Kyle Wood

Strategic Coach

Daily

Increasing your prices

Daily ·

A few things to consider spring to mind when it comes to increasing your prices:

1. Who is your service for? A gym is relatively cheap because they are competing to offer the lowest price for customers that want the cheapest option. Many people are looking for more though. More results, more guidance and more accountability. And they will pay more for that service. It’s okay to be ‘too expensive’ for some people.

2. Grandfathering is a good way to honour those who’ve been with you since the beginning. Simply keep them at their current rate and raise the price for any new members.

3. Not always, but usually, better quality clients will pay more. Charging more is a way to keep your best clients.

4. Try this exercise: What would your business look like if you charged 10 times what you charge now? What would you do differently? What would you do the same?

Increasing your prices can be another way to set yourself apart and to really lock-in who your service is for. Just make sure that the value someone is getting from you is equal to what they are spending.

No such thing as lazy

Daily ·

There are such things as low motivation, low momentum, doing too much, worrying too much and being afraid.

The characteristics of lazyness (lethargy, being unable to finish things, lack of motivation, avoidance) are symptoms. Curing a desease requires fixing the condition, not merely treating the symptoms.

It’s the same deal here. Lazyness is just a sign that there is something else going on. Fix that something and suddenly the floodgates open and productivity arrives.

Here are some of the somethings:

  • Too much freedom, not enough constraints.
  • Fear of failure.
  • Fear of success.
  • Trying to do too many things.
  • Trying to do too much at once.
  • Being a 3-day monk.
  • Judging your work before you even begin.
  • Too many distractions.

So if you remove the word lazy from your vocabulary, what’s really holding you back?

Little habits

Daily ·

‘When can I stop exercising?’ my friend asked me, ‘I’m about as fit as I’d like to be.’

He was asking me if, with all of the hours he’d sunk into the gym over the past few months, he’d maintain this fitness after he stopped exercising. Gently I told him no. I told him that if he didn’t keep up some form of exercise he’d end up back where he was. He wasn’t happy.

Long term change doesn’t usually come from putting effort into something for a short while and then leaving it in the past.

12 Step programs like AA, NA and others have the motto that you’re always in recovery. They know that changing habits is not something you do and then forget about it. It’s a life long practice.

So for anything you want to change, improve or achieve, you need to be working on it multiple times per week, if not everyday. And this brings about something interesting. We only have a limited amount of time each day.

You will have to choose what you will change and you will have to accept other things that you won’t change. There is no hack to becoming a perfect human.

Pick what matters most to you, do a little of it everyday and go from there.

The same time everyday

Daily ·

Here are some things you should do at the same time every day:

  • Wake up and get out of bed
  • Eat meals
  • Finish working for the day
  • Go to bed

Everything else you want to do can fit into the time that remains.

Creating new habits and practices becomes easier because you can simply attach them to one of your consistent daily events.

Want to start meditating everyday? Now you can do it everyday straight after lunch as a way to reset. Having sleep issues? Now you go to the bed at the same time it’s easier to stick to a bed time routine. Dying to engage in a creative practice? Do it first thing in the morning every day.

Routine is important because it helps us show up, be consistent and get things done. Time for serendipity is also important because it helps us think outsite the box and create new opportunities.

Find the balance between both, because each helps the other, and you’ll be spending more time doing the things you want to be doing.

No need to specialise

Daily ·

The world only needs a few experts. Thanks to the internet anyone can get access and learn from these experts at any time.

Don’t get caught up in comparing yourself to those that dedicate their life to being the best at just one thing. Instead, focus on learning just enough.

Just enough to get your project done. Just enough to help your client overcome their problem. Just enough so that you can move on to solving more problems.

When you do this you’ll notice two things:

  1. You’ll get better at learning new things. Learning is a skill, the more you sharpen that skill, the more confident you become at trying new things.
  2. You’ll be better at solving problems, often in interesting ways. Instead of having a narrow focus that comes with being good at just one thing, you’ll be able to draw inspiration for your solutions from a range of backgrounds, topics and practices.

You Are Enough

Daily ·

You don’t need to wait for permission or until your skills are good enough to share.

You aren’t missing something. You don’t need to go outside of yourself to find fulfillment and contentment.

Everything you need, you’ve already got. You are already whole. You are just waiting for you to take that first step. So take it.

‘Your pencils are sharp enough, even the dull one’s will make a mark.’

– Ze Frank

The Art of Getting Things Done

Daily ·

Have you ever noticed how some things get done easily, but other things get shifted from one to-do list to the next without ever being completed?

You don’t have any issues getting your group fitness session planned for tomorrow. Sure it might take a while, and it might get done last minute, but it will get done before you meet with your clients.

You also don’t have any issues packing your gear and turning up on time to run your sessions. Or buying groceries for dinner tonight.

So why is it so hard to find time to write that newsletter? Or call that client who’s been missing the past 2 weeks?

Two things are going on here:

  1. The tasks I mentioned are Urgent. If they don’t get done, there will be immediate consequences. In the examples I mentioned you would end up with a crappy session, grumpy clients who are waiting for you and hungry kids.
  2. There are people holding you Accountable. If you run a session poorly, you’ll get immediate feedback from your clients. You’ll see it on their faces, in their body language and, if they’re nice, the feedback they give you after the session. And that discomfort is enough to make sure you do it differently next time.

So how do you get the other things done that you want to complete? Things that aren’t urgent where you don’t have anyone watching you to see if you get it done?

The answer is simple: You create the urgency and accountability.

Create urgency by giving yourself a deadline. Then, and this is important, share that task and deadline with someone else. Someone who will check up on you and see if you got it done.

Note: Don’t try to do one or the other. The magic of this is in having both urgency AND accountability.

One thing to boost your membership engagement

Daily ·

Some memberships and communities fail despite the huge amounts of labour that go into them. And some succeed even when everything is done “wrong”.

That’s because no amount of clever tactics will make up for a lack in the experience the group has.

The most powerful kind of experience the group can have is a shared experience.

Shared experiences give the group empathy to each other, a common language for connecting and a feeling of ‘being in it together’. It turns the others in the group from ‘the others’ to people like me.

Some communities are lucky enough to be built around an existing shared experience (e.g. having a child, buying a home, growing your own veggies in your backyard). These are the groups that often grow in spite of everything else because every single person in that group has experienced that thing.

For the rest of us, with communities that bring together a wide range of people, it’s up to us to create a shared experience for our community.

What makes a great shared experience? Here are some that I’ve seen work:

  • Live events hosted for the community (e.g. a summer camp for adults like Camp GLP)
  • Teaming up to complete a challenging event together (e.g. Half-Marathon or Obstacle Course Race)
  • Learning together from leaders of the community (e.g. a membership site like Fizzle or school like Akimbo)
  • Rallying together to help a member of the community achieve something (e.g. fundraising for a cause or lifting someone up the same level)

What do these have in common? Members of the community are being challenged by something new. Something potentially unknown. Facing and overcoming new experiences is what brings us together.

How will you unite your tribe with a shared experience?

Self-Care or Self-Awareness?

Daily ·

The idea behind self-care is that if you take the time do something for yourself that you’ll feel better.

On the surface it’s a great idea. Adopting some self-care might allow you to stop working for an hour and go for a walk outside helping you to feel refreshed and reinvigorated and giving your subsconcious some space to work on problems in the background.

But the problem with always seeing self-care as taking time for a bath or to treat-yo-self or learning to meditate is that taking time for yourself isn’t always what you actually need.

For example: Perhaps you’re feeling depressed, so you cancel everything social to spend more time by yourself.

But what if spending time with some of your friends is the thing that would help normalise what you’re feeling and help you feel better?

Or another example: A project you’re working on starts getting really hard. It’s stressing you out and impacting other areas of your life, so in the interest of self-care, you drop it.

But perhaps what that project really needed at that time is for you to continue to show up, even in a small way, every day and that the satisfaction of seeing that project through would have been a boost to your confidence and self-esteem.

That’s why self-awareness is so important.

Self-awareness allows us to correctly identify what we’re feeling in the moment. The we can pick the ‘self-care’ activity that will truly help us.

Taking time out to re-energize is a good place to start, but sometimes self-care involves leaning in, reaching out to or helping others and seeing things through.