Learn how to distinguish between busy work and needle-moving tasks to unlock sustainable progress in your coaching or service-based business.
If you’ve been here for any period of time, you know that I love looking for correlations.
It’s impossible to learn and integrate those insights if we’re not proactively taking inventory of our own growth, which is why I always make a point to look for correlations in my own work and business.
But more importantly, I’m looking at correlations within the community in order to distill those into frameworks that support you in creating more of the results you want (for those of you in Traction, the August masterclass was dedicated to this. It’s good – dig in!).
I’ve noticed a trend – and it’s this…
The difference between those who are steadily building traction, versus those feeling frustrated by their lack of progress boils down to the type of work they’re doing, and their understanding of busy work versus needle-moving work.
Because here’s the kicker.
Busy work and needle-moving work can often feel the same.
They can both make you feel tired and require a lot from you.
They can also leave you feeling busy and like you’re doing a lot – but only one of them is going to move you forward.
What I’ve found is that way too many people are doing busy work.
And the way I’ve come across this is two-fold.
The first is when I speak to people who are constantly searching for more information, more coaching and more complexity (and that’s true for people outside and within my containers).
They’ll say things like, “What else should I be doing?” or will request more novel or advanced strategies, which I always find so fascinating.
Why would you want more things to do when what you ultimately want is simplicity and bigger results from doing less things?
Why would you want new strategies or complexity before you have created traction with the fundamentals?
And why would you want to move on to the next thing without taking what you’ve already created to a level of sufficiency and reliability first?
It’s easy to rush past these points but they are really important questions to sit with.
The other way I came across this is when people tell me that they’ve been doing something for a long time and haven’t got anywhere.
It’s something I’ve always struggled to understand because it feels impossible to me that someone could be working away at their business for so long and find themselves in the exact same place.
What I realized about both scenarios or groups is that busy work is essentially making them run, but in the same spot.
When you’re running in place you’re exerting yourself just as much energy as the person who’s moving in a direction; the only difference is the other person is actually going to get somewhere.
When you’re doing busy work, you get equally as tired as the person doing needle-moving work; you just don’t have anything to show for it.
That’s why a lot of people are frustrated and tired; and that’s why I recorded an entire episode of this inside UNCUT lately because I really want to help people to understand the difference.
And to be clear, needle-moving work doesn’t necessarily mean you’re instantly creating the result you want.
Needle-moving work means that you’re focusing on things that either get you where you want to be today or they are giving you insights that contribute to getting there.
Those insights allow you to pivot, to test new hypotheses and go at the same strategies again, but in new ways that allow you to improve.
And in that way, failing becomes a slingshot for growth.
Stagnation is often a byproduct of failing in the exact same ways because we’re doing what’s familiar, whether that’s because avoiding the real work or doing things that are comfortable but don’t actually matter.
We don’t improve or grow when we’re failing the same way – it just maintains the results you have and most people who come to me want new results.
New results require you to learn the skill of managing your mind so that you don’t shrink as a way to protect your self-image and avoid shame.
They also require you to stop fiddling with things or distracting yourself so that you can get out of the echo chamber of your own thoughts and beliefs so you can improve on your work once it’s out in the world.
In that way, can you see that creating results that you’ve never created before is a combination of knowing what to focus on, but also developing a mindset that supports you to stay focused, to show up for yourself and look for wins and areas of improvement as part of the process?
Something I’ve done inside Life-First Business is to hone in on the essentials so that you’re clear on your needle-drivers and can therefore focus on depth, and lean into our office hours for support in managing your mind so that you can follow through.
Everything is broken into stages that intentionally build on one another.
In Foundations, I teach you how to create, launch and sell a high ticket offer to replace your 9 to 5 income and allow you to generate consistent, guaranteed monthly recurring income into the future.
In Refine, you learn how to shift and turn your methodology and framework into a one to many offer that you can sell and deliver at scale, so you can begin to scale your income independent of your time.
In Scale, we pour gasoline on that and really optimize and take things up a notch.
If something isn’t included, it’s because it isn’t important.
Each section has exactly what you need to master that stage.
Because sustainable business growth isn’t about effort or complexity.
It’s about depth and focused practice.
But more on that soon.
