Do you ever feel stuck in analysis paralysis? You know what I’m talking about…the constant “what ifs” and fear of making the wrong decision in your marketing that mean you end up doing nothing at all. 

Instead of trying to figure out every possible scenario and answer to each and every question, take action one step at a time. Taking action (even small actions) make it possible to gain feedback. That feedback is critical to growing a successful business. 

In today’s episode, I’m diving into the importance of not getting stuck in overthinking, but instead taking action and making progress. If you feel like you have to have everything figured out before making the next move, listen in. This one’s for you! 

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

Sitting in your mind right now wondering about all of these things is preventing anything from happening because how are you going to know if it worked or not? What worked, what didn’t? What your audience says And all of the answers to the questions that keep rolling around in your mind if you don’t take some action.

You are listening to the Not For Lazy Marketers Podcast, episode number 503.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I am back, I missed two podcasts over the last two weeks, which is so unlike me. But I was on two back-to-back trips. I shared that in the last episode. They were great and I love traveling. It just gets me outta my regular routine, the day-to-day. I get the best ideas after it clears my head. It just gives me new experiences. Ever since I was little, I’ve always loved to travel. When I was like 10, I used to save my money. So my grandma would take me on trips and I’d planned them. So I’ve always been like that. I just, I love it. So I went on two trips, one by myself, one with my kids, and it was awesome. It was great. I was very unplugged doing the kind of minimum amount of work that I needed to do to keep things moving that were under, you know, kind of my responsibility.

I still have a few client things that I support with, otherwise I was just checking in on Slack with my team every day. But that is the true gift. Like every time I do this I’m like, this is why I do what I do. This is why I build a team. This is why I push through in the hard moments of building a team and I have the pressure of building a team and all those things when, when you have those months that feel heavier. This is why, because you get to go on a trip and your company runs smoothly without you and continues to bring in money without you having to work is the dream. And it’s why we do what we do. It’s why we take all, all the bad for those moments of the good. At least for me, that’s one of my biggest why’s.

And now this week is what we call birthday week in the Hirsh house. I have two of my kids, my two oldest kids are two days apart, almost two years to the day. So we have back-to-back birthdays and for the last three years they have insisted on separate parties. They will not share their parties, which I don’t blame them, but it means we have two actual birthdays and two birthday parties to plan. And it’s just a little bit. April’s always a little bit crazy, but good, good. Crazy. All right, so I was inspired by this episode. I have a lot of inspired content for you guys because I have been away because I have been just thinking and free and out of my day to day, which always comes a lot of inspiration. But this episode I was inspired based on a conversation I actually had this weekend with a friend of mine who is also inside of our launch your Funnel live program, which is happening live right now.

People are going through the program and it’s really good, you guys. I have such a dial down process for getting to this end result of creating a marketing strategy and, and having it ready to go and ready to launch. That’s custom for your business. And it’s been really cool to watch people kind of go through the process and see the people who try to jump ahead or skip steps and the answers are in the steps that they skipped. And so it just gives me that kind of confidence and, and confirmation that my process is really, it’s really good. Anyways, so I was having this conversation cuz I had a friend who joined the program. So I was checking in on him over the weekend and was making sure he was good. And so one of the things that came up was as he was going through this process and last week, the to-dos were around getting your strategy dialed in and decided like what your actual funnel strategy is gonna be.

Are you gonna do a webinar? Are you gonna do a live launch? Are you gonna do a lead gen funnel? Like which one, which comes making a decision that feels like I don’t wanna make the wrong decision type of thing. And I think that a lot of times what comes up for people in those cases is they start to think of the what ifs. Well, I could do this or I could do this, but what if it doesn’t work? And he came back to me and he’s like, yeah, I’ve gotten to this place so many times where then I just don’t actually do anything because I have such a, i i one have such a hard time seeing how it’s all gonna come together and all gonna work like six to 12 months down the line. And for him specifically, he was saying, well even if I, you know, get this many clients a month in this funnel that only equals $25,000 a month.

And he’s like, and so all that work and I have to do all this and I’m only making that much. And he’s like, and that is great money, but I wanna be making more. And like, is this the right thing? And my answer back to him was, you have to understand you’re not gonna go from A to Z. You are not going to have every single step figured out of how you’re gonna get your business to the million dollar mark. He’s at the early six figures. So he’s doing like maybe 10 k a month, this, you know, but he’s doing a lot of trading his time for dollars and he doesn’t wanna do that anymore. And so he can’t get out of the mindset of that. He’s capped, he keeps capping himself. I can only take on this many clients ev at this rate.

I can only take on this many clients and this offer. And he had three different offers. The details don’t matter as much. However, one thing that matters the most is that he kept playing this story in his mind that he was gonna cap himself. That he can only take this many clients. That this equaled only this much business revenue. And he was afraid, if I do all this work, if I write all these emails, if I build this funnel and I get this going and I only sign five clients, or I only do X, y, z, is it gonna be worth it? Is it gonna work? Is my business gonna grow? And I said to him, you have to understand that you staying in a place of inaction because you’re trying to analyze every possible scenario. And what if this happens? What if this happens?

What if this doesn’t happen? What if this doesn’t work? What if this does work? How is it all gonna fit together? How am I gonna get to a million dollars if I’m only at $10,000 a month? Is this gonna be worth my time? Am I gonna be able to do it? Those questions are not helping because you don’t have all the answers to them. And you trying to analyze and answer them is what is preventing you from making progress because you’re not able to, you’re stopping you from taking any action. And I said, I want you to understand your goal right now is to just go A, B, C. That’s it. You don’t have to figure out A to Z because what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna go through this program which is basically a b, abc and you’re gonna implement it and you’re gonna get this strategy and you’re gonna launch the strategy and then you’re gonna get feedback, you’re gonna figure out what worked, you’re gonna figure out what didn’t work.

Both feedback from your audience and your leads and your customers, but also feedback from yourself in learning. Oh, I really loved that. Oh that worked really well. Oh I could do more of that. Oh, I didn’t like that. That really drained me. I don’t wanna do more of that. That felt out of alignment. You cannot get that feedback without taking action. You sitting there in your mind right now, and I’m talking like as I’m talking to them, but I’m talking to you guys, sitting in your mind right now wondering about all of these things is preventing anything from happening? Because how are you going to know if it worked or not? What worked, what didn’t? What your audience says and all of the answers to the questions that keep rolling around in your mind, if you don’t take some action and understand that nine out of 10 of the things you do are not gonna work, one outta 10 might work, but it might work really well.

And if I could just get you guys to believe this and truly see this, I see behind the scenes of so many businesses, I myself have built a multi seven figure business at a young age, blah, blah, blah. All the things people think is cool about me. Do you wanna know one of the number one reasons why? Because I take action every single day. I take action and I am willing to fail. I’m willing for something not to work and to go, oh, that didn’t work. Let’s change. Let’s do this instead. And not sit in the place of tying meaning to that failure. There are plenty of things that you guys don’t see that do not work for me, whether it’s my marketing or business growth or a decision I made, you name it. The thing that is so key is that I am taking action at a rapidly fast pace.

And so yeah, I’m gonna make mistakes. Yeah, some things aren’t gonna work, but the only way that you are going to get that feedback is through the experience of actually taking action. And so if you look at your business and your marketing, and now I want you to look back in the last, you know, three to six months, how much forward action have you taken? I don’t care if it actually led to progress, because to me progress is anything. And this is what I said back to my friend, I said, even if you get feedback that something didn’t work, that is progress. Cuz you’re not gonna do that thing again. You’re gonna refine the messaging to a place where now it does work because you learned, because you tried things. And if I look at our clients that we work with, we are constantly trying things.

I, I just had a client right now who we were getting a lot of leads and not sales and this was to a low cost membership site. And so it was like, okay, what are all the things we could do? And we came up with, well we can put the membership on the thank you page and we had it there, but we can update the copy there. We can test direct membership ads, sales ads to the membership, we can update the email sequence. We looked at all the variables that we could control and, and I was like, you know what? We’re gonna test ads direct to the membership. I have no idea if they’re gonna work or not. I don’t know. Like it could work for some people, it could not work, but we’re gonna try it. We’re gonna put $250 or whatever we decided behind it and we’re gonna try it and we’re gonna do it.

And we implemented that in a week, less than a week. We got that all turned around and tried. And so the thing is, the biggest goal for all of you guys should be action. And you try to be as strategic as possible 100%, but you have to not be achieving for perfection. And I feel like people say that and they think, like, I feel like if someone said to me when I was at that stage of maybe early six figures or even before that, don’t strive for perfection, I would be like, well, I’m not, I’m not really striving for perfection, but I want, I guarantee that it’s gonna work. And so I think some of you think you’re not striving for perfection. Like there are definitely entrepreneurs out there who make sure like all their copy and their videos and everything is perfect before they publish it and they have that kind of perfectionist mentality.

That’s one version of this. But the other version of this is overanalyzing everything you’re doing to try to find evidence and a guarantee that it’s gonna work, which ends up way slowing down your progress and creating a place of paralysis for you. And I think that’s where I see a lot of people hang out is they don’t make the progress because they’re scared to invest the time they’re scared to invest the money and have it not work. What if it doesn’t work? Ask yourself that whatever you’re holding back on, if you have something right there that you’re holding back on because you are going back and forth, over and over and ruminating in your mind about is it gonna work and what if it doesn’t, what if it doesn’t? And attaching meaning to that about yourself as an entrepreneur and your success and your capabilities and if you can do it or if you can’t do it right, am I right?

What if it doesn’t work? Who cares If it doesn’t work, then what if it, what’s the worst case scenario? You’re gonna be out that money in time and then you’re gonna get back up. You’re gonna have learned from it and you’re gonna do the next thing. And I am telling you, the best entrepreneurs out there do this relentlessly. They do this every day. They do this faster than any of us can because that experience is what gets you to the next level. I just recently also had someone asking me for, for business advice, a friend, and they were like, you’re so good at social media and you’re so good at, you know, ads and marketing, like, can you help me? And you know what I said to them? I said, yeah, I’ll help you, but you have to come ask me the questions. You have to come show me that you’re trying things and then I’ll come and tell you how to do it better and I’ll help you, but I’m not giving you the ideas.

I am not, and this was a friend, this wasn’t a client, but I knew for them specifically that if they didn’t go start just like posting and writing things and putting themselves out there and trying things and testing, they were never gonna learn. And if I just went to them and was like, here’s exactly what you do, they weren’t gonna do it. And that’s why so much of in my teaching, I give you guys the frameworks and I give you guys the the all the tools that you need to be successful. But if you don’t go implement those and adapt them to your business and yourself and learn from them, you are not making the amount of progress you could. For me, my best learning tools has been experience. It’s truly been when I tried something and it didn’t work and I learned from it.

Or maybe I tried something and it worked way better than I thought it was gonna be and it allowed me to do something even better after that. And you don’t know those things until you do it. So the one shift that can make a huge difference in your business right now today is to pause for five minutes and ask yourself, where am I stuck in inaction? Where am I ruminating in my mind, trying to control every scenario and what if? And playing them out and really leaning into that fear of what if I fail? What if this doesn’t work? What if this, what if that? And trying to have A to Z figured out before you’ve even done a abc, you’re never gonna have A to Z figured out. You know what? You don’t want it all figured out because if you do that, then you’re gonna ignore the feedback you get when you’re in the middle of the process, when you’re at letter M, if we keep going with my analogy and you get feedback from a client or a customer or a lead or an audience member and you’re like, well, sorry, can’t listen to that feedback because I’ve got my plan already.

That’s not gonna be good for your business. You can’t have it all figured out. You have to let go of that, and you have to just have the next foreseeable future, the next 90 days, the next week of action figured out and be as strategic as you possibly can. 100%. Like I’m not suggesting to be careless with your actions, I’m just saying don’t get stuck in inaction. Don’t get stuck in rumination because it’s such a waste of time, such a waste of time, such a waste of energy, and it’s going to leave you completely stuck and not making progress. If you get any ideas from this, I would love to hear about them. You can send me a message on Instagram at Emily Hirsh. Otherwise, I’ll talk to you guys on Thursday.

Thanks for listening to the Not for Lazy Marketers podcast. If you love this episode and want deeper support with your marketing, head over to helpmystrategy.com to see how Hirsh Marketing can help take your marketing to the next level. No matter where you’re at today, we help our clients scale faster than ever, find hidden leaks in their funnel, experiment with new creative marketing strategies, and help their business explode and be more profitable than they ever dreamed possible. Head over to helpmystrategy.com and see if you qualify for a free strategy audit with Team Hirsh.

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