When to adjust your personal strategy?

When we define strategy as how you navigate forward through uncertainty — we might ask:

So when is it useful to adjust your strategy?

In a fast changing world, the timespan for relevancy of an intentional strategy is not 5 years, for sure. Or even 1 year in some contexts.

So how do you know when to reconsider your way forward?

Based on my experience and study, I’ve found three types of triggers for this:

• Time-based triggers
• Event-based triggers
• Energy level-based triggers

Time-based triggers

Let’s start with the time-based ones, as they’re more straightforward. In the flow of life, having a personal strategy might be useful as a guide. At the same time, when we’re going about our lives, we usually don’t stop to pay attention at how the strategy plays out.

That’s why you might decide to revise your strategy after a certain time. It might be after 3 months if you’re transitioning into a new role, for example. It might be longer if you’re in a more stable landscape.

In my experience, I’ve adjusted this time-based trigger:

• from 3 months (when just starting my professional life)
• to 6 months (when settling on a role)
• to 1 year (when mastering the corporate role)
• to 3 months (when switching careers)
• to monthly (when launching a start-up)
• to 3 months (when switching to independent consulting)
• to 6 months (when working with larger consultancies)
• to 3 months (when switching to independent advisory)

For me it was useful to ignore common advice on New Year’s resolutions, annual reviews etc and try to find a pace that’s relevant for my own context.

Event-based triggers

When we’re talking about triggers based on events, it’s really about the idea of paying attention to anything significant that happens in different areas relevant to you.

This is where the Sense & Change model comes in handy for me.

Environment

• Has anything significantly changed globally, in my country, in the market, in my professional space etc?

Radar

• Are there any strong signals of change for things on my radar?

Capabilities

• Is there anything significant that affects my ability to do things (positively or negatively)?

Strategy

• Are there strong signals in practice that the assumptions that I based my strategy on are not valid?

Projects

• Are there any external changes that significantly affect the progress of my projects?

Day to Day

• Are there any external changes requiring significant adjustments of my daily habits?

For me, answering yes for at least one of the questions above was a good trigger to adjust my personal strategy.

Energy-level based triggers

Finally, I found that it’s important to pay attention to my energy levels. Even though I might not sense any relevant external change using event-based triggers or time-based triggers, I might find myself having low energy for more than one week, for example.

I found that there is much non-cognitive wisdom that we have, wisdom that is not connected to rational processing of information. Sometimes our body is wise to show us that things are not alright and we become tired more easily or need more sleep. Sometimes we feel that something is off and we feel disconnected, not in flow.

In this case, I discovered that there are 3 options for going forward:

Change

• Looking to change yourself, your personal strategy, your context, how you interact with others etc.

Accept

• Making the decision that you will accept things as they are

Leave

• Deciding to leave a specific context, project, group or relationship that drains you of energy continuously

On a fun note, it’s why I think that I became decent at changing myself and leading change around me. I’m usually choosing to leave as a last resort.

Coming back to personal strategy, I felt many times that I need to adjust it, even though “on paper”, on the surface, everything looked fine. My energy levels are an important indicator for me while navigating through the uncertainties of life.

Hope these ideas make sense! I’m curious of your perspectives on adjusting personal strategies — why not share your take in the comments section? 💬👇

Next time I’ll share another practical example, of helping an executive create their personal strategy 🧭💡

Enjoy the journey,
Bülent

Follow the updates by subscribing to the Personal Strategy newsletter.