Business is an inside game
When it comes to business coaching, it's the behind-the-scenes work, the soft stuff, that often makes the difference.
You can have the best idea for your business or plan to bring a new offering into the world.
But...
— if you can't see how you're getting in your own way
— if you're getting bogged down or held back by perceived limitations
we can create the best strategy for you, but you'll never execute to the level you're meant to, at the level at which you're capable.
I know this being on both sides of the relationship — as the coach and as the client.
So, I’m always seeking out ideas, methodologies, and means to address both.
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On a (rich) roll:
As you may have gathered by now, I’m an avid consumer of podcasts — those that are straight-up business-oriented and those that tend toward “the soft stuff.”
One of them is The Rich Roll Podcast. Like Tim Ferriss, Rich Roll favors the long-form format. So I need to be curious enough to press play and then engaged enough in the conversation to listen for the full 2+ hours.
Last week’s episode was one of these. His guest was Brad Stulberg, a sustainable excellence expert, human performance coach, and bestselling author (Ep. #77). Their topic was “The Art & Science of Mastering Change.”
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Change, acceptance, and identity.
Their conversation covered a lot of ground and still managed to dive deep on a few key topics, three of which hit home as a way to address the two challenges shared above.
Here are the 3 big ideas:
1. Homeostasis vs. allostasis —
“Homeostasis is this notion that living systems create stability, and any time that they are confronted with change or disruption, they try to get back to that stability as swiftly as possible. So it describes a pattern of order or stability, then some sort of disorder or change, and then back to order.
Allostasis is a process of order, disorder, reorder… If you look at the etymology of these words, ‘homo’ means same and ‘stasis’ means standing. So, it’s having the same standing by being the same.
And ‘allo’ means variable. So, allostasis is literally translated into stability through change… We stay stable not by resisting change, but by changing.”
👉 Think COVID — everyone was waiting for things to go back to normal. There was no going back to normal. But this is good — it’s evolution, it’s leveling up. When you face a challenge, you become the person you need to be to meet it.
2. The “inescapability trigger” —
“When there’s an event or change in our life, and instead of trying to problem solve or make it go away, or wonder if maybe in the future it will shift, we just accept it. It’s completely inescapable.
And then when we do that, it allows us to start thinking about reorder instead of just being stuck in disorder or even the old order... It allows you to have the potential to change.”
👉 This stopped me in my tracks, and I listened to it again (and again). What is the “inescapable” for you, in your business and in your life? With that settled (you will feel it in your body — a sense of calmness or peace), what options are available? What possibilities are there that you didn’t see when you were contracted around the issue?
3. Thinking of your identity as a house —
“Within the house, you want to have some different rooms and you might have the room of parent, of partner, of creative, of athlete, of employee [or business owner], you name it. It’s okay to go spend all your time in one room for a season of your life… You don’t have to balance your time across all five or six of those rooms.”
They dove into the training philosophy of the world’s best speed skater Nils van der Poel - which was “motivated out of a desire to expand his concept of who he was and his identity so he could embrace his training from a more holistic point of view and enjoy his life and take it as it comes… Having a life outside of speed skating allowed me to skate without fear.”
Bottom line: be intentional and diversify your sense of self.
👉 I love this concept of diversification because it creates room to bring some lightness and play to your business. And for those of you with a multitude of ideas you want to bring into the world… they can be different rooms and you can decide how and when to visit them. See Terry Crews.
If your interest is piqued, you can listen to the episode here. You’ll get these three topics (and more) in the first 45 minutes.
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You and the “soft stuff.”
Business development, marketing, hiring, your P&L, client onboarding, and service delivery… we create a plan to do the right things in the right order for profitable growth.
And I facilitate the “soft stuff,” to help you get your best results.
It looks like this:
- I provide the support and structure you need to let your creative energy flow and bring your ideas into the world.
- I help you see your real, perceived, or self-imposed obstacles, so we can work with them by...
- Finding creative solutions to overcome them and use them to your advantage, which has the power to result in something much better than you originally planned.
By reframing obstacles, challenges, or limitations as possibilities and opportunities, you see the gifts that are being presented and the ways to bring those into your business. #magic
If this hits home for you, book a call so we can discuss your business and how we might work together to make it grow.