How To Have It All…Without Planning It In Advance.

IF YOU DON’T HAVE IT ALL PLANNED OUT, YOU’RE FUCKED.

This seems to be an underlying — yet dominating — belief held by SO many people in business.

• “I don’t know HOW to grow my business to 7 figures…”
• “I’m not clear on where I’m going to be 5 years from now, so I’m frozen.”
• I’m totally lost; I don’t have my future figured out…”
• “I don’t know what I want to do next in my business; everything feels hopeless…”

I get it.

Seriously, I do.

I used to think this way too.

To an extreme, actually.

I’ve always been a planner.

I always HAD to have everything planned out BEFORE I began. (Like, I literally planned out what order people got their presents handed to them on Xmas morning when I was 7.

I would plan out in advance EXACTLY what order I would ski runs at the resort when I was 10.

I was giving myself panic attacks at 15 because I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up.

My mindset was…

“If I haven’t planned something out, HOW THE HELL AM I GOING TO KNOW WHAT TO DO OR HOW TO DO IT??”

So yes, I GET the fear that shows up when you don’t know what you want to do next.

In your life. In your business. In your career.

In fact, I lived with this fear, daily, from 2013 – late 2017.

See the photo here?

Just found these notes from me trying to plan out my next business. This was from January 2016.

I kept thinking, “If I could just KNOW EXACTLY what my next business would be, I could build it!! BUT I DON’T KNOW WHAT NEW BUSINESS I WANT TO BUILD.”

And it drove me crazy.

I always wanted to be clear on my destination BEFORE I started moving forward.

Interestingly enough, I was sooooooooooooooo backwards.

While visions and ideas and goals help orient us in the general DIRECTION of the future of our dreams, we can rarely imagine all the possibilities, opportunities, options, people, resources, feelings, developments, or synchronicities that will show up along the way.

WE CAN’T PLAN FOR EVERYTHING.

We don’t have crystal balls.

Even as recently as December 2017, I could never have planned out where #MindFix would be today. Yet here I am, with a successful business rapidly growing each month, changing people’s lives and having an incredible ripple effect along the way. Could NEVER have planned this out, even if I’d tried, just a couple years ago.
So.

How did I end up with everything I wanted when I didn’t have it all planned out? (Actually, when I literally had NOTHING planned out?)

I’ll share my secret with you.

Some people call it following their Hell Yeses.

Others call it following their highest inspirations.

I call it “letting go of having to see the end of my path before I start walking, and taking small steps toward what LIGHTS ME UP every single day.”

Sounds lovely, Erin. Very idealistic. But what the hell does that look like in REAL life?

I’ll share what it looked like for me.

Taking a step forward without seeing the end of my path looked like:

• Staying up late and reading about/studying concepts that fascinated me…because I WANTED to.
• Finding test clients to try out consulting engagements on–to see if I could get the results I thought I could AND to see if I’d actually like what I was doing as much as I thought I might.
• Paying close attention to what gave me energy and doing more of that (seeing clients get massive insights and change their lives)
• Dropping consulting work that initially sounded fun but ended up feeling tedious to me
• Starting to share ideas and concepts that fascinated me on social media.

The more I filled my days up with activities and ideas and concepts that LIT ME UP, the faster I realized I was moving down my path toward the future I’d always wanted.

I didn’t need it all planned out from the beginning.

I knew the general DIRECTION I wanted to go.

I DIDN’T have to know what my final destination was before I started moving forward.

For YEARS I’d clung to believing I had to have it all figured out FIRST, and THEN I could move forward.

But holy shit, I’d had it backwards all along.

All I needed was a general sense of a rough direction, and then to maximize my time with what inspired me.

Less than 2 years later I’m in a place that I absolutely, positively, 100% could NEVER have planned out for myself.

Being of the mindset that you MUST have it all figured out FIRST breaks people.

It almost crushed me, and I see it initially doing the same to clients who come to work with us.

It can cost you years of your life as you keep trying to plan your future down to the final detail and “getting ready to be ready”.

Just know: The journey CAN be filled with excitement even when you’re not 100% sure of where you’re ending up.

Take it from an ex-control-freak and over-planner.

There ARE other options and other ways to get to where you’re looking to go.

Promise.