🛠️ Pivot Toolkit: Plant

❤️ Jenny Blake
Aug 29, 2023
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Plant by creating a foundation from your values, strengths, and interests, and your vision for the future. The most successful pivots start from a strong foundation of who you already are, what is already working, and how you define success, no matter how broad that initial vision might be. The Plant stage explores: values, vision, strengths, and finances. 

Templates

  • Ideal Day Madlib Template: Fill-in-the-blanks in this document to articulate what your ideal day looks like. Bonus points: do one version for your wild-and-crazy vision, then do another for your ideal average day; what an energizing “regular” work-day might entail.

  • Knowns vs. Unknowns Template: Before moving on to the Scan stage, summarize your known variables for your one-year vision, as well as remaining questions.

  • Hotter/Colder Exercise: Reflect on the last week and figure out when you were in the zone (what you might want to do more of) and when you felt bored or indifferent (what you might want to do less of)

  • Time Tracker and Schedule Blocker Template (3 Tabs): Especially great for those with flexible schedules, the time tracker and schedule blocker template will help you analyze where your time is currently going and help you put your ideal average day plan into tangible weekly terms.

  • Job Interview One-Sheeter: This template condenses nine key questions into a one-page “Cliffs Notes.” Quickly articulate your answers to 9 key areas, including: strengths, goals, work-style, ideas, challenges you have overcome, questions & an answer to that dreaded “weaknesses” question.

  • Four-Step Budget Template: Most budgets are too cumbersome to be useful. Check-out this handy 4-step budget: After filling in income, must-have expenses & nice-to-have expenses, you’ll get a “monthly allowance” for you to spend on discretionary items as you’d like.

  • Financial Modeling Template: Get a bird’s-eye view of your business model, and track your business income and expenses with this template. This more robust template helps you assess baseline expenses for living and for running your own business. It also includes simple financial modeling tables to map out potential income sources, such as the number of clients needed at specific rates.

  • Test Your Side Business Ideas: Side businesses are great experiments: you have a hypothesis about something that interests you that could make money, and now it is time to test your theory.

  • Your Career Permission Slip: In a stark contrast to when you were a minor, you do not need anyone's permission to make a change in your life except your own. In fact, holding out for permission from others is often a reason why we end up in frustrating career situations in the first place. So grant yourself permission to start today.

  • Chili Soup Recipe & Grocery List: Reduce decision-fatigue with this chili soup recipe that lasts all week. Healthy, hearty and delicious, meals can be one less thing to worry about when grappling with bigger pivot questions.

  • Mind Map Tools: Nothing beats pen and paper, but for online mind-mapping tools, check out Bubble.us and MindMeister. If you have an iOS device, check out Simple Mind and the Post-It App (which allows you to photograph and re-arrange post-it notes).

Personality and Strengths Assessments

Related Books

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