Effective Strategic Advice Comes from Lived Experience, Not Hypotheticals in Business Books

There are three stages to effective learning: 

• Understanding and completing a task
• Understanding and completing the task and its associated tasks
• Incorporating the task and the associated tasks into your process

Take learning to cook as a simplified example. You first learn how to make a meal or several meals. In the next stage, you learn how to gather the right ingredients, cook the meals, and clean up the kitchen. In the last stage, you incorporate cooking into your daily process. At some point in the day you think about which meals to make, what you will need to accomplish the tasks, and which tasks can be automated or delegated. You have worked through all three stages, and “learning how to cook” has been incorporated into your train of thought and has become a part of your daily routine.

Our choices are motivated in the same way. Can you imagine incorporating that new skill into your life? Will your environment make it easy to adopt this new task and all of its associated tasks? Do you think about how you will apply this new skill? We make many choices based on how well we can incorporate that choice. 

Maybe you read my earlier blog on Choice Value Motivation, about how passive, positive experiences have a long-term effect on brand loyalty. If you want to create loyalty, your offering needs to be based on experiences that you’ve incorporated into your daily life and communicated in a way that allows the customers to imagine the experience for themselves.

LVL-Up advisors draw from our lived experiences as Eligible Family Members (EFMs) in the Foreign Service and Military. We use our skills and knowledge to progress our clients’ businesses because we understand the nuances of their roadblocks. We work from their perspective, present real solutions that they can incorporate into their systems, and then stay on the journey with them until they reach that third stage of learning. We work with our clients on an experiential level rather than a hypothetical level.

Recently, a LVL-Upper referred to advice from a well-known business coach as applicable advice for an issue our client was facing. I asked a few questions to learn more about the coach’s experience with small businesses, and how implementing the method would work in our client’s environment. After scratching at the surface a bit, we realized that the advice was hypothetical. You see, hypothetical advice is reading the third or fourth self-help book and seeing the same top-level information. These hypotheticals fail to dig into how the change would become a fundamental part of the client’s process.

There are millions of books and videos that on the surface seem very insightful, even life-changing. You have probably read a book and thought to yourself, I’m never going to do this. Or the advice was so generic that you were offended that they assumed you hadn’t thought of that yourself. When you look closely at the advice, you start to notice the holes. It doesn’t quite apply to your real-life scenario. You cannot incorporate it into your process because it doesn’t meet your specific needs or isn’t sustainable in your current business environment.

Consulting and coaching are industries famous for offering hypothetical solutions that don’t actually fit your business when implemented. We understand the “bad wrap” that has come as a result of this business model. But at LVL-Up, we share this differentiation—between hypothetical and experiential advice—amongst our team and with clients each day. We push ourselves to dig deeper than the task. Our team considers our advice and its associated tasks, and we put ourselves into our client’s processes and train of thought to see if the solutions are viable. 

As EFMs, we know we can do this for our clients because we do this for ourselves all the time. We’ve planted ourselves into new countries, we’ve run our own small businesses, and we’ve led our own agile teams. We understand how to start solving an issue without having all of the information or knowing exactly what the end product will look like. Because we don’t spend much time in a new place, we also know how to get things handled so we are quickly set up and ready. We are comfortable in unfamiliar environments and we know that progress requires the drive to keep moving forward. We even push ourselves to work on our own careers when everything around us is telling us to just enjoy overseas life and take it easy. Haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like to take it easy? But that is not we operate; we thrive when we are learning, growing, and taking our teams to the next level.

LVL-Uppers know the road you are on, how to jump to other roads, and how to get on a road to progress. And that is why we are so skilled at advising you. For most of our clients, we’ve become part of their team, ingrained in their process because they know they can rely on us. They trust that we will look at the entire problem and how any solution affects everything associated with it. They know we will repurpose instead of rebuild, incorporating as much of their existing work as possible. We’ve provided a calm (or passive), positive experience for our clients time after time, and that motivates them to continue choosing LVL-Up. The funny thing is, our clients have also become part of our process and train of thought. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve woken up with great ideas for my client or thought through their issue on a walk. Thoughts about their projects pop up often, and then I start to wonder what I am going to make for dinner.

Are you ready for more than hypothetical advice? Schedule a free discovery call to learn how you LVL-Up can join your team.