I applied my own system to my commercial pillar
This is part 2 of the ‘eating-my-own-dogfood’-series. Read part 1 over here.
You don’t have a marketing problem.
You have a doubt problem. Not doubt about the market or your offer.
Doubt about whether you're making decisions you won’t look back on with: ‘we should’ve seen that coming'.
Last week, I promised I'd apply my own system to my own business.
As a test of integrity. Because if I can't use my own work to make decisions in my busines, why would you trust it to work in yours?!?
So I did the audit. Properly.
Using the same system I built for my clients:
Fault Line diagnosis (where the story breaks)
Truth Mapping (what buyers actually believe)
Commercial Truth OS (how to scale only what’s solid)
This time, the subject was me.
What I expected to find was not what I ran into...
Capacity was not the constraint...
For years, I told myself I was operating within limits.
As a co-parent, I run on a strict hours-and-energy budget.
Keeping the business small felt intentional. Responsible.
But when I looked closely, I saw something uncomfortable.
I wasn’t engineering for scale, I was engineering for control.
That belief quietly dictated my decisions:
- what I sold
- how visible I allowed myself to be
- how much demand I let in
The constraint wasn’t operational. It was invisible.
It was doubt.
And I see this in every client i've worked with in the past 15 years.
Doubt in sales teams, marketing teams, the board room.
It leads to fiction fights. It crushes growth. Let me show you.
How doubt hides in plain sight Doubt doesn’t announce itself.
It disguises itself as:
- nuance
- flexibility
- keeping options open
- “we’ll decide later”
- rushed decisions from panic
From the outside, it looks like discipline.
In truth, it stalls momentum.
And once I saw it in my own business, I couldn’t unsee it.
Because it’s the same pattern I see in the companies I work with.
Not a lack of intelligence or effort.
A lack of confidence about what really matters... and therefore, what to commit to.
So here's what I'm going to do Before I commit, I’m going back to the source.
Not to learn more, but to decide harder.
So this is the question I’m taking into the field now:
Where exactly does doubt turn into conviction?
I'm not interested in when someone says yes. ChatGPT can barf that up with a smart prompt.
I need to figure out exactly when they stop hesitating.
That’s what I’m investigating next.
And that’s what the next edition will be about.
If this stirred something uncomfortable, good.
It means you might be looking in the right place.
Thank you for reading! Next up is a deep dive into where doubt is actually showing up in business, marketing and sales.
