No goal-setting

We don’t start planning by setting goals. Instead, we set commitments. Your commitments are the compass you use to make decisions, change behavior, and focus on what matters. They might lead to goals—or they might not.

Life & business work together

Once you’ve set your commitments to guide you personally, you’ll use them to set strategic priorities to guide your business. Instead of having life and business at odds, your life and business are moving in the same direction.

Resets unhelpful mindset & behavior patterns

A big reason that plans fail or get forgotten is that they’re based on an uninformed perspective of how we work. We all have blindspots. We all have patterns of self-sabotage. We all act in ways that disrupt our ability to create what we most want to create. The Commitment Blueprint is designed to help you unearth those patterns, notice how they impact our work, and gently shift them.

Not rigid

Most of us have schedules that can change, mental health that wavers, or outside influences on our capacity that impact how much we can get done. The Commitment Blueprint celebrates progress—not perfection—and outcomes are icing on the cake, not a reward to be won. That means that this planning system is inherently flexible and can be adapted no matter what life throws at you.

Sneak Peek: Read The Preface 

I’ve had a reputation for “having it all together” my whole life. My family, my teachers, my coaches, my bosses—they always assumed I could be counted on to take the lead or have the answer.

And most of the time? They weren’t wrong.

I’m proud of this reputation. And, this reputation belies the struggle I’ve felt to keep it all together when things get tough.

Taking the lead, learning new skills, coming up with the answer, finding a solution—these all come easily to me. My challenge is in how I keep it organized and prioritized in order to do anything of consequence with my leadership, skills, or solutions.

I’m constantly wavering between the certainty that I have the ability to excel at any task in front of me and the doubt that I’ll be able to follow through.

Last year, I was talking about an idea for how to take an event we run to a new level. I laid it all out. It sounded wonderful—and totally within our capability of executing. But, I was hesitant. My community manager asked me why I wasn’t ready to commit.

I told her that I just wasn’t sure that I could do it the way I was envisioning. It felt easier to keep it small and within the realm of what we’ve already done than to go big and risk it falling short of expectations. I’ve often found the distance between what I can imagine and what I can execute to be daunting.

Over time, I’ve learned that this is not an uncommon struggle. You may very well experience something similar. And if you don’t, you have your own struggles and challenges when it comes to turning your ideas into reality.

For most of my life, I interpreted my struggle as a personal failing. I had been gifted talent and brains but lacked the organizational aptitude and stick-to-itiveness to do anything with it. I was broken.

When I started my first business, I overcame this problem in the only way I knew how; I ignored it. I keep my ambition in check and relied on my personal abilities to see me through.

But as my business grew—and with it, my ambition—I started to lose control. I tried all of the project management tools and organizational systems that promised to help keep things organized. I spent more than a hundred thousand dollars hiring people to create systems and keep me in check.

And none of it worked. Worse, it reinforced what I already knew about myself. I was broken. Deficient. Incapable of making the impact I wanted to make and achieving the idea of success I craved.

Throughout this time, I was discounting one of my greatest strengths. I’m actually a system creator.

Now, I know that probably sounds pretty odd considering everything you’ve read thus far describing my lack of organization or ability to conform to systems. But that’s just the thing! I’m not good at organizing work the way you’re “supposed to” or sticking to systems that have been designed to tell you what to do or being managed by others.

But what I’m really good at is thinking in and creating systems.

I’m a sense-maker. A world-builder. A system-creator.

I didn’t need to conform to someone else’s system for making sense of my work or keeping track of the things that needed to be done. I needed to create my own.

In the time since I started building this system, I discovered that I’m autistic. I’ve always sensed that I experienced the world differently than others but now I have a way of making sense of those differences. I share this with you not because the lessons you’ll read on the following pages are specifically for autistic people or even neurodivergent people.

I know enough about neurodivergence to know that I know nothing about neurodivergence in any way that makes me qualified to do that!

My hope is that, by sharing a bit about my neurology, you can embrace whatever differences you experience in how you approach planning, organizing, and executing your work.

The Commitment Blueprint isn’t a system you need to follow to the letter. Instead, it’s a way of thinking about goals, planning, and execution that invites difference instead of suppressing it.

I’ve built a whole business around inviting business owners to find “what works” for them. And with The Commitment Blueprint, I invite you to do the same.

Experiment with the system. Adapt it. Add to it. Subtract from it. Use it as a jumping-off point to find your own blueprint for turning your ideas into reality and growing into the leader you really want to be.