I have an acronym for personal development, based on the word DEVELOPMENT. We already discussed the DEV and the ELO parts of the acronym in Part 1 and Part 2. Read those before you proceed.
Why PLANNING is Important
Planning is very important if you are trying to go from where you are to where you want to go in life, because if you don’t plan for your life you will fall into someone else’s plans. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much. They got nothing on their agenda for you. You’re not even a part of their plans. You’re not even a blip on the radar. Because you want to know why? They’re into their own plans.
So if you want your life to get better you must plan and prepare and here’s a wonderful powerful quote by a very, very, very successful college basketball coach named John Wooden.
“If you fail to plan in life then prepare yourself to fail.”
-John Wooden
“If you fail to plan and prepare in life then then you must plan to fail,” because you are going to fail. People that wake up in the morning and say, “What am I going to do today? Where am I going to go today?” If you didn’t set that up the night before it’s too hard to catch up when the day starts. It’s like changing the flat tire of a moving car. Did you get that one? If you try to plan your day after you wake up instead of planning it the night before right before you go to bed, it’s the equivalent of trying to to change a flat tire of a moving car. Good luck with that. It’s easier to plan when we’re stopped. It’s easier to adjust when we’re stopped. It’s easier to make repairs when we’re stopped. And then in the morning when you wake up you’re ready to go. You got boom boom boom boom boom lists of things that you’re going to get done and accomplished.
Don’t sleep on the power of planning.
It’s a game changer.
Stick to the plan once you have one.
Persistence.
That’s another thing what people do. They plan for a little bit and then when adversity comes in they hit the eject button. And they abort. They’re not persistent. They just get up and go. It’s kind of like when people build a house and there’s proper planning that’s happening and then all of a sudden they’re building it one day and something doesn’t go as planned. Do they just abandon the house and say we’re going to go build somewhere else? No, they’re persistent until they find the solution. They work around it and they figure it out and they move forward and build the house.
Life is the same way. Plans are plans and if and when the plan changes we must change with it. It is very important to know. Like in sports you go in with a game plan. How good of an example is this? In sports you go in with a game plan, you have it all dialed in, you’ve worked on it all week, you feel like it’s going to work and execute perfectly with the goal of getting a win, and all of a sudden it’s all falling apart at halftime. You go in, you have a choice – do I stick with the plan? Yes, because we worked on it. Do I need to make some adjustments to the plan? Yes, we adjust and continue on the same path. Hopefully, those adjustments are enough to produce a positive outcome.
Proper planning prevents poor performance. If I don’t plan my day I actually get very tired throughout the day, lost all day. It’s 100% true. Because we’re trying to play catchup. We’re trying to pull all of our resources and finding out what’s the most efficient way to do it. And by doing so we are already burning at both ends of the candle because psychological thinking also has a physiological effect. So when she says she gets very tired, if you sit down and just think all day and not even move you’ll feel tired. Thinking even burns calories. People don’t know that but it’s very important to plan. So I’m glad we’re all on the same page with that one.
Create a Growth MINDSET
A growth mindset looks at challenges in life as opportunities for progress. A growth mindset is what we want to have. We don’t want to have a mindset that’s based in stagnation and complacency, and it’s based on scarcity. You don’t want to have a mindset that’s afraid of obstacles and challenges. Because my friends, the only way you get better in life is by overcoming those obstacles and challenges. And here’s why. Because you have to become a different version of yourself. You have to tap into a higher vibration of yourself. You have to tap into a more resourceful version of yourself to climb and overcome that. And when you do, on the other side you are different.
Look at all of the challenges of serious adversity you’ve had in your life. Have they not changed you? Have they not changed your perspective, your mindset? Oftentimes for the better. Then why when we get faced with challenges, and we get overwhelmed instead of fighting, we go in our turtle shell and hide in fear? We succumb to fear and as long as you do so fear will always win. And you will always be stuck in the same place. This talk of personal development doesn’t mean anything. So your mindset matters.
How you do anything is how you do everything.
Obstacles are chances to grow. Anytime in life you experience a setback, a challenge, a problem, a breakdown, just know that after every breakdown there is the possibility of a breakthrough. A breakthrough of a new world, a new experience, a new you, so when you break down and you fall and you and your world is spinning around you either look at it as if I failed, I struggled, it’s over. Or you say what type of a breakthrough is possible, available for me on the other side of this breakdown?
Embrace the breakdown. That’s where the magic happens.
