Law of Success Simplified – 4: Planning
What should be your strategy to reach where you wish to be from a place where you are? Dreaming your future won’t take you there. A definite and concrete plan is a must. As they say, if you don’t know where you want to go, any road will take you there. You have to know where you want to go and decide HOW you’re going to get there. A plan will help you chart a course to arrive at your destination; it will give you a road map, a route. It will also help you provide you guiding mechanism for handling the hurdles and road blocks which might come during your journey. It will help you sail in unchartered waters without any problem because planning is your compass to help you navigate through high seas. It will prevent you from going astray and losing your track. A good plan will have following characteristics: It should be action-oriented. A good plan will have built-in proactive measures. It will specify action plan to transform vision into reality. It will secure you in driving seat with the command of complete control where you could see the road ahead and drive rather than acting on reflex and reacting to situations. It will set a timeframe and a timetable. Where you would be able to break tasks into subtasks and allocate realistic, practical time schedule for completing the same. Without a specific timetable, your plan loses cohesion and never gains momentum. The casual approach will get a casual result. No one knows the future no one can predict with certainty what lies ahead. The plan should be flexible with enough space for adjustment for contingencies and unforeseen eventualities. The presence of flexibility mechanism in the plan gives you confidence because you know that you have provided enough room in your plan to handle exigencies and unexpected events. Planning starts with revisiting your vision and reviewing your mission statement. Its also important to assess your present situation or starting point so that you could measure the gap between where you are and where you wish to be. Then follow following steps: Goals ---> Priorities --->Strategies You should always bear it in mind where you are doesn’t control your destination. With right plan, priorities and strategies you can achieve your goal irrespective of your present position. Goal: Famous author and motivational speaker Brian Tracy while talking about Goals says – “Success is goals and all else is commentary”. Finding a goal is the prerequisite to all the accomplishments. Goal don’t come in sizes, anything which prods you to move ahead as per your vision and objective is welcome. As great Chinese philosopher Confucius said “A journey of thousand leagues begins with a single step.” You don’t get there in a single leap. You break the trip down into steps, one step at a time. You don’t have money start saving, you don’t have education get yourself enrolled to get the necessary education, don’t have a job – go find one. You do it, one step at a time. You never do everything together all at once. It’s like shifting your library, you move one book or may be couple of books at a time. Plan backword from your vision, as famous writer and speaker Stephen R. Covey says begin with the end in mind. Decide what you want to achieve. Decide when you want to achieve it. Then plan backward in time to the present. This will help you set the time schedule and action plan rather realistically. It might also help you in identifying probably hurdles and bottlenecks that you might face in the course of your journey towards achieving your goal. All successful people are goal oriented. They know what they want and they are focused single-mindedly on achieving it, every single day. Goals provide fuel to your engine and fire to your imagination. Goals transform your thinking into possibility thinking. Goals unlock your positive mind and release ideas and energy for goal attainment. Goals can provide you with emotional tugs that draw you toward the achievement of your objectives. You can draw energy from your goals by absorbing them into your subconscious mind. Without goals, you simply drift and loiter aimlessly and reach nowhere or anywhere. Long-range goals are broad objectives that will require several years to achieve. They may have deadline 10, 15 or even 20 years in the future. Medium range goals are more specific. They specify the things you need to accomplish to achieve long range goals. Usually, they involve time frames of one to five years. Short-term goals usually encompass time periods of less than a year. They tell you what you should be doing in the near future to accomplish the medium range goals. Immediate goals are things you should be working toward right now to take you toward your short-term goals. You can set daily, weekly and monthly goals to carry you toward your broader goal. The shorter the time period involved, the more specific should be the goals. Suppose you wish to be an entrepreneur and want to have your own business. It’s an objective but a very crude one. You need to become more specific, when would you like to have your business running, what type of business you are looking for, would it be in service industry or product based. Suppose you chose service industry, and then identify the sector in which you wish your business to be. Identify some benchmark industry/business houses; find out the competencies, skill, manpower, money and resources needed for that business. Evaluate your status from where you have to start. Set a time frame for the same set the priorities and work on the strategy to achieve those individual objectives set under each subset of assignments that you need to finish to reach at your stated objective. You will also have to constantly keep checking on your resources, time frame, and adjusting the same to ensure that you achieve your sub-objectives and final goal within the specified time, a time that you have promised yourself for achieving that objective. You need motivation both internal and external to hold on to your action plan to achieve the goal. Our mind is an interesting entity it can give us ideas in whichever way we wish it. As David J. Shwartz has narrated a story about presence of 2 efficient supervisors in our mind; Mr. Triumph and Mr. Defeat, in his famous book “Magic of thinking big”. These chaps are very efficient and competent and are absolutely dedicated to serving our demand from them. It depends whom we want to serve us. Therefore, sometime to keep Mr. Defeat away from us, we may need to advertise our goals. This advertisement works as check and balances us when we try to waiver from our path, which we have set for achieving our goals. We have three types of people in our acquaintance zone. Those who will be cheering for your whether you win or lose – they are the motivators and we need them around when we are down and low and feel like quitting, they provide us with necessary motivation and inspiration to stay on course. Then there are those who will be pulling for you to fail – these guys challenge us, give us even stronger motivation and fighting spirit to sustain us during the hardship. Priorities and Strategies: We break our goal in sub-goals, objectives and sub-objectives; we need to identify each in terms of its importance and urgency in terms of achieving our larger goal or objective. Based on our assessment we must priorities various identified activities. Then we work on the strategy to accomplish these tasks and activities, strategy in terms of organizing resources and processes. We also need to see that we don’t overshoot the time or overrun the budget. There should also be alternative mechanism/strategy designed to handle should such overruns occur. This method of planning is true for smallest to biggest of goals. The sequence remains the same only the extent, magnitude and quantum varies based on our objective. Keep chasing your goals, with right planning, priorities and strategy you shall achieve your objective.