End Of Year, Beginning of plans

What a year!

You can always find some extraordinary events in your year and now is the time to remember and cherish those moments, while planning the next ones.

You know which ones, those extra, special moments, those with heightened emotional charge!

For me, one of those was the excruciatingly slow zig-zag flight into the cold air over Queens Town, New Zealand, on the first of May, just before jumping out of that plane with a guy strapped to my back, with a parachute that I really prayed would open and my eyes wanting to disappear into the back of my head... and that feeling after a safe landing! Whew, wow, gulp, hahaha!!!

This year has been a plethora (thanks Annetta!) of wonderful moments, fantastic adventures and fulfilled dreams. You can read about most of them here in My Travel Blog.

Those dreams only became reality thanks to a plan and the conscience that they were actually things that I wanted to have in my life.

I am sure you have tried to do goal-setting at some point in your life and most of the time it has been a pointless exercise, something that just takes on massive proportions and the obstacles seem so daunting that even a trivial objective is difficult.

That famous question, "what do you want?"and the impossibility of coming up with any clear or useful answers.

It gets easier if you do the exact opposite.

No, I'm not trying to be a smart-ass, although I have been known to do just that (just ask some of my old teachers ;)

It is easier to write down what you DON'T want, simple as that.

It is also easier to look back from an achieved goal to see how you got there.

With these two bits of information, you can, if you want, set yourself a neat little plan, with a bunch of goals and a step-by-step way of getting there in the time that you want!

Just take the things on your list that are most interesting to you, or turn those "don't want" items into positives and then plan backwards from achievement to today!

There is even a free site to help you do the backward planning process, something so simple yet so effective that you will kick yourself for not having thought about it before!
Make your planning Simple!

Here's my personal example:

I don't want to be stuck in a boring job with only 4 weeks holiday per year and only take those two weeks at a time, IF, no other co-worker has not already booked those days...

This turned into: I want to be free!

Which then turned into: I want to travel around the World!

It took two years of planning, saving, preparing, closing down ties and bureaucratic stuff, until I had my ticket and was standing at Heathrow airport in November last year, on my way to Madagascar!

Looking back, the immediate step prior to departure was to have my ticket, the step before that was to decide itinerary and times. Parallel were visa considerations, places to stay, money matters, etc...

Basically, I had a large piece of paper with the date and goal at the top right corner and worked my way down, diagonally to the bottom left corner which was the day I was writing it, that last little box had an action step for right then!

It took a lot of the load out of the whole thing, dividing it into little steps like that!

So, that little childhood wish of traveling around the world, became a plan, action was taken and it was achieved, despite the odds!

What would you dare do if you could really be daring?

Have fun, keep smiling and enjoy the Holidays!

Cheers!

Melchior