Look back at the last 10 years of your life. Are you happy with your results? Do you get thrilled when you reflect? Unless you make a point to design your life plan for the next ten years of your life, life will just happen and you will find the next decade will look pretty much the same as the last decade.

Incredible success does not simply happen. You design them.

The Sydney opera house did not simply happen. An architect designed it whilst first having a picture of the completed opera house in his mind. Once designed he build it according to a carefully monitored plan. Why do we think our lives will simply happen?

Every single top achiever in the world shares these two common factors: A commitment to learning and staying a lifelong student. Setting goals that are clear, documented and visible and they have a plan with all the steps how they will achieve their goals.

Mark McCormick discussed a 10-year Harvard research study that was conducted between 1979 and 1989 in his book “What They Don’t Teach You At Harvard Business School”. The 3% of the 1979 MBA graduate class, who had clear documented goals when they graduated, earned on average ten times more a decade later than the 97% of their graduating class who had no written goals when they graduated. The difference between the results the graduates achieved was the clarity of goals they spelled out for themselves.

Most people spend more time planning a vacation of one week, than what they spend to plan their life for the next ten or 20 years. So foolish! Jim Rohn said “We all have two options: We can make a living or we can design a life.”

What is your reason for doing what you do?

Part of planning your life is to get clear on your why. Your why is your dream. To be clear about what you want and the reason for wanting it.

A very good way to pinpoint your why is to reflect on the past 10 years. What worked for you and what did not? What were your mistakes, what were your successes? Which were good actions in the last ten years and which were bad ones?

Think beyond some of the financial goals. Think about your life.

Goal setting tools can help you clarify where you want to go and what you want to achieve with your life. An excellent tool is to write your own obituary. Imagine you are standing at your own funeral. What do you want people to say about you then? What did you achieve? Whose lives did you touch and change and improve? Where did you help? Whose lives did you change positively? What would your children say about you?

Why is your “why” important?

When you plan your life, you draw up a blueprint to reach your life goals. As you live your life following your plan, you will have problems. You will feel pressure. Adversity will arrive at your door. If you have a clear reason, nothing will push you off course and make you want to stop. You will find a way around, over, under and through any problem because you will understand why you want to succeed.

On the other hand. With no clarity on your reason, you will become despondent and weary. You will want to quit when the going gets tough.

How do you plan your life?

Begin by thinking about the end result. You look ten years ahead and decide where you want to be. What do you want to achieve? Evaluate all the parts of your life. Decide your financial worth in 10 years from now. What do you want to reach in your business? What kind of relationships do you want to have? What donations do you want to make and to whom? Where do you want to be in your spiritual life? How fit do you want to be?

Write down the goals for all the areas of your life. Write clear measurable goals. Then make a a plan of how you will achieve the goals. Divide each goal into smaller objectives. Simply documenting the goals without having a plan to start working on, is similar to writing New Years resolutions down. A year later, you will look back and wonder what they were.

Begin from a vantage point of gratitude. If you want to create a life filled with abundance, then appreciate and be grateful for abundance. You cannot plan a life when you experience desperation and frustration. Write down everything you are grateful for in all the parts of your life.

Start to design your life…

Melanie Kok is a Lead Generation Coach and an Online Marketing Strategist. More articles on lead generation tips and how to Design Your Life for online success is available on Melanie’s Blog. To get access to free training to generate your own business leads, go to Online Lead Coach Training.

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