080: Worried about the optics of tweaking your business?
If you’ve ever felt like making tweaks and pivots in your business makes others see you as flaky, inconsistent, incompetent, or like an imposter, this episode is for you.
In the episode, I share
the story of how I got that judgmental voice in my head
all kinds of things I’ve tweaked in my business(es)
two benefits of regularly tweaking and experimenting in your business (and life)
Productivity Ecosystem summary
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Show notes
So a couple of weeks ago I posted an IG story on a whim, asking if making changes or tweaks in your business makes you feel… not great. And this seemed to hit home with a lot of people – they were telling me that they felt like they’d be seen as flaky, inconsistent, like they’re not competent – or like they’re a fraud or imposter.
This came to mind for me, because I started pondering if maybe I should call my intensives something else because I didn’t want it to seem like my intensives are a lot of work – they actually bring my clients pretty much instant relief from having too much to do.
Whenever I make changes to my businesses, or even think about making changes, big or small, I have this voice in my head that says “You never stick with anything long.”
Now, this voice is not my “mindset” or a negative inner monologue. This voice is actually the voice of a friend from a long time ago.
The story of how this voice got into my head
It must’ve been something like 2008 when my friend and I decided to start a style blog together. We thought it would be nice to have this special thing to do together since we lived a couple of hours apart – I was at university in Turku, Finland, while she was in Espoo which is the city where I grew up.
One of the things we decided was that we should use our own photos *or* use those visual style planner websites to plan outfits etc. We wanted to monetize at some point and didn’t want to get into trouble with copyright stuff.
But a few blog posts in, my friend started making blog posts where she had used other people’s pictures. So the next time we hung out, I said Hey, remember we had talked about not using other people’s pictures?
She didn’t think it was big of a deal, and so I suggested we maybe start a second blog that’s purely 100% our content, and asked would she rather I just do that on my own.
She looked at me with this really intense, kinda annoyed look. And then the corner of her mouth kinda did some kind of smile and she said “Oooohhhh. You’re one of THOOOSE people who doesn’t stick to things. I get it. Let’s forget about this whole blog thing.”
And we never spoke of it again.
I was pretty taken aback, that a friend would say that. Especially since she’s the one who didn’t follow through on what we had decided for the blog.
How the voice has stayed with me throughout life
When I decided I didn’t want to get my psychologist license in the US, but instead wanted to pursue something creative and started a DIY blog.
When I a year later started my photography business. When I went from posed sessions to lifestyle to documentary within the span of 6 months or so.
When after working on that business for 5 years, I also started dabbling with what eventually became this coaching business.
And those were the *big things*. But there’s been plenty of stuff I’ve changed up just within this business alone.
Things I’ve changed just in this coaching business
It would take forever to list out everything I’ve ever played around with in both my photography business and this business, so I wanted to stick to just one business for clarity:
My niche (I went from talking about just minimalism and intentional living to self-care, to overwhelm, to planning – only to eventually realize *all of those components* matter.)
Youtube channel → podcast
The podcast’s name and focus
Brand colors and visuals
My framework (I’ve called it a few different things, like the pillars of the Finnish lifestyle to The Productivity Ecosystem)
My services/offers
How I approach coaching sessions – because I learn from them I of course want to keep tweaking to make them better and better for the next person (or sometimes even *during* a process with someone, when I know it’ll be more helpful)
Probably lots of other things I can’t think of
And that’s just on the business side – I’ve of course done lots of tweaking and course-correcting in my personal life too.
Why do we worry about what others think?
I’ve often thought about why my friend’s voice still pops up so strongly. Not strongly enough to keep me from doing things, but it pops up nonetheless.
While I can pinpoint some personal things that made that moment so strong for me originally, I’d say a key component is how in the online business world we’re constantly told that consistency matters. And in the more general work world you’re more appreciated if you just keep your head down and do the things, vs spend time pondering and making tweaks that don’t always have a suuuper visible effect.
Thus, we are made to feel flaky, inconsistent, incompetent, or even like an imposter, if we don’t just pick a thing and stick with it.
Then there’s the layer of maybe having learned in school that there’s just one right way to do a thing – which also gets perpetuated by the online business world - all the have-tos and the shoulds.
Why it’s actually good to keep tweaking, testing, and changing things in your business regularly
Firstly, the only way we can find what works for us, is to test things out and let things evolve.
For example, recently I had a call with a website designer who said that normally she can “eat the frog” in the morning. If you haven’t heard of this expression before, it’s basically this productivity method that says you should identify and do your most challenging task first thing in the morning before doing anything else. So, she said she can normally do that first thing when she starts working, but now as the fall season has arrived where she lives, it’s been harder to wake up all energized and still do the challenging things first. So what should she do? And we talked about how it might just be that in summertime, eating the frog works, but in winter time, maybe it’s actually best to take care of some smaller things first to get going, to build up momentum and then do the most challenging, focus-needing work in the afternoon when she’s perked up.
And the only way to actually see how that works for her is by testing it out. And it doesn’t have to take a long time to see how that goes – it can literally be a couple of days, and if it turns out that things got even worse, she can always switch back.
Secondly, I like to think that if we’re constantly iterating and tweaking as we move through life and business, there’s less likelihood of hitting a mid-life crisis where you feel like you need to burn everything to the ground and start over because you suddenly realize you’ve felt misaligned for the past 20 years.
I hope that this helped you feel a bit better about *anything* you’ve been wanting to tweak in your business – actually, if it did, take a screen shot of this episode, share it to your IG stories and tag me, and let me know what you’ve been wanting to tweak!
We are in a season, the end of the year, where reflecting on what has worked and what hasn’t is pretty natural – so tweak away my friend.