We think everyone should be using a calander planner. But if you’re an athlete, it’s even more important that you incorporate planning as a major part of your daily routine. Our calendar planner for athletes was developed specifically to help athletes achieve success, both in sports and in life. Here’s how you can begin to implement it into your game plan.
How do you start planning?
Before you start planning, you must figure out what are the most important activities in your life. That is, you should narrow down to what activities will bring you closer to the most important goals in your life. If you are an athlete, then you likely already have some goals established within your sport. You know what the next level looks like. But what you need is a strategic plan to help you get there. Enter the calendar planner for athletes.
What do I need to plan?
No doubt you’ve heard the cliche, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Without a plan, you could easily spend the next five to ten years floating through life. You may continually repeat negative habits, essentially walking around in circles and wondering why you’re not getting anywhere. Too many people treat life as if it’s something that is happening to them. It is the rare person who realizes early on that intentional planning will determine their outcome. Those are most often the people who achieve what they want in life.
So, if you’re questioning what you need to plan, the answer is you should make a plan for every goal you want to achieve. You should plan your athletic career. Plan your educational path. Then, plan when you will start a family. Once you have the big picture planned out, then start narrowing your plan down to a more granular level.
Calendar planning for student athletes
For example, if you are a college athlete, your plan should not only be to get recruited out of college. You must also have a plan to get your degree. That means you’ll need to graduate within the next two to four years. From there, you will need to plan a roadmap of how you will graduate in that time period. Plan out which classes you take and when, as well as how many units per quarter or semester will keep you on track to your goal.
For student athletes, having a plan is critical. Athletes must accomplish their studies alongside your training schedule. Taking some time to write this out will enable you to create time to relax and hang out with friends. As an athlete, you may not have a lot of “extra” time for a social life. But social activites are important to plan so that you can give your brain a break. If you don’t make room for socializing, then you may be tempted to abandon important study time when you see your friends doing things without you. But if you already know you’ve scheduled some hang time, then you won’t fall into the trap of feeling left out. You will have already set your mind on what’s important, so your expectations will more easily fall in line.
Using a planner to stay organized
Not only will a strategic planner help you to create and achieve important goals, but it will also help you stay organized. Nowadays, it seems like a full time job to eliminate clutter. From junk mail to school notices, paperwork always just seems to pile up. Even the information that flows into our lives can leave us feeling like the messy desk that collects all that junk mail.
As an athlete, you may not realize how much clutter can throw you off your game. When you eliminate the chaos, you will have more mental space to hone in on your goals. You will actually create more space in your brain to advance. This is called “growth mindset.” When your brain has room to grow, you will see tremendous improvements in your game. You can begin to incorporate mindset techniques like visualization. Or you might begin to see solutions to problems that previously seemed complicated.
Using a planner can help you zero in on what really matters, so you can eliminate the junk and stay focused. Taking the time to figure out where you should spend your energy helps you become focused on what’s important. A focused mind will lead to success in whatever goal you set.
How do you use a daily planner?
The daily planner is the primary tool to help you keep your focus on a granular level. A lot of people dive right in to the daily planner, but that is a mistake. To use your daily planner correctly, you first need to set some yearly, monthly and weekly goals. That’s what will help you figure what you should be doing daily that will help you achieve those goals. Otherwise, you’re just filling your daily planner with more clutter that will have you running around aimlessly and achieving very little.
For example, if your goal is to lose 10 pounds in two months, then you could create a target of losing 1.25 pounds every week. You would want to choose which fitness and nutrition plan will work best for you, and then create a daily routine that will enable you to shed the weight. But if you didn’t start with the larger goal of 10lbs in 2 months, you might walk around in circles. You could end up being overly strict with your eating habits and workouts the first couple of days, then crashing and burning prematurely. Without a target, you’re just throwing darts aimlessly.
How to use a weekly planner
Similarly, the weekly planner needs to be well thought out. Using the example above, maybe your daily strategy is to eat a certain number of carbs and a certain number of proteins every day. And perhaps you’ll allow yourself one “cheat” day a week, so that you can relax a little bit and not feel overwhelmed by your new diet plan. This could prevent the premature burnout caused by lack of strategy.
Another example might be financial. If you know you need to save $1000 in 3 months, then you could break that down into a weekly and daily budget. Figure out what extra work you could take on to accumulate the extra cash. Then figure out what bill or daily expense you could eliminate, and watch your savings grow.
What should be included in a planner?
As discussed above, a calendar planner should include your daily responsibilities, appointments, weekly, monthly and yearly goals. All of these activities, responsibilities and appointments must be in line with your overall goals.
But beyond tasks, you should also make your planner a place for inspiration. There should be space for you to envision something new and exciting, or express your creativity. A planner is not a place to become rigid in your routine. But it is a place for you to create space for positive actions that will bring you to a higher level of success.
Planner tips for beginners
- Take an overall view of what you are trying to achieve. This will help drive your strategy.
- Create a goal for the year. If you’re an athlete, then your yearly goal should be to achieve the next level in your sport, whatever that may be.
- Now create a goal for each month that will bring you closer to that yearly goal.
- Once you have a monthly goal, you’ll need to figure out what you have to achieve weekly in order to meet your monthly goals.
- Finally, when you know what you have to achieve weekly, then you can create a daily routine. Everything you do each day should help you meet your weekly benchmarks.
What do I need to track?
In the Souletics® Strategic Calendar Planner for Athletic and Life Success, we’ve created unique pages to empower athletes. These pages will help you track your measurable statistics, workouts, athletic progress, and mindset on performance days. This way, you can write down all of these important details of your athletic life and see how they are changing month by month. Think of them as your guide to helping you achieve that yearly goal of leveling up.
But each person is unique and will have different aspects of life where they really want to see specific progress. If you’re a ballerina trying to lose weight, you’ll want to track your weekly progress on the scale and/or with a measuring tape. Or maybe you’re a football player trying to gain weight–you’ll want to keep track in the same way. If you’re a student, you need to track your grades on assignments, quizzes and tests. And everyone should be trying to save money! So start tracking your savings and/or investments.
Why can’t I just use my smart phone?
There are plenty of apps designed to help organize and plan your life, and these can be very useful. But studies show that when you write your goals with paper and ink, you are more likely to achieve your goals. There is something about the act of writing that will help you stay accountable to your goals.
Your smart phone likely contains so many apps that your mind doesn’t know how to differentiate which ones are more important than others. If you spend a lot of time on social media, you may be wiring your brain to give those apps supreme importance in your life. By taking your planner offline and creating an entirely new activity for your brain to experience, you’re creating a new program. Now you’re telling your brain that this is something different than your digital habits. This is unique. You begin to program your mind to understand that your planner has a special significance for your life.
What makes the Souletics® Planner different?
The Souletics® line of planners are tailored for specific purposes. Our Strategic Calendar Planner for Athletic and Life Success provides pages where athletes can track their athletic progress. Athletes who are serious about leveling up must know where they rank with measurable statistics, weight room workouts, fitness and performance every month.
If you are an athlete without a plan, this is a great place to put planning to the test. Give our Strategic Calendar Planner for Athletic and Life Success a try and see how it will help you level up in your game!