The Excite Strategy Summit, What I learned

Over the past few weeks, I've become active in the Happy Startup School on some calls and recently watched the Excite Strategy Summit.?

I'm sharing my key takeaways here because as we close out the month of July inside the Find Calm Here Community, our theme is Community Validation and this message continued to come up over and over again during their sessions.?

During this 4 day event, Laurence and Carlos will share with you the core elements of building an exciting strategy for your work and business. They call this working from the inside out.

Unlike the conventional approach to business, it starts with YOUR needs, not the needs of the customer. The core to building an exciting strategy is creating a clear definition of success that gets you excited about the future.

Rather than just doing work for money you'll learn how to design work around your core emotional needs. Work then becomes something that energizes you, not something that drains you. This means understanding where you get energy and where you doing.

When you've figured this out you'll make the big decisions that dictate how you make money, how you spend your time, whom you spend your time with and what impact you can make.

If, for a while, you've been asking yourself what's missing and what could make you really happy then join these sessions to start heading in the right direction.

Session 1: Lead with Needs

During this session, learn what it means to identify your core emotional needs and to use them to guide what you do.

Vision 20/20:?An invite-only program for entrepreneurs and leaders seeking new horizons.?

Cohort-based mastermind program with a limit of 20 participants, starting in September. This is a group coaching program based on the realignment of a founder’s needs, values, and lifestyle goals with their business mission and purpose.?

Finding the “why” with clients has helped us as the founder identify how we can “lead with needs” through personal and practical needs.?

Why is “leading with needs” important??

It isn’t easy to start working in a way of re-shifting focus to focusing on what needs a founder has through their past experiences?

The goal we have is to discover?what has cultivated energy and excitement in the past, then examine burnout skills including;?identifying the tasks, roles, clients, customers, projects, products, and/or day-to-day activities that drain or tax an individual, team member, or founder.?

We start to do this by putting our values into verbs through ideas that light you up instead of feeling overwhelmed, stressed, or demotivated.?

Core Needs & Values:

Which Needs and values are honored versus violated values?

Purpose Playbook:?To design a business that is rooted in needs and a foundation that allows for creating a business strategy that fulfills the needs and aligns the values that are important to the founders of an organization.?

Non-Violent Communication has been the inspiration for this program to allow participants to stand back and observe and identify how this applies to their personal needs and values.?

Having difficult conversations, building communities, challenged with struggles of gaining clients or customers, it becomes very hard to stay aligned with values, because we tend to react instead of responding to challenges that arise in personal and business experiences.?

Which of our sessions sounds most interesting to you??

Poll Results:?

• Lead with needs: 2 Votes
• Tune into change: 2 Votes
• Make happy money: 4 Votes?
• Work out loud: 5 Votes?

What’s At Your Course PDF?

This would be a great program to coordinate with YouMap! (Ask me about this via email at?[email protected]?

Session 2: Tune into change - The Excite Strategy Summit

Change can lead to allowing for disconnection to projects that aren’t active or successful.?

Creating change in someone’s life, allows us to connect to others.?

Carolos: There are gets focused too much on the “thing that we want to create” instead of the people we are making the tool for, and that can get lost in the tech world.?- Rob Fitzpatrick?

“It boils down to this: you aren’t allowed to tell them what their problem is, and in return, they aren’t allowed to tell you what to build. They own the problem, you own the solution.”― Rob Fitzpatrick,?The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you

We need to “ask them” the questions to make sure there is a product-to-market fit for the problems that the product or service is trying to solve.?

Sometimes it is hard to have difficult conversations because so many people can be so attached to the current strategy and not be willing or able to consider a change in that roadmap.?

• Thinking about the context, in a broader context helps to identify the?change journey
• The impact you want to create in the world takes a lot of work, we want to help create more ease, and shift from it being “hard” to feeling “ease”?
• The first concept Lawrence mentions is knowing where your customer is on that journey and whom you are solving a problem for, along that journey. Deep-diving into things that they are really passionate about and our ideal participant knows they don’t want to do a project, launch a business, or do something big alone.

Carlos mentions?Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, who helped bring the organization into the next phase, with shifts to service-oriented offerings.

• Culture Change is necessary for tech

?If the product or service doesn’t actually help the consumer, customer, or client – if you can’t reach these people, then it will be difficult.?

Value-proposition?is key to getting people to pay for your offer?

What is the cost of not thinking about the people the product or service is for and/or making assumptions about the marketplace?

It will create stress, anxiety, and negative experiences if the business doesn’t get to the right solution they solve, and if assumptions are the only development, it may cost a business a lot of money and time in building the wrong solution or the right solution for the wrong problem that people are willing to pay for.?

• Changing the course of thought based on new concepts, ideas, or strategies can lead to changing the organization and/or the person who is trying to create the solution depending on what is experienced, but Carlos says it’s important to have a vision, then being agile when progressing, processing, and designing the projects.

How to identify when a change is needed

• Easily bored or no longer enjoy tasks?
• Something feels “off” or not right?
• Stress with financial challenges?
• Growth or shift in identity?

When people are in “chaos” of trying to learn so much too quickly, they just need a simple message to create a change or shift in perspective.?

Habits help establish a plan each week and implement new habits by having others around you that you can tap into to share ideas.?

1. Using clarity in identifying needs
2. Learn what lights you up and build habits to support that change?

The ONE thing Laurence mentions:?

Not obsess about a solution, but hold it lightly, this will help you be open to change so that you don’t spend time and money building something that doesn’t align with your needs and values

Let go of the fear of failure and criticism?

Session 3: Making happy money - The Excite Strategy Summit

What does un-happy money mean??

• Money is the “good” feeling because money is needed, providing security, but it doesn’t “feel” good on the inside - knowing that you think that everything is going to be great in a project or role, but then things change for the worse?
• Recognize that you don’t feel necessary, meaning that if you left that job, then someone else could easily replace you. Over time that challenges your sense of self, and purpose.?
• Feelings that money brings when it is received, guilt, desperation, scarcity, and shame, are connected to the “how” or “process” in which we receive money, but are also associated with money.?
• How you relate to others → Un-Happy Money = Un-Happy Relationships?

What does it mean to make “Happy Money”?

Agency → Happy Startup School?

• Fun, playful experience shift?
• The best experiences are feeling good and making money?

Money does NOT equal happiness?

• Commitment and Belief - Some people can’t believe that they can make money by doing things that they enjoy working on or creating?

For many of us, we need to connect to the right people, tell the right stories, and identify the change journey for ourselves and for others.?

Clear and effectively communicate with the work will bring happy money - Carlos?

How can you be freer - stepping away from the familiar concepts; build it and they will come, or make it perfect then they will buy it,?

What do you feel, think, or experience with money??

Establishing the “goals” and the vision for making “Happy Money”?

• Human-centered goals that you want to achieve while NOT pushing money away, recognizing you can charge for these offerings.?
• If you can’t invest in yourself, you’ll have this story that will keep you from creating abundance in this process.?

We spend money to make ourselves feel better, alive, relaxed, motivated?

It’s about listening to others, and being aware of and skillfully can result in you helping others.?

Knowing your money story, how will this change you??

• Awareness helps connect actions to values?

What is “too much”??

Money, pricing, and the conversation start to uncover other things such as positioning, marketing, and knowing your ideal client?

You need to be accessible?

Yes… and someone may be able and willing to pay a lot of money, they value it so much, even if they can’t really afford it.?

Have honest conversations with clients about the offer, until you are able to justify it, it’s valuable, and it could be that they aren’t the right client for this offer?

Sustainability, Transparency with costs to make customers understand the expense → Ethical and logical questions while considering the feeling and experience that you have and that you want them to have?

Being open and transparent is okay but it will land differently with other people, so people might be offended, or start to question the value of your offer, so it is tricky.?

Section 4: Work Out Loud

What does Work Out Loud Mean??

• Talk about how we work, why we work, and not always giving answers, being okay if we don’t know the answers?
• Being “seen” by others?
• A shift in mindset from protecting ideas to sharing them for collaboration?
• What is your mission “question”??
• An invitation to connect with others for clarity for self, and early-stage market research, useful to ask potential customers, clients?

Sometimes it is the question that you ask, that leads to the shift that you need,?Minimum viable product?

Learning about who has done something that you are considering doing, has someone done it before you??

If you can practice talking about your idea with someone you don’t like, it will be more enjoyable and you’ll be more confident when speaking with people who you do like, or that like you?

How do you build trust??

• Being more vulnerable?
• Sharing thoughts and ideas with others?
• Showing up and telling others that you will do the work, then do it?

If people like what you say and what you do, they will share your work with others. - Lawrence

Trusting yourself, that you are making the right decisions, which is where working out loud can make the biggest difference, by allowing yourself to gain clarity through empathy and vulnerability.?

Co-Creation and Collaboration - This can only happen when you create trust?

Build this trust early in the process, so you can gain feedback or steer you in the right direction, this will speed up the progress, and minimize the pain - Carlos?

Freedom for Queers?

Sarah Massey: The Origin Story?

• Challenges with pricing the proposal for tech companies asking her for consulting services to increase the amount of talent within their organizations.?
• Are you spending $$ on hiring and firing people?
• Then the cost of a workshop isn’t that big of an investment for the company.?
• Learning through conversations, asking them questions, what is the cost of failure? What is the cost of having a “bad brand”??
• Challenges for the future of organizations that don’t address the problem?

At what cost… continue to ask that question.?

Learn more about this program?here.?