Unbound with Chris DuBois

Want to achieve your goals and a fraction of the time? Today we're going to walk through how military leaders plan operations, how you can use that same system to tackle your own targets. Are you a leader trying to get more from your business in life? Me too. So join me as I document conversations, stories and advice to help you achieve what matters in your life. Welcome to unbound with me, Chris DuBois.

Hello, everyone, welcome to today's episode, where today we are going to talk strategy, right, as a leader, as a business owner, as a manager, as a parent, right? Anywhere in your life, you are going to have to plan out strategies. And the act of understanding how to strategize is something that can really set you apart from others and can actually help you with achieving your goals at a much faster rate. There's a lot of different ways people will define strategy. One way is that I like is just the strategy is prioritization. Right? It's the ability to say yes and no to things. And, and being able to look at what's actually important right now. And making a decision to focus on that and saying no to everything else, right. So just as much saying yes, as it is saying, No. Another way to look at it is that with strategy, you're applying an input, multiplying it by a leverage point, and then getting your desired output, ideally. So you're trying to figure out what do I actually need to put into this? Right? And what assets do I have? What skills do I have, that I can use as leverage so that whatever I'm putting in, I actually get more value out of it, so that the desired output is much bigger than, you know, just a one for one deal. Because we're always doing that one for one, right? It's like trading your time for money. Yes, you can do it. But you're never going to get rich that way, you're never going to actually achieve more that way, you're never going to be able to have a bigger impact. And so we want to always find a way to apply leverage, so that we can get that bigger output. Now, what I want to actually talk about today is how you can strategically attack your goals. And there's a method that I pulled from, from my time with the army. That really makes it easy to plan. Now I say easy. This was like this one portion was like a two week course. Right? Just figure this out. And there are much longer courses on this specific thing. This is called if you want to look up the manuals and everything, it's intelligence, preparation of the battlefield. And we are now going to treat your life and all the different aspects of it as if it was a battlefield. Okay, so the easiest way to remember this is green pen, red pen, blue pen, as it green, red, blue. When you are doing anything in military planning, green will represent the terrain. It is a map features, you know, trees, it's everything that you would see on a map, we're going to reference that as green, then the red pen comes in, that's always the enemy the enemy is, is red, because it's very angry color. Hey, so we choose red. And then the blue pen is finally the friendly forces. It's looking at, like, what are we doing? And so the reason we do green pad red pen blue pen, is because when we start with the terrain, and we start looking at the environment and the area that we have to work within it, it's something that everyone has to has to work with. Right? And I'll go through some examples in a second. But But if we're if we're talking to Hill, everyone has to deal with that hill that's in the middle of this area, right? Nobody gets to say, Oh, it doesn't exist for me. And so the very first thing we have to do is is take into consideration what is around us, what do we have to work with? Or work through in order to achieve our goals? Then the right Ben is now looking at the enemy. Okay, so this could be I mean, there's so many different ways you can take this part, right. And in the military, it's a legit enemy, someone who is trying to kill you. In business, it could be the competition in your life, it could literally be the thoughts in your head. And then finally, you have the blue pen. So now that you know what the terrain you have to deal with, you know the enemy and how they're going to deal with that terrain, too. Right. We're incorporating that terrain into what we believe their plan will be. So that we have an idea of how we should act accordingly. And so then we can make our plan because we know the enemy's capabilities, we know generally how they're going to react based off whatever known factors we have. And so let's go into some examples for how this can work. Alright, first I'm going to start with the military example, just so that it makes it clear, like how this translates into everything else. Right? So starting with the green pen, let's say there is a cliff in the middle of the battlefield. Right? A cliff is a pretty terrifying terrain feature depending on which side you're on. And but everyone has to deal with that cliff. But if we're at the bottom of the cliff, that means one thing, right? If we're at the top of the cliff, it means something else. So we need to know, here's the cliff here are all of the avenues that lead to it, here are the ways you can go around it, here are the vantage points that you can get from this cliff, right? Maybe you can't see straight down and South below. But you can see it like a 30 degree angle below. And so we know okay, well, if we are the ones on the bottom, and we can sneak in here, then they're not going to be able, the enemy won't be able to hit us as hard. And so so we're taking all of those terrain features into consideration. Now we look at the enemy. Alright, what weapons do they have? How many people do they have? What what types of actions will they take, depending on what we believe their goals are? Right? Like, if they know we have some super cool piece of equipment that they want to get rid of, because they know it's dangerous for them, they're going to target it. So we can do a couple things, we could use that as bait, we could use it, we could keep it in the back and reserve so that the enemy doesn't see it or they're not. Yeah, tempted to, to just overwhelm us and take it out. There's a bunch of different things, but we understanding those, what the enemy is actually thinking through will help us get there. Then finally, we know all of these things, right? And so we can, we can make our plan, we can say, Okay, we know the enemy is going to have the high ground on that cliff, and they're going to want to take out this equipment, right. So they're likely going to use these weapon systems. In order to do this, they're gonna try luring us into, you know, a position here so that they can they can fix us and destroy us. And so here's what our plan is right to get around all that and we make contingencies. And we have, you know, just everybody providing insight so that we can really make sure that we're going to crush it, because we've done all of the preparation in order to ensure we know what's going on. Okay. Military example. And these are very, like, loose examples. I don't want to make this a two week podcast. So let's talk business. Okay, starting with the terrain, right? What is the market doing? And this could be, you know, as big picture as is it a bull or bear market? Right? How are things actually going? Are people buying this type of product right now? Our people, it could be an election season. And so people are buying differently. There's so many different variables, right, that as long as we can have situational awareness of what's going on here, and we start our strategic planning here, then we should be good. And so we capture all those little details, and then we can look at, alright, what's the competition doing. And I am a believer that you shouldn't try working against your competition, you should be working for your customer. And that's, that's the ideal, but at the same time, we got to know what the competition is doing, because we need to be able to differentiate from them. And so understanding how are they approaching this? What types of things are they doing? What's their product look like? What are they promising? What's their guarantee? Knowing all of these ins and outs of the competition means that we can now come back and look at our plan, right? How can we be undeniably different? And in a market like this? What do we need to offer that the competition isn't that we can now use in order to get that leverage, right? In order to have something that people want. So when we put stuff in, we actually get a much larger desired output. From a personal example, actually, I'll give you a personal personal example. So I stopped drinking just over seven years ago. And there are certain personal reasons and stuff but the challenge of non drinking is real, right? Especially when you're used to doing it every single day. And so I kind of took this approach, and I said, Alright, what's my environment? Right? How many times am I go to bars? Really, most of my drinking was at home. So I know, okay, so I'm at home, what does this look like, right? I have a fridge stocked with beer, I have a liquor cabinet stocked. So like, these are the things I need to pay attention to, if I'm going to be home, especially if I'm at home alone, or I'm stressed, like, these things are there in my environment, so I need to be aware of them. You know, the enemy, for me was that there are some people who are just going to try pressuring me to drink constantly, right? We live in a society where it is the norm, and it's okay, because most people can drink responsibly. And that's great. I have something in my brain that trips doesn't work well, and so I just avoid it. But so I had to talk to those people, right, have to know who these people are and that they're probably not going to work in my favor. But at the same time, I had to know that I was the enemy here where if I tell myself I'm not going to drink. I was very quick to be like, it was a long week like you can have one right and then then leads to too, which leads to three and you just keep going down the rabbit hole so, so I as well here was the enemy AI, as well as I like to think I know a lot about myself, right? You don't always know when you're, you are going to try tricking yourself into doing these things that

you're like, enter your subconscious and stuff wants, but you consciously say No, I don't want this. But that finally I was able to make my plan. And for me, this actually meant one finding the people who liked my friendly forces, right? My allies, people who if we did go out, to hang out at someone's house or something, they were going to watch me they're gonna say, hey, like, we got you, like, you don't need a drink, we'll make sure nobody's pressuring you, you're good to go. And I very much respect those people who are willing to help me do that, and did help me do that. I think a lot of the reason I was able to is because I had a support system. But I also made a list of every single thing that I might tell myself in order to convince myself that it was okay to drink. And then I took that list. I folded it up, I kept in my back pocket. So anytime I was craving a drink, and I started saying like, you know, it's just gonna be one, like, so what? I would pull out a piece of paper, I would find that list be okay, I knew you were gonna say that. Right? My own brain was trying to trick me. And then it was just easy, because it was like, okay, the I just beat the enemy because I, I called them out, right? He was trying to sneak up on me. And but I spotted him. So now it's not an issue. And so, anyways, those are some examples, right about why you should use the green pen, red pen blueprint strategy in order to get after just your goals much faster, because you can approach these in a way that's a lot more. It's almost bulletproof. Right? If you're putting in the work you're making sure, yeah, there's gonna be some things that come in that that are just unexpected. But for the most part, you can look at what's in front of you. And you can plan around all of these different variables, if you just sat down, made a list, right? Actually thought through these, and then just say, hey, my goal is x, it's to make this much money this year. Okay, well, let's look at look at the environment that you're in. Right? What is the market doing right now? Are people hiring? Are people firing? There's a lot of layoffs going on? Like, are you going to be able to do that? Do you have like, are people looking for the skills that you have? Right, and then say, Okay, what's the competition? Well, I'm going into a market against all of these other people. And so I should look at like, what are they doing? How are other people getting jobs? Things like that. And then finally, okay, now, what's my plan, and if you just go through it, doing that you will be way more successful. So I hope you can put that into play. I hope it's valuable for you. Please let me know. podcast is just getting started. But if you liked this episode, please leave a rating and review. I will be reading all of these because I do that to myself. And and we can keep getting more of these created. And hopefully we can keep creating some content that it's actually helpful stuff that you want to listen to. So thank you for joining me. Hope you have a great rest of your day and keep it up deserve it.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai