Quick Tales: Planning Impulsively, But Not Aimlessly
I say the people who come prepared are usually the ones who win, but those who over-analyze the state of preparation and the actual situation loses the battle.
I’m a very analytical person and at the same time, I’m quite impulsive. For me, planning is a necessary step for achieving your goals. You need to know what steps to take to “get there.”
If you follow a plan and strictly abide by the rules you’ve set to yourself, there’s a good chance you’d be able to reach a certain goal.
For example, if I want to lose get to a certain weight, you need to cut down on the junk foods you’ve been eating, get on a healthy sleeping habit and start with actionable exercise.
If you plan that you will wake up every other morning to start with just 15-minutes of cardio and follow this with a meditative practice, you know that eventually, your body can adjust to the initial strain of the 15-minute workout. You will be able to increase the minutes of working out or even the frequency you’re doing it every week.
They say there really is no certain recipe for success, but it’s just following through and hard work.
Planning can help you along the way because it essentially saves you time and as we all know, time is our most valuable asset. It saves you time because since you’ve planned out what you will be doing in the near future, you won’t have to set aside time everyday to think about what you will do next.
You have direction.
But the conflict begins when what you’ve planned out don’t come to life. What if all of this planning goes down and nothing happened as you would’ve hoped?
ADJUST. PIVOT. REPEAT
I’ve been in multiple situations where this happened to me. I’d say, every year, I would fail a big goal and I would need to readjust what I had initially planned or I get stuck with pondering what went wrong.
So, whenever I find myself losing in the plans I’ve made, I clear my head. What we all need to understand is that the future will always be infinitely undecipherable. You can plan as best as you can, but you will never really know what will happen next.
That’s why I’ve mentioned in the first part of the blog that those who get stuck with what they think SHOULD happen loses. For these kinds of people, they have to get it their way or no way at all. What they don’t understand are the blessings with detours and miracles along the way.
So, if you ever find yourself in a lost plan, breathe in and out. The first thing you have to do is to forgive yourself. We’re always too hard on ourselves. Forgive yourself because life, the world, doesn’t revolve around you. Circumstances happen not necessarily because of you. You may have caused it in one way or another, but there are other factors at play too.
Once you’ve realized that, go on to the next step: GET YOUR ACTION GEAR ON. Don’t dwell on it too much. Even though there are 99 billion things you can’t control, you can still control how you will pivot, adjust and react to what happened to you. Are you going to sit there and murmur with all the pettiness you can think of or are you going to use your wit to think of a way you can still win?
It will always be frustrating to have your plans flunk, but time still moves forward and your beautiful life can still go on.
So buckle up with your chin looking high up the clouds and just face it.
Lastly, don’t ever give up on planning. Aside from all the technical benefits of planning, it’s also a sign of hope.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pat Villaceran is an eclectic social entrepreneur. She creates social enterprises that empower multi-fold impact on economy, society, and environment. She’s also passionate about equality, human rights and the plight of emerging markets.
Pat’s non-fiction publications focus on the introspection of the mind and how human beings are able to achieve the impossible. She surmises findings from scientific researches, extraordinary life examples into the life-changing philosophical ethos she writes in her books.
For more information on her upcoming and latest releases, follow Pat on her social media accounts.
