Have you felt pride and guilt simultaneously ever in your life? Well, I feel it often. Precisely, every day.
If your attention span allows, let me elaborate. I am a master of making brilliant plans, such that I can spend a whole day just writing and planning my whole week, month, year and many times my whole life. I do feel a sense of achievement because to foresee all your “future” actions living in the present is a productive skill. But that feeling is momentary and the pride doesn’t sustain for long. As that sense of gratification fades, the feeling of guilt kicks in. Guilt? Of what? Afterall, I did work. I used my skill.
Then, why did that rewarding feeling vanish?
Was my plan a problem? No chance, it was an ideal one.
How to bring plans into action? We all struggle here, how do we fix it?
I think, I know. After the repeated feedback loop, I now know!
My conscience somewhere believed that a “plan” is a first step towards my goal. An ideal plan was all I wanted to get started. No. Nothing of it was right. All the preconceived notions led me nowhere. It took me several failed plans to realize that I don’t need one to get started. The only thing which was required at that time was actually taking that first step and that first step was not “planning”, but doing what I planned no matter how inefficiently I did it. All my unproductive time was consumed by my belief in perfectionism. What’s this fancy term now?
Let me explain, my plans were actually “too good to be true” and driven by that pride I expected my actions to give justice to that, so I was convinced that if my plan is not executed perfectly, I would start all over again. If I had planned to eat a healthy breakfast in the morning and say for some reasons I couldn’t then, rather than continuing my schedule, I used to tell myself, “No. this wasn’t supposed to begin like this. Restart from tomorrow”.
Well, it doesn’t seem that bad but, the repercussions were not very pleasing. There wasn’t a single day which went as I thought and even if it did, it was not sustaining. This continued for months, I changed plans, but results didn’t. The loop was getting into my nerves, the work was piling up and nothing productive had happened so far. I thought that by all this trial and errors I have come a long way, but the truth was I never started. I was exactly at the same old position with no substantial results. Perfectionism at its peak!
If anything didn’t go according to my so called “ideal” plan, the implementation just stopped. My unreal expectations never allowed my momentum to flow. End result?
Stagnant. Being stagnant stinks.
That odour of self-doubt and guilt, trust me, was suffocating. It paralyzed my thought process. Solution? Simple. Let air flow in. Remove things that make breathing difficult. Ok, then. This time, I didn’t make any plan, just random things done daily. No superficial expectations, no thinking about the past, only and only action. Along that journey I observed something strange. The most consistent tasks we do in our daily life are the ones we never plan for. We don’t plan to brush, bathe, eat or all those minuscule activities which we do on regular basis. If logically viewed, they too are actions, which are not default by birth. They were taught to us and we kept on following it. Then, what went wrong?
Timing, perhaps!
We have been taught about planning so much that its importance has been ingrained deeply within our minds. But, the reason why most of us struggle in its execution is that, we believe a plan is the starting point of any journey. Whereas the reality is, a plan is a catalyst which will help us to work on our goal at a faster rate. The burden of initializing a journey which is yet to begin, on something that isn’t concrete, and exists only in our variable imagination is a disaster waiting to happen. Actions are reality, when directed with a good plan will hit the nail on the head. But wait, good plan?
Good question. A plan which entails no flaws, accelerates goal attainment and incorporates good amount of hard work is not a good plan.
Confused? No worries. A good plan has a room for error, it knows that we are bound to be emotional, disappointed, hyperactive at certain given points of time. No matter how much driven we are, at the time of planning, we might not be at the same state while executing them. These considerations make plans executable and consistent executions does bring output. The results may be average or even excellent depending on your level of input. But, the bottom line; there will be results.
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