The laundry basket in the corner of my Zoom screen
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Hello Reader, Carrying on from last week's discussion about minimum viable products, I wanted to share one of my own challenges. I often find myself muttering, "I did not sign up to be an A/V professional. I did not sign up to be a set decorator. And I certainly did not sign up to be a stylist." This perform-type stuff is so far out of my wheelhouse, I don't even know where to start. We're definitely not in the Zone of Genius here! Getting set up to look reasonably presentable on Zoom or when recording a course usually looks like this: Whoops, forgot to turn on my lights! Okay, lights are working, but why is my hair doing that? Fixes hair, but oh no, it's that time of day when the light in here has that weird glare. Tapes paper against window to diffuse the harsh light. Oh no... forgot to charge the lights again... The search for the charging cable begins! Starts camera—finally! Welp, there's a basket of laundry needing to be folded right in the corner of the screen. No one will notice—right? RIGHT?! Sound familiar? (Please, tell me it sounds familiar!) The thing is, I have friends who are immensely skilled at this—and they love making lighting look good, styling their backdrop with more than laundry that needs to be put away, and really creating a production. I do not love it, so I do what I can to make things work with a reasonable amount of mental bandwidth. Instead of aiming for this to magically become my Zone of Genius, I've decided that I'm okay with Competence. Competence is actually a pretty freaking good benchmark, right? The same can be said for any of the tasks that you find overwhelmed and uncomfortable in your business. A lot of my clients feel as out of their depth with marketing as I do video. So, we templatize, we make checklists, we clarify, we find support, we work to raise their level of execution to competent and confident. And that's a massive win! What I've found is that a lot of folks in my world are under the impression that they need to be genius level at every single thing. Which is incredibly unfair and unkind to ourselves, right? We build businesses to share our actual zone of genius, not to get bogged down trying to master things that drain our battery before lunch. If marketing or strategy is the thing that currently has you taping paper to the windows just to get by, remember that you don't have to figure it out in a vacuum. We can strip away the noise and get you to a place of total confidence—no performance required. What’s one thing you’re going to give yourself permission to just be competent at this week? Cheers, Sarah P.S. Seriously, if anyone has tips on how to remember to charge my stupid lights, my inbox is wide open. |