How To Avoid Making Bad Business Decisions

One of the biggest things that will sabotage your education business is constantly changing your strategy.

By this I mean always changing who you serve, the niche you help them in, the way you create content, the platforms you’re present on, & your product itself.

I know this issue all too well, as I’m just as guilty as anyone else. I’ve pivoted several times in each of the aforementioned areas.

The reason I kept changing is because I hadn’t found what was right for me yet. So I had to change. But, the way I was going about making the decisions was wrong.

Bad decision making > Wrong decision > Need to pivot/change again

The real problem?

I was making the decisions with my head, not my heart.

It’s crazy to look back on how much time, energy, and money I spent on trying to make the wrong things work. I now realize that making the wrong strategic decision about my business slowed me down in a huge way. It only led me to dead ends and caused me to have to start over.

On the other hand, slowing down and taking the time to arrive at the right answers is actually faster in the long run.

But we don’t like slowing down.

For some reason, it feels better to listen to another podcast episode or Youtube video (on 2x speed) where a guy is telling you how HIS strategy is the one thing you’ve been missing.

Then go implement that, fail, and repeat.

What we need is a new way to go about making decisions. A new origin point OF the decision making itself.

In order to dissect good vs. bad decision making, we need to talk about something that might sound sort of “woo woo”:

your head vs. your heart

(By the way, some people use words like “intuition” or “gut” in the same way I’m using “heart”. Choose whichever you like best.)

Bear with me, and I’ll give you an entirely new way to approach your decision making, so you can eliminate the wasted time, money, and energy that come with wrong decisions.

I want you to think of your brain like a computer.

Computers store, organize, and analyze information for us. They speed up processing. They assist us in doing work, no doubt about that.

But, a computer can’t tell you what you want to do with life. It has no idea what feels right to you.

Your brain (i.e., your thoughts) don’t contain the answers to what you want to do.

What’s worse, the brain doesn’t just give us no answer, it gives us the wrong answer.

Just observe the nature of your thoughts on any given day. Doesn’t your brain tell you some pretty insane shit?

Have you ever thought one thing, but your emotions were telling you something different?

For example: Your brain told you to have a second piece of pie, but you had a feeling in your body that was saying “hell nah”.

Or, maybe your brain was telling you to stick to your secure job, but in your body there was resistance, telling you to run like hell and go do something that excited you.

Eckhart Tolle (the author who has had the biggest impact on my life) says that whenever there is an apparent conflict between a thought in your brain and an emotion in your body, the thought will be the lie, and the emotion will be the truth.

There is so much wisdom in that statement, and if you really catch what he’s saying, then you’ll get the gist of this post.

When I go to yoga class and I’m laying down in shavasana at the end of class, totally relaxed and present and not thinking, I’ll sometimes have sudden epiphanies about my business and what I need to do.

It’s like a bolt of lightning strikes me with an idea.

Other times this happens when I go on a long walk, meditate, or take a shower.

Can you think of times when this has happened to you?

That’s your intuition speaking. That’s an answer that came from somewhere deeper.

Those are the answers to listen to.

After coaching real estate for years, I grew drained. My body resisted another day of getting up to create content and coach. I could feel it.

But my head said “Brian you have a good business making good money, you’ve established yourself in this niche, it would be dumb to switch”

Turns out the brain was wrong, again.

This post itself is not here to give you any answers. It is a mere signpost. It is pointing back to you, telling you to listen to your body and look within. Feel into your decision making.

Feel what type of client you’d love to serve.

Feel what outcome you’d be inspired to deliver to them.

Feel what content you’d be excited to create.

The answers are inside of you.

Go for some walks, journal, meditate, and trust that you have a large amount of the strategy already in you.

It might feel like you are going way too slow. But it works for Tim Ferriss, too.

Tim, the author of the 4 Hour Workweek, said that if you hung out with him on an average day, you’d be shocked to see what he actually does.

He mentioned that when he needs an answer, he might spend up to 3 weeks just relaxing, meditating, going on long walks, and spending time in nature. He lets the answer come to him, and he doesn’t rush it.

I’ll admit that when I heard that, it struck me as a little crazy. I mean, who has 3 weeks to walk around the forest when we’ve got work to do?

But Tim is one of my idols. I want to be like him and to make the impact he has. I believe that looking at how he makes his decisions has a ton of value.

When you get the answers right - meaning you arrive at the right strategy for your education business -you’ll be clear on who you serve, what you do for them, how you deliver it, and how you want to market it.

This is the foundation of your success.

Then you just need to have fun with talking about it on a regular basis (marketing).

Making the right decisions about how you will enter the education space is what we cover in my 6 week 1:1 coaching program that takes successful entrepreneurs who want to break into the education space and gives them a roadmap to launch their business and start sharing their voice and making an impact.

Many of my clients have avoided years of going down the wrong path just by having 1 or 2 long conversations with me where I ask them a series of questions about what they want to do.

Last week a client of mine named Allen (very successful real estate investor) discovered that he didn’t want to help others with real estate, but with scaling their small business.

Allen’s words after the end of our first session: “Wow, this is so relieving. It feels like a weight has been lifted off my chest. I know see what I really want to do and that I can go after it”

If you’re interested in learning more, shoot me a DM and we can chat over Messenger (or a short phone call) to see if it’s a fit. Only if it feels right, of course 😉