Ep 47. Invisible Bottlenecks in Your Business (and How to Finally See Them)

Hello and welcome to episode number 47. Today we’re talking about invisible bottlenecks in your business and how to finally see them. Listen, if you are tuning into this episode, I know you’re smart. I know you’re doing the work to drive the needle forward in your business, and I also know that there are many common roadblocks that I see all the time with founders that they just can’t see on their own. So in this episode, I want to take you through the three most common invisible bottlenecks that most purpose-driven founders deal with, and how to shift those so that they don’t hold you back heading into the rest of this year. Of course I am a human with a human brain just like yours. So expect lots of personal stories in today’s episode because I have definitely dealt with all three of the bottlenecks I’m going to share with you. So I wanna start off today’s conversation by telling you a little story, and I think I’ve mentioned this in the episode, I think it’s number 14, around how vacations can be so strategic for massive business growth. So make sure you check out that episode, as well, right after this one.

[00:02:11] But the story in that recording is talking about how. Last summer I was really trying to cram before taking some time off. I was about ready to fly to the United States to spend, you know, the whole summer there. We bring both my kids over there to enjoy my family’s lake house. We have a family reunion with like 30 people on the lake for three, four weeks, and we really do the United States thing since we live in Norway the rest of the year. And so I was really just head down, trying to tackle my to-do list, trying to get everything, you know, organized and structured so that the business could just hum along while I was taking time off. Who doesn’t want that? And during that time, I really discovered, or I noticed that my brain was falling into something called task orientation, which is something that I spot and help my founders to stay out of when we’re in coaching sessions. I am normally really good about staying out of it, you know, just on the day to day. But for some reason I fell back into it when preparing for this vacation. And when I caught it, I had a major aha moment around how we can use vacations to really zoom out and to reassess the entire business model to find all of these possible ways where we could find new efficiencies, better ways of doing things. Because you know, think about it, if you are heading into a vacation and you are realizing that you’re the only one who can solve a particular problem, or if it’s an issue for you to walk away from the business for 10 days, that opens up a conversation of, well why is it designed this way? Does that make sense for the longevity of this business?

[00:04:07] So listen to that episode because it’s a really insightful, but the takeaway I want you to have for today’s podcast episode is around task orientation. I was literally just talking to another, founder earlier this week and I was explaining task orientation to her. So in short, task orientation is a employee mindset that comes when you have a boss and you have a job description and you have these things that you need to complete on a weekly or monthly basis. As long as you manage those things and you check those things off, and you do those things with quality, and you do those things on time, you get the gold star from your boss. This is how normally we are trained to operate. At least in the beginning of our careers. So it trains the brain into getting these dopamine hits into kind of view success as checking things off on time, and I think that this can even begin in school, right? This is what we are taught to do. Here is your assignment. Here’s your list of responsibilities. Do quality work on time, and you get the A and you get good grades and you go to college and everyone says, yay, you’re successful.

[00:05:24] This is a really useful mindset for students, for employees, assistants, VAs. It’s completely worthless to founders and leaders. So we have to be on the lookout for task orientation because it will block your brain from actually doing what it’s supposed to be doing as a leader. I want you to think about why an employee would check things off of a calendar. The answer is not just to, you know, get a gold star, a thumbs up from their boss. It’s also to make sure that the overwhelm doesn’t get too high, and the sense of clutter, complexity, chaos doesn’t get too high, right? If I just check these things off, then everything stays organized in my brain. I know I haven’t missed anything, so my boss is not gonna yell at me and everything is just nice and tidy in its little boxes. I can go home and rest at the end of my workday because I’m not paid to carry this whole business. I’m carried to just manage these few things well.

[00:06:32] So an employee will use task orientation and checking things off in order to feel calm and grounded with no overwhelm and no stress in the brain. They’re literally escaping complexity, escaping chaos, escaping overwhelm, and this is not useful to entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders, CEOs. What we need to remember to do is that we wanna go into the complexity, into the chaos, into the overwhelm. If it’s there and we need to redesign for leverage, we need to find how everyone is currently doing something.

[00:07:19] We need to reimagine a new way forward in a more simple, streamlined, effective way. And this is what creates innovative products, and this is what creates a scalable company without everyone running with like a chicken with their head cut off. It’s actually not having a bunch of employees just, you know, in task orientation.

[00:07:41] It’s constantly zooming out and looking at, is there a better way? This is the essence of being an entrepreneur, a founder, a leader. The mindset is about zooming out and being that visionary, constantly looking at the machine and saying, does this make sense or is there a better way forward? And this is why I love vacations because it will kind of shine a light on any inefficiency, any process that doesn’t make sense. Any business model, that doesn’t make any sense. Any workflow, because there will be chaos that occurs because the time is crunched. Then you can look at it with fresh creativity, a fresh pair of eyes and say, you know, does this actually make sense for me to go through this stress and this like crunch mode, every single time I wanna step away from the business. And the answer’s no, right?

[00:08:37] So it’s an invitation to use this CEO mindset. So the first invisible roadblock is your task orientation, and it will pop up from time to time. When it does, and when you’re able to catch it, it’s your opportunity to flex those visionary muscles, those muscles, for zooming out and looking at the machine and making adjustments for it to run in a leaner, faster, better way. For a lot of founders, this is actually unnatural and this is why coaching is so effective, is because it constantly will help you to shift out of default thinking and to form a new way of thinking. Coaching is all about asking really good questions to get the brain focused on the needle mover. Focused on the most important thing, not necessarily the default thing that the brain is, you know, caught up in or trained to do. If you are a founder, this is why having an outside set of eyes is so important. It’s so important that it’s not just a friend or a husband or even a mentor. It’s gotta be someone who understands how the brain works and understands this CEO mindset versus this employee mindset and how to get your brain on the right train so that it’s operating at really, really high capacity in a strategic way.

[00:10:06] That is the first bottleneck. And I will just tell you right away, this is not about perfection. The human brain and the human body are wired for energy conservation. That means that the brain is constantly scanning the horizon, scanning the environment, and making predictions on how can we solve this with as little calorie output as possible. That makes task orientation really easy to get into because it takes a lot more calories to zoom out and to crunch the big problem and to use your brain power to actually come up with an entirely new way to think about it. It also requires a lot more brainpower and a lot more discomfort, and a lot more time to talk to another person, like a coach, a mentor, an investor, a team member, in order to look at all the possible ways forward and to really dissect and, you know, rebuild the machine all the time so that it can continue to grow.

[00:11:10] So, your brain will take you to task orientation and just like knocking things off the list so it can go home at night. That’s not what we want it to do. So just to know that you’re not stuck in like a old mentality and you’re stuck in the employee mindset and you just need to be better than this. It’s literally something that, we are naturally wired to do, and it’s just been reinforced since our school days, and that’s why we need to really push against it in order to create a new way of being. This is not a quick fix. This is ongoing leadership development. The faster you get on board with really focusing on your leadership development, the better because. I think that might actually be another roadblock or a bottleneck that I should have put in this episode, which is, if you are a founder who’s just so focused on the metrics, on the KPIs, on the goals, and you haven’t seen that your leadership development is the pathway to actually reaching those in the quickest way, then you’re going to struggle a lot more than you need to.

[00:12:21] I always like to say here on the podcast and in my work: your business equals your brain. You are the common denominator. If you have a gap there in how you’re thinking, how you’re approaching, how you’re communicating, how you’re problem solving, how you’re making decisions, there’s no amount of striving or checking things off that’s going to actually lead you to the goal. You’re gonna stay spinning, and it might just be a mindset shift or a different way of viewing goals or timelines or communication that can really shift things to make everything flow with more ease and more effectiveness. So that is the first bottleneck, your task orientation, instead of being in that CEO leadership mindset.

[00:13:06] The second invisible bottleneck that I see all the time is bad goals. We’ve all heard of the smart goals. You’ve heard of the acronym of specific and measurable and actionable and timely. A lot of us, you know, you might even be rolling your eyes thinking, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know this and my goals are fine. But I think 99% of the time when I see a founder overwhelmed or frustrated or feeling behind, it always comes down to a bad goal. They think it comes from, well I don’t know what to prioritize. Help me find what I should be focusing on and what I shouldn’t be focusing on. Help me find my North Star. Help me get focused. Help me get some processes in place. These are all the statements I hear, and yet I know underneath the surface you’ve got a bad goal. So I always have us zoom out. Right. We get out of that task orientation and we get out of trying to find places on the calendar for all the stuff, and we zoom out and we put those CEO glasses on and we go back to, okay, what’s the goal and what’s the timeline?

[00:14:18] There’s two specific examples of me doing this recently. One of the founders was just finished with her seed round and she was prepping for her next funding round in about a year, and she was telling me these statements, I need the North Star. I need to get organized. I need to know what to prioritize. We’ve just got a lot going on and a lot we need to accomplish in order to prepare for this next funding round. And what we realized is that, the things in her strategy were actually tied to a bigger milestone, meaning a business milestone about five years out and not the very, very next metric she needed to show investors. I’ll just give you an example of this. I asked her, okay, what is the metric that you need to be able to show investors that you’ve reached in order for them to want to, you know, invest in you during the next round? She told me that metric. Then I said, okay, when do you need to have that metric achieved by? She told me the timeline. And then I said, how do we do that in the quickest, fastest, easiest way possible? That’s a very different question than how are we going to, you know, grow this business in order to be attractive to investors? So the more you can really simplify, the very next milestone you need to achieve and then work backwards from that and kind of leave big vision off the table. The more you can really create a good goal and a good set of priorities in order to reach that next thing. Now, that doesn’t mean that you don’t have a big vision, so I think that this is also a big blind spot that founders have, where they go really all or nothing with this. They think I need to have the big vision and then just run toward it as fast as I can. Not really breaking down this journey into just little milestones and little tiny action plans along the way. Or I just need to think smaller and you know, try not to think as big, and that’s not what I’m saying. There’s a really good book called 10 X is easier than two x. I hope all of you grab it and read it right now, or at least this summer because it talks about how strategic it can be to go really big with your vision to really explore what 10 xing your company would look like and how that would require you to basically burn down what you’re doing now and to redesign in a different and better way. It kind of goes back to that last bottleneck I was just saying.

[00:17:04] So this process of zooming out and trying to go really, really big, like to your ideal scenario without censoring yourself at all, that’s really an effective and important thing to do, on a regular basis. Because what it shows you is that the pathway to get there is actually maybe not harder than the path you are on for sort of a watered down version of your goal or of your vision.

[00:17:35] This actually happened to me very recently. I’ve been kind of censoring myself and kind of diluting my vision and telling myself, well, you know, in the future I will go for this big vision because I just don’t have the bandwidth right now. I need to do this other thing first. So it’s been sitting on the nightstand for several, several years, and I’ve just been telling myself that I’m not ready. But when I finally let myself just be like, you know what, I don’t care how long this big vision takes me. What if I just went for the most ideal business model, the most ideal structure that I could think about doing? The most ideal work that I know I am uniquely capable and uniquely skilled to do. What would that look like to actually go for it now? When I wrote down what I would actually need to focus on, it was not harder than what I’m currently doing. So I really had to ask myself, well, why are you waiting? Why are we doing this version now, if we could just do that version? If it takes like one extra year, you know, to get there, in the grand scheme of things, does this really matter? I got so re-energized around the business. Even so much so that I was thinking, oh, you know, it’s, it’s fine if I just need to pick up a little cash flow here and here and there for, you know, the next year it’s fine because I’m so energized by this big vision. So that was an example of me putting on my CEO glasses, getting out of the day-to-day task orientation where I’m just like, well, this is the business we have and we just need to keep working it and keep trying to scale it in little increments. I stopped and I said, yeah, but like, have we really stopped lately to recheck in with the point. The why. The true desires underneath the service. That was really strategic for me.

[00:19:33] So I want you to keep doing that. Then, once that is done and you see the pathway in order to at least go get started down that road of the business, it’s really important to just chunk it down as like small as you can. The things I’m focused on right now for my ideal vision are so specific and so tiny, and I’m not really worried about anything too far out. I know where I’m going. My little to-do list and the things that I am focused on from now until August are so tiny and simple. So that inspiration and that motivation and that flow and play date can still be there, right? So that I’m running toward these goals instead of getting into overwhelm. So that means that the action plan is really lean and the timeline has a lot of space in it. I’m not trying to accomplish too many things in too little time. That’s literally the definition of overwhelm. Trying to solve for too many things into little amount of time, which is kind of also the definition of crazy, right? This overwhelm is not necessarily coming ’cause you do have too much to do. Okay. I wanna say that again. Overwhelm never comes from having too much to do. It’s coming from a poorly executed or a poorly thought through plan that didn’t fit to begin with. So we’ve gotta go back to like: what is the goal? Why was that the goal? What is the timeline and how do we plan this in a better way? That will immediately get rid of the overwhelm. This is a really big blind spot that I have as well. So it’s important that we have people on the outside going, okay, what do you wanna accomplish? When do you wanna accomplish it by? Why do you wanna accomplish that? And why was your plan developed like that? And then how do we trim the fat off this, get more lean and really get to the needle movers so that you can accomplish what you wanna accomplish in a short period of time. While also keeping your personal life and your wellbeing in check, because that’s gotta be in the plan. It’s gotta be baked in.

[00:21:57] I am planning a podcast episode right now with one of my past clients. I love her so dearly Vonne. She’s gonna come on the podcast in August. She’s an amazing breath work instructor. You guys are gonna love her. It’s gonna take a little bit of time for us to get that episode out to you because we’re putting so much thought into that conversation and I’m planning a workshop with her. But she had told me something really amazing last week when we were having coffee locally and she said, you know, you said something so small to me one day in one of our sessions, and you probably don’t know that it was the major breakthrough, the thing that changed everything for me. You probably thought it was something more strategic than this, but this thing you said to me was just so life changing that after you said that I was never the same and my business was never the same. I think, more or less I told her, why isn’t the rest that you need, why aren’t the naps that you’re taking anyways, that you need to because of your health ,why are they not baked into your plan? Like, if you just went ahead and scheduled the nap every day, instead of resisting the nap, what would change? Right. When we stop pushing against ourselves and our natural design and we stop using willpower and pressure and resistance all the time in order to motivate and we just build a business around what we want and what our needs are, it can go a lot faster. It required us to really think about, okay, what kind of business model would allow you to take a nap? Then how could we execute that in a way where you could do it in the amount of time you need to do it in? It really caused us to zoom out, redesign, and then build really good goals in a really good plan underneath that. You have the permission to do that. Whenever you’re feeling like something’s not working. I’m frustrated. I’m overwhelmed. Why isn’t this working faster? That’s always just like an alarm system for you to stop. Put on those CEO glasses. Look for leverage. Look for something you can shift so that everything moves forward more smoothly. This is how we stay innovative as founders and leaders.

[00:24:18] So that is the second roadblock or bottleneck. It is bad goals, so make sure you understand how to set a big vision and then make sure you know how to chunk that up. You know, cut that up. To look at what is my very next and minimal viable goal? What’s my very next and minimal viable action. It’s not gonna be the most beautiful, the most perfect, the most well executed thing. Maybe it’s gonna be smaller than you think it is, but it’s really gonna get the momentum going in your business.

[00:24:54] The last bottleneck I wanna share with you today. There’s lots of them. I really had trouble narrowing it down. The last bottleneck I wanna share with you is motivation. I think that the human species, like just in general, this is a really big problem. That we don’t understand how to work with our natural design and with our biology to motivate ourselves. This starts from when we are babies. This starts from when we are small, when our primary caregivers use discipline, punishment, pressure, deadlines, timelines. I’m gonna count to three and if you don’t listen by, then there’s gonna be a consequence. Shame, fear, all of these things unintentionally wire are our nervous system to use things like deadlines. To use things like willpower. To use things like your inner critic. Negative self talk. It’s all negative based behaviorism. Okay. Behaviorism, like in the parenting world is about say what you need to say and do what you need to do within reason to get this negative behavior to go away and to get you to do the more appropriate or the more positive behavior. It’s not really looking at motivation underneath the surface of how we’re wired. It’s looking at just what you’re doing on the outside and then just being a strict parent in order to, to change it. We know from the latest neuroscience and child development research that this doesn’t work. Behaviorism doesn’t get to the root issue of the human emotional need underneath that’s driving a behavior. So for example, if you are trying to get your kids to stop fighting with their siblings or you’re trying to stop a kid from being whiny. Instead of just saying, stop whining, or you need to share or else, we need to look at well, what’s driving that on a nervous system level? On an emotional level? What’s driving that behavior? Because we know that we’re wired to be in connection with other humans. We are wired to co-regulate with one another. We are wired to have these really positive, nurturing relationships with other people. This is how we are wired. So if that’s not happening, then there is an unmet need underneath the surface. We are not different than children. We are the same, right? We don’t just become a different species when we’re adults. I know that children are very underdeveloped in terms of their brains, so they do have some differences, but the way you motivate yourself is the same.

[00:27:52] As a founder, as a leader, it’s really interesting to just look at how you’re motivating yourself. Most founders are using willpower and trying harder. If they’re behind on a goal, they will try to tell themselves, okay, we gotta focus. If they can’t make a change, they’ve told themselves they need to post on social media more, or they’ve told themselves that they really need to have those one-on-ones with their team, or they’ve told themselves, oh, I really need to make sure that I go to the yoga class because I need to do more self-care and they’re not doing it. They try to use more willpower. Oh yeah, right. I just need to do that. I just need to do that thing. You need to do that thing. Right? I think try to use more effort.

[00:28:37] But here’s the thing, the human brain, the human body, it will naturally lean into things when the natural motivators are turned on. Natural motivators are all about safety, connection, and play. So if you feel really connected to yourself and your desires and what you want, and you’re connected with how that behavior change is gonna help you to get there. There’s this like emotional connection there. If you feel safe doing the thing and there’s not any negative consequences that are going to occur if you spend more time doing that new thing than what you’re doing now. Or if you know that you are going to be safe, meaning there’s no social pressure or possible negative feedback from someone. Or if there is play, a sense of fun and enjoyment there, then you will naturally do it.

[00:29:39] So if you’re not doing something that you said you wanted to do. If you can’t make a habit change. If you just can’t seem to get started on a project that you’ve been trying to get started on for a while. If there’s procrastination there, you know that you are stuck in willpower. Willpower just doesn’t work, and you know that you have a little bit of perceived unsafety there from a nervous system perspective. What I mean by that is the nervous system on a subconscious or like just a fundamental level doesn’t feel safe. It doesn’t mean you don’t logically feel safe. I know we all talk ourselves out of fear all the time in our own heads. But if you’re not doing it, it means there’s something that feels unsafe there that needs to be addressed. If a child is not leaning into some sort of a new environment, it’s most likely ’cause we just haven’t built enough safety around it. You also wanna look at is this inspiring creative ? Is there enjoyment there? Is it fun? Can I enter into a play in flow state with this? Because that’s also really important. If the answer is no to any of those, we really need to solve for that. That’s how you motivate.

[00:30:57] What I wanna kind of conclude this episode saying is that if there is something in your business that you are unclear about. It might be the vision you’re unclear about. It might be the needle movers. You’re like, I don’t really know what I need to be focusing on right now. There’s so many things that could get my attention. What should be the priority? Or if you’re frustrated, you haven’t been able to achieve your goals on time and you feel behind all three of these bottlenecks probably apply.

[00:31:33] You have the task orientation that we were talking about at the beginning, probably that’s keeping you stuck in whatever you’re doing now and not zooming out to look at the bigger vision.

[00:31:45] You probably have a lack of clarity around the vision and a bad goal, a bad timeline for whatever you’re supposed to be focusing on right now, it’s probably too much packed in.

[00:31:57] You definitely are operating with willpower and have some unmet needs there around fear. Instead of learning how to tap into play safety connection as your motivator.

[00:32:11] If this is you, this is exactly why I have decided to do something really fun during the month of May and the first half of June. I’m calling it my summer strategy session. And this is something that I am so excited about because I feel like it is such a need for founders at this time of year and yet, no support systems, none of the founder ecosystem is doing anything for founders around this time because they’re saying, founders are all going on vacation, and I wanna flip this on its head.

[00:32:46] I did at the beginning of this episode to say, no, actually, the time that you’re busy is the perfect time to reassess because we have just brought all the stuff that’s not working out onto the table, and you can really feel it and see it right now. Like you’re trying to finish up, you’re trying to open up more space and you’re feeling behind, this is the exact moment we should be evaluating and the exact moment we should be putting on those CEO glasses to reassess. We shouldn’t be doing that when we come back in August, when we are at the end of the year, looking at the new year, like we all love to do in December and January. We need a mid-year check-in. This is the perfect time for you to get help, really looking with fresh eyes at the business.

[00:33:33] What the summer strategy session is. This is a 90 minute VIP coaching session with me. And I normally do not do this. Normally you have to work with me in a long-term container and do a long-term commitment so I can follow my founders over a six month period of time. But I wanted to do this at this period in time because I just think it’s so needed and I know that there’s so many founders trying to problem solve and trying to self motivate all in their head, and they’re just spinning around in these bottlenecks. It takes just a 90 minute session to completely transform the business and how you’re operating. So what we’re gonna do in these summer strategy sessions is we are gonna cover all these bottlenecks, and we’re gonna do it in a way where you leave the session with a very lean strategy that’s going to move you towards your goals this summer in a faster and leaner way than you had before. You’re gonna come to the session, you’re gonna say, okay, here’s my current vision. Here’s the current goal. Here’s the action plan. Here’s how I’m behind. Here’s everything that’s not working. And here’s what I would like to accomplish in the summer in terms of my personal life and wellbeing. Okay. Let’s look at this with fresh eyes. So we’re gonna zoom out. We’re going to make sure that the vision is really aligned with what you really want. Then, we’re gonna make a good goal and a good timeline, and then we’re going to map out the leanest strategy possible, so that you are super pumped up in order to achieve it.

[00:35:09] We’re gonna get rid of so much clutter, so much stuff that you’re doing now. That’s just not a needle mover. Because I guarantee you, if you feel like you’re behind or you feel even just a little busier than you’d like to feel, I know that you’ve got some non needle movers in your plan currently. We’re really gonna get like down and dirty and strategic, and I promise that there will be an aha moment mindset wise on the call, similar to maybe some aha moments you’ve had on this episode already around how you’re motivating yourself. How you’re designing golds or how you’re actually just showing up in the business day to day. These kind of breakthroughs are the ones that are really fun for me because they always happen on these 90 minute strategy sessions like this, and the founder leaves just with a completely fresh pair of eyes. I hope that you will snatch up one of these summer strategy sessions. This is a special thing. I don’t do that often. Well, I’ve never done it at this time of year and I’ve never offered a full 90 minute VIP session. Normally, they’re a lot shorter. So you’ll have to snatch one up while they’re available.

[00:36:17] In order to do that, you’ve gotta be on my newsletter. I’m not gonna share another link for you. I didn’t create an extra landing page. I just wanted to do this simple and lean to get you to the scheduler as quickly as possible. So you’ve gotta be on my newsletter and the next couple of weeks. I’m gonna be sharing that link with you in order to get straight on my calendar and booked up for that. So join my newsletter. You can do that at do business better school.com/newsletter, and that will get you on my insider list in order for you to get all the details.

[00:36:51] I also, every single week send out an email with coaching just like this, but obviously in a more condensed format. So it’s just a great list to be on if you want that dose of business strategy and mindset in your inbox every Monday. Alright. I hope that this episode has really made you think about where you might have some bottlenecks that are invisible in your business and maybe which ones you would like to make a priority as you move your business forward and develop yourself as a leader. I hope you have a wonderful week, and I’ll see you soon. Take care.

[00:37:27] Thanks for listening to this episode of Business Brain Rewire. If you wanna learn more about my work, come visit me at do business better school.com. See you next week.

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