How Realistic Is Your Plan – ElPropósito4 min de lectura

How realistic is your plan for the next decade? (continued)

Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash

Last week I wrote "What Are Your Plans for the Next Decade?", and this post continues a series I hope gives you tools to set goals that actually happen. I write about this at year-end because so many of the hopes I set out to reach (they were never real goals) didn’t pan out. I’ve since made the changes I needed, so read on to see how I got past that hurdle and how I now reach what I set out to do.

Every plan rests on a few fundamentals, and I’d group them into two big areas: the plan has a Purpose, and you know your Capacity to Execute it. A "why" at the core of a plan gives you the energy, or willpower, to handle whatever comes up. Knowing where your capabilities stand today answers questions like "do I have the resources, and what do I need to improve?"

The worst outcome is the frustration of falling short. You can see it coming early and boost your odds by making the right changes at the right time. That means valuing listening, having the humility to take feedback and, above all, trusting that a timely course correction can still get you to the same destination.

Plans begin when we set out to do something new and trust the future holds the best for our lives. Making them real takes full ownership of carrying them out. The more they depend on other people or networks, the more complex they get, and new factors come into play, such as everyone sharing the same vision, values and rules. You have to account for those to succeed.

What makes a plan inspiring is picturing a better future and conveying that message, to ourselves or to others, so we stay motivated and enlist the support we need to get there. What story do we want to tell ourselves or others? How will we tell it? How realistic is the story I’m telling? Those questions shape that last, inspiring piece.

Some questions to reflect on: Where do you see yourself in ten years? What will fuel your energy and inspiration in good times and hard ones? How realistic does your plan feel today? Can you pull it off? Whom do you depend on to make it happen? How far do they share your vision? What else would you need to execute it?

Warm regards and all the best,

Rodrigo Baccaro

P.S. This week’s VELA:

• What I’ve been Viewing: What makes a leader? A short video that walks through the five components of emotional intelligence and how they connect to leadership in real detail. It pairs well with The Emotionally Intelligent Leader by Daniel Goleman, one of the good books I read in 2019. My takeaway: emotional intelligence has gone from "nice to have" to "need to have", and the video shows why.
• What I’ve been Listening to: How to have a whole new life in 2020. While we wait for a plan to tell us where to go, what to do and how, we forget that we’re the ones who design the plan, choose where to go and, above all, carry it out and adjust along the way. A great podcast worth your time, especially since it ties into last week’s post, "What Are Your Plans for the Next Decade?", and this one.
• What I’ve been Reading: What Leaders Really Do. A 1990 article by Harvard professor John Kotter, republished in 2001, and still highly relevant. By far one of the best articles I read in 2019, and in my life. My takeaway: "Motivation and inspiration energize people, not by pushing them in the right direction as control mechanisms do but by satisfying basic human needs for achievement, a sense of belonging, recognition, self-esteem, a feeling of control over one’s life, and the ability to live up to one’s ideals. Such feelings touch us deeply and elicit a powerful response."
• What I’ve been Learning: The Fourth Industrial Revolution. It’s fascinating how emerging technologies such as gene editing, artificial intelligence and neuroscience will shape the coming decades. My takeaway: the Fourth Industrial Revolution "is a vision for developing, diffusing and governing technologies in ways that foster a more empowering, collaborative and sustainable foundation for social and economic development, built around shared values of the common good, human dignity and intergenerational stewardship."

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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