#107: Next Level L.E.A.P: Establishing a Plan
Planning is one of those things that everybody wants and when we're doing it we don't necessarily feel like it. And afterwards we rarely follow the plan.
So, what is the point of planning and how does this fold into the leap methodology that I have seen create remarkable results for clients?
In the last episode, I talked about having a limited focus and today I'm going to talk about establishing a plan, but probably not in the way you think.
So stay tuned in the next episode of the Next Level Leap podcast. We'll be talking about how to establish a plan that you can stick to that you'll like, that your brain will actually want to follow through with, and that will create the result that you want most in your business.
Listen to the Show:
Laura (00:01):
Planning is one of those things that everybody wants when we're doing it we don't necessarily feel like it. And afterwards we rarely follow the plan. So like, what is the point of planning and how does this fold into the leap methodology that I have seen create remarkable results for clients. And so in the last episode, I talked about having a limited focus and today I'm going to talk about establishing a plan, but probably not in the way you think. So stay tuned in the next episode of the next level leap podcast, we'll be talking about how to establish a plan that you can stick to that you'll like, that your brain will actually want to follow through with. And that will create the result that you want most in your business.
(00:52):
Welcome to Next Level Leap, a podcast where we dive into the mindset and strategies of scaling your company and creating a legacy brand. As a top growth strategist, multi passionate entrepreneur membership site, owner trainer, speaker, author, and mom to three. I love exploring the journey of how we as founders can multiply our income, impact and influence by landing on the other side of our next big leap. Let's get started.
(01:27):
When creating a plan, it's important to actually make decisions with the part of your brain. That part that is the most sophisticated in terms of thinking forward, thinking into the future. And for many of us, we will participate in planning exercises that feel long and drawn out and cumbersome, or we will throw together a plan, very haphazardly, and both of those extremes tend to be incredibly ineffective in my experience, when it comes to creating leaps and revenue, as a result of a focused plan, a great plan starts with limited focus. It starts with that one thing and sourcing the right set of tools and the right approaches, whether it's diagnostic tools or application tools or proven frameworks to optimize what you already have in place versus create something new. And most of the time for most of my clients, when we establish this great plan, which happens in 90 day segments, it's typically all about doing whatever it is that you're already doing, better, selling more to audience members that you already have increasing your average order volume.
(02:51):
It's simply adding more onto the back end of whatever's working in your business versus creating something brand new. But why do so many entrepreneurs when they're creating a plan, want to throw away everything that we've already done in our business. And we want to completely start from scratch because it feels fun and exciting. Well, I actually think this has a lot to do with how our brain works and you may have remembered many years ago, a talk that went viral, a Ted talk by a doctor named Jill Bolty Taylor. She wrote a bestselling book called My Stroke of Insight. She appeared on Oprah and she was named time magazines, 100 most influential people. How it started is that Dr. Taylor was in her late thirties when a blood vessel exploded in her brain, the irony and all of this is at the time she was a neurological researcher.
(03:47):
She was at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and she could actually feel the experience taking over her body. And what happened is, is that the left hemisphere of her brain started to deteriorate very quickly. And when that was happening, because she knew what was taking place, she started experiencing all of this peace and joy, as she says, Here I am in this space. And any stress related to my job was gone. I felt lighter in my body and imagine all the relationships in the external world and all the stressors related to any of those were gone. And I felt this sense of peacefulness. Imagine what it was like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage. I felt that euphoria and euphoria was beautiful and the energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale guiding through a sea of silent euphoria sounds amazing, right?
(04:45):
Because in this view, as she describes it, the left brain is the seat of logic, language, judgment, separation, and linear time where the right brain is more holistic creativity, intuition S spatial perception, interconnectedness. The right hemisphere is all about the present moment. It's all about right here right now. And our right hemisphere thinks in pictures, it learns through movement information in the form of energy streams through it simultaneously. Whereas the left hemisphere thinks very linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past, and it's all about the future. And it's designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment and start picking details in more details and more details about those details and categorizing and organizing that information. So because the stroke was in her left hemisphere, it shut down completely and went totally silent. And what she experienced was a loss of memory of who she was, but this deep inner peace that comes from being completely dependent on the right hemisphere.
(05:51):
And then when we think about how that applies to the prefrontal cortex versus the more reactive part of our brains, she was only planning forward from an totally emotional state that was independent of anything she had ever experienced in the form of memories. It was fascinating. She said, I found Nirvana and I'm still alive. And everybody else can experience the same consciousness of being part of the right hemisphere. It was really, really interesting because as she shares this fascinating, sincere, and loving approach, as she started to add back in layers of time and space, she started understanding how the two parts, the left part and the right part work together in a new way of being when it comes to planning for the future. What I find is that so many people either plan from the right hemisphere entirely when it comes to planning, they just want to feel their way through the weeks and the days and the months.
(07:09):
And there's a lot of value in the intuition that is housed in our right hemisphere, in the right portion of our prefrontal cortex. And then at the same time that left component is filled with processing and integration and memorized information, associative learning. The prefrontal cortex helps people set and achieve goals. And it receives input from
multiple regions of the brain to process information and adapt accordingly. When we are fully present in our prefrontal cortex, we can focus our attention, tap into our intuition, predict the probability of anticipating events in our environment. In the future. We can manage our emotional reactions and plan for the future, and we can coordinate and adjust complex situations like I can't do a until B happens. And what happens is, is that when we function in a way where our brain is firing fully in our prefrontal cortex, we can focus on what is most likely going to be our best path forward when it actually comes to having a plan for our limited focus.
(08:32):
But this limited focus only takes place within a 90 day period. There's a lot of research that's been done on why 90 day goals are better than year long ones. And why so many more goals are met when they are housed in a 90 day container, especially in the changing world that we're living in and in the constant need to adjust to the landscape around us. Life changes a lot in a year, especially if you are a high growth company and goals that might be set annually can, can feel irrelevant in six months. And so 90 days is really about creating a specific result in a shorter period of time in that smaller chunk. So we can see the end in sight and know exactly how far away or close we are to our focused objective. It's also not too short. If something happens where you need to not work on the business for a week or two or something comes up, you have enough flexibility within that 90 day period in order to reset quickly and get back on track of what it is that you wanted to accomplish within that particular period of time.
(09:44):
And you don't necessarily spread yourself too thin. It's much easier to say, well, if I am going to have this specific goal within a 90 day period, then it is very likely that I can have four big leaps within a year. And when we think about it that way, we don't feel this need to pack everything in one 90 day period. We know that well, that might be something that we want to improve or increase or decrease later on in the year. This is our best opportunity right now. It's going to be our top priority. And we are going to sprint to this number in the next 90 days as an entrepreneur. A lot of times we can feel pulled in a lot of different directions. And when we have that single focus and we have a timeframe in which we're looking to accomplish that single focus, it starts feeling much more doable.
(10:34):
The thing about the planning process is it's not necessarily that everything always goes according to plan, right? The plan is a lot about the exercising of the brain of looking at what is our best opportunity and how does it feel to actually focus on that one thing for a 90 day period? A lot of times, fear sets in, well, what if we have too few things going on, right? And that one thing that we decided to focus on doesn't work well, what do we do instead? And working through that conversation during your 90 day plan, when we have this limited focus of doing less and making more, it can feel really uncomfortable. It can feel very uncomfortable because that's not how we grew our companies to this point. We grew our companies to this point by being spread really thin and overworked and
overwhelmed and listening to lots of different kinds of advice, and just kind of like doing too many things and, and experiencing growth, but no growth in the actual net profits.
(11:44):
We're not actually making more, like all of this history is building up in our prefrontal cortex with the memories of, in the back of our mind, kind of saying like, well, this actually did work. I mean, it got me here, right? And then as we start tapping into our intuition and we start making decisions with even the most sophisticated part of our brain, we can say yes, but that's not what I want to do. Moving forward. The key here is to make decisions in advance, because what happens inevitably is that it doesn't go the way that we think it will which is always the case with planning. Like never have I said, okay, we're going to, you know, increase by this number and have these, this number of registrants. And they're going to have this show up rate and they'll convert at this percentage.
(12:38):
A lot of times we hit our numbers, but not in the way that we were expecting and we're learning and we're gathering new information for the future for that next leap as we're observing. And what we don't want to do is in that moment of going, huh, this isn't going exactly the way that I had anticipated is getting completely distracted and blowing up the plan. And this is particularly true if you are in like a mastermind or you're talking to somebody else, and they're saying, you know what, actually I've been using this like social selling tool. It automates outreach. Like maybe you should just do that. Right. And we get well, that might be a great tool to use. It has nothing to do with what we had already decided with our planning process and utilizing the most sophisticated components of our brain, what we had already determined to be our best focus.
(13:31):
And what we're doing at this point is we're just reacting, right? We're we're in the reptilian fight flight or flee or freeze part of our brain. And we are making decisions be typically based on reactivity and fear. For many of us, this is an identity shift that you are now the kind of leader that does less, better, that you are now the kind of leader that makes decisions in advance from the most sophisticated part of your brain that you are now the kind of person that is not reactive, that you're now the kind of person that sets up yourself and your business for success. And that you have your own back on creating repeatable assets in your business, that you are building an engine in your company and not necessarily hustling for every single sale or throwing together a new offer. Every single time things aren't working out the way that you want them to.
(14:38):
And the truth is is that it may never go according to plan, but when we can adopt this new identity in ourselves and stay committed to the plan or stay committed to making adjustments to the plan, based on our most intelligent approach, based on what we are saying within ourselves and within our own intuition where we can hear our own, the voice and that we can also look at the numbers and the data of what's worked best in
the past. That's when you have these incredible self sustaining companies. When you hear of people who are like, how in the world do they have a $10 million company? And they work like three half days a week. I can tell you for sure that they've adopted a new identity as the kind of leader that plans intelligently for the future, where they focus on the one thing where they do less, better, where they stay committed to the outcome, and they're open to how they get there.
(15:45):
That is what this planning process is about. And when we operate within these 90 day segments, and then we track weekly of how far or close we are to what it is that we said we were going to do, that is when we create incredible transformation in our company. So that's step two in the leap process. Step one is limited focus. Step two is establishing a plan step three, which I'll be covering in the next episode is creating assets, repeatable assets, investments in your business, much like you would make an investment in a stock or real estate. These are investments that will continue to provide income for your company, that you can systemize and automate without you being the one to do. It sounds amazing, right? And then the last step is to review progress, look at what worked, what didn't and make changes based on data.
(16:47):
This keeps us in a state where we are planning from deductive reasoning, where we are intelligently problem solving, where we are fully comprehending the scope of the information and making the best plan forward, where we are actively creating impulse control by having a plan in advance. And we are tapping into our most powerful sources of creativity and perseverance, the result, a standardized framework of which you can create massive results in your company and a set of assets that you can use again and again, and a system that you can rely on in order to create massive growth in your company, without exhausting yourself, burning yourself out or turning over your team. If this is resonating with you, just let me know, shoot me a message on your favorite social media platform. You'll just find me at Laura Meyer on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook. And I hope that this series will help you know exactly what to do to create that next level leap in your business. See you soon!
(18:02):
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The Scale with Joy podcast dives into the mindset and strategies of scaling your company to the million dollar mark and beyond. Each week, we follow the journeys of innovators, disruptors, experts and leaders - sharing behind the scenes stories of their most challenging moments and greatest lessons learned-all while building their multi-million dollar empires.