In this solo podcast episode, Steven Lichtman expands on the second component of his RISE framework—Identify—by illustrating how business owners often mistake surface symptoms for deeper root problems. He shares a client story where the owner blamed low leads on traffic, but analytics revealed a weak offer. Lichtman introduces the "five whys" technique to drill down to underlying issues, uncovering that many entrepreneurs’ true barrier is a fear of judgment that stops them from making bold, clear statements about their value. He argues that fixing the offer and confronting this fear is far more effective than spending money on ads or SEO. The episode concludes with a practical challenge: listeners should write out their own five whys for their biggest frustration, accept the short‑term discomfort, and use the insight to reshape their messaging and confidence. Throughout, he emphasizes that the truth may hurt briefly, but ignoring it leads to prolonged pain.
Chapters
Most business owners are exhausted because they're swinging its shadows. They're solving problems that feel real, but, you know, they aren't. Today we're going to fix that with the second part of Rise, and that's the I for identify. So let's go into story mode, right? I'm going to do some stories for the next few episodes that I wrote out that I thought would be interesting for people. No names. To protect the innocent and the unknowledgeable and all that good stuff. I'm out of. You know, anonymity is always fair when it's with. Some of my clients are also my friends, and I wouldn't want to put them out like that. So a client hits me up in a full panic mode one day and goes, steve, I've got zero leads. Nobody's coming to my website. I need to get some ads going. I need you to do some SEO for me. I need to be on guest podcasts, man. I need all the things, and I need it now. So, look, this happens. I've had phone calls like this before over the years, obviously. I mean, and it's. We go down the same rabbit hole. We always go down. The first thing we do is we pull the analytics, we look at the numbers, right? The traffic's actually decent. Conversion rate, though, was pretty much garbage. It was zero. And this was a site that I hadn't even worked on yet. So it was an interesting kind of. Somebody came in with an existing process, an existing system that for the outside looking in, looked perfect. But as we started to pull back the curtain and look at the analytics, we realized, wow, okay, so you've got body's coming through, but the flow isn't there. So the problem wasn't that he had a traffic problem at all. He had an offer problem, right? Nobody understood what he actually did for them in two sentences or less. So fixing the offer, look, that feels personal at times. It feels scary. Running ads, that feels productive and safe, right? You throw an ad up online, you're like, oh, I'm doing something great. I'm running some ads. But when the offer's not there, you might be ready to burn thousands and thousands of dollars while you're avoiding the real issue, which is identifying what's actually broken in your process. Because it's not often what you think it is, right? The thing that you're complaining about is almost never the actual problem. It's the symptom that you're comfortable yelling and screaming and getting all irate about. It's just how it works. So I like to use the five whys, right? State the surface problem, then ask why five times until it hurts. So here's a good example. In this example, I'm not getting clients. Why? Well, no discovery calls were booked. Why Nobody's clicking my calendar link. Why my posts aren't getting any engagement. We still got two more to go. Guys, lots of whys here. Why? I'm scared to say anything bold. I'm scared to make a declarative statement. I'm scared to put my line in the sand and say, this is how my business rocks and this is what we do. And last but not least, why I'm afraid that people are gonna judge me. That's one of the biggest fears that I deal with on a daily basis with folks, especially as people get into starting to do media and recording themselves, doing videos, doing podcasts and audio put out content. People are petrified of being judged when the truth is 99.99999999% of the Internet doesn't give a toss what you're doing online. But that.000000001, that's your ideal client, and that's the only person you should be speaking to. Forget about the rest. If you're not a mass market person, you're not a massive entity like a Microsoft or a McDonald's or something like that where the hundreds of millions of people scale. If your scale is about having, you know, 10 active clients, why are we worried about what the rest of the world thinks? Right? So let's get back to it. We did our five whys, and boom. The real problem, it's that fear of judgment. So if you fix that, in many ways, the rest will sort itself out, right? So do the five whys on your biggest frustration this week. Write them down, Every single one of them. The truth is gonna hurt for a couple seconds, right? But 10 seconds of pain for 10 months of glory. I'll take it every single time. The rift this day, Today's riff of the day. We're gonna call it the riff of the day, right? We still haven't figured this out. It's the riff of the day. You can't fix a problem you refuse to name. The truth hurts for 10 seconds, but BS can hurt for 10 months or 10 years. So look, guys, you can't read the label from the inside of the bottle. Everything we do here on the show, unfiltered and unshakable. And on unshakable is AF the. The community. It's full of people that are going to hand you the mirror. So stop guessing. Thank you so much for listening once again. My name is Steven Lichtman, and this is Unfiltered and unsh.
