Today we’re finishing up our topic of Purpose and Planning for the month. Last week we talked about how to develop a Purpose-driven Plan and today we’re going to focus on what happens when things don’t seem to be working as planned.
So you have this great plan, but as you monitor your progress to your original plan, you notice things aren’t adding up! What happened? It was such a great plan…
Provided you really did put together a detailed plan that is Purpose-driven and followed the methods we discussed and laid out in the workbook provided, there are a few reasons things might not be going like you thought.
DOWNLOAD WORKBOOK HERE
First, in the words of John Lennon, “Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans”. Things change. We use a lot of outside variables when we create our plan based on certain assumptions, and things around us change, so we need to adapt our plan based on changes in our customers, our partners, new technology and our own lives. If you’re not modifying your plan at all as you go along, it either wasn’t very detailed or you’re very intuitive (great quality to have)!
After that, the two biggest problems I see are based around priorities. I want to do a visual today that the great Stephen Covey illustrated in his book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. If you haven’t read that, I highly recommend it. It is one of the most influential books in my life, which I read when it first came out and still positively affects every aspect of my life today.
This is a great illustration about priorities, and even if you’ve seen it, it really helps to bring home how important it is to manage our priorities. So, let’s take this jar and let’s fill it with all those things we have to do every week. We have all those little things that have to be done and come up along the way. [fill jar with sand]. Then we have all those tasks that seem to just pop up and have to be taken care of right away or those on-going weekly commitments we made. [fill jar with pebbles]. Then we have those really important tasks that are critical to use achieving our Purpose. [fill jar with big rocks]. But as you can see we ran out of room long before we got all those big rocks in!
But let’s see what happens if each day we look at what are the three things I can do today that will get me closest to achieving my goals. [put big rocks in jar]. Now let’s do the things that are important to achieving our goals and support those three main tasks. [put pebbles in jar over rocks]. Now let’s do all those little things that have to be done and come up along the way. [fill jar with sand]. As you can see not only did we accomplish our main priorities, but we were able to fill in all those other things around it!
As Steven Convey says in his third habit—“Make First Things First”.
The other major problem that I see commonly regarding priorities is conflicting priorities. If a major goal is to spend more quality time with your family and you also set a goal of writing a new book in 8 weeks with a big promotional tour, you may run into conflicting priorities. So you’ll have to go back to your Purpose/Your Why and ask yourself what really are the objectives that support my purpose and what strategy am I going to take to accomplish the associated goals. Then look at the strategies across all areas of both your business and life, and ask yourself if there is going to be conflict in what it takes to get you to your goals. It doesn’t mean you can accomplish your objective, it just means you may have to alter the strategy and goal of how you’re going to accomplish it.
But either way, make sure you know how to put, first things first!
So next week we’ll be starting a new topic for the month of February on Innovative Marketing. This is a priority for all entrepreneurs and something that really allows us women to utilize of feminine qualities to full advantage!
Until then remember TRUE wealth comes from within.
What have you found to be your most common planning problem and what are your tricks and tips for staying on path?
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