A Simple Framework to Create Anything You Want in Your Life
“5 Healthy Steps That Changed My Leadership and Life”
“The Four Strategies for BD Success at Your Consulting Firm”
“5 Ways to Create a Client-Friendly Consulting Firm”
Do articles like these sound familiar?
The truth is many of those articles, while often well-intentioned, most likely aren’t relevant to you and your specific, unique, and beautiful life. They’re often confusing, distracting, and ultimately ineffective.
They’re also incomplete (I’ll share more about that in just a bit).
So you end up wasting valuable time reading these articles, trying to implement ideas and tactics that will help you reach goals that others have defined for you.
But are they actually creating the results YOU want?
Probably not….
In this article, I want to share a simple framework that you can use across your business and across your entire life to clarify how you spend your time and energy, and cut down on overwhelm and confusion.
So that you can quickly create anything you want.
This is not a “5-step” listicle of “proven tactics.” It’s not a step-by-step checklist for “success.”
Rather, it’s a different way of thinking about your life altogether, which I’ve found helpful in my own life and I hope you will, too.
A bit of my own story
In the spring of 2017 I started my business after 16 years in corporate America. And for the first year and a half I struggled. I didn’t know very much about growing a coaching & consulting firm, but I stuck with it.
By 2018, I had enough cashflow to start hiring mentors and coaches that could help me accelerate the change and growth required to be successful as a business owner.
For the next 6 years I learned, studied, worked, and grew — learning from the very best mentors and experts in the consulting, entrepreneurship, and coaching space. I was making significant progress, but still hadn’t had the breakthrough I knew was available….
Then in the spring of 2023 after a trip to see my brother in Hawaii all the pieces kinda clicked together. There’s nothing like traveling and seeing how other people live to make you think differently about your own life.
You see, before that I was simply doing what other people were telling me to do. I trusted that their experience would translate to my life… but the truth is: it really didn’t.
I was overwhelmed by all the “do this, do that” articles, advice, and mentors out in the world. They all present conflicting and overwhelming advice, which can leave anyone reeling and unsure…
Unless you define what you want first!
Once my awareness grew I was able to understand something fundamental to my life, and that changed everything.
How the law of Cause & Effect changed everything
The law of Cause & Effect, simply stated, is that every cause has its effect and every effect has its cause.
This is critical to understand if you want a way to quickly and efficiently create the things you want.
If you aren’t lining up the causes with the effects you want, you end up learning or doing a lot of things that don’t result in you creating what you want. And you end up creating “effects” that aren’t the ones you want.
It wastes a lot of time and energy.
I did that for years... I would simply learn or do things without understanding how to organize them in a way that creates efficient results.
What finally clicked for me is that specific results or effects have very specific causes. And if I can create clarity on the effect I want, then understanding the associated causes is actually straightforward.
Which results in a lot of saved time and minimized confusion.
And, those causes are always going to be your skillsets in a few different areas which I’ll define below.
Now when I’m working on my business or my clients’ businesses we always use the Cause & Effect framework to think about and organize what we’re doing.
The skillsets to master in order to get the Effects you want
There are three skill-based Causes that will help you create any Effect you want.
Here they are:
Mindset: How you think, feel, and operate your body
Strategy & Tactics: The specific thing(s) you choose to do
Activity: Doing those things consistently
Each one is its own skillset to become aware of and master. And each one is required to create a specific result. But you have to do them ALL, otherwise you get nowhere. (This is why most of the advice is incomplete - they are all Strategy & Tactic without the required Mindset & Activity skills.)
It looks like this….
The most important part of this framework is defining the Effect or result you want to create, FIRST. This can feel backwards, but you have to start with where you are going. This is why in the above illustration the first arrow is from Effect to Cause. Being clear about what you want is the key.
Once you are, you can start to line up the Mindset, Strategy & Tactics, and Activity skills required to create it.
Let’s use a common example that I come across in my work.
Let’s say you want to add revenue to your business while reducing workload and stress.
First, you need to define your Effects
The first thing to recognize is that in this example, you actually want three different things to happen, i.e. your Effects or results:
Added revenue
Reduced workload
Less stress
But we need to get even more specific.
For “added revenue,” you need to be as clear as you can about how much revenue you want to add, and even clearer about what you are going to do with the money.
Same for “reduced workload.” What do you want to do with your workload; what parts do you want to remove, add, or change?
And for “less stress,” how do you want to feel in your body? Calm, peaceful, happy, joyous? Achieving less of something is more difficult to accomplish, so you need to figure out what you want more of, not less.
What feelings or experiences would you like to replace the stress?
Once you’ve defined your Effects, you can start working on the 3 skillsets that will make up the Cause side of your equation.
Let’s do that now.
Skillset #1: Mindset
When I say “mindset,” you might think of some fluffy, woo-woo, spiritual concepts. Maybe you think working on mindset is effective for some people, but it’s not really relevant to you.
But what I mean by mindset is how you think, feel, and operate in your body. Are you a thinking, feeling person with a body? Yes, of course.
That means you have a mindset. Your mindset is operating all the time, whether or not you’re aware of it, and it’s creating your results. The question to be asking is; do my current mindset skills align with the results and effects I want and/or what are the mindset skills required to create the effect I want?
Let’s take our “added revenue” goal. Phew, but aren’t there a lot of mindset issues around money? You bet there are. We all have them. It’s a matter of bringing them into your conscious awareness and working on them.
If revenue is intrinsically related to money & sales, what are your money & sales mindsets or beliefs? They might include fear of rejection, low self worth, scarcity mentality, imposter syndrome, childhood trauma, lack, not good enough… the list goes on and on, and these beliefs will look different for each individual.
The fact is that you can have all the revenue-generating strategies and tactics in the world — but if your mindset doesn’t match your goals, they’re not going to work at all.
Now, developing skills around mindset is not a box you can check, or something you can “fix” overnight. Like any complex skill, it takes learning, change, growth, and fine-tuning over your whole lifetime.
And it often requires working with other people (therapists, mentors, coaches, etc.) to help identify your unique mindset issues and work through them, to reframe your mindset in a way that will help you reach your goals and create what you want in your life.
This is why Mindset work is integral to the sales work I do with my clients.
Often, they start out feeling it’s not relevant to them — and after a while, they realize it’s actually the most important skill to master in order to build the business and life they desire.
Skillset #2: Strategy & Tactics
Your strategy & tactics are going to be the things you do that you believe are the cause of what you want. You may make mistakes here and there picking a strategy and tactic; this is ok and to be expected. This is where a coach or mentor who has created the result you want can give you some starting points that might work for you.
Ultimately though you have to find strategy and tactics that create the results you want and are aligned with work you love or can love doing.
When it comes to our “adding revenue” goal, the strategy & tactic is sales.
It’s not going to the gym or being on a dating app or writing a book. It’s sales.
Because sales is the only thing that moves money in a business.
Sure there are other ways to move money such as getting a job, applying for a loan, robbery, begging, etc. and if you want to use those as Strategy & Tactics, go for it (ethical and moral issues aside). But when it comes to growing a business, the big strategy & tactic is going to be sales.
Now let’s revisit our “less stress” goal.
There are many proven ways to reduce stress — yoga, running, exercise, meditation, breath work, journaling, therapy, smoking pot, moving to Tahiti… These are all stress lowering strategies and tactics.
What about “reducing workload”? Our strategies and tactics there might include hiring team members, delegating, reducing waste, doing less, raising your prices, improving your skills, using AI, etc.
Again, there is not going to be one silver bullet here. There will be some trial and error. But the key point is to be more aware of choosing Strategies & Tactics that actually align with your desired Effects.
Remember: current strategies and tactics will lead to current results.
Skillset #3: Activity
The Activity skill is the simplest part of this equation, but sometimes the hardest to accomplish.
“Activity” just means: doing the Strategy & Tactics consistently.
Let’s take our “less stress” goal. Let’s say that the Strategy & Tactic you’ve chosen to reach this Effect is yoga. You enjoy yoga, it works well as a calming exercise for you, you’ve read the research on its efficacy, etc.
Great. The problem is that you never actually do yoga because you’re filling your calendar full of stressful work stuff. And, unfortunately, you can’t do yoga twice a year and expect it to have any real effect.
That’s where the Activity skill comes in.
Whether it’s a sales tactic, a stress-lowering exercise, or a workload-reducing strategy, none of those will work unless you do them consistently.
Consistency is 100% required to create the results you want.
Why those articles don’t work
Now, at the top of this article I talked about all those annoying (and seductive!) LinkedIn articles that probably aren’t actually changing your results.
Hopefully now you understand why most of them don’t “work,” and just serve to overwhelm and confuse you.
It’s because it’s generic information. It’s not likely to be relevant to the specific Effects you want, and to your unique circumstances.
They’re usually strategies and tactics, standing alone, without being connected to the essential Mindset and Activity skills that make the whole thing actually function.
They’re missing the “Cause & Effect” big picture that I’ve outlined here.
Use the Cause & Effect framework to create the life you want
The law of Cause & Effect is one of several universal laws that can help us think about our life in a way that simplifies what is required to create a specific result and connects us with the truth.
It provides a framework to organize what you are doing and create anything you want.
Your business is a vehicle that can create an incredible life for you, your family, your community… Filled with freedom, creative expression, and love.
But you must know how to build it, drive it, and maintain it.
Cause & Effect + the skills of Mindset, Strategy & Tactics, and Activity are the roadmap and path to get there.
-Christopher
P.S. I’m on the journey as much as you are and I definitely don’t have it all figured out. If you want to journey together and are looking for help, please reach out.
