Designing your Power Plan for Peak Performance

Success always leaves clues. No one around you that has achieved great success has done so in a vacuum. The path they have traveled, to achieve the remarkable success they have achieved, is paved with their own personal recipe or brand for success. One of the easiest ways to invite similar levels of success into your own experience is to explore what they did and to uncover their recipe. This recipe can then form the foundation you use for building your own “success blue print” or strategic plan. If you fail to plan, you are most certainly planning to fail. Not having any plans at all is a plan too; it is just a very poor plan, where you are left to the whims of everyone and everything around you. You are left traveling through your life like a rudderless boat, with no real direction or purpose at all.

Achievers Always have a Plan
The one thing that stands out the most for me, about all the successful people I have admired and whose biographies I have read, is that each one of them had a plan behind their success. So even if you are unable to unlock the individual success recipe of someone you admire, to follow. Know that the path is far easier and requires far less effort, when you have a plan. It is impossible to create a plan until you know what you want to achieve with your life. Start right now by getting a vivid picture in your mind of exactly what you would like your life to look like in the future. Visualise what would be around you, what you would be doing, who would be in your life and what experiences would invite meaning and fulfillment into your experience.

Create your Plan for Success
Once you have a crystal clear picture in your mind of exactly what you want your future to be like. It is a good idea for you to create a plan for your success, one that will work well and will take you to the finish line powerfully and in style. I have written some ideas below to help you create your “Power Plan for Peak Performance”.

Build a Plan that Works for you
All people are different, some people need plenty of detail in their lives and they work best with a very detailed plan, which highlights every intricate detail. Other people are more freewheeling and work better within a plan, which offers only an outline or framework, within which they must work.

The first question to answer is “What is the right plan”? The right plan is one that suites you and your style. A plan that is unique to your circumstances, one that fits you and is right for you. Each of us is unique and driven and inspired by very different things. No one knows you better than you know yourself, create a plan that suites your personality, one that considers your strengths and weaknesses.

Build an Annual Plan
Explore your goals and the outcomes you are trying to achieve. Start the planning process by looking at the big picture. Divide your year into four equal segments of 90 days each. Break your goal or goals back into smaller bite size chunks or smaller projects. During each 90 day segment select a realistic number of projects to tackle and complete. The secret to success is avoiding overwhelm whilst still ensuring that you stretch yourself.

Break each 90 Day Segment back into a monthly plan
Now break these projects back even further into smaller achievable mini goals. These are goals that you will be able to tackle and complete within a month. Finally break these mini goals back into micro goals, which can be achieved within one week. Remember each micro goal must have a completion time during the week and must be measurable. In other words you must know when you will achieve it and be able to monitor your progress daily, until it is done. Whatever gets measured gets done.

Turns your plan into Individual Action Steps
Your plan must then be broken back to include individual daily actions, which you can put into your daily schedule and actually take action on hourly to complete. Review your progress daily and ensure that you are applying sufficient discipline to ensure that you are completing all the actions scheduled each day and more importantly are the actions you are taking delivering the desired results. Planning is important, but with ensuring that you are taking the right actions every day, they remain just words on a piece of paper. Assess your progress as often as possible to ensure that your actions are delivering the desired results. Plan, Do, Review and then if necessary Improve.

Meet your Future Every Day
Create time slots in your daily schedule that are devoted to work on the individual tasks highlighted in your plan. I call these time slots in my daily schedule “Meetings With My Future” Show commitment and perseverance every day and make sure that you meet your commitments to your future. Develop discipline and make completing those daily tasks your top priority. As you repeat this positive cycle over time you will move closer and closer to the future you desire and any dream becomes achievable.

Review your Day
It is always good practice to set time aside at the end of your day to reflect on how you did. Are you meeting your commitments to create the future you desire? This is an opportunity for you to go over everything you have done that day. Are the actions you are taking delivering the desired outcome? If not ask yourself what you can do differently the next day to get a better outcome.

What did you learn?
It is also an opportunity for you to re-examine everything you have learnt that day and lock all the valuable information away for use at a later date. Look back over your day and examine all the people you saw, who you talked to, what was said, what happened and how you felt. Each day is like a mosaic in the big picture of your life, carefully store each one, so that you can use it to create a wonderful picture of your past. This allows you to gain the maximum benefit from your past experiences and makes your past experiences even more valuable, so they can serve you in the future.

Make it Work for you
Ensure that you act on the plan that you have created. Simply commit to do it, work your plan every day. Your daily disciplined actions, over time, will add up to massive equity. Stay committed to take action every day and remain disciplined and focused. You have got so much to gain when you commit to apply these few really simple principles in your life.