We designed the Souletics® Calendar Planner for Every Season and Obstacle to empower families with a strategic plan. If you’re new to planning, this post will help you understand the why and how behind strategic planning for your family.
Why is it important to have a life plan?
Your plan will determine your outcome. If you don’t have a plan, the outcome will be subject to any number of external factors. That’s not to say that a plan will prevent the unexpected from throwing you off course. But having a plan will steer you in the direction you want to go.
Living life without a plan is like driving to a new destination without a map. You wouldn’t drive your car somewhere without knowing where you’re going. That would be like someone in New York saying, “I’m going to drive to California.” So they get in their car, head west, and hope for the best. They might, in fact, make it to California. But how long will it take? When will they arrive? Without a plan, there’s no sure way to know when or even if they will make it to where they think they’re going.
A calendar planner for families will help you drive your whole family to whatever destination you choose.
Why is strategy important in life?
Very few good things in life just happen out of the blue. You may be one of the lucky few who enjoys a “good” life without much effort. But if that’s true, most likely that’s due to someone else’s strategy. A grandfather who figured out how to start a business, or a parent who sacrificed to buy the family home. Most achievements only happen after someone has decided they want to achieve. Then they create a plan as to how and when they will hit their goal.
What is a strategic life plan?
When you take the time to write out your goals, you become more intentional about the direction of your life. Your strategic life plan takes it a step further by developing a strategy for reaching those goals.
A strategic life plan is like your personal roadmap for your life. It will help you make better decisions and eliminate activities that don’t bring you closer to your goals.
A calendar planner will help you create a strategic life plan. When shopping for a calendar planner for families, look for pages that will help you develop your strategy.
How do you develop a life strategy?
It may seem complex, but developing a life strategy is actually fairly simple. The hardest part is figuring out what’s most important to you. It can take time and plenty of contemplation, but this is the most important step. Once you know where you want to go, the “how to get there” part will typically follow a logical sequence.
For example, if you know you want to retire by a certain age, the strategy follow logically as a mathematic equation. If you own a home, you’ll probably want to figure out how to pay off that home before you retire. Then, you’ll need to establish what amount of money you will need to live off of every year once you stop working. Multiply that by how many years you expect to live, and you’ll have established a numeric goal.
That number you come up with will likely be a pretty big number, so your strategy will likely involve financial investments. So, again, it will logically follow that you’ll be doing some research to figure out which investments will yield the best results for you.
Granted, this example is more of a financial strategy, and your life strategy should encompass more than just money. But finances will likely play a big part of your life strategy. A good calendar planner for families will contain pages specific to creating a family budget and/or planning your investements.
How do you make a family plan?
A family plan could be thought of as the grand plan that will include smaller plans for each member of your family. The grand plan will start with a mission statement that defines your family’s primary goal. To do this, you must first define your core values. These should be driven by your faith or your personal belief system. From there, you must establish a tangible goal that can be measured in some way, shape or form.
For example, a goal for your family of four might be to achieve work/life balance and spend more quality time together, while also becoming more giving to your community. Once you’ve determined this mission statement, you’ll need to carve out a monthly, weekly and daily path that helps you create more balance in your work and school schedule. Then you could also begin looking for opportunities where your entire family could serve the community together as a family. That would bring you closer as a family unit through experiencing the fulfillment of serving others together.
What are the five steps in the strategic planning process?
- Establish your vision. This essentially means to write down your goals.
- Next, you create objectives. These are like smaller goals that help you reach the larger vision. Prioritize them according to where they fit in the process.
- Then you develop your strategy. This should fall in a logical sequence from steps 1 and 2. It’s basically how you go from objective to objective until you reach the larger vision.
- Once you’ve written out this plan, you begin executing it on a daily basis.
- As you begin executing, you will need to continually review how it is working. You may need to make revisions along the way. This is the perfecting of your plan.
What resources will help me make a family plan?
Still unsure where to start? Try out the Souletics Calendar Planner for Every Season and Obstacle. We’ve developed it with families in mind, with specific pages to help guide you through the process. It contains pages to help you develop a yearly, monthly and weekly strategy, with a budget, meal plan, shopping list, medicine list and more.