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Momentum Series: Transform Vision into Operational Plan

5 Steps To Create Momentum In Your Business & Life in 2024 (Part 3)

Hey there Evolutionary Entrepreneurs! You’re reading my 2x weekly newsletter where I share actionable tips on business, mindset, and creating leverage so you can build a profitable coaching business doing what you love and sharing your dharma.

Welcome to the weekly Deep Dive!

To achieve your desired outcome, you have to change what you do and how you do it.

Momentum is not just about consistency.

More of the same, only creates more of the same.

Momentum requires the reorganizing of your inner and outer systems to align with your desired outcomes.

  • Your inner systems change your behaviors.

  • Your outer systems direct your behaviors.

This is as true for business goals as it is for personal and relationship goals.

In the last two Momentum Deep Dives, I talked about the first two steps to creating momentum:

  1. Stabilizing your Personal OS - nothing prevents momentum more than feeling overwhelmed

  2. Regulating the Pressure - how to increase your capacity and energy for momentum

Today, I’m going to share with you the third step in this Momentum Series.

How to use a strategic planning system to transform your Vision and desired outcomes into day-to-day execution and results.

Let’s dive in.

Today At A Glance:

The Domino Effect

In this Momentum Series, we’ve been talking about the Momentum Formula:

  • M = (O - N) E

  • Momentum = (Outcome - Noise) Energy

  • Momentum is created by having a clear outcome, reducing the noise and pressure, and then amplifying it with your elevated energy

If you haven’t read the first two parts, I highly recommend starting there and doing the exercises.

Each part stacks upon the next.

In part 1, you distilled the noise and pressure in your life, relationships, and business to reveal your core desired outcomes.

Here’s the thing: knowing what you truly want is important and aways the first step, but you can’t stop there.

You need to take that desired outcome and strategically reverse-engineer it into a clear and actionable plan.

This plan needs to be designed in a way that creates the “Domino Effect”—where every action you choose to take each day and week cascades toward your desired outcome.

Momentum is designed right into your operating system.

Willpower alone will not get you there. Discipline is the true power here.

Why? Because every day you open your eyes and get out of bed, you will be at battle with the old programming of your Past Self and the desire to be your Future Self.

Without discipline and the systems designed to be aligned with your desires, you will spend more time and energy at war with yourself than working on the things that move you forward.

And if you’re reading this newsletter, I know you have a deep dharma (calling) to answer, transformation you’re meant to facilitate, people you’re meant to serve.

Let’s get you spending more of your time and energy serving your dharma.

Back to the Domino Effect.

How it works is by bridging your long-term vision to your short-term direction and further on to your daily activities.

  • Your Mission and Dharma

  • Your 3-Year Vision

  • Your 1-Year Goals

  • Your Quarterly Objectives

  • Your Weekly Commitments

  • Your Daily Top 3

Completing one leads to the natural completion of the next one up.

When you have long-term vision but no operational structure in your day-to-day and week-to-week, you’ll lack focus.

When you’re deep in the day-to-day but don’t have a clear long-term vision and direction, you’ll be reactive.

You’ll need both, strategically and methodically organized for alignment and momentum.

Here’s my process for using a strategic planning system to create the Domino Effect.

Define your Mission

Start by clearly defining your mission, your dharma, the great work you’re called to do.

If you’re a coach or service provider… this is your client-centric mission statement.

It has nothing to do with what you get from your art and work. It has to do with the impact or transformation you create with your art and work, for your clients. It is the purpose of your business.

Your Mission clearly defines two things:

  • Who are you serving?

  • What transformation do you help create?

Refined into a clear, bold, simple, and specific statement.

For example, my mission is to help coaches and conscious entrepreneurs create wealth and freedom by building a thriving and leveraged business that allows them to play their dharma full out.

My why: conscious coaches and entrepreneurs are the biggest source of positive change and impact in the world.

Your Mission becomes your Core Focus. Your Obsession that you align all actions and decisions to.

If an opportunity arises that doesn’t align with your mission, the answer gets to be simple: No or Not Now.

Not sure how to refine your Mission?

Search up “Ikigai” and use that framework.

Refine and keep refining.

“No one can compete with you being you. Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.”

Naval Ravikant

The goal is not perfection, but alignment.

Can your mission evolve?

Yes, and it will.

Become the best in the world at what you can uniquely do. Keep refining what you do until this is true.

Define your 3-Year Vision

Next up is to define your long-term vision. Why?

  • It keeps you from getting stuck in day-to-day reactivity

  • If defines WHO you need to BE (your Future Self) to make this happen

Step 1: Start with your 3-Year Vision for your Personal life.

This is your relationship with Yourself and Others.

  • What will your life look and feel like 3 years from now?

  • What personal accomplishments are you celebrating?

  • Do you have a family? Do you have kids? How old are your kids then?

  • What do your day-to-day interactions with your partner and kids look like? How involved are you with their daily lives?

  • What activities are you doing with them? What events are you attending regularly?

  • Are you traveling or taking vacations as a family? How often?

  • Where do you live? What does that look like?

  • What personal activities, hobbies, or passions are you involved in?

  • How many hours a week do you work?

  • How much income are you taking home from your business?

  • What other investments are you making to build your wealth and legacy?

Step 2: Define your 3-Year Vision for your Business.

  • What will your business look and feel like 3 years from now?

  • What are the biggest accomplishments you’re celebrating?

  • What industry have you dominated?

  • Who are you serving, and what problems do you solve for them?

  • How is your business doing financially?

  • What does your team look like? What’s your relationship with them like?

  • What role do you play in this business then?

Step 3: Make sure there’s alignment between the two.

Does your Business Vision fit into your Personal Vision?

Alignment is key here. Entrepreneurs are visionaries and often collapse time in the way they think. This is a superpower for achieving great things normal people couldn’t dream of achieving.

But where this can be an issue is when their business vision doesn’t align with the personal life they desire.

When it’s not aligned, you’ll continue to unconsciously sabotage your business to protect what you personally desire.

Always choose alignment.

Create your 1-Year Goals

These are the outcomes you need to achieve this year to be on track toward your 3-Year Vision.

Remember, you want to create a Domino Effect. By accomplishing this, I naturally move the needle forward.

Step 1: Look at your 3 Core Outcomes.

These are your desired outcomes in your relationship with Yourself, Others, and Business that you revealed from the exercise in Part 1 of Momentum Series.

Step 2: Look at your 3-Year Vision.

Reverse engineer both to come up with what needs to be done to get there.

Step 3: List out all the potential goals for this year.

What COULD I do this year to move toward my Core Outcomes and 3-Year Vision?

(If you’re doing this mid-year, create goals for the remaining time left in this year)

Step 4: Choose 5 Goals you’re committing to.

What WILL I do this year to move toward my Core Outcomes and 3-Year Vision?

  • 1 Goal for Yourself

  • 1 Goal for your Relationship

  • 3 Goals for your Business

Less is better. Less means more focus.

Just because something didn’t make the Goals list doesn’t mean it won’t be worked on, it just means it is not your highest priority.

Leverage AI to brainstorm:

Here’s a prompt you can use to help brainstorm a list of potential year end goals based on your 3 core outcomes and 3-year Vision.

Brainstorm 1-Year Goals Prompt

Note: AI can help come up with strategic options, but ultimately it is up to you to decide what you will choose to do.

Create your Quarterly Objectives

Once you have your clear Year-End Goals, the next step is to create your Quarterly Objectives.

These are your short-term 90-day outcomes—projects and measurable targets achievable in 90 days that move you closer toward your 1 Year Goals.

They must be specific, tangible, create a forward-moving impact, and of course, excite you.

Step 1: List out potential objectives.

What COULD I do in the next 90 days to move toward my 1-Year Goals?

Step 2: Rank them.

Stake and rank the items on your list from most to least impact it’ll have on your 1-Year Goals

Step 3: Choose and commit.

What WILL I do in the next 90 days to move toward my 1-Year Goals?

Choose 5-7 Objectives. Again, less is better. Less is more focused.

Leverage AI to brainstorm:

Here’s a prompt you can use to help come up with strategic targets and projects for your next quarter:

Prompt to brainstorm potential Quarterly Objectives

Note: AI can help come up with strategic options, but ultimately it is up to you to decide what you will choose to do.

Step 4: Turn your Quarterly Objectives into OKRs

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) is a goal-setting framework for defining and breaking down desired outcomes into clear and measurable milestones.

  • Objective (O) defines the desired outcome

  • Key Results (KR) define the measurable milestones leading to the outcome

Take one of your Quarterly Objectives, this is your O.

  • Reverse engineer it into 3 Key Results

    • Can be 3 tangible milestones to get to the outcome

    • Can be 3 monthly targets leading to the outcome

  • Repeat for each Quarterly Objective

Review your OKRs and make sure there’s a domino effect upwards from Key Results > Objectives > Goals > Vision

Step 5: Assign clear owners.

Review your Key Results, if responsibility can be delegated to someone on your team, assign them as the person responsible.

If responsibility cannot be delegated, you’re the owner. Identity who can support you with execution and list them as a Support.

Leverage AI to create OKRs

Here’s a prompt you can use to help you brainstorm potential Key Results for each Objective:

Prompt to brainstorm and create OKRs

Note: AI can help come up with strategy and ideas, but ultimately it is up to you to decide what you will choose to do.

Closing Words

As humans, we’re driven by our habits and perspectives. Most of which we learned from our past and carry forward.

Every new desired outcome requires a new set of habits, way of thinking, and way of decision making.

To achieve any outcome, we need to unlearn the old, learn the new way, and then make the new way a habit — a behavioral pattern that allows momentum toward that outcome to be natural.

This strategic planning system allows you to reorganize and redefine what to focus on and how you do it with each new desired outcome you have.

This is the game we get to play.

In the next letter, part 4 of the Momentum Series, I’ll show you how to take these Quarterly OKRs and design a weekly and daily operating system that ensures you accomplish them each quarter with forward momentum.

Let’s get it my fellow Evolutionary Entrepreneurs! 🙌🏼

Your Pal,

Colin

Evolutionary Entrepreneurs Community

If you’re enjoying this Momentum Series…

You’ll want to consider joining the Evolutionary Entrepreneurs Community that I’ll be opening up soon.

You’ll get access to courses, live trainings, monthly challenges and more.

I’m throwing in early access to the Momentum Lab course I just created, just for those on the waitlist.

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