How do you move forward when you aren’t sure what to do next? How do you escape the trap of continuing to need more information before you make your next move? You move.

 

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Highlights

  • It’s tempting to want 100% clarity before taking action and yet that clarity often only comes by taking action
  • The benefits of perspective from other people
    • Coach
    • Mentor
    • Someone that’s not you
  • Deep planning can be a huge procrastination trap because there is no way to 100% know the future and unexpected things come up 99% of the time (that’s a made up statistic)
    • Strange to hear from a project manager
    • Overly-detailed plans can be a waste of time
    • I’ve rarely (never?) created a WBS (work breakdown structure) for a project
    • I’ve never managed a project to a Gantt chart
  • Planning is one of the best, sneakiest procrastination tools of all
  • The story of how John got into podcasting, met Stephen Warley of Life Skills That Matter and produced other podcasts
  • When you have an inkling
    • Start moving
    • Make it small
    • Define success in small ways
    • Give it time to grow
    • Keep showing up on a consistent basis
      • Even if you doubt it’s quality
      • Even if you aren’t sure where it’s going
      • Clarity comes as you iterate and following the inklings before you
    • Work in Themes
  • Mike Vardy has a whole methodology around theming–look for him in a future podcast
  • If you are working towards a larger goal, consider theming your:
    • Days
    • Weeks
    • Months
    • Year

Related Episodes

Credits

All songs licensed under Creative Commons

Transcript

This transcript was created automatically and may contain small errors.

Today we’re talking about the notion of starting even when we don’t have 100% clarity on the end destination or where everything is going. Now, this happens to me all the time. I know it happens to other people all the time. That’s why I’m talking about it. So I was having a conversation with someone the other day where they were talking about wanting to get into a new industry that they’d never worked in before.

They were enumerating all the things that they don’t have or don’t know, kind of enumerating all the limitations. And then they were, you know, talking about some of the things that they had. But we kept coming back to this place of Yeah, but I don’t really want to start really making that full emotional investment in trying until I really have the full picture, the full lay of the land, the full vision of where this is all going to end up. Interestingly enough, I was talking to Stephen Warley, who was on a couple, a few episodes back. We were talking about work and I was mentioning to him that, you know, a lot of times, and the same thing I share with this person, Sometimes you can’t get the clarity that you want until you start moving.

And it feels counterintuitive and it doesn’t make it easier to get started. Sometimes it makes it harder. But I’ve learned from my own life that 9 times out of 10, you just have to start moving and then the clarity comes. Sometimes making this move Requires an external force. Now that force might be a coach, it might be a mentor.

Sometimes my biggest successes are, it’s a person that’s not me. So it’s someone that’s not me that has a view into my life that can kind of see what’s going on, that can call this out or help me to just take that first step. Another potential trap here, and this may sound strange coming from a project manager, is that deep planning, like super, super detailed plans, can also be a huge trap here, procrastination technique as well. So I have a huge disdain for overly detailed plans because in my experience, this happens in life just about every day. No matter how reasonable or how well I think I know how something is going to go, I’m usually not 100% correct.

So if you’re familiar with the PMP, PMI, Project Management Institute, and their whole detailed planning structure or work breakdown, maybe you’ve heard of work breakdown structures. I’ve never created one in my entire life. I’ve never managed a project with a Gantt chart. I just don’t find those detailed, super detailed plans to— well, one, they take a ton of time to create. Then you go to execute them and within the first— say you’ve created this amazingly detailed plan for the next 6 months and it’s 100 different things.

My experience is that by the second or third day or the third or fourth step, The whole plan needs a replan. The whole plan is, you know, you’ve found cracks in it. There’s problems with it. You’ve got to keep reworking the plan. And if that super detailed plan isn’t really needed or needed as much as you think it is to get to your destination, then why create it?

And so that’s often been my approach to managing projects. We know the end destination. We know what we have to do. We know that these are kind of the major milestones. We know we need to hit those major milestones and whatever your deliverables are within those milestones, you’re the subject matter expert for them.

If you’re in the testing team, you tell me what you think the best viable date is for you to complete your testing, and then you test however you think you need to. If you’re writing code or fixing bugs, same thing. So just keep that in mind that There’s often this illusion that if I create this totally bulletproof, super, super detailed plan, then I’ll know where I’m going and what I need to do. And then I just need to execute that plan. Funny thing is, if you haven’t done it before, chances are you’re going to create a super detailed plan that doesn’t reflect the reality of what you need to do anyway.

So maybe you’re trying to get clarity on the bigger picture, or there’s something more you want in your life. In the case of this person I was talking to, they wanted to change industries and go into a completely different line of work than they had worked in the past. Maybe you’re not even sure what that is. Some things I’d be on the lookout for here are awareness, just a general everyday awareness. What am I interested in?

Where, what are the things that I naturally gravitate towards? Are there certain recurring themes? Are there different types of, are there certain types of events? Well, so for me it was podcasting. For a while, podcasting just kind of came up.

I was at a, I was at a WordCamp event, like, I don’t know how many years ago, and someone did a presentation on podcasting and it totally captured my attention because they showed How easy it could be. It was still difficult in the sense of getting started and executing because I’d never done it before, but it planted this seed in the back of my head of, ooh, wouldn’t it be cool to like have a podcast someday? So here’s how I moved down that path and here’s what it turned into. I read a book about Christianity that totally made me angry. I hit up one of my good friends.

I said, hey, would you read this book with me and discuss it with me? Help me figure out what is— Not working for me in this book. They totally agreed to do it. Again, inkling of a podcast, something in the back of my head. So I said to this friend, hey, how about if we record our conversations and maybe someday we’ll turn this into a podcast?

So again, I never had like this clear vision of like, this is the podcast, this is what it’ll be. It was just following that inkling. So we started recording them. We started recording our conversations. That forced me to figure out the different ways to do that.

Some were better than others. And over time, the quality improved. We captured these conversations for about a year. And then at a certain point, mostly at the encouragement of my friend, he said, hey, we got to start putting these out into the world. And so then that was like the next set of hurdles, which was, okay, how do I learn Audacity?

How do I start editing these things? How do I edit audio? Okay, now I got that down. How do I find music? And it was just a series of hurdles and different things that I had to figure out.

So time goes by. I edit these things. We begin publishing them. People start listening. We get some feedback.

We keep iterating. And then I was like, this is really cool. This is really a really cool process. And I saw a marketing meetup locally about Uh, podcasting. So I went to it and I learned some interesting things there.

Again, following those inklings. And meanwhile, at work, I’m doing— I think I’m managing projects at that time. I’m not— yeah, I’m managing projects. Has nothing to do with podcasting, but it’s something interesting. And this just continues to capture my attention.

So I go to this meetup on podcasting and I start following the people that were on this panel. And I start looking at their followers to see who they’re following. And one thing leads to another and I find out about an event called Podcast Movement that is in its very first year and is being run as a Kickstarter project. And the first conference is gonna be somewhere in Texas. It was Dallas?

I wanna say it was in Dallas. So I buy a ticket. I think it was like $80 or $100. I was like, well, who knows if I’ll go. Maybe I’ll use frequent flyer miles. Maybe I won’t go.

But it seems like a good cause. What’s $100? So I go to the conference. I meet a few interesting people there, other people that are interested in podcasting, because podcasting is sort of on the rise. And in the course of meeting people at that conference, kind of as I’ve mentioned on some other episodes, maybe the one about networking, I get to talking to someone about wanting to help people get unstuck.

This is like 4 or 5 years ago. And they say to me, oh, there’s a podcast about that. And I said, really? I said, yeah. They said, yeah, it’s called Unstuckable.

And so I looked up that podcast, and what do you know, it was done by this guy named Stephen Warley and another guy that I can’t remember his name. And they encouraged people to write in and say hi and all that. So I did, and they both wrote back to me, and I couldn’t believe it. Wow, these people have a podcast, they’re interacting with me.

Time— more time goes by, I’m editing more and more of these podcasts with my friend where we discuss Christianity, and now I’m probably up to 80 or 90 episodes or so, and Connected to this podcasting conference. I hear about this guy named Mike Vardy. I hear him introduced, or I hear him on a podcast with someone else discussing productivity. And then I find out that he has a podcast, so I start listening to his podcast. And I noticed that the quality is, it’s not so great.

Sometimes the music is not at the right volume, or the, you know, the, the audio levels between him and the guests are not the same. And I think, gosh, I figured out how to do all that stuff. Um, maybe I could make this into a— maybe I can make money. Maybe I could get— maybe this could be a business. I don’t know, maybe, maybe I could get the inside track with this guy.

So I signed up. He was offering a special for coaching. I did some coaching with him, and I offered to produce his podcast. And I totally was thinking it was just a volunteer thing. And he insisted on paying me something.

It wasn’t very much, but it was like, well, sure, why not? One thing leads to another there. Now I’m producing that podcast in addition to the other one. Fast forward another year or two, Stephen Warley, who I now meet in person here in Portland at an event, and we stay in touch, and he’s going to do a new podcast. Life Skills That Matter, and I end up producing the first 100 episodes of that show. And so now I’ve got this little podcasting business.

And then somewhere along the lines in there, this podcast is born because I want to talk about other stuff related to business and whatever else, and kind of also inspired, as I mentioned in the first episode, inspired by this idea of doing 100 episodes without any idea of what it’s going to be, where it’s going to go, but knowing that along the lines of this notion of experimentation, by the time I get to 100 episodes, I’m gonna have found a groove around something. So there you go. There’s John Poelstra’s overnight success that took around 5 years. Started with an inkling, had no idea what I would What it could be or what it could turn into and had no idea the doors and possibilities that would unfold. So, if you’re working on that thing that you’re kind of interested in, or you want to head in a new direction and you have no idea where to start, again, start looking at those— start following those little inklings.

Start doing something. Make it small. And define success in small ways and give it time to grow. And then keep showing up on a consistent basis, even if you doubt its quality. When we produced those first episodes, we thought it was pretty good, but we didn’t know.

And we didn’t know where it was going. We had kind of a rough goal of, let’s get to 100 episodes because then we’ll know that we totally are legit and that we really— Do it. Did this, but we didn’t know its long-term journey or trajectory. I’m still kind of involved with it, but not as much as I used to. Now I’m more focused on this show, and that’s totally fine.

I think the interesting thing is in doing this show and how this show has evolved, you know, I’m talking a lot these days about personal development and human potential and becoming a better version of yourself. Through coaching or any other number of approaches or techniques. Coaching— this came along after this podcast was going. And coaching, incidentally, came out of another inkling that I’d had several years ago, which is, this is something that was really transformative for me. I’d love to help other people do it.

I’ll take a class. So the organization that one of the coaches I previously worked with had attended and been certified through was called the Coaches Training Institute. So I started following their calendar. I bought their book. Again, following these inklings.

And I saw that they had some training. They had a class coming up in Los Angeles and unfortunately not one in Portland where I live, though they did— they have them all over, but Los Angeles had the best dates. And so I signed up for one of the classes. And thought, well, this will at least help me know if this is something that I’m even interested in, good at, whatever. And so I went to that first class following that inkling and fell in love with the whole thing.

Not only could I see the power of their training and techniques and coaching to help other people, but I also saw That it was helping me develop as a person in a huge way too. So that happened throughout the classes, of which there were 5, and then through the 6-month certification program and the 100 hours and the paying clients that you’re required to have and all the other rigor that went around with it— and all the other rigor that went with it continued to sharpen my skills, give me experience. And go deeper with this inkling that I’d had.

So you’ve got the inkling, you’ve got this thing that you think you want to do. You don’t have complete clarity on it. You’re going to start pursuing it here and there, but how do you really make traction on it? My best advice here is you just have to start iterating. You just have to start showing up.

Even if you don’t know where it’s going to go. Maybe it’s a little bit each day before you start work for 30 minutes or an hour. Maybe it’s getting up 30 minutes or an hour earlier than you normally get up. Maybe it’s theming your days. So Mike Vardy has this whole program called Time Crafting where he has created this kind of methodology around managing and planning your time that I use bits and pieces of it.

I don’t use all of it, but there is a lot of power when I have used it in terms of feeling like I’m kind of focusing and using my time in the right directions without, like I said at the beginning, overly planning things. So I hope this has been helpful. I hope this has shed a little more clarity on the notion that A lot of times we really can’t get complete clarity until we start moving. So if you want to talk about any of this stuff, something jump out at you that you love the idea of, or you think I’m just completely crazy and I’ve missed the mark, send me an email to REDACTED. I read and respond to all of them.

I’m also glad to get on the phone for 30 minutes just to— explore this topic more in depth or anything else that maybe you’ve heard on a recent episode that struck your fancy that you’d like to go deeper on, love to do that with you as well. So send an email and we’ll take it from there.

Thanks for listening to The John Poelstra Show. Notes, links, and all that other good stuff for this episode are at johnpoelstra.com/podcast. If you have questions or ideas around the podcast, send those to REDACTED.