How do you know if your business strategy is still working for your benefit, or it is time to do something new and different? Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo discuss how to evaluate your strategies in real time to avoid sticking with something that does not actually serve your goals. They explain how to determine the best course of action by paying attention not just to your data but also to your intuition. Gwen and Tonya also talk about the differences between qualitative and quantitative data, as well as panicked and proactive reactions. Find out how to refine your strategies by being wary of your numbers and what your gut is telling you.
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How to Know Whether Your Strategy Is Working (Beyond Vibes & Beyond Numbers)
Difference Between Intuition And Emotion
Numbers alone won’t tell you if your strategy is working, and neither will your feelings. Great leaders make decisions based on a mix of indicators. They don’t just make decisions based on a gut check, based on which way the wind is blowing, or a big pile of spreadsheets. In this episode, Gwen and I, but mostly Gwen, to be honest, pretty much all Gwen, like it’s a 90-10 split. Gwen’s going to break down how to evaluate your strategy in real time so that you don’t stick with something too long, but also don’t abandon it too soon. Gwen, I want you to just kick us off. When it comes to evaluating strategy in real time, what do you think is the most important thing for our readers to be aware of?
I think a key thing is understanding there are two elements. One element is very tactical, which is data. It’s things that we can track. The other is very soft and gooey, which is intuition, because at some point, intuition is really, really valuable. However, as women, often, we conflate our emotion and our intuition, and when we do that inappropriately, that becomes problematic.
As one of my favorite people, Jason Campbell, who is a grandmaster and does a ton about breathwork, one of the things he talks about is he says women have a 220, where men have a 120, in the connection between the third eye, that whole intuition piece, and our gut. He says “Women have this wonderful, strong cord,” and so he’ll ask this. He’ll say, “How many times has your intuition actually been wrong?”
Women will hem and haw, and he’ll say, “Not your emotion, your actual intuition.” They’ll smile, and he says, “One hundred percent. I don’t know any woman that it’s not right 100% of the time. When it’s not right, it was usually driven by emotion, but also the problem with this great connection is our emotions are also stronger.” It’s easier to confuse the two and conflate the two. When we can start separating, is this an intuition, is this an intuitive thing, as opposed to am I reacting to my emotion, that piece, I think, is a huge piece that can be driving our strategic decisions in concert with the data.
Before we can get to the data, I’m still a little fuzzy, and if I’m fuzzy, our readers are fuzzy too, because in my head, what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to figure out what would be an example that I could give that would explain the difference between intuition and emotion, and I’m not coming up with one. How do you describe them?
I’m going to give you my example that was my time that I finally understood my intuition was 100% correct. This was years ago when I was working in a corporate job leading a team, and we were hiring somebody new that was going to work directly for me in a role. It was well-defined, all the rest of it. The resume that came in, this person checked every single solitary box. I interviewed them, my boss interviewed them, and several coworkers. They kept checking all of the boxes.
My gut, truly my gut, said this person is a bad hire. It wasn’t because I didn’t like the person. There wasn’t any emotional energy around it. It was just this feeling that I could not logically explain at all. I could not, for the life of me, explain it, and because I’m such a high logic, that made me doubt my intuition on it. My boss thought this guy was going to be great, and I really trusted my boss. It’s like, “Okay, we’re just going to do it.” I never said anything because I couldn’t explain it, but like I said, I also knew there wasn’t any fear, anger, all the things that would be emotional words around it. It was just this weird feeling.
Once we got him hired, within about three months, we realized it was a really bad hire. It was one of those like, “Yes, I knew that, but I couldn’t explain it.” In this case, I could tell there was going to be a cultural mismatch. That was what was going to happen. Looking back, I could see that. At the time, though, I could not put those words. I couldn’t put those words to it.
For me, the way you start distinguishing it is to say, “Is it something that I know to be true without ever being able to put any necessary words around it?” To me, that’s intuition. As opposed to, “I feel something about it. I feel anxious, I feel nervous, I feel scared, because I didn’t feel anything about it. It was just, “This just seems wrong.” From that point forward, I started really trusting my intuition, and as Jason would say, it has always been correct.
How Intuition Plays Out In A Business Strategy
Now that you’ve explained intuition versus emotion, like in a practical example, I think most of us have encountered, whether it was with a hire or even just meeting a friend or relative’s significant other, how might that look in a business strategy scenario?
In a business strategy, I’ll just pick on a marketing example, because I think a lot of people deal with this in their marketing worlds, where you’re working with someone and they say, and I’m just picking something completely at random, “What you really need to be doing is you need to be emailing your people twice a week instead of once a week.” Your gut says, “No, that’s not going to actually change anything.” Not because you have data, not because you have anything else, you just know instinctively it’s like, “No, that’s not going to do it.”
It’s not because, “That’s so exhausting, I don’t want to do it,” or, “I don’t know what I’m going to say,” or that there’s any emotional energy. You just say, “No, I don’t think that’s right.” That would be a place where we’re applying our strategy we’re trying to make better contact with our customers or whatever around our marketing and we’re saying, “Yeah, my gut says this tactic isn’t the tactic to make it happen.”
Often, our intuition is partly being in touch with the broader energy of the universe and our people, and often, we can’t explain it. It’s just like, “I know my people well enough to know that it’s not like two is going to annoy them. A whole bunch of people aren’t going to unsubscribe because I’m doing it twice a week. It’s just work that’s not going to deliver any ROI.” To me, that’s where we start practically looking at it, is to say, “Does it feel right? Does my gut say this makes sense, or does my gut say this doesn’t make any sense at all, even if I can’t explain it?”
When it comes to strategy, because what I think is really important about this episode, because it is coming out for the first time at the beginning of the year, in Q1, and no matter how hard you and me try to evangelize the opposite, a lot of people do their planning in a vacuum. There are a lot of people out there that teach you to do your planning in a vacuum. What I mean by doing your planning in a vacuum, which is it’s like all future-focused, and it’s not effectively using the past to inform the future, it’s not taking things outside of your control really into consideration, it’s just, “I’m going to make $1 million because I said I’m going to make $1 million,” or whatever.
It’s around about this time of the year that things start to look a little hairy, or it’s like, “If I’m trying to make $1 million this year and I haven’t made $100 yet, I don’t know how.” I could start off on January 1st saying, “That’s okay, I can just make it up tomorrow,” but by February 2nd, I needed to have made at least $1 in order for me to really feel good about saying I’m going to make $1 million in the next 11 months. This is the time when people start going, “Do I need to switch gears?” Sometimes, they’re ready to throw the whole baby out with the bathwater. They’re like, “Maybe I need a new business model, maybe I need to fire everyone, start from scratch, new office, new this, new that.”
Most Important Signals To Look Out For
Sometimes they’re like, “No, I made a plan and I must stick with it all twelve months.” You and me have been in business long enough to say that neither extreme is typically the right answer. It may be, but I haven’t seen a situation where either extreme was the right answer. There’s this place where you have to look at things and see if the writing on the wall tells you anything, but that early in the game, oftentimes, your numbers aren’t a reliable indicator because it takes time for anything good or bad to really manifest itself in the data. That’s why I think it’s important to be paying attention now, but my question for you, Gwen, is if the numbers aren’t trustworthy a month in, two months in to the strategy, what do you do? What do you look at?
Neither extreme is typically the right answer. Share on XThis part of this is where the intuition comes in, because I will agree with you that the numbers may not be accurate, but the numbers are probably still telling you something. Part of it is understanding, is it points of data or is it actually starting to demonstrate a trend? A trend means that we have enough data that we’re actually seeing a path. An up path, a down path, a straight path, whatever a ziggy path, whatever it happens to be.
Even when we don’t have a full trend, we still usually have some data. To me, that’s part of where we start, is we say, “We’ve got a little bit of data, let’s start with that,” and then that’s where we go to the intuition and say, “Where does our gut land on that?” One of the things when we talk about planning and people, I love your, “We’re going to make $1 million this year,” they’ll say, “We’re going to make $1 million this year,” it’s like, “Okay, but you’re coming into the year having made $100,000 last year,” Just picking some random numbers. You’ve got to grow ten times.
Now, the reality of this next month, you’re going to make the same as you did all last year probably isn’t very realistic unless you have some really unique thing that’s changing everything. What that really says is next month, instead of making 8 or 9 or 10, we need to make 12, but that means the next month we need to make 20, so by the time we actually get to December, we’re not needing to make $100,000 to make $1 million, we’re probably needing to make $125,000 or something.
Part of it is, are we looking at the data in a way that’s realistic? Someone could look and say, “I only made $12,000 this month. There’s no way I’m going to hit $1 million.” It’s like, yeah, but if you actually can keep that month-over-month growth, you’ll probably get really close to $1 million by the time you get to December. No, you did not make $100,000 this month and you’re not going to make $100,000 probably next month.
If you went from 8 to 12, that’s a 50% growth, which means next month, you would go from 12 to 18, which means all of a sudden, those numbers, if you can keep that up, it’s like, “That actually is getting me pretty close to the number that I’m trying to get to.” Part of it is looking at the data, but also with some gut to say, “Does this actually fit what I think the reality is?” Part of it is understanding your gut saying, “Do I have enough time to actually be evaluating this yet?”
Using the exact same example, instead of making 12, let’s say the last month of December, you made 8, because that gets you pretty close to making $100,000 in a year. If in January, instead of making 12, not only did you not make 8, you only made 4. That’s a place where the data has given you enough information right off the bat. You are not in the right trajectory from where you started. At that point, you may need to be looking at, “Okay, what is changing? Why is that happening? What’s going on there?” Even though it’s very tiny data, it may be enough data without much gut into the whole thing.
Part of it is using that intuition piece to say, “Do I have enough data? What is that data telling me? Is part of my intuition saying I need to stay the course and get more data or is the intuition telling me, no, what I really thought was going to happen just isn’t going to happen, for whatever reason?” Sometimes, it’s things within our control and sometimes it’s things outside of our control that we’re dealing with. Part of it is doing that gut check on a regular basis to say, “Does this still feel like it’s in alignment with where I’m going and what I’m wanting to do?”
Why Qualitative Data Matters In Your Strategy
I feel like I’m tracking, and I think you did a good job of also explaining that when we’re interpreting our data, it’s important to be as neutral as we can be with it. I think this is also one of those areas where if you can’t be neutral, like if money genuinely freaks you out, because there are people that are genuinely freaked out by dollars and cents, then bring in a business advisor, a finance person, whoever, to objectively help you interpret that data.
When interpreting data, be as neutral as you can be with it. Share on XAside from that, it should be fairly easy to find a way to divorce the emotion from the numbers you’re seeing so that you’re avoiding that bias. When we’re looking at like some of our strategic indicators, the indicators that we should be paying attention to. We’ve got data, which are our numbers, and they could be anything from dollars to followers. If we’re looking at social media performance or marketing. It could be churn rate if we’re looking at client acquisition, churn rate, lead-to-sale timeline, all of that good stuff.
All of the millions of things that people tell you should track.
Those countable things is what I like to say. If they could be somehow deduced to a number of some sort, easy to measure, they tend to fall with a number value, that’s your quantitative data. You’ve got your qualitative data, which is where I think people get a little bit confused, first of all, because if you don’t come from a research background, I think when we talk about qualitative data, that sounds super fancy and reliable, but then when we start to talk about the things that count as qualitative data, that sounds awful fuzzy and subjective.
Let’s be honest, qualitative data really is gooey.
Unpack qualitative data for me and maybe why it matters and even why it may not matter?
Qualitative data really is where more of that emotion kinds of words fit in. It feels easy, it feels hard, it feels like it’s gotten better, it feels faster, even though it may not be really measurable in the normal way that we think of time. Any of those things tend to be where the qualitative data is. “I feel like we’re communicating better. I feel like our customers are happier.” We can do some things that will put some quantitative measurements to that as well, but most of the time, it’s still a bit of a qualitative environment.
One of the classics is the net promoter score that everyone gets very excited about, and it’s a good measure, which basically the question is on a scale from 1 to 10, “How likely are you to recommend our business to someone else that need our services?” It’s worded in slightly different ways, but that’s the gist of it. Since it’s got a measurement, 1 to 10, people consider it a very quantitative piece. To some degree, it’s still qualitative because it’s, “How likely are you to?” It doesn’t say, “How many times have you?” It’s, “How likely are you?” It’s like, “I don’t know that many people that would need the service, but probably I would recommend it because I’ve gotten good service.”
At the same point, the next day, something could go slightly awry and be like, “Not very likely at all,” as opposed to, “How many people have you referred our business to?” That would be a real quantitative number because it’s like, “You have referred me three times, so we know that there are three referrals,” and then we can chase that down. “How likely are you?” “Today, I would give you a 9 out of 10 that I’m likely to recommend you. Another month from now, I might give you a six because something hasn’t quite gone as well.” Even sometimes our quantitative data really is also qualitative, which is how likely is it to stay the same on any given day in any given situation. Qualitative data often will vary somewhat.
Usually, it won’t vary lots unless something goes terribly astray. If we’re trying to put a measurement around it, like a 1 to 10, today it might be an 8, tomorrow it might be a 7, the next day it might be a 9, might be an 8, might be a 7, might be an 8, might be a 7, might be a 9. It’s not going down to one, and it’s not doing these big things, but it changes based on how we feel about things is a qualitative piece. Often, we assign qualitative feelings toward our quantitative information, particularly like you were talking about where, “I’m not really comfortable with numbers and so I see this number and I’ve decided this number is bad.”
The number itself is not bad. It’s probably telling you something, but we feel bad about the number. We don’t actually need to feel bad about the number, we just need to understand what that number is telling us. That qualitative data is really useful because it’s often the source behind the quantitative data and is giving us better details about it. When we see our revenue go up, everyone’s happy, that’s a wonderful thing.
How do we feel about it going up? There’s a qualitative piece there. Is it way harder? Am I exhausted all the time? Not every dollar is equal to every other dollar when it comes to our energy. Out in the world economically, my dollar and your dollar are exactly the same dollar to Amazon. How I got my dollar and how you got your dollar may energetically feel very different. That’s where that qualitative piece is, is about the energy around it. We’ve talked a lot that the three big components in any business are money, time, and energy. Money, easy to measure. Time, relatively easy to measure. Energy, super hard to measure. I consider qualitative measurements are often about energy in some form or fashion.
Qualitative Vs. Quantitative: Which Is More Important?
It sounds to me like none of those is more important than the other?
I will always count data stronger so quantitative than qualitative because we aren’t putting lots of other emotions well, we can be, but generally, the data is the data. If I got $100,000 in this year in sales, I got $100,000 in on it. I can tell myself that it was an easy 100,000 or I can tell myself it was a hard $100,000, but it’s still $100,000. Part of this is my own tendency. I will tend to weigh slightly to the quantitative information because it’s verifiable by a second source.
You feel like it’s more reliable?
It’s a bit more reliable, but it doesn’t mean that the qualitative data isn’t important.
I think in your example, what you’re saying is the quantitative data tells us what. It tells us the behaviors or the actions that took place, and the qualitative data helps us give context to it.
It gives context. It gives some of the why, it sometimes gives a little bit of the how. Back to, you and I could both make $100,000 this year, and you could say it was a really easy $100,000 and I could say it was a really hard $100,000, even if we were doing pretty much the same thing. That’s a qualitative measure about that $100,000, but we both made $100,000.
The Numbers You Need To Pay Attention
When it comes to figuring out whether your strategy is working, especially when you’re early into it, early in a quarter, early in a year, or just at the early stage of a new strategy, a new initiative that you’re trying, walk us through your personal process, and then let us know if there’s anything you would do differently or advise differently for maybe somebody reading. I know for you sometimes, it depends on stage of business and whatever. How would you build out your decision-making process? What would you track, how often would you track it, what do you ignore early on that you might need to pay attention to later?
Difference Between A Panicked Instinct And Proactive Instinct
You always need to be watching the money because if you’re not watching the money, then it’s not actually a business. There always has to be some measurements of money. It doesn’t necessarily have to be revenue. It might be, and often I would encourage this as a better measurement, your profit. How much are you making after all you spend all the things that you have to spend to be able to make the money that you’re making?
There needs to be some a money measurement always. As I said, it can look like other things. Revenue as a top-line number is often a not a good data point, quite honestly, because it can lie. It can make it sound like we’re doing really well when we’re not. Back to, we could be selling $1 million, but our net profit could be negative $500,000, which means it’s costing us $1.5 million to make that $1 million. I’m not sure that’s actually good numbers.
Revenue is often not a good data point because it can lie. It can make it sound like you are doing well when you actually are not. Share on XUnderstanding what are we needing to track and what are we needing to track now? That’s the other thing. Sometimes, those things will change over time. When you’re first starting out, probably sales, top-line revenue is a good number to be tracking. However, after you get past that product-market fit stage, that may not be the best number. It may be back down to what is my gross profit, what am I making after if I’m selling a product or my cost of delivering the services or things like that, or my net profit. That may be a much more important number than the revenue per se.
Part of it is always going to be money. There are the things that are the drivers toward the money that are measurable. Sometimes that’s marketing things, its sales calls, it could be followers. There’s a whole plethora of those pieces. It’s always going to change as your business grows and matures. Some of the things that we’re tracking early on won’t necessarily be the things that we’re tracking later on. There are some things, like I said, that are universal, but they’re still a little more generic than specific.
At any given point, Coca-Cola is always looking at their money, but they may be looking at certain numbers differently than they’re looking at other numbers, as opposed to you and I as very microbusinesses by comparison. We should be looking at our money too, but we’re I’m sure we’re looking at it very differently than Coca-Cola is.
If we have employees, then there’s staffing hours and some of those things that we may want to be looking at. Are we actually getting a return on the investment that we’re making in our employees? They are also a resource that we’re investing in, so that can be something else that we’re looking at. The data will vary and it varies very much depending on your industry there are all sorts of variables there that you’re going to be looking at. We’ve talked in previous ones about utilization, where if we’re a service-based business, how much are we actually billing out? That’s a different kind of measurement. Those are all those data pieces.
As we’re looking at the data, back to, we do want to look at the qualitative pieces of it to say, “Does the energy toward these data pieces match the energy I expect to put toward getting these levels of points of data?” one of the things that we joke a lot about with us is I love being on a Zoom call in ways that most people do not understand and cannot process. For me, how is my energy being used in a day? If it’s being used on being on client calls and other types of Zoom calls, that’s good use of my energy, and that’s a qualitative measurement. How does that feel?
We can track the time and we can say, “Yeah, Gwen was on six hours of Zoom calls today,” that’s a time measurement, but also, how does my energy feel for that? Are we picking tactics to solve our strategic problem that are matching our qualitative measurements as well as our quantitative measurements? If the way that I reach $1 million, we keep using that as just a random number, is that I need to sit and manually send out 100 emails every day and hardly talk to anybody, it is not worth $1 million in my world. There is someone else who’s reading that and it’s like, “That would be the best thing ever.”
“Wait, you mean I can just type all day and never talk to a soul? Yes. I am in.”
That’s where the qualitative measurement works. We want to be looking at is the energy that we’re putting toward the thing also something that we can sustain over a long term for whatever strategic problem that we’re trying to solve. Sometimes it is a, “We’ve got to do this for three months, it’s going to be miserable, but we know we can stop after that.” Other times it’s like, “No, this looks like the way that we have to do business.” It’s like, “Is it worth it?” That’s the qualitative question.
When we’re first starting out, we don’t have a lot of data, and so we tend to focus more on qualitative assessments. Also, we don’t have a lot of data there either. It’s tempting to make lots of shifts really fast, but part of that then is we don’t ever get enough consistent data. As we get further and more mature, I think we can start going back to we can use our instinct, which is part of where our qualitative data is coming from along with the data and be able to say, “We need to actually pivot faster than what we thought we were going to.”
Pause there for just a second.
I think you said I could talk 90% of the time this time.
I did, but I just want to I want to make sure that everybody can catch up here. The question I asked was what to track, how often, what to ignore. I think you’ve given us a really good representation of the things that are important to track. Obviously, tracking the money that comes in is important. Tracking how hard it feels to bring that money in equally important. Maybe tracking even what it entails to bring that money in, not to mention the profitability piece. How much does it cost us to bring that money in and to support this entity and to deliver, like all that? Really tracking the cost, the revenue, and how they interplay with each other in addition to effort, energy, bandwidth, capacity all of that.
We haven’t talked about what to ignore, but I want to set that aside for a moment because you led us so beautifully into the next piece, and I think the next piece will cover the what to ignore piece. I also feel like you were leading us beautifully into some ways to simplify this whole process because there’s no shortage of things that we could be tracking.
The next item that I want to bring up that you were heading us toward is, so you’re chugging along and you get to a place where it might be a bump in the road, it might be a gigantic hole, it might be a cliff, we don’t really know, but it doesn’t feel good. What are the signals that we need to be paying attention to that help us understand whether we stick with it? We just like jump over the bump in the road or try to lunge over the hole versus plunging off the cliff, or when we need to pivot, we need to turn around, we need to go around? What are those signals?
To me, it’s the difference between doing it with a panicked, reactive instinct as opposed to a thought-out, proactive instinct. If we’re paying attention, we actually know there’s potentially a cliff there. We can see it’s like, “There’s something funky happening on the horizon there.” In a proactive approach, it’s like, “Okay, we need to be paying closer attention and be thinking about what some alternatives are.” Using the cliff, I’m using the Thelma and Louise driving off the cliff example, but instead of hitting the gas, we actually slow down so that we can see it in time to put on the brakes.
To me, that’s the difference between the panic, like all of a sudden, it’s like, “There’s something here,” and we just react. There are emergencies, they are so few. We treat so many things like emergencies that are not. How bad is it going to be if we take a week to think about this as opposed to making the decision? The other thing, and this happened with one of our clients where they panicked.
What they did is they made a change that they knew would allow some things to work but they very specifically didn’t tell the people that it would negatively affect. They also didn’t tell me, and when they did tell me, because it did negatively affect somebody that then found out and was like, “That’s problematic for me that you’re doing this thing.” It was like, “Yeah, you got to own up to it.” I said, “You knew that you really shouldn’t do that.” She’s like, “Yeah, no, I know.”
I said, “If you had done it strategically, you would have told everybody that you were doing it. You wouldn’t be afraid to talk to me about it because I wouldn’t say, ‘What the hell?’” part of it is, are you trying to do it on the sly? Are you doing it in a stealthy way? A stealthy way means you know it’s not what you actually need to do. This is where you’re letting your emotion take over your instinct.
Part of it is to say, “That may be a problem. Let’s start thinking about it,” as opposed to, “I’m just going to react because this something didn’t quite go right.” It’s the question of, so did it not go right 100% of the time or did it not go right 1% of the time? It not going right 1% of the time just probably means it’s normal. If it’s not going right 100% of the time, then we probably need to change, but we probably can take a couple of days to talk about what really is the best change as opposed to “I’m just going to hit the gas,” and go flying off because maybe I can jump the gorge.
If something goes wrong 1% of the time, it is probably normal. If something goes wrong 100% of the time, you probably need to change it. Share on XI think what I’m hearing is that the signals that matter are going to vary depending on what you’re doing, what you’re working on. I always love a good very practical example, but it’s hard because when we’re talking strategy, it’s so varied from business to business. The signals that matter are the ones that you look at and go, “This could be the sign of something really good. This could be the sign of something really bad. In either case, we need to keep watching this, we need to watch this closely.”
For instance, to your earlier example about a trend when you look and you’re like, “We have sold five fewer units this week than last week.” something could be going on in the world, that could be a market shift, that could be a lot of things. If next week we sell five units fewer than we sold this week, that could also be a bump in the road, or that could be a sign of a downward trend.
That’s why we have to keep watching it because if we keep dropping five units week after week after week, we’re going to have a really rough year. It doesn’t mean that when we drop the five units the first time that we need to make any changes. I think what you’re saying is, really is paying always be paying attention to anything that if it continues the way it’s continuing, could mean great things for you or could mean really bad things for you.
It really is about being proactive about it.” I like your five units drop situation. If that keeps happening for another give it a period of time 3 weeks, 4 weeks, 5 weeks, something that feels like we’re actually starting to get some data, what would we need to do and start planning that now so that if it happens, we’re actually moving into something that we thought through as opposed to all of a sudden going, “It’s been eight weeks and we’ve lost five units of sales every week for the last eight weeks. Let’s do blank.”
“Let’s have a fire sale so that we sell more units at a loss that actually doesn’t help our bottom line.”
It becomes a reactive and so to me, the real piece here is strategy is not about being reactive. Strategy is about being proactive, which means we have to be thinking ahead. It doesn’t necessarily mean we have to be taking action, but we have to be thinking ahead about what action we would take and why. Why we think that will actually change the trajectory, whatever trajectory we happen to be on, positive or negative?
How To Separate Discomfort From Misalignment
I just have one more question because it goes back to the earlier point you made about how it feels. Somebody makes a suggestion of emailing your people twice a week instead of once a week and it’s like you know in your gut that feels right or that doesn’t feel right. How do you separate discomfort, though, from misalignment? Sometimes, we can convince ourselves that we’re just uncomfortable when actually there’s misalignment.
It’s like you knew you shouldn’t have married that guy, ladies. You just knew. You did it anyway. It’s okay. You knew it wasn’t cold feet. You knew that this was a warning sign, but you did it anyway. We’ve all had some experience. Maybe it was just a date you shouldn’t have gone on. However, there are other times when we’re like, “This is going to go really bad. This doesn’t make sense,” but it’s really just fear talking. Do you have any tips on how we can separate the two?
Honestly, it’s practice. I think that’s the only thing it really is. It’s being very aware. My earlier example of saying, “This felt like intuition and I felt like I was right, but I really don’t know,” and waiting to see what the outcome is. Starting to be able to say, “This was different than that.” This is where I talk about being able to separate the emotion from the intuition. It’s really about watching and saying, “When did I say no,” and looking back I can tell it was fear or discomfort or any of those things. Where did I say no or yes, I mean either side, but we’re using no for the moment, and I was right? Even though I still can’t explain it?”
Start being able to say, “This felt this way, this felt this way. They were very, very close.” Over time, you can start saying, “This is this thing over here and this is this other thing over here,” because I don’t think there’s an easy answer. I really don’t because I do believe as women in this society and based on how we’re wired, that we do for a long time early in our lives conflate emotion and instinct. We have to practice at separating it.
Exercising Your CEO Brain At All Times
I didn’t know we were going to end here, but really, the answer to the question is the only way to know whether your strategy is working is to constantly practice evaluating whether your strategy is working. In the consistent practice of evaluation is when you start figuring out your particular or your business’s particular mix of indicators that tell you whether things are about to go sideways or not. That consistent practice helps you get out of that reactive path.
The more we practice awareness of not just going through the motions, the better we get time and time again. Share on XI think all of us, the first time we’re encountered with something going sideways, will be reactive. We don’t know any better. We don’t have a different pathway. The more we do it, the less reactive we become because we develop a library of experience in, “I’ve seen this movie before. I know how it ends.” What this episode really has been, Gwen, and it’s been amazing, actually, it’s been a workout. It’s been a mental workout. I feel like I just ran a mental marathon in the best way possible.
What I want to say is this kind of work is actually a great way to strengthen that CEO brain. This is what CEO thinking is really about because that reactive stuff, that’s really much more at the individual contributor level. Just trying to keep your head above water. To really be a CEO is you’ve got to practice this thought process. If this is the thing that you want to get better practice at, you want to strengthen your CEO brain week in, week out, then I strongly suggest you get on Gwen’s weekly question email.
The question email is probably the best thing that we put out. Definitely the best thing we put out for free, but it might be one of the best things we put out there because every single week it is just one single question dropped into your inbox because we get that the last thing you need is more answers or more information. What you need is a really good question to help you get into that CEO train of thought and start thinking of ways to be much more proactive in the running of your business.
In order to get on that list to get that email every week, you just go to EverydayEffectiveness.com/question. Whether you sign up on Sunday, you sign up on Thursday, you will get your first email the following Friday. That’s just how it works because we don’t inundate your inbox. You just get one question a week and it comes on Friday. Until next time, I want you to think about what might be different if you spent just 15 to 30 minutes per week in the coming week, in the coming two weeks, really exercising that CEO brain of yours. Let us know how that works out for you.
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.
