What's Your Life Plan?

“If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.” (Zig Ziglar)

What are you aiming at in your life? What is your vision? How do you want people to remember you at your funeral?

These are big and important questions. They are also questions that fall in the “important/not urgent” quadrant of Eisenhower’s well-known scheme. You will get through the day without a life plan. You’ll probably get along OK for years or even decades.

At age 53, I finally said that I needed to spell these things out. After all, I’m a Life Coach, right? This is the stuff I thrive on.

But where to begin? Well, for me, I decided to stop searching around for the “perfect” system (there are many to choose from). I just chose one that I worked through from beginning to end. Altogether, it took about 8 hours, both to read the book, then implement the process. Not a huge time investment, when you consider the payoff.

The book I used as a guide is called Living Forward, by Michael Hyatt and Daniel Harkavy. The end result is a 10-12 page document that really gives great, personalized direction for your life.

One key for me, though was that I needed to invest about 4 hours in a block to write the first draft. I had a sort of retreat at home where I turned off all distractions and just did this one important task.

Best of all - It’s coachable in two ways: First, you can be coached on the specific elements of the Plan. Second, after you write your Plan, you find all kinds of details that you can be coached on. Lately, when I am preparing to be coached, I open up my Life Plan document and look for commitments that I am having trouble following through on. Those are great coaching topics, because I have already decided that they are priorities in my life.

So that’s my encouragement for today - Stop drifting and nail down a plan. You will not regret it!