by Dreama Vance

Darren Hardy is a motivational speaker that I heard at a convention. He had a PowerPoint slide with two side-by-side images. On one side was a slovenly dressed, middle-aged, overweight man in front of a clunker of a car, in front of a run-down house. On the other side was a picture of a well-groomed, trim man with a beautiful woman and two smiling children in front of a sleek car in front of a beautiful house and landscaped lawn. His question was, “Where do you want to be?”

I always laugh when I think about this picture because it is such a visual image and is applicable to just about everything in life. Indeed, his message in his presentation was that it is what you do everyday that determines where you will be in five, ten or twenty years. But first, you have to have a plan.

Everything starts with a plan. Do you want to have lunch with friends? You have to make a plan. Do you want to lose ten pounds weight? You have to have a plan. Do you want to be spiritually enlightened? What’s the plan? The odds are pretty good that something is not going to fall out of the sky, hit you in the head, and magically transform you.

Getting things done and accomplished requires a plan. When you go buy weekly groceries, you probably go with a plan… either you have a grocery list of things to buy, or you have some idea in your head of what your meals will be in the coming week and therefore know what you need to purchase. There is a maintenance plan for your car and when you take it in for service, you either plan to wait for it or plan for someone to pick you up and return you when the car is ready. There is a plan.

Making plans and following them help us get to where we want to be. You have the picture of what you want and then you break it down into daily practices that are doable and will get you the desired outcome. If your plan is to one day run a marathon and you have never run a mile, you aren’t going to go out and run that marathon today. You are going to train for it. You are going to map out a plan. You are going to keep your ultimate goal in mind, but start with a much smaller and manageable aspect of the bigger picture.

Only you can make your plans. Others can help and give assistance, but your plan depends on you… where you are now, where do you want to be, what are you already doing on a consistent basis, how big a step can you take at a time… these all depend on you.

Can you meditate for two hours everyday? If you already meditate for an hour, then probably the answer is yes; but if you find it difficult to meditate twenty minutes, then you will need to decrease your time to a more comfortable period so that you can maintain the daily habit. If twenty minutes is uncomfortable, then you will soon give up. Better to decrease the time and establish the habit. Once the habit is comfortably established, then you can slowly increase the time. See how it works?

What you do consistently is how you achieve the desired outcome.

So make your plans for your health and well-being by mapping out the changes in your diet and your exercise routine, your spiritual life, time with family, whatever your priorities are. What do you want that picture of you to look like in five years time?

Design your plan!

Tell a friend…