Inner Visions: Planning Our Future

POSITION: Leaning In

Life planning. A thing that life planners advocate, and few people bother doing. Perhaps that accounts for the vast numbers of life planners with second jobs waiting tables or mowing lawns. Well, I don’t know if that’s true, but I can tell you from experience, encouraging family and friends to lay out a course of action usually garners only passing interest.

Carol and I plan. We’ve been doing it for 10 years. I consult on and facilitate strategic planning sessions, so I’d better be drinking my own Kool-Aid. But planning is often seen as the elimination of distracting alternatives. Not what I believe it should be, the shaping of an aspirational future. An expression of something far more powerful and transformative than simply prioritising a list of tasks.

Some accuse the younger generation of not wanting to make choices, or worse, that they live solely in the moment. My experience tells me such resistance is not a generational question, but an individual one. Of course, if you don’t know where you’re going, or have difficulty imagining the future, any kind of forward planning is challenging.

PROGRESS TO DATE

Pulling out our original, dog-eared life plan, the one we created long before Carol called my bluff on buying Aleta, we reviewed it and took stock of our situation.

At the start of the exercise, I asked Carol to imagine she was 60 years old. “I can’t possibly imagine being 60,” she said at the time. But she suspended disbelief, and we had a run at it. By 2020 we envisioned ourselves as fit and active and sailing around the world. We’d dive, paraglide, and write a blog (with photos and videos). We’d learn Spanish and live locally with no ties to the USA. The house was sold.

Four years later, Carol, days away from empty nesting and deep into the best job she’d ever had (building a national early childhood educational infrastructure with the Vietnamese government), turned to me and asked, “What if I quit and we didn’t go to Vietnam? What would we do instead?”^[1] “Buy the boat now and circumnavigate,” I said without hesitation. Just like that, instead of relocating to Vietnam, we were suddenly back on track. Four months after that we were sailing down the Chesapeake heading to the Bahamas on the first leg of our journey.

That first plan characterised our relationship as, passionate, opinionated, argumentative, and sexy. There were a few other words like supportive, secure, trusting, but people who know us well will nod their heads at the first three adjectives. Looking back now, more of the plan came true than either of us expected.

Then Covid hit. In consulting parlance, a pandemic is an ‘externality’, or sometimes, a ‘stochastic event’. Whatever you want to call it, life had gotten in the way and our five-year trip around the world was clearly going to take longer than anticipated.

NEW PLANS

A couple of months ago I asked Carol to imagine life at 70. She looked at me in horror and said, “70? I can’t possibly imagine that!” (That’s not entirely true, but it makes good copy. – ed.) Having gone through the exercise once makes a second go much easier. Setting both plans side by side allowed us to see what we’d accomplished and what we hadn’t. With room for imagining a new future, we could decide what to bring forward and what, based on our experience and current circumstances, we could drop from the list.

• Accomplished: an offshore sailing certification, one ocean crossed, the Caribbean and seven Mediterranean seas sailed.
• Still on the list: climbing Kilimanjaro and motorcycling across a continent.
• Hmmm, we’re less sure about this particular goal: circumnavigating.

What’s up with circumnavigating? Isn’t that the only reason you bought Aleta? Well, in case you weren’t paying attention, the world has changed in the past couple of years. Geopolitics, the cost of living, and encroaching senility have all played a part in recategorizing this big hairy audacious goal (BHAG). In short, thanks to externalities our priorities are shifting.

I put down my pencil and said to Carol, “If we really want to circumnavigate, we have to head west as soon as we get back to Spain. Not only are we situated 5,000 miles in the wrong direction, but we need to start moving at a much faster pace.” That statement, while probably true, didn’t sit well with either of us. We like exploring countries from top to bottom, and that takes time.

I recalled a conversation I had with Thomas in Marmaris. He is a little younger than us but has lived aboard for more than 15 years. He and his wife Uli know everyone in the sailing community. His assessment was that people who cross the Pacific to New Zealand spend a year or two getting there. They then spend six months refitting their boat before carrying on to the Indian ocean and back home. That doesn’t leave much time for exploration. There are quicker ways of getting around the world, he pointed out. Being two years behind schedule, I took his comments to heart. Besides, if, heaven forfend, should we arrive somewhere boatless, we know with our resumés we can always hitch a ride.

IN THE NEAR TERM

Given all our discussions, our near-term plans haven’t changed much. This summer we’re heading to the Baltic Sea. After eating our fill of pickled herring, we’ll head as far south as we can. Once hurricane season passes, then we’ll head back to the Caribbean for the winter. At that point we will revisit our land-based adventures list and decide how much time those dreams demand. That will determine whether Aleta stays on the hard someplace safe or joins a new family. You will be the first to know. We are not done with the sailing life by any means. Far from it. But as we grow and evolve, so must our objectives. Life is too short.

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HOW TO: LIFE PLANNING

The thing about planning is it works. Even if you go through the process, shove the plan in a drawer and don’t look at it again for years, you’ll find yourself following it. Time frames for achieving your objectives are invariably optimistic. What you think might take a couple of years often takes twice as long. That’s because life gets in the way and takes you down side roads. Yet, when you set your sights on a goal and you commit to achieving it, articulating a plan and writing it down is very, very powerful.

START WITH THE END

The key is starting with the end in mind. Envision a future where you’ve successfully completed your BHAGs. Give yourself permission to think expansively. After all, these are your dreams, no one else’s.

Be in the future. Where are you? What are you doing? How do you feel now that you’re successful? Then write that down, or draw a picture, or copy an image from the web, or make a model of it out of plasticene. Anything that is both representative and meaningful to you. Physically engaging with your dreams goes a long way to making them real.

The next steps are to work backwards from the future to the present day. Think about what you were doing just before you achieved your vision. Then ask yourself, what were you doing before that step? Repeat the process until you’re back in the present day. Record the things you did and how you did them as though you were in your future state.

Horizons

Next, identify milestones that let you know you’re on the right track. That could be three-year increments, or age ranges, or the point at which you’ve achieved mastery in a skill you need before you can realise your dream. At Spearfish Innovation we call these major milestones: ‘Horizons’. Each horizon is as far as you can see, until you get there and are ready for the next one.

That’s it. You have a plan. Go take the first step and get on with the rest of your life.

Click here for a template with instructions on how to make a personal vision and horizons plan. Personal Horizoning Process

Postscript

Carol and I just started watching Love & Death, a new miniseries on HBO. If you watch the first show, suffice it to say that is not how we pursue life planning. But the show takes place in Texas where anything is possible.

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[1] You’ll have to get the details from Carol. Or buy her memoir. You can encourage her to write it by emailing her at: clkmbn@gmail.com

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