S. 1 Ep. 32 – From Vision To Action and Everything In Between

Taylorr: Welcome to another episode of Technically Speaking. We’re are your hosts Taylor and Austin and we are so excited about today’s guest. Today we’re talking about vision and action and everything in between. And the whole goal about today’s episode is to talk about the importance of having a clear mission, having a clear vision and how to take those goals that you have and turn them into action. And in order to help us digest this topic, we are going to be bringing in one of the most accomplished and prolific speakers on productivity today, Dr. Mary Kelly. Now, Dr. Mary Kelly has authored 13 business and leadership books, including 15 Ways to Grow Your Business in Every Economy, Money Smart, 5 Minutes Per Week and 52 weeks to Building a Better Business.

Least to say, Mary is the go-to person to be talking to us on this subject. And if you’re wondering how, you can take that vision that you have for yourself, your life, your business, and turn that into action, this episode is for you. As always, don’t forget to stick around until the end for some awesome resources relating to the show. We hope you like this one. All right, we are live. Mary, welcome to the show. It is so great to have you here.

Mary: Taylorr and Austin, I am so excited to be with you folks. We’ve been friends for a while and it’s just great to get a chance to talk.

Austin: Agreed.

Taylorr: Absolutely. Agreed. So, the first question we love to kick off every episode with is what got you into the crazy world of professional speaking? How did you get here?

Mary: I did a lot of training and teaching and talking for the military. As an officer in charge, I was an Intel officer, so I did a lot of briefings for air crews. I’ve been talking for most of my career, my parents would say I’ve been talking most of my life. How I got specifically into the speaking world was being a professor at the Naval Academy, which I did for four years the second time around. They’re always looking for people to go out in the community and do talks. And so, I thought, well, sure, you know, I’m happy to do that. So, I did a lot of that and then some of those people who saw me in uniform speak asked me to come back to their organizations and talk to their groups of people.

And I thought, Oh, sure, yeah, that’s no problem at all. I’m a civilian. I can do this. And then somebody said, well, what’s your honorarium? I’m like my, what? Like, I didn’t realize that was something people got paid to do. I thought, well, I’m just a woman, I get to talk and I’m going to get paid to talk. This is fantastic. So, after 25 years in the Navy, I thought, well, if I’ve got any expertise on leadership, which is predominantly what I get to do or economics, because that’s what my PhD is in, this would be a great idea. And I grew up in a small business. So, the business side of growing the speaking business was honestly not as much of a challenge for me as I think it probably is for a lot of people.

Austin: That makes sense. What a cool journey too. And I you have a very decorated background the letters before and after your name are significant so it’s cool that you bring all of this experience and wisdom with you from the real world. You know, you’re, you’re not pontificating on these ideas, what you speak on comes from time tested and real-world experience. So, I just have to highlight that that’s one of my favorite things about you.

Mary: Oh, you’re very kind. I feel very lucky that the military allowed me to have leadership positions when I was 21 years old and actually younger than that, you have leadership positions at the Naval Academy. And I got to use the training and the tradition and the talent of all those people who came before me. And unlike a lot of people who just kind of fumbled their way through leadership, the military teaches leadership. So, I feel very fortunate I get to bring that expertise to my civilian organizations.

Austin: Yeah, that’s great. 

Taylorr: So, today’s topic is about taking visions and implementing them in the real world as the title suggests and as you probably know, you’re well-recognized in the speaking space, have lots of speaker friends, speakers tend to be ultra-visionaries we found. They’re great at coming up with these awesome ideas and what they want to accomplish for the future and so on but I think a lot of people struggle with the in-between steps, meaning taking their vision and then making it actionable. But we don’t have to talk about all that right away, I’m curious from your seat, what do you feel like defines a great vision for somebody’s business?

Mary: Great question. A vision is where you want to go with your business. It’s not your mission, which is what you do like we make garlic presses. Your vision is we make the world’s premier garlic presses that are featured in all the world’s top restaurants. That’s the vision. Or I want to be a medical researcher who cures liver cancer. It is specific enough to define you as who you are, but it is lofty enough to be motivating. That’s the idea for a vision. And when you talk about, especially in this bigger community, speakers have envisioned you’re right. There is no shortage of squirrels in the speaking community, we always have good ideas. But it’s like people who, and you’ve talked to them all the time in and out of the speaking community, I talked to somebody this morning and she works in the medical field.

And she said, I should write a book about, well, how often have you heard people say, I should write a book about fill in the blank every week. Somebody says that, but do they do it? No. So there’s a difference between an ideation, which is I should really write a book they’re not serious and a vision, which is very purposeful, very driven and very focused on where you want to go. Many people will think, well, I want to climb Mount Everest. Really? Have you trained for it? Well, no. Do you have hiking boots? No. Do you even know where Mount Everest is? Like on what continent? Well, no, but I’ve heard people say that climbing it a good thing. Okay. That’s still in the ideation stage. A vision is, in 2022, I am going to climb Mount Everest. And then from that vision, which is very purposeful, then you can create a plan to attack where you want to go and how you want to get there.

Austin: Simple, concise. I love that. And what an interesting differentiation between the ideation phase and the vision stage. I don’t even know if I’ve personally ever thought about this and I’m huge about setting goals and milestones and so on so you just enlightened me.

Mary: I don’t know about that, but you know how sometimes we think, oh, that’s a great idea. I’m never going to do it. And sometimes we’re smart enough to realize that but how many times have you heard people say, yeah, my dream is to take a two-week trip to Europe and then they die and they never have done it. So, it was an ideation, but it wasn’t really a vision. They really didn’t envision it and being there. They kind of looked at the pictures of Italy and France and thought, oh, that’s something other people do. Your vision is something you’re going to do. And that’s the difference. I’ve got a whole new thing on creating a personal vision and mission statement. I started by; I was doing a strategic plan for a company. And of course, you start with the normal steps of strategy and vision, mission goals, all those things.

But then for the personal strategic plan, which is what I’m calling it, the PSP, the personal strategic plan, I flipped it on its head. And I thought, okay, if it’s a personal vision and it’s maybe as an entrepreneur, solopreneur, this is where you start. You start with your values. You start with the things that are the most important to you and then you work from there into what it is, you’re good at doing what you can get paid to do, what the market will allow you to charge for what you do. Figure out if that’s a viable option and from that, you can craft what it is you’re going to do. That’s your mission. What you do, we make garlic presses. And then once you’ve got that defined, now you can launch into your vision. One of the issues I have with some parents, very well, meaning nice people, is they tell their kids you can be anything you want to be. 

No, you can’t. No, you really can’t. I can’t play women’s basketball. I am five foot eight on a good day if I stand up straight. I can’t shoot, I can’t jump, I can’t block, I’m not fast. Oh, and I’m old. There’s a lot of reasons I can’t play women’s basketball. I don’t have the talent, I don’t have the ability, I just don’t have it. So no, you can’t be everything you think you want to be as a little kid and your parents say you can do it. No, you really can’t. You have to hone in on where you’re great. Where you’re good, you can become great. But where you’re absolutely terrible, if you have zero aptitude, zero talent, zero ability, me, basketball. I know I tried. Trust me, I’m horrible. You have to hone in on what you’re great at and then define that as what aligns with what you want to be doing. You may be a great cook, but you don’t want to cook for a living. And that’s were figuring out what you want to do, takes it from that ideation phase into the vision place.

Austin: Yeah. Well, you kind of answered a question that I was going to have, which is how do you take those things that you’re good at and then combine that with something that you like? Because oftentimes I think we end up chasing things that we’re good at solely, because we’re good at them and that always doesn’t align with being happy. And I think people could debate about how important being happy really is. I think you can find happiness in what you do, but would you have any thoughts for somebody that said, yeah, I’m great at these things, but I don’t like doing them?

Mary: Yes. That means outsourcing those things, get somebody else to do it. And in every business, there’s going to be things you don’t like doing. But some people say, well, just follow your passion and the money will come. That’s said by poor people. 

Taylorr: Yes.

Mary: We don’t want to do that. I’m an economist. And I don’t want people feeling that scarcity of being short on money. I wrote a personal finance bestseller and one of the biggest problems I found when doing more research on that I researched for about 12 years before I published the book, was people get frustrated thinking that other people have this, I should too. Well, are you willing to do the things that those other people do? Well, no. Well then you shouldn’t be surprised when you don’t have those other things. Well, but I’m pursuing my passion. 

Well, that’s great but your passion doesn’t necessarily pay anything. So again, some people say, well, I want to talk about how cute my dog is as a keynote speech. Okay, that’s lovely and I have two cute dogs, but I am not naive enough to think that anybody would pay me to talk about how cute my dogs are. Now, can you make a different twist on it? Can you do something different maybe? But the whole idea is analyzing where the market is, understanding market supply and demand forces, and then figuring out where your best talent skills and abilities lie in a marketable place.

Taylorr: That’s a perfectly summarized. As you’ve been talking, it seems like we’re kind of heading down a path, almost like step-by-step. We have the ideation phase, we have the vision phase and I’m sure in the rest of this episode, we’re going to talk what goes beyond that but when somebody has an idea and they want to be intentful about creating a vision out of it, what can they do to take their idea and then craft it into a vision? Is there a process that you walk people through to try and figure that out and get concrete so they can move on to the next steps after they’ve crafted their vision?

Mary: As you know, I like processes and checklists and systems. Every time we launch a plane, there’s a checklist and you may have flown that plane a thousand times and it doesn’t matter, you still look at the checklist. So, I like to walk people through not a defined checklist, although do have a lot of those, but, okay, this is your idea. What are you willing to do? And when I say that, I say, so for the next, for the next 30 days, if you’re serious about launching this new business, I want you to allocate 10 minutes and I need you to set a timer and write down everything. And every day there’s a new thing that you’re going to think about. Who’s your target market? Who are you going to market to? What are you going to market? How are you going to market? What tool do you need to market?

That’s just on the marketing side. On the sales side, what are you going to sell? Who are you going to sell it to? Where are you going to find people to sell to? Who do you want to work with? And that’s all part of this process. And when somebody says, well, I’m trying to transition from working corporate to running a speaking business or running my haircutting shop or whatever it is, I say great. So, take the next 30 days, 10 minutes a day. And then I want you to call me every week on Fridays and tell me how it went that week. And it gives them that accountability but it also tells me if they said, well, I just didn’t get to it this week, they’re not serious. They’re not. And then it’s just a squirrel, it’s an ideation. They’re never going to get serious about it. 

But when the time is right, sometimes it just takes the right timing, and sometimes the timing isn’t right. Maybe their kid is sick, maybe their parents in the hospital, maybe COVID hit, maybe, maybe, maybe. But in the same token, it’s kind of like personal finance. When I talked to people about budgets, they said, well, January is a tough month because we’re paying off bills from December. Oh, okay, then what’s happening in February? Well, February there’s a long weekend and then there was Valentine’s day so that wasn’t a good month to budget. And then well, March, my kid was on spring break so we all did this stuff and then April, well there’s Easter and then May we’re be heading into the summer and then June, we took vacation. Then July there’s 4th of July, then we get into August, that’s back to school so we had all those expenses and then September happened, well there’s Labor Day, we can plus it was somebody’s birthday. 

There’s always a reason to not do it. So, for people who are serious, that’s what they need. They need the real checklist. They need the vision plan, the mission plan, the business plan, all of those things and then they work through it, and that is what helps people be successful. It’s getting out of that ideation phase and really making the commitment to do it. So, all I ask for is 10 minutes a day. 10 minutes a day. And that’s what all of my plans for the Five Minutes Per Week, 52 Weeks to Building Your Better Business, they’re all five-minute plans. And if you’re crystal clear on what it is you do, who your defined audience is, who you’re marketing to, who you’re going to sell, they take five minutes a day.

If you’re not quite so clear, it might take 10 or 15 and that’s where I start people though. And so, every day I ask people to spend 10 minutes just working on this and tell me how it goes. And then at the end of 30 days, then we can craft where they need to go. We can craft their vision and we can craft then their business plan from that. And I like a one-page business plan. I like to keep it very straightforward because it should be on your wall. It should focus on all the highlights, the same kind of things that you focus on. What’s the executive summary? What do we do? And for whom everyone is not a target market. People say, well, everybody needs this. Everyone is not willing to pay for this. Everyone is not a target market. So clearly go find your target market and then differentiate you and how you are best suited to fulfill the needs in that target market.

And that’s part of the business plan. How do people find out about you? What’s your strategic plan to do that? How you making money? What do you charge? Who do you charge and how much? And then when you’re growing, what you outsource? Many people say, well, I can do it. Every time I hear an entrepreneur, solopreneur, whether they run the local restaurant or the nail salon or whatever they say, well, I can do that. But should you do it? Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should do it. It’s kind of like getting pregnant for some people. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. All right. And you’re supposed to laugh there because if you didn’t, that would be bad.

So, I love this idea that then you say, okay, what am I great at? And what are the parts of the business that I’m not great at? And there’s always things to learn. I think once we get complacent and think that we know stuff, we start to slide backwards and that’s not good. I’m very fond of some other… we’ve got some great talent in our speaker world as you know. And one of my friends is fond of saying, don’t let the tech get in the way of doing what you need to do. You can always find somebody to do the tech. And I think that’s absolutely right. A lot of people will take a small bump in the road and they let that bump in the road stop them. It becomes an entire obstacle. A lot of people, I go back to the book writing idea, a lot of people say, well, I’d like to write a book, I just don’t know how.

I go, well, let me see your manuscript. Well, I haven’t written it yet. Okay, so what’s stopping you from writing the book. Well, I don’t know how to publish a book. Okay. Well, if you start writing the book and you have a manuscript, then you can get to the publication phase, this works that way, but start. Just start moving forward. And momentum does carry you through. This is where the laws of physics apply. A business in motion stays in motion, a business at rest stays at rest. So, you got to move in the right direction. 

Austin: Sounds like it all comes down to action beyond the vision stage. I say this all the time. I forget who I should be crediting this to, but the idea is that even if you do it badly at first, just do something because usually action leads to more action. And we can always iterate upon things that aren’t perfect right away. Would you agree that just taking action in any direction is really the thing that will move you from vision to accomplishing that vision? Or should we be more strategic and try to do it as good as possible first time?

Austin: I love action, but I have to tell you that when I started my business, I started by doing my own website. What a terrible idea, because I didn’t even know there were businesses who did websites, and this tells you how long ago this was. And part of that was I went forward because I didn’t know, and I went in different directions because I did not know how to be focused. And it’s kind of like people who start college, we’re terrible. We asked 16-year-olds say, what do you want to do with your life? And they go, I don’t know. And then we expect them at 16 to know what they want to do when most people, my age, I said, what do you want to do with your life? They still don’t know, they’re totally confused. 

The reason people go to college is not necessarily because they know they want to be an astronaut or an executive director of a chamber of commerce. It’s because they’re trying to figure out what they’re going to do. And I think action is the same way. My whole family, my older brother, his wife, me, my husband, my younger sister, her husband, my younger brother, everybody was military. And one of the things that our parents taught us was do something. Even if it’s wrong, do something. Take action. Because again, it’s physics, a body at rest remains at rest. A body in motion remains in motion. Just taking that step forward to explore. You’re going to make mistakes. I certainly made dozens. I made all mine and then a lot of y’all’s too. I made a lot of mistakes, but you don’t let the mistakes stop you. 

Some of them are costly. I wrote some checks I should not have written for sure. I look back now and I’m like, what were you thinking? How could you have fallen for that? It’s embarrassing. It’s all those things and costly, those mistakes don’t stop you, that’s the idea. So, you start. You start doing something and you say, oh, that didn’t work. I’ve had a series of products and some of them, guess what? They didn’t work. I’ve got one book that I think may have sold 30 copies, if I’m lucky. It was not a great book. It’s an okay book. Did I know how to market it? No. Did I do a very good job with it? No, it’s terrible.

That’s all on me but I learned from it. And so then by the time I got to the next one, I was like, okay, all right, I’m going to do this one better. So, every single day, you just get a little bit better. You just start. And if you don’t know how to do it, you call experts for help. You outsource. I’m a big fan of outsourcing things that you do not do well. If you can’t figure out a process for your business, get help from people who do this well. Oh, if only we knew somebody who did this well. [Cross-talk 19:02].

Taylorr: Yeah. 

Mary: I know if only they were like Speaker Flow guys [inaudible 19:06] amazing. Yeah.

Austin: Make me blush.

Taylorr: Look her guys, we didn’t even promote ourselves this episode, look at that. So, Mary, as you’re talking, I see this kind of roadmap in front of me now. So, we have ideation, we’ve got our vision and then I see action. Is there, anything that happens in between vision and action that people need to be considering?

Mary: So, it starts at ideation and then you look at your values because if your values aren’t aligned with what you think you want to do, like I had a guy who said my family is the most important thing ever to me. I’m like, that’s not true. He’s like, yes, it is. I’m like, no, it’s not. I said, you’re on the road 300 days a year and you’re away from your family. You can’t tell me that your family is the most important thing to you if you’re gone that much. I’m gone a lot too but I said, it’s in congruent. And he was like, oh. He happened to be a really good friend, I said, I’ve been to more of your kids’ little league games than you have. And he was like out and I was like, hard to argue.

So, your values have to be right there at the forefront when you create this. So, ideation, then values, then your vision. Where do you want to go? What do you want to do? And what are you going to do as your mission? And then your mission can tie into that. Your mission is again, what you do. I am a medical researcher and I want to study what I need to do to cure liver cancer. And then you sit down with a goal setting form. I have a great goal setting form, all your people are going to get that, it’s in the book. Because when you go to set goals and I use, I’ve got it here, which is also in the package you people are getting, I use a productivity sheet each and every day in my life. Every day. Saturdays, Sundays, this was New Year’s Eve. Every single day in my life.

Because even though I use apps and technology and tasks and to-do list on, there’s something very cathartic about writing things down and getting it out of your head and seeing it organized on paper and then crossing it off. And it’s just your brain releases it when it’s written down, you go, okay, I don’t have to worry about forgetting that it’s all there. I’m going to get that done today. Got it. Every single day, I have a sheet like this and I call it the productivity sheet. And it’s things like the calls to make, the follow-up s, the to-dos, the appointments, and then short-term goals, which I almost never remembered to figure it out, even though it’s right in front of me, and then today’s accomplishments. I can’t tell you how many I’ve actually ever done, because it’s almost never because most of us don’t take time to celebrate the accomplishments because we’re already looking at the next day. 

But every single day, that’s how I organize what I have to do. When it comes into goal setting, a lot of people fail early and fast. And in most cases in business, you want to fail early and fast, but not with real goal setting. So, if you know you’ve got to just do something simple, like you’re going to launch a book so you’re going to create a one sheet for your book. Okay, so stopping you from doing that? Well, you have the graphic ability of a 3-year-old. That would be me. So, I know I have that, so I know I have to outsource that. So, I brought out or sketch it out and then I don’t really know what it’s supposed to look like and then I can look at other people’s things, but really, it’s not something I want to do so of course, I’m going to have to hire somebody to do that. And then how do I get past that?

Well, whatever goal you’re thinking of. So, if everybody right now thinks of a goal, and I know it’s still kind of early in the year, but a good New Year’s Eve resolution is we’re all going to lose weight. Okay, great. So, we’re all going to lose weight. All of a sudden, your brain immediately says, but wait, I like to eat, I like to drink. You know that’s true. I travel, okay not as much as I used to. I don’t really like exercising, I don’t really like vegetable, your brain automatically goes, goes to the obstacles. And if you don’t give your brain an alternative place to go, it will stay on the obstacles and you will reach for the donut.

So, there’s a psychological twist to this that I make really quickly when I do this as a goal setting maneuver. So, let’s say you want to lose 12 pounds, one pound a month in 2021 or whatever the happens to be. So, then you say, I like to eat, I like to drink, and by drinking, I don’t mean water. I travel, I don’t really like vegetables and I don’t like to exercise. Okay, there’s my five obstacles on why my brain automatically says, you can’t do this. You can’t do this. And in business, your brain does the same thing. You can’t do this because it sees the obstacles right away. Especially if you’ve ever been trained in operations. Operations people are the biggest, no, you can’t do this because of these things. They come up with the obstacles.

But you have to let your brain go there. And then for every obstacle you have to brainstorm the solution. So, the first one I like to eat. Okay, well eat healthy things earlier in the day so you don’t get hungry and reach for garbage. Okay, like what? Well, I’ll eat a bag of carrots a day. Okay, I like carrots. I can do that. I like to drink. All right, you know that you could taper that down so for every glass of coffee or wine that you drink, which is what I tend to reach for, you’re going to have to drink a 16-ounce bottle of water. Okay, so there’s a one-to-one thing there. Got it. I can do that. All right, I travel. Okay, what are you going to do to make better choices on the road? Okay, I’m going to pack healthier snacks, I’m going to do that water trick, and I’m just going to say no to all the desserts.

Okay, I can do that. And then I don’t really like to exercise. Okay, but you’re good at walking. You can walk do that thing on your watch where you can do the 10,000 steps. Okay, that gives me goal. I can do that. So, whatever the obstacles are, you have to give your brain something else to dwell on. And then the cool thing about our brains is it likes those solutions. It goes, oh, okay. Remember. So as soon as you reach for the coffee, you’re like, wait, I already had two cups of coffee. Darn it. I have to drink two 16-ounce glasses of water now. Darn it. And as soon as you allow that to happen, your brain will do the work for you. But this is where a lot of people use that they see an obstacle or they get a speed bump and they just stop. They don’t know how to roll over it. And unfortunately for many people, they allow the mole hills to become mountains, I guess, is what I’m trying to say.

Austin: Wow. That’s super cool actually. We hear goals talked about, and usually it comes back to the cliche, set smart goals referenced and I think that there’s some value to that. If you don’t know how to set a goal, it’s good to have some framework, but I don’t know if I’ve ever really heard this twist, I guess you could say, that you just explained where we’re not just setting the goal, but we’re identifying and solving problems for the obstacles that our mind immediately jumps to. I can think of a thousand goals that I’ve set for myself that have fallen out of the waysides specifically for that reason, because I have all these obstacles and that’s what I’m thinking about and I feel miserable because of it and so I don’t make the changes because it’s easier to just not run into those obstacles. So that’s a cool way to look at it.

Mary: Thanks. A lot of the stuff that I do is I love to study brains and I’ve never seen anybody put it together that way so when I was writing the five-minute plan, I was talking to a couple of people, and they were speaker friends, and I said, but why can’t you just get this done? And they’re like, because of all these obstacles. I’m like, okay, but none of these are hard. They’re like, they’re horribly hard. I’m like, no, they’re not. And that’s where I came up with this. I realized that what other people see as a big obstacle to some people it’s not. So, for me, there’s certain tech things that I’m not great at when I hit a brick wall for somebody else, they’re like, that’s a five-minute thing. I’m like, oh, I’m going to drink it over the brick wall. I realized, o, if I can just go to the obstacles and figure out either who to call, how to call or what to do, then it takes that mountain and turns it back into the molehill that it should be. So then when I was writing the five-minute plan for this, and I crafted that, I was like, oh, I could use this with my clients. This would be a really good idea. So that’s kind of where it came from. And it’s in the, it’s in the planning guide that y’all are getting.

Taylorr: Awesome.

 Austin: Super cool.

Taylorr:  Yeah. Speaking of that, as you know, we’re all about creating value for our audience. What are some of the things you’re working on that our listeners can benefit from?

Mary: I have a 12-month planning guide. It’s the 12-month business success and accountability guide. It’s about 50 pages long because there’s three pages for every month and then there is a five-minute plan attached to it. And then there’s a couple of bonus plans in there. And so, this sells on my website for about 40 bucks. And for your people, of course, it is free, free, free, because we love your people. And the idea is you keep that by your desk all the time. And it’s a monthly planner so at the beginning of every month, you start planning. The night before is when you plan the next day. You don’t wake up in the morning and I’ll look at your computer and look at your email and go, okay, what am I going to do today? No, that’s not how you plan a day.

You plan the day the night before, you plan it the week before, you plan out what you actually have to do. You look at your calendar, if you really want to get it done, you plan it. That’s how these things work. And the same is with your month months go by and a lot of people have said, well, I just lost like three full months. I’m like, what do you mean? You’ve lost them as well. I didn’t get anything done. How can you not get anything done? Well, I just binged watched, okay, that’s your choice. But then you have to put that down in your monthly planner. Well, I don’t want to, that makes me look bad. Well, guess what? That’s why it’s an accountability thing. So that’s the fun thing. It’s a 12 month again, it’s a planner and it’s downloadable, it’s a PDF, fillable PDF.

And you print it out, you can fill it in online and then you can see every month, how well you did. So that’s what I’m using with a lot of my facilitated groups. I facilitate some masterminds; I facilitate on some coaching situations and that’s what I’m using for them. And then the other fun project I have is called the Five-Minute Leadership Guide. So, it’s a combination of a leadership book. There’s only about 40 pages of verbiage from me. And then it’s kind of a daily planning, accountability tool. And the idea is if you’re serious about achieving what you want to achieve and by serious, I don’t mean it has to take 20 hours a day. You just have to start moving in that right direction. So, every day it asks you, okay, what are today’s priorities? What are today’s likely challenges. That’s where we get into tackling those mountains and turning them back into molehills.

And then what skills do I need today? So, I know that for me, creating a new one sheet, I need graphic skills and I don’t have them. Am I going to develop them? No, I am not. People say, oh, it’s so easy. Just use, fill in the blank. Well, it just doesn’t work for me. It’s going to take me two hours to do it, I’m going to be mad the whole time, it is so much easier for me to go to my graphics person and say, here you go for 20 bucks, please do this. That’s a challenge that I might have. Well, what am I going to do? I’m going to assign it to somebody else. Okay, good. And then what skill sets do I need to do today to reach out to people? Well, I need to not be afraid to pick up the phone, I need to make sure that I’ve got my marketing on track, whatever I need to do, I need to be really patient with one really tough client. 

And then you grade the day say, so how was today? How did it go? So, the idea is you kind of grade it the next day or the next morning or that night. And it goes from terrible to meh, to okay, good and then, great. And then I asked, what would you learn today? And then you’re like, well, I learned that Austin and Taylorr are super cool, but I already knew that so it’s not really learning. It was just reiterated. Reiterated Austin and Taylorr are super cool and they do cool stuff and they help a lot of really cool people. Whatever it is you learn. And then if you go a couple of pages and you go, wait a second, I don’t think I learned very much, then he kind of tells you, maybe you need to be doing a little bit more learning.

So, it’s a self-assessment, accountability tool. And the great thing about it is it takes less than five minutes a day. So, I’m very excited about that. It goes on Amazon in just a matter of days, it’s called the Five-Minute Leadership Guide. And it’s a guide because when I was doing the 12-month planner, I was told that a percentage of the population doesn’t like the word planner, because it implies that they don’t plan. So, then I thought, well, I can’t call it a journal because that makes it sound like a twelve-year-old’s diary. So, guide, we settled guide, that was what the focus group came up with. The Five-Minute Guide. I’m all about five-minute plans, five-minute guides, five minutes. There’s somebody came out with a Five-Minute Gratitude Journal, which is terrific. I didn’t do it, but it’s really good. And so, I’m all about things that just make your life better in short amounts of time.

Taylorr: Wow, love it. Goals. Those links will be down in the show notes, everybody go grab those things. And if you liked this episode, don’t forget to rate and subscribe and if you want more awesome resources like this, go to speakerflow.com/resources. Thank you so much for chiming in. I just wanted to take a second to thank our sponsor Auxbus. Auxbus is the all-in-one suite of tools you need to run your podcast and it’s actually what we run here at Speaker Flow for Technically Speaking. It makes planning, podcasts simple; it makes recording podcasts simple; it even makes publishing podcasts to the masses simple and quite honestly, Technically Speaking wouldn’t be up as soon as it is without Auxbus. Thank you so much Auxbus. And if you are interested in checking Auxbus out, whether you’re starting a podcast or you have one currently get our special offer auxbus.com/speakerflow, or click the link below in our show notes.