Why I won't argue with your doubt

THE PROSPEROUS CONSULTANT

Turn your decades of expertise into a premium consulting practice built around the life you want.

Issue #42

He has a PhD and thirty-one years inside one of the biggest manufacturers in America.

Patents. Teams. The kind of career most consultants would trade an appendage for. We were on a call talking about his consulting practice, and when the conversation turned to getting help building it, his voice dropped.

"I've been in so many programs," he said, "that it's hard to have the confidence that any one of them's gonna bust through the wall."

He wasn't complaining. He was leveling with me. Nobody says a thing like that unless they've paid for the lesson at SHK University (School of Hard Knocks) more than once.

When you've paid that tuition a few times, it's easy to become cynical. I’ve done my share of spitting and cussing after investing in programs and coaches that just didn’t work for me.

But the crazy thing is, they worked for others. It’ll make you think you’re the problem, not the program or the coach.

And that might be true.

It’s easy to treat the doubt like a character flaw... proof that something’s wrong with you, not with what you bought. I’ve wrestled with this many, many times.

In this issue:

• Why your skepticism about programs is earned... and correct
• What those programs actually got wrong (hint: it wasn't you)
• The one question that beats "can I trust this one?"

There’s a digital “junk drawer” that collects all the things you tried that didn’t work... and that you might come back to someday.

You know the drawer I'm talking about.

There's the course you bought three years ago. The login still works. You checked.

There's the coach who took months of your time and money before you admitted it was going nowhere. One man I talked to fought for a refund after seven wasted months. Another lost a couple thousand dollars across two vendors and had nothing to show for it but better questions for next time.

And there's the midnight search. Typing a program into Google with the word "scam" after it. One prospect told me he did exactly that before our first call... "just to see I'm not being scammed." I didn't blame him a bit.

The feeling of lighting money on fire really stings. But the money isn't what does the damage.

The damage is what the string of letdowns does to your trust. After the third one doesn't deliver, every new program starts to look like the last one wearing a gussied-up sales page.

You quit believing anybody can help. So you do what any careful buyer would... you stop buying help altogether and go back to grinding it out alone. Which means the wall you wanted busted through is still standing, and now nobody's even swinging at it.

And underneath the distrust, a quieter story takes root: maybe the common denominator is you. Maybe you're not coachable. If you're already asking the harder question... am I good enough to do this on my own, and is it too late to find out... every program that fizzles presses on that sore spot.

I don't think either story is necessarily true.

Let me explain.

You've spent decades getting paid for what you do. For what you can accomplish for others when you’re doing the thing you’re best at.

Somebody hands you a vendor proposal to review and you can sniff out the padding by page two.

A candidate interviews well and something in your gut says no, and eight months later everybody in the room wishes they'd listened to you. That Spidey sense took thirty years to build. It doesn’t shut off when you’re building your own things and you’re the one doing the buying.

Your skepticism about programs is that same Spidey sense, doing exactly what you trained it to do. You paid good tuition for every one of those lessons. It’d be a shame not to use them.

Think about it this way. A fellow at the farmer’s co-op sells my neighbor a new miracle fertilizer, guaranteed to double his hay crop. He buys it once. The hay produces the same low yield as before.

Next spring, he doesn't quit fertilizing... he'd be starving his own fields out of spite, and he's smarter than that. He reads the label. He asks what's in the fertilizer. He asks who else used it, on ground like his, and what their second cutting looked like.

Nobody at the farmer's co-op calls him cynical. They call him experienced.

But that still leaves a question. Some of those programs weren't junk. Some were solidly built, with plenty of happy customers. So why didn't they move the needle for you?

Here's the part that surprised me when I finally figured this out.

Most programs are built to provide information, and that’s helpful. But information comes one-size-fits-all, and no two consulting practices are the same size, in the same place, at the same time. When a program worked for somebody else, the fit happened to be right for where they were. When one didn’t work for you, the fit was wrong. That’s the whole mystery.

The real work is construction... your positioning, your messaging, your offer, your pipeline, brick by brick, in the right order, for your specific situation. And construction starts where you’re standing right now. Maybe the first thing to build is your positioning. Or maybe what you need this month is help closing the two deals already on your desk. A program hands everybody the same page one. A good builder finds the thing that’s got everything else stuck, and starts there.

Information is free. Construction is not.

They sold you information when what you needed was construction. That's why it didn't work. Your discipline was never the problem, and neither was your coachability. The tool didn't match the job.

So what do you do with earned skepticism? You put it to work.

First, ask what the program assumes you're missing: "What do you think I don't have?" If the answer boils down to information... another framework, another library of videos... walk. The whole world's information runs about $20 a month now.

Second, decide what evidence you'd accept before you ever get on the call. See the actual process instead of the sizzle reel? Write down your questions. Then demand answers. A good operator won't flinch.

Third, watch how they treat the skepticism itself. A seller fights it... they handle your objection and push past it, because their job is to get your money. A leader respects it... they'd rather you say no with clear eyes than yes with crossed fingers.

The man with the PhD put me through all three, whether he meant to or not. And I told him what I'll tell you... he'd earned every ounce of that doubt, and I wasn't going to spend one minute arguing him out of it. We put the whole thing on the table instead. If the evidence added up, we'd go to work. If it didn't, no hard feelings, and he'd have better questions for the next guy.

He joined us and went to work. Not because I out-argued three decades of Spidey sense... you can't, and you shouldn't want to... but because for once, nobody was trying. I've said it before: I'm not in the convincing business. I see myself as a decision facilitator. His skepticism didn't have to be defeated. It had to be answered.

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." ... Richard Feynman

Dale

P.S... I didn't write this from the cheap seats. I have a digital junk drawer, too. Programs that promised the wall would come down and didn't loosen a brick. I don't regret many of them anymore. They taught me how I never wanted to sell, which turned out to be worth more than what they were selling. Funny how that works. If this one stirred something up, hit reply. I read every note myself, usually with coffee, before the rest of the farm wakes up.

Want to dive deeper? Check out these related articles:

👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #41
👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #40

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🔎 What was under the blanket
🔎 The "Strategic Ascension Designer" Prompt

P.S.: When you're ready, here are more ways I can help you...