The Future Works Best When You Plan For It

THE THREE FUNDAMENTALS OF PLANNING

If anticipation is the act of looking forward, planning is the system of disciplined anticipation that sharpens your vision and drives your capacity to achieve it. It is simple but it isn’t easy. If you’re willing to implement these three fundamentals of planning, you’ll become someone who realizes their own dreams while helping others realize theirs. Here’s how Dr Diane McIntosh and I planned our new book, You Belong Here, and turned it into a blockbuster hit:

1. Declare Your Purpose Your purpose is your why. It’s the reason you’re doing something. At a basic level, your purpose in going to the store could be to buy milk, bread, butter, and eggs for breakfast. The importance you place on that purpose motivates action: your family needs that food and you love to cook for them. At a higher level, your purpose must inspire you every day and should be imbued with urgency, enthusiasm, and love. Some call it their North Star. A deeper purpose can be personal, professional, or shared with a team. Every day, Diane hopes her team starts work energized because they’ve agreed upon a shared propose: to change the world for people living with mental illness.

Why do you work every day? Is it just like going to the store, or does it bring something more to your life? Do you feel a gravitational pull toward something bigger or deeper? What do you love to do? What do you believe you could be great at doing? Where can you make the biggest contribution to your world? What would enable you to get the highest return on your life investment of time, energy, or treasure, so that when you come to the end of it, you can say, I gave it my all?

You’ll notice we said declare your purpose, not just define it. Declare means to make known in an emphatic manner. It means publicly announcing your purpose, making others aware and inspiring them at the same time. You can begin by sending your declaration to me at [email protected] .

When you declare something important to yourself and to others, you start building their belief in you. You invite them to trust you. You set yourself up for success if you’re totally committed to following through. You enable others to understand your why, and you open up their minds and hearts to believing in your message. You co-create credibility with them in advance of your deliverables. Yes, there is risk—you’re raising expectations. But the alternative is irrelevance. If others don’t know your raison d’être, and if it doesn’t inspire them, you’ll mean a lot less to them. Even worse, they might make one up for you that misrepresents who you are.

2. Declare Your Goals Your goals are the ends toward which your effort is directed. Like a soccer or hockey player, they are the net into which you’re aiming your ball or puck. They should stir your blood and stretch you to your max. When you think of them, you should be scared and excited in equal measure. Sometimes, the only difference between the two is the mood we’re in.

We have created the DART model of goal-setting:

• Definite—it must be clear and explicit.
• Audacious—it must be bold, daring, disruptive, and practical.
• Resolute—it must withstand doubt and setbacks.
• Time-bound—it must have a date by which the goal will be achieved.

Diane and I believe in setting twelve-to-twenty-four-month goals because the future is too unpredictable to think too far past that. Even as we’ve created this book together, we’ve adjusted what we’ve had to deliver on a rolling month-by-month basis. We’re always looking ahead, but not too far ahead. We can always see the finish line from where we stand—even if it moves along the way. We’re audacious but still practical. That’s how we protect ourselves against overwhelm or loss of direction.

Send me your DART goals.

3. Declare Your Strategy Your strategy is a disciplined method for consistently achieving your desired results. It’s the ingredients and formula that enable your success. It’s part art and part science.

Here is our strategy for creating and marketing this book:

1. Scan for the need.?Diane and I live in the world of treating mental illness and growing mental health. We study and understand the trends, the pitfalls, the science, the politics, the service providers, the technology, and the economics of the field. We identified the opportunity to combine our talents to satisfy what we believe to be a crucial need: creating a safe space of belonging that empowers people to take risks. We wanted to go beyond just facilitating psychological safety to fostering high-performance safety.
2. Play to our strengths.?Together, Diane and I are a formidable team. We complement each other perfectly. We have the same goals and purpose, but very different skill sets. She brings the science and I bring the art of marketing, motivation, and sales. Our combined offering is unprecedented. Based on our research, we believe there is nothing else like it.
3. Create a powerful value proposition. Every great strategy balances on a powerful value proposition that can be explained in a statement. Our value prop is: You Belong Here will help make people feel safe to take risks that help them win. The win represents fulfilment on every level: mental, emotional, social, and financial.
4. Design, produce, and package a phenomenal product or service.?While Diane and I created the raw content for this book, it needed another level of skill to refine, edit, and polish it. We hired the wizards at Page Two publishing to do that for us. Both Diane and I have published books through Page Two before, so we knew their genius. Page Two also consulted with us on the financial considerations of production costs, book pricing, royalties, and other publishing esoterica.
5. Distribute, market, and sell through every appropriate channel.?We’ve identified Amazon as our primary medium for selling the analog version of the book, Kindle for selling the ebook version, iTunes and Audible for selling the audio version. We will also sell direct to organizations as part of our workshop strategy. We will publicize You Belong Here through our personal networks, podcasts, and the traditional media with whom we have cultivated long-term relationships. We will also encourage every reader or listener to become a mobilizer on our behalf.