120 Day Plan: 30 Days Update

That illegible text above is how I’m tracking my success toward some of the harder goals on my 2022 Goal List. I’m doing this because one of my meta goals (I should really start another list to track these!) is to figure out other methods for accomplishing the difficult goals on my list.

The Eight Items are:

1) Make 30 videos for my Chronic Pain Coaching business.
2) Hit 4 Leg Lock Entries
3) Complete 4 Weeks of Spanish Lessons
4) Complete 2 Chapters of Spanish Grammar
5) Get a new official job Description at Work
6) Get a better title and more compensation to go with that new job description
7) Rehab my Hip and Ab injury by doing PT daily for 4 weeks
8) Write and publish 6 pieces of writing

Success and Failure:

Leg Locks: My 120-day goal is to Heel Hook someone who is a purple belt or better. In order to accomplish this goal, I decided to focus on finding entries into leg entanglements, because without setting up the entanglements, I can’t find the HH finish. I’m very comfortable playing butterfly, so I am ALWAYS now looking to lift my opponent and spin into Single Leg X/Closed Ashi, adjust the foot across the lap then hit the heel hook. I’m working on chaining sweeps into the SLX leg lock entries, but I’m not competent at this yet. I’m also working on RDLR Sweeps into 50/50 and chaining an anklelock attack to the HH. And I’m also trying silly moves like backstepping into the saddle while passing, which has been weirdly successful, but I’m unlikely to rely on it because it is a serious positional sacrifice and I never want to undercut passing repetitions. I’ve also been watching both Danaher and Giles on leg attacks and working to understand how they enter the legs. I’m going to add watching some live footage from previous ADCC’s to the mix in order to see how the best guys are setting things up in competition. I was successful at getting more than 4 leg entries, (I stopped keeping track after I hit 5 entries), but only successfully set up the HH on a white belt because he didn’t know leg escapes. This next month I’ll be back at Cascade for the month and hope to get some reps with folks who are used to training in the gi. I suspect I’ll either hit my long-term goal this month, or be completely stuffed because I haven’t been doing gi training. Total toss-up.

Spanish: My goal was to actually do Spanish lessons and to push through with self-study of Spanish grammar. I signed up for an italki tutor to help me with speaking practice, but have run into the issue of not having a wide enough Spanish vocabulary. I’m likely going to look for a different tutor that will help me build the grammar and vocab skills in parallel with speaking. Overall the italki platform has been excellent and cheap and finally pushed me to work harder at Spanish. My goal for a new tutor for the next 30 days is to have “homework” assignments that cause me to have to study more Spanish on my off days. I was not successful at doing self-study of grammar this month, but I think if I fold it into the social expectations of a tutor, I know I will do it.

Job: I’ve been bidding for a job description change since my team was re-organized and the project level Change Management process was folded into the PMO. It’s in the works, but I suspect there are forces at play behind the scenes that have made this slower than expected. It’s coming but not as rapidly as I’d like. My goal for this space is push for Organizational Change Management as a critical capability to deliver on our strategy and to continue to define my role in terms of my facilitating, coaching, and leadership development abilities. I love this space and the more I can do work that is targeted toward my strengths, the happier I’ll be.

Chronic Pain Coaching: My goal here was simple: Make 30 Tik Toks. The long term goal in this space is to create 10k impressions, which now seems low. I made 20 videos, with just over 9k views total, 150 profile views, 338 likes and 40 comments and 29 shares and 33 followers. My videos are mostly landing in the 400 to 600 views range, with my lowest being my whiteboard videos and my highest being a couple of random "talking at camera” videos. This space is really funny. Clearly, I have some engagement and every time I post a video, I get another couple of folks following me, but I haven’t cut through yet. I’m skeptical that Tik Tok will be a useful conversion engine, but I want to keep pushing out content because it’s forcing me to think. I’m starting to reconsider them as micro coaching sessions instead of as educational videos and I’m enjoying them more. This next month, I’m going to continue to try to produce 1 or so Tik Toks a day, but hone in on creating Instagram content as well. I am also going to look at what I produced this month, follow some advice on how the algorithm on Tik Tok works and try to break out of the model of video I’ve been creating to do something more compelling. Additionally, I am going to create and publish a marketing plan, several user journeys, and a couple of client personas. I also need to finalize some administrative paperwork. I’d like to challenge myself to see if I can get one additional coaching client, chronic pain or otherwise, by the end of the month. I want to be doing more of this, but there are lots of layers of learning that I need to develop in order to succeed. Bit by bit.

Hips and Abs: I had a really nasty, mostly undiagnosed hip/ab injury in February that I’ve been rehabbing. I have weird chronic pain issues and (probably) because I was in pain for so long, my body slips into defensive pain cycles easily. To deal with this issue, I’ve been using a 4kor ball on my lower abs, hamstrings, and glutes. This is agony, but it’s helping. I’m also stretching my hamstrings, upper glutes, and inner thighs with wall stretches. Finally and most critically, I’m doing a weighted, knees-over-toes lunge stretch to really deeply stretch and strengthen my hip flexor and lower back. These together have reduced my nagging pain from constant 5 or 6 level pain (yikes!) to an occasional 1 or 2. More work to be done here, and the tissue is clearly not healthy yet, but a massive improvement. Thank god that I have a big pain tolerance because this method, especially the ball, is not for the faint of heart.

Writing, finally: My goal was to write and publish 6 pieces of writing to this blog and I have done that. It’s been such a joy to be so inspired, to have so much variety of inspiration, and to know that there is more coming. I have 3 or 4 topics and ideas that are kicking around in my head already. I need to get back to work on the meaning problem specifically, so I’m going to commit to 3 more pieces in that series, as well at least 1 piece analyzing the framework for meaning over at Meaningness. There is more poetry, more fiction, and a lot more prose to follow this month. I have no doubt that my time in Seattle will be inspiring even further.


Learnings:

This 120-day plan idea was inspired by a weird source: Jujimufu’s 2-year transformation video. Specifically, this part here. I don’t really know how I ran across this video because I’m not subscribed to his channel, but I was deeply inspired by the idea of transformation periodization and Jujimufu is clearly someone who has shown that the framework works if you are the right person for it.

The idea in a nutshell is that you can’t do everything at a high level all the time. If you try, you will fail, and likely give up. So instead, you should try to do a few things really well and everything else can have a different intensity. The items in my list above are the areas that I’m giving serious attention to. I’m dead serious about getting my business off the ground, but I knew that I needed to learn to content marketing, and I knew the biggest hurdle was the breakthrough in my reluctance to look like an idiot and do mediocre videos on a subject that I care about. There are items on my 2022 list that I haven’t focused on. I did not, for example, memorize a single poem in the last 30 days, but I will when the current goals are completed.

One more interesting feature of this model is that certain things degrade in intensity as you complete them. I am going to keep stretching and improving my hips and legs, but I’ve built a habit now, so the intensity is substantially lower. When I work out, I work on my mobility and I stretch before sleep now. These areas can be improved, but they don’t have to be started from scratch. Having a habit of posting and creating videos for Tik Tok will lend itself to creating other content marketing and marketing schedules.

I suspect that having my goals broken down and in front of me every day also made it more likely that I would complete them. I check my digital list often but knowing I had to update the box on the whiteboard put it front and center in my mind. It wasn’t a perfect method, but I’m planning to add an additional whiteboard to my wall where I can really flesh out the checkboxes instead of having week summaries.

Conclusion:

The 120-Day plan appears to be working and some of my goals will likely be replaced by different ones as I succeed at them and the intensity of those goals falls off.