For Coaches, Healers and Other Change Catalysts
Leaning into new, Emerging Work
Introducing A New Twist on the Usual Business Planning Process
A Springboard to Boost
Your 2019 Business Planning
a Virtual Group Retreat Created for You
On Friday, January 25th
Carol McClelland Fields, PhD, BCC
Your Retreat Guide
When a new level of your work is emerging, and some aspects are clearer than others, creating a plan for the coming year requires a different starting point than the traditional end-of-year planning process.
If you aren’t aware of this distinction, you are likely to invest a lot of time, money, and energy in a plan that you’ll soon abandon because it won’t be grounded in the truth of where you are with your new work.
I describe why this is true below.
The Time for 2019 Planning is Now
Throughout December the buzz in the business world is all about naming your intentions, claiming your goals, leaning into your yearnings, and identifying the stretches you’ll focus on during the year ahead.
If you are clear about the core focus of your work and confident in the impact of your offerings, it can be fun to consider how you’ll increase your income, enhance your offerings, and expand your reach in the coming year. That is if you are clear.
If you feel hesitant or unsure about the new elements of your emerging work and business, then sitting down to think about your plan for the new year is anything but fun. Cue the procrastination and avoidance!
Why Traditional End-of-Year Planning Won’t Work For You this Year
“Carol’s system for guiding you to clarity is simply brilliant. Thank you Carol for this new clarity, my heart thanks you, my business thanks you, my life thanks you. (Full testimonial below.)”
When you are evolving your business in some way — adding a new program, reconfiguring your offerings, bringing a new level of your work forward, or starting a new venture — it’s perfectly natural that your next steps are fuzzy.
Your lack of clarity about your vision and your next steps is a natural phase of evolving your work.
Don’t take this lack of clarity as a sign there’s something wrong with you or your business
You are right where you need to be, discovering the focus of your new work.
Though temporary, your current lack of clarity does make it difficult and frustrating to engage in the traditional business planning process.
How do you lay out your offers if you are still in the process of defining your emerging work?
How do you forecast your income if you aren’t confident about your offers or your pricing?
How do you design your marketing strategies if you don’t know what you are selling?
How do you plan out your sales strategies if you aren’t sure what you are selling, how your offers will be structured, or how you will price your work?
As you can see, without a clear, reasonably stable vision of your current work, it’s impossible to come up with viable goals that make up a traditional plan for the new year.
Using the Vision of Your emerging Work
as the foundation for A detailed
Traditional plan for the New Year
is Frustrating at Best!
It’s possible that the very act of embarking on a business planning process is triggering a range of resistant responses. Do any of these responses feel familiar to you?
Feeling anxious or nervous
Increased sense of fear or worry
Vague, unsettling sense of uneasiness
Spinning in action without making progress
Frustrated you aren’t moving forward faster
Too many ideas competing for your attention at one time
Experiencing a definite lack of motivation, procrastinating
Can’t make important decisions or choices about your next steps
A diminished sense of excitement, because you aren’t able to take action
What if your body and intuition
are spot on in their assessment
of your next step?
What if you really aren’t ready to plan your business year right now?
What if now is not the time to nail down your goals for 2019?
What if there’s something else you need to focus on first before you try to plan?
Listen and honor the messages
you are receiving.
Stop pushing yourself to
plan for the New Year using
the traditional planning process.
New Twist #1: Focus First on Defining Where You Are Right Now
Rather than rushing straight into planning mode, your first step is to assess where you are right now with your vision. Be honest and forthright with yourself. Lean in to all the nooks and crannies of your work and business. Be curious and open to seeing what you discover.
During the Springboard Retreat I’ll guide you through a series of questions to help you discern where you stand with your emerging work right now. Your answers will help you discover:
What elements of your vision are solid? You know these aspects of your business reflect your truth without a shadow of doubt.
What’s feeling too vague, soft, or shaky? You hesitate or question your status in this area.
What’s non-existent? You realize that there’s a definite gap in this part of your vision.
Just this information alone will help you gain new insights about why you’ve struggled or hesitated to move your emerging work forward.
It’s quite likely that the gaps and soft spots in your vision are the key source of your discomfort when it comes to taking action and making plans for the year to come.
When you feel unsteady or confused
about the Vision for your New Work…
Then any plan you create
will feel shaky and tentative.
Developing Your Plan from
a Place of Clarity is Essential.
New Twist #2: Discerning Your Best Next Step
“Carol has a finely-honed ability to take her clients on deep yet productive dives into more clarity. This session with the clarity questions offered me a big-picture perspective and showed me specific places to put my focused energies for shifting and up-leveling to achieve the next level of clarity. (Full testimonial below.)”
When you see precisely where you are clear and where you aren’t clear, you have information you’ve likely not had before. Each question you’ll answer within the Springboard Retreat maps to a specific part of the journey to evolve your new work.
With this knowledge about your emerging work, you can now pinpoint where you need to focus to clarify and strengthen all the elements of your business foundation that have been soft or non-existent. This step is a must if you hope to flourish in your work and business.
Although it may feel like you must set your goals and lay out the year ahead so you can get on with building your business, if you try to take that route with gaps in your vision, the resulting plan will reflect the instability of your vision.
The fastest, most effective way to grow your business is to spend time shoring up your foundation and testing the feasibility of your new ideas before you attempt to put big growth plans in place. Your answers during the retreat will provide you with insights about the best ways to use your time, money, and energy to make progress with your new work and your business.
When you know the foundation of your business
is strong, viable, and financially feasible,
you’ll be able to envision
your future with Far More Ease.
Your Enhanced Vision and Foundation will
naturally inspire more confidence in
yourself, your body of work, your offers,
and your business building strategies.
With this Foundation in Place
You will be Ready to Plan for 2019
with Renewed clarity, Creativity, and Commitment.
Join me for the Springboard Retreat
to Boost Your 2019 Business Planning
During this virtual group retreat I will guide you through a series of questions on four key themes (see schedule below) to help you discover:
Where you are confident about your vision
Where you feel shaky about your work
Where you have gaps in your business vision and foundation
After the retreat I will help you use your answers to create a road map for filling in the gaps so you can successfully and effectively develop your new work and your business. To make sure you are clear about your next steps, I’ll offer two ways you can be in touch with me about what you discovered during the retreat so that I can give you some personalized my insights about your next steps. This follow up conversation is included in the price of the retreat.
How Does the Virtual Group Retreat Work?
Each hour we’ll focus on one of the themes that make up your vision and foundation:
Hour 1: You – Touch base with the roots of your personal foundation and explore what is most important to you right now.
Hour 2: Your Body of Work – Reconnect with what is at the core of the work you do. Recommit to what’s true for you and discover what’s ready to evolve.
Hour 3: Your Offers – Review the way you share your work to discover where you feel confident, where you are holding back, and what’s ripe for evolution.
Hour 4: Your Business Building Strategies – Explore the best ways to engage people in your work while growing your reach and impact.
Closing: During the final gathering, you’ll have the opportunity to synthesize what you’ve discovered about the state of your vision and foundation. I will also share several guidelines to help you sort out your best next steps and two ways you can confirm you are on the right track with your plans.
After the Retreat: I’ll send you an email that spells out how you can reach out to me for personalized insights about your situation. This option is included in the price of this retreat. Watch the deadlines so you don’t miss the opportunity to receive confirmation about your next steps!
The Nitty Gritty Details
We’ll begin at 10 am Pacific | 1 pm Eastern and continue through to 2:30 Pacific | 5:30 Eastern. See below for the two retreat dates.
Each hour will include a 20 minute conversation on Zoom. After a brief check in as we gather for the next hour, I’ll share a short tip or strategy that will give you a new context for the questions you’ll be answering privately during the rest of the hour.
What Clients Are Saying…
The questions I’ll be sharing with you in the Springboard Retreat come from my private Clarity Boost Sessions. As you’ll discover in these testimonials, the questions open the way to deeper clarity and understanding of exactly where they were and their next steps.
“Carol’s system for guiding you to clarity is simply brilliant. She deconstructs aspects of your vision in a way that helps you see how the different layers lead one into another. She highlights what is clear and spots what is fuzzy, what is missing and what is dominating. You end up seeing how the whole can flow, how to find the next steps, how to build from a place of clear authenticity and solid authority.
I am gobsmack-thrilled at what a single session has yielded. Her yin and yang marriage of insights and intuition, together with that uncanny layered approach, was like a journey of discovery into past and future, ending in a grounded self. I am excited and looking forward to evolving a more soul-centered business. Thank you Carol for this new clarity, my heart thanks you, my business thanks you, my life thanks you. ”
““Carol has a finely-honed ability to take her clients on deep yet productive dives into more clarity.
The clarity questions she asked during our session together allowed me to verbalize both new insights about how much more clear I’d become from earlier conversations, but also to articulate certain points where I was “stuck” or didn’t feel like I was 100% clear.
One of the greatest gifts of this session was that, in the container that Carol and I co-created and held, I was able to speak in terms of percent of clarity that I now felt on what had been long-troublesome issues. Most importantly, I could do it matter-of-factly and without feeling the guilt and shame that previously had been wrapped up with those issues and my lack of clarity around them.
This session with the clarity questions offered me a big-picture perspective and showed
me specific places to put my focused energies for shifting and up-leveling to achieve the next level of clarity.
The questions elicited, together with Carol’s insightful commentary, a way for me to recognize and speak about things that I had long experienced as complex, tangly, and rambling. Finally I could articulate them unapologetically with a new level of streamlined simplicity and clarity.”
Knowing the current state
of your Vision and foundation Will
Show You exactly where to invest your
time, energy, and resources in 2019
to create a flourishing year
for you and your business.
Register for either Retreat:
Friday, Jan 25th
We’ll begin at 10 am Pacific | 1 pm Eastern and
continue through to 2:30 Pacific | 5:30 Eastern.
All sessions will be recorded. If you are unable to attend live,
you are welcome to register and listen to the
recordings after the virtual retreat.
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