So, What’s Your Plan?

The first principle in flawless planning is that we always have a plan.

This might seem counterintuitive when we feel lost or stuck. The notion that we could not have a plan is based on the story that plans have predictions, details, and timelines. When our story is that we don’t have a plan, it could be when we have a problem, dilemma, or challenge — without predictions, details, and timelines.

In flawless planning, we are clear we always imagine the future. This is because our minds are hardwired for prediction. They run millions of simulations per second to predict what our bodies need to do our best in the world. It would be functionally impossible to not imagine the future.

Specifically, we imagine feeling and doing things in future situations based on what we assume and wonder about these situations. What we imagine is our plan.

If we imagine the best or worst happening, that’s our plan. Whatever we imagine is essentially our plan. Improvising, winging it, and hope are plans. They are exactly what we imagine feeling, doing, assuming, and wondering.

This deceptively simple question of what’s our plan instantly confronts us with our agency‒our sense of choice. It provokes the consideration: So, if that’s my plan, how happy am I with it? Our bodies will instantly chime in with feelings or emotions of instant approval, disapproval, or curiosity. In that moment, we have choice. We have created the possibility of imagining something else‒of having a different plan if we’d like.

The other profound significance of this question is that who we are in the present is primarily shaped by our sense of the future more than our sense of the past.

Whatever stories we have about our past, if we imagine a happy future situation, we will feel happy in the present. If we imagine a crappy future situation, we will feel crappy in the present. The quality of our present is shaped by the quality of our future. And the only future we have is the future we imagine.

We can ask ourselves this simple, powerful question in any situation. We can also give others the gift of this question in any situation. It is a superbly compassionate gift.

If we want to make it more accessible, we can break it down into two questions: What are you imagining feeling and doing in this situation? and What are you assuming and wondering? This opens up some options for consideration of different plan variations.

When we or others feel lost or stuck in any situation, the question of what’s your plan, gets us unstuck because it shifts us from the past we can’t do anything about to the future we can do something about. This simple shift opens up access to new options of ideas, questions, and opportunities we would never have access to by focusing on the past.

It’s not difficult. It’s just magic.

For more about flawless planning, visit FlawlessPlanning.org