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Foreign welcome to the Courage and Clarity podcast. I'm your host, Steph Crowder. I'm a former sales training director who's helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn a living doing something they love over the past 10 years. On your journey, you'll need the courage to be bold, to take risks, and to do what looks crazy on paper. You'll also need the clarity, the brass tacks, simple strategies that actually work. And on this podcast, we deliver both in equal measure. Oh, and by the way, we've got absolutely no time for bs, gross marketing tactics or get rich quick schemes. Just sustainable business strategies for good humans with big dreams. If that sounds like you, you're in the right place. Let's go. Hello. Hello, my wonderful CNC listeners. Welcome. Welcome to the podcast. I am so excited to be hanging out with you all today. Let's get into it. This is an episode that I have actually had on my docket, kind of in the back of my mind that I've wanted to record for quite some time and I just, I don't know, just haven't gotten around to it. Other ideas have come to the forefront first, but I want to talk to you about this concept that I've been sharing with my clients and coaching them on for some number of months at this point, and I call it iceberg ideas. Okay. And by the end of today's episode, you're going to understand what an iceberg idea is in your business. How to spot one from a mile away, maybe a few miles away to be safe, how to avoid the perils of iceberg ideas. And we're going to have I I what I hope is a really interesting conversation about what I am considering the new productive procrastination. All right, this is going to be my take. It could be a little bit of an unpopular opinion about kind of the state of things today in business. You know, in the online business world, in the world in general. But it's certainly the online business world. There's always like new tools and new tech and new platforms and every, you know, few years or something, there's like this big new thing that comes and everybody gets really into it. And we're going to be talking about the role that that can play in creating more iceberg ideas and just overall, how to keep you on top of the the things in your business that are true needle movers, right? So you can avoid the kind of like time suck and scope creep that comes into play when we think we're doing something really productive. We think that we're like like hitching our wagon to the next thing, that's going to be really useful. And sometimes that genuinely can be the case. And I think hopefully in today's conversation, you'll be given some criteria to help you assess that. But what we really have to look out for is when we are working on something in our business that is giving us a bit of a false statement, sense of accomplishment, right? Or it's helping us feel that dopamine of like, oh, I did something today. I moved the ball forward. It feels like traction, it feels like progress. It feels like I'm getting somewhere. But if we were to really look at it with an honest lens, sometimes the thing that gave you that feeling was a little more than productive procrastination. Okay, so here comes the part that may be the unpopular opinion. Some of you will love this, some of you are. Will bristle. But either way, stay with me, okay? Bear with me. Let me make my case. The core. One of the core theses or thesis that I have for you today is that AI is becoming the newest place that entrepreneurs are hiding instead of of selling. Okay? Now, lest you think I'm going to pry your clawed or your chatgpt from your fingers, I'm not going to do that. Okay? I'm here to say I use AI in my business. I use Claude to help me refine. We're going to talk more about, like, the role of AI, but certainly for idea refinement. I mean, heck, ChatGPT helped me organize today's episode. It was my idea, but ChatGPT helped me put it into a cohesive order, merge a few ideas together, and also helped me come up with a good title for the episode. So this is not an anti AI episode. I know some people listening may feel you may be anti AI right now. You might feel there's a lot of feelings that people have, and that is totally fine. Personally, I think this is something to be embraced. I think that it can. And my experience with AI this year is it has helped me go so much faster with tasks that, you know, require that idea refinement that require some help with putting things together. AI has really helped me with. I shared this in my last episode, all about my summit. Just getting things out faster, getting my summit put together, getting my new curriculum, put together podcast episodes, things like this. But just like things such as endlessly redesigning a website or tweaking your branding or creating another freebie, or reorganizing your notion, or building a funnel that you have no business building because you're not that far in business, right? Just like those things that I have been talking about for years and years and years. I've always talked about distractions in business and how we all have to be very, very aware that most of us avoid money making activities and avoid our daily sales activities because they scare us and because they can feel uncomfortable and because it's a new emerging skill set. Okay? And so just like those things that I just mentioned, people are now spending hours and hours and hours setting up their AI, okay? Claude, cowork, and like training agents and all of this stuff, while they are actually avoiding the work that grows a business, such as making offers, getting out there and selling, talking to humans. Right? Refining your messaging, making your messaging better, and delivering client results. So I want to emphasize the problem isn't AI. I don't. I'm not anti AI. I'm not anti any of the things that I just said, right? But the problem is using AI as emotional buffering, right? You're supposed to be doing your money making activities. So we. It feels. I really get it. It feels fun to play with a new technology. It feels fun. It feels productive to set up these tools. And you tell yourself, like, oh, it's going to pay me so much down the road. It's going to help things go so much faster. But you really have to look at it and ask, is this getting me where I want to go? Right. I think AI is kind of becoming the latest version of like, color coding your Gmail or reorganizing your Google Drive. Come on. Y' all are guilty of it. I know I'm guilty of it. Oh, this is gonna be the thing, right? Color coding my calendar is gonna be the thing. Instead of just getting out there and making money, some of you are spending more time building CLAUDE agents than talking to potential clients. And I'm seriously watching entrepreneurs convince themselves that they're working just because they spent six hours optimizing an AI workflow. Okay? So the reason this really matters is because productive procrastination is way more dangerous, in my opinion, in my experience, than just regular procrastination. Because when you're procrastinating, when you're putting something off, when you're watching Netflix, when you're supposed to be working, you know what you're doing, you're like, yeah, kind of putting it off, right? But when you're engaging in productive procrastination, you will really feel like you've accomplished something. Right? And it won't be until days or weeks or months that you look back and say, where did the time go? Okay, so I want to talk about why this feels so productive. And I promise this episode's not just going to be a big downer. I want to talk about what I'm thinking of as minimum viable AI. You all know I've been like the minimum viable queen on so many things over the years. Minimum viable income, minimum viable content, minimum viable productivity. Right? We're going to talk about minimum viable AI because I don't think you should avoid it. I think it's silly to avoid it. It's a tool, right? But I want you to be able to do what I do, which is I get in and get out. I'm not spending hours and hours. And some people out there who are like AI power users might think I'm missing out, that I don't have, like Claude skills trained and I don't have all this stuff set up. And that's fine. Like, I'm sure there's a counterpoint, but for the average entrepreneur who's listening to this podcast, who just wants to get clients, okay, if we're optimizing for getting clients, if y' all want to get paid, I know many people listening to this podcast want to get one client, two clients, three clients in the next 30 days. It's not coming from Claude, it's not coming from Chad, GPT. It's coming from conversation, and it's coming from your money making activities. Okay? So if you love this stuff and you want to, like, treat it like a hobby, like instead of doing a puzzle on a Friday night, you want to play with Claude. I think that's totally fine. But it's important to be honest with yourself. Like, when I talk to my clients about an hour a day of money making activities, it doesn't matter how productive working with AI makes you feel. It's not a money making activity. Friends, I don't care if it's helping you write emails. It's not a money making activity. Okay? So I just want to touch on why I think AI is so seductive in this category. And it really is, because it does give dopamine, right? It gives dopamine because you feel like you're getting something done, right? It's novel. And anything that's new and novel feels. It feels. It feels cutting edge. It feels like you're part of something. You might have the thought, oh, my gosh, like, finally I'm getting somewhere, right? It gives stimulation, it gives instant feedback. I know I personally sometimes like, really have this urge to get, like instant Feedback, instant validation. And AI feeds right into that desire. It gives us a feedback feeling of momentum. Just due to the back and forth nature of the conversation. I think it feels like you're getting somewhere when really I cannot be the only person who's just gone in one big chat GPT circle, okay? It's a real thing. It gives you the illusion of leverage. And maybe, how about this one? It may even give you a feeling of like, future business owner, right? Like I'm an early adopter or I'm like, getting ahead on something, right? And most importantly, I think it's important for us to just call ourselves out, that it feels safer for many of us than visibility and selling, which I know these are tall tasks. I know these are scary things that you have to go out there and do. Because the truth is you can train your bot, build a GPT, play with your prompts, build systems, experiment endlessly. You can do all of those things, and you know what? You can do them without risking rejection, right? There's no rejection. Absolutely no rejection. And the truth is, AI lets people feel like operators, right? Let's lets people feel like, you know, CEOs without having to do the, the hardest and most important CEO work of feeling vulnerable. And I think it gives us the illusion of, like, all of the right answers are out there somewhere. If we could just keep asking more questions. Okay, now, tied to this, I want to introduce this other idea that I call iceberg idea. Okay? An iceberg idea. This goes beyond AI, although AI is a iceberg idea. Setting up your quad, whatever is an iceberg idea. Oh, I'm gonna connect my Claude to be able to, you know, read all of my emails and put it like that. Okay, that's an example of an iceberg idea. An iceberg idea looks so small, it doesn't seem like it would take that long, right? But it secretly expands into way more complex complexity. It takes way more time and certainly way more cognitive load than you expected. So literally think about an iceberg where you just see a little bit of the ice sticking up from the surface and you're like, oh, that's not that big of a deal. I could probably just like, if I'm in a big dare, I make a Titanic reference here? Like, my boat can probably just like cruise right over that. Like, it's not gonna, you know, slow me down and then slam into the thing and you're like, oh, my God. There was so much under the surface that I didn't realize, like, how much of this would actually be a Time suck would actually be an energy drain. So other examples of this. Now I want to be very, very clear. All of the things I'm about to say on this list are not inherently bad. I'm not saying don't do these things, but in the context of, of having other goals, these can really turn into ice, iceberg ideas. So examples would be like, oh, like let me spin up a quick little freebie, right? Like let me put together a new lead magnet, let me make a new quiz for my website, let me come up with a new low ticket offer. Oh, I have these recordings that I could just like sell on my website. Let me get those and put them up, right? Like maybe people will buy those, right? Maybe I'll just put together a summit or a membership or a new funnel. Maybe I need to have a welcome sequence. Like that would really help me, right again. And then we have, you know, AI automation. Let me go ahead and set up my automations. It could be AI automations, it could be backend automations, it could be like zapier and you know, setting up triggers, it could be setting up things in your email, like your backend email system, right? And the reason it's really iceberg ideas is because we, especially as entrepreneurs and ambitious people, I think we underestimate things like the setup, the maintenance, the decisions, the integrations, the troubleshooting, the learning curve, all of the mental bandwidth required. And the truth is the visible part of the idea may seem tiny, but it's really the hidden labor underneath that is massive. And I know this from working with so many people. And they'll, they'll sell me on it, right? They'll be like, well the stuff like I'll be like, hey, but didn't you tell me, because we do 90 day plans that I work with my clients on inside of my mastermind sold out group programs. And we'll be, and we'll be like, okay, you got your 90 day plan, you know what you're supposed to be doing, right? And they'll come to me and they'll be like, and this is not about anybody in particular before any of y' all feel called out. I see this all the time. They'll come to me and be like, hey, I know I'm supposed to be doing that thing where I'm like signing five one on one clients. But I had this idea, this won't take me long. This is quick. This is like, you know, I want to do this training, I want to do this thing. I want to, I want to host this bundle, I want to do this, that or the other, right? And I'll kind of push back and be like, well, what about your North Star? What about your 90 day plan? And the defense is always like, oh, well, this isn't going to take me that long. Like, this is just really quick. This is, you know, not going to be a big deal, right? But the truth is that, like, what I see is they'll come back to me and be like, this took 10 times longer than I thought. I've even had clients be like, why did you let me do this? And it's like, hey, y' all are in charge. You know, I tried to tell you, right? And I do see it all the time where people are like, oh man. And it's like this disappointment where they're like, I spent all of this time and all of this energy and it still wasn't the thing. Because guess what? They're not money making activities. So the problem is you spend time and energy and bandwidth on these iceberg ideas and not only have they slowed you down, cause now you got a, you know, big old hole in your boat, but they didn't make you any money. So now you're kind of like, there's like this shame that can go on top of it. Which I think the shame is totally optional. I don't want anybody to feel shame. We've all done iceberg ideas. Like, there's a reason that my word of the year is boring. I'm trying to spend a year avoiding iceberg ideas. And let me tell you, there's an iceberg left, right and center. I see so many where I'm like, ooh, I could do that. Or what about this idea? And it's. It's really a challenge. But the truth is that there is a real cost here. It's not just time, although time is certainly a big one. I know lots of us are working on what feels like very limited time, especially with summer coming up. If you're a parent, if you know, you know, right? But the real cost beyond time is fragmenting your focus, right? To accomplish a huge objective, like filling up your one on one practice or selling out your group program, you have to be focused on it every single day. I'm not trying to be like raining on people's parade. I'm just being honest that my clients who are selling out their offers and selling out their group programs are doing money making activities every single day. Okay? So you fragment your focus when you kind of like divert. It's like if you're on the path and you're like, oh, let me just like run into the woods really quick and like go look over there and see if there's a waterfall. And then you try to turn around. First of all, there's no waterfall. You're like, shoot, okay? And then you turn around to get back to the path. And now you've lost the path. And it takes you a few minutes to get back on the path. Okay? So that's part of it as well. It can delay your sales as a result because you're, because you're doing your iceberg idea. You're playing with AI or doing whatever. You're not doing your money making activities. And that can be okay for a day or two, but once a week or two or three or four go by and you're not really doing your money making activities. Then you're looking at your sales. You're like, how come I don't have any sales? And it's like there's a math equation that's just not working, right. We're delaying our sales because we haven't been focusing on the very simple things, the simple, boring, sometimes unsexy things of getting more sales. You also dilute your momentum. So for my clients who, you know, we see this all the time in sold out group programs, it's like they get one client and then they get two, and then they get three, and then they get four. And a lot of that has to do with the momentum. When they go and close somebody and they're like, okay, great, like, let me go see, like who else I can talk to. Imagine the momentum that gets killed when we have to go, well, that's great that I had some momentum, but let me go over here and make a new email sequence, right? And then you try to get back on track and you're like, wait a second, where was I? Oh, let me. Like now this, this boulder has like come to a stop and I have to roll it all the way back up the hill. This leads to emotional exhaustion, okay? And you're like, why am I so tired? I have so many. It's like, well, you put so much stuff on your plate. It's like saying, why am I so full? But you keep putting more stuff on your plate at the buffet, right? Really think about that. It's like we're saying we want a result. I want to get five people in my one on one. I want to fill up my group program, right? And it's like you should have like one or two things on your plate. And just sit down and eat. But instead, you keep getting up and being like, well, I saw the Mac and cheese. I don't even really want Mac and cheese. But, you know, maybe that's the thing that'll fill me up. Oh, how about the cookies? Right? And then we sit down, and we're. We're, like, taking bites of everything, and suddenly we're just stuffed. That's what's happening when we're giving in to all the iceberg ideas, it leads to a loss of clarity. So if you're somebody who's like, I just need clarity, and you keep kind of taking on iceberg ideas, they will confuse you. And that's because you end up never fully committing to one path. So I see this a lot where, folks, I think it's a bit of a protective mechanism where it's like, we don't want to fail. We don't want to really, really, really try one thing for 90 days because we're like, oh, my God, what if I try and I still fail? Like, that's gonna feel terrible. So we kind of spread out our focus so that if it doesn't work, we can kind of have something to point to. This is very deep psychologically, right? It's sort of like, well, I wasn't like, then if you don't get the result that you wanted, which you won't, because you weren't doing what you're supposed to do, you'll. You won't be able to say. Like, the most intolerable thing that you'd be able to say would be, like, I tried everything for 90 days, and I still didn't get the result. Some people are, like, even really deep down, subconsciously so scared of that that they're busying themselves with all different kinds of projects because they don't want to have to face that possible reality. Now, paradoxically, you're creating exactly that when you're not focused. Right? And back to AI For a second. AI Experimentation often gives people the feeling of building a business without doing the uncomfortable part. Think about how much you could spend your time talking to chatgpt about business without actually doing business tasks. Like, that's really, really something that we need to be watching out for. I don't think there's been a moment in my entire career where there's been a tool that is so, like, scratching the itch that we all have of, like, the analogy I've given for years is, like, if you really wanted to be a basketball player and. But you're really scared of Getting onto the court. So you're trying to learn the game by sitting in the bleachers and you can learn a lot about the game of basketball by sitting there. But at a certain point, are you going to be the next Michael Jordan sitting on the bleachers? No, of course not. You have to get out there and suck and miss baskets and not know how to dribble and try again and again and again. And I think over overthinking and over building an AI is a great example of trying to do it all from the bleachers. And at a certain point you got to be like, okay, I know the rules of the game. I've got enough. I need to pick up a ball and get going. Right? So let's talk about, you know, a reminder of what actually grows businesses. Because businesses growing right now are not necessarily the ones with the fanciest systems, the best AI stack or the smartest automations. They're often the businesses where, quite simply, the founder or the CEO is showing up consistently, making offers, communicating clearly, selling regularly, making decisions and staying focused long enough for that momentum to really build. And I don't care how big AI gets, focus is still a competitive advantage. Right? And truthfully want to really think about this. One sales conversation. One sales conversation where you can close someone is likely worth more than six hours of tinkering with your AI. Right? Like closing one sale, especially if you're selling premium higher ticket, one sales conversation is going to be a bigger needle mover in your business than playing around with chat for the next six hours. Right? So I do want to touch on how to use AI without hiding inside of it. Again, minimum viable AI. Because I'm not saying don't use it. Like I said, I use it pretty much every day at this point. And what I really want to hammer home is don't go looking to AI for clarity. Okay? I think that is the key. If I could distill it down, go to AI after you are clear and use it to help you keep taking steps. Okay? So examples, good uses would be refining your messaging. Okay? If you have like, you know, a big old transcript of a sales call and you're like, okay, I want to take this sales call and really pull out what the person was saying to use it in my messaging. Great use of AI. You can get in and out and do that in a couple of minutes. Okay? Outlining your content. Like I said, hey, I have this idea. This is what I want to talk about. Let me hit the microphone button in ChatGPT and just ramble about this podcast episode that I want to do. Can you put it into a cohesive outline for me? Again, this will take five minutes. Summarizing your ideas, very, very similar, right? Helping you work faster, helping you brainstorm new angles, helping you with repetitive tasks, right? Helping you take like large amounts of data and mine for insights. Like, one thing I love to do is take coaching calls and ask AI to help me pull out, like, what would be good content ideas, right? What would be good like, you know, hooks or good like questions that my clients are having that other people out there in the world might have as well that I should make some content around, right? That is going to help me work so much faster. So I'm not like watching back to my call. Like, how else would I do that, right? I'd have to be like, I mean, I, I know because I've been here longer than AI. We used to hire somebody in some cases to that used to be a job that somebody would go through your call and make a list of like, here's what like, good ideas would be for an Instagram post. Or if you were the coach, you might try to make notes as you're talking. Like, it's amazing that we have this tool to help us be like, hey, here, here were the, the key points. Like, you know, even with like note taker apps like Otter and things like that, they can help us with that as well. So I think that, you know, notice that in all of those examples I gave, I have clarity of what I'm trying to do. I'm not like asking AI, like, what should I do? I'm not being like, you know, make decisions for me. I'm not trying to offload my decisions are certainly not trying to offload my sales to a robot. Right? I think danger signs that you're maybe not using minimum viable AI. And like one thing I'll say is it should kind of feel, I think it should feel like you're getting in and getting out. That's how I feel with it. I'm like, I'm going to it for a very specific thing. I get what I need, I get a better title, I get a better whatever and then I leave. Okay? If it's, if you're spending a ton of time in there, if you're constantly rebuilding the same systems, that would be a warning size sign. If you're endlessly like prompting just like coming up with new prompts, like what's the best prompt prompt engineering, right? If you're avoiding publishing, avoiding posting of if you're using it to avoid anything like really take an honest look at yourself, Are you avoiding, are you avoiding sending your personal invitations? Are you avoiding prospecting, booking sales calls, making content? Are you trying to feel productive there instead of doing your actual money making activities that you've identified? Right. And if you like, especially if you're one of my clients, we identify your money making activities inside of my program. Right? Inside of sold out group programs. But for those of you that don't work with me, you can really look at what are the things I can do in my business every day that are likely to generate sales. So I think a practical. Oh, here's another thing to think about. If you're spending more time on tools than you are on customers, serving them or getting them, that would be a red flag to me. I think you can apply this very practical filter of is this helping me sell or helping me avoid selling? I know, I know, right? Like, and I mean sell today, not like, oh, if I get this set up, it's going to help me sell so much in the future. No, no, no. What is it doing to help you sell today? So, for example, I used AI to help me clean up the outline of this, of this podcast. It's helping me sell today because I am publishing this episode today. Right? I got what I needed and I clicked go on my microphone. That is helping me move forward. It's not keeping me stuck in thinking about it. That's another way you can look at minimum viable AI is, is it moving you forward? Is it cutting down on time? Is it helping you go faster? Is it helping you move forward quicker? Or is it taking up your time? Are you having to spend time, you know, playing with it and training it? Right. Especially if you're kind of like, you know, one of my ideal clients, somebody who's really just working on building the skill of selling out your group program. You do not need that level of sophistication right now. And I think you can ask yourself, am I truly simplifying my business or am I creating a new hobby? Okay, so, you know, as we kind of start to wind this episode down, what I really want to bring this back to is what I something that I think is true about us as humans, which is, and I've been saying this one for years, people want certainty before action. And that's so normal. You want to feel clear before you take action. You want to be like, I want to know that this is right. I want to know that I'm going in the Right direction and then I'll take action. Right? And I think in a lot of ways AI promises certainty, control. You might be under the illusion that it'll make you feel more prepared or more sophisticated. But nothing about the advancement of AI has changed the fact that businesses grow from courage, repetition, visibility, consistency, actual human connection. And never ever forget what I've always said. Clarity comes from action, not the other way around. Right? You don't like, wait to feel clear and then go take action. And I think for a lot of us, AI has given us another way to try to search for clarity before we take that action, right? So I think it's really important to not mistake building systems for building momentum. And truthfully, the entrepreneurs who win are usually not the ones doing the most things. Like, truly, if I think about people I know who are really on an upswing right now, they're not the people who are doing the most. They're just the ones who are willing to stay focused on the right things long enough for those things to work. And this one, like I, I gotta say this one, you're really, as much as you might be tempted to believe it, you're not one Claude set up away from a sold out offer. You're just not in the same way that you're not one. Whatever away, right? Oh, if I could just get this automation set up. If I could just get many chat going. If I could just make a funnel like that'll do it. It's just another unicorn, right? It's just another shiny object. So look out for those iceberg ideas. Don't take your eye off your North Star goal. If you know what you're supposed to be doing for the next 90 days, be boring and keep taking steps every day to get you there. Use AI like a flashlight, right? Maybe that's a great way to look at it. AI is like a flashlight helping you light your way so you can keep going. It's not the North Star, it's not the moon in the sky, right? You are the one driving forward. Use it as a tool to help you on your way. But do not give in to the temptation of making this like a whole extra project. Remember, minimum viable AI, my friends. Get in, get out. Use it as the tool that it's supposed to be. No more tinkering, no more playing around, and definitely no more iceberg ideas. Okay? All right. I hope this has been helpful. You can let me know if you liked this episode. Send me a DM on Instagram. I'm Heystaff Crowder or reply to any of the emails that you might receive from me. And, you know, we'll be back with more goodness next week. Until then, I'm wishing you the courage and the clarity to go after what you love.