Give Me 10 Minutes, and You’ll Finally Understand Why You’re Stuck

Give me 10 minutes and you'll finally understand why you are stuck. And it's probably not because of the reason you think it is. Now, in the last 10 years, as a certified High performance coach, I've helped countless clients, content creators, business owners, professionals, figure out what's tripping them up from living the life that they really want. And we know this from high performance science, that there are five levers that you can pull to get unstuck or to discover what's holding you back. And the benefit is, is sometimes when you're working so hard, you're striving, you're pouring your heart into your work, you develop blind spots. And so this is a quick diagnostic that you can do to understand what's holding you back. And if you stay till the end, I'll share with you a way that you can move forward in acting and figuring out how to take those next steps to live the life that you want, that's fully confident, that's present, that's full of joy and happiness. Hi, I am Sean Butner, host of the Creators that Crush podcast, which you're listening to right now, and certified High Performance coach for the last 10 years. And this show helps creators go from being crushed by their career to crushing it through personal development and improving you to be the best you. So let's jump into the episode. It's very difficult to find your blind spots alone, and I've worked with tons and tons of people that have wanted to change behaviors or have had mindsets that weren't serving them, but they didn't really realize it until they were in conversation. And this happened to me, too. Right. I've talked on this show about creating 700 YouTube videos without getting progress on audience or views or subscribers. I was doing the work and getting comfortable being in front of camera. So it was a lot of learning in that first 600 videos. But I wasn't getting the results that I wanted. It wasn't getting the results I wanted because I didn't know what I didn't know. And so I started to do some research. Actually, the most successful thing, though, was hiring a. A coach who understood YouTube, understood and had made millions of dollars on YouTube with tons of views, who was able to then say, hey, like, you need to kind of think about thumbnails and you have to think about the hook. You have to be engaging. You know, I could talk and speak engagingly, but if the content wasn't particularly grabbing, why would anyone listen? And that's fair enough. And maybe you've experienced that on your YouTube videos or in your podcast. And so, you know, started to work on hooks and get around people that were really great on that and learning from people that are really great on that. And in two years I went from like 20 to 100 subscribers. Average view count is up per video. So I'm happy I'm seeing progress. I see that the work that I put into my YouTube channel and my podcast is actually gaining results out in the world. The lessons here are I couldn't do this myself because I had tried for eight years and 600 videos by myself, just showing up, being consistent like you hear out in the world without seeing any progress. And so we don't know what we don't know. But looking back at that too, I would, I should have coached myself because this diagnostic that I'm going to share with you what have identified what was going on. And speaking of, if you're curious about this diagnostic before I start to walk you through it, you can go to SeanButner.com quiz and on there at the bottom of the page, click any of the buttons to get shortcutted. There you'll go through a 10 question quiz, which five are just picking numbers and then a little bit of reflection and this is how you can diagnose and figure out where you are stuck. So I just wanted to share that there. But let me go through what these levers are. The first diagnostic thing that I look for as a coach and any of my coaching clients. When I interview people for the podcast, I'm often asking, how clear are you? And that's a general one. But to break it down, you know, how clear are you in your values? How clear are you in your next steps? How clear are you in the outcomes you want for your business, for your family, for your well being, for your health? You know, pretty broad. But on average, how clear are you in your life and how clear are you in your life in the last two weeks, would you say at a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being clueless, 10 being like, I can see the matrix and how everything is laid out and I just gotta show up and do. And everything's effortless based on that number, how would you justify it in two to three sentences? The power in this is if you are not really clear about your values, you're going to be making decisions that go against those values and you're going to be like, why am I stuck? And it's like, if I think that I'm a happy person and I am miserable at my job or Miserable showing up to do YouTube videos. I'm going to resist doing YouTube videos because I'm a happy guy and I don't want to be miserable. Right. That's a lot of energy you're expending just to show up and do the work. The second lever that you can take a look at is on a scale of 1 to 10, how energetic do you feel? And this is physically energetic, mentally energetic, emotionally energetic, spiritually energetic. And how energetic on average in the last two weeks have you been? On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being dead fish, 10 being like, you know, Dragon Ball Z Goku, like doing the energy thing. And again, what are three sentences that justify the number you gave yourself? The third lever in this diagnostic is courage. And we. And again, we know this from the high performance science. But how are you in being decisive? How are you showing up boldly to take action towards your big dreams, your big goals? And a lot of times, if there's fear here, this is where a lot of great coaching comes in. At a very high level. The three types of fear are process fear that the act of doing something is going to be painful. Loss fear that the act of doing something is going to cause you to give up something you love. And then there is outcome fear, meaning that it's not going to be as worth it to you as you, you might think if you accomplish it. And so if you experience a lot of those, maybe you're a one here on courage. But if you're kind of free of those fears, you're able to act quickly, you're able to act confidently, you're able to take bold action towards your dreams. That's a 10. And then on that scale of 1 to 10, three sentences, why you gave yourself that number. A fourth way to diagnose where you're stuck is your productivity. Right? So one, being super distractive, never making any progress on the major projects. Ten, being like, I am acing and doing the right things at the right time in the right order to achieve my goals in record time, right. And super efficiently. And this one, I'm always listening for distractions. I'm always listening for where people are just kind of going through the motions. That kind of tends to bring this particular score down. We can work on being more present in our work or finding what's engaging and focusing more on that. This is a really great one, especially as a high performance coach. A lot of people want to see, you know, how am I doing out in the world? This is more of an outward one. But Very critical for diagnosing where people get stuck. And then five are how much influence do you feel like you have in the world? One being like you're a lone wolf, you don't see anyone, nobody listens to you. Or a 10 being that you're able to easily share ideas and get people on board, you're able to move people into action, you're able to get people to believe in your ideas, call to actions, you're able to have relationships. So I said influence. This is, this is the relationships one too. So 10, like you're charismatic, you're able to move people to action, you have a lot of close relationships and you have a lot of people that you look up to. And one being you're completely isolated and alone. And for again, all of these questions, after you rate yourself, ask yourself, you know, give yourself three sentences as a reason why you rated yourself. That and that act of self reflection is built into the creator performance quiz that I shared, you know, before getting into these. So we have it structured on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 so you define a number of it. But it's super important to do that three sentence justification exercise where you self reflect. Why did I give it this to me? Because nearly every time I walk through with a client on these and challenge them to explain why in a couple sentences, they tend to move that number sometime. Mostly, I'd say a lot of times people overestimate and they go back. But there's also people that are really hard on themselves and might be like, oh, I'm actually instead of a five, I'm actually a seven here. Instead of a seven, I'm actually a nine on energy because I have all my health habits dialed in. So it's, that's a very important thing for, you know, making that number a little bit more solid and baselined. And you also will discover how you're measuring that in your life. Also, what's really cool about this assessment and what we know from high performance studying and the literature and psychology and whatnot, is if you improve just one of these areas, the rest of the areas will rise and your overall performance will rise. So if you are stuck, if you're feeling like you've plateaued, if you don't know what to do next and you have your five scores. If you took the score that you were the weakest on and improved it by one point, you would get unstuck. And I've seen this time and time again. It sounds crazy saying it out loud without showing you in person or Whether you take that quiz or not. But it's amazing to see that, oh, when I move my energy from a six to a seven, you know, it's much easier to not get distracted. And so now I'm more productive. Now that raises. It's this crazy interrelationship that can have a positive feedback loop for you and really get you, you know, back in progress, back in momentum, back towards building your dream life. So knowing why you're stuck is just the beginning. The main question that I would try to coach you through, that you could coach yourself through to find more momentum right now in this moment to get unstuck is take your lowest one or two or three scores and brainstorm three ways you could bring up your score in that number, right? So if you have a clarity of four, you're like, maybe I need to. If your big goal is to create a YouTube channel that's successful, maybe the first step is like, you just need to know what to do. So maybe you're going to go listen to an Evan Carmichael or you're going to study Mr. Beast, you know, the top 10 Mr. Beast videos, or, you know, go talk to or study what Mark Roper's doing, you know, and when you do that, you know, you're like, oh, I have a better idea on how the video needs to go down. So you move up that clarity score and see if that unblocks you in starting that channel. And sometimes you need an external tool or an external coach or some support from your community. So if you are working on something and you just need some encouragement, get in the comments on our YouTube channel. We'll cheer you on. If you are stuck and want to figure out the next steps, you can go to SeanButtner.com quiz in the show notes too, and that'll figure out your scores and your next step so you can identify where you need to improve and see the magic for yourself. Because ultimately, you know, I could just be talking because ultimately this all is proven or disproven through action. And so I hope you'll take that step for yourself to get unstuck to find out where you need to go next. And I'm cheering you on. You guys go out there and crush it. We'll see you in the next episode. Sam.