Satisfaction Strategy in Action: Aligned Seasonal Planning - EP 043

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Are you tired of rigid business planning that doesn't feel right? What if you could align your strategy with the natural flow of the seasons?

In this episode of Pleasure and Profits, I dive into the power of seasonal planning and how it can transform the way you approach business and life. I introduce a simple four-step process—intention setting, reflection, introspection, and goal setting—that allows you to create a business strategy that truly aligns with your energy and aspirations. By recognizing and honoring the different seasons in both your personal and professional life, you can build a sustainable and fulfilling business that supports your goals for impact, profit, and pleasure.

Tune in to discover how aligning with seasonal rhythms can help you plan with ease and satisfaction.

Episode Takeaways:

• Business and life have multiple seasons—learning to recognize them is key.
• Aligning business planning with seasonal energy fosters natural momentum and growth.
• Setting clear intentions helps create a focused and meaningful strategy.
• Reflection allows you to learn from past experiences and apply those insights.
• Introspection deepens self-awareness and clarifies your desires for impact and pleasure.
• Goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
• A well-crafted strategy turns goals into actionable, achievable steps.
• Flexibility and experimentation are essential—plans should evolve as you grow.
• Prioritizing pleasure in business leads to more sustainable success and fulfillment.

Key Insights:

“By tuning into and aligning with these natural rhythms rather than fighting against them, you allow for growth that feels organic rather than forced.”

“The goal isn't to create a perfect plan that you follow without deviation. The goal is to create an intentional container for growth that honors both the natural rhythms around you and your deepest desires for impact, profit, and pleasure in your business.”

Question for Your Reflection:

What season of business or life are you currently in, and how is it influencing your energy and priorities?

Connect With Me:

• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: @RachelAnzalone
• Facebook: Rachel.Anzalone
• LinkedIn: RachelAnzalone

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Remember: Your pleasure is your power. 💫

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Episode Transcript

Hello and welcome to Pleasure and Profits. I'm your host Rachel Anzalone and this is the first episode of the Spring Quarter, a season that's focused on growth and implementation and of emergence and action.

So far this year, we've been exploring the satisfaction strategy framework. That powerful integration of impact, profit, and pleasure that creates the foundation for a soul aligned and sustainable business, all through the lens of the winter season, a season of rest and visioning and planning and setting foundations.

Couple weeks ago in episode 41, my good friend Krissy Shields and I talked about the Spring Equinox, the energy of this season and what it means to align with that energy and plant seeds for what's to come next. Well, in today's episode, we're going to get really practical. 

As we move deeper into spring in the Northern Hemisphere, it's the perfect time to talk about how to align your business planning with the natural rhythms and energies of the seasons, particularly of this spring season. Now, some people get really excited about planning. I'm one of those people. And I know that other people really dread it. So if you feel any kind of resistance to traditional business planning approaches, or you've found yourself making elaborate plans that never really materialize, then this episode is for you. 

We're gonna explore how to create a planning process that honors both the seasonal energy around us and the seasons you're personally experiencing in your life and business. You're gonna wanna bookmark this episode so that you can reference it again and again. Anytime that you feel yourself transitioning into a new season or preparing to plan for a new phase of your life or your business.

When we talk about seasonal planning, it's really important to recognize that there are multiple seasons at play. First, there's the calendar season, the actual time of year that we're in right now. So right now, we're in the spring here in the Northern Hemisphere. It's a time that's naturally associated with growth and rebirth and experimentation and emergence. This energy is palpable in the world around us. I can look out my window and I see flowers blooming and leaves bursting forward on the trees and the days are getting longer and there's this sense of expansion and possibility in the air.

But there are also your personal seasons and your business seasons, which may or may not align with a calendar and may or may not align with each other. You could be in a winter season of your business focused on recovering from a period of intense growth or on building foundations. Or you might be in a summer season harvesting the full abundance of what you've been sowing for a long, long time. You might be in a summer season in your love relationship, in full expression and abundance mode, or you might be in an autumn season where you're letting go of what's no longer serving you. 

Collectively, in so many ways, particularly here in the United States, we are in an autumn season. So many things that are no longer serving us are breaking down around us. This is the energy of autumn. And what comes after that is the winter. It's the incubation time, right? And all of that needs to happen so that the earth can become fertile and everything that's broken down can be composted so that something new can be birthed in the world. 

So how each of these seasons present and interact in your day-to-day life is gonna be unique to you. And the magic happens when you honor all of the relevant seasons in your own planning process.

Traditional business-focused quarterly planning misses so much of this nuance. It assumes that Q1 and Q2 and Q3 and Q4 should all follow the same template and approach, disregarding all of the other seasonal factors at play - personal, professional, in nature and in the collective. And if you're working in a large organization, maybe you can do that because there are enough people, enough players involved that the organization can really set its own season and where each person is at individually isn't playing that big of a factor, but when you're a solopreneur or you're an entrepreneur running a small business, you really need to take into account all those factors because it's really all about you and the energy that you are bringing. And if you have a small team, it's about the energy that your team is bringing as well. And if one or two or three members of that team are in different places energetically than the businesses, it can really have a significant impact.

By tuning into and aligning with these natural rhythms rather than fighting against them, you allow for growth that feels organic rather than forced. Your planning process becomes less about pushing boulders uphill and more about channeling the energy that's already available to you.

As we make this exploration today, my first invitation to you is to identify what season you are personally in, perhaps in some different areas of your life. Think about your health and wellness, your love relationships, your family, your friendships, your community, your parenting, your home. The list is really endless. But figuring out what's happening for you personally and how those seasons might affect your energy and the ways that you show up in your business or other areas is  going to help you to create goals that take all of that into account, which is so important in creating a business that's sustainable. 

And then identify what season you're in professionally in the big picture of your work life.  And also, what's the shorter term season you're in in your business right now? So in the big picture, you might be thinking, I'm in my forties. I've been doing this a long, long time. I'm an established professional with a level of expertise.

And so in the big picture of your business, you might be in that summer harvest, but you might be working on different projects that are bringing in an energy of birthing something new or sunsetting something that's really past its prime.

So give some thought to each of these areas and consider whether you're in a winter season in them, whether you're in that foundation and visioning time period, or if you're in spring and growth and experimentation, or if you're in a summer season and full expression and implementation, or if you're in autumn, a season of harvest and celebration. Once you've identified what season or seasons you're in, you’ll be way better equipped to create an aligned plan of action for yourself that takes all of this information into account.

Now that you've given all of that some consideration, let's dive into a four-step process for planning that integrates the Satisfaction Strategy Framework. This approach will help you create a plan that honors both the seasonal energy that you are in and your unique desires for impact, profit, and pleasure in your business.

Step one is intention setting. Every powerful planning process begins with setting clear intentions. Before you dive into goals and action steps, take time to connect with why you're planning in the first place and what you hope to accomplish. Ask yourself these questions: Why is now the time for me to make plans? What do I want to get out of this experience? What feels the most exciting, the most pressing to focus my energy on for the next few months? 

For spring specifically, your intention might relate to growth, experimentation, or bringing to life ideas that have been germinating over the winter. Maybe you're feeling called to launch a new offer or to refine your message or to connect with a whole new audience. Make a point of writing down your planning intention in a single clear statement. For example, my intention for this planning session is to create a roadmap for launching my new program that feels aligned, exciting, and sustainable. This intention will serve as your North Star throughout the entire planning process, helping you stay focused on what really matters the most to you.

Step two in our process is reflection. Before looking forward, let's take a little time to look back. Reflection isn't about analyzing what worked and what didn't. It's about acknowledging your journey and extracting the wisdom from your experiences so that you can learn from them going forward. So take a few minutes to reflect on the past quarter by answering these questions for yourself.

First, what am I grateful for? Consider both the obvious wins and the subtle blessings. Maybe it's a new client relationship or a boundary that you held or simply making it through a challenging period with your wellbeing intact.

Second, what am I proud of accomplishing? This is about acknowledging your growth and your contribution regardless of whether it showed up in your metrics or was visible to other people.

Third, what do I want less of in the coming quarter? This might be certain types of projects or ways of working that you've outgrown or internal patterns you've recognized that just don't serve you anymore.

And finally, what do I want more of? What energizes you? What lights you up? What do you feel particularly aligned with that you want to amplify in the months ahead? This process of reflection provides valuable context for your seasonal planning, ensuring that your path forward is informed by the wisdom of your recent past.

Step three in our process is introspection. And of course, we're looking at introspection through the lens of the satisfaction strategy framework. This is where we dive deeper into your desires for impact, pleasure, and profit during this particular season. 

Let's start with impact. Ask yourself, how do I want to impact others in the coming months? Consider your clients, your team, your community, and the broader world. What transformation do you want to create? What problem do you want to solve? What difference do you want to make in the world? What's the incremental impact that you can make that moves you toward your bigger impact goals?

Spring is a beautiful time to focus on reaching new people or bringing innovative solutions to existing challenges. Maybe your impact goal involves launching a new offering that addresses an unmet need, or maybe it's about deepening the transformation that you create for your existing clients.

Next, let's explore pleasure. How do you want to feel as you create this impact? What would make your daily work experience more joyful, more energizing? What would help you feel aligned and in flow?

Spring energy naturally supports growth and creativity. So think about how you can harness this in your work. Maybe it's collaborating with others. Maybe it's spending more time in nature while you're working or building more spaciousness into your schedule to allow for inspiration.

And finally, let's consider profit. What financial goals would support your impact and pleasure objectives? What level of revenue and profit would feel both like a stretch and also something that's attainable and sustainable? How might you structure your offerings to create healthy cash flow through the season? Spring is an excellent time to plant seeds for future revenue streams or to refine your existing offers to better align with your desires for both impact and personal experience.

Take some time to write down your specific desires in each of these areas. The key is to ensure that they're connected to each other, that your profit goals support your impact goals, and that both of these are designed to create the experience that you want to be having in your business.

Step four is declaration and goal setting. With this solid foundation of intention, reflection, and introspection, you're now ready to declare specific goals for the season. I suggest that you identify one to three primary goals for the season. If you have more than that, make a list of them and set it aside, hang it on the wall, put it someplace so that you can come back to it later, but really focus on picking what are your top one to three priorities for this quarter, for this season.

And then take some time to write out these goals as the ambitious, inspiring statements that they are. And I can't even say this without laughing, make them “SMART.” Make them specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. And I have to laugh because the last time I led a quarterly strategic planning, there was an incredible woman in the group who had so much resistance to this word “smart” because it's been used over and over and over again. And she suggested that I come up with a new acronym, which I haven't done yet, but we'll see, we'll work on that. 

But it is important that your goals are specific, that they are measurable, they're achievable, that they're relevant to the bigger picture of what you're wanting to create in your life, in your business. And they're connected to a timeline. And none of those things are written in stone. All of those things are flexible, but it gives you a starting point for what comes next, which is the planning around actually reaching these goals.

For each goal then, you're gonna define a couple of metrics that will indicate that you've actually met your goal. Like how are you gonna know when you hit it? 

So for example, if your impact focused goal is to launch a group program that helps purpose driven entrepreneurs align their marketing with their values, your key results might include enrolling six founding members by June 30th, create and deliver six core curriculum modules, achieve a 90% satisfaction rating from participants.

What makes this approach powerful is that it connects your measurable targets, the success metrics, to the meaningful impact that you're wanting to create, the goal.

If it feels aligned, I recommend that you create at least one goal related to each element of the satisfaction strategy. Impact, profit, and pleasure to ensure that you're creating a holistic plan that feels sustainable and feels aligned.

You might look at your own assessment of your impact, profit, and pleasure goals, and you might recognize that you're doing exceptionally well in one of those areas, and it doesn't need to be a focus this quarter. And that's okay, too. You can focus your attention on the areas where you do feel like you need to make growth.

All right, now what happens next is where so much goal setting and planning goes completely awry. And this is where so many business coaches fail their clients because there's an element that's missing between goal setting and accountability and that is a strategy. That is the game plan of how you're going to get from point A to point B, what are all the steps that you're going to take in between.

This is why I call myself a growth strategist and not a business coach because I am a strategist. I live, breathe, eat, and sleep, like not just what's the goal, but how are we gonna get there? What are the steps we're gonna take every single day in order to help you reach that goal in a meaningful way to be able to have the impact, profit, and pleasure that you are really wanting to create?

And so it's about creating a game plan for how you're going to get it done through aligned action. Once you've set your goals, the next thing you need to do is to identify your development phases, followed by the specific actions that you'll take in each phase as you move forward. 

So here's where a lot of people get hung up, what if you don't know what the actions are that you should take? So often we just want to get started and we get excited about this then we don't know what that first step is and we end up frozen.

And so here's what you're gonna do differently this time. If you don't know what the steps are to get started, then your phase one is going to be to research. It's going to be to figure out what those actions are by Googling, by asking ChatGPT, by reaching out to people who you know who may have either the information for you or may be able to connect you to the person with the information.

If you don't know what your game plan is, then your phase one, 100% of the time, is going to be to research, find the information, learn what you need to know in order to move forward. And then once you've learned what you need to do, then your phase two might be just making the plan. It might be taking that research and creating a timeline for yourself and a plan of action of what the steps are that you're gonna take to start to bring it to life, but you can't even plan Phase 2 until you've completed Phase 1.

And so if your goal is to do something that you are experienced in, you have done again and again, and it's really easy for you to just map those phases out and map out that plan, then you can go ahead and do that. And if not, then you set your goal for phase one, you might say, phase one for two weeks, I'm gonna research this. And then you make that your to-do list, is to research, to find the answers.

For example, I have launched hundreds of products, maybe thousands, I don't know. I have managed countless launches, everything from $7 digital products, lead magnets, all the way up to webinars with tens of thousands of people on them, to campaigns to bring thousands of people into rooms live together, you name it, I have launched it. So if my goal for the season is to launch a new product or program, I know that work inside and out. I can map out a plan for that in my sleep with my eyes closed. And so that's no big deal for me. But if you haven't done that and your goal is to launch a new product or program, your first step might be, I need to research how to launch a product or a program. I need to go ask the questions of people who know how to do these things, so that I can figure out what my timeline is, what my budget needs to be, what are the best steps for me based on where I'm starting from.

And I know maybe that feels a little bit like a bummer when you're like, I made a plan, I just want to go, I just want to get into action. But doing that research is gonna be the thing that helps you succeed in reaching your goal. So you need to research, you need to make a plan, from that plan, set a timeline from yourself, and then commit to completing those actions day after day after day, until you reach that goal. 

And you have to take into account where you're starting from. I'm a huge fan of Abraham Hicks. I've mentioned that many times, I'm sure. And Abraham often gives the example of if you want to drive from, say, San Antonio to Phoenix, you don't get in your car and after driving for an hour, say, I'm not there yet, and turn around and go home, right? You just keep going and going and going and following the directions until you get there.

Well, I'm going to add another layer to that.

Everybody's starting in a different place. So trying to get to Phoenix, some people are starting in San Antonio. Some people are starting in New Orleans. Some people are starting in Tampa. It's a long drive across Route 10, but it's longer the farther you're coming from, the farther distance you are from your destination. And so does that mean the person who's coming from Tampa should not even try? They just need to make a plan that it's going to take them a little bit longer to get there, right? 

And then let's take this into account. What if you don't even know how to drive? Would you just decide I'm never going? Or would you perhaps invest in taking driving lessons, buying a car perhaps? Or hiring someone to drive you, or buying a bus ticket or buying a plane ticket. You wouldn't just decide I'm never going to get there, right?

As we wrap up today's episode on Aligned Seasonal Planning, I want to emphasize that the goal isn't to create a perfect plan that you follow without deviation. The goal is to create an intentional container for growth that honors both the natural rhythms around you and your deepest desires for impact, profit, and pleasure in your business.

Spring is a time of experimentation, of emergence, of planting seeds without knowing exactly how they'll grow. Embrace this energy in your planning process. Be willing to try new approaches, to adjust your course as you learn and to trust the wisdom of both the season and your own intuition.

I invite you to set aside some time this week to work through this spring planning process we've outlined today. Create a plan that feels both inspiring and doable. One that will support the next phase of your business evolution.

Next week, we'll be exploring how you can further ensure that you meet your goals by beginning to examine how you need to evolve as an individual and who the person is that you need to become in order to ensure that your goals are met. 

Until then, remember that your pleasure is your power. Take care.