Personal Plan: A Strategic Approach

I know you’re looking for information about a personal plan. I want you to know you’re in the right place!

The art of the personal plan

Writing as a professional Project Manager for over 20 years, as someone who has helped some of the biggest companies in the world and some of the most brilliant people build and execute their strategic plans, I can say with authority that planning change is an uncertain process.

Innovation always feels like you’re hanging out, dangling at the end of the rope.

Sometimes you don’t know what to do next.

You never really know how the big picture will play out.

That’s part of the art and science of planning, custom planning, and executing custom projects.

That’s part of the fun, too, right?

You don’t always know how it will go, but you can take one step at a time.

Ultimately, in every project I’ve ever seen, where people stayed focused and kept working together, projects always succeeded, plans always worked, and plans always got carried out successfully.

However, that doesn’t mean the original plan is the one that ended up being finally carried out.

Still, planning is essential.

There are lots of quotes about it.

For example:

“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.”

– Yogi Berra

There are three steps to creating a personal plan. Anyone can do it. It always helps to have some help, but you can still do it for starters on your own.

Step 1 to create a Personal Plan: Define Objectives

The first thing you have to do is get clear about, “What’s the plan about?“.

Ultimately, it doesn’t need to be all that specific.

All too often in school, we’re told, your goals need to be SMART. They need to be specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and time-bound. There’s about seven different acronyms that SMART stands for. At the end of the day, it doesn’t have to be perfect at the objectives level. It just has to be general.

Do you want to be rich? Do you want to get a new job? Change careers or get promoted? Build a tool that does something? If you can define it at that level, you’re on your way to defining the first step of a personal plan.

All of the above are fine Objectives.

Step 2 to create a Personal Plan: Define Key Results

The second part is that you want to begin setting some SMART goals. These are more specific goals that would be indicative of if that objective was being fulfilled.

How would you know you were making progress, if your goal was to change careers?

Well, depending on how much you know about what career you want to go into, you might have objectives of researching other career options. You may do some personality testing or assessments to understand what might be good careers for you.

There are always going to be milestones along the way as you work out a plan. As you create a plan, and by the time you’ve generally defined an objective, you should also be able to define some more specific intermediate milestones. We’ll call these Key Results.

If and when these results are delivered, there will be evidence that you’re meeting the plans objectives.

Step 3 to create a Personal Plan: Define Actions

The third thing that has to go into that plan is more specifically.

Still, for each one of those key results, intermediate milestones, or indicators of success in the plan, you can always take actions.

These can even be complete projects that can be kicked off, or that need to be kicked off, in order to fulfill that overall plan.

Recap

By this stage, you’ve got a high-level overview of where you want to get to.

You got some specific, measurable milestones along the way.

Then you’ve got some specific action items, or initiatives that if you begin work, you will be making progress immediately.

Those are the big ideas of creating a personal plan!

4. Use a blueprint to create your personal plan

If you want to learn more, or if you want some help, there’s a download that I invite you to grab.

Click the link below to get the blueprint.

It’ll give you some more details about how to create and frame objectives and create and frame key results.

It’ll even show you how to create and define action items and initiatives (projects).

5. Work with a pro to create your personal plan

Inside the blueprint, there’s also an opportunity to get a Strategic Planning Session.

Let’s create a plan together.

Work with an expert, and get the support you need and deserve.

This isn’t rocket science, although unfortunately they don’t teach it in most schools.

It is something that many organizations and people have done professionally for decades, well over a century.

Lucky engineers and builders have been building and creating plans forever for custom undertakings that nobody has done before, and nobody will do again, just like anything you want to do in a personal plan yourself.

Create your personal plan with Plan Creation Blueprint

Get the tool and take the opportunity to meet with me or one of my other coaches.

We look forward to working with you!

Click the link to get the Plan Creation Blueprint: https://pcb.teamaccelerationacademy.com

Create your personal plan with clear objectives using the Plan Creation Blueprint. Take the first step now! Download here.