Creating Your Plan

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Do you feel like you're running day to day by the seat of your pants or do you have everything organised and planned? Doing things on purpose with a clear intention?

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, International Influencer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today, I want to finish our conversation around intention by talking about your plan. Over the last few weeks, we've been talking about our values, our vision and our mission. And when I said we would do this week is to look at how we put that all together into a workable plan. I have a lot of people who tell me that, "Oh yeah, look, I know what I've got to do. It's all up here." And what I want to do is challenge you to understand that writing it down, making sure that we have a clear understanding of where we're going, that we could quite easily explain to someone else and they would understand it.

Therefore, being simple and concise enough is what people who are more successful and get more done do.

So, I want to invite you to change the way you do things if you need to and to do more planning. Now, obviously we need to put action behind the plan.

Without putting the action behind the plan, the plan is just a document.

It's just something that would frustrate us because we know we want to do and we're not doing it. So, there's a few things that I want to talk about that will help us with our plan and then we'll get into the practicality. So, the first thing we need to recognise is that the plan of today is slightly different to the plan we used to do. The world has changed. We are a lot faster and changing more quickly than we used to.

We're in this VUCA world that we always talk about, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. We are more global. I mean, right now, I'm coming to you from the Solomon Islands where I'm here for three days. I've just finished for the day in taking 25 government leaders through some emotional intelligence and leadership training. So, I'm planning doing this now so that my team have got it to be able to produce when I need to for you to be able to see it. So, things are a little bit different now. I'm someone who had to change their thinking around this and had to realise that running by a calendar, running by a plane, running by set of guidelines for me is important. Yet, as I said, we want to make sure that we're doing a plan that fits today's world. So, a good friend of mine, Taki Moore, taught me about three horizons of focus and it's like thinking about going in to space.

So, we've got that right up there in space position, which is a satellite view of looking down over the top of everything that's going on. We've got that space when we're just breaking through the atmosphere and then we've got the launch. If we use that same analogy, we can look at the top of plans that I use and that I work with my clients to help them to stay on track. We firstly want to have a look at that overview. And for me, that's a three year plan. So, how do I want it to look three years from now? And that's where our vision and our mission come in. Three years from now describing it in the present tense, i.e. it is now. So, what are we today? The 26th of February, 2020 as I'm recording this. It's the 26th of February, 2023 and we then describe what that looks like.

We describe in the certain areas within our life, within our business, whatever it is, what is different to how it is now, and that's the results that we want. Then we come back to the breaking through the atmosphere. And for me, that's a year from now, 12 months from now.

It's the 26th of February, 2021 and we have a statement around what things look like then, "what does my team look like?",  How am I investing my time? ; What is my income? Those sorts of things. Whatever it is that's important to you in your plan. And then we want to come back to launch, which is when the rubber is actually meeting the road and we're doing the actions. And for me, that is the next 90 days. So, we've got a year, we have four quarters, and we break that down and then we have a plan for the next 90 days and that becomes our main focus.

 Why 90 days? 90 days is long enough for you to set some goals and stretch a little bit, but it's close enough to see the end result or to see the finish line. So in our planning, we want to have three years, one year, 90 days, and then break that 90 days into projects that we're going to get done.

A project is something that's a little bit larger than a task, so it has more than one task. I like to make sure that I personally take on no more than three three big rocks, three big projects within the 90 days. Then breaking that down so that we have actions that allow us to achieve whatever the overall project goal is for that 90 days. So, what have we done here? We've looked at what it's going to be like three years down the track for it to be that way.

Three years down the track. What does it need to look like 12 months from now, and then for me to achieve that 12 month goal? What do I need to get done in the next 90 days? Within that 90 days and what I need to get done? What do I need to do this week? What do I need to do tomorrow? What do I need to do today? And breaking that down into bite-sized actionable chunks.

Having a plan to execute our mission, our vision, surrounded and supported by our values is vital if we want to actually go beyond just having a big picture, thinking about what I'd like the world to look like.

I'm talking about a one-page plan that guides you so that you know who you need to be and what you need to do so that you can get to where you have been wanting to go to.

So, I'm signing off now from the Solomon Islands. I've earned a bit of time around the pool. I'm going to go and get changed and do that now, and I look forward to reading some comments down in the comments area around your plan. If you have any questions, then pop those in there as well, and I'll see you again next week. Bye for now.