287: The Visibility Decision You're Making From the Wrong Lens

Selective visibility strategist and business mentor Cindy Gordon gets honest about a hard personal week and the one thing her mentor said that reframed everything. This episode is not a mindset pep talk. It is a visibility episode about the lens most entrepreneurs are using to make strategy decisions and why it is keeping them stuck.

In this episode you will discover: Why your brain is actively filtering out evidence that things are working How a scarcity lens leads to visibility decisions that solve for the wrong problem Why the entrepreneurs who move fastest are not the ones with the best strategy A simple daily practice that changes how clearly you can see your own progress The question to ask before you blow up your content strategy, switch platforms, or rewrite your offer

Perfect for: Female entrepreneurs and small business owners who feel like nothing is working despite being in motion and keep making big strategy changes that do not seem to move the needle.

Find the win. Even when the week was hard.

Connect: @exclusivelycindy on Instagram  - BOOK a Strategy Session

About Your Host: Cindy Gordon is a Selective Visibility Strategist and 6x online business owner behind Exclusively Cindy. With a Masters in Special Education and training in Behavior Analysis, she takes an individualized approach to visibility, helping female digital entrepreneurs decide what they stand for, where they show up, and how. 

Learn more at exclusivelycindy.com

💌  Join 1,500+ entrepreneurs receiving weekly strategic insights and business clarity frameworks - sign up now! https://cindygordon.myflodesk.com/countmein

Transcript

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I wanna tell you about a week that I had recently. It sucked. I lost a pet. The garage door gave out. I had an ER visit with an elderly family member, a setback in their home care. On top of it all within about five days. By Friday, I was on Zoom with my mentor and she stopped me mid-sentence and said The thing is. You are still smiling and it's how you are approaching it all. And I thought about that a lot over the weekend. Not because it was a compliment, but because it was a data point. Hi, I'm Cindy Gordon, a selective visibility strategist and business mentor. And if you're not on my Thursday newsletter yet, this is the kind of thinking I go deeper on every single week. I have over 1500 other entrepreneurs who are on the list, link in the show notes to join us. Here's what I wanna talk about today, and I promise this is a visibility episode, not a mindset episode. So stick with me. Your brain is filtering right now actively. It is scanning for evidence of what is not working. That is the default setting for most entrepreneurs and honestly. Most humans, and when that is the lens that you are looking through, you can have all the right strategy beyond the right platform, have the right offer, and still feel like nothing is moving because you are only seeing the gaps. I watch this play out in visibility decisions constantly. Someone decides their content isn't working and it blows up their whole entire strategy. Someone decides Instagram isn't working and jumps to a new platform. Someone decides that their offer isn't landing and rets. Everything, and sometimes those are the right calls, but a lot of the time they are visibility decisions that are made from a scarcity lens, from a brain that has been trained to find the problem and cannot see the progress that is actually happening Right alongside it. I have a particular client who has figured this out down to a science Every single day. She writes down her wins. Now, this is not a gratitude list in a big picture sense. These are actual wins from the day, and then she writes down one thing that she wants to win at tomorrow. She is constantly building forward from what went right instead of excavating what went wrong. And I noticed early on that she makes visibility decisions differently than most people I work with. She is not reactive. She is not blowing things up. She is not convinced that every single thing is broken. She can look at her data clearly because she has trained herself to see the full picture and not just the gaps. This is not a personality trait. This is a true practice when I talk about the what layer of visibility, the trust foundation, the voice, the what makes you unmistakable. A lot of entrepreneurs think that is all about messaging, and it does have to do with messaging. But it also has to do with the lens that you are making decisions from because if you cannot see your own progress, you will keep solving for problems that are actually not the actual problem. You will change your content when the real issue is your foundation. You will switch platforms when the real issue is your message, and you will rewrite your offer when the real issue is that you haven't given anything long enough to work. The entrepreneurs iWatch move the fastest are not the ones with the best strategy. They are the ones who can see their own progress clearly enough to build on it. That clarity is not accidental, it is trained. It is a practice. So before you make your next visibility decision, before you decide that your content is not working, before you convince yourself that you are on the wrong platform, or before you blow up your strategy again, I want you to do something first. Write down three things that went right this week. Not three things that you're grateful for in the abstract, but three actual wins. A conversation that felt good or a post that got a great response, or a client who said exactly the right thing, something you finished, maybe something you started evidence that you are moving forward, even if it doesn't feel like it. Write down one thing that you want to win at tomorrow. That's it. Do this for two weeks and tell me that your perception has not shifted. Tell me that you are making the same visibility decisions from the same panicked place. I do not think you will be. Some weeks will be a full on shit sandwich. That is just the reality of running a business and sometimes life. But there is always something in there worth finding. There is always a lesson, always proof that you are still standing and that you are still moving. And the entrepreneurs who train themselves to find that thing, they move differently. They decide differently. Their visibility decisions come from a completely different place. My mentor told me I was still smiling, and she was right, not because the last week wasn't hard. It was, I spent several years building the practice of finding what went right inside the week that felt like everything went wrong, and that's the practice that changed how I see my personal business and my life. How I make decisions and how I show up. If you wanna go deeper on this type of work, on your visibility foundation, on getting clear about what you actually stand for and what makes you unmistakable in your visibility so that your decisions come out of a place of clarity instead of panic. This is exactly the type of work that I do in strategy sessions. Link in the show notes if you would like to explore what that looks like for you and your business. I want you to find the win this week, even if it's small, especially if the week was hard. That's the assignment. Thanks for listening today. This is the Strategic Entrepreneur.