Potent Expression Coach

If you are looking for a coaching group that helps you find your way in your business without pushing you or shaming you to do more than your capacity or do things that don't feel right to you, consider joining my Group Trueing Adventure starting Monday, October 3.

I invite folks to join the group twice a year and one of those times is now through October 3!

Three group calls a month, weekly email exchange with me, support to develop your messaging, guidance on your business design and marketing and more.

$600 a month for six months.

Learn more and apply here: https://isabelparlett.com/group-trueing-adventure

Isabel Parlett | Step In to Your Potent Expression Innovative Business Owners ~ Make Your Business Your Deepest, Truest, Wildest Expression You Have a Choice How You Show Up in the World You can be unapologetically yourself. Or you can be a watered-down cardboard cutout that fits someone else's expectations. You can write searing articles and posts....

While I am not hot on Planning, I absolutely believe in Year End Reflection, and harvesting the insights and wisdom of what you’ve already lived. Letting that be the solid ground you stand on, the impulse that guides you moving forward.

Annual “Planning” Day is no longer, but in its stead, I’ll be doing a Year End Reflection Ritual, drawing on some of your favorite parts of the Annual “Planning” Day (and the Year End Digestion process) on Friday, December 17 from noon to 4:30pm ET (with an optional bonus Year End Inventory Day on Friday, December 10).

Pay What You Are Inspired. Suggested payment of $180.

https://isabelparlett.com/annual-planning-day

Why I’m Not Big on Planning This Year

As many of you know, I haven’t been an advocate of traditional planning for decades. You know, the “pick your goals, then break down the action into quarterly, monthly, weekly action steps.”

For years I’ve known that life doesn’t work like that. We don’t work like that.

When we start, we may not know what we need to do to get what we want. What we think we need to do might not be the best way to get what we want. And most of us don’t get up every day and do the same things, the same way, week after week, with the same energy and focus.

While discipline, structure, and useful habits are wonderful tools to help get what we want, and are tools we should use to get what we want, there also has to be room in our plans for making new discoveries, experimenting with alternative approaches, and reprioritizing what gets our attention. None of which go very well with long-term planning.

I tell my clients (and my young adult son) that we have to remember that as humans, we are TERRIBLE at predicting the future. We are TERRIBLE at estimating how long things actually take. We are TERRIBLE at anticipating the obstacles and challenges that might get in our way. We are TERRIBLE at estimating our bandwidth.

And if we think we are supposed to be good at those and we don’t stick with our time line, and things don’t go how we expect, we beat ourselves up.

We like to think our mighty minds can figure things out. Can chart the course, solve the problem, map the territory. But often we can’t.

And rather than take that as a sign of failure, or weakness, maybe we just laugh at how desperately we want to manage and control our futures. We have compassion for our attempt to stuff our deepest desires into neat and manageable boxes.

And then we show up each day with a fresh mind, ready to do what we discern what matters most.

To be honest, 2021 kicked my ass. Ground me into the dirt. 2021 made a mockery of my plans and intentions. 2021 held me down until I surrendered. 2021 broke my heart and my spirit.

Until I accepted that while I can wake up and manage myself each day as best I can, life might have other plans. Other assignments that took precedence over what I thought I was here to do. That the further I tried to get out into the future, the more likely what I planned and what happened would diverge.

Have desires. Absolutely. Big ones. Have intentions. Yes, yes. Hold them dear. Figure out your next step or steps and take them. Sure thing. Day after day.

But plan . . . map out over a longer period of time what you think will happen when, what you think you will do when. I just don’t think it’s a good use of time or mental energy. It risks putting you at odds with yourself. When things start to shift a few degrees, so much of what you mapped is no longer relevant.

Stay closer in. Stay close to your heart, your heat, your passion. Commit to what you care about.

But stay here, stay now. Focus on today, tomorrow, this week. Hold next month, next year lightly.

Stay nimble. Be prepared to change directions, change course, change strategies. Change your expectations about what you do today or tomorrow.

And stay loving yourself and your beautiful heart and all the things you want to feel and experience in this lifetime. And let that guide you.

The price of having an original business is that we have to work a little harder to tell the story of what we offer, why it matters and why someone might actually want to pay us for this thing we want to offer them.

When you have better words, you no longer have an excuse for hiding out or for playing small. It’s much harder to back away from doing the work that you’re called here to do. And it’s much harder to come up with an excuse not to take some of the sometimes scary and uncomfortable steps of putting yourself and your work out there.

In other words, it becomes much harder when you have the right words to choose the discomfort and the discouragement of not being understood, of not having business, of not knowing if your business is viable, over the discomfort (and exhilaration) of being out there in the world doing the work that you’re meant to do.