What are you aiming for in life?

The value of a purpose-led Game Plan:

I love a good game plan! I mean, don’t get me wrong; I hate being boxed in, like to ‘play what I see’ – making the best decisions I can in the moment, and am nothing if not practical and focused in my approach to life. Ironically perhaps this is why the right game plan for life – a game plan with purpose, helps me thrive.

We expect to see a strategic plan for a business, a periodized plan for health & wellness (whether nutrition, physical activity / both), certainly for our favorite sports teams and athletes generally. So, why wouldn’t we take the time to map out the most important aspects of our life.

In our work with organizational leaders we design and provide game plans for individuals and teams, which all fit on one page. The idea is to set the high-level direction of where we want to go, articulate some clear milestones along the way, fuel the journey with meaning (often the missing part) and set ourselves parameters as to how we can be at our best (and continuously get better) in getting there. From there, we lean into strengths, develop perspective, rituals and routines to establish purposeful habits and polish them off with skills (our two additional articles this month).

Why have a purposeful game plan for life?

If a sports competition deserves a game plan, if you have a financial plan, or contribute towards a business plan – you’d better believe you’ll be better off with game plan for your life. Honestly, what could be more important, assuming you’d prefer to live and lead an intentional and meaningful life, and not just let life happen to you?
Our “One Page Purpose Game Plan” (fig. 2 below) articulates outcomes from the breadth and depth of perspective our participants explore through an in-depth series of self-reflection exercises, workshops and coaching sessions. These help unearth common themes around:

• · their passions – which tend to sit at the intersection between things they enjoy, are good at, believe in and care about;
• · their desired impact – the meaningful difference they want to make for themselves (Me), those they surround themselves with (We) and beyond (World); and just as importantly
• · their application – what they want to do about it.

Which, are the three elements of our PurposeFused purpose discovery model (fig. 1):

Fig 1. PurposeFused: Purpose Discovery Model

These themes provided the grounding anchors, north star and performance barometers that help guide their journey to their ultimate destination.

If this all sounds a bit ‘out there’ – I would challenge and encourage you to go through the process and enjoy the benefits. It’s arguably the most valuable thing you can do to identify and clearly articulate what truly matters most to you, how, when and why you at your authentic best and the legacy you want to leave on a daily basis (not the one you think about when you retire because you’ve not nothing else to do). This redefines how you spend your time and energy, how you best blend together the various spheres of your life, how you infuse your best self into the things that matter most in this season, how you lead, take care of yourself, support others, drive progress, improve performance and optimize your impact.

What should be in a Live with Purpose game plan?

Per most Game Plans – we want a clearly articulated vision of where we want to be, a foundational purpose of why this all matters, some milestones of what we need to get done at various points to pull us forward and some behavior parameters to guide and focus how we show up at our best.

We’ll use our One Page Purpose Game Plan from our Live and Lead with Purpose program, as an example. I’ve included a screenshot of my personal one pager, so you can refer to the content examples under each of the 7 heading below:

Fig 2. One Page Purpose Game Plan.

A. Where we want to be:

1. Aspirational Dream – is where we start – the ultimate, ideal view of the world you’d like to live in. It’s the furthest thing a way and for many the hardest thing to define. It’s not realistic or achievable necessarily, just awesome. It should reflect what you care about the most and are committed to nudging forward every day. The reflective process for considering this is to project forward how you’d want to be remembered, across the various spheres and by the people in your life.

2. 10 years out we look at Impact, by Me, We, World:

· Me: Having been your best self between now and then, how do you want to feel and why? (see my EG)

· We: What positive outcomes would you like those you have interacted with the most to say about you (in terms of how you have helped them experience these outcomes). (see my EG)

· World: What sits beyond your we? Is there a specific cause you are passionate about, a community initiative you want to bring to fruition, a movement you want to contribute to? If so, what does success look like? If not, if you looked down from 10,000 ft, what would your We’s We world look like (we call this your segment of the world)? What words would you use to describe how people would be interacting? (See my EG)

3. 5 Year Destination: This could be a state of life, kind of like an affirmation statement of how you want to feel and you’ve been able to achieve in 5 years time – the most meaningful pieces; as focused as a bucket list experience / challenge; or as simple but material as the one biggest thing you must get done in the next 5 years (the latter being how I expressed mine). In addition to being material, it should be expressed in a way that ‘you know if you’ve gotten there’ – hence ‘destination’.

B. What we want to achieve:

4. From here, some tangible goals: 3 x 3 Year Ambitions. These should be three things you’d be proudest to have achieved and are the most excited to go after. They should represent your whole self (so tend to include combinations of personal / professional / community / philanthropic). Make these SMART and outcome based, so what would success look like in this area for me and how would I measure it in 3 years?

C. How I will be at my best:

5. Principles: These are the behaviors that bring to life your non-negotiable core values, in combination with any aspirational values you’d like to exhibit more often. Up to 7 total. These are your own behavior code that represents you showing up as your best self.

We do a lot of discovery work with leaders around past experiences – at their best, at their worst. How others would describe them at various stages of their life, we dig into the concept of Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi), to define and benchmark experience against those that are optimal. These help unearth some of our values and more importantly, the behaviors we exhibit which define us at our authentic best. Projecting forward to Aspiration and Impact, we can also identify principles we’d like to adopt more often to make us even better, in getting there.

6. Focus: 3 things you keep front of mind every day to keep you on track with where, what and how – they provide alignment and connection across these areas. Per the screenshot mine are “Inspire, Connect, Advance”. That means – inspire someone daily, connect them to resources (people, knowhow, programs, models) and support them in taking steps forward.

D. Why this all matters:

7. Purpose: Last but not least, we focus time on people’s purpose statements. This sits as the foundational element to the game plan. In short, these statements should be a powerful and punchy sentence that reflects 3 core components: i) what you’re doing when at your best; ii) how you uniquely do it; and iii) the meaningful difference that makes (not necessarily in that order). The purpose embraces and condenses all the aforementioned elements in the One Page Purpose into what could be considered an umbrella statement – but importantly one that is 100% authentic to us. It’s the plan that brings the purpose statement to life, and the application of how we do that this is unique person-to-person.

My purpose (see template fig. 2) reflects the single biggest passion I have which is inspiring people, and that I uniquely (and authentically) like to do that by creating things (often programs / experiences) and engaging people in those things, and that ultimately – these things help folks take steps forward on a journey to be the best they can possibly be.

The One Page Purpose reflects a framework within which our clients can be the absolute best version of themselves over the timeline it represents. Obviously there’s a lot of additional work to prepare and put it into practice, which starts with evaluating it against their current reality (our truth) upon which all change and growth must build.

We’ll expand on these elements in future posts and in the meantime, you can consider the importance that habits and skills have in going-forward at our best with an appreciation and intention of making a meaningful difference.

Until then, ask yourself, what do you want out of life? What’s most meaningful to you? How intentional are you about being your authentic best self, continuously getting better and making a difference? To what extent would you benefit from a One Page Purpose Game Plan?