One thing I’ve learned since going self-employed is I spend a lot of time solving the wrong problem. And the problem is very rarely what I think it is. For a long time, I’ve known what it’s not. It’s not motivation. Motivation is unreliable. It’s not willpower. Willpower depletes. It’s not discipline. Discipline is a smug, misleading word used to make people feel crap. It’s always good to know what something isn’t, but how do you know what it is?

what’s really going on.

That’s the real trick. Identifying what’s going on so you can make the changes you need to move forward. It happens to everyone at some point. Someone running their own business, they’ve experienced success, they know what they are doing and they have the evidence to prove it to themselves. Then suddenly, seemingly from nowhere, they hit a roadblock and they can’t figure out why. The things they were doing are keeping them where they are, but they’ve got ideas and plans to grow and move forward. Why isn’t it happening?

It’s hard to see what’s happening for yourself. It can feel like you’re hitting your head off a brick wall. Going round in circles. The frustration is real and it just keeps growing. You start to doubt your abilities, the sense of your plans. Everything is called into question.

nothing changed.

Earlier this year I was talking to a friend. They wanted to post more consistently on LinkedIn. Their business was relatively new, and they’d had great conversations with LinkedIn connections, so they knew it was a channel they wanted to nurture. They weren’t short of ideas, but the problem was capturing the ideas when they came to mind. They’d tried all sorts of note capturing apps and systems. But they’d forget they’d written them, or where they’d written them. So, nothing changed.

the perfect system.

They were frustrated and felt that the perfect system was just out of their grasp. They weren’t wrong. However, the system they needed wasn’t the one they thought they did. It sometimes takes an ‘outsider’ to see what’s really happening.

It wasn’t the ideas, or the capturing of the ideas. It was the fact they weren’t visible. Making them visible increased the likelihood of the ideas becoming posts and making it onto their LinkedIn page.

build a habit.

The next thing was to create a system and build it into a habit. We started by identifying that collating all their ideas into one place would make it easier, then putting that ‘place’ somewhere visible would act as a prompt to write the content.

We looked at the ideal time in their day to do this, a task or thing that happened at the same time every day. They worked both from home and were out for meetings, so the prompt was centred around their home desk. Either the moment after they finished work and were about to walk away from their desk, or the moment they got home and put their bag on their desk chair.

That action would prompt them to capture all their ideas from their day, mostly collated in their phone notes app, but also in the notebook they took into meetings. They would add them to a single document which they then pinned on their wall next to their desk.

They already had two times blocked out each week to write posts, now they had their ideas visible and easy to access. The quality of their posts improved, they achieved the consistency they were looking for, and they were no longer frustrated by ideas that got lost.

my own blindspot.

I’ve done this too. For a long time, my problem was time. Or so I thought. I had no idea where my time went, and it frustrated me, so I assumed time was the thing to fix. For months I tried to manage it better. I blocked it, I tracked it, I read about it. Nothing worked, which should have told me something, but instead I just tried harder at the same fix.

It wasn’t time. I was distracted by old habits left over from years of working for other people. It wasn’t distraction either. I’d been trying to solve a time problem and find ways not to be distracted when the real problem was specificity. To-do lists that were too vague to act on. I’d write down a task, and I’d have no idea what doing it involved. So, I’d default to whatever was easiest to start, which usually wasn’t the thing I needed to do. Months spent fixing the wrong thing, confidently, because from the inside it looked like the right thing.

It’s hard to see for yourself. Not because you’re not trying, but because the wrong problem can look like the right one when you’re standing too close to it.

what a coach really does.

This is a lot of what I do with the people I work with. Not telling them to try harder at the thing they’ve already identified, that’s rarely the issue. Helping them see what’s underneath it, the way an outsider saw the visibility problem behind my friend’s ideas or could have shown me the specificity problem behind my time. You usually can’t spot the difference from inside your own situation. Someone outside it can.

If you keep solving the same problem and getting nowhere, that might be why.

Identifying and solving the right problem, that’s what I help with. Book a free introductory call.