“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
For the past sixteen years or so, I (Daniel) have participated in Hood to Coast, the largest relay race in North America. Over a thousand teams run nonstop almost two hundred miles from Timberline Lodge, which sits at 6,000 feet on Oregon’s majestic Mount Hood, down through several small cities, farmland, hillsides, Portland, and then over the coastal mountain range. The finish line is the Pacific—specifically, Seaside Beach—where about fifty thousand people gather to celebrate the achievement.
Hundreds of volunteers cover the course and you can download an app to stay on track. But when I first started running it in the late nineties, the volunteers were few and the apps nonexistent. Runners were given a map with mileage and major street markers. And that was about it.
Once, after looking at the map at 3:30 in the morning, I set out for my second of three runs. I had a pretty good idea of where I was supposed to go. The moon was out, I had a nice pace, and I was feeling great. Suddenly, three runners came up behind me and blew past our turn. I yelled, “Hey, you missed our turn!” They slowed down, and I recognized one from the Oregon State University track team a few years back. They told me they had the right course and convinced me to catch up and run with them.
You know how the story goes from here.
About fifteen minutes and two miles later, they started to have doubts. We slowed down and finally stopped to debate our direction. My panic and frustration rose, especially because I knew I’d let my team down. I could just see them at the exchange, worried when we failed to show on time—being more than thirty minutes late at an exchange usually means something bad happened.
Having clarity on where you want to go is one of the most critical components of your Life Plan. Knowing the course is critical to finishing the race well and on time. If we’re not crystal clear where we’re headed, we may allow other well-meaning people or exciting opportunities to influence us and then make decisions we later regret.
One of the core exercises we coach our clients through is to write a vision for their businesses that is both clear and compelling. When we have clarity on our destination and are grounded in our current reality, we are equipped to make the best decisions possible. We believe the same is true for our lives as well.
As we said in chapter 2, “Understand the Mission,” a Life Plan is the answer to three powerful questions. We have answered the first two, so now it is time to answer question 3: How can I get from here to where I want to be? Put another way, how do I properly chart the course I’ll take? We suggest breaking each Life Account down into five sections.
Section 1: Purpose Statement
In this section you state what your purpose is for each Life Account. How do you determine your purpose? Think of it this way. Imagine you were assigned this account. What would be your primary responsibility? What’s your role? That is your purpose.
Jon, for example, wrote this in his Health Account:
June wrote this in her Spouse Account:
Stuart wrote this in his Friends Account:
Section 2: Envisioned Future
This is where you describe how the account looks when you have a “positive net worth.” In a financial account it is easy to see. If the number is positive, it’s good; if it’s negative—or in the red—it’s bad.
With Life Accounts you have to do a little more work. You want to describe the account when it’s functioning at its best—as if it’s already a reality. This is crucial. To help you capture your envisioned future, we suggest you take these steps:
Stand in the future. People are pretty talented at being somewhere, anywhere, besides where they are. We rehash the past and obsess about the future. This often feels like a curse. We struggle to live in the present. But let’s put this tendency to time-travel to our advantage. Project yourself to a future time—maybe three years, ten years, any point you choose. The important thing is to picture yourself consciously at that future point. Are you there now? Good. Now stay there as you work through this process.
Make your imagination work for you. Most of us use our power to imagine the future the wrong way. We regularly envision a grim future full of worry. Instead, consciously visualize positive possibilities. If you can imagine a future, you can imagine a better one.
Employ all five senses. As you begin to envision the future, the more concrete you can be, the better. You need to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel it. The more you can do this, the more compelling it will be. Start by describing what you see. Some organizations do this by crafting short films to excite employees, consumers, and investors about what the future will look like as people use their products. Corning produced a series called “A Day Made of Glass” (LivingForwardBook.com/corning). And Microsoft created a series of its own called “Productivity Future Vision” (LivingForwardBook.com/microsoft). You may not be able to turn your vision statement into a short film, but you want to be so vividly clear in your sensual imagery that you could if you had the resources.
Record what you see. Writing our thoughts forces us to get clear about them. We won’t kid you, this is hard work. It might be the most difficult part of creating a Life Plan. But it is vital to the process. You don’t have to get it perfect, but you do have to get it down. Once you do, you can tweak and revise it over time. But it all begins when you start writing.
Use the present tense. To make your newly envisioned future as real and compelling as possible, describe it in the present tense as though you were standing in the midst of it.
For example, rather than saying:
Say:
Do you see the difference? Or, rather than saying:
Say:
The difference between each set of statements is subtle but central to what we’re doing. Fantasizing about the future doesn’t do much good by itself, but when presented with a clear and compelling picture, our minds get busy trying to make it a reality. We consciously try to close the distance between where we are and where we see ourselves, actively formulating plans and next actions. What’s really important is that we believe we can achieve our goal. If we believe we can, even our subconscious gets to work, problem-solving and directing our focus. The more belief and confidence we feel toward achieving our goal, the higher the probability of our making the changes required to hit our targets.1
After following these five steps, I (Michael) wrote this down for my Health Account:
I (Daniel) wrote this for my Health Account:
Search for a quote that resonates with the core of your future purpose. This could be anything you find personally inspiring. It is optional, but some people find it very useful. It could be a verse, a proverb, a famous saying, any thought you find compelling.
Susan uses this adaptation of a quote from Lawrence Pearsall Jacks for her work account:
The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he’s always doing both.2
John uses this Joyce Meyer line for his Health Account:
I believe that the greatest gift you can give your family and the world is a healthy you.
I (Daniel) use a line from Proverbs for my Self-Improvement account:
Make your ear attentive to wisdom, Incline your heart to understanding.3
There’s no right or wrong way to do this. The important thing is to find something that inspires you.
Section 4. Current Reality
Now it’s time to be honest with yourself. Where are you in relationship to your envisioned future? Don’t pull any punches. The more honest you can be, the more progress you will see. But don’t get discouraged. The whole point of a Life Plan is to move beyond your current circumstances.
We recommend that you keep it simple and list these as a series of bullets. Try to write down the first things that come to mind without too much analysis. For example, here’s what I (Michael) wrote a while back in my Health Account:
We would share more, but frankly it’s too personal. Make yours very intimate too. It’s not for public consumption. You want it to be so real and honest you would only share it with one or two people you’ve positioned in your life for the sake of accountability, perhaps including a coach.
Section 5. Specific Commitments
This is where you commit to specific actions to move from your current reality to your envisioned future. Again, we recommend these as a series of bullets.
While these aren’t goals per se, they function like goals and should be SMART. The acronym is used a lot and is interpreted in different ways by different teachers. We suggest that your specific commitments meet these five criteria:
I (Michael) made these specific commitments in my Health Account:
I (Daniel) wrote this in my account for Sheri:
To see what a complete Action Plan looks like, here are a couple of examples. Remember, these are directional, not dogmatic. We provide them so you can get a better idea about structuring your own.
This is one for Monica’s Rest Account:
Here is an Action Plan for Mark’s Finances Account:
Create an Action Plan like these for each of your Life Accounts.
Incremental Change
While our friend, author and executive coach Dr. Henry Cloud, was struggling through his doctoral dissertation, someone gave him an ant farm. It was a curious gift, but Cloud set it up. It didn’t take his ants long before they were hauling grains of sand here and there in the glass terrarium.
Why they were doing it wasn’t exactly clear, but it became clear when Cloud returned after a few days away. Suddenly he could see tunnels and structures taking shape. “It wasn’t much longer,” says Cloud, “and an entire ant city had been built.” Each ant—by moving his solitary grain of sand at a time—built something truly impressive.4
It was the inspiration (and instruction) Cloud needed to finish his dissertation, and it’s a lesson we can use too. When you are writing your Action Plans, it’s easy to underestimate the power of incremental change. Some people think they must take massive action to achieve anything significant.
Sometimes big steps are necessary. We’ve certainly used them to achieve certain results. But if we make the job too daunting, we can get demotivated and give up before we ever start. Don’t make that mistake! Maybe your challenge is finishing a dissertation like Cloud. Perhaps instead you’ve got a significant weight-loss goal, a substantial savings target, a need to improve your golf score, or a foreign language to learn. Whatever the goal, small, daily investments can bring big results. Just move the grain of sand a little each day.
Here are several examples to get your creativity flowing:
Losing weight. A few years ago, I (Michael) lost eleven pounds in six weeks. A friend lost more than eighty in a year. We both did it using LoseIt, a free iPhone app. We didn’t do much besides record what we ate each day. By becoming aware of what we were eating, we made healthier choices. The cumulative power of those little daily decisions added up to—or rather, subtracted—a lot!
Health. I (Daniel) have a dear friend who is one of the top-ranked triathletes nationally in his age group of fifty and older. But he wasn’t always in great shape. Seven years ago he’d never even run a marathon. I helped him with his first, and more races followed. By adjusting his daily schedule to include time to run, swim, or ride, he was eventually ready for the grueling Hawaiian Ironman. Incremental adjustment to his routine transformed him, his health, and even his marriage—his wife now competes with him.
Improving profitability. In a publishing division I (Michael) once ran, we decided to improve our margins by 2 percent in twelve months. We chunked it down to ½ percent per quarter. Taking it in bite-sized pieces enabled us to implement very practical measures. With targeted price increases and expense control, our team moved more than a million dollars to the bottom line that year.
Paying off debt. One of our friends wanted to pay off all of her personal debt. She didn’t do anything radical. She simply established a budget, took opportunities to earn extra income, and cut back on gourmet coffee and other nonessentials. Using Dave Ramsey’s “debt snowball” process, she paid off her smallest debts first, then the larger ones. In all, she knocked out $15,000 in less than twelve months.
Marriage. About a decade ago, Sheri and I (Daniel) had our fourth child. We’d been married fifteen years and our oldest was already a young teen. To say our lives were full during this season would be an understatement. Unfortunately, we were not as connected as we had been in earlier years. So we decided to start dating Mondays at lunch—a time to sync up, connect, talk about our week, our schedules, kids, and so on. By handling the life management stuff at lunch, we were free to enjoy much richer date nights. Nine years later, I credit the discipline of those regular, weekly lunch dates for the present-day health of my marriage.
We’re convinced you can do almost anything if you are willing to clarify your commitments and make incremental investments over time to achieve them. Little daily decisions and course corrections are the story of our lives—that’s why they matter. Action Plans help you intentionally leverage the power of incremental change.