small moves over massive action that's a big term in the online world george that a lot of online coaches quote unquote they have to take massive action i'm like stop freaking people out small moves is actually more important than your massive action welcome to the belief shift the show that explores what you really need to know about building a successful small business i'm your host camille rapacz small business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance and i'm george drapeau your co-host and her brother i'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective but mostly my curiosity together we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it but mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive
number three micro moves over massive action so micro moves is something that i tell my clients to focus on a lot which is just take the smallest task that is the smallest thing you can define as like taking an action it's almost embarrassingly small because all that matters in the micro move is that you make movement i don't care about the size or the of the move or the task i care about movement and the counter to that is oh you'll often hear people talk about especially in sort of like personal development spaces and things you know you have to take massive action to reach your goals not that taking massive action is bad like if you can do it good on you but if you're waiting to you have the ability to take massive action to make progress you might be waiting a long time we're not all dialed in and ready to take massive action because that's a really big leap it requires taking you know a big risk potentially um it requires you potentially setting aside big chunks of time to do the work getting out of your comfort zone like massive action is just this like massive move you have to make that can be very overwhelming for people and or it can feel just impossible like i'm never going to have you know if the massive action that if i've defined my massive action as i need a you know a whole day just to dedicate to this thing when is that ever going to happen in my life that's where i think it can get in our way so again i'm not saying like if you have an opportunity to take massive action you should do it but don't rely on massive action to make progress really rely on daily micro moves to make progress actually micro moves can lead to you naturally taking massive action because it starts to build some momentum examples would be you know like i said if you're waiting to do something because you're like i just need maybe you're just like i just need three hours of time in my day and i just can't seem to find it or maybe you even get the three hours and you realize i don't know how to stay focused for three hours it's not realistic for me i don't know how to stay on top of it so there's all sorts of reasons that that might not work for you yeah so instead of thinking well i'm never gonna get this done like maybe you're like i gotta start writing a book and i need three hours to start writing and then you're like well and instead of giving up on writing the book start writing for 15 minutes and do that consistently like if you could just do 15 minutes or 10 minutes every day i'm just going to spend 10 minutes on this thing what will happen is you'll start to build up some momentum and some progress that can lead you toward one of those bigger chunks of time or some of that more uh massive action that you can take but at least you're starting to make progress on that thing in small bits and pieces they add up faster than you think actually i this is a classic example is just reading a book be like i don't have time to read people will tell me i've had this happen in our membership because we read a book we almost read a book every quarter and some people are like oh is there an audio version because i don't have time to read i'm like if you read for just what is it 15 20 minutes every day you easily read a whole book in a month it does add up and we just don't we underestimate what the micro moves can actually lead to so that's why i really try to get people to emphasize working on the micro moves as a way to make progress instead of leaning solely on i have to take massive action in order for me to achieve my goals of all the belief shifts this is the one that i think i have the hardest hardest one visualizing and i think a lot of people have the hardest one believing like i know this is true from my own experience but it's really hard to visualize like how is it that i can do one small thing and then that gets me to my destination like saying to somebody dude look just start just do something for 15 minutes i think people can't see past that first 15 minutes they they can't visualize it like okay i did this for 15 minutes now what we'll do another 15 minutes well now it's hard to integrate that a bunch of small actions into a final result what are examples of things that people could do or people have maybe done in their lives where they've actually seen this happen themselves katie's nodding i wonder if katie has an example well the gold cascade certainly helps with managing the whole situation there but outside of that i mean the first thing of course i thought of was oh exercise i used to be able to talk myself into if you just get on the elliptical you can get right off but then i was like well i'm in the close i'm on here okay i'll do five minutes and then after five minutes you're like well i guess i'll do five more minutes because i'm already kind of like and i think that's sort of the momentum you're thinking about and in terms of let's say my work i can get into the same thing with a newsletter let's say i have what i want to write it about but now i have to sit and do it so i'm gonna just get there and sign in and have it in the background then maybe i'll go walk the dog real quick come back okay now i'm gonna chunk out doing just the intro and then do something else then i'll do you know everything else and then send it so maybe it takes all day but at least it went out whereas previously it may not have happened at all yeah it's that taking that overwhelming task and breaking it down into small pieces so yeah katie mentioned this goals cascade which is something i teach my clients to do which is take a big goal and cascade it down into these small increments of work that they can do and down even to the point of if you have to a micro move because you're just so stuck and you don't know what to do so i think when i work with people george that's how i answer the question of how do i connect the small things to how it's going to piece together into a bigger one and there's there's kind of two types of problems that can be probably more than that but there's two things we're talking about problem solving with this one is like the book reading is just i'm telling myself i don't have time that's a way to take the i don't have time excuse out of the equation and find a way to do it by rethinking how you use time awesome the other part of the equation for this is when you're just procrastinating to do something you don't really want to do like write my newsletter you're like i need to do this it's very important i'm not motivated to do it how do i get myself motivated to do it i just start chunking it out in these small little tasks that are very doable and i can get through them quickly and that's the way that i can sort of do and then potentially build momentum onto that bigger thing i have to do and the other day in the membership one of our members she said i actually had to go to your coaching of pick something embarrassingly small because she was struggling so much she was like so i did i was pretty embarrassed but it was literally i'm just gonna sit down at the desk
but she said it worked i was like it totally worked i sat there and i was like oh i did it i'm here but that was literally she had defined like the very first thing i have to do to make this happen is actually sit at my desk what's the check mechanism to see if you're doing the right thing how embarrassed i feel when i'm doing this action like i'm pretty embarrassed okay i think i'm doing it right that is awesome yes it was so awesome that she shared it and she's lovely about sharing all that kind of stuff openly with us in the membership but it was spot on and it really i think helped everybody else go well maybe i'm not going embarrassingly small enough with how i start you don't have to tell the world that's what you're doing but just do it and then give yourself credit too yeah so this would be how you benefit is do exactly what we're talking about whatever you're struggling with whatever you're hesitating on whether you're telling yourself you don't have time or you're procrastinating just because you're like i i just don't even want to do it you might even be struggling because you're like i know what needs to happen but i really don't know where to start the only way to fit to sort of resolve any of that is but through action action really can solve a lot of the challenges that we have so and if you pick it small enough then it doesn't feel so risky so that's the whole point pick this tiny little thing this is when i talk about taking the risky out of business and you take this little move and that removes the risk for you and then you can actually start making progress so find the thing in your business that you're hesitating on for whatever reason and try this micro move thing and try just doing one little thing every day see how it adds up that's that's the to do we are on number four i believe cuatro planning it over winging it uh this is one of my favorites so planning it this is identifying the work that needs to get done the right work and then the what how and when of doing that work winging it is like i'm just jumping in and doing stuff as it comes at me i'm reacting to emails reacting to requests without really thinking about it i'm just trying to like check stuff off the list but i'm not sure that all those things are actually important i'm not prioritizing and it's sort of this very extreme bias for action i'm just going to take action all day long i'm just going to do a bunch of things but not with any thought to whether they're the right things so that's the difference swinging it i'm not really thinking about whether it's the right stuff or not i'm just doing a bunch of stuff planning it is i'm actually thinking about what the right things are to do overall and then in this moment so my example is i see this happen a lot for small business marketing where they're just putting out as much as they can in as many places as they can it's just like scatter shot i just need to be in all the places and get out there and do a bunch of stuff but it doesn't have any purpose or objective there's no so they're creating a bunch of posts and they're putting i got my job done because i did five posts on instagram and that was my goal that's just wing i'm just winging it i'm just putting stuff out on instagram planning it means what do i want instagram marketing to do for my business and then what kinds of posts should i put out there in order to get that outcome like what do i want those posts to look like and then how often do i need to do it right so then you're making a little plan around it this also starts getting into strategy which we'll talk about later it's a different part of the beliefs but that's the sort of difference to me of just like i'm just winging it doing a bunch of stuff that i think is the right versus i have a little bit of a plan around what i need to do and what's important and how i go about that yeah marketing is kind of the one example i see showing up a lot where i see people wasting a lot of time doing a lot of marketing stuff that isn't actually serving their business because it doesn't have a plan okay so i'll tell you my case for planning overwing it which is great and i actually have something from the software world too so in the tech world there's been this huge shift in how we do software development over the last 30 years from what's called the waterfall model where you specify everything up front you take months to release stuff and software gets released once or twice a year and long stories versus now and everybody's focused on agile development where you you literally stand up every day for 15 minutes to talk about what you're doing you only think about in like one day increments which is not actually true that's not but if you think in these short periods of time you could confuse that for winging it but even in agile development you have epics and stories you don't really get anywhere unless you map that to your overall goal or larger goals you still have to plan which speaks to that the whole point of the plan is to make sure you're getting the outcome you want oh yeah you can't define what the right work is to do if you don't know what you want that work to lead to what do you want what do you want to have happen here so when you just described the waterfall versus the agile plan to me both of those are planning what's happening is they're both identifying the work that needs to get done but the what how when is a little different and the cycle of i'll call it the cycle of improving the plan is tighter in agile than it is in waterfall so there's all these different ways that you can think about planning we can geek out on that in another episode of just project management and planning on all the different ways to do it but what matters is that you are applying the right method approach to planning to suit to the thing you're trying to do so when you're in a highly creative space and you're not exactly sure things are moving fast you're not exactly sure you know where this is going to lead or what you're going to do you're going to have tighter cycles of planning and re-planning and re-planning but there always should be cycles of that so there's no such thing as creating a plan and it's set and done and perfect which i think people think that's what waterfall is but it's actually not that's never true either it's just not as obvious because the cycles are a little bit broader so all of that is to say i think you're describing planning it in both of those scenarios it's just a different way to apply it and how you would do it and it the contrast is that what you're not doing is when you have a plan you know where you're headed and when you're winging it you don't know you're just doing lots of things and so it's sort of this busy culture like i'm super busy in my work doing a lot of things and that makes me feel like i'm successful but as a business owner if i if that's what i do i'm probably not sending my business in the direction i should be because i'm not paying enough attention that all my actions are actually sending me in the right direction so that planning it is really important from my perspective so that you don't have wasted time and effort especially as a solopreneur you don't have a lot of time and effort to waste because you're just this one human trying to make all the things happen so even more important to know it's the right stuff it's helping you get the outcome you want in the way you want to get it it's both of those things because then that's where the time and effort part comes in because there's a lot of ways you could get to that outcome and you could kill yourself doing it yes george in the back row
so reconcile for me this belief shift versus the previous one yes as we talk about all of these belief shifts they're very integrated right they all work together and in concert so while they can singularly be very powerful even we were talking about microwaves you know katie was talking about understanding the gold cascade process so she's using micro moves in the context of a plan okay you talked about it of in the context of a plan that's ideal ideally you are doing micro moves in the context of i have a plan and i know what i got to execute but i'm struggling for one reason or another to do it and instead of looking at this giant plan and feeling like well i'm going to take massive action to get it all done and having that overwhelming feeling hold you back you use micro moves to do it caveat here is if you don't have a plan if you're in winging it mode one way to start to get to having a plan is by taking micro moves with your planning so if you're like i don't have enough time to make a plan i don't i have to just get a bunch of work done you can start by just starting to build a plan in small micro moves micro moves are not winging it because micro moves should be in the context of i know what i'm trying to accomplish i'm just not getting it done and so it's trying to resolve a different problem than the planning it over winging it like the more of these that you use together the better things get i would say these are all in service to you having a high performing business you adapting these belief shifts build this whole bigger picture of this is how i can have a high performing business number five systems over chaos so systems it's basically like a set of principles or procedures or something for how you uh run your business it could also be technical systems but more often than not for small business owners i think about is the systems for how you you accomplish things in your business and it's a way to make sure you're accomplishing those things in a consistent manner that things are running smoothly that's what systems do for you which is the opposite of chaos which is i just randomly do especially a recurring task that i see business owners just do randomly and differently every time it's almost like every time they have to reinvent the wheel because they don't have a system for how they can do it right so it might be something it is exhausting and a lot of times the answers are really simple here so this is a great one for people to not overthink what it means to build little systems and again this microsystems maybe should be the way i should think about it because just little systems little ways of doing things consistently can make a big difference so an example might be you're going to publish a blog there's a lot of steps involved in that from the outline to the drafting to getting the headline to the you know getting it edited to doing the seo and getting it published ready i got to pick an image i want to use and lots of moving parts in that it's not as simple as like i just write a thing and i stick it out there if you have a set list of processes that you run through then that can go fairly smoothly for you if you don't and say you don't remember wait how do what's my login how do i if i've got to get into wordpress and i think i put it in here and i don't remember how i do the headline thingy and what button do i push that helps me with this seo thing and like if you just aren't doing it enough that you remember then every time it's like you're re-learning how to do it and you're wasting time and it's a little chaotic and can it'll slow you down so that's a great place to just what's my system for putting out a blog and that system could be a schedule it could be a list of here's the tasks that i do it could be about the actual behind-the-scenes systems that you're using to get that blog out there so that would be an example of some sort of recurring task that i think we can tend to underestimate the complexity of doing it and so we don't bother to actually write anything down or create a nice system for doing it and so it just it's always chaos which also can mean like then we kind of always dread doing it because it's like oh i gotta remember this thing and i forgot my login and blah blah blah you know um it happens a lot it's the simple things that really can get in the way it also could be things like do i have a solid system for onboarding my clients or is every time i do it so if you're a coach or you're a consultant you know they're signing an agreement you're onboarding them how does it work how do they schedule their appointments those kinds of things do i have a smooth process for that or am i oh i forgot to send them this thing oh shoot and i didn't give him the link to the whatever that's chaos and it is bad if your client's experiencing your chaos in that way right so it's another place it's really important to have nice smooth systems for any interactions with your clients how do you manage systems in your work george this is one area where i think i'm pretty good actually i'd like to think systematically and then i have comments about why the benefit for me for doing it and for everybody i don't worry about building big complicated systems a driving principle for me is to try to simplify the system into as few steps make them minimal that works for me but i also think it it makes them easier to construct the systems why i do it because i've realized a long time ago that systems help you delegate and delegation is something i work on as a manager i'm not that good at it and i realize that if i have a system for something i can teach it to somebody and then i can have them own it and delegate it and i think i'm hoping this is true for small businesses delegation is your key to retirement when you figure out you can delegate that means you can truly hand off to somebody else and you can leave it to somebody else and then you can retire but you can't just hand off without you can't hand off to somebody and not explain how it works or what to do so in order to retire you need to be able to delegate in order to delegate you need to be able to explain the best way to explain is create a system that explains how and what all this that you're talking about yeah the example of um you know being able to delegate is definitely a recurring theme with the small business owners i work with for sure where they have just a handful of employees or even just one person assisting them and they're frustrated because it's not going as well as it should be as they imagined it would be and i mean this is also true in corporate leaders most of the time it's on them they're not doing a good job of providing clarity delegating the work clearly creating a nice smooth system for how the communication flows back and forth um you know that's something katie and i have worked on to make sure that this goes well for you know what's coming up next what are the priorities what do i work on when does podcast editing have to happen so building those systems for how you make all that happen even if small business owners aren't thinking about it in terms of retirement i should they should think about it in terms of like how do i just make my business easier to run yeah and systems are the way and small simple ones so that would be the to do like if you want to benefit from this as a small business owner what's that space in your business that feels chaotic and isn't going well whether it's how you're trying to work with someone else whether they're an actual employee or an assistant or a contract person or just some operation in your business that just you're always frustrated every time you go to do it you're like oh this thing again take a little micro move carve out a few minutes to just improve that system in one way don't try to build up the whole thing in one fell swoop because that can be frustrating and maybe you'll never do it but just try to take one part of that either write a list of steps or just improve one piece of it and see how that goes and then try to build from there i have an example of a small system uh within my team my system for doing vacation time that's four parts first of all the further out you can tell me the easier it is to get the kind of time you want so and then once you we've agreed you can take um vacation time it's three steps first tell me what kinds of things are going to come across my desk while you're gone so you know don't surprise the manager it's always a good rule number two identify your delegate while you're gone and make sure they know they're your delegate just tell them and number three uh send emails to your stakeholders before you go that's it but that's a little system and it's very clear i've written it down people can understand that that's that's a system good enough and it works yep right and it's so simple right it hits all the key points it's super simple yeah i love that i think people can be doing that all over the place and their business you'd be surprised at just taking a minute to create these little systems and how they again and all this stuff is like you get cumulative benefits from everything we're talking about you start small and you keep doing it and you keep adding to the systems and making them a little bit better and and adding a little bit more and it starts to build this is how we're creating we're focused a lot in this podcast talking about how do you create stability in your business small business owners things that feel really unstable inconsistent and i always hear them struggling and wanting to i want more consistent income or i want more consistency and just my day-to-day work i want to be able to rely on my you know schedule of work so that i can plan other things these are all the ways that you do that this is how you get to that consistency and stability so that the small business is actually operating in a way that you enjoy instead of feeling like it's constantly just demanding of you that's what we're trying to get to well now we've made it through five of our eight belief shifts but we're gonna pause there and we will finish this up we will finish up six seven and eight in our next episode so make sure you are subscribed to the podcast so you don't miss a beat and make sure that you've gone and downloaded the free guide that explains all eight of the belief shifts and you'll find that link in our show notes thanks for hanging out with us see ya
