Success Planning

*Note: The following text is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Bill Berthel:
Welcome to the Get Emergent Podcast. The Get Emergent Podcast guides leaders to creatively strengthen relationships and improve performance of their leadership and those that they lead. We like to provide concepts and ideas that you can turn into pragmatic experiments to help you develop your higher potential in your work and in your leadership. And hopefully you’re going to find some better practices to apply directly to your work. I’m Bill Berthel.

Ralph Simone:
And I’m Ralph Simone.

Bill Berthel:
Ralph this is a topic, I think, near and dear to us and our whole team. This concept of success planning.

Ralph Simone:
I’ve been doing this a long time. Planning and a couple things, I think, to ground people. I want toa go to, an old definition of success, which I remember hearing on a cassette tape from Earl Nightingale. And he defined success as the progressive realization of worthy goals. The progressive realization of worthy goals. And I think success planning is intended to do that, to connect our goals to our purpose and meaning. Right. The context of our life, and to have a process that could guide us to make conscious choice in the moment.

Bill Berthel:
I love that quote. It, gives me permission to reframe. Success is not just the final result. I so often think of it that way. Right. Whatever I produced or the endpoint. But that worthy progression is success.

Ralph Simone:
It makes that quote, it’s the journey, not the destination, a little bit more pragmatic for me.

Bill Berthel:
Right.

Ralph Simone:
And you know, I shared a recent example with you on the project that I’m collaborating with my son Renny. We’re working on a couple books.

Bill Berthel:
Yes.

Ralph Simone:
The fact that we are working together, the fact that he is guiding me on, getting a product worthy of submittal, that in and of itself is a worthy goal.

Bill Berthel:
It’s already success.

Ralph Simone:
Yes.

Bill Berthel:
You don’t have a book published yet, but that’s already success.

Ralph Simone:
But that’s frosting. That’s gravy. Use whatever metaphor you want, success is the progression of worthy goals. Time spent with him. There’s no replacement for that. And it’s tied to the purpose. I mean, this will get out somehow, some way. But so success planning was actually a key piece in getting that work done.

Bill Berthel:
So it took some planning.

Ralph Simone:
Yes. And it was connected to something purposeful. And I would say I shared with you before we got on this quote from Toni Morrison, the best thing that success planning, I think, can do for people. “You want to fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” And, so this is not just about putting more and more into your container. This is about being really intentional about the things that connect to your purpose in your vital goals.

Bill Berthel:
That’s proactive activity filtering, getting ahead of that as much as we can, being intentional and filtering our activities to include what’s essential to perhaps delegate or gift off what isn’t essential for us to do, but needs to be done. Maybe there’s some stuff that doesn’t need to be done, sacred cows that we can eliminate or at least put aside for now. No one has to do this right now.

Ralph Simone:
Well, just think about this image for a minute. If people are working really hard with head down, grinding, almost blinders on, they don’t actually see whether or not what they’re doing connects to something bigger.

Bill Berthel:
Absolutely.

Ralph Simone:
And so I think there are some things that could be done differently. There are some things that could be done by other people, but there are some things that just don’t need to get done because they no longer are aligned with the purpose, values or high leverage goals.

Bill Berthel:
I think it’s the key to safe driving and not to seasonalize this podcast, but right now it’s a blustery winter in central New York and I think the majority of the challenges I see with folks in traffic is they’re so locked up, holding onto that steering wheel and looking only 5, 6ft in front of their bumper. It’s scanning ahead. It’s scanning ahead to know what’s coming so we can be more responsive, not reactive. Right. So we have the stopping time, we have the good old fashioned defensive driving. It’s the same in our schedules, isn’t it? It’s. It’s scanning ahead.

Ralph Simone:
Absolutely. And we have fallen into the tyranny of the urgent. There’s this urgency addiction which demands that we rush from one thing to another. In that rushing, we lose context, we lose perspective, we lose the connectivity to what’s really vitally important. And I think this idea of having the wisdom to discern the vital few requires that you spend 20 to 30 thoughtful minutes at the end or the beginning of a week to really think about what does success look like at the end of this week. What are the relationships and activities that I want to invest my energy on that will help me scale my leadership, will help me scale my business. It’s balancing, achieving and relating. You know, success planning is not a traditional to do list, but it is focused on those vital few things. It’s focused on context. The things that really support both our mission and our vision.

Bill Berthel:
Really grounded first in our values. I know you do this, Ralph and I do very similar in scanning for the week or two weeks ahead is start by reminding ourselves of our personal values.

Ralph Simone:
Absolutely.

Bill Berthel:
And then we look at our purpose in our work. Right. So we can remind ourselves what we’re grounding, our tasks, our time and our energy we’re going to apply in the next week or two. What those are really attached to the values in our purpose.

Ralph Simone:
It actually supports us being a conscious leader in making conscious choice in the moment.

Bill Berthel:
Absolutely.

Ralph Simone:
You know, we hesitated and when we talk about success planning, even using the word planning, because of people’s paradigm around planning, the idea isn’t to plan every moment. So high achievers get a in a hole of success planning in shit. They’re going to maximize the heck out of it.

Bill Berthel:
Right. Fill  every void.

Ralph Simone:
Not about that. The idea isn’t to cling rigidly to the plan you came up with, but the goal is to think intentionally about your future so you can live more effectively and intentionally in the present moment. On, previous podcasts I’ve talked about, part of my planning is guided by 3568 I always want to add who do we appreciate at the end of that. But I guess that’s a little too corny. But 3568 part of the planning process is three essential things I get the opportunity and pleasure to work on today. No more than five unique events because I want space in my calendar for contemplation and reflection. Six weeks vacation. Yeah,  I’ve been working on a 46 week year since 1991.

Bill Berthel:
Yeah.

Ralph Simone:
Because you need time away, you need distance and then eight hours of sleep. Right. Not quite there yet, but really doing those things until using that to even guide the planning process. There’s a quote from George Leonard who actually we modeled LeadFORWARD after George Leonard did a lot of work in the 80s and 90s on the west coast around holistic and integrated leadership development. George Leonard said mastery is nothing but a series of plateaus with brief spurts of progress. And that’s what success planning can do for us. It can help us develop mastery. A series of plateaus with brief spurts of progress. It’s intentional, it leaves space and it allows the opportunity to balance that tension between being and doing.

Bill Berthel:
I think if we give ourselves permission to really believe that, it can also help reduce that urgency we so often feel. If these are a series of plateaus with short bursts. Right. It’s a little bit more like climbing a set of stairs than having to sprint up a mountainside.

Ralph Simone:
Yeah. Well, it’s the intermittent renewal that we teach in LeadFORWARD It’s the 90 minute sprints, you know, with a rest period in between. And the rest period is just not a physical rest, but it’s a mental rest. It’s an emotional rest. It’s the opportunity to create space for inspiration, intuition. Right. Things that we are often crowding out when we’re moving at warp speed.

Bill Berthel:
Yeah. Not to go too deep into the how, but this is something separate or disconnected from to do lists. You mentioned that. This isn’t necessarily your electronic calendar. This is a place to journal. This is a place to reflect and write. Maybe the 3, 5, 6, 8, maybe some time blocking, some activity, filtering.

Ralph Simone:
It’s a place to experience your life. I remember when I was training with Stephen Covey, he would say that all things are created twice.

Bill Berthel:
Yeah.

Ralph Simone:
First in the mind and then in the physical world. I actually write out my whole success plan for the week. Pen and paper. But I don’t just write it out. I connect to the feelings. I connect to the feelings of my vision. I connect to the feelings of my mission statement. I connect to acting in alignment with my self chosen, self selected values. I connect to how it will feel when I achieve my three to four vital goals. And so I’m actually experiencing it twice. I’m experiencing it as I plan it and as it happens. And there was something I saw on it might have been Facebook, it might have been Instagram, I’m not sure, but which I think supports success planning and was focused on really making an impact. It said if you do four hours of deep work per day, walk 10,000 steps per day, exercise three times a week, save 20% of your paycheck, sleep eight hours per night, and read 10 pages per day, you’re ahead of 99% of the population. I don’t know the credible source on that. But the idea of using success planning to do 4 hours of deep work, 4 hours of deep work kicks the crap out of 10 hours of superficial work. But making blocks of time for other things. So success planning really is a way to not only make more of an impact, but it’s a way to feel better as you’re doing it.

Bill Berthel:
Love it. Ralph Thank you.

Ralph Simone:
Thanks, Bill.

Bill Berthel:
And folks, thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed this episode and that you’re looking forward to more. You can always listen to a new podcast two times every month here at GetEmergent. And wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hopefully you pick something up you’re going to apply to your leadership and your work. Let us know how it goes by reaching out to support@getemergent.com or directly to myself or Ralph. Thanks for listening.