STEP IV

TRANSFORM

The fourth step, Transform, is akin to your product fully being in the market! You’ve been iterating, testing/learning, and getting feedback from your marketplace. You’ve been improving your results and making continuous improvement. You are transformed, and you will begin to transform your environment around you. You will now sit and work with the changes in your product. Because you are not quite the same person (or product) who started your journey and if you don’t take time to adjust your identity to your new role, you could backslide. So here is where you reflect on your accomplishments and decide what you learned and will do differently next time you seek growth—because there will be a next time. While you want to stay with this feeling of triumph, you never want to feel like you are done growing and learning. So you will end where you began by deciding where you will set your sights next.

In Chapter 10, you will take a moment to reflect and absorb what you’ve achieved, how you did it, and what you’ve learned—just like the replays athletes use to see how they performed in their last competitive encounter. You will want to apply your learnings the next time you go through your EDIT or while you are learning your new situation.

Chapter 11 helps you learn how to sustainably walk in new shoes so you can focus on what’s ahead of you, design your strategy for how you will initially learn about your new situation, and then transform the situation. Staying confident in your achievement, while staying grounded and humble so you can learn and contribute, can be daunting. I will cover how you can do both.

Chapter 12 is a special chapter that addresses some realities of how to “win while Black.” To be authentic or to assimilate is a daily challenge for people of color while delivering on commitments. People of color should not take the negative feedback and behaviors personally, but should take them strategically instead.

Chapter 13, the last chapter in the book, reveals how there are times that life will happen, and no risk-adjusted plan can predict what will happen or when. I will discuss how I handled a major setback and how we all can keep improving our product to become the next better version of ourselves.