Sunday, November 7, 2010

Have a Plan - by Greg Everett

Have a Plan

This will be a short one this week, but it's an important one. In just a few words: Have a plan. I mean this with regard to everything in your life, not just your training. I also mean this in terms of multiple levels of specificity.

With anything, not having a plan means not doing as much as you can as well as you can. Without some kind of guidance, it's too easy to get off track and fail to accomplish what you've intended.

The first part of planning is of course creating a goal. If you don't have a clearly defined end-point in mind, it's impossible to create a path to reach it. Something I'm just as guilty of doing as most is believing I have clear goals when in reality they are extremely vague and consequently impossible to achieve. If you can't sit down and write your goals on a piece of paper in concise, clear language, they're not goals yet; they're just ideas. Start with those ideas and keep refining them until you have a set of crystal clear goals; and remember, any set of goals must be complementary of each other; they definitely can't be contradictory. You can create goals at a few different levels related to time and specificity, e.g. monthly, quarterly and yearly. The closer the goal time to the present, the more specific the goal must be.

Once you have your goals clearly defined, you can begin charting a path to accomplishment. Again, work with different time periods. You can't create a detailed plan for something 3 years into the future; you can create a detailed plan for the next 30-90 days or so. Give yourself markers to track success along the way rather than waiting until the end of the goal period to find out what you were doing was unsuccessful. These won't be fail proof, but they will help you evaluate the effectiveness of your plan and make necessary revisions along the way to keep you on track.

Don't wait around and hope things will happen. Become pro-active and committed to making them happen.

No comments: