Ep 68: The Paradox of Action: When Effort Doesn't Equal Results

EPISODE 68

Achieving Clarity and Intention in Social Enterprise

 
 
 

Picture burning dinner two nights in a row, not from distraction but due to negative mental chatter.

In this episode, I share how our thoughts can shape our outcomes.

We explore the hurdles of energy inertia that hinder our goals and offer simple ways to ease stress, like a mindful walk or uplifting music. Discover how to overcome resistance and savor the journey toward success.

We get candid about how you can unintentionally derail your success -- even when you're taking action!  

Think you’ve reached out to “everyone” in your network? Out of ideas to get noticed and get funded?  Generate leads for your nonprofit or social impact business: https://www.splendidcourses.com/prospect

Steal my Prospect List! Lead Gen just got a lot easier!

Resources mentioned:

 
 
 

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TRANSCRIPT:

00:02

Welcome to the Purpose and Profit Club podcast for nonprofit leaders, mission-driven creatives and social entrepreneurs.

00:09

Get ready to stop dreaming and start doing. Here, ideas become action. We prioritize purpose and profit. You ready, let's go.

00:20

I wrote down in my notes for today's podcast this question Can you repel money? Think about it. It's not a weird question, but I want you to take a moment and think about your organization, your mission, your business and ask yourself is it possible that I'm actually turning away prospects? I'm actually turning away my ideal client, donor or customer? Could it even be? Is it possible?

00:51

There's some repellent going on In marketing. Sometimes we talk about you have to repel some people in order to attract the right people. The way that might look in practice is you want to specifically talk to your audience who's like a hell yes, and call out some of the things they care about. If you're an organization that serves maybe, environmental issues, maybe climate change, you don't want to just talk in the very, very broad terms. You want to strike a chord. You want to talk specifically to the people who care about that. That is one way that you're like yeah, you're going to repel people who don't believe climate change is real. You're going to repel people who don't think recycling is really a big deal or a problem. That's one way. That is not the type of repellent that I want to talk about today. I want to talk about this idea of energy inertia, action to do less, being full, being deliberate. Yet the outcome of all of that inertia is not at all what you want. You're scrambling, you're busy, you're asking, you're launching, you're doing all the things, your funding is down, you're just not hitting your goals. There's usually this exasperation or frustration on the end of that. I want to talk about why. I want to talk about why and how you can identify where you can take responsibility for it and why it's actually a really meaningful piece in turning the whole thing around.

02:40

This podcast is rooted on the principle of enjoying the journey, not just the destination, enjoying the process, not just the product. How do we do that? Not through that exasperated phonetic energy. How do we do that? Instead, I sent an email out to my list recently and I asked them you know that breaking point where you catch yourself saying, god, I'm putting in so much effort but nothing is clicking or it's barely clicking. Y'all have been sending me some emails and some texts and some DMs lately that have said it's harder than normal. My numbers aren't where I want them to be. Lots of ranting, lots of disappointment happening. So I know that that's going on, but here's why nothing is clicking.

03:29

Not all action is created equal. What I mean is the action is. I built the fundraising page, I sent the email, I pressed post, I got out of draft mode, I made the ask. But you can actually take all of those actions and have lackluster or less than ideal results. Okay.

03:51

So I'm going to tell you a story about how recently I have like two back-to-back days in a row where I burnt dinner and I can cook, y'all, I can cook and I don't really burn dinner. It's not just, it's just not one of I don't know, it's not one of my problems. Okay, in the kitchen Not really a baker, but I can cook some food. So on the second night in a row, I'm sitting with my kids and they're like I don't like this, and they take a few bites and then I sit down at the table and I'm like, yeah, this is not good. I was like I'm with you, this is not good. And it kind of made me laugh because I could see on their faces that they were like, wait, we're not going to sell it to me. You're not going to sell it to me that this is actually really good and I'm like, no, I'm actually with you, this tastes like shit. So what was going on there?

04:43

My mental chatter was all over the place the night proceeding it, and the night I was cooking it is it proceeding, I don't know. You get me the night before and the night of, and the mental chatter sounded like I don't like cooking. I don't want to cook. Someone else should be handling dinner duty, me side eyeing my husband, right, right, those were the pieces. So I'm literally taking the action of cooking while thinking I don't want to do this. Somebody else should be doing this. This is not how I want to be spending this hour or this 30 minutes. Right, it was like this, this resentment, okay. So while doing it, I'm thinking that and what is the outcome of that Burt dinner? Why did I burn dinner? Because I was not only coming from the mental place if I don't want to do this, but the way that it showed up in in the actual kitchen meant that I probably was walking away from the stove. I wasn't putting a timer on those types of things, right, I wasn't taking care of the action. I wasn't doing it with thought or with purpose, I was doing it with like, begrudging, begrudgingly.

05:56

And so if you actually made the donor ask, you pressed post on what you thought was a really great Instagram reel, or you hit send on an email that took you a really long time to write and you have that frustration I want you to think about, like, what were the thoughts, what was that inner chatter, what was that intention when you were doing it? Okay, so oftentimes the thought in the internal chatter for many of you right before you send out an email is crap, I should have sent this sooner. I got to get this out today. Right, that is not a great energy and not a great place to actually write an email that tells a story of the impact and makes an ask or makes an invitation for somebody to take action. Right, because it's like, stressed, it's stressed writing the email. Same thing, if there is a hurriedness to maybe a social post, it's going to come out that way.

06:56

Right, and, most importantly, if you're in a donor meeting or maybe talking to a prospect, right, you're kind of queuing up the ask or you're working on that piece and you're thinking, oh my God, I don't know what to say, or I should have contacted them sooner, or some sort of internal chatter. That is really negative. How is that showing up for you? So you'll say to me but I made the ask, christina, but I made the call right. But it matters the intention going into it, because when that prospect gives you one little hint of like, hmm no, I don't think so, we're not able to you nod your head, your shoulder slump, you walk away, you leave. Right Versus when you are in main character, energy, when you are coming from a place of belief in your mission, excitement for the future, commitment to making this goal happen, courage to telling the stories, to saying the hard things. When that prospect says, hmm no, you don't leave, you lean in and you say tell me more, you ask questions, you become a great listener, right? You keep going Versus, walking away from the kitchen, leaving that shit to burn, okay, and then plating it up, saying, listen, I cooked dinner, I cooked dinner, I did it. So you see the difference, the nuance between the exact action is the same I made the call, I cooked dinner, but it's not the same. The action actually isn't the same. If you were going to explain it to me, you may say I did these things, but the action isn't the same.

08:36

One of my coaching clients I talked to them this morning and we were talking about the follow-up process with one of his prospects who basically said let me think about it in their own way. Right, let me think about it. And they said, okay, and that was it, that was the end. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. Just because somebody says let me think about it, there are these default things that we say in our life, just like let me think about it.

09:02

Or in my world, if I'm talking to, let's see, like a service provider or something like that, for, say, our house, like to do some home improvement stuff, I might say, oh, let me talk to my husband, which is code, for I don't want to make a decision right now, or I'm not interested, or now's not the right time. Okay, let me think about it. Let me talk to my team, right? So you want to ask? Instead of this, in those moments, you want to actually lean in, not out. You want to stay on the phone, stay in the meeting, which does take courage, by the way. Okay, it does take courage. The only way you're going to be willing to do that is if that internal chatter is like is at least neutral or positive. Okay, that internal chatter isn't all over the place, isn't critical, isn't negative, isn't just going on and on and on.

09:56

So let's talk about some actual ways you can work through this going into the next few weeks, going into your next campaign, going into your next meeting. The very first thing that I would recommend is, if you have a task that is looming thinking of our easy email students we had a bonus coaching call today and one of our students said I gotta write six emails with like a. You know, I gotta write six emails. And so we talked about how she could do that, how she could do that simply quickly, but one of the things that we talked about the framework to write these six emails. I gave her two options. It was like you gotta go into the writing these six emails, not begrudgingly, so let's set the stage for that. Let's set the stage for what you need. So you write these emails in a way that it's like I'm getting this done. Maybe there's even a reward at the end, because begrudgingly, we'll write emails that aren't that good, that you blow through the ask that aren't that compelling, and then on the heels of it, on the other side of it, you're frustrated that you had to do it in the first place, right, which, again, that is not the point. You're enjoying the journey.

11:12

So if I am feeling stressed, if I'm feeling grumpy, if I'm feeling just tight and frazzled, I wanna offer a couple of things that have worked really well for me, and all of them, I'm sure, will just seem like what has she been talking about, but I swear they work. I told you I have a small trampoline in my office bounce, jump, get to do jumping jacks 60 seconds. It will just change the energy in your body. It will at least move you from grumpy or stressed to more of a neutral spot. I promise, I promise, I promise there's something about just the movement quickly. That works for me every time.

11:48

That's the first thing. The second thing is fresh air, a walk, and one of the things that we consistently do as leaders is we tell ourselves I don't have time to do that, I don't have time for a 30 minute walk, I don't have time. Have you seen my list? Have you seen my calendar? I don't have time. That is the lie. That is a lie. Take 15 minutes instead. Put your phone away, just like Andy, one of my clients, said on our earlier podcast. She shared how she goes on a phoneless walk. Put your phone away, take 15 minutes, walk, just let your mind wander. That's it. That's another thing that works really really well for me.

12:25

Okay, third thing that would work really really well would be either listening to some pump-up music that just gets you kind of excited and high energy, or there's an app called Insight Timer that has these really quick meditations, but they're not the kind that you're chanting and they're not the kind that are silenced it's actually somebody speaking. I find those are really helpful. Sometimes I'll just do a three-minute one because there's no right and wrong. There's no. I have to do it for 30 minutes, okay. So try one of those to actually set the stage before you're taking the action.

12:59

Okay, in an earlier episode recently, I talked about how the lie we tell ourselves is I don't want to, right. So my lie in the cooking scenario was I don't want to cook, I don't want to cook. The truth was, in the moment I did want to cook. Okay, it's like both were, true, I didn't feel like cooking dinner, but I wanted to. I chose to because I wanted my kids to have something to eat. I didn't want to order takeout, like, I had food in the fridge, I wanted to cook, right, it's like holding the both true, like, yeah, this is an ideal. I'd rather just not have to cook anything, and I actually do want to cook it. So that piece of just taking a little bit of ownership of the action I find is really really helpful. So, homework care, watch your thoughts, watch your thoughts internally, watch your thoughts going into the action.

13:52

Maybe you look at the last time you had a campaign whether it's giving Tuesday, whether it's some sort of online campaign, whether it's some sort of in person outreach, just some sort of thing and ask yourself how that campaign went. So when you, when the results are in, if it didn't go how you wanted it to, meaning you didn't reach your goal, I want you to ask yourself was I taking action from a place that was full of, like mental garbage, chatter? Right, I showed up. I, you know, drove to the place, I did the dinks, right, I did all the things. What was my mental chatter like? And, conversely, I want you to go through a time where it did go well, you did hit your goal and ask yourself, what did that inner chatter look like? And maybe the inner chatter was actually probably not even chatter.

14:42

As soon as I said the word inner chatter in that, in that context, I was like I don't even think it's chatter. I think that when we're feeling more aligned, more excited, more, just like I said, committed and courageous towards our mission, just like more in it, more enjoyment, I don't think there's a whole lot of da, da, da, da, da, da chatter in our heads. I actually think it's softer and more like. Instead of like waves on an ocean, like big, strong waves, it's more like a rocking kind of gliding, like a, like a what is the word? Like a pool, you know? Or like a lake, or something.

15:19

So ask yourself, what was I thinking when it went well? Were you thinking maybe, oh, it's so nice to have help, or I know what I'm doing, or people are totally going to come, or this is going to go well? She's going to say yes, like whatever it is? Ask yourself what that chatter was and find the difference so you can find your default. Okay, we all have a default, inner critical chatter, and the first step of starting to undo this is to figure out kind of what, what, what are my favorite little loops to, to, to spin on right. Then, once you have that awareness piece, you can start to unravel them. Okay, so, if this was helpful, here's what I want you to do. I want you to send me a message. You can send me an email or I can DM me on Instagram at splendid consulting and tell me what, like what, stuck for you. What was that mental chatter, what, what does it sound like?

16:11

The second thing I want you to do is I want to invite you to book a discovery call with me If you're interested where the strategy and the mindset piece intersects. That is what we do when we private coach together. So book a call with me. There's a link in the show notes here. I'm cheering you on. I really am, by the way, when I say that I'm totally cheering you on. You got this. I'll see you next time. You know how they say you should enjoy the journey, not just the destination. Have you ever wondered how do I crack the code to do that? I can help you do that. I can help you not only achieve your biggest, most daring goals, but the journey to get there, no more overwhelm, no more self doubt. I want to invite you to book a call with me. Go to splendidatlcom forward slash book.

You Get To Have Purpose And Profit. I’ll Show You How.

 
 
PodcastChristina Edwardspurpose and profit, marketing, entrepreneurship, purpose driven, nonprofit, social impact, mindset, productivityComment