Coaching Corner: The IF/THEN strategy

Your personal GPS

These posts feature insights from nearly 15 years of coaching clients on their careers, artistic projects, businesses, and more.

These are also the strategies I use for coaching myself when I feel stuck, discouraged, or when I’m trying to get organized (internally or externally) about how to make progress on my projects.

A few weeks ago, I shared about how I’d like to move my White Rose projects toward “graduation,” and how right now that means focusing intently over the next three months on a new version of the script.

Whether it’s the ultimate goal or an interim goal, the IF/THEN strategy is a tool that helps me clear the clutter of what I actually need to focus on and what I need to let go of, even just temporarily. For us creatives who have the blessing/curse of so many ideas all the time, this tool can help us focus and pre-empt getting derailed from our goal.

Here’s how I use it:

IF my goal is achieve X, THEN what do I want or choose for myself?

What about my current life, mindset, skillset, schedule, how I spend my time, how I talk to myself, where I live, how I relate to certain things, etc, etc. would need to change so that I am more likely to reach my desired outcome?

Your “IF” should be simple and clear. Use it as a prompt uncover a whole bunch of “THEN”s.

It’s a moment for radical honesty. Not necessarily a moment for action, but starting on the plane of thought, which precedes action and needs to accumulate in energy and strength before it can turn into action.

It might seem really simple, but here’s the catch.

We can easily have a goal or destination we want to reach while simultaneously NOT taking the necessary action, NOT behaving in an aligned manner, or NOT managing our internal state in a way that is going to get us there.

It’s normal! Bringing awareness to it is how we get our full self-onboard, rather than staying in a state of conflicting intention, either consciously or unconsciously.

A conflicting intention is believing you want something but your actions, thoughts, and behaviors actually point to the opposite or something very different.

Said another way, imagine you have a destination you want to reach - so you get into your car and plug it into your GPS. But what happens if you keep adding stops along the way, or you get a phone call and suddenly you’re headed somewhere totally different and you don’t even realize it?

But a conflicting intention is not inherently bad, but it is counterproductive when it comes to reaching a stated destination. On the positive side, it holds GREAT information, if you’re able to spot it!

So, I’ll get a bit more concrete with my situation:

IF my bigger intention is to take my musical, The White Rose, to the point of a full production, potentially as soon as next year, THEN… (some options)

• I want to prioritize a rewrite of the script/book ASAP. Most important is to get the piece to as high quality a place as possible by the fall.

  • THEN…

    • I want to implement a consistent writing practices.

    • I want to create the accountability and support team to help me get there, both in terms of mentorship/feedback cycles AND having appropriate milestones on an appropriate timeline.

    • I want to focus on the positive outcome I want in terms of the script itself. how I want it to feel, and letting the elements I do feel clear about grow so that it’s constantly expanding within my mind space. This makes it so much easier when I sit down to write.

    • I want to think about how I can enhance my behaviors, daily practices, and inner state in order to match the version of completion for this project that I am envisioning.

Other “THENs” coming out of my bigger “IF”:

• I want to prioritize nurturing an audience for my work.

  • THEN…

    • I want to learn the Substack platform and figure out how to make it work for me, if that’s where I’m choosing to focus.

    • I want to create a consistent writing practice, which I’ve never had. Better yet, I want to find a way to enjoy writing, to align what I write here with my bigger goals so that it becomes a useful part of my overall creative process.

• I want to continue pitching and networking with people who could be helpful mentors or collaborators for the next phase of my project.

• I want to build up the financial resources for various next steps, which could be a competing intention time-wise, so I want to think creatively about how to make it all make sense with my limited time.

• I want to be judicious about how I spend my time, de-prioritizing or eliminating as many other things from my schedule as I can

• I want to stop saying or thinking things that put distance between me and my goals. Getting fully onboard mentally makes everything flow so much better.

It’s helpful to sit and brainstorm a bunch of possibilities for your “THEN”, to see what comes up. You might then try each of them on for size and see which ones float to the top, which ones are great but not the most important right now.

But most useful of all, I find that this framework keeps operating in the background. As more new things, ideas, considerations, etc come up, they are more likely to pass through this framework and I can sort them into things for now, for later, or to forget about entirely.

Also, I believe that going through my IF/THENs regularly in my mind encourages new insights and ideas to help me reach my goal.

“I should reach out to this person!”

“Great new idea to start Act 2!”

“I know which tasks to focus on tomorrow!”

Or, new internal boundaries will pop up, reminding me I should not say yes to something, or I should conceive of something differently so as not to compete with my primary goal.

Life is hectic. None of us pursue goals in a perfect vacuum where we have no other responsibilities. As a new parent, I feel that more than ever. But if I have 30 minutes to myself in a day, this gives me guidance on how I should spent it. It gives my mind a productive place to wander while I am snuggling a sleeping baby, putting toys away, or cleaning up the kitchen.

Your Turn

Choose a single IF statement. Give yourself 5 minutes to brainstorm a bunch of THENs to match your IF. See if any of them surprise you. You might discover a helpful insight that sticks!

Let me know what you find! Reply to this email, or better yet, leave a comment and tell me what you’re working on and at least one IF/THEN statement.