Are You Working With Your Strengths, or Just the Way You Think You Should?

Have you ever created a beautiful system for something in your business, felt very pleased with how organised and professional it all looked, and then realised you absolutely hate using it?

Because I have.

There are so many things we do repeatedly in business that need some kind of process around them. Onboarding clients, following up with leads, writing emails, creating content, managing projects, sending invoices, keeping track of everything we’ve promised to do. Having systems for those things can make running a business significantly easier.

But sometimes we create a system to make something easier and accidentally make the actual task harder.

I’ve done exactly this with my podcast.

I love neatly written guides. I love having information organised somewhere I can easily find it again. Give me a nice document with everything beautifully laid out and I am very happy.

So, naturally, when I was preparing podcast episodes, I started creating increasingly detailed written notes. They looked lovely. They were organised. They felt very proper and grown-up.

There was just one small problem. They made recording the podcast much harder.

I’d accidentally built a preparation process that required more effort than the thing I was preparing for.

And once I noticed it, I realised this is something I talk about with clients all the time: are you actually working with your strengths, or have you built a way of working based on what you think a competent, professional business owner is supposed to do?

Those aren't always the same thing.

Working with your strengths can sometimes feel suspiciously easy

As soon as I stopped trying to write out my podcast episodes beautifully and went back to my usual method of preparing for spoken content, everything started flowing again.

And my usual method is significantly less impressive.

I have some slightly scraggly notes, a handful of bullet points and enough information to remind myself what I wanted to talk about. Then I talk.

That works for me. The slightly ridiculous thing is that I already knew this.

Years ago, my old business partner and I did a lot of recorded content together. We had very similar approaches to coaching and wanted people watching our content to come away with similar things, but the way we prepared could not have been more different.

She could prepare an entire script, put it on an autocue, rehearse it and deliver it beautifully.

I tried using an autocue once and was so distracted by it that we had to scrap what we'd recorded.

On one recording day, I turned up with a crumpled bit of paper in my pocket with a few bullet points scribbled on it.

That was enough for me.

If you'd watched our finished videos, you wouldn't necessarily have known that our processes were completely different. We both got the result we wanted, but we needed very different things to get there.

Neither way was better.

The problem was that mine didn't look as polished behind the scenes, so part of me assumed I must be doing something wrong.

Why do we make things harder when they come naturally?

I think there can be something strangely uncomfortable about work feeling easy.

Especially when you have a very uneven skill profile, which is something I recognise in myself and see in plenty of my clients.

There can be things you do incredibly easily that other people find difficult, while something supposedly simple feels like it may as well be rocket science.

When you spend enough time experiencing that difference, your perception of how hard work should feel can get a little skewed.

Something comes naturally and instead of thinking, "Excellent, this is clearly one of my strengths," we think, "Surely I should be doing more than this?"

So we add things. More preparation. Another template. An extra stage. Higher standards. More research. Another round of edits.

Suddenly the thing that originally flowed beautifully has become a massive faff.

I think this is particularly important when you run your own business because one of the enormous advantages of being the person in charge is that you can design the business around how you actually work.

You don't get bonus points for recreating someone else's processes. If something feels easy because you're genuinely good at it, that's not cheating.

That's exactly the thing we want to identify and use more.

Work with your strengths by looking at where you already get results

If you've got something in your business that always feels stickier than you think it should, I wouldn't start by asking how to improve the system.

I'd start by looking at when you already get good results. When do you feel most in flow? What can you repeat relatively easily? When do you feel most like yourself while you're working? Where do you get the most useful output from the time and energy you're putting in?

The answers can tell you quite a lot about how you naturally work with your strengths.

For me, when it comes to speaking, I know that I work best with a loose structure. I need to understand the subject, know the main points I want to cover and then have enough freedom to explain them naturally.

That's the process that gets the result.

Once I know that, I can start looking at everything I've built around it and asking whether those things are helping.

What have you added that isn't actually helping?

This is the next question I'd ask.

What have you added to your process that doesn't directly contribute to the result?

Maybe you've created an incredibly detailed content planning system but now spend so much time planning that you don't create much content.

Maybe your client onboarding process contains several steps that made sense when you set it up but nobody really needs anymore.

Maybe there's a section of your monthly email that you dread writing every single month and your readers probably wouldn't notice if it disappeared.

Maybe you keep editing something because you want it to reach a standard nobody except you is actually asking for.

For my podcast, it was the beautifully formatted written preparation.

The podcast is spoken. I was creating a written process around it because the written process felt more legitimate, not because it improved the thing people were actually going to hear.

Once I could see that, removing it seemed obvious.

But there's another question we need to ask before we start gleefully deleting steps from everything.

If a business process isn't helping, what is it doing for you?

I don't think we usually add unnecessary steps for absolutely no reason. Something about that extra step is probably doing something for you.

That's important.

Maybe it makes you feel prepared. Maybe it gives you reassurance that you've done enough. Maybe it creates a visible sense of progress. Maybe it makes the work feel more professional. Maybe it scratches a perfectionist itch.

In my case, having beautifully prepared podcast notes made the process feel more proper.

There was something reassuring about having everything typed up. It felt like a very sensible, grown-up approach to podcasting.

Which is quite funny when you remember that I am, in fact, already a grown-up and can choose how I want to make my own podcast.

But those little assumptions are incredibly easy to pick up.

We have ideas about what a "real" business owner does, what professional work looks like and what a proper process should involve.

Sometimes those ideas are useful, sometimes they're the exact thing getting in our way.

Don't just remove the step, replace what it was giving you

This is where I think simplifying business systems becomes more useful than just telling yourself to stop doing something.

If the unnecessary step was meeting a need, what else could meet that need without disrupting the process that already works?

With my podcast, I still like having something tangible and organised around the episode. So rather than turning my rough notes into a detailed script, I can use them elsewhere. They might become part of the social media content or feed into an email.

I still get the satisfaction of doing something with those ideas, but I don't need to put that process between myself and recording.

The same applies if your extra step is connected to perfectionism. I'm not particularly interested in telling someone to "just stop being a perfectionist" because I don't think that's especially useful.

Where could that desire for really high-quality work actually help you?

What part of your business genuinely benefits from that level of attention?

Can you use it there and allow something else to simply be functional?

You're not trying to remove parts of yourself. You're trying to deploy them somewhere they're useful.

Working with your strengths doesn't always mean taking fewer steps

There's an important caveat here, because I definitely don't want you to finish this blog and start deleting every slightly long-winded thing you do.

Sometimes the extra steps are the process. The way I edit written work is a fantastic example.

I tend to have two versions of a document open and, when I'm making significant edits, I'll actually retype the content from one document into another.

Yes. Retype it.

I wrote a book this way, which means I probably typed somewhere around a quarter of a million words during the drafting and editing process.

For some people, that sounds completely unhinged.

Fair.

But it works for me.

Retyping helps me think about the words differently. It lets me properly reconsider sentences rather than skimming over something because I've seen it too many times. That extra step contributes to the result, so I'm keeping it.

That's the distinction I want you to make. An unconventional process isn't automatically a bad process. A longer process isn't automatically inefficient, and a shorter process isn't automatically better.

The question is whether that process helps you produce the result.

There is no perfect business system because there is no standard business owner

This is one of the reasons I'm wary of any business advice that presents a process as the way to do something.

There are certainly useful frameworks, principles and tools we can borrow from other people, but we don't have access to their brains.

We don't have their strengths, their circumstances, their capacity, their experience or, frankly, the particular collection of features and bugs that makes their system work for them.

We have our own.

The aim isn't to find someone else's perfect system and become better at following it.

It's to understand yourself well enough to build systems that help you do good work consistently without making everything unnecessarily difficult.

That's a big part of what sustainable business means to me.

What could you simplify in your business?

So, if you've been thinking of something while reading this, I'd go back through these four questions:

When do you get your best results?

Think about what you're doing when the work flows and produces the outcome you want.

What are you adding that doesn't directly help you get that result?

Look for extra steps, standards, templates or processes that have crept in.

What does that addition do for you?

Don't dismiss it as pointless. Work out why you added it in the first place and what need it's meeting.

How else could you meet that need?

Can you keep the useful part without letting it interfere with the way you naturally work?

And then I'd add one final question:

What else could you simplify?

Not because everything needs to be quick or easy, but because your business is allowed to work in a way that makes sense for you.

I have a note attached to my computer that says:

"Done and functional is better than perfect."

Because "done is better than perfect" doesn't quite work for my brain. I need the functional bit. It still has to do its job.

But it doesn't need to become a masterpiece every time.

Build a business around how you actually work

I think this is the bigger point underneath all of this.

When something in your business repeatedly feels difficult, the answer isn't always that you need more discipline, a better template or a more complicated system.

Sometimes you need to look at the way you're already capable of doing the thing and stop putting obstacles around it.

And sometimes you'll discover the opposite. You'll realise that an apparently unnecessary step is actually really important to how your brain gets ready to work.

Both are useful things to know.

This isn't about making your business as simple as humanly possible. It's about understanding how you work well enough to know where complexity helps and where it's just getting in the way.

Because there is nothing particularly sustainable about spending your working life trying to operate with somebody else's brain.

If you're looking at your business and thinking there are probably a few things you've accidentally made harder than they need to be, this is exactly the kind of thing I explore with clients. We look at what's working, what's getting in the way and how your business can grow in a way that works with your strengths, wellbeing and actual life.

You can find out more about working with me and the different ways I support business owners on my website.

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