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<\/a><\/p>\nLife 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\u2019t know if that\u2019s true, but I can tell you from experience, encouraging family and friends to lay out a course of action usually garners only passing interest.<\/p>\n
Carol and I plan. We\u2019ve been doing it for 10 years. I consult on and facilitate strategic planning sessions, so I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t know where you\u2019re going, or have difficulty imagining the future, any kind of forward planning is challenging.<\/p>\n
PROGRESS TO DATE<\/h6>\n
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.<\/p>\n At the start of the exercise, I asked Carol to imagine she was 60 years old. \u201cI can\u2019t possibly imagine being 60,\u201d 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\u2019d dive, paraglide, and write a blog (with photos and videos). We\u2019d learn Spanish and live locally with no ties to the USA. The house was sold.<\/p>\n Four years later, Carol, days away from empty nesting and deep into the best job she\u2019d ever had (building a national early childhood educational infrastructure with the Vietnamese government), turned to me and asked, \u201cWhat if I quit and we didn\u2019t go to Vietnam? What would we do instead?\u201d[1]<\/sup><\/a> \u201cBuy the boat now and circumnavigate,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Then Covid hit. In consulting parlance, a pandemic is an \u2018externality\u2019, or sometimes, a \u2018stochastic event\u2019. 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.<\/p>\n A couple of months ago I asked Carol to imagine life at 70. She looked at me in horror and said, \u201c70? I can\u2019t possibly imagine that!\u201d (That\u2019s not entirely true, but it makes good copy. \u2013 ed.)<\/em> Having gone through the exercise once makes a second go much easier. Setting both plans side by side allowed us to see what we\u2019d accomplished and what we hadn\u2019t. 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n I put down my pencil and said to Carol, \u201cIf 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.\u201d That statement, while probably true, didn\u2019t sit well with either of us. We like exploring countries from top to bottom, and that takes time.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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 resum\u00e9s we can always hitch a ride.<\/p>\n Given all our discussions, our near-term plans haven\u2019t changed much. This summer we\u2019re heading to the Baltic Sea. After eating our fill of pickled herring, we\u2019ll head as far south as we can. Once hurricane season passes, then we\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n The thing about planning is it works. Even if you go through the process, shove the plan in a drawer and don\u2019t look at it again for years, you\u2019ll 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The key is starting with the end in mind. Envision a future where you\u2019ve successfully completed your BHAGs. Give yourself permission to think expansively. After all, these are your dreams, no one else\u2019s.<\/p>\n Be in the future. Where are you? What are you doing? How do you feel now that you\u2019re 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<\/a>. Anything that is both representative and meaningful to you. Physically engaging with your dreams goes a long way to making them real.<\/p>\n 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\u2019re back in the present day. Record the things you did and how you did them as though you were in your future state.<\/p>\n Next, identify milestones that let you know you\u2019re on the right track. That could be three-year increments, or age ranges, or the point at which you\u2019ve achieved mastery in a skill you need before you can realise your dream. At Spearfish Innovation we call these major milestones: \u2018Horizons\u2019. Each horizon is as far as you can see, until you get there and are ready for the next one.<\/p>\n That\u2019s it. You have a plan. Go take the first step and get on with the rest of your life.<\/p>\n Click here for a template with instructions on how to make a personal vision and horizons plan. Personal Horizoning Process<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n Carol and I just started watching Love & Death<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a><\/em> You\u2019ll have to get the details from Carol. Or buy her memoir. You can encourage her to write it by emailing her at: <\/em>clkmbn@gmail.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n 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\u2019t know if that\u2019s …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13331,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[8,26,15,1229,1228,16,1227,1167,1226,1230],"class_list":["post-13313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-preparation","tag-aleta","tag-aleta-life","tag-carol","tag-coaching","tag-life-planning","tag-mike","tag-personal-horizoning","tag-planning","tag-plans","tag-start-with-the-end"],"yoast_head":"\n<\/a><\/p>\nNEW PLANS<\/h6>\n
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<\/a><\/p>\nIN THE NEAR TERM<\/h6>\n
\nHOW TO: LIFE PLANNING<\/h6>\n
START WITH THE END<\/h6>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nHorizons<\/h6>\n
Postscript<\/h6>\n
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