Tag: self-improvement

Growing up, there was a saying that was repeatedly drilled into me – “If you fail to plan, you can plan on failing.” Perhaps you have heard the same phrase or a variation of that phrase. Proper planning is the foundation for developing, increasing and moving forward in life. Everyone should strive to live every day on purpose and with a definite purpose. Planning is essential to living fully and fulfilling one’s purpose. Without question, it is imperative that we ready ourselves for opportunities BEFORE those opportunity arrive and planning accordingly assists us in this process.

A plan is an idea created in advance. Planning is the process of creating ideas in advance. You should think about a thing before you execute a thing. I’m sure if not from personal experience, all of us could identify people who, without properly planning, rushed out and made moves that they lived to regret. Had we (they) taken a moment to cultivate a strategy for sucessful completion in advance, a fair amount of grief, heartache and despair could have been/would have been aborted! However, there are so many of us, who, because we are gripped by fear and wanting everything to go “just right”, find ourselves in a perpetual state of planning, which becomes overplanning and the result of which, often leads to NOTHING changing, growing and leading us to the fulfillment and the success that we seek! How would you describe yourself? Are you a “reasonable planner” or a chronic “over planner”?

Actionable Steps: Three Ways to OVERCOME Overplanning

1. Prioritize – Identify what matters the most to you, what needs to be done first or what will provide the most impact and then get busy serving those interests/needs FIRST!
2. Time It! – Give your tasks time! I do this all the time. AND IT WORKS! Once you identify and place in priority the assignments that need to be done, give the task an allotted amount of time for the task to be completed. Some tasks may need an hour, some 20 minutes and some two days. Timing the task will keep you accountable for being focused and staying focused on completing your goal.
3. Let it Go! – We tend to stay nestled in the safe cocoon of overplanning because we are afraid of what will happen if and when we actually take action. Let’s rip the band-aid off: some things will go great, and some things will go wrong. Okay! Whew! Now, take action. We will live. We won’t die. We will learn and grow – IF we choose to let go! Stop holding onto what has been meant for you to do/release/share! There is too much at stake for you to constantly be thinking about a thing and never doing the thing!

Don’t be rash and irrational. Do not jump into an ocean if you do not know how to swim. However, once you have thought through it and you have prepared, GO FORWARD! Follow through! Watch the growth, development and success you will enjoy as a result! Planning is great! Overplanning only invites grief!

Let’s go and GROW!