First Action Best Action

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With each passing day, going into my inbox feels more and more overwhelming.

There are messages that I love, like those from my current clients, people who want to hire me, and my loved ones. Then there are the messages from people pitching me to redo my website, create an app for my business, or telling me how they can fix my business.

To mitigate this feeling of overwhelm, I generally only look at my inbox a few times a day. (I will cover how to manage your inbox more effectively in a future episode.)

Even with the onslaught of so many messages, there is one person from whom I love receiving emails. Some days they send me as many as 20 emails and I always open them first.

You should also be receiving emails from this person!

This is how you can get them to email you regularly AND why you too will look forward to hearing from them.

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Recently, at the start of one of my client coaching calls, my client "Deborah" said, "I want you to look at my website. I want to know if I have finally gotten it right."

As a little background, for the previous three weeks we had been going back and forth via emails as she was updating her website.

She was really excited for me to see all the progress she had made. She finally felt ready to share the new website with her audience and with the wider world.

So it makes sense that she wanted to know if it was "right".

The reality is that when we are trying to make changes of any sort, whether in our business or in other areas of life, asking if something is "right" is probably the wrong question to ask.

Instead there is a better way to evaluate your progress that both evaluates what you've just done AND will guide you on what you should do next.

This is that approach...

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I am a huge fan of goals.

Goals serve two purposes. First, they give us a clear direction to shoot for. Second, they give us a way to measure our progress so we can recalibrate our actions and get to where we want to go.

A number years ago I started adding a phrase to the end of all my goal statements.

It is a simple phrase that has changed the way I work.

You can tell what the phrase is from the title of the episode, but I think it is also important to understand why it is such a useful phrase. Understanding the why behind the phrase will make it an even more powerful tool.

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My business partner and I were self-employed in our early twenties doing full time ministry work and making just enough to get by.

There were a number of occasions when people were amazingly supportive of the work we were doing. People would buy one of our $15 tshirts for $1000. (That really happened more than once.) Or they would shake our hands after a presentation and slip us a $100 bill.

I am now successful enough that I am able to do the same sorts of things to support the people in my life.

A few weeks ago I found out a friend wasn't starting the fall semester of her architecture degree because she was short of money. As I was trying to give her a gift to allow her to start the fall semester she said, "I can't do that. This is supposed to be hard!"

I'm guessing you are like my friend, thinking that you should have to "work really hard" to earn your way.

That isn't actually the case. Here is my reflection on what I think we should and, most importantly, should not do when trying to achieve success.

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My calls with one-on-one clients usually start with them sharing all of the details about what they are currently struggling with in their business or life. Where the problem is complex, this description can go on for a number of minutes. It includes details about what is going on, plans that aren't working out, confusion they are facing, and the emotions they are feeling.

One of the best parts of working with clients for a long period of time is watching them integrate the tools and techniques I am teaching them into their own process.

I have a handful of clients who, after going through a debriefing of their issues, will pause, take a deep breath, and then say, "And now you are going to ask me…" which is followed by a question.

And they are exactly right.

They know the precise question I am going to ask.

It is a simple question, but it is also powerful.

This one question will help you to clarify the problems you are facing AND most importantly help you to realize what you don't need to be worried about.

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One of my favorite albums (and yes I listened to it on vinyl) was the children's album "Free To Be You And Me". One of the songs was penned by poet and storyteller Shel Silverstein. It is called "Helping".

The final verse goes:

And some kind of help is the kind of help That helping's all about And some kind of help is the kind of help We all can do without

It speaks clearly to the idea that sometimes help is wonderful and sometimes other people's help actually gets in the way. I often refer to the latter variety as "kind-hearted incompetence".

In the mid-2010s there was an absolutely beautiful (and sadly short-run) television show called "Going Deep with David Rees". In each episode David tackled the best way to solve one simple problem, like how to make ice, swat a fly, tie a shoe, shake hands, or open a door.

Each episode was dedicated to only one of these topics.

David is a beautiful mix of curiosity, kindness, and obsessiveness. Because of this, each episode turned into a reflection on what it means to be human and to be kind. (So much so I bought the first season on DVD just to show my sister the episode on how to pet a dog.)

In the episode on how to wash dishes there is a long segment dedicated to how to load a dishwasher. In case you weren't aware (and I somehow doubt that), people have strong opinions on the best way to load a dishwasher and they are willing to let you know how they do it and why it is the best.

In the middle of this conversation David made the most beautiful statement about helping. The statement provides guidance on how to offer "the kind of help that helping is all about" and not "the kind of help that we can do without".

Understanding this concept will not only make you a better helper to the people in your life, but it will also teach you the best ways to ask for help so you can avoid kind-hearted incompetence barging into your life.

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If you were to tell any of my childhood teachers that one of the main reasons my clients come to me is for help with creating systems, they simply wouldn't believe you.

As a child (and for a good portion of my adult life), you certainly wouldn't have described me as organized or systematized. My homework was always late. I regularly lost important notes. In grade school my desk was frequently so messy that I would have to stay behind during recess to clean it up.

My daily life looks very different now as I have found my way to creating and maintaining efficient systems.

The funny thing is that people assume I was like this in childhood, when that couldn't be farther from the truth. Today my clients think I am organized with everything. Everything has an order and place. Everything gets done on time and comes out exactly the way I want it.

It is true I am way more organized and systematized than I used to be, but my working life is far from perfect and things go wrong all the time. My systems don't always work and I often lose my way.

But that is fine, because the goal of my systems isn't to solve all my problems or to ensure that everything goes smoothly.

Instead I have a very different goal for my systems. By aiming for something other than perfection, my systems have had a huge impact on my productivity, even when everything goes wrong.

This is how I approach systems so they are working for me and I am not being controlled by them.

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Recently one of my clients was sharing her frustration about how hard she was working.

It wasn't that she minded the hard work, but it felt as if all the hours she was putting in were not actually moving her business forward.

AND she was right. The tasks she was working on were not producing any sales in the short term, so they weren't fulfilling her mission of using her gifts to make an impact in the world.

I acknowledged her (justifiable) frustration and shared my perspective on the situation:

Working on building infrastructure in your business is hard because it isn't fun or sexy, and it's not about short term success. BUT it is work that is essential for long term success!

In this episode I explain why infrastructure is so important in our lives and our business and how you can create the best infrastructure to support your goals.

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I'm an early morning person.

For my social life this means that I am normally the first person to fade during a night out on the town.

The people in my life are aware of this and other than some good natured ribbing about how I am a "party pooper" are supportive of me being the first one to head home.

The only time this becomes a problem is when I am the one hosting the party and can't be the first one in bed.

At the same time, I want to be a good host, but without actually telling everyone one that they need to go home because I want to go to bed!

Years ago I realized there was a simple strategy to get everyone to leave without having to be explicit. When it was time to clear out my place, I would join a conversation with some friends and bring up a certain topic. Within five minutes the people I was talking to would wish me good night and head home.

I'd then move on to the next group of people and do the same thing.

Fifteen minutes later almost everyone had cleared out, making it easy to end the night and head to bed.

The topic I would bring up is one of the most taboo topics in our society. It's not money, politics, or religion.

Instead it's an emotion that we all feel BUT one that people want to talk about the least. Knowing what this emotion is and what you can do to avoid it is essential to your happiness and success.

This podcast episode is about that tricky emotion and how you can avoid it.

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The American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson often talks about how children are natural born scientists in the way that they are constantly experimenting.

They think, "What happens if I hit this wooden spoon on the ground? On this pot? On the family cat?" With each strike they are learning about the world.

As time passes and we age, we do less and less experimentation. Instead we try to learn how to do things "the right way". We create plans that have the best chance of succeeding. We aim to be super efficient and productive. We follow the directions!

Doing tasks in the optimal way is a great choice for businesses and our lives, but at a certain point it also stifles opportunities for us to create and grow.

Because this is the case I set aside three hours a week to be child-like and do experiments.

Although little usually comes of most of my experiments, this time is some of my most valuable each week.

Even if you don't do three hours of experiments a week, I think you should be experimenting. This is why I experiment, how I experiment, and how you can add it to your productivity tool set.

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