If you go shopping when you’re hungry and suffering a serious sugar crash it’s a mess.
Your stomach makes all the decisions and you end up with chocolate, cake, and candy.
If you plan a week of healthy meals and a shopping list first, it’s quite different. You arrive at the supermarket with energy and your plan in hand.
It’s not surprising that you buy all the things you should buy in one go.
Strategy…
In fact, professionals do not attempt to mix decisions and actions at the same time.
There is a clear divide between the two.
This is a fundamental part of success in whatever you are trying to achieve.
Social Media Strategy
Imagine you want to post on social media more.
You open your social media app with a plan of thinking of what to post.
Instead, you get lost in status updates and videos and after half an hour suck yourself out of it and don’t even remember why you opened the app.
That is not a strategy.
If you need to post then you should decide what to post first or perhaps even prepare it beforehand.
But what do professionals do?
If a Social media Agency used the strategy of “open the app and attempt to come up with ideas” it would be absolute chaos.
No - they have a real strategy:
At the start of the month they make a plan for all of next month’s content and clients.
For each client they’ll take a single day to decide all the topics, what to say and dates to post it.
The next day they will make it all. Find good photos and quotes, film videos etc…
Finally they schedule all the content and leave it to be published next month.
Any updates to ideas or topical content can be implemented as needed.
Voila - A coordinated series of posts that work together seamlessly.
If it looks like they planned it. It’s because they did.
What about sports?
A professional athlete doesn’t wake up in the morning and fumble through a random breakfast of what happens to be in the fridge.
Whilst munching on their stale cheerios they don’t ponder what exercise they should do today.
They make a 3-month training plan with their coach that incorporates different forms of training across the week that map to specific progress goals.
They’ll be hitting exact amounts of heart rate zones, a targeted volume of strength training vs VO2 max training and they’ll be incorporating mobility and recovery.
Yet many people start the day and are yet to make the decision if they will even exercise.
They don’t know what exercise they will do, when or what the goal might be.
What do professionals have that we don’t?
Besides being paid they have something else.
An abundance of action.
They have concrete evidence that they will execute on all their decisions.
If you have a history of deciding to go the gym and never going, you can’t plan a timetable of optimal workouts.
If you have a history of avoiding your writing habit, you can’t plan a timetable of content.
Without evidence that you will carry through on your decisions now, you can’t plan a list of actions in the future that will never happen.
You have a scarcity of follow-through.
So by default, you can only do things when you happen to be in the mood. You don’t know when that ‘mood’ will be so you stumble through your life without a plan hoping to suddenly have time and motivation to do the thing that isn’t scheduled.
As you drift through each moment of your life without a plan and without a time in your calendar, it’s incredibly hard to execute anything.
If you know that you will take action on a decision made today even if it’s in three months.
You can plan to your heart’s content.
Starting
Now don’t run off and make a 3 month plan just yet.
Start small - plan tomorrow’s actions today and get into a routine of delivering on your ideas.
You might not need to BE a professional, but you can be a competent amateur.
Don’t worry about trying to be good. First, worry about being reliable.
Steven Pressfield says an unskilled but disciplined writer will beat a skilled but undisciplined writer hands down.
A book takes years to write.
Reliability builds skill.
It doesn’t matter if you want to learn a language, change your diet or become an entrepreneur.
Start small and deliver consistent action against your decisions.
Identity change takes time.
Over time build a longer gap between your decisions and the moment they need to be implemented.
Then you can plan a series of coordinated actions that work together.
Whether that’s a social media strategy that works coherently and doesn’t vacuum important time out of every day or building skills towards your long-term goals.
So be strategic and think more professionally about what you take on and you’ll find it gets easier.
If you seriously want to do something, then think seriously about how to do it.
Don’t try to mix decisions and action at the same time.
Want a free call with me?
I’ve been enjoying connecting with my podcast listeners this month. It’s become one of my favourite parts of the week.
Happy to connect with any readers and find out what’s going on in your world.
Geek Corner
Concepts as Plug and Play Devices - Nick Shea
We don’t need to apply serious mental effort to walk one step.
You don’t think. Lift leg and balance on other leg. Move lifted leg forward and shift balanced weight. Put front leg down and move weight onto that leg etc..
You just stick your foot in front of the other and walk.
We have automated the behaviour and motor pathways.
In the same way, we don’t need to apply huge effort to sift through our entire mental archive when someone says the word Lasagna.
You don’t drag out the concepts of meaty, tomatoey, pasta, creamy, baked, and Italian food and put them together. You go straight to Lasagna.
This is important when it comes to how we learn, imagine and create new knowledge.
Memes no one asked for