I’ve had a conversation with three coaching clients this week, and anytime that happens, I feel like it’s important enough to send to you.
The conversations revolved around not confusing simple and easy.
Simple means something is easily understood. Easy means it requires little effort.
Make no mistake about it, in almost every industry or endeavor, there is absolutely nothing complex about success. Do a small number of things well enough, for long enough, and you WILL achieve results.
But that doesn’t make it easy. In fact, consistently doing the simple is quite hard.
Let’s take sales as an example. In its simplest form, sales is contacts and conversions. Contact people and convert them to a customer.
But every day when you sit down at your computer, you have the option to do the activity of contacting or converting people or doing something else to fill your time.
Which one do you choose?
The simple, hard work or the “complex,” easy work?
(I use quotes around “complex” because it could often be called distracting)
We’ve all been there, me included. Too many times.
In these conversations, I’ve tried to help my coaching clients understand two things that have really helped me:
1 – Stop searching for the complex because it usually leads to inaction.
Always seeking more opinions, looking for more details, believing that somewhere out there, there is a super secret sauce that you have not yet found. It doesn’t exist.
2 – Reward yourself for doing the simple! It’s why I’m such a big believer in starting the week with a few simple things that you’re going to execute on and then reflecting on how you did at the end of the week. Interestingly enough, I see people that beat themselves up for not achieving all of their simple tasks for the week and that’s where the distinction of simple vs. easy becomes important.
Thinking that simple means easy keeps people from internalizing and feeling really good about making meaningful progress towards their goals and ambitions.
Do I need to say anything more complex than that?
