Are You Doing Your Greatest Work with Dr. Amanda Crowell

You feel it calling to you—the Great Work you most want to do in the world—but real life keeps getting in the way. Dr Amanda Crowell, author of “Great Work: Do What Matters Most Without Sacrificing Everything Else”, tells us how to get to the work we were most meant to do:

How to get off the “productivity roller coaster of doom” to make the time for your Great Work.

Why your health and happiness make your Great Work flow easier—and how to optimize for them.

A few questions to consider if you haven’t quite figured out your Great Work (hint: the threads are already there).

A framework to catalyze your Great Work from simply a motivating vision to specific day-to-day actions.

The role of identity in keeping you from—or rushing you to—your Great Work.

LINKS

Dr. Amanda Crowell Website | Book | LinkedIn | Instagram

Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram

BIO

Dr. Amanda Crowell is a cognitive psychologist, speaker, podcaster, author of Great Work, and the creator of the Great Work Journals.

Amanda’s TEDx talk: Three Reasons You Aren’t Doing What You Say You Will Do has received more than a million views and has been featured on TED’s Ideas blog and TED Shorts. Her ideas have also been featured on NPR, Al Jazeera, The Wall Street Journal, Quartz, and Thrive Global.

Amanda lives in New Jersey with her husband, two adorable kids, and a remarkable newfiepoo named Ruthie. She spends her days educating future teachers, coaching accidental entrepreneurs, and speaking about how to make progress on Great Work to colleges and corporate teams.

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TRANSCRIPT

00:00 – 00:26
Amanda Crowell: If I showed up unprepared for a consulting meeting, they should fire me. I did it wrong. I picked the wrong thing. But you can’t allow that truth to be the fear that keeps you racing against the clock to do every single thing perfectly, because you cannot allow yourself to ever do perfectly passable work because in your heart of hearts you knew it could be better. That is a prison of your own making.

00:30 – 01:10
Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to Soloist Women where we’re all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I’m Rochelle Moulton and today I’m here with Dr. Amanda Kroll, who is the author of Great Work, Do what matters most without sacrificing everything else. She is a cognitive psychologist, speaker, podcaster, and creator of the great work journals. Amanda’s TEDx Talk, 3 Reasons You Aren’t Doing What You Say You Will Do, has received more than a million views and has been featured on Ted’s Ideas blog and Ted shorts. She lives in New Jersey with her husband, 2 adorable kids, and

01:10 – 01:27
Rochelle Moulton: a remarkable new fee poo named Ruthie and we’re all about the pets here. And she spends her days educating future teachers, coaching accidental entrepreneurs, and speaking about how to make progress on great work to colleges and corporate teams. Amanda, welcome.

01:28 – 01:30
Amanda Crowell: Thank you for having me.

01:31 – 01:32
Rochelle Moulton: We finally made it happen.

01:33 – 01:36
Amanda Crowell: I know. It’s just like that these days.

01:36 – 01:56
Rochelle Moulton: I hear you. Well, I discovered your book, Great Work, and I knew you had to come on the show, so thank you for joining us. It is so full of great wisdom for soloists in the expertise space, I almost didn’t know where to start. So how about with a definition? So Amanda, when you say we want to do our great work, what do you mean exactly?

01:57 – 02:32
Amanda Crowell: That’s such a good question. So great work, most simply described, is the work that matters the most to you, which almost sounds like a cop out. It’s like, yeah, but what is it? But it really is the definition. It is my experience of people that everybody has something inside of them that has been brewing since birth, some issue that they care about, some industry that they’re drawn to, some big idea that has sparked light in them. And it’s not that it’s 1 true love, but it’s more like a way of being in the world that can

02:32 – 03:06
Amanda Crowell: shift and change. Like you write this book and then you start that podcast and then you do this job and then you start that team and it can shift and grow with you as you grow. But there’s a golden thread almost that ties it all the way through that marks it out as your great work. What’s interesting about your great work is that it’s often the thing, tragically, that we don’t get to. It’s the thing that in a world of commitments and expectations, we often spend time saying, oh, I will write my book when I’m retired,

03:06 – 03:38
Amanda Crowell: or I’ll get there later when the kids are grown. And we never really prioritize it because we continue to prioritize the expectations, the external demands over our great work. And so the book and my work is to help people figure out how to do that great work now without, make, because 1 thing that will happen is people will be like, how, okay, I’m going to add my great work to my life and I’ll change nothing else. And then you get on what I like to call the productivity roller coaster of doom, which is where you’re just

03:38 – 03:51
Amanda Crowell: very burned out and you’re doing too much and you’re stretched too thin and you think I never should have done my great work. But there’s just skills and strategies to make it possible to do your great work without sacrificing your health and happiness

03:52 – 04:26
Rochelle Moulton: Well, I now have a new phrase the productivity roller coaster of doom Yeah, I think a lot of people can relate to that kind of on that topic So in the opening of the book, you tell a series of stories about your own health challenges that forced you down this path of managing your work and your life and your stress better. And I was struck by how after you went through all the time management tools, including David Allen’s getting things done, which I also like, you realized that you were productive but not, and I quote, more

04:26 – 04:34
Rochelle Moulton: relaxed, grounded, and joyful. So, Will you talk some more about how we can let our happiness matter?

04:35 – 05:11
Amanda Crowell: Oh wow, what a great question. And I want to give a lot of props to productivity tips and tricks, you know, like you can get this. The story goes that I totally maxed myself out and then was able to create a semblance of work-life balance by using, getting things down and other like productivity tools and tricks. And it was a really great learning experience for me. I learned a ton. I was able to do, as they say, a lot more without getting burned out. But there was this missing undertone, this current of, I was still mostly

05:11 – 05:50
Amanda Crowell: beholden to the external expectations of deadlines, multiple clients. I’ve always had multiple jobs. And there was this feeling of like Now I’m doing so much more But I didn’t make any space for my great work. I just did more of what was expected of what was default I wasn’t necessarily exerting a lot of influence on my own life. And that just felt like it was this impossible game where the more I gave to these expectations, the more I was doing and I was getting accolades and I was doing well and I was making more money, but

05:50 – 06:24
Amanda Crowell: like my life, my feeling of my life wasn’t changing. And what happened to me very specifically was that I actually got everything I wanted. I got this book deal that I really was like a lifelong dream of mine. I was totally booked with coaching clients. I was you know really enjoying my work at the School of Education where I teach. You know everything was going great but I was so at capacity all the time that I ended up, there’s a thing that happens in very stressed out people, which I think describes most of us. If you

06:24 – 06:57
Amanda Crowell: have an injury, like a traumatic, but that’s a more dramatic word than I really mean, like I fell hard on my foot. Sometimes if you really will fall hard, it triggers all the inflammation in your body. And I had this massive, just because I hurt my foot, I had a massive full body autoimmune flare up. No 1 really knows why. It wasn’t diagnosed as like rheumatoid arthritis or fibromyalgia is the other 1 that they thought it might be. It wasn’t those things. And yet every single joint in my body was inflamed and it was hard to

06:57 – 07:31
Amanda Crowell: climb the stairs. It was quite the wake-up call actually. And I was like, Why did I do this? Why did getting what I want trigger my body’s most complete shutdown? And it was just a moment where I was like, Okay, Amanda, what are you doing here on this planet? Are you gonna achieve and strive and drive yourself and just collect accolades that you don’t have any time to enjoy? Or are you going to not do that? And you know, it felt like a choice. But really, at the end of the day, I couldn’t survive what I

07:31 – 08:05
Amanda Crowell: was doing to myself. I was making my own body attack itself. And I had this pivotal moment where I was like, okay, I guess that’s it for me. I’m just not gonna do, I didn’t have the term great work yet, but I’m just not gonna do my great work. I’m just gonna give up and I’m gonna like, just reach my classes and just try to enjoy the way things are. And what shocked me, it was truly shocking, was the minute that I took the steps necessary. I said no to the extra things I was doing. I

08:05 – 08:37
Amanda Crowell: closed down some clients that I was working with. I was still working with a consulting company that I had, we used to be full time with, and now it was just like a part time consultant. I stopped doing that. And I added things to my life that made me more relaxed and happy. I started riding my bike again and healed what had become a somewhat strained relationship with my husband and just really kind of became a relaxed and more, I don’t know, joyful version of myself. And what truly shocked me was that was when my great

08:37 – 09:14
Amanda Crowell: work took off. As a recovery project, I designed these great work journals that have become like a foundation of the work that I do with clients and I really love it. My own sort of whole person time management system. I wrote the book, Great Work, I launched the podcast. And I found that people are more interested and willing to work with me. And Everything just exploded into the space that I had created by not doing everything all the time for everyone anymore, but instead doing what really matters and making sure that I never got. I now

09:14 – 09:46
Amanda Crowell: think of my resilience or my like bounce back ability. That’s something that I manage almost the way people manage their budgets. I watch it, I keep track of it, I make sure that if I’m doing something really heavy loaded early in the week, I don’t do it later in the week. If I start to get sight, you know, noticing my own triggers, then I build more resilience into my life again, because I just now realize that great work, the work that really matters, not like checking boxes off on a list, but The work that really matters,

09:46 – 10:14
Amanda Crowell: it happens because of your resilience and despite hustle. That’s what I really learned. That if you wanna do great work, you stop hustling and you actually build your resilience and you create space for creativity and communication and critical thinking and collaboration, which are the things that create amazing world-changing art and ideas and products and whatever else it is that you’re doing speeches, books, blog posts, podcasts.

10:16 – 10:50
Rochelle Moulton: In sort of an odd way, the gift of your health experience is that you learned that you now manage your bounce back ability, your resilience. And I love to think that we don’t all have to go that far. I know. I mean, sometimes we do. But if we can, you know, start to dial that back and really recognize, there’s a quote from the book that kind of gets to this point, great work flows better when we are healthier and happier. Yeah. Yeah. And I just love that because I think sometimes we think it’s supposed to be

10:50 – 11:05
Rochelle Moulton: a grind. This is mostly an anti hustle crowd that’s listening to this. It’s kind of an anti bro hustle. Yeah, it is about being healthy and happy and then having more capacity to do the things that are really meaningful to you.

11:05 – 11:10
Amanda Crowell: Yeah and doing them faster and more creatively and with more success really, which is the best part.

11:11 – 11:27
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah so of course the big question that lots of us ask ourselves is what is our purpose, What is our great work? I mean, if a listener hasn’t quite figured it out yet, like where do you suggest they start with the 4 essential pillars that you talk about?

11:27 – 11:56
Amanda Crowell: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think that, you know, for people who are book readers, I think chapter 2 of the book is a great exploration of that piece by piece. But the top level of it is that your great work has always been with you. So a lot of times we think we don’t know what our great work is, but the truth is we’re just not believing what we’re hearing from inside of ourselves. So there are questions that you can ask yourself like in the book there’s like a little list of them it’s like

11:56 – 12:26
Amanda Crowell: what what has always been true like ever since you were a small person like what has always interested you what has always captivated your interest what makes you think could I possibly do that, like let that be the first spark of it, but then there’s also questions like you can find it through the opposite of that, which is like what isn’t working in your life right now. Like that can point the way out of the things that maybe would be great work for other people but aren’t for you. And like what feels missing. I think the

12:26 – 13:04
Amanda Crowell: most interesting question actually that helps you discover what your great work is, is when you have an experience of like full body jealousy. And when somebody has an accomplishment and you just think to yourself, why isn’t that me? Why didn’t I do that? Why haven’t I set myself up for that too? Like I could do that and it doesn’t mean that you’re begrudging somebody their accomplishment, but instead it just points the way towards something that we feel deep inside ourselves would bring us a great amount of joy that we could be great at that could be

13:04 – 13:32
Amanda Crowell: part of our contribution to the world. There’s lots of different tips and tricks and stuff like that you can do an audit of the work that you have done. This is a great 1 that people can do without any more information which is like write down each and every place that you’ve either worked or projects that you’ve worked on depending on the kind of work that you do and Write down the parts about each job that you really enjoyed and loved and what you enjoyed and loved about it And then look across your history and you

13:32 – 14:03
Amanda Crowell: once you make your great work visible to you, it’ll pop out like a neon sign. Like, here I am. This is what I am. And it’s there. I’ve never met anyone. I have a lot of people who tell me, I understand that some people have great work, Amanda, but I just don’t. I just really don’t. And I just don’t believe it. I don’t believe it because I’ve had hundreds of conversations with people and it all it really this the vast majority of people just don’t believe that what they are hearing inside themselves is like good enough

14:03 – 14:36
Amanda Crowell: for great work or like that they have the education or the expertise or the connections possible to do to get involved in what it is they’re hoping to do. They’re hoping to do. And so it’s more a question of learning how to believe in what you’re hearing and then giving yourself the tools and the time and the patience to figure out how to do it piece by piece, which is the other half of the book. First half of it’s like, what is great work? And the second half is like, how do we actually do it? Well,

14:36 – 14:46
Amanda Crowell: it’s that question of value, too, because I think a lot of times what comes naturally to us, we discount. Because we think it comes like this to everyone.

14:47 – 15:24
Rochelle Moulton: But I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count all of the people I’ve met in my life who have a unique skill that I just revere. And they don’t see it because it’s there inside the bottle, right? They just can’t see it. So it’s sometimes I think what’s helpful too is, is when you listen to yourself, but you also listen to things other people who you respect, say, when it’s good, ignore the bad stuff. But when it’s good, there are some clues in there into the things that you do that really Impact and matter to

15:24 – 15:27
Rochelle Moulton: other people that I think we can pay attention to sometimes.

15:27 – 15:56
Amanda Crowell: Yes. That’s a really great point You can actually go on a you can tell them I was listening to a podcast and the author of the book said that I had to, so now I have to. You know, go to 3 or 5 people that you just really value and say like, what are the 3 skills that you would say are my most powerful, the ones that have impacted you the most, you can go seek it actively. You can look back at what people have said, but you can also just outright ask people. They will tell

15:56 – 15:57
Amanda Crowell: you gladly.

15:57 – 16:12
Rochelle Moulton: Oh, and it’s so much fun too, because you get something back and it’s kind of like you’re getting the Academy Award and you’re saying, thank you, thank you. From a room of peers, I super respect it. Yeah. It’s very, very affirming.

16:13 – 16:13
Amanda Crowell: Huh.

16:13 – 16:33
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. I guess it’s not surprising with, you know, your emphasis on health and happiness at work that you also suggest in terms of what we can do is that we do less. I said much much less. So what are some tactics that you suggest for listeners to do exactly that?

16:34 – 17:05
Amanda Crowell: Yes. So there are 6 strategies in the book that we talk about in terms of doing less. But I feel like this is 1 of these topics where people say, we should do less. And Everyone nods, yeah, we should do less, you’re right. But when the rubber hits the road, where it’s like time to tell your boss that you would like taken off of a project that you don’t feel like is really suiting you, and there’s somebody better for it, Or you’re going to say to the people at church that you’re no longer going to make

17:05 – 17:35
Amanda Crowell: the brochures for the weekly service or whatever it is, right? Like, when you do the list of things, which is 1 of the tasks that you have to do first is like really make a list of everything that you’re doing every commitment that you’ve made. And then you have to back out of some of them. That’s when people go like, Oh, I didn’t think you meant me. I didn’t think you meant this. I didn’t think you wanted me to tell people that I was not, you know. So it really is, it takes a ton of courage.

17:35 – 18:07
Amanda Crowell: And I say that first and foremost just to like make it so that people are aware that what we’re asking them to do is counterculture, we’re a yes culture. You should say yes and show up and go the extra mile and come in early and stay late and show everybody that you are in it to win it and so when you start actually doing the counterculture stuff which is backing out and saying no And then there’s a couple of other talking about doing accepting places where you can do sort of B minus work Where it’s still

18:07 – 18:37
Amanda Crowell: perfectly passable you would a hundred percent pass the class, but is it shining? No, but it doesn’t have to shine you can accept that so doing that kind of work especially when you’re honest about it, which you have to be in order to back out of something when you say to somebody, I know I said I would, but I can’t. It hurts. And we get really panicked about it. And that’s why this particular chapter nowhere else in the book do you see these, but this particular chapter has these panic buttons. Cause people, you know, I work

18:37 – 19:12
Amanda Crowell: with people to do this work and I have seen them come back, coaching call after coaching call, and they haven’t done it yet. And it’s like, what’s really at the core of it. They just don’t want people to think that they don’t care, that they don’t, you know, that they aren’t trustworthy, that they aren’t good for it. And yet they have to feel that way about themselves. They have to show up and make time for their own great work and for the growth of that great work into other things that are more aligned with where they’re

19:12 – 19:15
Amanda Crowell: hoping to go. But it does take a lot of courage.

19:16 – 19:51
Rochelle Moulton: I think some of it is cultural too. I mean, I have to say, when I read your sentence about doing B minus work, I had this body moment where I was starting to move and I realized I was demonstrating my discomfort with that because I don’t do be minus work. But here’s the thing, just as a really simple example, I keep notes for myself on a variety of different things. I always put the header in my favorite color. Does that take longer to do? Yes. Do I want typos on my project list? No. I fixed them.

19:51 – 20:10
Rochelle Moulton: But if I just went through it and just kind of just did it, I’d probably save myself some time and some angst. Just a very small example. But I think so many of us have been indoctrinated that we, especially women, I think, we can’t do B minus. We have to be A plus plus. Yeah, except that we are doing B minus work. This is the

20:10 – 20:42
Amanda Crowell: thing is it’s like, really, when you look at your actual life, if your health is suffering, if you are not exercising, if you are not spending enough time with the people that you love, if you aren’t keeping the items that you love in good repair, you’re doing B minus work. You’ve just accepted all the B minus work on the stuff that matters to your heart and happiness and you’re not giving any of the B minus work out to the world where the world does not care. The world does not care whether or not your task list

20:42 – 21:12
Amanda Crowell: is in that color. Now I’m not that might make you happy right like and that’s worth it right but I remember like 1 of the examples and it’s not at the at the level of the whole project, it’s not like, go do work for a client that you know could be better, but you don’t care, because You’re just trying to protect your time. It isn’t like that. But when you break a project down into smaller pieces, I used to work in consulting, and we were a very documentation heavy consulting company. So when you look at it

21:12 – 21:46
Amanda Crowell: almost like a workflow, first we would create an agenda, then we would go facilitate the meeting, then we would write a notes document, and then we would write follow-up emails. And if you try to show up, you can, until you have 14 clients, where every single agenda has a four-sentence, like, perfect explanation of the work that came up until that point takes you 20 minutes to write or you can write 5 minutes of bullet points. Do they care about the difference between your perfect pros and your bullet points? They don’t. They might even prefer the bullet

21:46 – 22:14
Amanda Crowell: points. I was sending these notes documents, and once I sent in a little survey out to all my clients and said, be honest with me, I don’t care, I’m not gonna be mad. Have you ever opened 1 of the notes documents? Not 1 of them had ever opened it, but they were pieces of beauty. And then I was like, okay, what are we really hoping to accomplish with these notes documents? We just, honest to God, the whole point of it was, and it was valuable, so that right before the next meeting I could open the notes

22:14 – 22:50
Amanda Crowell: documents and remember where we were so that I could facilitate the group meeting that we are about to have by saying Here’s what we did last time. Here’s what you said you would did said what you would do. Here’s the reminder to do those things I’ll see you tomorrow. Here’s what we’re gonna do so We often do these like shined up pieces of work when they genuinely don’t matter. And so at those tiny little levels, the notes document, the reminder email, the way that you prepare or follow up for something, and every job has its own

22:50 – 23:22
Amanda Crowell: areas where you can do B-minus work, and it doesn’t matter, and areas where you can’t. If I showed up unprepared for a consulting meeting, they should fire me. I did it wrong. I picked the wrong thing. But you can’t allow that truth to be the fear that keeps you racing against the clock to do every single thing perfectly because you cannot allow yourself to ever do perfectly passable work. Because in your heart of hearts, you knew it could be better. Like that is a prison of your own making.

23:22 – 23:52
Rochelle Moulton: Exactly. And the way you described it is there’s kind of the work prison. And there’s the, I guess I’ll call it home prison, but it could be about how you’re parenting your children, how you’re being a spouse or partner to your partner, all of those things. And when you look at your life in totality, that’s it, you do wanna spend time on those things that matter. I totally get that. It’s a great distinction. I just wanna point out 1 more thing about this part of the book. You used an expression, you know, the parking lot as

23:52 – 24:09
Rochelle Moulton: a way to do less. And I’ve heard that expression a million times, of course. But what I loved about what you did, because our friend David Allen with getting things done talks about the someday maybe list. But what I love about the parking lot is you’ve got short term, medium term and long term.

24:10 – 24:10
Amanda Crowell: Yeah,

24:10 – 24:21
Rochelle Moulton: there is something psychological about taking something and putting it on a parking lot list that immediately, at least for me, it immediately clears my brain.

24:21 – 24:51
Amanda Crowell: Yes, that is the point. Short-term parking is probably the most underutilized of the strategies, but I think it’s the most powerful. And that’s where you might only put it in the parking lot. So putting something in the parking lot means I’m not going to think about it right now. I’m putting it out of my mind’s eye because I can’t do anything about it. I don’t want to do anything about it. Or like maybe I want to, but I just can’t. Whatever it is, you decide, okay, I’m just not gonna think about it right now. And short-term

24:51 – 25:22
Amanda Crowell: parking, you might only do it for the weekend. It’s really, really powerful as a routine. If you do have strong boundaries, or you attempt, or you really want them, between a working week and a weekend off, which people often sort of corrupt their weekends off with work. If you can have a routine on Fridays at 5 or whenever, it makes sense to do it, where you put all of your projects, you do a little work to shut them down so they can be safe and happy while you’re gone

25:22 – 25:23
Rochelle Moulton: for the weekend.

25:23 – 26:06
Amanda Crowell: And then you put them into short term parking. And then you go into your weekend having resolved them And accepting whatever happens over the weekend, you’ll handle it on Monday. And it’s like a psychological transition away from work. Something might happen, but I will not know until Monday. And there’s just an acceptance of that kind of thing that’s helpful. You can also really use short-term parking for emotional things that you have been making yourself crazy worrying about, and you can choose that you, like I’ve done this before where something is really worrying me Having a disagreement

26:06 – 26:34
Amanda Crowell: with my boss or I’m not sure whether I should stay at this company And I’m making myself crazy going around and around and around should I leave should I look for a new job? I’m not sure I’ve often put that in the parking lot. I’m not going to think about that problem of whether I should leave my job and get a new 1, for example, for a week, because I just need a break from it. So the minute it enters my mind, wanting to distract me and take away my resilience, I’m gonna say like, oh, well,

26:34 – 27:02
Amanda Crowell: I hear what you’re saying, but now’s not the time. I’m thinking about other things now I’ve made the space, you know, now’s not the time. And that’s really helpful. And that’s the kind of like self-management That makes it possible for you to rise above what you rightly pointed out as sort of a societal commitment to Be doing everything all the time. You can choose not to do Parts of what you’re doing right now. You can put it in short-term parking. It’s very powerful.

27:02 – 27:32
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, I have a husband who just shuts it off on the weekend. When that laptop, he has a separate work laptop, when that thing closes, it’s done. Done. It’s not on the phone, nothing, it’s done. And I so admire that about him. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So you also identify what looks like a simple system to help people develop their ideas and make their great work a reality. It’s an upside down triangle. I was thinking of Maslow only flipped.

27:32 – 27:33
Amanda Crowell: So can you

27:33 – 27:47
Rochelle Moulton: just talk a little bit about those, that triangle, because the thing that I loved about it is I felt like I could see if I have some ideas how I can get from having an idea to actually implementing it in my day to day.

27:47 – 28:19
Amanda Crowell: Yes, I love that upside down triangle. It’s like, I use it every day. And the reason that I do that is because at the very the top, the broadest part of the triangle, right, is what we all kind of, when people are like, I want to set my my annual goals, often what they end up doing is what you would rightly call visioning work, they go and imagine the New York Times bestselling book that they want to write and how it’s going to feel to get their lifetime achievement award and what the look on their husband’s

28:19 – 28:47
Amanda Crowell: face is gonna be when they tell them that they got the agent to sign the, you know? You can get real jazzed up about it. It’s like, oh man. And that’s the point of a vision, right? Is for it to carry the emotional burden of the goal. Because what we can do today can be kind of boring. Well today I’ll write that email. And you’re like that’s not, I can’t get all jazzed up about that unless you know that you can see how today’s actions lead towards that vision. But if you try to work directly from

28:47 – 29:20
Amanda Crowell: the vision, from the highest point of the upside down triangle, you can become very frustrated. Because often with great work, especially in the beginning, we’re working on the margins of our time. We’ve got 10 minutes, we have half an hour, we have an hour, we painstakingly saved 2 hours. Well, how are you gonna get closer to writing a New York Times bestselling novel in 10 minutes? You can’t, and it just feels so frustrating. And so you want to make sure that you understand that There’s different levels to goal setting. There’s that vision, which is like, someday,

29:20 – 29:50
Amanda Crowell: I don’t know how, I don’t know when, but someday, I’m gonna do that, I am. And it makes me feel all excited. Underneath that, it’s like, okay, if that’s where I’m headed, Big picture, what could I do in the next couple of years? 1 to 2 years, that’s the accessible aspiration. Now you can imagine doing it. If you wanna write a New York Times bestselling book, then what can you do in the next year or 2? Well, you can hone your, especially if you’ve never written anything ever you could hone your craft on a sub stack

29:50 – 30:25
Amanda Crowell: or you could Write a couple of articles that you’re gonna submit to journals Like there’s a version of the goal that gets you a lot closer to writing in New York Times bestselling book But it isn’t that It’s something that in 2 years you could reasonably do if you were to really put the time that you do have towards it over the next couple of years or even just 1 year. And then I think of goals as 90-day goals, because I find that psychologically people can really understand their lives for the next 3 months in a

30:25 – 30:51
Amanda Crowell: way that they, like even 4 months out, we start to get hazy about what life is going to be like. But we can imagine like, oh, 2 and a half months from now, could I have lunch with you? Yeah, I could probably do that. I can imagine my life well enough to know. So we want to think like, well, in the next 90 days, how can I, this is the key phrase, how can I get a little closer to where I’m headed in the next 90 days? Well, if I’m trying to hone my craft and maybe

30:51 – 31:17
Amanda Crowell: build an audience on Substack, in the next 90 days I can get Substack set up and I can publish a blog to it, or an essay or whatever they call them. And then the question becomes, okay, if that’s what I’m doing the next 90 days, What can I do this week to get a little bit closer to that? Well this week I can sign up and go poke around and you know you want to set goals You know whether or not you’ve met them so like I’m gonna look really closely at 5 sub stacks that I’ve

31:17 – 31:45
Amanda Crowell: kind of heard about in the ethos and we’ll look really closely at them and take notes about what I like and what I don’t like and start to understand the system. I can do that this week. And then the very point of the upside down triangle is what can I do today? Looking at your actual life, looking at your real commitments. How much time do you really have to put towards your great work? If it’s only 10 minutes, do not throw your hands up and say, oh, well, maybe tomorrow. Do 10 minutes. It’s easy to know

31:45 – 32:15
Amanda Crowell: what to do. If the goal is to set up Stubsac this week and today I have 10 minutes then I’m gonna go over there and I’m literally just gonna set up my account and then if I’ve got time later this week maybe I’ll look at the first person that I’ve mostly heard about you know look at Jenny Blake look at whoever else you know is over there, Tara McMullen, and really get to know that space in the 10 minutes you have today and the 10 minutes you have tomorrow. That helps you to connect, even though you’re

32:15 – 32:28
Amanda Crowell: just looking at Substack, you know that it’s, you know, you can see how it leads to your New York Times bestselling novel, you know, and that as the goal may change over time, but as long as it’s powerful and driving you to action and then it’s working as your vision.

32:29 – 32:59
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, that’s what I really liked about that whole model is that I think sometimes it gets hard for us to see how what we’re doing today connects to our vision, our mission. And after I read the book, I made a little triangle for myself. Yeah, I mean, I have my goals and have all this, but I just loved having this single visual that keeps your mind on the prize. So love that about the book. There’s so many discoveries in the book. That’s why I want to talk about like all these tactics as well as

32:59 – 33:39
Amanda Crowell: the strategy. Another thing I want to ask you about is when it comes to discovering how any 1 of us specifically does great work, you coined a term called self-expertise that you said becomes the driver of your great work. So what exactly is self-expertise? Yeah, so self-expertise is the information that you glean by observing yourself about how you specifically make change, about how you are able to organize your time, choose your goals, what really works for you, what really doesn’t work for you. And self-expertise is a little bit of a response to what I see in

33:39 – 33:57
Amanda Crowell: the productivity marketplace of ideas, where it’s like, here’s the best idea for productivity. Set the Pomodoro little 30 minute timer. But I’ve tried Pomodoro and it’s great. Some people love it, but for me, every 30 minutes I’m like brought out of my trance and I’m annoyed.

33:57 – 33:59
Rochelle Moulton: I threw my tomato away.

34:01 – 34:33
Amanda Crowell: Exactly. And you know what? It’s fine. It doesn’t have to work for everybody. And we will sit and we will be like, what’s wrong with me? I don’t want to wake up at 5 AM and have a morning routine that sets my day on fire the way Instagram tells me I’m supposed to. It’s fine. Do it at night. Know yourself. And so the the idea of self expertise is to think about the world of productivity tips and other people’s ideas and great ideas that sound like they might work for you as sort of your research and

34:33 – 35:06
Amanda Crowell: development arm. People giving you great ideas to try but then try it for yourself. You know really give it a shot and see if it works for you and if it doesn’t believe what you hear and you don’t have to use it. It might work for you. I can’t tell you how many productivity tips that did not work for me before I had kids. Suddenly, we’re the life raft once I had kids because my life changed dramatically. So there’s a season for productivity tips just like everything else, but instead of thinking like I’m gonna find the

35:06 – 35:38
Amanda Crowell: way It’s more like I’m going to stay in relationship with myself and my productivity and my life as that I accept it is as it is and I’m gonna find the elixir that’s working for me right now and Constantly remain open to new ideas and that things might shift and it sounds like well then there aren’t any productivity tips Like no, of course lots of things will work for you your whole life time blocking for me. Very powerful always it always has been I suspect it always will be But there are people who use time blocking,

35:38 – 36:08
Amanda Crowell: and they hate it. And so then they shouldn’t use it. So that’s self-expertise If you can just believe yourself when you say like, I’m just not going to get up at 5am. Now great. That’s great information. Now let’s see what we can build using your actual energetic tendencies and what does work for you. It’s possible to do your great work, period, but if you try to force yourself into something that doesn’t work, you’ll waste valuable time.

36:09 – 36:38
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, that’s kind of the newest thing du jour, right? It’s like somebody says, oh, here’s the productivity hack for today. It’s about finding your own way. So I want to talk about identity because you said some things in the book that just really, really resonated with me. So you said that identity shapes behavior and I couldn’t agree more. But so what I’m curious about is how does how we hold our identity mess with doing our great work?

36:41 – 37:16
Amanda Crowell: Well, so when we have a piece of our identity and then we try to do something new. We may not realize that that part of our identity is in conflict with what we’re asking. This is very abstract, so I’m gonna use an example. I’ll use my own self. I consider myself to be kind of a heart-centered helper type. You know, like I really want to help people do their great work. I love it when they do it, you know? I just, parts built into my DNA to be like that. And so When I started becoming a

37:16 – 37:49
Amanda Crowell: coach, 1 of the things you have to learn as a coach, as a small business, as an entrepreneur, selling your services, is that you really do have to sell. You have to convince people is the wrong word, but you have to be in conversation and relationship with people to help them come to the realization that they need your help specifically and they need it like now, and they should pay you money so that you can give them that help. And that is just a reality of having a business you have to sell. But when you’re a

37:49 – 38:24
Amanda Crowell: heart centered helper person that feels in conflict with it. So I would go and try to sell my services and I would I would get tongue tied. I would meet somebody and think I could totally help them and I wouldn’t say anything. And it wasn’t until I really looked at the way that I was holding sales and the way that I was holding me as a helper type and really realized that I was holding sales as a persuasive, pushy, like not in the best interest of the client, not for their benefit, but instead so that I

38:24 – 38:59
Amanda Crowell: could make money. And when I was holding it like that, it was totally against this major part of my identity. So I had to look at the way I was holding sales and see if it was possible to broaden the understanding of sales, which it was of course, into a more heart-centered sales kind where it’s the kindest most advocating thing you can do to help somebody who’s in pain to recognize that there’s a solution to their problem and you’re willing to help them. When I held it like that, it was no longer in conflict. And then

38:59 – 39:24
Amanda Crowell: the action that I needed to take was able to flow more easily. I still had to learn how to have sales conversations and what have you, but I wasn’t blocked in my effort to do so by the fact that it was in conflict with who I held myself to be. Because we just won’t do things that are in conflict with the way the important parts of ourselves that we think make us who we are.

39:25 – 39:46
Rochelle Moulton: Yes, it hasn’t come out yet. I had a conversation yesterday with a guest and we were talking about kind of therapy versus coaching, you’re a cognitive psychologist. So when does identity where it gets in your way become something that you can resolve with a coach versus something that you wanna resolve with therapy?

39:47 – 40:19
Amanda Crowell: It’s a really good question and an important 1 actually. Here’s what I would say and I also want to just, you know, say like when in doubt, go to a therapist, just to be, you know, if you really are thinking maybe, Maybe it’s something that’s got tender roots. So that’s really what I’ve used 1 with my, because I work with both therapists and coaches. So helping them build their practices. They are the quintessential accidental entrepreneurs. They don’t want to be in business. They just want to help people. And I help them do the same transformation that

40:19 – 40:58
Amanda Crowell: I went through. So we have this conversation often. What I would say is if it’s something that the person can have a conversation about and they’re living their life in the struggle of it, then it is probably okay to work on it with a coach. If it’s something that starts to trigger trauma, if they start to feel like it’s got, like there’s a deep wound, or it’s something that they haven’t really worked out from their childhood, then somebody who isn’t qualified to help people with trauma can do quite a lot of harm. So I’ve just seen

40:58 – 41:40
Amanda Crowell: that happen, where there are coaches like, depending on the model of coaching, sometimes coaching can be a little tough love ish and the people who are implementing that may not know the negative consequences of tough love for people who have trauma or really deep wounds or can be triggered over into like really confusing emotional states because they haven’t truly handled their deep wounds. Now that’s not most people thank goodness dealing with most issues in their lives. So if it feels like you can really have a conversation with yourself like, why can’t I, I don’t know, whatever

41:40 – 41:56
Amanda Crowell: it is, stop eating cookies but it doesn’t make you feel like you’re gonna instantly cry, probably you can work on it with a coach. But if you feel in your own self as a person choosing between a coach and a therapist, this is sticky. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to find under here, then I would go with a therapist.

41:56 – 42:24
Rochelle Moulton: Yes, yes, perfect. And all the more reason why coaches need to have the right boundaries in place because we are not therapists. You can be a therapist. People like me cannot. Right. So let me switch gears and ask you 1 final question, which I love to ask every guest. If you could go back to who you were when you started your business what’s the 1 thing you’d advise her to do?

42:28 – 43:07
Amanda Crowell: I think that sometimes well okay I’m talking to my own self when I was starting I think I would have been very convinced by people who told me what the best business model was. This is what is gonna make the money. This is the niche that’s hot right now. This is what you need to do on social media. This is what, it was very much like I thought there was an answer and I was dead set on finding it. And I would have done whatever the answer said to do. You know, I would have been a

43:07 – 43:43
Amanda Crowell: career coach who works with, I don’t know, someone who’s not a good fit for me because I thought I should do what makes money, you know? And what I’ve learned over the decade or more that I’ve had a coaching business and The difference when you hit on something that you’re genuinely that is your great work that you Never stop being passionate about talking about all the rest of it is so much easier. It’s so much easier to write social media content. It’s so much easier to coach people. It’s so much easier to write a book and

43:43 – 44:14
Amanda Crowell: be on a podcast when you’re talking about what really lights you up on the inside, so much so that I think having a rarefied, super high niche business is infinitely easier to make the kind of money that most of us are trying to make, like a living wage for our families, then having a business that you run a ton of just general population through but isn’t your passion, that sounds so much harder to me. And I think you’re much less likely to be successful.

44:15 – 44:29
Rochelle Moulton: That’s awesome. I love that answer. Yeah, Amanda We’re gonna be putting all sorts of links to you and your content in the show notes But where’s the best place for people to learn more about you? Honestly read in the book. I would

44:29 – 44:34
Amanda Crowell: say go read the book after you’ve read that book you will know if you want to know more about me, because my heart is there.

44:36 – 45:05
Rochelle Moulton: And it shows. It shows. I just want to thank you so much for coming on the show. Your book was, it was just phenomenal because it had, it had a really good bones and it had strategies and it had tactics and a lot of books tend to be 1 or the other. It had both and it I think it hits the kind of people that are listening to this right now. So thank you so much. Thank you for having me. I’m so glad.

45:05 – 45:12
Amanda Crowell: And thank you for reading the book and asking such wonderful questions. How could I not? I love it.

45:13 – 45:33
Rochelle Moulton: I love the book. OK, So before we say goodbye today, if you’re looking to connect with like-minded women working in the b2b space Be sure to check out the link to my soloist women community in the show notes It’s at rochellemoulton.com Slash soloist dash women. That’s it for this episode. I hope you’ll join us next time.