Moving from information to action

This month’s classes!

This month’s professional development classes are open for registration:

• Master class: On Monday, May 11, guest instructor Wudan Yan teaches “Fact-checking: How to build your skills and find work.” Registration is $60 and includes the recording. Learn how to properly fact-check print, audio, and video media, to improve the quality of your own work, or to offer fact-checking as a standalone service.
• Self-paced course with live sessions: Registration ($110) is now open for guest instructor Molly Yurick’s course, Breaking Into the Subtitling Market. You get access to the self-paced lessons for six months, and there are two live sessions in June where Molly will present a bonus lesson and answer your questions. We got excellent feedback from the first round of students in this new format! Registration closes on May 22.

How do we move from information to action?

I’ve gotten a version of this question from multiple students: I take all of these webinars and classes, and then I never do anything with what I learned! Help?!

This issue affects us all, because, let’s be honest, we’d rather take a class and talk about marketing, or website development, or content creation, versus actually doing those things. Additionally, we may:

• Hate business development so much and so viscerally that we literally cannot do it (yet)
• Resent that we need to work on our businesses when we’d rather just be working in our businesses
• Feel that needing to work on our businesses means we’re really not that great at the job, otherwise we’d be swamped with tons of work from referrals and word of mouth

Let’s dig in…

But first, my favorite information sources

Now that I’ve told you it’s not really about information, let’s pause for a moment on information. I’m pretty discerning about the newsletters I subscribe to. But every time I hear from Cal Newport, James Clear, Lizzie Davey, and Jen A. Miller, I read the whole thing. Maybe their newsletters will help you, too!

Next, what’s wrong with “endless learning”

Nothing, really! I tell people all the time, you can 100% push back on my (or anyone else’s) advice, if you’re getting the results you want to get from your business. If you’re reaching your target income and doing interesting work, stop reading and go back to what you were doing. But if you’re not getting the results you want, then you need some input.

Learning is good, when your issue is that you need or want to learn something. That sounds ultra-basic, but here’s what I mean: I recently took an excellent class on SEO/GEO (search engine optimization and generative engine optimization). Why did I take it? Because I wanted to learn more about how to write well for good search results. The class was taught by Stacey McCormack and I thought it was great. I actually put some of the information to use for a client the next day. Success!

But for many of us, and in many areas, we’re taking a class partially to learn something, and partially or even primarily to motivate ourselves to do the thing. We take an e-mail marketing class not because we don’t know how to write a pitch e-mail, but because we need to actually write pitch e-mails and we’re not currently doing that. Learning feels productive, and in many cases it is productive, but it’s not the same as doing.

Think of it this way: If you wanted to get better at something physical, like running, or skiing, or lifting weights, would you read books about it and then expect to immediately be better at the activity? Probably not; you’d know that you had better information, but you had to put the information into practice in order to see results.

So, what now?

One thing I would not recommend: thinking that spending tons of money on classes will motivate you to do something you don’t want to do. I try to keep T4T’s classes affordable, almost always $60-$75 for a one-time class and $90-$250 for something longer. But I’ve talked to students who have spent a lot of money ($1,500 and more) on classes and coaching, and they still didn’t do anything.

Better ways, in my experience:

• Identify at least some of the Why factor. It can help just to say, “Because I feel caught between two not-great options; having a freelance business that I have to market, or having an in-house job that constrains lots of other things in my life.” “Because I feel physically sick when I think about cold marketing.” “Because I think my target clients aren’t receptive to direct marketing, but I don’t think I can afford to go to client-side conferences and I hate talking to people I don’t know.” There. You said it. Now you can figure out how to move beyond it.
• Broaden what “counts.” Maybe a structured marketing campaign (identify 100 potential clients, e-mail them all, then connect with them on LinkedIn, then follow up) is ideal. But most of us don’t have the discipline for that kind of thing. Of the freelancers I’ve talked to who are doing well right now, they have something in common: they’re just doing more of any kind of marketing. Maybe one day that’s LinkedIn connection requests, the next day it’s nudging dormant clients, the next day it’s writing an FAQ for their website, the next day it’s asking a colleague if they want to do a LinkedIn Live together. They’re doing the opposite of overthinking it, and for most people it’s working.
• Make the task so small that it’s impossible to avoid, and make it a priority. You have 15 minutes. I know that, because I’m a pretty disciplined person and I spend at least 15 minutes a day watching videos about how to bottle-feed an orphaned meerkat, or how to pack for a two-week Europe trip in one bag. As Austin Church (ooh, another newsletter I like!) recently noted, “There’s always enough time for what’s most important.”
• Implement some accountability. Again, even if you’re an Upholder (raises hand!), accountability puts some metrics on the things you feel overwhelmed by, or that you avoid, or that tend to spiral into analysis paralysis. Just today, I told my ATA mentee, “By the time we talk next month, I want you to contact at least 15 potential clients.” I myself have a meeting with my SCORE mentor tomorrow, and guess what I’m doing this afternoon: finishing the stuff that I committed to doing when we had our last meeting. Even if you’re not avoidant about these things, accountability can really help you move it from “someday” to “done.” You could also try Focusmate, an in-person or virtual coworking group, or bribing yourself to do the hated thing (i.e. going to your favorite coffee shop only if you work on accounting while you’re there).
• Stop doing what doesn’t work. Again, this sounds kind of “duhhhh,” but here’s that I mean. A couple of years ago, I admitted that I just do not watch recorded webinars. I pay for them, and then I never watch them. Literally money out the window. So I made a policy for myself that I don’t sign up for a webinar unless I can attend it live. For you, maybe that’s totally different. I recently talked to a student who lives by herself and told me that she motivates herself to cook a real dinner by watching recorded webinars while she cooks and eats. You do you. But at the very least, stop signing up for classes that you never take action on.

I hope these tips are helpful! Have a great week!

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