I found myself recently solving problems in the wrong order. It involved a passport, a family holiday, and a baby. It wasn’t pretty, but it reminded me of what I so often see with my clients. Business owners often solve the wrong problems, or solve them in the wrong order.
Why is that and what can you do about it?
The short answer is that limiting beliefs are keeping them stuck. In this episode, I’m sharing how to identify a problem vs a symptom, common problems I see my clients solving in the wrong order, and how to remedy this with a simple exercise.
If you’re serious about solving your money and time problems in your business, these are real things you will want to be addressing in the near future. And I’m confident you can do it!
In this episode, we cover:
- What common mistake entrepreneurs make when problem solving
- Which problems I see my clients solving in the wrong order
- How to identify what the problem is vs the symptom
I can’t emphasize enough the importance of spending your time and money solving the right problems—or certainly the problems in the right order, particularly if you want a business making you the money that you want in the hours that you want to be working. Of course, if you need any support completing that final exercise that’s a perfect time to reach out and say hello!
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More about The Time & Productivity Podcast for Entrepreneurs
The podcast to help you, as an ambitious high-achieving Type-A woman, master work-life balance as a business owner.
Join Kirsty Knight each week, so she can help you create the level of success you truly desire, in a business that you love, without needing to sacrifice time for yourself, your health, your family, and your enjoyment of life outside of your business. Without hustling, without working yourself into the ground, and without burning out.
Kirsty will be sharing lessons from her own business journey, business strategies, time management and productivity hacks, and the psychology you need to understand – to help you go from overworking and overwhelmed, to mastering your time and productivity, so you can be working less, and earning more.
If you are trying to build or scale your business, but find yourself struggling with overwhelm, self-sabotage, procrastination, distractions, perfectionism, people-pleasing, hustling, overworking and always thinking “there just aren’t enough hours in the day”, this podcast is for you.
You CAN have it all. And she’s going to show you how.
The unedited podcast transcript for this episode of the The Time & Productivity Podcast for Entrepreneurs
Good morning lovelies. How are you doing today? So today’s episode is inspired by my latest cock up. So I’ve just recently come back from our first trip abroad with a little one, our seven month old baby Finn. And if you are one of my clients, you probably already know that I made a major boo boo before we left. My first epic fail as a mama and that is I forgot my baby needed a passport.
It just didn’t even cross my mind. Fortunately, I realised two days before we got to the airport, actually it was my dear mother who reminded me. So yes, I’m 36 years old and I clearly still need my mama around. So at least we didn’t have to do the walk or drive of shame back home from the airport. We actually know friends who did that. They realised at the airport that they had forgotten it, but still it was not ideal for us either.
as I basically ended up having to move our flights and our accommodation and our car hire and all the things twice because the guaranteed fast track one week passport service was not actually guaranteed. It did not come in the seven days that they said it would, which basically cost us an arm and a leg and it basically halved our holiday in two. So that wasn’t great.
But I did make it out there in the end. We went to Madeira, which was lovely. And apart from the driving, because Baby does not like the car much, the flight she was an angel on. Anyway, this episode is inspired by my mistake, like I said, because when I asked myself why I didn’t think of getting her passport, I realized it was because I was so focused on solving for all the other problems and challenges that I could see were coming that I missed the first thing I needed to solve.
Kirsty (02:10.484)
So I was focused on challenges we were gonna have when we were there. So for example, there is hardly any shade on the beaches where we were going, so we needed a beach shade, sheltery thing. I’ve just started weaning, said Baby, so I needed to take appropriate bibs and spoons and beakers, et cetera. We needed a car to get around the island, so we needed a car seat. We also needed a lighter weight push chair.
than my usual heavy, very heavy farm buggy that I use. And the list went on and on. And I was so focused on solving for all of those problems and challenges that I missed the most important one of all, which was her passport. And of course the others still mattered, but the order in which I focused on them and solved them needed to be shifted for sure. And ironically, this is something that I coach my clients on, hence this episode.
because sometimes they’re trying to solve the problems in the wrong order and sometimes they are trying to solve the wrong problems altogether. So take my client this week, for example, who wanted my help with deciding her goal. So in her eyes, the problem was there were too many choices, so she didn’t know which one to pick. So essentially in my time masters program, I get them to come in,
I get them to do a time tracking exercise to get really aware as to what they want their time to look like and what it currently looks like and why what it is right now isn’t what they want. And also get them to look at, I get them to list basically all the things that they need to improve upon to get from where they are to where they want to be. And in that exercise,
A few things come out always and then I get them to pick one goal, one thing to focus on each month. So this was exactly what my client came to me for, was help in deciding which one to work on because she struggles with people-pleasing, she struggles with procrastination, she struggles with over-scheduling herself, having too many meetings, she’s got too much stuff to do, she struggles with overwhelm, she struggles with loads of things.
Kirsty (04:32.716)
So she came to the session asking for help with deciding which one to select as her goal. When really the problem that actually needed solving once we did a bit of a dig around is actually the fact that she doesn’t trust herself enough to feel confident in making her own decisions and then having her own back with them. So do you see how if she solves for the latter first, she will actually never need help with making decisions again. And
The fact that she’s not good at making decisions right now, and she believes that she’s not good at making decisions right now, is costing her so much time because she’s undecided, she changes her mind, she picks the wrong thing, all of that. If she works on trusting herself to decide, if she works on believing she can make good decisions, if she works on the skill set of making fast decisions and committing to them, and then having her own back with what she chose, she won’t.
ever waste time deciding or asking someone else to help her decide. She will just decide. But she’s not alone in not seeing which problem should be solved first. And it’s not always immediately obvious. So that was her problem. But I’ve coached clients who are trying to wrestle with their calendar because they feel out of control of their time and they have a million things to do and organize, but they haven’t yet streamlined their business. So
They wonder why no amount of scheduling is working to fit in the 200 hours worth of tasks they need to do each week. I’ve coached clients on, well, I’ve coached clients basically who are wasting time trying out project management software, productivity apps, and AI schedulers galore before they’ve dialed in what their business strategy is.
and then they wonder why they’re super busy all the time, maybe even productive at getting tasks done, but they’re not making the money that they want to be making. I’ve coached clients who are attempting to hire team members, run Facebook ad campaigns, raise their prices or move to groups before they’ve done the inner work to feel safe to be seen, to burn money.
Kirsty (06:47.884)
to have a ton of no’s and to either have their income slow down, decrease or explode and have people unhappy with them or the amount of money they are making. And they wonder why they are finding moving the needle on those projects so damn hard or why they aren’t doing the things they know they should be or why they seem to be taking one step forward and then two steps back every time and seemingly self-sabotaging their progress.
I’ve also coached clients who are still obsessing over learning more to improve their marketing and lead gen and messaging and selling and delivery skill sets. So they keep signing up for more and more marketing programs and sales coaching programs and certifications. And they aren’t actually doing the work in the world to test what they already know to risk putting themselves out there to risk failing, but also risk succeeding before signing up to the next course that promises the magic formula or pill or secret to
their success. I have clients come to me who think they have a time problem when it’s a productivity problem, a productivity problem when it’s a fear problem, a strategy problem when it’s an implementation problem. So they are either solving for the wrong problem or they are solving them in the wrong order. I’m not saying you don’t need to be good at sales or you don’t need to be visible. What I’m saying is if you’re not doing those things right now because you are
afraid of being visible, afraid of people judging you or you don’t fully feel like your offer is amazing, then you’re solving the wrong problem first. And the cost of this, of course, is usually a time consequence or a money one or both. And so it matters that you know what the real problem is and not just the symptom and that you’re tackling the problems in the right order.
So for example, we’ll do a few examples, okay? You might know that you aren’t getting the needle moving projects done in your business right now. You might see that you are procrastinating on them and you might think that that is the problem. But procrastination is just the symptom. It’s how we know that there’s a problem. But the actual problem is maybe that you have an underlying fear that you’re not even aware of.
Kirsty (09:10.176)
that once you complete the project, you’ll be overrun with requests for work and you don’t know how to fit that all in without burning out or spending less time with your family, which you don’t want. So you are subconsciously acting in a way to keep that from happening. Or maybe you think that you aren’t making sales, that’s a symptom, because your offer isn’t good enough. When really it’s because on some level you feel guilty that you’re charging that much.
And so you are tentatively offering it rather than shouting it from the rooftops. And that’s the real problem that needs to be addressed. And so rather than you needing to buy another sales and marketing course to improve your sales skills, what you should be doing is getting coaching on the pricing and the guilt. I mean, I could go on and on about the different symptoms you might have in your business.
and the things that you think they indicate and the things that are actually the problem that should be solved first. And ironically, it’s easier for me to spot it in your business than it is in my personal life. And then we actually have to go one layer deeper even then to the root cause of the problem, which is where we go to fix it. Which in the last example would be where the guilt is coming from, which belief system is making you feel unworthy or undeserving.
or like it’s not okay to be paid well for what you do.
Either way, I can’t emphasize enough the importance of spending your time and money solving the right problems or certainly the problems in the right order, particularly if you want a business making you the money that you want in the hours that you want to be working. So here is what I want you to do today, especially if you aren’t exactly where you want to be money-wise, time-wise with your business. I want you to take a minute at the end of this episode and do this exercise.
Kirsty (11:02.24)
I want you to think about what problems you’ve been trying to solve over the past few months and the results you hope to create from implementing the solutions that you tried. And I want you to jot those down on a piece of paper. So you have the problems and then the results. And then I want you to go back through them and put a tick next to the ones that you’ve solved or seen the results that you wanted. And I want you to put a cross next to the ones that you haven’t seen the results that you wanted.
the ones where there is still a problem there. And then for those ones, I want you to get curious and start to question if you might have been trying to solve the wrong problem. If there might be an underlying problem that you’re not addressing or a more pressing problem that you’ve skipped over to focus on a problem that should be focused on later rather than first, and just see what comes up. So,
Have you been trying to solve your lack of sales problem through learning more sales strategies, yet your sales haven’t increased since? And so really it could be that you aren’t 100 % confident that your offer is priced right. Have you been trying to solve your lack of time problem through using an AI scheduler when you have a hunch that the math doesn’t actually add up and you need to hire help with some tasks in your business?
Have you been trying to learn more marketing strategies to be more visible yet you still aren’t taking action on them? And if you get curious about why, you have a hunch that you aren’t doing lives on Instagram because you have visibility fears that haven’t been addressed yet. Try to tune in and see what comes up because these are the real things that you will wanna be addressing over the next few months if you are serious about solving your money and time problems in your business.
And of course, if you are struggling with figuring out what the problems are that you should be working on first or what the real problems are, this is exactly what I can help you with on a free consultation call. Just click the link in the show notes and we can get one booked in. That’s it for this week. I will see you next time. Have a good one.
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