What To Do When You Don’t Know What To Do

TRANSCRIPT AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED Hey, Hey, so this week I want to chat about a particular question that I hear asked in business circles and business programs that really just, who gets right on up my nose and Platts my nose hairs. Like it just drives me bonkers. And it's that space where you say to someone who you've paid an awful lot of money. Well, I don't know what to do and their responses. Well, what would you do if you did know? Honestly, if I did know, I wouldn't be paying you thousands of dollars to tell me what to do and I get it. I get that. It's a coaching question. And then it is designed to pull the ideas out of you. But when somebody is in that kind of overwhelmed state, which I think this time of year really generates, it's just a completely unhelpful question. So I want to chat a bit more practically about what to do when you don't know what to do in your plan next year. If you're like me using lots of people posting about planning about maybe planning, retreats, you're seeing detailed spreadsheets or air tables or posted walls. And for me, I love it. Like I nerd so hard on this stuff. I like to see how different people approach it. I like to see different angles that they take from it, but the one piece of it that for me, can become overwhelming. When I decide to sit down and try and plan my entire year out, is this feeling of as an ideas person, as a person who thrives in an innovation space, it's hard for me to know what idea my brain will come up with in March or in June or in November. Right? So the idea of having a full year completely blocked out can create. And that can get you into that space of like, oh, I don't know what to do. Cause there's so many things I could do. And then questions like, well, what would you do if you knew become really unhelpful? So I always want to start from a space of like, what could you do? Or what could you try as a starting point? So when you're in that overwhelm space, in order to just unfreeze yourself, those are kind of the questions I like to ask myself, like, what could I do? What am I options? What am I choosing from just to get my brain like back into gear, just to get like the cogs kind of unstuck. Right? And then how do you turn that into a plan? When you don't know what new idea could come up and that's where you have to have some space and some flexibility built in to allow for some experimentation. And what that can look like is putting in like your big blocks. So if you have a signature program and you know, you need to launch it twice a year, well, those launches are kind of non-negotiable, whatever other ideas you have, if you're going to continue doing those programs, you need to do those launches. Right? So those can go into the calendar. If you do VIP days, maybe, you know, that you do. For VIP days a month. And so, this amount of time is taken up during VIP days, selling VIP days, marketing for VIP days. And then there's this week over here that is free for experimentation or trying new ideas or having new ideas. Because in that, innovative CEO space, we need time to think in a big way. And I think sometimes we just ran our planning so full of. Deliverables that we forget that we also need white space and quiet time and thinking time and staring into space time to really allow those ideas to come. So as we are in planning session, I want you to just take a deep breaks when you sit down to plan. Have a more detailed plan for how you want to spend the next 12 weeks, which things are super fixed, like, like hard core read that time has taken, which things are necessary, but could be done at different times. And maybe they're like an orange. And then where's your free time. Where is the time that you can have an idea or experiment with something new? And then stretching out from 12 weeks to 12 months, I would have anything that's hardcore red. Like we need to launch in this month, in this week, blocked out. And the rest of it, I read simply have a capacity. Like I know I need 10 hours to work on necessary orange things. And during the rest of the time is free. So I know I have this amount of time I want you to be able to look at your 12 weeks with. A fair idea of what you're going to start with. What are the ideas that fit into those gaps that you have? How are you going to play with them? And then as we stretch out to 12 months, what I ideally want you to be able to see is where you have green space, because then when you start to feel, oh, I'm a bit bored with the stuff that I need to do to keep things going. And I'm really excited about this new idea. You'll be able to see that you have space for that new idea coming up and that'll help, you know, Blow up all the necessary things, because you feel a little bit bored, and remember you still have two months left of this year, right? Have a look at these mixes. Is there anything that you have to get done that you're launching? Boom, put that in and read. What are the things that you need to do? How much time do you have put those ones in orange and then look at that green space and ask yourself what ideas do I want to play with right now? What's going to help fill your creativity tank to sustain you through doing the things that need to get done. But might not be the most exciting to you that doesn't have to wait for January 1st. That can start right now.