Why Paint-By-Number Rarely Works In Business

Quick Intro: No-cost call tomorrow “Six Months: Go!”

Join us tomorrow, (or at least register so you get the recording if it’s too late to fit it in), for a free call on how to make the most of the first half of 2011, including where to focus, what your business needs, and a teaching on sovereignty. The closest thing to a magic bullet.

Click to get the details and register: No-cost Teleclass- Six Months: Go!

Why Paint-By-Number Rarely Works In Business

Business just isn’t that hard, and lots of people are around to remind you of that. They offer paint-by-number systems to make your business work in six easy teleclasses and it seems so easy.

Yet the reality is that many people struggle to implement those systems. People take quick courses and then struggle to put the teachings in place. Is it incompetence? Is it fraud?

I think it’s something else.

A Teacher Gets Angry

A high school teacher stood in front of the black board, trying to really get how the sun, moon and earth all move around each other. She was in a learning situation with other teachers trying to figure out what learning looks like from the children’s perspective.

Now this teacher knows full well that the moon revolves around the earth, the earth itself is spinning on its axis, and both of those crazy celestial marbles are traveling around the sun. What isn’t so easily understood is the paths they take in relationship to each other.

As it turns out, it takes a tremendous amount of observation and experience to be able to correctly predict where the moon will appear in the night sky and what it will look like. So she had sketched it out on the blackboard, with a line across the middle of the earth separating the dark side from the light.

She was immediately bombarded with questions from other teachers in the room: “Is the line so stark? Isn’t there a gray twilight transition between them? Is it precisely through the middle?”

Frustrated and angry, she told everyone to just stop! That kind of precision was stopping her in her tracks. “I needed some time for my confusion,” she explained later.

More Time For Confusion

I read that whole anecdote in a book, The Having of Wonderful Ideas by Eleanor Duckworth, who was a student and colleague of the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. (The book itself was recommended to me by the amazing Julie Margretta, an education reformer at Harvard University.)

I won’t bore you with a lot of academic research. The bottom line is this: for students to have a thorough and personal understanding of a topic so that they can apply the principles in unique, as-yet-unseen situations, they need to have time for confusion. They need to avoid getting too precise about answers so that the system, and the relationships between all the parts, can be understood.

This may be why, if you’re trying to make a solo business work, and you just care so much about the thing that you could cry, you recognize yourself at that blackboard.

The basics of every business are fairly simple, and you probably already get it. You need to have an offer that people want and need. You need to have marketing. You need to have systems. You also need an effective sales process, among other things.

But how do they relate to each other? How does it all come together?

After ten years of working with clients, I’ve seen that too much precision too soon can slow down business progress. And I’ve experienced it myself.

What It Looks Like

I’ve personally been on quite a learning curve at Heart of Business around leadership and sovereignty. When you start to run a team, the way you spend your time during the work week changes radically.

I made plenty of mistakes trying to figure how to schedule my time. How much time for meetings? How much time for relationship building? How much time for strategic thinking? It’s been a huge struggle that has made some weeks completely unproductive and has brought me to tears. By tears, I mean going through multiple handkerchiefs.

It also led us into a cash flow crunch, because too many balls were in the air, and I was trying to both listen to other people’s advice and tunnel into too many details.

As I get the relationship between the team, the business, my creative self and our clients, things have come into focus. I’m beginning to understand how they relate to one another. I finally have a strategic plan in mind where things build on each other. As my buddy Dan Duggan told me, “Now you’re thinking like a CEO!”

I’m not God’s gift to CEOs yet, but I’ve made huge strides. And too many details too soon, too much advice and too many questions, and not enough time just being with my confusion slowed down the process tremendously.

You may not be in the same transition I’m in, but you are probably trying to learn how to make your heart-centered business better in some way. Maybe you’re just trying to get it off the ground.

Intuitively, in rare moments of grace, you my experience your heart, your business and your clients all in beautiful relationship. But it’s a little confusing how to get them to come together predictably—what is their relationship?

Then you get pelted with all kinds of questions and advice from well-meaning people: “Just do X-Y-Z and the clients will come in like magic!” “What are the three most important things you’re doing this week?”

Stop! Ugh! Too much precision, too quickly. Yes, obviously you need clients and money, and don’t have time for long theoretical discussions. And yes, you need to take action.

The Earth Used to Be Flat

If you don’t take some time to really get the relationship between all these different moving parts, the precision that’s needed in business will actually slow you down rather than move you forward, because you’ll be doing something mechanically, like a paint-by-number, instead of truly understanding and running your business the way your heart can do it best.

It takes time to let go of the old view business and then to truly take in the new understanding. It doesn’t have to take a tremendously long time. Unless you rush the process and try to get into the details immediately.

This is a fantastic example of where rushing actually slows the process way down. I’ve seen it over and over.

Yet if you’re willing to take the time needed with the concepts, not rush too fast and furious, then it all begins to click. Suddenly the relationship between your heart, your business and your clients makes sense.

Here’s my question to you: What bits of precision can you relax around and let go of so you can truly understand the relationship between your heart, your clients and what you’re trying to learn or get better at?

And if you’ve been through this cycle, can you share a moment when something big in your business clicked for you?

p.s. Umm… that’s why we created Opening the Moneyflow…

This need for confusion and spaciousness is one of the big reasons we offer our six-month program Opening the Moneyflow. Big picture, systems, relationships, coaching, healing, support and feedback are all part of what you need.

Yes, there’s precision there too whenever you’re ready for it. The five elements that make up a powerful article. The particular steps to creating quick and clean copywriting. The six parts of an enrollment conversation that gets to yes and includes your heart.

This is the most powerful, profound, and truly helpful version of our program yet. And it’s starting to fill up. Get your application in and let’s start moving you at your pace with what your business actually needs, instead of forcing it into a paint-by-number.

Read about it and apply today: Opening the Moneyflow 2011

If you have questions, our no-cost call tomorrow will help you understand what we’re doing and why, so you can apply it to your own learning. I hope you can join us for the No-Cost Teleclass—Six Months: Go!

p.p.s. Friday is the Virtual Retreat

Jump in! If you need to take time and space to just be with your heart and your business, the Virtual Retreat is a profoundly nourishing way to do it.

Join us.