As I sit here during the first week of January, I can’t stop thinking about the exciting year ahead. I have some new adventures planned that will make this a fun, exciting and hopefully prosperous year.
But I have learned some very important lessons along the way and one of those is that none of those adventures will happen without a plan and a commitment to executing the plan.
So, do you have a plan for 2019? Have you sat down recently to review where you are going and how you are going to get there? Or, said differently, have you thought about your key goals for the year and what it will take to make them happen?
For many, this is the easy part. Planning is easy. The execution part is not – the commitment to making it happen. We get busy, we forget, we get side-tracked, we dream another dream or every day life just gets in the way. We can line up the excuses and reasons – many of them very valid reasons – but the end result is the same. Without a commitment to executing the plan, nothing is going to happen
So, what can you do?
1. here are three steps to help ensure that your dreams will come true this year.What’s the plan? List your 5 key goals for the year. Describe what your dream looks like. Outline the great idea that you want to make happen. Take time, lots of it, to document what some would call the ‘Future State’.
2. What does life look like now? Pull out a new sheet of paper or open a new document and describe the ‘Current State’. What are you? Who are you? Where are you? How are you? We can’t get to step three without knowing where we are coming from – the ‘Current State’.
3. And how are we going to get from here to there? List the steps it will take to make the future state a reality. List the people you need to meet, the work you will have to do, the time it will take and any other steps you can think of that will be required to make it all happen.
This all sounds like strategic planning 101 and it really is. But it makes sense – a lot of sense.
Put a plan together, dream the dream and talk about the future, but without a solid plan built from a solid foundation – it won’t work.
Start now. Build the plan. Share it with a colleague or friend. Get buy in from those that need to buy in. Become accountable to them for the key steps you need to make.
Do all of this and I promise, a year from now, your life will look very different.
