00:00:01 Welcome to tonight's Saturday night, special episode 66 here on the inspired stewardship podcast. I'm Matt and I'm Jocelyn from the family life movement podcast. We challenge you to find a way to balance your work and your family. And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this inspired stewardship podcast by my friend, Scott Mader. But what I have discovered is when I use this,
00:00:40 I end up having some of the best years ever, even when it's a really challenging time in my life or in the environment around me, even then, I discovered that at the end of the year, I've had one of the best years ever. I've had more growth. I've had more approvement, I've achieved more goals. Welcome. And thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast.
00:01:04 If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling and the inspired stewardship podcast, who will learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world. And tonight, Saturday night special, I talk about the review,
00:01:35 reflect revise plan and execute cycle. I share why these are the key to making improvement and how they can fit together at different scales of your journey. Now, one area that a lot of folks need some help with is around the area of productivity. Getting not just more things done, but actually getting the right things done can be really, really tough.
00:02:07 I've got a course called productivity for your passion. That's designed to help you do this, and then to hold you accountable and walk with you so that you can tailor productivity, not just to be getting more done, but actually getting the right things done. What's more, we take the approach of looking at your personality and how you actually look at things in the world and tailor the productivity system to your personality.
00:02:36 Because the truth is a lot of the systems that are out there are written really well for somebody with a particular personality type. But if you have a different approach to things, they just don't work, but there's tools and techniques and approaches that you can take that will work for anyone. And we help you do that and productivity for your passion. Check it out over@inspiredstewardship.com
00:02:59 slash launch. So if you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you've heard me reference this review, reflect revise plan, execute kind of cycle, but I wanted to unpack it a little more tonight. So I presented on this idea as part of a larger presentation I did for the international financial coaches conference a few weeks ago. And I thought it would be valuable to unpack it here as well.
00:03:26 For those of you that are listening to the podcast, you know, this idea of a cycle first off, I want to execute or want to in, you know, make a point that this is not a line. This isn't about start with review and end with execute. Instead, this is a circle. And that means you can start it at any point.
00:03:46 So this is something that you haven't been doing. It's fine. You can start at any point in it. So let's say there's something that you've been doing. You've been executing on it. You've been working on maybe a habit, maybe something around fitness, maybe something around budgeting, maybe something around how you use your time. Maybe you've been working on a business idea or trying to get something off the ground,
00:04:10 or you feel like you have a calling that you need to be doing. And you've been working on trying to get it so that you can transition out of a corporate environment, whatever it is, maybe you've been working on something. And so let's take the idea here of working on a habit goal. Let's say in something that you're trying to do three times a week,
00:04:30 like take a long walk. You're trying to take a three mile walk three times a week. So as you execute on that goal, you want to spend some time each day that you're supposed to walk or once a week or both see there's a daily cycle, there's a weekly cycle. There's a monthly cycle. There's a quarterly cycle. Then there's an annual cycle.
00:04:55 You can do this at multiple scales of time. But after you've executed, you need to spend a little bit of time reviewing what happened. So for a habit goal, it's as simple as did you walk or did you not walk for something that's more complex? It may actually spend some time thinking about, and the three questions I like to use for reviewing is what went well,
00:05:21 what didn't go well? Or what did I struggle with? And what would I like to change? What should be doing differently? And that change is key because sometimes what you want to change is actually something that went well. It's possible that it went well, but you either want it to go better. Or you've identified that even though it's something that's going well,
00:05:41 it's not actually something that's very valuable for you and you need to eliminate it so that you can do something even better. See that's what happens in the next phase, the reflect phase, you begin to think about what did you review? What happened in the execution? How did that affect you? What was good about it? What was bad about it?
00:06:01 What would you like to change about it? And then you revise your plans. So maybe a five mile walk, turns out to be too long for starting out. And so you drop it down to a three mile, maybe on the other hand, instead of walking on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, you discover that Friday and Wednesday are really busy and it'd be better for you to walk on Tuesday,
00:06:25 Thursday, Saturday, there's ways you can change what's going on so that you can begin to adjust and have more success. Usually what happens instead is you start breaking the habit and because you're not revising anything, you're not redoing it. You eventually just fall off the wagon and stop trying. See the next phase is plan. This is the idea of actually sitting down and figuring this out.
00:06:52 What was your goal using the smarter goal kind of framework that I've taught before? And I'll teach again, the idea of sitting down and coming up with specific measurable goals that you're trying to achieve in a finite amount of time. This is the planning phase, and then you execute again and you keep repeating this. And what you'll discover is instead of quitting on your goals,
00:07:16 you'll slowly begin to make incremental improvement, see this kind of cycle, this kind of return, and try and do again and again and again, these are keys to continuing to improve over time. This is what keeps you from stalling out. This is what keeps you from stopping and allows you to move forward. Even if you're struggling, this is what keeps the frustration level down because you're constantly revising and seeing new ways to improve.
00:07:47 And again, I want to mention these fit at all different scales. This works for great big goals. This works for tiny goals. This works as something you do every single day. It only takes about five or 10 minutes at the beginning and end of the day to begin to implement this. You can do this weekly. I do mine on Sunday night.
00:08:06 This is when I execute and I plan for the next week. And I review from the week before. And then I execute on that week. During the week, each day, I do this little cycle for what happened that day. Each week. I do this cycle for what happened that week and the week before. And then at a monthly period,
00:08:24 I do this little cycle to reflect on what happened the month before and what do I want to achieve in the next month? And then each quarter I look at what happened the quarter before, what do I want to achieve in the next quarter? And then at the end of the year, I do this again is an annual planning and reviewing cycle. So I do this every single year.
00:08:44 And I mentioned a couple of episodes ago. I've tracked this back and I actually started a version of this 35 years ago. I will tell you it, wasn't exactly this idea then because I've let it grow and adapt and change over time as well. It's not something that I'm always successful at. I guarantee you, there are weeks where I've not executed on this.
00:09:06 There are days where I've not executed on this. There are even months and quarters and whole years where I haven't really successfully executed on this across at 35 year history. But what I have discovered is when I use this, I end up having some of the best years ever, even when it's a really challenging time in my life or in the environment around me,
00:09:31 even then I discover that at the end of the year, I've had one of the best years ever. I've had more growth. I've had more approvement, I've achieved more goals. I've gotten more things done and I've had in general, a better feeling as well as more Results I would encourage you as we come to the end of this fourth quarter for 2020 to begin to implement this cycle.
00:10:00 And don't wait until the end of the year. Don't wait until new year's resolutions. Begin it now because you can use it at any time to improve what you're doing. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast, as a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling.
00:10:33 If you enjoy this episode, please, please do us a favor. Go over to inspired stewardship.com/itunes rate. All one word iTunes rate. It'll take you through how to leave a rating and review and how to make sure you're subscribed to the podcast so that you can get every episode as it comes out in your feed until next time, invest your time, your talent and your treasures,
00:11:05 develop your influence and impact the world..