Hey guys, and welcome back to another episode of your Brain's Coach podcast. My name is Angela Sharina, I'm your host, I'm your Brain's Coach and it is my job here to bring to you all the best recent, cutting-edge, most important, useful, inspirational and insightful at least that's the hope to brain-body tools to help you navigate this life's journey in a more and more successful way to control your thoughts much better, to control your emotions much better and, most importantly, to take control of your actions so you could steer the ship of your life in the direction of your boldest, most exciting, extraordinary vision. Guys, and all the tools that I'm sharing with you, they are a part of my journey, or the journey of my clients, and I personally you know. People ask me actually, what's your process for creating so much content? I create at least two pieces of content every single day, whether that's my newsletter, which you can sign up to when you follow the link in the show notes, newsletter, blogs, linkedin and other social media posts, videos, podcasts, like how do I keep coming up with ideas? Very simple way If you learn every day, you'll have something to say every day.
Speaker 1And yes, you can read books, you can read articles that spark your interest, but also you can talk to people and at work. You can talk to your clients. You can ask them more questions, or you can ask your co-workers. You can ask them more questions, or you can ask your co-workers, you can ask your superiors, people on your team, people you manage. You can ask a lot of questions and from every single person you can learn something new, and that's how I. Every day, I have something new to say, something I want to share, because I keep learning every single day. And I have this joke with myself don't feed me, give me something to learn. And on all of the assessments of personality and character, curiosity, love of learning comes up as my top strengths, something that keeps on giving, something that keeps me pulling through my life's journey, no matter how hard it gets, but anyhow, that's my secret to always having ideas for creating my content.
Speaker 1Today, guys, we are talking about nutrition, meal plans and startup journey, and I am a startup so far, a startup of one, but very soon we're going to have more people, not a lot more. I don't see myself managing hundreds and thousands of people, but you never know in life, right? So keep growing, keep exploring, don't limit yourself. See what feels right. In any case, I am a startup of one, figuring out how to scale my idea to more people because I believe it can improve so many lives of people. Just like this podcast, it gives you useful, insightful, thought-provoking things to think about, things that hopefully steer you into a direction of your best, of your better self, of your full potential, so you can create a bigger impact in the world. So that's why this podcast exists and, obviously, to learn new things. So the startup right.
Speaker 1So I'm scaling my idea and I'm trying to figure out how to do it better, and there are always obstacles, there are always challenges that I'm working through. Just like on any other person's journey, folks, there is always something to work through, to work on. There is not a single person alive who's not going through something, trying to figure it out. So at the moment, I'm figuring out how to scale the idea that I have that is shaping more and more clear form to many more people, how to work with more people, how to help more people. And while doing so, I recently started well, I recently just yesterday finished a book the Lean Startup. I realized I started it some time ago. I had highlights on my Kindle, but I never finished it and I'm like maybe that's why I'm struggling still with this same issue. If I read this book with the same issue, if I read this book, perhaps I could have figured it out earlier. So the Lean Startup I recommend everyone to read it, whether you have a startup or you lead any business initiative that you'd like to make it less wasteful and make progress faster, learn faster, build something better and iterate, change it and then get progress faster towards the mission, the goal that you have.
Speaker 1So meal plans and startups what do they have in common and why meal plans and startups? Why this association come to my mind? I've been a nutrition coach for 15 plus years. I still do nutrition coaching for almost every single of my clients, just because so many people have not the relationship with food, with their nutrition, the one that supports their goals, their better aspirations for themselves, their health, their fitness, their energy levels, food. We are built of those molecules in foods, right, and so we got to figure it out, how we can make it work, how we can enjoy it, how it can support our health, wellness and energy in all of our goals. So that's how startup journey and nutrition journey they got connected in my mind and I realized that nutrition plans, meal plans and business plans and startups especially, and a lot of other business initiatives fail very often for the same exact reason.
Now, before we jump into that, do you have your favorite salad, or do you like salads in general? And when you try that salad for the first time, when you decide to make your favorite salad once again, if you start experimenting with all these different ingredients even two or three and you experiment with two, three, four, five variables, and then you don't like the result, can you agree? Will you agree that it's much harder to figure out like what exactly didn't work and why it's not the way you'd like it to be? Compare that to the scenario that usually happens with professional chefs. You have your dish, or you're in the process of working on it, and you add one ingredient and you try it and like I kind of like it, but there is also something missing, or you're like I kind of don't like it, so I need to change something up. The reason why you add one ingredient at a time or you change something in the process one step at a time is because then it's much easier to figure out what went wrong. Compare that again to if you start baking something and you change five ingredients and then you decide to use a different machine, and then you perhaps change the temperature or the timing, etc. And then it didn't come out the way you wanted.
Speaker 1So what is to blame? The same happens with meal plans when they fail. A lot of my clients, who do not have the success they seek before we start working together and even when we start working together, they're like I want to change all of it altogether, I want to make it perfect. And then they start to change things for breakfast, for lunch and dinner, and they change something every single day and at the end of the week nothing works out. And you know what happens. You don't really know what didn't work out. You're like well, it just didn't work. The worst part, you don't know what didn't work and what worked or what could work. And that's why, with meal plans, before creating complexities, starting to figure out or how can I navigate this social situation, that social situation, this meal, that meal, you have to simplify it, to bear bonds. That's why super simple meal planning, done, consistent and daily, when you eat the same freaking thing for seven days at least. That's why they work so well, because if they work or when they don't work, you know that this thing did not work.
Speaker 1I did not lose the weight, so I'm still eating too much with this plan, but at least you know that this your body. When you eat all of this, it does not allow your body to lose weight. So you need to adjust something. But it's not 100 things that you did differently every day and then you don't know how to adjust it. You don't know if it was too much, too little, or what you should quit, et cetera, and so the same.
Speaker 1I realized the same mistake I was doing in business. I would try offers with like all this 10, 20 features and every client, potential client, would be bombarded with this offer and then they would not say yes or don't even want to consider it, and they wouldn't even know why. It's like probably, maybe just it was too much. It's like oh, it's food, maybe it wasn't the food, maybe it was just too much of it all at the same time. Whenever there is some complexity, you kind of want to ease people into that, one step at a time. It's also when you introduce any change in the organization in your company, in your relationships in your family, not everything at the same time. You'll overwhelm the person and they're going to feel resistance. The same with my clients and the book Lean Startup. That's where I wanted to bring it up.
Speaker 1In the Lean Startup, there is a very good concept that really hit home for me. It's called validated learning, and what validated learning is all about. It's about creating the process of learning, the process of learning that has only essential parts, as few as possible, that you need to test. That will bring you the answer you need to either pivot, adjust your strategy or quit it, or change the experiment. Validated learning is all about giving you metrics, giving you results that will help you to know exactly what thing to change when you run the experiment.
Speaker 1So, in my case, having different offers for different clients. It's not about testing all of the tens of offerings all at the same time. No, choose one type of client and then give different options people. In this case, one feature offer, offer solving just one problem. Okay, would you be interested in doing a trial session covering this topic? Then the next person would you be interested? The same type of client, but different offer, but with one feature, because when you then run 100 of those, you'll see. Okay, people this kind of client said yes more often to this type of problem and then you can run more tasks with that specific problem over the same type of client and then when you see that this specific pain offer works guess what you can do then? Then you can change the type of client and run that again.
Speaker 1But the point is not testing many things all at the same time and then not really knowing what turns your clients off, your prospect clients, but instead testing one thing at a time, getting the results on however small test audience and then designing the next experiment until you figure out what works. And then you can add on what works some other test that will show you also what's the next thing that's working, that's not working. And that's how you can make continuous progress versus just running in circles, running all these experiments and some hit, some don't, but you never know what's really working. The same with meal plans. If you start adjusting one thing, then the next day the second thing, and then the next day the third thing, and then at the end of the week or two weeks you did not get the result. Well, how do you know what didn't work or what could work. Or maybe it worked, but you still don't know what worked. And then you change something and nothing works again. So, running smarter experiments with as few moving parts as possible, that's the takeaway. And hey, when it comes to nutrition, yes, you don't have to live on broccoli and rice and chicken breast till the rest of your life. You don't have to have the same meals till the rest of your life, but let's say, for the next week, just stick to the same thing for the sake of the experiment. That's the easiest way to realize whether what you do is working or not, whether you do eat too much or not.
Speaker 1And in terms of business, run one experiment, one variable, one offer, one audience at a time. And you run it, let's say, on 100 people or 100 companies, if you do B2B, and then you see the statistics what worked, what didn't work, you repeat it again. If that's confirmed, then you can run another experiment. So here is the plan Simplify your offer, focus on one type of client, one type of problem at a time, test it out. If they pay your clients, you're on the right track. If not, then test another thing, one change at a time. So I wanted to also share with you a quote from the Lean Startup book about validated learning.
Speaker 1As you consider building your own minimum viable product basically that thing that works, so you can build on that your successes and progress. As you consider building your own minimum viable product, let this simple rule suffice Remove any feature, process or effort that does not contribute directly to the learning you seek. So in order for learning to work in business really well, just like with a complex thing such as nutrition, you need to simplify it to minimum viable product, to minimum, to bare bones. Keep as few moving parts as possible for the duration of the experiment that you also define in advance. The duration of the experiment that you also define in advance. And I feel like that's been a major mistake with all of my endeavors, when it started to feel like I do a lot of things and I hit lucky breaks, like it felt here and there, but I still don't understand what I do right, what I do wrong and what's the next step to build on the success that my efforts showed. The same with nutrition folks how can you simplify what you do? So for the next two weeks it's very consistent and then, only then, you can change things up and you have to stick with that, whether you feel like it or not. Just stick with it until the experiment is over.
Speaker 1And, by the way, folks, I've been a nutrition coach for 15 years. I've probably seen any problem that can arise throughout more than a hundred of clients at least, working individually and in groups. Yeah, 100 is actually a gross underestimation. Sometimes you forget how many people you interacted in the last 15 years of your life, from resorts and gyms to one-on-ones and online groups and all kinds of projects that I worked on. So, yeah, there are hundreds, maybe even over a thousand by now. So I saw almost any other problem that could be out there with nutrition and meal plans.
Speaker 1So if you need some advice, some professional advice, there is a link to a complimentary for you as a listener of this podcast session. So take it and let's see what might be the most obvious stumbling blocks and how you could design better experiments so you could understand what actually works and where you get it wrong. So you can then design better experiments, learn better and adjust the process Validated learning, nutrition, meal plans or startup business plans, keeping it on the lean side, having as few moving parts as possible to test before creating conclusion, before estimating your success and ultimately building on top of that. So your successes feel like maybe slow but still steady progression forward, versus some magical process where success sometimes comes and sometimes it doesn't. That I don't know about you, but that have been creating major stress in my life. It's like it worked, but I don't know why and therefore I cannot repeat the process. So let this not stop us. Let's design better experiments. Let's learn how to do proper validated learning.
Speaker 1Pick up the book the Lean Startup A ton of amazing things about the process of building successes in the highly uncertain, fast-paced and changing environment. So pick it up. I don't think the things described there will ever change, no matter how much AI you're going to get. Lean Startup teaches you the way to think, the way to design business processes, the way to manage highly uncertain and again fast-paced, changing all the time environment of startup or, to be honest, any business in the today's environment of fast change. So pick it up. If you need help with your meal planning, then go and sign up for our complimentary session. Thank you for your attention, thank you for curiosity and learning and always striving to do better. Have an amazing weekend Plan better. Have good, successful, validated learning experience and we'll connect very, very soon.