Sean Buttner walks through a four-step framework for deciding whether to take on a project: clarify the concrete benefits, evaluate how it affects your energy and other life areas, check that you have the resources and support, and surface any underlying fears. He offers a free one-hour strategy call to help you gain clarity.
Morning, everyone. Welcome to Ask a Coach A Question, the show where we talk about habits, strategies and best practices to advance your life in your career and your health and your relationships and general well being. Now, I'm your host, Sean Butner, certified high performance coach. And the question we have today for y' all that you guys submitted is how can I find. Oh, not that one. It's how do I know if I should start a project, have my notes a little screwed up, and it's live. So anyways, so this idea of, you know, the. The question was, hey, I have a technology project that I've been thinking about making a decision on in my business, but I don't want it to completely overwhelm my life because I have family and I have, you know, other parts of the business I need to run. So I keep wanting to do this, but I'm not sure what to do. How do I evaluate this and either make a decision to start and get going or stop? And so I think that question of whether that's a project for your business, whether it's renovating the kitchen, whether it's, you know, working on building a new skill, right? This idea of starting something new can be really overwhelming. And so, as you know, the coaching perspective would be, well, first off, how clear are you on the outcome? Right? What's it gonna get for you? You have the new renovated kitchen, you're gonna be able to like, cut things. You have like the whole family and they're chopping vegetables for dinner versus that one really awkward corner of space where, you know, you're eyeballs are hitting everything, say, right? Or is this tech project going to provide a new cool experience for your customers, or is it going to drive revenue in that particular case? And so knowing what the benefit is for yourself, for your family or for your business, whatever the context is, is really important. Because if you're like, this isn't really. It's gonna be a lot of work and I don't think it's going to pay off. It's probably an indication not to do the project. But if you're still kind of stuck there, right, thinking it and about, or thinking about the project, whatever I get, like, it's a home project again, or your business project. And how is it going to impact my energy? Is it going to be fun? Am I going to be lit up doing this? Or is it just going to wear me down and impact other areas of my life? So if you got started on renovating the kitchen and you got overwhelmed and then you stop Right. Halfway through the kitchen being completed, that's, you know, not being able to cook food in your house for a while. It's a big pain in the butt. Maybe that motivates you to finish the project, but you're not doing it with a sense of door. You're just, you're being dragged through the project. Right. And that's kind of the thing to maybe look for is am I going to get dragged through this? Do I have the necessary tools and resources and people that I might need to make sure this is done with excellence and done timely? And you know, so you have to think about it like that. If you, you have to also think about if you're hesitating, making a decision on a project, is there a fear behind it that hey, this might not succeed and I'll be embarrassed and, you know, lose face? Is it, I, you know, I'm afraid I'm just going to sink a bunch of money into something that's not really going to turn out again or, you know, if I do this and it doesn't change, is it just going to make my life miserable? Which are all like valid fears and. But you have to understand where those are coming from. Is it that you're doubting yourself and you need some of that somebody to challenge your thoughts on? Yeah, you can do this. You can't figure this out. This will work. You know, you can do the work and if again, if the outcome is worth it, you know, awesome, you know, but if you're afraid because like you don't have the money to throw into the project or if it goes over budget at all, you know, that's going to really impact you and your family. Like, okay, we need to make sure that that's teased out too. So that would be like the three different ways to initially look through do I start a project or not? And in the certified high performance coaching process, we actually have an assessment with 10 different questions, with 10 different ways to rate yourself to see if you actually follow through on a project or not. So if you are stuck some on trying to make a decision on do I start this, do I stop this, what do I do here? We can take you through that assessment through the certified high performance coaching process. So if you're interested in that one on one experience with someone that can help tease out if you're being a little bit afraid or if we need to do this assessment to see where you're at, go to shawbutter.com coaching, fill out the assessment and with that, so that questionnaire sets you up for free. One hour strategy call. So yeah, that one's on me. You know, just so you get to feel the process out. Or we can talk about whatever project you're working on and get some clarity around whether you should start or stop. So hope this serves you guys. I'll see you next week. I think I'm gonna go Back to the 10 o' clock time because this has been scrunching my mornings trying this at 8, so we'll see at 10aM Pacific Standard Time and I'll see you then. Take care, guys.
