Day 23 of 31 days to Creating Your Inspiring Personal Plan for 2012
You have come light years in the last three weeks! And, you are now ready to assemble a draft copy of your plan for forwarding to the members of the Board of Advisors you established back in Step 2. You will not actually be submitting the draft until the day after Christmas, but in this step you will be pulling the draft together for the first time. (Regardless of whether you celebrate Christmas, you will want to be sensitive to the celebration choices of those to whom you will be sharing your plan.)
To help you assemble your plan in a format that will be attractive and facilitate quick review by your Board members, I am providing you with a Planning Process Handout (click to access this PDF). All you have to do is insert some of the previous created written documents and you will have a very professional looking draft that is in keeping with the amount of thought you have put into where your 2012 Plan stands at this time.
In back of a cover page (illustrated in the attached template), you will display the following three pages, in landscape format:
These three pages represent the heart of your 2012 Plan.
Of course, to get to the point of being able to create these pages, you did some other important work, the output for which I am suggesting be included in an Appendix which is also illustrated in the (above) attached template. This other work will provide Board members with important context for the heart of your plan. Assuming you concur with my recommendation that you include an Appendix, you will include the following (landscape) pages:
- Desired Legacy (from Step 7)
- Life Purpose (from Step 8)
- Strengths (from Step 4)
- Opportunities (from Step 6)
- Planning Assumptions (from Step 5)
To help your plan reviewers to quickly understand how all this all fits together, the attached template includes an illustration of the planning process you have been through. I recommend that this be inserted right behind the Appendix cover page which is included in the attached template.
It will be easiest for your reviewers if you assemble this into a single PDF document that will consist of eleven pages (yours might have an additional page or two depending on your formatting). You will save it electronically so as to be able to send the file electronically to members of your Board of Advisors.
Now, I recommend that you not yet send out your draft. Let it “age” for a couple of days. Seeing it all together for the first time, you may see a couple of tweaks you want to make. Or, you may want to polish your terminology.
Keep in mind that this is a draft and doesn’t have to be perfect. On the other hand, your Board of Advisors is (hopefully) a high powered group and you will want to put close to your best foot forward in what you send them.
Take the time to savor your draft once it is assembled. You should find the resulting product to be uplifting, in many dimensions. Look what you have accomplished in three weeks. Getting this far, while you carry-on yo day-to-day activities, speaks well for what you will be able to accomplish in 2012!
Tomorrow, I will be giving you access to a page that provides review guidance for your Board members. You will provide a link to this page when you send Board members a copy of your plan. The only work scheduled for tomorrow will be for you to read through those instructions.
The day after Christmas, you will distribute your assembled plan to your Board and then get your support team in place while you await feedback from Board members.
When you have completed Step 23, you can access Step 24 here. If you want an anouncement every time a new step is posted, you can sign-up – to the right – to receive new steps by either RSS feed or email.
Please note: If you have arrived at this step first, it is not too late for you to join other high performers who are collaborating to follow the bite size steps that are unveiled here every day. Get started here.
This blog post was written by Dave Carpenter. Dave is a prolific author, inspiring speaker, and well-known consultant to professional service firms. Besides writing regularly for this blog, Dave’s writing can be seen in leading business and personal development publications. Dave is also the leader of the Accelerate Success mentoring program where he mentors high performers in a unique program designed to do great things for the favorite charity of each participant. If you are (1) a high performer who believes you still have untapped potential, and (2) passionate about a favorite charity, you may want to learn more about this powerful program. You can also follow Dave on Twitter, on Facebook, and/or on Google+.
