Getting Started on Your Directional Planning (The Six Strategic Inputs that Can Help You Prepare Yourself)
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One of my clients turned a negative cash flow into a positive one. Now, she has a portfolio that’s worth several million dollars. Discover how she did it and how you can replicate her success.
When my client came to me, she’d already started building her portfolio.
But the problem was that she had a lot of negative cash flow. Investing in property was actively costing her money every single month.
That’s not what anybody wants!
So, she made it her goal to create positive cash flow while building her portfolio. And with the help of The Kaizen Way, that’s exactly what she did.
How?
She learned about a range of strategies, such as partial sell down strategies and multi-tenant strategies, that helped her to generate more income from her properties.
And she discovered just how powerful the art of strategic thinking is when investing.
Today, my client generates positive cash flow from her portfolio. And that’s not even the best part.
That portfolio is now worth several million dollars!
Combine that with a business she has that operates in both Australia and the United States and you have somebody who’s on a phenomenal investing journey.
Of course, that brings us to a question…
Can you get results like these?
You can!
But before you get started on your property journey, there’s something crucial that you must confront:
Your mind.
My client’s success came, in part, because she learned how important strategic thinking is when investing. And my own experience in corporate business planning taught me the same thing.
It’s the strategic inputs that make the difference in gaining clarity and direction for your life - whether that be in property, business, health or relationships.
And in this article, I’m going to explain what I mean by that and provide six inputs that will have you thinking more strategically.
What Are Strategic Inputs?
Strategy helps with direction.
So, you can think of strategic inputs as the inputs that surround your life’s vision. And it’s with these inputs that you get yourself into the right frame of mind to build a strategic plan.
Such inputs assist you in gaining perspective while provoking your strategic thinking muscles to set the complete direction for your journey.
I learned about them through a combination of what I’ve experienced in my personal life and the work I used to do in the corporate world.
There are six of these inputs:
Baseline
The Capability Channel
Life Assessment
Strategic Intent
Discovery Model
Dream Life Bucket List
Let’s look at what each of them means.
Input #1 – Baseline
Whatever’s happened has happened.
The past is the past - and if you look back to learn and not to live, then we can gain valuable insights and leverage from the past.
If you want to move forward and develop a strategic plan, you need to baseline it. That means getting yourself to a “zero point” in your life that you can use as a springboard for what’s to come.
To get to this “zero point”, you’ll ask yourself a few questions.
What have you accomplished over the last 12 months? What didn’t you like about the last 12 months? And what decisions did you make over the past year that you found empowering?
The answers to these questions tell you what you want, what you don’t want, and what inspires you.
That’s your baseline.
Input #2 – The Capability Channel
Your capability channel focuses on your ability to turn your visions and dreams into reality.
Again, you will look back on your past achievements and successes. Those achievements may be as small as a trophy you earned or as big as a major career milestone. The key is that the achievement has to be something that you really wanted.
Write the achievement down.
Then ask yourself the following question…
“What steps did I take to achieve this objective?”
Now, go beyond that.
Create a list of anything in your life that was once a goal, dream, or desire that you’ve already achieved. Choose two or three dreams from that list and then write down the steps you took to turn that dream into a reality.
Use this as a reminder to yourself that you’re capable of achieving great things. That you can turn your dreams into reality because you’ve done it before. Use this as motivation to open your mind to your other dreams.
Input #3 – Life Assessment
Before you do anything on your to-do list, you’ve got to work on your life. And there are two main areas that 99% of people must assess and manage to put themselves in a position to succeed:
Personal
Professional
Now, there are several major themes that run through people’s lives that generally fit into these two categories. For example, health, mindset, finances, family, and significant other are all important themes that you may choose to focus on here.
By looking at each theme, you can work out where you are with them, thus giving yourself a greater level of awareness about them.
Those are your inputs.
For each, give yourself a rating on a scale of 10.
Let’s use health as an example here. You may be in generally decent health but aren’t as in shape as you’d like to be. Also, you haven’t made time to visit the doctor and your eating habits may not be the best. This could mean you give yourself a 6/10 rating for that theme.
Repeat this exercise for each major theme that influences your life and you’ll develop a picture of what your life looks like right now. More importantly, you’ll also see what you need to prioritise when making changes.
Input #4 – Strategic Intent
This input is all about getting you to think differently about your intentions in life. I’ve found five main types of intention to focus on here:
Identity
Connection
Engagement
Growth
Anticipation
Your goal is to examine your current intentions in each of these areas. From there, you ask yourself how changing your intentions in some of these areas could help you to move closer to your dreams.
Input #5 – The Discovery Model
Ikigai is a Japanese concept that focuses on our reason for being and it’s been around for a long time. To create The Discovery Model, I learned about Ikigai and adjusted it a little to fit into my own life.
The intention of The Discovery Model is to do just what it says:
Discover!
It’s all about exploring who you are by focusing on the following areas:
Passions
Talents
Service
Essence
People
By exploring these areas, you will see how each of these inputs affects the decisions you make in your life.
For example, the people you spend time with provide inputs. So, if you’re spending time with negative people, that means you’re getting a lot of negative inputs.
Think about how that might affect the decisions you make.
Input #6 – The Dream Life Bucket List
In discovering yourself, you can start to build a bucket list of what you want your life to be.
For example, let’s say you have a passion for gardening.
That’s something that can go onto your Dream Life Bucket List! So, you want to create a life that offers you the freedom to spend more time in nature doing what you love.
That’s just one example.
This final input is all about figuring out exactly what your dream life looks like.
Again, write it all down because this will serve as the inspiration for you to think strategically about how you can make that dream life a reality.
Strategic Thinking Comes From Understanding Yourself
What you input into your life affects the outputs you create.
That’s the main lesson I want you to take away from this article.
After all, it’s the guiding principle of my client that helped her achieve the success she enjoys today.
I know you can achieve the same level of success.
By examining your strategic inputs, you start to develop an idea of where you want to be, what you need to do to get there, and what needs to change to make your dreams a reality.
Spend some time with this article.
Grab a pen and start working out what your inputs are and how they’re affecting you right now. Once you have that information, you’re in a position to
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