So, Here's My Story...

Are you and your business applying for support from your government during COVID-19? Your answer might say more about your style of entrepreneurship than you think! Why is that important for business?  The very characteristics that make someone prepare for these kinds of circumstances in business are the same characteristics that make people apply for this help, regardless of urgency of need.  The very thing that makes someone a billionaire, for another example, is the same thing that leads them to cash a cheque for $1.11 (or even $0.64, in Donald Trump’s case - https://www.celebritynetworth.com/articles/entertainment-articles/billionaire-cash-13-cent-check-someone-actually-conducted-experiment/).  It’s interesting contemplating what would make a difference between someone who would rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it, and those who just choose not to ask for help until they absolutely need it. This might have something to do with the distance in time some people can think. Some peopl

Emotions are running high right now, and while business leaders shouldn’t feel the need to become counselors, we are being called on right now for heightened awareness and a well-timed, “are you okay?” Why is that important for business?  Right now, even in business, emotions are constantly creeping around the edges. And even our intrepid podcast favourites, Eliot and Jodi, can fall prey to the charms of frustration and emotional exhaustion. Luckily, their first “fight” (not to be mistaken with fist fight) has a lot to teach us about heightened emotions in business.  People might be coming to conversations already primed with anxiety, fear, stress and little sleep. Like a toddler who throws a fit ostensibly over a blue cup, but truly because they need a nap, we’ll need to get better at noticing when things are off. In the current state we are in, not being aware of heightened emotions is no longer a luxury we can afford.  We’ll need to get better at balancing personal needs against business needs.  Unfortunat

We’re not here to Pollyanna the coronavirus, but one of the things we hope we can learn from this is that business is a human experience. There is a return to humanity in business, and we are here for it.  Why is that important for business?  Like most business stories right now, this story starts with, “so I was on a zoom call the other day”, includes feral children, and ends with this lesson: we are weirdly grateful for the return to humanity in business that this is providing us. There is a process of clearing away of how you are supposed to be and to act, and the whole world is getting on board with caring less about a façade of professionality.  We can’t help but be curious to see how much of this we will retain, or will we pretend none of this happened and go back to hiding our humanity? Will we go back to limiting this sense of intimacy we are forced into now? This crisis is stretching the bounds of what we thought was possible. For instance, we may have thought we were being creative, but it was only

“Progress looks like a new set of problems”. As you evolve towards a goal, you have new problems to deal with that you’ve never had to deal with before. Apparently, it’s also true of the opposite of progress – this time of massive uncertainty. Why is that important for business?  Right now, as businesses process this pandemic, the definition of what it means to be a leader is changing. Leaders might want to come int and try to maintain business as usual, to set an example that it can be business as usual. But in our current times, leadership is the opposite: recognizing and adjusting to the fact that it is not business as usual.  We indeed still need to set a good example, but this is a different type of good example we have to set than we have ever had to before; we have to set the example of reacting to the circumstances vs overcoming them.  We cannot forget to pause and find ways to connect with the people that work with us and remind ourselves that these are humans going through a scary thing. They are hu

There’s so much to talk about with Covid-19, you can hardly blame us for having a second episode on it. Let’s talk about the behind-the-scenes decision making happening in businesses right now as they navigate these wildly uncharted waters.  Why is that important for business?  As businesses navigate the difficult decisions that come with this unprecedented time in our world, we want to remind you that there are often no clean solutions to problems in business (see our episode Stop Ignoring the Solution https://soheresmystory.com/ep132-stop-ignoring-the-solution/). We can’t dismiss solutions simply because they come with new barriers – we don’t have the luxury right now of waiting for the perfect solution. It might not even be possible to let your values guide your decision. This requires a new way of dealing with a problem and it can be paralyzing. We aren’t used to thinking 9 steps out from our own thing. We live in a world that makes assumptions about other people’s availability that are no longer true.  

Are you prepared to deal with large scale problems, like the Coronavirus, in your workplace? Although we don’t have a ready answer for how to deal with issues like this, we do have some ideas in this episode.  Why is that important for business?  Adopting a plan for how to work through something like the Coronavirus is something to work through now. Do you have a culture of “being a hero through attendance”, where taking a sick day is a sign of weakness and powering through a sign of strength? Do you have everyone’s phone numbers available? Do you have a plan to work virtually? These are all questions it’s better to ask now, instead of in the middle of a crisis. What is your plan if you can’t go about business as usual?  It can be hard to tell when you are over- or under-reacting to a situation. Like our episode on deciding when to take your kid to the doctor (https://soheresmystory.com/ep119-the-fear-of-reaction/), making decisions on when to call it a crisis can be really challenging. There is no tidy answe

Feeling misunderstood? Maybe you need a little metaphor in your life! Why is that important for business?  “Metaphor is how we nail the jelly of reality to the wall”.  Joe Moran, from First You Write a Sentence. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38470061-first-you-write-a-sentence So often, we feel like we have good communication - we think everyone knows what is meant by a word, but everyone has their own perspective of how they imagine that word.  "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." George Bernard Shaw If someone says “stability” and one person thinks they mean financial independence and one thinks they mean flexibility, we are now living on separate islands, trying to have a conversation and make decisions. If you use metaphor, however, it takes people out to the fuzzy focus of a thing, where you don’t get stuck on wordsmithing and things become somehow more clear.  This isn’t necessarily about stories – stories are where we draw metaphors from, but

College is a really big buying decision, and it can teach us a lot about buying decisions in our business, and why it’s important to not just give information, but connect to wants, desires and fears. And potentially, to help people discover wants they didn’t even know they have (like bespoke librarians!) Why is that important for business?  When making a sales or onboarding presentation, it can be interesting to notice what businesses (or colleges) decide to highlight. With colleges, you are speaking to prospective freshman and, often, their parents about one of the biggest decisions they will make, and you have the opportunity to speak to all of their wants and desires and fears. But if you focus instead purely on information – like tuition and financial aid – you miss an opportunity to connect on an emotional level. And ultimately, these are emotional decisions.  These conversations are an opportunity to reflect your values. Too often, in a misguided perception of what people actually care about, we miss a

If you handle it right, sometimes the biggest snafu can turn into real business.  Why is that important for business?  When the very thing you offer to clients - your core competency – hinges on someone else’s business, things can go bad completely beyond your control. Which is what happened recently with our texting app. Instead of taking our (non-paying!) business elsewhere, we opened a door to communication that ended with us turning into paying customers.  When someone complains to you, you have an opportunity. You can highlight exactly what your marketing brochures say you do (we really care! #1 in customer service!) in real time. When you know there is a real person responding in ways that align with their best promises, even if it’s at a time when everything is falling apart, you’ll follow them anywhere.  When you bring love into your business - whether for the people you connect with or the service you bring into the world - it gets right into the meat of loyalty and connection. It’s hard to replicate

We often rely on other people to self-screen in our relationships – to not ask too much of us, to know when “a quick question” turns into “I clearly need to hire you”. But when others breach your boundaries, sometimes you have to be the one to speak up.   Why is that important for business?  Sometimes setting boundaries on your expertise is a concrete or even legal issue – you can deflect blame to your lawyer, your association rules, or even company policy for why you can’t do something. But what do you do when something is just a personal boundary, or it just doesn’t feel right? Your ability to define and hold your own boundaries is one of the most important skills you can master in business. Exerting boundaries not only benefits you, but it also helps build trust in the relationship. If you make it clear that people can ask of you what they need and trust you to maintain your own boundaries, you can trust the same, and everyone saves a lot of time. Every time you set out healthy boundaries, you plant the se

Being the guardian of your time can bring up all kinds of issues. You want to be accommodating, and you don’t want to disappoint people. Which is why sometimes, you need to outsource to an Enforcer.  Why is that important for business?  If you aren’t naturally someone who can enforce policies, and also effectively filter them by understanding the nuances to needs, then it might be best to delegate that role to someone who is good at it. Even if you are still ultimately involved, having a first line of defense for your time and resources means you can still make exceptions, but someone else ensures that the exception doesn’t become the rule.  But first, you need to have the willingness to subvert your instinct to accommodate or your fear of disappointing someone else. If you want to solve the problem, you must shamelessly admit your limitation. Whether you outsource or tap into part of the Enforcer in your own personality, you need to craft a solution that makes the problem better. Sometimes, the Enforcer or G

It’s not often that you use a room full of orphans with puberty as a metaphor, but when you talk about abandoning new clients, who just bought a product and now have questions, you almost have to. Why is that important for business?  What is your responsibility, as a business, to deliver and guide new clients and customers in a responsible way as they consume your products or services? How often are you theoretically trying to simplify an experience, but actually complicating it? And where are you investing too much time, charging at windmills and fighting battles that aren’t yours to fight? These are just some of the lessons we explore as we talk about the fasting app that abandoned some pubescent orphans. Metaphorically, of course.  Some businesses don’t do a good job in meeting their clients where they are at – they build a box and make clients fit into it. In the process, they can install angst in a paying audience. Especially when a business doesn’t provide ongoing support. If you host a party, you have

Tough conversations are…well…tough. But we make them harder by tensing up and predicting how tough they will be. We make them harder when we don’t consider all of the ways our solution will affect people. And mostly, we make them harder when we aren’t leaving space for them to not be hard.  Why is that important for business?  Usually there are a number of ways to accomplish a task, but often we focus so much on what we feel we “should” do that we lose focus on the goal. And as much as we might not be able to control or influence the way someone else sees something – a perspective that is rooted in experience and beliefs that are individual to each person – we can come to a hard conversation with openness, empathy and curiosity.   Instead of presenting our solution, looking at the ramifications of what this solution means to the person or people it affects can help us craft a strategy that isn’t so much about the “can’t”. Things often go awry because we are bracing for a tough conversation, and not leaving an

When things are going well, it’s natural to want to stay where you’re at. But at what point does lack of change become complacency? Where does contentment stop being a positive in business? Why is that important for business?  It’s a wonderful feeling when you’ve had a great year in business and realize that there isn’t much you’d change about how things are going. But comfort can easily start to feel dangerous. How do you avoid changing for change’s sake, but not surrender to complacency either?  In the middle, between complacency and hunger, is comfort, and it can feel dangerously close to complacency. You don’t want to always be chasing something new, and you can’t be successful if you don’t have some drive to make things better - the fascination with gaps is what motivates entrepreneurs. You want enough contentment to turn away work that isn’t a fit, but when you find yourself coasting, that can be a problem.  In the beginning, change is often big and involves a lot of scrappy hustle. But there comes a po

Found yourself with a paralyzing list of things to do? Where you can’t start anything because there are fifteen other things that need to get done first?  Overwhelm comes in at least 35 different flavours. For this particular flavor, we have a suggestion.  Why is that important for business?  When you get paralyzingly overwhelmed by everything on your plate, prioritization can itself feel overwhelming. You have a large project to finish, but there is a pile of smaller projects weighing on your mind and sapping your energy. In cases like this, sometimes it’s best to realize that you aren’t giving your best to the priority project when your mind is focused on everything else that is backing up. Taking time to clear some of the smaller projects actually frees you up to be more efficient with the larger project. Those little tasks can feel like a barrier to getting something bigger done and can make everything feel bogged down in clutter. Taking a few hours to complete as many of these little tasks – that realist

Have a business problem?  Before you start dismissing solutions, listen to this. Because there’s a very simple rule to finding solutions that you are probably ignoring. Why is that important for business?  It’s probably not too bold of an assertion to say that you probably don’t like having problems. But if you have a business or, you know, you breathe, you are probably going to encounter a few. But the simple fact of problem-solving is this: you have to pick your problems.  Every solution comes with a new set of problems to solve. So which problem would you rather have – the original one, or the new one? People get disillusioned and discouraged when they can’t find a perfect solution, because they are suffering under one key misunderstanding of solutions: they think the perfect solution is problem-free, and it isn’t.   That’s why we have to pick the problems that we want to work on.  Instead of just picking joys, you can also think about what problems you want to have in the world.  Dismissing a solution bec

In this special by-listener-request episode, we talk about the importance of helping your team understand your decisions, and the even greater importance of setting up a joke before delivering the punchline.  Why is that important for business?  When you have to make a decision, you go through a whole process to get to an end point. But often in leadership, you only communicate the decision, not the process. That means that people who have no connection or insights into how you arrived where you did have to understand the decision out of context. It’s like walking into a room and telling the punchline to a joke without the setup. Dropping a pronouncement on people that haven’t had the benefit of seeing the entire path that took you there often makes it hard to understand and accept. They needed a line of sight to how you got there.  What would change in people’s reactions if they could see all of the things that you are seeing from your vantage point as leader? Of course, even if they had all of the informati

What can we learn about our own businesses from the cannabis industry? Well, sometimes we design our culture to reflect the product we are selling, but not what our people need.  And sometimes we learn that what we think will be fun…isn’t.  Why is that important for business?  The cannabis industry went from something you get behind the dumpster in an alley while looking over your shoulder, to an actual industry, and the transformation hasn’t been without hiccups. Which is why you see over 80% of the employees who approve of the industry, yet there is over 60% turnover and over a third would not recommend the company they work for to a loved one. The reported problem relates to a lack of structure, which seems ironic for an industry that doesn’t seem suited to structure.  But weed jokes aside, there is a lot to learn about how it can look when an industry (or even a business) goes from nothing to something really fast (much like our secret episode on the used panty industry - https://soheresmystory.com/bonus)

Sometimes, our actions today ripple out and have long term effects. We know this. But it’s wild to think that what happens in 2019 might cause a Christmas tree shortage in 2030.  Why is that important for business?  The 2008 recession is far enough in the past that we think of it mostly in abstract terms. But for the Christmas Tree industry, the effects are very real and very current. https://whyy.org/articles/you-can-thank-the-great-recession-for-2019s-christmas-tree-shortage/. And that gets us thinking – how often in your business is there a financial cliff that you can see coming a decade away? How is the Butterfly Effect going to show up in your business? What are you doing today that is going to affect your business in the following years or quarters? Can you look forward into the future and see what’s coming? And when you know there is a cliff of some kind coming, what can you do now to mitigate the damage? Diversification, obviously, is an option. Anticipating your customers needs if things go sideway

Does social support help just as much as physical support when facing an obstacle?  Jodi has been reading NIH studies before she has even had her morning coffee, and it turns out that having someone you care about beside you make even real hills look less steep.  Why is that important for business?  The way you perceive the slant or steepness of a hill is changed by a lot of factors, including your energy levels and even the weight of the backpack you are carrying. But perhaps surprisingly, it is equally as affected by support. Having anyone beside you as you contemplate a hill makes you perceive the hill as less steep than it appears when you are alone. Having someone that you are closer to or have known for longer makes it seem even less daunting. When you have some kind of social support, your perception of slant (and difficulty) goes down. “Social support reduces psychological load.” This can relate to many areas of your life. Your mind’s perception of a thing impacts how much of a challenge you perceive