The Myth of Being Ready- Part 4 of 5

Good evening. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach. Coming you to. Coming to you from my very warm office. I set up the heat a little while ago. Up in here. Let me show you. So there's this creepy attic space right there. So if I open the door, I can kind of ventilate. But if you see me get up and go there to close it, that's what I'm doing. Because, you know, it takes the heat really fast. Anyway, I'm so excited to talk to you tonight. I'm continuing the series of the Myth of Being Ready. And today I wanted to talk about one of the things that we try to prepare for. We try to mitigate in so many different ways, and that is we would try to get ready so that we don't screw up. And can I just tell you, there's good news and bad news here. The good news is that there's, like, no way you can, like, mitigate and prepare to not screw up at all. Okay? So it's going to happen whether you want to or not. And also, there's nothing that you can do that's irreparable unless you murder someone. All right? So good news, don't. And also don't murder someone. The bad news is also that you know you're going to screw up either way. You know, you're never going to not screw up. You can be as prepared as possible. You can spend your entire life getting ready for a single moment, and there's always going to be something that you wish you had done differently. Okay? That is just the name of the game. And welcome, everyone who's watching. As you know, I Stream this through Streamyard. It goes to the Facebooks, to the LinkedIn, and to YouTube. Sometimes the comments don't come through from everywhere. Oh, hi, Larry. Nice to see you. Yeah. So if you comment and I don't call you out, then just know it's not you. It is just the platform. But anyway, there is little to nothing you can do to prevent any kind of screw up. Okay. You're always going to say something that, you know, rubs someone the wrong way, and you're gonna have to apologize. There's always going to be little things that you screw up in your delivery and the product you produce or whatever. Let's look at cars. I'm not a big car person. And yet it's such an easy analogy here or metaphor. So they invented cars, you know, about 100 years ago, longer, whatever. Not 100% on the timeline there. So they've invented a car and that was great. And yet they've been iterating that process for how many freaking years now? They've produced how many different kinds of cars? Okay, they're going for perfection and yet there's always a feature missing. There's always something new that they could do differently. The first cars, we probably wouldn't want to drive them right now. You know, their turning capacity, you know, they were a little top heavy. They, I think they only had like a top speed of 40 miles an hour, which was amazing back then, don't get me wrong. But they also, you know, they weren't designed for having the roads that we have. They were designed for roads that were shared with horses and carriages. They were designed for societies which didn't understand how to be a pedestrian when there's, there's cars around. Okay, so not saying they screwed up in any way, shape or form in those cars, in those first few cars. Bernard. Hi. Welcome. But there's always room for improvement. There's always room to grow and to do better. One of the things that I love hearing leaders talk about, leaders of companies, of governments, whatever, is after they retire, after they've, they've run their course, after they have had the impact they're going to have, is to, is to see the interviews they have with people who ask them, what would you have done differently? And of course, you know, they have regrets. Of course they wish that they had followed different advice. Of course they wish they had done different things or treated people differently. But a lot of the time that hindsight is with new information. Hi, Mario. Welcome. Doing this earlier, I've noticed over the last couple nights, it's when I do a live, I get so amped, I get so excited and then I have to come down from it. And it's made for some very late nights just because I, you know, I. How do you come down from being live? You have to watch a bunch of stuff and then, yeah, I get sucked into a story and then I'm on Netflix until 1 o' clock in the morning. So doing this a little earlier. So. Yeah, so nothing, no problem or nothing that you do is irreparable. If you're starting a business, you know what, you can always make things right. You can always, if you step on toes, you can always apologize to those people. You know, if you screw up in a deliverable, you can always fix it. But know that if you are preparing to get ready to do the thing and you're waiting until you're ready, you're waiting until you're at the point where you don't think you're going to make mistakes, know that's never going to happen. Okay. I'm a coach. I'm a business strategist. You know, I can't tell you how many times I'm in session with one of my clients and I misread what they need from me. I misread. I have them do a visualization that they didn't need, or I point them in a direction. And here's the thing, is that as someone who's providing a service, you just have to be ready to be wrong at any moment. That's fine. Do you just be ready to be wrong and move on past and do whatever the client needs for you in that moment from you in that moment? You know, they're. There's a lot of forgiveness out there. There's a lot of forgiveness as long as there's no ego involved. Once your ego gets involved, that's when things get a little hairy, okay? Because that's when you get dug in on I'm right, you're wrong. And the I'm right, you're wrong. Winner, loser mentality never serves anyone. There is this. There is this TikTok that I actually sent to all of my married friends, and it's about what makes marriages last. And it's this really funny influencer on TikTok. And I forget her, but she. She does everything sarcastically. She's like, okay, the thing that makes marriages last is winning. And if you feel like your marriage isn't this way, then guess what? You're the loser. And I think it's funny, but I also think it's not true. I think it's funny because there's absolutely mental, you know, people who live their lives that way. Bernard, the client has to have skin in the game. Absolutely. Absolutely. And also, the client gets to name. Here's the thing that I love about coaching, is that I get to say, oh, I have an intuitive hit about this. You know, what do you think? And I don't care if I'm right. You know, if I'm right, that's fine. But what I care about is that the client assesses what I say, and they're able to say, yes, that's it, or, no, that's not it at all. But you know what it is this thing over here that is the path I want to take. Like, that is the most freeing thing about being a coach, is that you can put things forth. And, you know, sometimes. Sometimes it's not the answer, but sometimes it gets them to the answer. And that's all you need because you just, either way, you've gotten to the answer, right? You've ruled things out. So as a business owner also, now that I'm on that topic, knowing who you work with is really important. Having a niche, having an ideal client is super important. But it's also really important to know who you do not work with. Name. These are the people I do not work with. This is. These are the problems I do not solve. These are the types of companies I do not service. It just, it makes it so much easier for people to know if they can be in business with you or not. What else? Yeah, there's. So everyone's a leader of their own life, right? Everyone is a leader of their own life. You're a leader within your world. So here's what happens when you take the brave step of doing the thing before you feel ready. Doing the thing, even though you're afraid of fucking it up, is you actually inspire everyone around you to also go and do the brave thing. You have to. You get to inspire the people around you. Show them that it's okay, that you can go out and you can fail or you can screw things up. And it's not the end of the world. Because, let's be real, like, when has a screw up, either a big one or a small one, been the end of your world? I don't see that happening a lot. There's always a way to come back. There's always a way to recover from that. Bernard. You know, clients have to convey their stories thoroughly. Not necessarily. Not in the style of coaching. I do, in some styles of coaching, maybe, but you know, it's a funny dynamic. So coaching and the client, the client coaching relationship, it's not like therapy where it's really important to understand. Oh, David, do the subtitles censor my swearing? Oh, my God, that's so funny. Well, thank you. Thank you. Subtitles, I guess. But so here's the difference between coaching and therapy. So therapy. And this is a broad generalization. Those of you who are therapists are going to have, you know, different definitions, but this is how I see it. So don't get all worked up. It's just a difference that I use to explain how coaching works. So therapy is often like, okay, cool, you're screwed up. Let's look at the past, understand why you're screwed up, what screwed you up, what were those elements and those events. Really understand it, get into the story of it. You Know, understand all the key players, and then maybe you won't be screwed up anymore. And that is a gross generalization of what therapy is now. Coaching is a little different. Coaching kind of looks at you and is like, okay, awesome. You're screwed up. Everyone's screwed up in their own way. What do you want to go and do with this? Like, what do you want to do? And how can we design a way for you to get there? And by the way, like, you being screwed up, let's not let that stop you anymore, okay? It's a great story to stop you. It's being screwed up is also waiting to be ready. Okay. Like, waiting to sort out my garbage is absolutely a reason people use to not go and do the thing. So clients don't necessarily have to convey their stories thoroughly to their coach. It's helpful if they're honest and real with their coach. But, like, the coach is never going to ask, oh, I need more details on what happened there. Not necessarily when you're creating a strategy that gets to be detailed, but the understanding of the stuff. Not necessarily. Mario, you're awesome. Thank you. Yeah, go run. I hope, you know, get good exercise. Or if you just meant figuratively, then, you know, have fun with the rest of your day. Thanks for joining us. My phone is blowing up here. I just want to make sure there's nothing. Okay, cool. I can handle that after this. Live. Just client texting me, but yeah, so. And the dogs are barking. Bernard. When I write a business plan, I have to know the client's story so that their end goal is revealed. Yeah. Yeah, the client's story. So I do a similar thing with my clients. We get really clear on the type of life that they want to create and have their business support. Because the last thing you want is to design a business that does not support your ideal life. So say you want your. You want to be able to take three separate months off throughout the year to go travel. You want to be able to leave your clients and go do that and come back to them. That is a separate business structure from other business structures. So, for instance, my business structure, I would probably be working during those three months, and I'd have, like, a week off. You know, I could have a week off every month if I wanted. I don't want that, though, because I would go crazy being bored, especially now. But knowing what your ideal life is and how to structure your business towards that. Absolutely. But what I'm saying is, like, you know, I don't actually have to understand, like, their childhood trauma or where they went to school and what they majored in and why. That's what I'm trying to say. But yeah, no, you, any goal is reverse engineer and any goal is reverse engineer bull. With some flexibility to allow for screw ups. Also, there's, there's absolutely a way to set up a plan for your business and its success that is really rigid and can crash and burn if you make a tiny mistake. I don't help people design businesses like that because I don't think that's helpful because I know we're all humans, we're not robots. So when I work with a client and they want to start a business, I help them design a business that is going to forgive them for being human. It's going to withstand any human mistakes that you make. It's going to withstand, you know, just things that happen, you know, there's, there's no reason to build a business that is that fragile anyway. It is, it is 5:20. We have dinner almost ready here and I really. So I have one more day of this series and I would love to hear from you what parts of what I've said so far this week. If you've been tracking, if you've been watching, what parts have popped for you, what parts have really sparked your interest. Because tomorrow, and I'll be real, like every single day this week because this is the myth of being ready. I haven't prepared for it. It's literally like, okay, cool, I'll sit down to write the announcement for what I'm going to be going live on later. And that's in that moment I come up with whatever it is based on things that inspired me throughout the day. So if there's anything that you found particularly interesting of what I've said this week that resonated with you, please tell me because tomorrow I'm getting short on ideas, guys. Tomorrow I have my last one and I want to make sure I'm doing something that resonates with you, that, you know, interests you and maybe, maybe I can go deeper on one of the topics that I've already touched upon. Anyway, I'm going to wrap it up there because I'm hungry. It's been a long day and I'm gonna go eat. So I hope you all have a wonderful evening. Thank you so much for joining me a little earlier today. I know we're getting Little Wild at 5pm Anyway, I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach. Thanks for joining me. And I'll talk to you tomorrow. Bye.