Quick announcement: Authority Letters is back on 5th May.

Complete all of Authority Letters trainings with me and a small group of peers, in just one day. Yes that’s right. No more waiting weeks to get the clarity unlock you’ve been waiting for.

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• Landing on your One Big Idea, once and for all

• Choosing the Hero Piece that will drive inbound demand for your service for months, if not years to come, leaving with a clear outline

• Identify the right channels, people, and platforms who’ll help your message spread

Past Authority Letters participants weren’t quite prepared for the visibility and demand they got once their Hero Pieces went live. A nice problem to have right?!

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Are you ready to be bored?

One of the biggest (and least spoken about) objections to Authority building is the requirement to choose a lane.

And with that lane comes your direction, and, the commitment to staying in it.

For a lot of the founders I work with, that's where the resistance lives. Because of the implications of that strategy: that you'll have to stop being quite so… interesting.

If you looked at my bookshelf, my YouTube history, or my music library, you'd see someone who loves variety. Someone who changes things up. Who has, over the years, developed a very well-worn habit of beginning new projects with great enthusiasm and not always finishing them.

And yet the best business decision I've made … and the one I now help clients make … is to go in one coherent direction.

To build assets, frameworks, IP and systems that compound.

To stop creating new things, and get better at refining existing ones.

I still love the 0–1 process of a new beginning and don’t think that will ever change, it feels core to who I am.

But I’ve trained myself now, to stay in my lane and innovate within it, rather than constantly stepping outside of it.

The cost of keeping things interesting

The cost of keeping things ‘interesting’ is that nothing really builds.

I was speaking with another expert on Authority building this week and our conversation was very much along these lines. We ourselves know that the right move isn't to keep changing it up or reinventing the wheel. Or to build new things every month.

Because a smaller number of offers, assets, articles, done better, is what really makes a difference.

But for a certain type of founder this can feel like a kind of slow death. And I’ve seen this particular flavour of resistance everywhere. I see it in discovery calls. I see it in coaching sessions. I saw it very clearly in a recent conversation with a client, let's call her Maya.

Maya had been circling the decision of what her business’ core promise would be for the better part of a year before we worked together. She's sharp, credible, and genuinely excellent at what she does. But every time we got close to naming the lane, she’d build around, resistance would show up. Another new idea or “but what about…"

When we finally got underneath it, the thing she said was: "I think I'm scared it'll get boring."

And I understood exactly what she meant.

Because there is some truth here.

You’ll end up saying similar things more consistently. You refine the same frameworks instead of building new ones. You’ll have to resist the pull of the shiny new idea in favour of the thing that's already proven.

A boring business. An interesting life.

Here's the reframe that's helped me, and that seemed to land for Maya too.

Your business doesn't have to be the most interesting, varied part of your life.

When your business is reliable (when leads show up consistently, when you're not reinventing your positioning every six months, when you have systems you can train people to run, frameworks that hold, content that compounds)… you get something in return.

You get your time and your headspace back.

And then the interesting stuff gets to happen around the edges.

The hobbies, the travel, the projects that have absolutely nothing to do with work. The things that light you up but have been perpetually deprioritised because the business kept demanding your full creative energy just to stay afloat.

Your business gets more boring and your life gets to be more interesting in return.

I've lived this.

The last 6 months or so, a lot has been navigated. I'll share more on that when the time is right but what I can say now is that the business held because my foundations were there. Because I'd done the work of letting go of things that didn’t serve me, and building something that didn't entirely depend on my daily energy and enthusiasm to keep standing.

That's what authority building gives you, if you let it. Not a restrictive box. More like a foundation.

So yes, you might have to be a bit bored

For those of you who want a business that scales beyond your time and a reputable brand in the market. Who want systems you can rely on, frameworks that last, blog posts that serve you for years to come…. then authority building is the path.

But you might have to make peace with the process being a little less exciting than you'd like.

Stop creating. Start refining. Choose the lane. Build the thing that lasts.

And then go and live a very interesting life with the time that frees up.

I'd love to know, are you ready to be bored?

Hit reply and let me know. Or if you want my support actually doing the thing: you can apply for support doing just that, here.

Until next time, Ellen

Ellen from The Ask is brought to you by Ellen Donnelly, Founder of The Ask, offering strategic business coaching & mentorship to Authority Entrepreneurs ready to grow a profitable business in a way that feels true to them.