Session 10 – The Foundation For Everything Else In Life

Action Step

1. Write down how you think the SIMPLE Personal Plan will help you by forming the foundation for your life, work, and leadership.

Post your response to this question in the GU Leader Community by clicking here. Share one of your new Actions and ask for feedback.

Session Transcript

Welcome back to another session of Guidestone University.

We’ve been talking about personal plan, and I want to stop right here in this session for just a few minutes and talk to you about why personal plan is so foundational to what we’re doing. I want to show you, our model, the Simple Leadership Spiral, and how personal plan fits into everything that we’re doing here.

In fact, if you haven’t had a chance you, you can watch the video, The Five Phases of Simple Leadership. And the Simple Leadership Spiral is the picture of what the five phases of simple leadership look like. So, if you haven’t had a chance to do that, you may pause here and go back and watch that and it will help you form what you’re doing here.

I’m going to go real quickly through that process here for just a few minutes. We understand again how personal plan is foundational in what we’re doing, and how everything in our work, in our leadership, in our roles is based on and should be based on personal plan.

So, when leaders seek help – they normally seek help, in fact, 80 to 90 percent of leaders, when they seek help – whether from a coach or a mentor or someone else, they seek help in one of three or four areas. They’re looking for a higher revenue or income, they’re looking for help at leadership skills, they’re looking for help to lead through change better, or they’re looking to be more effective and more efficient.

It’s been said that people don’t seek help or people don’t get interested in making a change until they’ve heard it enough, they’ve had enough, or they’re hurt enough. And so, a lot of times when we come to someone, we seek help – we ask for help, there was a reason why you invested in this course. There’s a reason why you are investing this time and energy into this course. And a lot of times, it is because something is off a little bit. I mean, maybe you’re just uncomfortable, maybe you’re discontented, maybe you’ve reached the point of despair and something doesn’t get fixed we’re going to end up in a disaster. I mean, there’s some reason why you’re working through this.

A lot of times we come looking for some nugget or some principle or some new concept that we haven’t considered before to make that change. And so, when we do that, what were the area or the face of simple leadership that we’re looking for is, priority management decision making which happens in this phase – the prepare phase, of the Simple Leadership Model.

While we can help people do that, and when they come to us, we help them with tools and would give them things. We almost always tried to at some point, fairly quickly back down to the foundation which is, first of all, perspective. Who I am? What am I here to do? What is my life’s work? And then, to get to the second phase which is, Purpose, and that’s who and what’s most important to me and what do I want in those significant areas of my life and work? That make sense?

No matter why somebody comes to work with us, no matter why somebody engages us to come work within their company, no matter why somebody comes to an event, we almost always try to work them back down.

Number one, the perspective. Understand who you are, and how to interact with other people.

Number two, to get to that place where we’re thinking about our life’s purpose, and what we want life to look like. How we want to be remembered in life. And that’s what personal plan is all about.

Now, if we don’t back down, what we found, and you know that this is true in your work as well, if we don’t solve the root problems, then we begin this vicious cycle of solving some of the same problems or similar problems over and over again.

For example, if somebody comes to us, they want to increase effectiveness or deficiencies, and so we give them some tools, we give them a process or we help them set up a system. They go away and they do it for a while. If we haven’t solved the business culture problems, if we haven’t solved the life and work balanced challenges that they face on a day-to-day basis, that their team members are facing from a day-to-day basis, they’re going to be back calling us, or we’re going to be back in their organization, and we’re going to be trying to solve other challenges for them.

And so, we mean it when we say, if we can walk in an organization, we can walk a leader or a team through the Five Phases of Simple Leadership and A Simple Leadership Model, then we can solve 80 to 90 percent of the daily challenges that people face. Because they’re working on these things on a solid foundation of who they are and what they want in their life and everybody is using a common vocabulary, a common language, and common tools, to work toward a healthy culture within the organization or within the team.

So, while we can help you and we can help other leaders with priority management and decision making in a prepare phase, or we can help you with this simple one page business plan for any size company in the plan phase of the simple leadership model, or we can help you with simple vision and how to communicate vision effectively in the path phase of the simple leadership model.

Our goal is to get you back to phase one and phase two, perspective and purpose, because they form the foundation for everything else that we do. If we’re off on perspective or we’re off on purpose, everything else is off.

Fuzzy leader, fuzzier followers. You got it? Unhealthy leader, unhealthier followers. So, a simple personal plan is so vitally important to everything that we do. Without it, it is difficult for us to communicate effective vision. Without a simple personal plan guiding our life and helping us understand how our work fits into our overall life, it’s difficult for us to craft, and implement and execute effective business plans. And without a simple personal plan, without a plan for our life, and how our work should fit in into that life, it’s difficult, if not impossible, for us to manage the day-to-day crisis that we face.

We struggle with priority management, and we struggle with decision making, because the world is too chaotic. We do not have enough capacity or enough margin to manage day-to-day challenges as they’re thrown on us. We have to make decisions earlier, and the best time to make a decision is before we are forced to make it. To make it when we’re not under pressure in the heat of the moment.

So, here’s what we are going to do today. One simple action item. Write down how you think a simple personal plan will help you by forming the foundation for your work, for your leadership and how that work fits into your overall life. So write one sentence about how you think, how you can envision a simple personal plan as your work through this process. How can a simple personal plan help you be more effective with vision, be more effective with plans, be more effective as you prepare for day-to-day issues, priority management, decision making?

Write down how you think a simple personal plan can help you. And I want you to post that in the Guidestone University group on Facebook, and then it will be cool to come back and look at those things later as we work through this process.

We’ll see you in the next session of Guidestone University.[/text_block]