Transcript #169 The daKAT Method can Keep You Smart

Intro:

Welcome to Arise2Live Podcast, episode 169. How do we stay smart when things are coming at us fast and hard? You know, the ones that make your hair stand on end. The daKAT method can keep you smart in scary business situations and go from fear to trust.

Let’s hear from Scott about staying levelheaded in times of stress and pressure.

Scott Weaver: 

Have you ever been under the gun where people and events are pressuring you to make a decision, and you make the wrong decision? That’s me. More than once. How many of you thought, “Oh, no, that was just a one-off, I won’t do that again,” and then you do. Yeah, that’s me, too. Again, and again. It’s pretty disheartening.

But us business owners and founders are always under the gun. There’s always outside pressures. Today, it seems it’s inflation causing problems or the increasing interest rates or those pesky supply chain issues that are constantly invading our space and our companies. Then there’s the inside pressures in the company. How many of you thought, “No, not that employee again!” or “The project that just never can go right,” and you are very sure it came from Mordor.

Well, if we can’t prevent problems, especially surprise problems, then we probably should be proactive. Out of necessity, I’ve come up with an approach to deal with those uninvited surprise events that just bring out the emotions. I call it the daKat method. DaKAT stands for:

• Don’t Fear.
  
• Ask Questions.
• Know the facts.
• Action now.
• Trust.

Welcome to episode 169: titled The DaKat Method Can Keep You Smart. I am your host, Scott Weaver, the Arise2Live business coach for business owners and founders who are looking to grow both financially and in operations.  My services include part time CFO advising to build a solid finance foundation and a company to scale. For this podcast, please share and like and comment on this podcast. Thank you for the ones who have been doing that. I really appreciative it. Also, be on the outlook for the announcement of a soft launch of the Business Owner GPS membership site coming out later this month. It will be a place where you can get extra resources to follow up on things we talked about on the podcast. There’s business tools, and access to Q&A webinars. I’m excited for this step out and pretty sure it will help a lot of people.

In English, there are many words to describe people who stay calm in the storms of uncertainty.  Phrases such as “keeping your head”, “cooler heads prevailed”, “staying smart”, and many more. An image of this can be found in a famous poem by Rudyard Kipling called “If”. It starts out as: ‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.’ How many of you have experienced that frustration and sinking feeling in your stomachs? I’m with you on that one.

As business owners and founders, it’s tough going being captain when there’s rough waters rocking the ship and your team loses their heads and blames us for circumstances outside our control. But this just goes with the territory of owning a business.

So how do we keep our heads in scary and uncertain times? Well, it’s easier if you have a method and we’ll be talking about the daKAT method today. Perhaps it’s not the best acronym out there, but it’s one I can remember when emotions are running fast and loud.

DaKat is Don’t Fear, Ask Questions, Know things, Act now, and Trust.     4:58

The first letter of daKAT is, of course, ‘D’, standing for “Don’t Fear.” Don’t make fear-based decisions.

Fear is an enemy to deal with. You don’t deal with fear by ignoring or pretending it doesn’t exist. It’s just foolishness to believe that fear is not a powerful emotion that all people have inside them.

In the United States, the telephone emergency number is 9-1-1. In the early days of the system, it was advertised and people remembered it as 9-11. That’s easier to say and remember than 9-1-1. It was quickly discovered in emergency situations and when the strong emotions take over some people, their thought process is not always complete. Some people did the right thing to call 9-11 to get help, but panicked because after hitting the nine button, they couldn’t find the eleven button on the phone and so the call failed. That’s why we say 9-1-1. It simplifies what needs to be done. Less brainpower is needed in an emergency.

Like an emergency call system, fear is best handled before a situation comes along and fear tries to take over.

So I’m encouraging you today, make the decision, be intentional, not to give into fear when a surprise situation arrives.

However, reality is that strong resolve is not enough.

The second letter of daKat is ‘A’. Ask Questions to get clarity of what’s going on.

Two of my favorite questions are ‘why?’ and asking ‘what then?’ Ask these questions five times in a row to fully see what’s going on so you can make the right decision.

This principle is nothing new. When I was young, when I first heard this, it came from an old, gray-haired professor, who said that he heard it when he was young from his old, gray-haired professor. This asking question has worked for generations.

For example, a construction owner finds out that his least performing crew did not install a door for the customer and the customer got furious. So the upset owner goes out and asks the crew what happened? The answer was ‘didn’t have a door to install’.  Why? ‘The lumber company didn’t have one to pick up.’ So the owner calls the lumber company. They say, ‘The shipment did not come in.’  Why? ‘The distributor didn’t have one.’  Why?  ‘The door hasn’t arrived from the manufacturer.’ Why? ‘The Chinese government closed the factory because of COVID.’

Asking a series of questions can create a much better picture and prevents you from making decisions from false assumptions. It wasn’t the owner’s least performing crew that was at fault that the door was not installed. So instead of yelling at the crew, the situation becomes a training lesson of communicating problems before the customer gets upset, and in theory, will improve the crew’s performance. I think this approach is better than yelling at the crew for something they had no control over.

The third letter of daKat is ‘K’. Know the facts and lever points of the situation.     8:23

Asking questions is one way to know the facts. It is equally important to know what the levers and variables that are creating the problem situation and which ones you have control over, that you can improve things.

In business acumen, there is a concept called scarcity that is a shortage of something like products, time, and money. You know, the usual suspects. I’ll be using the word ‘scarcity’ in this podcast because it connects with human behavior better than saying ‘we’re out of stock’. Scarcity brings out the emotions of the situation. When things are scarce, people get upset, but knowing the levers of what’s causing scarcity problems, or what’s causing problems in general, this allows you to know where to apply pressure and the fixes to resolve the problem.

Let’s say you own a manufacturing company, and you cannot produce enough widgets to keep the customers happy and everybody in the company is stressed out over it. You have a scarcity of widgets and upset customers.

Rather than panicking, you ask yourself, “Why do I have a scarcity of widgets?” Well, it turns out in this case that there’s three possible reasons: not enough inventory, not enough workers, or maybe just too many orders. You ask around and you’re at full capacity with workers, but still getting many, many orders.  On top of that, there are some supply chain problems. Neither one of those things you have full control over, but at least you know that it’s not your company that’s messing it up.

After finding the facts, it’s time to see, to identify, what levers you can pull. Or maybe I should say, “Buttons you can push.” It’s good to identify those things that can improve the situation, but also things that you can change. In our example, the owner decides on two levers to pull. One lever is setting the proper customer expectations and trying to improve the relationships. The other lever is increasing production, getting the shop to produce more.

This leads into the next letter.

The Fourth Letter of daKat is ‘A’. Take action now.     11:00

Action counters fear. A person can’t steer a parked car. However, once the car is moving, it can be steered. That’s the power of action in stressful situations. It is okay even if you have to drive around the block because you started in the wrong direction. That is much better than sitting around in fear.

Continuing with our example of a manufacturing company owner. The owner, after figuring out what levers can be pulled to improve the scarcity of widgets, takes action and decides on two changes. The first one is in the order process. It attempts to improve the customer expectations by updating longer delivery dates and the second change is deciding to add a second shift and increase prices to help cover the costs of hiring more employees.

So this is good. Two concrete steps to resolve the situation of not having enough widgets for the customers. It’s great to go from fear to action. But experience business owners know there’s one more thing to do.

The Fifth Letter of daKat is ‘T’. Trust that things will turn out for the better     12:28

After the action and tasks have started, there is a phase of trust that is needed until the changes have been completed. Faith that the customers will stay when they hear the action plans. This phase takes time and patience. Using our example owner, there is need to trust the employees who are facing the customers to do their thing and faith that the customers will stay on when they hear of the action plans. There is also trust that the hiring process will go well.

However, beneath the surface, there is a more difficult level of trust. It’s trusting in things we can’t see. It takes effort to push aside self-doubt and to trust ourselves with the plans and the actions we started. There is going to be resistance to these plans, and those create doubts, but knowing that we can deal with those. If self-doubt isn’t enough, it’s hard to trust a process with slow wheels. We have to resist from interfering and micro-managing the change process we started, because if we did, that would be hurting ourselves. And for some people, there is a challenge of trusting in God to move business mountains on the road to success.

This last letter, this trusting phase, is really important if you are going to overcome fear from a particular business situation.

Recapping here:

The daKAT Method is a acronym for:

• Don’t Fear. Don’t make fear-based decisions.
• Ask Questions to get clarity of what’s going on.
• Know the facts and lever points of the situation. Take
  
• Action now.
• Trust that things will turn out for the better.

This process takes us from a state of fear to reach a state of trust. Trust is the ultimate way to cancel out fear. When the fear of the unpleasant situation comes around again, like a sneak attack, the defense is merely saying, “Hey, look what I’ve done so far.” I should add that sometimes it is good to say, “I just got through this.” Or as the British sometimes say, “All’s well that ends well.” I think many of you feel that way after getting through the pandemic and its challenges.

Yes, this episode used a simple example of an owner with a product scarcity, a widget scarcity, but the point is that following the daKAT approach leads to clarity and focused solutions that addresses and overcomes scary problems. This method makes you smarter when you are under the gun. I trust that you’ll be able to use this daKAT approach to work through those surprise or economic business situations that come around every so often.

So hang tough. Decide in advance to say ‘No’ to fear and ‘Yes” to making smart decisions. Make those steps towards clarity and action. Then trust that things will turn out for the good. Trusting ourselves and in others is how we Arise2Live.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

 If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!