Building my coaching business over the past 6+ months has been a lesson in many things - focus, persistence, consistency, grit - the lessons you would expect any time you’re building a business or creating something from nothing. Birthing has stages, and not all of them are fun.
But it’s also been a good reminder of things I already knew to be true. Things that we all understand intuitively but that only become obvious in the moments where we’re pushing ourselves, where our comfort zone has been breached.
Most problems boil down to one of two things.
People or perspective. People problems include the conversations we need to have and the issues we need to address. These are fundamentally people problems because they can only be solved with a dialogue between people. And that’s what makes them so hard - they require some semblance of courage to have them.
And then there’s the problem of perspective. There is always something to learn from a situation, but we have to be willing to ignore our own ego long enough to shift our perspective into something more useful. When the stoics wrote about the obstacle being the way, the moment in which the obstacle becomes the way is the moment when perspective shifts. The power of a problem lies in what we do with it. Which brings us to the next truth.
Action solves most problems.
My business has an endless amount of variables - recording videos for the online course, creating the materials for a Leadership Playbook, writing content, building websites, building a sales funnel, closing new clients, improving the program. The list goes on, and none of them can be ignored.
Action is what removes the overwhelm. Having the conversation > thinking about the conversation. Making the sales call > stressing about sales. Asking for help > having an internal pity party. Shifting perspective is the moment the obstacle becomes the way, but taking action is what moves you along the path of the new way.
Clarity is the prerequisite for momentum.
This is true for my clients in our coaching sessions and this is true for me in building my business. Whenever we feel stuck, clarity has to be the starting point. We can’t build momentum in any particular direction if we don’t first define where we’re wanting to go.
What am I optimizing for? What does my ideal state look like? What is the contrast between where I am now and where I want to go? What has to change between here and there? These are the questions that lead to clarity, and that clarity is what enables us to take action and build momentum.
The well is deep.
We all have a lifetime of experiences and skills to pull from. We feel unprepared when we’re outside of our comfort zone, but that’s only because we don’t have an accurate assessment of how much gold we already have within us.
We don’t need another book. Or another tool. Or another resource. What will get us from here to there is already within us. It just isn’t obvious because we’re too close to it. The well is plenty deep enough, and action is how we tap into the well.
🔥 Meet Forward Coaching and the High Performance Leadership OS™️.