Mastering CiviCRM

What does it really take to succeed with CiviCRM?

First let's define clearly what we do and do not mean by "succeed".

By success I do not mean any of the following:

• Never hitting a challenge

• instant gratification

• perfection

Success means simply this: You have clear and measurable goals, and you achieve them.

And by "succeeding with CiviCRM", I do not mean that you will become the worldwide expert in this or any other system. Instead I mean that you will achieve valuable goals for your organization's mission, by leveraging what CiviCRM has to offer.

In my next several emails I'll elaborate on 10 critical elements of mastering CiviCRM.

In my many years of helping organizations nail their goals with CiviCRM, I've seen that the ones who are happiest with their systems are those who who make a habit of sticking to some or all of these points.

Here they are:

0. Winner's mindset
1. Focus on mission value
2. Investment vs expense
3. Simplifying
4. Designated in-house expert
5. Online documentation
6. Your own documentation
7. Online community
8. In person community
9. Professional help
10. Staying current with new developments

(Being able to count 10 is optional.)

I'll see you tomorrow, winner.

- A.

Mysterious permission problems

Most of my clients handle things pretty well on their own, and they only come to me when they get something that really mystifies them.

Among all the mysterious problems that come my way, the most common cause is probably complex user permissions.

WordPress and Drupal offer a variety of ways to control access to content, and so does CiviCRM. Permissions, roles, ACLs, financial ACLs, groups, memberships, etc., etc.

I've found that organizations who avoid problems with permissions are doing at least one of two things:

1. They limit the complexity. Fewer roles, fewer ACLs, fewer policies about who can do what.
   
   They either know that they don't need the complexity, or they make an intentional decision to keep things simple and make sure that staff are well trained and user interfaces are well designed.

2. They keep thorough documentation. Both the rationale and the mechanism for any permissioning scheme is written down somewhere, and frequently referenced and updated. This makes it easy to sort out what's going on when something surprising happens.
   
   It also has a limiting effect on the complexity: if you have to document everything, it kinda makes you think twice before changing the permissions.

Some of the biggest wins in reducing complexity come from simplifying the user permissioning scheme.

If you can think of more than a handful of times that your users have been mysteriously denied access the content or features that they should have, there's a good chance you need to sit down and simplify.

All the best,
A.

Simplify, simplify

Walden author Henry David Thoreau wrote:

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”

To which Ralph Waldo Emerson replied:

“One ‘Simplify’ would have sufficed.”

I just love those guys.

Do you understand your CRM system? Sure, probably not all of it. Any robust system is likely to have complexity that you don't need to comprehend.

But among the things you need to do on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis, are each of the various moving parts understood by at least one person or another on your team?

Can you recall more than a handful of “mysterious” problems in the past year?

Emerson and Thoreau might have some wisdom for you.

All the best,
A.

Easy decisions

The difference between a hard decision and an easy one usually comes down to your assessment of cost versus benefit, or difficulty versus value.

Take a look at this matrix:

We can make fairly easy decisions for something that is high value and low difficulty, or low value and high difficulty.

In between those extremes, you can lose a lot of time and energy wrestling with the possibilities.

Don't do it.

Try this instead:

If it's low value, it doesn't matter how easy it is. Either do it, or don't do it, but decide quickly and move on. You've got bigger fish to fry.

If it's high value, but still seems too hard, take a minute to consider some alternatives: Maybe you don't really need everything you thought you needed. Maybe you could get most of the same value by just doing something easier.

Here's the thing:

Your brain has to make thousands of decisions every day. You don't even think about the easy ones. But there are more hard ones than you would like.

Pick your battles. Look for the value. Remember that no solution is perfect, but real value is attainable.

This applies to your fundraising strategy, your membership engagement, even to practical matters like making your CRM do exactly what you want.

Remember what your goal is. They're surely more than one way to get there.

All the best,
A.

Client question: How can I make membership changes easier for my members?

This week I got the following question from a coaching client (paraphrased here for brevity):

We've been using CiviCRM's contact dashboard for a long time to let our users keep up with their history — contributions, email subscriptions, etc.

We've recently started a membership program and now have about 150 members, all with automatic monthly renewal (payments processed through Stripe). The contact dashboard is still useful, but we've noticed a couple of limitations:

1. There's no link for a member to cancel their membership. We'd like them at least to have the freedom to stop the recurring payment if they really want to.

2. Our membership program allows members to set their own recurring membership amount. We'd like to allow them the flexibility to change this amount if they need to. The dashboard provides a “Renew” button, but when the member clicks this button and renews with a different amount, CiviCRM creates a second membership for them, so now they have two recurring contributions with different amounts.

Is there any way we could allow users to cancel their own membership? And can we also allow them to easily change their membership amount?

I love this question because it presents a few different possibilities.

The short answer:

Neither CiviCRM nor the Stripe extension provide a way to offer these features.

Still, I'm pretty sure we could develop a custom extension that would do it. CiviCRM's APIs do allow for canceling a membership, and canceling a recurring payment; so it should be possible to create an extension that allows the user to cancel their own membership and its recurring payment, and also to create a new recurring payment (at a different amount) while automatically canceling the previous recurring payment at the old amount.

But it would be smart to do some value assessment first.

Consider some alterenatives:

Developing that custom extension is not a trivial expense.

As with anything, there's a broad range of investment that you could make in such an extension, from something very bare-bones to something very robust. The fancier you make it, the easier everything will be for the people who use it, but the more investment you'll need to make in building and thoroughly testing the functionality.

Since it's not a trivial expense, and could become "very expensive" (whatever that might mean to you), it's worth thinking about the alternatives.

Especially since you only have around 150 members, you might not even know yet how common this need is. And you probably don't yet have a clear picture of all the other things that members will want to do in this vein.

So there's a lot of uncertainty here, not just in the expense of building an extension, but in the nature of the actual need.

As one example of an alternative: Why not just throw staff hours at it? For example, you could:

• Create a simple form by which users can request that you cancel their membership. Have a staff member monitor those requests, and manually cancel the memberships.

• Create a simple form where users can request to change their membership amount. This one would need to collect the credit card details and actually create a new membership with a new recurring payment via Stripe. Have your staff monitor the form submissions and manually cancel the old membership in favor of the newly created one.

• On both of these forms (or on a completely separate form), include a free-form field where users can ask any question at all about changing their membership. Who knows, maybe you’ll find a lot of people who just want to pause for a couple of months.

That should be pretty simple to set up; and letting it run for a few weeks, or even a few months, would help you get a sense of how often such requests come in, how much staff time is spent processing those requests, and what other changes your members want that you haven’t thought of.

Once you have that info, you can make a much more informed decision about any custom featurese.

Clear goals for measurable outcomes:

Obviously this is not as sexy as having a fancy interface where users can do everything they want without your help.

If sexy user interfaces are a big part of your brand identity, then you might already have some mechanism for estimating the business value of such tools.

And if you can put a number on that, then you can think about how much you're able to invest in such an extension, and make a real value decision on the investment.

Either way, before you dive in on a custom extension project, I recommend you get a clear sense of exactly what needle you're trying to move — what specific measurable outcome you're trying to achieve — and the measurable business value of moving that needle.

This way you’ve got a clear target, and a clear standard by which you can judge your success afterward.

All the best,
A.

When the solution is elusive, go back to the problem

Yesterday I wrote about a simple brain hack for tough problems:

When the solution is elusive, take a step back and make sure you understand the problem by writing it down.

So why does this work?

I'm not a specialist in human brain function. I can't tell you exactly what mechanism inside your skull is blocking or promoting success in these situations.

But I think it's mostly a "mirage" effect:

Sometimes it just "feels" like the solution is just out of reach. And if we're walking toward that distant shadow, surely we'll get there eventually.

This is all rolled up in your brain's incredible capacity for distraction, misdirection, wishful thinking, and a tendency to expect that you'll get it right the first time.

After all, life is as easy as it is only because we normally deal with problems that are pretty familiar to us. So we usually do get it right the first time.

But when we don't — when the first time or even the fifth time doesn't produce something useful — it's time to change tactics.

Next time you feel a dull pain from banging your head against a problem repeatedly, take a step back and re-examine the real problem.

You probably won't break through that brick wall with one more whack of your forehead. But maybe there's a door that you just haven't seen yet.

All the best,
A.

A simple brain hack for tough problems

Two tough problems this week reminded me of a simple brain hack that I sometimes recommend to my clients:

When the solution is elusive, take a step back and make sure you understand the problem by writing it down.

1. Chemistry homework

Helping my high-school daughter with a tough chemistry problem, I spent half an hour struggling to explain the method that I thought would work, until I finally realized that I wasn't super-clear about what I was trying to find.

Finally I took 2 minutes to write the question on paper, as a grammatically correct sentence starting with a capital letter and ending with a question mark. And then the correct method became obvious.

Ten minutes later we were done with the calculation.

2. Software headache

For three days this week, I puzzled repeatedly over a tough software development challenge for a client project. Each time I came back to it, I thought I had the right approach. But I couldn't quite make everything fit together, for reasons that eluded me.

This morning I sat with pencil and paper, and I wrote out in a few simple sentences and a couple of very simple diagrams what I actually wanted to achieve.

One hour of genuinely productive work later, it's done.

Here's the thing:

I've seen this approach work time and time again.

Put down your tools — your dashboards, your spreadsheets, your calculator, your email, your brainstorming committee — and write, with pencil on paper, the simplest possible explanation of what you're actually trying to achieve.

Sure, when you just get it right the first time, you don’t need this — and that’s great!

But when you don't, getting back to the problem — and away from a swirling morass of possible solutions — has a genuine clarifying effect.

All the best,
A.

ASAE: "Are You Measuring What Matters to Grow Revenue?"

I love a good discussion on measurement and goals.

The American Society of Association Executives has a great little article here that presents a few gems worth noting:

1. Long-term tracking provides insights to actual program results.

The American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians ...monitors a group of nonmember attendees that it offered memberships to in 2019. “We have tracked this cohort and have been able to maintain just under half of these physicians since,” [the association's Executive Director] said.

2. Organization-wide access to your metrics helps everyone pull together.

“You may have membership data on renewals or lapsed membership that the CFO alone is looking at from a revenue standpoint. But those numbers can help the organization identify what they need to create a communications strategy and messaging that will resonate with a member.”

3. Website stats can help identify weak points in your messaging.

If engagement with your products isn’t what you’re hoping for ... Carlisle suggests looking at your website’s bounce rate—the percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate can mean you’re leaving money on the table.

4. Goals matter.

Any meaningful work around KPIs should begin with a discussion of what strategic goals the association is trying to meet, says Cruz... “The organization should be defining the problems that they’re trying to solve, and the data they’re collecting should be providing insight into the effectiveness of the organization at solving those problems,” she said. “Before data collection can start, you should have a thorough, achievable, and measurable operations plan.”

5. Common terminology keeps everyone on the same page.

For an organization to draw meaningful conclusions from its data, it needs to establish consistent terms for KPIs across departments and agree on definitions and usages. “We’ve standardized it—here’s the data, here’s the metrics we’re pulling, here’s when it’s pulled, here’s when it’s communicated,” George said. “Everybody has a single point of truth, and there aren’t alternative narratives.”

I encourage you to give it a read, and think about how your goals, plans, and measurements are (or could) work together to help you nail your development goals.

All the best,
A.

Getting back to the joy of your work

Do you remember when you decided to take on your responsibilities at your organization?

I'm guessing you saw it as an opportunity:

• To make a difference in the world

• To help people who really need your support

• To practice and perfect your particular set of professional skills

• To feel a sense of belonging among a team of people who share your values

At some point you decided to use CiviCRM as a significant tool in this work. (Or someone else decided, and you agreed.)

I'm guessing you also saw this as an opportunity, as a way to support your personal mission in pursuing all of the above. You probably hoped it would help you:

• To get a clear picture of the data that informs your work

• To understand the people you're trying to help

• To easily connect people to the services and information that they need

• To feel the satisfaction of achieving one goal after another

So how's that going?

I mean really:

• Are you feeling satisfied and proud of your achievements?

• Are you looking back with pride on a series of accomplished goals, large or small?

• Are you continually improving in your sense of clarity of the data that matters?

If you are, that's music to my ears.

If you're not, what's up?

Here's the thing:

A powerful and flexible tool like CiviCRM comes with its own set of delights and derailments.

I hear from people on a regular basis who are experiencing the delights, by working through (and going around) the derailments.

They do it by mastering the tools, focusing on measurable outcomes, and making sure they understand the underlying structure of their data.

Fortunately, these are all learnable skills, if you make the time to learn them, and get help where you need it.

And it’s worth doing. Sometimes it's just a matter of pausing to remember why you started this journey in the first place.

All the best,
A.

Where’s the joy?

Where do you find joy in the work that you do?

It's probably not in struggling with technology, though if you're a puzzle solver like me, there is a lot of satisfaction in making a tool do what you want it to do.

But there's a deeper reason why people work in community-driven organizations.

Why they seek out those positions.

Why they stick around through all the headaches and challenges.

As you slug it out in the trenches today, remember this:

You are helping people who matter make valuable accomplishments in their lives.

Your members, your staff, your volunteers. The work you do matters to them.

Press on, and count the wins as they come, large or small.

All the best,
A.

What needle are you trying to move?

Running an organization — nonprofit or otherwise — is kinda like flying an airplane. You know you're trying to get somewhere, and meanwhile you're faced with decision after decision.

It can feel a little like this:

Which one of these settings is for Donor Retention Rate?

Mission objectives, board requirements, regulations, income in all its forms, expenses in all their forms, staff management, internal workflows, policies, on and on.

When you get an idea that your CRM can help you with some of this, it's important to ask yourself one question:

What needle am I trying to move?

Of all the inputs and outputs your organization has to deal with, can you name even one — perhaps two or three — specific measurable changes that you want to see?

• Reduce staff workload by 10%, thereby freeing up resources for more important tasks?

• Decrease by 25% the time it takes to onboard a new service recipient, so you can effectively serve more people?

• Increase membership renewals by 20% year over year, in order to increase funding and member advocacy?

• Decrease form abandonment by 35% so you can stop losing so many sign-ups and contributions?

Here’s the thing:

Every pilot would love to “fly the airplane better," or "have a better airplane." Every airline executive and passenger would probably want that too.

But in order to do that intentionally, and not just get lucky, you have to know what “better” means, and you have to decide what specific and measurable improvements you want to pursue.

Yes, you have to keep flying the airplane you've got. The question is, where's the next best chance for an improvement? (Hint: it’s probably the one that’s aimed at a specific measurable outcome.)

All the best,
Allen

The best payment processor for CiviCRM

Here's a question I got from a client recently:

In your opinion which payment solution works best with CiviCRM?

PayPal

Square

Or what?

Of those two choices, only PayPal is supported by CiviCRM (there's no available payment processor for Square), but if you're just starting out, I'm going to recommend Stripe instead.

PayPal

PayPal works, is well known, and is fine for low-volume situations. But for an organization using CiviCRM, PayPal is full of headaches. For example, PayPal requires you to include their logo on all payment forms, insists on trying to get end-users to pay with their PayPal account instead of their credit card (which is confusing to people who are just trying to give you money), and is very hard to investigate when questions or issues come up (as they sometimes will, e.g. why was this payment canceled? etc.)

Stripe

Stripe, on the other hand, is very actively used in the CiviCRM community, offers clear documentation and clearly organized data, is completely transparent to the end user (users will never see a Stripe logo or get redirected away from your site to make a payment), and has a CiviCRM integration that is actively maintained and continually improved.

Stripe is what I use on my own site, and what most of my clients are using.

iATS

Here's another one that's fairly popular, and I know a few organizations that are using it happily with CiviCRM. They're also active supporters of the CiviCRM project, which is a boost for everyone, including organizations like yours who depend on it.

Others

If one of the above doesn't work for you, or if you have a specific payment processor you want to work with, you have a couple of options:

1. Take a look at the CiviCRM extensions directory. There may already be an extension that supports integration with the payment processor you want.

2. It is possible to hire a developer to create an extension for a given payment processor. This is not a small project to be undertaken lightly, but if you think that using that specific payment processor will save you $10K to $15K in the first year, then it might be worth it.

All the best,
A.

Human systems first

I was happy to hear from one of my clients last week that they've done something really smart.

It's something I often recommend, because it saves a ton of effort and expense, and applies resources only where needed.

In short, it's this:

Seeing an opportunity to improve their workflow, they did not begin with software. Instead, they simply implemented a change in their human processes.

Here's the background:

A big part of their mission is connecting people to services. They get dozens of new inquiries per month, from people who may need any number of the services they offer.

Previously they would offer separate intake forms on their website, one for each program.

A new contact would sign up for a particular program and the program coordinator would take it from there: make sure they're a good fit for the program, and then get them enrolled.

It wasn't a bad system, but they realized that people were often missing out on services in other programs.

They needed a way to centralize the enrollment process so that service recipients could be fully aware of all the options available to them and get connected to the services that would really help.

So they designated an Intake Coordinator.

This person is responsible for all new inquiries: for making sure they get connected to the right programs, that each program coordinator is doing the right follow-up, and that the service recipient is being connected to new services as needed.

And here's the smart thing that they did:

They started with the human process.

They made sure everyone was clear about the process, designated and trained (and actually hired) the Intake Coordinator, and set up very simple communications: ad-hoc email notifications and a shared spreadsheet.

That was enough. They got to work.

They did not insist on having a customized set of software features to manage this information. They just started with the human process.

6 months later, it's time for the software:

Their president reached out to me about it this week.

They've been using this system in the real world for 6 months now. They know what works and what doesn't. They know where the choke points are.

With that knowledge, we’ll be setting them up with CiviCRM’s case management features to streamline communications and tracking. And we can use their 6 months of experience to be sure we're building the features that are needed, not just what someone imagines might be needed.

From this they get two big benefits:

1. They were able to start their new intake management process quickly, without waiting on a software development project.

2. The software project itself is focused, meaningful, and well informed.

Here's the thing:

Yes, you’ll hear me grouse now and then about the inefficiency of ad-hoc emails and shared spreadsheets as a data management tool set.

But there's a greater inefficiency to be had.

It's the one you get when you hurry off to build the “perfect” software system for a human process that you don't fully understand yet.

Build a human process first. Then you'll know where the software can provide real value.

All the best,
A.

Design the sidewalks last

You can't always predict how people will use your systems.

Do you remember your college campus, or the last big office campus you visited?

If it was like most such places, it had dozens of buildings connected by concrete sidewalks — where the planners wanted people to walk — criss-crossed with trails worn through the grass — where people actually walk.

This system has two problems:

1. Somebody spent a lot of money building sidewalks that nobody uses.

2. The dirt paths are hard to maintain. Muddy in the rain, neglected under heavy snow.

Campus personnel may try to force people onto the “correct” paths by erecting barriers. But the people just make slightly longer shortcuts by wearing a new trail around the barriers.

Probably not the result they were hoping for.

There's a better way:

In recent decades some landscape designers have caught on and decided to stop fighting the inevitable.

How?

They design the sidewalks last.

It's a simple concept:

You first build the buildings, and put in few or no paved pathways.

Then, in the second year when the lines of desire and convenience and efficiency have worn themselves into the grass, you pave them.

Sure, the campus is actually less convenient in the first year: it has no paved pathways at all.

But after the second year, the pathways are both convenient and maintainable. And you haven't wasted your resources building sidewalks that no one uses.

Here's the thing:

In any software system, including your open-source CRM, you have the same opportunity.

You can do it by implementing the human system first, with whatever ad-hoc data sharing methods are easiest. Shared spreadsheets, ad-hoc emails, whatever.

Work out the policies that fit your mission, and let this human system run its course for a few months.

By that time you'll see what shortcuts people have begun to take. You'll know where the big inefficiencies are, and where a well-designed CRM feature set can really help you.

No system will ever be “perfect.” You can save yourself some heartache by starting with what matters most — the human system — and investing in the software later.

All the best,
A.

The best resource for mastering CiviCRM: CiviCamp

CiviCRM has a fantastic online community. MatterMost for chat, StackExchange for getting questions answered, the official blog for news, even Twitter and GitLab (nice if you're a developer).

But if you ask me, in-person meetups are where the real magic happens.

When it comes to learning, contributing, and inspiring each other, nothing beats hanging out in real life with a bunch of other people who are working with the same tools to meet similar challenges achieve some of the goals.

Of course in-person gatherings for CiviCRM, as for everything else, took a big hit in the gloomy COVID lockdown days.

But they've been slowly making a comeback. CiviCamps, trainings, and developer sprints are coming up in 2023:

• CiviCamp in Brussels, Belgium: June 2

• CiviCamp in London, UK: June 20

• CiviCamp and sprint in Leipzig, Germany: Sept. 11-14

• CiviCamp, sprint, and training in Manchester, UK: Nov. 29 - Dec. 8

And great news for us here in North America: discussion is under way now for a CiviCamp in Ontario, Canada (currently looking at Toronto or Ottowa) in the Fall.

Here’s the thing:

I’m so impressed with the benefits of attending that I sponsor 50% of the event fee for my most active coaching clients. If they're that committed to mastering CiviCRM to further their mission, I want them to be at these events

If you can make it to one of these, you probably should.

It’s one of the best time investments you can make in leveraging CiviCRM to support your mission.

All the best,
A.

You don’t have to know why it works

A couple of days ago, I wrote about the Monty Hall problem, and how intiution and common sense can be misleading.

When I encountered this exercise, I became rather obsessed with trying to understand it. After all, it had pitted dozens of academic mathematicians against the "World's Highest IQ" Guiness Record holder.

I puzzled over it throughout the day, and later I sat with a mathematically inclined friend to work through a series of trials to test it out.

Those trials showed the surprising "correct" pattern: by switching, I won about 2/3 of the time.

I then sat for another hour trying to understand why it worked that way.

And that's how life is. When measurements tell you that something is happening, it's not always easy to understand why it's happening.

But here's the thing:

If you observe cause-and-effect, you don't necessarily have to know why it exists. You just have to figure out how to use it.

And this is why testing really matters: your email subject lines, your link text, your membership sign-up form complexity, all of it.

There are rules of thumb, and best practices, and game theory, and marketing truisms.

But when you reliably measure and observe a pattern — even if you don't have time to dissect and understand it — the odds are in your favor if you make use of what it's telling you.

All the best,
A.

P.S. The above “pitted dozens” link contains the original article from Parade magazine, and many entertaining reader comments, including this one:

In a recent column, you called on math classes around the country to perform an experiment that would confirm your response to a game show problem. My eighth grade classes tried it, and I don’t really understand how to set up an equation for your theory, but it definitely does work! …

My thoughts exactly.

Google analytics conversion tracking for CiviCRM

Are you using Google Analytics 4 to measure traffic on your site? (You are measuring traffic somehow, right?)

Wouldn't it be nice to use the conversion tracking features to track your contribution and membership conversions?

Now you can.

There’s a new extension for CiviCRM that will let you do just that. It's called Google Tag Manager for CiviCRM, and you can get it here, or read the announcement here.

This brand new extension was just announced a couple of days ago, so I can't yet point out any progress and cons per se.

But I will be trying it on my own sites, and I recommend you at least give it a try.

It's one more tool in your kit as you aim for measurable improvements.

All the best,
A.

Measuring is hard. Guessing right is harder.

Intuition and common sense can be surprisingly misleading.

Here’s a simple exercise in probabilities that confounds even professional mathematicians. It’s known as “the Monty Hall problem”:

A game show host offers three doors, behind one of which is the big prize. He allows you, the contestant, to choose one door.

He then opens one of the losing doors, so there are now only two unopened doors. Then he asks you if you want to change your selection.

Would switching help you win?

Almost everyone, intuitively and very strongly, believes that it doesn't matter if you switch.

But that's incorrect.

Believe it or not, switching will double your chance of winning.

I didn't believe it either, until I actually tried dozens of trials and measured the results. Then I could at least believe it — and understanding it took even more effort.

Here's the thing:

Cause and effect are not always easy to understand. The obvious answer is not always the right one.

When you're trying to increase constituent engagement, maximize membership retention, increase contributions, or achieve any other business goal, a quick glance at your CRM reports might seem like it would tell you what you need to know.

But does it really?

Intuition and common sense are great tools when you're pressed for time.

But when you want to really understand what's going on, and make reliable plans that have a good chance of achieving desired outcomes, there's no substitute for careful measurement of real-world cause and effect.

All the best,
A.

P.S. If you’re really curious, here’s a short video that explains the Monty Hall Problem.

Expect lots of questions from a good coach

Self-diagnosis is a routine part of taking care of your own systems. But it's not always the best starting point when pulling in outside help.

Imagine you're a doctor, and a patient comes to see you.

The patient begins by saying, “Doctor, I just need you to prescribe some malaria pills. Can you do that?”

Sure, as a doctor you certainly could prescribe malaria pills. But are you ready to do that?

Probably not. You'll need to ask questions, maybe a lot of them, just to come to a diagnosis of the problem, let alone prescribing a remedy.

Here's the thing:

When it's time to talk with your coach or another specialist you trust, consider that the best value you can get from them is their professional opinion based on a full understanding of your situation.

Be ready to share about your underlying goals and your specific challenges. Be ready to answer their questions.

Be ready to tell what you've already tried.

And be ready for them to suggest something completely different.

After all, they're not just there to prescribe a solution. You have them on your team so they can help to identify the real problem in the first place, and point you to solutions that will work for your situation.

All the best,
A.

Is self-diagnosis holding you back?

Keeping your CRM healthy is a lot like keeping yourself healthy.

And most of us do our own self-diagnosis quite often, usually to good effect.

Heartburn after three big bowls of spicy Texas chili? Yeah, probably indigestion. Maybe take some Tums, maybe go a little easier on the chili next time.

But sometimes that's not good enough.

If the heartburn persists for days or months, you would probably want to ask whether your self-diagnosis is holding you back. Could there be a more serious underlying cause? Or could a different solution be more effective?

It might be worth visiting with a trusted professional, and being ready to answer whatever questions they may have.

Here's the thing:

I want all of my clients to be as self-sufficient as possible: confident in analyzing their situation, identifying their goals, and setting a path to get from where they are to where they want to be.

But sometimes you can feel that you're not making progress. Or you wonder if you could be making progress faster or better.

That's a good time to call your coach or another specialist.

Recognizing when you need help is an important part of healthy self-sufficiency.

You've taken a good swing at it yourself. Getting a second opinion can't hurt.

All the best,
A.