December 3, 2020
As we approach the process of planning for 2021, in both on a business level and a personal level, let us properly reflect on our 2020 and inspect reality.
This episode talks about the reality of our business and personal goals of this year? Did the pandemic or other circumstances stop you from pursuing your goal? Did it freeze you? Or does the activities you did this year created a path in achieving your end goal or result?
TRANSCRIPT
Hello Enchilada Nation, excited to spend some time with you today. It is the time of year where a lot of us are spending significant amount of time putting our business plans together for the year we’re wrapping up 2020 which is an interesting year to say the least, not only with the global pandemic going on but with the president presidential race, and several other things that we made a list of all the crazy things that happen in 2020 would take the entirety of this podcast, but I think it’s safe to say we all agree this year was a little crazy, and things came up that weren’t necessarily on our radar when we were putting together our business plan for 2020.
So, as we approach the process of finding out right here for 2020. I think that a lot of us, myself included, we are such drivers and goers that we are in the middle of trying to tidy up and finish up 2020 at a high level and hit our goals in 2020 at the same time of going through the process of putting together a business plan for 2021. Well, there, there is a process or a gap that should be happening from the hustle of trainer wrap up the current year that actually physically putting together our business plan for the following year that I think we missed the mark a lot.
This goes both on a business level and a personal level and reflection of our year. It’s hard to slow down enough to properly reflect on the results of the year when you’re still actively pursuing the results of that year.
At the same time, if, particularly if we’re in the process. We’re in the business of sales, the activities that we’re doing today are all ready gonna be measured and results to show up the year that comes. So it’s this weird balance of I’m going to slow down enough to actively put together a game plan for the following year, and at the same time, put enough energy in, in focusing to finish the year strong that I’m currently in.
Well, the this process that we’re talking about, but I feel like a lot of us don’t take the time to do is actually an inspection of reality, inspecting reality.
A lot of us measure our success for the current year based on how the income showed up, or what the result would have been. We’ve already talked a little bit about the lag measures but it’s it’s those lag measures that that are the results of the activities we’ve been doing, and we want to measure success on those lag measures. Instead of really saying, was I successful on the lead measures?
I’ve already had the opportunity so far this year to run a couple business planning clinics where I’ve coached hundreds of people already putting together their business plans for the year to come I’ve got several more to do in the next coming weeks. In addition to that actually sitting down with the business plan for my personal businesses, and I go through the same process.
So today we’re going to talk about a couple things that you should be considering from inspecting the reality of your current situation before you go in the process of putting together that business plan. The reason I think this is important is to many of us. This is how we we approach this process is. Oh, I’m a business person I’ve got to put together my business plan for this coming year so we go to our filing cabinet or on our computer pull up our business plan from the year before. And for a lot of you. This will be the first time that you look at your business plans in 2020, since you wrote it in 2019.
Now, I want to congratulate you for actually going through the activity of putting together a business plan because I think a lot of people don’t even take the time to put together an accurate business plan, but at the same time I want to point out the fact that, why did we put together a business plan if we were going to file it away and not look at it, or measure against it. Throughout the year or we were able to make clear course corrections along the way.
That is the power of a strong business plan is the ability to measure instantly in an ongoing basis create a cadence of accountability and make the small course corrections along the way where a lot of us as we dust off that business plan from the previous year, we might make a couple minor adjustments and just say now work for me last year. Let’s do it again. When we’re really saying it worked for us in the lag measures I think this year, particularly is interesting because I know a lot of our. A lot of my associates have had the best financial year they’ve ever had regardless of everything going on the world.
But I would dare say is the inspect reality the activities they did, or the approach to the activities that they committed to do felt different this year based on everything going on in this current year of 2020.
So here’s, here’s a couple suggestions or ideas around inspecting your current reality. And as you expect your current reality you’ll identify the things that are working well for you and producing the results. And you’ll also identify some things that in your business planning from the year before you committed to because you believed they would draw the result. But you still don’t know the answer if that’s accurate or not because you didn’t measure the activity throughout the year.
Here’s a couple thoughts to carry our conversation today.
Number one, inspect reality, this process isn’t an emotional inspection of your business. This is for a lot of us we consider our businesses our babies we have all this emotional time and energy tied up into them with every conversation we have around our business tends to have some element of emotion and protection against the think of coming across the bear in the woods, the only works to come across the a bear in the woods is coming across the bear with his baby cub there, because all sudden you’re much more risks and I think a lot of us are like mama bears are businesses where we will do anything to protect that that baby cub. In this instance of this conversation of the quiet of your home office what you’re expecting reality, you need to take emotion out of it and not try to protect that baby cub, but really look at it from a third party perspective. In this scenario, you’ve got to give yourself permission to step back and look at your business differently than you look at it from within. The data is not concerned with with effort from intentions, it simply focuses on outcomes. This is another area I feel like a lot of us get sidetracked a little bit is we think man we worked really hard this year. We stayed way busy. In, we’re confusing effort with results so the data. If we look purely at the data, it’s not concerned with how much effort you put into it. It’s actually more concerned with what effort or what results did that effort return. And that’s the most important thing for this conversation is understanding that did we put forth effort into the right areas or activities that yielded the results that we expected. Measurement drives the execution process, it is the, anchor of reality. So, execution is the anchor of reality, in essence, what we’re saying here is your current reality.
Whether you’re looking at your current reality from a business perspective. Relationship perspective, physical fitness perspective whenever that is your current reality. All that is, is a summation of all of the activities, you did. Minus all the activities that you did not do that you should have done is your end result. It’s your current situation is always a summation of the activities you chose. And in essence, sometimes you chose the right activities and other times you may have chose the wrong activities, you take those two things together a path is what creates that end result.
So here’s another thought that I jumped in for a conversation today, ultimately, you have greater control over your actions than over your results. Your results are created by your actions. Â An execution measure indicates whether you did the things you said you were most important to achieving your goals. So as we went through this process last year in creating our business plans for 2020, we said we, we want to create this result. And then we work backwards to say what are the specific activities and how much of those activities must happen, that we believe will yield the results. Well, a lot of us have measured the results of our year, and gets that result, let’s say, in, in gross income or net income, we’re measuring against that but do we actually take the time to go look at the activities to say, How did I. How did I stack up against the activities I committed to do? And did those activities yield the results in proportion to conversion rates that I had anticipated?
If we can answer that question and say I committed to this many conversations are committed to this time lead generation I committed to this, this, these many appointments. We can measure how many we did actually get that, in essence, we don’t know whether that plan work or not. Regardless of whether the results showed up, or not. We can’t say with confidence if that was the plan that created the results or something else the critical results.
So here’s the thought if you were not hitting your goals, you need to know whether it was due to a flaw in the plan content, or the execution of the plan. Too often if we’re not hitting our goals we didn’t hit our income goal we instantly want to, we want to wipe the whole board clean and start from scratch. When we may have had the perfect plan in place, but we didn’t measure the plan. So, we jumped to the conclusion that the whole plan is flawed. A breakdown in plan content occurs when strategies and tactics are not effective, A breakdown in execution occurs when you fail to fully implement the plan tactics. So that becomes the question for putting the business plan you put together 2019 for 2020 is. If you missed the mark with your results. Was it due to a failure in execution of the plan or was the plan flawed in and of itself.
Now one quick comment here is I want to encourage you not to jump to the conclusion, and blame your entire results on COVID-19, or the global pandemic or any of these other things, because there was a lot of additional motion, emotion created around our activities today. If some of those things were outside of our control I’ll agree with that. However, how you reacted to that lives in the global pandemic was what created the results or lack of results that you currently had not necessarily the pandemic in itself.
I can give a list of people within my world that shifted and moved and approach things differently. They still put forth a lot of effort in their business they just shifted tactics a little bit on our game plan still treat the same and execute on the same lead measures and have the best year ever. While at the same time, the people that are that are within my world, who historically have had very successful years froze with the changes in 2020, and did not take action. It wasn’t because they didn’t have the energy or the drive to take the action, they chose the freeze that take no action, other than some action and moving forward.
So here are a couple of thoughts as you analyze and inspect reality I’ve encouraged you to take some time. Time block some time this week to sit down and write out in your journal. Inspect reality. And then break down all of your businesses, your physical health, your relationships, anything specific that you’re going to build a game plan around for 2021. And let’s get clear on that reality, take the emotion out of it, and ask yourself, some questions like this. What does the data actually say about my business, not the results? But what does the data say, of how I showed up in relation to lead measures when I said were important. And again, this can go on a personal level, or a business level is a great example of this on my calendar every Tuesday night, after my workout I’ve got a kid’s date night, I have four daughters I try to rotate through and give them all a one on one time once a week, or, or one of them each once a week. What they realized as the for the amount of my calendar I feel like I’ve done pretty well against it this year keeping that appointment. I know there were times that I was unable to keep that appointment, but I can’t tell you exactly how many I was able to keep versus how many I wasn’t able to keep because I did not track that data better. I can’t In reality, take the time to say, what was it that stood in my way of completing that work, do I have that on the right, the right spot on my calendar, where if I had tracked it better, it would have given me better insight on how to shift that that goal for this coming year.
The next question is one of my favorite questions that I keep coming down suggests in this book travel the world was stupid, is if your business could talk. What would it say? Give me permission to have its own voice. If it was to say something, it was to share the secret to that is feeling and the emotions it’s feeling, what would it say and I think as you go through that process. Some of the things that it would share and say about how the drama being cared for, are probably different than how you express your emotional feelings about your business.
In the next couple of conversations we’re gonna be diving into more how to utilize some specific tools in supporting your execution of the plan. How to finalize your business plan for this coming year. And one thing I want to make sure that you’re, you’re thinking through in your, in your personal plans for 2021 goes beyond your business plan, it’s really critical particularly for this group. The enchilada nation the enchilada network that we are focused on becoming balanced, individuals, achieving high standards across all aspects of life, business, personal relationships physical fitness adventure all of those things. We don’t want to be mediocre at any of them. We want to be excelling in all of them so we need to be thinking and inspecting the reality, across the board in all these areas.
So, as you’re analyzing and inspecting the reality across your businesses, your personal life your personal relationships I would encourage you to also expect the current reality around what is your current networth. How did you affect your networth in 2020. How do you want to affect your networth in 2021, in addition to the networth. there’s also talking about passive income. And then also the third one that I put on my short list here that we’ll talk more about is what life experiences did you commit to in 2020. How did you measure against those, and what life experiences do you want to create in 2021? An example of this as one of my personal goals is to visit two foreign countries that I have not visited before each year, at a minimum, as you know, travel restrictions in 2020 are significant. So here is the mistake I made is, I took that as I guess I’m not able to fulfill that goal this year, and kind of put it to the side, but were there other experiences life experiences that could have carried as an equal amount of value to me that I would have been better to say, hey, the goal is still the same to create these life experiences. The lead measures of how I’m going to create those life experiences have changed due to changing circumstances around me, but can I still trade that result.
So, this is the mental process I went through over the last several days thinking through inspecting reality. I encourage you to go to the same, inspect the reality of your world, your life. Let’s get clarity on that reality as we approach putting together our business plans for 2021 so we can all together, lean on each other create the energy and make 2021, the best year yet now.
Enjoy the network. Don’t forget, go live life on your terms.
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