470: Don’t Just Learn: DO!
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What are you learning right now? Are you doing anything with it? We’re reflecting on the overwhelming abundance of information available to us, especially in running a pet care business. There is a crucial difference between endlessly acquiring knowledge and actually applying it to make tangible progress in our business. Something that is a hard balance to walk. We want to encourage you to prioritize action over consumption of new information!
Main topics:
Stop taking in new information
Information overload
Making time to do stuff
Learning from doing
Main takeaway: We should never learn at the expense of doing.
Links:
Episode 255: https://www.petsitterconfessional.com/episodes/255
Episode 390: https://www.petsitterconfessional.com/episodes/390
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
learning, pet sitters, information, listen, business, blogging, implement, pet, hard, reels, homework assignment, associates, conference, priority, commit, applicable, webinar, easier, coaching program, episodes
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin Funkhouser
Meghan 00:00
Oh Hi there. Welcome to pet sitter confessional. I'm Meghan. I'm Collin, and we are the hosts. Thank you for joining us. Today we're going to be talking about not just learning but doing thank you to pet sitters associates and our Patreon supporters like Liz, Jillian Lisa, Ashley, Stephanie Tracy, house and Hound, Wendy, Shirley and Keith, thank you very much for listening and finding value in the almost 500 episodes that we have. If you would like to help keep the podcast going, you could go to pet sitter professional.com/support, to see all of the ways that you can help out. We are so hot off the heels of the Texas pet sitters conference from last weekend and the NAPS Conference this past weekend. There has been a lot of learning going on while we were in Texas, we were speaking with someone who said something that really stuck with us. She said, I'm always learning, but it's hard to actually do anything. And that really hit us because there is so much information out there. I mean, I just said that our podcasts alone has almost 500 episodes and weeks and weeks worth of content, if you listen to it back to back. pet sitters International has been around for 30 years, naps has been around for a long time as well. There are a dozen or more pet sitting and dog walking business coaches out there. There's books, there's YouTube channels, for conferences for industry specific conferences every year. And then again, our podcast has almost 500 episodes, but the thing about knowledge is that ultimately it is pretty useless unless you're doing something with it. Yeah,
Collin Funkhouser 01:25
I mean, the other week I was reading a blog about the problem with creatives, you know, people who makes stuff, as well as with entrepreneurs, is that we as a collective are really good about reading books about being an entrepreneur, or about being creative. But a lot of times, we're really bad about actually doing the creative work. And it's for two big reasons. The first one is, as entrepreneurs, we are too busy. And we don't make time in our schedule to actually do something with the learning. But then secondly, there can be moments where we use learning as an excuse to actually avoid doing the work that we know we need to do. But the fact is, is that we should never learn at the expense of doing, I want to say that again, we should never learn at the expense of doing because when we do that, that means that we do not make any progress in our business. Basically, we just have all of this knowledge of what we should be doing. But we never actually get around to doing it. Because we're so busy learning the next thing.
Meghan 02:33
And in this day and age with the internet, there is always something else, there are always more reels, Facebook will never stop showing you reels, you will never hit the end of the reels, it will just keep putting more and more in your face. So at some point, and it's different for everybody, but you have to stop taking in new information and work on the stuff that you have that is on your to do list, you can get back to learning at another time, obviously learning is good, and we through our lives should never stop learning. But there is a time where we need to be doing instead of the learning because otherwise, our brain can't keep up. Truthfully, not everything that you take in is going to be applicable to you or stuff that you need to do. So if you listen to this podcast, and you are a solopreneur and you never want to grow a team, well, then you don't need to listen to the hiring episodes that we've done. Because those are not applicable to you, you can skip over those I give you permission. But that
Collin Funkhouser 03:27
information does take up brain space, right, and then you're eventually going to forget that information because you're taking in so much. And it's not even just the percentage of what you're taking in. Let's say that you listen to all of the podcasts episodes back to back to back to back to back. Don't do that. But let's say you did that. If only like 30% of that is actually applicable to you, okay, then you go to a conference, and only 30% of that is applicable to you. And then you keep doing that, eventually, you'll have all of this stuff that is just sitting there taking up space not doing anything for you, when you could be more focused in what you're actually trying to learn. You keep adding to this. And now you've got all this hours and hours of information. That's not actually helpful to you, but it's still up there in your brain. Because the fact is, is that the information that you take in you, we don't actually know what's good, what it's good for, until we start trying to do something with it, start trying to, to utilize it in our life in our business. Theoretically, it may be good for us. But that's only theoretical. It's when we actually turn to start implementing it and doing something with it, that we truly understand what we need to be doing and whether it was good information or not that
Meghan 04:39
implementation that thinking about it, it takes time. If you are if you are continuing to consume content, while you're supposed to be thinking about the implications of the thing that you just learned, you are not going to be giving your full attention to the thing you just learned and just keep consuming. Your brain will not stop trying to input information. But if you do that at the first roadblock You will likely throw in the towel to say I can't do this. This is too hard, or it's not, it's not worth it to me.
Collin Funkhouser 05:06
Because we didn't take the time to think through the information that we had. And we just rushed to trying to get to it. Because the what we do is not a cookie cutter business, you can listen to your friend's advice, you can listen to this podcast, you can try and find the right way, quote, unquote, right way to do something. But unless it works with how you work, you'll never actually do it. How are you actually going to implement blogging on your website? How are you going to post reels and things to social media, you can learn all you want about different training tactics and operant conditioning. But until you know how you'll actually use it, it's not any help at all, or
Meghan 05:45
maybe not use it at all. But that's where that takes the time. And knowing is this useful for my business? Or is this just something that somebody else does that I not super interested in, you're not going to know that until you get into it and try to figure it out for yourself. So again, it gets back to this, we feel like we don't know everything, and we don't watch. So we have to keep learning. But when we learn at the end of the day, it has to have an endpoint, learn and then do it. It's the doing that is the hard part. It's the doing that we try to avoid at all costs. Because when the rubber meets the road, that's when it gets hard. When you go to Step One of that project that you need to do. That's hard, when you are trying to implement it and figure it out what how is going to work in your business, it's much easier to continue to operate the way that you were doing it before. But if you have if you know that this is going to benefit your business, and you have the end goal in mind, it will make the doing easier. But we still need to do it.
Collin Funkhouser 06:47
Yeah, we see a lot of people who have taken the same courses two, three, even four times because they took it the first time, and they didn't have the time to start doing anything. At that time, they got busy. So they went they went and they took it a second time. And they kind of got halfway through it. But then they got busy or they got distracted or a big thing came up. And they were sort of kinda like, oh, well, nevermind, I'm not going to get to this. When we go to learn something, we need to commit ourselves that there's going to be an actionable outcome from this, that we can do before you even start saying, Yeah, I'm going to take this course, I'm going to take this course so that I can do XYZ in my business, at the end of this, I will have the skills to do this thing that I've been trying to do, I'll commit to whatever you know that I need to do, always walk away with adding something to your homework, we're going through this process of working with a lady from our local college, where she's walking us through various marketing aspects and website stuff, it's really good. It's good to just dig down into some basics to make sure that we have all this covered. Every time I'm on this phone call, I'm listening to what this person is telling me and it's a lot of things. But at the end, I have to ask myself, what's my homework assignment, because I personally, I don't want to just sit and have her talk to me for 1530 minutes or whatever about on site SEO, or blogging or image tagging or whatever. I want to have her talk to me about that for whatever length of time so that I can do something with it. I need to have a homework assignment at the end of the cycle. Okay, great. You've talked to me about on site SEO, it sounds like I need to do this one thing this coming week, so that I can take this knowledge that you've given me and actually make an application towards our business to make it better? Well,
Meghan 08:34
it's also hard because we intake information all of the time, practically, virtually while we're sleeping, it feels like there's just so much to consume. We're in taking this information all the time. And it doesn't feel like it takes time. But when you actually sit down pen to paper or hand to computer, then you're actually taking the time to physically do something, it's easy to listen to a webinar in the background while you do other things. Something that we struggle with is that we find it really easy to sign up for a webinar that we know is going to be really helpful to us in our business. But we know that it's going to be recorded. So either we skip it altogether, because we're busy doing something else or we try to multitask with it and have it on in the background and know that we're listening but also we're trying to do other things at the same time. And then we just really don't pay attention. And then they send us the recording and the follow up emails and everything and we say we'll get to it, we'll go back and pay attention to it. But then it just sits on our email inbox and we never get to it. And it's so frustrating because I need to make the time for this. And I want to because I know it's going to be beneficial for us, but I just don't.
Collin Funkhouser 09:37
Yeah, it's part of that I'll get to it later. And we think we always think our future self will have more time than our future self actually will. The only way that our future self will have that time is this present self gives them that time and blocks out that schedule allows them that space that capacity to to process or to To review or to look at or to complete the handout, the paperwork, watch, whatever it was, that that is a gift that we give to our future self. And unless we deem it a priority and real issue right now, but it's hard, right? Because life happens, things come up, we have fires to put out we've got to do with kids at the school, we've got to deal with staff members, or new new clients coming in, or problems that are coming up for trainings that we need to take. All of that is very important. And it is about us finding out ways and blocking that time off just for us personally going know, if I, if I don't, if I can't commit to an hour today to watch that webinar. Where is that hour coming from next week, and Am I blocking it out them? Because I know that's something that we can get a lot better at.
Meghan 10:46
If you're finding it hard to get started on a project that you know you need to do. Just take a little bit out of time, just eat the elephant one little bite at a time we talked about this on a couple episodes, episodes 255, which was feeling overwhelmed and inadequate. And then also Episode 390, which was the process of self coaching in your pet business. Something that is great for your business is pet sitters associates, as pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members. And that's why pet sitters Associates is here to help for over 20 years, they've provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. Because you work in the pet care industry, you can take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options, client connections and complete freedom in running your business. Learn why pet sitters Associates is the perfect fit for you and get a free quote, at pets@llc.com. You can get a discount when you join by clicking membership pets that are conventional and use the discount code confessional when you go to checkout, check out the benefits of membership and insurance once again at pets@llc.com. And
Collin Funkhouser 11:43
it's a lot more than just taking notes, right? I can teach people how to take notes all day, we can talk through all the different systems, the different platforms we can our different thoughts and schools of thoughts around note taking and how all of that works for your particular brain or learning style. We can have all the highlighters that we want people geek out on highlighters, like they really do people geek out on notebooks, on the pencils on the format. That's what they spend all of their time actually doing. And when I say like you're talking about yourself, I was gonna say when I say people, I really mean me, right? Because when when I take information, I like to have it organized. When I was taking classes, especially in science, anytime there was information that was about a plant, I would write that down in my green pen. Anything about animals was in blue, I had this whole coding thing in my notes. But what was actually important at the end, what was necessary, it was that after the information was all down, what do we do with it, I would teach my students to come to go comb back over it, you rewriting it, organizing it in a different way, put it into a system so that we can use it later. And as a business owner, we've got to put it on our to do list, putting things on our calendar, making a phone call to a friend, or maybe calling a CPA or going on Fiverr. And looking for somebody to help you with that next project. Whatever the options are, it means you have to take actions with what you wrote down,
Meghan 13:07
if we take in 30% of 100% of whatever it is if we are needing to do something with that 30%. And it's good useful information. But we don't, we'd never do anything with it. We've listened to it, and we think we've learned it. But we don't actually do anything with that 30%. And ultimately, it was just a big waste of time, which is very sad. And very unfortunate. If you've paid for a coaching program or an online course or something, you don't want to have to go back over two or three times to revisit that. But if a year later, we're back at the same spot. And we've never implemented anything from the last time, then what was all of it for, which is another reason why people take the same thing 234 times, if we would just do the thing right the first time, we wouldn't have to spend so much extra time. And
Collin Funkhouser 13:54
what's important to hear is not that we should stop learning. But we should allow ourselves time and space to digest and do something with what we have just learned instead of just rushing off to the next thing, because then we fill our calendar, here's how we fill our calendar with the next webinar instead of blocking off time to implement what we learned the previous week. And all we have is a calendar full of events to take in new information instead of a calendar that's been blocked off to give us space and time to implement them. And so really, what we need to be doing is making sure that when we sign up for something that there's an action item that we can take from it so that we're not just continually pulling ourselves through more and more information. Instead of doing the stuff with it. That's even more important. Like for example, maybe we hear a presentation about the importance of blogging, and we hear it 10 times in a row. You know, we go gosh, I better be blogging. I really need to do that. And then we hear it another time. Oh gosh, I really need an e book. Logging, I really need to do that. But then we go off and we read a book about something else. And then we go off and we read a webinar about something else. Well, do we really need to be doing the blogging? Or do we need to stop saying that we're going to do it, because telling yourself that you're going to do something and then never doing it? It's lying to yourself. You're, you're, you're cheating on yourself in that point. And at some point, you just need to admit that's not going to get done. And that's okay. That allows us then to refocus on other things that are maybe more important or more pertinent to where we are actually in our business. At that moment, it comes
Meghan 15:35
down to priorities, if you are having to take the same thing multiple times, are you saying, Okay, I'll get to this later, and it keeps getting pushed on your to do list that ultimately, it's not a priority for you. And again, that is okay. Except to fix taxes, you really do need to do those. Oh, that is important. But pretty much anything else in your business? If it's not a big priority for you, it is okay to either delegate it or just take it off your list completely.
Collin Funkhouser 16:02
Yeah, either move on to something else, or actually do the thing. There's no notebook in the world that's going to make blogging easier. There's no AI generator, that's going to make it easier. There's no simple writing app that's going to make blogging more effective for you. But there is Chad GBT, right, but it's low quality. And the search engines are actively working on decreasing content written by it, making it less available to people. So we want to avoid that. So there's no system in the world that will make you right, except you sitting down to actually write, like, Do you know how authors write books, they sit down, and they bang away on a keyboard for hours and hours and days and days? How do you shoot a video for training purposes for your staff, you sit down in front of your phone and turn on the camera, maybe using the loom app and you record yourself talking and talking, there's nothing that's going to make it easier, maybe a little bit of prep work. But at the end of the day, the camera has to be turned on recording must commence and you must talk, you just have to
Meghan 17:02
do it. And that's what this boils down to taking in all the information you want is great, but then do something with it. The information should spur you to action in whatever way that looks for your business or even your personal life. Really prioritize that time. We aren't saying that if you can't do anything with the information right away, then you shouldn't learn it. If you're a solo now and you want to hire in the future, go ahead and take that hiring course so that you're that much further along when you go to hire. It's okay to learn things. Now for the future. We're talking about paying money to go to a conference or sign up for a course buying that book paying for a coaching program. That is time and money that you are dedicating to those things wished you could have spent elsewhere. Go in with a homework assignment. Be intentional with the things that you choose to spend your time with, because you can't get time back. Don't keep wasting your time and money on things. We want to challenge you pick one thing you want to learn this quarter in the next three months, and then commit to using that in your business. Do something with it. But just one thing. That's all you can let us know what you have picked. If you would like to you can email us at feedback at Pet Sitter confessional.com or send us a voicemail at 636-364-8260. Thank you very much for our sponsor, pet sitters associates and our Patreon members for helping to support today's show. Thank you most of all for taking your time your most valuable asset and listening to this today. We will talk to you next time. Bye
