“A vision without a strategy remains an illusion.”
– Lee Bolman
Everything you do is a strategy. Any outcome is a result of the strategy you have run.
Strategies create our results. If you want to create change, you must understand the strategy.
You can model strategies to get the results you want.
By taking the emotion away and implementing a proven strategy that can be trusted, you are setting yourself up for success.
Consider making a cake. You need the right ingredients in the right order to make the cake. Change any ingredient or part of the sequence, you don’t consistently get the same cake.
Same goes for driving a racing car or choosing a fine wine. There is a process – a sequence – that must be followed to achieve your desired outcome consistently. And that’s what we are talking about here – consistency. Over and over again.
Are you the expert in this field? Do you consistently get the results you want?
If not, you will need to let go of your ego and biases and follow the strategy.
You can tweak the strategy once you have implemented it successfully – but you must be able to consistently replicate it first.
Everything We Do Is A Strategy!
As we have already discovered, modelling is the process of understanding someone’s beliefs, physiology and mental strategies to achieve the desired result. The strategy is the mental sequence used to achieve the goal.
Everything we do is a strategy. It’s not just happening. It’s a strategy. It’s a choice we have. The strategy we run is our choice.
It’s the pathway to self-leadership and owning our results.
It’s the series of steps we take in order to create an outcome.
If you want to be sad, focus on sad thoughts and the things that have gone wrong.
If you want to be happy, focus on the things you are good at, the things you love, people who love you – focus on where you have choice.
So, we do happy and do sad.
If you want to get great at health, learn the strategies for great health. Same goes for relationships, wealth, career, business.
We need to access what really works and install it in ourselves and take action.
Knowing our strategies creates an awareness of how we achieve our results.
A strategy is the steps we take that gets the outcome.
Our strategies are the internal keys to success. If we understand how we internally process a strategy, then we can change it, copy an effective one or create a new one.
A strategy is made up of two elements – internal (what we tell ourselves, feel, see, remember) and the external (what happens around us).
So it starts internally.
Developing Your Strategies
In the previous unit, we discovered what it is that you want to model, and who has what you want.
We also know our goals and understand about benchmarks.
Now it’s time to actually work out the strategy they run. Those small steps in each category of their actions that create the outcome we want.
For example – we want to model excellent health and fitness. We now know what we want, who has what we want and we are modelling their strategies.
But it’s not simple.
There are different categories to the action taken.
For health and fitness – there may be nutrition, gym, sleep and then each of those categories are broken down further – nutrition is types of food, when to eat, how to physically eat well. The gym is how often, how long, what you do. Sleep is the routine before, what for how long, and so on.
What is their mindset, their behaviours, their internal processes that creates the outcomes?
How Do You Elicit A Strategy?
One of the simplest methodologies used to elicit someone’s strategy.
TOTE = Trigger + Operate + Test + Exit.
We can apply this to anyone with any strategy.
Now, let’s consider the person you are modelling and their strategy.
We must first find their trigger – or event that kicks off the process.
For example, it might be first up in the morning and they see their gym shoes. That’s the trigger it’s time to exercise. They see something. What else happens internally? Do they tell themselves something? Or do they feel something?
These are all clues about how they run their motivation strategy.
Next you write down the operation of the strategy precisely. Step by step. Use the exact process you are testing. Use their thinking, feelings and actions. What’s happening internally and externally?
Then you test it. Did you get the results you wanted? That’s feedback. What are your results telling you?
Go back and operate it again. Learn more. Confirm the outcome and benchmarks you are after. What works and what doesn’t work?
Who do you need to be in order to implement your new strategy?
Your Turn
Let’s do another exercise together.
Download the workbook from the ‘Materials’ tab at the top of this page.
What new strategy do you want for your success?
Who has what you want? What’s best practice?
Focus on where you get the best outcomes.
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Modelling