What’s In the Way? How to Turn Stuck Plans into Progress Artwork

Uncomplicating Business with Sara Torpey

Business gets WAY less complicated when you keep it human. In the Uncomplicating Business world, we use a simple, flexible four-part framework—ground, plan, connect, sell—to help you simplify decisions, set (and keep!) effective timelines, and show up consistently without burning out. You’ll hear bite-sized solo episodes and thoughtful interviews that turn messy challenges into actual actions, from pricing with confidence to building trust with yourself, your offers, and your community. Come for the clarity, stay for the momentum. Let's create *functional success* - where successful businesses are one part of our successful lives - together.

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Uncomplicating Business with Sara Torpey

What’s In the Way? How to Turn Stuck Plans into Progress

April 21, 2026 • Sara Torpey • Season 4 • Episode 8

0:00 | 12:54

In this episode, we're talking about one of sneakiest places business owners get stuck: the GAP between thinking about what we want to do and actually doing it. We're talking about passive planning (the thinking and mapping things out) and active planning (putting those plans on your calendar and into motion), and how to bridge between the two.

Three key takeaways:

--> Passive vs. active planning: Both are essential—thinking time and calendar time—and progress depends on connecting them with clear decisions.

--> It's mindset AND strategy: Sometimes the issue is time or tools, but also? It can be doubts like “no one will want this,” which stop you from even trying.

-->Your calendar is a decision tool: Giving your business “client-level” space on your calendar is one way to create the structure that turns plans into revenue.

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Welcome to uncomplicating Business friends. I am Sara Torpey. I am happy to be here with you today. Today we are going to talk about planning, and specifically we're going to talk about what I think of as one of the trickiest parts of planning, because there are different varieties of planning.

I think one of the places I know, one of the places that lots of people get stuck is in doing too much of one kind of planning and not enough of another. So what does that mean? In my head, there are two kinds of plannings that I think about when I talk to clients, when I help them plan out their businesses, when I make my own plans, I think about what in my head I call passive planning, but not in a derogatory way. So it's the passive is just the it's thinking planning. And then there's active planning, which is like the actual planning of the actions. Both of them are required, but often we spend way more time on one than the other, and that's part of what gets in our ways.

So that's we're going to talk about today. First, let me define a couple of things, passive planning. Again, not derogatory. So this is not me saying if you're passive planning, you're doing it wrong. Passive planning is where you sit and think, honestly you're passive planning all the time. It's where you lay out the options and the ideas and the processes you want to follow. It's the the actual thinking, the like, Okay, here's the options, here's the ways I could do this, here's the thing I want to accomplish, right? It's this, laying it all out on paper, active planning is the planning of the action part of that, right?

It's the when you touch your calendar you are an active planning mode, when you agree to meet with somebody about something, when you look at your calendar and you move this meeting and you add that one, all of those kinds of things, when you look at your time for the week and think like, Okay, I'm going to accomplish these things on that day, and this thing on this day, and I'm not going to do any of those things on Friday, whatever all of those things are the active part of planning, the actual putting into place. The thing that connects those two together, the bridge between passive planning and active planning is decisions. So for example, if you're thinking about a goal, like one of my goals right now or better yet, let me use a client.

I have a client right now that one of her goals for the last couple of months has been many of her clients work for our sort of sub entities of a larger entity, and she has been really thinking about how to gain clients outside of that larger entity. And so we have been really thinking about what that process looks like. And every week she's planning the action, actions she takes towards reaching out to people that are not in that larger company. And in the last two weeks, she's gotten the first client outside of that company, and because the thought planning, followed by the calendar and action planning, let her to actually gaining that work.

So what happened in the process is she went from the thought planning to deciding which actions are the ones she was actually going to take for her. It has been a combination of networking, asking for connection, and reaching out to people who have left that larger company and gone other places, and really making sure they know about what she does and are connecting to her in new ways, and then making sure, making a decision again about where those things fit in her day, how much of them she's going to do, and how to prioritize them. One of the things she's done in this calendar year is really prioritize making sure she's treating her business like a client, and giving herself a half hour or so most days at the start of her day to work on business growth tasks for
just her business, rather than work for her clients.

So she put her business growth tasks at the front of the day. This is passive planning and active planning combined into result, right? So for you, one of the questions to ask yourself is first like, okay, what are the ways that I am doing passive planning like, where do I am I taking the thinking space in actually getting the passive planning time is an active thing, like, you might have to put it in your calendar. Where am I getting that thinking time? And then the question that follows that is, how am I translating my thinking into action. This is something that I as a business coach do with clients and members of the uncomplicating business lab all the time, where they'll say, Okay, I decided, here's what I'm going to do, here's what I need to do.

Or they'll be like, here's this thing. I just talked to a client today, she's working on hiring someone to do a small job for her business, like a, like a project based thing, and we've been talking about it for weeks. And she said to me today, you know, I haven't posted that yet. And I was like, okay, cool. What's the plan for posting it? And she was like, Well, I said, What do you actually need? Because sometimes it's like, do you have what you need? She was like, well, I already have the written words, whatever I know where I want to put it. Okay, great. And she was like, I just have to do it. And so I said to her, Okay, let's do it right now. And then she told me she hated me, even though she loves me and I love her, and we did it. And within the next 10 minutes, she had somebody applying, which was kind of amazing.

So for me, a lot of times, what I see in people is you have the thinking, and you might even have the decision, but you haven't done the planning for when you take the action, right? You know you're going to take the action, but you haven't, like, activated it in your planning to give it space and weight and time. And it could be that you're like, cool, I put things on my calendar and then I ignore them. That is a separate kind of issue, right? Because if you're doing the act, the passive planning. You're doing the thinking, and then you're doing the active planning of k this is going in my calendar, and I have time at these spaces. That's how I'm going to do it. The next question, and then you're saying, Okay, I don't get them done in those blocks.

The questions I have are about like, the size of the task. Is the task the wrong size or the wrong task? Is the action synched up with the goal? Then the other part is like, the client said to me this morning. She was like, you know, what's really in the way is that I don't think anybody's going to want this job. She didn't share it because she was saying no for people. And I was like, Okay, listen, I promise there are people that want this work. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean they won't and immediately she got a response. So that was a mindset. She was having a thought, like a grounding issue, around the thing, the action she was going to take that was impeding the action.

So if you are putting it in the calendar, and you're doing the active planning pieces and they're still not happening. It's like, okay, is this a size of task problem? Is this the kind of task problem? Is it not synced up somewhere, or is it just not a task i i want to do, like I don't put posts to Instagram on my calendar because I don't like to. I do it occasionally when I remember, and then it feels like a win because I did it. The other thing, though, is like, Okay, what's in the way? Here? It's one of my very favorite questions to ask people and myself. It's like, okay, if I'm not doing this, why? What's the problem? What's in the way? In asking myself, it's not like, what's wrong with me very purposefully, it's what's in the way here. And when I asked that to my client this morning, she was like, Well, I just don't think anybody wants this job. Well, okay, that's in the way here, because if you think nobody's going to respond, why bother? But you don't have the evidence that nobody's going to respond, that's just like a your doubt creeping in.

So for you, the tasks here today are, you know, where are you getting your passive planning space? What are the decisions you're making? How are you translating those into active plans? And if they get stuck, what gets stuck? This is work that I do all the time with clients, and in the uncomplicating Business Lab, the most efficient way for you to get support with this is to come to coaching in the lab. The lab is $250 a month for a year, or it's $2,500 for the year, and you get a whole year of support with this kind of stuff. We talk about planning.

I have. Every week, we talk about goal setting and action planning at the start of the month, we evaluate and reset it at the end of the month, we talk about it in between, and then we do it again, because these are the habits, this passive planning and action planning that allow us to create ongoing, consistent, simple, uncomplicated, confident, progress that translates into money. Because here's the thing, the task my client needed someone to do that she's now getting people to say yes to today to apply for that job is one that is going to make her business money. It's probably going to make her business 1000s of dollars because it's a marketing task that just isn't getting done. And so she is going to pay a little bit to gain a lot that she wasn't making when that task wasn't happening.

So for you, there's a higher cost to the task not happening, to being in the way of it, to having it be impeded through either not following passive to active planning, or having something in the way of it that you're just not getting around it's costing you the money that's not being made when the plans don't go into effect.

So if you want support with that, that's what we do in the lab. If you have questions about active and passive planning and decision making, please ask. I'd love to talk to you about them, and I will see you back here in two weeks. I have another really amazing guest coming to talk about sales, and I can't wait to see you.

Then if you get a chance, I would love for you to do me a quick favor and rate and review this podcast on whatever platform you're listening to it, because this is how other people helped find it. If you're not subscribing now is a great time. I'll talk to you soon. Have a great week.