A few days ago, I got an invite from a well-known founder in the media space.

They run a large private community of business owners and asked if I’d be interested in being a part-time growth coach.

To be totally honest, my immediate instinct was to decline the invite…

I’ve got a full plate. I just accepted two new advisory clients. And, I deeply value my own flexibility.

“Are you sure this isn’t a mistake? You really respect this person. You’re just gonna walk away? What if this is the last time they want to collab with you?”

I honestly didn’t want to say yes, but I also felt like I was being super reactive.

So I brought it up with my biz coach, and we workshopped a framework that he learned from some ancient author/creative/self-help dude.

I’m not even gonna link the video, because it’s like watching Bob Ross meets McKinsey Consulting, and you’ll hate me for it.

But the framework was actually AWESOME.

Let’s say you’ve got a tough call…

Whatever it is. Doesn’t matter.

You break your decision into the 3–5 key components that actually matter to you—and you evaluate them individually, as best you can, with a yes or a no.

When I scored it, only #2 and #3 were yes. The rest were no.

So the answer was clear: I was right to pass on this offer.

But instead of just being like, ahh f*ck it, and sending them a polite decline email back, I asked myself:

We ran different scenarios:

Turns out: nope, none were dealbreakers on their own.

But I did realize that I needed 4 out of 5 to feel good.

So I emailed back and say hey, love ya, appreciate you thinking about me always, but in order to make this super exciting for me, this is what it'd look like:

I sent it back, and, they replied back, “awesome, lets do it”.

First of all, I was like hell yeah, I’m pumped.

But the even more insightful part for me was, if they had written back and said “sorry, we can’t do that,” I would’ve been totally fine.

That’s how I knew I made the right call—it was win/win either way.

To be clear - this is a small amount of money. And a small amount of time. And a pretty small decision, all things considered.

But it’s the kind of stuff that comes up all the time—where your gut is a bit all over the place, you have massive decision fatigue from your kids asking you 9 thousand questions that day, and you don’t want to screw it up.

This framework helped really helped me step away from the emotions and the reactivity that sometimes f*cks me up, and helped me make a clearer, more confident call.

Highly recommend trying it.

If you liked this blog post, you might enjoy this other one on the 5 levels of communication & leadership, and how it can help uplevel your team.

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