3 Steps for pursuing something new

Tiffany Sauder [00:00:01]:

Welcome to Scared Confident. I'm your host, Tiffany Sauder. I was on a panel a couple weeks ago and got a great question, and so I thought I'd just share the answer here, too. The question was something to the tune of, hey, I have a full time job, and I'm trying to figure out kind of when and how to start some type of an entrepreneurial side hustle or another project. And I think that whether it's entrepreneurial or a hobby or anything else that you're wanting to add an and that you're wanting to add into your life, I think I have, like, I don't know, like, a simple way that I think about this that might be helpful to you. The first thing I would say is, and this is me speaking to my younger self, that you first have to earn the right to add a new thing by first being successful at what you've already said yes to. So, for example, there was many, many, many, many years of my time as being a leader. Element three, where I had all of these other ideas of things I wanted to do, you know, being a full time speaker, doing this podcast, other business ideas, some of those I dipped my toe into.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:01:15]:

But I started to realize I first have to make sure that element three has a team that is operating at a very high level, a culture that can sustain itself financially, is successful. Like, is not laden with a bunch of debt. Like, the company had to be healthy and growing and vibrant, and, like, actively led for me to be able to earn the right to do anything else because my first responsibility was to that thing. It had to be. And so sometimes that can take like six months, 18 months, a couple of years to say, okay, I have these dreams of things that I want to do, but I first have to make sure the stuff I'm committed to, the things that are paying my bills, the places I've committed my time to people, that that is successful first, because otherwise, anything that you are diluting your attention away from, it's just going to move slower. That is just true. So that would be the first thing I would say. The second thing I would say is I talk about this concept in the life of and academy called shopping for your time.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:02:21]:

And that is to literally sit down and ask yourself two questions. One is, how many hours do I believe this new thing is going to require of me? That's the first question. And then I always add 20% because I'm way too optimistic for how long it's going to take me to do things. You might be better at that than me. But my guess is you're nothing. And the second thing you need to ask yourself is, where am I going to find that time? Because if you don't find it on purpose, then likely you are going to compromise things that you really care about accidentally. So if you don't decide it on purpose, where is it going to accidentally come from? Oftentimes it's things you're doing for yourself, like working out quiet time in the morning, time with friends. Who knows? Social time could be time with your spouse that starts to get compromised, likely become sleep.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:03:11]:

And you may decide for a season that those are things that you want to give up because this other thing is important. My point is not to not pick those things. My point is to pick it on purpose. Where will that time come from? Is it time that you can do it in the car? Can it be done on the road? Does it have to be done in your office? Like, all of that really matters a lot. Because what it is displacing is something you need to be sure that you're also choosing intentionally. Because life is nothing, an eternally additive game. Once you've done that, I want to encourage you to do two things. Define your bullets and your hurdles.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:03:44]:

So, your bullets. Jim Collins has this awesome analogy that he uses in the book, great by choice, where he says, oftentimes when you're in an innovation cycle as a business, if you're not good at that, naively, what you can do is take all of your available gunpowder, all of your available resources, time, money, whatever it looks like, engineering capacity, whatever it is, all of your available stuff, shoot one massive cannon towards the target. And the problem is, if you have just enough gunpowder for one cannon and you shoot it, and you are not at the bullseye, then you have some problems because you don't have enough resources to be able to recalibrate your aim, load it that cannon again and shoot another one. You're like, kind of one and done. So instead he says, shoot bullets. Look at your resources and group it into very bullet sized efforts that you can define so that all of your time and money and resources is not expended on just one shot. How do you take little tests that you can run towards a market, towards an idea, so that you can figure out if you want to do it or not? For example, let's say you're thinking about, well, I'll just use this podcast as an example. When I first started it, I knew that there was not much time I was going to be able to put towards it I was going to be able to record, and that's about it.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:05:12]:

My frequency was once a week. That was all I could support. And that was probably even a little bit of a stretch. And I hired an outside production team to do everything else, create all the social assets, do the music, like blah blah blah, like everything else. I outsourced and I could do that because I had a business that could financially support me doing that. Does that make sense? So that was the bullet that I shot. I'm just going to do a podcast. It's going to be one episode a week, and I'm going to do nothing but record.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:05:43]:

I didn't have a website. I didn't have a personal brand. I wasn't posting on social media super consistently. I didn't have a speaking page. Like, it was just literally the podcast, one episode a week. All I was doing recording, which was about 45 to 60 minutes of time because I wasn't very efficient at it. And then the hurdle that I set, and that is, what is it that you need to clear for you to say, I want to keep going. And if you define that at the beginning, I think it has made me a much better decision maker because you can kind of get emotionally invested in it.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:06:18]:

Like, well, I'm already doing it this long. I guess I should just keep going. And we don't prune well when we don't set really clear. Like, I'm going to be excited if in 612 months this is where I am. So going back to the podcast example, I set out three hurdles that I needed to clear. I was like, I'm going to do it for twelve months because I knew I was not going to like it at the beginning because I wasn't going to be good at it. The technology was going to feel hard. Like, everything feels so acute when you're starting something new.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:06:49]:

Your fear starts to kind of like start chatting at you like, who are you? You're such an idiot. You sound so stupid. Your friends are going to make fun of you. That's what fear says to me. All this silly stuff starts showing up in your head. So I was like, I'm going to commit to it for a year. That is the bullet that I'm going to shoot. This is how I'm going to resource it.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:07:04]:

This is the amount of time it's going to take for me. And at the end of that year, three things need to have been answered. The first is I need to like it. So I knew not every single day for a whole year was I going to like it. But on the whole, I needed to say, yeah, I like doing this. I like interviewing people, I like jumping on the microphone. I like exporting what I'm seeing, feeling, learning, experiencing. That was one, that was the first kind of aspect of the hurdle.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:07:33]:

The second one was that I needed to hear from someone I did not know on the planet. I needed to hear from them that what I was doing was helping them. I was like, if all I'm doing is helping people inside of my network, I can do that in other ways. I don't have to do it in this podcast way. You know, I can like go to networking events and whatever that looks like, but like, it doesn't have to be a podcast. I needed to help people that I didn't know at least one person I needed to hear from. And the third was from a financial perspective. I wanted to see that the podcast had elevated my personal brand in a way that I was no longer primarily speaking for free.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:08:15]:

So leading up to me launching this four years ago, I was doing, I don't know, three to six speaking engagements a year. And I would say 75% of those were like favors for people. I wasn't necessarily getting paid for it, and I felt like I was getting good enough that I could get paid for it, but I kind of didn't know how to have the courage to start saying, well, I'm going to now charge you. And so I felt like with the podcast, like, if people want access to my voice for free, then I have a way that they can do that. But if they want to pay for me to come speak to their group specifically, then maybe the podcast is a way to elevate my brand and also just give people an alternative access point. And so that was my third hurdle, or maybe the third leg of my hurdle, but you get my point. Those are the three things that needed to happen, not just one of them, not just two of them. All three of those things needed to happen.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:09:05]:

And so when I got to a year, I could look at that criteria and say, okay, how did we do? And each one of those things were checked off. And so then it was okay. What does my commitment look like for the next twelve months? What's competing for my time? What can I sustainably give to this? How do I start to think about, do I want to grow it? Like, what do I strategically want to do with it became the question of year two, not so much for year one. Now, I'm not saying those are exactly the right order of hurdles or exactly the way that you need to do it. I'm just giving you that as an example. Ask yourself what needs to happen, what hurdle I need to clear, and what bullet do I need to fire for me to feel comfortable starting something new? So if you are in a season of trying to figure out or kind of feel this, like, there's kind of these seasons where there's, like, this restlessness of, like, I kind of feel like I'm supposed to do something new. Or maybe there's. You're in a season where your kids need you a little less or a little more, and you need to adjust what you're committed to.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:10:06]:

This has been a really, I think, easy framework for me to apply in a lot of different scenarios in my life that helps me think critically through what I want to do because I can get really distracted, like, oh, my, sounds so fun. And I jump into it irrespective of everything else going on in my life and every other stuff that I've committed to. So. Okay, hopefully this helps you. As always, thanks so much for listening. And I am here encouraging you on your own journey towards your life of and thanks so much. Thank you for joining me on another episode of Scared Confident. Until next time, keep telling fear.

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Tiffany Sauder [00:10:43]:

You will not decide what happens in my life. I will.

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