In This Episode…
In today’s episode I reflect on the need to be flexible in your approach and adapt to the changing landscape as you progress forward when executing your plans.
I had set out a plan to achieve my goals and was working on that plan when I discovered I’d missed someone.
Today I reflect on the lessons learnt from that experience and share my thoughts about the importance of developing the right mindset to these apparent “setbacks”.
Episode Transcript (Edited)…
Hi and welcome to today’s episode of the Profit Productivity Podcast. It’s your host, Michael Tipper. Who else would it be?
Now today’s episode is called “A Plan Rarely Survives First Contact With Reality”.
Now in the military, there’s a phrase that says, a plan rarely survives first contact with the enemy. Now I’m no longer serving in the military and I’m developing a less aggressive approach and mindset to my work. So I’ve changed that quote to “A Plan Rarely Survives First Contact With Reality”.
What shouldn’t change though is the objective. Before Christmas I set my goals and objectives for the next two years and I created a plan for their achievement. I did so by identifying the various milestones I expect to achieve for each aspect of my objectives at each month over the next couple of years.
Now it’s simply a case of just working at that plan.
One of my objectives is to develop my keynote speaking around personal productivity.
So in the plan, there’s a lot of milestones towards me becoming a prolific and effective keynote speaker. The January milestone was to identify potential speaking opportunities.
I’d allocated time this week to do that and I’d put aside two days (yesterday and today) in order to do that.
The reality is yesterday I spent a lot of time just brainstorming where can I find potential opportunities? I had some specific ideas but also identified a few routes where I could find out more information and probably unearth more opportunities.
What I realised is that, um I had no promotional material ready to give to people who might be interested. I had nothing to point them to say this is what I’m doing.
I suddenly realised there was a step that I’d missed in my plan. It’s something that’s blindingly obvious now I’ve started this, but at the time I had missed it for whatever reason.
Maybe I just didn’t consider it important. Maybe I just glossed over it. Maybe I didn’t apply enough time to putting the plan in place, but nevertheless, there was a shortfall.
In the past, I would have seen this as a failure, that I got it wrong, that I’d miss something. That’s really indicative of a fixed mindset.
But what I’ve taken from this today is that I’ve realised that I’m iterating my plans, I’m evolving my approach. I’m spiralling into success. And what I’ve demonstrated over the last couple of days is adaptability, it’s flexibility, and the ability learn from my experiences.
With that in mind today I have put together a one page PDF, a webpage, and have recorded a video to help promote my keynote speaking. I’ve spent a lot of time putting together these resources needed.
I’ve made a huge step forward with my plan. Now I’ve done something I wasn’t expecting to do, but I’ve achieved the objective of these couple of days.
And the main thing from this as well, not only have I made progress, but I also feel I’ve matured in understanding the reality of what it takes to become successful and also how I need to deal with some of the potential perceived setbacks that I may come across.
That’s today’s episode.
Until tomorrow…
