I’ll let you in on a little secret, I know where the gold is buried.
You probably actually already know where it is too, so I suppose it’s not really a secret - there’s heaps of it in your “too hard basket” (THB).
We’ve all got a THB and it’s useful when we use it correctly. It’s productive to be able to say “I’m moving that into the THB for now until I’ve finished focusing on this”. This allows us to be with the task at hand and give it our undivided attention.
Having a THB also allows us to set things aside and create some space from ideas and potential actions we can take. This is good because some of the ideas and actions we put in the THB will turn out to be useless distractions, while others will be pure gold. When we create space from them and step back and think, we can actually choose which ones are most likely to be gold.
Most of the time though, we won’t know which things are useless or gold until we actually test and measure them by giving them a run in the real world. But let’s face it - thinking about the effort to test them and put them in place is probably how they came to be in the THB in the first place. Thinking about this too much can lead to overwhelm.
We want to find the gold though, so if when we’re using our THB correctly, occasionally we grab an item out and give it a go. This is easy to do in a calm fashion if we have been regularly sorting through the basket and keeping it well maintained.
The problem with the THB arises when we let it get too full and it becomes unsortable. When this happens, we can’t easily sift through for the gold. When too many things are tossed in and none are taken out and tested for a long period of time, the THB becomes the “Too-Hard-and-Too-Full-Basket” . It becomes impossible to sort through and we become unable to tackle any of the things in there. It’s a one way door that ideas go through to die. They start to pile up and it seems impossible to pick one to start working on when there are so many. The longer it goes on, the worse it gets. Like dirty clothes piling in a laundry, at some point there becomes so many that you haven’t even got the space to move them around and sort them and see which ones need washing, which ones need mending and which ones need throwing out.
Why does this matter now though? Well with everything going on in the world at the moment, more people are tossing more things in the THB than ever.
Can you afford to bury gold in your THB?
We all have aspects of our business that we know we need to attend to. Areas that we suspect we would greatly benefit from if we put the time in, but we just don’t know how to get started or what the right move is. Sometimes we need a little help to get us started and keep moving in the right direction.
With the Upper Limit coaching program, we work together to build a framework for action that sees continual, gradual and most importantly, sustainable improvement.
We continually sift through the basket, find things that look like they might be gold and we test and measure them to see if they are. If they are, we work on sustainable ways to put them into play. If they’re not, we tweak the test and try again or simply mark it up to experience and move on.
Are you ready to take charge of your business and dig up some of that buried gold?
Thank you for taking the time to read and for investing in better thinking.
If you would like to discuss any of the concepts further you can do so by emailing think@upperlimit.club or by clicking here to book a call.
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Until then, Onward & upward, Jake