6 Reasons Why Your Annual Plan Won't FailEach year in November I do my annual pre-planning. Some say this is business jargon for New Year’s resolutions, and I disagree. I believe the way I do it is far from a resolution. Let me explain why.

This week I will be spending 4 hours preparing for my Faith-Filled Annual Planning Day on December 4. This day helps me take a look back and a look deep inside to better center and focus myself to avoid the 6 reasons I think most annual plans fail.

You know how it goes. I lived it myself for many years… resolving to make the new year the best year yet.

Did you know that New Year’s Day is the busiest day at the gym? It also boasts the record for the greatest number of Google searches for “diet”. January 1 is the first day of most every other “New Year’s resolutions” that can be set. Each year people around the world make them, and each year many fail.

Planning is seductive

Yep! There. I said it. Planning lures you in because making the plans is far easier, prettier, and way more fun than doing the work required to reach the goal. Case in point? Vision boards. I make one (or more) every year and I love doing it. It is fun, I get to create, and I think they are beautiful when I finish.

Failure is easy

Failure is valuable to each of us from time to time, if we learn from it. Seth Godin says, “Successful people fail often, and, worth noting, learn more from that failure than everyone else.” I agree. If we don’t learn anything from these times, we waste so much.

Journaling, mind-mapping, planning out our dreams, goals, intentions for the year is easy. Delivering on them is what we really want. When I write my gratitude letter to 2016 next November, I plan to fill the pages with gracious thanks for each and every thing that I delivered on throughout the year.  This week, as I write my gratitude letter to 2015, I am able to do that and I hope this post can help you do the same.

Here are 6 things you can do to keep your annual plan from failing:[tweetthis]#Faith-Filled-Plan 6 Reasons Why Your Annual Plan Won’t Fail. [/tweetthis]

1. Be in alignment with your core purpose. What are you aligning yourself to? As a faith-based business owner, I align to my faith, and the work I believe God has put me here to do. My spiritual gifts are administration, help, and leadership. I have intentions for my life that are built around those gifts and the impact I believe I am meant to make here, the legacy I am meant to leave behind, my core purpose.

Goals can really make you crazy. I choose intentions instead, but that’s just language. You can read more about how I do intentions in my free guide to setting them.

My life intentions are in alignment with what I believe to be my core purpose. I have long-term intentions that I have crafted and nurtured for myself to help me reach these life intentions. My annual intentions, what I call my short-term intentions, are created each year after a review of the life and long term intentions, before any plans are made to deliver.

For me this means that I annually first evaluate the life intentions with prayer and contemplation. How am I living in alignment with them? Where am I out of alignment and why?

This same process happens with my long-term intentions, then as I create my short-term intentions, I am constantly comparing them upward, to confirm I am planning things in alignment with my core purpose and not work that will lead me off of that path.

2. Live intentionally every day. Without action, intentions are just dreams. Setting intentions that are realistic and attainable, even in combination with one another, and that are in alignment with what we are ultimately meant to do and be in the world, is the first step, but there have to be more steps taken.

A year is a really long time to focus. As I plan, I break my year down into things I can do each quarter, then each month, then each week to meet the ultimate deliverable. As I work on each thing, it can get checked off the list, but more importantly, as I plan each week, I can plan with these things intentionally incorporated into my work.

I have found that maintaining this intentionality with each day’s and week’s plans, helps me remain in alignment with my purpose. And looking at things in smaller chunks, helps to keep me on track and with the right things in focus.

3. Persevere with consistency. Something I’ve been hearing more and more of lately is that success comes from two things: consistency and perseverance. I am far from perfect, but I have found an approach that helps me keep the habits I create. I generally fail when I fall away from this seasoned process by doing the following:

  • Try to tackle more than I am able. This is where honesty with yourself comes in to play. Rome was not built in a day, friends.
  • Attempt something I don’t love. If I dread it, I won’t do it.
  • Hide the habit. When you fail, no one knows, which makes that choice easier to bear.
  • Compare myself to others. When I run someone else’s race, compare my life to their highlight reel, I will never measure up and I will feel defeated.
  • Fail to motivate myself. Motivation can far outweigh discipline if you allow it to. Just try it and see what happens.
  • Take on multiple habits at one time. Spreading my focus too thin allows me to fail miserably at all of it.
    Throw in the towel when I make a mistake. Had a busy week and missed a blog post? So what. It’s not a permission slip to just let it go for weeks at a time. Don’t let one misstep derail you.

Consistency combats failure because we just keep trying, tell others what we are doing, are realistic and outward focused, and just simply stick with it.

Choose things to tackle in the new year that you are able to build solid habits toward achieving them and then make consistent progress towards that end each day, week, and month.

4. Build your life and work on a firm-foundation. As you examine what you are aligning to, your core purpose, you can generally find your foundation. As I stated before, as a faith-based business owner, I align to my faith, and the work I believe God has put me here to do. My faith is my foundation.

What is your foundation? Is it solid, or is it easily shifted beneath you. It’s not only hard to chase a moving target, it’s exhausting. I have found that my solid foundation is the driving, dependable force behind my ability to keep moving forward.

Challenges will come in the coming year. Failures will happen. A foundation beneath you will help you continue forward regardless of what comes your way.

5. Spend time each week evaluating how things are going. I heard the following quote: “A rocket to the moon spends only 7% of the time on the correct course, the rest of the time it is off course and needs to be corrected and put back on course.”

It’s important to not only have your destination in mind but to keep checking if you are on course and correct.

The way to make the first point, alignment, work for you, is to evaluate along the way. I do this weekly. On Sunday afternoons I sit down and review the past week.

  • How was I in alignment with my short-term goals?
  • Where was I out of alignment?
  • Why?
  • Where might I make adjustments in the coming week to realign?
  • What can I do in the coming week to take a step forward, to intentionally add an action to the plan?
  • Do I need more accountability (see below)?
  • Do I need more motivation?
  • Do I need support?
  • Have I chosen something that might be out of alignment with my core purpose and therefore action on it is difficult?

If, like that rocket, you spend only 7% of your time on course, checking in weekly will help you make subtle corrections. Waiting until March, or even half-way through the year in June, you’ll find yourself so far off course that adjustment might be overwhelming and lead to failure.

Evaluate weekly and see what magic happens for you. It helps you learn from the smaller failures before they can turn into larger ones.

6. Surround yourself with some form of accountability. This is the big one. I invest in a business coach that helps tremendously here, but I don’t stop there. I have colleagues who I stay in touch with as the year moves on so that I can remain accountable. Remember above, don’t hide things???? If no one knows what you are working toward achieving, if no one cares or addresses you when you slide (or worse, give up) then you will likely fail.

I recommend a coach, colleague who walks with you as an accountability partner(s), or at the very least a friend who knows you well. This allows you to make a connection over the things you want to achieve and help you through the tough times.

With these 6 things in place: alignment, intention, consistency, foundation, evaluation, and accountability incorporated into your year you can experience amazing things in 2016. And, if you incorporated these things in 2015, you are already able to celebrate with gratitude the results of each of these steps.

Will you write a letter of gratitude for these things in 2015? Let me know in the comments, and if you have already written about it, please link to it below as well!