Why Working Harder Is Killing Your Growth
Why Working Harder Is Killing Your Growth
If you have ever wondered why your effort is not matching your results, you are not alone. I coach high performing leaders, service providers, and entrepreneurs every day, and there is a pattern I see over and over. You are not burned out because you lack drive. You are burned out because you have been carrying far more than your share.
This is the part no one warns you about when you enter the coaching space. You come in with integrity. You come in with an honest desire to serve. You come in ready to be the reliable one. And very quickly you become the person everyone else depends on. You pour into your clients. You pour into your team. You pour into your family. You pour into your community. And eventually you realize your own cup is running on fumes.
Not because you are not strong. Not because you are not capable. But because you have been pouring into everyone else for so long that you forgot to pour back into yourself.
Where Burnout Really Comes From
Burnout rarely comes from a lack of ability. It comes from a lack of alignment. On the surface you look reliable. You look competent. You look committed. But underneath that commitment is a quiet pattern. You take on the emotional, physical, and strategic load of everyone around you.
You respond quickly. You say yes to requests you do not have space for. You step in to fix things that were never your responsibility. You want to help. You want things done well. You want things done right. You want everyone to succeed. And because of that, you keep pouring from a cup that never has the chance to refill.
When your time, energy, or finances are stretched thin, your nervous system starts living in constant overdrive. And that is when burnout takes root.
The Cup Metaphor That Changes Everything
Imagine that you are a cup. Every time you help someone, you pour. Every time you keep a promise, you pour. Every time you take on someone else’s urgency, you pour. For a while this feels manageable because you are strong and committed.
But here is the truth. The cup only works when it is full. Pouring from an empty cup is not noble. It is not sustainable. And it will not move you toward the life or business you desire.
Your cup fills when:
You honor your own capacity
You set boundaries you are willing to keep
You design a schedule that supports your health
You follow a plan instead of a panic
You let data guide you instead of pressure
This is not selfish. This is leadership.
Why Working Harder Creates Diminishing Returns
You have been told that if you want more, you should work harder. But working harder inside the wrong structure will not create growth. It creates strain. Growth happens when your effort is aligned with a real strategy, not when you pour endlessly into misaligned tasks.
Most coaches are not struggling because they are lazy. They are struggling because they do not have a system. They do not have a predictable way to attract clients, nurture leads, or close conversations. They rely on hustle instead of rhythm. They rely on hope instead of structure. And then they wonder why their results feel inconsistent or unpredictable.
Working harder in a broken system does not fix the system. It only exhausts you.
Your Environment Matters More Than You Think
When you decide to grow, the first thing to examine is your environment. If your environment is chaotic, your results will reflect that chaos.
Start with the basics:
Is your workspace set up to support focus
Are your phone notifications stealing your attention
Are you surrounded by people who drain you more than they support you
Creating a supportive environment does not require a complete life overhaul. It requires intentional choices. A boundary is not a declaration. It is a standard. When this happens, I am going to choose this response. This is what allows you to protect your energy without cutting people out of your life.
When your environment supports your goals, your goals stop feeling like an uphill battle.
Feelings Are Signals, Not Stop Signs
One of the biggest traps in the coaching industry is making every decision based on feelings. Feelings matter. They provide valuable information. But feelings cannot run your business.
When you choose action only when you feel motivated or inspired or confident, your momentum becomes inconsistent. And inconsistency is the real enemy of growth.
The shift is simple. Keep feeling your feelings. Keep noticing them. But do not let them override your commitments. Follow the plan. Show up when you said you would. Let your structure lead your energy, not the other way around.
Your Strategy Needs Data, Not Guessing
One of the most freeing lessons you will ever learn is that success is math. It is not magic. It is inputs and outputs. If you want clients consistently, you need to consistently put yourself in front of people. Posting once a week or sending a message when you feel like it is not a strategy. It is a hope.
Look at your data.
Your reach.
Your conversations.
Your conversions.
Your consistency.
Data does not criticize you. It just tells the truth. And when you know the truth, you can adjust.
Most coaches think their message is off. Most of the time, that is not true. What is off is their system for testing the message. You cannot refine what you do not measure.
The Real Path Forward
Here is the simple foundation for sustainable growth:
Build a rhythm you can maintain
Protect your capacity with boundaries
Use data to refine your actions
Stay consistent long enough to see results
You cannot create a full cup by accident. You choose it. You design it. You live it.
When your cup is full, your business is stronger. Your creativity is sharper. Your coaching is more powerful. Your energy is aligned with your goals rather than with everyone else’s demands.
You are not here to carry the world. You are here to lead it.
And that starts with choosing yourself.
Chapter List:
00:00 Why Working Harder Is Not the Answer
01:26 The Hustle Pattern That Keeps You Stuck
03:02 What Happens When You Run on Empty
04:48 Why Life Will Never “Calm Down”
06:10 Smart Work vs Hard Work
08:04 Why You Cannot Optimize From Guessing
09:55 Creating Structure That Supports Growth
Full Transcript:
Amanda Kaufman (00:00)
Your cup will fill when you choose to fill it.
you can't wait for some magical time
Hello, welcome to this week's live on why working harder is killing your growth. Working harder is killing your growth. If you can see me and hear me, let me know in the chat, say hello, wherever you are watching.
I'm glad you're here. And if you're looking for the whole recording, make sure you go to Clients Over Chaos. That's our free community where we are choosing to be coaches who have coaching that sells itself. That's the idea.
If you feel like you're sick and tired of chasing your to-do list, if you are absolutely done with that feeling like you're burned out, like you aren't excited anymore, like this whole idea was maybe not such a good one, then definitely stay tuned for this week's training because I am going to help you do less while earning more. And I hope that that sounds super exciting to you.
All right, so here we go. I just realized I'm also live on the book of faith. So we're really pushing the computer today, but we'll see how it all works out. I think it's gonna be just fine. All right, so where is this coming from? You know, I've been coaching for, I'm working on my ninth year, which is nuts. And today is December 1st. We are in...
the home stretch for 2025. Who's feeling that energy, right? Shout out, holiday, in the chat, if you're just like, woo hoo hoo, we're getting into one of the busiest times of the year. Whether you're a business owner or you're a employee, it really doesn't matter. This is a really busy time for family, for getting all your goals done, trying to relax.
and also set up for 2026. So it felt like it was a really important conversation to have today and I'm super excited to have it with you. So if you can see me and hear me, do let me know wherever you are. I see that we're working really good on Riverside. We're trying a bunch of things today. But what we're gonna do is we're really gonna unpack.
working harder is not just unnecessary, it's actually sabotaging your results. It's actually sabotaging your results. And look, it comes naturally. Everybody that I work with that struggles with this, it's for the same reason, okay? Basically, you're the one in your sphere. You know, you're the one that people turn to. You're the one that people ask.
You're the one that people can count on. You've built probably a reputation of being the one and maybe you even love that. Like you love being the go-to person. You love being the person who, who is can be counted on. Like I'm guessing, tell me if I'm true, if I'm real about this, that you really value reliability and integrity, right?
Now I'm not saying this because I'm a fortune teller in the coaching space. I'm saying this because I have worked with so many coaches, so many people who are building a coaching based business. And I noticed again and again, the thing that people really value is integrity, telling the truth, and they really value reliability. So where do we fall afoul? It actually has to do with your capacity, right?
So we earn this reputation for being some, and I just want to check in, like give me a number one in the chat if I, I, if I, if I nailed it, right? Like you definitely value integrity. You for sure value when people are reliable and they, and they do what they say they're going to do. And you are that for other people, right? So just let me know if I got it wrong in some way. And if you agree, shout out a one. So, okay, here's, here's the thing to know is that
You're not alone in this. It's a really, it's more common than you think to have this desire to be super reliable. And if you're, if you're somebody who has that desire to be very reliable, it might be coming from a place of knowing what it's like when you can't count on other people.
So shout out to if I'm right about that too. Like you see people making and breaking commitments all the time. You see people making promises that they don't keep and it actually drives you so crazy because you know how important that integrity thing is, right? So shout out to if you're like, you feel like there's lots of people around you that maybe just don't worry about checking every box. Maybe they're not too concerned about where their
where their good intentions and broken promises end up going. Yeah, totally. Me too. I'm there with you. I'm there with you. But here's the problem is if you're always the one to take on the burden, to take on the concern, to take on taking care of everybody and everything, imagine you are a cup, right? And you just keep pouring into everyone else.
being able to rely on you and everyone else getting what they want. What happens eventually to that cup? It like you cannot pour from an empty cup. We all know this. So what we need to do instead is we need to be pouring from a full cup. Now being very honest, when was the last time your cup runneth over? You know, if you're, if you've been working really hard and you're not earning what you think you should be earning,
You're not getting the results you think you should be getting. You're not able to count on people around you the way they can count on you. Shout a three in the chat because this, my friend, is the source of so much of the burnout that I see in the coaching space. It's not that you don't have the capacity to be reliable or the capacity to be in integrity.
it's that you took too much of everybody else's burden to do so.
Let me know on a Monday if that was like too much to hear, but it's true. Like that reputation you have of being the reliable one, the responsive one, the high integrity one, unchecked on your time capacity, unchecked on your energetic capacity, your emotional capacity, right? So I'm not just talking about physical capacity. I'm talking about the mental load, the psychological load.
If you're over on that and if you are finding that your cash flow is out of whack because you're making it available to everybody else or you're deferring your earning because you want to make sure everybody else is good first. That is how hard work can actually sabotage the growth of your business. So what do we do about it? Well, same metaphor. You've got you're a cup.
Right? We need to fill the cup, meaning you have enough sleep, meaning you have space to think, meaning you have the cash flow plan up and running. You are on a path to profitable. Those things need to be in check. That's part of you being taken care of. Your bills are taken care of. Your health is taken care of. All of these things.
Now here's the danger zone is when we go to fill this cup sometimes because we've never actually felt our cup full or it's just been such a very long time since we've had our cup feel authentically full. It can be very tempting to just shut down your whole life to wait for this cup to fill up. And that's what I see most people do as soon as they get awareness and consciousness. It's like, my God, my cup done not runneth over my cup.
is so empty, it's been absolutely dry for so long, I need to fix it, then they sit there with their Netflix or their favorite snack or they just like they sit there and wait for the battery to just recharge and they just sit there. Here's the big shift for you today. Your cup will fill when you choose to fill it.
Not when you can't wait for some magical time
when this when people will stop asking when needs will disappear. That's a fantasy. None of that will ever happen. People will always be needy. People will always have problems. People will always make those problems your show to four in the chat. If you hear what I'm saying loud and clear, this waiting for the battery to recharge like you're some sort of a solar panel and you're just sort of sitting there like
That's not real life. Real life is I am going to have a boundary on my money. I'm going to have a boundary on my time. I'm going to have boundaries around my energy, my emotional energy, my physical energy that are intentionally filling my cup. So what does that look like?
It could be, I'm going to take the time to do my makeup today. Not because I'm trying to impress you, but because it makes me feel good. Right. That could be a thing. I'm going to take the time to make that phone call to follow up on that nagging administrative thing that's just been sort of annoying to me. I'm going to carve out the time so I no longer have to worry about that. Right. Same thing with money. I will have a budget.
I will have a budget and a plan for how I am not only going to spend my money, because when we think about budgets, we often think like just about the spending side, but also to manifest, to generate. know, so many people come to me and they say, Amanda, I want to have a really successful coaching business. I'm like, amazing. When do you want this successful coaching business? They say in 90 days, always 90 days.
They say, want it in 90 days or I want it in six months or I want it in nine months. And I'm like, cool, when do you plan to start? About 90 days before I need it. I think I'll do it about 90 days before I need it. And I'm like, okay, that's a choice you can make. Tell me what is informing your 90 day timeline? I don't know, I just, I want to make sure I give myself plenty of time.
When you've been running everybody else's agenda, 90 days feels like a really long time, right? Show the five in the chat if you're tracking with me, they're like, yeah, 90 days feels like a long time. If you are in the habit of responding to every email, if you're in the habit of responding to every women wish of everybody around you, and you're in this habit of like the speedy reactor, the speedy responsive person.
90 days. I mean, that seems like a really long time. But let me ask you, let's see. Today is December 1st. So today my math gets to be easy. So we got November 1st, October 1st, September 1st. How long ago was September 1st really to you? Like do let me know in the chat. Was that a long, long, long time ago? Or does it feel like holy cow? Right? It was like yesterday, man. Like it was
No time at all. And yet so often when I'm talking to people about building a business where like their coaching is positioned really well and people are like organically coming in, they, they are surprised to find that maybe they needed to start that yesterday as well. Right? I don't know what's going to happen for you and your business in 90 days. I'll be honest. I don't know what's going to happen for me, but you know what I do know? I know I have a plan.
I know I have a rhythm. I have some broad strokes out there of like, okay, here's how I'm going to put myself in the way of opportunity. So what does that mean? Well, if you're a coach, that probably means that you are meeting people, talking to people and fitting with people really regularly. So if you don't have a copy of my book, Coaching Leads Made Easy, make sure you grab a copy of it, especially today because I extended the
Black Friday sale that I was having going on. If you do Black Friday 25 at checkout, you can get that book for $1. Okay, but it's only for like the next day. So make sure you grab it if you know somebody who needs like just the 401 on how do you get leads? How do you convert them into clients? How do you do all of that? It's in my book, Coaching Leads Made Easy. But what's your plan?
What's your plan for getting in front of people? What's your plan for nurturing the relationships that you have all around you? What's your plan? So like for me, my plan includes, I'm going to be posting really regularly on my Facebook, right? I'm going to keep continuing the conversation using media to be social with my community. So that's like part one of plan. Part two of plan is I actually just announced that I'm hosting the planning extravaganza again.
this year. if you would like a ticket, just DM me the word extra. It's actually free to join us. It's going to be on December 31st. And it's a long one. It's from it's from noon to 4 p.m. And it's free to be there live. No rewinds, no no replays. If you would like the VIP upgrade when you opt in, you'll get a chance to upgrade to VIP. And I'm doing something super fun this year.
If you know you want the VIP, make sure you DM me the word VIP because this week it's only seven bucks. Next week, starting on Monday, it's gonna be 17 bucks. And the following after that, it's gonna be 27 bucks. That's for VIP. Now when you have VIP, you're gonna get the full recording, you're gonna get special access, you're gonna get some bonuses, things like that. But if you're interested in any of it, just shout extra.
and I will send you the details. Yeah, it's a fun deal, right? And I'm basically rewarding people that take action right away by giving you like an awesome steep discount. And then as you get closer to the event, you're paying full price for VIP. It's just fun. But that's like my plan, right? Awesome, Lynn. I got your extra. So I'll make sure I follow up with you later today. Watch your messenger. So, okay. So you've got the plan.
Community plans. I've already planned that I'm gonna be doing live streams every Monday and I'm gonna do it 9 a.m. Right here in the clients over chaos community. I'm Multicasting it to see if that you know attracts a few more people to our central little Community here where we can keep talking about getting clients and moving past chaos and we're gonna do that every Monday See there's a plan right shadow plan if you're picking up what I'm putting down so I don't know how many people are necessarily gonna come to
the livestream next Monday. I never get to know that until like we're here, you know, and when we're here, then I can see like, okay, here's who tuned in. Here's the questions that were asked. That's awesome, right? And it's all just data. The next thing that's a big plan of mine is I'm actually running a coaching program for the next four nights. And this is in partnership with a coaching certification program. So I'm to be doing that. And I know that it's already planned.
So when it comes to my capacity for doing a lot of other building and stuff, it's like, know that that time is already taken care of. The other part of my plan is like this holiday, I know I'm gonna be spending with my family in Canada. So we already planned, I've got a travel day on the 18th, we already planned when we're gonna be coming home. I've already set the scene with my family, like, hey, I'm gonna be there, but I'm like working though, right?
And I've already set what my boundaries of the working hours are gonna be and what I'm planning to do is work products based on what I know today. Now, why don't we follow plans? Why don't we do that, right? So when people enroll my programs, honestly, the number one thing that they struggle with is just opening the dang program, right? And...
So I do everything I can, you know, I send multiple reminders. I set that standard at the very beginning. I remind them every live coaching call, but like that's still, you know, the work part and people really struggle with that. And I understand that struggle because I know what it's like to have so much on your plate that you just don't feel like you can give anymore. I know exactly what that feels like. And here's the uncomfortable
awful, rude, terrible answer. And there's no easy way out of this. You've got a plan. You've got a plan like I'm going to be unavailable to other activities during this block of time. This is called time blocking. So when you time block,
What a lot of people do is they're waiting for that again magical moment in the future when somehow nobody's gonna need anything from you and somehow the world is less complicated and somehow you have more energy than usual. Never happens my friends, right? Because we're all getting older. Nobody's getting younger yet, right? The world's going faster. That's not gonna change. And the people around you, look.
If they've been having challenges and troubles for the last 20 years and have been dropping them at your feet, what makes you think that next year it's going to be any different? It's only going to change if you decide you're going to have that boundary. And a lot of people that get really intimidated, intimidated by this. They're like, you know, I can't, I can't take it away from my current life. I'm like, amazing. Well, then that means that you're not going to have the space to create the new life. Which one do you want more?
Do you want your current life, your current circumstances, your current empty cup? Or is it time to change? Now, I've studied quite a bit of behavioral science around this because when I went to go and change, I was like very declarative about it. I was like, I'm gonna change everything. I'm gonna lose all the weight. I'm gonna have a really bodacious business. I'm gonna have an amazing family. And also I'm gonna make the best friends ever. I'm gonna have the life of my dreams.
And I was just like all of it at once at the same time right now. And I stumbled and I quit. And for several years I was just like, I didn't want to even make a New Year's resolution. Didn't want to talk about new goals. Didn't want to talk about it because I was just like getting into such a bitter critter situation with the whole thing that I was just like, it's never going to happen for me. So why bother?
Right? Shout out six in the chat. If you've ever had a friend that you've talked to that you're like, Whoa, you know, like they're, they need to come back from that dark side of the, the force thinking. And what really made the biggest difference for me was studying psychology, studying behavioral change, studying sociology, studying all these different things. I'm going to give you two factors that made the biggest, biggest impact when it came to actually applying it in my life. Number one, environment.
environment. So showed an E in the chat if you're hearing me loud and clear. If you keep following the same worn routines that you have been following for the past 10 years, the next 10 years are likely to look the exact same. Why? Because you're already just bowing to the environment. So change something. So it could be changing your like
For example, setting up my office to actually be like something where I can turn the camera on and I love it. I like the background. It's me. If it's my personality, I like it. That was such a move because then I was no longer looking for places to record, feeling like I was kind of carving out a corner of my family's space, but not really having any space of my own. It wasn't like logistically difficult to turn on the camera.
I've got lighting set up in here that's semi-permanent, right? So I don't even have to think about the positioning of lighting or the post editing or any of that garbage because I set up my environment to make this really easy. Now, the first time I set up the environment, was it easy? No, it was hard. It sucked. It was annoying. There was work. Ew, who wants that? But the benefit of it, I can't even begin to tell you.
Just having a door closed behind me while I'm in my office changed the environment, right? Because it signaled to my family, like, hey, she's in worky mode. And it made a huge, massive difference. Sometimes, like, it's as simple as just organizing things or rearranging things to just make the load easier. The other thing environmentally that we just cannot not address is actually your phone.
So when you look, I was like looking for my phone. I'm on my phone because I'm doing a live broadcast. But your phone, and shut a pee in the chat if you're hearing me on this, is such a huge part of your environment as a modern adult. Okay, so what are the notifications that are happening? What is streaming into your ears and your eyeballs all the time? What is that content like? Is it content that uplifts you, that motivates you, that activates you?
Is it teaching you something that you're genuinely super interested in learning? Or have you left it up to your negativity bias so that you're seeing all the scary things that are happening in the world, all the annoying things that are happening in the world, all of maybe the cute stuff that's a dopamine hit that then they're gonna drive you back into the floor with more scary content, right?
When you just leave it to your own negativity bias devices and you don't proactively curate your environment with your phone, this is like literally actually causing major problems with focus, with mood, with isolation and loneliness. Like it's a big issue.
So if you haven't already turned off notifications on your phone or at least dramatically reduce them, like take the five minutes and turn off all the notifications and just notice like, where am I always impulse to pick up the dang phone? Here's a move. Put your phone at least six feet away when you're working. At least six feet away or lock it in a drawer. Make it difficult to access. Put it in another room. It'll be okay. All right.
But like so many people won't do anything about their phones. And then when people are asking for new things or people are demanding their attention, you're just like, here you go, here you go, here you go, here you go. And you're emptying from your cup environmentally, not even realizing it. It's very unconscious. So proactively curate that phone. Third thing on the environment that just has to be talked about is who you hanging out with. Who are you making time for?
Are you making time for people that it's like always a complaint or it's always a crisis or it's always a drama and they're coming to you and you're such a good listener, but like it's the same drama that you guys have been through three times before. I'll never forget. Like my first friend breakup was almost 20 years ago now. And it was this person who just like kept putting herself in the same romantic challenging situation.
I'm not gonna tell you exactly what, I'm not here to spill tea. I'm just saying like this is a circumstance, right? But she kept doing it over and over and we'd have these deep heartfelt, wow, you're such a good listener talks. And then like the following week, we're right back to where we were before. And it was scary and awful because I'd been friends with this person for years. But I said to her, I was like,
I love you. What is it gonna take for you to change this pattern? Because I don't think I'm helping you. I think I'm actually reinforcing it. And she was so offended. We ended up breaking up as friends over. She was so deeply offended. And I felt horrible for a while. I really did because I was like, no, this friend who's already feeling bad, I made her feel so much worse. But you know what? Six months later,
And like it did take me time. wasn't into personal development at the time, right? So it took me some time to really kind of go through it. I was like, I know I feel a lot better because I'm not having to sit through and endure this. And I don't think, I don't think anybody's actually worse off by my refusal to participate in this. She's going to do whatever she does. And that's it. Right. And, but I can tell you like it really affected my energy.
And I hope it affected her personally to examine some things perhaps, but who knows if it did. I don't know. And like that's the, that's hard. When you have an environment full of people that are full of drama, drop a D in the chat if you're hearing what I'm saying loud and clear. It could be family members, it could be friends, it could be colleagues, it could be kids, it could be like all these people. Here's the thing, you don't have to go like full no contact, right? That was not the situation from my point of view.
with this friend breakup, but I did have a boundary. And here's how a boundary actually sounds, because a lot of people are like, just so you know, and I'm like, of. It's more like when this happens, I am going to blank, right? So when you complain about your boy troubles, I am going to excuse myself from that conversation, because I don't think it's actually helping. And I know that it's a conversation that we've had many times.
That's a boundary. So it's when this thing happens, then I will. It's not, it's not shame on you. Don't have boy problems. Don't complain about your life. Don't do this. Don't do that. I'm not controlling you. I'm just saying that when this happens, then I am going to take responsibility and do this thing. That's the best way I've ever heard like a interpersonal boundary described to me. Hope it serves you as well. If you want less drama, it's not about them having less drama.
It's about you having less go with it. It's about you having the agency to say, okay, you know what? Pause. When you complain about this thing or when you start talking politics or when you start complaining about mom or when you do that, I'm just giving you lots of examples. When this happens, I'm going to excuse myself, right? I appreciate you want to talk about this. I am not going to discuss this.
So you can very often have fully functional relationships where you're just not going there with particular topics with a person and when they can respect that and you can respect that they are going to go talk to somebody else about it, all the better. And you can actually have very meaningful relationships with people when you actually have those standards. yeah, environment. OK, was that helpful with the boundaries? Show to be in the chat if you're like, OK, when you do this, then I'm going to do that. OK, cool, right?
Okay, so you see how we're just like doing less, right? We might have to make some changes in order to do less from now on, which that the change part, the making the change part, that's the part you're resisting. That's the part you don't want to do. If you do it, think about every day going forward, every week going forward, every month going forward, because you've set that new standard, you set up that new environment, you're actually doing less work overall by a lot.
Right. So last thing that I want to say on like we're working harder might actually be sabotaging your business. This one was really, really, really hard for me personally to hear and to receive and to process and to believe. And I was just like, shoot. So here it is, my friends. The coaching space, I would say in general, is very woo, very emotionally driven, very
you know, spiritually driven. And I love that. I do love connection with spirituality. And also I really believe that universe has given us bath. Universe has given us statistics. Universe has given us data as well. So what can happen sometimes in this space is there's just such a priority placed on how do you feel about something, you know, and
Lately, I've been following the Hormozis for a long time and Leila Hormozi has this saying like, F your feelings. So she says it with full color, but F your feelings, follow the plan. And I have such mixed feelings about that particular message given the platform, because I do think that regulating your emotions is incredibly important to your performance, that your mood can certainly be an indicator, though it may not be the indicator of the thing you think it is indicating.
their story that goes with mood. So I don't think that suppressing and denying a consistently recurring emotional state is healthy or advisable. That being said.
When we swing really far the other direction, where everything is based on feelings, meaning I don't feel like doing something, I feel frustrated, I feel afraid, I feel angry, I feel depressed, I feel anxious. When we excuse ourselves from following a plan or a course of action that would ultimately be helpful on the other side, because the feeling is present,
that's where we start to really get in trouble with high performance over the long term. So if you have, and this was what was so hard for me, if you have this tendency to just like barrel through stuff and follow that plan, regardless of your mood, because you are a committed cookie, like you're just somebody who's gonna do the thing. You can sometimes ignore very real data.
that suggests that perhaps you're pushing up the wrong hill. work for the sake of work is, I don't think, the way to go. Smart work is actually really hard work because it makes you slow down and do really inconvenient things like math, right? I'm gonna give you one.
that will hopefully save you a ton of effort. How many hours does it take you to get one person to have a consult with you?
How many, so for programs maybe you've already sold, how many hours are you spending delivering that program and what are you actually getting paid per hour? This was brutal for me to like look at because there's so much like hustle culture in entrepreneurship. It's like, and there are gonna be seasons where you're investing and investing and investing and investing time, money.
energy and you're not necessarily seeing the final result. But here's what you do need to look for. Leading indicators. Leading indicators. So what is the proof that you're taking action? So many coaches, they go weeks without posting anything, right? So their content strategy dies on the vine because they're not posting anything.
Then after that, they have to like reach out and connect and talk to people. And I've worked with people who, for example, figure out the ad strategy. They've got literally a thousand people to talk to, but they don't send the email.
So because you don't send the email, you don't know the open rate of that email. You don't know how many people are clicking through. You certainly don't know how many people are gonna wind up on your calendar. You don't know. You have no idea, right? And where this really burned me was I got into the habit of like doing the things and going through the motions of the business and I wasn't looking at the data.
I wasn't looking at how far my posts were reaching or how much engagement I was getting or whether I was getting more followers or whether those followers were people who could work with me. I wasn't examining that. Smart work requires the hard work of looking at data and being fairly unemotional about that data. I mean, it just is what it is. So you can tell a story about it and what it means about you and how much you suck and all this kind of stuff. Don't do that.
But if you don't even look at the data, you're not really actually better off just by going on a gut instinct that's informed by bad habits, right? And informed by old habits and routines that have never actually worked for you. So when I got much more, and I'm still working on this, like much more obsessed with the numbers and the data, you know what I started to see is I was like, content strategy, right strategy, wrong frequency.
I was posting, but I wasn't growing. And when I was growing, I couldn't tell who was actually joining. Now I can actually see it. And now I'm like, yeah, we're kind of cooking in the right direction. OK, OK. But it took a lot more effort than I thought it was going to in terms of the number of posts, the frequency of the posts, and all of that to actually affect the result that I was really looking for. The other thing is that what I was talking about really did matter. So there's motivational content.
there's educational content and there's, there's, there's just engagement content. They're like different. And what I didn't realize until I really looked at my data is I was like, my God, my content is very one note. So I was always like, educate, educate, educate, educate, educate, educate, educate, educate. And there was no story to it. There was no conversation around it. There was no, there was nothing to like compel somebody forward.
And if I hadn't slowed down and just been a data driven CEO coach, I would never have seen the opportunity to improve. And that my friends is where you will work a lot less. If you can do the hard work of looking at the data to isolate, here's where in my process, in my business, I should be improving. And you only work on that. You're not working on
What is the squeaky wheel that gets the grease? You're not working on the thing that jazzes you and motivates you. You're working on the dang thing that is going to get the dang result. Right. And you want to know something? Your energy goes sky high when you start overcoming obstacles. When you start like making meaningful progress in the direction of your goals, you go like that hard work is so worth it. Right. Because it's targeted work. It's specific work. So
If you're at the stage of your business right now where most of my my folks in this community are where you're still looking for those first or next five clients I'd really suggest to you that the first thing your first priority is like get a full system going Where you are posting regularly you're sharing content regularly you're attracting people regularly I teach people how to do very basic lead form ads so they can see like this can be automated this doesn't have to be something that you are
you know, sitting there, like we said at the beginning, hoping to fill your cup with people who just stumbled by you. Like that's not a good strategy. Can we agree on that? Chode and asked in the chat, if you're like, you need a real strategy, you need an actual system. Your first priority is get the system up and running, right? And it's this end to end system. And again, if you read the book, you'll get the gist of the system. Then we optimize the system. You cannot optimize from your imagination. You can only optimize
from the vantage point of real something to tweak. Like there's no gap to work on when it's all in your head because you're just judging that gap. But I got news for you. There's like a 60 % plus chance that you're wrong about what the real gap is. Most coaches tell me that the gap is that they don't have the right message. And I can confidently tell you that at least 80 % of the time they're wrong.
The real gap is that they don't have a system to test the message. So because they don't have a system to test the message, they actually have no freaking idea, and neither do I, of whether that message is really gonna resonate and work. That's the bigger issue. Can you guys shout a G in the chat if you can hear what I'm saying? Your real first priority is just get a rhythm. Once you have the rhythm, you can start to...
analyze the details of the rhythm to start to go, okay, this part of the rhythm ain't working. Let's fix that part first. Then we can go and here's what's crazy. It's called the law of constraints. When you solve the gap of the part of the system, what happens is that the gap moves, right? There's another part of the system that is now constraining the growth. So then again,
The hardest thing in entrepreneurship is to just identify the right gap. And because we as humans are so conditioned to the externals, to the end product, we just look at the bank account and we're like, bank account broken. But it's like, well, what's your rhythm to change the bank account? If you don't have the rhythm, then we can't fix the gap. If we don't have the gap fixed, then you're going to continue to having the result of the bank account. You can't do anything about the result if you don't do anything about the input.
Yes, I want you to work a lot less hard in 2026, especially using and leveraging tools like AI and automation to take things off your plate so that your coaching actually sells itself, that you're not sitting there as a hustle buddy or worse sitting there with your cup, hoping people will fill it. That does not work, right? And secret coaches in 2026 certainly will not survive. So if you want to be very successful, it's really about being seen.
and having an interaction path that is very audience driven, right? Like the audience wants to interact with it because it is awesome for them at the stage that they're at. And it needs to fit your economics. Like it needs to actually fit with your time, your energy, and your financial capacity to support it, which is exactly what I focus on with my clients. So.
If you love this, if you would like to work on implementing your systems, do make sure you DM me the word expert so that I can send you the details to apply for the Experts Network program. In that program, I walk you through the exact step by step by step by step of what you need to do to have that system up and running so you can start to optimize it. If you've just had enough of waiting,
for a magical time when it's gonna be easier or waiting for a magical time for when other people aren't gonna need you. If you're sick and tired of all that, make sure you shout out expert and I will coach you through all of it. All right, my friend, thank you for joining me this week. I will see you back in Clients Over Chaos at next number five clients.com. That's our free group, next number five clients.com. We will see you next week and we will keep having this conversation about how to free your time. We'll see you soon.
