91. Rocks & Hard Places (CEO Summer School)
Now that we’ve discussed how to tap into your life and business vision and the willingness required to make your next-level goals a reality, it’s time to talk about an experience many interior design CEOs like you face: feeling stuck between a rock and a hard place.
If you know what you want to achieve next but only see two different yet equally undesirable options, you might be stuck in rock-and-a-hard-place thinking. Perhaps you’re faced with challenging circumstances or courses of action that feel uncomfortable, and you just can’t see beyond the 'bad' options. This is where today’s CEO Summer School lesson comes into play.
Tune in this week to hear examples of how designers find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place, and why, although disempowering, it can feel comfortable to stay frozen. You’ll learn how to strengthen the skill of cognitive flexibility, and why applying your creative thinking skillset as a designer will allow you to see all the options you could be pursuing.
CEO Summer School is my summer podcast series where we’ll explore the power of questions. Click here to join me in CEO Summer School!
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What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
Examples of being stuck between a rock and a hard place in your business.
What’s underlying your experience of being stuck in a rock-and-a-hard-place thinking.
Why our brains aren’t practiced at looking for the grey or nuance in a challenging situation.
What to do when you feel stuck between a rock and a hard place.
How to develop the skill of cognitive flexibility.
Listen to the Full Episode:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Hey designer, you’re listening to episode 91. I’m bringing you the third installment in the CEO Summer School series today and the topic is rocks and hard places. Whether or not you think you’re in a spot between a rock and a hard place or not, you’re definitely going to want to listen to this episode because this concept shows up in all goal setting and achieving a greater vision for your life and interior design business.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you’re ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you’re in the right place. I’m Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let’s go.
Hello designer, welcome back to the podcast. We are here with the third episode of the CEO Summer School series already. I feel like it’s going fast. Just like summer I guess. If you are catching this now for the first time or are new to the podcast, the first two episodes of CEO Summer School were released as episodes 87 and 89. So you can go back in the feed and find those. And you can definitely still sign up to get the bonus resource guides that pair with each of the summer school lessons.
All you have to do is go to desiid.com/summerschool and for each of the summer school episodes that are released you’ll receive a one-page guide with the key takeaways and a few questions you can use to apply the summer school episode directly to your unique interior design business. It’s completely free, but you do need to sign up so head over to desiid.com/summer school.
And if you have been tuning in and loving this series, I have a favor to ask of you. Can you please share this with your designer friends? It would mean so much to me. You could just forward one of my emails. You could share the link in the podcast notes, post on social that you’re participating, or just tell them to go to desiid.com/summerschool. And tell them please join me. Join the conversation and let’s do this together.
In the first episode of CEO Summer School we dove into the topic of Trading Good for Great. This tapped into the idea of business and life vision, which is something that I’m always working on with my clients. And you’ve heard me talk about it here on the podcast before if you go back all the way to episode 1.
And in the second episode of CEO Summer School we talked about willingness to do what it takes in your business to trade good for great, to make those next-level goals reality. And not from a place of hustle or grind, but from the perspective of expanding your capacity for new challenges and the discomfort that often arises from pursuing goals.
Today what I want to talk about is putting yourself or finding yourself between a rock and a hard place. The reason I want to talk about this next is because often when we decide we are going to trade good for great, or we are going to think about what am I willing to do to achieve this goal, we often then plop ourselves right between a rock and a hard place. I think we’ve all heard that expression.
And I’m picturing all of you squeezed in this tiny little space with no way out. And you know where you want to go, but when you think about where you want to head, you see just this tiny little confined box essentially that you’ve put yourself in. And sometimes it totally feels like that. Like it is this tiny little cramped space where you’ve got the rock, you’ve got the hard place, and there aren’t any good options available to you, right?
You’re in a difficult situation, or you have a challenging circumstance or obstacles that you’re going to need to overcome in order to achieve those goals. And when you look around, your brain is only presenting two equally unpleasant courses of action. And whether it’s that you aren’t willing to navigate the discomfort of one of those options, or maybe you’re not afraid of the action but you’re afraid of the potential outcome of that action, neither of the options look good.
And then it’s like, that’s where your brain freezes and says, well, I guess that’s it. And it just seems like there is no way to move forward. There’s no good option available when you’re believing that you’re in between a rock and a hard place. I want to give you some examples of how this might be showing up.
Let’s start with thinking about those big goals in your business. And you want to cross another milestone, maybe it’s in revenue or type of clientele or some other big idea that you have. But you’re believing that in order to achieve that goal, you either have to work around the clock and totally burn yourself out, option A. Or maybe then option B is, well, if I don’t work myself around the clock, maybe I have to become a really pushy and aggressive marketer and be all salesy in a way that I definitely don’t want to be. There’s your rock and a hard place. Two options, neither sound good.
Another example of this might be that you want to have a really high performing team and want to be supported in your business so that you can really have that freedom and flexibility that you’ve been craving. But you’re believing that you either have to be a total hard you know what in your business and be that boss that nobody wants to be, or maybe you can be nice, but then you’re going to have to spend all of your time managing people and being that micromanager that you also don’t want to be. Another rock and a hard place.
Or maybe this is more of the day-to-day ongoings in your interior design business and there’s a client issue. And in trying to figure out what you’re going to do about this client issue, you’re telling yourself that you either have to be a my way or the highway type of person, or you have to bend over backward for your client. Those are the only two ideas you’ve got, and neither of them sound very good.
When you’re stuck in a rock and a hard place thinking what’s really often underlying this is black and white thinking. Black and white thinking really is all about thinking in extremes or absolutes. It’s either this or that. It’s either good or bad. I’ve succeeded or I’ve failed. I’m right, or I’m wrong. Do you see the extremes there?
If you think about black and white thinking in relation to rocks and hard places, the extremes or the absolutes are absolutely present. And really, the difference is that with rocks and hard places, the two binary options your brain presents are two bad options. And if you could see me, I’m putting little air quotes around bad, versus with standard black and white thinking typically there’s a quote unquote good option and a quote unquote bad option. But regardless, there’s no middle ground. There’s no third perspective. There’s nothing else in that gray zone.
There’s a really good reason why we tend to think this way. And that is because it’s easier for our brains to process a simple this or that scenario. It’s harder and takes more effort to process complex ideas and come up with nuanced and creative and out of the box solutions. Remember, your brain is most concerned with keeping you alive and expending as little energy as possible. So it’s not going to look for that nuance unless you actively direct it to it and train it to look for the gray zones, which is really all the options and ideas in the middle of a rock and a hard place.
One of the ways you can develop this skill is to ask yourself higher quality questions. I recently did an entire episode on this, it was episode 84 titled Asking Quality Questions for a Better Business. So if you want to know more about that, definitely check that episode out. And also know that what we’re doing here today within CEO Summer School is helping to build that skill of asking higher quality questions.
One of the things that I think is important to call out here is that when we put ourselves or find ourselves between a rock and a hard place, feeling that stuck feeling doesn’t necessarily feel great. And I also want you to know that there can be a level of comfort that you experience from keeping yourself stuck between that rock and hard place. And that’s because if you’re stuck, then you don’t have to do anything. It’s kind of like that, “Well, I guess here we are. Here we’ll stay.”
And while being disempowered in that way does not feel great, if you aren’t in the mental habit of seeing options available to you, of seeing that gray zone, it can feel really challenging to get yourself out. This is where today’s CEO Summer School lesson really comes into play, and that is to develop the skill of cognitive flexibility paired with the willingness we discussed in the last lesson.
Cognitive flexibility is a skill you develop where you’re increasing your ability to switch between different ways of thinking and considering other perspectives. And from there, overcome habitual responses and mental thought patterns and create new thought patterns and new perspectives.
You might even have a habitual response of putting yourself between a rock and a hard place, which is just a mental pattern, really, of keeping yourself stuck by giving yourself no good options.
What I want you to know about cognitive flexibility is that you already have this skill. We’re just going to strengthen it so it works better for you and works with less activation energy to get it going.
I know you have this in you already because we all continuously have to adapt to new environments when we’re out and about, whether that’s living our lives or we’re traveling. And we’ve all had an experience of modifying a behavior or response that we’ve typically or habitually had in the past. Or even if you just think about it, you probably went and solved a problem on a job site or with a project in the past day or so. That’s cognitive flexibility.
Knowing that you already possess this skill, what I want you to do is flex those muscles and apply it to your business goals and the actions you take to achieve those goals, allowing yourself to more easily see beyond two bad options and see that there are many, many options that you could pursue, whether that’s in overcoming a more immediate challenge or overcoming obstacles and pursuing a new goal.
A few years ago I took a class and the instructor asked us to identify our favorite color. I thought this was really interesting even just to think about, oh yeah, what is my favorite color? I feel like little kids ask each other that all the time, but as adults we don’t spend too much time thinking about it. But people were answering things like blue and red and pink and yellow in the chat. And all of these answers were fine, but they were just very like common answers. They were very simple colors. There was no complexity or nuance to the color that they selected.
Now, granted the majority of the people in this class were not designers, probably not even any of them. But I’d even think about it for you, like what is your favorite color? And maybe what comes to mind is a color you’ve already seen on a fabric or a paint deck, but you’re not even thinking about the possibilities and options that exist beyond the things you’ve already seen.
There are things that you have never seen that exist in this world. And we want to start to train ourselves to essentially extend what we see as possible, to see the options and strategies available to us beyond just the paint deck. To see the infinite and how we could proceed. And in some of those cases, they might be options for things we want to pursue. Some might not be, but let’s look at what is on the table.
You don’t have to be between a rock and a hard place, but you do have to consciously make a choice that you’re not going to stay there if you find you put yourself in that position. You can then choose to be in this wide open, infinite field of possibilities. That is your creative thinking. That is your cognitive flexibility. That is you being a designer and applying that creative thinking skill set to your business and your goals.
That is you actively looking for options that are available to you. Some you want to pursue, some you don’t, but it’s okay. You don’t have to pursue them all, but let’s see what’s there. What could be workable? What could be forward movement that might lead you to desired outcomes? Let yourself see the good options that exist.
The question I want to post to you this week in CEO Summer School is this, think of a specific challenge you’re facing in your interior design business where you’re only allowing yourself to see two undesirable solutions. That’s that rock and hard place. And then give yourself permission to look beyond the rock and the hard place and ask yourself, what is a third option? Maybe even a fourth or fifth or sixth option that you haven’t even given yourself the chance to see?
I’m so curious what will happen when you allow yourself to pop your head above that squished little spot and see solutions beyond the rock and the hard place.
This question, along with two other bonus questions and some key takeaways from this episode that you can use to dive deeper into this concept, applying the lesson to your business specifically has been emailed to you if you’ve already signed up for CEO Summer School. Be sure to print out that quick guide and answer these questions for yourself.
And if you haven’t joined, it’s not too late. All you have to do is go to desiid.com/summerschool and you’ll receive a link to the one-sheet reflection guides I’ve released to date, along with making sure you get the ones that are yet to come.
And one other note while I’m thinking about it, the waitlist for private one-to-one coaching is open. So if you’ve been thinking about wanting to work with me in a really intimate, high-touch way, make sure you get your name on the waitlist so that you’re the first to know when spots become available. I’ll put the link in the show notes and you can add your name there.
Next week on the podcast you’ll have an episode that is going to further support your exploration of this question. And then the week after that, I’ll be back with another episode of CEO Summer School. I can’t wait to be back with you in that way, as always. And until then, I’m wishing you a beautiful week. I’ll talk to you in the next episode.
Have you ever wished I could be your coach? If so, keep listening. For a limited time when you leave a rating and review for the podcast you’ll be entered to win a one on one coaching session with me. I can answer your questions and coach you on your unique challenges.
All you have to do is scroll down to the bottom of your podcast app, tap the five stars and leave a review. Tell me your favorite episode, why you look forward to listening every week, or why another designer needs to check out the show. It won’t take long, and as a thank you for leaving a rating and review you’ll have the opportunity to win a private coaching session with me.
Just click the link in the show notes to submit your review so I know how to get in touch. I can’t wait to select a winner and it might be you. I’ll talk to you next week.
Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
Welcome to The Interior Design Business CEO, the only show for designers who are ready to confidently run and grow their businesses without the stress and anxiety. If you’re ready to develop a bigger vision for your interior design business, free up your time, and streamline your days for productivity and profit, you’re in the right place. I’m Desi Creswell, an award-winning interior designer and certified life and business coach. I help interior designers just like you stop feeling overwhelmed so they can build profitable businesses they love to run. Are you ready to confidently lead your business, clients, and projects? Let’s go.
Hello designer, welcome back to the podcast. We are here with the third episode of the CEO Summer School series already. I feel like it’s going fast. Just like summer I guess. If you are catching this now for the first time or are new to the podcast, the first two episodes of CEO Summer School were released as episodes 87 and 89. So you can go back in the feed and find those. And you can definitely still sign up to get the bonus resource guides that pair with each of the summer school lessons.
All you have to do is go to desiid.com/summerschool and for each of the summer school episodes that are released you’ll receive a one-page guide with the key takeaways and a few questions you can use to apply the summer school episode directly to your unique interior design business. It’s completely free, but you do need to sign up so head over to desiid.com/summer school.
And if you have been tuning in and loving this series, I have a favor to ask of you. Can you please share this with your designer friends? It would mean so much to me. You could just forward one of my emails. You could share the link in the podcast notes, post on social that you’re participating, or just tell them to go to desiid.com/summerschool. And tell them please join me. Join the conversation and let’s do this together.
In the first episode of CEO Summer School we dove into the topic of Trading Good for Great. This tapped into the idea of business and life vision, which is something that I’m always working on with my clients. And you’ve heard me talk about it here on the podcast before if you go back all the way to episode 1.
And in the second episode of CEO Summer School we talked about willingness to do what it takes in your business to trade good for great, to make those next-level goals reality. And not from a place of hustle or grind, but from the perspective of expanding your capacity for new challenges and the discomfort that often arises from pursuing goals.
Today what I want to talk about is putting yourself or finding yourself between a rock and a hard place. The reason I want to talk about this next is because often when we decide we are going to trade good for great, or we are going to think about what am I willing to do to achieve this goal, we often then plop ourselves right between a rock and a hard place. I think we’ve all heard that expression.
And I’m picturing all of you squeezed in this tiny little space with no way out. And you know where you want to go, but when you think about where you want to head, you see just this tiny little confined box essentially that you’ve put yourself in. And sometimes it totally feels like that. Like it is this tiny little cramped space where you’ve got the rock, you’ve got the hard place, and there aren’t any good options available to you, right?
You’re in a difficult situation, or you have a challenging circumstance or obstacles that you’re going to need to overcome in order to achieve those goals. And when you look around, your brain is only presenting two equally unpleasant courses of action. And whether it’s that you aren’t willing to navigate the discomfort of one of those options, or maybe you’re not afraid of the action but you’re afraid of the potential outcome of that action, neither of the options look good.
And then it’s like, that’s where your brain freezes and says, well, I guess that’s it. And it just seems like there is no way to move forward. There’s no good option available when you’re believing that you’re in between a rock and a hard place. I want to give you some examples of how this might be showing up.
Let’s start with thinking about those big goals in your business. And you want to cross another milestone, maybe it’s in revenue or type of clientele or some other big idea that you have. But you’re believing that in order to achieve that goal, you either have to work around the clock and totally burn yourself out, option A. Or maybe then option B is, well, if I don’t work myself around the clock, maybe I have to become a really pushy and aggressive marketer and be all salesy in a way that I definitely don’t want to be. There’s your rock and a hard place. Two options, neither sound good.
Another example of this might be that you want to have a really high performing team and want to be supported in your business so that you can really have that freedom and flexibility that you’ve been craving. But you’re believing that you either have to be a total hard you know what in your business and be that boss that nobody wants to be, or maybe you can be nice, but then you’re going to have to spend all of your time managing people and being that micromanager that you also don’t want to be. Another rock and a hard place.
Or maybe this is more of the day-to-day ongoings in your interior design business and there’s a client issue. And in trying to figure out what you’re going to do about this client issue, you’re telling yourself that you either have to be a my way or the highway type of person, or you have to bend over backward for your client. Those are the only two ideas you’ve got, and neither of them sound very good.
When you’re stuck in a rock and a hard place thinking what’s really often underlying this is black and white thinking. Black and white thinking really is all about thinking in extremes or absolutes. It’s either this or that. It’s either good or bad. I’ve succeeded or I’ve failed. I’m right, or I’m wrong. Do you see the extremes there?
If you think about black and white thinking in relation to rocks and hard places, the extremes or the absolutes are absolutely present. And really, the difference is that with rocks and hard places, the two binary options your brain presents are two bad options. And if you could see me, I’m putting little air quotes around bad, versus with standard black and white thinking typically there’s a quote unquote good option and a quote unquote bad option. But regardless, there’s no middle ground. There’s no third perspective. There’s nothing else in that gray zone.
There’s a really good reason why we tend to think this way. And that is because it’s easier for our brains to process a simple this or that scenario. It’s harder and takes more effort to process complex ideas and come up with nuanced and creative and out of the box solutions. Remember, your brain is most concerned with keeping you alive and expending as little energy as possible. So it’s not going to look for that nuance unless you actively direct it to it and train it to look for the gray zones, which is really all the options and ideas in the middle of a rock and a hard place.
One of the ways you can develop this skill is to ask yourself higher quality questions. I recently did an entire episode on this, it was episode 84 titled Asking Quality Questions for a Better Business. So if you want to know more about that, definitely check that episode out. And also know that what we’re doing here today within CEO Summer School is helping to build that skill of asking higher quality questions.
One of the things that I think is important to call out here is that when we put ourselves or find ourselves between a rock and a hard place, feeling that stuck feeling doesn’t necessarily feel great. And I also want you to know that there can be a level of comfort that you experience from keeping yourself stuck between that rock and hard place. And that’s because if you’re stuck, then you don’t have to do anything. It’s kind of like that, “Well, I guess here we are. Here we’ll stay.”
And while being disempowered in that way does not feel great, if you aren’t in the mental habit of seeing options available to you, of seeing that gray zone, it can feel really challenging to get yourself out. This is where today’s CEO Summer School lesson really comes into play, and that is to develop the skill of cognitive flexibility paired with the willingness we discussed in the last lesson.
Cognitive flexibility is a skill you develop where you’re increasing your ability to switch between different ways of thinking and considering other perspectives. And from there, overcome habitual responses and mental thought patterns and create new thought patterns and new perspectives.
You might even have a habitual response of putting yourself between a rock and a hard place, which is just a mental pattern, really, of keeping yourself stuck by giving yourself no good options.
What I want you to know about cognitive flexibility is that you already have this skill. We’re just going to strengthen it so it works better for you and works with less activation energy to get it going.
I know you have this in you already because we all continuously have to adapt to new environments when we’re out and about, whether that’s living our lives or we’re traveling. And we’ve all had an experience of modifying a behavior or response that we’ve typically or habitually had in the past. Or even if you just think about it, you probably went and solved a problem on a job site or with a project in the past day or so. That’s cognitive flexibility.
Knowing that you already possess this skill, what I want you to do is flex those muscles and apply it to your business goals and the actions you take to achieve those goals, allowing yourself to more easily see beyond two bad options and see that there are many, many options that you could pursue, whether that’s in overcoming a more immediate challenge or overcoming obstacles and pursuing a new goal.
A few years ago I took a class and the instructor asked us to identify our favorite color. I thought this was really interesting even just to think about, oh yeah, what is my favorite color? I feel like little kids ask each other that all the time, but as adults we don’t spend too much time thinking about it. But people were answering things like blue and red and pink and yellow in the chat. And all of these answers were fine, but they were just very like common answers. They were very simple colors. There was no complexity or nuance to the color that they selected.
Now, granted the majority of the people in this class were not designers, probably not even any of them. But I’d even think about it for you, like what is your favorite color? And maybe what comes to mind is a color you’ve already seen on a fabric or a paint deck, but you’re not even thinking about the possibilities and options that exist beyond the things you’ve already seen.
There are things that you have never seen that exist in this world. And we want to start to train ourselves to essentially extend what we see as possible, to see the options and strategies available to us beyond just the paint deck. To see the infinite and how we could proceed. And in some of those cases, they might be options for things we want to pursue. Some might not be, but let’s look at what is on the table.
You don’t have to be between a rock and a hard place, but you do have to consciously make a choice that you’re not going to stay there if you find you put yourself in that position. You can then choose to be in this wide open, infinite field of possibilities. That is your creative thinking. That is your cognitive flexibility. That is you being a designer and applying that creative thinking skill set to your business and your goals.
That is you actively looking for options that are available to you. Some you want to pursue, some you don’t, but it’s okay. You don’t have to pursue them all, but let’s see what’s there. What could be workable? What could be forward movement that might lead you to desired outcomes? Let yourself see the good options that exist.
The question I want to post to you this week in CEO Summer School is this, think of a specific challenge you’re facing in your interior design business where you’re only allowing yourself to see two undesirable solutions. That’s that rock and hard place. And then give yourself permission to look beyond the rock and the hard place and ask yourself, what is a third option? Maybe even a fourth or fifth or sixth option that you haven’t even given yourself the chance to see?
I’m so curious what will happen when you allow yourself to pop your head above that squished little spot and see solutions beyond the rock and the hard place.
This question, along with two other bonus questions and some key takeaways from this episode that you can use to dive deeper into this concept, applying the lesson to your business specifically has been emailed to you if you’ve already signed up for CEO Summer School. Be sure to print out that quick guide and answer these questions for yourself.
And if you haven’t joined, it’s not too late. All you have to do is go to desiid.com/summerschool and you’ll receive a link to the one-sheet reflection guides I’ve released to date, along with making sure you get the ones that are yet to come.
And one other note while I’m thinking about it, the waitlist for private one-to-one coaching is open. So if you’ve been thinking about wanting to work with me in a really intimate, high-touch way, make sure you get your name on the waitlist so that you’re the first to know when spots become available. I’ll put the link in the show notes and you can add your name there.
Next week on the podcast you’ll have an episode that is going to further support your exploration of this question. And then the week after that, I’ll be back with another episode of CEO Summer School. I can’t wait to be back with you in that way, as always. And until then, I’m wishing you a beautiful week. I’ll talk to you in the next episode.
Have you ever wished I could be your coach? If so, keep listening. For a limited time when you leave a rating and review for the podcast you’ll be entered to win a one on one coaching session with me. I can answer your questions and coach you on your unique challenges.
All you have to do is scroll down to the bottom of your podcast app, tap the five stars and leave a review. Tell me your favorite episode, why you look forward to listening every week, or why another designer needs to check out the show. It won’t take long, and as a thank you for leaving a rating and review you’ll have the opportunity to win a private coaching session with me.
Just click the link in the show notes to submit your review so I know how to get in touch. I can’t wait to select a winner and it might be you. I’ll talk to you next week.
Thanks for joining me for this week’s episode of The Interior Design Business CEO. If you want more tips, tools and strategies visit www.desicreswell.com. And if you’re ready to take what you’ve learned on the podcast to the next level, I would love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm.
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