20: Set Your 2016 Strategy

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Hi, I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot Podcast and author of the book Turn what's Working for your into what's Next, which comes out with Portfolio Penguin in September of 2016.

In this podcast I talk with peak performers to reverse engineer their most successful career. Pivots interview experts on what it takes to be agile in a rapidly evolving economy and open the kimono on what happens behind the scenes of my book and business. You can learn to capitalize on risk, fear and uncertainty as the doorways of opportunity. My promise is that you will leave every episode with practical tips, tools and tactics. For show notes from this episode, visit JennyBlake Me podcast.

If change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Welcome to another episode of the Pivot Podcast. Today I'm really excited to talk about how to set strategy for your career and business for 2016. This is something that I have honed and refined my processes over the years and as we come to a more quiet time of the year, it's a really nice time for reflection. Not just because of what the date on the calendar says, but because as people start to take time off over the holidays, the Internet and social media and all of that stimulation actually starts to slow down and get quiet and I find I can actually hear myself think. It's really amazing. So today we're going to talk about why set a strategy in the first place, how to go about it by starting broad how you can then apply the Pivot method to narrow down that strategy and then turn it into quarterly goals that you can break down what you're trying to pursue over the year in a more manageable chunks. Finally, at the end, I'll share some ways that you can maintain momentum for doing all of this. And I'm going to share a lot of concepts today where I have templates online so you can find all the show notes from this episode at jennyblake Me Podcast. And I highly recommend visiting the show notes because I'm not going to call out every template, but I've assembled many over the last eight years of blogging that relate to this topic. I'll include as many of those as I can in the show notes. All right, let's get to it. Why set a strategy in the first place? There were a few years there where goal setting got a really bad rap and people said goals are pointless. And to be honest, I don't love the word goals. I find it kind of annoying now for some reason. But the fact is I really enjoy setting my sights on something, challenging myself, and then breaking it down into a hundred small steps to figure out how to get there. This podcast is a great example. It started with me recording on my iPhone headphones and then uploading them to SoundCloud with no intro music, no outro music, no podcast feed, nothing. And I used that approach for almost a year while I researched how to podcast. I got a fancier microphone. I learned GarageBand and how to edit. I'm not saying I'm a pro by any stretch, but I actually enjoyed the process of chipping away at a goal little by little. Little. And then once you get something achieved or launched, you can always improve it over time. So a lot of people face this when they're thinking about blogging or setting up a website of some kind. So why set strategy? I find it really helpful to identify what's exciting to me sometimes when we're reacting to life, when we're reacting and responding to email and requests and things that we have to do in order to pay the bills, we can lose track a little bit of what's actually really exciting and compelling to us, and what are the new frontiers that we want to explore in our life and business. The reason I think it can get a bad rap is it can seem kind of stodgy and limiting and too serious. When you set all these goals or when people set New Year's resolutions, oftentimes they feel restrictive. And as Martha Beck calls it, your inner wild child starts rebelling, and she says, you can't tell me what to do. The classic thing of oh, I'm going to start a diet on Monday. Just the idea. Idea of a diet has actually proven to make people gain weight. So the goal here is not to fence yourself in with some annoying set of rules and tasks that you have to accomplish. That's not what this is about at all. This is about identifying what's really compelling to you and how you want to challenge yourself in the new year before making a list of more serious objectives. I always like to start broad. I think this is so important for the creative process. The way that I enjoy doing this every New Year's is to create a mind map. So I put the year in the center and then I draw spokes for different life categories like money, social, business, fitness, learning, things like that. And then from each of those categories, I'll brainstorm what I would like to accomplish. And maybe that's tasks or maybe it's results. So on money, maybe it's how much I want to earn, how much I want to save, or maybe it's even different types of activities that I want to experiment with. If it's a big part of my business, I might have a whole circle coming out of 2015 to something like speaking or the pivot book. And then I'll make a list freeform of all the milestones that I might need to pursue to get there. And it's fun to have on something like this. Categories like friends and learning. So in learning it might be something like taking cooking classes, learning how to tango, anything that feels interesting to you. I'm practicing Spanish right now and so I find learning in general and hobbies is kind of fun. To balance out some of the more serious or income related goals that are on your mind map by starting broad. The goal is to go for quantity, not quality. Get as much down and do this by hand on a piece of paper. Get as much down as you possibly can. The goal should be to fill the page. You can always narrow this down later or go back and circle themes or highlight things that are going to be the most important to you. But in doing this, you don't limit your brain to just what's possible or what might fit into a neat timeline. Instead, you're articulating what it is that you want. And then later you can troubleshoot or brainstorm how to pursue it.

The next phase of setting a strategy, I use the pivot method. This is what I have been working for several years now on writing the book. It'll come out in September of 2016. And in the meanwhile, I've been piloting these workshops at Google, teaching managers and running career development workshops using the pivot method as a shortcut for setting career strategy. So how can you do the same? The overarching principle of the pivot method is double down on what's working to help you bridge the gap toward what's next. So there are three key stages of the pivot method. The first is plant. When you plant, think of the basketball player. The basketball player has one foot planted firmly into the ground while he scans for where to pass the ball with his other foot, and that's his pivot foot. So before you go about making changes and pursuing your strategy, you want to make sure you have one foot firmly rooted into the ground. What are your strengths? The things that are your certainties, your known variables that you can keep coming back to even while you continue exploring? The plant stage has two main parts. One piece of it is what you already know. So who are you? What's working best? What are your biggest strengths? What are your interests? Capture all of that. Maybe some of you already have a great sense for what all of those things are. But in a way, as you set strategy, you might want to look back on the year and say what worked best? And it's not always what you think. Sometimes what worked best, let's say for someone running their own business, well, maybe all their clients came from one source. And you may not want that to be your same source or the same type of client in 2016, but you can't deny that that's what worked best in 2015. So make a note of it because the pivot method will help you shift that methodically into the new direction. But you can't ignore, it's a mistake to ignore what has already been working. So that's a really big piece of using this for year end reflection and year ahead planning. The second really important part of the plant stage is vision. What is your one year vision? I think the five year question of where do you see yourself in five years is totally and completely obsolete. Instead, I recommend, and I think it's much more manageable for people to look and say one year from now, I would be thrilled if X, Y and Z were happening. And that can be things, results that you want to be experiencing and also how you want to feel. I love asking my coaching clients, what is your ideal average day? And I've also created a mad lib template that was in my first book that I'll include in the show notes that you can fill out to figure out how do you want to feel and what does your ideal average workday look like? What is smashing success? That vision is a critical piece of the plant stage because now you have a much more accurate picture of where you are today and where you want to be one year from now. Now the rest of the pivot method and the strategy that you set can help to bridge that gap and make it smaller and smaller and smaller until you reach that desired vision one year from now.

The next phase of the pivot method is scan. Now that you know where you are now and where you want to end up. You can scan for people, skills and opportunities that sound interesting to you, just like the mind map exercise. And you can even do a second mind map for just the scanning phase alone, related to your strengths and to what is already working, what's out there now. You can look at who's doing what you want to do, who do you admire? Maybe it's their career, their body of work, the types of topics that they're talking about and thinking about, or even how they set up their day to day. It could even be behavioral, how they are as a person and qualities that you might want to emulate. Another part of scanning is looking for skills. How do you want to grow your knowledge and your skill base? This year I talk a lot about how the economy is changing so quickly. We don't necessarily know exactly what skills will be useful in five years. So knowing that, what can you learn now that would be helpful to your career or to your business? And a lot of those tend to be things that involve empathy, relationship building, but it could also be something technical. So, for example, me teaching myself about podcasting and audio editing, am I ever going to become a professional audio editor? No. But it helped me get to a certain point with my podcast and in the future, and there are already tools I'm using, I don't know how you say it, alphonic. It's a tool that Pat Flynn recommended for editing and that's kind of automatic. And so of course there's always the chance that skills you're going to learn today could become automated in a year or two because of apps and online services. But knowing all of that, what would you be the most excited to learn in the coming year? And then what would be most beneficial to you to learn? The third piece of scanning is opportunities. When you look at what worked last year and you think about what you're most excited about and your one year vision, what are the specific opportunities that you might want to pursue? If you work for a company, that might be roles within the company or creating your own role if you run your own business, that might be types of clients you want to pursue or types of projects that you want to take on this year, the third stage of the pivot method is pilot. And this is all about running small experiments to take smart risks. So rather than betting the farm on one big idea for the next year, think about given all your hypotheses, whether it's your mind map or what you've done in the pivot method so far. Think about what are some small experiments you could run to test three things. One, do you enjoy this new area? Two, are you actually good at it? Can you become an expert? And then three, is there more interest where that came from? Is there a market need or want for what it is that you want to pursue? And if those three things line up, then you can start to expand those pilots and experiments within looking at pilots and trying to narrow down opportunities. Because if you've been brainstorming and following exercises up to this point, it's likely that you have a wide range of things that you could pursue. So it is important to narrow things down. And I like to have a balance between high risk and low risk activities and then high income or high yield and low yield. And the reason for that is just to balance out and make sure that again, you're not putting all your eggs in one basket, but also that you're not playing too small either. So it's okay to have one or two high risk, high reward type activities, but you just want to balance those out by having more stable income in tandem. There's actually a fourth stage of the pivot method called launch. But the idea is that you repeat the first three phases as many times as necessary until you launch to reduce risk and get more data. I always say decisions are data, so decide on something and get going. And you repeat plant, scan, pilot. Plant, scan, pilot. If you are scanning too much and you fall into analysis paralysis, it probably means you need to go back and plant in your strengths, your interests, and what you want to achieve a year from now. If you're piloting and things are kind of going haywire, or not getting the traction that you seek, or you're just not enjoying it, it's likely you might need to go plant and scan again. Some people are happy piloting in their business and even in their careers and their jobs for years. So there's nothing saying that you can't use plant scan, pilot to get a really long way toward where you want to go. Sometimes eventually there is a bigger launch moment that happens, for example, with podcasting. Maybe I'll pull the trigger and I'll put out a blog post that says, hey everyone, I did it. I launched. Here I am on itunes. Leave me a review. One of. But until then, I'm doing a ton, dozens of little tasks one by one. And I'm piloting and I'm experimenting and just doing the scrappy recordings on Soundcloud for a year was a great form of piloting. For others, the launch is getting a website up, quitting a job, starting a business. The launch is that big moment where you can no longer take small steps. There's this gulp and maybe a rush of adrenaline where you actually pull the trigger on the remaining 10 to 20%. Now we can get into quarterly planning. Quarterly is kind of business speak. So for the uninitiated, quarterly refers to basically the seasons. So January, February, March is Q1, April, May, June is Q2, July, August, September is Q3, and October, November, December is Q4. I don't do anything super fancy at the start of each quarter, but I do make a list and I look at my mind map, I look at what I've set out to achieve in that year, and then I break it down into a quarterly list. And I don't try and do this for every quarter in advance sometimes, but things change so much, you all know that, that I really just do this one quarter at a time. So once you've done your one year vision and your mind map, I encourage you to just take the next three months and say, what are the biggest projects that I want to accomplish and how will I know? So there's a difference between milestones and results. Results would be how much I want to earn, what kind of impact I want to make, the metrics that let you know it's actually working. Milestones are a little different. Those are completing different steps necessary in the process. When I'm working with coaching clients who are starting their own business, I often talk to them about the difference between direct income generating activities and indirect. Indirect are things like social media. Just because you grow your newsletter list to 1,000 subscribers doesn't mean that you're directly earning a living. So when you're doing your quarterly planning, I encourage you to have some milestones that are project related and then others that are results oriented within your quarterly list. I and this is something we do in Momentum, which is my private online community. We set a quarterly focus and we have a focus tracker. And this was really important to me to have this be part of the Momentum experience, which is that every quarter we encourage members to pick one thing that they want to track and work on for added group accountability. Most of us have a to do list already of things we're tackling. And I think for me, when I set quarterly objectives, it's less about what I already doing or have to deliver to earn my income. It's more like projects that if I don't put some structure and attention on them, they might not get Done taking. The Pivot Podcast Pro, for example, was a quarterly focus tracker because it could have easily fallen off by the wayside, and there were many, many different moving parts to doing this that it was actually fun to be able to go into momentum and update my progress. Even if you're not a Momentum member and if you want to learn more, you can. @MomentumCrew.com you can still set up accountability with your friends. I love having friends where we get on the phone and do an exchange. My friend Adam and I have a 3030 call, so we brainstorm 30 minutes for his business and 30 minutes for mine. And I do this with several other friends as well. And some of my friends. I've had Mastermind calls going now for over three years, and they're not super formal, but we do identify every quarter. We say what we're working on and talk about what our next steps are going to be at the end of every call. So however you set up your accountability, do it for the project. That's a little bit of a stretch for you. Do it for the stuff that's not already getting done, and that's not super easy to knock off. A lot of times people are too ambitious in this way. And this is why in momentum, we only do one quarterly focus. It doesn't mean you can't tackle other things. Of course, even while I'm working on the Pivot Podcast, I'm writing a book, which is a huge goal and a huge task that spans many quarters. But if you have one that you really care about and that's exciting, when you finish it, you can always start another or you can diversify. I enjoy having three big projects where, depending what kind of mood I'm in, I can work on any one of them. So maybe it's writing the book, the Pivot Podcast, and creating a speaking reel or getting the pieces in place to make that happen. So for you, think about what would be most exciting to accomplish by the end of the next quarter, the next three months, and from there break that project down into five or 10 key tasks that will help you make progress. Almost always when someone is overwhelmed by a project, they're doing all or nothing thinking like, unless I have all the time in the world or unless I can knock this all out, I'm not going to do anything. And what I find for myself, whether it's writing the book or working on the podcast, that there's a hundred tiny tasks. And some mornings all I can muster is 1, 1 tiny fraction of the project. But I'll do it anyway. And so whether you only have 10 minutes, some people have a writing goal. Even if you only have 10 minutes write, you would be amazed. My book has mostly gotten done and I've been working on it for over a year now of intense writing and editing, not just conceptualizing it. And I am shocked that the majority of the progress that I've made have come from one hour a day because sometimes that's all that I can give, but it really adds up over time. And then I'm so surprised at the end of the month to see how much progress I've actually made. But what happens if you still don't know what you want to pursue? Some people are at a plateau in their career or business, but they don't know where to put their time and attention. And sometimes people come to me and they have a ton of different ideas but they don't know which one to really invest in or they have a hard time choosing. So for that I recommend taking a more exploratory approach until one of your racehorses, your idea racehorses, becomes a clearer winner. We're putting together Last year Marisol and I created the Momentum Safari, which is a three week safari meant to take you through a series of questions. This is totally free. It's for all of us to just have some fun thinking about one area that we care about and how we can generate momentum. And so this is a really creative approach that for those of you who aren't sure yet what you want to pursue or how to go about it, can just help you explore. And so if you want to sign up for the 2016 edition of the Momentum Safari, that's at Bitly Bit Ly Momentum Safari2016 all lowercase.

That about wraps it up for today's podcast episode on Setting a strategy for 2016. I would love to hear from you on the blog and about what works for you when setting a strategy. And if you still have questions that I haven't addressed, I do a monthly live workshop and Q and A within Momentum. So if you want ongoing support and resources as you pursue what's most important to you, I would love for you to learn more and potentially join us@MomentumCrew.com and then all the show notes and tons of free templates and courses and resources are available for this episode at jennyblake Me Podcast. All right everyone, happy reflecting and planning for 2016.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot for podcast. To learn more and get in touch, visit JennyBlake me where I blog about systems at the intersection of mind, body and business. Or find me on Twitter at Jennyblake. And remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.