8. The Secret to Solving Any Problem
Do you ever find yourself wondering why some problems in your business keep coming up? Maybe it’s not getting as much done as you wanted in a day, or having to reinvent the wheel every time an issue comes up. We think slowing down to look at what’s going on will delay us from the results we want, but the truth is… it’s the solution.
When things aren’t working as fast as we want, the tendency here is to plow through and push harder. However, sometimes, it’s not about doing more. It’s about doing less or implementing a few tweaks to make your business more effective, and this is where the concept of curious evaluation steps in.
Join me this week to discover how to use curious evaluations to streamline your business for productivity, profit, and sustainable growth. You’ll hear why evaluations are the most strategic way to solve any problem in your business, and how to begin using this process for any goal you have right now.
My signature program Out of Overwhelm is officially open for enrollment until December 17th 2022. I won’t be offering this program again until summer 2023, so if you’re a busy interior designer who wants to take the work we do on the podcast deeper, click here!
To celebrate the launch of the show, I’m giving away gift cards to Jayson Home, one of my favorite home decor sources. All you have to do to become one of the five lucky listeners to win is follow, rate, and review this podcast.
Please leave your honest feedback, and click here to learn how to enter!
What You’ll Discover from this Episode:
What the process of curious evaluation looks like in practice.
Why consistent evaluations are the most valuable use of your time in your business.
Client examples of how evaluations have been a useful tool to streamline their businesses.
The first step to using curious evaluations.
Why you might feel resistant to using evaluations.
How to begin using my process of curious evaluations for any goal you have.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
Enter the podcast launch giveaway by leaving a rating and review! Click here to learn how to enter.
If you love what you’re learning on the show, I’d love for you to check out my signature group coaching program, Out of Overwhelm
Full Episode Transcript:
Hey designer, you’re listening to episode 8. This is the one where I’m sharing how to use the concept of curious evaluation to streamline your business for productivity, profit, and sustainable growth.
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 designers, welcome back to the podcast. This is actually just the week following Thanksgiving for me, I am getting ahead on recording. So coming off the holiday break and Thanksgiving really is one of my favorite holidays. I love to cook and so we always host. And being able to cook all of those delicious meals just the way that I want, have exactly what I want is so fun for me.
I actually made a pie that I made a few years ago where I made a crust that’s kind of like a Larabar, if any of you like those, and it is so good. If you want the recipe do not ask me for it, it’s something I made up. And that’s kind of how I cook.
I actually had a blog for a brief while called The Imprecise Cook because people would always come over to our house for dinner and I’d cook and they’d go, “Oh, this is so good, I want to recipe.” And then I’d have to unfortunately tell them, “Well, I used some of this, this, and this, I have no idea on the quantity. But if you want to try putting those ingredients together, you might be able to come up with something like that.” So I started documenting that.
But anyways, side note. Today we’re going to be diving into how to use evaluations in your interior design business. Evaluations might sound a little boring, I don’t know, maybe it even brings you back to getting evaluated at some job you had a long time ago. But what I want you to know is that what’s really boring is not enjoying your business and being frustrated on a daily basis. And evaluations are how you’re going to create a business that you love to run, that is streamlined, is profitable, and that you actually enjoy leading.
A lot of times when things aren’t working or working as fast as we want, the tendency, I think, is to plow through and push harder. And I think that it’s common to think that slowing down and taking a look at what’s actually going on is a problem, as in somehow that’s going to delay you to getting the result that you want. That if you take 5, 10, 15 minutes, or even an hour to evaluate, that you’re somehow missing out on valuable time.
But slowing your thoughts and actions down is never the problem, it is always the solution. An evaluation is one of the ways that you can do this. Consistent evaluation serves so many purposes and can be used in so many ways when it comes to managing your time, your projects, client relationships, networking, your profits, your goals.
It’s really the most valuable use of time in your business because it keeps your from reinventing the wheel and missing really important clues that your business is sending you. You can keep doing what you’ve always done and keep getting the same results or maybe just incremental improvements, or you can use this process that I’m going to teach you today to hop, skip, and leap your way forward.
Before we dive in today I want to highlight a listener, Amber, who left an amazing review. She said, “I’m loving this podcast. It always gives me the much needed reminder to get out of my feelings and be strategic about my work. I look forward to listening to more episodes as they come out.” Amber, I’m excited for you to keep listening too.
If you’ve been listening for a while you probably have heard me talk about I’m giving away $50 gift cards to Jayson Home. If you rate, review and then submit your review, I’ll enter you to win one of these gift cards. And if you aren’t familiar with Jayson Home, you need to go look it up, it’s amazing.
But I want to remind you, the key piece here is that you have to submit your review because on Apple Podcasts there’s no way for me to know exactly your name, especially if you use a nickname to give the review. And I don’t have your email or any way to contact you. So you have to go to desicreswell.com/podcastlaunch and there’s instructions for how to enter the giveaway.
So thank you so much to everyone who has already rated and reviewed the show. If you did do it, make sure you go and enter your review so that I can potentially send you a little gift.
All right, so Amber is talking about being strategic, which is really perfect for today’s episode because when we often think about being strategic we think about doing more, learning more. But being strategic is also about looking back in the form of evaluation and doing it in a useful, informative way. Sometimes it’s not at all about doing more, it’s about doing less or doing what you’ve already been doing with a few tweaks to make it better and more effective.
So with that, let’s dive in. I will say that in Out of Overwhelm, which is my group program, I teach a five step process and curious evaluation is one of these steps. Literally any problem in your interior design business can be solved by coming back to one of these five steps.
And if you’re interested in joining me in Out of Overwhelm for the January round, tomorrow is the last day to apply. So be sure to check out the show notes for the link on the program and how to apply to make sure that you get in. We won’t be opening up again until summer.
So one of the steps, like I said, is curious evaluation and it’s something that I teach all of my clients and help them practice because it really is a skill. So they work on it for the entire six months or however long we end up working together and it becomes second nature. It becomes a way that your brain starts to think. And it's really something that I have used throughout the course of my business and it has just proved valuable time and time again.
When you find yourself asking, “Why does this keep happening?” it's always a great time to pause and evaluate. I thought I'd give you some examples of how this has come up for my clients. Because Out of Overwhelm is so comprehensive, the coaching calls are always really rich with a variety of topics that are going to apply to every designer that's in the group. So here's some examples that I just pulled straight from our calls about issues that were occurring for these designers that could then be evaluated.
So one client brought that clients were consistently not buying accessories at the end of a project. Or another person brought the issue of their employee always had so many questions and was missing deadlines and not being held accountable. We talk a lot about time management and another designer came and said she had her day scheduled, but then only half the things that were planned were actually accomplished.
So these are all just real examples, and I'm sure that you can relate to at least one of them, if not more. So I want you to think about a specific issue that you're experiencing as we continue with this episode. When we get specific, the insights you'll gain will always be more valuable and the lessons can then be applied more broadly, or give you insight into other areas.
So hopefully me sharing some of those client examples has sparked your brain to start thinking about, where can I be taking this concept of evaluation and applying it to my business? I'm going to use one example specifically to walk you through this as I give you the process, and that is the example of you had your day scheduled but then only half of the things you planned were accomplished.
Now, if I were to just approach a designer at the local design center and tell them to start evaluating, what would typically happen is they would start listing off a bunch of things that aren't working well or going well in their business. This makes complete sense because the human brain is designed to scan for danger and protect us, of course it's going to jump to the bad things and placing emphasis on those.
However, it is not the most effective way to evaluate and you're missing out on really useful information when you go straight to what isn't working. So when you evaluate you always want to start with what is working in your business, or what is working with a specific thing that you're evaluating. This puts your brain in a positive state and you start to generate positive emotion as you look at what is working, that might be pride, accomplished or joy.
When you are experiencing positive emotion, your brain is settled down and you're able to access the higher level thinking parts of the brain. So you're able to problem solve and think more clearly when you are in this regulated state, which is really useful as you progress through this process. And then, of course, when you look at what is working this also tells you what you can keep doing. If something's working for you, that's really good to know so you can keep doing it or even double down on it.
In the example that I'm going to be walking you through with the designer who planned her day but only then got half the things accomplished, what was working for her was that she planned intentionally, right? She made a plan, that's huge that she planned intentionally to begin with.
And then what she said she also did that worked really well was she left plenty of time, extra time to drive to client appointments. This made her feel like the day went much more smoothly and it really didn't impact her scheduling all that much. It was something that still worked within that framework.
Then once you've thoroughly looked at what is working, then that's when you move on to what isn't working or what isn't going so well. The key piece here, and this is the whole reason I call it curious evaluation is this is not the part in the process where you start to judge yourself or the future of your business.
Typically when clients have resistance to evaluating it's because they're using the process of evaluation against themselves instead of for themselves. If you look at the definition of the word evaluation it's defined as looking at the original objectives or what you wanted to accomplish, and seeing if what you predicted or set out to do happen. That's it. During this part of the evaluation you really want to work towards being that neutral observer of the facts.
So in this example, when the designer was looking at what didn't go so well, she found that she had her phone on her desk for the majority of the day and wasn't really waiting for anything in particular, but kept checking messages. So that was really distracting and took up a lot of time that wasn't necessary.
And then the other thing she noticed was that she didn't leave room for the unexpected. She kind of stacked her day like a domino. And really, she knows something always comes up and so this was that case of not realistic planning. Now, I'm going through these fairly quickly with the example, but I want you to take time when you're evaluating to really create a thorough list.
Once you have that list of what didn't go so well, then you can move on to what you want to do differently next time. Essentially, you're going to go through what didn't work and develop solutions to create your roadmap forward. So what didn't work? How am I going to address it? And what am I doing about it moving forward?
And this is where I really love to get curious. Curious is one of my all-time favorite emotions because it lets me play with ideas. I don't have to get stuck in is this the right or wrong solution? It doesn't get me stuck in perfectionism. It's more of a let's see what happens. What could work? Let's experiment with this.
So a couple of phrases you might want to try on here is, I wonder if I did this. Or it could work if I tried this. I'm going to try presenting it this way or scheduling meetings this way, right? You're just posing a theory, you're taking a guess, you're trying it out, seeing how it goes, and then evaluating again and repeating this cycle until you get the result that you want.
So in the example with the designer I was talking about, the distraction of the phone, her solution of that is she's going to put her phone in a drawer for one hour tomorrow to give her some uninterrupted work time. And then she's also going to create the solution of leaving an hour of unplanned time to accommodate the unexpected.
And she might notice that when she leaves the phone in the drawer she can stay so much more focused, and that she's going to start doing that again the next day. Or she might find that an hour of buffer time wasn't quite enough so she's going to try leaving an hour of unplanned time late morning, and then also a half hour toward the end of the day to give herself more of that buffer.
So you can see, you're just taking the data of what you tried, looking at what's working so you can keep doing it, figuring out what didn't work so you can stop doing it. And then using that to create solutions for moving forward. You're using what you learn from your evaluations as your next best steps.
And now I want to be clear, you don't have to implement all of your do differentlies at once. Just pick one to two things you're going to focus on so you can get some traction. I love this process because as the CEO of your business, you are creating your own roadmap.
One of the things I always share with clients when we're working together is that the process of coaching, whether that's me coaching them or the client using the tools I teach them to coach themselves, is that coaching helps you think at a higher level. Your ability to problem solve and create solutions for yourself and not get stuck in the not working phase is exponentially increased.
It's kind of like that saying of give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime, right? We want to use this process as CEOs so that we become the leader of our business. We create self-leadership in our thinking and can use tools, resources, other knowledge that we've gleaned from how other people have done it, and filter it through our own experience and what's going to actually work for us.
You could even think about this process in the context of learning design principles. There are, of course, certain rules about proportion, and scale, and color palettes, and pattern combinations that we might have been taught by a mentor or if we went to school for design. And those can be guiding principles. But then you also get to use them however works for you within your unique aesthetic.
It's the same thing you do with anything in business, you can take information, you can take your own experiences, and then run them through this evaluation process to come up with what is going to ultimately work best for you and the business you want to run.
We have to remember that as wonderful as it is to learn from those who have gone before us, we need to remember that just because something worked for someone else doesn't mean it always will work for us and that doesn't have to make us wrong. And it's really helpful, I think, to also remember that we never truly have the full context of what has worked for someone else in the past. And that's why I always want to be bringing my clients back to evaluation to check in what is true for them.
There's, of course, best practices, and I encourage you to try them out. I teach you tons of best practices in my coaching. Absolutely, this is a great place to start and then you get to fine tune them, decide what you'll keep, decide what you'll tweak, what you're going to set aside. And to me that is really true freedom, to know yourself, to know your clients, to know your business, and evaluation is going to get you there.
It really creates flexibility and ownership of your results so that when things don't go as planned you have an evaluation process to return to and just make a new plan. Versus one plan and then, oh that didn't work, so now what? And to me, that's really truly been an empowered CEO.
Let's recap now so you can put the process of curious evaluation into practice. You're going to pick something that you'd like to solve for or change in your business. Here are some examples of what you could potentially evaluate, so a specific goal, or an overall quarterly review. Something we do with my clients is having them set goals for our time together and then consistently evaluate where they’ve been making progress, what needs to shift, what obstacles are getting in their way, right?
So you could evaluate at the end of the week with your schedule, at the end of a project, at the end of a sales call or a consultation trying to increase your close rate. You can also evaluate when things are going really well so you can know where you're on the right track. You could evaluate after the first week of onboarding a new hire. All of these are great times to evaluate.
You're always going to start with what's working. Then you'll look at what's not working with curiosity, not judgment. And then you're going to create a list of potential solutions or what you could do differently. You're going to pick one to two things to try. You're going to try those things, see what results you get, evaluate again, and then keep going until you achieve your desired outcome.
It's simple, it's effective, and it will take you where you want to go. That's what I have for you today, I'll talk to you in the next episode. Give this a try. I'd love to hear how it's going. And until then I'm wishing you a beautiful week. I'll talk to you in the next episode.
To celebrate the launch of the show, I'm going to be giving away gift cards to Jayson Home, one of my favorite home decor sources. I'm going to be giving away $50 gift cards to five lucky listeners who follow, rate, and review the show.
Now, it doesn't have to be a five star review, although I sure hope you love the show. I want your honest feedback so I can create an amazing show that provides tons of value. Visit desicreswell.com/podcastlaunch to learn more about the contest and how to enter. I'll be announcing the winners on the show in an upcoming episode.
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 designers, welcome back to the podcast. This is actually just the week following Thanksgiving for me, I am getting ahead on recording. So coming off the holiday break and Thanksgiving really is one of my favorite holidays. I love to cook and so we always host. And being able to cook all of those delicious meals just the way that I want, have exactly what I want is so fun for me.
I actually made a pie that I made a few years ago where I made a crust that’s kind of like a Larabar, if any of you like those, and it is so good. If you want the recipe do not ask me for it, it’s something I made up. And that’s kind of how I cook.
I actually had a blog for a brief while called The Imprecise Cook because people would always come over to our house for dinner and I’d cook and they’d go, “Oh, this is so good, I want to recipe.” And then I’d have to unfortunately tell them, “Well, I used some of this, this, and this, I have no idea on the quantity. But if you want to try putting those ingredients together, you might be able to come up with something like that.” So I started documenting that.
But anyways, side note. Today we’re going to be diving into how to use evaluations in your interior design business. Evaluations might sound a little boring, I don’t know, maybe it even brings you back to getting evaluated at some job you had a long time ago. But what I want you to know is that what’s really boring is not enjoying your business and being frustrated on a daily basis. And evaluations are how you’re going to create a business that you love to run, that is streamlined, is profitable, and that you actually enjoy leading.
A lot of times when things aren’t working or working as fast as we want, the tendency, I think, is to plow through and push harder. And I think that it’s common to think that slowing down and taking a look at what’s actually going on is a problem, as in somehow that’s going to delay you to getting the result that you want. That if you take 5, 10, 15 minutes, or even an hour to evaluate, that you’re somehow missing out on valuable time.
But slowing your thoughts and actions down is never the problem, it is always the solution. An evaluation is one of the ways that you can do this. Consistent evaluation serves so many purposes and can be used in so many ways when it comes to managing your time, your projects, client relationships, networking, your profits, your goals.
It’s really the most valuable use of time in your business because it keeps your from reinventing the wheel and missing really important clues that your business is sending you. You can keep doing what you’ve always done and keep getting the same results or maybe just incremental improvements, or you can use this process that I’m going to teach you today to hop, skip, and leap your way forward.
Before we dive in today I want to highlight a listener, Amber, who left an amazing review. She said, “I’m loving this podcast. It always gives me the much needed reminder to get out of my feelings and be strategic about my work. I look forward to listening to more episodes as they come out.” Amber, I’m excited for you to keep listening too.
If you’ve been listening for a while you probably have heard me talk about I’m giving away $50 gift cards to Jayson Home. If you rate, review and then submit your review, I’ll enter you to win one of these gift cards. And if you aren’t familiar with Jayson Home, you need to go look it up, it’s amazing.
But I want to remind you, the key piece here is that you have to submit your review because on Apple Podcasts there’s no way for me to know exactly your name, especially if you use a nickname to give the review. And I don’t have your email or any way to contact you. So you have to go to desicreswell.com/podcastlaunch and there’s instructions for how to enter the giveaway.
So thank you so much to everyone who has already rated and reviewed the show. If you did do it, make sure you go and enter your review so that I can potentially send you a little gift.
All right, so Amber is talking about being strategic, which is really perfect for today’s episode because when we often think about being strategic we think about doing more, learning more. But being strategic is also about looking back in the form of evaluation and doing it in a useful, informative way. Sometimes it’s not at all about doing more, it’s about doing less or doing what you’ve already been doing with a few tweaks to make it better and more effective.
So with that, let’s dive in. I will say that in Out of Overwhelm, which is my group program, I teach a five step process and curious evaluation is one of these steps. Literally any problem in your interior design business can be solved by coming back to one of these five steps.
And if you’re interested in joining me in Out of Overwhelm for the January round, tomorrow is the last day to apply. So be sure to check out the show notes for the link on the program and how to apply to make sure that you get in. We won’t be opening up again until summer.
So one of the steps, like I said, is curious evaluation and it’s something that I teach all of my clients and help them practice because it really is a skill. So they work on it for the entire six months or however long we end up working together and it becomes second nature. It becomes a way that your brain starts to think. And it's really something that I have used throughout the course of my business and it has just proved valuable time and time again.
When you find yourself asking, “Why does this keep happening?” it's always a great time to pause and evaluate. I thought I'd give you some examples of how this has come up for my clients. Because Out of Overwhelm is so comprehensive, the coaching calls are always really rich with a variety of topics that are going to apply to every designer that's in the group. So here's some examples that I just pulled straight from our calls about issues that were occurring for these designers that could then be evaluated.
So one client brought that clients were consistently not buying accessories at the end of a project. Or another person brought the issue of their employee always had so many questions and was missing deadlines and not being held accountable. We talk a lot about time management and another designer came and said she had her day scheduled, but then only half the things that were planned were actually accomplished.
So these are all just real examples, and I'm sure that you can relate to at least one of them, if not more. So I want you to think about a specific issue that you're experiencing as we continue with this episode. When we get specific, the insights you'll gain will always be more valuable and the lessons can then be applied more broadly, or give you insight into other areas.
So hopefully me sharing some of those client examples has sparked your brain to start thinking about, where can I be taking this concept of evaluation and applying it to my business? I'm going to use one example specifically to walk you through this as I give you the process, and that is the example of you had your day scheduled but then only half of the things you planned were accomplished.
Now, if I were to just approach a designer at the local design center and tell them to start evaluating, what would typically happen is they would start listing off a bunch of things that aren't working well or going well in their business. This makes complete sense because the human brain is designed to scan for danger and protect us, of course it's going to jump to the bad things and placing emphasis on those.
However, it is not the most effective way to evaluate and you're missing out on really useful information when you go straight to what isn't working. So when you evaluate you always want to start with what is working in your business, or what is working with a specific thing that you're evaluating. This puts your brain in a positive state and you start to generate positive emotion as you look at what is working, that might be pride, accomplished or joy.
When you are experiencing positive emotion, your brain is settled down and you're able to access the higher level thinking parts of the brain. So you're able to problem solve and think more clearly when you are in this regulated state, which is really useful as you progress through this process. And then, of course, when you look at what is working this also tells you what you can keep doing. If something's working for you, that's really good to know so you can keep doing it or even double down on it.
In the example that I'm going to be walking you through with the designer who planned her day but only then got half the things accomplished, what was working for her was that she planned intentionally, right? She made a plan, that's huge that she planned intentionally to begin with.
And then what she said she also did that worked really well was she left plenty of time, extra time to drive to client appointments. This made her feel like the day went much more smoothly and it really didn't impact her scheduling all that much. It was something that still worked within that framework.
Then once you've thoroughly looked at what is working, then that's when you move on to what isn't working or what isn't going so well. The key piece here, and this is the whole reason I call it curious evaluation is this is not the part in the process where you start to judge yourself or the future of your business.
Typically when clients have resistance to evaluating it's because they're using the process of evaluation against themselves instead of for themselves. If you look at the definition of the word evaluation it's defined as looking at the original objectives or what you wanted to accomplish, and seeing if what you predicted or set out to do happen. That's it. During this part of the evaluation you really want to work towards being that neutral observer of the facts.
So in this example, when the designer was looking at what didn't go so well, she found that she had her phone on her desk for the majority of the day and wasn't really waiting for anything in particular, but kept checking messages. So that was really distracting and took up a lot of time that wasn't necessary.
And then the other thing she noticed was that she didn't leave room for the unexpected. She kind of stacked her day like a domino. And really, she knows something always comes up and so this was that case of not realistic planning. Now, I'm going through these fairly quickly with the example, but I want you to take time when you're evaluating to really create a thorough list.
Once you have that list of what didn't go so well, then you can move on to what you want to do differently next time. Essentially, you're going to go through what didn't work and develop solutions to create your roadmap forward. So what didn't work? How am I going to address it? And what am I doing about it moving forward?
And this is where I really love to get curious. Curious is one of my all-time favorite emotions because it lets me play with ideas. I don't have to get stuck in is this the right or wrong solution? It doesn't get me stuck in perfectionism. It's more of a let's see what happens. What could work? Let's experiment with this.
So a couple of phrases you might want to try on here is, I wonder if I did this. Or it could work if I tried this. I'm going to try presenting it this way or scheduling meetings this way, right? You're just posing a theory, you're taking a guess, you're trying it out, seeing how it goes, and then evaluating again and repeating this cycle until you get the result that you want.
So in the example with the designer I was talking about, the distraction of the phone, her solution of that is she's going to put her phone in a drawer for one hour tomorrow to give her some uninterrupted work time. And then she's also going to create the solution of leaving an hour of unplanned time to accommodate the unexpected.
And she might notice that when she leaves the phone in the drawer she can stay so much more focused, and that she's going to start doing that again the next day. Or she might find that an hour of buffer time wasn't quite enough so she's going to try leaving an hour of unplanned time late morning, and then also a half hour toward the end of the day to give herself more of that buffer.
So you can see, you're just taking the data of what you tried, looking at what's working so you can keep doing it, figuring out what didn't work so you can stop doing it. And then using that to create solutions for moving forward. You're using what you learn from your evaluations as your next best steps.
And now I want to be clear, you don't have to implement all of your do differentlies at once. Just pick one to two things you're going to focus on so you can get some traction. I love this process because as the CEO of your business, you are creating your own roadmap.
One of the things I always share with clients when we're working together is that the process of coaching, whether that's me coaching them or the client using the tools I teach them to coach themselves, is that coaching helps you think at a higher level. Your ability to problem solve and create solutions for yourself and not get stuck in the not working phase is exponentially increased.
It's kind of like that saying of give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime, right? We want to use this process as CEOs so that we become the leader of our business. We create self-leadership in our thinking and can use tools, resources, other knowledge that we've gleaned from how other people have done it, and filter it through our own experience and what's going to actually work for us.
You could even think about this process in the context of learning design principles. There are, of course, certain rules about proportion, and scale, and color palettes, and pattern combinations that we might have been taught by a mentor or if we went to school for design. And those can be guiding principles. But then you also get to use them however works for you within your unique aesthetic.
It's the same thing you do with anything in business, you can take information, you can take your own experiences, and then run them through this evaluation process to come up with what is going to ultimately work best for you and the business you want to run.
We have to remember that as wonderful as it is to learn from those who have gone before us, we need to remember that just because something worked for someone else doesn't mean it always will work for us and that doesn't have to make us wrong. And it's really helpful, I think, to also remember that we never truly have the full context of what has worked for someone else in the past. And that's why I always want to be bringing my clients back to evaluation to check in what is true for them.
There's, of course, best practices, and I encourage you to try them out. I teach you tons of best practices in my coaching. Absolutely, this is a great place to start and then you get to fine tune them, decide what you'll keep, decide what you'll tweak, what you're going to set aside. And to me that is really true freedom, to know yourself, to know your clients, to know your business, and evaluation is going to get you there.
It really creates flexibility and ownership of your results so that when things don't go as planned you have an evaluation process to return to and just make a new plan. Versus one plan and then, oh that didn't work, so now what? And to me, that's really truly been an empowered CEO.
Let's recap now so you can put the process of curious evaluation into practice. You're going to pick something that you'd like to solve for or change in your business. Here are some examples of what you could potentially evaluate, so a specific goal, or an overall quarterly review. Something we do with my clients is having them set goals for our time together and then consistently evaluate where they’ve been making progress, what needs to shift, what obstacles are getting in their way, right?
So you could evaluate at the end of the week with your schedule, at the end of a project, at the end of a sales call or a consultation trying to increase your close rate. You can also evaluate when things are going really well so you can know where you're on the right track. You could evaluate after the first week of onboarding a new hire. All of these are great times to evaluate.
You're always going to start with what's working. Then you'll look at what's not working with curiosity, not judgment. And then you're going to create a list of potential solutions or what you could do differently. You're going to pick one to two things to try. You're going to try those things, see what results you get, evaluate again, and then keep going until you achieve your desired outcome.
It's simple, it's effective, and it will take you where you want to go. That's what I have for you today, I'll talk to you in the next episode. Give this a try. I'd love to hear how it's going. And until then I'm wishing you a beautiful week. I'll talk to you in the next episode.
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Now, it doesn't have to be a five star review, although I sure hope you love the show. I want your honest feedback so I can create an amazing show that provides tons of value. Visit desicreswell.com/podcastlaunch to learn more about the contest and how to enter. I'll be announcing the winners on the show in an upcoming episode.
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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