A Guide To Change For Everybody: Introduction
This Introduction is from the book “Next For Me: A Guide to Change for Everybody” from the founders of Next For Me.
“You have to go through it to get to it.”
– Musician Sly Stone
So, you’re planning some big change in your life, are you? There is a lot of noise out there about reinvention, transformation and the like. It would seem (with only slight exaggeration) that there are more books, podcasts, and thought pieces on the “evolutionary journey” than there are people making changes. Granted, some of it is practical information worth paying attention to, but where do you go when you’d like to be more introspective and open-minded about what you’re setting out to do?
In the following pages we offer a set of exercises that should help you see your “next thing” in a more expansive light. Starting at Your Philosophical Center we dig into the values, mission, people and associations you make along the way. Then on to Fresh Perspectives with some fun techniques founded in open-mindedness including visualization, using constraints, mind mapping, and even deja vu. Then we come back to earth with The Tactical, our most useful survival techniques for hacking through the day-to-day and having the endurance to stay standing.
We’ve built our company around a cause we really believe in, with people we trust and respect. Our hope is that the things we’ve learned along the way can help guide your next move in life or career and even help you enjoy the process.
Before we started our company Next For Me we were time-tested Silicon Valley professionals known for our work in online communities, user experience, and research. After years of contributing to successful Fortune 500 companies, as well as participating in our share of startups, you might say we were quite independent-minded.
We weren’t necessarily looking to start something new. But the market signals pointed to something big and meaningful that we couldn’t ignore.
We made a conscious decision not to follow the Silicon Valley approach of asking investors for money to buy a big audience and then hopefully influence them to act in a way that was “monetizable” That approach would have left us with dice-rolling venture capitalists breathing down our necks, impatiently waiting for a big payday.
We found our own way to move forward and build a company which at first was geared toward people over 50 and was about work and financial readiness.As you’ll see, that evolved over time. As we wrote about and built resources for people going through change, we used those same techniques to think more broadly about our own company and evolution—we became consumers of the very methods we were encouraging our readers to adopt.
What we learned was that change didn’t have a timestamp. That people of all ages could create new ways of living and being with a focus on mindset adjustments. But knowing what you stand for is a foundation for what comes next.
We started the company with this lofty statement:
Next For Me inspires you to evolve your life through new work, a new purpose, or a new social contribution.
Little did we know how much we would learn about ourselves in the process. Because we were bootstrapping — starting our business with no outside funding — we also began to call in a free set of tools and techniques that we used to stay open minded about the approach to the business we were building.
We started by publishing a weekly newsletter. Our revenue path wasn’t defined. We were thinking that if we hit a chord with the large audience, they would come flocking to us and the path to revenue would come later.
An obvious path to revenue didn’t occur to us until Carole reminded us that we had a great story from our past about using our online community building skills in research environments. We had done it before for a big research firm along with Deb McDonald, a qualitative researcher who saw the potential in the technique.
By being open to alternatives to the venture capital or paid user growth paths, we now had a compelling business story to tell. We started to sell research, sponsorships for our events, and workshops for organizations targeting this in-transition demographic.
Simply obvious, you would think. We would grow with money we earned from sales. This would keep us in control of how we evolved and help us be certain that we adhered to our values and a set of guiding principles we would develop.
Midway into our second year, some of our advisors and readers questioned the tone of our corporate story and consumer message. It was filled with what they considered too much negative messaging rife with doomsday predictions. The feedback was our community didn’t need to hear a retelling of such dark predictions week after week. What they/we needed is something to hope for.
We listened (we had become doomsday weary too) and conducted quick experiments to test the theory. We started publishing articles that were aspirational stories of facing down adversity and finding a way through it. Those articles immediately got considerably better traction and engagement than the darker pieces.
The results also underscored that “mindset” had as much as anything to do with a positive outcome. It suggested that having an open mind was a personality trait that would become increasingly important if our community was to make progress in their own personal development and evolution. We wrote about that too, and the positive reaction to those pieces told us we were honing in on the story that our readers were looking for.
So, not only did an open mind and a willingness to transition benefit the community we were building, it became the “way of being” for us and our company. If we were going to be a catalyst for transformation, we, too, had to be people open to transition.
It didn’t hurt that we were nurtured in California traditions of Buddhist thinking and social experimentation. Being in California in the 70s and onward meant you were likely exposed to human potential movements, open dialogs about roles and self-identity, political activism, free and open information, often along a thread of eastern philosophy.
That’s how we ended up here.
This book is a set of ideas and experiments you can use to think more broadly and philosophically about what’s next for you. The concepts can help you no matter what stage you are in thinking more deeply about your place in the world.
We begin by discussing your philosophical center. We’ll walk you through some exercises that help when articulating your core values, and to establish some guiding principles as a framework that you can operate within. Once in place, this foundation will be your “north star” when working through your “what’s next” strategy, and is a quick go-to if you’re ever doubting your intentions.
Then, we go deep on how to find and associate with people who share those values.
Next, the broad topic of open-mindedness. Or, how to get your head ready for absolutely anything being possible. We developed an appreciation for techniques to find a fresh perspective, where we detail how stepping back, writing, drawing, or using other techniques to change your perspective opens a world of possibilities. They are simple hacks that expose paths and opportunities you may have missed otherwise.
Rest assured, it’s not all pie in the sky, California-speak. We next cover our methods for the elegant handoff from high-mindedness to actionable strategies. We include a tactical toolkit for staying healthy, financial realness, doing things yourself, and the directive to sell yourself from day one.
We refer to career moves, life changes, or a new business interchangeably. No matter what change you’re looking at the people you’ll interact with can easily be considered your audience and customers. Your career is as much an entrepreneurial effort as starting a new company.
If you’ve taken the plunge to do something new, we hope this book will help you on those days when you could use a nudge toward a bigger view. For us, the process of sharing something new with the world is a gesture that has our reputation, ethics and core beliefs attached. We hope our experiences will help inform your next self and sustain you through the long days ahead. Make it fun. Make it matter.
- Carole McManus and Jeff Tidwell
This Introduction is from the book “Next For Me: A Guide to Change for Everybody” from the founders of Next For Me.
