Building Your Life Plan

The need for building your life plan is important. Taking time to intentionally do this can be the key to a happy transition through these seasons.  Newly married, first child, more children, moving to a new location, children leaving home, or even retirement all create change in our lives. 

I am moving into one of those seasons myself and I find myself wondering as to what direction I am to go.  Children are getting married and leaving home, grandbabies are being born and my homeschool career of almost 20 years is coming to an end. So now what?  I've poured my life into raising a family and mostly forgot any thought of what to do once it was over. 

I needed help to find direction for this new phase in my life. I wanted to live my life by choice, not just chance.  I wanted to look back at what was good, evaluate where I was now and decide where I wanted to go in the future. I'm an organizer so I needed it all on paper, nice and neat, step by step.   It became apparent I needed help, I needed a life planning workbook. 

I searched and found many options but when it came down to a decision on which life planner would be most helpful it was clear that The Life-Planning Workbook from Life Design Company was the best choice for me. 

The Life-Planning Workbook: Living your life by choice instead of chance.

The Life-Planning Workbook is a tool to help you live your life by choice instead of chance. It can help you take stock of where you are as a function of where you've been, decide where you want to go, and make specific, realistic plans to get there. It's designed to raise your awareness of how you can create the life you want. Like most other tools, it works if you work.

The life-planning process prepares you to deal effectively with the constant change that comes to all of us. It includes a set of time-tested tools that you can use to stay on track and to change course when needed.

It doesn't tell you what to do; rather, it taps into your inner thoughts through questions and helps you organize what you've learned, what you value and what you want to do with the rest of your life

Through Amazon the workbook is a quick download, so I printed a copy for my husband and myself. We decided it would be best to take a weekend away from home to go through the books together. We were really glad we did because it was quite intense to even go through in just two days.  

It was important for each of us to work independently with our own personal copy of the workbook in order to learn all we needed to know about our own values and goals. Once we committed our thoughts to writing, sharing them together helped bring even more clarity and insight. 

The first day we did Parts 1, Where Have You Been and Part 2, Where Are You Now. These are specifically designed to help you get a deep understanding of how you came to be the way you are and what matters most to you. 

The next day we went through Part Three, Where Do You Want To Go. This became a very intense session. We covered topics such as lifestyle checklist, if I had to do it all over, making it happen, choices, and goal setting.  We would do a few sections and then discuss, which took us all morning and into the noon hour to complete. 

We spent the afternoon completing Part 4, How Do You Plan To Get There. Surprisingly this was the easy part. So much thought had gone into the previous chapters it became easy to know where we were going and what we needed to do to achieve our goals. Some goals were short-term, some were over the course of the next year and others went all the way into our golden years. 

We then took all our goals and dreams and created a story web poster.  We keep this in a place that we see several times a day to help us keep in the forefront of our minds the direction we feel lead to go in our lives. 

Going through the workbook empowered our lives in many ways.

• It helped us make everyday decisions with greater ease because we have a clear renewed picture of what's important in our life.
• We feel a sense of excitement in a new awareness that we are not a finished product, we  can still learn and grow in directions of our own choosing.                                                                                                                                                                
• We could begin each day with renewed energy and confidence that comes from knowing who you are and where you're going.

I encourage anyone that needs to bring focus to their life, take a weekend and go through this workbook. It will help you focus on what is really important to you and give you  stepping stones to build a life plan that will help you live your life by choice, not just chance.