What's Really Holding You Back? Discover Your Immediate Constraint!

All right, welcome everyone. So we are here in the Wednesday Catalyst coaching call at 1 PM Eastern. This is a weekly call where all of my one-on-one clients are invited to do a hot seat kind of group coaching session. It's group coaching in the, in that we are in a group and you will get a one-on-one hot seat with me. It's not a, we're not crowdsourcing perspective or solutions or reflections. It's just a bonus that one-on-one clients get in addition to their one-on-one calls with me and their daily Voxer access. But we also have Jeff here from the Voxer Velocity program. There's, you know, 9 more of you in the, in that program. And Andrew is here. Good to see you, Andrew. Um, and so what I wanted to do was share some context because all the Vox Velocity people are just getting started and all of us have recently just gotten started with our 90-day goal for the third quarter of 2025. And so I wanted to provide some, uh, context for how this works as a reminder to those of you that are in a program or as context for those that are considering being in a program. And I want to give you a specific mental model, a heuristic for how you can think about, um, identifying and navigating your next most immediate constraint. Because that's what we're actually here to do every week on this call is what's my most immediate constraint and what is my plan for navigating that constraint. And part of that involves asking better questions, but it's also making sure we're asking better questions about the right thing. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to share my screen and I just— this is, this is all going to get shared as a more dialed-in, defined, and step-by-step workshop process. This is just a first pass. It's something that literally came to my mind today. Um, but I thought it would be helpful for, uh, those of you that are, you know, just getting started with me in, in this quarter of 2025. So everyone can see my screen. So this is the Inversion Solution, and it's a 5-step process to help you set and achieve your most immediate objective. Again, this is vital for anybody that's in Cornerman Coaching or Voxer Velocity, and even for those that are just getting started with the Inbox Catalyst, where maybe you're starting to figure out what you're most, uh, what you're trying to accomplish and what your most immediate constraint is. Regardless of the program that you're in, we, we follow this process, this coaching process, this, this way of beginning the conversation that I have borrowed from the arena, from, um, Engaging the Field Manual by Nick Peterson and Joseph Robertson. And it's called the RADDA process— Resource, Action, Discovery, Question. Resource: here's the information that I'm consuming to help me define what I'm going to do next. So if you are in one of my coaching programs, you're go, this is going to be something like the Forever Offer Framework, the Close the Gap goal achievement process, or Be a Blessing Marketing. And it, it's even better when you can identify it as an element of that. So for instance, I am working through the Forever Offer Framework and I am crafting some icebreaker questions and I would like, uh, and I've shared some of these and got some feedback and I would like your help refining these questions. That would be a perfect example of a RATA framework resource. Forever Offer framework, specifically the Silver Bullet campaign or the icebreaker question. Action: I wrote some 9-word emails and I sent them out. Discovery. What I discovered is that after I sent these out, I got very few answers. So my question is, how can I improve my 9-word emails to drive up engagement so that I can start to initiate these conversations that are going to give me the data that I need to refine and optimize my client attraction system? That's a perfect example of a, a RATA. So we do this in both on this call for, for one-on-one clients in Cornerman Coaching. We also do this daily in the Voxer Velocity. There is, and this is why I wanted to invite everyone to this call, in order to execute the, the RATA coaching process, you really have to have done some pre-work.. And we talked about this in a workshop where I showed you my 90-day plan. And the workshop was called What Got You Here Won't Get You There. It's in, in the YouTube channel. It's also a replay in the Transcendent Solopreneurship podcast. And if you haven't done this, or if anything that I'm saying here is something that you need to spend more time with, then go to this video or go to the podcast episode and revisit this because this is key. If you are struggling right now with your client attraction system, which is what most people are, are working on, then you need to make sure that you have your— a clearly defined 90-day objective and plan, and you need to be sure that you have a forever offer process or, uh, forever offer framework that you're working from. And this is going to help you with the 90-day framework. In that workshop, we did not start with— we did not start with what I do now, which is where we are programmed to start. What I'm doing isn't working. What should I do? That's actually the worst place to start because what you're saying is, what tool, tactic, or strategy do I need to add to help me get better results? Well, if you're going to add things to your client attraction system, you're going to, you're going to create greater ineffectiveness and inefficiency in your client acquisition system. Because when you add anything to any existing system, the effectiveness and efficiency is immediately driven down. It's a system reliability problem. It's a math problem. Before you ask, what do I do now? You have to know what your plan is. That's what we determined in that workshop. What's my 90-day objective and success plan? Before you can decide what your plan is, you have to decide what your plan is aiming for. What are you trying to accomplish? And what you're trying to accomplish, what your objectives should be, is resolving your most immediate constraint. Most immediate constraint. Most immediate constraint. Your most immediate constraint. If you can identify and resolve that, it will reveal the next most immediate constraint, the next kink in the hose, as we like to say, right? If you think of the garden of your lifestyle as what you are trying to nourish and grow and cultivate, and you are watering that with this old kinky hose that is attached to a rain barrel full of very finite resources— time, attention, money, effort—

reputation.

In order for that water to flow from that rain barrel through the hose and water the garden, you have to start eliminating all the kinks in the hose. And you have to start with the most immediate constraint because the whole object is to increase flow to the garden. If you start at the end, and resolve the last most immediate constraint, there's no flow. And you will exhaust all your resources before you get to the most immediate constraint. If you apply your resources to the most immediate constraint, it will increase flow, which will reveal the next most immediate constraint, which you can then isolate, ident, and resolve. And when you address that constraint, it will reveal the next constraint, and on and on and on. The whole way you are increasing flow as you go, which provides you actually with more insight, more clarity, more confidence. And the amazing thing about identifying the next most immediate constraint is some of those down-hose constraints actually kind of work themselves out. Because of the pressure and flow that is coming through behind each constraint that you measure or address. Before you can identify your objective, you must identify your most immediate constraint. And before you can do either of those things, you have to know what it's for. It's not more money or more time. It's your— the whole point of being a purpose-driven solopreneur is that you are building a business that is meant to fund and fit your ideal lifestyle, doing work that matters with people you care about. It is a lifestyle business in that you are making the difference only you can make in the way you can make it, and you have to be Your every process has to be, and every objective has to be designed around what is the actual lifestyle that I'm trying to optimize my business for. So in that workshop, again, if you don't know this, you need to go back and watch this workshop. You have to start with what's the vision of the life that I want to be living, that I want my business to fund and fit around. And if you go to that workshop, there is a very specific prompt that will help you identify that. To circle back to the conversation Bree and I were having before I turned on record, it doesn't have to be the perfect vision of the life because you don't know what it is yet. You're not going to know exactly what it's going to be because it is an emergent thing. Clarity about the lifestyle that you want to actually live will come by getting better at making the difference only you can make in the way that you will make it, which will happen as you solve real problems for real people that help you identify the people that you seek to serve and the way in which you serve them. So you just have to come up with a good enough lifestyle vision, and it will probably change. When I during the pandemic, my life— my wife and I had a, uh, a, a, a vision of the life that we wanted to live after the pandemic. We wanted to become world travelers. That was what we were optimizing for. That's the lifestyle. And in order to do that, we knew how much money we had to have in the bank, and we knew how much money we had in the bank. And so The constraint that we were resolving was how do we close the gap between the amount of money that we have in savings and the amount of money that we need to travel for a year? And we started to work on that problem. We started by saying, hey, housing market is really great right now. We don't need a house if we're going to travel for a year. Let's sell our house because of all the equity that we had in our home. We almost completely close the gap just by selling our house at the top of the market. And that allowed us to go to the next most immediate constraint. Like once we had money locked in for a year of traveling the world, then it was our next most, uh, our next priority was where's, where are we going to have home base? Where could, where can we build our dream house? We had to have a down payment for land. So that we could build the house that we actually wanted to build in the place that we wanted to build it. So we started to work on that. As all of that was unfolding, the kids announced that they were pregnant and our lifestyle vision soon changed from we want to travel the world for a year once the pandemic ends to we want to take care of our grandson. We want to be full-time daycare providers, completely different lifestyle vision. It changed. Because we reserve the right to change our mind. And the most immediate constraint to achieving that goal was that I worked 10 hours a day, 7 days a week minimum, and I couldn't work 70 to 100 hours a week and take care of my grandson 9 hours a day, 5 days a week. The most immediate constraint was how do I reduce the time spent in my business by at least 80% while maintaining or increasing my revenue. And that became the solvable problem that we were working on. That's the level of clarity you have to have. Again, it can change. When we're talking about identifying constraints and defining object— defining objectives, Identifying Most Immediate Constraints, which actually helps you identify the most immediate constraint that you're, or the most immediate objective that you're working on. We have to look at it from this inversion process. Again, we much more frequently start with, what do I do now? But we need to invert that. We actually have to remember what's the lifestyle I'm trying to accomplish. We have to keep the end— it's not keeping the end in the, in mind, it's starting at the end and working our way back to what has to happen before I get that, what happens has to happen before I get that, what has to happen before I get that, and so on. If you remember, so just a quick pause here. This workshop replay is free for everyone. If you are in the Inner Circle, I think Andrew, you're there, Penny, you're there, you have access not only to the replay but to all the presentation notes, the workbook guidebook, and a GPT helper to help you work through all the things that need to be worked through to identify your most immediate constraint and your current constraint. But for those of you that are not in the Inner Circle, you can watch this replay. And it will give you all the information you need, you just won't have access to all the additional tools. I lost my train of thought there for a minute. But the whole idea here is inverting the process. There's again, a prompt in that workshop for how do I identify the lifestyle vision? How do I identify the most immediate constraint, which helps me define my most immediate objective, my 90-day goal? You can use 30 or 60 days if you prefer. And then, then you can ask, what do I do now? So instead of starting here and working your way to some vague, undefined goal. You're starting with a clear, clearly defined goal and working your way back to the, the plan. So I'm gonna, do you now see identifying the most immediate constraint in the shared screen? Okay, cool. So this is just part of the presentation notes from that workshop. The best way is what do I want to accomplish long-term? What's the lifestyle vision? What, what do I have to accomplish before the end of this year? What do I— to accomplish that, what has to happen this quarter? To accomplish that, what has to happen this month? To accomplish that, what has to happen this week? To accomplish that, what has to happen tomorrow? That is a template that we use, the rearview mirror, for starting with the lifestyle vision and working all the way down through the 90-day goal to the monthly goal, to the weekly goal, to the daily goal. Um, and then these are some questions that we talk about when we're trying to ask a more beautiful question that will, uh, create the better question that helps us define what it is that you're, you're trying to accomplish long-term, right now, and identify, uh, it's not the next kink as in your, um, sexual fetish. Please keep that to yourself. It's the next kink in the hose. That needs to be removed so that you can create flow in the hose that waters the garden of your ideal lifestyle. So that's just a quick share on that. So going back to the inversion solution, how do I invert? So if you have gone through the process of identifying your lifestyle vision, identifying your quarterly objective, and identifying your plan, the 3 things that have to go right, and which will help you identify the thing that you have to do next, the most immediate constraint that you need to, um, take care of, then you are ready to go through the RATA process every single day through the Voxer or on these weekly calls. And you can— this is a, a, another process another way, another type of process that talks about doing a lot of the things that I just shared. It's just a different framework in case a different perspective helps you. You have identified the problem, whatever the constraint is. You have defined your objective. This is what I need to accomplish today, this week, this month. You have identified the forces that support the change toward that objective, the reasoning from first principles. Here's what has to happen to accomplish this thing that will solve this problem. Here's the thing. Most of you, and when I say you, I mean me too, we stop here. This is where the inversion step has to happen, because in addition to all these things that we're, we're all probably getting better and better at, if we're not already pretty good at, we also have to know what are the things that impede change toward that objective. Why do we need to invert at this step? Does anybody want to volunteer an answer? Why do we want to also identify the things that we need to stop doing or do less of, in addition to the things that we need to identify, the things that will help us or create leverage that become force multipliers for getting what we want.

To increase flow.

Why will identifying the things that impede change help us increase flow? Bri, you're on the right track.

Wait, my brain just blipped. Say that again. Sorry.

Why? Yes, we are always trying to increase flow. Why is identifying the forces that impede change toward the objective going to increase flow?

Because the system works more efficiently then.

Why?

Because we've removed those hindrances, like with the water, kind of.

Exactly right. Exactly right. The best, the fastest way to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your system is stop doing all the shit that you don't have to do. Eliminate the cruft, eliminate the unnecessary components, eliminate the distractions. Bree, I'm going to pick on you again. What is always the biggest obstacle to our success?

Me.

Exactly. And I'm picking on Bree because we actually just had this breakthrough moment in a Boxer conversation. I'm not going to go into the details, but, you know, Bree had this realization where she not only identif— Bree has known for a while, and most of you probably have already known that the biggest impediment to your progress is not out the window at any of the external things, forces. It's the person that looks back at you when you look in the mirror. But it's one thing to know that you're the biggest obstacle to your own success. It's another thing to identify specifically what behaviors are impeding that progress. And, and Bri had a real, really profound moment with all that. And like, now that she knows, she can work. Like, one of the things that she said she was being blocked by is releasing the next chapter of her book. And lo and behold, the next day after we had this Voxer conversation, she published the next chapter of her book by getting clear and specific about what was actually holding her up and addressing that in a deliberate, committed, focused, disciplined way. And addressing the personal stuff is always the hardest. So, you know, big kudos to Brie for not just identifying it, but also leaning in and doing the really challenging work of addressing it. So you can identify the problem, define the objective, and identify the forces that support change toward that objective. But if you don't at that stage invert and make sure that you are also identifying all the forces that are impeding progress towards that objective and eliminate them and address them, any tweaking you do to the things that will support change, the, the return on investment's severely diminished. So after you get rid of all the things that you can stop doing, and identify the 3 things that you can— that need to be done, you've identified your next most immediate constraint. Because if you've identified the 2 or 3 things that need to go right within your system to, to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be, then the next most immediate constraint is to raise the floor on the least effective, efficient component of that system. You don't get where you want to be faster by pushing on the ceiling of the thing that's working best. You get closer to what you want with greater ease and velocity by fixing and fine-tuning the least most effective component. And that is how you're going to strategize your solution. Before we move on to— before I stop the recording and we move on to our hot seats. Any, any questions? Does that help clarify how this all works? Whether you're a one-on-one client or a Voxer Velocity client, does that help you understand how you can— how the system is designed and how you can make it work better for you? I'm getting some nods and some thumbs up.

Cool.

Any questions about any of that? Okay, I'm going to stop the recording and we'll get to our hot seats.