Stepping up the cycles

To extend the growing season and your garden’s total yield, you can plant kale late in the season for a cool weather crop that will persist past the first frost. (Image by Gerhard)

As a coach, I like checking in with my clients every day.

Not all of them like checking in with me every day. But those who communicate with me in between appointments are able to accomplish more. It’s simply a question of having more cycles.

There is certainly a limit to how many cycles you can have between live appointments, but it’s not three and it’s not five. It’s a lot more. The more questions that my clients ask, the more we can answer together.

To unlock this potential in our work, my client needs to shift from thinking of the live call as the place where the work gets done to recognize that the work gets done whenever they have an intention of doing the work. While it’s difficult to accelerate progress within a given cycle, increasing the number of cycles will speed things up.

I’ve been thinking about how this idea applies in other contexts. I went to a conference fully expecting to have transformative insights, and I did. Would I still have transformative insights if I went to a conference every month? It seems possible. It would be interesting to see what the limit is.

Of course, transformative insights can come from a lot of places. If I am only expecting to have them from an annual conference, that’s what I’ll get. Where else can I find them?

As a matter of fact, one of the things that I took away from this particular conference is the idea that I can remake and refashion my work as often as I like. I can step up the cycles in that regard, too.

This is important because, without realizing it, I had put myself on an academic calendar. It used to be that I could reevaluate my schedule every April for the following academic year, so I was unwittingly continuing that habit.

I am now recognizing that I can make changes to my schedule and focus as soon as I see that there are changes to be made. I can turn things around in a matter of weeks or even days. I don’t have to sit with the results of my current experiment for a year before creating a new one.

Now that I see this, I can’t imagine how I didn’t see it before. But even then, I will have to consciously stimulate the cycles. Otherwise, I’ll drift along on the old frequency.

I have all kinds of ideas for new programming I’d like to create. In the past, it’s taken months or years to launch new programming. This time, I don’t want to wait. I want to challenge myself to create and launch the new programs in a fraction of the time it would usually take. And I can do that if I rework my schedule to allow adequate time to create the programming and prepare for launch.

Changing my schedule in the middle of the fall semester — I really feel like I’m getting away with something. But there’s no such thing as a semester for me anymore. I have no external obstacles. I’m limited by only what I can conceive of and follow through on.

I’m not sure how long it will take me to get used to this new rhythm, but I’d like to make a game out of messing with it. I’m interested in seeing what happens when I push against it directly. I’ll find out soon.

What might that look like for you? Where might you step up the cycles in order to achieve your goals?