Success always leaves
clues. No one around you that has achieved great success has done so in a
vacuum. The path they have travelled, to achieve the remarkable success they
have achieved, is paved with their own personal recipe or brand for success.
One of the easiest ways to invite similar levels of success into your own
experience is to explore what they did and to uncover their recipe. This recipe
can then form the foundation you use for building your own “success blue print”
or strategic plan. If you fail to plan, you are most certainly planning to
fail. Not having any plans at all is a plan too; it is just a very poor plan,
where you are left to the whims of everyone and everything around you. You are left
travelling through your life like a rudderless boat, with no real direction or
purpose at all.
Achievers Always have a Plan
The one thing that stands
out the most for me, about all the successful people I have admired and whose
biographies I have read, is that each one of them had a plan behind their success.
So even if you are unable to unlock the individual success recipe of someone
you admire, to follow. Know that the path is far easier and requires far less
effort, when you have a plan. It is impossible to create a plan until you know
what you want to achieve with your life. Start right now by getting a vivid
picture in your mind of exactly what you would like your life to look like in
the future. Visualise what would be around you, what you would be doing, who
would be in your life and what experiences would invite meaning and fulfilment
into your experience.
Create your Plan for Success
Once you have a crystal
clear picture in your mind of exactly what you want your future to be like. It
is a good idea for you to create a plan for your success, one that will work
well and will take you to the finish line powerfully and in style. I have written
some ideas below to help you create your “Power Plan for Peak Performance”.
Build a Plan that Works for you
All people are different,
some people need plenty of detail in their lives and they work best with a very
detailed plan, which highlights every intricate detail. Other people are more freewheeling
and work better within a plan, which offers only an outline or framework,
within which they must work.
The first question to
answer is “What is the right plan”? The right plan is one that suites
you and your style. A plan that is unique to your circumstances, one that fits
you and is right for you. Each of us is unique and driven and inspired by very
different things. No one knows you better than you know yourself, create a plan
that suites your personality, one that considers your strengths and weaknesses.
Build an Annual Plan
Explore your goals and
the outcomes you are trying to achieve. Start the planning process by looking
at the big picture. Divide your year into four equal segments of 90 days each.
Break your goal or goals back into smaller bite size chunks or smaller
projects. During each 90 day segment select a realistic number of projects to
tackle and complete. The secret to success is avoiding overwhelm whilst still
ensuring that you stretch yourself.
Break each 90 Day Segment back into a monthly plan
Now break these projects back even further into
smaller achievable mini goals. These are goals that you will be able to tackle
and complete within a month. Finally break these mini goals back into micro
goals, which can be achieved within one week. Remember each micro goal must
have a completion time during the week and must be measurable. In other words
you must know when you will achieve it and be able to monitor your progress
daily, until it is done. Whatever gets measured gets done.
Turns your plan into Individual Action Steps
Your plan must then be
broken back to include individual daily actions, which you can put into your
daily schedule and actually take action on hourly to complete. Review your
progress daily and ensure that you are applying sufficient discipline to ensure
that you are completing all the actions scheduled each day and more importantly
are the actions you are taking delivering the desired results. Planning is
important, but with ensuring that you are taking the right actions every day,
they remain just words on a piece of paper. Assess your progress as often as
possible to ensure that your actions are delivering the desired results. Plan,
Do, Review and then if necessary Improve.
Meet your Future Every Day
Create time slots in your
daily schedule that are devoted to work on the individual tasks highlighted in
your plan. I call these time slots in my daily schedule “Meetings With My Future” Show commitment and
perseverance every day and make sure that you meet your commitments to your
future. Develop discipline and make completing those daily tasks your top
priority. As you repeat this positive cycle over time you will move closer and
closer to the future you desire and any dream becomes achievable.
Review your Day
It is always good
practice to set time aside at the end of your day to reflect on how you did.
Are you meeting your commitments to create the future you desire? This is an
opportunity for you to go over everything you have done that day. Are the actions
you are taking delivering the desired outcome? If not ask yourself what you can
do differently the next day to get a better outcome.
What did you learn?
It is also an opportunity
for you to re-examine everything you have learnt that day and lock all the
valuable information away for use at a later date. Look back over your day and
examine all the people you saw, who you talked to, what was said, what happened
and how you felt. Each day is like a mosaic in the big picture of your life,
carefully store each one, so that you can use it to create a wonderful picture
of your past. This allows you to gain the maximum benefit from your past
experiences and makes your past experiences even more valuable, so they can
serve you in the future.
Make it Work for you
Ensure that you act on
the plan that you have created. Simply commit to do it, work your plan every
day. Your daily disciplined actions, over time, will add up to massive equity.
Stay committed to take action every day and remain disciplined and focused. You
have got so much to gain when you commit to apply these few really simple
principles in your life.
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