207 - A Strategy for Life

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Today, I am gonna be telling you all about how I create a strategy for my life. And I know that sounds very broad and possibly overwhelming, but hang with me because I feel like I have been given some amazing tools to help me in four main areas of my life: my faith, my home, my work, and my legacy or my life overall.

So that's what we're gonna talk about today, how to create a strategy for your life. If you're feeling like you need some clarity, then this episode is for you.

For the full episode, hit play above or read through below.

Mastermind & Patreon Update

Before I jump into these four main areas of our lives and how we can develop a strategy for each one, I wanted to tell you about two things very quickly and then I'll talk a little bit more about them at the end of the episode if you're interested. I just wanna make sure you don't miss it.

So number one, I am launching an online mastermind. It's gonna be available for 10 ladies. Applications are open through the end of September, and we are gonna do this for six months. It's gonna be very intimate, it's gonna be monthly calls once or twice a month, depending on the month. It's gonna be, we're gonna have a private chat where we can talk to each other and you'll get unlimited Marco Polo access to me.

I am really craving some community with some like-minded women of faith where we can really speak wisdom to one another, and that is what this is for. I'm really excited about it. I'm just gonna leave it at that.

The second thing I want you to know is that there are some exciting changes coming to Patreon, and I'm gonna be offering three new tiers that you could be part of. I really just wanted to offer some more fun things, some more interaction, and allow you to choose how involved you want to be in supporting this podcast. So of course you can just keep listening to it for free, but it means so much when you support this podcast because I don't run ads regularly and I feel like you guys are the thing that keeps me going.

And so you can join at like a very base level, like, “Hey, I just wanna support the podcast.” You can get some extra goodies from me at like the mid-level, or you can join the new Work and Play membership, which is basically, well, it's a lot of what I'm talking about today and it's a lot of the content I'm gonna be going through with the 10 ladies in my Mastermind over the next six months made available to you just without the small group accountability effect. You just get the material, the content. So anyway, listen, at the end, I'll talk more about it then.

A Strategy for Life

I'm really excited to talk to you today because I think that my heart and, and even my brain is made for strategy and planning and I really love this kind of stuff and there have been different points in my life where a different kind of system or idea was introduced to me and it changed everything for me. And I'm gonna walk you through a few of those things.

So one of them, I've talked about this often on this podcast, when I was running Nancy Ray Photography, my husband introduced me to EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. And he was like, “I think you're gonna love it.”

And I was like “that is—what? No, that is weird.” He was like, “Just read this book, Traction It's really great, by Gino Wickman.” And I ended up reading it. I ended up learning more about it, and over the course of like two years, I just dove into this system that's all about creating a plan for your work. Just getting really, really clear on why you're doing what you're doing, how you're doing it, how you're delivering it, who you're marketing to.

I mean, basically all of it boils down to having two pages. It's very simple like a two page business plan, but you know where you're going. It's amazing. And that's the work strategy that I'll tell you about today.

Then I read this book, I think it was called The Secrets of Happy Families, and he talked all about how to write down values that your family holds and a mission for your family. And then I started learning about the rule of life when I read Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. And that's a mouthful if you say that three times fast. It's an amazing book by Pete Scazzero.

And I started learning about what it is to have a rule of life, and it was the third podcast episode I ever released on this podcast. It was called A Rule of Life, maybe it was the second one, I can't remember. Anyway, it really changed my faith and my walk with the Lord.

And then I don't know if you've ever heard of creating a life plan, but that is something that I have always wanted to do. And just recently I've been doing a deep dive into what it looks like to create a life plan. And I haven't actually created mine yet. I've gathered all the tools for creating a very simple one, and that's gonna be part of kind of this curriculum that I'm putting together for my mastermind. So I'm gonna talk you through all four of those things today.

This is gonna be like a crash course, okay? And how you can get clarity in one or all of these areas of your life, your faith, your walk with the Lord, your work, your home and family life, and just your life and like what goals and dreams you have for your entire life.

I love planning, I love strategy. And this is really hitting all the most important areas of your life and how to have a clear strategy for all of them.

So I'm going to give you like the bird's eye view of each one. Let's start with a rule of life. Simply put, a rule of life is creating rhythms or even moments or traditions in your life, in your family that reorient your heart back to God again and again and again.

And this can be something as simple as waking up and before you leave your bedroom, you just get on your knees and you invite the Lord into your day. It can be as simple as stepping outside and taking deep breath of air after lunch every day and just acknowledging God's presence with you. It also can be more than that. It can be the things that mark your holidays to make sure that your family or your heart is really focused on the right thing and is focused on the Lord in your walk with him. So I think it's best to look at your rule of life starting small, like with your day-to-day life, and then moving to weekly rhythms and then looking at your months or even maybe even like the quarters of your year and then your year as a whole.

Again, you can go back and listen to nancyray.com/podcast, slash two or three, I can't remember, I think maybe two. And listen to my rule of life, like what that looks like, what I do every single day to try to just walk with the Lord as best as I can. And what that looks like for me every week. How, you know, I've talked a lot about how we practice Sabbath now as a family and how that's so important, and that's such a vital part of our weekly faith rhythm and our rule of life and being involved in our local church and being involved in a Bible study, but also just having those quiet times with the Lord in the morning, reading scripture, worship, all those little things that you do daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly.

You know, I think holidays are such an important part of your rule of life and how you celebrate Easter and how you mark a birthday or Christmas or a new year and what you do to really just pause and acknowledge God's hand in all of it.

And so if you've never sat down and thought through, what are the things that I want to do in my life to reorient my heart back to God again and again, and you've never written those down, I highly encourage you to do it because it helps you build habits that just direct your attention to what matters, that direct your attention back to the Lord every single day.

Because we naturally drift, we naturally are busy, we're naturally just going about life and work and family. And I feel like it's so important to have that rhythm daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, to reorient yourself back to the Lord.

Okay, let's talk about creating your family mission and values and why that is important. Now, I'm just first gonna say, if you have a family and you never write down your family values or your family mission, that does not mean that you don't have an amazing family. You probably have a stellar family and an amazing family culture and dynamic, and you can go, I mean, you can go live your entire life and never do this and have the most incredible family.

My encouragement to you is to consider this only because words have power and repetition is something that our children need to really take hold of things. And we know that's how kids learn and their memories are amazing when they're young. But it's such a great way to instill values as a family into your children so that when they grow up and leave your house, they have this compass that's like built into who they are. Like, our family believes this, our family does life this way. This is what our family values and this is our family's mission.

So when they go out and are finding their way or you know, meet someone and are starting to form their own family one day, they have a really strong foundation. So it's just an encouragement from me to you to try this and see what you come up with and see what it does for your family and your family culture.

I'm really passionate about culture and I think businesses talk a lot about creating a great team culture, but I think it's just as if not more important to create a culture within your family. So my encouragement is simply to, whether it's over dinner one night, whether you wanna make a fun night of it, just to brainstorm with your family, getting your kids involved, what matters to us as a family.

And obviously you as the parents get to guide and shape the final answers here. This is up to you, but getting your kids involved in getting their buy-in from the start is so fun first and so important because they really feel like they're part of the family in making all of this come together. But just write down like five or seven things that you value as a family, your family values, and then come up with like one phrase or a sentence that's your family mission.

I heard some friends the other day say, “Well, Tidwells, we don't, we never quit. Tidwells never quit.” And I loved that. I like just kind of put that in the back of my mind and I feel like I heard someone else say something similar in my, in my Bible study, but it's like a small like catchphrase that you can just use, use for your family. Like, this is what we, we do, or this is what we don't do. Like we never quit, we don't give up. The Ray family sticks together. What, you know, whatever it is, like what's most important to you, you get to decide and write that, but it brings clarity and I think it brings a lot of unity and it just brings a lot of fun.

Like you're not a family that just gets together and goes through life and routine and homework and it's always fighting and rough. It's like, it's not just work, it's the play part of being a family. It's like, this is who we are, this is what we do, and this is how we live.

All right, let's talk about work and creating a strategy for your work. Creating a business plan can sound so overwhelming. If you own a business, it can sound like, okay, I need a business degree for this. I don't even know what to do, and I am just here to say, it can be so simple. And actually the more simple it is, the better.

When I ran Nancy Ray Photography for 12 years, it wasn't until about halfway through that that I was introduced to Traction, EOS, and started learning about what it could look like to create a two-page business plan. And within those two pages, you write out what is your 10-year goal, like your 10-year target that you're working towards, or you, we shortened it to five years, 10 felt like a lot. What's your five-year target? What's your three-year picture like? What can you picture three years from now in your work or your career? And then what's your one-year plan? What are you gonna do for the next year?

And then dividing that down into quarterly rocks are the things that are most important to get done every quarter and tackling issues in your business, working through them one at a time and making sure that you have all of that clear. It's like a track that you can run on and you know where you're headed.

But more importantly is defining your core purpose. Some people call that mission statement, I think a core purpose is a better phrase for it and your core values, and that's simply like what we do, why we do it, and how we do it. So my encouragement to you is if you've never taken the time to do those things, do it. Get the book Traction and read it. It will, it will change your life. Like listen to it on an audiobook. It's so good. If you have a business, you're an entrepreneur, you need to be listening to it.

If you work part-time or maybe you just have a side hustle, I still think that it's worth doing. There are so many things within the whole Traction model that is incredibly helpful. But my favorite thing about it is that two-page business plan that just defines who you are, how you work, why you're doing what you're doing, who your target market is, your one-year plan, three year-picture, five-year target, all of that is, it takes time to get clear on those things. But once you have clarity on that, man does it help you know exactly where you're going and it helps you hit those goals. So taking time to create a business plan or that, that two page, it's called a Vision Traction Organizer from the book Traction. It is so helpful in gaining clarity in your work.

Okay, the last thing, so we've talked about rule life, we've talked about creating a family mission and values, and now we're talking about are we just finished talking about work and creating a business plan for your work. And now let's talk about creating a life plan.

This one feels really heavy and daunting. And personally, as a 36-year-old recording this podcast, I'm like, oh, I'm 36. I'm like, I mean, over a third of the way through with my life. And I, it's crazy to think about like my kids, they're growing up my time with them. It, it's so, it feels like it's dragging on and yet it's going by so fast. It's just bizarre. And I know like there's just such a grind that comes with being a parent of young children and there's also a heaviness of wanting to raise them, right? And discipling them. And then you feel like time is so fleeting. All of these emotions that we're dealing with every single day are very real and very true.

But I'm really excited to start working through creating a life plan. Because what that does and what this whole podcast episode, my heart behind it is to help you just pause the day-to-day stuff and zoom out on your life and ask some big questions and make sure you're headed in the direction that you want to be headed in your life.

So a life plan, there's a lot of different life plans that you can work through or or do. There's a lot of different things. I mean, if you Google it, you'll find a lot of different options for you. Okay? But the gist of it is simply stopping and asking yourself, what are my priorities? What are my life priorities? And how do I want to be remembered? What is the legacy that I wanna leave? And we'll break that down further by asking, okay, what is the legacy that you want to leave on earth in your faith? Like how do you want the Lord to think about you? That's kind of a crazy question to ask, right?

When you leave this world, how do you want your spouse, if you go first, how do you want your spouse to remember you? How do you want your children to remember you, your parents, your colleagues, your friends? How do you wanna be remembered? So naming what is important, what are your priorities and how do you want to be remembered?

And then you take those questions and you match it up with, okay, what's my reality right now? What's the reality? What do, what do those people think of me right now? How am I living out my days? And like if I were to be hit by a bus tomorrow, how would they, how would I be remembered right now? What are my priorities and are they matching up with how I'm spending my time right now?

And then this is a really fun exercise that goes along with a life plan, which is simply looking at your life in the decades that you have left. God willing, you live to be, let's say 90-something. Just looking at for me, okay, I'm 36, finishing out my thirties, my forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties.

We'll just stop there. Like what, where do I wanna go? What trips do I wanna take in those decades of my life? What's the most important things in those decades of my life? If you break it up like that, you realize your life is, there's a lot of life to be lived right now.

Like small children are all consuming. And it feels like this will be my life forever and ever. And this exercise is so helpful to remember, it's not gonna be that way for very long. Like I've got one decade of my life to give to this, and when that decade's up, my youngest will be 10. Like, that's wild. So just thinking about that, I think it's just really good, even if you don't work through any of these with paper and pen. Okay, just thinking about that today, that's a gift. Like where, how do I wanna be remembered today? Like start small. How, what can I do today to really match my time with my priorities? Like do, do I need to stop right now and just turn on a worship song and just get right with God? Do I need to just text my husband and tell him I love him and I'm sorry for the argument we got in? Do I need to just put in my calendar, just write it down on my calendar, like different date nights with each of my kids? Whatever it is, what are your priorities and does your life match up with them?

So that's it. I just really encourage you to take a minute and think about your walk with the Lord, how it's going. Do you have those rhythms in place? Do you have a rule of life in place where you can follow him in intimately and faithfully, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly? Do you have something in place for your family so that your family knows who they are and how to live life?

Do you have something set up and outlined in your work to where, you know, a five-year business plan, a three-year picture, a one-year plan that you have laid out where you know exactly where you're going and who you're marketing to and what your mission is, what you're trying to accomplish in your work? And lastly, have you ever stopped to think about your whole life, like holistically, like where am I headed? How do I want to finish out my days for the glory of God? What are things that I want to see and experience and do? And how do I want to be remembered? And what are my priorities?

These are big questions, but they're so good to ask because the Bible tells us to number our days to just pause and think about where we are and where we're headed. And I think for me, when I'm lacking clarity and feeling stressed out sometimes when I zoom out and think about these things, that really helps me find the clarity that I need.

So what I just described those four areas is exactly what I am going to be working through with my mastermind. So there's gonna be 10 ladies, and we are gonna do a deep dive into each of those things with accountability, filling out a custom booklet that I have made all about your rule of life, your family values, your work plan, and your life plan.

And I'm so excited for the next six months because I tell you what, you can listen to this podcast episode in one day and get so many wheels spinning, but it takes time and diligence to really get those answers right and it takes accountability and sometimes it takes trying different things and throwing some ideas out and replacing 'em with new ones.

So I'm just really excited to have the community and commitment with a small group of ladies over the next six months to work through this. If this sounds interesting to you, like something that's fitting for you, you've been in business for at least a year and you feel like you wanna a deeper dive into all these things, and also to get kind of a, some spotlight feedback on your work and your business and kind of the the different issues that you're facing, please go to nancyray.com/mastermind and just read about it and see if you feel like it would be a good fit for you. And if you do think so, hit apply now and apply. You've got till the end of September to apply and then we'll be getting started right in October.

And I'm just praying for the ladies that are gonna join, I think it's gonna be great. It will just be online so you can join from anywhere. It's gonna be great.

And like I said, if what I've talked about today is interesting to you, but you don't feel like you can do the Mastermind right now, you don't have the capacity for that. I also wanna let you know that this same content and the same material and the same booklet is gonna be available to work through on your own, at your own pace with some encouragement from me through the new Work and Play membership through Patreon. So feel free to go to patreon.com/work-and-play to learn more about that, if that sounds interesting to you.

Because our lives are short, I have been so excited about this because I feel like man, life can get busy and it can get crazy, but it's so important for us just to get perspective, to keep our priorities straight, and that is what this content is all about. And these four things have just given me a lot of peace and clarity in what really matters in life, and I can't wait to walk through it with you.

Thanks for listening to episode 207 of Work and Play with Nancy Ray. Everything I've talked about today can be found in the show notes at nancyray.com/podcast/207. And you can find me at nancyray.com or @nancyray over on Instagram.

I'm gonna close with words from Peter Drucker who said,