What's Your Plan?

A mentor of mine once told me that if you don’t have a plan, then that usually means you’re part of someone else’s. So with the New Year just getting underway, what’s your plan to take some action this year? Without sounding too presumptuous, if you’re reading this article you are probably off to a good start because you are at least thinking about what your goals might be. There are a lot of people in the world who do not set goals; these are usually the same group of folks who like to blame and complain too, usually about everything from the economy, to money, to your job, et cetera, et cetera. Most of the people I know who do this never seem to take action or responsibility for their current situation and they just sit around wondering why things aren’t getting any better. I know this because I was one of those people and until I sat down and physically wrote out a rough plan for my life along with goals I thought I was going to stay that way.

I personally started setting goals 25 years ago, and my only regret is that I didn’t start setting them earlier. I was 26 years old and I had just entered my first sales position as a Realtor. Looking back over the years, I can honestly say that mostly all of whatever I accomplished can be attributed to goal setting. At the time I started my goal was to buy one investment property a year, then years later my goal was to buy one investment property a month. Most people don’t even have the idea of getting an investment property, let alone having a plan. Which makes me look at all of the Realtors I knew at the time I started, none of them ever thought of doing what I was doing, in fact they thought I was nuts! Now I see a lot of the Real Estate firms closing or downsizing and it makes me realize how important my goal setting really was in relation to my success.

So is it really that easy? Actually, it usually is but you don’t have to start completely from scratch. I like to start my personal goals with an old form I got from Jack Canfield, of the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” fame (you can still find the form here, just click on the PDF entitled “Principal 8: Chunk it down”). I really love his form best because it doesn’t just cover financial goals, it also covers other areas as well, like personal/ business goals and it even goes much deeper with family, religious, and charitable goals. These are all equally important. For example, most of my goals today are not monetary (although they are still very important) like becoming a better speaker, getting another coach, traveling to some wish list destinations ( New Orleans, Maine this Summer, & Italy), putting an addition on my mountain house, as well as the physical fitness type goals everyone has.  And of course, let’s not forget our charitable endeavors. So now is as good a time as any to start to take some new direction and most importantly some action.  Let’s not do the normal New Year’s resolution thing that never seems to go anywhere. Now’s the time to stop going through life like a ship on the ocean, just drifting around hoping to land in a good port with no map, compass, or direction. Take a few minutes this week and ask yourself what you really want and do like I do, put them on a Post-it note on my desktop. This way I see my goals and yearly plan at least twice a day.