The Name-It-First Decision Framework
I swiped this business matrix from diet culture, and it will work for you too.
Most bad decisions aren’t made from lack of information.
They’re just reactive & lack pause.
In May I made 3 decisions that could have gone badly wrong.
They didn’t - not because I’m any kind of business whizz - but because I used the same decision making process each time…
And when I looked back on it - it’s a framework.
And THEN I realised…
This process is almost exactly what health and fitness coaches teach their clients…
Let’s get into it:
Step 1: NOTICE the impulse.
What is the thing you want to do right now, in this moment, from this emotional state?
From a coaching perspective, this might be to snack, to skip a workout etc… But from a business perspective, this looked like:
Fix it.
Chase it.
Defend yourself.
Intervene.
Step 2: NAME why acting on it doesn’t serve you.
Not “is the impulse wrong” - In my experience, it usually isn’t…
But: what does acting on this cost me at scale?
In coaching, this might be “If I have this sweet treat now, it might not matter, but if I was almost at goal, it could really mess things up!”
In business, that looked like:
If I chase every failed payment, I don’t have a product.
If I rebuild in a panic, I might make it worse.
If I keep reading this content, I keep my focus off what I’m building.
(“At scale” turned out to be a really important part of the thinking because you can do a lot of stupid shit yourself at a smaller level - but if I had 100X the users, clients or customers, it wouldn’t be realistic.)
Step 3: CHOOSE your response.
The goal here is to serve the version of you building something deliberately.
Not the version of you that wants to feel better today, but the version of you that wants this to work long term.
At the scale and size you’re planning on building to.
In my experience, health and fitness coaches are able to think long term about training and nutrition, but struggle to think long term when it comes to their business.
The 3 decisions I made this way in May:
1. I didn’t intervene when a subscriber’s payment failed for CathAI. It was the first time it had happened - and the first time I let the dunning emails do their job. before May, I didn't even know how to set up dunning emails - huge result!
2. I realiseed I’d messed up the trial architecture - giving new trialists 1000 messages not 100. This was a Stripe issue and I’m kinda scared of messing with Stripe, so I didn’t try to fix it in a panic. I chalked it up to acquisition costs and made a better quality decision after sleeping on it.
3. I muted the person whose criticism was taking up mental real estate it hadn’t earned. And I stopped checking the account.
None of these were big dramatic things.
Notice. Name. Choose.
Exactly the way you would on a diet!
The framework doesn’t make the decision feel easier… But it does slow you down long enough to make the right strategic call.
Hope this helps!