Base Camp Strategy

What's the best approach to making really big, important challenges or changes in our lives? Should we jump straight in, or should we develop well-considered plans? In this episode, we'll look at how to best handle the path forward—toward our full power and agency.

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Base Camp Strategy

Let's say we want to make a big change in our life. What's the smartest way to go about it? Would it be best, meaning that our chance of success be highest if we worked out every detail of the required actions and took each step forward carefully? Would it be better if we set our intention and jumped in straight off, as in shoot first, aim later?

The careful route reduces the chances of errors, missteps, and dead ends that would not have been avoided if we hadn't thought through the process, but it's also slow. It takes time and effort to formulate those plans. That time and effort could be directed to the actions required to execute the changes we know will move us toward our goal, and that's the advantage of the leap with only a glance approach. Speed. Sure, we will make some mistakes, but that would happen anyway.

No amount of planning will account for all that happens once we start. The plan is to do and react. We talked about this concept in Episode 12, dynamic steering. That's a jargony way to describe the process of systematically learning and adjusting as we go. Consequently, we could end up way ahead going this route, but it could also be disastrous, especially if our perceptions and assumptions are wrong, which they very likely are.

No amount of planning will account for all that happens once we start. The plan is to do and react.

The specifics of the situation push us toward one strategy or the other. What are the stakes? What are our strengths and vulnerabilities? Some people will not move unless they know every conceivable detail of the path ahead. Others are simply moving too fast to slow down for such formulating thought. Again, which of these is right?

Most of the time the answer is both and neither. If a goal is too bold, too far away, something we may have tried to achieve before and failed, we simply don't believe enough to jump right in. We lack faith that we will succeed, or we may have tried the shoot-first approach before, missed our mark, and are still smarting from the experience.

That's why when I'm helping someone make an important change, I typically recommend what I call the base camp approach. We don't climb straight to the top of Mount Everest. If we want drastic improvement in our life conditions, they are liable to be very different from those to which we are accustomed. It makes sense then that we break it down into manageable chunks.

Our aim may be to summit some of the highest mountains, but that's not what we begin with. To start, we set our sights on reaching smaller, but still stretch goals on the path toward that ambitious ultimate destination. We plan to reach base camp where we will assess our progress, acclimate to the new conditions, and plan the next leg of our journey to the next camp.

Base Camp Strategy: Set your sights on reaching smaller, but still stretch goals on the path toward that ambitious ultimate destination.

We carefully plan each leg as in the first strategy we talked about, but when it comes time to set off, we don't dither. We go for it straight to the base camp one with us. No stopping, second-guessing, hesitating, or doubting. If there are solid reasons for any of those things, we consider them once we have reached the next camp. With this strategy, we enjoy the advantages of both approaches while we minimize their disadvantages. The trick to using this strategy is being clear about the steps, and the key milestones in our journeys.

If we attempted to climb Mount Everest using only one stop at the first base camp, we'd be in trouble. It's too far from there to the summit. In that case, there are five camps before climbers reach the final stretch to the top. Likewise, if we set up twenty camps, we'd be on the mountain too long. We'd exhaust ourselves before we had a chance to go for the gold ring.

Something analogous applies as we claim all of our power as we move toward manifesting our full agency. We gain the clarity and discipline to exercise control over our decisions, and thus how our lives manifest in this world. We are not going to go from wherever we happen to be to the ultimate destination in one shot. We need to pick our spots. We need to examine the parameters that pertain to the changes we have in mind.

Some of those are universals. We can all move down those paths. An example of that is when we wish to maximize our physical health, we can set the goal to establish control over our habits and decisions about what we eat. Other goals are unique to each one of us. Those elements are our journey. Only we can take those steps and it's a beautiful thing because it's what gives us our specialness.

The other cool thing about it is we must take the steps, do the work, take the risks, and make the choices that sacrifice things we'd also like, but we don't have to do it alone. We can join hands with people who want to help us because they want the same thing for themselves. They want support as they make important, sometimes Titanic changes.

When we join hands, we are so much stronger.

When we join hands, we are so much stronger. We are so much more likely to formulate an effective plan of action where we define what the base camp and the subsequent camps look like. We are so much more likely to stick with the work of the journey. We are less likely to fall off course, and as we reach each camp, we have people we can celebrate with. How great is that? Let's go.

 Important Links

• Episode 12 – Past Episode