Success and having a great life can be created from intentional action, and your actions come from creating a plan for your days and weeks. Learn how to create a 7 step plan for your success this year and get on the path to achieving your dreams.
Are you looking to take control of your life this year? Would you like to make a change this year and start living the life you want and deserve? Will you make this year your best year of many to come and set yourself up for happiness?
Creating a plan for success is not only possible, but easy – and once you have your plan, then you can get on to taking action and living your best life.
However, how do you make this plan for success?
In this post, I’m going to share with you how you can create a 7 step plan to create the life you want and deserve.
What is Success… for You?
First, before creating a plan for success and for the life you want this year, we need to answer some questions.
First, what is success? What does being successful mean?
I pose these questions first because I want to make a point here – trying to answer the two questions above are useless unless you personalize them.
So, the questions become, what is success for you, and what does being successful mean for you?
For some people, success means making a lot of money or having a prestigious job. For others, success is being able to travel the world and experience many things. Other people might just want to be able to spend time with family and give their kids and loved ones time and gifts to make them happy.
Before creating a plan, we need to define what success is for you so that we can build a plan around those dreams and thoughts.
For me, for example, I want to have financial stability to be able to provide for my family, to be able to live stress free, and to do projects that I enjoy.
For you, what activities do you love doing that bring you joy? What is important to you? Is there anything in your life that you need and never want to let go?
All of these questions are important to keep in mind before getting to the planning process.
Creating a 7 Step Plan for Success
Creating a plan for success can be done by taking some time for yourself and following the steps below to define what is necessary to make the changes you need.
The 7 steps I’m going to talk about in the rest of the post are below here. You can keep scrolling or click on the following links to go to the section you want.
- Decide to Take Full Responsibility of Your Life
- Take Note of Where You Are and Where You Want to Go
- Define What You Want Specifically in the Future
- Believe in Yourself
- Create a Daily Plan to Attack Your Goals
- Plan to Reassess Over Time to Stay on Track
- Stay Consistent and Let the Power of Time Take Over
Below, I’ll go into detail to give you more details on these steps.
1. Decide to Take Full Responsibility of Your Life
The first step in making this year the best it can be is deciding to take full responsibility of your life.
You are the only person that can positively affect what happens in your life.
If you want more, you need to go and get it – no one else is going to give it to you.
Taking responsibility of your life means making a plan for yourself and working towards it each and every day.
You can’t just sit on the couch waiting for the world to change – you need to get out there and do what’s best for you and your goals.
While you might believe some people are just more lucky than others, you can begin to create your own luck through your work and habits.
2. Take Note of Where You Are and Where You Want to Go
Before planning, you need to take note of where you are and also understanding where you want to go.
For example, if you want to increase your salary at work, you can first start to understand where you are in the organization, what skills you have and how your skills and experience are valued.
Next, where do you want to be and what is required at your desired position? Do you need to get more education? Is a different or more prestigious degree required? These are questions you’ll need to answer for whatever goal and dream you have.
If you are currently an analyst and make $50,000, and want to become a manager making $75,000, what are the skills, habits and experience needed to get to this level?
Understanding all of this will be important for the next step in defining your plan. 
3. Define What You Want Specifically in the Future
Now that you know that you are the only one who can change the future, and you understand where you are and want to go, now it’s time to define exactly what you want to begin to start making your plan.
For example, let’s say you have some debt and you want to pay it all off.
That’s a great goal, but it’s lacking specifics.
Some questions I would have for this goal are:
- What’s your timeline for this goal?
- How much debt do you have and how much can you pay off each month?
- Is there any way to pay more each month to speed this process?
Changing your goal from “I want to become debt-free” to “I want to become debt-free in 24 months by paying $100 extra towards my loans and credit cards” is WAY more powerful and concrete.
When you shift your goal to the second, you will force yourself to start creating exactly what you need to do on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis to find your success.
4. Believe in Yourself
Going back to the first step, you are the only person who can affect change and for that reason, you need to believe in yourself.
Having confidence in yourself can be hard, but you can do it.
Belief in yourself is something you can work on over time, and you can improve your belief in yourself through positive thinking and affirmations if you struggle with it now.
The point is that you need to believe that you are enough and you can achieve anything in life.
No barrier is too much and anything is possible with time and effort.
5. Create a Daily Plan to Attack Your Goals
Even though we have been talking about setting goals for the entire year, the way that you will achieve those goals is through daily actions.
For example, let’s say you have a goal to lose weight this year.
To achieve this, you might have decided that you are going to eat better and do some more exercise.
Well, how can you set daily actions that will ensure you are eating better and doing exercise?
This could involve having two meals a day which are completely clean and do not include sweets.
Your daily plan could be that you are going to walk for 30 minutes a day and stretch or do bodyweight exercises for another 30 minutes.
Of course, this can be implemented at the weekly level as well (for example, I’ll work out 3 times a week), but what I’ve found is you are less likely to put off what you want to do if you are focused on daily actions.
For me, I try to do a little exercise each day, do some learning each day, and do some work on my creative projects to keep everything going for my future goals.
6. Plan to Reassess Over Time to Stay on Track
When creating a plan, something that you need to keep in mind is flexibility is very important in your plan.
Sometimes things can change in an instant, and for that reason, you want to build some flexibility into your future plans and have periodic reviews of your actions.
For example, if you are trying to lose weight and after 1 month, you haven’t achieved the results you wanted, maybe you need to cut more sweets, add more exercise, or switch your diet.
Doing the same thing over and over won’t lead to the results you want if you aren’t doing the right things.
Experimenting and figuring out what is best for you will be crucial in creating the life you want – over time, your wants and dreams might change in the short term, and for that reason, flexibility is crucial.
7. Stay Consistent and Let the Power of Time Take Over
Here’s something that you should know and internalize as it’s very critical for your success.
Growth is NEVER linear.
In a world filled with instant coffee, instant breakfast, instant credit, instant shopping, instant information, and 24/7 news, we have come dangerously close to losing touch with reality and believing we have access to instant life. But life is not a clickable link.
Starting out in any area you want to become better in, growth is incredibly slow.
Think back to a time you were a beginner in something you wanted to become better at.
I love the example of when I started working out: I was weak and barely could do a few push-ups.
The next time I worked out, I could only do 1 more push-up, but it was progress. The next time, I could do 2 sets of 5. After a few sessions of working out, I was up to 3 sets of 8.
After a few years of working out, 30 push-ups in a row is easy and I can do more than 50 in a row. What started with less than 5 push ups in a row turned into many. It’s the same concept in life in whatever you want: personal finance, education, health, etc.
Understand that over time, you can accomplish anything and for you, anything is possible. Being patient, staying consistent and trusting in the process will get you to where you want to be.
Plan for a Successful Future and Live the Life You Want and Deserve
With this post, I’m excited to see what you come up with for your dream year.
Again, you deserve the best and with your plan, you can achieve and create the best for yourself.
In a year, you’ll thank yourself for taking action and living your life to the fullest.
Readers: what makes you happiest? What are your plans for making this year the best it can be? Are you making big changes or little tweaks?