It’s Not The Tool, It’s How You Use It

Last week I had a conversation with one of the community members in my coaching program and it ended on a much different note than he expected.

He’s building a new invoicing system for his business and he wanted to streamline it - make sure the process from start to end was as efficient and dialed in as possible. Seeing the quality he already had, I asked him “What’s the constraint? What’s keeping you from getting the result you want?.” And after a brief dialogue we realized the limiting factor wasn’t the system itself, it was the consistency with which he was using it.

This is such a common problem. There are thousands of products in the marketplace that can help you with anything and everything, and people figure that a new tool or resource is going to get them a new result. That’s often not the case. The problem isn’t that we don’t have the right tools, but rather that we don’t know how to use the tools we have.

There are so many habit tracking apps out there designed to support you in being healthier and more focused. And people bounce around from one to the next hoping that it’ll be the one that changes their life. But they all fall into the same unfortunate fate of being lost and forgotten.

It’s like an assembly line where you’re trying to make one step of the process 10% better, but the real problem is getting people to show up to do each task.  Who cares if that one step is 10% better if there's no one there to do it!

For this Community Member, the constraint wasn’t the quality of his invoicing set up, it was his consistency of using the system, following the process, and delegating the work to his team. So that’s what we improved upon - helping him build new systems of time management and awareness that prompted him to use what he’s built more easily and reliably.

No matter what tool you choose to use, the limiting factor is your ability to use it. Any tool can work when you work it, but that’s where most people fall short.

If you’re looking to get into better habits and routines, let me share with you my system for being more disciplined in the things you know you should be doing or could be doing better. And not just the tool, but the process behind the tool that helps you to use it consistently (and really accelerate your progress in ways you never have).