Episode 453: The quick tactic for getting unstuck
In this episode, Fiona explores the power of coming up with three options when you're stuck in business or life decisions. This simple tactic helps you unlock creativity and break free from all-or-nothing thinking. Tune in!
You'll Learn How To:
The importance of pitch decks for business
The power of coming up with three ideas for creative solutions
Examples of using three options in marketing
Alleviating stress by not focusing on one perfect solution
Applying the "power of three" to business campaigns
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Welcome to episode 453 of the My Daily Business Podcast. Today is a quick tip tool or tactic. And I would say, this is a tactic and a tool, but it's going to help you if you are ever in that place where you're just stuck, whether you're stuck for ideas, stuck for how to start a hard conversation, this can help. Before we get stuck into that, I want to acknowledge where I'm coming from and acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of these beautiful lands. And that is the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. And I pay my respects to their elders past and present and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. The other thing I wanted to say is a massive thank you. We are nearing a million downloads of this podcast, which is crazy and you can hear the laugh and smile on my face because we've not spent a single dollar on ads it is shocking to me and incredibly amazing that we are nearly at a million downloads of this podcast that I questioned whether I should start or not.
If you are thinking of starting a podcast, we have a course How to Start a Podcast and I go through the exact steps that I've taken to create the podcast and not just create it. 'cause a lot of people create podcasts, but a lot of people do not go any further with their podcast. I think it's something like, I should know the stats. It's something like 80% of podcasts will never get beyond like three or four episodes. And then those that do get beyond something like 90% of those will never get beyond episode 20. If you want to have a podcast and not just launch it and spend all this time and effort launching it, but keep it going because it's like compound interest, it seems to get better with time, then check out our course on How to Start a Podcast. You can just go to mydailybusiness.com/courses or email us at hello@mydailybusiness.com and we will link you to the right place. Let's get into today's quick tip episode.
I help people with all sorts of parts of their business. One of the things that we work on with a lot of people, and it's part of group coaching and all group programs that I run, is a pitch deck. How to pitch yourself, how to look at partnerships and collaborations, all these things that lots of people never put into their marketing strategy. They're so fixated on social media that they're not looking at all these other things which can do wonders for your business. But it could also be pitching for investment, it could be pitching for all sorts of things. But one of the things I'll get people to think about is three ways that this collaboration could work. Three ways that this partnership could work. Three ways that you could work with them, three ways that you could be a keynote speaker for X, Y, Z conference.
I think there's this interesting thing with three is that when you are thinking of three ideas, you can be more creative because you can usually come up with a pretty crappy one. You can usually come up with something that's way over the top and then sometimes you'll find this middle spot. And a lot of the time if you have three offers to people, they will always choose the middle one, not, but a lot of the time. Just this idea of getting out of your head and thinking about three options as opposed to the perfect option. We do the same when we talk to people about their taglines for their website or taglines for just their messaging in general or even for like book ideas. We have a course on How to Get Your Book Published and I've had two books published now.
When I first pitched Passion Purpose Profit, which was called something else in the pitch, I came up with three book ideas. And when I was teaching this in the course, we ran the first group in May 2024. One of the people in the course gave me the feedback that I was so interested in coming up with three ideas because I'd spent so long coming up with one and it had to be perfect and it took the pressure off to go what would three book ideas look like? Also, it's helpful if you do have a conversation with a publisher that you're able to talk about two other ideas in addition to what you have. Maybe, they're going to pull a bit of each into the perfect book proposal. When you give yourself the ability to come up with three great ideas, it alleviates the stress and pressure of having to get to the perfect one first and having to get the perfect tagline, having to be the next Nike.
Just do it and it alleviates that because you've got three chances here. And it's the same with the pitch deck. If you think about it okay, I am going to pitch and I want the result, the big objective is to win this collaboration or win this partnership or get some work with X, Y, Z companies. When you come up with three options, usually what happens is that then you can come up with 10. You can then start crafting, if they're looking for this, we've got this. If they want this, we've got this. And it's not to come up with endless solutions. Because I think that can also harbour people and get people frozen in like, I've gotta come up with 40 different things. But just starting with three can be such a way to open up the creative floodgates and to get you to go, I guess we could start here.
What would that look like if we built on it? and then what would look like if we did X, Y, Z? If you are stuck in business at the moment, and you may well be, it could be you've got a campaign that's coming out for the end of the year. It could be that you are working on 2020 fives marketing or strategy or the hiring process and you're just trying to think about, okay, what is the next hire that we need in this business? Sometimes starting with three. If you said to yourself, instead of just getting one person, if I could somehow magically make the amount of money come in that I can hire three people, what would those people's jobs look like? Because then you're like, I can't hire three people right now, but what I could do is amalgamate a role that has a bit of that skill and a bit of this and a bit of that experience and now I have a much greater understanding of what I want to go forward with.
Same with let's say an end-of-year campaign or a holiday campaign. Let's say you're a retailer instead of sitting there and believe me, I have been in so many of these brainstorming sessions where everyone is trying to outdo each other with the most perfect idea. Sometimes what happens is you'll get one good idea or one mediocre idea sometimes and then someone seeing you will like it. Then the rest of the time is just spent trying to make this one idea into something incredible as opposed to going by the end of this hour or by the end of this time, we are going to have three strong ideas and then we are going to dissect each and maybe we'll borrow that bit from idea three and we'll put it with the idea for the shoot for idea one and then we'll come up with something.
This idea of coming together with three concepts can just be so helpful. Even when I've looked at subject lines for my emails and now I just do them very quickly and we have a good open rate for our Sunday email, but for the first few years I would always be putting in three options and then seeing, and sometimes I'd do AB testing with those three options. Sometimes I'd put those options into, what was it called? This tool at the time, I don't know if it still exists, is called the headline analyser. And you could put in your subject lines and it would tell you like it would give you a percentage out of a hundred of how good or bad that was. And it would tell you exactly why it wasn't good or bad, but I would always have three.
I just think that it's so helpful whether you're like anything, even in your private life, if you're choosing, I don't know if you're choosing like three places to go on holiday, I mean that's a very luxurious choice at the moment. But if you were choosing, you'd be like, we could do this, or we could do this and then start narrowing down as opposed to just going, everyone else has gone to this particular place so we should go there. Because it gets you to start thinking about what is it you're trying to do here. It also stops that black-and-white thinking of, it's all or nothing. Say, for example, you have decided that at some point in the next five years, you would like to move to the country or move to live near the beach or something.
You may decide, that's not a reality right now, but instead of crushing it and being like, black and white thinking, I just can't do it, so let's just never think about it again. You might think, okay, how could I have a beach life or how could I have a life in the bush? Or how could I have that one option? if you're thinking of three, one option is to move, to uproot our house and children and all of the things if you have them and move to the country or move to the beach. But if you just have that one option and then for example, you can't do it for, maybe you've got elderly parents that you need to be around for or something else, instead of it swiping that away and going, absolutely not, you have option two and three.
Option two might be, that we can't, however, we could buy a house with four of our friends. Maybe we could, maybe you've got excess money and you could look at we can't move there, but what if we went and bought a house together with some friends of ours? Now I know somebody who's done this. And when they were first telling me, I was like, we got to meet them. And I said to them, I don't this is like an intrusive question, but I'm someone who does ask them. And I said, so how do you afford that beach house that you have? And they said we went in with like six of our friends. I'm like, that is so cool. I have never heard people doing that. You may hear people going in with a friend or family, but not six friends who all put in.
If you think about, let's say a house, not that you could get anything with this much money now, but let's say a house back in the day might've been like 300,000. That's $50,000 that each personal couple puts in. And yes, that's still a chunk of money, but that's an option. And a lot of us don't think like that. A lot of people think in a very singular way when they look at options for things. The second option for this beach life might be going to put in with some friends and we can't all live there all the time, so we'll all have a sixth of the year to hang out in this house. The third option might be, we are not going to do that. However, there's a beach that's like, if I think about the closest beach to me personally, it's probably a 40-minute drive.
If I wanted to have the beach life, I might decide which weekends in every single month can we get up, drive to that beach, which is 40 minutes away, or catch public transport or whatever way and have that and spend three hours maybe it's like, every month I'm going to spend at least six hours on the beach. And it's like, that's great because you might not even spend that even if you lived at the beach. Just having those options and saying, I'm going to come up with three options every time, whether it's a partnership, whether it's moving your family to the beach, it allows your mind to expand and it doesn't give you this either or all or nothing, black and white thinking.
That's it for today. If you are stuck, use the power of three. And if you want to go through this and you have some options in your life that you're thinking about and you want to brainstorm, you can always book a one-on-one coaching session. You can find that at mydailybusiness.com/shop. But we'll link to that in the show notes along with everything else that I've talked about today. And for those, you'll find it at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/453. Thanks so much for listening, I'll see you next time. Bye.
