Planning is the foundation of any are of life. Try to get through a day at work without your calendar or task list. Go to a classroom and see if they are teaching without a lesson plan. Try to run your business without a plan. If we try to accomplish any of these things without a plan, what do we get? We get a challenges and frantic adjustments. We run into the unexpected and we don’t know how to handle it. What happens in any of these situations? We fail.
You may say: “But I always do that and I make due.” Or “I don’t need to plan, because I can figure it out as I go.” You may also say that you have not yet reached your goal. If you are talking about an ongoing task, you will realize that the task is much more difficult than it would be if you had a plan.
I’ve seen it, heard about it and even done it myself, so I am well aware of the thought process that leads us down this path. It seems like it will be easier to put off any thinking and just worry about things as they come. It seems that way only until things start coming.
Once you are in the middle of a situation, you have no choice but to react. You have to make decisions on short notice with very little idea as to how they will affect your long-term goals. In health, every meal becomes an opportunity for planning. Every exercise session should be part of your plan. If we don’t plan these things, what happens? We know all too well. Things that we want to get done don’t and things that we don’t want to do just keep ending up in the routine.
How does this happen? It’s simple. When we fail to plan, we are planning to fail. By not spending time to make sure we know what we are doing, we are deciding that it is not important. When something is not important, we won’t do it. You may say it is important, but if you are not doing something that you “want” to do, just ask yourself why you are not doing it.
Often all it takes is a little planning. Wanting to do something or thinking we should do something is not enough. If it were enough, we wouldn’t have the health crisis that we have in our country. We would all be doing what we “know we should be doing” and what “we want to be doing”. Everyone would be planning their day to day routines and the healthy habits would be the norm.
Unfortunately our country does not look like this now. We all want to be healthy. We all want to be doing the things we know will give us what we want. We know. We want to. But, for some reason, most of us still just know that we want something different. We want change, but we haven’t done what it takes to make it happen.
What does it take to make it happen? First of all, it takes plan. Once you have a plan in place you can start to make progress. Before the plan, you can only hope that you can do it. If you are going on a trip without a map, how do you know where you are going? How do you know if you are on track? How do you even know where you are? You don’t know the answers to any of these questions and it is no different for someone trying to get more exercise or eat healthy. It is no different for someone trying quit smoking or manage their stress. If you don’t have a plan, you can’t possibly make progress. Even if you do make progress, you won’t know it.
That brings me to an important point about goals and progress. When you first get started, it may be difficult. The biggest benefit of planning is that when you get started you can start to gauge your progress. Realizing that you are making progress is motivation to keep going. Doesn’t a plan sound like a good way to gauge your progress? If you are anything like me, proof that you are succeeding is enough to help you keep doing something.
The beauty of planning is that you are in control. In fact, if you are not planning you are simply giving the control to someone or something else. Most people will tell you that they are in control until they are explaining why they aren’t reaching their goals. It’s not that they can’t get control, it’s more like they chose not to take control.
Think about this conversation: “I wanted to go but I just didn’t have time.” There are certainly circumstances when we don’t have as much time as we would like. I understand that not everything can be fit in. What I don’t understand is how we can choose not to fit something in and continue to pretend that we tried to fit it in.
By taking a closer look at this statement, we can see what is happening. “I just didn’t have time” sounds good when looking back at the situation, but let’s see what really happened. The activity they were trying to fit in was not in the plan. There were many other tasks to be completed and none of them were even in a plan. There was no expectation of time to be spent on each task and therefore to realistic timetable.
Without a timetable, how can you say that they have time? I would argue that you can’t even firmly say they don’t have time. They simply don’t know. They don’t have a plan, therefore they don’t have a gage of what will be able to fit in or where it will fit. Instead, they just say, “I just didn’t have time.” Again, it is easy to say afterward, but what does it mean? It means they failed to reach a goal.
When not planning becomes the habit, failure becomes the result. You have to decide what is “easier” for you: taking a little time to plan or spending a lot of time failing. It sounds black and white and actually this is about as clear-cut as it gets.
We all have the power to succeed. We also have the power to fail. When we don’t take control and use the power we have, we are getting in the habit of failing. We are actually training ourselves to fail. Like it or not, it’s all in our hands and we decide which way we want to go.
Planning is a must for success in any area of life. Next time you are debating whether or not you should take time for planning, just remember: Failing to plan is planning to fail.
We’ve all been in that situation where we “just didn’t get to something”. If we had a plan, we would have. Next time you are looking back at a missed opportunity, ask yourself one question: Were you planning to fail?
Business Health Expert Joe Byrd uses his passion and expertise to bring business and health together. He integrates health education in lifestyle topics such as Stress Management, Weight Management, and Smoking Cessation into businesses in order to accomplish the following:
Improving Employee Health
Decreasing Health Care Spending
Increasing Your Employee Productivity
Improving Employee Satisfaction and Retention
Joe applies his craft in the business world by making health part of business strategy. As he helps companies invest in their employees, together they create healthy and successful cultures.
Web: http://www.ByrdWellnessconcepts.com
Email: info@ByrdWellnessConcepts.com
Twitter: @josephrbyrd
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ByrdWellnessConcepts
Toll Free: 866.851.7961
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