#059 Making Important Decisions in Your Business
Do you struggle to make decisions in your business?
Procrastination much?
Confused about all the things?
Successful people make decisions and move on.
In this episode, I share how to stop overthinking your decision making and move towards your goals.
If you’re ready to make a decision to get the support you need in your business to scale to 10k+ months, connect with me here:
https://thesarahleather.com/contact/
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Transcript
Do you struggle with making decisions in your business? Because the reality is if you have goals, if there’s things you want to achieve in your business, you’ve just got to get better at making decisions. I don’t think there’s anything that holds us back more than staying in the confusion of not making a decision, of doing what we call the “indulgence of indecision”, of sitting in that place of procrastination and just going around and around and around in circles. And you’ve just got to get better at making decisions and moving on. Successful people make decisions fast. They know that they won’t always make the best decision and that they might mess up. They might fail. They might trip themselves up, but they have so much more information to keep moving. If you think of a big ocean liner, a big ship in the ocean, and let’s just say, it’s stopped, it is anchored, or it is parked up somewhere in the ocean and it’s facing a certain direction and it wants to turn around and go in a different direction. What does it need to do first? It just needs to get moving. It needs to get moving first, course correct, and then it can move in a different direction.
One of my favourite analogies though, is talking about using your satnav in your car. So, let’s imagine you are in a country that has massive, big roundabouts, and you’ve got a load of noisy kids in the back of the car, and you are on this roundabout, and you are going around and around and around. And the satnav is not giving you any information. It’s just, showing, just stay on the roundabout, just keep going around and around and around. It’s really hot. And the kids are complaining, and you want to get to your destination. You really, really just want to get there and go for that swim or do something nice. You’ll want to get out of the car. But the thing is the satnav is not helping you. What do you need to do to get to your destination? You need to just pick and exit off the roundabout. And it doesn’t really matter which one you pick. You just pick whichever one sort of maybe feels like the right one, but you have no real evidence that you are leaving on the right exit, but you’ve got to get off that roundabout and start driving in a direction for the satnav to kick in and tell you that maybe you are going the wrong way and you need to turn around and go back and get off a different exit. But you have that information and that’s what’s really important that you’ve got to get moving. You’ve got to make a decision so that you can get the information that you need to get to where you want to go. And it’s no different in business. So, anything that you don’t have clarity on, you probably need to make a decision writing pros and cons lists. I don’t find overly helpful because then you get stuck in like, oh, well there’s this pro and this con and I really can’t. Yeah, there’s more pros than cons, but I still don’t know if it’s the right decision to make.
So, for an example, if you’re growing a team in your business, let’s imagine you’ve got a team member has been trained up and is a really good member of your team, but imagine every single thing they do in your business, that they come to you and say like, oh, I’m not sure if I should do this or this. I’m not sure what to do here. Would you prefer that they just make a decision and then maybe not always do exactly the right thing, but actually learn how to grow as a team member, then coming to you every single time they need a decision on something. There are going to be mistakes and fails in business. We fail our way to success. If we’re not willing to feel the discomfort of maybe making a wrong decision, gathering that information, course correcting and moving on, well then, we’re going to stay stuck for a very long time. Just making decisions is always the best thing for your business, making a decision and carrying on. And when you make that decision, decide that it’s going to be the very best decision you could make and look for evidence of why it’s a great decision.
I know in the past, major decisions in my life such as buying cars, buying houses, I’ve always had some degree of buyer’s remorse. A few weeks later, we’re going, oh, maybe I should have kept looking or looked at a different this, that, or the other. And that’s just our brain’s way of really questioning ourselves. And it’s not useful. But, if you make an intention that you are just going to make a decision, you’re going to make the best decision. You are going to just choose something, and you are going to carry on and you are going to look only for evidence that you’ve made the best decision that you could at the time and keep moving forwards and stop looking backwards. We so often go to our past and look for evidence of things that didn’t work in the past, but we don’t live in the past. We live in the present, looking forward to the future. So, I will often ask myself what does the future me, who’s the CEO of a really successful business, do when I was on my journey to becoming a six figure entrepreneur. I would continually ask myself, what would six figure Sarah say in this situation, if a friend would send me a text message saying, “Hey, I’m in town, any chance you’re free for a coffee?” Well, first of all, I learned not to have my phone on all day long when I was working in my office in town. And secondly, I would ask myself, what would six figure Sarah do? And six figure Sarah would reply saying, “thanks so much, that would be really great. I’m working today, but I’m free on Saturday morning, does that suit you?” And then I’d turn my phone off and I’d look at it in the evening when I was no longer working. So, that’s what six figure Sarah would do. For you, look at your next income goal and go to that person and ask them (they’ve got to that goal already), what would they do in this situation? What’s a decision they could make now and move on.
So, focusing on your goals, focusing on the future, the you that’s reached that next level in business is a great place to go to. Not back to the past. The past does have information for you, but it’s usually not helpful when it comes to making decisions. And normally you use it as a way to beat yourself up and give yourself a hard time about why you can’t make this decision now, because very often it is fear running the show. It is the fear part of your brain. It’s that emotion of fear that is keeping you stuck in making a decision, because you tell yourself the stories of when things didn’t work in the past. So, if you make that, you know, the wrong decision, now you’re going to feel that fear. You’re going to feel really uncomfortable. You’re going to fail, and that’s terrible. That’s an awful thing to happen, where it’s often the best thing that can happen, but nobody wants to fail. Nobody wants to feel fear. You want it all to be great and happy, but it’s not like that. It’s 50/50. So, it’s just not useful to be looking for it to be comfortable, for it to feel familiar. And yet, very often it’s just because it is unfamiliar, you’re doing something new. You’re moving forward to a place that you haven’t been before. And it feels really uncomfortable because it’s just new. It’s something I often used to just say to myself like, this is just new. It’s just new territory. I haven’t been here before. It’s kind of feel uncomfortable for a bit and then I’m going to get used to it and then I’m going to up-level again and then we’re going to go through it all again. And that’s amazing, that’s the best thing that could happen. The reason why I really encourage all my clients to do regular CEO debriefs in their business, like I do one at the end of every week, the end of every month. I used to do them all the time after a sales consultation, after doing a workshop or some training to really develop myself as the CEO of my business. And that’s just asking these three questions regularly; what’s working and how did you celebrate, it’s really important. That second part about how did you celebrate to really anchor in those wins of what’s working. The second question is what didn’t go so well? That is another way of saying failures. What didn’t go so well and what did you learn? Cause there’s always really powerful stuff to be learned. And then thirdly, what needs to change? What needs to change next time you’re doing this, next time you are selling this thing or marketing this thing.
So, asking great questions is really helpful for moving yourself forward and making decisions. And I do that with my self-coaching every day when I use my steer process, it’s my way of really coaching myself every day. It’s the way I coach my clients, the way I help my clients to coach themselves and coach their clients. And it really gets out the thoughts that are in my head, out of the head onto paper and just really holding them up to the light and go like, okay, is that really true? Do I have any control over this? If you have no control over it, let it go. It’s very often wrapped up in other people’s behaviours or something. You just get to choose what you think about it, and you know, ask yourself, what am I worried about? What am I worried about making this decision? Or what am I worried about in this situation? And just really looking at all of those. Is it true? Do I have any control over it? Well, I just let it go. And then what am I not making a decision about? I often like to call them the word incompletions, things aren’t complete when you haven’t made a decision about something. And once a decision is made, I’m just doing one thing. What’s one thing I can do right now. Like, if you decide to hire somebody to do something for you, could you make a decision right there and then just to reach out to them, make an appointment, move forward. Moving on.
I want to say a little note here about the idea factory that so many of us multi passionate entrepreneurs have going on inside our head’s day after day, of all the new ideas that are coming up, because what happens is that those new ideas involve a lot more decisions, so many new decisions. Or, if I created this new program, what would I call it? How long would it be? How much would it cost? Who would it be for? When will I start it? Well, what will happen to the programs I’ve already got running? And there’s so many more decisions that will go on with that, but our brains get excited over new things. We love new things, the things we are doing for a long time that actually work very often, don’t feel that exciting, but our business doesn’t need to feel exciting all the time. And we get to choose what we feel excited about. And every single new thing you create in your business needs its own marketing and sales system behind it. So, the new things very often become not so shiny and new and exciting after a few weeks. When I get a new idea that would involve making lots and lots of decisions, I’ll just write it down and then I’ll put it away for a couple of weeks. And if I’m still excited about it in a couple of weeks’ time, I might take some action on it then, but I’m not going to use up my brain space, making all those decisions because it’s very often at the detriment or making something else more complicated. It often messes other things up. So just watch those new ideas because you know who you are, you multi passionate people. I seem to attract them and it’s just so much more fun, isn’t it? To just play with those new ideas.
So, finally, just ask yourself, what are you willing to let go of? And it’s usually a fear. So what fear are you willing to let go of that’s stopping you from moving forward? So, and are you willing to let go of your fear and move forward? And the only answer for that is got to be yes, that you are willing to let it go. You open to letting it go and you can ask it another way. Am I willing to let my fear stop me from moving forward? And the only answer to that has to be a no, a huge, huge wholehearted NO to letting your fear stop you from moving forward. And are you going to spend any more time trying to decide? It’s very indulgent in that confusion of not being able to decide something because we just get to stay in procrastination. We get to stay in making that decision that can feel a bit scary or you’re just going to do it. You’re just going to decide and move on. Sometimes there’s no right answer. You just have to make a decision. So, I often laugh when my clients and go like, well I can’t see a right answer there and neither can you. So, are you going to do eenie meenie miney mo and see which one you land on, or toss a coin, what are you going to do? You’re going to just make a decision and move on. And then when you do that, decide that it’s the best possible decision that you could make and just decide you’ve got to draw a line in the sand on being in that confusion around decisions, because our brains love drama. They love getting caught up and they’re like, I can’t decide, this is too hard. I’m going to go and journal about it for another year. And I love journaling. I absolutely adore journaling and I love self-coaching and I love going and getting coaching. And I love it when my clients bring their indecisions to my group. We’re coaching on it today in Wholehearted Marketing, on making a decision about a program, on when it should start and how it should be marketed. And that was great, just to help my client, to just make a decision, make a decision, make a decision and move on. And that is amazing, but just decide that you’re going to make decisions and move swiftly along and know that usually within a couple of weeks, this happens over niching all the time, you choose a niche, you decide what your real focus is going to be, what the main problem is that you’re going to be out there writing about and posting about. And then two or three weeks later, the little voice will come up and go like, oh, don’t like that one anymore. What about this? This one would be better. This one’s much better. This one’s way more exciting. This one’s way more aligned. Just know that your brain will do that. And that’s normal, because we’ve all got normal human brains. So, just make decisions and move swiftly along.
Okay. Thank you so much for being here. I’ll be back with you really soon. Bye for now.