Personal strategic planning can be defined as the process by which you determine your long-term plans, organize your resources and reach your goals. This planning also involves assessing your short-term and immediate needs and objectives, as well as those of your team, organization, and others. This planning is an organized process, and one that has been refined over decades, and has now been distilled into a simple and powerful Personal Strategic Planning Tool.
A Personal Strategic Planning Tool consists of an action plan, or " marching game," with clearly defined goals and time frames. The Personal Strategic Planning Tool is flexible enough to take into account changing circumstances as they arise, but is also disciplined enough to take into account the needs of any given scenario and adjust the plan accordingly. It should be used to set and then keep realistic goals and corresponding time frames for achieving those goals, as well as setting aspirational and realistic goals for reaching them. It is important not to get too carried away in the power of the Personal Strategic Planning Tool. For instance, while it is useful to set achievable and realistic goals, these goals must still be reasonable and achievable, even in the face of obstacles and changes in circumstances.
The Personal Strategic Planning Tool includes a series of activities to help people in their everyday lives develop and maintain a strong set of core values, and to achieve those core values. Core values are beliefs about the significance and importance of a variety of matters: what you work on, the way you behave, your personal relationship to society, your contributions to the development of human society, etc. These core values and beliefs help guide your thinking and your actions, and they also provide the foundation for your personal and professional aspirations and goals. When developing or keeping your own personal strategic planning, it is important to keep in mind the aspirations and goals that underlie your actions. In fact, these aspirations and goals can actually become a crucial part of your Personal Strategic Planning.
For instance, when writing personal strategic plans, people should remember that there are two kinds of goals: specific goals and broad or general ones. Specific goals are more focused. They deal with things such as getting promoted at work, developing and improving one's health, getting a better grade point average, buying a new car, etc. Broad goals, on the other hand, can deal with major life changes, such as changing the country or the world around you, changing your career, getting a new college degree, etc. As well, when organizing a personal strategic plan, people should remember that although they are writing down their goals, they are also writing down the time frame in which they hope to reach them, the money they need to make this happen, the kind of reputation they want to have in their chosen profession, and many other things. Therefore, their plans will always be "in the pipeline."
The second thing to remember when organizing a personal strategic plan is that it is not necessary to write down everything you hope to achieve in a given year, decade, or life. In fact, this sort of strategic thinking tends to be short-sighted and overly ambitious. Instead, people should think about their overall goals over the long term. This means that instead of putting off writing down long-term goals until the latter becomes a necessity (for instance, if they lose some weight), they should put more thought into writing down goals now while they are still healthy and in good shape so that they can evaluate them later on.
People should also take care to realize that the organizational and personal planning processes do not need to be linked. Although most of us tend to think that they do, linking the two makes the entire process less effective. In fact, the best way to start an organization or carry out a personal strategic plan is to separate the two as much as possible, so that the overall strategy can be shaped more easily by looking at what the organization needs to do in order to get from point A to point B. The same holds true for personal strategic planning: you should put as much thought into your strategy development as you put into executing it. And if you find that executing your personal strategic plan is much more difficult than making your organizational one, then you should really start looking at turning the task over to someone else.