Hi there! Today, I want to talk about one of the concepts and mind shifts that my clients love and rave about the most. Even after they stop working with me, they still email me and tell me that this particular idea is one of the most helpful, impactful, and overall transforming. 

Today, we're going to talk about the idea of experimental mindset, where it comes from, how to embrace it in your personal life and how it is different from the traditional goal setting that we've all been taught. 

Let's go.  

As you probably know, the monthly method is based on agile scrum principles. I've borrowed what I've learned from observing, how engineering teams work, how product teams work in tech companies, what are some of the principles they use? I've borrowed these ideas and I have applied them my personal life, to my personal projects, to my personal calendar,  to how I approach goal setting, habit building all of that.

If you ask the companies that embrace agile and nowadays, I think even the most conservative companies are understanding the power of agile and they're moving towards it. For example, I have some friends who work in large corporate banks and even these conservative companies, even they started to embrace agile and they are now doing all this training, they're trying to change how they do things because they see the power of agile. And so the main benefit that comes from agile is that you can pivot really quickly. You can adjust and you can build new products that are in line with the current world, with the current demands, with your customers quite quickly.

 How it's different from the traditional way is that you don't rely on these five to 10-year long-term plans.  use. Embrace short-term planning, meaning that you work in sprints. You build as much as you can of a product, of a  solution of something in this short amount of time. Yes, it's not perfect.

Yes, it's not ready, but you try to ship it to a customer. Not all the customers, but to someone to see their reaction, to test it out. And if you see there is a disconnect, if your customers are not responding to it, quiet in the same way, then you can quickly pivot. You can quickly adjust.

With the traditional way, you would not get feedback till the very end to look five years from now. So that's the power of agile and the fact that our world is changing so incredibly fast, I feel like this is the only way to be. This is the only way to operate. Doesn't matter if you're a company or if you're an individual, it worked. 

For example, 50 years ago, the idea of just picking one profession, one degree, one industry seemed like a good idea, and it was feasible. Nowadays, most likely unrealistic, unless you're a doctor, but even if you're a doctor, you can't really expect the things that you learned in university are going to be used 10 years from now.

No, you always have to keep changing how you do your procedures if you're a  surgeon, right? There are always new technologies. Therefore, coming back to, again, the main benefit, the most appealing reason to go with agile and scrum is to be able to do something, to produce something in this short period of time. And then test it out in the real world. How we do it on a personal level with like some personal projects, personal goals as we call it an experiment.

We set goals for this sprint. Under the monthly method, it's three weeks. You would set a set of goals for three weeks and you don't really go into this mindset that you're going to do these things for the rest of your life. Every sprint is an experiment.

Meaning that maybe you want to try running as an exercise.  You set your goal to run a certain number of kilometers or maybe run every second day. You set the goal for yourself related to running,  and then you do this activity for three weeks. After three weeks are over, you analyze your experiment.

So, you've set the goal. You went out and did it in the real world. You've seen your first results. You've interacted with the world because you were doing this activity. You were going there and creating this action or  if you have a goal of I don't know, writing blog posts, recording podcast episodes, you've shipped those out.

So you've seen the reaction from the outside world, but most importantly, before we even go with reaction from the outside world, you've seen the reaction from yourself and from your life, because right now,  every one of us, we have our own set of life conditions, right? We have a job. We have some people who depend on us, kids, husbands, wives, some external commitments.

Then you see how this activity, how this goal fits into your life because when we set goals in our head it's all perfect. We can dream about it all day long, but until we actually start doing it in real life, we can't really say if it's the right activity for us, if it's the right activity to keep ourselves in shape or the right form of exercise.  Whatever, you are doing this for. So, after three weeks is over, you look at this running activity and evaluate it because it was an experiment.  Then you put on your scientist hat as I like to call it. And you say, okay, we've run this experiment. Let's look at some data.

Let's see how it went. Was it a success? Was it a failure? Even if it was a failure, it's not because you were bad. It's just an experiment that failed. If you're a scientist, you have experiments that succeed and experiments that fail. If you have the ones that fail, you don't take it

personally. You look at the data, you analyze why it failed and you decide how you're going to change it. How are you going to tweak it? Because It doesn't make sense to repeat the same experiment again because you already know the results. Also, the beauty of short-term planning,  scrum planning, and ultimately experimental mindset is that you can set a goal.

You can be excited about this goal. You can do this goal but then realize that you don't like this goal anymore. You don't want to do this anymore.   Then you say, okay, this was a great experiment, but there are some other experiments that I want to try in the upcoming month and that's totally fine.

You don't have to say that, oh, I'm a failure because I can't really stick with anything for too long. I lose interest and all of that. If your sprints are long enough to see the first results because that's when you get the second wave of motivation to do the activity after you see the first results, but if you've done the activity, you've seen your results,

you've done it. And you're like, yeah, I see the results, but I don't like it. And then you're free to change the activity, free to change your goal for something else, but whatever you do, whatever goals you set for this sprint, if you're not doing the monthly method, just set goals for one month and see how it goes.

But always look at it as an experiment. Every goal is an experiment. You might have an idea that achieving something will make you feel happy, feel excited, but when you get there, you're like, yeah, it was nice, but it doesn't really, it's not what I expected. And then you're like, okay, great experiment.

I've learned a lot. This is what I've learned, this is what they can borrow from this experiment to my other experiments. What are some lessons that I've learned that were successful? Great. I'm going to apply the same learnings to my next experiment. What failed? Okay. I'm not going to apply the same techniques to my next experiments, but yeah, great thing, loved it. But let's move on to something else and it's totally fine.  That's what pivoting means. 

A lot of people like the idea of, oh, I'm going to pivot but pivoting means that you need to say no to something else and not feel bad about it.

Just take the best part. And then lose the rest and pick your next experiment that has some of the parts from the previous experiment, but it might be a completely different one. It's totally up to you.  The beauty of this experimental mindset is that the pressure is gone because whenever we try to set goals for the rest of the year or for four, five years from now, there is this pressure to get the right, to set the goal that you will enjoy doing for the next five years.

You can really know till you go and do that.  The pressure is to do the right decision right now and not change it for the next five years. That's a lot of pressure. That's why people procrastinate setting any goals. They procrastinate writing anything down. They procrastinate doing anything creative because they think they need to be perfect.

There is a lot of procrastination and feeling of being stuck.

So, when you embrace an experimental mindset, you tell yourself, this is just an experiment. We're going to do it for three weeks and then we can stop doing it completely. We can change our path and maybe tweak things around, but it doesn't have to be so serious. It doesn't have to be so long-term.  If you look at that as a short-term commitment to something that you think you would enjoy doing, then you get unstuck.

Then there's no pressure to be perfect,  to do the right guess or the right decision up front. You look at it as an experiment and give yourself full permission to change things around after one month is over or after three weeks is over, however long you want this experiment to be.

And you don't take things so seriously. That's another problem that we have with goal-setting is that we just take it so seriously.  It's not a fun way to go about it. Your life is changing the outside oral list is changing. and Don't take yourself too seriously. You will have to adapt and if you look at the evolution, the people who survived were the ones who were able to adapt the quickest. That's the truth of our existence.

So get used to it. The decisions that you make today about your future, are based on the information that you have today on life and the world, as it is today. It will change one year from now. 

Who knew three years ago that we would have COVID? No one knew. And now we all had to adapt. So, all the goals that you had, all the expectations that you had about your life and how it's going to be three years ago, like think about it. You were probably taking yourself too seriously, but then life happened and you had to change things around and that's normal. And that's going to continue to be like that with this speed of innovation, climate change, political situation, it's not going to be the same.

You can really take everything too seriously. If you want to be able to pivot, adapt and move on with your life.

Also, an experimental mindset allows you to learn very quickly because it forces you to analyze the results of your experiment. If you limit the time in which you run this experiment, let's say three weeks, then in three weeks, you have to evaluate your experience. That's why we have the sprint review sessions.

It's like, okay, what worked, what didn't let's learn. Let's apply this learning to the next experiment and let's get better. If you embrace the long-term solution, then you can be suffering for like the longest time ever, because you've committed to doing something for five years. It's definitely not working out, but you're just sticking with it, empowering through, but you're not learning from your misery.

You're not changing things around like there's no feedback loop happening. And no change will happen. It'll just continue being miserable.  Under this long-term goal setting, there is never a time to slow down, pause, and say, okay, am I going in the right direction? Should I switch things around? Does it make sense anymore to be doing this thing? Given everything that has happened with the world over the past two years, given my family situation, given my health issues, does it make sense to be continuing this?

If you embrace an experimental mindset, you'll be able to constantly be tweaking things around to be able to fit it more effortlessly in your life.  This should be like a puzzle. You take one puzzle piece, you look at it and you're like, okay, let me try fit it in. You go to this part of the puzzle that you've already collected, right? Then you go to another part. So that's your sprint, right? You, try it out. You give it a fair chance and then you're like, no, this puzzle piece doesn't fit right now into my life. And then you put it away.

Maybe eventually, you can come back and it will fit, but for now, it doesn't fit.  Then you take another puzzle piece, you do the same for three weeks, another sprint, another experiment. Did it work? Okay? Yeah. You found a place for this puzzle piece.

So you put it in. You continue doing this activity, maybe it becomes a habit and then you take another puzzle piece and you continue with the rest of the puzzle.

Sometimes, you'll have sprint goals that you're not gonna achieve.  The old mindset will look at it as a failure but under an experimental mindset, if you're doing experiments. Every experiment is useful because it brings you closer to the right experiment. You just collect data and even data from the failed experiments is a success.

If you ask any researcher and your scientists, they will tell you that failed experiments are valuable because they also tell you things. They tell you things that do not impact some of the variables that they're studying. That's also information that's very useful. 

 When I talk with my clients, one of the things that they mentioned is that once you embrace this experimental mindset, you can move on really quickly. You can say, okay, what worked? What didn't? There was no drama. There is no, oh my God, I'm such a failure, then beating yourself up for the next three weeks. Again, you don't take things as seriously as before.

And also once you embrace this experimental mindset, you can try different things. You can try things that are way outside of your comfort zone. Maybe, you've never tried running before and now you decide to try it because you have your full permission to stop doing it after three weeks. If you've never tried it. a cooking class or if you've never tried horse riding, you can go ahead and say enough for horse riding classes for three weeks and then see how it goes.    Then you can stop and analyze this experiment if you like it, continue doing it. And now you have a brand new hobby that you didn't have before.

And you enjoy it, but if not, then it's still was an awesome experience that you can learn a lot about, but you don't have to agonize about what a failure it was just because you didn't stick with it for the next 10 years of your life.  So that's what they wanted to share with you today.

Look at your goals as experiments. Don't look at them as something that you want to keep doing for the rest of your life. Don't look at it as a commitment to yourself. Don't look at it as something that your self-worth depends on. The only healthy way to look at your goals and your habits. And all of that is just one experiment at a time.

See how it impacts your life.  See if you like it or not. See how it fits with other parts of your life, and then decide afterward if you want to stick with it or not. But for now, when you were just setting this goal, keep it short, keep it three to four weeks and treat it as an experiment. Okay? That's it.  Please subscribe, if you want to have a freshly baked episode delivered to you next Monday. For now, have a fantastic week and  I'll talk to you next week. Bye.