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Effortlessly Productive
Welcome to Effortlessly Productive with Annie Veblen McCarty, where we dive into the art and science of mastering your time and boosting your productivity without the burnout.
Join Annie as she explores practical tips, strategies, and mindset shifts to help you streamline your tasks, prioritize effectively, and get more done with less stress.
Whether you're juggling work, family time, or just trying to find more time for what matters most, our conversations will empower you to work smarter, not harder.
Tune in and discover how to make productivity not just a goal, but a way of life!
Effortlessly Productive
How Do I Scale If I'm Not Tech Savvy? (Breaking the Limiting Belief)
Are you hesitant to embrace technology in your business because you think you're "not tech-savvy"? You’re not alone, and today’s vibrant discussion sheds light on this prevalent belief that often stifles creativity and progress. We dive into the reasons why many entrepreneurs, especially those in creative fields, feel overwhelmed by tech. You’ll learn that feelings of inadequacy in tech aren’t set in stone—they can be transformed with the right mindset.
Throughout the episode, we dismantle the myth that you need to be an expert to utilize the tools that can scale your business effectively. Instead of overwhelming you with complex jargon and processes, we guide you through manageable steps to demystify technology. Our conversation emphasizes the power of visual mapping and systematic breakdowns of tasks, techniques that can illuminate your understanding of how to piece together your business systems.
By the end of this episode, you'll be armed with actionable strategies to tackle your tech fears and feel more confident in your abilities. Join us for an engaging and empowering exploration of technology, its role in entrepreneurship, and the pathways to becoming comfortable in this evolving landscape. There’s no shame in seeking help, and we encourage you to learn the fundamentals while making decisions around outsourcing as needed. Embrace technology and unlock your full potential! Don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review, and let us know how you manage tech in your business!
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On today's episode, we are going to be talking about how you go about scaling your business and implementing business systems and automations if you are not tech savvy. So let's dive in. I meet people all the time who tell me I would love to have some of these business systems that you teach, but I am just not tech savvy. And what happens is people have this belief, this thought that is probably very valid. It is probably come from life experience that when they tried to do some tech things, things on the computer it did not go as planned. Maybe they have not had a life where they spent a lot of time on the computer learning that. Maybe it's not something they grew up with, maybe it's just not something that they're that interested in. So, for whatever reason, they have this belief that they are not tech savvy. And so we are going to be diving into this today, because this is one of the biggest things that I find holds entrepreneurs back. Specifically, I find it so much with entrepreneurs who are creative, with coaches, with healers, with spiritual entrepreneurs, because these are often people who are very in that creative flow and a lot of the time, that tech side of things is just not something that they've spent that much time in and maybe again, maybe they've attempted to set up some of these systems and it's just not on his plan and they kind of give up. And there is nothing wrong with that. There is no shame or judgment there at all. We all have things that we try, that we run into roadblocks or they seem like they are outside of our superpowers or even our non-superpowers, outside of what comes very naturally to us, and we're like, okay, maybe this isn't for me. And while I am a firm proponent of staying within your zone of genius, that place where it's things that you love to do and things you do really well, I think it's really important, especially in the day and age that we live in, especially as an entrepreneur, where so many of us are building our businesses online, even if you have a physical location. How we do marketing in this day and age, how we build our business, is often online, on social media, with advertising, with all the things right. So it is important for us to at least understand how the tech works.
Speaker 1:My opinion maybe you don't agree. Maybe there are other people out there who don't agree or who have told you opposite, even if you are going to have somebody that you outsource all of your stuff to. I think it's really important to understand how that all works. Number one, so you can hire somebody who you can have a conversation with, so you understand what it is they will be doing for you. So that's one of the reasons. Number two, let's say that there's a little tiny tweak that needs to be made to something like right now. Rather than having to go find somebody be like, oh my gosh, I need help doing this, just understanding some of the basic building blocks and how it all works together is really important because you can make little changes. You also understand what is happening behind the scenes in your business. So again, this episode is not to say that you have to build it all yourself. This episode is not to say that you should not outsource this stuff if it is not in your zone of genius. Definitely you have my full permission to do that.
Speaker 1:However, I think it's also really important that, number one, we tackle this belief that I am not tech savvy and understand how that's holding us back in our business and in our life in other ways. And, number two, that we start to get a basic understanding of how these business systems and automations and all of that is working so that we can make educated decisions for our business in who we are hiring and how we are spending our money and what is important in having set up for us what's going to give us the biggest bang for our buck and make sure that our business is going to have that growth. So we are going to start today by taking a little bit of a life coaching perspective on this belief. You know I am a certified master life performance and leadership coach, so I start to see everything through that life coaching lens. Right? So I am not tech savvy.
Speaker 1:That is actually a belief. It is not a truth, right? Because I'm sure we can go out there and find somebody who is less tech savvy than you, especially if you are listening to this podcast episode or watching this on YouTube. You at least know how to go to the podcast app that you listen through, or pull up YouTube and listen. Or maybe you got one of my emails and you clicked a link and you are listening. That means that you are using technology and I guarantee there is somebody out there on this planet who does not know how to do the things that you just did in order to listen to this and compared to them. You are tech savvy. So that was just a little bit to prove to you that this is not a fact.
Speaker 1:I am not tech savvy is not a fact. We could have a fact of I tried to set up this business system and blank, went wrong and it did not work the way that I intended it to work. So that could be a fact, but then from that experience, we have this belief I am not tech savvy. And so what happens when we feel not tech savvy is that we have emotions come up right. Oftentimes it's when we are presented with having to do something with technology that is outside of our comfort zone. We feel scared, we feel frustrated, we feel confused. We have all these emotions that start to come up in our body. I know, for certain people that I have worked with, because I teach a lot of the tech side of things, the setup side of things a lot of the people I work with they're like literally you're just saying that like triggered off all these emotions in my body, and where that came from was from this belief of I am not tech savvy. So let's think about when we are very confused or frustrated or have a lot of doubt in our abilities.
Speaker 1:What do we do? We often do not go. We're going to talk about what we do not do first. We do not go seek out trainings to help us learn those things. We do not open up our computer and just dive in and be like I'm going to go figure this out on my own. We shy away from things like that.
Speaker 1:Right, we might just continue. The things we might do is we might just continue to do our business the way that we have been, even knowing that that is holding us back from the growth that we want, from the business success that we want, from impacting more clients that we want to reach. So we might continue to do things the old way, if we have this belief that I am not tech savvy. So what that is actually creating is that let's think about these actions. So we are doing things the way that we always have done them, that are not using technology. We are not going out and learning. We are not opening up something outside of our comfort zone and experimenting and just seeing what happens, seeing if we can figure it out on our own. We're not learning from people who can teach us these things, and what happens is we actually are manifesting, we're actually creating that we are not tech savvy, right? So let's have a little shift over this, all right, because I think we all want to be able to do these things, even if it's something that is a little bit more challenging or has been challenging for us in the past, maybe if we've had specific failures that didn't work.
Speaker 1:I think, for the most part, everybody I talk to is like even if I don't want to be glued to technology which maybe that's another little belief in there right, if I know how to do this, I'm just going to be glued to it all the time. That is also not a fact. That does not have to come true. We don't have to manifest that, right. So what happens is we just avoid it. We don't learn it. However, I think most people do want to learn it. They know that this is important for their business. They know this is the direction for their business. They know this is the direction that the world is going. They see all these new technology advances. Like how many times in the last week have you heard about AI? Maybe you're like, oh my gosh, that scares the bejesus out of me. No, thank you. I don't want to learn about AI, but it's all around you, it's literally everywhere right now. So we in a lot of ways want to, and I would argue if you go back to one of my last episodes I would argue that actually not learning the tech side of things is capping your business growth. You're missing opportunities, it is limiting you. So it's important to at least start to have an understanding of some of the technology. So I want to share with you some of the ways that even I so let's start there Even I, as somebody who started programming computers in early high school, is somebody who was on computers all the time, even growing up, when I am old enough that it was not a thing to have a computer in your house until I again, probably most people I know did not have a computer in their house until they were in high school at the very earliest.
Speaker 1:So I'm dating myself a little bit, but I was lucky enough that my dad he was a professor and he actually had a computer at our house when I I think I was like eight, nine, 10, maybe when the computer came home and I had used computers in his office for quite a while, but I had that there. It was something that I just got onto and I experimented and I realized that the tech side of things does come pretty easily to me and I've spent literally my entire life, since I was eight or nine years old, being more comfortable with technology in general. However, I will share with you there are things that come up with technology that I am not comfortable with, that I am not comfortable doing because I've never done them before, and I will find times where I realize those emotions that we talked about, that frustration, that confusion, maybe like a little bit of anger at myself of like I am tech savvy, why am I not getting this? Why do I not understand how this works? That starts to come up. So it does not matter.
Speaker 1:I would say, probably unless you are at the very cutting edge, forefront of technology and technology is such a broad thing. People who are doing one aspect of technology like, let's say, they are in like the network side of things they might not understand the hardware side of things exactly. People in the hardware side of things may not understand business systems and scaling systems and automations. So that's the first thing to keep in mind is we all have things that we can learn with technology. We all have things that are outside of our comfort zone. It's just a matter of some people being a little bit more advanced and having more knowledge in certain areas. So I know how that feels, even as somebody who technology does tend to come pretty easily to me. Part of the reason it comes easily to me is because I've spent so many years this is not just like a hidden talent that I magically was born with or had. I literally have spent I don't even know how many tens of thousands of hours to this point in my life on these technologies. So that's the first thing.
Speaker 1:The second thing that I do, even for myself, and that I hope clients do, is to break things down into smaller steps, and the reason why I'm sharing this with you is because when we start to look at building out even kind of a basic business system as a business system or a scaling system, it's going to have a bunch of pieces that work together, and when we look at these pieces in their entirety, in their whole, it can feel overwhelming, it can feel like a lot, it can feel like I don't know where to begin with this, and so what I do is I actually draw out a map of what it is that I'm going to build of each individual piece. So if I am going to have a funnel, a landing page that has a form on it and it takes you to a thank you page, I will actually draw on my piece of paper. I am a very visual learner. If you are not a visual learner, maybe you're writing a list, maybe you are speaking it out loud voice, recording it, whatever works for you, but for me, just seeing it in front of me and seeing how the different pieces connect to each other really helps my visual brain. So I'm going to go ahead and I would draw a little box. That is my form. That form is going to be embedded into the landing page, so I have to make a form. I then am making a landing page that form is inside of. Then, when people fill out the form that is embedded on that landing page and they click submit, they are going to a thank you page. So I would have another box drawn for my thank you page.
Speaker 1:Now we can get much more complex right, so we could have an email sequence. That also happens when they fill out the form. So I would, literally on my piece of paper, I would draw a line with an arrow to my email sequence. I might actually draw out how many emails that I am going to have in that sequence, what each email is going to be about, what they are going to include. And that way I start to have this map and we could add way more pieces on. We could add a Facebook and Instagram ad that is going to that landing page. We could add on offers. Let's say you have some upsell offers on your thank you page that you want to offer to people, so maybe those go to a different page where people can buy those offers, or it goes to a shopping cart checkout. So I would literally draw every single piece out on the piece of paper. So that way, as I build the things, when I make that form, I literally am just checking off, like okay, the form is done, and then I can look at my piece of paper, at my visual map that I've created for myself, and see all the pieces that are left to build.
Speaker 1:But also the next most important one If the form is embedded on a landing page and we created the form, we're probably going to go build the landing page next. So that is part of how I break something that could be a very large, oftentimes pretty complex map of things that are all connected together. That's how I organize it for myself and break it down into smaller, bite-sized steps that I can work on day by day so that I'm not feeling like, oh my gosh, I have this huge thing that I have to get built all today and I don't even know all the pieces of it and I don't know where to start. No, we can map it out and then that way we have an actual game plan to keep us on track of what we are building. So another question that I ask myself and I encourage you to use is what do I need to learn when I want to sit down and build this stuff and not what are? I mean, it is helpful to brain dump and think of all the things that we need to learn. However, breaking it down into the next step that we need to learn is helpful because again, we're we're isolating that one piece. It becomes manageable in our mind.
Speaker 1:If you are, let's go back to that example of what I just used, of that funnel. So if you were like, oh my gosh, I don't even really know, like, what a form is, why I would use it, how to build it. Maybe you need to write down. The next thing you need to learn is what is an online web form and how do I create one. So that has been very, very helpful for me, especially approaching a lot of the technology stuff, and rather than staying stuck in the skills that I already have, being like, ok, I just need to pick one next thing, one next thing that I'm going to learn how to do or learn about or figure out how this system works. So very, very valuable way to also keep things paced out and keep it small, right. We don't want to have this like four month project that we're trying to work on all at once.
Speaker 1:I recommend starting with something very basic. Also, when we dive into building systems, a lot of the time, people have the belief that they need to have it all built out at the same time, that they have to have their start finish like all of it done. And I actually take a very different approach. I take an approach of, let's say, you do want to have people register and you want you would ideally have people register on a form that they can fill out online. I would literally start with just a form that's not even embedded in a landing page and then, once we have that form built, maybe you use that for this upcoming masterclass that you are hosting and then the next time you do a masterclass, you can then create a landing page that the form goes into and then you can create a thank you page. Like there's so many little steps that we can take, rather than having to have this huge, massive system fully complete before we can use it, we can actually use little bit by bit and still be able to use them in our business to scale, to make things easier for us, and just add on little pieces as we go.
Speaker 1:One other thing I would suggest is learn this stuff from somebody who is really good and comfortable at teaching beginners. I sometimes get onto walkthroughs or tutorials. I'm trying to figure out how to do something a little bit differently or learn something new, and I will pull up a tutorial. Sometimes it's on YouTube, sometimes it's a course that I bought and I am like, oh my gosh, this person started like so far down the line. They're using words. I don't even know what that means. They're not good at showing the actual steps that they are going through. They're using words. I don't even know what that means. They're not good at showing the actual steps that they are going through. They're just jumping from one thing to the next without really showing all the pieces of that sequence.
Speaker 1:For me, that is somebody who is not so good to learn from, and maybe they are great to learn from for somebody else. But especially if you are somebody who has that belief right now that you are not tech savvy, getting onto a training where it is literally jumping like huge gaps in there that they're assuming that you already have specific knowledge that maybe you don't have already, it can just feed this limiting belief. Right, that is actually going to feed and reinforce that belief of I am not tech savvy. It's not that you're not tech savvy, it's that the person who you are taking that training from is teaching either for somebody who is much more advanced than you, or they are just not great at teaching to beginners, or they're not great at teaching in a way that shows each individual step. And again, that's okay, because I'm sure there are people out there who that is who they want to learn from. But for you, find somebody that you love learning from.
Speaker 1:If you want to come see what my teaching is like, I actually have a mini course that is coming up that is called Funnel Godmother. We are going to, step by step, I'm going to be teaching you how to build a basic funnel, piece by piece. So I would love for you to join in and just see if the way that I teach maybe resonates a little bit better with you. Maybe it is a way that you are more comfortable learning. So that is a huge piece of the puzzle is finding somebody that you can rely on to show and demonstrate and teach things and explain things in a way that makes it really easy for you to start to learn these building blocks and these pieces. And again I will come back to where I started.
Speaker 1:You may outsource this If you start to learn. Again, I highly encourage you to learn the fundamentals and the building block pieces and what goes into it. So you know understanding that in a sales funnel, in a landing page where people are registering for a masterclass, here are the pieces that are needed. But maybe you don't need or want to learn right now how to actually build those yourselves. That is okay. You can definitely outsource that to somebody else. So or think about hey, I'm going to build these one or two pieces and then I'm going to outsource the rest to somebody, because that's what I'm learning right now, and when I get to the next step of my learning and learn how to do the next few pieces, then I'm going to do that myself.
Speaker 1:Maybe you're in a season where you step of my learning and learn how to do the next few pieces, then I'm going to do that myself. Maybe you're in a season where you're like I already know how to do all of this stuff. I just don't have the time and energy and capacity to do it, or that's not the best use of my time. Outsource it. I have been there. I got a college degree, a minor and an extra diploma in website design. I can build websites. However, I have also had other people build websites for me because at that season of my life, that was not the best use of my time and energy. It was not something I had the capacity for. I had other things going on. So there is no shame judgment, anything else, no, nothing bad about having other people do it.
Speaker 1:However, I also want you to feel empowered around technology, and these are the little steps we can start to take in order to feel more empowered, bit by bit, until we get to the point where we're like you know what, I am tech savvy, I am just choosing to have somebody else do this for me.
Speaker 1:Or maybe you're like I'm tech savvy and I am totally in love with building business systems and this is what I want to do to help other people as well. This is how I'm going to make my impact around the world. You can get there. I believe in you. Take it bit by bit. I hope this was helpful today in hoping you just kind of walk through some of the belief of I am not tech savvy and also figuring out how to break things into smaller pieces so that you can start to learn where you are right now. Right, it's important to meet, figure out, have resources and people and teachers and technology that's going to meet us where we are, so that we can take that next step. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day and I will catch you on the next episode of Effortlessly Productive.
