The Myth of Being Ready- Part 3 of 5

Good evening, everyone. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach. So excited to talk to you tonight. This is continuing my week of the myth of being ready. For those of you who are new to how I do this, this is all through Streamyard. Streamyard is a great technology that allows me to go live on the Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube all at the same time. But it's an imperfect technology. It doesn't always show me the comments from everywh. So if you comment, I really like this to be interactive. If you comment and I don't call you out, it is not you. It is just the technology. I'm not ignoring you. You didn't do anything wrong. Okay. Unless you say something rude, then I might not call you out, but I haven't had that issue yet. Anyway, so today I want to talk about one aspect of waiting to be ready that I see show up so much, and it drives me crazy and it is over. Preparing now for you trolls out there. I am not talking about just go and do stuff without being prepared. Okay? That is not what I'm saying. Preparation is wonderful. Where is preparation helpful? Skydiving. I've never been skydiving, but if I ever do go, I hope to be fully prepared with the right equipment and someone who is trained to do it, because I will have no idea what I'm doing. You know, when things get intimate with someone, you want to make sure you have all the things necessary. You know, especially if you want to avoid having children, you need to make sure there's some contraception. That's where preparation is really, really good. God, LinkedIn is going to kick me off with that one. Where else is preparation good? Oh, job interviews. Yeah, you want to be prepared for those. You want to have a resume. You want to have a cover letter. You want to know some things about the company. Absolutely. Surgery. If you're a surgeon, it's really helpful if you know how to do the surgery, you know, for the benefit of everyone involved, it's helpful. But where I see preparation, I got a thumbs up on that one. Yeah. I think we can all agree that all those things are really, really good to be prepared for. And welcome everyone who's watching. I'm just saying that the number right now, thank you so much for tuning in. But here's where preparation can mess you up is when you use it as a stalling tactic. And you know who you are. Oh, hi, Rob. Nice to see you. When you use it as a stalling tactic to go and do the scary thing, the thing that you know you want to do, that is going to take a lot of bravery and confidence and is way outside your comfort zone. And you know who I'm talking to. You know, if you're this person who does this, you know, I hope you're squirming in your seat right now, because I see you. Well, I don't actually see you. That'd be creepy. And that's not how this technology works. But you know what I mean. You spend forever practicing your webinar, practicing your webinar to no one. You go through, you create a whole slide deck, and you do this, and you work on the graphics for this and the graphics for that. And if you're wanting to become a public speaker, I'm thinking of all the things I wrote in the post. If you want to become a public speaker, you can talk to an empty room all you want. It's not going to make a difference. It might make a little difference, but, you know, at some point, you just have to get up in front of a bunch of people and start talking. I'm teaching holistic selling right now, and one of the things that I make sure that everyone does throughout the process is get on sales calls, because you can learn everything there is to do on a sales call. But if you haven't done it, if you haven't gone through it and seen what the actual reaction is, you just have to go and do it. And by the way, if you spend all your time practicing them and not actually doing them, you're not getting clients. That's how that works. You have to actually do the sales call to get clients. What else? I just had another one. I lost it. I'm so ADD today. It's been a long day. I don't know what it is, but the days are all melding together. I'm just completely losing sense of time and space. What's the other one? Shoot. Oh, riding a bike. Riding a bike? Yeah. You can watch people ride bikes. You can read books about riding bikes. You can watch videos. You can do. I'm sure there's a video game out there about riding a bike, but if you don't actually get on the bike and start riding, you're never gonna know how to ride a bike. You can do a stationary bike. You do peloton. You know, that's not gonna make the difference. I need a larger chair because I like sitting comfortably, and this chair is just a little too small. You guys see me moving a lot during this call. That's why? But I like it because it's short and I like my art showing in the background, the struggles of Katie McManus. So here's my challenge to you is, and I'm going to keep tonight short because I'm tired and I want to go to bed early tonight. And this challenge, I should have made it a little earlier in the evening. So that's my bad. My challenge to you is that if there's something that you've been preparing for that you've used preparing as the stalling tactic to keep from actually doing it, you're gonna go and do it this week. And if you need some accountability around it, you want to reach out to a coach, doesn't necessarily have to be me, or you want to reach out to a consultant, or you want to reach out to someone who knows how to ride a bike. You want to reach out to someone who is just a few steps ahead of you in doing this thing. Most coaches and consultants offer like a 15 minute strategy call. Some of them don't. But, you know, whatever. They'll give you some information. And you just want to do something because if you haven't done it by now, when are you going to do it? Like, what's it going to take for you to actually just reckon with? Okay. I'm prepared enough. Okay. You know, my first few webinars, well, my first webinar, no one showed up. Not one person showed up. No one registered. But I still signed in as if there were gonna people show who showed up, which, you know, in hindsight just shows, you know, how nervous I was. I thought people were gonna show up too, and I didn't want them to, you know, feel like I'd been, I'd no showed them. The second one two people registered, I think no one showed up. The third one two people registered, and then they confirmed that they were coming. And then I panicked and I made my sister, my dad, and my friend all show up with them, and I made them all be in my webinar. And then beyond that, you know, my webinars are now pretty, pretty full like, and they have a pretty good, like, show up rate for people who register depending on what time and day I do them on. But I never would have learned how to do a webinar unless I did it myself. Oh, I forgot the one that my marketing guy showed up. The person that I pay, he showed up once. But anyway, but, you know, there, there are things that happen in a webinar that I never would have learned how to handle. If I hadn't gone through it like a participant trying to take over and teach incorrected, incorrect things. That's its own kind of thing. You have to figure out how to deal with that, and you're not going to be able to figure that out in practice. Another participant saying something inappropriate about women and trying to dance with that in the moment and not derail everything. Questions that people ask. You're never going to know what questions people ask in a webinar if you're just doing it by yourself. And I'm using webinars just because it's top of mind. I did one last week. So, yeah, whatever it is for you, if anyone's tracking these, these videos this week, this myth of being ready, I hope you're. You're seeing the areas of your life where you're waiting to be ready or you're waiting for something to happen in order to go and do the thing that you actually want to do. You know, there, there are very few cases where waiting to be ready is actually useful. One is, you know, if you're planning on having a baby, I have some friends who are trying to have babies right now. And you know, there, sometimes there are certain health things you have to take care of, you know, like you have to quit smoking or, you know, sometimes you have to get in better shape before you start doing it. Yeah, absolutely. You know, those are some benchmarks to be ready, getting ready for a marathon. Yeah, you probably don't want to just go and do a marathon. You probably want to train for it for a bit. But also, you know, a lot of training plans for marathons don't actually have you run a full marathon before a marathon. I'm thinking of Run Keeper and it's, you know, I've never run a marathon. I don't plan on it, but I'm not a runner. But yeah, there's this myth of, like, you have to be ready. You have to accomplish a certain amount of things before you can go and do X. You know, traveling. Once the world opens up, like, are you really going to keep, you know, putting off that vacation you've always wanted to do after spending what, by the time this is over, it's going to be, what, two years? Two years home alone. No, no, you're not. So whatever it is for you, go and do it. Stop waiting to be ready. Waiting to be ready is such a waste of time. Stop over preparing. Stop using that as a stalling tactic. I see you. If you're stalling by over preparing, you're Just wasting your own time. You're wasting your own time and you're putting off everything that you want. It's. You're the one that is in control of that timeline there, and you're the one that's putting it off. So, anyway, I'm exhausted. I don't know if you can tell. I have these bags under my eyes. Like, these are blue light glasses and I use them for my computer. And, you know, I have this ring light behind it and it's very intense. A former work husband, Jeremy Kunkel. Hi, Jeremy. If you're watching, he bought it for me and it's intense. And if I don't have glasses on when I'm, when I'm doing a lot of filming, I actually get headaches because it's like so bright. But also the benefit of wearing these blue light glasses is that it covers these ginormous bags I have under my eyes. Welcome. Anyway, thank you so much. For those of you who've tuned in, I will be going live tomorrow and Friday, but I'm going to be doing it earlier in the day because I've noticed when I go live this late, I end up staying up until like 1:00am Because I'm so, I'm so keyed up. I get so excited. Like, this makes. This has its own kind of high for me. So maybe doing later. I'm sorry, earlier in the day also, I want to have some of my UK people because I have such a huge group of connections there. I'm hoping I'll be able to be more accessible to you all. But anyway, thank you so much for joining and I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach. I will talk to you later this week. More about the myth of being ready. Anyway, have a good night. Bye.