Stop the Drag: 5 Fixes That Make Growth Feel Easy

Stop the Drag: 5 Fixes That Make Growth Feel Easy

Growth is supposed to feel exciting. Expansive. Rewarding.
So why does it sometimes feel heavy, exhausting, or harder than it should?

If you have ever looked at your business and thought, “This should not feel like this,” you are not broken. You are not lazy. And you are not failing.

What you are experiencing is drag.

Drag is the invisible resistance that slows growth even when you are doing many of the right things. And the good news is this. Drag is not a sentence. It is a signal.

In this episode of The Amanda Kaufman Show, we explored what creates drag, how to tell the difference between healthy challenge and unhealthy friction, and the five fixes that can make growth feel lighter again.

Let’s break it down.

Drag Is a Signal, Not a Sentence

One of the most important mindset shifts for entrepreneurs is understanding that drag is information.

When something feels heavy for an extended period of time, your business is telling you something needs attention. Not effort. Not grit. Attention.

Too many entrepreneurs interpret drag as a personal failure and respond by pushing harder. That usually makes things worse.

Instead of asking, “What is wrong with me,” the better question is, “What is creating friction right now?”

Healthy Challenge Versus Unhealthy Drag

Not all hard seasons are the same.

A healthy challenge sharpens your focus. You know what you are working toward. You can see a payoff. Even when the work is difficult, it feels purposeful and activating.

Unhealthy drag does the opposite. It diffuses your focus. There is no clear finish line. No visible payoff. Just a lingering heaviness that drains energy before you even begin.

If something has felt hard for months with no momentum, no clarity, and no progress, that is not grit. That is friction.

Fix One: Decision Friction

One of the biggest sources of drag in business is indecision.

When you delay decisions, everything slows down. Your focus scatters. Your confidence drops. Your energy leaks into overthinking.

The truth is this. You do not need perfect decisions to grow. You need decisions.

Making a decision creates conviction. Conviction creates focus. Focus allows you to rally people, resources, and learning around a clear direction.

Even when a decision turns out to be wrong, it gives you something better than waiting. It gives you movement. And movement allows you to make a new decision with better information.

If growth feels stalled, ask yourself where you are avoiding a decision.

Fix Two: Tool Friction

Tool overload quietly drains energy.

Too many platforms. Too many subscriptions. Too many systems that do not talk to each other. Each one adds cognitive load and hidden friction.

Simplicity is leverage.

You need one primary tool per function in your business. One place to manage contacts. One place to send emails. One place to schedule. One place to create content.

Every additional tool adds complexity, cost, and maintenance. Growth accelerates when tools get simpler, not fancier.

If your systems feel heavy, consolidation is often the fastest win.

Fix Three: Role Friction

As a business owner, you play many roles. Coach. Marketer. Salesperson. CEO. Technician.

Drag shows up when those roles are unclear.

Role friction happens when you do not know which version of you is responsible for what outcome. Everything feels blurred, and nothing feels owned.

The fix is clarity.

Name the outcome first. Then decide who owns it. Sometimes that is you. Sometimes that is support. But ownership must be clear.

When roles are defined, energy stabilizes and progress speeds up.

Fix Four: Expectation Friction

Unspoken expectations create silent resistance.

Whether it is with clients, partners, or family, friction grows when assumptions go unaddressed.

The solution is simple but powerful. Write it once. Say it twice.

Clear communication reduces confusion, resentment, and rework. Repetition is not annoying. It is necessary.

People are busy. Attention wanders. Clarity requires patience.

When expectations are visible and reinforced, momentum improves and trust deepens.

Fix Five: Energy Friction

Many entrepreneurs try to do high focus work during low energy times.

That mismatch creates drag fast.

Energy is a resource. When you schedule demanding tasks during your strongest hours, everything feels easier. When you fight your energy, everything feels harder.

Match task type to energy level, not just calendar availability.

Small shifts in timing can create massive gains in effectiveness.

Why Fixing Drag Matters

Ignoring friction costs more than fixing it.

Unresolved drag drains time, confidence, and emotional energy. It keeps you re solving the same problems without resolution. Over time, it trains your business to feel harder than necessary.

Ease is not laziness. It is leverage.

Leverage multiplies results without multiplying effort. Ease creates consistency. Consistency creates growth.

If something feels heavier than it should, that is not a sign to quit. It is an invitation to simplify.

Growth Does Not Have to Feel Heavy

Hard work still matters. Discipline still matters. Commitment still matters.

But growth does not have to feel like constant resistance.

The best leaders design for flow, sustainability, and leverage. They look for friction and fix it instead of tolerating it.

If growth feels heavy right now, start there.

Drag is not your identity.
It is just feedback.

And feedback, when used well, changes everything.

Chapter List:

00:00 Understanding Growth and Drag

03:32 Healthy Challenge vs. Unhealthy Drag

11:21 Identifying and Fixing Decision Friction

18:57 Streamlining Tools to Reduce Tool Friction

21:57 Managing Role Friction in Solopreneurship

24:41 Setting Clear Expectations to Combat Expectation Friction

26:03 Aligning Energy Levels with Tasks

33:06 Taking Inventory to Eliminate Friction

Full Transcript;

Amanda Kaufman (00:00)

If you have experienced drag in your business, it's a signal, not a sentence. So what it means is that you need to take a closer look. It means that it needs more attention from you in a special way.

Good morning. Welcome to the Coach's Plaza training. It is on a Monday and I'm here on time. So I'm feeling pretty good about myself. If you can see me and hear me, let me know in the chat. Say hello. Don't be a stranger. And let's let's unpack what we're going to talk about today.

So I'm coming to you live from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan for my holiday trip. And today we're going to be talking actually about growth. And we're going to talk about growth from kind of opposite kind of perspective, which is drag. So when you have a lot of growth, that's good thing, right? Like you could be growing the number of people that you're serving. You could be growing the impact that you're having. You could be growing your bank account.

You could be growing in all kinds of lovely ways. So today we're going to talk about what are the big obstacles to growth. We're going to talk about stopping the drag. We're going to talk about five fixes that can make growth actually feel a lot easier. So today's live is informed by a lot of high performance coaching with a lot of incredible entrepreneurs. And we're going to talk about some of the things that cause the most drag.

And you know, the thing is, your business shouldn't feel like it's heavy. It shouldn't be heavy all the time. Now there's going to be challenging seasons and challenging moments. There's going to be, yes, I am in Canada. I'm like bundled up. But there's going to be seasons where your...

your growth is gonna come from either inside, like you're gonna decide that you wanna make a change, or it's gonna come from outside. And I've been in business long enough to tell ya that both have a pretty significant impact on your growth overall, both the outside impact and the inside impact. So today we're gonna talk about these five fixes that are gonna help you when your business starts to drag. Now, here's the thing.

If you have experienced drag in your business, it's a signal, not a sentence. So what it means is that you need to take a closer look. It means that it needs more attention from you in a special way.

So in this episode, you're gonna learn five easy fixes that are gonna clear friction, restore your flow, and make your success feel light again.

And a lot of entrepreneurs that I talk to, they wanna go back to the very beginning, when they launched the thing, when they felt full of faith and ready to go and explore. And the truth is that if you've been on the journey for a little while, that drag is kind of a rite of passage. It happens for all of us. So today I'm gonna talk through how do you tell the difference between a healthy challenge and unhealthy.

drag, so we're gonna actually make that distinction today. I'm gonna talk about the five most common sources of business friction that are probably slowing you down. We're gonna talk about why ignoring small inefficiencies tend to cost more than just fixing it. And we're gonna use a tool that I call the Ease Index to decide where we're gonna simplify next, and we're gonna learn why

activating your flow and finding more ease in your business is not laziness, it's something called leverage. And leverage is a very good thing in business, okay? So, here we go, let's pop into it. when you are building a business, there's no question there's gonna be challenge. Like, no question at all. For sure there's gonna be challenge. And for each of us we have different challenges, and I'd love for you to just take a moment with your notes and reflect on like what.

has represented some challenge for you in 2025. Maybe it was the courage to try a new offer. Maybe it was to finally get great at selling. Maybe it was to automate your marketing. Maybe it was to put yourself onto stages and platforms that are actually going to promote what it is that you do. I don't know, you tell me, you can share in the chat, like, what was a challenge that you experienced in 2025? So,

Let's talk about the difference between a healthy challenge and unhealthy drag and as a coach I'm always listening for this unhealthy drag And I'm gonna give you some examples here to really drive this home So if it's a healthy challenge what you're gonna notice is that it activates your focus okay, so Think of it kind of like you've got a puzzle and you need to solve the puzzle and so then you just like focus in on the puzzle

I'm visiting my family here in Canada. We love puzzles. So I've been like working on a puzzle with my brother on the on the on the floor and it's been so so so fun. But it activates like this focus, this clarity, like I'm looking for a piece that has this particular shape or I'm looking for a piece that has this particular color on it because I am committed to solving this puzzle. So that that is a sign that you are probably facing healthy challenge. Now.

unhealthy drag, you'll notice that it actually diffuses your focus. Okay, so healthy challenge, dial it in, focus. Unhealthy drag, I can't focus to save my life. So it creates like an avoidance, right? Because you're not engaged with solving the problem, rather you're engaged with things that are going to take you out of the problem solving mode. So think of it like challenge sharpens your attention.

but drag makes you procrastinate, dread, or even numb out. And so that's one distinction. Another big distinction that when I'm looking and I'm coaching people and I'm looking at telling the difference, like, are they in a moment of healthy challenge or are they in unhealthy drag? Well, a challenge has a really clear payoff, right? So take for example, I wanna get really good at marketing this year. I really wanna nail my message this year.

Amazing right that that gives you so much. When you have a clear payoff then you can see a win, right? You can see a win and that's what happens when you have healthy challenge. When you have unhealthy drag it tends to feel like there's no finish line. It tends to seem like it's just going to go on and on forever and ever and there's no end in sight and there's no payoff and

you know, there's no light at the end of the tunnel. So shout out why in the chat if you're tracking the difference between challenge and drag. I'm gonna give you another example. Challenge tends to energize some kind of, energize you especially after you take action. So sometimes when you are activating a healthy challenge, it's actually really hard.

Right, like it requires a lot of thinking, it requires design, decision making, maybe you have to do math, ugh, who wants to do that? But the thing is, is like you're gonna engage the problem, you're gonna engage the challenge. But then your energy after you engage the challenge, because you're making meaningful progress, goes up, right? So that's how you know you're doing healthy challenge. If you're in an unsustainable...

know, drag sort of a pattern, it's gonna just feel like it's draining you even before you even start, right? So healthy challenge is sometimes quite hard, it's quite difficult. But that doesn't mean that you're doing it wrong because it's got some challenge or difficulty in it, so long as there's payoff and progress. If there's payoff and progress, and it doesn't have to be payoff and progress every single time, so I'll give you a perfect example from a coaching business.

If you're having a lot of consults, you're making progress by filling your calendar with more consults than you had before. It's gonna probably take you some attempts, some practice, to get to this place where you are closing a lot of those consults into becoming clients. And that's because it takes some practice, some confidence, some finesse for those sales calls to go really, really well. And so...

You can lose sales calls and still be in a healthy challenge because you're learning from each of those calls that makes the likelihood of you closing go up every single time. So drag on the other hand, it drains you before you even start, right? Like you're just totally exhausted by the very idea, much less actually making effort against the idea, unhealthy drag. Okay, another example. Challenge tends to grow your capacity.

Okay, whereas drag tends to shrink your capacity. if something keeps making you feel like it's making you smaller and smaller and smaller, then it's not really growth work anymore, right? You're really kind of battling this drag feeling. And then finally,

Challenge is gonna be something that's probably very seasonal, very cyclical, right? There's gonna be times when you're really activating into challenge, and then there's gonna be times when you're not in a hardcore grind. Whereas if you're in an unhealthy drag, it's gonna feel like it's this constant, constant obstacle, okay? And if it's been hard for months and months, that's not grit, that's straight up friction.

And I'll be honest with you, from my own journey, I have a high tolerance for pain. I'm curious if you feel the same way. Would you say you have a high, medium, or low tolerance for pain? So I have a pretty high tolerance for pain. So something I have to watch for personally is getting stuck in a drag pattern and not necessarily being activated into challenge to move out of the drag pattern. And some of it is because of the high...

High tolerance for pain. Some of it is just I'm straight up stubborn, right? And I gotta tell you, sometimes stubbornness is amazing in entrepreneurship because when people would have quit like a long time ago, I'm still there, I'm stubborn, I'm gonna keep on doing the thing. But if you're stubborn to the point where you're not receiving input, you're not letting the data tell you what the data's trying to tell you for like an overly long time and you don't ask for help, that's the big signal.

You're not asking for help, you're just suffering through it. Then watch out, right? You wanna shift that and pivot that into a healthier challenge, right? So let's talk about like, do business owners typically experience this challenge and business friction in the first place? And we're gonna just like talk about how do you actually fix them? So yeah, way to go, Debbie. Good for you.

Way to go, man, that's insane. Great, in a great way, because I know you've been thinking about that for a long time. So good for you, congratulations on that big move. Okay, so let's talk about the first form of friction in your business, how to fix it. So number one, and my God, write this down. Shout out notes in the chat if you're writing down your notes for this week's training, because this is like, you're gonna wanna notice these.

Number one, decision friction. my word. Okay, when I'm working with clients, the number one habit that I'm helping them to develop is a decision making habit. So what happens with decision friction is you find yourself with so many choices and you don't have any default ways that you just look at things. So.

Typically when people are really struggling with this, they have not formed a personal philosophy. So what is a personal philosophy? A personal philosophy is like, what are the sets of values and beliefs and standards that you are going to uphold that make decisions so easy for you? Right? Because like if you have a really strong personal philosophy,

I've worked for years to really develop my personal philosophy around things. It's like you've decided in advance how you want to engage the world, how you want to engage in certain conversations, and what you want to do. Because the bigger you get, the more successful you get, the more people are going to ask of you, and they're going to think, it's no big deal. But the thing is that the more successful you are, the more people are asking something of you. And so if you don't have a personal philosophy to kind of...

help you navigate all of those opportunities, then you're gonna look at every opportunity with equal weight and that's where overwhelm gets triggered, right? Shout out one in the chat if you hear what I'm saying loud and clear. If you are constantly trying to decide, do I wanna work private or do I wanna have a group program? Do I wanna charge $500? Do I wanna charge $5,000? Do I wanna work on low ticket? Do I wanna work on high ticket? Do I wanna meet people through Facebook? Do I wanna meet people in person?

Do I want to do email marketing? Do I not want to do email marketing? Do I want to do it every week? Do I want to do it every day? My goodness. Okay. One of the biggest things that's helped me be more successful than the average bear is simply making decisions. Now I'm not necessarily right about the decision that I make. There've been plenty of decisions that I've made that were not necessarily optimized or they weren't necessarily going to be the thing that, you know, shot us off like a rocket ship of growth.

But the very fact I'm willing to make a decision allows me to operate with a level of conviction about what it is that I'm doing. So then I get to rally people to support me. I get to be focused in my consumption of like the books, the courses, the programs, the things that I'm gonna do to actually activate that thing. And even if I'm wildly freaking wrong, okay, the fact that I made a decision allows me to make a new decision. So I'll give you a perfect example from my own journey as a coach.

I made a decision to make my business work through setting appointments through a Facebook group, spending a lot of money on agencies, spending a lot of money on team members, spending a lot of money on AI before AI was cool. I was doing all kinds of stuff to make this one method work. And what I realized was that actually content and mastery of content is

is a bigger factor in your success than the mechanism of the Facebook group. Which is why when you work with me in the Experts Network, I tell you to do a Facebook group not because a Facebook group is necessarily the be all end all tactic, but because it actually works really quickly and you don't have to do a whole lot of setup and you can get in the game to start mastering your content a hell of a lot faster. Right? So shout a number one in the chat if you understand that like,

making a decision, even if the decision ends up being not totally correct. It was just the best you could do with the information that you had. And by the way, Amazon, one of the biggest companies in the entire world, they're making massive investment decisions with maybe 60 % of the information they need to be able to make the decision. you know, Jeff Bezos has talked about this several times. And I think that that's super telling, like people that are in a really broke mindset, a poor mindset.

They tend to be looking for like radical levels of certainty and they're like, I'm not going to move forward with a dang thing unless I know everything, every possible thing before I do the thing because I might get hurt. And here's the truth. You're going to get hurt. Right. In your life, you're going to get hurt. You're to get hurt. Your ego is going to get friggin bruised. You're going to get betrayed. You're going to have like all kinds of stuff that just happens in your life. You being a worry war about it isn't necessarily going to prevent that thing from happening.

Who's tracking on a Monday? Shout out to them in the chat. And by the way, if you're here on Christmas week, love it. I love it. I'm glad you're here. Okay, let's keep going. So decision friction, the big fix. Make rules for yourself or default decisions, right? The next time you're facing, should I do like private coaching or group coaching? Flip a freaking coin. I don't care how you make the decision, but make the damn decision.

And the worst thing that can happen is that you're wrong and that you need a new decision to make a new choice. second thing, tool friction. my God. So I work with a lot of small businesses and especially solopreneurs who really need to streamline their tools. So, you know, right now in the AI obsessed world we're in for expert entrepreneurship,

It's all about the new model of the new AI and should you use Claude, should you use GPT, should you use Gemini, should you use, and it's like introducing all these questions about what's the actual best one. And in a given moment, one of those models is gonna pull ahead as being the best for a particular application and then literally 24 hours later, you're gonna see another headline that says that another tool is even better. And for solo entrepreneurs,

and for small business entrepreneurs, you need Google Workplace to write your shit down, okay? You need to be able to do math, you need to be able to document, you need to be able to present, the end, Google Workplace, done, right? And if you're a Microsoft user, fine.

go for it, right? But you just need a tool. You need a CRM. So we use Plaza Plus. I'll drop it in the chat if you wanna check out that tool. It's our white label of Go High Level.

We love it because it's all your tools in one. It's got all your contact management, all your automation, all your scheduling, all your landing pages, your website, payment processing, like everything in one tool. So if you can keep things really tight, then it means that you're one, not paying so many different subscriptions. Two, you're not having to have different lists synced up with each other through integration tools and like adding all this

cost to your system versus just having like one really good one. So pick one primary tool per function in your business and then just get rid of the rest. Just don't even bother with the rest. Okay. And this is like a big one because people feel like committed to the decision that they made in the past. And I, I used to spend like $10,000 a month in software. Not anymore.

Right, but I used to spend $10,000 a month in software because I had three different CRMs. I had a different tool for hosting my courses versus like doing my courses. And I just had like tools on tools on tools on tools. And it was just crazy expensive. So shout out number two, if you heard me loud and clear, you gotta get rid of the tool friction. You gotta keep it really simple, right? Just pick your favorite and run with it. Third one, roll friction.

So role friction is really interesting, especially if you're a solopreneur because you get to live so many different roles. I'm saying roles, not rules. So like you are a coach, for example, but you're also a marketer. You're also a salesperson. You're also the CEO. You're also probably a peer and a colleague to other coaches.

You are also probably your graphic designer, copywriter, right? You're playing all these different roles and technician. You know, we were just talking about automation and tools. You're data scientists, you're all these different things. And I think that that's what makes solopreneurship so challenging is because sometimes you need to not be the coach for a second so that you can get your finances in order.

Sometimes you gotta not be the coach for a second so that you can actually build a marketing engine that brings you lots of clients so that you're not freaking out every month that you're not, you know, you're not operating at your highest capacity. Sometimes you gotta stop being a coach for a second and actually just get back to like, who are you? The human behind this machine. The human that's requiring yourself to do all of these different roles in the first friggin' place.

You know what I'm, right? So shout out me in the chat if you're like, yeah, you know, there's a me in all of this too. It's not just about service. It's not just about, you know, doing things the right way. It's also doing things in an aligned way, right? So that role friction, it's just not clear like who has to do what. And so the main thing here is to name your outcomes.

Name your outcomes. So as a high performance coach, I'm constantly coaching towards clarity. What is the outcome? Well, the outcome is I'm going to have a weekly live show for the rest of 2026, and I'm going to have really awesome topics that are super relevant to my dream client. And so then ask yourself, who's really going to own that? And it's like, I will. I must, because I'm the one that's behind the business. You know what I mean? Right.

And that's one of the perks of making the money, Debbie, is you actually can hire out some of those roles, but I think a lot of solopreneurs are hiring a little too soon or they're hiring a little too big. So for example, we have a virtual assistance team that we share with some of our clients for a few hours a week because they don't need a full-time person, right? And rather than paying for a full-time person, they can do a fractional assistant.

and it just kind of takes some of the repetitious sucky stuff like scheduling and automating and things like that just off their plate, you know? Yeah, so roll friction. So that's number three. Shout out three in the chat if you heard that. The second drag is actually expectation friction. So the expectation friction is when you have unspoken expectations by your clients.

or by the people around you. So for me, this showed up in my first year or so when my husband and I were really out of alignment about how much money I should be making by when and how much it was going to cost to get to a place where I could make that much money by then. So I had to work pretty hard on learning how to set proper expectations and not have these unspoken assumptions.

And so my fix for expectation friction is very simple. Write it once, say it twice. Write it once, say it twice. And document things very visibly. So like, I like to joke, I'm a dreamer with a spreadsheet. Like if I have a spreadsheet that talks about what the inflows and the outflows of cash are and the impact of the decisions that I'm making,

that and I bring that spreadsheet to a conversation with my husband, it goes so, much better because it's visual, right? Now I don't just flip him the spreadsheet and hope, you know, pray for the best. I talk about the fact there is a spreadsheet and there's a conclusion I'm drawing from the spreadsheet and I'll even sit down and walk through it with him to make sure that he's really understanding every assumption. No matter how well I label stuff, by the way, he's still sometimes makes leaps that are like not great. So

But I do the same thing with my clients. I'll draw pictures. I'll draw diagrams. And it's the same thing. A lot of us, I think this is a bit of a broke mindset thing too, is the belief that you should just say something once and that's good enough. Master communicators understand that they need to have multiple formats. They need to have patience. They need to understand that the listener has their own belief system. So,

They're checking everything that you're saying against their belief system. And also, P.S., we all have wandering minds. I heard from scientists recently that during conversation, our minds wander about 25 % of the time. Wild, right? So if I've been talking for 20 minutes, you missed five. Right? You missed five minutes. Even if I'm like super engaged, if I'm looking at the camera, I'm saying all the right things, you still miss like five minutes of what I said. And maybe that was like the most

vital five minutes that you needed to hear. Yeah, exactly. So why do I say some of the same things over and over and over again every single week? Well, because you might not have heard it, right? You could have had four weeks in a row where I said a thing and you spaced for that five minutes where I said that thing. And then the fifth week I say the thing and you finally heard it you're like, wow, that's new, right? And that's just how people are. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Replays are necessary. It's a super important piece of this. So expectation friction.

This is also super important when you're doing coaching programs. So when I first was selling coaching programs, I would be like, okay, you're in, and then they'd pay, and then I'd wait for the next meeting and there'd be no communication at all. And what I realized is that by recording just an onboarding video, by having some onboarding emails that come out alongside the program, by having an orientation call as you're starting the program,

it actually really improved not just the retention of my clients, but also the outcomes that they received because they felt actually taken care of. But what am I doing there? Setting expectations repeatedly, right? With kindness and candor, right? So, and a bit of levity too, you know, like I like, I don't think that you being clear about your expectations has to come across as being like draconian or rude or.

strict or anything like that, but they're darn well better be some repetition. Yeah. So there you go. Expectation friction. Okay. Last one. Energy friction. Okay. This one's so super huge. I can't tell you how many of my clients are complaining that they're trying to do high focus work in low energy times. So like one of the things that I did that really changed my life for the better was shifting to being an early bird.

You know, I used to be a night owl. I used to stay up super late and I was on a mission to empty my inbox. But the trouble with that is, is that I was prone to making mistakes. I couldn't think as quickly because I was so tired from an exhausting day before. And so I did an experiment and I was like, can I switch from being a night owl to an early bird? And it took me about two weeks and it was hard. But

that those two weeks occurred like, I don't know, 10 years ago, 11 years ago, something like that. So two weeks of suffering for 11 years of improved productivity where when I start my day, my brain is fresh. I haven't been, you know, clawed at for the entire day from my kids and my business and my clients and all of that kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, waking up early and getting after the day made a huge difference to my energy because I was doing

high energy things when I had a lot of energy, as opposed to low energy things. And this very show, by the way, I've done weekly lives for years and years and years, but I used to do them like Tuesday late afternoon sort of deal, and my word, my energy in those were not as good because it was a high energy thing, and I'd already been two days into the work week, and it was late in the day, so I'd already had a lot of client meetings, and I felt like I was rushing, and it was just like a

So energy friction. So generally, I would say that it's a great move to match your task type to your energy level, not just your calendar availability. There's nothing on your calendar that you didn't put there. I'm going to say that again. There's nothing on your calendar that you didn't put there. But Amanda, I've got to drop my kids off at this particular time. I'm like, yeah, well, you decided to do that. I'm not saying it's not important to you.

I'm not saying it's not a good thing to do. I'm just saying it's still you. You're still deciding to run your life the way that you run it. And the day that you realize that, you realize that there's just not a lot of things that have to be where they are on your calendar that you can move them and you can make it match your energy load. So by the way, I've had radical calendar changes over the past several years and in general, two weeks.

Right? Two weeks, I'll honor my commitments that I have on my calendar right now. And then within two weeks, within two weeks, I'll, I'll be able to operate under a new schedule. Right? So, and that's without disappointing anybody. food for thought, for thought. So why not just ignore these efficiencies? Why not just ignore the drag? Well, the thing is, is that not fixing the problem.

costs you way more energy than actually fixing them. So like I said with becoming an early bird, for example, I became an early bird after about two weeks of focus and I've been benefiting from it ever since, 11 years, right? So that's one way that you can kind of think of it. Another way is like just tiny annoyances tend to create these energy leaks. So for example, in the earlier years of my business, I had a less powerful computer.

And so then I was endlessly waiting for downloads and uploads. And like, if I wanted to do video, it was just like terrible, absolutely terrible. A few years ago, I said, you know what, I'm going to do the topped out MacBook Pro laptop as a standard. Well, here's what happened. I'm no longer dragged by things like video production, uploads and downloads. I also have the ability to like work without being plugged into a wall for hours.

You know, like there's so many things that are just so much easier and better because I kicked for the more expensive hardware. You know, those energy leaks, man, they kill you. They kill you. Your brain tends to spend the energy resolving the same problem over and over again. Like this breaks my heart. And I'm saying it out loud because I I'm hoping that somebody hears this and they realize like, OK.

But the number of people that have come through my programs with the same problem week after week after week after week after week after week, this is not judgment. I'm just saying that their brain is burning energy, re-solving but never quite solving the same problem over and over and over again. And what I notice is like when people do this, they get so frustrated, they make it about their identity, they globalize the problem, they tend to get really catastrophic in their thinking.

And it's hard to watch, right? Because, yeah, it's really hard to watch. It's really hard to watch. And I think if you don't fix the friction, it keeps on forcing you into the same pattern of thinking, the same conversations over and over again. And then you have the same frustrations over and over again. And it's a real drag.

I think the thing is that you're not just losing time on all of this, you're also experiencing like really negative emotions. And, you know, after studying positive psychology, like the science is pretty conclusive here that when you are in a positive mindset, you're far more productive, you make better decisions, you assess risk better. There's a lot of reasons to take care of your emotions. And if you're negative, neutral or stressed,

You can think of it that as like being really a big drag. So that's not to say you should never feel sad. That's not to say that you should never, you know, you should deny your feelings to actually completely opposite to what you should probably do. But if you're living in those feelings because you're staying in that spiral, like it's not just the time drag, it's emotional drag. The thing is, is that a 30 minute fix can save hours of future resistance downstream. So for example,

you know, on these very lives I was in the habit of coming up with a topic on the morning and they worked pretty good. I mean, I did have some pretty awesome topics and then Chat GPT comes along and it made it a little easier because I could just ask every week, like what topic should I do? But then I realized I was like, you know what, if I can actually just come up with 16 of these topics in a row, I sit down four times a year to write my lives and I just show up and do them.

Doesn't that sound easier? Right? Shout out to Y in the chat if you're like, wow, that does sound so much easier. Now, did it take a couple of hours to come up with the topics and make sure I had everything I needed? Yes, it did. But then it just saved me so much time in the subsequent 16 weeks. And I think like the biggest reason why not fixing that is causing problems is that your ignored friction quietly trains your business to be harder than necessary.

what you tolerate ends up becoming your operating standard. And that's how businesses stay stuck at the same level of revenue for years at a time because they're not allowing the growth. So how do we fix it? The first thing is you've got to do an inventory. So a lot of times people are trying to fix a problem and they don't have the clarity on the problem, so they can't fix the problem. So step one is to gain the clarity.

I call this brain barf just like everything you can think of that you feel like you're supposed to do, should have done, could have done, would have done, planned to done, all the things. Just like write it down. This might take you 45 minutes to just like write everything down. But the first thing is that you got to write them down so that you can first eliminate things that you're just like, you know what? I don't have the capacity, the resources nor the desire to sustain this. Right. Like I'm doing this from a should place, not because

I really should but just because I thought I should, know, and the more I think about it the more I realize this doesn't go on the list. So once you, you know, I like to do a quick call before I really get started with this next part which is to rate your tasks on a scale of one to ten on the effort versus return. So if it's a high effort and low return then you need to get rid of it. You need to eliminate it. If it's...

low effort, high return, you need to prioritize it. It needs to be something that you're going to really do. Look for tasks that feel really heavy compared to the results that you get from it. Start with the easiest simplification, not the biggest one. Right? So there might be like a big marketing system that you want to put into your business to make your life a lot easier. Chunk it down to something way smaller and be successful with the smaller chunk. Right?

So that's what I'm saying. Ask like, what would make this 10 times easier? What would make this 10 times easier? So like when I was designing 16 weeks of live streams, my thought was, just want to start. Like I just want to come to work on Monday morning and just start. And I don't want to feel like I have to get up super early on Monday mornings to be ready to start. I just want to start. And so that's what...

That's why I ended up writing 16 in advance. Now, the key thing with this exercise is to repeat it, right? Every month you should be downloading all the things that you wanna do and eliminating the things that don't work and doubling down on the things that do. All right, so let me take us home here. Keep in mind that looking for ease is actually a good thing.

Right? So people say like, there's no silver bullet. I'm one of those people. There is no silver bullet. But it also doesn't have to be hard automatically. You know, like the job is to look for ease. The job is to look for leverage. So leverage is like, imagine you've got a lever, you've got a fulcrum, right? And if you apply a little bit of pressure, you get a whole lot of force out the other side. That's what leverage is.

With a coaching business in modern times, having content that is speaking to your genius is super important. Building reputation around your genius is super important. And so that's a high leverage activity because the more people who hear about your perspectives and they can apply it and they can get a win, the better.

So ease is not laziness, it's actually leverage. It means less resistance, not less responsibility. In fact, I would say you're taking more responsibility by actually evaluating the data of your business and making better decisions. Shout out to Y in the chat if you agree with me there. Leverage multiplies results without multiplying your effort, and that's how you grow. Ease creates consistency, and consistency creates growth. If it's too hard,

to execute, you won't execute it and you can't grow. So that's why I think looking for a little bit of ease can go a long way. Now, remember, hard work is still required, but what if you were applying hard work to things that are going to work hard for you, right? That's what actually gets you to move forward. The best leaders, they tend to design for flow and for sustainability, not through brute force. And most people, they don't take the time to actually think.

about the flow. All right, my friends, thank you for joining me this week for the live stream. We're going to have this broadcast, this broadcast saved inside of our clients over chaos community, which you can join at next five clients dot com. Tell your friends about next five clients. We are going to be back next week with our next episode.

it's going to be all about the hidden habits around your momentum. By the way, if you're seeing this today and you have not joined us for the planning extravaganza, make sure that you register at extravaganza.thecoachesplaza.com. Again, tell your friends. We've got some really incredible speakers coming. It's going to be pretty awesome. Yeah, exactly.

And yeah, Merry Christmas to you. Happy holidays. Hope this was super helpful. I hope in your downtime, you're able to really think about your flow, really think about your purpose, really think about what you want your 2026 experience to be like. And as always, I am DM Away. So if you would like more support in a great system to go from inconsistency to consistent client flow,

then make sure you DM me the word expert and I will talk to you about our expert program that helps people with setting up systems that don't suck. All right, my friend, thank you so much for being here and we will see you again the next time.