S2:E7 Creating a Roadmap for Your Goals MAIN
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Jeremy: [00:00:00] What if there was a framework to bring clarity and action to your biggest challenges? Today, we're diving into VOSTEK and how it can guide you through life's uncertainties.
What's good? What's good? It's the Jeremy Haselwood Show. What's good, what's good? Let's get ready to go. Welcome to the Jeremy Haselwood Show. Plug in. Turn it up. Let's go. Hey, hey. Welcome to the Jeremy Haselwood Show.
Welcome to this episode where we will be talking all about creating a roadmap for your goals. Before we get started here, make sure that you tap, click, or smash the follow or subscribe button so that you'll be notified when each new episode drops.
This is season two of the Jeremy Haywood Show, where you are learning all about life [00:01:00] transformation and personal development. Each season, my show covers a different topic. My goal is to spark curiosity. Build community, inspire action and deepen our understanding of the world around us. Today we are going to dive into VOSTEK.
That's V-O-S-T-E-K. This is a model that you can follow when you're trying to tackle any goal that you have in life. Remember this success is not about luck. It's about structure and action. Today, I'll give you a roadmap to make your goals a reality.
A quote that I like is that vision without action is just a dream. Action without vision is just movement. But when you combine the two, you create transformation. Lemme talk a little bit about a personal story and why today's episode is so important, especially when it comes to creating your goals and understanding where you are going in life.
I like to call this shift happens In life, you're going to go through different shifts, whether it's graduation, [00:02:00] job loss, personal loss, rediscovering yourself. There's a lot of shifts that can occur in your life. So I do like to say shift happens. Has shift ever happened to you?
Of course it has. You may be going through a shift in life right now and navigating that transition can be a little bit of a challenge. I'd like to share a story of a time of my life when shift happened, and this was, if you listen to the last episode of my show, when I experienced job loss and. That's, I'm not gonna get into that story because that's for another episode, but basically just not having a job, being unemployed, having talent, having passion, and not really knowing what the next step will be.
I come from that era where you see the generation ahead of, you work at a certain company and they may work there their whole career and then they retire and that's it. That's not been the case for my generation or generations that follow me. It's a very different day and time now. But for me, I wanted that stability as most people do when it comes to [00:03:00] employment.
And I was at a crossroads trying to decide who I am, what my skills are, and what I really want to do with life. Do I want to. Go after a job somewhere else and work for somebody else. And I'm in the marketing world, so those jobs can be up and down. It doesn't necessarily have the stability of some other jobs, or do I start my own company and take my destiny into my own hands?
And it didn't quite seem like that. Big of a risk risk, especially coming off. Of job loss. So I pursued that. But when I went through that whole process, I really had to do some work on myself. Whenever you're doing something big in life, whether it's starting a business or even making big decisions about what your personal goals are, you need to have some kind of a format that you can help to create your goals and help to hold yourself accountable to those goals.
So through that process, I developed this model called VOSTEK, and it is a trademark. Model that I actually use with my consulting clients, whether [00:04:00] it's coaching clients or even my corporate clients and nonprofit clients, this is a very effective model that I use that really helps to encapsulate the whole goal planning process.
So VOSTEK is a powerful tool for structuring goals and ensuring that there is follow through. Do you have a goal that you've been struggling with to execute? If so, this framework can help turn those ideas into results. So without further ado, let's dive into it because I've mentioned this word a couple times, but let's get into what it really means. VOSTEK is an acronym. It is Vision, objective Strategy, tactics, execution, and KPIs. I. We're gonna walk through each different piece of this, but it's starting with a framework.
Let's go through a scenario. For example, if you're in life right now and you're looking at possibly switching careers, maybe you have goals to improve your fitness or starting a passion project, or if you own a company or work at a company and you have to create. Your business goals for the calendar [00:05:00] year or whatever that next big thing is that you want to tackle.
VOSTEK will help bring clarity and structure to these big decisions. And also on a personal side, if you use this model in your personal life, it can lead to life transformations. So let's go through each of these different parts of this acronym. By themselves. We start with vision. Vision is the big picture.
So you wanna start first and foremost with creating that vision. And vision is all about beginning with the end in mind. What is the end state of where you are trying to go? And I don't care if this is on the corporate side or on your personal life, what is that big goal that you're trying to accomplish?
And what I like to look at is almost like what is your view from the podium? Let's say you're at the Olympics and you just won the gold medal. Or maybe it was a. Silver or bronze, whatever. You're on the podium and you've gotten, that was your big goal to accomplish. So what is that for you? What have you accomplished to put you on that podium?
This helps you to define what success looks like in that [00:06:00] specific area, whether it's personal growth, career, relationships, what does the destination look like? So write down what that vision is of that end state where you're trying to go. The next one is objectives. Objectives are about setting clear targets, and these are the pieces that will help you.
If you accomplish these objectives, then you have. Accomplish what your overall vision is. Objectives are specific. They're measurable milestones that break the vision into actionable goals. And when we look at goal setting, I believe it was my last episode, we talked about setting smart goals. So I won't dive into that in this episode, but go back and listen to that one.
But. Setting smart goals can definitely help you with your objectives. So let's look at it like this as an example. If your vision is to become a respected entrepreneur, then your objective, one of your objectives may be to launch a business within the next 12 months. I. You can certainly expand on that.
That's a little broad, but at least there's a timeline there. You can't be a successful or respected [00:07:00] entrepreneur if you don't start the business, and let's give ourselves some time to start that business. This is, again, just an example. Maybe you're gonna start it in the next four weeks, but whatever it is, put some time parameters around it.
What I find is when you're setting objectives, it is typically three to five objectives that you're trying to accomplish in order to fulfill that overall vision. let's move on to strategy. Strategy is the game plan. How are you going to accomplish these objectives? Strategy is about outlining your overall approach to achieve your objectives. So think about like this. If your objective or one of your objectives is to secure a new job, then your strategy would be to leverage online job boards, go to networking events and direct outreach, re reaching out to companies separately.
These are different parts of your strategy that will help you achieve those objectives. The next piece is tactics, and I want to call this out because strategy and [00:08:00] tactics are often confused and a lot of times people, think they're talking about strategy, but they're really talking about tactics.
So keep in mind again, strategy is the game plan and tactics are the specific actions that you will take. Think about this from, let's say a an American football perspective. Your game plan may be to be a team that is very good at passing the ball. So that is your team that's going to win the game by passing the ball, and that's primarily what your strategy is. So in that respect, your tactics would be creating plays that are designed around passing the ball. Okay, so that's how I would separate strategy from tactics.
So tactics are your specific actions. They break your strategy down into day-to-day steps that you can do. So an example if again, the strategy is to leverage networking to secure a job, then your tactics would be to reach out to 10 industry contacts per week, attend one networking event per month, or [00:09:00] update your LinkedIn profile and resume.
These are three tactics that can help. fulfill your strategy. so we have strategy, tactics and execution. And again, this is getting into the weeds, which is why this. Process why this model is so necessary, because I also see people that confuse tactics with execution. Going back to our American football reference, if the tactic is to draw up plays that will be primarily passing plays.
The execution is when that ball comes into to play. And this is like where the play has started and now you have your linemen that are blocking, you have the quarterback with the ball, you have your receivers that are going out like that is the actual execution of the play. this is where the rubber hits the road.
This is where all the work happens, is within the execution of it. Everything before execution is really just planning. And when you get to the execution, this is when the plan is actually in motion. It's where strategy and tactics become real through consistent effort. So again, getting down to the execution of one of the [00:10:00] tactics that we outlined, which was reach out to 10 industry contacts per week. That was the tactic. The execution of that tactic is actually reaching out to 10 industry contacts per week. That is the execution of it. So it is important to distinguish these two because when you talk about.
A tactic is just a tactic. the execution, is the state of actively completing a tactic. And then lastly, KPIs. These are key performance indicators.
This is what helps you to measure progress because you You can have everything laid out, your vision, objectives, strategy, tactics, execution. But if you don't really understand what you're measuring, then again, it's really just movement. You don't know if you've achieved something or not.
Having your KPIs, establishing what your key performance indicators and key is, the key word. It doesn't mean you're measuring 10 different things tho. Those are just metrics, and that's the difference between metrics and key performance indicators. Metrics are. All the different things that you can measure.
Your [00:11:00] KPIs or your key performance indicators are the most important things that will help to measure success for you. and KPIs help to track success and determine if adjustments are needed. Let's talk about an example that's more of a personal level if your goal is to lose weight, then KPIs could be weekly weight measurements, calorie intake tracking, and your workout frequency. So how much do you weigh each week?
That's a measurement. How much, how many calories are you taking in per meal per day? That is a measurement. How frequently are you working out and for how long? Those are measurements. These are pretty key. If your main goal is to lose weight, so that's how you would measure it If your goal is business growth, then your KPIs might be revenue, it may be the number of new customers.
It may be how much web traffic you brought in, so understanding what are metrics And what are key performance indicators? If your goal is getting a new job, then you can measure how many jobs did you submit on? How many people did you reach out to on LinkedIn, and how many networking [00:12:00] events did you attend this month?
These are all specific things that you can measure. So KPIs measure the whole process of this VOSTEK model.
As you're listening to this, think about the areas of your life right now in which you can apply VOSTEK. Is there a scenario at work that you can apply it to? Is there something personally that you're going through? Changing careers, starting a new personal habit, even strengthening your relationships. You can use VOSTEK for interpersonal communication with your family, with your partner.
There's so many different ways that you can use VOSTEK. Essentially, it's just a framework for you to accomplish your goals and helping you break it down and really understand what the goal is and how you will get there. VOSTEK is a flexible tool for any life situation, whether it's business or personal, and I encourage you to use it. It's been very helpful for me. I've used it when I started my business. I use it with clients. I use it in my. Personal life, my professional life. If there's goals that I'm [00:13:00] going after, I put it in this VOSTEK framework and it really helps to uncover any blind spots and helps me think through how I'm going to accomplish this particular goal.
If it worked for me, it can work for you. So let's get to our reflective questions for the week. This is what I want you to do for this week. Create your vision. Write down a vision of who you want to be as a person or what you want to accomplish in life. You can also, if you wanna use this as a time, if you're tackling a business problem, use this to create the vision of whatever this problem is that you're trying to overcome or this business goal that you're trying to overcome.
The second thing I want you to do is to list two or three objectives that you'll need to accomplish in order to fulfill your vision. So you're writing out your vision, and then you're writing out two to three objectives that will help you accomplish your vision. And the third piece that I want you to do is block time on your calendar To complete the rest of the VOST framework for what you wrote down to answer question [00:14:00] one, to fulfill that goal. And the reason I'm having you block time because it, this whole process, it can take you some time to build out. Creating a vision can take time just in itself, alone. Once you have your vision, it's actually really helpful though because it helps to drive everything else that comes behind it.
It's like your vision leads your objectives. Your objectives lead your strategy. Your strategy leads your tactics lead the execution. You measure it all through your KPIs. So follow this, and if you can do it this week. Great. If not, please block some time on your calendar to do this. I noticed for me personally, what gets scheduled gets done.
If I don't schedule it, I just, it's off my radar and I forget about it. So make it something that's important enough for you, especially if you're at a period in your life where you are experiencing life change. Now is the time to take action. I'd like to end this episode with a quote, and that is clarity doesn't come from waiting.
It comes from acting with purpose and adjusting [00:15:00] along the way. Thank you for tuning into the Jeremy Hazelwood show. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to follow or subscribe, so you're always up to date when each new episode drops. Until next time, keep following your dreams to find your purpose.
