Why You Want To Plan Your Year

So how did last year go? Did you get everything that you wanted done, done? Did you actually plan last year? If you are like most people we struggle with planning. Yes, we want to plan but then we come up with all these excuses as to why we don’t plan our lives.

Instead of planning we wish. We would like to have things done but we want them to just magically happen. We want our dreams to come true without the effort of making those dreams come true. It gets frustrating when we talk about something and then at the end of the year, we don’t see our dream realized. We then chalk up the goal setting as if it doesn’t work.

Now you are right, goal setting doesn’t work. Goal setting will never work, with how most people set goals. People talk about what they are going to do and then go about their day. So yeah the goal-setting process will not work unless you are willing to do the work required to achieve that goal. There is no Ronco goal-setting style. You know “ Set it and forget it. ” 

You can’t just set a goal and think that it will just magically happen. Use all the laws of attraction you want. Sitting on your duff will not allow that new home or new job to just land in your lap. You have to be moving yourself forward.

When it comes to goals that we want to accomplish we have to plan. Yes, planning can result in some unpleasant emotions. However, if you know the thoughts behind the emotions you can head those emotions off at the pass.

Why do we not plan?

One of the wonderful points of humans is that we all have our “reasons”. Those reasons can be as simple or as complex as we choose them to be. Another name for a reason is an excuse. When we start calling our reasons excuses all of a sudden those reasons don’t sound so flowery and worthy of attention. It actually starts to sound better to just voice the true reason why.

Let’s shed some light on the excuses as to why we don’t plan our years out as we need to.

The key to why we don’t want to make plans is our thoughts. All the excuses and “Reasons” we don’t plan are because we have a thought and that thought creates an unpleasant emotion in us. 

Why the unpleasant emotion? It depends on the excuse and the real reason behind the excuse.

The discomfort of making decisions

Why do we have such a hard time going to a restaurant with our girl? She wants you to decide and you want her to decide. What is the problem? The need to decide. We fear that we are going to cause the other person some type of discomfort if we make the wrong choice. 

The real answer to this is no. We’re not going to cause our spouse any type of pain because we made the wrong decision. We can’t make them feel anything; their emotions are created by their own thoughts. but our thoughts create our dis-ease in the situation that we are in. That discomfort that we experience from making decisions shows up when we are planning our year.

The thought of, “What if I get it wrong”, crops up time and time again. This one thought often cripples us from achieving our goals, Holds us back from reaching for our dreams, and binds us from fulfilling our passions. 

The discomfort of learning something new

Taking the time to learn something new can be one of the biggest challenges we men face. We have to take the risk of looking foolish in front of other people. 

We also have to fight our own Motivational Triad. Our brain wants us to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and be as efficient as possible. We can’t do any of that when we’re learning. Learning is uncomfortable. That right there cancels out two of our motivators. 

Learning also is not efficient. We don’t know how to be efficient when we are learning something new. It takes a lot of energy for your brain to learn new systems and functions. Therefore learning Is the very opposite of what our brain wants us to do.

So you have to be willing to suck at learning something new to get better at your task. You have to be willing to overcome the thoughts and the discomfort that follow those thoughts to achieve your goals.

FOMO

Most of the time we don’t want to miss out on something because we have already planned something else. That FOMO or Fear Of Missing Out is huge and driving emotion. Fear as a whole is a powerful emotion. 

Another emotion is that of feeling foolish because we didn’t plan accordingly. Yeah especially when you are starting, we don’t know how to fully plan our whole year. We just sort of guess and hope for the best. The fact that we are guessing will often cause us embarrassment because we let our pride get the best of us.

Our Excuses

Now as an old high school football coach used to say, “Excuses are like assholes everybody has one.” Yeah we do, we always make excuses as to why we are avoiding those emotions we experience if we are doing something new. Now Let’s explore some of these thought errors that we often have. 

I don’t even know what I am doing tomorrow.

I hear many men state this excuse as to why they don’t want to plan. Even one of my mentors uses this excuse. When he is asked what he is going to do in 10 years. So we as men are all willing to turn away from wanting to make plans.

It is often difficult to make fully fleshed-out plans when we look that far out in the future. That is why you want a vision of what you are doing at that distance. Like anything far away you aren’t going to have 20/20 vision. You aren’t going to see all the details, but you have to have a clue as to the general direction you want to head. 

A year is close enough that you need to be able to have plans. What do you want to accomplish this year? How are you going to get to that goal? You have to plan. You may get it wrong and most often you won’t get it right. Yet you will hit the target more often when you are aiming than when you aren’t.

I Like to be spontaneous

Oh, the free spirit. I do love them. I am a free spirit myself in many aspects. Yet I also realize that my free-spiritedness is the reason why I am not further down the line. 

Believing that you aren’t able to be spontaneous because you have made plans is a thought error if there ever was one. Being spontaneous has no bearing on you making plans. You have to plan when you are being spontaneous. 

So you want to make a surprise trip to Florida. You still have to plan the trip. You have to know where you want to be spontaneous. So there is still planning involved in your spontaneity. ]

Another element to this thought error is that when you plan you have more time. More time allows for you to have spontaneous moments. More on that later.

I can’t make plans. I have kids

You are right, you have to plan for yourself. And that is for yourself only. Your kids are going to be interrupters. We accept those little interruptions as they happen. We often welcome them. 

Yet, to deny your betterment because you have kids. This means we are doing our kids a huge disservice by showing them that their aspirations need to be held down. Don’t try to better yourself, or worse yet they could take your lack of taking action because of them. You are sacrificing yourself for them and how is that good for them? 

You are your kid’s leader. You help them see what is fully possible. If you are continually telling them that they are a burden and a killer of dreams. Wow, how sad. How about you show them that because of them you have to be the best. You have to excel because of them. You have to reach your dreams so they can reach theirs. Which of those ideas feels better?

I don’t have time

This excuse is wrong right off the bat because everybody has the same number of hours in a day. We all have the same number of hours in a week, in a month, in a year. to say you don’t have time is just another way of saying I don’t plan. If you did plan you would have time. if you did plan you would have so much more accomplished.

To say you don’t have time or you are overly busy says you don’t have discipline. One of the biggest displays of being a people pleaser. A people pleaser takes on everybody else’s work. The interesting fact of the matter is that the people who say they don’t have time are often the ones who don’t get anything accomplished. All because they use the excuse that they’re just too busy. 

Planning and setting goals is just a waste of time

You are correct. planning and setting goals is a complete and total waste of time when you don’t execute. planning a goal is only the easy part of the goal. and it is the easiest part of a goal.

We know many men who are all talk and no action. That is somebody who makes plans but doesn’t follow through. We may even be the people who are all talk and no hat. If so this is your challenge. Make a plan, set the goal, and follow through. Can you achieve your goal? 

You can but it’s going to require you to take action. That is where the planning comes into play.

If you don’t plan and you don’t make choices then you are doing nothing but wasting your time. 

What you are actually saying

Now these are the main excuses that we like to use so that we don’t have to put in the effort to get off the couch. I also want to look at what you are truly saying about yourself and those who rely on you.

It is easier to react.

There are two ways of behaving around an unplanned event. The first is to react, the second is to respond.

 I do want to point out the differences between reacting and responding. The best way to do this is to think of a doctor’s office. when you get treated for an illness, if you break out in a rash it is said that you are reacting to the treatment. Yet if you are getting better you are responding to a treatment. So Which would be better?

Most men would say to respond to an event, and they would be correct. 

What does it mean to respond to an event? It means you have to be intentional in what you are doing. Otherwise, you have to plan your response. When you react to an event you are just going off of emotional energy. If you know anything about life you know you do not make a decision when you’re in the middle of an emotion. So it may be easier to react to an event than to plan but the reaction is going to be costlier in time, talent, or treasure.

You chose to not prepare

When you’re making an excuse as to why you did not plan you’re actually stating that you chose to not prepare. It is as basic as that. you had a choice to take action yet the action you chose was to be no action. This forces you to have to choose on the fly with very little information so again you have to react instead of being prepared and having a good response.

You aren’t Disciplined

Planning takes discipline. You have to decide that you’re going to cut parts of an event away. It is easier to avoid those. That is where discipline comes into play. When you can be disciplined in making plans, you will start making your life easier in many different aspects. From the amount of time available to you to the speed at which you make decisions. 

Now this isn’t easy discipline never is but it gets easier the more you do it. The benefits also show up more as you practice being disciplined. In making plans.

It is uncomfortable to see how much time you waste.

The one true unreplenishable commodity we have in our lives is time. we are allocated only a certain amount and when it’s gone we’re gone. The rub is that we don’t know how much time we have. so we try to avoid wasting our time.

 The interesting point about this is that when we are unintentional with our time we waste a lot of it. if you start planning your year or even a week at a time you start freeing up so much more of that time.

One of the big reasons why we don’t want to plan is because we start to see how much time we are wasting, and that hurts a lot. How much more could you have gotten done if you hadn’t blown 4 hours on social media? What grand dream could you have accomplished if you weren’t watching so much television? Where would you be in your relationship if you didn’t put so much effort into buffering by drinking? Those are tough questions to ask yourself yet when you start facing the truth you stop wasting that time. 

Your Benefits to Planning your Year.

Now we have looked at why we don’t plan. So what happens if you were planning your year? What rewards would you have if you were even planning your weeks?

The biggest benefit is you would be more efficient. you would get more done in a week than most people. When you make plans and schedule your life you are putting into effect Parkinson’s law. At the heart of this law is this…

Work expands to fill its allotted period, regardless of the amount of work to be done.

This is why so many people get so much done right before they leave for vacation. The amount of time is small and they become very focused. 

Thanks to Parkinson’s law this frees up so much time because now a 5-hour job can be shrunk down to 2 hours. that extra 3 hours can be applied to whatever you want. more work okay you now can apply to get more done in the same amount of time you can also apply it to your free time so you’re you can be spontaneous because you have become disciplined enough to plan your weeks to schedule how long you’re going to work how much free time you’re going to have.

If you want more time in your week to spend with your kids, start planning your goals. Start looking to the horizon and adjusting as needed. To get more time to spend with your wife. You have to work on your discipline. You get more free time to do what you like. By scheduling your life. If you are interested in how to do this. Please sign up for a free Collaboration session