The Importance of Personal Life Planning

It’s often easy to ignore your personal life when you begin laying out your quarterly and yearly business goals. It goes without saying that as a leader you are always thinking strategically about your business: you set up benchmarks for success, discuss your goals and plan for the future business that you’d like to grow. While business planning is second nature to many great leaders, personal life planning is often undervalued and ignored. 

Personal life planning refers to taking the time to think holistically about your life and set up goals and priorities for each area of your life. Business can be one of those areas, but if you are doing personal life planning, it should not be the only area that you plan around. For example, a significant part of my life is family. When I plan for the future that I am working to build, they are an important aspect of that future. To ensure that I am properly building them into my planning, I have to take time to ask questions such as, “how much time do I want to be spending with my family on a day-to-day basis?” and “what resources do I want to be able to provide my children?” 

By asking these questions, I ensure that the work I am doing will help me to build a thriving life and not just a thriving business. Too often, I’ve come across individuals who have built amazing businesses but who, in the process, ignored other aspects of their lives. Personal life planning is a way to ensure that you do not ignore those critical parts of your life.

“You can’t be considered successful in your business life if your home life is in shambles.”

— Zig Ziglar

One way to make personal life planning a practice is to create a personal vision for yourself. Above, you will see some images from our team member’s vision boards. If you would like to learn more about vision boarding, and the powerful role it can play in personal life planning, click here.

Another powerful exercise to envision a future that you want to create is to go through what we call the Legacy Vision tool. This tool captures all that you want to be and do on a ten-to-thirty year timeline, and it will ask you to transport yourself into that future and answer questions such as: 

1. Who do you serve with your business? Who do you serve in other areas of your life?

2. What is your impact? How do you want to be remembered?

3. How long are you working? How much time do you spend with family and friends? What is your relationship with your family and friends like? 

For a complete set of exercises and questions, feel free to download our Legacy Vision Tool. Once you answer the questions and reflect on your future, you will have the information you need to draft a vision for your future. This vision can be one that you create with prose, bullet points or even with diagrams. The point of the vision is to have open space to envision what a thriving life looks like for you.

Capturing the Momentum of the Economic Recovery: Accelerate Your Growth in the Second Half of 2021

If you are a business leader, you are likely still experiencing the lingering effects and stress of the global pandemic. You might be facing supply shortages, a reduced pipeline, and staffing shortages, as well as lingering doubts from the challenges you have endured from the last year. This being said, you also likely know that the economy is recovering – spending is increasing, unemployment is dropping, and by the end of the year, the gross domestic product is even projected to reach, at least temporarily, the path that was projected for it had the pandemic never happened.

 Now, as a leader of your company, you might be in a rather challenging position. For over a year, you had to firefight – dealing with an unpredictable market in a time of international uncertainty, while also taking care of the people you employ and in your community. Now, to scale your business and capitalize on the economic recovery, you must switch mentalities – from surviving to thriving. While this might sound challenging, we have three tips on actions you can take to put yourself in the right headspace for growth in the second half of 2021.

Align to a Mission

First, to get out of your head, we recommend that you focus on something that is bigger than yourself.  At PFD, we are deeply passionate about the profound importance of having a vision and mission for your life and company, how they can clarify your thinking, and get you out of daily firefighting. By creating or reconnecting with a mission and vision for your company and your life, you can become inspired again – aligning toward where you would like to be long-term, and taking steps to get there. This can be an effective way to fight against burnout and reignite passion. If you would like to learn more about creating an effective vision and purpose for your company, check out the blog post here.

Get the Right People

Getting the right people into your organization can be the greatest opportunity and the greatest challenge that you face. On one hand, with unemployment decreasing, the market is getting more competitive to find great talent, but on the other, having the right people in the right roles will be transformational for your organization. Often, to get the right people, you have to be creative. To create a creative sourcing plan, take fifteen minutes to consider the questions below to identify potential sources of talent that fit your company culture:

1. Who do you need to talk to at your local Universities or Community Colleges?

2. Are there nonprofits aligned with your mission whose board you need to be on?

3. Are there major community events that you need to chair or be on the planning committee for?

4. Are there other well-run organizations whose leaders you need to partner with?

5. Who are the five most influential people in your industry that you should talk to?

6. Who are the five most influential people in your community that you should talk to?

7. Who do you need to buy lunch?

Focus on what you can control

Finally, while there is a lot about our businesses that are not directly in our control, like supply chains and sales pipelines, we suggest that you focus on what you can control. It is a simple concept - easier said than done. We have found that there are two things senior teams can do that will set you up for growth in the latter half of 2021.

1. Cultivate Operational Excellence

   If your pipeline is slow at the moment, perhaps you can use this season where you are less busy to cultivate operational excellence in your organization. Perhaps this means you roll out a new project management software, or any other software you have been avoiding putting into your organization because of the length of time it will take to install. Perhaps you update employee manuals, get the team into an online dashboard, or cultivate a coaching rhythm that allows you to coach your team candidly and consistently for success. Whatever the case, use this time to intentionally work on your operations so that you and your team have the capacity for growth later in the year.

2. Conduct Senior Leader Planning Sessions

   Having the right people in the right roles on your team is critical for success. These are the people, if they are A Players, that will come up with creative solutions for challenges and help reignite passion among your other senior team members. Having the right people in these key roles, and actively communicating with these people via senior leader planning sessions, will take pressure off you as the CEO and lead to better outcomes overall.

With the economic recovery already happening, right now is when we need to invest time and energy to transforming our mindset and business to scale. If you would like to inquire about senior planning sessions, please contact us here.