THE POWER OF PLANNING

In the last post in this Empowerment series, I asked if you have a plan for your own self-development for identifying and developing your human capital and potentials. Well, do you? Is it written down? Is it detailed out so that you have an action plan for each day and each week? And do you consider it important?

Typically when I pose such questions at trainings, several people will pipe up and ask, “But do I have to have a plan? What’s the big deal about a plan?” Others will say that they “did that and it did not work.”

The key here actually is not the plan, it is the process of planning. There’s a famous quote from General George S. Patton during the Second World War about plans.

"A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week."

The other quote is that what’s most important is not the plan, but the planning. If the next day you find out that the plan is no longer relevant or useful, throw it away. You have not wasted time or effort, because the value was in and is in the planning. So Patton identified that what is important is not the Plan per se, but the process of planning. So be ready to abandon any and every plan that you draw up. If the key to success then is not the plan, then the key is the planning.

Ah yes, planning is the important item. This is the process of going through the struggle of figuring out what you want. Planning is the process where and when you want it, what’s involved in accessing the required resources and prerequisites to get what you want, identifying the obstacles and constraints to be dealt with, the problems to solve, the solutions to invent, and the process of innovating the plans so that they become real. The experience of planning involves a lot! And it is this that is important.

So, do you have a plan for your own human capital development? What plans do you have for actualizing your highest and best? What plans have you created and are creating so that you can become the best version of you? What is your planning process for your most highly desired objectives? How do you incorporate continuous improvement into your plans?

Now the power in planning obviously lies in using all of your core powers (thinking, emoting, speaking, and acting) as you engage in a process of imagining and inventing a desired future and then figuring out the steps and stages for getting there. It is this whole process that we call planning.

When I modeled the experience of wealth creation in the early 1990s, this was one of the things I discovered in those who had succeeded in becoming financially independent. They had sat down and

planned what they wanted and how they would go about obtaining it. Later when I examined the literature and the longitudinal research on wealth creation, the same theme emerged. So I sat down and wrote my first wealth creation plan. Talk about hard! It was “hard” because it revealed that I really didn’t have a clear idea about what or how. So to complete the planning process, I had to do some intense and focused thinking about that, I had to revisit my notes on the process, I had to do a lot of self-exploration about skills, potential competencies, weaknesses, plans for addressing those weaknesses, passions, etc. Eventually I created a 10-year plan which I broke down to a year-by-year development, which I broke down to a month-by-month set of activities, which I broke down to a day- by-day checklist of things “to do” that would be my small everyday steps toward financial independence.

The planning process itself involved all of that intense focused thinking that detailed the grand idea., the grand idea was financial independence, but the work of planning was the meta-detailing the specific everyday activities that would make that possible. And true to what General Patton said, the truly important was not the Plan. As life kept happening, I found myself constantly change it and updating it. And that was the important thing.

That’s why to this very day, one of the objectives and take-aways from the Inside-Out Wealth Training is the ten-year-plan that every participant is encouraged to create. I even put that in the book by the same title so that if you are just using the book, you will be invited repeatedly to create a ten-year plan and have even offered a template for creating that plan (Chapter 15, p. 234ff).

If the planning process is the key to creating your own inside-out wealth so that you win the inner game of how you think, understand, believe, and decide about “wealth,” and then win the outer game of actualizing that, the same will be true for other objectives. It will be true for your personal empowerment.

Have you set out to create a ten-year plan for empowering yourself mentally, emotionally, linguistically, behaviorally, relationally, etc.? If you set out to create a personal empowerment plan— what would you write? What planning would you do? What competencies would you focus on developing? What beliefs would you need to identify and install so that your beliefs support you? What states, intentions, identities, etc.? (here using the distinctions of the Matrix Model).

The power of planning taps into the power of a well-formed outcome, into the power of intentionality, and into the power of meta-detailing.