May 13, 2020 | by David March.
Have you ever felt procrastination about doing the pre-work for the main work? Let’s face it; we all have.
We all know we must be strategic in business or in our career, but we often love to fly by the seat of our pants. We live to go, go, go, build, build, build, but we never worry about the pre-work needed to get to the next step.
For years, I struggled with getting the work done that I wanted to do for myself. Going at it alone was not working for me. It wasn’t until I hired a mentor to help me that I suddenly had the looming deadline of, “What will I bring to my mentor to review weekly?” That question, and the time limit it provided, prompted me to reflect and start going inwards.
The question, “What am I paying him for?” created urgency – it was exactly what I needed to get the pre-work done and move on to the big stuff.
So, what is this pre-work I am talking about?
Before you brainstorm, perform coaching calls, build your own business, or work on your career, there is a lot of pre-work that you have to do before the real work begins. When beginning work on any project, you must do an audit of the information you have; you need to take an inventory of your skills, education, and passions.
However, there can be a lot of uncertainty and anxiety around doing this pre-work, and in some ways it’s a bore or a chore.
For example, in career coaching, I get clients all the time who haven’t really thought about what kind of career they’re looking for. For me to get you into your ideal position, you will have to know what you’re aiming for. Whether that’s the type of industry, the ideal company size, your primary work function, your existing skill sets, continuing education you might need, or a combination of all those factors, you have to have a goal.
Maybe you don’t know all the details, but you have hints, ideas that stick out to you. There might be things around you that can point you in the right direction. This is the pre-pre-work: writing out an inventory of everything you like to do, are good at doing, want to be doing, and so on.
The idea here is to figure out where you are and where you’re going. But how many of us really have a good picture of our goals? How many of us know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, where we want to be?
Goals are the key – but you have to discover them first
Goals are made to keep us on track with our planned direction. They are a form of planned change and organized development.
Carl Jung said it best: “Life is teleology par excellence; it is the intrinsic striving towards a goal, and the living organism is a system of directed aims which seek to fulfill themselves.”
To be teleological is to be goal-driven – it works through the internal desire to grow/elevate/change the current conditions in your life, career, family, business, or relationships. As such, the motivation for the change comes from within. By going inwards, you create the variables necessary to get what you want in the outer world.
The pre-work is identifying the changes you want to make. Once you have your change in mind, you can craft your goal.
For example, you have identified you don’t like your job. What are you going to do about it? You search and analyze for a solution and the change you are going to make.
Do you want to start your own business?
Continue working the same profession in a more ideal industry or company?
Combine different skill-sets to change your career entirely?
you look for the correct solutions to your specific desire or problems. Goal setting this way is embedded with motivation by its very nature.
This discovery process is vital if you are to accurately target the ways in which you want to change. Then, once you’ve found your target, all that is left is the follow-through.
The implementation and coaching process
Now you have a goal and you know what you want to change. This is where the real work with a coach begins.
Eric Ries, the author of The Lean Startup, discusses this in an interview with IDEO U: “It’s complicated, but the idea is to deconstruct a business plan in a rigorous way to identify which of these metrics have high sensitivity to the final outcomes, and the way you do it is by looking at the inputs that drive the model, not the outputs.”
What are the specific actions or metrics that will create your success? A coach will help you look at your self-inventory and identify the areas that can be used as an action plan. It helps to look at it through the lens of “innovation accounting” – your method must be input-based, not output-based.
Then, as you work on achieving your goals through these measurable actions, challenges will come up (they always do) and may be a cause for strategy refinement. Your coach will help you reflect, review, and create clarity around your strategy.
Just as in the age-old Hero’s Journey, the emphasis is on the journey.
Focus on the journey
and you will naturally reach the result you desire. And once you reach that result, the cycle repeats itself anew.
Additionally, if the direction in which you’re going is innovative or a huge shift from where you began – a career transition is a great example – a key factor of the coaching process is helping you believe in yourself. I help my clients turn inwards and discover who they are in terms of who they can truly become and why it’s important to them.
To ascend, to become more than what you are, you have to grab onto someone else who is ascending and make a human chain. Each person brings themselves up and, in turn, brings others up in the process. The work we are doing is for ourselves and others.
Working with my mentor, I am excited to report not just the results, but the progress. As a unified team, I have been lifted beyond what I thought was possible on my own. If you’re ready to do the pre-work, just as I did, I can help you reach new heights.
To take the next step, schedule a call with me at https://calendly.com/coachdavemarch
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