What I’d like to talk about with you guys today is this concept of going further, faster and what you need to do in order to go further, faster. I want to start off by asking you a question. What comes to mind when you think about weeds? I’m looking outside right now at my garden, and because of the shelter in place thing, our gardeners have not been coming and things are looking pretty weedy out there right now. Maybe you have found yourself in the exact same predicament. They grow fast. They’re hard to kill. Growth, we think of weeds. If you don’t uproot them, they come back. Absolutely. They need to go. They require a lot of time and energy.
There are two ways that we know how to get rid of weeds. You can either trim the top or you can eliminate the root. What happens to a weed when you just trim the top? What happens if you are just continually trimming the top? I remember when I was a kid, one of my jobs as a kid was to go out, and my dad had this manual weed wacker, so it was this giant shovel. To be honest, I have no clue why… this was the old days. I don’t know why a parent would give their kid that, but it was this giant thing that I had to swing. It was super long. It was this six-foot-long pole, really razor sharp bottom. I would basically just trim back the weeds all day long. That’s exactly right. When we do that, they grow back. They continuously grow back if all we’re doing is trimming the top.
How does it feel when they keep growing back? Overwhelming. Frustrating. Exactly. It’s frustrating and it’s also exhausting because you’re in this continuous place of taking action and you’re just like boom, boom, boom, boom, constantly addressing the very tops of the weeds as opposed to eliminating the root.
Well, problems in your business are a lot like weeds. We’ve got these surface symptoms and they’re all popping up because beneath the soil, beneath what we can see to the naked eye, lies a core problem. These surface symptoms are especially insidious because they can look different. If we look at this weed over here, we have this surface symptom, which is the yellow flower, and that looks very different than, say, the green leaf, which looks different than this other… the dried out dandelion, where you can blow it and the little seeds go everywhere.
What we want to make sure that we’re doing is that we are stopping ourselves from staying in this overwhelming, exhausting, busy place of trimming away the surface symptoms and that we’re really digging in and getting to the core problem. If you identify the core problem in your business, you’re going to be able to completely eliminate the cause of your surface symptoms and prevent them from cropping up again and again. Eliminating the core problem makes you feel capable, confident and you’re going to make a whole lot more money. But, but, but, but to identify your core problem, you have to be still and you have to be fully present to the situation at hand, which feels incredibly uncomfortable.
Why is it so uncomfortable for entrepreneurs to be fully present to a problem? Because we want to, what? What do we want to do? What are entrepreneurs inherently skilled at? What are we born to do all day long, 24/7? Every time we see a problem, what do we want to do? We want to fix it. We want to solve it. We don’t like the feeling of being in this place where we have to confront a problem and we have to be still. It feels uncomfortable. We’re actually not in danger. A lion is not going to come and chomp our heads off, but it feels uncomfortable.
And solving problems feels good because when we’re solving problems, we feel busy, we feel productive and we enjoy the feeling of knowing the answer. That’s why you see in tons of free Facebook groups, people are asking their most intimate business questions and they’re saying, “What should I do? A customer just said this? How do I do this?” Dah, dah, dah. They just want to know an answer. They just want to hop right into that problem-solving mode.
And why does being fully present to a problem feel so uncomfortable? The reality is that being fully present to a problem feels bad because we have to be in that place of uncertainty. We have to not know. We have to be still.
Sometimes, if we slow down, if we allow ourselves to do the things that we need to do, if we allow ourselves to not know, to be uncertain and to be still, then we fall into the greatest entrepreneur mental trap of all time. We make the problem mean something about us. Mental trap: what my problems mean about me.
The reality is that problems don’t mean anything about you. They actually have nothing to do with you. Problems are not bad; they’re just an opportunity to make something better. The reality is that when we get into this space where we are feeling like we’re not good enough, like we’re an imposter, like we’re a failure, we start to have a lot of shame around those feelings. When we start to have shame, then we start to retreat and we start to want to hide and then we don’t want to talk about our problems. We don’t want to raise our hand and get the help we need because we built out in our heads this whole story of what having this problem means. When, in fact, these problems are normal.
I can show you the most successful entrepreneur on the planet and whoever that is, I don’t even know who that is, but if you can think of someone, a super successful entrepreneur, I guarantee that at one point in time, their sales have plateaued. They set a goal, they didn’t meet it. They ran some ads and they didn’t perform the way that they wanted to. That entrepreneur is extremely successful. That entrepreneur is good enough. They’re not an imposter and they’re certainly not a failure.
The good news is that inside of Scale with Success®, we transform exhausted symptom-trimmers into successful problem-solvers. You will transform into a successful problem-solver inside Scale with Success® while you build your evergreen sales machine, while you launch your evergreen sales machine and while you keep your evergreen sales machine built.
Today, I want to walk you through a very simple four-step process that will help you become the successful problem-solver you were born to be. When you are a successful problem-solver, you can overcome anything that comes in your way. You become almost unstoppable. You look forward to seeing problems because you can’t wait to dig in, figure out what’s wrong and, of course, fix it.
The very first step of this four-step process is to actually take the time to acknowledge that problems are good. Go ahead, write that down. Step number one, Acknowledge that problems are good. You develop skills by solving problems, not by avoiding them.
If you love reading biographies as much as I do, then you know that the greatest leaders of our time have overcome the greatest problems. What either business leader or historical leader or community leader do you really hold in a high regard? Whether it is Oprah, love it. Michelle Obama. Ellen, Sara Blakely, Richard Branson. These are all people that have overcome tremendous problems in their lives. They did not spend their time avoiding problems and beating themself up about problems and making those problems mean something about them. Instead, they tackled those problems head on. The first step of that was actually acknowledging that the problems are good.
The truth is, you know who makes a really crappy leader? Someone who constantly avoids problems and, as a result, never learns how to overcome them. I’m sure, in our head, we can all think of someone in our life who is constantly blaming other people, blaming other people as opposed to confronting the problem, taking responsibility and meeting things head on.
And so, the second step that we want to do in order to become a successful problem-solver after we, number one, acknowledge that problems are a good thing, the second step is that we want to identify the core problem.
Now, this is where things get painful. Just going to say it. This is where things get really painful because… There’s a really great book. It’s right here. I made sure to have it on my desk. This is what I am always telling my mastermind clients from Altitude to make sure that they read. Our team has read it. This book, when I read it a couple years ago, totally changed my life. It’s called The Road Less Stupid. Essentially, the argument is that business owners spend a lot of their time solving problems, but they’re actually solving the wrong problems. It’s like they find themselves in a space where they’re constantly trimming away these superficial symptoms over and over, just like on top, like the flowers, the leaves, all that. They’re just trimming it over and over and over, instead of taking the time to make sure that they’ve identified the core problem. Entrepreneurs don’t kill their businesses because they’re not solving problems; they kill their businesses because they waste all of their time, money, and energy on solving the wrong problems.
Here’s an example. You may find yourself in a situation, I know I have definitely found myself in this situation from time to time, it’s totally normal, where you’re in your business and you find yourself in a place where your sales have plateaued. The first thing that we think about when our sales have plateaued is, “How do I solve this problem?” Like, “Oh! Sales have plateaued. That’s a problem. I’m going to fix it.” The first thing off the bat is you’re thinking about, “My sales have plateaued, so I’m going to get more traffic. I’m going to grow my Facebook group. I’m going to redo my webinar.” Choice D is none of the above.
Which is the correct answer? My sales have plateaued, so I am going to A) get more traffic B) grow my Facebook group C) redo my webinar or D) none of the above.
Yes, I love this. If you said, “None of the above,” which is D, you’re right. We don’t know what to do yet because we haven’t identified the problem. Do we know why the sales have plateaued? No, we don’t know yet. We know that that has happened, but we don’t know what is causing it. A sales plateau is a symptom and we want to identify the core problem that is causing that symptom.
The question is how do we identify what’s causing the symptom? How do we identify the root cause? Looking at the data will always reveal what’s wrong and what’s wrong is usually not what you think it is. Let’s say, for a second, that we’ve gone through the KPIs and we’ve determined that the root cause of our sales plateau is that we do indeed have a traffic plateau. Now, this is not a guess; this is because we fully reviewed the KPIs, we see that our webinar conversion is where it needs to be, our webinar registration page is converting the way it needs to be, our email open rate is converting the way it needs to be. We’ve looked, we’ve fully examined all of the data, and we’ve determined that, in fact, our traffic has been the same. Then you know that you have a traffic problem. So, redoing your webinar won’t help and neither will growing your Facebook group because we know that we have a traffic problem. This part over here is really important and I want to circle back to it and touch on it.
At the end of phase three, there is a lesson that shows you how to fill out a KPI chart. That KPI chart should be filled out every single week. Whether you’re running ads or whether you’re not running ads, or you’re filling it out or someone on your team is filling it out. There is no short-cutting it. You can’t run your webinar for three days and be like, “Okay, now I’m going to fill out the KPI chart.” No, it hasn’t been seven full days yet. You want to make sure that you’re filling it out every seven days. You or someone on your team, doesn’t matter. But the reason why we want to do that is because we get into almost this really comfortable loop of solving problems.
The reason why it’s so helpful to get outside perspective when it comes to identifying the correct problem is because we like to identify problems that are going to be easy for us to solve. An example of that is if you’re really great at growing your Facebook group, then 9 times out of 10 you’re going to be like, “The problem is that I need to get more people in the Facebook group. And that’s great because I know exactly how to do that, so I’m just going to do more of that.” But it’s like we have to get that outside perspective, which comes from the coaches asking questions over and over again to help kind of lift up the wagon from the ruts from the trail and reposition it into the right direction. It’s like we have to literally rewire our thought pathways and get us focused and pointed in the right direction.
Step number three is that after we’ve correctly identified the problem, after we have reviewed all the KPIs, after we’ve determined that, yes, in fact, traffic is the problem, the next step is that, and this is another one that really trips people up, we want to fully consider all the possible solutions. The worst thing that you can do here is attach yourself to a solution before you fully consider all your options.
This can look like, for example, going into our client Facebook group and saying, “Hey, so guys, I looked at all my data. I have determined through looking at the data that I need to get more traffic. So, can someone tell me how to run my ads?” Well, running ads is one possible solution. That is one possible solution to address traffic, but before we latch onto that solution, we want to make sure that we fully consider all of the options to see what makes the most sense for you. One of the great things about this program is that we can really help people based on what is going on in their business, because for some people it might make sense, “Yes! Of course! Jump right into ads,” dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. For other people, it might make sense to do something different, to maybe not do paid traffic, to do organic traffic. But we won’t know that unless we’re fully considering all the options.
The first solution that you think of is likely not the best solution, but it’s probably in your comfort zone. That’s why you chose it first. As a small business with a really lean team, you need to make sure that you are only focusing on solutions that will provide maximum impact. Those comfort-zone solutions that you’re thinking of are not going to make much of a dent, but it will feel good to implement them because you’ll feel like you’re taking action, and taking action is comfortable. What we want to do is we want to get out of the comfort zone. We want to get away from those comfort-zone solutions that keep us in our comfort zone, which, in this case, is a sales plateau.
If you are experiencing a sales plateau right now, yeah, it might be traffic. Yeah, it might be a webinar conversion issue. I don’t know what it might be. But one thing is for sure, it’s that you’re definitely in your comfort zone because being in a plateau is the same thing happening over and over again. Whether it’s a good habit or a bad habit, it’s comfortable. It feels good because you’re used to doing it over and over and over again.
This is where we really need to practice sitting still for a little bit. It’s when you have to answer all those annoying questions that the coaches keep asking you over and over again. It’s really hard because I know you want to jump into action, but jumping into action is not solving anything.
The other book that I highly recommend is this one called Stillness Is the Key. This is a great book that goes into the details of how so many leaders have found that the key to really solving these big problems only happens when we allow ourselves to slow down, to be still, and to fully consider all of the options. That’s something that does take a bit of effort initially but, just like anything else, following these four steps that I’m laying out for you today is going to eventually become a habit.
Number one, acknowledge problems are good; number two, identify the problem; and number three, fully consider all the possible solutions, only then, after doing one, two and three, do you get to step number four, which is create and commit to a plan, and here’s the important part, and to follow through. All of the, “Should I do this? Should I not do this? Is this going to work? Is it not going to work?” All of that thinking and questioning needs to happen before the commitment is made. But once you commit to a solution, you cannot second-guess it. That slows down everything. Whether you are a team of one or you’re leading a big team, once that commitment is made, everyone’s on the same page.
I can speak on my team. Before we make a decision, sometimes there’s a lot of back and forth and sometimes there’s a lot of disagreement and some people think we should do it one way and some people think that we should do it another way. And so, while we are fully considering all of the solutions before that commitment is made, we’re spending a lot of time discussing and debating and thinking about, “Well, which one would be the best plan?” But once we make that commitment, once we made that decision that this is what we’re going to do, even those who previously disagreed with it, they get on board and they’re like, “Okay, this is the plan. We commit to it. We’re all in.”
There is a lot of time that is wasted when we start to get into this drama of like, “Is that the right decision? I don’t know if that was a good thing. Should I have done that? Should I not have done that?” No, there’s no time for that. If you’re on the battlefield, you don’t have time to second-guess stuff. You’re going. You’re going. You’re moving forward. Afterwards, then it’s time to reflect and think about like, “What happened? Let’s do a debrief. Let’s consider do we need to alter the plan moving forward? Do we not?” but initially, you have to fully commit to it and spend your time executing.
You must fully commit to following through with your proposed solution and carrying out the plan to full completion. You don’t stop until the plan is done. It has to be completed by the time that you specified it would be completed. If we say, “We’re having a lead flow issue, so we’re going to come up with a plan to address that lead flow. And it’s going to be fully implemented within the next 30 days or within the next two days or within the next 90 days,” or whatever the timeframe may be. And then you fully commit to it. There’s no time to second-guess because you’re executing. And then you’re able to sit back and reflect. It is tough to do and it is so tempting to do so many plans at the same time.
This is a time when it’s time to stop listening to a gajillion business podcasts and to stop following everyone in the world who has all of these different opinions, and to get really focused. If you want to focus, you are the only person who can take responsibility for being in that place of focus. You’re in charge of that. You get to decide whether you’re focused or not focused. Nobody is subscribing you to that email. Nobody is following that Instagram account for you. You’re choosing to do it or to not do it.
If the plan doesn’t work, you tweak the plan, not the goal. We had a big conversation about this at the last mastermind retreat. We also talked about this at the last Scale with Success Summit also. We talked about this idea of setting a goal, not reaching it, and then lowering it the next month. And then you don’t reach that, and so you lower the goal for the following month. And then you don’t reach that, and so you lower it. You just keep lowering your expectations and your goals. And then by the end of the year, you’re like, “Wow, I really did not set out to do what I wanted to do.” That’s because you kept lowering the bar for yourself.
It’s good to set a goal that you initially don’t hit. Having a problem doesn’t mean anything about you. Not meeting a goal doesn’t mean anything about you. Has nothing to do with you. It’s all about the actions and what problems need to be solved and all that kind of thing. A lot of times, we want to avoid that feeling of not meeting a goal and so we continually lower the bar because it feels uncomfortable. It’s okay to set a goal “I’m going to make 15 K this month.” And then you swing and it’s a miss. You make 8 K, not 15 K. Well, guess what? The next month, come February, the goal needs to stay the same. Still 15 K. It was a swing and a miss, the 8 K that first month, so then you go to the next one. Swing and a miss, 12 K. Well, guess what? At least you made a little more progress. It’s still swing and a miss. The following month, do not then lower your goal to 12 K.
If your first plan to solve the problem doesn’t work, do not make it mean that you’re not good enough, that you’re an imposter, that you’re a failure. So many people have lowered their expectations. If you don’t hit a goal, hold yourself accountable. Holding yourself accountable does not mean beating yourself up. It doesn’t mean starting to spiral into a place of self-pity and poor me and all of that. You just keep swinging until you hit it.
The key to hitting it is to make a plan because what we don’t want to do is get into this place where we are like, “Well, you know what? Guess what? I’m just going to hope and pray. I didn’t meet my goal this month… ” And listen, I’ve been there. I’ve totally done this. That’s why I’m talking about all this because I totally have done this before. So, like, “Oh man, I missed 15 K this month, but I’m going to set it again next month and I think it’s going to be better. Come on, guys. We can do it. I think it’s going to be better.” But guess what? Why would it be better? There’s no new plan. There’s no new thing to implement. There’s no new initiative to move us forward.
If your traffic is stagnant, then something has to be done to improve it. If you determine, by looking at the data, that the reason why your sales have plateaued is because your traffic has plateaued, if you want to double your sales, well, then you’ve got to double your traffic. Doubling your traffic is not going to happen by hoping that it happens; it’s going to be made by fully considering all the options and then by determining what plan is the best path forward.
And so, what we want to do is that whenever we find ourselves in the situation we’re like, “I’m not good enough, I’m an imposter, I’m going to fail, I’m a failure,” those are all thoughts that are allowing us to play the role of a victim inside of the drama triangle, which is something that we talked about at the last summit and I also have a podcast episode that talks more about the drama triangle.
We want to get ourselves out of victim mode and into creator. We want to stay focused on what you are trying to create. You’ll notice that the coaches do a really good job of that because sometimes we’ll get a post and it’s like, “I’m just feeling so defeated right now. I don’t know what to do,” dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Right away, what do the coaches do? They’re like, “What are you trying to create? What’s the goal? Where are you going?” because we can’t make a plan until we know what the goal is.
If your first plan to solve the problem doesn’t work, do not make it mean, “It’s all my coach’s fault. She wants me to fail. It’s all my team’s fault. They just won’t do the right thing. It’s all my audience’s fault. They’re just broke and they’ll never buy.”
How many of us have blamed our audience, been like, “They just don’t get it. They just don’t buy. They have no money.” Well, that’s not the case because the next day, you see them on Facebook posting about their trip to Disneyland and it’s like, “Well, obviously they had some money.” They just chose not to spend it with you. When we’re having these kinds of thoughts, we’re in the role of persecutor. We’re looking for someone outside of ourselves to blame.
Again, how do we move out of being in that persecutor mode into creator mode? We stay focused on what we’re trying to create. We redirect our thoughts from, “Who am I going to blame? Whose fault is it?” to, “Wait a minute. What’s the goal at hand? What am I trying to create? I’m trying to double my traffic. okay. And doubling my traffic means instead of 250 hits, I want to get 500 hits. That’s my goal, 500 hits. Okay. Now, I’m back on track.” We have to constantly redirect ourselves. You can create anything that you want as long as you stay out of the drama and focus on the goal. Then, after that, you look for another problem because that’s what we do.
We all have problems right now in our business, just like from this initial slide that we looked at the beginning, where we looked at this little diagram in the beginning. We all have problems in our business. Unless we really set a goal… We want to make sure that we set a goal that allows us to stretch. The goal is not what you did last month. It’s not what you did last year. That doesn’t make any sense. That’s going to keep all your problems covered up. It’s going to kind of feel good because you’re like, “Oh look, I don’t have any problems. I don’t know why I’m not making money. Everything’s good.”
Everything’s pretty because you’re trimming away the weeds, but guess what lies beneath? Whole bunch of wormy things, insects, creatures. Maybe you have a groundhog or a mole eating away at your roots. I don’t know. Got a lot of things under there, but you don’t know what those things are until you’ve really stretched the goal. And so, then you can see like, “Whoa! Now, I get it. Now, I see all the problems.” When you’re outside, and you guys might remember doing this as a kid or maybe you do it now, where you’re outside and you lift up a really big rock and then all of a sudden, you’re like, “Whoa!” There’s all these bugs and things underneath the rock. But you don’t know until you lift up the rock, until that’s revealed. And so, it’s a really good thing to be able to spot those problems as long as you don’t allow yourself to get sucked into that drama cycle.
What I want to do now is I want you to take a pen and a paper. I want you to spend five minutes telling or writing about a time when you feel like you are in this place where you are setting goals and you’re continually lowering them and lowering them and lowering them, when you have allowed yourself… and maybe it’s not a goal for your business; maybe it’s an expectation for your team. Maybe you’ve laid out an expectation for your team, something for your team to do, and they haven’t hit it and so then you lower their goal. You’re like, “Oh, they didn’t hit that? Okay, I better lower it. That must have been too hard. Oh, they didn’t hit that? Okay, I’m going to lower it.” And you just keep on lowering it.
I want you to take five minutes to write about that. The question is “How have I lowered goals or expectations for myself or my team or for my clients?”
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