Building Your Company Around Your Natural Strengths

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The Business You Really Want | Natural Strengths

Feeling drained by forcing yourself into rigid business models is a clear sign you’re working against your own nature, and in this episode, co-hosts Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo are flipping the script to focus on building your company around your natural strengths. Gwen and Tonya delve deep into why many entrepreneurs struggle when following advice that isn’t aligned with their core selves and explore how understanding your innate gifts can be the key to unlocking sustainable success and preventing burnout. They discuss the difference between operating in your zone of excellence versus your zone of genius, and share practical tips for identifying your natural tendencies and designing a business that truly energizes you. Tune in for a candid conversation about ditching the “shoulds” and embracing what makes you uniquely brilliant in business.

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Building Your Company Around Your Natural Strengths

Build Business On Strengths, Avoid Burnout

Forcing yourself to follow business models that leave you drained will make success feel much harder than it needs to. If you are constantly fighting your nature in business, our episode is for you. I am going to guess Gwen. It is going to be a whole lot more you than it is going to be about me. I feel like you are so good about helping other people understand. I’m just going to say it like I see it, which is how they are doing themselves a great disservice by following what everybody else is telling them to do.

That’s absolutely true because, as you well know, I very much believe that there are lots of right answers and rarely is there a right answer. There could be the best right answer for you, but that very likely is a very different best right answer than what it is for me.

I don’t know, I find that is I see you having a lot of conversations with folks who maybe come to you because they’ve tried everything and it hasn’t worked and they just don’t know what else to do and so they come to you and you frequently will say, “It sounds to me like everything you’ve tried is great advice for other people, but I don’t see it being great advice for you.” You tend to observe something in them that nobody’s ever brought up before. I’m wondering maybe if you could just kick us off with why it is important to pay attention to who you are and what you are and what you like and all of that good stuff. What you bring to the table before you start deciding which advice to follow and which advice to maybe set aside.

This goes back to the title of the show, The Business You Really Want, but I think the trick here is that we get so conditioned to do what we’re supposed to do at such an early age. As soon as we start entering school, we are starting to be conditioned to do the things that we are supposed to do. Part of this is about fitting into society and being able to contribute, and all of that. I’m not saying that like we just need total anarchy. Is so not mine.

That is not my soapbox at all. We get so conditioned to start doing all the things that we are supposed to do that by the time that we become fully independent adults somewhere in our late teens and early 20s, maybe even early 30s, it’s hard for us to start separating out what it is that we’re doing because it’s what we’re supposed to do versus what it is that we want to do. That is our natural tendency, behavior, thought pattern, action, whatever. That self-reflection is way harder than it sounds. We haven’t used this phrase in quite a while on the show, but I know we’ve used it before.

It’s hard to read the label from inside the jar. Sometimes part of what I’m bringing is that I am outside the jar. When I bring up something, it’s like, “Yes, how did you know?” From my standpoint, it’s like, “It seems pretty easy. I think I can see this.” The other is that I’m good at asking questions that get to that information fairly quickly. It’s because I’m asking questions that seem completely random and unrelated to what’s going on.

What I’m looking for is what are the things that are more instinctual, natural. What are the things that you’re going to tend toward? I think that if we aren’t doing the things that we tend toward, that’s another cause of burnout that I don’t think anyone talks about. We talk about overwork and all of the things that we would typically associate with burnout.

Burnout is about energy. When you’re having to work against your natural energy, that’s always going to lead to burnout, even if you’re able to do it successfully. Even if you like the result, it’s against your natural tendency. I think that’s part of where we’re getting burnout and overwhelm. People are being surprised that they’re burnt out and overwhelmed because it’s not the typical reasons, just these subtle reasons.

It sounds to me like you didn’t say these specific words, but it reminds me of the fact that working, like using skills that you have developed over time, maybe even skills that you’re like it’s just something you’re good at, is not the same as working within your natural strengths. I think sometimes we get confused between the two of those.

Genius Vs. Excellence: Find Your Zone

Strategic coach, I think, is the one that talks about and it’s also in The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks of being in your zone of excellence versus being in your zone of genius.

For people who aren’t familiar with either strategic coach or the big leap, explain the difference.

I’ll be honest, I struggle with this too. I’m not going to give a great definition of this, but a zone of excellence is that you achieve exactly what you said. You’re good at it, you’re able to do it. You get positive feedback, you succeed 95%, 98% of the time at whatever it is. The zone of genius is that it is so natural and intuitive for you. Often, you don’t even notice it. The bigger issue for some folks, and I’ve seen it in a lot of people in my world, both personally and professionally.

It’s so intuitive, you assume that it has to be easy for everybody because it’s so intuitive. You don’t give it any credit at all because it’s so second nature. Of course, everybody does this. It’s like, “No, almost nobody else does that in that way, in that combination of things.” It’s usually not a thing. It’s 5 or 6 things the way that they all work together that make this very unique thing. Zone of genius is often hard to figure out for people because they just cannot see it as a genius for themselves, where excellence they’ve usually had to work at at some point or another for.

I know that there are a million and one assessments that people can do out there. There are strengths.

   

The Business You Really Want | Natural Strengths

   

I’ve done most of them.

It’s like there’s StrengthsFinder, there’s Colby, there’s Enneagram.

There’s’s personality type, working genius, YOS. The list goes on and on.

We will not list all of them. I think those are one way to figure out what your natural strengths are. But I think what’s more helpful really is to be able to sit down and identify the business activities that leave you energized versus the business activities that leave you drained, and to figure out what’s left there. Is that your approach, or do you have a different one?

Unlock Your Hidden Business Genius Now

It’s a bit of that. It’s one of the things that I find a lot of business owners who’ve taken what sounds like good advice in growing their business have often given away, one of the things that was their zone of genius. This is back to the reason we started this podcast way at the beginning, and then they want to burn down their business because they hate their business. You hate your business because the thing that you loved, you’re no longer doing.

To me, that’s another example of it. You have to be careful, even if it happens to be one of the things that’s not highly valuable in the business, because that’s the first thing that’s like, “You have to get rid of all the things that are highly that aren’t highly valuable.” What if 1 or 2 of those are part of your energy? We only look at it from a dollar standpoint. What if we talk about all the time, so it’s not a big secret. I love doing my bookkeeping.

What if taking away the bookkeeping from me is reducing my energy? Could someone do it cheaper than what my hourly rate is? For sure. Is the energy giving me energy for other things and other discussions, and other places? We don’t ever ask that question. We just look at the dollar equation. You’ve said for a long time, and one of my other clients is, I’ve got only one, everyone else is so happy to give away their bookkeeping, but I have one other client who’s kept their bookkeeping way past when they probably should.

Even I’ve encouraged them to give it away sooner, and they haven’t been willing to do it, but they now see that it’s not giving them the energy, and it’s starting to hold the business back. My business is nowhere near that yet. I could see it getting there, that there would be a point that’s like, “I actually need to give this up now.” The energy dollar, the whole equation, not just the dollar equation, but the energy and the dollar and the time equation, makes sense to give it up.

I think people are giving up a lot of their high-value in terms of energy pieces away early because they aren’t always high-dollar value. I think that becomes part of the problem. We don’t think about energy, and we don’t think about what we love, because the business has so many pieces to it, especially when you first start out. You are wearing every hat all the time. Switching all the hats, I think it’s hard to determine which of these hats are the hats that are my energy hats from the beginning. I do agree. I think the assessments help, but I think often we can go to more instinctual answers and probably get as good or better answers.

Childhood Instincts: Your Business Blueprint

How does somebody figure out their natural instincts, then?

I was recently exposed to this, and it’s still being refined. The concept of saying, “What did you just get lost in and love doing when you were a kid in that 8 to 12 range?” It is one way to think about it. In that 8 to 12 range, you’re able to start remembering things that you did when you were that age twelve, maybe not specifics, but you can remember conceptually things that you did. You probably didn’t have a whole lot of constraints put on you yet about what was right and what was appropriate and all of those things.

Like, “Did you love playing in the dirt?” At some point, it’s like, you’re not supposed to play in the dirt anymore. Even if you still really liked playing in the dirt. It’s thinking back to like, what are those things that I just really love to do? Looking at them in big, giant swaths to say, “Are there similarities?” Did I really like doing all of this stuff mostly by myself, or did I prefer it when I was with a big group of people, or a little group of people, or when I was on a team versus when I was doing an individual sport?

Some of those things start helping you figure out. If you’re somebody, and I’ll just use me, I liked mostly doing individual things, but I was also good at doing them in small groups with 2 or 3 other people. Although I have run a team, I run a department of nearly 100 people. I was pretty good at it. I would call that zone of excellence. I was good at doing it, but I also know I don’t want to grow a business that’s that big anymore.

I’m okay with a tiny team. That limits some of the things that I can build when I’m building the business I want. That may probably means I’m not building an 8 or 9-figure business if I really want a tiny team. I could potentially, but that’s more of a fluky thing as opposed to like a really planned. We’re going to make this thing happen. Could I build a seven-figure business? Yeah, sure. Possibly. That’s very feasible depending on lots of other factors, but 8, 9, probably not.

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If I go back and look, it’s like, “Whenever I’ve been in those environments, those are some of the times that I have been happiest.” Even when I worked at Ernst & Young, which is a giant multi-international firm. I worked in a department that didn’t even exist as a department with three other people. I didn’t even think about it until just now. I was like, “Yeah.” Always finding the little group. The smaller group.

Even within a large group, still saying, “These are my people. I know all these people are here, but they’re not my people.” I think that’s an important piece. One of the things you and I talk about all the time, and that comes up a lot, is that I am both an outside person and an inside person. I always had hobbies that were outside-based as well as hobbies that were inside-based, about equal. I’m as happy being outside as I am inside.

Where I have not been able to make this job work. This job is very much an inside job, but the day that I can be like in a really good screened-in porch in the right temperature space, screened in because bugs love me way too much. That’ll be perfect because I can be both outside and inside at the same time. I can imagine what that is and how that’s perfect for me. We don’t always get to have everything we want, but these are some of those kinds of themes that you start looking for.

I’ve always been an extrovert versus an introvert. Have a very good sense of time, which means I am pretty good at winding up a call within a minute or two of when the call is supposed to be done. For me, a back-to-back schedule where I finish a call at noon and then I start one at noon, and I finish it at one, and I start the next one at one, actually works for me because I can manage my time well.

I know what an hour is, even when I don’t have a clock in front of me. I’m able to manage that going forward. If I were someone who had a less natural sense of time, which a lot of people don’t have a good sense of time, not that that’s a right thing or a wrong thing, just a natural thing. That back-to-back schedule is really hard for them. I’ll talk about my husband. My husband does not have that same sense of time. He is the exact opposite. Often, he’s a vice president, so he has a lot of meetings he goes to.

The days that he has back-to-back meetings, he is almost immediately running behind after the first one because he doesn’t have a good sense of time, which means he shows up at the next one late. Unless one gets canceled or something happens, it’s like, “It’s going to catch up today.” It’s like, “I’m not surprised.” Designing your business to work toward as many of those natural things, that means that’s not taking energy away from you, because it’s just the way that you work.

People Vs. Systems: Identifying Structure

That I think leads us to the next natural question, which is here’s something that you’ve made me aware of that I think is invisible to a lot of people. I don’t think everybody knows naturally what the business structure is that they’ve built. Just an example. It’s like, I know people who don’t actually know that they have a service-based business. I think everybody knows whether their business is a product-based business.

You know that you sell a chachki of some sort or you sell a thing. You either sell a thing or you don’t sell a thing. Some folks are actually in service-based businesses, but they’re operating as if they’re in product-based businesses. For instance, photographers. I think a lot of times, they sell a product. Not so much these days because many times photographers are out there, they’re doing their photos, and then they just make a gallery of the photos they took available.

Back in the day, they thought they sold prints. The four hours that they spent at your wedding were a vehicle in which to give you your wedding album. These days, we acknowledge that a photographer is actually a service-based business. We acknowledge that graphic designers, even if they give you a bunch of Canva templates or a bunch of Canva designs, that’s a service that they provide.

Whereas coaches and consultants oftentimes, they understand that they are service-based businesses. Even that, some are like project-based services, and some are ongoing, like retainer-based services. I’m wondering if maybe what we could talk a little bit about are what are the business structures that complement different natural tendencies? The person who thrives on personal connection, like I always look at it like, are you a people person, or are you a systems person?

There are folks that really like interacting with people. I’m going to say it this way, and it’s going to sound harsh, but those who know will quietly raise their hand. There are people who like people, and there are people who don’t actually like people that much.

I would say, yes.

It’s not an introvert or an extrovert thing. That’s one of the things people can do. I know introverts who love people, and I know extroverts who hate people.

Somebody told me this, and it was one of those things where I was like, “Oh,” because I am not an extrovert and I genuinely like people. This person was an extrovert, and they said that they used to love to say, especially when they were working retail, they loved to say that they were a people person. That’s why they liked retail. They had a boss that said, You cannot say that you are a people person unless you like people on their bad days too.”

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That was new information for them because they did not like people on their bad days. They liked people, they liked having conversations, they liked being surrounded by people. What they realized is that in a retail environment, when it came to a customer having a complaint, they wanted nothing to do with that customer. They wanted to go hide in the back room and let somebody else deal with that customer. You’re right is being a people person really liking people is not the same as being an extrovert.

No, yeah. What they were showing was their extroversion, but not their people liking. No one likes to be around people on their bad day. Nobody does, but can you do it? Do you find it interesting? Are you curious about it?

I totally am.

I am, too. It’s like, “Why is that happening?”

When I’m working with online communities, there’s always the person who is like super duper grouchy or easy to offend. I’m the person who loves to explore that. I don’t want to hide. I don’t want to ignore them and hope they’ll go away. I want to connect and see what that’s about because maybe it is something we’re doing, and maybe it’s not. For the people who thrive on personal connection, where are some good business structures or business models maybe that are good for them?

Personal connections, definitely that one-on-one model makes a lot of sense because you’re getting to know a person and getting into it and/or what I’m going to call a small group environment or regular interaction. When I mean interaction, I mean more like the DMs interaction, where there’s some back and forth so that you’re getting to know people as much.

I’m just going to throw in some models there that I have seen and heard. Coaching one-on-one, small group coaching, having some if you’re going to be a course creator, having some a live delivery or live interaction, whatever that is, a Q&A call, whether that is DM, email support, maybe, Voxer coaching. I’m a big fan of Voxer coaching.

I know you are. I’m not good at it yet. That’s okay.

That’s okay. That’s all right. More for me, I will say. What about those who prefer systems?

Those that prefer systems are generally going to be more on either the automated side of things, like courses, definitely more in the group program, where they’re controlling the conversation as opposed to lots of just ask me anything kinds of conversations. Sometimes, group programs it’s like, “If you have questions on module two, come on Wednesday because we’re going to address module two.”

That is not a people person. That is a systems person. We’re staying in this box that we have predefined, and those things. I think some of these, I’ll call it products slash service providers that you’re talking about, like the graphic designer or the web designer or the wedding photographer, can be either, depending on how they approach the business and how they design it. A web designer or a graphic designer could mostly have you fill out a form and have everything go back and forth in a much more asynchronous way.

Obviously, like a wedding photographer, probably need to be a people person because if anyone’s going to have a bad day, it’s either probably going to be their best day or their worst day, possibly both. You’re going to have to deal with that, but maybe you have an assistant who’s dealing with all of the people piece.

You’re just really good about making sure we’re going to get every one of these shots. We’re going to do it just the way they want. We’re going to be able to do it really efficiently. The photography thing does not end up taking an hour and a half, but we’re done in twenty minutes. They can go to the reception and do that. I could see that crossing the line, depending on which way you want to approach it.

As I said, I do think courses, and also I think fixed-length programs, also fall into folks who are more systematic. We’re going to do A, then we’re going to do B, we’re going to get to step K, we’re done. Whether you’re done or not, that’s not my problem. We’ve taken you through all the steps. If you’ve done all the steps and kept up with us, you should be done too.

Designing your business to align with your natural inclinations means it won't drain your energy, because it's simply how you operate. Share on X

What about detail-oriented versus big-picture thinkers? What are the options there?

Detail-oriented are definitely going to fall more into what we would call operational-type roles. Accounting-type things, any of the VA, administrative, SOP writing, all of those things can be on the web, and the graphic design as well, depending on how you’re doing it. Where the big picture thinkers are definitely going to be more in the coaching, consulting, and strategic kinds of things. Not that you cannot be both, and not that you cannot deal with the other, but where do you have the most energy?

How about creative versus analytical personalities?

Generally, a big generalization, but still generally it’s the same answer as above. Most of the time, the visionaries also see themselves as more creative, and the detail-oriented people usually see themselves as more analytical. There can be some crossover and some slightly different looks, but I find those line up very closely, 80%, 85 % of the time. Did you experience anything different on that?

Yes and no. I do know creatives who are more detailed. It’s like the details are what help them to be creative. I do think your analytical personalities, though, are almost always detail-oriented. I don’t see analytical personalities being big picture thinkers, but I do see some creatives being more on the detail-oriented side.

There are some strategic thinkers who can also be very analytical. As I said, I think it’s like an 80% those two line up.

Adapt Models: Fit Your Unique Strengths

I also feel like those are one of those things where you just like there’s enough overlap also in different business models and structures that you can benefit in those. In our last episode, we talked a lot about high-touch one-on-one services. Being in a business, like a popular business model right now, when we’re recording this. I want to address just briefly your take on adapting whatever business model is popular to fit your strengths.

Taking that people person, if high-touch one-on-one isn’t in vogue and what’s really in vogue is DIY self-study courses that people can buy and take at 2:00 AM, it may sound like, “I just cannot be successful in an online-based business.” That’s not necessarily true. What are your thoughts on, like, how do you adapt what a popular business model is to fit your strengths?

My first thing, and we talked about it the last time, I’m going to stick to it because I think it’s important is if what gives you energy and makes you light up and you do a really good job at, even if it’s not the popular thing, if you stick with it, you’re going to outshine. I don’t think you always have to adapt. That’s the first thing. I think that’s one of the things that we get caught in because of all the social media, all the conversations, all of the group chats, all of the other things like, “If you don’t do this, your business is going to fail.” It’s like, I am not convinced of that. It could, but I doubt it’s just because you didn’t do this one thing.

Fair, but I am going to actually jump in here and because I’ve seen you do this and this is one of those things where I want to give you space to talk about how you do it and yet at the same time I want to acknowledge that for you it’s so intuitive that you don’t necessarily know that you’re doing it.

There we are.

It comes across maybe as a brag if you bring it up, but less so if I bring it up. When I look at some of the offers that you have, let’s just take your group program, for instance. I think this is actually a really good example. You are somebody who shines one-on-one because you do really well if you can work with somebody on a deep level, have enough time and space to ask them hard questions.

Give them time to just sit there for 3 minutes, 5 minutes, silently processing without pressure that “Somebody else’s turn next, so I have to shut up or I have to answer quickly, whatever comes to mind.” You do really well working with people in that environment to get to the heart, what you would call the root cause, to really help them dig into what they really want and what the best way is to get what they really want, so on and so forth.

It would be very easy for you to say, “I have to work with people one-on-one. That’s the only way I can do it.” You figured out that you actually can have a group program. How you’ve adapted that model, though, to work to fit your strengths and how you best know you serve clients is that your group program is one group meeting per month, whereas a lot of group programs they’ll have you meet weekly. You’ll meet with the group once a month, and then you’ll meet with them two weeks later, one-on-one.

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As you were saying that, I thought, I appreciate you bringing this up as an example, because you’re right. It is an adaptive example of it. The other thing is I know that if I grew that group program to a hundred people, the one time a month wouldn’t be enough for the bulk of the people. The first thing I said was, “We’re going to keep the number of people on the call small.”

Everyone potentially has not just a two-minute time, but everyone really can take ten minutes of time, give or take, with a question and a thoughtful answer, and other people can chime in, and we don’t have to say no one else can say anything. We don’t necessarily have to keep a clock on it, because sometimes that will create undue pressure that doesn’t need to be there. If we didn’t have the clock, they would actually do better than if they did have the clock. That was one of the pieces.

When we were talking about what happens if it grows, I immediately went through a process that said, “We could open up another group and let everyone know they get one meeting. They can choose A or B until one of them is filled up.” Once everyone’s had a shot, then if there are spaces, people can come to the additional one, because I’m okay with that as well. Part of it was saying, “No, we’re going to limit the number of people that actually can get on the call.” The way to be able to still do enough one-on-one interaction within a group.

What I have seen only because, like I’ve observed a couple of times, your group. There’s this 90-minute time where they’re all together. They get that group interaction. They get to mastermind with each other, so to speak. If something comes up, that is deeper or if you get so far, let’s just say they need to take to cover five steps and they only got to step three, then it is helpful for you to be able to say, “You we could go a little bit deeper during your one-on-one session.”

They only have to wait two weeks for that. They don’t have to book something else. You’ve made this work to your strengths, to how you feel like you best provide value. It’s very different from what most people think of when they think of a group program, even if they think of a group program that includes someone one time.

That’s just a really good example that I would encourage anybody reading when we’re talking about adapting what you see out there being popular, what people seem to be buying like hotcakes. You’re like, “I want a piece of that pie,” is to just think, how do you best deliver value to clients, and what is a piece of what you see being on trend that you could either add or maybe that you could replace as it makes sense. Maybe there’s something that’s a little bit lower value that you could replace, but to be thinking about that.

Let me give another example that I think people have been dealing with. I think they’re getting past it now, but I think it’s still a great example. There was a time when everything was about the launch. We do the launch, and we get a thousand customers, or we have a hundred thousand dollar launch, or a million dollar launch, or whatever.

The launches started fading for whatever reason. I’m not even going to try and go into any of the reasons that it could be. The question is, does your program need the launch, or could it be evergreen? If it does need the launch, does it need it as often, or could it be less often, or could it be more often? If you’re only launching once a year and it’s not a very big launch, could you launch once a quarter instead? Back to, do you need a launch? Some things do run as a cohort, and you need a launch.

You need everyone to start at a similar time. It’s another place that we did an adaptation. I’ve never been a big fan of launch for lots and lots of reasons, but we realized for our weekly course of action that it made better sense to onboard people at a similar time so that they had a certain amount of experience before they joined our quarterly planning session. We realized that by putting a launch time, even though that made a few people had to wait, and they could have had a little more experience, it’s like, no, but it makes it easier so that we know this group’s coming in together.

Overcoming The “Too Easy” Obstacle

That’s a prime example of just shifting things that make sense for you, for your business, for your customers, for what aligns with your natural strengths. Before we close, I wanted to talk a little bit about, I’ll say some of the obstacles that get between thinking like, “That sounds like a good idea and doing it.” You alluded to this earlier in the episode, or actually, you directly talked about how one of the biggest barriers to making your business about your strengths is believing that it cannot be profitable because it’s too easy. It’s so easy for you. There’s no way you could make money at doing it.

It’s true.

I am just going to say to our dear reader what was said to me, because this was the exact conversation I had. I still remember. I was sitting in a cubicle in 2017, and I was on a break, and I was having a conversation about like if I was to have a side hustle. I was in grad school, and I was like, “Yeah.” They were like, “What are the things that you do like to do?” We’re talking about all sorts of things.

They were talking about social media being really popular. Like, “What about doing social media?” I was like, “That’s my day job.” They just stopped, and at no point in time in the conversation had I ever mentioned that I was a social media manager. They were just like, “If social media is your day job, why don’t you just like offer it, not competing with what you do as your day job, but to a different market, different industry?”

I was like, “I don’t know, it’s easy.” The two women who were advising me at the point were like, “It’s easy for you, but it’s not easy for anybody else. Usually when we’re looking at side hustles, we want to do something that’s easy because we don’t have time, energy or space to do something that’s hard.” I was like, “Really?” In my mind at that time, there was no way I could ever charge anybody a decent price for social media management because it’s just how my brain worked.

   

The Business You Really Want | Natural Strengths

   

For me, when I started this business in, I don’t know if it was 11, 12, 13, 14, something when I really started doing this as its own thing. I had been doing it in a particular industry. I was like, “I know about that industry, so it’s probably okay.” I thought, “No.” The type of stuff I’m doing, though, is not industry-specific. It’s broader.

My thought was, “Do I know enough to do this for any industry?” It wasn’t until much later when someone actually made me count, I realized how many industries they did know about. That was like a whole different conversation, but this was before that conversation. I approached it in a slightly different way, which was like, “Let me just try something outside and see how it goes.” I threw it out as a free thing to just test it out and say, “Can I provide this strategic insight, valuable thought, and make it worthwhile?”

I did it with like 3 or 4 completely different industries. It was like, “Maybe I can.” That’s when I opened it up outside of the very narrow industry that I had been working in and realized it’s like, “This actually is easy for me because it’s not about the industry. It is about seeing the way I see things. It’s about me questioning the way that I question things, which works for any industry.”

Also, because the way that you work with people is so personalized.

That was part it because I was working with them one-on-one. What I realized was, “Context matters, and I could get to their context quickly.” That was actually what was valuable.

It’s like you could personalize it. It didn’t have to be about everybody in this field, does it always does this?

That was my natural tendency, is I’ve always been able to get to someone’s context quickly.

Ask These Questions: Business Harmony Guide

If somebody is reading and going, “This sounds good. There are some things that I might like to do more of, do less of,” what are some questions that they could be asking themselves in terms of getting to how to do more within their natural instincts, their natural tendencies, what they’re naturally good at, and maybe doing less of the things that are harder or take more mental bandwidth?

The first always is to go back to thinking about what really has always been natural for you. Looking for those common threads, whether it’s being inside, outside groups, teams, creating, or building. What are those things? Where do you find those themes? Start there so that you’ve got something that you can look toward.

Ask yourself, what are the things that I’m currently doing that either fall pretty clearly into it, not at all into it, and what’s on that sitting in the gray scale? The things that aren’t, so ask yourself, “Do I need these?” That’s first question is, do we need to do any of the things that are not in my strengths at all, or is this something that I decided we should do because I was reading it on the internet?

Back in the day, we used to talk about when the CEO read the airplane magazine, it’s like, “They just found a new technology in the airplane magazine that doesn’t apply to us at all.” Same type of thing. Did you see something on social media? Decided you should do it because everyone’s doing it, and it must be the thing. When you look at it, this is not at all in my wheelhouse in any form. Drop those things off.

If they are things that you actually want to be doing, then you have to start asking your question of, “Can I think about doing this in a completely different way?” Which means we have to let go of all of the standards, all of the expectations, all of the normal things. The good news is, unless I’m really misunderstanding who our listenership is, you guys are all visionaries and creatives.

This is actually in your wheelhouse. I think we don’t use it a lot on ourselves. I think we save all of our visionary creative processes for our services, for our clients, for our whatever. I don’t think we think about applying it to our own selves and our own business. Part of it is because it’s hard to read the label from inside the jar. You may need to get some outside perspective as well, but say, “This is the thing I know that I need to keep, but I don’t like it being done this way.”

Someone else might be able to help you say, “You thought about doing it A, B, or C.” Often, as soon as you hear it’s like, A, no, B, maybe C, yes. You could start redesigning to make that thing happen. I would look at the things that are absolutely a no fit first. I would also look at the things that are absolutely a yes fit and see if they can be amplified, and then deal with the gray. The gray is always tough. We leave the gray to the last.

Yes. That is the perfect segue into a brand new resource that we have available called Breaking the Burnout Cycle. It’s an assessment and action guide to help you identify your natural strengths, pinpoint where your current business model is working against you, and provide a step-by-step plan to transform your business while supporting your well-being. You can get that at TheBusinessYouReallyWant.com/Burnout, and that will allow you to download your copy. As Gwen said, those of you who are visionaries, who are so good at doing this for other people, this is just a resource to help you do it for yourself, to write down your results so that you don’t forget them.

  

Mentioned in This Episode

   

About Your Hosts

Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.

Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.