Ep #523: Busy Work vs. Result Work

You are listening to The Life Coach School Podcast with Brooke Castillo episode number 523.

Welcome to The Life Coach School Podcast, where it’s all about real clients, real problems and real coaching. And now your host, Master Coach instructor, Brooke Castillo.

Hello beauties. How are you? How have you been? What have you been doing? I am currently at a golf tournament watching Christian play golf. It has been a roller coaster. He had five straight birdies in a row today. We were on a run. It was so amazingly fun.

We are in Georgia. It’s a five-day tournament. We’re just through the first day of the tournament. So I am in my happy place, loving my life, watching my son do his thing. It’s very exciting.

I am also teaching a class right now. And throughout the entire year this year, I’ve really been focused on helping my students, my alumni students, get the knowledge that they need and the support that they need in order to start and run their businesses.

I’ve been focusing on my beginner students and teaching them what funnels are and how to get funnels going. And I’ve also been talking to my higher earner students who want to go from six figures to seven figures. And so I’ve been doing two types of classes with each of them and kind of catering the content and the curriculum to each of them.

And one of the things that I’ve noticed, one of the biggest differences that I noticed when I’m teaching my students who are already beyond the six-figure mark and are trying to make more versus my students who are just learning and just starting out and really struggling is that with my higher earner students I don’t have the same type of issues when it comes to working hard.

And it does not mean that my newer students that aren’t to 100K aren’t working hard, but I have discovered a difference. And the difference between these two groups comes down to knowing the difference between busy work and result work. And there is a huge difference between those two things.

Now, first, I’m going to tell you how they’re the same. Both busy work and result work can make you tired. Both of those types of work can make you overwhelmed, exhausted. Both of those types of work can take up a lot of your day if you let it. And both of those types of work make it feel like you’re doing something and that you’re producing something. That you’re really out there doing the thing and that you’re all in.

But only one of them is going to help you be successful. And way too many of my students who are trying to start out with some things, businesses, entrepreneurship, are doing way too much busy work. And this is true for my students who are building businesses as entrepreneurs, but this is also true for my students who are trying to build their careers within organizations.

And the way that I came across this kind of issue where I really started to see that this was happening, was that I would have students come to the coaching call and say things to me like, well, I’ve been at this for two years, or I’ve been trying to change my career for 18 months, or I’ve been trying to get a promotion at my job for three years. I’ve been trying, or I’ve been trying to get my business off the ground for the past year.

And I’m always wondering, what does that mean? What does it mean? Because they’ll say, I’ve been trying this for a year but I haven’t gotten anywhere. And it’s almost, to me, like someone saying, I’ve been running, but I haven’t gotten anywhere. Well, how could you not get anywhere if you’re running?

And then I realized that busy work is basically running in place. And result work is getting somewhere, is moving forward. Even if it’s in the wrong direction, it is moving forward. You can run in place and get just as tired as someone else who’s running down the street. The only difference between you and the person running down the street is the person running down the street is going to get somewhere.

Even if it’s in the wrong direction, they’re going to know they went in the wrong direction and they can turn around and come back. If you’re simply running in place, you’re never going to get anywhere, and you’re going to be equally as tired, and you’re going to feel like you’re expending just as much effort as everybody else, but you’re not getting anywhere.

And this can be so frustrating. So many of my clients and students come to me and they’re tired. They’re tired of trying and trying and trying and not getting anywhere. And they’ll say to me, well, I’ve been trying to write a program, or I have been trying to write a book, or I’ve been trying to make offers, but I haven’t actually gotten myself to the point where I’m doing it and I need you to help me. I need you to help me start running somewhere and not just running in place.

And so I was like, okay. I sat down one day and I was like, okay, I really want to help people understand the difference. And I did a podcast on this called What is Hard? And I talked about hard work and what it is. And I also read a couple of articles from sports coaches who coach teams, a women’s basketball coach and also a gymnastics coach, talking about the different levels of athletes and the different levels of success with athletes.

And it’s not necessarily more time practiced, but it’s more result-oriented focused practice that makes the best athletes. And so I was thinking, how can I take this knowledge and apply it to my clients, apply it to you all, and help you utilize the effort that you have so you can produce result work and not busy work?

I’ll give you an example to help demonstrate the difference. So I have a student who has been trying to build her coaching practice and she wants just one-on-one clients. She’d like to get 10 one-on-one clients. And she has been trying to do it for a year and she only has a couple of clients. And she just told me, it’s just so frustrating. I keep trying, I keep trying, and I just can’t get any traction.

And I said, okay, what are you actually doing? And she says, well, I’m posting content on my social media and I’m doing it every single day consistently. And I said, okay, so if this is your strategy, which I would imagine that is. My strategy is to post things on social media that are so good that I get lots of followers and that then I can sell something to those followers.

This is not a bad strategy. It’s not one I teach because it’s not one I’ve ever done personally. So I don’t teach that, but there are many people that make that work. And so I’m down. I’m like, that’s the strategy that we’re working on. And so I said, so tell me how often are you adding an additional hundred followers to your platform? And she was like, what do you mean? I said, well, how fast is your platform growing? Like how many people are we bringing in?

And I think about it in terms of running ads, because that’s how I’ve built my business. I’ve run a lot of ads. I’ve used a lot of straight marketing to funnel ads. And so I know how many new people I’m bringing into my world.

And so if you’re going to do it on social media, how fast are you increasing your followers? Is your content getting to enough people? Is it going viral enough? Is it being shared enough that you’re building? And she was like, oh no, I don’t think my followers have increased very much at all. I think it’s just very gradual. And she goes, you know, and I lose some and then I get some.

And I said, okay, so has your interaction increased? Has the number of people participating with your posts increased because they’re riveting and exciting and irresistible to your clients? She goes, no, I usually get about the same response every time I post a post. And I’ve been doing that for a year.

And I said, okay, I understand what the problem is, you have been running in place and you’re wondering why you’re not getting anywhere. You can’t just keep doing the same thing, even though it feels like effort and even though it feels important, and even though it feels like you’re busy. You can’t keep doing that and expecting to get a different result than you’re getting. You just can’t.

You have to do something that gets you a new result, that moves the needle. Something you can learn from. Something you can create and make a significant difference by. And if all the posts you’re posting aren’t increasing your engagement and aren’t increasing the number of followers that you have, you have to try something else. We’re not getting anywhere, right?

And I have so many students that’ll say to me, well, but I really like my content. It’s the content that people need. I said, but no one’s paying attention to it enough to grow your audience. So if you want to have organic growth, you have to be riveting. You have to be interesting to your people enough that they interact with it, that they share it, that they tell other people to do it, that it goes viral sometimes. And if what you’re doing isn’t working, you have to do something different. You have to run in a different direction to find different results.

So when you look at your production, when you look at what you’re doing to work towards your goal, you need to ask yourself, is the work that I’m doing busy work or is it result work? And the way that you can answer that question is you write down the different results that you get from those actions that you are taking towards that goal.

And those results should be significantly different from each other. And you should be able to say whether they are successful results or failure results. Both are amazing. That is really real. If you run in the wrong direction and you find out it’s the wrong direction, this is a beautiful thing. You won’t run there again. You’ve narrowed down the direction you need to run and it’s not there.

If you run in a direction and you see this is the right direction, that’s success. That’s wonderful. And the way that you know if you’re running in the right direction is you produce a measurable result that you want that will help contribute to your goal.

So let’s go back to my social media friend. She could have a goal of having 10 clients and she could say in order to have 10 clients consistently each month, I need to have at least 10,000 followers on my social media. Which means within the next year I need to add 7,000 people to my social media. Here’s what I’m going to try.

And you try something and if it works, you keep doing it. And if it doesn’t work, you do something else. And you rinse and repeat and you rinse and repeat and you rinse and repeat. You move forward, you get results, you learn from those results and you either repeat them or you do something different. And this is where our creativity comes in. This is where our focus comes in. This is where measuring comes in. And this is where result work produces the results that we want.

Busy work is basically a lie you tell yourself. When you tell yourself that you have been working on something for a year and you don’t have any results to show for that work, you’ve been doing busy work. And I’m talking about if you haven’t failed in new ways.

People say, well, I just keep failing, but you keep failing in the same way. You keep running down the same street trying to make that street not be a dead end. It’s always going to be a dead end. But because you’re familiar with that street and you know how to run there and you know that it’s safe, you keep running down it.

The way that you know that you’re doing result work is you are producing maybe lots of failures, but they’re all very different. And those different failures add up to learning. They add up to knowledge. They add up to information that you can use to apply your creative mind to, to create things that do work for you. You keep trying, you keep measuring, you keep learning.

I love the idea that you are either winning or learning. Winning, just keep doing more of it. Learning, just keep doing more of it. Producing results with the work that you do.

So I have a program that many of you are very familiar with called Monday Hour One. And the way that I teach how to plan your days, how to plan your weeks, is to plan the results that you’re going to complete. And you check off not an activity that you did, not work that you did, but a result that you created from that time that you scheduled. What is the result that you created?

You can spend your entire life doing busy work. Same thing every single day, producing the same exact result every single day. Now, if that is what you want to do, if that’s what you’ve signed up to do, it’s a beautiful thing. I want to wake up. I want to take care of my family. I want to make them breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I want to hang out with them. I want to go to bed. I want to wake up and do the whole thing again.

That is not producing different results every single day. That is compounding beautiful results, but they’re the same results. And we could argue that when you first figured out how to do that, that was your result work and you found that it was successful and that you liked it. And so you just kept doing it and producing the same result. If the result is amazing, you want to keep doing it.

But so many of you come to me and you don’t want the results that you’re getting. You don’t want to do the same thing anymore. You don’t want to get the same results. So you have to start doing different things. You have to start producing different results.

And in my time management courses, I’ve really tried to teach this in a way where when you put something in your calendar, you require yourself to produce a result within a certain amount of time, something you can measure and something you can learn from.

And a lot of people want to rinse and repeat successful things, and that’s beautiful. But a lot of people want to stop rinsing and repeating unsuccessful things. And those of you are the ones I’m talking to. I’m talking to you if you want to change your life. You want to create a new big goal. You want to create new results.

And I want to offer that many of you are so tired of doing your goal work, you’re so tired of focusing on trying to achieve more because you’ve just been running in place. You’ve been thinking about your goal and trying to believe in your goal and wanting your goal and visualizing your goal and you’re not running towards it.

You’re simply doing the same thing or not doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over again and calling it work. And it’s so demoralizing, you know what I mean? To do the same thing over and over and over and produce the same terrible result that you don’t want for yourself and not learning from it and calling it working towards something when really you’re just not moving forward at all.

So I have an assignment that I think will help many of you as it applies to creating result work. And for many of you who’ve done my work on creating big goals, creating impossible goals, this will be really useful. Look at your big goal, and instead of writing down what you’ve done to accomplish it or the effort you’ve put in to accomplish it that’s maybe busy action or passive action, I want you to write down the results that you have created that are different, okay?

So maybe you’ve posted on social media and you haven’t gotten a response. That’s one result, okay? Even though you’ve done it a thousand times, that’s just one result. What else have you done that has produced a different result? Write it down.

Now, when you look at that list, you have to make sure that the results that you’ve created are not passive. They’re not simply learning something new. They’re not simply reading about something new. They’re doing something that produces a result.

And if you are frustrated with your progress, my guess is that you will not have many things on that list. You will not have many different scientific method experiments that you have conducted around your goal.

And for those of you who are inspired and excited and have learned a lot, my guess is you will have a very long list. Many things that have worked and many things that haven’t worked. That is result-oriented work. And you have to understand the difference. Because if you don’t, you’re going to start thinking that you’re not capable. You’re going to start thinking that you’re not able, that you don’t have the capacity.

And when you’re running in place and not getting anywhere, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have the ability to run. You just have to start going somewhere. And you have to know where that place is, and you have to start testing out methods. You have to start testing out trails. You have to start testing out roads. And if you come to a dead end, please turn around and don’t go back down that road again. All right, my friends?

My wish for each and every one of you is that you have the courage to try new things. That you have the courage to access your own mind and come up with creative ways of approaching the journey to your ultimate goal. You can’t know the how until you get there, because you don’t know what’s going to work and what isn’t going to work at this point.

But if you’re committed to result work and not busy work, I promise the journey there will be even more delicious, even more educational, even more evolving than having the goal completed. Trust me on this one, my friends. So all of you go out there and start doing result-oriented work, and I’ll talk to you next month. Take care, bye bye.

Hey, if you’ve ever wanted to work with me as your coach, now is the time to do it. You can join me in Get Coached in Scholars by going to thelifecoachschool.com/join. This is going to be the best year ever. It’s your turn to change your life. Let’s go.