Having a plan

By Vesna Pajevic

Plans, resolutions and best intentions are a part of our New Years ritual often lasting no more than a few days after the event. Very few among us actually realise these dreamed up goals. This is because for the realisation of our plans what is important are not dates, nice calendars, pens or notepads but an honest desire to successfuly complete them.

Let's begin with the "spring clean" today!

Experts in life coaching tell us that all we need to improve our quality of life is a strong will and a good plan. It is important to remind ourselves that our lives are a sum of 8 parts which dictate our personal success and happines. These parts are: health, family, love, work and career, financial well being, emotional growth, friends and social life, and, finally, fun and pleasure. Some of these can be more or less important than others but if we are unhappy with one of these then all the others suffer also.

The first step should always be an honest appraisal of these parts of our lives. We must write down using a few simple senteces the real and honest condition that we find our lives in. Not the vision of our lives that we are trying to sell to ourselves but the the real one that we fear might be true. Like school teachers we should grade our success from 1 to 10. Health 5! Why not 9 or even 10?! Can we achieve that? Yes, we can if we want to, in fact, with a good PLAN!

What we can immediately do is take the first step and the first step is making the plan itself. All taht we really need is a six month plan with a few goals we want to achieve in this time frame. The next step is to figure out how to achieve them. According to life coaching experts a good plan is worth as much as half on the way to realising our goals. It is important that our goals should be clearly defined, achievable and measureable. Smarter people have noticed that when there is a real desire the universe seems to conspire and help, but ultimately it is still down to us. As the story of a man who was praying to God daily to help him win the lottery, until God spoke to him in his sleep and told him to "buy the ticket, already!". Therefore, we must forget self pity or excuses, they do not exist, what exists are the six months ahead of us and our plan on how to improve our lives.