Welcome to part five of five in this five-part series of building clarity and systems from a life coaching point of view. This final episode focuses on process, the habits, routines, and systems that bring your strategy to life. If strategy is your best idea about why your actions will work, process is the actual doing.
It’s the consistent execution that transforms ideas into results. So in this video we’re going to cover what process really means, the three most missed opportunities, and how to design process as part of a living breathing clarity system. So what is process? Process is where everything comes together.
It’s the place where the mission, the strategy, and the planning turn into action. I like to think of it like this. Mission is your purpose in action.
Your strategy is the best idea about why the things you’re doing are going to succeed. And the process is what you actually do, repeatedly, time over time. Process is made of habits, routines, workflows, and cadences.
It includes how you start your day, how you run your meetings, how you deliver your work, how you recover. And a solid process, a system, it supports you without overwhelming you. It’s about getting things done and it’s also about getting things done in a way that aligns with your larger purpose.
And so you can really start thinking as processes as something that you do on a daily basis, that it’s your rhythm. It’s how you put your ideas into action. And so these are the three most commonly missed opportunities when people are looking at process and designing a process in their life.
The first is building a system, building a process, without considering values, mission, vision, or strategy. Most people, myself included, when I started building this business, coaching, you know, trying to build my coaching practice, I just jumped right in without really spending time thinking what is the purpose, what is the larger vision for this. And without grounding systems and purpose, we end up feeling like the process becomes flat.
And it’s just not as much fun to build without first considering your values or your vision. And so before, you know, before building any habit, it’s useful to check alignment. How does this process, how is this process going to support my core values? Does this process bring me closer to that larger vision I have? And in what ways is this process connected to strategic priorities? And when your systems are rooted in that purpose, they become expressions of who you are becoming.
It just feels better to have processes that are more vertically aligned with your vision and what you’re really going for in your life. And there’s a thread between what you’re doing in the present moment, the habit that you’re building, the thing that you’re doing over and over again. There’s a thread between that and where you’re going in your future.
It just makes your present moment and your systems feel more alive. And this leads to the missed opportunity number two, which is treating processes as a fixed thing instead of a living and growing and evolving aspect of life. And so it’s not useful to think of processes as a blueprint, something that you need to create once and follow it forever.
In fact, it’s helpful to think of a process as evolving with you. You can have these things adapt and you can learn what works and you can ask questions such as, where do you consistently get stuck? What steps do you want to skip? What parts of your day energize you versus what parts drain you? And these things, they’re not necessarily flaws, they’re feedback. And when something works, you amplify it.
When something doesn’t work, you adjust it. And if you’re mindful about looking at your work as a process, something that you can try to craft and try to rinse and repeat, and you look honestly at what’s working and not working, this is a really useful place to look at in your lives, especially when you align that with strategy and vision and mission and values. You start to have a really coherent picture of how you can craft your day in a way that really aligns with yourself as a person.
And this goes to the next one on this, missed opportunity, is not designing processes with the beginning, middle, and end in mind. Too many workflows, they treat this work like a light switch. It’s either on or off.
There’s no structure to it. When you’re getting into work that is deeper, more mindful, and more effortful, it’s helpful to think of them as having a warm-up, a main workout session, and a cool-down, much like you’re going to the gym or you’re doing some sort of a practice. And for this deep mental work, it’s helpful to have a beginning, a place where you clear the space, where you have a warm-up, where you just say verbs and nouns to yourself, where you just put words on a page, and maybe even set a timer for five minutes or so, and then leading to the middle part.
And this is where the focused work really happens. This is where you’re warmed up, you’re in a groove, you have the, you know, the work is flowing, the words are making it onto the page, or the the film is being made. Like, this is the middle section of the work.
And then at the end, to have a cool-down. For me, a cool-down is a lot of cleaning up, cleaning up the files, cleaning up the words, cleaning up the desk, cleaning up the space. Have some sort of ritual around, this is how I end the process that I’m going for.
And that beginning, middle, and end, what it does is it helps you avoid the frustration. The frustration of feeling like you can jump into the middle of this and just start doing your most important work without having a warm-up. That’s just not a really, it’s hard to do.
I mean, athletes don’t do it. They have tremendous work, you know, warm-up routines. Very specific things that they do to make sure that they are at peak performance when they’re in the middle of what they need to do.
This is true when they’re performing, this is true in practice, this is even probably true in different aspects of their lives, beginning, middle, and end. Everything becomes very ritualized, very structured. And your brain, it needs, it’s helpful to have this time to settle into focus and process what it’s accomplishing.
Without these transitions or starting cold or ending abruptly, I mean, in the long run, it makes your work a lot harder. And so those are the missed opportunities. And what this really leads to is designing and evolving your process.
I like to start simple. You can pick one area where you want to create clarity. It could be the start of your day, how you prepare your sessions, how you transition between work and rest.
And then you can ask yourself, well, what’s the purpose of this process? What’s the anchor that’s going to help make it stick? How will I know if it’s working? And you can treat this like a living experiment, adjust, align, rinse and repeat. And when you find something that works, you can scale it, you can use it. You can find, oh, this is what works for me.
And not everything really needs to evolve. And once you have a process that you know works and aligns, you can turn on rinse and repeat, let the thing run and look at innovating on other areas of your life. That’s the good stuff.
That’s when things really start to click. And so thank you. Thank you for journeying with me in this five-part series.
If you’re interested in taking any of these concepts deeper, I invite you to check out coachtheory.com. It’s an experience where you can have on-demand coaching sessions. And thank you for watching, subscribing, engaging with this material. Thank you.
I really appreciate it. And I hope to see you soon with some more content about innovation and coaching. Thank you.
Part One: Values | Part Two: Vision | Part Three: Mission | Part Four: Strategy | Part Five: Process
