In the best mastermind groups and consulting relationships, the generation of ideas leads to a decision. This, in turn, leads to action steps, which encourages progress and accountability.

Sometimes your clients don’t know how to analyze all the options and make a good decision. Or, they don’t know how to create an action plan once they’ve made a decision.

Let’s talk about those two situations and I’ll share two exercises to help your clients and members get into action and make good decisions.

Decision making 101

There are many places in the action planning phase where clients get stuck. When they need to make decisions which are either complicated or expose a conflict of values, the decision-making wheels grind to a halt.

For example, in a recent mastermind group meeting, Joan needed to make a decision about which target audience she wanted to market to. She could either work with seasoned women entrepreneurs or she could work with business owners in the startup phase.

Joan had a passion for both groups. She was a seasoned entrepreneur herself and loved the idea of supporting her peers. But she remembered the struggles of the startup phase and knew she had knowledge and experiences to share with this audience, too. From a marketing standpoint, it’s a lot of work to market to two audiences simultaneously, so she needed to choose one audience to work with first.

To help Joan make a decision, we used a simple “T” chart:

• Draw a line vertically down a piece of paper.
• On the left, list your goals and values.
• On the right, list your choices.
• Next, draw a line between the left column items and the right column items: which choice will help you achieve the most goals and aligns most with your values?

(This is a great group exercise, too. Use a whiteboard or flipchart, and let everyone jump into the written brainstorming!)

In Joan’s case, she decided to work first with the seasoned women entrepreneurs. Here’s why:

• This group was likely to have enough income to be able (and willing!) to pay her fees.
• Working with seasoned entrepreneurs would challenge Joan to step up and be seen as a high-level expert.
• There was less competition for this audience compared to the “all small business startups” audience.
• There were places where her audience congregated, like at conferences, so she could network with them easily.

Because this choice aligned with both her goals and values, it was the perfect choice for her.

Action planning 101

It can be daunting to choose a course of action and write up a plan. Mastermind groups help each member by giving them tools to help make the decision about which actions to take, whether to do it themselves or delegate the task, figure out what resources are necessary to complete the task, and assign reasonable deadlines to each project.

Now that she had chosen her target audience, Joan had to write a marketing action plan. There were dozens of tasks and projects to consider and she started to feel anxious and overwhelmed. In the next mastermind group meeting, Joan asked her co-members to brainstorm a To Do list so that she was sure of several pieces:

• Which tasks to do and the order to do them in
• The goal of each task or project
• How much time each would take
• Where she could delegate some tasks to reduce her workload
• What was her deadline to get all this work done

We put all the ideas for tasks onto Post-It notes and stuck them on a whiteboard. This allowed us to rearrange the order of tasks, and add sub-tasks as needed. Then Joan took a photo of the whiteboard so she could transcribe the finished results into her marketing plan.

With these two simple tools, you can help your clients and mastermind group members move forward!

Related posts:

• 3-Part Process to Help Members/Clients Discover and Solve Problems
• Sometimes They Need a Kick in the Pants
• Why Accountability is Important in a Mastermind Group
• How Will You Know That You’re Successful, When You Don’t Know What It Looks Like?

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