Future-proof your dreams #2: Keep the dream alive

Predicting the future is impossible, but all your goals live there, so you can’t avoid thinking about it.  We need plans to channel our time, energy, and money despite having little idea what the next few years will hold or how well our ideas will work.

Last week, we discussed the dangers of overplanning and under-strategising. When we rush into the details without allowing enough space for messy thinking, we don’t build the commitment to the bigger vision that will hold us together when things change. This is particularly important when we are making decisions with others.

Remember, there are three common things people do poorly when planning for the future:

1. Over-plan and under-strategise
2. Let it die when things shift
3. Assume stability.

This week, we’ll talk about the second.

Don’t let the dream die

When we take our eye off the ball, our dreams die. Plans are simply predictions about how we think we could achieve our goals. They’re a hypothesis, an experiment ready to be run.

This means a plan should never be considered a one-and-done exercise.

You will need to review your plans more often than you expect. Our predictive powers aren’t as good as we think, and it is practically guaranteed that you made some incorrect assumptions or that unexpected things will throw you off course.

If you’re a slave to the plan, you’ll do one of two things when this happens:

1. Grind harder to try and jam the square peg of reality into the round hole of your plan, become increasingly frustrated and make your life harder than it needs to be.
2. Hold the plan in mind as a distant but increasingly irrelevant wisp in the wind, plan to get back to it at some point, and eventually give up on reaching your goal at all.

There is a third way: keep your plan alive by reviewing and adjusting it as life unfolds. Hold your initial predictions lightly, and delight in discovering which assumptions and predictions were correct.

If you’re making shared decisions, you’ll need to book that review time proactively, or it won’t happen. Keeping a plan alive requires fighting against the natural chaos of things. You’ll have to bring it up in conversation, put it on the wall, and intentionally, regularly, gently breathe life again like you would a struggling open fire.

Plans are kept alive by two things: intention and attention.

Recommended tool: monthly checkups

Review your plan every month - or more often if that feels right. Always start by celebrating the progress you’ve made. Odds are, you’ve managed to pull something off, even if it isn’t in the shape you expected.

Ask questions like:

• Here’s what we thought would work – has it?
• What has come up that we didn’t expect?
• What will we adjust for the next month or so?

For work, keep it simple and light. A 30-minute chat is often enough. For your personal life, treat yourself to a cuppa or a glass of wine while you go over your predictions. The important thing is that the conversation happens, not that it’s perfect. Remember: intention and attention.

Next week, we’ll complete this three-part #futurefocus series with some advice on expecting the unexpected!

Til next week,

AM