Monday Motivation | How to plan for an amazingly successful week

Happy Monday!  Once again, we're blessed to have a fresh to new week bursting with potential.  Pretty much anything can happen over the course of the next 7 days.  But what ends up happening most of the time is a replication of the weeks prior.  It's like groundhog day.

It takes a whole lot of intentionality to craft a plan that will keep you from repeating the same week over and over again.  We should make a concerted effort to plan for a successful week  because it's a bit risky to assume an amazing week happens on its own.  Unless we seed our week with specific actions, we'd be foolish to assume that these 7 days would be any different than the last.

This is you, living the life of your dreams after you've mastered the successful week planning process.

So what does it look like to plan for a successful week?  Here are three steps to get your started.

1.|  Visualize It. [If you could live out a perfect week, what would it look like?]
For me a perfect week would include some of these aspects:
a.) Highly productive days.
b.) Feeling good about myself
c.) Being in a great, inspiring environment
d.) Having lots of energy
e.) Connecting with friends/family
f.) Making substantial progress on my business
g.) Enjoying new experiences.

From this list, I can start to create specific actions.  Everything on the list is an outcome.  In order to achieve that outcome, certain actions must take place.   For example, if I want to have lots of energy, I should ensure that I eat well throughout the week, get enough sleep, schedule exercise sessions, etc.  The same goes for everything on the list.  Those things don't just happen on their own, I have to be an active participant.  Your first piece of homework is to create your list of outcomes that would make your week amazing.  Then figure out what you need to do to get to those outcomes.  Once you're done with that, you can move to step 2.


2.| Plan It [How will I ensure that my perfect week happens?]
Once you've identified the attributes of your perfect week, then we plan the necessary actions needed to create this ideal outcome.  For me this means means breaking out my planner and writing down what I need to do and when I need to do it.  I literally have to schedule time to call my parents and brother because, if I don't, the week could fly by without me realizing it.  Also, I probably won't have a productive day unless I set aside time to plan and execute my morning routine.  Again, none of this happens on its own.  Part of the reason for this is because I currently don't have solid systems in place to unsure they happen automatically,  but's that's a whole 'nother post.  For now, I have to put in direct effort otherwise, my desired outcomes won't happen.  Planning it means that I'm setting aside time to do the things that aren't likely to magically take place.  I write down (or mentally plan) when I'll go work out, or what actions I need to do to reach my business goals, and what food I'll eat for the week that'll feed my energy levels.  Even though you take precious time to plan your day/week, nothing ever goes 100% according to plan.  That's ok.  Because a 40% execution rate on a great plan is much better and executing a lousy week at 100%.

3.| Elevate It [ What are you going to do differently this week to create new, amazing results?]
Whenever you're reflecting on how you will allocate your time, always remember this.  The same plan executed over and over again will eventually create diminishing results.  I don't care how great it is.  We'll soon get into a comfort zone rut and things will go down hill from there.  So whenever you are reflecting on the week ahead, ask yourself "what can I do to take things to the next level?"  This is critical!  Elevating actions are the key to infinite results.  By the way, elevating actions don't have to be super-crazy.  It's about importing new actions, experiences, people that will shift your paradigm.  It could be as simple as listening to audio books in the car or as big as waking up at 5:00 am every morning to work on your creating your dreams.  Obviously, the bigger your action, the greater your shift.  But keep in mind that small actions lead to larger ones so don't be afraid to start small.  The cardinal rule of elevating actions is that they need to keep elevating.  Otherwise, they become normal actions.  Normal actions don't have that same burst of power as actions that elevate.

Always remember,  we won't typically take elevating actions if left to our own devices. These actions must be planned and carefully inserted into your day, otherwise today will look exactly the same as yesterday.  Last month, I infused my life with lots of elevating actions (as an experiment) and the results were absolutely incredible.  I saw huge progress in all aspects of my life and had the best month of the year in my business (I also reached another huge milestone as well).  I'm here to tell you that this works!!!!

Monday's can be viewed as another start to a long, boring work week or, we can turn them into Life Transformation Days.  Which do you prefer?