Creating a plan for what you want to accomplish is critical to success. Whether it is your life (now that’s a big plan!), your career, your marriage relationship, raising your children, your health, your wealth, your community involvement, your political involvement, your education, your relationships with family and friends or your spiritual views, plans are necessary to accomplish great things.
By default, you will need to figure out what it is you want to achieve in these areas. If you don’t know where you are going any path will take you there. I want to give you a warning though, if you take any ol’ path… you may not like where you end up!
Making plans is a multiple step process. In reality, making plans is a never ending process. After deciding what you want to achieve, the next step is to build a skeleton. The process is similar to writing a speech or a report. First create an outline. The outline would be the broad points you want to cover in your speech/report.
The next step in the plan making process is to start adding some meat to the skeleton. Once the broad points are outlined then start adding to your plan rough details about what and how you will do things to accomplish your broad points.
Following this is getting to the details. Picking out and putting on the clothes. Choosing the right jewelry and perfume. What are the right shoes! You have to put details on your skeleton.
Let’s work through an example. What if you want to change the state of your health. What if you want to loose some weight, or build some muscle, or maybe sculpt your body for bodybuilding competition? What if you want to improve you health to be less sick, stronger, more alert and less tired, have more energy and think more clearly?
You see, we’ve barely begun and already many decisions have to be made. In our example, one, (or more), of these will have to be chosen as our goal. We have to decide where we want to go. What is our destination? If we don’t make this first decision about our goal, our destination, we can’t make a plan to get there.
What happens then, is since we don’t know where we want to go, we either will go nowhere or we will simply follow any ol’ path. Maybe blindly, without any thought of where the path we are on will take us. Or maybe, we will simply go along a path because our friend(s) are going that way. Or because it’s popular in society.
With this plan, by default, our health is under the control of others. They want you to eat processed foods, junk food and beverages, sit around and watch TV or play video games. They want you to become dependent on the prescriptions and OTC drugs they sell.
The result is we become overweight, lazy, lethargic, disinterested, simple minded, sick, tired, unmotivated, angry, bitter, rebellious and chronic complainers.
The first step is critical! What do you want to accomplish in all the areas of your life?
Pursue Great! is about action. It is about taking an active role in your own life. Making decisions and acting on those decisions to be great in your home, in your work, in your church, in your community, in your country. This blog is not called “Just Let It Happen”.
Next time, we will continue with our exercise in the example of building a plan for the state of our health.