Plan. Do. Correct
While pursuing your goals, financial or otherwise, you’ll inevitably find yourself off course, sometimes more than you may be comfortable with. To illustrate why being off course shouldn’t cause you to abandon your destination I’m going to share with you what I know from my experience as a former Air Traffic Controller, how airplanes relate to your success.
Before a pilot can depart, a Flight Plan must be filed. It’s a detailed description stating how the pilot will get from the departure point to the destination, the airways and each point the pilot will connect to, as well as the altitude and speed is written on the Flight Plan. It’s like writing directions for a road trip but for the sky. Since airplanes are quite susceptible to a number of factors influencing its course like winds, weather, other planes in the sky, birds and so forth, it’s not unusual for an airplane to be off course for 95% of its flight. When I say the plane is off course I don’t mean the it’s in the middle of nowhere flying through the sky, it simply means the plane may be one or more degrees left or right of the assigned heading. Assuming New York is directly East of Los Angeles, a heading of 270 degrees would be assigned. In flight the pilot will likely encounter winds, turbulence, or some other phenomena knocking the plane off course. Even if it’s only one degree, constantly flying off course by such a seemingly insignificant amount from New York to Los Angeles will put the plane 40 miles off course from its destination.
As the pilot corrects, other factors place the plane off course by a few degrees, and once again the plane makes a correction. During the never-ending quest to correct, the pilot has to constantly scan the skies, check her instrumentation, listen to controllers and evaluate her position in relation to where she needs to be so she can make more necessary corrections. She may even have to change course to avoid potential problems, take advantage of a jet stream or some other opportunity.
You moving toward your financial goal is like an airplane en route to its destination.
The first thing is to understand that you have to do what pilots do which is determine where you are going. Get clear about your goals, write them down, and figure out what steps you have to complete in order to accomplish them.
Use that information to develop your plan. Establishing your time frame is next. How long do you want to focus on this particular goal? Once you’ve decided that, you can set your timeline and contingency plans.
Then you have to be willing to actually take off. There’s no point in having inspiration and a great plan if you aren’t willing to do the work. Moving into action involves getting a little risky with your emotions and leaving your comfort zone behind. Not everything you try will work but part of the process is discovering what does, learning to master skills, and even picking up new ideas and techniques to help you along the way.
During your journey to success you have to be willing to constantly make course corrections. It’s one of the most essential skills to develop. Along the way you’ll undoubtedly face storms, turbulence, lightning and a large number of other unpredictable occurrences to push you off course. You’ll even make mistakes. That’s normal. That’s life. One of my mentors, Joe Beierly said, “ Making mistakes is an inherent part of life that we can’t escape from, however, we must be big enough to admit those mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, strong enough to correct them, and wise enough not to repeat them.” Making mistakes doesn’t mean that you won’t reach your goal. It just means you’ve deviated from the plan and course corrections are needed to get yourself back on track. Why was White Out invented or a delete button placed on our keyboard? It’s because to err is human.
Motivation is something else you should have. Uncover why achieving this goal is so important to you because daily, things get thrown at you. Keep your reason in front of you. This will help you develop laser like focus. Maintaining that focus can be tricky depending on the storm or circumstance before you, but you must remain persistent. Don’t give up. Stay focused on what you’re doing until your goals for that day are accomplished.
You’re probably not off course as much as 95% but once you notice that you’re headed in the wrong direction make small adjustments. Changes definitely need to be made in order to get back on track. Taking information from the best possible sources will benefit you and help to determine your next steps so find a mentor who has been to where you want to be. Also, find the lessons in your experiences and remain open to new routes to your achievement (if there were a tree in the middle of the road you’d drive around it, not through it). Poor decisions lead you further and further from your desired result and not learning from your mistakes or an inability to recognize them may cause you falter.
Are you on a path leading further away from your goal? If you are, look at what may be keeping you from it and make the changes necessary to get back on track. A key quality to becoming and staying successful is the capability to course correct when something has gone awry. Course correction isn’t a one-time fix, it’s something that needs to happen whenever you notice you are straying from the path you need to be on. I personally had to take stock and change the way I did things, while dealing with personal storms. When I was writing my book Weakness to Winning, one of my storms was fear. Fear of unfavorable criticism and the other was time. The last email from my publisher about a week ago opened my eyes to the fact that I was off course. He wanted to know if I was still interested in getting my books in the hands of readers. The whole reason I dedicated so much time to the process was to help others but I allowed myself to remain one degree off course, and I wasn’t going to complete my goal if I didn’t correct myself. For more than six months I let a single day’s worth of edits and formatting work keep me from submitting my manuscript. When I committed to act in the face of fear, that’s when I became serious about making time to land the plane in flight. I worked in the car while waiting for my kids to get out of school for about three days then finished up on the weekend and emailed it by Sunday night.
You have a goal, something you see yourself accomplishing or a brighter way of life. You’ve defined your destination. Now you have to Plan. Do. Correct you way to success.
