A plan with four layers? If you want your plan to fly, you need to breathe life into it. Why? After all, a plan is neither an animal nor a plant. Indeed, for most people, a plan is not breathing, growing, evolving, morphing like a plant producing flowers and fruits. But yours, your plan? Shouldn’t it evolve and swing? Obviously, you like a plan bringing flowers and fruits into your life. But for that, your plan needs the ability to adapt.
Creating a plan that brings fruits is the overarching topics of a small series in this blog and the Success and Inner Growth podcast.
Today, we are not yet moving to the rhythm of a breathing, growing, swinging, and even dancing plan. But that is our goal over the next few blog posts and episodes of Success and Inner Growth. Instead, start out by studying the different components of a plan with four layers, their tasks, behaviors, and needs.
The Four Layers of Your Plan
I call the components of your plan the four layers. Let me introduce them: the road map, the resource plan, the growth plan, and the action plan. If you want to reach your goal, they need each other for mutual support. Let me give you an example:
- If you want to breath the air and enjoy the scenery on the peak of the Kilimanjaro, you must know the steps to reach the foothills of the mountain and the different paths from there to the peak. This is the road map.
- But that is not enough. Your growth plan guides you through the acquisition and development of gear and skills you need to reach your goal.
- Your resource plan helps you building up the resources you need to reach the peak of the Kilimanjaro, and to return home afterwards. The resource plan guides you through acquiring the time, money, and energy you need to spend for the gear, guides, transportation, and accommodation necessary to reach your goal. It helps you to have the right amount of the right resource at hand at every step of your journey, and to spend it in the right order.
- Your action plan helps you to do the right thing, at the right place, at the right time. Acquiring the proper resources when you need them, collecting the necessary skills and gear in the right order: obviously, all this needs action. It needs finely choreographed action, taking one step after another, moving, jumping, retreating, coming back.
Today, we will have a deeper look at each of those layers of a living plan. This is the first step we have to take on our path to a powerful arrangement allowing us to fulfill our mission while enjoying the path of our life.
The Road Map
If we want to rule our own life and fulfil the mission our soul has set out for us, we must follow our personal path.
Starting Point and Destination
To move on our path, we must of course know where we want to go. In other words, we must know our destination. A clear purpose of our journey is a necessary condition for creating a road map, but it is not enough. If we do not know, where we stand, we cannot plot a path to our destination. Therefore, we need also the starting point.
There is no roadmap without starting point and destination. But a straight line from the starting point to the destination does not make a useful road map for humans. For birds, this might be a different story, but even they would have to know something about the wind and the weather on their journey.
Challenges and Milestones
On the path of our destiny, we meet always challenges and barriers. They serve as milestones, and they serve as catalysts and step stones, guiding, pushing, and pulling us to the next level of our personal development. Although some of the barriers will surprise us, it is worthwhile to identify the upcoming challenges as early as possible and to mark them on the road map. This helps us to prepare for them and to measure our progress.
Mostly, those obstacles and challenges demand, that we build more leverage. Therefore, we can overcome them by growing a bit further, adding knowledge, skills, wisdom, and resources to our life.
Stars and Role Models
Stars and role models help us to stay on the right direction. There is no reason to emulate a single one of them. Remember the saying: You have to live your own life, all others are already taken. But as we move, our distance and perspective on those role models change. This works like sailors in ancient worlds using the stars to navigate through the oceans, determining their position and their course.
It is up to us, whom to choose as stars and role models. They might be persons, whom we have experienced and observed in our personal life, like parents or grandparents. Famous contemporary figures out of our reach with remarkable success serve as orientation points. We can use Saints honored by the churches as our stars. Even figures like Odysseus or Hercules from the Greek mythology can support us as points of orientation.
Your stars should be visible and outstanding, like landmarks. Variety is here as important as it is in your personal network. Personal role models should represent and embody the different human archetypes. Their purpose is to reflect our own personal evolution and tell us at every moment, where we stand.
The Growth Plan
Growing means adding wisdom. knowledge, skills, and resources to our life. We accumulate them as investments if we care and dare to do so. Together, they allow us to make an impact in the world. Additionally, wisdom and knowledge cater to the needs of your soul for its own evolution and growth.
The more wisdom, knowledge, skills, and material resources we have already accumulated, the faster we can grow them further. Together, they help us to build leverage. Such leverage allows us to overcome even the steepest challenges and biggest obstacles popping up on the path to fulfill our mission. This is the place, where the magic happens. If we do it right, we can grab the opportunities passing our way all the time, and experience exponential growth.
The Resource Plan
Another name for the resource plan is the budget. But this budget is not only concerned with money. It plans, observes, and controls the flow of our time, energy, and money. The task of the resource plan is to ensure, that we have always the necessary resources available on our road map. If we run low on one of our three key resources, we must adapt our action plan and direct our activities to replenish the resource running low.
If such a problem persists, it is a sign that we are running against an obstacle or challenge. Chances are that we haven’t mapped out that little friend on our road map properly.
The Action Plan
Positive result without focused action do not happen. Your action bears fruits in the form of information, skills, better understanding of your environment. Action lets you move along your path of success. To focus your activities, you must plan them, day after day. What happens if you do not make conscious decisions about the activities? In the best case, nothing, but in most cases your leverage and resources start to decay.
Bringing your Plan with Four Layers to Life
In this edition we covered the components of our plan with four layers. In the next one, coming soon, we will explore how to turn this layered plan into a system.
Why is that important? Every army in the world, and every successful corporation, knows very well that they cannot execute any plan exactly as it was conceived. The plan must evolve.
But that does not mean stopping to plan. To the contrary, strong organizations spend vast resources on systems adapting and tweaking their plans continuously, and planning for scenarios. If you plan only for one way, and events take a sudden turn into another direction, you are at a loss. You would better have been prepared to grab the arising opportunity.
Free Strategy Session
If you want to find out more about me and Chavavo Publishing, I invite you to a free one to one strategy session. There we can find out, whether we are a good fit to take the next steps together.
If yes, it is fine. But, if not it is also good. In any case, we will spend an interesting and inspiring hour together.
Here is the link to register.
