Last week I surpassed 5,800 participants of the OTM Plan for Personal Success® program. The program enables participants to identify exactly what they want out of life and how they are going to create that life.
The program covers:
- One Core Concept
- Background Research – on yourself
- Five Principles for Personal Success and Life Balance
- Six Vital Strategic Areas for Success
The planning process always follows these four steps:
- Identify what you want to do
- Clarify your starting point
- Brainstorm the strategies/actions that will move you from where you are to where you want to be
- Prioritise those strategies/actions so that you identify their order and/or key strategies/actions that have the highest leverage for achieving your desired outcomes
You might wonder why you don’t start with Step 2 first?
No matter what planning you are doing whether it be for your organisation, your team or yourself, you should always start with what you want to achieve. If you start with where you are then you are at significant risk of being ‘blinded’ by your current circumstances. For example if you are in a job that you don’t like because it isn’t fulfilling, you aren’t challenged and not recognised for the value that you are providing, then this will make it hard for you to create a plan to achieve what you do want from a career if your starting point for your plan is your current situation. Quite simply your current situation will have very clear examples of why you can’t have what you want out of a career.
Your current situation often provides motivation for you to move away from it, but when you create your plan you must focus on getting as clear as you possibly can about what success really looks and feels like. You must focus on the outcome you want first.
What would a fulfilling career look like? What would your relationships with your colleagues look like? Would you be working more on your own, as part of a team or a mixture of both? What would ‘respect’ look and feel like up, down and across the hierarchy of your ideal organisation? Would you be travelling a lot or not all? What would your income be?
For each of your answers to these types of questions you must ask yourself why you want what you want and picture it as clearly as possible. “But what if I don’t know exactly what I want?”, I hear you ask.
If you don’t ‘know‘ exactly what you want then I urge you to find the questions that you would like answered. If you think about it, what you actually want is to have discovered the answers to your own questions. So discovering and exploring the answers to your own questions become the focus of your strategies and actions in Steps 3 & 4 of this process.
Fortunately we humans are amazing explorers. I’d argue that the world we have created has resulted largely from our ability to explore and discover the answer to our own questions, such as a famous question asked by Isaac Newton, ‘How can electricity give light?’.
When planning follow the four steps above, they are powerful and they work.
The OTM Plan for Personal Success® has just been launched on an online platform called Yes For Success so that anyone can now access this powerful process for creating the success and life balance that you want.