How can you know for sure if an opportunity is worth taking? Is there a way to know for sure if you’re making the right choices?
If you’ve ever been stuck between choosing one action over another, you know how frustrating it can be to have to make a decision.
Ultimately, you want to know which one will yield better results and be the right choice.
In this blog post, we are gonna talk about how to know that you are making the right decisions.
All your choices have costs and benefits. It’s obvious that anything you do in your business and your life will probably require a resource to get going and will have the potential to make your life better.
Why do people struggle with making decisions?
The reason people struggle with making decisions is that they’re unsure of the costs and benefits going in. Will the benefits eventually outweigh the costs?
You might also call these risks and rewards. What are you risking if you take this project on and what are the potential rewards at sell your service?
Two-step filter
Any new project that we take on must pass through a two-step filter.
- If we take this project on, will we commit to it a thousand times, and
- What are the risks and the rewards for this project?
For example, let’s say that we want to start a new advertising campaign. The first question is to ask whether we will commit to it 1000 times, which means are we willing to do this project a thousand times? Maybe once a day for three years or run it a thousand times into the future.
Secondly, what are the risks and rewards? What are the costs and benefits? How much will it cost us to start the campaign? What could go wrong if the campaign fails? But also what could happen if everything goes right? What are the potential upsides?
Pros and cons list
We have really simple pros and cons list that I run through in order to understand whether a choice is worth taking on. If I’m comparing two choices, I’ll compare the pros and cons list to each other. Of course, it’s worth noting that intangible benefits are just as important to list perhaps even more.
Psychic profit
There’s a concept called psychic profit, which is essentially another way of saying something which is intangible and impossible to measure compared to utilitarian values.
For example, buying a brand new sports car makes literal zero economic sense, but if you’ve set goals to get your business to $1 million a year and you reach them, the sports car is a symbolic representation that you feel you deserve based on your status of being a $1 million a year turnover business.
Understanding the status and deeper emotional feelings of the benefits that you would reap from committing to a project are in fact more valuable than the measurable metrics and the tangible results.
I remember when I was asked by my coach Sofia, she asked what types of goals and metrics I would like to hit. For example, a 200-kilogram deadlift and being able to run a marathon.
After we listed a few of those examples, she asked me a really interesting question. She asked me, “Why?”
Without thinking I replied, “I just really want to feel like I’m in the best shape I could be. I want to feel proud of my body and my fitness.”
Sofia explained to me that this sense of feeling was perhaps more important than the actual numerical goals I was trying to hit.
What I was looking for were psychic profit and intangible benefit. All the programming and exercises, and it’s the exact same as your business.
You might want to run a $500,000 a year business because that’s what real businesses do and you want to see yourself as a real business owner.
The intangible psychic profit is not just money and income. It’s feeling like a business owner.
If you try to fool yourself into thinking that you value money or income, when you really don’t, those numerical goals are never going to motivate you. They’re also going to seem like choices that you shouldn’t make.
Whereas if you understand the benefits of immeasurable intangible values, such as family security and self-worth, and self-confidence, if they outweigh the costs of feeling tired, investing in education, and working a little harder, you are more likely to move towards those choices which help you attain the values that you’re seeking.
Getting clarity isn’t necessarily easy. It can sometimes be easier to talk through these ideas with somebody else. That’s why we offer a free 10-minute one-on-one session with a member of our coaching team to help you get clear on your goals, especially towards doubling your monthly revenue and helping you work fewer hours.
If you head over to sellyourservice.co.uk/freedom, you can book a free 10-minute call with one of our coaches to get hyper-clear on your goals.
