When Vision Meets Reality: Adjusting Your Plans to What Matters Now

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:08] So have you ever started the new year feeling kind of unstoppable, only to hit February and realize that your plans need a major refresh? I have been there to the ambitious goals that we set in January. They can seem so achievable in the moment, but life has this way of asserting itself. Unexpected challenges arise, priorities shift, new opportunities emerge. We have all been there, energized and determined at the start of the year, only to learn our reach exceeded our grasp. The question is, what do we do when we find ourselves at this crossroad? Do we rigidly cling to the outdated plans and try and force failure? Or do we have the courage to tear up the blueprint and start again, aligned with a new reality? My guest today, Charlie Gilkey, is intimately familiar with this entrepreneurial rite of passage as the founder of productive Flourishing. Charlie has coached hundreds of teams on goal setting and strategic planning. He's seen firsthand how even the most well-intentioned plans go awry, and in our conversation, Charlie shares his wisdom on what to do when you realize it's time to reconsider your goals. With insight gained from years of experience, he reveals how to take stock of where you actually are right now, not where you hope to be, and then create an updated plan aligned with that reality. So with Charlie's guidance, you'll learn how to rework your plans while honoring the past and creating the space for the emergence of new possibilities. So if you're ready to fearlessly examine where you are today and realign your dreams with your current reality, let's dive in. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is SPARKED. Hey, before we dive into today's show, you know, we've learned that a lot of our listeners are sort of at this moment where they're really exploring the notion of work in their lives and their next moves in their careers.

Jonathan Fields: [00:02:12] And if you are in that place, we talk about the SPARKED and the Sparketypes a lot on this show, this body of work that we've developed to help you really identify what makes you come alive and how to apply that to the world of work. We've heard from a lot of folks that they would also love some help along that journey. If you're curious, you can also find on our website a directory of Certified Sparketype Advisors who know this body of work and can really help coach and guide you through it. So we'll drop a link to the show notes in that right now. And if it feels interesting to you and you just like somebody to help guide you through this next part of your career or work journey, take a look and see if somebody resonates. It might be the perfect fit to help you along this next leg of your journey. Again, that link is in the show notes now. And we are back with another episode of SPARKED. This is a SPARKED hot take episode with Charlie Gilkey, esteemed brain trust member here, and we've got a topic that tends to pop up just around this time of year for a whole lot of people. Sometimes people fight it, some people accept it, some people have no idea it's actually happening, and yet it affects us both on a personal level and on a professional level. And if you happen to be an entrepreneur or founder, work for yourself. Private practice where so much relies on how you're showing up, it can really affect you in a lot of different ways. So, Charlie, I'm gonna turn it over to you to tee this topic up today.

Charlie Gilkey: [00:03:50] Well, first off, thanks for having me again and I'm glad you teed it up in that particular way, because around this time of the year, many people are thinking about how the year is shaping up and either hanging on to all those wonderful New Year's resolutions and and strategic plans and big goals of the year, and really doggedly attached to where they are compared to that or they're sleepwalking. I like life does what life does, and it's just happening, and those things don't even exist. We kind of remember doing them. But, you know, you're kind of or you're definitely most focused on the problem or bright shiny object du jour, like what's what's on the deck today and let's get that solved. And so I wanted to talk about this today so that for the folks who are knuckle gripping on that plan and really having a lot of agita about this with themselves, but also their teams to talk about how we can maybe shift that. Right. And for those people who are sleepwalking, not just to be like, it's okay to sleepwalk, but it's okay that life has happened, what are you going to do to sort of get back in the seat and drive forward? So that's kind of what we're teeing up today.

Jonathan Fields: [00:05:08] Sounds good. So let's let's talk about those two options. But before we even get there, let's take a step back. Because the thing that sets it all up is the way that so many of us enter the new year. I won't say most, but a lot of professionals and a lot of small businesses and founders, we operate on a on a calendar year. Um hum. Um, whereas larger businesses often don't do that. They, you know, their year actually starts in, you know, like September or something like that. But for the vast majority of people and, and I think when people think about their careers in particular and how they're showing up, we tend to look at January 1st as this marker, like a line in the sand. Okay. So we close the books on the year behind us. Maybe we do some reimagining, maybe actually we actually look back at the year and do a little bit of processing and review it and see what we've learned, and then close the books. And then so many of us kind of step into the new year with this fresh energy, fresh eyes, fresh, fresh ideas and aspirations. And we start to plan around that and we say like, oh, this is what I want to happen this year. By the time we hit December 31st, at the end of this year, this will have happened for me personally in my career, for my business. And we write it all down and sometimes we'll get more granular than that. We'll process it into weekly goals, monthly goals, quarterly goals. I know you have an entire beautiful methodology to really break it down into smaller chunks to make it more doable. And that new year, new you energy, as it's often called, tends to fuel us for the better part of a hot minute.

Charlie Gilkey: [00:06:39] I get 54 seconds.

Jonathan Fields: [00:06:41] Exactly, and then we get towards the end of January, and sometimes we're still we got to sell a chunk of that going, but oftentimes it really starts to fade. The complexity of the fact that we are actually still in the same business and still in the same job, and still have all the things that we had to do last year to do on a day to day basis, in addition to whatever the aspiration is for growth or change or accomplishment that we're now setting ourselves up for, then by the time we hit sort of like the middle of February ish, so often, as you described, we hit this moment where we're like, huh, um, I may need to do some rethinking here. Tell me more about your take on sort of like this, the setup window that we're we're talking about that leads us to this sort of like decision point.

Charlie Gilkey: [00:07:27] You know, this may be a hot take here, but I actually only accept the beginning of the year bit because it's so ingrained in our culture. It's, um, it's a chimera. Most of like we know that actually, there are at least two different New year energies that happen. One is around September, right? For many people, that's actually the back to work, back to school period. So there's a lot of new energy there. And then four months later we have a new year. New year again. Again. Right. And so it doesn't actually honor the biological beings that we are. And partially what's going on with this new year, new you stuff is biological sunset or solstice, things like that, that we're actually more key to than that. So yes, it's one of those things to where there's this collective ritual around it that we attach a lot of weight to that doesn't actually fit our organic business or organizational rhythms. Um, and that's part of the problem with this, and part of the reason why I wanted to have this conversation, because it turns out if the actual recycling of our brains and awarenesses and everything happens in February, well, if we continue to play the game of the new year, new you stuff, we can also play the game of saying, you know what, let's update that.

Charlie Gilkey: [00:08:48] Like we are actually recycling. We are. In the year and see what's real. And my general rule about this is, and it's going to sound obvious when I say it, when reality changes from what you thought it was going to be in your plan. Don't try to change reality, change your plan. So many people get stuck on like, well, we have to sort of force it and it just doesn't work, right. So part of this whole process of going into annual planning and thinking forward is and some of the flaws underneath that is that we tend to think of some magical time in the future where we and our teams have some magical amount of free, abundant space that's not filled with stuff. And then we write goal checks against that, that balance of things without realizing that for most of us individuals or teams, the reality is we wake up and 60 to a good 75% of our day is tied up into routines and fires of the day and so on and so forth. That is going to be true three months in the future, as much as it is today. That's not going away. And this is where you hear so many folks like myself say, we got to pare those goals down because it's not about your team's capacity or their can do or your capacity or can do.

Charlie Gilkey: [00:10:11] It's about the fact that at any given point that you project out three months, a year, two years, you need to think about the 50%, 50, 60, 75, how much is relevant for your business of just routine stuff is going to live there at that time. It might be different stuff than what it is right now, but it's still going to be there. So your window for change, I'll talk about I'll talk about this a lot when I do strategic Facilitations your window for change is not 100% of your capacity. At most, it's like a good 30, 35% of your capacity. And that's if you've got a team that's used to driving strategic projects forward, or if you yourself as an individual, are used to driving your best work forward, you may have a bigger window of change than that. But most of us need to plan that. Like that's the window we've got. What are we going to do with that window? Not how do we make these BS plans that assume we have 100% of a window for change?

Jonathan Fields: [00:11:15] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. And what's coming to my mind also is so in the northern hemisphere we're also in January. We are in the shortest days of the year. So, you know, the sun rises later and the sun sets, you know, at four something in the afternoon rather than closer to like eight something by the time we hit summer. And I'm wondering whether I've noticed just me personally, that even though I don't want to, I'm in the summer. I can work pretty long days. There's just something I have noticed that my sort of cognitive and creative capacity is really strongly tethered to my perception of it being daytime or nighttime. It's not a conscious thing. I don't will it to be like that, but I notice, like the sun drops behind like the mountain. I'm in Boulder, Colorado, and actually, funny enough. So where I am, we're right up against the Front Range of the Rockies. Like the we're literally sitting next to the mountain in Colorado, and the sun sets over the west side of that, which means that the mountain casts a shadow over my home office an hour before it actually sets.

Jonathan Fields: [00:12:24] So it gets it gets darker here. And I've noticed recently, and especially this January, I was really paying attention to it, that there's a there's a switch that flips in me that basically says, okay, it's time to dial down your the work that you're doing. Even though like I'm sitting there saying, if I look at my calendar, I'm like, oh, but I have stuff time blocked until six and my, my rhythms are saying, yeah, but no. And I've started this for the first time this year. Started to realize I really do need to account for this, you know, because if I and it's, it coincides with the time of year where I'd love to hit the ground running and do big things, but my, my physiology and psychology is literally saying, um, but you really don't have the capacity to do that right now. And it's been it's been something that, um, I've been grappling with in a way that I haven't really keyed into in the past. Do you see? Is this just a weird me thing, or do you see this with clients that you work with on a regular basis?

Charlie Gilkey: [00:13:20] I see it with clients that I work with all the time. So it's not just you. Um, and it's also there are studies. I'll have to send them to you after this because I wasn't primed. But the show that actually we are tied to these things. This is why like Apple designs their phones so that they have like the night modes and things like that. Because the change in the light actually in your eyes changes the way that your brain signals whether to be up or not. And so you're absolutely right that that shadow being cast is telling your brain and your body, okay, time to wind down. Time to get in somewhere safe. Time to bundle up. Time to tend the fire. Because that's how we are evolved. We have not outrun our our evolution yet, right? Night time always meant most of the people come back, come home, get around the fire, get safe. There are some people who are those wolves that are up late at night and sentinels at night. But most of us, we sort of bundle up and that's how we are primed, and that's what makes humans work. And so during this time of the year, if you're a leader or a manager, you're fighting against that or you're leaning into that. I hope I try to help people lean into that and say, this is just a time of the year where that happens. Let's plan accordingly, right? Let's stop trying to change people's nature because that's hard. It's hard to change people's fundamental nature. It's easier to lean into it and say, this year, maybe we're not going to be the hard Chargers as a team because we're all fighting this.

Charlie Gilkey: [00:14:53] I live in a Pacific Northwest, so I'm in Portland, Oregon. So yeah, I get it right. I get it in a in a real way. And this also Jonathan, this is my prime time of the year. Two birthdays, the 2nd of January I get I'm a Capricorn, I get that energy. And I'm just one of those things where I know for me personally, if I'm going to harness that energy, it doesn't happen after 3:00 in the afternoon. Right. It's how I and we've talked about this on the podcast. It's how I sort of win those 15 minutes in the morning so that when I am have my natural bright morning energy, the sun doesn't like the sun or the nighttime doesn't bother me like priming. But I'm going to lose the 415 430 fight, right? Um, I'm currently recording from a from a new office. And I don't have the artificial lighting on, because I know that the neon lights sort of trick your brain and get you off rhythm. So most of the day I'll work without it. So I'm following the natural sunlight. Um, because I know I'm going to be off sync if I have these bright lights on me and I hit for 30 and things are going to be off. So not just you. This is just humans, right? There are some of us, the wolves, the night owls that do thrive at night. And so I want to make room for that. But what I'm trying to say is that the majority of us are much more sensitive to that very thing.

Jonathan Fields: [00:16:16] Yeah. Now, I've definitely noticed that. So let's deepen into this now. Like so, so many of us that have hit this window. So like mid-February ish, where we're kind of like, all right, so I have these plans. I'm now in this moment a month and a half or so later and like, I'm seeing what's happened. And you describe these two reactions that often happen. How do we where do we go from here.

Charlie Gilkey: [00:16:39] So let's start with the people who are sort of got the death grip on the plan that they made three months ago, or however long ago. The chief question that you want to reconcile here is what truly matters now, what truly matters now. And it could be that things have changed, your team has changed, so on and so forth. But if you start with that, what truly matters now, it lets you look at that plan and say, you know what? 60% of us with good ideas that don't matter now or don't matter as much, so we're going to do the prudent thing and let that go or adjust them. So maybe you adjust a goal up or down, maybe you delete it. I can't say universally what to do because it's contextual in that way. But you start with what matters now and what is going to truly matter in the future. Because, you know, if you make some other plans, you're probably going to have two thirds of the stuff that's like, maybe, maybe it doesn't matter, but pick those two points. And then sort of the third question is what truly needs to shift, what needs to shift to get us back in. And going into that, not from a place of we just failed.

Charlie Gilkey: [00:17:44] We just screwed up. We did this wrong. Reality shifted. Right. You made a plan at a time that maybe didn't address your full reality. You update, you move forward. I have realized some leaders are going to have to negotiate with their with their bosses and things about those shifting goals. But a lot of times what I find, Jonathan, is that if we assess what matters now and have those good conversations with our team, with our bosses, with our other teams, we can align pretty quickly and still hit the things that truly, truly matter. What we end up letting go of is just the stuff that would be good to get to the bonus stuff, the inessential stuff. We can let a lot of that go. The trouble that happens is if we don't do this reconciliation now, we end up where we've sort of fed 5 or 7 goals just a little bit, but we don't have any major wins on any of them. And the thing that truly mattered, we got that 20% progress on. Whereas if we just would have pulled back and put more resources to that, maybe we would have hit 80, 90% and all feel better off than just kind of eking forward a bunch of different things.

Jonathan Fields: [00:18:56] So, I mean, what's coming up for me when you share that is is this really a now issue, or is this really a six week or three month ago issue, like should this actually analysis have been done from the very beginning, or is this something that tends we really we tend to only really come to realize once we've sort of like hit that point where, you know, like we're we've got to reassess and we're like, ooh, like maybe we were eyes were bigger than our plate.

Charlie Gilkey: [00:19:22] In an ideal world, we would have done it in the past. In an ideal world, we would have at the end of the year or whenever we started this planning, said, okay, let's get real about this. Like what? We would have done that review. So when I teach these types of planning processes, I always start with a reflection on the past. It's deeper than most people want to go into because past is prologue, right? I want to look at all of that and really acknowledge that, because a lot of times we see again that window for change. But when you do a real review, you see we don't have as big of a window for changes as we think. So we're going to have to choose better. We're going to prioritize better. So yes, in an ideal world we would have made better decisions in the past. It's mid-February. We can't take that back. Like we just have to pick it up and drop what we have to and go. And so I'm trying to use it as a tool for us to get back in alignment. And when we do our after action review, just realize, hey, when we made that plan, the critical flaw was not our capacities, not our competencies. It's just we were exuberant and we overshot. Okay, let's not do that again. Let's not do that again or let's do better. Right? We're still going to overshoot because we're humans. That's just a thing that we do.

Charlie Gilkey: [00:20:33] We're also going to overshoot. I'm just going to call it like it is, because a lot of organizational practices around goal setting are so broken that you can't show the actual growth that you're going to have. You can't show the actual trajectory. We have to go through this sort of social gaslighting of each other, right? That's a part of this process. And so I hate to say it, but you got to got to play that game. But the question becomes in February how you're going to acknowledge this with yourself, with your team, with those around you to say, okay, I know we had to do the thing then, and I know why we did the things then, but we're not going to hold on to that. We have to move forward. Let's move forward better. And the fun thing about doing this in February is because for many teams and organizations and. People. It's so off cycle that you don't have to play the normal game, right? It's this weird thing of where you can recalibrate. You don't have to do the strat planning process. You don't have to do the LRP 3.0 process. You can just get real and human and look, look at yourself and look at the people and say, okay, what's really going on here? What are we actually going to do? Let's let go of the rest. We made some mistakes. Doesn't matter. Let's drive forward stronger.

Jonathan Fields: [00:21:47] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So that's the one scenario. That's the sort of grasping onto onto the past plans. Um, the scenario like talk me through the other.

Charlie Gilkey: [00:21:58] I do want to throw in one piece. It also helps. Okay. This is the second part of your question. It also helps that you just have reality just pushing against you. You see like the the delusion that that you have, you're just like we are. There's so much cognitive dissonance between playing that game versus this real game, with reality just pushing on us that you have to make a change. So that also is helpful. Um, necessity is the mother of invention. Reality can be that way for us. Sleepwalkers. These are the folks that either made the plan and can, like, abruptly forgot about it, which is a lot of folks.

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:32] Or of course, I've never done that. And you've never.

Charlie Gilkey: [00:22:34] I've never done that.

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:35] Before. Nobody listening has never done that.

Charlie Gilkey: [00:22:36] Nobody listening has done that before. The only reason I don't do it is because I have practices around this. Otherwise it would be like, oh yeah, I did a thing.

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:43] I know I've occasionally made it happen.

Charlie Gilkey: [00:22:44] Yeah, I may have occasionally, um, or the end of the year was the end of the year. And a lot of businesses, like between a lot of businesses, organizations, routine teammates, being out between hard scheduling, between the sicknesses that happen. It's just one of those things that can easily slip. Um, so we roll back into the year, like I was having this conversation with a client earlier this week, Jonathan, where she was like, I just and she was like, well, I'm just not getting into my work. I'm just so far behind. And just like, I'm not getting to the things and I'm like, it's the 10th of the year, year of the new year where you've only had four workdays. It's almost impossible for you to be as behind as you think, right? With four days in the year, all things considered, for the for this person. And so for many companies, the real getting back into seat happens second, maybe third week in January. By the time everybody's back and off from being sick and you get your footing in. So on the one hand I want to say it's okay. And that's much of the same way that I said for the people who are death gripping those plans like you are where you are, right? The question is much the same. All right, let's not do the team shaming. Let's not do the individual shaming thing. What matters now? Where are we? Where are we trying to go? And let's make that happen. Same basic process is just how you have to let go of it. So the force, the first group has to let go of the plans that they made and all the commitments they made around that. The second group has to make let go of the shame and expectations that they should have done something that they didn't. Um, but you're going to end up in the same spot. What matters now? What truly, truly matters now? How do you get teams aligned around that? How do you get yourself aligned and how you drive forward?

Jonathan Fields: [00:24:27] So give me 1 or 2, sort of like immediate action steps to take to start down that road.

Charlie Gilkey: [00:24:36] So there are three different types of planners. And I have to say this because it's going to make it help me answer that question. So we talk a lot about top down planners. And these are people who can think, you know, the strategic plan to the annual plan or to the annual goals, to the quarterly goals. And they think from the top down, very common. Much of this type of stuff caters to them there at the bottom up planners, these are the people who don't have to work from what's in front of me to where I'm trying to go. And then there's a third group that really gets under, um, under supported, which are middle end planners. They kind of have to start with like what's going on, and then they zoom up to where am I trying to go? And then dump back down to like, okay, I got to change these things around. So it's going to depend upon which of those types of planners you are for top down planners, for the sleepwalkers. Right. It really is just looking at okay, start with the longest horizon of planning that makes sense for you and your team.

Charlie Gilkey: [00:25:31] If that's annual, go annual. If that's six months, go six months, go as far out as you can. Revise those goals. Set them based upon the information that you have, and work your way back down to get back to where you are right now to say what you should do now. Um, bottom up planners, exact opposite process. Where are you now? What's actually happening? What are the trends that you're seeing? What are the problems that you're solving? Scoot those out as far as you can in the future to sort of project where you'll end up and then walk yourself backwards. Um, and the middle end planners usually have to do a project assessment, right where it's like, what are all the things I'm working on right now? What sense do any of them make? Oh, okay. I remember it's tied to that initiative. Okay. That's what I'm doing now. What in those projects do I need to let go of? That's sort of the way you have to work through that. So I'm compressing a lot in a few minutes, but hopefully that's helpful. Jonathan.

Jonathan Fields: [00:26:27] Yeah, no, it's a great starting point. So as we wrap up, is there sort of one macro piece of advice that you'd like everyone sort of at this particular moment, you know, like you're whether whether you're the the Death Grippers onto the plan or the Sleepwalkers. Um, but you hit this moment. Is there one sort of like big idea or big question or big insight where that would be sort of a great starting point for anybody to at least plant the seeds of inquiry.

Charlie Gilkey: [00:26:55] Great planners are always changing their plans, and that's counterintuitive for people. For a lot of people, they think if you make a great plan, you don't have to change it. You don't have to update it. You don't have to iterate on it. It's actually the exact opposite. The best planners, the best people that are great at strategy, execution, and getting big ideas done are actually the ones that iterate and change and adapt. The plan is not a straitjacket, it's a guide rail. It's a guide rail. And when you have enough to get you and your team focused on what matters next, update it. Get after it. And when you're going into that too much, way too much land, pull it back. Get back to what you need and get after it again.

Jonathan Fields: [00:27:39] Love it. Charlie Gilkey, thanks as always for your insights and to our fabulous listening community. Thanks so much for tuning in. We'll see you here again next week. Take care. Hey, so I hope you enjoyed that conversation. Learned a little something about your own quest to come alive and work in life, and maybe feel a little bit less alone along this journey to find and do what sparks you. And remember, if you're at a moment of exploration, looking to find and do or even create work that makes you come more fully alive, that brings more meaning and purpose and joy into your life, take the time to discover your own personal Sparketype for free at sparketype.com. It'll open your eyes to a deeper understanding of yourself and open the door to possibility like never before. And hey, if you're finding value in these conversations, please just take an extra second right now to follow and rate SPARKED in your favorite podcast app. This is so helpful in helping others find the show and growing our community so that we can all come alive and work in life together. Until next time. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is SPARKED. This episode of SPARKED was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and Me, Jonathan Fields. Production and editing by Sarah Harney. On this episode.