The Power of Planning

How you respond to challenges and opportunities in life is a choice.

You can choose to 'squeeze' life and create the future that you want, or you can choose to allow life to 'squeeze' you and be governed by your own past ways of thinking or other people’s ways of thinking.

Napoleon Hill, in his book 'Outwitting the Devil' talks about the 'definiteness of purpose'. Tony Robbins also talks about having clarity on what you are passionate about and what your purpose is, what are you wanting to achieve in life.

To go after what you want requires action. Nothing can happen without it. You can have the best idea, the biggest goal, and the greatest intent and achieve nothing. Alternatively, you can have all of that and with a great plan combined with consistently acting on the idea, you can achieve your dreams, create impact, and inspire possibilities for yourself. It all comes down to how committed you are.

Ask yourself are you interested or committed? This is an interesting question to ponder, so you may want to take some time to do just that! This is important because when you are interested you most likely do what is comfortable and easy, however when you are committed, truly committed, you will do whatever it takes.

This is how it is with planning. A plan is powerful when you are committed to developing it, using a framework that gives you the best outcome and then a structure that will bring it to life. Then all that is required is the discipline to show up every day and act, even when mistakes are made, or perceived failures occur. This is another crucial aspect to consider because there is no such thing as failure, there are only results. Everything you do will give you a result. It may not be the result you want; however, it is an outcome of some kind. Change your thinking, change your results. When you get a result that is not what you want, change your thinking to change the strategies and actions you are taking as part of your plan to try something different to get a different result. It really is that easy…test and measure.

Back to planning. Having discipline around planning is choosing between what you want now and what you want most. How many times have you thought about an idea or something you wanted to achieve and not taken the action to bring it to life and then experienced that someone else has done or created what you had the idea for? They were not smarter or more intelligent, in most instances, the difference will simply be that they acted. They were disciplined to focus on what they wanted most and not allow the short-term gratification of the now moment to get in their way.

Discipline is simply choosing between what you want now and what you want most.

This is the power of planning and here are three steps to follow to get started:

Step 1

Identify your big goal. Think big, go big. The bigger the goal the more action you will take to achieve it. The smaller the goals, the fewer actions you need to take. I am not talking about big in global terms, I am talking about big in your terms, what is big for you?

Step 2

Decide what you need to act on to achieve your goal. What are the areas of business or life that will require specific actions to bring your goal to reality? This is where you get to challenge yourself as to whether you are interested or committed. Ask yourself what am I willing to do to bring make this goal a reality?

Step 3

Create a documented plan that uses the SMART principles and that captures what you need to do. This is where discipline is important. The discipline to spend the time to document and get clarity to bring your goal to life by chunking down and prioritising what needs to be done.

Follow these 3 steps and experience the real power of planning. Planning helps you live with integrity in your values and your beliefs. By showing up consistently, with discipline and commitment you can create the life you want. Without planning activities and steps to make that happen you may be allowing life to squeeze you.

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