Having established the direction of your Life Plan by examining and determining your Core Values, defining your Life Purpose, examining the current realities of your life with the Wheel of Life, and envisioning what impact you desire from your life in your Life Vision Statement, you are now ready to begin moving forward with defining how your plan turns into action, the most important step.

Too often in both business and in our personal lives, we are guilty of crafting a plan but then putting it on the shelf to think about some other day. A plan only has value when it prompts movement or change. Good intentions in the plan will have little effect on the course of your life without establishing Goals and Action Plans to move your life toward where you want it to be.

We can develop and gather these goals into two major categories, both of which are driven by the prior steps in your Life Plan. There will be some goals and action plans specifically defined to align your life with where you want it to go, in other words, plans to extract yourself from things that do not fit with your Life Plan and distract your attention and energy from the important things. The other category will be those goals and action plans that are defined to move you further along or accelerate your development in the vision that you have defined for your life.

Elsewhere much is available on developing goals and action plans, so here we will give a very brief overview. Individuals are sometimes capable of developing these goals and actions on their own, but it is often more effective to find a partner or a coach who is able to help you think more deeply about developing the best goals and actions and to help you achieve them through an accountability relationship.

One of the effective tools for defining Goals is the use of the SMART acronym. Goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-specific. In other words, in setting goals we must be able to judge our achievement of them. Of course, one of the challenges in setting goals in the Life Plan process is defining and prioritizing the many goals that might be possible. Often, the Wheel of Life exercise is a big help in this defining and prioritizing process.

Similarly, Action Plans must be specific and sell-defined. We can’t fall into the trap of thinking about doing “something sometime.” Action Plans must be carefully crafted to identified who, what, where, and when. And accountability is often helpful in seeing these actions through, so a partner or coach can be very helpful.

This article is the last in a series of articles describing the Life Planning process. To see the other articles in the series, click here. While individuals are welcome to complete this process on their own, partnering with a Life Coach is often more effective. Please contact us for more information.