What's the Plan? A simple approach to personal goal setting.

1. Whats the plan? - Introduction: Welcome to what's the plan? A simple approach to identifying and pining your personal goals. The process I'm going to take you through in this course is one that I've used numerous times to figure out my personal goals on. I really hope it's a process that works for you. Planning of any kind can be very intimidating. In my day job. I spend a lot of time planning my own projects and supporting others in their planning activities. And I see time and time again people who look at the size of the task ahead of them and just feel overwhelmed if the planning process itself is too involved, too complicated, whether too many steps, then you easily run out of steam. And he could be setting yourself up for failure before you even get to the fund stuff. So why are you here? Well, maybe, like all of us. At some point, you've reached a place where you just feel the need to do something with your life. But you don't know where to start. Or maybe you're feeling a bit directionless and want something to work towards a nice goal for the next six or 12 months. or maybe a little bit longer. Or maybe you want to start laying the foundations for some longer term goals. So whether you want to learn to play the violin, take a holiday or maybe run a marathon, the process I'll talk you through will help you figure out what you want to do and what you need to do to make it happen. I hope you find this course useful. By the end. You'll be able to apply the lessons you've learned to your course project, which is where you can take your own first steps toe identifying and planning your personal goals. 2. Lesson 1: Priorities: welcome to what's the plan? A simple way to assess and reach your personal goals. Now there are tons of resources online that will show you how to plan to achieve goals and which rely on complicated, multi step project planning methodologies. These results is a great when you have large, complex projects to plan that have multiple conflicting timelines and milestones to track. But as I said in the introduction, if all you want to do is set yourself some simple goals and track how you'll achieve them, all that paperwork can bog you down and make a Mole Hill look very much like a mountain. So personal goal setting shouldn't be that complicated. We can be our own worst enemies when it comes to achieving goals. As it is, we set tasks that are unachievable because we want to push ourselves. We become easily distracted, lose focus, and slowly everything grinds to a halt. The way we're going to approach this course is to help identify what's important to you. We're gonna figure out some priorities, and then we're going to touch goals to those priorities, and then we're gonna go through a process to help you figure out how to achieve those goals that you've identified. Now, if you sat down and thought for a moment about the things that you enjoy doing, and the people that are important to you will come up with a decent sized list of all the good things in your life and that this will include things that you want to focus your time on and your energy and your money, whether it's for six months, 12 months, five years off for the rest of your life. It's not about a picture for you, of where your energies and probably your cash is best spent now and into the future to help you live the most personally fulfilling life you can. So knowing your priorities in life is the first step to identifying your goals. And once you've identified a few goals, whether they're short or long term, you consider about figure out how to achieve them. That's the process of this course, and it's what I'm gonna take you through step bust it. So let's start with that list that I talked about. We're gonna do a quick exercise here just to get you thinking about what's important to you . right now, you can follow along with me as I do this exercise, or you can just watch while I do it and then you'll have an opportunity do yourself is part of the class project. So what I'm gonna do is we're gonna make up a list of as many things we can think of just in a minute or two off what's important in our lives. Now, this list that I'm going to show you other things that are important to May and I just want to show that nothing is too small or too silly. So here we have first of all, old books. I collect old books. That's an important thing to me. I love Earl Grey Tea. I love piano music. I can actually play the piano. I love landscape painting, and one of the painters I really enjoy is J. M. W. Turner. I also watch a lot of art documentaries. I'm very interested in would origins and where language comes from on one of my favorite authors in that area is the entomologist Mark Foresight. I have a cat called Molly, who obviously I play with this much as possible. I also have a very good vegetable garden, and it's something that I'm interested in. I'm also interested in Russian book cooking, which is something that came out of World War Two. There's a lot of books around that show you how to do great things with very little food. I play a fair amount of online games, and I'm also quite into Dungeons and Dragons. I enjoyed sketching. I like going for walks. I like sunrises and sunsets. I enjoy going to the theater. I really like red roses and I really like my bed. So now that we've got this list, this is where the fun starts, because what we can do is look at it and say the things that perhaps we're already good at . But we want to get better at things that we have no idea about. Maybe there's people we want to spend more time with or cats that we want to spend more time with. Or maybe there's even some habits there that you enjoy doing, but maybe answer good for you, and you want to try and not do them so much. They could just be skills there that you want to improve on in my list. There's a few things that I could do already, but I want to be able to do them in a little bit better, such as sketching. So now that we've got that list, they're all things that are important to us and that we enjoy doing that, make up a big part of our life or that we want to make up more of Ally. So what we're going to do is use this list as a basis for setting some goals, and you may find that there are a couple of goals for each of the priorities, and there may be some priorities that don't need a goal. It'll, but in the next lesson will look at how we attach goals to these priorities. 3. Lesson 2: Goals: in this lesson, we're gonna look a gold setting. So based on the priorities that we picked earlier on, we're now gonna expand those out, and we're gonna identify some simple one line goals that are gonna help us. Either get better at something, maybe start something. You maybe plan for a fantastic holiday. Whatever it is that's on Ellis, they don't have to have a goal attached to every item on the list. And you may even identify a gold that takes a couple of items. And you may also decide that happy with some things as they are and you don't need to attach a gold to them. So what I'm gonna do is take a few off the items in my priorities list, and we're going to bring up some goals based on the items in those in that list. Now I've chosen old books, piano music, landscape paintings, vegetable gardening, dungeons and dragons, sketching and walking. You might have holidays in there. You might have spending more time with your family. You might have cooking. So for old books, I'd like to own a Jane Austen first edition. The piano music. I'd love to learn to play the piano, and that's also gonna main. I'm gonna need to buy a piano, which is gonna be a second goal that only toe attached to this the landscape paintings I'd like to visit the National Gallery, the vegetable gardening. I want to learn how to companion plant and actually get some healthier plants and stronger plans for Dunstan Dragons. I'd really like to run a game as a dungeon master. My sketching. I would like to improve my figure drawing and for walking. I'd like to take some guided local walks. I just added knows here as well that it may seem like some of the things that I'm showing is an example or a bit sort of low level, maybe a little bit flippant. But I'm just focusing on some lighthearted personal goals just to get the process started and get the creative juices working. It may be that your golden more work related or health or fitness related and you'll list might include things like get a promotion in 12 months or run the London Marathon. The planning process that I'm shaking you through will help you map those types of goals just as well as something mawr fun. Like giving you cada manic. You'll not that I'm saying your cat will think that that's fun. What you might also notice with this list is that the goals that I have said they're all that the endpoint. They're very active. I'm gonna own something. I'm gonna learn something. I'm gonna go somewhere, I'm gonna do something. I'm going to improve on something and that's gonna make it really easy because we have a very clear focus off what it's gonna look like when we succeed at this goal. Now that we have this list of gold, it's time to get into the nitty gritty Daito. This is where our plan will start to form, and it's where most people start to give up because they see the size of the task in front of him. It might seem all a bit too hard, but stick with me. I promise you. There are no again charts. There are no spreadsheets, and there are certainly no indecipherable acronyms involved in the next lesson will start looking at how to tease out the goals and what we actually need to do to achieve them. 4. Lesson 3: The Five Ws and How - part 1: welcome back to what's the plan? So in this section, we're going to look at the five W's and how, and this is integral to tasting actual goals into what you actually need to do to achieve them. So far, we've identified our priorities. Maybe we're gonna learn a new skill. We're going to travel somewhere. Or maybe we're going to stop doing something that isn't quite health. And we've teased out those priorities to some identifiable goals that we want to achieve. So now it's time to get into the day titles. So whether you're trying to save money for a holiday, want to learn to play the piano or transition from full time work toe working for yourself ? Anything you want to achieve can be broken down into small medical activities or actions. And that's the essence of project management, really. But this Farmall paperwork involved in project playing them, we need to worry about here, so the perch we're going to use is very simple, and it might even be a little bit familiar to you. It's used by journalists, the police authors and anyone interested in general problem solving. It's known as the five W's and how so They are who, what, where, when, why and how. One of the most important things about the five W's and how is he? Can't answer any of those questions with a yes or no response. They all make you think about your answer and provide details. So if you're an author, they help you tease out a plot and motivation for characters. If you're a journalist that the foundation on which the story is investigated, built and reported, and if you're a member of the police force soul, maybe an amateur detective pondering these questions will help you figure out who done it. But if you're trying to set yourself some realistic and achievable goals, is part of a personal goal planning exercise, we can switch them around a little bit. And when we do that, we get what, when, why, how, who and where and from there we can expand those out, too. What do you want to achieve? When do you want to achieve it? By Why do you want to reach this gold? How you change this goal? Who can help you and where can you find resources now? I also like to add in a couple of little extra categories in that list, and that's risks and contingencies because, as we know, we don't live in a perfect world and the best laid plans of mice and men. And if you want to make gold love telling your plans, I'm just saying that it's it for the fun of it. So we should try to identify when things may not go to plan and indeed plan for when they might not go to plan, and that's all going to become very clear very soon as it goes through the exam. 5. Lesson 4: The Five Ws and How - part 2: Welcome back. This is part two off the five W's. And how so. We've already figured out what the five W's are and how actually means and how we can taste that out into the questions that are going to help us achieve our goals. And we also added some wrist in contingencies because you never know what's gonna happen and you should be prepared. So what I'm gonna show you in this lesson is how I now take the five W's and how and apply it to one of the goals that I have selected. Now you can do this for every goal that you have, by all means, but I'm just don't with one just to show you the process. So the goal of selected is landscape paintings and that I want to visit the National Gallery. What I want to do is visit the National Gallery in camera and see your landscape exhibition , so that's stating very clearly what it is I want to achieve. I want to do this before the end of the year, and I want to do it because I want a better appreciation of Australian artists and to study styles that are different to what I'm used to looking at. And then the house section is well, where we can plan out exactly what we need to do to achieve this goal. So you can do that as dot points he might do is a check box list. It might just be a wall of text, however, works for you. So for May, I've identified that I need to check exhibition dates and times I need to book exhibition tickets. I need to research airline and hotel costs. I'll probably need to prepare a travel budget. I need to book travel and accommodation, and I'll also need to find a cat sitter from my cat who can help me with this. The National Gallery had the customer service. I can also talk to a travel agent, and I have a friend who lives in Camber who could probably give me a bit of advice about what's on in town. And when the best time is to actually go, I can find information on the National Gallery website on airline websites and, of course, on hotel websites. Now there could be some risks involved. With this, I might not be on to get time off work when there is an exhibition. So the contingency there from a would be, well, let's look for a weekend exhibition or find one that falls across a long weekend. I could also look for something that's a little bit further out and plan to actually books and leave for that time. Now that's a pretty short process. But what I've done is I've taken a priority. That was important to me. I've created a Gold Force, and now I've mapped out how I'm gonna make that go. It's important to keep this short and sharp into the point. You don't want it to become over complicated, and there may be points in there where you realized a goal actually needs to be broken down into smaller goals. So within their I might need to create a travel budget I might need to save for a while. I might even need to raise some cash by selling some things so that could be a whole other golden that I need to create a plan for. In your case. It might be that you want to learn to play the piano, but you don't own one, so you need to figure out how you gonna be able to get a piano as well. It's also important to reassess your goals every now and then. It's good to challenge yourself, but it's important that your goals and the steps to reach them are manageable and achievable and always allow a little bit of flexibility in planning to be prepared for contingencies and to address any risks that you think May Papa. 6. Class Project: So now it's your turn, and the first thing I want you to ask yourself is what makes you happy? And then what I want to do is make a list of the things that make you happy. There you priorities from that list. Identify three goals, pick one of those goals and expanded out using the plan shaped that you'll find in the project section that's already set out without five W's and how for you, Then, once you've met that out scan will take a photo off the beach and uploaded to Project Page and then leave an encouraging comment, maybe a helpful tip or ask a question about another students plan. I hope you have fun with this project, and I look forward to seeing all your goals, and I wish you the best of luck in them coming to fruition. 7. Congratulations & one more thing...: welcome back, and congratulations. You've just been through the project. So you now have one plan that you can go forward to to achieve one of your goals through the course. You figured out your priorities. You've identified some goals, you've learned how to apply the five W's and how process, and you've set out of capable steps to reach your goals. So I hope you continue to use this process every time you need to send a goal. Or maybe just when you need to figure out what it is you want to do with your life. And I just wanted to finish by saying, Obviously big thank you to you all for coming to this course and to say that all the content and the process is taken from the book of the same name. What's the plan? Which is a guided workbook and journal. So the 1st 10 pages of the workbook step you through the process, and you can work along with the process as you go. And then the rest of the book is a two page spread, which includes the planning template, which you've just seen in the project, and a journaling page for you to take notes and keep track of how you're progressing in your goals. So if that's something you are interested in, the book is available on Amazon, and I'll put a link to a way you can get the book in the class section below, thank you very much and go forth and plan.