What’s Your Life Plan?
(Image from Pixabay)
What’s your life plan?
‘The best way to predict the future is to create it'
Abraham Lincoln
Anne was the head of finance, and her position meant she was a member of the senior leadership team. She was very ambitious and a respected team member who was commercially savvy and produced great results.
Her career was a big part of her life. Anne had been married for about six years and occasionally wondered about having children, but she didn’t see how it could work. Anne believed that you could not have a senior leadership role in a large organisation, do a good job, and have a family. In her mind, you had to choose one or the other, and she wasn’t ready to give up the career she had worked so hard for. But Anne also had an empty feeling as, deep down, she really did want children.
Did you know that most people spend more time planning their annual vacation than they do their lives? Staggering but true. Often this can come down to not having a simple process to follow so, read on to gain more clarity about how you can do this for yourself.
The Elements of our Life Plan
When creating a life plan, it’s useful to start by identifying how you view your life. Let me explain. Some leaders, like Anne, see life as a row of buckets. They often have a bucket for career, friends, and family, significant other, money, home environment, fun and leisure, wellbeing and fitness, and maybe personal growth and development. You might have different buckets in your line-up, and that’s fine, but the idea is that the buckets represent the various elements of your life.
When we start adding time, energy, and money (imagine this as water) into our buckets, they begin to fill.
Occasionally something else comes into the picture, so we add another bucket and start to fill it too. Over time, some buckets are full, even overflowing, while others remain almost empty or even dry. But we end up with a row of disconnected buckets and tend to deal with each in isolation.
The wheel of life is a common planning tool used to identify the areas of your life and how you think you are currently fulfilling each area.
My version of this tool is more like a pizza. The great thing about pizza is that we can choose the flavours we want, and I love that. We are all different, so my pizza will look different from yours – and that’s okay. No one says we should all have the same pizza. How boring would that be? We know this to be true. Have you ever held an event where you tried to cater to the food tastes of everyone? Everyone has preferences, and that is what makes life so interesting.
Okay, so you get the concept of thinking about life as a pizza.
Now, the pizza represents your entire life, so create as many slices as you need. You may include the areas listed above or, you may have different labels on your pizza pieces. That’s fine – it’s your life.
Priorities
The pizza approach is more helpful than buckets because we decide how big or small the various slices will be. We can prioritise our pizza pieces by size. If we intentionally increase the career slice, we must choose which other slices to make smaller. Then we can decide whether we are happy with that choice and how it helps us become the person or leader we want to be.
The other great thing about our life pizza is that we can always re-slice it to suit our needs. We always have the option of a do-over.
As with the wheel of life, the middle of the pizza rates zero (not at all satisfied), and the outside edge of the pizza is a ten (extremely satisfied). How would you rate each slice of your current pizza?
This is a great way to gain perspective on the important components and how you are currently performing in them, given where and how you spend your time, effort, and money.
Questions to ponder
How do I currently view my life? Are there buckets or pizza?
How would I rate my satisfaction with my life plan pizza? A zero score in the middle of the pizza represents unsatisfied. A ten on the outside suggests I'm very satisfied with this element of my life.
Where would I like each element of my life pizza to be in the future?
Is there an element of my life pizza that will leverage other areas and would therefore be a great place to start?
Need some help?
If you would like some help identifying what you truly want in the future but have difficulty in formulating that picture for yourself, then let’s chat.
Alternatively, you could grab a copy of my book Inside Out: Why Leadership Starts With You.