84: Moving Away from the Messy Middle to Decide, Implement and Evaluate

TTLU_EP84_MASTERED.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:09] You're listening to the Time to Level Up podcast. I'm your host business life coach, Andrea Libros. I help women in business commit to their own growth personally and professionally. Each week, I'll bring you strategies to help you think clearly. Gain confidence. Make your time productive. Turn every obstacle into an opportunity. And finally overcome the overwhelm so that you can make money and manage life. Let's create a plan so you have a profitable business, successful career, and best of all, live with unapologetic ambition. Are you ready to drop the drama and figure out the how in order to reach your goals? You're in the right place. It's time to level up. Let's do this. Hello my friends and welcome back to the Time to Level Up podcast. I think we are in episode 84, I'm not sure, but I think it's Episode 84 and we are going to continue our discussion around decision making. Now, last week I talked to you a little bit about knowing where you're at, knowing where you're starting point is turning on your own personal GPS, assessing your current location and pinpointing it and why that's so important now today. We're going to talk about when you experience growth, how can you put yourself into what I like to call a high value growth cycle? Okay. That's what we're going to talk about today. But before I get started, I just have to tell you that I am about to embark on a week long trip to celebrate my 50th birthday, and I've got a lot of packing to do today.

Speaker1: [00:02:07] I I'm kind of I feel like I'm a little behind, but I wanted to record this podcast before I left, and as I was preparing my outline, I thought to myself, Huh? How can I experience some growth this week and who I am? How can I make this a high value growth cycle for myself, even on a vacation? So I will report back and let you know. Okay, so when you're growing and you're experiencing growth, you always go through a stage. I call it sometimes I call it the messy middle, but it's a place where it's really hard. I like to sometimes also call it the river of misery. It's really when you just feel like everything is going wrong, it is all terrible. You're never going to get it. It's so hard. And then. On the other side. If you keep pushing through and you get there, you actually have a breakthrough. So this month we're talking about decisions. And I want you to think if you've ever heard the saying. Och the quality of your life depends on the quality of your decisions. The quality of your life depends on the quality of your decisions. Now what if that were true and not only the quality of your decisions, but the frequency and the speediness to which you implement those decisions into your life? What if that determined the level or the impact your results had? When you're trying to create something different, then you already have a thing a thought, a feeling and action.

Speaker1: [00:03:52] A result reach a goal, something different. Really? You were wanting to break through a barrier that is keeping you from it. Okay. And to have a breakthrough, it really does simply come down to deciding to do something different or to think something different, following through on it, and then getting a new result. You break through your current result. You break through your current thoughts, your current belief system, your current feeling that you may be struggling with you break through maybe the inability to even feel anything. We break through old habits, old things that we do, old decisions we make. So the more we break through, the more change that we have. The more your thoughts, feelings, action and results shift, the easier it's going to be for you to do this in all aspects of life. Oc and I would say most of you listening who aren't experiencing this aren't living in a state of growth. So go back and listen to episode 82. Okay. So how does one get into this breakthrough mode? And I will say, once you get into the breakthrough mode and one aspect of life, the others come along. It's so fun. I see my clients experience that all the time. Once they get one thing kind of role in all the other, things start to roll too.

Speaker1: [00:05:23] But I think there's three main steps. And I call this putting yourself in a high value cycle. So there's the making the decision. Implementing the decision in evaluating the decision. Okay. And I want you to imagine a clock like a continuous circle that goes around and around and around and around. And I want you to picture yourself at 12:00 and at 12:00, you make the decision. At 1:00, you implement the decision from 1 to 2. The decision plays out and then between two and three you evaluate, so you make the decision, you implement, and then at 3:00, you evaluate how it's going. And maybe parts of it are going well and parts aren't. So then you make another decision and you implement and evaluate when you get to 6:00 and then you make another decision and you implement and you evaluate at 9:00. So notice I didn't say you throw anything out the window. Right. Oftentimes, we like to throw things out the window and say, well, this isn't working and you feel like you need to start all over. But what if you didn't have to start all over? What if you just made a decision? You implemented, you evaluated, and you made a next decision? Okay. The more times you go through the cycle, the more times you make decisions and implement and evaluate. The faster you do this, the more breakthrough, the more growth you get, the faster you get to your results.

Speaker1: [00:07:02] But most of us get stuck in phase one. Most of us don't want to make any decisions because we're afraid of failing. And as we've talked about before, making decisions can be scary. So you don't want to make a decision or you choose powerfully that you are not ready to decide. So if you make the decision and you stick with it. That's one thing. But if you decide powerfully that you're not ready to decide, that in and of itself is a decision. You'll never get out of indecision or a fear of making a decision until you decide not to. So making decisions. The first thing it requires is you having your own back. Okay. The reason we fear making decisions is because we may not trust how we'll handle the result on the other side. So how are you going to react to failure? How are you going to treat yourself in failure? What are you going to make failure mean? A great thought to think about failure is that it's just part of this high value breakthrough cycle. It's just something that you might notice as you evaluate. Or what if there was no such thing as failure? It was just learning or winning. Because if you you learned that you might need to make a different decision if you've identified something as failure. Here's another thing to contemplate. What if you actually succeeded? What would that mean? I know we don't do that.

Speaker1: [00:08:41] Okay, so in order to make the best decision, I want you to make them from what I call having done energy. So once you've set a goal you want to achieve, the goal is to learn to make decisions as that person, as that future person. And once you start consistently making decisions as that person who has made the 500 K, you will start producing results, getting you closer and closer to 500 K, but you have to know that you won't start making decisions as that person consistently in the beginning. You're going to have to make a lot of decisions to practice making great decisions that mirror the result you want to create. So you have to be able to be okay with that, be okay with making decisions. And you're going to get that having done energy, not right at the beginning. You're going to struggle to get there. But when you do get there, it's still going to be slightly influenced by still being raspy in knowing the how. Okay. So let's say you become a master at making decisions. I'm going to warn you that you might still feel a little grassy in wanting to know how. And not believing that you're actually going to hit the goal. And still being a little afraid that you might fail in order to get into pure having done energy, it's going to take more and more practice and more and more high value breakthrough cycles where you make the decision at midnight, you implement it one and then you evaluate at two.

Speaker1: [00:10:24] You make a new decision at three and you keep going around the cycle. Making decisions from pure. Having done energy. May require you to consider how to make things simple, doable and fun. Go listen to episode 20 on that one. And part of this decision making is also figuring out how to make it easier to make decisions. So let's talk a little bit about the implement phase. Here's what you want to consider when we're implementing. If we realize that we don't love it in the evaluation part, then we might make a decision to implement in a different way the next time. Okay. So I remember that I decided I wanted to create more content. And I started to implement blog writing. And then when I evaluated it, I decided I didn't love it. So I made the decision to start creating podcasts. But listen, it took me six months at least. I think it could have been longer before I actually stopped stressing over blog writing. Okay. So it took me six months to implement my next decision, which was to create a podcast. So it may not happen overnight. It doesn't happen in 60 minutes. Now, the third part of all of this is determining what your next decision is like, the evaluation part, evaluating what worked, what didn't work, and what you're going to do differently next time.

Speaker1: [00:12:08] And if success leaves clues, you are not more noble for ignoring them. You need to find them and repeat them. And what didn't work. That's your next opportunity for growth. What is next for me? Where do I need to grow? What decisions do I know I need to make to create a different result? And if you think about it right now, you know some decisions that you probably need to make, even if you haven't really evaluated on paper, you've evaluated subconsciously. Okay. You could even start with things just in your life, like getting better at firmly deciding something and not putting it off and not waiting. I did this actually once with emails and this changed everything for me. I decided the way I look at my email and a whole different way. Now I go through three times a day and look at emails that was life changing and that was something little, but it helped me. Become better at decision making. And a decision I struggle with sometimes is when to record these podcasts. Should I record 11a week? Should I batch? But each month I just decide it doesn't have to be the exact same process every month. Right? So you guys get the idea, you know, the decisions you are in aren't making the ones that you're struggling with, the things you're struggling to decide, start there. That's the place where you start. So your growth is really making any decision, any decision at all that you haven't been making.

Speaker1: [00:13:46] You just have to make it. Get into that having done energy to help you decide and then implement. And after you do that, evaluate and make the next decision from having done energy. So for every breakthrough cycle that you complete, you become closer to the person you want to be with the results that you want to have. And if you understand these high value cycles, then you become a more evolved person day after day, which will make you amazing. So you want to complete your breakthrough cycles without dillydallying because you can't move on to the next breakthrough cycle until you complete the first. Now you might think that what I'm talking about, going through all these breakthrough cycles and not dillydallying and getting through as many as you can might sound exhausting, but I want you to think about this. What's exhausting is what happens in between making decisions and implementing. When you are in between. When you aren't implementing, you either haven't made the decision or you've made it and you just haven't implemented it. And here's what you're doing. Instead of implementing, you're constantly having to make the decision over and over in your head. You question yourself in the decision constantly. You are in what I call decision drama or decision debt. A lot of the coaching I do is comes from decision or decision drama because all the decision drama is really.

Speaker1: [00:15:26] Doing is just sucking energy away from what you could be doing if you had already made the decision. And I realized how exhausted decision drama makes me feel because I have slipped into this myself. Like I might say, okay, this is a decision I need to make, but I'll make it later. Or I made the decision, but I haven't implemented it. So it's just swirling around in my head. Och, I was just coaching one of my clients on this recently. She, she'd gotten coaching and she kept saying, I know, I know, I know, I've gotten so much coaching on this. I can't believe we're still talking about it. I don't know why we're still talking about it. Why are we still talking about it? Because she hasn't implemented. She has been spending brainpower spinning and energy on going back and forth about the decision she hasn't implemented. I mean, I was recently in drama about how long should I make this trip that's coming up? Should it be a week? Should it be ten days? Should I tack something on to it? Ten days seemed too long. A week seemed too little. I know it sounds stupid, but that is what happened. I am sure you've done this to. We spend so much time in the back and forth and a lot of time on stupid things like that, at least I do. All right. So the other thing that sometimes we do is we rationalize or justify why we're not implementing or following through or why we haven't taken action.

Speaker1: [00:16:59] Maybe it's not the right time. Maybe you think you need another piece of information. But the longer you go between making the decision and even starting the implementing process, that space between what you do in between the decision and implementing it exhausts you and you want to not be exhausted. Not taking action is exhausting. Taking action is empowering. So a lot of you experience this exhaustion when it comes to things like increasing prices or making a phone call or deciding to just try something or to fire someone or hire someone or deciding even whether or not to work with a coach. Or maybe you've decided, but you haven't told anyone. Or maybe you decided and you told someone and they discouraged you. And then you exhaust yourself in between about that. And you'll even justify it by saying, I don't. I don't know. I mean, I don't exactly know how to tell everyone what I'm thinking or I don't have the right words to say it, or I don't know what to call myself or I don't know what my what my clients will think. I don't know what I should charge. So I'm just going to avoid it. I recently had a client tell me that she had not raised her rate in seven years. What? But she had one person pushed back, I guess, when she suggested it, and then she tabled it.

Speaker1: [00:18:35] Crazy. So instead of committing full on to that decision the moment, you know, you need to make it and then acting upon it. You dilly dally. You don't implement. Implementing my friends. That is everything. You will experience so much growth, you will get so much farther when you do that. When you make a decision. Sometimes you can even feel the indecision coming on. Or you can feel yourself. Coming out of indecision. So oftentimes when I do a consult call and someone says, Well, I have to think about it. I'm a ten, but I have to think about it. I can feel the indecision percolating. Other times I can feel the freedom that they have from being in indecision. So for some of you, it's like the smallest little decision that moves you forward, will give you tons of momentum, little decisions, start pulling you into a breakthrough cycle and start moving you through the making decision and implementing process. And once you feel that momentum of being pulled into a breakthrough cycle just by making the slightest tiniest decision and acting upon it, it is everything. Sometimes, before I even have my first session with my clients, they've just said yes and they've signed the agreement and we have a date on the calendar just in that couple days between the time they say yes and the time we actually meet for our first session. They make huge strides because they've got some momentum.

Speaker1: [00:20:15] When you make decisions, what will also happen is that you will stop fearing making the wrong decision. And the more decisions you make when you know each decision isn't so heavily weighted anymore, it will actually take less of your energy. Even if you don't get the result you want, you will just make another decision and keep moving. When you never make decisions, it feels heavy. It will feel like everyone and everything. And every decision is so important and it needs lots and lots and lots of careful consideration. When this happens, when someone says, I need to think about it, they are putting the weight of the world on that decision. And I might find out that. What they're doing in between or in the thinking about it stage and the making of the decision stage. What they're doing is that they're going into decision debt. And this is a pattern of what they what they usually do when they're trying to make a big decision. And that is the whole reason that they actually have reached out to me. So I teach them about this breakthrough cycle. Seriously. If I were you, I would rather you say yes and try coaching and decide after trying it that it wasn't for you and potentially not renew. Then decide ahead of time that coaching wasn't for you and never try it at all. Okay. If you decide to not try it at all.

Speaker1: [00:21:54] You've made a decision without knowing anything, without knowing anything. How can you make a decision without having implemented first? So now I am not saying that it is okay for you prospective clients if you're thinking about coaching, to come to me and say, Oh, I'm just going to try a couple, couple of days. And I'm not going to say that's okay, you can quit. But what I'm trying to say is because that's kind of copping out. My point is that by kind of staying in that state of indecision, they're sucking their own energy. They're deciding against something before they've even tried it or before they've committed. They're in indecision about something that they couldn't possibly even know about. So I make sure that my prospective clients, who are stuck in a decision about whether or not to agree to join us, for example, and committed to growth, I make sure they understand that they will never, ever know if they've made the right decision until they try it. And then they can decide. They won't know if they've made a decision that's going to work for them until they have a greater perspective, until they've implemented it and evaluated. They won't understand truly the decision of coaching if they say no and don't try it, they're left with the exact same thing that they came in with. If they say no, they're the exact same places. When they got on the call in the first place, the consult call, they're not going to grow at all.

Speaker1: [00:23:35] Nothing is shifting for them and they have no perspective to tell them whether or not coaching would help. Unless they try it. So when you get used to making decisions, I will tell you it changes everything about you. It changes everything about you interacting with other people. I'm a pretty quick decision maker. I usually don't enter a situation without having contemplated my decision ahead of time so that when I'm there, I can just decide. But when we don't, it's like this daunting, heavy thing. That weights us down. If you are carrying decision debt around like in a big Santa sack and you know who you are. If you're struggling to make decisions. It's probably because you haven't made enough decisions. If you're struggling to make decisions, it's probably because you haven't made enough decisions. But when you make them and implement them all the time and evaluate, it just becomes trial and error. You just try something and if it doesn't work, you try something new. Often, what keeps my clients from making and implementing decisions and starting a new breakthrough cycle is they think they don't have time to implement and evaluate. I don't have time to make that decision that will support and serve me in the result I'm trying to create. I don't have time to make that decision. That might help me. You think you have to keep taking action and thinking about it because there's not enough time to actually implement and evaluate.

Speaker1: [00:25:27] But my friends, time is running out. While you're in indecision, you are putting yourself behind by not making the decision. Now I want you to understand this. Taking a lot of action is not the same as implementing a decision. You have to make new decisions as the person you want to be with, the results you want to have, and then implement and take action. You have to believe that you're going to get what you want out of the decision before you implement. Now, I am not saying that you need to hustle and make rash decisions, but what you do have to do is slow down enough to get to a place of believing that your decision is going to get you the result you want to being in a place of having done energy, to feel it, to feel where you're going to be in that mental space of having arrived. In order to implement effectively. I think often we just give ourselves too much time. There is taking the time to get into having done energy and making a decision. And there's taking swift action. To get that implementation started. And then on the other hand, there's indulging in indecision and unproductive failing by avoiding taking action from fear of failure or success. To wrap up, I want to talk about the evaluation stage. You want to make sure your decisions stay within the success framework you choose.

Speaker1: [00:27:09] So I'm going to give you an example from another client I recently coached. She chose the framework of offering programing to libraries in schools. So she's an educator who kind of does enrichment programing. And she decided she was going to offer it to libraries in schools and it didn't really like she would have liked it. So she decided to change what she was doing and actually go and work for someone else and give up. On going into libraries and schools on her own. But then she didn't really like working for that someone else, so she came back to what she was doing in the first place, perfected her process of selling to libraries in schools, and this year she has booked more gigs than she had booked in an entire year in the past. So it's only June and I think by May she had booked more libraries in schools than she had ever in the past in an entire year. So here's the thing. When she first evaluated her process, she decided, oh, I'm not getting the result I want. So she threw it out the window in a sense, and she changed the container or the circumstances in her life, going to work for someone else, thinking that it would make things better and it didn't. But what really needed to happen in that evaluation process is that what really needed to happen is that she needed to stick with her offering and just make it more solid, more profitable, more like more of a well-oiled machine.

Speaker1: [00:28:47] She may have had to have learned a few different skills and created a few more systems. That's what she needed. That's a high value cycle, throwing it out the window and going to work from someone else. That's low value. So sometimes the decision you make from having done energy. Is to not change anything, but to just implement with greater belief or more experience or a deeper understanding of what's worked and what hasn't. And sometimes your next decision is to figure out where you kind of half assed your last decision or where there's room for improvement. So it will be easier to understand these three steps of making a decision, implementing and evaluating once you start doing it. So you're going to have to have a little trust in this process of high value breakthrough cycles and just go do it. And as always, the best thing is to have a coach or a process to follow to help you evaluate these decisions. When you join Committed to Growth, I give you that exact evaluation process to follow. That doesn't change your formula. I give you a process that helps you figure out what to do next within your own context and not throw things out the window. I give you a process that helps you at 3:00. Evaluate. Make a decision and start implementing again at 4:00. So you're wanting to go out and experiment with this.

Speaker1: [00:30:26] You've got to practice this. This is something that you might struggle to understand logically. But the moment you start doing it, the moment you start implementing it, everything will change. You will totally get it, I promise. So make decisions, implement them, evaluate them, and then just ask what worked, what didn't work, and what do I want to do next time? Where do I need to grow in? That will help you make your next decision. I am here to help you along the way. Join us inside. Committed to growth so that you can perfect the breakthrough cycle. All right, my friends, I will see you next week. And remember, now's the time to level up. Thanks for listening to the Time to Level Up podcast with me, your host, Andrea Libras. If you know someone who could benefit from listening to this episode, I encourage you to take a screenshot and share it with them. Okay, now what about you? You listen to the podcast, and if you now know that you're ready to upgrade your life, upgrade your business, upgrade you, then stop being only a listener and start being a liver living that upgraded life. Head over to my website and schedule a call right there on that call. We'll start changing the way you think and act so that you can have the freedom to achieve the impossible in life and business and have the resources to do it. You deserve an upgrade. Let's do it.