Pt. 2 – Making it happen with effective planning.

If you want something to happen, you have to plan to make it happen. (In other words, you can’t just wish for it and expect it to come to you.)

Planning is a matter of probabilities.

You never know what might come your way or happen in your future but you can do things to increase your probabitlities of success by first always having a back up plan, or a few back up plans. Sometimes we can get discouraged if things don’t go just exactly as we had planned, however instead of wasting time being discouraged we need to reach into our bag of backup plans and pull out the next idea. This keeps us on our journeyto a life of freedom with options and choices, without wasting any time.

Planning should cover a variety of time spans

We can plan:

• Long Range Goals which is an overall lifestyle plan. This should be very flexible because as we continue to live and grow our ideas with grow and perhaps change with us.
• Medium Range Goals are the plans we have for where we would like to be in five years.
• Short Range Goals cover plans for the next month to one year.
• Mini-Goals consist of the goals we have set for ourselves with flexible deadline from one day to one month.
• Micro-Goals cover the next 15 minutes to an hour. These are the most important goals. They are the ones we have the most control over. Also if we work to accomplish our Micro-goals, the Long Range Goals will take care of themselves.

Many baby steps accomplished will eventually equate to a huge step being completed. You have to start somewhere, so start by taking that first single step.

You have probably heard of  that well known quote, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” well consider our micro-goals those first steps on the infinite journey which we will call the rest of our lives.

Plan to be intense in at least one area of your life.

This means pick one are of your life (job, hobby, or whatever you’d like) and have a strong focus on that one area. Excel at something, so you know that you can do at lease on thing very well, and know that you are a valuable person.  You can’t focus intensely on all areas, but choose one to work on with much dedication, determination and persistence, and if you pick the right thing to focus on, good things will come your way.

Plan diversity in your life.

Even as you are focusing on one particular area of your life, changes occur and unexpected things happen. To avoid disaster, acquire diverse skills, experiences etc. (also known as your assets.) This way you don’t have all of your proverbial eggs in one basket. This is where your back up plans come into play. But you still must have a diverse set of assets in order to carry out your diverse set of plans.  With these types of plans in place you should waste very little of your most precious and scarce resource, your time.

Plan for gradual improvement

While we would love to have instant success in everything we do, we must exercise great patience, as practically everything in worthwhile in life is achieved by taking the small steps first. This also brings to mind the little children’s tale of the tortoise and the hare, where the moral of the story is that ’slow and steady wins the race.’

Effective planning requires accurate information.

The most important part of your planning is to know what your plans and goals will require. No matter what the area of planning, acquire as much knowledge as you possible can. Read books, magazines, web sites,  talk to knowledgeable people and find ways to get personal experience in the area in which you are planning.

The worksheet for this section will be available soon. For now, just jot down some of the things that came to mind as you read this.

Part 1 – Finding the Road to Somewhere

Part 3 – Building Your Supply of Assets (coming soon!)