Succeeding as you, not as someone else.

But if I'm having the thought, there must be something in there for me and maybe something in there for them. So then what I do is after the interaction, I go puzzle on that. I just think about it. What do I mean when I say they just don't get it? Today's episode is my attempt at explaining one of the big things that can contribute to a person not getting it. I want to talk about this through the lens of business strategy and business tactics.

Now I want to do a good job here because if you go to Google or YouTube or chat GPT, you will get a million definitions of strategy and examples. And the same thing with tactics. And so let's not over invest in my definitions here. Let's just hope. That these lenses, strategy and tactics give us some insight on how to be more effective and more confident and above all happier as we attempt to build our practices.

So for me, strategy is the heading that I use to describe a person's way of being in their business. It touches on what they do at the highest level. So strategy touches on what a coach is doing in their practice at the highest, most zoomed out level, why they do it. And how they do it also at the most zoomed out level.

So if I were to describe my business strategy and my coaching practice, it would sound something like I do one on one coaching because I believe in and value and enjoy regular, deep one on one interactions with people who are trying to Self discover, self improve, transform in some way. I create those client relationships by talking into a microphone and waiting for people to reach out and ask for coaching. That's my strategy. You notice it doesn't have a lot of detail in it.

That's not what a strategy description is for me. A strategy for me is two or three sentences that describe what I'm doing, how I'm doing it, why I'm doing it. Someone whose strategy is very different from mine, maybe even almost the opposite of mine would say. Something like I sell courses to people who want to develop a specific skill and those people find me primarily through paid advertising. That's their strategy.

Now, the reason I think it's important to try to figure out what your strategy is or what you want it to be. is that it will help you figure out what your tactics will be, and it will help you figure out who to pay attention to and who to ignore.

If my strategy is I create longterm one on one coaching relationships, and I do that by talking into a microphone and waiting for an email to land in my inbox, then There's no reason for me to pay attention to someone who teaches people how to succeed with paid advertising.

If I know what my strategy is and I'm happy with my strategy and the results that it produces, then It makes it so I can cut out a very high percentage of the content that I might consume, the programs I might purchase, the communities I might hang out in. I can just ignore all of them because they don't relate to my strategy. With clarity on what my strategy is, I can go pay attention to people who help me get better. At talking into a microphone that might mean buying courses.

It also might just mean listening to podcasts and seeing what I want to mimic in what I'm hearing on those podcasts. It might mean hiring coaches. And just experiencing their way of being and figuring out how I want their way of being to bleed into my way of being, what do I want to model? It might mean signing up for trainings and certifications.

If I think that they meaningfully impact my ability to do the work that I want to do, but I'm going to take actions that are in support of my strategy. If I have no idea what my strategy is, I'm I have no idea what actions to take because the actions or what I'm calling today, the tactics always flow from the strategy. Where I think we get into trouble. And by trouble, I mean frustration, discouragement, confusion is when we value equally advice, and instruction,, that spans all strategies.

So if I'm part of a coaching community, for example, that hosts what we would call general business calls, these are probably great in many cases. I'm not opposed to them in principle, but if I go into this general business community call and the coach or the presenter. is giving advice and telling me what to care about. That's useful if the advice they're giving relates to my strategy, but it's completely counterproductive if the advice they're giving does not relate to my strategy.

If they've got five or 10 or 500 people on that call, you can't expect or hope that the answer they're giving to another participant or that the principle they're teaching or that the advice they're giving. relates to and supports your strategy. It's your job to know your strategy and it's your job to decide what to consume and what to ignore. It's not fair for any of us to blame other people for our confusion.

If we don't know what our strategy is now, the earlier a person is in their business, the harder it is to know what their strategy is in the early days. We're trying to figure out what our strategy is.

We're working on a hypothesis that sounds something like, I think what I want to do is sell courses using paid advertising, or I'm running an experiment where I do one on one coaching and where I only look to create one on one coaching clients by fill in the blank, you know, hanging out in communities or. Having a podcast or whatever. We should have our own experiments, our own hypotheses and our own strategies, and then seek support around those.

But if you're hanging out in communities where general business advice is being given, then the confusion becomes your responsibility. Also the clarity. If you end up with clarity, then credit to you, you gave yourself that clarity. The coach didn't give you that clarity. You gave yourself that clarity by seeking out the right environment in which to get insight. As you consider who to listen to, ask yourself first, what is my strategy? What is my current experiment?

Am I clear on what tactics flow from that strategy? For me, being a person who wants to create one on one coaching relationships, primarily through my podcast, then I get into tactical questions. Well, should my podcast have lots of guests? Should it all be me monologuing? Should it be once a week? Should it be once a month? Should it be three times a week? Should the episodes be 10 minutes? Should they be one hour? All of these things are tactical implementations of my strategy.

They can all be experimented with as well. We get ourselves in trouble when we think tactical questions are the only questions or are the important questions., Tactical questions matter much less than strategic questions. If a beginner or a newer coach finds themselves thinking primarily about How often should I publish my podcast? It's the wrong first question. The first question is how does a podcast fit into my strategy?

When I encounter a coach who says, what do you think of this particular newsletter? I wrote, I'm happy to give an opinion. I always have one, but my opinion isn't worth very much. What I want to do is ask that person instead, how does your newsletter relate to your overall strategy? What is your newsletters role in your business? What do you believe about newsletters that causes you to think that a newsletter is one of the things you should be doing?

Because the newsletter can be part of a strategy, but it's a tactic. It's a, it's a thing you do. It's not necessarily a why. If a person can very clearly tell me how a newsletter relates to their strategy, then I will say, Oh, okay. Then you probably want this kind of approach to your newsletter. And consider this frequency. And now I can give a bunch of opinions. They'll still just be opinions that a person could go test or not. I'm wrong probably as often as I'm right. So are they.

That's why we experiment. Until we have some sense of why we're doing what we're doing. We're just sprinting forward in the dark. And bumping into a lot of furniture and walls along the way.

There is a big benefit to that, because as you sprint forward in the dark, you will gain experience and you will gain skills, depending on your demeanor, you may grow in confidence by sprinting forward in the dark, and you may grow in enthusiasm, but if you're a person who struggles with a lot of self doubt, or a person who just likes things to be a certain way, you like things to be orderly, you like to know what's going to happen ahead of time, Sprinting forward in the dark will cause you a

lot of pain if you can get yourself to do it at all. I'm not really a sprint forward in the dark kind of person myself, so I have no criticism of any of these ways of being. My suggestion is try to figure out and name your strategy first, and then dig into which tactics flow from that strategy, and then consume content, maybe courses, maybe coaching, around developing skill and confidence in those tactics.

But first work on your strategy now as a concluding chapter here, I'll give you my two cents on how to figure out what your best strategy might be. And that is to know yourself deeply. Here's how I work on knowing myself. I've done a lot of experiments over the last 20 years that I've been doing kind of entrepreneurial things. As I do those experiments, I've gradually learned what I like to do and what I don't like to do, where I feel the most at home, where I feel the least at home.

It doesn't have to take 20 years. It will probably take a while for you to very deeply know yourself in the context of a business. That's okay. It's fun. It's rewarding to self discover and self explore through a business. You can use tools like personality tests. I love a personality test. I've taken all kinds of personality tests. I don't over index. I don't over invest.

I've In the conclusions of those personality tests, but they're very helpful in giving me another way of looking at myself and my way of being. Sometimes I take a personality test and its conclusions help me make much more sense of myself. And then as I'm considering a strategy in my business, I can say, Oh, I don't really think that aligns with my personality. I don't have a lot of evidence in my personal history that says I will enthusiastically charge ahead inside that strategy.

Get to know yourself and get to know the best way to express yourself in your business. My strategy includes talking into a microphone and then waiting for people to reach out. That strategy comes from a very clear understanding of myself at this point in my entrepreneurial life at age 45, because I like talking. I mostly won't shut up, ask my family. I like thinking. Feedback I've gotten from people over the years is that I overthink.

I agree with that feedback, but the strength on the other side of that weakness is that I'm a really good thinker. I think hard about things. I fall asleep at night working on puzzles. I wake up with those same puzzles in my head. The puzzles might be a programming problem that I'm trying to solve in, in some software that I'm building.

Those puzzles might be a relationship that I'm coaching, you know, between a couple where I'm thinking about him and I'm thinking about her and why does she do that? And I wonder why he does that. I'm puzzling. I'm thinking hard. That's who I am. It's what I like to do. I'm really good at it. I also sometimes overuse that strength and I get too analytical, I overcomplicate things, I don't move forward, et cetera, et cetera. This is all part of me being me.

My strategy flows from this understanding of who I am and how I like to be. When you look at the other part of this strategy where I say, talking to the microphone, wait for people to reach out, the wait for people to reach out part is also very authentic to me. I've said it on this podcast before. I don't want a business that involves me doing a lot of pursuit. It's not that I think pursuit is bad. I have such admiration for people who can sustain a lot of energy in pursuit.

These people in my mind, they make the world go round. They make things happen. I've been the beneficiary over the last 10, 15, 20 years in my business life. Of working for people who have a lot of energy for pursuit. Thank goodness. They are the way they are. It's not really my energy. Sometimes I wish I could generate a little more energy for pursuit. I think it would benefit me. I'm sure that I can brains are plastic things.

None of us are trapped in our way of being so I could ask myself Okay, do you want to generate energy?

For generating energy for pursuit and maybe the answer is yes My default is no and then I attempt to have my business strategy and my tactics flow from my defaults from what is closest to my natural way of being my easy way of being just consider that if you hear a person talking about their way of being if you hear them giving advice and it just Does not resonate with anything inside of you That's okay. You're not wrong. What you're looking for is that resonance for yourself.

So you hear someone else talking and you say, that's much closer to my way of being. I'm going to try something along those lines. I'll have my strategy look something like that. And then the tactics, they will differ in their specifics, but they'll be kind of similar because the strategy is kind of similar.

So. A person who's maybe wired a little bit more like me, they might say, I want to talk into a microphone too, but I really like highly structured, action oriented, informative content that would almost be like a really good class. Okay, great. That's their strategy. And then the way they implement that forms around, how am I going to do my research? How am I going to structure the information? What's going to be on the back of that information? Will it be quizzes? Will it be workbooks?

Will it be courses? What do I want to do? It's all good. It's all good. It all flows from an understanding and an acceptance of who I am and what is my preferred way to be. Yeah, I think that's what I have to say about that. Your strategy describes. The big picture of what you're doing and why you're doing it and how you're doing it. The tactics are the actions that flow from the strategy.

And the way to discover and to experiment with your strategy is to know yourself, acknowledge and accept your preferred way of being and then gravitate toward people whose ideas and whose enthusiasm line up with yours. Yeah. I think that's pretty good. I'll talk to you next time.