The Breakdown and Clarification of My 5-year plan

What does it look like to affirm a 5-year plan?

Before the new year, I shared that I am accelerating a 10-year plan to a 5-year plan, and I was surprised how many people assumed that meant I was no longer working with clients as a career coach, leadership coach, and branded résumé writer.? Firstly, I can’t make that vision happen without continuing to career coach and do executive branding. Secondly, this is not just my job; this is my mission, and over the next 5 years I am not stepping back. Quite the opposite – I’m leaning in. (Ugh. I do hate how cliché that has become, but nonetheless...)

I am separating myself as the brand identity of the company, as I expect to hand the keys to a new leader and my brand will transition into workforce advocacy, which still serves my current mission as it will serve me in my future missions.?

That is what leaders do, I learned in 2008. They create more leaders, and they make it easier for leaders that follow them to succeed. It was always my goal and vision to not be the only person offering my proprietary branding and career campaign (job searching, but for people who want to use their career to make a bigger and more meaningful impact) services and tools. I didn’t know it would take me 16 years to get here, but I also didn’t know much about what being a parent involved, or how the world would change, or how aging would affect me, or how my parents’ aging would affect me. I’m at peace with the time that it has taken to get here, and my declaration means the time is now.?

I am and always have been someone who gets involved in diverse interests, hobbies, activities, and research. It is this time that will be refocused to activities that help me learn skills that I will need to plan, build, launch and run an ecovillage, and I’m excited to spend my free time this way and involve my family in it, as well.?

My work time is more focused now on leveraging tools I have been building for over a decade to streamline the branding process and successful career campaign management and make it more user-friendly and accessible.??

For Career Discovery – that part of your journey where you are deciding what is next.

In 2015 I published an e-book called Laser-sharp Career Focus: Pinpoint Your Purpose and Passion in 30 Days . I am re-configuring, editing, updating, and redesigning this book to be a colorful, fun 30-day Journal.?

For Branding – including Executive Branding, Personal Branding, Career Branding, Professional Branding, and Entrepreneurial Branding – when you are intentional about who you want to work with and for, branding enables you to build rapport with these people, and they “get you,” transforming prospecting conversations into enthusiastic co-creating of the future.?

In 2018 Wharton MBA students took on validating and designing an Online Branding Journey, complete with wireframes, user avatars, and real feedback from target users. This is my proprietary process that I have been honing and my clients have been proving highly effective since 2007.?

For Career Campaigning – which encompasses all your efforts to pursue the work you love, the career path that aligns with your desired professional growth, and the environment that will best support and nurture that growth.?

With the help of a team of technical geniuses, in 2014 I converted a multi-tab Microsoft Excel tool that accompanied my career coaching calls into a gamified program, leveraging psychology and neuroscience to help job seekers not just apply best practices, but apply and learn how to control their own fate. 76 funders helped me create a prototype mobile app game. At this point, it required $300k to launch.? Many investors said I was “too early”, needed at least a thousand users, needed proof, etc. etc.? My kids were 3 and 4, and not yet in school all day. Though I did launch a manual beta for validation that it works, and helped one of my users and advisors (a CTO) start a bidding war, I decided to table this venture. I started teaching at Drexel University instead and continued on and off as an adjunct professor until 2020.?

A lot has changed since then, including the barriers to entry, technical landscape, my knowledge library, and my bandwidth – both of my kids are now middle schoolers with active athletic, activity, and social schedules of their own.

For Conscious Leadership Coaching – when you recognize the need to increase your self-awareness, heal your traumas, navigate conflict in the workplace gracefully, and expand your impact to accelerate progress.?

Since 2017 when I attended the Mindvalley reunion, I have been developing The Corporate Consciousness Ripple Blueprint and CCQ (Corporate Consciousness Quotient) assessment and scale. I was ready to launch in 2020, but realized that I wanted instead to expand my community to co-create with other conscious leaders. Once I did that, I realized that this curriculum would be that much more powerful in influencing real transformation and that much more adoptable if other conscious leaders were folded in to the development and facilitation of this program. As a result of the work that my co-leader Lawrence Henderson and I have been doing with the C3 community (Corporate Consciousness Co-op), we have been co-creating powerful content that I expect we as a collective will make available to leaders along this timeline.?

All of the above initiatives require generating revenue, saving, and building a team. The foundation has been built throughout my entrepreneurial journey.? My virtual assistant, Stacy Guerrero , is growing alongside me to be my Online Business Manager and help me build and train new team members.?

Now, I can use the time I had been teaching in higher education (which was ample) to learn new skills, such as gardening, sustainable farming, bush crafting, turning raw materials into textiles, alternative energy sources, and land development.?

The time is not right to acquire land yet, and I don’t have plans to relocate my kids out of their school district where land availability is minimal to make this dream happen. However, in 5 years, they will be planning their own futures. I see an overlap between them building their dreams and me building this one, and I will want a “new baby” to develop once they are off on their own.?

This is why I have accelerated this dream. It won’t magically appear in 5 years, but I expect that once that time arrives, it will start to take over my bandwidth. These career management solutions will be launched with widespread usage and adoption, giving people not only excellent results, but control of their own destinies, which will empower them to lead consciously regardless of the limits today’s corporate landscape imposes on such choices. I will have had an impact spreading conscious leadership practices, making the landscape more consciousness-friendly.?

I will continue to focus on the spread of conscious leadership and offer the ecovillage as a retreat destination and transformative space. In tune with the self-service automation that is bound to replace certain repetitive recipes for success, the assistance that I offer now will be at your fingertips in the future, and I will have been part of that.?

None of this changes the work I do and will continue to do with individuals. Please, come to me when you know you want to be intentional about your next career steps and level up your positive influence and impact.? Trust that I am modeling that as I am offering that. Let’s scale up our legacies together. Who’s in??