Entre-Talk: Maybe I’m Just Not Good at This

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, Entre-Talk: Maybe I’m Just Not Good at This.

Did you know that you can live a life that’s even better than happy? My name is Jody Moore. I’m a master-certified life coach and a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. And if you’re willing to go with me I can show you how. Let’s go.

Hello everybody. How are my entrepreneur friends? I want to talk to you about being not good at things, maybe it’s whatever kind of coaching program you offer or whatever service you provide. Maybe you’re new to that. Maybe you’re trying to build a coaching practice or let’s say you’re an interior designer, you’re trying to build an interior design business. It’s tempting if you’re new, you don’t have a lot of experience, you don’t have a lot of happy satisfied clients or a portfolio of beautiful pictures for your brain to say, “Maybe I’m just not good at this”, when you’re starting out.

And even if you know you’re really good at whatever it is that you do, maybe you are worried that you’re not good at all the other things necessary to run your own business. Maybe I’m just not good at sales. Maybe I’m just not good at marketing. Maybe I’m not good at Instagram reels. Maybe I’m not good at writing emails or making offers or figuring out Facebook Ads. How about technology, I’m just not good. There’s usually not even a maybe at the beginning when people say this to me.

They’re like, “I’m just not good at technology. I really struggle with it. I get really overwhelmed.” I’m just not good at managing my time. I’m just not good at sticking to what I said I was going to do. So many things to be not good at when you’re an entrepreneur. Here’s what I want to tell you. Of course you’re not good at it, you’re not. A lot of times people try to answer that part of the brain that says, “Maybe you’re not good at it”, with, “No, you are, you’re good at it, keep going, you can do it.”

And if that works, great, do it. I have just found for me that doesn’t work because I already know that I’m not good at something if I haven’t done it very much and it doesn’t come natural to me or especially if I haven’t done it at all or especially if it just doesn’t fall in my wheelhouse of my natural skills and talents and things that I am intrigued by and fascinated by. And that’s the way it goes when you’re an entrepreneur.

Maybe you consider yourself to be really creative, a more organic type thinker, okay, great. That can work really well and serve you really well. No matter what kind of business you run you’re going to need creativity and you’re going to need to be flexible and you’re going to need to be able to think organically. But that means the part that’s more linear, logical, prescriptive is going to be harder for you and you’re not going to be good at it especially in the beginning but maybe you’ll never be amazing at it.

And let’s say you’re a more logical linear type of thinker, okay, great, that’s going to serve you really well as you go to build your business. But there are going to be parts of building your business that require creativity and flexibility and a more organic way of thinking. And those parts might be hard for you. You might not be good at them. You might be terrible at them and you might never get amazing at them, okay, so what? So what?

I think there’s, I don’t know about you but there’s this part of my brain that thinks that there just are people who are just magically talented and they don’t have to get good at all of these things. Because they’re so amazing or skilled or just likable or magical in some way that they just get plucked out of the crowd by someone who gives them opportunities and money and success. Am I the only one that thinks this?

I love to listen to bios, bios, they don’t have to be audio bios but I love listening to true stories about really successful famous people because I’m always so shocked at how long it took most of them to become successful. And at how bad they messed up along the way, how bad they were at so many things or, and/or I should say, usually there’s a lot of that. And there’s also in many cases a lot of really hard situations they’ve gone through in their lives to no fault of their own, just circumstances that came along, family situations or health challenges or what have you.

The level of struggle and the amount of time and the perseverance and the deciding not to quit and the keeping on going and building themselves up even when they’d been literally torn down by the results or by someone or something happening in their life is astounding to me. And then it makes me go, “Of course, that’s why they have the level of success that they have is because they had the level of failure over and over again and hardship and trial. And for some reason they kept going anyway.” They were willing to be terrible at things.

I say this a lot but it really is life changing being willing to be terrible at things. Now, you don’t have to be trying to become a celebrity or achieve some super high level success. And if you are that’s fine too. But if you’re like, “I’m not trying to do that. I’m not trying to be Oprah or Chip and Joanna Gaines here. I just want to have a thriving business that brings in a nice income for myself and my family and provides a nice quality of life.” That is noble too.

That’s amazing too. But it’s still going to require perseverance and failure and getting up and trying again when it doesn’t work and then doing that over and over and over and over again to learn the things you need to learn and become the person you need to become to achieve what you want. It really is. It might not require as catastrophic of level of failure when you’re aiming a little bit, I don’t want to say smaller but just a little bit more easygoing but it may. It may.

So here’s the thing. I am really good at being not good at things, I am. I just, I don’t know what happened. When I went through coach training nine years ago something clicked in my head when I heard Brooke Castillo say, “You have to be willing to be bad at it. You’re going to be terrible at it, it’s fine. You’re going to be terrible at coaching in the beginning.” You are, you’re not a good coach in the beginning because you don’t have enough experience to be a great coach. You’re an okay coach, you’re a so, so coach, you’re good enough.

You’re not going to hurt anybody if you pay attention in coach training and depending on where you’re trained or what you do. I’m not saying you’re going to harm anyone but you’re not going to be great at it, you’re really not. That’s why in the beginning I coached people for free. I said, “Come and get some help from me, I promise it will change your life. And I’m not even great at it and it’s still going to change your life. Are you ready? Let’s go.”

And then I said, “Come and get some coaching from me at a really phenomenal rate. I’m getting better but I still have a long ways to go but I have tools that are going to change your life. Are you ready? It’s going to cost you not that much, you’d better get in right now because one day it’s going to cost a lot.” I just knew that. So you don’t have to pretend you’re really good at it, you really don’t, it’s okay to be not good at it. The key is just are you willing to be not good at it? And sometimes you will be terrible at it, sometimes you will fail.

Some of your marketing is going to fail miserably. You’re going to write sales copy that’s going to suck, it’s not going to convert at all. You’re going to run ads that are going to lose money if you put money into them. Or you’re going to have conversations with people that don’t want anything to do with you, that are like, “Ugh, get away.” They probably won’t say it that way but they’ll just start to not answer your emails or calls or texts. You are going to do all that.

You’re going to say it the wrong way. You’re going to accidentally offend someone. You’re going to put out content that is cringy. At least, I don’t know any way around that. I don’t know anyone that’s succeeding that didn’t start by being pretty bad at it and maybe there will be again a couple things that happen to fall within your zone of genius that you’ll be naturally a lot better at than the average person. But there’ll still be a whole bunch of other things that you’re terrible at, so now what? Are you willing to just be terrible at it? Own it.

Say it out loud. It makes me feel better to just own it with people like, “Hey, I’m going to do this thing with you but just so you know it’s my first time. I’ve no idea what I’m doing. I’ll probably make some mistakes. I want you to know I’m going to take care of you. I will do my best to correct those mistakes but here’s my best guess as of now, let’s go. “That’s the way you do it. I just see people shut down when they’re not good at things. Sometimes I coach people, as a coach my job is to give you true honest feedback.

And some people want the honest feedback and that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t still hurt a little when somebody tells you that you’re not doing it right or that you whatever, especially depending on how they deliver the feedback. I feel I’m pretty soft about how I deliver it but it still doesn’t ever feel great. What we want to be told is, “You’re amazing at that, you did it perfectly, keep going.” But if that were the truth then we would already be at the level of the goal that we’re seeking to achieve and then we would probably have a next level goal which means there’s a bunch of other things that we’re not good at now.

So the solution is to learn to be not good at things and the better you can get at that the faster you’ll succeed because the more you struggle and are willing to be terrible at something the faster you’ll get good at it. And if you’re willing to be terrible publicly then you can get the necessary feedback to know how to improve. Here’s what I mean, when I decided earlier, I don’t know when it was, last year sometime. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to have to do some reels on Instagram because that’s what’s converting on Instagram.”

And if I want to keep using Instagram to try to get my message out then I’m going to have to play the game a little bit and reels are hands down the way. I don’t know if that’s still the case but they were at this point last year. And I was just like, “I don’t know how to make a reel.”

I remember sitting in the drive-thru at Chick-fil-A with my daughter who’s a teenager and saying, “Can you help me figure out how to do this reel thing, how do people do this where it looks like they’re in their pajamas and they jump in the air and the next thing you know they’re in their clothes? How does any of this work? How do you put music to it? How do you put words to it? How do you do it?” And it really only took 10 minutes for my teenager.

She had never done a reel either but of course being a teenager she just clicked around and tried a few things and she went like, “It goes like this.” And she taught me. I was like, “Okay, I understand the technology kind of well enough.” Now I have to go try to create some content and all I know to do is to try to imitate a little bit of what I’ve seen and make it my own. That’s what we do at first. And it’s cringy because it’s not me. It’s me trying to emulate what I’ve seen someone else do. And that’s always going to be cringey but that’s where I have to start anyway.

And as I did that more and more I figured out what are reels for me and for my clients in my business because a reel is actually just a short video. Once I learned that it helped a lot. I was like, “Wait, I thought a reel meant you have to be pointing at words or you have to be jumping and changing clothes or you have to be whatever.” And it could be those things. That might work well in your business. A reel is just a short video that you happen to have a lot of pretty amazing tools to edit in a really more engaging way really fast and easily thanks to Instagram. That’s it, it’s just a short video.

So how do I want to use short videos to best serve my clients, to get my message out? And then I got really good at reels. I got much better at reels anyway. I still have a long way to go actually. I’m just not as bad at them as I was in the beginning. But you know what? Some of my reels are kind of cringy, some of them still are actually. But in the beginning most of them were.

Okay, I’m willing to be bad at it and put it on social media where I have quite a few followers, you know why? When I see what people respond to, when I see how things perform then I get some feedback about what to do differently or what to try next time or what to never do again. And also when other people who are really good at Instagram see those reels and they can give me some tips and pointers. But if I’m sitting at home waiting to get good at it, that’s a no.

So the way I chose to dive in and I’m just using this as an example, pick one little thing that you think it would be really useful if I got better at that. With reels I said, “Alright, I’m going to do”, this was last fall, maybe September-ish. And I said, “I’m going to do a reel every day from now till the end of the year.” And I wasn’t 100% on that but I was probably 80/85%, B minus, that’s what we aim for. That’s a lot of reels for someone who had never done a reel.

So you have to be willing to be not good at things. I started to say this earlier but I might have lost my train of thought but I was saying as a coach sometimes I give people feedback. And they cringe and they can’t handle it and they shut down and they’re so upset and they go into shame and drama and overwhelm and they talk about it for weeks after like, “Can you believe Jody told me this?”

I’m just like, “Whoa, you know what, you’ve got to thicken up your skin a little bit. You’ve got to be willing to get your own back. Maybe the answer is okay, thanks for your input, Jody Moore, I’ll take it into consideration.” And maybe your thought is, no, Jody’s wrong. I am perfectly fine with that. I would much rather you go to, “I disagree. I hear what you’re saying Jody Moore and I disagree.” That is going to serve you so much better than shutting down and moving into drama and freaking out. Don’t do that. Don’t do that.

Be willing to be ‘bad’ at things, even your craft, even the thing that you ultimately want to do, so whether that be your coaching or your interior design or the breath work that you do. Maybe you’re bad at that at first. Okay, just promise not to hurt anybody and then be upfront about the fact that you’re new and you’re testing stuff out and you’re going to take care of people. You’re going to be really generous in the process but you need practice and experience to get better. That is the way you get better.

After the book learning, that should be the shortest part but most of us want to make it the longest part then you just have to be willing to be bad at things. And don’t pretend to be good. I see people go, “No, I got this. I’m really good at this.” And then they’re terrible at it and it’s way worse than if they just say, “Hey, I want to try this thing, I want to get good at it but the truth is I don’t really know how. I don’t have a lot of experience. Give me a chance and then I’ll welcome your feedback.” Or, “Give me some guidance and I will implement it and then give me some feedback and help me get better.”

All of us are actually really open to other people being bad when they’re really upfront and honest about it. What we don’t like is somebody trying to pretend that they’re really good at something and then they’re not. It feels fake. We don’t connect with that. But if somebody was like, “I’m not good at this at all but I do have some things I’ve learned. I want to test it out. I want to get better at it. I want to give you a killer deal. I want to help you for free or make it really inexpensive and I welcome your feedback. And I promise I’ll be making changes as I figure out how to get better at it.”

That’s kind of a beautiful thing. Alright, you’ve got to be willing to be bad at things. And even when you get good at those things like I said, there will be a whole new set of things that you’ll be bad at. So this is a skill that is not just necessary for new business owners or entrepreneurs. This is necessary ongoing even if you’re like, “I like where my business is at, I don’t want it to grow. I don’t want to change it.” Okay, but the world around you is going to change so you’re going to have to constantly be making improvements at least to your business in order to even just maintain where it’s at.

I mean think about pizza places before there was delivery. There were pizza places, I remember when I worked in corporate, one of our leaders used to tell this story about this pizza place, this was in California where I wasn’t raised. So he would name the pizza place, I don’t remember the name now but everyone would go, “Oh yeah, I remember that place, it was really good.” And he was like, “When was the last time you saw one?” And everyone said, “I haven’t seen one for a long time.”

He said, “That’s because they didn’t want to deliver pizza.” They said, “No, we’re good. We want to just stay where we are.” But the rest of the world started delivering pizza and because they weren’t willing to change, you don’t have to want to grow but you’re going to have to change at some point to keep up with changing times. And they went out of business because they weren’t willing to. So change is inevitable but it’s a beautiful thing.

I want you to master the skill of being okay with being terrible at things. Are you in? Alright, thanks for joining me everyone. I’ll see you next week. Take care.

Hey there, if you enjoy this podcast or even if you just find that it sort of piques your curiosity, or it makes you think, you’re going to love the book that I wrote. It’s called Better Than Happy: Connecting with Divinity Through Conscious Thinking. And it’s available now at Amazon in print or kindle version. Or if you want me to read it to you, head over to audible and grab the audio version. And why not grab a copy for your sister, your best friend, or your mom while you’re there too. Just saying.