🎯 Work Smart Wednesday - January 29, 2025
I hired an Olympian, do and tell, and a quote from Rumi
Work Smart Wednesday
👋 Hey there!
Here is your fortnightly dose of Work Smart Wednesday.
In these emails I will share with you 3 things to help you work smarter.
For the calendar conscious of you, I appreciate this edition of Work Smart Wednesday is actually going out on a Friday - silly me! I made a mistake with the scheduling, spotted and rectified immediately (now!). Better late than never. Normal service will resume for next time. Enjoy your weekend :)
1. 🏋️♀️ I hired an Olympian
Last week I hired an Olympian.
Here’s what I learned and how it will help your business:
Background: I play badminton recreationally regularly to a decent standard, but I thought it is about time I got some professional help. If it is something I am going to do regularly for the foreseeable future then I may as well be good at it. So I hired a badminton coach, Rajiv Ouseph.
I looked for a coach as I was inspired by another read through of the fantastic article “Personal Best”, and the progress my own clients have made recently. I know the power of coaching, so I was confident that the right coach would help me improve quickly.
He arrived 20 mins late, bad start.
When we finally got started, I saw the impact almost immediately. He identified part of my play that I thought was a weakness as a major strength, albeit an unrealised one.
I have always struggled attacking from the back of the court, defaulting to positional and trick play if forced backwards. He made a very minor tweak in the way I was doing things and within literally 5 minutes I could see the difference. I was skeptical at first, but I embraced his advice and saw an enormous improvement immediately. He took me from unconscious incompetence to conscious competence.
Despite playing for years and thinking I had a great overview of my playstyle and my body, he could see things I could not. He had the experience, and the external view point. He was right, he saw that a small change switched a weakness into a key strength.
His advice was almost the complete opposite to what the other players at my level (and slightly above) were telling me I should work on and try to improve. They told me to work on clearances to reset the rally, but he told me to instead work on back court aggression. He was right. The back court aggression comes with many advantages.
I have implemented his advice and it works much better. What might have taken me years of trial and error to figure out was learned in one session. I saw such a leap in performance after even one session, it was absolutely worth the investment.
So how does this impact your business?
It reminded me of three key lessons that have served me well:
If you want to be truly excellent at something you aren’t going to get there by copying the people at your level. You can’t become great by mimicking mediocrity. His advice helped me leapfrog an entire level and advanced my play by years.
There is significant value in something as simple as external perspective. Sometimes, we are too close to our own work to see what needs to change. An experienced outsider can provide insights that we might never have noticed on our own. It helps if they are an expert in your field, but in my experience someone simply being external is a big enough advantage. This applies to business and personal development.
Small changes can have outsized impact. I see this with clients all the time - often, 90% of what they’re doing is great but they just need someone to show them what to tweak or what to focus on for very significant improvement to happen very quickly. My coach didn’t suggest a complete overhaul but a minor tweak that had a massive effect. Sometimes the biggest improvements come from refining small but crucial aspects, rather than making drastic changes.
Look for people who are where you want to be. Reach out to them for help. Their experience and external perspective can leapfrog your performance to the next level and save you years of trial and error.
2. 📢 Do and tell
In business, being good isn’t good enough. You need people to believe you are good. Perceptions trump reality.
As an entrepreneur you cannot just deliver great results, you also need to tell your clients and your leads how your help led to the great results.
My clients often tell me that one of the most frustrating things they find while running their service businesses - be it coaching or agency work - is their clients not properly attributing their success to the work they do together.
Imagine helping a client lose a tonne of weight but they attribute the success to an unrelated minor change, or helping someone make a tonne of money but they think it is solely because market conditions changed. That sucks. Your efforts are overlooked.
Chances are, you experience this both in your business and personal life.
If you want people to achieve lasting change, if you want people to appreciate your efforts, and if you want people to want to work with you then you need to communicate how your efforts are what led to the change.
Regularly tie back your work to the results. Remind people of their “before” and “after” situations. Provide evidence that what you did mattered.
Some ways I do this:
When a client achieves a milestone, such as revenue goal, I take a moment to celebrate the win with them and make a conscious effort to contrast that win against their previous situation. E.g. “Wow, great work on x! Do you remember 3 months ago when you did/were/thought Y? You have come such a long way!”
I ask for feedback in a way that highlights change. E.g. “We have been working on x, how is that going? What has changed? What do you do differently now?”
Show proof. E.g. Remind clients of specific actions we took together and what happened, collect evidence like data from before and after, share clips/photos/data of client successes. "Three months ago, we implemented X strategy, and since then, you've seen Y% growth in revenue. What do you think caused the improvement? OR That shift made a huge difference because of X".
It can be complex for people to tie correlation to causation, it is unreasonable to expect people to *just know* that you helped. A core part of your help should be to help them understand how you helped.
This not only reinforces your role in their success but also makes it easier for them to share their experience with others.
When you communicate how you created change your current clients will stick around for longer, your past clients will be more likely to reconnect, and your potential clients (your leads) will be more likely to want to work with you.
Make a conscious effort to both do and tell, it is a small tweak that makes a big difference.
3. 💡 Quote I'm pondering
"When setting out on your journey, do not seek advice from those who never left home” - Rumi
If you want to know what to expect, speak to the person who has experienced it. Ideally somebody who is willing and eager to share, as you don’t know what you don’t know. When on an unclear journey, you need them to drive the questions for you.
Example: My friends recently got back from living in Gibraltar. Before they moved there they had asked me what it was like to live in Spain as an expat and I had told them. While my advice was useful, they found their biggest gripe of living in Gibraltar was not the bureaucracy (like Spain) but the dust storms.
It would have been very difficult for them to find that information on dust storms beforehand as they didn’t know to ask about it and people don’t really talk about it online. They didn’t know what they didn’t know.
Had they listened to those who had never lived abroad then they wouldn’t have gone in the first place. Having listened to us, people who had been on a similar journey, they had an idea of what living abroad would be like (and loved it, despite the dust). However, ideally they would have talked with someone who had been on their particular journey, someone who had lived in Gibraltar, to get the best idea.
Who has been on your journey? Or a similar enough journey that they can provide insight for you?
🆕 My “Past Year Review”.
January’s template. A “Past Year Review” has been the most effective exercise I have discovered for moving my life forward and making me happier.
I originally discovered it thanks to a share from Tim Ferriss, and now both my partner and I complete our own past year reviews annually.
The exercise is simple to do and doesn’t take long, but it does require some radical honesty that can feel uncomfortable. Nevertheless, the insights you gather are extremely powerful.
You can get the template I use every year, including detailed instructions and examples to help you, on an entirely Pay As You Feel basis here:
https://buy.stripe.com/bIYdTZ1M68Rq3EQbIU
Bonus tip when goalsetting: Write down what you are willing to give up to achieve your goal. We all only have 24 hours in a day. You have used your full 24 hours every single day you’ve been alive, whether intentionally or not. If you are to change something or achieve a new goal you will have to give up something to make time for the new thing. Identify what it is you will give up. Make sure it is worth it. Ease the transition.
That's it! I can't wait to hear what you think. What did you find most useful? What do you want more or less of? Reply to this email now and let me know
Also, if you have anything interesting to share, I want to know about it😊
Have a great week,
John
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