Life Development Plan – A Practical Guide, Part II

Continuing from the prep steps discussed in Part I, below we get a little more granular.

Step 3. Define current and success state

After listing your overall priorities, go one level deeper on each bucket so you have  clarity around what ‘success’ means for each of them. It is possible that during this exercise you need to readjust your priority buckets, add or delete some – that is ok.

Once  done, rate current state on a scale from 1-10 (10 being best).

For example, this is what my version of this exercise looks like today:

Assessment: in the health category,  I am doing well with my mental care and physical activity though I have to work on my eating and some of my spiritual practices,  as highlighted in orange, above.

Assessment: Being mindful and present with my kids is the biggest area of opportunity here. Absolutely one that I will need to focus my attention going forward!

Assessment: Kudos to us for really focusing on the experiences that are important to us and making great progress! Very happy with where we are right now, just need to keep consistently doing the same.

Assessment: My career is going very well. I am adding a lot of value, I love my job and I am setting myself up for success.  I have also kept my goal of networking with new people across the company and beyond, I need to just keep pushing myself and finish the year strong.

Assessment: Our financials are going strong, especially since we started to focus on them so much in the past year +. While we are on track for our expense goals, it will be close, so adding into a category to watch through end of year, as a focus.

Assessment:  I got all the tattoos I wanted done so we can even cross this off the current list! As for the convertible, I know which one I want to rent, I just keep putting it off (maybe I don’t want this enough and need to reconsider?). Finally, on the electric car replacement, we still have a few years to go I hope, but need to get better at putting  savings away towards replacing the car.

Conclusion

So far we took time to reflect about what we want our life to be like, we identified our life’s priorities, and we narrowed down what success would mean to us for each of them. Finally, we rated where we were with each priority, getting us ready to the next step of the process getting us to implementation.

Phase III will take us into specific steps to make a plan forward.