So let’s recap where we’re at in our journey to build future fulfillment. First, we practiced dreaming big and created a series of vision statements that capture the fullness of our desired future life. Next, we built a personal strategy model by identifying a few key pillars (the big pursuits that show up as themes in our vision) and the relevant priorities under each pillar. With these first two steps, we’ve now created clarity and direction.
Our vision and strategy are still at a pretty high level and are long-term in nature. Our next step will be to break them down even further until we understand exactly what it is we are doing today that contributes to making progress in the right direction. This will allow us to take action. Without action, our dreams for the future will remain just that…dreams! Our action is what will ultimately turn those dreams into reality.
Timing
As a general rule of thumb, you can think of the vision as having a horizon of about 10 years and the strategy having a horizon of 3-5 years. That doesn’t mean that you can’t or shouldn’t make tweaks to them from time to time, but the way we’ve built them tends to ensure they are relevant and meaningful for a longer duration. The work we’ll do in our current step, described in this article, is often done once or twice a year. If you’re wanting tighter cycles, you can do this work quarterly. You’ll just need to adjust the size and quantity of your goals accordingly. Ultimately, it’s up to you to experiment and find the rhythms and timing that work best for you.
Building the Action Plan
So how do we turn our long-term strategy into immediate action? The answer is an action plan!
Start with your strategy in front of you. For each pillar in your strategy, take a piece of paper and write the pillar and related priorities at the top. Then split each page into three sections: i) Reflection, ii) Goal-setting, iii) Behaviours. We’ll want to define and document these three important parts for each pillar. It’s best to begin with the pillar you think might be most straight-forward and then repeat for the others once you have the hang of it. Grounding ourselves in the first pillar with its associated priorities, let’s begin with reflection.
Reflection
When we get really good at living in the present and planning for the future, we can often forget the importance of appreciating how far we’ve come. In fact, I’ve noticed that in the moments when I may be feeling frustrated and disconnected from where I am now or where I want to be, the fastest way to turning my attitude around is to reflect on the personal growth that’s occurred to this point.
Take a moment to try this exercise: Subtract ten years off of your age and think about where you were at during that time. Looking at pictures or videos can help you to put yourself back in that earlier time too! Consider what you were doing, how you were thinking and all the things you knew about. Then fast-forward back to now and look at yourself through the same lens. You’ve had so many more experiences and you’ve learned so much. Not all of it may have been easy or joyful, but these are the things that have helped you grow. The person you are today is an enhanced version of the person you were ten years ago. Isn’t this wiser version of you pretty incredible? Look at all that you’ve done in the last decade!
In the same way, I’ve found that, regardless of whether it’s corporate or personal strategic planning, it’s always a good practice to start with reflection. It’s really helpful for priming our brains to be adopting a growth mindset and for allowing us to build from a place of confidence.
Now back to our action planning. For the first Pillar that you’ve selected, write a bulleted list in the “Reflection” section of any growth or progress you have made in the last year. If it’s your first time doing this work, you can write down any progress that you’ve made to this point in time.
Try to make your bullets as specific and measurable as possible. As an example, if your Pillar is Financial Independence, maybe you have a bullet that says “I contributed $5000 to my retirement fund” or “I set a budget for the year and reviewed it at the end of every month”. If your Pillar is Health, maybe you have a bullet that says “I went for a walk 2 times a week” or even “Two weeks ago I chose to have a salad instead of fries at a restaurant”. It doesn’t need to be monumental! The point is to shift your mind away from heading down the path of scarcity (focused on all of the things you DIDN’T do or have yet to do) and instead program it to adopt a perspective of abundance (focused on all of the things you DID do, no matter how small).
It’s up to you whether you’d like to complete the reflection section for one pillar and then continue with goal-setting and behaviours for that same one before moving on to the next pillar, or if you would like to do the reflection exercise for all pillars first. Challenge yourself to come up with at least 3 positive bullets for each pillar that capture the progress you’ve made in that area so far. You aren’t starting from scratch – you have momentum!
Goal-Setting
Until this point, we’ve held back on setting “SMART” (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, time-bound) goals for a couple of reasons. Firstly, we didn’t want to set limits on our visioning. It’s hard to play with impossible thinking if you’re trying to be realistic! Secondly, we wanted to set a direction for ourselves that was open enough to allow for creative problem solving and course correction. If we lock into a specific solution too early, it can prevent us from seeing opportunities as they arise and adapting accordingly.
Now that you’ve completed your reflection for a particular pillar, it’s time to do some goal-setting and this is where we’ll get SMART. Ground yourself in that pillar by thinking about where you’d like to get to and reviewing your related priorities. Ask yourself, what is a reasonable next step I could take in the direction of each of these priorities? At this point we’re brainstorming, so don’t worry about coming up with too many ideas.
Once you’ve noted the goal, take the next step to ensure it’s written in a way that is SMART. The easiest way to do this is to pretend you’ve asked a stranger to mark the goal as completed or not completed at the end of the year. Would they be able to objectively make that call without any commentary from you? Here are a few examples of how you can tweak the way you capture a goal:
- “Save more money” → “Contribute $10,000 to my retirement fund this year”
- “Do a “Life Travel” trip” → “Spend 8 consecutive weeks traveling the Eastern US during which I’m working at least 20 hours every week”
- “Exercise regularly” → “Complete a 30-minute workout of moderate exertion 3 times a week”
- “Write a book” → “Write 1000 words a day, six days a week”
Now that you have a bunch of goals written down in support of your priorities, it’s a good idea to make sure we’re not biting off more than we can chew. It’s easy to get excited and set your sights high! We’ll need to temper our enthusiasm with a reality check because we want to make sure we’re setting ourselves up for success. Once you’ve done goal-setting across all of your pillars, review your collection of goals and ask yourself “what can I reasonably accomplish this year (or this quarter)?” This is the hardest part for me. I think I can do everything and I think it will all happen way faster than it does. If you’re like me, try taking what you think is reasonable and ruthlessly cut it in half. Rest assured that if you find yourself, by some miracle, having completed all of your goals halfway through the year, you can always add on new ones. On the other hand, progressing through the year feeling perpetually behind can be incredibly demoralizing. We don’t ever want to build our future fulfillment at the expense of our present fulfillment, and this is what will happen if we allow the pursuit of our goals to make us stressed and miserable.
It’s also worth noting that your collection of goals does not have to be equal across all pillars or priorities. It’s often unreasonable to think that we’ll make significant progress in all areas. Consider which ones you want to pay special attention to this year and make sure that there is something represented in goals for those areas. Other priorities may be progressing at a much slower rate this year and perhaps will get some focused attention the following year. Not everything can be full-speed ahead at the same time, and that’s okay! It reminds me of a quote I’d heard referring to the idea of “having it all” – it says “You can have everything, just not at the same time”. So if you’re thinking of writing a book and adopting a new fitness lifestyle and working double-time to save more money and having a baby and doing some night courses on the side – all in one year – it’s best from a planning perspective to focus on one new thing at a time. Working toward your future fulfillment is a slow, long game. It’s not about managing your time, it’s about managing your energy.
Once you have refined your goals, you are ready to move into the final section of your action plan: identifying behaviours. This part is what will take us out of the “planning” and launch us fully into the “action”!
Behaviours
One of my favourite lines ever from a book came from a surprising source – it was Amy Poehler’s personal memoir “Yes Please”. In it she describes how difficult she found the writing process for the book, and in addressing the challenge she says, “You do it because the doing of it is the thing. The doing is the thing. The talking and worrying and thinking is not the thing.” I love this quote because it is such a great reminder that we can spend all the time in the world thinking about our dreams and planning things out and creating goals, but it isn’t until we take action that something will materialize.
When I was growing up, my Dad used to say “in this world there are two kinds of people – planners and doers”. While it’s true that we may lean more naturally to one side or the other of this continuum, the reality is that it’s best to be skilled in both. Even better, is to be skilled in both and to know exactly when to “think ahead” and when to “shoot first and ask questions later”. When it comes to our personal strategy, we’ve done the thinking and planning work in our vision, pillars, priorities and goal-setting. In order to translate this into action, we need to understand exactly what action looks like. For this, we’re going to define our behaviours.
For the pillar you are working on, reflect on the goals you’ve set. Ask yourself, what day-to-day behaviours would I need to engage in to achieve these goals? What does working on these goals actually look like? Behaviours can be things you start doing, but they can also be things you stop doing.
Here are some examples…
If I have a goal to publish one article a week to my website, then I need to make sure I have the time and space to do that.
- My behaviour is to block in my calendar and ruthlessly protect 2 hours a day / 3 days a week to write.
- My behaviour is to ensure I’m in a quiet environment without distractions.
- My behaviour is to turn on the do not disturb setting on my phone and computer during my writing blocks.
If I have a goal to save an extra $100 a week to put toward my retirement savings, then I need to be on top of my spending.
- My behaviour is to make my morning coffee at home four days a week and treat myself to a purchased coffee once a week, rather than swinging by Starbucks every morning on the way to work.
- My behaviour is to categorize my expense transactions and run a report twice a month to make sure I’m staying within my budget.
If I have a goal to read 25 books this year and plan to do my reading in the evenings, then I need to get to bed earlier.
- My behaviour is to set a reminder on my phone for 9:30pm that tells me it’s time to wash my face and brush my teeth.
- My behaviour is to put my phone on the charger at 10pm and not look at it again until the morning.
- My behaviour is to set the expectation with my kids that everyone is in their rooms reading or sleeping by 9:30pm.
James Clear, in his blockbuster book Atomic Habits, asserts that your habits are how you embody your identity. This means that the behaviours you engage in manifest into the person you show up as. He argues that if you focus on building your systems (your daily habits), you can completely ignore your goals and still succeed. As he sums up so perfectly, “Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress”. In this case, the systems and habits are the behaviours that we’re defining in our action plan.
Here’s where we can start to have confidence and fully switch out of planning mode into action mode. If we’ve done a good job of thoughtfully designing our personal strategy (which we have!), then being successful at our behaviours should, by nature of design, lead to success in our goals, which leads to focus on our priorities, which come together into a strong pillar, which leads us toward our dreams. You can now clearly trace how your behaviour and choices today link you directly to getting closer to where you want to be in the future. Just follow the bread crumbs! In knowing this to be the case, we can comfortably set aside our strategy and action plan and focus our energies on the behaviours.
Looking Ahead
There are times when we’ll want to revisit our vision, strategy and plan – for instance, at regular check-in intervals or when we need to be reminded of our why. I like to keep the strategy close by so that I can refer to it when I find I’m feeling a little lost. It’s amazing how quickly I can re-centre myself with a little reminder of my vision and big pursuits!
We’ll also want to assess our progress, dynamically evolve and make course corrections when needed. Plus, all of this can sound simple, but what do we do when things get tough? All of this and more will be covered in the next, and final, step in our personal strategy.
