A series of tips on how to develop a life plan with projects that motivate us.
A life plan is what helps us create all kinds of projects that underpin our personal development. Although in our lives there are things that we do not control, having a notion of continuity is important in order to fully experience what the world has in store for us.
In this article, we will see several tips about how to create a life plan and how it can be applied
How to create a life plan
It may be paradoxical, but many times we think we have very clear opinions about all kinds of issues, but we have no idea about what we will do with our own lives.
Precisely for this reason, developing and applying a life plan is interesting: it allows us to find a project with which we can almost always identify ourselves even though everything around us varies over time.
Of course, sometimes times of crisis appear in which a life plan stops making sense. But these periods of uncertainty do not have to invalidate the idea itself of having objectives and strategies to get closer to them; it simply requires us to create a new life plan. This also means that any time is good to start one of them, regardless of how old you are.
So, let’s see what steps must be taken to create a life plan tailored to our goals.
1. Analyze your life expectancies
In the first step, you have to stop and think about what we think a realistic margin of change can be about our living conditions. If we obsess in goals that we can only achieve by being billionaires, for example, that will only make us fall again and again in frustration, or postpone so much the pursuit of our goals that little by little we will forget the plan of life.
2. Determine your values
No life plan will prosper if it goes against our values. Therefore, we must be clear about which are those to which we give greater importance. For this, it is best to make a list in which the main values that you consider relevant are stated, and then arrange them according to their importance. If you have trouble thinking about several, you can find examples in this article:
3. Determine your needs
Think about what most fills you, but not simply selecting your current desires, but those general objectives that you believe can encompass your major life projects. Do the same as in the previous step: make a list of needs and order them prioritizing the ones that are most relevant to you. Stay with a maximum of three of them, since if you try to aspire to several, you may not be able to get too involved in all of them.
On the other hand, think that the best goals are those that involve the happiness of many people since their footprint remains for longer and more stable than the cases in which you are the only person who appreciates it. Anyway, beyond this observation, it is perfectly valid to guide a life to a goal that will make the only person who enjoys the fruit of years of work.
4. Transform your needs and values into chains of action
From your goals and values, develop a series of chains of actions that take you from the present situation to your goals. That is, go from the abstract of your objectives and values to the concrete, the strategies and methods that can take you where you want to be for several years.
A good way to do this is to go through several layers of abstraction, generating general objectives and then building sub-objectives from it. On the other hand, try to set deadlines to make your commitment to the plan of life increase.
5. Reflect on the role other people will play in your life
It would be a mistake to make a plan of life without taking into account the rest of the people that surround us and that will surround us in the future. Do you want to get away from certain negative influences? Would you like to spend more time with those you love and appreciate? How will you combine that with your goals?
6. Apply your life plan and monitor it
It is not enough to carry out the necessary actions to develop the plan of life. We also have to keep checking that those goals we aspire to have a meaning for us. The simple passage of time and our own maturation and learning process means that these needs can change spontaneously, and that is why we need to be alert not to continue blindly with these plans.
Bibliographic references:
Lerner, RM (2002). Concepts and theories of human development. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Pink, DH (2010). The surprising truth about what motivates us (1st ed. Edition). Barcelona: Books Center.
