How To Make A 5 Year Plan – Five Year Plan Tips And Tricks
Want to know how to make a 5 Year Plan? Here are my best five year plan tips and tricks for inevitable success.
Want to know how to make a 5 year plan for your life?
Great! You have definitely come to the right place.
Now please don’t freak out at the idea of creating a 5 year plan.
The truth is this is really valuable exercise to take the time to do.
Question time: have you ever taken the time to write a comprehensive long-term plan before?
What about your last five years – did you plan out part of your life out?
Most people never plan ahead that far.
In fact they often don’t even plan out the next day.
Some spend more time planning their holiday than they do their own life!
Imagine how much you could accomplish over the next five years if you made a reasonable plan and stuck to it.
Here’s the truth: Without a plan your life is unlikely to change much.
Without concerted effort you leave life up to fate and you put yourself at the mercy of luck.
And how’s that being working for you so far?
Did amazing things happen to you as a result of just dreaming about it and doing nothing?
Yeah I didn’t think so.
It’s time now to work out how to create a 5 year plan.
Pull out your journal now and consider the following aspects of your life:
How To Make A 5 Year Plan
Category 1 – Finances.
Think about where you want to be financially in five years’ time.
I want you to consider your income, net worth, debt, savings, and investments – write down all your goals in these areas.
Are there new income streams you want to create?
What are your future plans for spending?
Do you want to purchase a house? A boat? An investment property?
Do you have dreams of creating a six figure business from home (which is the exact goal I set for myself when creating my first blog)?
How To Make A 5 Year Plan
Category 2 – Health.
Think about where you want to be in terms of your health in five year’s time?
What are your current health challenges and how do you plan to resolve them?
How much do you want to weigh?
What type of diet do you want to follow?
How fit do you want to be in five years’ time?
Don’t limit yourself in this area because you can really transform your body and mind by taking constructive action every day.
Imagine if you ate only the healthiest diet and exercised for one hour every day for the next five years?
Can you see how different your body would be after taking consistent action instead of just thinking about it?
How To Make A 5 Year Plan
Category 3 – Career
Now let’s talk about your career.
Where do you see yourself in five years?
Where do you want to be working?
What do you want to be doing?
Do you need to go back to school?
What is your dream job?
How much do you want to be earning?
Brainstorm big goals that you can chase in the area of career over the next half decade.
Ideally it will be a career that you love and are super passionate (when you love what to do for work if it so much easier to devote the time and energy to work for it).
How To Make A 5 Year Plan
Category 4 – Relationships
Are there any relationships you’d like to create or dissolve?
Do you want to have children or more children?
What relationships do you want to nurture and in what way?
Think in terms of love, family and friends and don’t forget to include the relationship you have with yourself.
How To Make A 5 Year Plan
Category 5 – Personal Development
Life shouldn’t be all work and no play.
Life is always about growth BUT you need to allow yourself to grow and change because your future self is waiting.
Remember it is never, ever too late to be who you might have been.
I don’t want you to be afraid of growing slowly.
Be afraid only of standing still.
If you want something you have never had before, you have to be prepared to do something you have never done.
As Mark Twain so wisely said, twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so sail away from the safe harbor – explore, dream and discover.
How To Make A 5 Year Plan
So what do you still want to learn to do in life?
Do you want to learn to speak Spanish or to play the piano?
Would you like to learn how to dance?
Seriously how would you like to grow as a person in the next five years?
What would you like to learn or to become?
What skills do you need to acquire to make the most of the next half decade?
How To Make A 5 Year Plan
Category 6 – Adventure
Let’s talk about the aspect of FUN in your life.
You need to inject a bit of fun into your life every day (even if it’s just by regularly stepping outside your comfort zone).
What fun stuff would you like to do?
Climb a mountain?
Go skydiving or scuba-diving?
See a volcano?
Backpack all over Europe?
What adventures would you like to experience over the next five years?
Take the time to write down what you want for each of these six areas of your life.
Once you’ve completed that, we can begin the process of making a plan for the future.
It’s not enough to know where you’re going. You must plan your path, too.
The following strategies will help you to create a plan and execute it:
How To Make A 5 Year Plan
1 – Set goals
I want you to create a few goals for each area of your life and set deadlines for each goal.
Set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy and inspires your hopes.
You need to also come up with a reasonable time frame – remember if it doesn’t challenge you, it won’t change you.
Don’t feel tempted to decrease the goal – it doesn’t work that way!
Your goals SHOULD excite and scare you at the same time.
Instead increase your effort.
It’s hard to maintain focus on goals that require more than 12 weeks to reach.
That’s why I recommend breaking your big goals down into smaller chunks.
It’s important to have shorter-term goals that lead up to your bigger goals.
Break it down so the goals seem more palatable to you and give each small goal its own deadline.
The moment you put a deadline on your dream it becomes a goal.
How To Make A 5 Year Plan
2 – Write a plan
A goal without a plan is just a wish so you need to also have a plan in place!
Yes you need to have a proper plan.
You do know the importance of having a plan right? If you set a goal, you need to know how you plan to get there.
This is just the same as planning a holiday.
You want to go to Europe, cool!
You have a great goal.
But you know that you won’t be sipping cocktails on a beach in France anytime soon until you first save some money, do some research, book a flight, book accommodation, organize time off work etc.
There are steps you need to take in every goal (even simple ones like buying a TV) so start to brainstorm your own ideas.
People with goals succeed because a) they know where they are going and b) they come up with a detailed plan to make it happen.
Create a plan about what you want to accomplish over 12-week segments of time.
Just start at the end and keep working back to the present day.
Keep your eyes forward, mind focused, heart ready and be prepared to face the obstacles.
Don’t let anything stop you from reaching your goal.
How To Make A 5 Year Plan
3 – Create habits
Goals are so much easier to achieve if you can create the right habits.
The challenge is figuring out the right habits to support you and then implementing them.
With effective habits, reaching your goals is so much easier.
- Remember we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is therefore not an act but a habit.
- When you change your thoughts, you change your habits. Good habits are the ones you want to create because they are the key to all success. Bad habits on the other hand lead to failure.
- The secret to permanently breaking any bad habit is to love something great than the habit. The truth is you don’t break a bad habit – you need to replace it with a good one.
Moving forward – you now know that you choose a direction for your life by choosing a destination.
Most people fail to plan their lives in any meaningful way but that doesn’t have to be you!
Start to think forward in your life.
The future starts today, not tomorrow.
Just because the past didn’t turn out like you wanted it to doesn’t mean your future can’t be better than you have ever imagined.
How To Make A 5 Year Plan
The future depends on what we do in the present.
Better things are coming when you have a goal and a plan.
I honestly believe having a 5-year goal is the best step you can take towards making impressive changes in your life.
So take the time to come up with your 5 year plan today.
Wishing you much love,
Frances Vidakovic xx
-
Before You Go…
– See my EVERYTHING PAGE and grab a free gift > HERE
– Get instant access to EVERY COURSE I’ve ever created > HERE
– Listen to my INSPIRING LIFE PODCAST on Spotify or via Apple Podcasts.
– Or for biz owners, listen to LIFE COACH FOR BIZ MOMS Podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
With a degree in psychology, Frances Vidakovic is a certified life coach, course creator and host of the Inspiring Life Podcast. Her superpower is transforming dreamers into doers, with simple, kick-up-the-butt strategies.