In a recent Ask Me Anything that I hosted over in the Make It Happen community, one of my members asked me this question.
"How do you determine that it's time to change direction?"
She was specifically asking about business decisions, but honestly, I use this for absolutely every decision in my life.
I ask myself these two questions. Is it working? And do I love it?
Ideally, I want the answer to both questions to be yes. And if I've been doing this for a while, I add the word still, is this still working? And do I still love it?
If it's working, but I don't love it anymore, it's worth exploring if there's ways to make it more enjoyable. Perhaps I can change the way I'm approaching it or perhaps I can change how often I'm doing the thing.
But if I love it and it's not really working, it's worth considering and looking at what's not working so that I can figure out whether or not I want to do something about that.
And if it's not working and I don't love it or it's not working anymore and I don't love it anymore, what the hell am I wasting my time for?
But when I get that perfect situation, that ideal moment where it's working beautifully and I absolutely love every minute, then it's worth considering how can I double down on this activity?
This year, I used those two simple questions to help me reassess every aspect of my business. I had a group coaching program that I had run for three years and it was still working great but I had fallen out of love with it, mostly because I had done it for three years with very little change in there, it was getting routine. So I closed it down and turned the core piece of that content into a self-guided course and then started exploring what else I wanted to be talking about.
I had an online community that I called Hilda's Hub that I absolutely loved but that wasn't working as well as it should have. So I closed it down and reinvented it and created, Make It Happen, which is working beautifully now.
And I had a mighty network group, which was originally a Facebook group because I always had those groups and I didn't love that and it wasn't working. But I thought it was required to have one of those in my programs because well, I had always had one and I realized that I've always done it this way is not a good enough criteria for keeping it around.
Don't love it and not working, buh-bye. (By the way, the last thing the world needs right now is another freaking Facebook group, am I right?)
Another example of using these two little questions is when I decided that I was going to have this epic, in-person event called No Matter What and the pandemic had other plans for me, I figured I would move it into virtual so that we could have the event, but that that would only be a stop gap measure until we could have it in person again but much to my surprise, No Matter What, virtually, worked really, really well and I absolutely loved it. So I'm not changing that anytime soon. In fact, instead of hosting that annually, I'm about to host the third one that I have in less than a year.
Do you see the magic of these two little questions? Now, I'm not here to guru you, you do not have to use these two questions to make your decisions, it's just made my life a lot easier. Is it working and do I love it? Very, very simple. I know the answer to those questions immediately. I don't have to think about it really hard, I just have to trust my instincts.
Give it a try and let me know if it helps you make your next big decision.
