Misunderstanding the concept of planning is often the main problem with plans.
Whenever you make a plan that eventually doesn’t work, and you blame the plan, or you blame yourself for making that plan, or you dismiss planning altogether, you are acting from a position of helplessness. And helplessness never… helps.
It is solely your responsibility to make a realistic plan and follow it to completion. A plan is a tool, and, like any other tool, it hasn’t got any power of its own. Like a hammer won’t nail two pieces of wood by itself, your plan won’t work if you don’t use it properly.
Good planning skills have nothing to do with plans, they are all about you – your evaluation skills, your fears, your motivations, your focus, your drive. Everyone fails to plan effectively from time to time, because we tend to think that plans are more than the simple guides they truly are, and we’re not always comfortable with the idea of readjusting our plans as we go along. However, the best plans are change-friendly, adaptable, and supportive to you. A plan that exhausts you, one that challenges you into disturbingly miserable challenges, one that sets you up for failure, is a lousy plan!
We have to continuously adjust our plans, so that they bring us closer to who we intend to become and what we want to achieve. Inner work is often necessary, and not entirely pleasant, but there is no reason why we should complicate it by mixing in the misery of ineffective plans. Overhauling a plan doesn’t mean you’re giving up. More often than not, it means you’re taking charge of your life, and making better use of the wind in your sails.