Category: Life Tips

I’m a great believer in the power of planning. If you aren’t working to your own plan, then almost anyone can hijack your attention and efforts to their cause. It’s not that you can’t have flexibility; you definitely can! But flexibility should come within your own plan for your life.

If you don’t have a plan, now is the time to make one!

If you aren’t sure where to start with your planning, here are some ideas that work for me.

Goals in roles.

We each wear quite a few hats in our lives; each of these is a role. Our goals can be chunked into goals by roles. For example, some of  my roles are wife, business owner (coach and consultant, which might be two separate roles), blogger and friend. When I think about what’s important to me, I consider each role. I might ask myself, ‘In order to be a better blogger, what do I want to achieve this week?’ This technique helps me to be sure I consider all the roles that are important to me, and lowers the chance of overlooking something that matters.

Steps toward a longer term goal.

What’s the most important goal you have right now? New job? Living somewhere different? Becoming self-employed? If you already have a big goal, break the journey down into manageable steps that you can work on today, or this week. For example, if you want to change jobs, what are 2 things you can do this week to get closer to this goal? What one thing can you do today? Put those actions into your plan.

Unfinished business.

When things are left unfinished or unresolved, they can become stressors. Unfinished business can affect your health, your sleep and your reputation with yourself. For example, I have an overdue commitment to finish transcribing a certain Scottish census from 1871. In this case, the problem is that I made a commitment to someone to do this task. As the weeks go by and I don’t complete it, my reputation with myself suffers. When I think about it, I groan inside, miserable that I haven’t done what I said I’d do, or renegotiated it. (In fact, I’ll do something about that today!)

Too many things to do.

Sometimes I’m simply overloaded with things to do. If I’ve any hope of getting beyond this feeling, I need to schedule them into my diary and then be quite disciplined about getting them done. I find that sometimes just getting them all down in a list of things to do, and then plugging away at the list item by item helps me feel I’m more on top of things. Or, I can ask for help (the list is evidence!) The cost of not doing this is loss of sleep, arguments with my husband and a general feeling of overwhelm.

I  encourage you to look at what’s the most important thing this week. What role needs attention? What long-term goal needs some forward motion? Is there any unfinished business eating away at you? Are you feeling overloaded?

You can do something about it. In fact, only you can do something about it, and you can start right now. What will you do today?

If you’d like to hear more detail about how I do any one of these types of planning, please leave a comment asking about it.

Related Reading

Rewrite your future – what you decide and choose today writes your future

Eat that frog – get the most important things done first

Consistency is underrated – one thing you can do to make a huge difference in your life

Karma is the law of consequences: what you do today has consequences tomorrow. Karma has nothing to say about blame, or about what you ‘deserve’. It’s simply that what your life is like today is a result of decisions and choices you made in the past. Of course, you can’t change the past, but you CAN change your future, by changing the choices and decisions you make TODAY.

If your life continues as it is today, what does the future promise? Look down the road to the probable outcomes and consequences of what you decide and choose today. This question is valid in your personal life, family life, career, relationships, education, personal development. In fact, it’s valid in any aspect of life that I can think of.

If you continue doing what you’re doing today, what future are you writing? If it’s not the future you really want, the time is NOW to decide how to change your ways today to write the future you want tomorrow.

Make sense?

What you have to do is take action!!

I wrote that awhile back and it’s been languishing in draft mode. Today I had a serious talk with myself about my blog, and pointed out to myself that although I say my blog is a high priority in my life, I don’t ACT as if it is. So here I am today, basically pulling myself up by the scruff of my shirt, shouting in my face, ‘Hey!! Expect more from yourself!’

If I continue this road of not writing for weeks, what sort of future am I creating? (Not to mention what sort of reputation am I building with myself. We won’t even go there!) If I keep not writing, here’s my future: full of regret that I didn’t do anything to help when I could have, unlikely I’ll have written that book, not a single person would have hired me to work with them on anything, one more abandoned blog site in the blog-o-sphere (with my name all over it, so my grandchildren can see me NOT doing what I said was important), self-confidence low because I don’t finish what I start (or do what I say I’m going to do), lots of fun missed out on, too much television watched, and so on.

What I needed to do was get leverage on myself. It’s easy to list the benefits of blogging. I can even see the benefits of not blogging. But what are the costs associated with each? The costs of blogging are website maintenance (which can be non-trivial), time spent finding out what people are wanting to read about, time spent in improving my writing skills, and also time spent improving my time management skills. So, now what are the costs associated with NOT blogging? All those listed in the paragraph above. That’s where my leverage lies!

In a nutshell: I don’t want the future that not-blogging ensures I’ll get more than I don’t want the future that blogging will bring. Get it? The cost to me of not blogging is high in terms of the future I create.

So here’s a blog entry. May you find that it relates to something you’ve been thinking about.

There are lots of people giving advice on how to be more productive, get more things done, stop procrastinating. It does seem like we all share the desire to be more effective in our daily lives.

I discovered something that’s helped me a lot!

Brian Tracy is a well respected and prolific productivity guru. His book Eat That Frog, was first published in 2004, and this link points to a newer edition.

The idea is simple.

Frog: any task that you’ve been putting off, where the consequences of putting it off are BIG. The consequences could be good, or bad.

• If you don’t do it, you’ll see BAD consequences. For example, don’t file your taxes and just watch that Frog hop into your life take away some of your hard-earned money!
• If you DO do it, you stand to win BIG! For example, you’ll never get the lead role in that film unless you go to the auditions!.

Eat: take care of it. Show up and do something about it.

Here’s how it works.

1. Every morning when you wake up, identify your biggest Frog, and then first thing, eat that Frog.

2. If you find you have several Frogs, eat the ugliest one first.

3. If the Frog is particularly ugly, don’t spend too much time thinking about it. Just gobble it up.

And that’s all there is to it.

I think I heard that Brian Tracy thought of this when he was watching a jungle reality TV show, and the contestants had some really awful, creepy things they had to eat. He thought that if the first thing he had to do in the morning was to eat a live frog, then the rest of the day could only get better. Or something like that.

So, tomorrow, awaken to your gently chiming Zen alarm clock. Then, first thing, think: Do I have any Frogs today? Ah, yes. I have two of them: ring the doctors for an appointment for that test, and finish that work I said I’d do this month (because it’s now the last day of the month!)

I find this is just the best for reminding me to get done first thing the most important thing.

What do you think?

I’ve been paying attention to how much of my waking time I spend doing something other than being in the present moment. At first glance, it may not seem that important to live in the present in your life. But think: every peak moment in your life happens in the present moment. Go back (yes, to the past) and recall: when were you the happiest? When did you feel most connected to the world? What are your most cherished memories? They come from an almost indescribable moment in time where you were present to all that was happening within you and around you, and you felt totally, completely alive. In the present moment. Not when you were remembering what happened yesterday, or last year, or a decade ago. Not when you are planning for tomorrow, or dreaming of next year, or imagining how wonderful it will be when this or that particular dream comes true.

Your joy happens in real time. Your sorrow happens now, as well. In fact, it all happens now. When you feel sadness at something that happened in the past, it’s really your thoughts about what happened that cause the feelings. And when is it that your thoughts happen? In the present moment.

If I had some sort of measuring device, I think it would show that about 75% of the time I am thinking about the past, which is gone, over, done with, never to be seen again. About 24% of the time I’m imagining a future that may never arrive, dreaming, planning, following long imaginary conversations to some conclusion that is SO not real, and I get lost in it. The scant 1% left over is what I devote to my ‘real’ life, as it is happening with me (to me?) right now: how I feel, what I’m seeing and hearing, what people are saying and doing, how I relate to others in my world. Just being generally useful and kind. (Or unhelpful and grumpy — it depends.) I’m uneasy with that 1% figure. I’ve heard that life is what’s happening while you’re busy making plans. Indeed.

A mindfulness meditation practice can help us be more gentle with ourselves, but at the same time, to notice when our minds wander to the past or the future. My mind goes off on its own, habitually, and makes up stories: I say this and then she says that and takes this thingamajig and throws it over there, and I say ‘Well! Hmmph!’ and off my mind goes until I notice that I’ve gone somewhere else and gently say, ‘Hey. Come back. Focus on right here, now, in this moment.’

It’s amusing, really. I find it hard to hold my attention deliberately in the present moment for more than a couple of seconds. Once my mind wanders off, it can be off on a jolly for many minutes before I realize it and call my mind back to Now. I have to laugh. It’s just the way our minds work. But if we can develop a bit more awareness of how our thoughts take on a life of their own, we can feel quite a bit more patience with ourselves, and with others. And our compassion will grow too. And that’s a good thing.

The finding is that “people whose performance peaks in the morning are better positioned for career success,” according to a recent Harvard Business Review article called The Early Bird Really Does Get the Worm*. The authors refer to morningness and eveningness, which seems kind of, well, academic. Otoh, it IS Harvard University.

The ideas that follow are general tendencies found in studies of large groups of people. It doesn’t mean that every morning person is optimistic, nor that every evening person is extroverted.

In general, then, Evening People tend to:

• be smarter
• be more creative
• have a good sense of humour
• be more outgoing
• like to sleep in whenever possible

Morning People tend to:

• be more conscientious
• anticipate problems and attempt to minimise them
• get better grades in school, which leads to better universities, which lead to better business opportunities
• be proactive, which is linked to better job performance, more career success, and higher wages

One obvious difference between a Morning Person and an Evening Person is that the Morning Person tends to get up at the same time on non-workdays as they do on workdays. They would rise at, say, 6am on Saturday and Sunday as well as on workdays. The Evening Person will tend to sleep in on non-workdays, usually by about 2 hours. If he usually rises at 6 on weekdays, he’ll sleep in until 8am (or later) on weekends.

Lots of people report they’d like to change themselves to be more of a Morning Person, maybe because it seems the the business world is set up to expect morning productivity. For example, how many full-time positions to you know of where you could work from, say, 12 noon to 9pm?

Much of the tendency toward morningness or eveningness is changeable, but only to a certain degree. It tends to be about 50% genetic, and it seems that the tendency is to become more of a Morning Person as one gets older. But the authors aren’t very encouraging about changing your tendency. They hold some hope that organisations will start to treat this morningness and eveningness as the next diversity element, and create work environments where both types will flourish.

*This article is in the July-August 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review, HBR reprint F1007E.

I was talking to Marie yesterday. Marie’s daughter, Sarah, who is 9, is very much into her gymnastics and competes regularly.

Sarah does quite well in her local and regional competitions, often winnng a medal, but she’s not nationally competitive in her age group right now. Next weekend she’s going to an invitational open competition, where all the best 9 year old gymnasts in the nation will be competing.

This dilemma for her loving mum Marie is this: “Should I encourage her competitiveness and desire to win by telling her she can do it, that I have confidence in her, and she should really go for it and she’s sure to have a good result? Or should I be more realistic and try to prepare her for disappointment by telling her that the most important thing is for her to try, to have fun, to do her best, but to remember that because of her circumstances (a new coach,  emergency surgery causing time off, etc) not to get her hopes up, and be prepared to not place so high?”

I asked Marie what was the most important thing to her in raising her daughter? What was her biggest purpose?

Preparing them for life in the real world (where we regularly experience disappointments)? Nurturing their self-confidence so that they feel good about who they are? Protecting them from life’s tougher knocks?

There are two things this conversation brought to mind.

One, I hear a lot about the British culture of mediocrity, a topic of discussion especially during international individual sporting competitions –how we don’t encourage an attitude of winning, but one of trying your best. As a result (so some people say) Brits are seldom winners. The winners that DO emerge from the culture are idiosyncratic, and particularly noted for their unusual commitment and extreme will to win. Hmmm. I wonder how that unusual commitment and will to win is born? How do the exceptional performers develop their self-belief and confidence?

Second, how well do we prepare our children for the real world if we protect them from disappointment? What will happen to them once they begin to venture from the nest? Will the fledglings fly on their own? Or will they fall to the ground because they are unprepared.

I’m sure my bias is showing here. Provide love, nurturing and safety, plus good role models for self-confidence, positive thinking and taking risks (to an extent). Take care how you model fear of failure, acceptance of mediocrity or how you project your own limits onto your kids. Help them to prepare themselves the best they can for success, then let them try, and them help them learn from their results.

If Sarah doesn’t get the result she wants, then Marie can help her find a way to improve and get a better result next time.

We’re working on making our relationship better. The reason we married all those years ago was to work together on personal and spiritual growth, within the relationship. By that very commitment, we got what we intended. Every difficulty is the path. There is no place else to go to work on myself, or on our relationship with each other.

So I try to follow Dr Phil’s advice: ask for what you want, don’t moan about what you don’t like.

That’s harder than it sounds.

Whenever a subject comes up that’s distressing, all I seem to be able to notice at frst is how distressing it is, what specifically it is that I don’t like. But when I settle down to try to be clear (first to myself, then to him) about what it is that I DO want, I struggle. I persevere, but I struggle.

I try to phrase things in “I statements” like for instance “I feel sad when you don’t share with me what’s going on in your life.”or, “I feel lonely when I have no one to share my successes with.”

Then I try to say what I’d prefer instead. “I’d like it if you came home and shared with me the highlights of your day at work, and maybe one thing that caught you a bit by surprise and caused you to learn something about how you were being or how you were seeing things.” Or, “I want you to recognise my wins, and cheer me on.”

Like that.

In return, I get the respect that comes from being listened to. I receive a willingness to talk, to see what can be done, to understand what I mean and what I want. Solutions appear.

For example, if I want more words of encouragement or acknowledgment, I need to be sure that I’m sharing my troubles or successes at a time when he’s free to give what I’m asking for. To that end, I’m no longer going to email him with my successes throughout the day, when he’s busy and has only time for a few words. Instead, I’ll save my stories until he comes home. That way, he can be with me in the way I’m wanting.

How easy is that? (Actually, not that easy at all.)

Honey sent me a link and said “May be of interest.”

It has to do with the difference between Askers and Guessers.

Askers habitually ask for what they want. They ask for favours, a better deal when buying something, a flight upgrade, to stay in your spare bedroom when they’re in town, to borrow that book. Askers feel fine doing this, as they expect that people will just say “no” when the request doesn’t work for them (in whatever way — Askers often don’t expect or need an explanation). Askers ask for a pay rise, a promotion, a date. If they don’t get it, well, there may be disappointment, sure. But there are not usually any hard feelings.

Guessers aren’t so direct. Guessers pay attention to the nuances of a situation, they put out delicate feelers, or hint at wanting an offer of some kind, or try to find out if they would likely get what they want (if they were brave enough to ask for it!). Guessers won’t ask for something until they feel pretty sure the answer will be “Yes.” Guessers may be pretty upset when they aren’t successful at getting what they want. After all, they put a lot of work into it.

Guessers think that Askers are annoying, or worse, incredibly rude.

Askers think Guessers are wishy-washy, or worse, manipulative.

The trouble begins when a Guesser is approached by an Asker. “Do you mind if I borrow your Kindle to take along on my holiday?” The Asker will just ask, partly because they would find it easy to say, “No, I don’t think so” if the tables were reversed. The Guesser would struggle to say “No”, and would work hard to find an excuse, “because I’ll be using it that week.” The Guesser will consider the Asker rude, thoughtless, too forward. The Asker doesn’t understand why the Guesser has such a problem with saying No.

Honey was right: this was definitely of interest.

I’m an Asker, and I live in a world of Guessers.