Who will your business be when it grows up?
Most cultures have a “rite of passage” from childhood to adulthood.
Whether primitive or ceremonial, these rites always include these three stages:
- Separation from the tribe.
- Liminality (“the change”), usually including some kind of test.
- Reintegration into the tribe as a different person.
Now, you might be picturing a teenager in the Amazon, painted white and left to kill or be killed. But a new soldier in the army follows the same process. So do college kids.
The covid crisis is our generation’s rite of passage. It’s a primitive test: Separated from our tribe, we’re sent out into the jungle to prove our value. And we won’t return as children.
This is our best opportunity to make changes. This week, I’m going to outline how change is made. We’ll start with your own vision quest.
“Three things in life: your health, your mission and the people you love. That’s it.” —Naval Ravikant
Because this process is step by step and requires a lot of note taking, I’ve created a worksheet to help you:
You can also watch my webinar here: Your Gym 2.0.
Your Perfect Day
Since 2012, I’ve been asking gym owners “what is your Perfect Day?” and using that exercise to paint a picture of business success for them.
Most said something that amounted to “freedom of time and money.”
We all just got to test-drive our Perfect Day for six weeks. We were at home 24/7, we had complete time freedom, and most of us kept some kind of income.
Now it’s time to ask, “Is this the life I want?” And if so, how can you make it permanent?
First exercise: knowing what you do now, how would your Perfect Day change?
Would you still stay home or would you prefer to have somewhere to go in the morning?
Would you live where you are? With whom?
Paint the clearest picture you can. Leave nothing out.
Second exercise: Using your Perfect Day as Point B, start to map the path backward to where you are now—Point A.
Follow the vision-strategy-tactics model: You have your vision. What are the big things that have to change in your life to get you there? These are your strategic moves.
Then, how will you execute on each of those strategies? These are your tactics.
For example, some gym owners love staying home with their kids. Their Perfect Day has been updated to “shelter in place, plus ice cream and parks!”
Their strategy will be to shift mostly to online training over the next several months.
Their tactics will be to follow the 11-step plan I outlined in “How to Move Entirely Online.”
Other gym owners have different definitions of their Perfect Day. Most are in between. All gym owners have to do the exercise for themselves.
What Next?
In the next article in this series, we’ll talk about how to identify and take action on these tactics.
It’s almost mandatory to have an objective eye, like a mentor, to guide you through this. I can’t do it on my own. But if you want to DIY, I’ll give you the steps in Part 2.
