Awareness: The First Obstacle To Planning

On the third day of getting my shit together, I gave to myself…. awareness.

Whether you’re a planner, wishy-washy, or total chaos, you’ve felt it: FAILURE. Big and blaring, harsh and painful. You might have your daily routine under your belt, but trying something new, like:

saving money
losing weight
getting more organized {is that a vicious cycle or what?}
exercising more
yelling less
finding more time for yourself

just never seems to stick. You fail, you shame yourself, and the cycle begins again.

What is wrong with you?

Nothing.

You can plan your life out all you want. You can have the best planner in the world.

You can be absolutely clear on what needs to happen and when for the next week, or month, or year.

But if you don’t know what’s going on in your life right now, then you are never going to plan efficiently. Planning is never going to help you reach your goals. Planning is never going to make you feel less overwhelmed. You are always going to feel guilty about those things.

Be Aware of the NOW

If you want to plan for something, then you need to know what’s going on at the present moment first. That helps you make decisions (which we’ll talk about in tomorrow’s post).

In order to plan effectively, you need to know what’s working and not working in great detail. You may have a vague idea of what’s not working, so what do you do?

You put all your energy into PLANNING to take measures to change it.

You don’t take the time to really dig into the problem. Why? Because it seem easier to plan for the good instead of opening your eyes up to the current situation–which might bring up some flaws or some areas in which you’re falling behind. We don’t want to look at the faults. We just want to fix them.

Well, that’s never going to work.

It hasn’t worked so far, has it? So why do you keep doing the same thing? Planning and failing, planning and failing.

You can do that all you want. You can put all your gumption and commitment behind it. But if you just keep planning, you’ll just keep failing.

Plan to notice

For the record, I don’t consider it failing. I’m just using that word to get your emotions into it.

Do something different for the rest of 2016. Instead of planning, plan to notice.

For the planners: This gives you something to do so you don’t get anxious about not planning.
For the wishy-washy: This is a great way to transition between feeling chaotic and feeling organized.For the total chaos: This is a great way to get more organized without compromising your spontaneous nature.

This is what to do:

For the next 9 days, plan to notice what is going on in your life now.
You don’t have to notice everything, but focus on the aspects of your life surrounding what you want to change.

For example:

If you want to save money, notice what you’re spending money on now, when you spend it, how you feel when you spend it.
If you want to lose weight, notice how you feel in your body now, what you eat, when you eat, whether you exercise, etc.
If you want to get more organized, notice what you’re doing with your clutter and time right now.
If you want to exercise more, notice what you’re doing with your body now. How does it feel? What do you crave?
If you want to yell less, notice how you react on a daily basis. What makes you yell? How do you feel afterwards? When are you not yelling? Why?
If you want to find more time, become aware of what you’re spending time on now. If you have a planner that you never quite used for 2016, this is a great time to dig it out. Every day, write what you did. Keep track of the time you have spent before you try to plan for time that you don’t even have yet.

Really be honest with yourself about what is going on in your life right now. It can be painful or emotional. Realizing that you yell at your kids every single time you speak to them doesn’t feel good. Noticing that you actually don’t make enough money to support your current spending habits feels downright terrible. But that awareness will help you create real change instead of planning for change that will never happen.

So stop planning and start noticing.

When the new year hits, you may be surprised at how confident you become about actually planning for the future.