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Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer
hosted by Sonia Simone

The 2 Points of Clarity that Will Make You So Much More Productive

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Previous Episode:Launching Your First (or Next) Digital Product More Episodes

All Episodes:

July 25, 2016

The 2 Points of Clarity that Will Make You So Much More Productive

July 18, 2016

Launching Your First (or Next) Digital Product

July 11, 2016

A Quick, Enjoyable Way to Sharpen your Vision, Goals, and Values

July 4, 2016

Q&A from Twitter, Independence Day Version!

June 27, 2016

The Difference Between Mindset and Wishful Thinking

June 20, 2016

Things I Love / Things I Hate #4: Trade Secrets, Transparency, and Lemonade Stands

June 13, 2016

Should You Swear on Your Blog?

June 7, 2016

Up All Night to Get Lucky: Sonia’s in a New Documentary!

May 23, 2016

The Context of a Successful Content Strategy: The Harpoon and the Net

May 16, 2016

My #1 Time Management Tip: Don’t Multitask; Compartmentalize

May 9, 2016

The 7 ‘Escape Pod’ Principles (Help Me Write My Book!)

May 2, 2016

Things I Love / Things I Hate #3: Nerdy Nummies and Crummy Content

April 25, 2016

Leadership, Categories of One, and Purple Rain

April 18, 2016

Make Better Mondays! 6 Minutes to a Happier, More Productive Week

April 11, 2016

5 Idea-Generating Techniques We Use on the Copyblogger Team

April 4, 2016

Blog or Podcast? 5 Questions to Help You Decide

March 28, 2016

Two EQ Hacks: A Nifty Trick for Making Big Changes, and How to Handle Hurt Feelings

March 21, 2016

Things I Love/Things I Hate about Health & Fitness Marketing

March 14, 2016

A Simple, Powerful Creativity System to Capture and Generate More Ideas

March 7, 2016

Anniversary Edition! On Finding Your Stubbornness and Going the Distance

February 29, 2016

Q&A: Cornerstone Content, Creativity, and the Future of Our Businesses

February 22, 2016

Getting to Freedom and Business Clarity: A Conversation with Sonia Thompson

February 15, 2016

New Mini-Series: Things I Love / Things I Hate

February 8, 2016

Getting Clear on your Metrics and Benchmarks: The 3 Lenses to Look Through

February 1, 2016

The Untethered Society: Scary or Liberating? (Or Both?)

January 25, 2016

Deep Creative Focus, the Long Haul … and, Yes, David Bowie

January 11, 2016

Motivation and Creativity: A Conversation with Mark McGuinness

January 4, 2016

Vision and Goal-Setting for Your Digital Business

December 21, 2015

Encore: How to Avoid Getting Sucker-Punched by Internet ‘Facts’

December 14, 2015

To Craft Content Marketing that Works: Avoid Silly Fads … and Do this Instead

December 7, 2015

How to Work from Home: Getting Stuff Done when No One is Looking Over Your Shoulder

November 30, 2015

5 Work Habit Hacks from 12 Creative Geniuses

November 23, 2015

Encore: Productivity for Flakes, Head Cases, and Other Natural Disasters

November 16, 2015

What You Need to Know about Guest Posting

November 9, 2015

7 Straightforward Steps to Superior Blog Posts and Podcasts

November 2, 2015

Self-Help for Business Owners: Useful or Useless?

October 26, 2015

The 7-Minute Content Makeover

October 19, 2015

7 Commandments of Professionalism for Content Marketers

October 12, 2015

Staying Grounded on the Road to Success: A Conversation with JB Glossinger

October 5, 2015

Minimalism, Success, and How to Be a Big Shot

September 28, 2015

Finding the Balance Between Pragmatism and Your Ideals

September 21, 2015

What Happens at the Crossroads of Content and Social Media

September 14, 2015

But Facebook Doesn’t Work For … (waily waily)

September 7, 2015

Marketing for Writers and Other Creative Souls

September 1, 2015

How to Turn Bad News into Happy Customers

August 25, 2015

How to Avoid Getting Sucker-Punched by Internet ‘Facts’

August 18, 2015

Bringing More Emotion into Your Writing — From the Inside Out

August 11, 2015

A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Rainmaker.FM Digital Business Podcast Network

August 4, 2015

My Favorite Tools of the Trade for Writing, Content Planning, and Creative Collaboration

July 28, 2015

How Long Will It Take for My Business to Start Making Money? And Other Impossible Questions

July 21, 2015

5 Things I Learned from Minecraft about Community, Ecosystems, and Business

July 14, 2015

Call to Action: The Awesome Power of Asking for What You Want

July 7, 2015

A Question of (Writing) Voice: How to Strengthen It, How to Shape It

June 30, 2015

Deviance, Obsession, and Sharing Your Gifts with the World: A Conversation with Bill O’Hanlon

June 23, 2015

Is Hypersensitivity the New Fascism?

June 16, 2015

Q&A: Duplicate Content Worries, and Other Questions from the Audience

June 9, 2015

Business and Marketing for Artists and Creative Workers, Part Two

June 2, 2015

Business and Marketing for Artists and Creative Workers, Part One

May 27, 2015

The 3 Types of Trolls You Meet Online (and How to Deal with Them)

May 19, 2015

The 7 Circles of Belief that Drive Customers to Your Business

May 12, 2015

The Difference Between B2B and B2C Marketing (and Other Questions)

May 5, 2015

Annie Pratt on Resilient Leadership: How to Build a Smart, Agile Business by Crafting an Incredible Team

April 28, 2015

How Not to Be a Dirty, Rotten Spammer

April 21, 2015

4 Deep Marketing Questions (with Answers!)

April 14, 2015

How to Uncover What Your Audience Wants to Buy: An Interview with Ryan Levesque

April 7, 2015

Productivity for Flakes, Head Cases, and Other Natural Disasters

March 31, 2015

8 Harsh Truths about Social Media (and 1 Pretty Awesome One)

March 24, 2015

3 Juicy Marketing Questions Answered

March 17, 2015

How to Strengthen Your Talents

March 3, 2015

The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Business, Part 2

March 2, 2015

The Lies We Tell Ourselves About Business, Part 1

July 25, 2016

The 2 Points of Clarity that Will Make You So Much More Productive

Are you struggling to make progress on a project, a business, or something in your personal life? Find these two points of clarity for a map out of “the land of Stuck.”

The difference between people who are ultra-productive and the rest of us isn’t willpower. It isn’t intelligence, or time, or money, and it isn’t some kind of genetic gift.

The difference is that they have effective strategies for moving out of stuck spots and into a more productive flow.

In this 23-minute episode, I talk about:

  • Some ways you can turn problems into advantages
  • How to boost your creativity — and what to do during those “creatively quiet” times
  • Why a lack of willpower doesn’t need to hold you back
  • Finding your hidden advantages
  • The five-minute map from “stuck” to “flow” (do this one today!)
  • What to do when you don’t know what to do

NOTE: The show will be on hiatus during August, 2016, and we’ll return to a new iTunes feed and a new site starting in September.

PinkHairedMarketer.FM will take you to the right place when I resume! Looking forward to seeing you then.

Also, don’t forget to drop a comment and let me know what topic you’d like me to cover in a free audio course in the fall. ๐Ÿ™‚

Listen to Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer below ...

The 2 Points of Clarity that Will Make You So Much More ProductiveSonia Simone
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The Show Notes

  • If you want a detailed road map that will let you make a ton of progress on a digital project, our Digital Commerce Summit is where you want to be this October
  • For an even more in-depth experience, Summit attendees will have the option to attend small-group, hands-on in-person workshops. Chris Brogan and I are leading the one on online communities, and Brian Gardner is leading one on WordPress-based business. If you’re joining us for Summit, check your in-box!
  • A post I wrote for Copyblogger talking about the power of very small habits: (these work a ton better than trying to muster a lot of willpower)
  • And here’s the podcast episode I did on using your values as a battery — this is a great energy-booster if you feel like you’re spinning your wheels: A Quick, Enjoyable Way to Sharpen Your Vision, Goals, and Values (AUDIO)
  • Finally, a podcast episode about productivity for flakes — with some of my favorite flake-friendly strategies! ๐Ÿ™‚ (AUDIO)
  • I always love it when you say Hi or ask a question over on Twitter — find me @soniasimone!

The Transcript

Greetings, superfriends! My name is Sonia Simone and these are the Confessions of a Pink-Haired Marketer. For those who don’t know me, I’m a co-founder and the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital.

I’m also a champion of running your business and your life according to your own rules. As long as you don’t lie and you don’t hurt people, this podcast is your official pink permission slip to run your business or your career exactly the way you think you should.

Note: Links to extra resources are in the Show Notes!

So, today I want to talk about something that I teach all the time to our paid customers, so folks in Authority, Teaching Sells, etc., but I’ve only touched on it on the blog or the podcast.

And that’s the two points of clarity you need to get to in order to move forward on anything.

Your business, your career, your family life, your fitness plan. Anything.

So let’s get into it.

First, you have to know your constraints

I’ll take these first because they’re the easiest to identify. This is all the stuff we gripe about. ๐Ÿ™‚

Money may be a constraint, time is usually a constraint. If you have three kids under five, you have a significant constraint. You may not have a network yet. You may not have a good internet connection.

Abilities can be constraints as well — these are the kind that we can get a little creative about. If you don’t feel confident about your writing, and writing matters to you, write more. Or record your voice. Or make videos. Or do the thing that you feel needs work.

Then sometimes we have false constraints. One of the biggest is, “I’m not creative.” People who feel held back by this don’t realize that creativity comes from doing, not thinking. Creative approaches won’t come to you until you’re regularly doing that kind of work.

Sometimes a lack of confidence is another false constraint. Each of us has a unique psychological makeup, but often lack of confidence — or lack of self-esteem — comes from a lack of experience. The more solid work you put out, the more confidence you have.

Not always, sometimes highly capable people get into that Imposter Syndrome thing — but if you’re waiting for confidence to get some work produced, that’s counterproductive.

Will power, again, a false constraint that appears very real. If you lack will power, it’s because you haven’t made what you’re working on a habit yet. Will power does improve the more you use it, but it’s also finite. When you deplete today’s will power, you have to wait for the well to refill.

Habits beat will power. Use very tiny habits to create momentum, and also do the Value Exercise I talked about last week to give yourself some additional energy.

Now, the more fun one — assets

So your constraints are all the things you have to work around.

Your assets are — you guessed it — all the things you have to work with.

The categories are pretty much the same as they are for constraints. You might have a bit of a budget to apply to your project right now. You might have a few evenings free.

You might have a skill you can capitalize on — you have a good speaking voice, or you write reasonably well, or you have good design skills.

You may have a person you can get help from. This might be a person you pay, a person you barter with, a person you partner with, or a person you ask for a favor.

In terms of creativity — creative professionals will nearly all tell you that creative energy tends to come in waves. Some weeks are kind of dry and some are really productive and flowing. So if you’re in a good creative time, get some creative stuff done. If you’re in a dry spell, that’s the time to go back to fundamentals, to focus on getting better at the basics, and even to work on some “boring” things — if you call them “meditative” you may find them easier to take.

When you’re not feeling ultra creative, use that as an asset to work on the not-so-glamourous things. Those are important, too.

If you’ve built any kind of habit at all — even a habit of, say, posting a long post on Facebook every day, think about whether you could use that as an asset. A long Facebook post is almost a short article. Could you take that habitual time and deploy it in a way that’s serving your needs better?

Then, you put it all together

You’re at Point A. You want to go to Point B. Take a few minutes to just write that down — electronically or physically, just do what works for you.

Then scribble out the assets and constraints that are in play.

So to launch a new ebook, maybe your constraints are that you don’t have a budget for this one, your time is limited to weekends and two evenings a week, and you’re a slow writer. Your assets are that you know your topic really well, you have a blog and an email list, and you know there’s interest in the topic if you can get it done.

One thing you might do is look at the assets and see if any answers to the constraints might be on there.

So — you have an audience, and expertise, but you’re a slow writer. Could you send a post to your list and your blog asking for a writing partner? You don’t have budget, but you could barter consulting time in your topic of expertise for their writing ability and speed. You get together, record some phone calls, do some consulting hours, and you could have a solid ebook draft quite quickly.

Remember, how you put your own individual puzzle together depends on the pieces you have. It’s like Lego, remember?

Now, this assets and constraints business isn’t stunningly innovative. There’s a whole Theory of Constraints from lean production, that people who write business books have written about.

It’s kind of common sense. Funny thing, it’s those common sense, tried-and-ptrue solutions that tend to actually work.

When in doubt, the answer is usually people

Sometimes there’s kind of a gray spot on your map — something where you don’t know what you don’t know, or you just can’t see a solution.

In that case, the answer is usually to reach out to someone, or to a group of someones.

You can ask me a question on twitter, you can email your list, you can ask in a LinkedIn or Facebook group, you can form a little accountability group, or you could even do all of those things.

Before your ask, spend a moment to make a micro-commitment to yourself that you will act on some of the advice you get, even if it’s only a small action like researching or further investigating an option.

Just a reminder that the show will be on hiatus in August. That means this is the last show before my break! We’re returning in September with a new iTunes feed and hosted on a new site. BUT, the PinkHairedMarketer.FM url will continue to send you wehere you need to go. ๐Ÿ™‚

Before I start — one of the things I’d like to do when I return is to do a mini-course that’s just for the subscribers. This will help me to restore the visibility on iTunes, and plus I just think it will be fun.

If you have something you’d particularly like me to cover, just let me know in the show comments or on Twitter!

Thanks so much for your time and attention and I’ll catch you next month. ๐Ÿ™‚

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Comments

  1. Katie says

    September 19, 2016 at 1:39 PM

    Are you coming back soon or did I miss the new feed? I love your podcast and miss hearing your voice, thoughts and advice!

    Reply

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