why ‘making a plan’ doesn’t work

mini-lisa

lisa fabrega

France retreat
(Me and clients on a mastermind retreat in France)

 

Every day I hear dream-killing phrases like this:

“My dream is to own a retreat home in Greece.”

“I want to get to $2.7 million in revenue next year.”

“My goal is to get that huge promotion and a 2x pay raise.” 

And then inevitably every single one of these statements is followed up by:

“Yeah! Let’s make a plan to make that happen!” or “I need to hire a strategist who is going to show me how to get there, step-by-step.”

You might be thinking “what is wrong with those statements Lisa? Isn’t that the point? You have a dream, you make a plan to make it happen. How the heck is that supposed to be ‘dream killing’?”.

Here’s the problem…

It’s not enough to just make a plan. It’s not enough to make a strategy. The plan and the strategy alone don’t hand you the dream.

So many womxn I’ve worked with spent hundreds of thousands on plans and strategies before they came to work with me.  

So many of them were not 100% happy with their results. They wanted MORE.

All of them thought that the plan or strategy was going to be ‘the thing’ that handed them their dream on a platter.  

Until it wasn’t. Or, it handed them the dream and it turned into a nightmare.

Like Katelyn, a colleague who was burned out on 1:1 work in her business and invested $65,000 in a ‘high ticket funnel expert’.  When she told me she had invested in this strategic plan, she had a sparkle in her eye.  

“After being maxed out and tired of being on the phone with clients constantly, this plan is finally going to be the thing that scales my time and lets me work way less” she told me.

Except, a year later, while she had had a few sales in her new program, it wasn’t the passive income dream she’d hoped for. Even though the plan and the strategy was brilliant. Why wasn’t this working?

Or Andrea, my former client, who had spent over $100,000 on her last business coach.  She had been feeling unsatisfied with her business for a while and this coach had promised her a plan that would net her $1,000,000 that year.  A year later, she had a shiny, streamlined business model that sparkled like a brand new Corvette. It looked like a million bucks from the outside.

But her revenue was still about the same.  She wasn’t inspired by the new ‘branding message’ this coach had told her would be a million dollar slam dunk. She felt stuck and wanted to walk away from it all.

Why hadn’t any of these brilliant strategies worked?

Because you can have the best plan in the world. The most brilliant strategy. The shiniest website. The sparkliest publicity strategy…

But if you don’t have the capacity to hold, handle and receive all that you will bring in with those strategies, what’s the point?

That’s why my colleague’s high ticket funnel wasn’t working so well for her.  She didn’t have the support she needed on her team to handle the volume of people she wanted to get into the program.  She had outgrown her team. And she had a fear that if people didn’t get 1:1 time with her, no one would want to work with her and she’d lose her business.

Once she worked with me to expand her capacity, her funnel actually started working.  

We didn’t TOUCH the strategy.  We didn’t need to – it was a good strategy. But once her capacity was expanded, the strategy actually started working and producing the results she had wanted.

CAPACITY, not strategy, was the key.

My other client’s shiny new business wasn’t producing the results her fancy website seemed to imply. This was because she was actually having a crisis of purpose.  She needed to expand her purpose capacity.  

When we dug deeper, we found old trauma in her body around shaming she received as a child for being creative.  It didn’t feel safe to make lots of money within her purpose, so she had built a business not aligned with her purpose at all. 

With capacity work, she felt safe being herself in her big, shiny brand.  A few months later she had tripled her revenue and was doing work she LOVED within her business.  Now the spectacular website matched the way she felt about the work she was doing!

CAPACITY, not strategy, produced these results, too.

Please, stop pinning your hopes and dreams on a strategy. That’s like trying to build a $10 million, earthquake-proof house on top of cardboard scaffolding.

Yes, strategies are great frameworks and helpers.  But ONLY if you have also worked on expanding your capacity to handle and receive what the strategy promises to deliver.

If you want that retreat home in Greece, yes, make your plan.  But work on your capacity to execute such a plan in a way that doesn’t burn you out or take you far from your own internal alignment.  

Work on your capacity so that you aren’t secretly sabotaging it on a subconscious level. 

Work on your capacity so that you have the external and internal systems in place to allow it in.  

Otherwise, you’ll block your dream or delay it, and you won’t know why the strategy isn’t working.  No matter how many hundreds of thousands you spend going to the world-renowned strategic experts.

Because it’s not your strategy. It’s your capacity.

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Want to expand your capacity by returning some of the energy you got from this post? Tell me in the comments what you got out of it!

In love and capacity,

Ps: Read this and feel like you want to expand your money capacity? Money Capacity is one of the capacity areas we are going to be diving deep in to at my 2019 Capacity Retreat.  

I’ve just opened up 5 spots to my invite-only, 2019 Capacity Retreat.  

During the Capacity Retreat, we’ll be diving deep into the six different capacities successful womxn MUST address and expand if they want to reclaim their agency and solidify their legacy.

Spend a weekend with me and up to 14 other womxn in my beautiful home in Santa Barbara, California, expanding your capacity so you can step into a whole other way of being in the world.

It is the first solo retreat I have opened up to the public in three years and it’s already 50% sold out within just days of opening it up to my waitlist.  

This is an intimate, invite-only retreat for only fifteen womxn, so if you want an invite and to get more info, send me an email with:

  1. your name
  2. website address
  3. why the retreat is calling your name (what’s going on for you right now)

We’ll write you back with more info and an invite if we feel the retreat is what can serve you the most at this time! This is an invite-only retreat, so you must reply with the info requested above to get an invite.

Also, it goes without saying: serious inquiries only.  

I only want to work with womxn who are ready to truly prioritize expanding their capacity–so that means you are willing to move what you need to move around to be there. No excuses. Because you’re either prioritizing your capacity or you’re not. Yes, it really is that simple. I tell you the truth because I care.