“When you start putting your plan in place you might not know exactly the roads to get there. Or you think you do, and they might change. So, focus on setting your sights on the destination and allowing the road to take its course.”
– Steve Napolitan

Welcome to The Steve Show. Today I want to talk about planning. I want to give you some pointers on what you can do to make every year of your life a spectacular year!

The first thing that I do is I plan my personal time.

Now you might be saying what? So many of us put our work or our businesses first. This is the belief that we have. We work, work, work, work, work, and then we fit in our life.  

You might say, “Steve, how do you do that?” If you are an entrepreneur and you have your own business you’re looking at making sure you care for your clients, right? But if you don’t care for you, you can’t care for them either.

The first thing I do is I sit down with my wife and we plan out what we want from the year.

• What holidays do we want to go on?
• Where are those vacations going to fit?

We start placing that out how we want to do it. Then I start wrapping my head around the following questions.

• How can I work my business to support that?
• How can I work my business into that format?
• How can my vacations pay for themselves?

We don’t even ask whether we can afford it yet. We start with the end in mind then work backwards. We start by calendaring what we want to do and setting those dates. If we don’t put things on our calendar it will never become a reality.

When you choose to have that, things will start to formulate so that you can have that. And so, that’s why I choose my life first. I put down what I want personally then build all my business around that.

Sometimes we get caught up on the how. When a lot of times we need to pick the destination, and then allow for the best route to unfold as we’re going. There’re so many times when you’re driving your car and the guidance that you were going to take something might happen.

There might be an accident on the road, or maybe there’s an exit that closes, or different things happen, and we must change our route to get there. But you’re not going to stop. You’re going to keep going most likely. I don’t think many of us pull over on the side of the road and say, oh well, I guess I’ll wait and make my way when the road reopens.

We don’t do that, right? We go and find a detour. That’s something that Michelle Masters one of my teachers always said, “We don’t pull over on the side of the road.”

What I want you to do is take that and think about that for your life now. When you start putting your plan in place you might not know exactly the roads to get there. Or you think you do, and they might change. So, focus on setting your sights on the destination and allowing the road to take its course.

The second step is to get clear on what do you already know that you need to do to have what you want? So, just go over this one more time and back up. I put down my personal items on the calendar. Then I go over with my business partners what we need to do to make those things happen. There might be a little juggling. There might be a little bit of back and forth, but then we find our way, and then things start to unfold. Then I take what I want from the year, and then I divide it into the next step.

The next step is to divide it into smaller chunks. What do I need to do every month to make the 12 months the whole year? Then each month, what do I have to do each week to have the outcome I want for the month? And then I take the week and what do I have to have for each day? This is about chunking things down into actionable daily steps.

Now, those are going to shift. Over the course of the year, I’m going to review every month and every quarter to make sure that I’m on sight of where I want to go, and things always end up a little different.

So, what I want you to do is a plan at the end of every month gives yourself an hour or two to review. Look at what worked that month. You can do this every week as well.

Quick recap: Put your personal items first. Second things are to put what you need to do in your business or in your work. And then divide that by 12. Then divide that by four for the weeks. And then divide that by the five days a week, or whatever you want to work. Some of you might only want to work three days a week.

What you can do for me is let me know what are the things that you want to work on? How can I best serve you? Comment below. Let me know. I’d love to give you whatever I can to best help you.

Choose Gratitude Create Freedom

Steve Napolitan