266: The Framework Framework™️  (BFF Bonus Replay)

When the holidays start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for a Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and Winter Spice Flavor Fusion Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up this sipping season and only for a limited time. Sprite Obey your thirst.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Welcome back Free Timers. Today I'm sharing an episode from the BFF Bonus Vault. This is one that I recorded in June of 2023 and it was immediately following the fantastic workshop that Pamela Slim did for us on certification and licensing. You can access over 100 bonus episodes and that workshop by joining FreeTime as a paying subscriber, just visit itsfreetime.substack.com and you'll see the options for how to join and how to access the entire vault of the entire history of BFF Bonus episodes. So if you enjoy this podcast, there's a hundred more of where this came from. Now I hope you know the Framework Framework TM is tongue in cheek. I'm kind of poking fun, but also just joking around about. Here's a framework that I made up on how you can set up a framework for your IP in your business and if eventually something like certification and licensing is what you want to do, but also just to make your material more memorable and accessible to the community that you care most about reaching. I hope you enjoy this bonus conversation. And again, if you join as a paying subscriber, not only will you get to attend fun live workshops, I love sharing behind the scenes looms on various templates and processes. You'll also get access to Stephanie Houston's recent How to Batch Create youe Entire Content Calendar for the year ahead. With an epic multitab template, you're going to get all kinds of good stuff. Just visit itsfreetime.substack. com without further ado, here is the Framework framework and be sure to check out the show notes because I'm going to put all the links to everything I reference in this episode. As always, thanks so much for listening.

Part of this that we were talking about in the chat of Pam's Workshop, Kelly and Stephanie Were asking, saying it would be helpful to know how I started in terms of coming up with a framework versus moving into what Stephanie called the big scary, gotta make it mine from the beginning process. And it is a process, because in the early days of teaching and facilitating and delivering keynotes, I know I certainly relied quite heavily on other people's models. That is the low hanging fruit, to use that corporate metaphor, of just saying, oh, well, this person's an expert, and citing them and feeling comfortable kind of not necessarily hiding behind their models, their books, their expertise, but in some ways it makes it so that we don't have to be the ones to do the hard work of sitting down and thinking. Not just what is a synthesized distilled framework for what I'm talking about, for your own unique expertise, but then the internal shift of saying, I even have a right to claim this and not just cite the experts. That you get to a point in your knowledge, in your practice, in your value delivery, where you say, I am going to step forward a little bit more. I'm going to remove the OPP from your own delivery so that you can really lean into your own expertise. Especially when you're teaching in companies, if you're distributing recorded content. And again, also for your own credibility, if you only talk about other people's work or other people's property, opp, it's kind of like a book report in a way, you're making yourself into a commodity because you could be anybody who's assembling information and just compiling it together. Now, of course, in Pivot, I've talked about the benefits of seeing yourself as a qualified curator, but it won't be quite as unique or influential or even legally protected as if you were to really sit down and put the effort into thinking through your own unique lens on the world. And if you do have those feelings, like Stephanie called it the big scary gotta make it mine from the beginning feeling, that's so common. I mean, so many of these models and frameworks are borrowing from a universal pool of shared wisdom. All of us are standing on the shoulders of giants and we would never want to be disingenuous or just pulling something out of thin air. It should definitely be rooted in your practice and again, the value you deliver. But people are often saying nothing out there is so truly unique. We're all sharing in a different way. So what's always helped me, you'll hear a little later in this episode, is it's not just about the framework and trying to unhook from OPP by creating your own unique process. It's also about weaving in metaphor personal stories. Those things will always help make something yours compared to just drawing on and referencing other people's frameworks. So consider this a friendly reminder of PSA to as much as you can, start removing other people's methods, frameworks, diagrams from your materials. I would say one maximum two is okay, but look for the gap. What are you trying to reference and how could you start to develop your own original thinking in those areas around that topic and around the transformation that you want to inspire in your audience? With all that preface, let's get back into the story of Sam that I shared in the May Q and A call. Imagine Sam is this frenzied, harried, kind of stressed out business owner who is bending over backwards for every single client who walks in the door. Whatever the client wants, Sam is apt to deliver it. Whatever customizations the client requests, Sam is on it. Whatever price breaks the client desires, Sam is willing to go there. What ends up happening is that Sam is spinning 15 different plates at any given time. It could be completely variable who is doing what by when, at what rates. That makes it really hard for Sam to keep track of any given client, their roadmap, their path to success, even things like billing, if it's project based billing based on a three month or a six month package. After all, it's custom for every single client. It also makes it hard for Sam to train anybody else in this method because there is no method. It's different for every client. It's just you'll have it your way. Whatever the McDonald's slogan, that's kind of the mantra of this business and it ends up creating a lot of confusion, a lot of extra work and a lot of extra stress. What is Sam missing in their business? I'll give you a few minutes to guess, although I basically gave it away in the title of this bonus episode, John Warlow shares an expanded version of this story in his book Built to Sell. In this case, he's describing a harried branding agency who does a lot of custom one on one bespoke work for clients and then going on a journey of getting mentored by a more seasoned business owner who who helps productize the business and productize the services through standardization. Not only does it make that business owner's life easier, revenue is able to be more recurring, more predictable. There's more standardizations among clients. The business owner in that parable learns to fire his worst clients. It also helps create a more sellable scalable business. So one potential answer to what our friend Sam is missing in their business is a form of standardization. But before that, there's a very important step. Part of making ip. Creating it at all in the first place revolves around giving shortcuts, using powerful metaphor, analogy and even acronyms that succinctly describe a process of transformation. The journey that you as the expert, take your clients on. In the beginning, it's totally normal to have a bunch of one on one clients where you're kind of figuring out your zone of genius, you're figuring out what your IP even is, what your unique solutions are, and you're seeing what problems you're most commonly solving, what resources you've created to help solve those problems. But there will inevitably come a time and a point that you reach in your business where you are ready to move on from this bespoke service based business model to something that has a little more scale, a little more systems, therefore needing greater simplicity. And then you can help teach others to assist with you in your business if you reach that point. As we were preparing for the Certification Licensing Bonus workshop with Pamela Slim, I started to share in our earlier Q and A call that I think having a framework of some kind is a precursor to a lot of what we're talking about here. Because without a clear framework, it is more amorphous and even confusing what you offer and how you help people with transformation. Now, this kind of idea is not original to me. I learned it from books like Built to Sell that I mentioned earlier. Work the System, E Myth Revisited. All of those books have something in common which is systems and standardization. But in order to do that, it's helpful to come up with your framework. So as a joke, I'm calling this the Framework Framework tm because I was thinking, what is the simplest way that I can help you do this? I stumbled upon this with Pivot Method. I've talked about that how in the book Pivot. I did want to break down the process of career change into something simple and repeatable. I got inspired by Lean Startup that was so clear. Build, Measure, Learn. It was this repeatable three step process. Build, Measure, Learn. Build, Measure, Learn. And even though I had been doing career coaching for a long time and I had been working on global programs to do this at Google, I had never sat down to distill my method or my process that I had done with clients, I had never reverse engineered it. In the early stages of working on Pivot, when I reverse engineered my coaching process, it was seven or eight Stages long. And I realized that writing a book that had eight stages of change in it, nobody would remember them. It was too complicated. So I needed to look for what those stages had in common with each other and see if I could consolidate them. The reason I'm telling you this is that frameworks don't just drop out of the sky. You have to sit down, even carve out time. Maybe it's your Founder Fridays, where you have an hour or two to yourself every Friday to really think about what is your framework? What is your process of transformation that you take clients on, that every work engagement you do with clients has in common? And at first you too might come up with, well, it's ten stages long. Okay, great. Then the question becomes, can you narrow it down further? So here's more on the framework framework that I shared in our May 2023 Q&A call at the very end. And we use the acronym sam. So there's a reason that I started out by telling you the story of Sam, the business owner, because I wanted you to also associate it with my acronym. Now I kind of made this up on the fly. It would be even better if my acronym meant something or it tied to a metaphor like pivot. And the pivot method is the metaphor of a basketball player. One foot stays planted. That's your strengths and your vision, while the pivot foot scans for passing options. It just helps to the extent that you can give people a visual or something very memorable to hook into. Here's the framework Framework following the acronym sam. S is for solves a problem that people know they have. It answers a question, and I'll come back to this in more detail. A is for action oriented. There is a transformation journey or comprehensive process happening here. M is for memorable. Give it a concise name and stages. Ideally three stages, no more than four. That's a big challenge. And of course we don't want to be overly prescriptive here for any rule you could break it. But in my experience, it was hard for anybody I was teaching or coaching to even remember the fourth pivot stage, let alone the first three. Super bonus if you can come up with, as I said, a metaphor, a hook, or a story that goes with your framework.

Let's dive in a little more to S solves a problem that people know they have or answers a question with pivot. I've often shared the main question that I wanted it to answer. The prescription for the pain that the book is for is when someone says, what's next? Or I just don't know what's next or I'm having a career crisis, I have a perfect on paper job and I'm not happy. I'm at a plateau. The main question there is what's next? And the pain is that it's hard to know sometimes or it's hard to know how to answer that. So in the case of the pivot method, it's solving a problem. I don't know what's next. And I encourage you when you think about what problem your framework solves, it needs to be one people know that they have ideally in the language that they would use to describe it. So notice that I'm not saying oh, the pivot method is a method for organizations to improve career development clarity. That is not a problem most people know that they have. If you think about Lean Startup, part of the problem is that startups have limited funding and they don't know how to find product market fit. That's their problem. They don't have product market fit. Their Runway is running out. They're about to blow up. Okay, so then the framework is build, measure, learn, build a prototype or an mvp. Eric Ries popularized that idea. Then measure the success of that mvp, learn from it and repeat that cycle.

We'll be right back just after this.

Hi, this is Deechen Laichman and I am here to tell you Toyotathon is on. So stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year end deals on the cars, trucks and SUVs known for their legendary reliability like the stylish and efficient Camry. The ready for anything Grab four or check out a rough and rough rugged Tacoma or Tundra, all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more. Toyota let's go Places. Cuando entras a Burlington encuentras precios increibles y regalos geniales. Jesus energia del protagonista porquen Burlington los ahoros festivos nos unlo uni co que llama la tension descubria jasgos de calidar y regalos. Perfect.

The second part of our framework, Framework Action Oriented. You've heard me talk about how in the early days of working on the Free Time book, I had divided the book into categories Mind Time and team. And part of the reason that I did that that I was thinking, okay, what are all the systems that could help set your time free across Mind your mindset. What do you need to shift internally first? Then you can set your own time free, then with that extra free time, you can build a team and then help coach your team to set their time free, which in turn helps with your mind, setting your mind free, shifting your mindset for freeing your time back to your team. So I thought the virtuous circle there was going to be mind, time and team. However, dun dun, dun dun. The mistake that I made was at that time it wasn't action oriented. Yes, it's kind of catchy and easy to understand mind, time and team, but there was no continuity. It's not taking you on a journey. There is no hero's journey of going from mind, time and team. Yes, it could make a good diagram of how these three things create a virtuous cycle of setting your mind, time and team free and then repeating it, almost like a flywheel effect. But for free time, however, there's no transformation. So I ended up shifting the framework and you know, I spent time to make sure it rhymes to the free time framework. Align, design, assign. Now we're on a journey that if you are spotting an area of friction in your business, you then follow the free time framework that is the prescription. So the pain, the problem we're solving is a burnt out business owner. That's kind of how I thought about it shorthand. Now the prescription is the free time framework. And the stages that you follow in order are align, design, assign. You can see how each one fits my three categories. Align fits with mind, design fits with time, and assign fits with team. So I personally find a transformation journey as framework more compelling and more like kind of easier for people to follow than one that isn't oriented that way, where it's just kind of random stages, but they don't have to be done in order or it's just an amalgamation of things. However, there are certain books like Powerful Engagement, where there's a comprehensive system being addressed. So in the case of that book, managing your energy is across four dimensions. Physical, mental, spiritual, emotional. In that case, it's not necessarily a transformation journey in order, but you could dive into any one of those four stages, maybe whichever one is in pain the most. And the comprehensive nature of their model is that it's addressing all four dimensions of a person's energy. So that is another route that you could go looking at the whole body, whole self, whole organization, psychology, something that's comprehensive, that addresses the four parts of something. And there are a lot of fours to be found in the world too, like a compass, north, east, southwest, the grid on a four graph quadrant, a two by two used to diagram Two kind of dimensions and then four possibilities. Let's move to the M in the framework. Framework make it memorable Try to give your framework a concise name and concise stage or step names. Every single piece of this is important. So when I was telling you that I brainstormed the Free Time framework, I had a full 8 and a half by 11 sheet of paper that I'll see if I can find an image to show you. But I had all kinds of words and ideas mapped out. I was writing down everything I could, and only later did I circle the things that were most resonant or most important in terms of setting somebody's time free through smarter systems. I didn't know right away. I didn't know what was going to align design assign. I didn't know what was going to rhyme and be catchy, but I'm always looking for that. It doesn't make me any better at this process than any of you. It just takes intentionality to sit down and say, okay, not only am I going to boil my framework down into three or four stages maximum, but I'm also going to make sure it has a really clear name and that it's repeatable and memorable, and that even the stage names are easy for people to grasp and remember. Build, Measure, Learn, Plant, Scan, Pilot. Do you remember the fourth stage of Pivot? See, I told you it gets tricky. Launch. And then in that book I even have a fifth kind of bonus stage Lead, Align, Design, Assign. You could see I find that it's most powerful when things are really short. A counterpoint. I read a recent article on the seven types of rest, and you know what? I could guess at what the seven types are, but it'd be hard. It would get hard for me to try to remember verbatim. Have you read this article? Do you know what the seven types of rest are? I'm sure you could guess, but I'll link to it in the show notes. In case you're curious, here's a homework assignment. Read that article, go through the rest of your week, and then a week later see if you can remember what all seven types of rest are. I mentioned. One of the bonus elements is metaphor or analogy. An example of this Martha Beck, in her books Finding your own North Star and Steering by Starlight, and I'll put a link to an article that gives you a summary. In the show notes she talks about her change process as parallel to how caterpillars become butterflies. And so I'll link to this again in the show notes. These are the four phases of human metamorphosis. Phase one is dissolving death and rebirth. Phase two is imagining, AKA dreaming and scheming. Phase three is reforming, AKA the hero saga. And phase four is full flight, AKA the promised land. So you could see here how a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. Who knows how nuanced it is in nature. In reality, there might be a thousand tiny little steps and parts of the process, but this metaphor allows you to really picture and visualize. Oh, okay. Of course, phase one of the change process is dissolving death and rebirth. The caterpillar becomes goo. You can picture it. Oh, that feeling of going from a thing, a part of your identity, and then dissolving into goo is so confusing. Of course, it feels like a death and rebirth. And she gives for each phase, she says, here's the deal, what to do and a mantra. So in phase one, I don't know what the hell is going on. And that's okay. Phase two, imagining, okay, we're not yet a butterfly, but we're getting there. There's a vision, there's a template in the DNA of a caterpillar to imagine what's possible. And so she gives a couple again, an overview, what to do, and the mantra for phase two, there are no rules, and that's okay. Now, does a goose date caterpillar have the cognition to say there are no rules and that's okay? No. In fact, they probably are following the rules of DNA and what they're becoming. It's not like a caterpillar is ever going to turn into an elephant. But Martha has stretched the metaphor a little bit. And phase two is imagining phase three reforming. Now we can picture, we can picture the butterflies starting to come into being. It's getting shaped, it's still within the cocoon. But we could just picture in nature this happening. And she talks about what to expect, what to do. The mantra here, this is much worse than I expected, and that's okay. And then phase four, full flight. We now, as the recipient of this framework, we get to picture the butterfly busting out of the cocoon and then setting itself free and flying out into the universe. And this one, she says, you know, AKA the promised land. So the mantra is, everything is changing, and that's okay. And now we're starting to emerge from the cocoon and make adjustments, and then we get to fly around the promised land until we hit phase one again, dissolving death and rebirth. That is a great example of how metaphor can help a framework come alive and can help the people that you are teaching and who you're helping navigate the transformation journey with what they're experiencing. You might not have a metaphor right away, or maybe the metaphor comes to you first and then it informs the stages of your process. But the bottom line here with all of this, with the framework framework, is that sitting down to reverse engineer your process, distilling it into discrete stages, then consolidating it, making it more concise, naming your process, naming the stages within it helps give you something akin to a mean. You now have a packet of your process that is more spreadable, it's more teachable, it's more scalable, it's more systemizable. In Built to Sell, John Warlow gives two tips from Ted, the mentor that I find particularly relevant here. Tip number three, Owning a process makes it easier to pitch and puts you in control. Be clear about what you're selling and potential customers will be more likely to buy your product. Imagine somebody going to a website and this person's talking about one on one coaching. Sign up with me, I'll help you reach your dreams. I know when I was just starting out coaching, everything was super vague. It was just like, do you want more fulfillment in your life? Let's work together. But over time, your website and your services might say, I will walk you through my three stage process for transformation around XYZ topics or or struggles that you're experiencing. Here's how it works. In month one, we do this. In month two, we do this. In month three or in quarter one, quarter two, quarter three, quarter four so there we again we have the threes and the fours, three months and a quarter, four quarters in a year or four seasons in a year. When you own and name a process, it gives people a sense of safety. It builds trust because clearly you've thought this through. They know where you're going to take them, a high arc and they know that it's repeatable. Let's say if you are going to work with companies and try to go the licensing route, even for certification, when you have a proprietary process, it is easier to teach people how to serve you and customers and clients in that process. And then tip number six from built to sell. Don't be afraid to say no to projects. Prove that you're serious about specialization by turning down work that falls outside your area of expertise. The more people you say no to, the more referrals you'll get to people who need your product or service. This is where having a framework and a process starts to become very powerful. Because you realize what you're good at, what your zone of genius is the process you take clients through and you start saying no to things that fall outside of scope. You stop taking on every client under the sun and giving them all such different things. You start to specialize. And when you specialize, you can create repeatable processes and systems and website copy. Everything gets easier. So part of the change that happens here is that you are able to say no to random one off requests are going to actually create quite a lot of work for you. And you say yes to what already exists, to what is polished and perfected in a certain way, although you'll always be working on it. And that is your process, that is your proprietary framework, that is your IP that now you can create more scalable services and products around. Another example of this is keynotes. Imagine somebody who says, I can give a keynote on any one of these 10 topics and you list 10 workshops. It's actually not as compelling as somebody who says, these are my two signature keynotes. Let's work together. And you're not creating a different slide deck for every client. You have one slide deck per keynote and that's it. Then the slide deck stays the same no matter who hires you, because it's following your process. It's not just custom crafted for whatever the client wants. And so every next time you have a keynote, you're going to be doing less work because the base is already there. Yes, of course you're going to customize your stories and your examples and how you speak to the slides, but the core fundamentals stay the same. I would love to hear more about this in circle. What experiments have you been trying around this? Have you already landed on a framework or a process that you've named for your services? And if so, share with us in the comments and let's just keep the conversation going. And if you do want to work together on any of this one on one, I would love to partner with you on thinking all of this through. That's at itsfreetime.com voxer and use promo code voxerbff in checkout. Have a wonderful rest of your day.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

Word of mouth is the most joyful way we can grow this show and it helps us land interviews with the luminaries and insightful guests that you would most love to hear from. Please send this episode to a friend who might find it helpful. And for so no notes and related links from this episode, visit itsfreetime.com while you're there, make sure you're subscribed to the Time well Spent newsletter. You'll get instant access to my Tech Toolkit, a continually updated list of all the software I use, along with the total monthly spend. To run my business where no one works full time Even me, visit itsfreetime.com join Remember, you are running the show. It's time for radical reimagining, and everything is up for grabs. Let it be easy, let it be fun, and build with love.

The Uniswap wallet makes crypto easier and safer to own and use. Discover new tokens, research confidently, swap instantly, and manage it all securely in one place. The Uniswap trading protocol has powered over $3 trillion in volume, and it's trusted by millions worldwide. Buy your first crypto assets in a few taps and experience the freedom of decentralized finance with Uniswap. Tap the banner to get.