A month before a talk I had agreed to give to my local Chamber of Commerce, I wrote myself a rule: I would not sell anything from the stage, not during the talk and not in a follow-up afterward. In my own notes I put it more bluntly, that being the one person in the room who does not pitch is the entire strategy.
I believed that when I wrote it. Three days before the talk, though, putting together the packet of materials to hand out afterward, I found myself drafting a special offer page. A discount. Six months free for one business in the room, three months for everyone else. It felt like a small, generous addition, the kind of thing that would let a month of preparation point to something concrete rather than nothing at all. It also would have made the whole afternoon quietly about making a sale, dressed up as a gift.
I was working through the materials with an AI assistant, the kind of tool I build for other small businesses, and it pointed out something simple: this contradicts what you already wrote a month ago. My honest first reaction was irritation, the specific kind you feel when you are caught by your own earlier judgment rather than someone else's. I wrote back "ok, i agree with that," with a small sideways frown of an emoticon attached, which is a strange way to admit you are right, but an accurate one.
I want to be careful about the shape of that story, because it is not really about the AI. I was not corrected by a wiser mind, I was corrected by myself, from a month earlier, when I was thinking clearly and had nothing riding on the answer. Three days out, anxious and half-persuaded that one exception would not really count, I needed exactly what I had already written down. If a business partner had said the same thing back to me, or a friend I trust to be honest, it would have landed exactly the same way. The tool mattered less than the fact that the rule existed at all, in writing, before I needed it.
Every business owner has a version of this. The pricing you set with a clear head, and the discount that starts to feel reasonable the week a big client hesitates. The response-time promise you made when things were quiet, and the shortcut that tempts you the week they are not. The refund policy you wrote in good faith, and the customer whose situation makes an exception feel obviously deserved, right up until the next customer's situation looks exactly the same. The standard you hold your team to, and the exception you are tempted to grant yourself first, quietly, where the team will not notice. None of those moments get decided well in the moment. By the time the pressure is on, the case for the exception has usually already won the argument in your head, because pressure is a very persuasive lawyer and it only ever argues one side.
What actually holds is something you wrote down earlier, when you were not under pressure, sitting somewhere it can be read back to you. That is also, as it happens, most of what your customers are actually buying from you when they call you trustworthy. They never see the rule you wrote for yourself on a calm Tuesday. They only see whether it held on the one day it was inconvenient to keep, the day the easy thing and the right thing stopped being the same thing.
That is the whole practical point, and it does not require a machine to work. Write the rule while you are thinking clearly, about pricing, about refunds, about what you will and will not promise a customer under pressure. Put it somewhere a partner, an employee, or your own notes can hand it back to you exactly when you are least in the mood to hear it. Build enough humility into how you run things that when it is handed back to you, on the one day you least want to hear it, you can still say, however reluctantly, I agree.
John Moelker is a Software Engineer (fifteen years) and pastor (fifteen years), founder of WiseAI Agency, based in Ingersoll, Ontario.