As a long-time soccer fan, I got a big kick (ha!) out of cheering on the US women’s soccer team to gold in the Olympics earlier this month. Surprisingly, rugby was my favorite Olympic event to watch, partly because I didn’t know any of the rules or strategy. Watching rugby reminded me of how fun it is to be a beginner – something I don’t do enough as an adult.


Rugby and Beginner’s Mind

In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki says:

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.”

He emphasizes the importance of maintaining an open and receptive mindset, even as one gains expertise.

🙋‍♀️ This is me! Having run a small business for the past 15 years, I tend to dismiss ideas too quickly, especially if I tried them in the past and they didn’t work then.

When I’m working through a problem and want to access my beginner’s mind, I’ve been using ChatGPT. Here’s a real prompt from this past month.


Prompt Example with ChatGPT


Prompt:

I’m a small business owner, and one of my websites has had a 28% decline in users since March 2024.


Instruction: You are my SEO assistant, and your job is asking questions to help me figure out a prioritized list of things to check and changes to make to recover this traffic. What’s the first question you’d ask?


ChatGPT’s Response:

“Have you reviewed your website’s Google Search Console data to identify any significant changes in search impressions, clicks, or errors starting from March 2024?”

In less than a minute, I’ve gone from freaking out—“OMG! This website has had a 28% decline in traffic. I have to fix this NOW!”—to concretely defining the problem and digging into a tool with data that can diagnose the issue accurately.


Insights from Data Analysis

And digging into the data – always more helpful than freaking out – showed me that this website’s impressions hadn’t changed. So that means that Google is still serving our website, and we weren’t impacted by a recent Google algorithm update, which was my first assumption. Instead, the data showed that the number of people clicking on my website is down. And with a bit more digging, this decline is likely due to Google’s new AI summary display. With this darn good guess that’s backed up by data about what’s causing the problem, I can go back to my beginner’s mind to come up with 29 different ideas to address this problem, some of which are admittedly terrible, but one of which is likely to work.


Question for you: Do you have any problems in your business that you could approach with a beginner’s mind?


Quick Update from Cubit


TL;DR: Radius Reports will now be emailed to you only, rather than being both emailed and available for download on a webpage.


Why? We use Shopify to deliver radius reports, but Shopify has removed the functionality that allowed us to link to your custom radius reports on a webpage. My partner, Anthony, is working on an alternative method to link to your reports post-purchase. If you need help locating your radius reports, please reach out to Diana or me.

Thank you for reading, and here’s to tackling challenges with a fresh perspective!