tweak or two, it may work out brilliantly for you.
Stop trying to be the perfect student
I see this a lot – the program participant who’s super keen to be the star student, doing every single lesson thoroughly. These owners don’t get excellent ROI.
It’s precisely their desire to “keep up” and be a good student that stops them from implementing.
The most valuable part of a group program are the live calls and interactions with the coach – these are what you should prioritise. Your coach doesn’t care if you haven’t completed lesson 12 yet. They care about what you’ve done differently, your evolving attitude, what you’ve implemented – these are the results of the learning.
Ask yourself, “why am I not leaning in?” If the answer is, “because I don’t want to disappoint the coach because I haven’t kept up with the lessons in the portal”, then check yourself.
We’re not in school anymore. There are grades given. The best learning materials are those that make you so excited to implement that you pause the video mid-way and do so. Not every lesson will be relevant, right now, or perhaps at all.
Learning isn’t the end goal. Implementation is.
“I’m my own worst critic,” is a sure-fire recipe for wrought out marketing, stop-start sales, and a miserable owner. Criticising is easy. There’s a cynic and skeptic being miserable together on every corner.
Rather than reading into one low month, one lacklustre launch, or one less-than-stellar season, successful owners work hard at building their emotional buoyancy, capacity and resilience.
When you learn how to be our own hype girl – while remaining open to feedback from your coach – then you’re able to speed ahead.
Right now, you may be 12 steps ahead inside of what you’re doing on the outside, and that’s okay, because you’ll catch up with your aspirations eventually.
Step up. Claim your place.
Business coaching, Grow your profits
Apocalypse novels and dystopian novels were my favourite as a teenager. I loved losing myself in the end of the world, via a good book.
The last few years in business have been a deviation and felt, in the thick of March 2020 like the apocalypse has arrived. This deviation is being followed, thick and fast, with terrorism and war, cyber-attacks on corporations, and a global recession.
In business (and life), the ability to anticipate and adapt to change is paramount. The accelerating pace of change means that your business’s sustainability requires a future-focused approach.
In this article, I’ll share a step-by-step plan to not only future-proof your business, but also ensure your personal sustainability as an owner, to ward off burnout and ensure you thrive in the face of uncertainty.
Predicting the future
The first step in future-proofing your business is to cultivate a keen sense of awareness. This is a skill that I use when I’m marketing, especially when I’m preparing launch materials.
When I’m creating marketing, I let my awareness extend sideways, to listen into the zeitgeist – not of the year or month, but of the week and day.
We see plenty of fallout from brands who ignore the zeitgeist – forging ahead with tone-deaf marketing campaigns or out-of-touch messaging that alienates the very audience it was (purportedly) designed to attract.
The art of prediction is intimately related with awareness and listening. While it’s impossible to accurately foresee every twist and turn, we absolutely can stay informed of trends, use our own data and analytics (such as our email open rates and our Instagram or LinkedIn analytics) to significantly enhance our predictive abilities.
The future begins in the past. Says American novelist Pearl S. Buck, “If you want to understand today you have to search yesterday.” American journalist Norman Cousins adds, “History is a vast early warning system.”
Be careful that your awareness of history doesn’t tip into sentimentality or progress denial. Use historical context to help you understand human behaviour and predict future behaviours.
Suggestions:
- Participate in forums, conferences, and networking events, not just in your particular industry, but in complementary or adjacent industries.
- Read social media comments. These are a goldmine of insights into other people’s minds.
- Follow trendsetters and thought leaders in your industry – beyond the obvious mega personalities – to gain a deeper understanding of where your market is headed.
Building your resilience
In my Hustle & Heart program, this is part of the ‘heart’ – developing strength of character, and the resilience that comes of this. Resilient leaders have a constructive, proactive attitude, which makes setbacks, mistakes, hindrances, and failure par for the course.
Resilience is not “toughing it out”. It’s taking exquisite care of yourself, asking for help, utilising rejuvenation techniques, and getting comfortable with the uncomfortable.
Suggestions:
- Diversify your revenue streams so that you’re not exposing yourself to unnecessary risk. Your key offerings may well be applicable in several different ways, that don’t necessitate a complete redesign.
- Pursue opportunities to get out of your comfort zone: whether this is sales calls, pitching from stage, being more vulnerable in your marketing, or whatever else that scares you (that you secretly, really want to do).
- Establish a crisis plan or worst-case scenario plan: don’t wait until you’re in the thick of a crisis to decide what your plan of action will be. Having a crisis management plan in place enables your business to respond swiftly and effectively. This includes clear communication strategies, contingency plans, and a well-defined chain of command.
Grow your capacity
You know those individuals who have a disproportionate amount of responsibility, but look graceful and relaxed? That’s capacity.
Capacity building equips and empowers you, and your business, to handle increased demand, while enjoying yourself in the process.
Suggestions:
- Resilience starts from within. Even if you’re a company of one, foster a positive work culture. Design your week to create “meeting free” buffer, with time for research, learning, deep thinking, reviewing, and reflecting.
- Invest in automation, systems and processes: use technology to enhance your business’s capacity. Whether it’s streamlining service delivery processes, improving customer service through chatbots, or utilising data analytics for decision-making, integrating technology into your operations helps you build capacity, while protecting your energy.
- Change your attitude to stress: stress is normal and it’s not the enemy. Change your attitude towards ‘good’ stress and notice how much easier everything becomes when you’re not fighting the inevitable.
- Invest in training: as technology evolves, so should the skills of your workforce. Provide continuous training and development opportunities to ensure your staff or contractors are equipped with what they need to enhance performance.
Magnetising your community
Your community is essential to your business. Business is built on relationships, and in online business, this translates into your paying clients, email list, web visitors, social media communities, and the “word on the street” about you (aka: your professional reputation).
Building a strong and engaged community around your brand can provide invaluable support during challenging times, foster long-term loyalty, and increase sales and referrals. It also gives you invaluable insights to help you anticipate the future needs of your clients.
Suggestions:
- Invest in your communities: cultivate a sense of belonging in your online communities (via Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups, LinkedIn groups, etc), show the behind-the-scenes of your work, and engage authentically, creating a space where your people can connect with each other without you gate-keeping relations.
- Cultivate brand advocacy: exceptional customer experiences, actively seeking feedback, and incorporating client suggestions make it easy for your clients to become brand advocates. This is not about you as the hero of your brand, but rather, showcasing your clients as their own heros in whatever it is your business helps them with.
- Lead with your values: demonstrate your commitment to social and environmental causes through your initiatives. Whether it’s supporting local communities, reducing your environmental footprint, or championing ethical practices, this makes it easy to magnetise your community towards a common cause.
Be relentlessly relevant
To future-proof your business, you need to be relentlessly relevant – continuously evolving your business to meet the ever-changing needs and expectations of your ideal clients. This isn’t just about what you sell and to who. It also incorporates how you deliver it (https://www.hustleandheart.com.au/online-business-models/) , as well as your marketing and sales messaging.
What worked yesterday doesn’t necessarily work tomorrow, and evolving your business to be relentlessly relevant also ensures that you stay personally connected and inspired by what you’re doing – which creates its own momentum.
Suggestions:
- Take inspiration from a variety of sources. Innovation doesn’t happen by staying in your lane, or slavishly following your competitors. It comes from fostering creativity, making time to daydream, and exploring new ideas.
- Invest in your own thinking: this doesn’t mean being a perpetual student, never quite “ready” to launch. It means carving out regular space in your calendar to digest ideas and explore your own thinking on a topic.
- Speak with your ideal clients regularly: you can’t claim to be “customer centric” if you’re three steps removed from your ideal clients. Talking closely with a broad array of your clients (not just the VIPs), enables you to better understand their evolving needs.
- Stop blaming the algorithm: social media gives us immediate feedback on our messaging. Use social media to formally and informally gather feedback, conduct market research, and stay attuned to shifts in consumer behaviour.
Look at what scares you
We make business far harder than it needs to be by avoiding the inevitable or necessary, making up stories to justify our lack of decisions, and overcomplicating our offerings, marketing and sales.
Future-proofing your business includes future-proofing yourself: investing in your skills and attitude, protecting your enthusiasm, growing your capacity, and developing invaluable talents in prediction, resilience, capacity, community engagement, and relevance. Doing so enables your business to not only navigate the uncertain terrain ahead but also emerge stronger. The future belongs to those who embrace it.
Business coaching, Client case studies
At just 25 years of age, Josh Fritz loves a challenge. He’s the owner of Patch Agency in Brisbane, as well as eSpace, a luxury event space for hire. And when he began one-to-one business coaching with me, in October 2021, he already had a successful business under his belt – Patch Pets, an app for dog lovers.
Josh initially found me through Google. He wanted help with growing, nurturing and structuring his team and was about to launch a second business, eSpace, a gorgeous venue for e-commerce photoshoots.
“I wanted to scale but had no experience working in an agency,” says Josh. “I read about your agency experience and applied to work with you.”
“I loved the questions I was asked when booking the initial call to speak with you. I know you vet your one-to-one clients closely, and I was keen to make a good impression! Ha. I needn’t have worried. We got along great, from that very first call.”
Rapid growth: from home to Brisbane CBD
In less than two years, Josh’s growth trajectory has been swift, expanding the Patch team from five people to 16 (a mix of full-time, part-time and contractors), repositioning and rebranding the business, and expanding their premises.
When we started working together, Josh had six desks in the loungeroom of his apartment, with the dining room doubling as a meeting room for his team of five.
Within a few months of working together, Josh took out a lease on premises in Adelaide Street in Brisbane CBD and was able to reclaim his living space.
A lot of our initial coaching focused on increasing Josh’s personal capacity and self-leadership skills. Together, we worked to grow Josh’s sales, pitching and leadership skills, as well as developing sales assets including proposal and briefing documents.
“You helped me implement a better onboarding process, a minimum engagement period for clients as well as tighten our processes, boundaries, and terms and conditions, which has been invaluable not just for cash flow, but for lowering stress.”
We also focused on Josh’s work/life balance and self-care rituals, to expand his energetic capacity and focus.
Repositioning Patch Agency
Josh didn’t want to niche into a particular sector or service offering, instead, Patch Agency offers a broad diversity of digital marketing services across a wide range of industries. But we needed a connecting thread to tie the Patch brand together.
Josh is a lover of the finer things in life, and it was clear that Patch’s point-of-difference was luxury. Their tagline, “where luxury brands are born” speaks to Patch’s partnership approach to working closely with clients so as to better understand their sales cycle, profit margins, goals and aspirations, in order to better craft effective digital marketing.
“It’s been so exciting to develop and launch our new brand strategy,” says Josh. “Luxury doesn’t just call in our ideal clients, it also speaks to the care, diligence, and service we pride ourselves on.”
Patch’s refined positioning is reflected in their 2023 client calibre, which includes Brisbane’s largest LGBTQ event company, one of Australia’s leading venture capital firms, Brisbane’s largest rooftop venues and restaurant group, and one of Brisbane’s top real estate agents.
Watch out world!
Josh’s savvy development and expansion of both eSpace and Patch Agency has created synergies between both businesses. The “Insta-worthiness” of eSpace has attracted photographers, influencers and content creators while also doubling as an event space for corporate events, parties and weddings.
Recently, eSpace hosted META, the global tech powerhouse behind Instagram, Facebook and Threads, for its first-ever event in Brisbane. Queensland’s biggest influencers, with a combined following of over 16 million, gathered at META’s event at eSpace.
“The META event was a dream come true for us,” says Josh. “It was surreal to be hosting their first Brisbane’s event and to share eSpace with so many influencers.”
Josh is committed to Patch becoming one of Australia’s most sought-after agencies for young creatives. The Patch team are all digital natives, all under the age of 26, many of whom have been hired after doing internships with Patch, through Queensland University of Technology. Josh has just hired a business development manager, so he can focus more of his time on team development.
In less than two years, Patch’s growth is swift: from a team working from Josh’s home, to 16 staff in Brisbane city; more than doubling recurring monthly revenue; and, as of June 30, 2023, Patch cracked the one million turnover mark, a massive triumph for such a young company.
“One-to-one business coaching with Brook has helped me notice and seize opportunities, focus on only the most important things, anticipate problems before they occur, and prioritise my wellbeing. She gives me invaluable feedback on changes I’m considering, and her different perspective enables me to see blind spots that could otherwise become a problem.”
But Josh is not someone who rests on his laurels. He’s now got his sights set on expanding interstate – and beyond. Watch out world, Patch Agency’s star is rising.
Business coaching, Grow your profits
‘Growth at all costs’ is a pointless business maxim. The media is full of stories of massive multinational brands that have failed to ever make a profit, despite headline-grabbing rates of growth. Growth, profit, and time you invest – these don’t correlate.
Since starting my business in 2008, I’ve deliberately grown, held, and shrunk as needed. Following the arrival of two babies in less than two years, things got pretty intense, and so I kept my business in a holding pattern, servicing clients, but not growing.
My partner (also self-employed) and I met while traveling, and still love travel.
In 2013, we rented a big house in France for six weeks, invited a rolling entourage of family and friends. In 2017, we went to Portugal for six weeks, and in 2019, we had seven weeks celebrating my fortieth in Greece with family and friends, followed by a road trip to Italy.
In September, we’ll be taking six weeks to return to Italy, then England.
Perhaps you also love traveling, or you want to work less, or you have a job and are growing a side business. Perhaps, like one of my one-to-one business coaching clients, you’re working full-time while buying businesses on the side.
Whatever your motivations to work less, this is how to run your business in minimal hours.
Plan your time
Abraham Lincoln said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”.
Planning may seem like a waste of time when you have very little, but this is short-sighted. Planning is critical to ensure we’re spending our precious time on the right things. Planning in 90-day sprints ensures that you have a detailed, week-by-week action plan to focus only on the most important activities.
The first two things to plan are your marketing and sales.
The two key pillars of marketing and sales
Marketing is the lifeblood of your business because it keeps your leads coming. Stop-start marketing, sporadic pitching and random reach-outs means you’re making business harder than it needs to be because there’s no efficiency, strategy, nor momentum.
My Minimum Viable Marketing Plan™ is one piece of long-form per month, one email (which promotes your newest long-form content), social media marketing scheduling, and reach-outs. Reach-outs mean that you’re always focusing on building relationships: fostering a social attitude, generosity, following your curiosity, and staying top-of-mind with people.
Optimise your sales process to work to your capacity and communication strengths, and increase conversion.
Using a scheduling tool (I use Acuity Scheduling) and opening only a few defined times per week ensures that you’re not blindsided by a sales call that you’re not prepared for. Each call booked through Acuity necessitates people filling out a form, which means both parties are prepared, and we can use our time well.
Having (very) limited hours is no excuse for leaving people hanging. Remember, it’s not the most qualified person who gets the job, but it’s often the most enthusiastic (in other words, respond to people!).
Following up and pursuing opportunities
There’s no point doing marketing to generate interest if you then fail to pursue and follow up with prospects.
Ensure you have a list of leads with notes against each about when you last followed up, and why. Put follow-up dates in your calendar so that you don’t overlook this.
The Pareto principle applied to your offerings
The Pareto Principle – that 80% of our results come from 20% of our efforts – can be profitably applied to your offerings.
Most business owners invest an inordinate amount of time in offerings that:
a) Aren’t highly profitable
b) Don’t lead to other, more profitable offerings
c) Serve little strategic purpose.
Don’t let the squeaky wheel get the most oil. Implement a ‘minimum engagement fee’, below which you will not entertain.
Be strict with your process around client communications, repeatedly communicate this to clients, and always in their best interests, and ensure that you’re spending time where it’s valued: with clients who are paying well for it.
There are several different strategies you can employ to minimise contact with a client who is unnecessarily jeopardising your time and attention. But these start and end with boundaries.
It’s not enough to state your boundaries; you need to reinforce them. I had one client who kept calling me on a Saturday morning; another made a habit of calling late afternoon Fridays. Both stopped calling when I stopped answering their calls.
Becoming wise
Humans are very talented at filling time and the more time you have, the easier it is to fill it. But creativity loves constraints. The less time you have to run your business, the more you can sharpen your discernment and hone your focus.
It is not the hours invested that grows a business, it’s what you do with the time you have. In just 20 minutes, you can either write and send a proposal that lands a $10,000 job, or make pretty pictures in Canva.
Becoming wise doesn’t happen through reading a book or taking a course. It happens through challenging your thinking, making mistakes, reshaping your environment, backing yourself, and becoming clear on how you want to spend your precious time and focus.
Running your business in minimal hours isn’t easy. It’s hard to exercise self-restraint with emails that seem urgent. But learning how to run a profitable business in minimal hours can be a great first step in ensuring your business is sustainable and that they time and efforts you put in are being well-rewarded. In fact, it could be the smartest thing you’ve done in business yet.
Plan your year in 90-day sprints! Join us at Business Reset.
Business coaching, Values-based business
Smart business owners are excellent at creating immense stress through thinking. Lots of smart owners come to me skirting the edges of burnout, made worse by the fact that they can’t point to an external event that’s causing them stress.
On paper, everything appears dandy. Internally, they’re suffering under immense strain to
- Increase their revenue and profits
- Save the world
- Save the whales
- Get fit and healthy
- Prioritise wellbeing
- Be kind and generous, without giving everything away leaving you a hollow wreck
- Be intellectually challenged
- Enrol in that course/qualification/PhD you’ve been eyeing
- Get a good night’s sleep.
Smart business owners are too hard on themselves to label themselves Type As (“Surely I’m not good enough to be a Type A?!”) but clearly, their self-imposed expectations make the sky seem not high enough.
Get clear goddamnit!
To make matters worse, in the midst of a burn-out-existential-crisis, said Business Owner typically decides that they just need to Get Clear On What They Want, and everything’s coming up roses.
So ‘Get Clear!’ gets heaved atop the castle of expectations, another casualty in the pursuit of peace.
Business plans are rubbish
Typically, a crisis calls for a plan. Said Business Owner is convinced by some well-meaning friend that it’s the lack of business plan that’s the problem.
Except most business plans are rubbish: a relic from another era for an entirely different purpose – to raise capital and showcase the business to the board.
For agile owners, a traditional business plan makes no sense whatsoever, and could even be damaging, should the owner be sufficiently distracted by trying to cleave off parts of their round peg to fit the square hole.
A plan is useful when it’s used, amended, added to, reviewed – when it has the look of your favourite dog-earned, oil-splattered recipe.
A traditional business plan is none of these things. In a world of exponential change, a traditional business plan is a death knell.
Habits, rituals, routines
The only thing you can control is yourself. That includes what you do with your hours and minutes, but also your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, opinions and attitudes.
Your thoughts, beliefs and feelings are just as habitual as your habit of coffee first thing in the morning, or Netflix after dinner.
Feeling overwhelmed is a habit. As is feeling confused, worrying, seeking copious feedback on all decisions, or taking too much responsibility for things outside your control.
In the last 20 years, neuroscience has shown us that our brains are highly malleable and equipped to deal with the volatile, unpredictable vagaries of the twenty-first century. To use this, we must treat our thinking as habits to be either strengthened or redesigned.
You can change the way you think, the lens through which you view the world, and even the way you treat time – not as an enemy to be conquered, but as a friend.
Managing expectations
You might think that I’m now going to tell you to opt-out of the hustle and grind, find a forest, and spend your days listening to the sweet gurgle of the stream, fossicking for joy in each precious moment.
Alas, this is a fantasy for some, and neither practical nor appealing to others.
While I’m a huge fan of doing less admin, housework, volunteering, and all manner of other modern detritus that sucks my lifeforce, I don’t believe that opting out of modern society will reduce stress or overwhelm, for most of us anyway.
Instead, I propose:
- Getting on the ‘no train’
- Embracing ‘selfish’ as a compliment
- Prioritising thinking time
- Flexing your brain towards the many and varied possibilities of how you can exchange value for money
- Setting aligned goals that you actually care about
- Making action plans rather than business plans
- Prioritising regular time for activities that regulate your nervous system
Prioritising joy
Being successful is not the same as being happy. And while I’m pretty damn happy on holidays or while walking in the bush near my house, when the sun comes in sideways and has an extra quality that makes it distinctly winter, this isn’t enough to build a life around.
What I’m aiming for – and I guess you are too? – is to create success on my own terms, working for love and money.
And – here’s the clincher – to do it without creating stress, overthinking, or being so wedded to the outcomes of actions that nothing less than expectations being 100 per cent met will do.
The only thing you can control is how you fill your minutes and hours. The outcomes are not within your control.
What most people really need help with isn’t being successful in business: it’s being happy while being successful. After all, a successful business owner who’s unhappy doesn’t look like much of a success.
It’s taming the monkey mind to think less and focus instead on useful rituals, habits and routines. It’s sleeping soundly at night despite the ongoing, never-ending to-do list. It’s being okay with not knowing (the outcome, the future…). It’s being so fiercely committed to the things you care about that honoring these commitments is building self-love, self-trust, and deep self-satisfaction.
It’s divorcing work from suffering, work from dirge, work from obligation, and untangling productivity from self-worth. It’s prioritising joy in each minute, despite (despite, despite). It’s creating a new, twenty-first marriage between success and happiness.
Want to learn how? Join Audacious.
Business coaching
“Nowhere to run to baby, nowhere to hide,” sings Martha and the Vandellas. This is the point of accountability – it acts like an insurance policy – to do what you say you will do.
If you don’t follow through with your commitments, accountability will prompt you to do so.
And yet, people run. As a business coach, a part of which involves holding people accountable, I know this intimately. Together, the owner and I set their homework to do between sessions, much of which is initiated by the owner.
And still, I listen to people’s many and varied reasons why they didn’t do what they said they would do. Of course, this doesn’t apply to all clients. And it’s not something that I tolerate for very long with one-to-one business coaching clients.
Instead of repeatedly berating yourself, with your business coach or accountability buddy as your witness, it makes far more sense to focus on how your social conditioning and identity impacts your ability to follow through.
Why don’t we do what we say we want to do? Why do we know what we need to do, but don’t do it? This is the real work of coaching.
Eroding self-trust
You’ve told yourself you want to earn more. You’ve told yourself you want more: better-fit clients, more challenging work, more meaningful work, more creative, authentic marketing.
You’ve told yourself that you’ll turn off the laptop at 5pm every day, stop check your phone every minute, on the minute, and take a proper, work-free weekend.
So what happens when you don’t do any of this? You start to disbelieve yourself. You don’t trust yourself. You demonstrate this to yourself because your actions don’t line up with your intent.
This is one of the reasons why I’m not keen on the mainstream mindset movement – because too much focus on positive self-talk and affirmations, without the commensurate actions, can erode your self-trust over time.
Being in integrity
When you’re accountable, you take ownership. You’re an active participant in your life, not a passenger watching the scenery out the window.
Being in integrity means you take responsibility for yourself, and you don’t assume responsibility for other people. You have boundaries. It’s up to you to make your dreams come true and you’re acting accordingly.
Being accountable to other people is subtly showing you how to value your work – especially when you’re prioritising your own business development tasks, not paid client work. You’re valuing your future, rather than the immediate priorities of your hours and days.
You’re building self-trust in your own resourcefulness and abilities and demonstrating your self-worth to yourself. This is integrity in action.
Highlighting procrastination
The public nature of accountability – whether you’re accountable to one person or to a group – works quickly to highlight any procrastination. When you’re repeatedly saying you’ll do something, it soon becomes clear when you’ve been skirting this.
There are very real reasons why we procrastinate – research reveals that we procrastinate to avoid difficult feelings. When our work appears technically or emotionally difficult, we run, numb, and hide.
As business owners, we procrastinate from our most important work, by doing less important work, while telling ourselves that this is necessary, too. (We can successfully do this for years.)
As social animals, we care about the opinions of others; research shows we’re far more likely to follow through on a commitment when we share it with other people, as the threat of embarrassment motivates us. This is the value of accountability.
When accountability is misused
Paradoxically, it’s precisely the social nature of accountability that can make it problematic because, like all things, accountability can be misused.
The starting point in any relationship between a coach and coachee or an accountability pod is that the people involved are equal, with healthy boundaries and respect for each other.
Treating the person who holds you accountable as a master with whom you’re seeking to put yourself into a submissive role, wishing to be admonished, or admonishing and whipping yourself, is neither constructive nor healthy.
On the flip side, whoever is holding you accountable should not be punishing your lack of follow through with shame or embarrassment. This is an unhealthy relationship dynamic.
Normalising mistakes; building resilience
When we take responsibility for our mistakes and see setbacks for what they are, we’re more easily able to keep moving.
When a good rhythm of accountability is established, it’s easier for us to see when we’ve made a mistake or experienced a setback, without losing our perspective by catastrophising.
As we normalise mistakes and setbacks, we build our courage and capacity to take risks – both of which are necessary to grow our businesses.
Emotional resilience and regulation are part-and-parcel of self-employment. Over the years, I’ve learnt to normalise setbacks, mistakes and disappointments, experience my emotions more quickly, and get myself back into a productive, upbeat state of mind.
I’ve worked with many of my clients over a number of years. Within our Hustle & Heart program community, I’ve witnessed participants who dip out due to holidays or family illness or any number of other setbacks – and, most importantly, rejoin us to refocus and recommit to their business.
We witness each other demonstrating self-trust and integrity, which encourages us to do the same. And when big goals are achieved, one tiny chip at a time, one person’s victory becomes everyone’s. Joy is contagious, after all, so why wouldn’t we share it?
What to do when you don’t follow through
The beauty of accountability is that, while the public nature of it is necessary, much of accountability is self-directed: when you see you’re not following through, you course-correct.
So what does this look like? What happens, for example, when you share and declare the same task, week in, week out, and nothing is achieved?
You have options.
You need help. You’re procrastinating because it’s difficult (technically or emotionally). So get help. Seek advice from your fellow program participants. Outsource to an expert. Stop trying to grind on, alone.
Or, you like the idea of the thing more than the actual thing. This is a tricky one because big goals always involve tasks that are difficult, complex, boring or otherwise. But it’s quite possible that you’ve set yourself a goal which is not personally meaningful, or you haven’t made it personally meaningful. There’s nothing stopping you from removing this goal, or putting it on the “five year’s time” list.
Or, you need to set a timer, apply coffee, and do this first thing in the morning. So often, the task over which we’ve been procrastinatin takes no less than 15 minutes to complete. And yet the self-satisfaction, when done, is priceless.
Exercising your muscles
Over time, the daily and weekly practice of accountability exercises your muscles to help you become more self-directed, self-motivated, resilient and resourceful.
Building habits is a practice, not an event. It’s a million tiny decisions and actions that add up to big things. It’s the daily practice of choosing the most valuable and important thing to do, and not sweating the small stuff. It’s the weekly practice of making progress towards building leverage, growing your professional reputation, pitching and promotions, raising your visibility and growing your thought leadership.
Like all things of value, it’s not simple. It’s not easy. But it’s so very worth it.
Listen to Hold me Accountable! on the pod.
Want accountability? Want to build your own capacity to hold yourself accountable? Register interest in our Hustle & Heart flagship program.
