How Making A Plan Frees You From Needing The Plan

My head’s been stuffed absolutely full of wonderful productivity and strategizing ideas lately.

During Lift Off, Pam and Charlie spent a lot of time working with us (and helping us to work with ourselves and each other) on our plans for our lives and for our businesses. They wanted to know: what were our superpowers? What did we bring to the world that mattered deeply to us? What was the work we loved?

More difficult to answer were these questions: how will you actually bring your magic and your medicine into the world? How will you show people what you do, and get paid for doing it? How will you create your workspace, your website, your environment, and your marketing so that it resonates with YOU-ness (and, of course, pays the bills)?

Making a plan has always been hard for me, in spite of how I see the world.

I’m a big-picture person. Ali Hale talks about this on Charlie’s blog today – specifically, the differences between a more masculine, detail-oriented, get-that-shit-done mentality and a more feminine, big picture, do-the-things-that-matter-in-the-end way of seeing the world.

(I totally just summarized a post that deserves your undivided attention, so please don’t forget to go there and read it!)

I’ve always been better and zooming out and seeing things from a Google Earth kind of view. I can see the patterns between things, and intuitively know how those patterns are working together now, and how they will probably work together in the future.

However, it’s hard for me to do anything but dream big dreams, write down semi-vague intentions, and then be sad later when I realize that while I WANTED to make something happen, I never really figured out how to do it.

Dreams without plans can never come true, and plans without dreams are a waste of time.

On the last day of Lift Off, we paired off in sets like this: people who were big-picture dreamers with people who were focus-down detailers. Kyle (a very awesome and totally non-scary tax attorney) and I sat together and hammered out some specific plans for the next four to six weeks.

What I realized then, and understood again when I came home and did more strategic planning with Sarah, is this: my dreams and my plans complement each other, and I can do both. Not only that, but I can’t have one without the other.

Dreams without plans can never come true, and plans without dreams are a waste of time.

Making my plan freed me from needing the plan

My next epiphany came after I realized that planning was in line with dreaming, after I spent several hours writing down my dreams for the year, and daring myself to dream even bigger.

When I combined the ephemeral, in-my-head fluidity of my deepest wishes and hopes for my business and my life with the concrete black-and-white-ness of pen on paper, something shifted in me.

I had finally internalized my dreaming in such a way that I knew HOW to make the dream a reality. I realize now that I must have been subconsciously assuming that my dreams would never come true, because I had always held them inside and away from any real path to completion. And now that I had my plan, following it was as easy as breathing.

I don’t need a plan to tell me what to do any more. I don’t need someone (or something) to give me directions, because I wrote my own down and now I know where I’m going.

In short: plans are good, because they’re a tool that makes your dream real.

My to-do list doesn’t rule me now, because I know why it’s there. I know the WHY behind the WHAT, and that’s because I decided which WHY actually matters.

I’d love to hear your personal philosophy on planning and dreaming and productivity. Go crazy!