The relatively old saying of “how you do anything is how you do everything” is becoming almost the measuring stick of how we look at other people. Right or wrong, I have seen this more and more over the past few months that it has caught my attention.
This is clearly seen when you scroll through Facebook. Anyone is now posting like a social media expert on politics, religion, race, disease, etc. In other words when someone posts something, say a political stance, many times we assume this is their thought process across their entire life (which may be true – but who are we to judge?).
Back to how we do anything.
From my perspective, this quote really plays into the premise that, yes what we say about something most likely permeates into other areas of our lives.
So…
Let’s look at how to master this, especially in business where the lines of the personal and professional mix.
Planning Is The Key Ingredient
To have a seamless line between anything and everything, we need to start at the beginning. That beginning is what I refer to as pre-planning.
Not just planning, but pre-planning.
Planning is taking the necessary steps to ensure that whatever endeavor we are embarking on, we have all the essentials available to us. If not, we know where to get them. Planning also includes making those assumptions to handle any emergency or change that may occur.
All this is important.
However,
What carries a heavier weight if essentialness is how we pre-plan.
Pre-planning embraces the process of Research, Reason, Reality, Rebuttal, and Reward.
The Five R’s of Pre-Planning
The process of research could be easily argued into a general planning phase, however, the concept of research during pre-planning takes research a step deeper.
This depth is in researching the what. General researching is mostly constrained in the “how” of whatever is going on. For example, if you are taking an airplane to a destination, research may be on which airline provides the most cost efficient plan, whereas in the arena of the ‘what’ research is more concerned with looking at the various ways to travel beyond flying.
When we begin to understand that researching our what leads to a greater why, we begin to understand the beauty of its depth.
This why becomes the reason for pre-planning. Once we decide our what, the next question that must be answered is the why. Our reasoning behind what we do is the fuel that propels us to complete it. As we prepare to do something. Here is this pre-planning arena understanding our why (which is not necessarily our biggest why) is crucial to our how.
We come back to the “how we do anything is how we do everything” concept. The how is the reality of our situation. What is really going on becomes the driving force. How we pre-plan makes all the difference when moving into implementation. Research turns into knowledge, which then becomes a powerful weapon inside of the reality of how things work.
Understand too, that while walking through a pre-planning season, you will encounter pushback, or a rebuttal to where you want to go. This rebuttal may be inside your own head or you may encounter walls that tell you no. A key mindset here is to determine if the rebuttal is positive or negative. Remember that some doors are closed for reasons while others need to be opened and walked through.
Once we walk through the pre-planning process and feel confident about moving forward, it is time for a reward. Rewards can be as simple as acknowledging the accomplishment to full on Oscar winning trophies. The point here is to ensure that we create milestones along the journey and take time to relish in hitting them. Rewards become the encouragement that helps drive us forward in our journeys. They are what sustain us when we hit rebuttal points. They remind us of the reality of the situation. They provide more depth to our why and bring confirmation to our what.
Look at the next project, season, or circumstance you are in. Acknowledge the process is a beautiful work of art. The more you do it, the better you get at it.