Introduction
Do you ever have that moment where something unexpected comes up that completely throws your plans into Welcome to our final episode of the coaching hive podcast for 2021. I cannot believe we are here, and I am so excited to jump into our planning conversation for 2022.
Music
I’m Dr. Moira, and this is the Coaching Hive podcast.
Overview
As a reminder, as this series has been focused on getting your plan for 2022 in line. Now in the past few weeks, we have been talking about the concept of what are your three big pillars. What things do you want to focus on in the new year? And sometimes when we take this step back, we look at three big pillars instead of all of these big goals, and I have this and that and that to do, just identifying a few pillars where you’d like to focus your energy and your attention can simplify everything so much.
And then what we did was we got a little bit zoomed in just a little bit further and started thinking about what would it look like to work on these pillars? What would it look like to explore even on a quarterly basis, what you might do to work toward these pillar ideas? And the reason we look at that quarterly approach and a pillar concept is because life happens,
things are going to change. You can plan out every single week of next year and two weeks in something might shift and it throws the rest of your plan out of whack, right?
When you take a look at the three big pillars that you’d like to focus on, this can sometimes keep things a little bit more flexible, a little bit more free flowing while still allowing you to make progress in your coaching business so that you can better serve your clients.
Taking it a Step Further
We started with those three pillars, and then we kind of zoomed in just a little bit and started thinking about on a quarterly basis, maybe even just the first quarter, maybe that’s all you’re looking at right now to keep that flexibility in play.
Maybe you look at that first quarter and you say, okay, I know that I want to focus on pillar one this first quarter. I’m not going to worry about pillars two and three. They’re not as important right now. You can start ordering your pillars. So quarter one, maybe you’re focusing on pillar one, let’s make it easy. And as you think about pillar one, you start to explore what are some things that you could work toward that move pillar one forward. This was still a pretty picture, wasn’t it? And we talked about the fact that that’s okay. You can, if you’re ready, take that approach and zoom in a little bit more. And even, maybe look at the three months of the first quarter, if that feels too much right now, you’re not alone. In fact, I was talking with someone earlier this week, who said, I have made plans every single year. I create a vision. I create my plan for the year and it never works. And it feels like I’m failing. And so we talked for a little while and thought about this concept of let’s just start with three pillars. Not just start there, let them settle, see how they feel. What do you think about them?
Keep in mind what you’ve accomplished in the last year where you’d like to grow and what you can use from this past year to support the pillars moving forward. And what she came back with was in 15 minutes, she said, well, I have my three pillars. This feels so much easier. It feels lighter. Then coming up with this big plan, this big vision. And I do advocate for coming up with a vision of course, for your business, but it doesn’t always have to be complicated. And it doesn’t each moment doesn’t have to be complicated. And that’s kind of where we’re focusing as we wrap up 2021 is keeping things simple.
You have your pillars, you are building on things that you’ve already been successful with, or you’re using those strengths that you used in the past to grow those pillars that you’re focusing on. We focused in a little bit more by the quarter and said, Hey, if quarter one is all you want to look at right now, that’s okay. Stick with that. And for the sake of our conversation today, we are talking about pillar one and quarter one keeps it easy.
So if you’re ready, what you can do then is really break it down into your monthly concepts. What do you want to work on each month within that quarterly concept that supports the pillar, notice everything continually ties back. And the reason we do this is to make sure that you’re not spending time on concepts that are not going to support your ultimate vision for your business.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a whole lot of extra time. I don’t want to tackle tasks that are not going to benefit my business. I want to make sure that everything I’m doing is going to ultimately lead to where I want to go. At least right now, I do also like to test things out, but that’s built into my schedule for the big stuff.
I’m making sure that I’m really staying focused. You have this concept of, “all right, I know kind of what I’m going to work on each of those months in quarter one”. And now you have to start thinking about what does your day to day look like? And when you think about this, what I want you to think about is whether or not you have blocks of time, do you have blocks of time? Do you have snippets? What do you have in your day? And that’s different for everyone.
There are some days I have blocks of time and there are some days where I’m lucky to get one snippet of time, meaning 10 or 15 minutes will you work in the morning in the afternoon, in the evening, some combination,
do you have whole days where you will not work, where you need to make sure that anything that’s happening that day is automated. This is where your reflection of the year will help you to make adjustments. You can think back and look at what worked well. You can build that into your schedule. You can take what didn’t work well and think about why that was the case so that you can make a different choice for the upcoming year, right?
Suppose you discover that you planned to work in the mornings, but gosh, it was hard to get out of bed an extra hour early. And so you didn’t really end up working in the mornings. Chances are, if nothing has changed, you probably don’t want to make your plan to work in the morning because it hasn’t worked recently. It doesn’t mean you can’t test it out as the year goes on.
But for now, think about when you are most productive in your business and go ahead and schedule that time. Those days for your work. The beauty about owning your own business is that you can set your own schedule. It doesn’t mean you don’t have to work. You do, but it does mean that you have a choice over when you work and what that looks like.
You are already starting to narrow down what your day-to-day looks like by deciding well, mornings didn’t work for me. Let me, let me try out those afternoons. I was really productive in the afternoon. So I’m really going to say, you know, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I typically have a time block. Maybe I’ll work from one to three. And that gives you two solid hours, three times a week to get some stuff done where you don’t have those interruptions. And then you know that a couple of nights a week, you have some free time where you really, it just feels good to settle into that groove and do a few tasks.
Maybe those snippets are shorter. Maybe they’re 30 minutes. Maybe you have 15 minutes slots that you work in throughout the week. The idea here is to build a schedule, build a plan that truly works for you. Not you scrambling to work for it. That’s not what we’re here for a big part of why you own your own coaching businesses, probably to make sure that you do have flexibility so that you can take those extra days off sometimes so that you can go on the hike or go to the library or sink onto the couch and read the best book ever.
There are days like that for me, and I want you to have days like that too. So you’ve taken the big pillar, pillar number one, you’ve decided to focus in on quarter one. You’ve broken it down into what are some ideas you could work on each month knowing that you’re not overloading yourself.
I was listening to an interview recently with Donald Miller. And if you’re not familiar with Donald Miller, I absolutely love his books. He has business made simple marketing, made simple. He’s got a StoryBrand book. It is just, these books are great. They’re simple. They’re easy to understand or easier to understand and easy-ish to implement, but what Donald Miller said, and it’s something that I’ve been doing for years, as well as that, he comes up with three big tasks for the day that he’d like to accomplish.
He has a whole list of those other tasks that he wants to do, but they just aren’t on his radar when he’s focusing on the top three tasks of the day. And I thought, oh geez, where is he going with this? I only get one accomplished a day. I have my list of three, but it ends up being one. And don’t, you know, a few minutes into the conversation as he’s sharing, I have my three big ideas for the day to tackle, but usually I just get one done. And it was one of those moments where you smile and you go, oh, this is great. And he’s right, because what you do is you find that one big thing that you’d like to accomplish for the day and you focus on it first.
A lot of times, what can happen is that we, we put off the tasks that are big, or we put off the tasks that we aren’t sure of or how they might look. And in doing this, we’re just procrastinating. We have to take action. Procrastination is just you trying to be perfect and we don’t need to be perfect.
We’re human.
That’s why I encourage you to come up with three simple pillars. Why I encourage you to then come up with maybe all quarter of ideas of what you’d like to focus on. And then as you’re ready to break that down into the weekly and day to day concepts where you’re still keeping it simple, you don’t have this laundry list of items to do.
You do they’re off to the side, but you have one to three main things to focus on during your day. And recognizing that accomplishing even one, that’s a huge step forward. And that is more than enough as you do this. What I’d like to suggest is that you celebrate it’s easy. When we get into this planning phase to think about all of the things we have to do, all of the things we want to get done. And what you don’t see is right off camera. As I have a huge whiteboard with all laundry list of things that I would like to accomplish in 2022, but I also have my three simple pillars of where I’d like to focus my time and energy, but it’s easy when we have this list to sink into it and to feel stuck and frustrated by it, it feels big. It can feel heavy.
Celebrate
So here’s the last part of planning that I’d like you to do celebrate. We started the month in this series of conversations, by reflecting and looking at everything that we’ve accomplished. And now I want you to really celebrate, get yourself some balloon, some flowers, a nice piece of chocolate, whatever it looks like for you.
Maybe you go out on a, on a celebratory hike, take time to celebrate. You have reflected you’ve planned and you’re looking forward. You have really invested in yourself by taking this time. You could easily, and many people do this move forward without any kind of path without a specific direction or a vision. But instead you decided to be very intentional in your coaching journey.
And you are because of that looking to really make good strides in 2020 to pat yourself on the back. This planning process alone is reason to celebrate. You will be successful in your work because you are committed to being self-aware because you are committed to making adjustments along the way.
Conclusions
Congratulations, you have taken your business, made it a priority, but not made it your sole focus in life.
You are allowing for balance to come into your life and to celebrate that as well. You are open to the possibilities into the opportunities, and I cannot wait to see you in the new year with a whole new set of coaching, hive, conversations, topics, and challenges that we will work through together. As we wrap up 2021, this last episode of 2021 I cannot believe it, I hope you have a safe, happy and healthy end of your year, and certainly a gloriously wonderful 2022 full of promise, blessings and innovation.
Until I see you again, pat yourself on the back, celebrate, and get excited for the upcoming year.
~ Dr. Moira
