I don't need any more trainings

My coaching client Linda told me about a coach she’d worked with previously. “I started working with her because I needed the ideas out of my head and an action plan. But she kept sending me more options and trainings and other stuff she considered essential. I just didn’t need any more trainings, I needed to do something”

I think about this a lot, because it’s not really about that one coach, or Linda, or even trainings specifically. It’s about how much information we are all surrounded with. We are drowning in information and all the options and ways of doing things. Open any of the social media apps and you have gurus from any niche telling you this is the information that made them millionaires. So much stuff it becomes noise. Another module. Another 40 minute video walking through a concept. And it feels productive to sit through it all, it feels like progress, and that’s sort of the problem.

Most people who’ve been stuck for a while aren’t stuck because they don’t know enough. They’ve done the research. Read the posts, watched the videos, maybe bought a course or tow (chances are it’s still sitting there half finished). The knowledge isn’t the gap.

There is a name for this too, active procrastination. Fine tuning the website, reaserching the most persuasive colour HEX codes. Fiddling with a font. Looking into whether Stan Store is still good enough, or if you should switch to Kajabi, or ThriveCart, or the other one everyone’s talking about this month. None of it’s wrong exactly, it just isn’t the thing, and it dresses itself up as moving the needle when really it’s just a very well disguised way of not deciding yet.

Here’s what makes it so easy to fall into. Researching platforms feels like work. It has tabs open, it has a to-do list item you can tick off, it has the shape of someone building a business. But at the end of an afternoon spent comparing checkout tools, you have an opinion about checkout tools. You don’t have a product. You’re not closer to Sunday evening with something finished, you’re just more informed about a decision that, honestly, almost never matters as much as it feels like it does in the moment. Stan Store or Kajabi or ThriveCart will all take someone’s money just fine. The thing that was actually going to make you money was never the platform. It was the product existing at all.

Which is awkward to say, because what I’ve built is sort of a course itself. So let me be specific about what I mean, rather than just sounding like I’m dissmissing about other people’s trainings (I’m not).

The difference isn’t information versus no information. Obviously you need to know some things. The difference is whether what you’re handed is a concept you now have to go figure out how to apply, with your own research, filling in every gap between the lesson and the actual doing yourself - or whether it’s just the next physical step, already decided, so there’s nothing left to research.

Concretely, that looks like this. Instead of “here’s how to think about pricing your first product,” it’s “here’s the calculator, put in these three numbers, that’s your price, move on.” Instead of “here’s a framework for choosing what to build,” it’s “answer these four questions, the answer’s usually obvious once you’ve written them down, next.” Instead of a week of “let me just look into a few options first,” it’s Friday evening you do this, Saturday you do this, Sunday you do this, and there’s no fifth option to go compare because the decision was already made for you before you had the chance to go down a rabbit hole about it.

That’s the difference between more education and structure. Education leaves you smarter and still standing at the start. Structure moves you forward.

Less input. Less comparing. Less research disguised as readiness. Just the next step, and then the one after that, until it’s Sunday night and the thing exists.

Susanna xx

PS. If “I don’t need to learn anything else, I just need to actually do it” is a sentence you’ve thought recently, reply and tell me what the thing is.

PPS. the Digital Product Weekend waitlist is open, Friday evening to Sunday night, idea to finished, priced, listed. Waitlist gets £100 off when doors open, → Join the waitlist here

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