Ep #23: Crafting Plans That Thrill + Produce Big Results

PODCAST

The Uncorked Conversation

EPISODE #23

Planning is a thrilling, creative process where we look into the future to contemplate life’s infinite possibilities. Proper, soul-guided planning is an essential part of growing or scaling up your business or reaching those highest life and career goals.

When planning falls off our agenda, it costs us valuable time, resources, and effort. Without a good plan, we feel scattered.

In this episode, we’ll walk through how to make the planning process a thrilling part of your every day routine so that your plans consistently lead to big results and ultimately to your highest, long-term goals.

In today’s episode we explore:

  • What happens when you do and don’t plan
  • Why you should always build failure into your plans, and
  • The 5 elements to crafting plans that both thrill and produce BIG results.

Listen + Subscribe on iTunes or PodBean.

References & Resources:

  • Want to support in craft your life + business or career plan for 2019? Learn more and enroll in the Ultimate Uplevel: www.shantipax.com/uplevel.

The Uncorked Conversation Podcast with Allyson Scammell

Ep #23: Using Your Core Gifts to Increase Your Income

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You are listening to the Uncorked Conversation podcast with Allison’s Scammell, episode number 23.

Hello and welcome to the Uncorked Conversations, a podcast for soul-guided, passion-filled women entrepreneurs who wants to uncork big magic in life and business without burning out.

We’ll get to the truth of how to uncork our core gifts, the ones we keep hidden inside, and how to infuse those gifts into our personal and professional life in a way that feels like magic. We’ll also uncover how to truly experience the joy of the journey through smart time management and planning.

I’m your host, Allyson Scammell. Let’s uncork.

Happy New Year Shantipax Nation. I’m really excited for this episode because it’s all about something I absolutely adore doing and that is planning. I am a strategic, futuristic, big ideas thinker, so I absolutely love looking into the future to see what could be possible.

What’s out there in terms of what I could experience or feel or create or contribute? So for me, planning is a creative and thrilling process.

It’s January, and January is a beautiful time to plan and I really do plan in time chunks and my time chunks go as follows. I have my 10-year plan, so that’s my big strategic vision of where I want to go.

Then I have my one-year plan. So what is it that I want to produce an experience from January through December? I have my monthly plans, so I decide what has to happen each month in order for me to reach my year goals. And then I plan for my week, my day.

And then lastly, and this is specifically for my work hours, I plan in 90-minute chunks because most brains can only focus on intense creative energy for 45 to 90 minutes depending on your attention span levels, and then it needs a break.

So I do well in 90-minute bursts of creativity focused on one thing and one thing only. So I chunk my time for 90 minutes that I will be say working on a podcast for example, and nothing else.

So those are the time periods that I plan for. Ten years, one year, one month, one week, one day and 90 minutes. That may sound like a lot of work or very consuming, but I promise you it’s not. The results of planning, taking a little bit of time to plan is so worth the time investment.

In today’s episode, I’m going to discuss what happens when you do and when you don’t plan. I’ll reveal why you should always build failure into your plans and I’ll share the five elements of crafting plans that both thrill and produce big results, but before I jump into all of that, I just want to share a little bit of listener appreciation.

I really do get so much amazing feedback for this podcast that just makes my heart sing and not because it’s a good, nice little hug to my ego. It really is because I am thrilled to be offering something that’s useful and helpful for you to live more fulfilled days and run a more successful business.

I want to pass on some listener appreciation love to Ashley Smith who posted on Facebook the following, “Keep ’em coming. I’ve been bingeing your podcast the last few days. If I keep this up, I’ll be out of new ones by 2019.” So, Ashley, I hope you’re adding new ones and that this new one is in service to you and everyone else who is listening and thank you so much for that feedback.

Let’s get started on planning. Let’s start with what happens when you don’t plan. I absolutely love this expression that I first heard when I was working as a civilian planner to NATO and I heard it from somebody in the British military who said to me, “Proper planning and preparation prevents piss-poor performance.”

So I don’t know who said that originally. I’m just telling you where I first heard it and it is so true. Proper planning really does prevent piss-poor performance. And so this is what happens to most of us when we don’t plan.

So we don’t plan out our day or week or month or year and we just sort of have vague concepts and ideas of things that we’re shooting for. Where maybe we’ve got ideas in our head, but we haven’t put anything down on paper and we just start working towards these vague ideas.

It’s so much easier to get off-track. It’s so much easier to sit down and feel overwhelmed by everything on your agenda or the lack of guidance or structure of your agenda. And when you sit down to work for the day and you don’t have clear direction or clear idea of what you’re going to do, the first thing our brain will direct us to do is to just busy ourselves.

And we busy ourselves with emails and Facebook and just like, “Oh, well maybe I’ll just quickly pay a few bills and oh, my refrigerator needs to be cleaned out.”

Before you know it, you just haven’t produced what you want to produce in a day. And beyond just producing, you haven’t experienced the deep wild creativity you want to experience. When you busy yourself with Facebook and email, there’s nothing thrilling about that.

That’s not why you started your business. Or you’re pursuing your passion project. So if you have a plan, you could set yourself up to be so much more productive and produce so many more results on so much less effort because you have laser beam focus.

When you specifically write down where you’re going and you have it clear and I always find that writing things down makes it so much clearer than just ideas roaming around your head. Then you can get very specific about what you need to produce in a given week or given day to get there and when you know and you get down to the specifics of what you’re going to do today from 10 to 11:30. T

That’s when you really can start producing a lot with much, much less effort and because you know exactly what has to get done in a day, you don’t get lost in Facebook, you don’t get lost in your email. You schedule in a bit of time for Facebook and email because especially if you run a business, that’s an important part of your day, but those distracting things don’t run the day.

What runs the day is your top creative priorities. The things that allow you to step inside your zone of genius and really start expressing your core gifts to the people you feel called to serve. And planning, yes, it’s planning allows you and helps you to stay focused in doing that.

Let’s shift now to the five elements of a really solid, awesome plan that will really help you to stick to the plan and get results from that plan. The first element, which is so important, is to understand that all plans are fluid.

A plan by definition is an intended course of action and we’ll never know the results of that intended course of action until we get to that space in the future where we can see whether or not the plan is working. And all plans always change. So that’s why it’s critical to always tweak and refine and revisit your plan.

By tweaking and refining your plan periodically you stick to your plan. Your plan remains relevant and useful to you and it’s a way to actually build in failure to the plan because you know and you accept that things are never going to go exactly as planned, so that helps you to not get so attached to the outcome because you know that the plan is fluid and it will change.

So let me give you an example of what I mean by all that. Let’s say you’re launching a new product. Let’s say it’s an online course and you’ve never launched an online course before. There is so much newness there. You have to figure out what platform you’re going to use, how you’re going to market it. You have to write your sales copy. Are you going to do Facebook ads? Are you going to promote it through live events?

There is so much newness here and learning if you’ve never done it before, so you’re going to try a lot of things and you’re going to fail. I mean, it’s just that’s the way of the world. It’s like learning French.

You’re never going to speak French perfectly the first time you try.

It’s like anything in life, so if we recognize that and accept that as a normal part of running a business, then you actually can build that into the plan and be so much more easeful on yourself and not hard on yourself when things don’t go according to plan. So you write a sales email and it gets a zero percent conversion rate that’s factored into the plan.

You give yourself enough time to redraft the sales email or to rethink your target audience or to reconsider the timing of the email and try again and you keep trying until you get the conversions you’re looking for. That trial and error that tweak and refine is built into a good plan.

The second element to a great plan is that the end-state is clearly articulated and that end-state means the world to you. Oftentimes, we fall into the trap of making our dream small because we fear making big dreams, but if our dreams are small, they fizzle.

They don’t get momentum. They don’t matter to us. It’s when our dreams are big that we muster up the strength to pursue them and that’s when we get the momentum. That’s when things start to happen for us and these big dreams that mean the world to you should be articulated with as much clarity as you can as the end-state to your plan.

That end-state sometimes means being extremely specific about what you want to create or experience, but sometimes not. Sometimes the end-state of your plan is just simply experiencing the feeling of gratitude so it all just depends, but the important thing that there is an end-state articulated.

The beauty of the planning, because all plans are fluid, is that you can always change that end state and you can shift and adjust and tweak and refine it so it always feels like you’re in alignment to going in the direction you most want to go and achieving and experiencing the things you most want to achieve and experience.

The third element of a great plan is that it has space to grow. We have a tendency to pack too much into the one-year plan and not enough into the 10-year plan, so what we want to do is reverse that and getting back to what I was just talking about is we want to think as big an ideal and thrilling and just in awe to experience that.

That’s what we want to articulate as the end state of our 10-year plan or even our 20-year plan and that can be scary looking into the future like that. I get it, but that’s when you really want to do your big thinking, like, “In 10 years I want to be at this amazing ideal, ideal outcome, not holding back or corking up in any way, shape or form place,” and if you want to get specific you can again and if you don’t, that space can be just like waking up each day in a space of joy.

If that level of specificity feels good to you, you stick with that. And if you want something more specific, go more specific. Always go to what feels in alignment. What feels freeing, what feels true, and some people, depending where they are in their life and their tendencies, will want more specifics and some people will want less.

But the point here is to think big for the 10-year plan and then decide how the one-year plan, the year ahead, will be the first step of 10 to get you there and in that one-year plan, give yourself space. Give yourself time. Give yourself room to fail. Give yourself room to experiment and that will be both thrilling and produce big results for you.

The fourth element to creating a really awesome plan is to listen to the right voice, so getting back to how specific the plan needs to be. Nine times out of 10 or more, it’s the voice of our ego, of our thinking mind that wants more specificity than we actually really need.

What you want to do when you’re creating a plan and especially when you’re thinking about the end- state and articulating the end-state, is to listen to your inner voice.

You want to quiet your thinking mind and pivot down to the voice of your heart, your soul, your inner- being, and let that voice craft your plan. What is the end state that that voice wants to envision for you? And that is the voice that should drive the plan.

That voice will never steer you wrong. Will never get overly attached to the plan. Will never criticize you for failing within the plan and will always keep you on track and in alignment. And actually, the planning process helps you, will help you to hear that voice and to write what that voice is saying down and you have it in a spot, in a plan that you have written down on paper because that to me is an important part of a plan that will help serve you and guide you to where you most want to go.

And finally, the last element to creating plans that thrill and produce big results is to break your big outcomes out into milestones and break those milestones down into action items that can be worked on in 45 to 90-minute chunks, and engage in those action items of 45 to 90-minute chunks each and every day.

And if you commit to working towards your goal or your dream in small chunks of time, each and every day, you will get that clarity that you crave. You will get those results. You will be served by your plan and you will be getting the results that you want to get because it is a small consistent action that creates the clarity and creates the results.

And it prevents us from going into overwhelm because all we have to think about on any given day is what action item am I going to do in the next 45 to 90 minutes?

That’s all you got to think about. And if you work from home and have your own business and is planning out your work hours in 45 to 90-minute time chunks of all the things that you want to do and create that will help you get to the end result for your business and what you have articulated in the plan.

So to recap, planning is an amazing process that can keep you focused, that can prevent piss-poor performance, and that can really help you to produce more with less effort in alignment to your soul and to what you most want to achieve, experience and create.

The five elements to a great plan is one, to understand they are fluid and to always be tweaking and refining and building failure into the plan. Number two, always articulate a thrilling end-state. Number three, don’t pack too much into the one-year plan. Articulate the big dreams into the 10-year plan and give them a lot of space to come to light.

Number four, probably the most important is always let the voice of your inner-being be the drafter of your plans. And number five is to break your plans out into milestones and ultimately down into 45 to 90 minutes action items that you pursue in small chunks each and every day.

And my challenge for you is to create that plan. Create your life plan. Your business plan. Your career plan for 2019. Craft your 10-year vision and how will 2019 support that and make a plan that thrills you. That means so much to you, you can’t imagine not pursuing it and let that plan be a thrilling, exciting guide that you revisit, you tweak and refine, and treat as a living, breathing conscious document that will help guide you to the most divine life that you could ever possibly imagine.

And my dear friends, if you are feeling at all called to this material, I would be so amazingly grateful if you subscribed and left a rating and review, said some nice things about it on social media and even shared it with a couple of friends. It truly would mean so much to me, and as always, until next time, stay uncorked.

Do you want support in drafting and upleveled life and business plan for 2019? Then join me for the ultimate uplevel. It’s a five-day virtual workshop where we’re going to create a plan for 2019 that will allow you to wake up each day looking forward to what is on your calendar because it’s designed to support your goals and the growth you deserve. Learn more and enroll at shantipax.com/uplevel. That’s S-H-A-N-T-I-P-A-X .com/uplevel.