070: Find better solutions by asking yourself better questions

When we struggle with following through on what we want to do, we tend to ask ourselves "What's wrong with me?"

In this episode, I walk you through why focusing on that question often isn't helpful, and what you could ask yourself instead to find better answers – and solutions.

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Show notes

The tricky part with the brain is that when we’re really focused on one question, it can close us off from questions that might be more helpful, which means we’re not seeing solutions that lie outside of that question.

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I totally wasn’t going to record an episode today and I was ok with missing one episode while I’m in Finland, but I was on my morning walk and this idea just hit me out of nowhere, so I thought I’d hop on and talk about it when I’m feeling really excited about it.

So I want to talk about what tends to happen when we an’t seem to follow through on what we’d like to do.

I’m just going to throw out some hypotheticals here to paint the picture: Maybe you want finish a client project BEFORE it becomes a rush job, or you’ve planned to start working on a business update like changing the copy on our website or updating a course, or maybe you’d just like to stop working every day by 4pm but can’t seem to make yourself stop.

So like I alluded to in the beginning – the tricky part with our brain is, that when we’re really focused on asking ourselves one question, we get into trouble. What often happens in these moments is we start asling ourselves “What’s wrong with me when I can’t do those things I genuinely want to do?”. we tend to be thrown into a bit of a spiral with it, right? We might start judging ourselves and all of that

We might end up trying to force ourselves to stick with the thing we want to do, but it doesn’t feel that great and the progress might be pretty slow. We might end up doing a bunch of little to-dos and busywork just to feel like at least we’re productive in some way. Or we might start avoiding work altogether when we’ve planned to get things done.

And then this makes us feel even crappier, makes us lose even more motivation, and then we end up working longer hours to try to compensate.

Sometimes we come up with some solutions to try, like get a new planner, a task tracking app, or check out some motivational mindset or business content on YouTube by people like Mel Robbins or Marie Forleo. And these things we try might help for a little while, but sometimes those ideas don’t help us longterm. And I want you to know that this doesn’t mean something’s wrong with you because you couldn’t make it stick when everyone else seems to b enable to – it’s probably because the things you tried didn’t address the actual problem behind why you’re not getting the things done or following through on plans.

So this is why I think the “What’s wrong with me?” type of question is harmful. Because it can get us into this spiral of self-judgement, we either do nothing about it and feel like this is just how my life is now – OR we try these surface-level solutions that don’t actually help us with the problem.

And the reason to this, why we might go for the wrong solutions, is that when we’re focused on this line of thinking, that something’s wrong with me, it’s hard to notice other questions that would be more helpful instead, which means we’re not open to the solutions that would actually bring us longterm changes.

So I’d love to invite you to shift your line of questioning to: What’s making me feel unproductive or unmotivated? What’s making me avoid this thing, or unable to do this thing?

So notice the slight difference there. The question isn’t about what’s wrong with you, but about what’s going on with you, what’s present in your circumstances right now, what’s zapping your motivation *OR* affecting your ability to get the thing done.

And once you come up with an answer there, you can ask follow-up questions to dig even deeper and find your solutions.

Because we’re not having an actual conversation, I can’t dig into the deeper stuff with you here on the podcast, but I could tell you about a few things that I’ve uncovered together with cool people:

Cassie, a copy-writer was feeling pulled in too many directions all day. So that opened us up to dig deeper and ask what are the things that are feeling like the biggest pulls and can they be taken away or streamlined in some way. What came up for her was calls with clients. This is funny, but I’m the same way! If I have calls scheduled in my days, it’s like my brain gets completely wrapped up in them and I have trouble focusing on work in the hours before a call. So we made a plan for her to only schedule calls on specific days of the week, so that she would have days when she knew she can focus fully on her work. Another idea we came up with was to have one week a month blocked off from calls entirely, so that she’d have the brainspace to focus on things like marketing and business updates.

Maryia, a brand photographer wanted to work less, and her plan was to at least take Sundays off work. But she found it to be very hard, and was always pulled back to get something done. She wanted to spend more time on herself and her health, but had trouble making that a priority. When we dug deep, we found that because she had small kids when she first started, she had to use up all her available time on the business to get it off the ground. But as the kids got older and more independent, she was already used to filling up all her available time with work so that’s what she did. Understanding that this was just how her nervous system was used to operating helped her realize that stepping away from her work would be helpful to her – even if it felt unfamiliar.

One of the things my client Danbee wanted was to stop avoiding the updates she wanted to do in her business and stop dragging out the client work. Hei this is Jenna from the future jumping in to clarify that when I mentioned Danbee dragging out the client work, I should clarify that she described that she was spending more time on the client work than she needed to or used to – it wasn’t that she didn’t want to do client work or was avoiding it.  She also wanted to start working fewer hours per day, but she had a hard time making that a reality. So we got to the bottom of why these things were happening: When it came to dragging out the client work and avoiding the business updates, we realized that she was unsure if she was actually spending her time and energy on what was best for her and the business. As far as working less, she (understandably) worried about whether she’d still bring in enough of an income, and the other aspect of it was that she’s used to being an action-taker, a high achiever, so what does life look like if she isn’t constantly doing things to try and reach a higher level in her business? She told me that once she understood what was going on, it got easier to take action . And now she’s gotten to experience a couple of months of working less, and has seen that she doesn’t actually need to be that worried.

Jenny, an architechtural designer, wanted to work a 5-day week instead of 6, but had a hard time following through on this plan. What came up during our chat was that had a particular amount of hours she needed to spend on client work because she bills by the hour, so the challenge to making her workweek shorter was to do it in a way that didn’t reduce the amount of time she spends on client work. This meant that we could dive deeper into the other things she was doing in her business, and we found ways that she could drastically reduce her time spent on marketing, emails, and custom proposals for her inquirers.

So I hope these examples show that when you start to unravel what’s going on, it will bring to light more questions to ask in a very different way than just thinking something’s wrong with you when you can’t get yourself to do the thing you say you want to do.

You can totally figure this out on your own, I 100% believe that. But I’ve found that often I come up with better ideas and solutions when I talk to someone else, and it’s usually a lot faster. You could talk to some trusted business friends, a partner who knows you and your business well, or if you’d like, I’m happy to team up with you, too. My psychologist brain is more than happy to dig deep and connect the dots between what you want and what’s actually happening.

There are two ways that I can help you figure this stuff out:

1. I’m working on my audio course that’s designed to help you uncover why you’re not able to follow through on your plans or can’t get yourself to start on the cool ideas, updates, and projects you have in mind. I’m creating this because I’ve noticed that these are things I talk about with every single one of my clients, and they get so much relief from understanding what’s going on.

If you’re listening to this in real time, it should be about two weeks, max 3, until my audio course is done – the only reason it would be pushed back should be if something goes terribly wrong.

2. My 1:1 coaching. I love helping people uncover what’s going on, so that we then can come up with solutions together. Like you heard from the examples, with some clients the solutions are more around helping them be more productive or follow through on their plans, while for others the work is more focused on whittling down tasks and activities that they don’t actually need to do – so this frees up time for them to spend on their life outside of work or on more of the work they’d actually like to do.

To be honest, even though I have these two sorta different focuses, we end up doing a mix of both things with most clients! And my coaching includes a follow-up period because I know how important it is to be able to ask questions and get support as you’re implementing and experimenting. And if you think you’d benefit from a more ongoing support arrangement, I’m totally here for that, too!

Thank you so much for spending your valuable time with me, I hope you have an amazing week. Bye.