How To Overcome Your Fear Of Planning

TRANSCRIPT AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED [00:00:00] Hey, Hey. We are carrying on without planning theme for October and today, I want to talk about one of the main reasons that people don't like to dive deep into planning. And it's a reason that they also don't like to talk about. And that is fear now. That's understandable. Because there's all sorts of things in planning that might trigger some of the fears that you have. So what we're going to do is when you look at the main ones, and then we're going to look at how we can counteract them. So the first one is a fear of failure. And this ties into that age old problem, we have as small business owners where our business and ourselves are so connected. And so we fear that if we set this ambitious goal for our business, And we don't meet it. That says something about us. And so we don't want to set these ambitious goals and think about how we might achieve them. It's easier to say, well, I could probably do 10% more than last year and feel relatively safe that you could probably hit that. And even if you didn't, it's probably a small enough margin of error. That you could point at external forces. So it really helps us to protect ourselves from that idea that we might fail at something. The second fear is all fear of being wrong. Ooh, I do not like to be wrong. How about in the planning process, the sheer number of assumptions and decisions that you need to make increases the likelihood that one of them will be wrong. But what happens in response to this fear? Is that we get into analysis paralysis. Because we keep trying to make sure that every single decision is right, even when that's impossible. The third one is fear of the unknown. Uncertainty and lack of control of the external forces. On our business leads us to feel overwhelmed when we start to think about. What could we do with our business? It's much easier to ostrich and put our head in the sand and just be like, well, I can't control anything anyway. So what's the point of me trying to make a deeper plan. Now, this is such a key one. That I'm going to do a whole [00:02:00] episode on how we deal with uncertainty and planning. But I wanted to flag it here because it is a real fear that I see around planning. Next up is fear of commitments. Raise your hands or my fellow commitment, phobes bright. One of my primary rules for my businesses that I don't want to have to be in a specific location. At a specific time. On a specific day, right? I like to know that at any moment I can get on an airplane to somewhere else. Even if I haven't in months. And similarly entrepreneurs have a real fear of commitment in committing to a business model in committing to an offer. We like to feel that freedom, that ability to pivot on a moment's notice. To have a new idea and change everything and chase after that idea. And so this idea of sitting down and actually planning and documenting what we're going to do. Can really feel like a cage to us. And finally, I see a fear of change crop up around planning. And this usually shows up when we do some deeper work on planning and we realize it's something in the business isn't working. And something needs to be tweaked or changed. Maybe it's a small change. Maybe it's a dramatic change. Maybe it's a change in the team or a system. All of these can raise all of those fear of change. Red flags. So we've got all of this fear swimming around us as we start to talk about planning. And obviously I conscious leave those sitting up there to concern you and worry you and put your planning. So let's think about what we could do for each of these fears. So that we can go into this planning process for 2024 in that more strategic way in a more defined. And impactful way. So let's go from the beginning. So our fear of failure leads us to not set ambitious goals. We need to change the way that we think about goals for our small businesses. Okay, big businesses get very into annual goals because they have investors. They have the market [00:04:00] watching and determining their share price based on how much profit or loss or revenue they're making. But in a small business, we don't have that space. So, what I encourage you to think of is what is my big goal? And what would I like to have achieved by the end of this year towards that big goal? And then you can start to build a 90 day mile markers on that journey. And what this does is it allows you to look at the next success that you're chasing. So that first mile marker, instead of focused on this huge goal that we might fail at. That huge goal can be like down the track. What's our next success marker. What's the next thing that's going to tell us that we're on track. So it's really thinking about, yes, I have this really big goal. But then breaking it down into something that feels manageable and achievable and exciting. Okay, next up, we had the fear of being wrong and this one might be the easiest one to counteract. I want you to create buffers in your plan. And what that means is money buffers. So put some money aside for a rainy day. So if something doesn't happen, your cost, the cupboard. Put some money away for people who bought, asked you for refunds. Put some money away for investment that you might not be aware of. That's coming up, right? So you can reserve some of your cash to create a buffer against you having made a mistake in the plan. So you've got cash reserves to pull on. On the other side, I want you to create time buffers. I want you to be realistic about what you can achieve and what timeframe. Short term, we think we can do so much more and longterm. We think everything's going to take forever. So instead, I want you to think about what is that big goal. It's exciting. We want to achieve it. We'll probably get there quicker. But short term, I want you to be building in buffers. Because people on your team could get sick climbs. Don't deliver things when they're supposed to deliver. Something that you're doing with tick takes longer than you're expecting. And probably cost more so lucky you've got those reserves. Okay next. We had [00:06:00] the fear of the unknown, right? We're going to do a whole episode on this, but I want you to think about it in two different ways where we're counteracting uncertainty we want to be proactive. What that means is we think about contingency planning. So we think about the uncertainty and what could happen with that uncertainty. And we plan for it. And you want to document and learn, right? So you want to document. What you believed would happen in the plan? So that when you review the plant, you can see where you have been thought of something. So that next time, hopefully you can plan for it. Or you can create a reserve or a buffer for it. But we'll talk more about this by next week. Okay, next up, we had our fear of commitment, right on 90 day plan is the perfect cure for a fear of commitment. It's all long enough for us to make good progress towards that big goal that we have and feel successful. And it's short enough that we can cope with being committed to what we said. Very little in small business is permanent. And that 90 days kind of reinforces that for us the whole time, because as entrepreneurs, we do not like to be caged. And then finally we had the fear of change. The easiest thing to. Do in the face of a fear of change as together data. What will that change look like? What will that change require us to do? All we making the right change. What does the data tell us if the data tells us that we need to make that change? It's much easier to make that change. Then to make a change to dislike. I kind of hope sort of feel the smart, be the right way to go. So if you've got a fear of change, Whether that's your business model, your team, your offers. Start gathering data now. And finally for all of them, what is really going to help you is to get support. To get input from experts that you trust from your team as you're building the plan. And even from your peers , even if they don't have advice for you. they Can empathize with what you're going through because they're going through it as well. I think a lot of the times we think of panning as this [00:08:00] isolated process that we as a CEO need to do, and we need to go lock ourselves in a room on our own. Planning is a really collaborative process. You need those sounding boards, you need that brainstorm. You need that input in order to create the best plan possible. So if you've been afraid to dive deep into planning, I want to challenge you to get out of your comfort zone. I want you to think about which of those fears that I mentioned? Was it failure being wrong? Uncertainty commitment or change is maybe holding you back. And then do the thing that's going to counteract it. Set those quarterly success, markers, buildups, and buffers. Set a 90 day plan. Gather the data that you need, get some support and make any kind of contingency plan that you need. Building a plan is key to your business. The fear is normal, but the only way. Through it. Is to do the planning. Is to do it that first time at a deeper level. And you'll see where you can grow, where you need to learn how to do it. You didn't know how to grow on social media when you started and if you haven't ever done a deep dive into planning, You're not expected to get it. Perfect. The first time. But I so encourage you to at least try. Because your business. And your confidence will. Thank you.