getting started with planning

We’ve all been here I am sure…

Define goals and outcomes - tick

Create long list of hard stuff to do - tick

Get started..!

Getting clear on our goals and outcomes is often the easiest part; as coaches we help others set outcomes, so we are pretty fluent when it comes to visualizing what we want to achieve and experiencing what it looks and feels like when we’ve achieved it. Taking action to ensure those goals come to fruition is sometimes a lot more challenging when it’s our own business.

Often, it’s not because we don’t know what needs to be done, or that we don’t have the time to do it; Sometimes it just feels too big, and we end up putting it into the ‘too difficult’ box!

For some of us planning comes quite naturally and often it’s a learned behaviour based on the jobs we have done. For those people, it seems obvious what they need to do, whilst for others it can become a blocker to moving forwards.

Eating the elephant

I remember when my son was asked to do a 6-month project for school as part of an extra-curricular activity; he was 13 at the time and chose to focus on the social impact of Covid-19 (we were in the early stages of the pandemic then and the impacts were being broadcast everywhere). He knew what outcome he wanted to achieve but had no idea how to begin planning it.

During one of our conversations I asked, ‘how would you go about eating an elephant’? He looked at me as though I had gone mad; what did this have to do with the social impact of Covid-19 and how was it going to help him get this project underway?!

So, we talked about how it would be impossible to eat it in one go, how you would need to break it down into lots of bite-sized chunks, and that, whilst there might seem an awful lot of those little chunks, if they were worked through one at a time, in the right order, the task would seem more manageable and could be fitted around all the other activities he wanted to do.

The idea of setting up a coaching business and transitioning to using our NLP skills to help others can feel as big as an elephant. But if we break down everything we need to do into those bit-sized chunks we are already on our way to achieving the outcome. We start to see it as a set of manageable tasks which can be fitted in to our busy lives. We can pick up something that will take 30 minutes or an hour to achieve rather than putting off something which is going to consume the entire day, or even week.

There are some added bonuses to this approach too:

• We get to celebrate all those small achievements along the way, which helps to maintain motivation and momentum. Each achievement is one step closer to our goals and outcomes and deserve to be recognised and celebrated

• When we have a pathway towards our goals and outcomes, we stop comparing ourselves to others and begin measuring our own progress. This is because our own progress has instantly become more tangible, can be clearly seen, and described.

So, what will you do this week to help you to move towards your goals and outcomes? How will you begin to break the elephant down into bite-sized chunks?

Take care,

Jo

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