Many times throughout life, I feel like I’m not doing enough.
Despite what we are often told, the way to deal with this feeling isn’t by emotionally coming to terms with it and being “good enough” – we do it by having a systematic protocol on how to approach it, because ultimately we know that our intuition as business owners is actually trying to tell us something more useful than “believe in yourself”.
When we get the sense that we could be doing more, we are oftentimes actually right. The thing that causes us pain is just the how.
It’s the uncertainty of how to actually increase performance of whatever it is you are optimizing for, whether it be trying to increase the amount of clients you have, or you have sufficient leads and are now trying to provide a higher quality of care to all of them so that you can convert with the same efficiency as when you only had a few (you’ll likely get a higher lifetime customer value this way as well).
The pain that arises from the intuitive sense of feeling like we could be doing more comes from inadequate pathfinding on how to pinpoint how we could be getting better.
So, now that we’ve assessed this, it makes the issue at hand more clear to us. When we feel as though we are underperforming, or better put, not properly using our potential energy so that it gets the maximum yield, the first thing we should do is ask ourselves “how could we make better use of our time and energy”.
The game of life is about upgrades. We upgrade from having to do this low-level problem, to the next problem, so on and so forth. This is what it means to progress.
A practical example might be something like the standard entrepreneurship journey:
Working a job for $12/hour – problem is that we don’t have enough money to make it out of the cycle. We want to detach our income from our time, so our first problem becomes finding something to sell that people want, that doesn’t depend on time.
The most surefire way to solve this problem tends to be just finding something that sells already, usually services since they are easier than products, learning how to do the thing yourself and then outreaching to people.
From there, the problem then becomes “how can we make this more stable so that we can replace our jobs?”, to which the answer is simply to repeat whatever outreach methods you were doing and to do them consistently (and if this isn’t sufficient or would take too much energy, you know that you need to brainstorm on some more mass-marketing type solutions).
The problem then becomes “How can I make this more profitable?”, to which the answer then becomes “I could charge more money; I could try selling additional services to go with the first one; I could try just raising my prices”
Try it out and if it works out well then there you go, you’ve solved the next problem and moved upward.
Then it becomes, “How can I make it so that all these processes (ie: marketing, selling, fulfillment) get done without relying on me”? This is the next most logical problem since we want to account for days where we get tired, sick, or even if you just wanted to figure out how to double up your efforts.
We then do the same process of listing out a few solutions, then picking out the one we think has the best shot.
“Hire people; Write some code to automate the processes; strategic partnerships with people”.
In this instance, let’s choose “hire people” and go with that.
The key here is that if it doesn’t work out, you can always scrap it and revisit the other options.
Overall, the point is that when we feel general feelings of “we could be doing more”, to be specific about how that is. Write it out, and get specific about what the problems are, because then we can list out specific solutions.
“We don’t have enough clients”.
This is still not specific enough, and is possibly the outcome of faulty reasoning.
“We have healthy profit margins, raising them anymore would reduce our conversion rates in a way that lowers the average revenue per month. Additionally, if we were to just fill up our calendars, it would pay for all operational costs by 3.5x, therefore we would likely get the biggest gains just by getting more clients. How do we do that?”
This is a better, more informed, question. When we frame the question adequately, the problems almost seem to solve themselves.
“Okay, well we got the last 20 clients from this source in the last year and they were great to work with. It took about 5 leads to get one client, so it took us 100 leads over a year to get 20 clients. We want to 3x our business since our systems can handle that, so therefore we’d need 300 leads. Can we increase the output of the methods we are currently using to just ‘do more of it’ to get us to 300 leads comfortably?”
Upgrade to the next problem. This is how life and business is played. Don’t leave things as generalities, for you will be suffering with the same problems for 6 months when it could just be a 2 week solution.
Don’t ignore the intuitive feelings that we get. We evolved them because they actually serve a purpose. The important thing is to dial it in, and combine other techniques so that it becomes more useful as the things we are building become more complex.
Ultimately, feelings of overwhelm come from when we ignore those feelings and try and operate from the same levels of thinking that we always have. Upgrade your methods to upgrade your skillset, which will ultimately take you to where you need to go.