Creating A Life Plan

If you have ever stopped, like really stopped and looked at your life, would you say you have a plan?

For so many life planning is a term we may have heard but our lives are anything but planned. So little time, so much to do, there isn’t much time left to think about creating a life plan.

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However, so many times in our in our life what keeps us busy is far from what we should be doing. Not having a solid base leaves us to ponder each question big or small. What keeps us from concrete decisions is that we haven’t set our values to know what, at that time, is the right choice.

So we don’t know what the plan is then we have to make a decision and another decision and another, until we are faced with a monumental wall of big and little decisions to climb.

Not knowing how to value a decision leaves nothing for us to fall back on. So, so we have to figure out. What bucket does this fall? Do we choose family or work or fitness or … ?

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I want to do this with the family but I’m being asked to do this at work. And since there is no life plan, I don’t know how to make that best choice to really signal what is the most significant thing that needs to be done right now at this stage of my life. Now the key wording is “at this stage of my lfe”. A life plan allows you to lay out the importance of your steps in life so when a decision arises you can fall back on the plan and that plan guides you down the right path.

I have heard this concept discussed in interviews with people in the military time and time again. When they go to war there is a constant level of uncertainty and their training is conditioned to push conformity into their decision making and routines so when chaos rears it’s ugly their is always the routine they have trained for that they can fall back to without having to overthink.

We also recently had another interview with Ashley Wilson on our podcast, The Jason and Pili Project. Ashley is a marketing genius. She metaphorically described having a life plan as her light house. What is your lighthouse? What is it that you can go back to and focus your life on?

And this does not have to be one master plan. You can create multiple plans dedicated to all areas of your life from financially, and emotionally to physically and spiritually. All of these should be part of your lighthouse.

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The bonus of envisioning the light house gives you the visual of that light, that continuously beacons, that will serve you and point you in the right direction. So what is your lighthouse and how are you going to figure that out? I mean, lighthouse is a great analogy, right? It helps you find your way home. At times when we don’t feel connected to what we’re doing or feel off track it’s because we don’t have that base.

What is the most important thing right now to you that is paramount to your future fulfillment and what steps need to be in place to get there? That is what a life plan is. Let’s look at this from another angle. Consider building something a house or car. You in some shape of form know what each consist of but if you had no direction the end result would leave a lot left to desire and the choices you would have to consider throughout the process would cause countless delays.

Elon Musk’s plan to reusable rockets took another giant step forward the other week when they had a successful launch. A few days prior they had to postpone the first launch due to weather. The choice was easy. They had a big audacious goal and aligning reaching that goal with the weather patterns to have a successful outcome made the decision to delay easy. I also heard Elon speak about decision making and how he contemplated building houses but looked at his first most important goal of getting people to Mars and it became easy for him to decipher that the energy spent building homes would deter the bigger and more important goal.

It’s time to make your life plan. So the next time a question comes up or that topic comes arises, we can easily identify what the best option will be.

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Here are the five best ways to start charting your new course:

1. Identify all the main buckets in your life. This may include family, relationships, work, fitness, hobbies or a number of different items.
2. Set the major focuses for each bucket. For family it may be spending quality time together or for fitness it may be doing four thirty-minute workouts a week.
3. Label what your current life looks like and how you are attending to each of the buckets.
4. Identify what right now an ideal setting for each of those buckets would be.
5. Set a priority and hierarchy for each of the buckets. This may be allocated to certain seasons or certain times of years.
6. Implement the plan. Now that the plan is defined using it as your foundation for all your decision making. Not only will this allow clarity for your future but it will also define your next steps forward.

Remember creating a life plan is like setting a road map for where you want to go. There may be detours and flat tires along the way but having a map to the destination will always allow you to find your way back to the path.