How to Get Into the Right Mindset for Market Planning

How do you walk the line of having a productive, positive, mindset while acknowledging the state of the economy?  This is a question I’ve been mulling over recently as my clients jump into the fray of market and strategic planning for 2010.

You have to have the right mindset.  This means separating “what’s happening” in your business from what you’re making it mean for your business.  Here’s what I mean by that:

If one of your main customers has gone out of business and you’ve lost that revenue stream.  That’s what happened: you lost a customer and that revenue stream.  You might just as easily jump to the “meaning” of “my cash flow is in the toilet.”

The key question for everyone that’s doing market planning right now is to answer the question “What future are you creating?”  Because that is the point of the exercise — to create a future state for your company.  The plan is just what you’re going to do to get there and how you’re going to do it.

The best way to get clear about that is to make a statement about what you have right now.  Answer the question…

1. What is my situation right now?
2. What scares you about this?
3. Given what you’ve said, what is your default future?

Now take a look at that and decide if that’s right for you.  Is this default future ok with you?  I’m assuming the answer is probably no.  So let’s try this again.

1. What’s the situation right now?
2. What missing in this situation, that if it were present, would open new possibilities?  Is it risk-taking? creativity? passion about the business? Caring for the customer?
3. What future is possible now that you’ve brought in the missing ingredient?

The danger is always that we appear naive.  This is not the case.  The meaning that we assign to our circumstances define how we deal with them.  Take Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning.  He survived the concentration camps because he was living into a future of possibility.  His focus on creating this book influenced how he interpreted his future.

What meaning will you assign to your future and what will that future look like?

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