How to Make a Perfect Plan

How to make an effective plan for anything, using successfully your left brain and right brain

The left brain activity is driven and fed by results in the outer world. In this quest, your rational mind has been trained to make plans, organize things and design roadmaps towards a goal. You want to make sure things go the way you want. Ideally, you want to be 100% sure that there will be no mistakes all along the way and that everything will run smoothly. Failure is out of the question. You want to achieve your results in the outer world. Period.

In order to guarantee your success, you analyze every single angle of the matter, in an effort to make your roadmap perfect. The more trained your rational mind is, the more details you want to incorporate in your roadmap and the more structure is added to it, especially if you are dealing with a complex matter. You want to banish all doubts that your plan will succeed and come up with an answer or a course of action for every outcome or possible scenario that you foresee in your mind.

This is normal. This exercise gives you the confidence that you are “doing your homework”. This pacifies your rational mind. You are not going to be running like a headless chicken; you have a roadmap towards your goal. All is well, as long as you have not...

• Over-analyzed the matter, loosing perspective of reality;
• Been dogmatic about the steps of your plan;
• Based your plan heavily on statistics;
• Based your plan on opinions of people who are not experts or are biased about the matter;
• Left no room for experimentation;
• Excluded your feelings about the matter and the procedure.

If you over-analyze the matter, you may end up with a very rigid, inflexible plan that somehow looses perspective of reality and leaves almost no room for necessary adjustments along the way. A very rigid plan may lead to disappointments easily, every time things go a little different than you originally planned them. And disappointments may lessen your motivation to keep taking action in the desired direction.

Something similar may happen if you reach the point where you become dogmatic about your plan or roadmap. You are discarding before hand any possible variation to the procedure. You are predisposing yourself to being intolerant about any possible change, and this will influence your general attitude about the whole execution of your plan, since you are building up an inflexible attachment to the steps of your plan. This may kill your enjoyment of the whole thing, as it happens when you are driving your car on the interstate road and refuse to stop for lunch because you do not want to arrive to your destination any minute later than you originally planned.

If you based part of your analysis on statistics, you better exercise caution. Remember Benjamin Disraeli saying that “there are lies, damned lies and statistics”. Statistics are generalizations of a specific trend in a specific area at a certain time and in a certain place. Statistics are not rules. So do not base your good judgment and projections heavily on them or, even worse, use them as if they were a solid ground that allows you to take for granted certain responses from society to your plan of action. Keep in mind that statistics are relative.

Also, when building up a plan of action, people usually cannot escape the temptation of asking other people what they think about the whole thing. Naturally, responses may vary depending on the kind of people you ask about your plan. If you do ask other people about your plan, make sure that you are asking people who are experts on the matter. And make sure also that they are unbiased experts.

Every successful plan leaves always some room for experimentation and adjustment along the way. Things in society do not necessarily work mathematically, because emotions, different individualities, perceptions and circumstances are involved. If you want success, be ready for healthy adjustments.

Ultimately, never neglect your feelings about the whole matter, about your plan, and about every single step of your plan. You have to engage your right brain in the process. Remember that if you want to achieve some results, it is primarily because you believe you will feel much better and happier with those results than without them. So there is no point in achieving those results at the cost of unnecessary daily stress or through living negative emotions daily for a long time just to stick to your roadmap to success and make it work at all costs.

It is nonsense working on a plan angrily or in a constant altered mood, believing that the result will make it worth it. You have to be reasonably happy about the process, not only about the expected result. An unhappy process rarely leads to a truly happy result, because you are building resistance along the way. A perfect plan always takes into account your honest feelings. So when workings on your plan and its progressive steps, always ask yourself:

• "How does this feel to me?";
• "Am I enthusiastic about this?";
• "Do I feel light or heavy about this?"
• "Is this the course of action that feels best to me?"
• "Do I feel energized and motivated by this?"

When you have considered your feelings about each and every step of your plan and made the necessary adjustments to feel good about it, then you have a reasonably good roadmap. Once you have reached this point, do not be afraid of start taking action. Do not go back to re-analyzing the whole thing again over and over even if some doubts or second thoughts appear in your mind. Do not pretend to wait until you have sorted out the full puzzle in your mind before moving some of the pieces. Moving some of them helps the complete picture to start appearing and taking form before your eyes.

Think of it like playing chess. You may have some strategy, but you do not wait until you have the whole game sorted out in your mind before you move some pieces. When you interact with the world, you need to move some pieces before you can reevaluate, recalibrate or reassess the best course of action along the way to achieve your goals. That’s how it works.