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We have limited bandwidth. Too much consumption can lead to too many ideas. Too many ideas, or conflicting ideas lead to overwhelm because we don’t know where to start. This cycle leads to one thing… Nothing. That’s right. It leads to not taking any action. As a perfectionist we are constantly seeking more information to constantly improve. More books, blogs, courses, podcasts, social media, masterminds, etc. But is this working for you or against you? Tune in to find out.
Connect with us:
Did you enjoy the episode? If so, please leave us a short review on iTunes.
If you found value in our content, we'd love to connect with you. Please email us at landon@l2fitness.com to see how we can help you refine your message and design your business to support the life you want to live.
Click Here To Join The Momentum Lab Community!
We have limited bandwidth. Too much consumption can lead to too many ideas. Too many ideas, or conflicting ideas lead to overwhelm because we don’t know where to start. This cycle leads to one thing… Nothing. That’s right. It leads to not taking any action. As a perfectionist we are constantly seeking more information to constantly improve. More books, blogs, courses, podcasts, social media, masterminds, etc. But is this working for you or against you? Tune in to find out.
Connect with us:
Did you enjoy the episode? If so, please leave us a short review on iTunes.
If you found value in our content, we'd love to connect with you. Please email us at landon@l2fitness.com to see how we can help you refine your message and design your business to support the life you want to live.
Welcome back to the unfiltered coach podcast. I'm your host, Landon poleward, and I'm here with Laura. And today we're going to talk about how your ideas might be leading you down a path of taking no action.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've done gone down those paths so many times I can't even count. And all of my perfectionist out there are really going to resonate that with this one. So make sure you pull out a pen and paper and you take notes. Because I have been here and this is just so common.
Speaker 3:So what I see super, super common is, you know, we're all coaches. We are perfectionist, we're high achievers, we always are trying to better ourselves to get better results. And what that does is it puts us in a state of constant consumption. So we are listening to podcasts while we drive podcast, while we sleep, we're reading blogs,
Speaker 2:that's intense.
Speaker 3:Blogs were watching youtube videos, you know, we're buying books. We are, you know, trying to follow all of these leaders in the industry, subscribing to research reviews. So many inputs. And what that happens is it just really confuses the fuck out of us. So like I know I get so much inspiration when I am doing those things. Yeah. But what happens is all of these ideas draw me away from taking action on the task at hand. Yeah. So what this leads to, and I see this so common with so many coaches, is when we have too many inputs, it brings us to a state of not quite sure what and where to take action. They're not quite sure where to start on the process and it leads to overwhelm. They get very overwhelmed because they don't know where to start. They're not taking action, they're not moving forward. And sometimes it's stemming from too much information overload. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't know about anybody listening, but this is my process consumption of all of this shit. And I make so many lists of everything that I need to take action on. I get overwhelmed so I make more lists. Right. And I just keep making lists upon lists upon lists of things that I want to take action on in the future. I have no idea where to start. So at least I'm planning. That's progress, right? At least I'm planning, except through that iterative process of refining my lists and making more or less and more plans. I'm just getting more overwhelmed and confused. And I've had this conversation with so many perfectionists, especially lately actually around we just have to stop making lists, man.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And you know, I'm just going to to say it, ideas are easy. They are easy. So I, when I talk to someone and they say, I have so many ideas inside my inside voice says, fuck
Speaker 2:yeah,
Speaker 3:they're taking no action because it's so easy to come up with ideas. It's fun. Everybody had the idea for Facebook, right?
Speaker 2:I didn't. But
Speaker 3:one person took action on it. Like you, you see these things and you hear people say, Oh, I had the idea for that. While you might have, yeah,
Speaker 2:he stole my idea. Yeah. Well you didn't take action on it.
Speaker 3:Shit on it. Yeah. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Yeah. You might have some fantastic ideas and that's great, but you need to take action. And if you are consuming all of this and you have all of these ideas but you're not actually executing on anything, I really want to walk through like a systematic process to, you know, solidify this to, you know, remove all of this bs noise and actually get you taking action.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think before we jump into that, it's really important to understand that we didn't always understand this ourselves and we've definitely been guilty of this. Now we're very diligent about when we're consuming and when we're focused. Like right now we're working on a major overhaul in our business. We're working on redeveloping our courses and because of that, I'm not listening to podcasts. I'm listening to music and the jam. I'm not reading at night, I'm chilling because I don't want to overwhelm myself with new ideas when I'm focused on executing the task at hand.
Speaker 3:Yes, absolutely. We speak from experience when we talk about this, I have gone in just complete paralysis, being completely paralyzed by ideas, having no idea what to take action on because I have so many things I want to take action on and we don't know what we should be doing. We don't know where we should start because we have, we think everything is the best idea and we try and do it all. And that just leads us to a path to nowhere. Yeah. So the first thing is you must have clarity on the task at hand.
Speaker 2:I think even before that, I'm going to challenge you. We need a foundation in place so that any future big passion projects, ideas that you do have can be built upon something that's already sturdy.
Speaker 3:[inaudible] I agree,
Speaker 2:right? I think that a lot of, especially new coaches listening here, um, start taking action on their big ideas before they really set that foundation of their business without the foundation ideas will not, will be built on a house of cards. Right? So starting with the foundation as step one.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So yeah, going into that clarity would be, you know, assuming that that's in place. Okay. So we need to, obviously I've seen, you know, a friend of ours is built almost a million dollar business with zero structure in place. Yeah. And you know what? He spent the last year doing putting structure in place. Yeah. Because you can only get so far, just kind of it. Yeah. You know, some people can get pretty far wing in it. Yeah. But they're setting themselves up on, like Laura said, a house of cards where the smallest thing could just bring it all crumbling down. Yeah. That is not what we want. No. We want to have a sturdy foundation, which is going to allow us to take that messy action and create those successes so much faster. Yeah. So you need to have all of that in place and you also need to understand how to plan, how to execute, how to, you know, what to do when these ideas come up. Because it's not that you don't want ideas, it's that you need to know how to put those ideas in a place of a, when you're going to execute them and when they're going to become the priority.
Speaker 2:Yes. And if you're struggling with the foundation of your business, if you're not where it, sure where to start there and you have a million ideas floating in your head, come talk to us inside of our community. You can join up momentum lab.community and we'll have a conversation with you and just help you figure that out.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. So make sure your foundation is in place. And then once it is, you need to have clarity with the task at hand. Yes. I recommend no more than one to three big projects per quarter, so every three months are going to reevaluate, but you want to solidify the top one to three things that you're going to execute on. Yeah. You know, if they're smaller, you might have three. If it's a large like us right now, it might be one. Yeah. The only thing we're focusing on is redeveloping courses. Yeah. This is taking over eight hours a week of our time. Yeah. It's all of our free time. That's not working with clients and generating content is focused on, you know, developing these projects.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think just establishing criteria around how to decide what you should be working on really stems from the outcome you want from that quarter. Okay. So if you are in a growth phase and you need more clients through the door, if you're doing tasks weekly that are not with the intention of bringing more clients through the door, that's a distraction. Not a task you should be focusing on. It's not something that you should never do, but perhaps just not right now.
Speaker 3:Exactly. It's the natural ebbs and flows of your business. You're going to have time where you need to be moving your business forward, like in the early stages of your business and your tasks. You're focusing on need to be driving towards bringing those people in the door, not working on longterm plays and longterm income. Yeah. Whereas that's something you want to establish once you have a foundation of monetary income and clients in your business. So it's understanding that, yeah, and once you do, then if you have a few projects that are, you know, your clear focus for that quarter, you need to solidify your focus on what is the most important thing first. And that is where you start from there. You have to reduce your inputs. You need to eliminate the distraction because no pulling your attention away from what you're working on is a distraction. So what I see a lot of times is all of these ideas and then you have this one thing you're trying to do, but you are not moving it forward because you have all of these other things you're trying to do at the same time. Yeah. So remove all the noise. Stop listening to the podcast. You know, don't take that course.
Speaker 2:You know,
Speaker 3:maybe you reduce the amount of consumption on social media. You stop watching those educational youtube videos because there might be a time where learning a new skill is your number one priority. But if that's not the number one priority, you have to address the fact that it might be drawing your attention away from what you need to be focusing on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And understandings you that you're probably getting caught in the cycle of choosing the thing that feels comfortable. Right? Usually if we're putting off growing in some way, it's because it feels hard. It feels insurmountable and learning more by consuming a podcast still feels productive and it's easy. Yes. Right? So are you hiding behind your old coping mechanisms for avoidance of the hard thing? If you keep rewriting the same list over and over and over again like I used to do, you're avoiding the hard thing, right? That's just one example. There's lots of different ways this is, this is showing up, but getting to know yourself is really important here.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Cause everybody's going to operate slightly different and you need to understand how you tick and that's so important of this self-discovery of running your business. Um, but just to kind of jump into the very last thing is I like very focused time when I'm working on a project, you know, deep work, go read the book, you know, it's been shown, I think it's 24 or 27 minutes. It takes us to refocus on a task. The human brain cannot multitask. No we can, you know, switch back and forth from multiple tasks. But when we do it takes us 27 or 24 minutes to refocus to get into that productivity state to execute. So we need to establish longer periods of time when we're trying to execute. You know, working up to a period of four hours is awesome. That's not always realistic. But what I see what I'm helping people structure their week is sporadic one hour blocks of time. So there might be an hour on Monday, an hour on Tuesday, an hour on Friday where they're trying to do, you know, business development or working on a project. What I want to try and do is find where I can chunk all of that together. Yes. Because your going to get more done in, you know, three to four hours of like concentrated time on a task. Yeah. Then you're going to do in way more than that. You know when it's completely sporadic because you're going to finish a task and then come into that hour you're going to work on it. It's gonna take you that, you know 20 minutes before you're actually completely invested in it. Then you're going to get what, maybe half an hour max before you have to transition out of that and your mindset as you come out of that is already going to be transitioning into that next task. Whereas when you can have that concentrated deep work, you're going to be so much more productive
Speaker 2:[inaudible] and you're just going to feel more accomplished as well at the end of it. Right. I know if I only have an hour between client calls and I'm trying to work on a big project or I'm trying to write a blog post or something, I don't even start on it because I'm, I had, it's like a frack, like I don't have the time to do it right now. I'm just going to scroll through Instagram and then the end of the week comes and you haven't done anything. Right. So it's so true. If you can block off larger chunks of time, like you just said, you will move forward so much faster on those tasks that you feel are really daunting.
Speaker 3:Exactly. The, our brain only has so much bandwidth yeah. To, to process information. Yeah. And we want all of that bandwidth concentrated on that really important core project. Yeah. We want our subconscious to be connecting of those dots. Not connecting random dots on something else that doesn't matter right now because it's not going to serve us. No. We need to just, you know, funnel all of our prioritization and focus to that one thing to move forward. And it's scary at first to not be focusing on everything at once. Yeah, I know. I thought it was hard. I always wanted to try and do all of these massive projects at once, and then you just realized you'd never make any real progress on any of them. Yeah. You keep rewriting the same to do list because you're never crossing it off the same shit you say you're gonna do that week never gets done because you have all of these other things that you're trying to do. You're trying to research this, you're trying to read up on that project. You know, you're investigating this software and you're just kind of like putting out all of these little fires and you're not moving forward on anything. And then what that funnels into is this negative loop of disappointment because you're not completing your tasks and then that disappointment leads to you not taking action because you feel shitty and you're in a disempowered state and you're just moving in a downward, right?
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. And I think too, just to add onto that is prioritizing those chunks of time where you feel the best. You know, if you are the most creative in the morning, try and get that chunk of time right first thing in the morning. Because what can happen is as we fatigue, we're less motivated to work on those hard things. The excuses become easier to listen to and it's easier just to push this until the next day, until the next day, until the next day. Right. So really take advantage of knowing yourself and when you are able to dedicate that creative space and then create an environment that will allow you to be undistracted during that time. Yeah.
Speaker 3:For us, we've come to learn that we can't really plan too much on Friday afternoons. Yeah. Cause we're pretty burnt out from the, yeah. We don't usually get it done. We're usually distracted. We usually are just, you know, kind of focusing on just the smaller, easier, less intensive tasks that need to get done as opposed to those have very, very in depth things that require a lot of concentration and a lot of energy to do. So just to kind of, why don't we just kind of recap. So you know, number one, make sure you have a nice foundation belt so you have the ability to take action. Number two, gain clarity. So one to three projects per quarter is going to allow you to focus on what you're doing. Then solidify what the most important task is of those so that you have your time throughout the week is dedicated to one thing. And then number three, reduce your inputs. So we need to eliminate our distractions. We need to, you know, stop listening to the podcasts or you know, whatever it is that is taking up that bandwidth and that energy. Remove it so it's all focused on one thing. And then create focus deep work blocks of time throughout your week to be able to execute on it. And then find when you are most productive and make sure you schedule these things, then
Speaker 2:yeah, that's perfect. I have nothing to add to that. I think it's just really important to understand that you're not going to get it right the first time you try and do this. It's gonna take some shuffling in your schedule to figure out what works and what doesn't. Um, we are constantly adjusting our schedule based on what's working now versus what works like three months ago. Right? So just be open to that pivot, but understand these chunks of time need to become non-negotiable so you're not removing them entirely. You're just adjusting
Speaker 3:when you need to be the most productive so that you can build that momentum. Absolutely. And if you want any feedback on creating your ideal schedule and you know, removing distraction and taking action, make sure you head on over to momentum lab.community. Join the community so we can help you out. But until then, we will talk with you soon. Have a great day. Okay.