Create your Route Card

Knowing your start point and intended destination is crucial when out in the hills, but this only provides a fraction of the information required to have a safe a successful day.

You may get away with it a few times, but eventually it will become inevitable that you'll find yourself in a hairy situation without the development of certain skills and prior planning.

Direction, Distance, Conventional Signs, Relief, Alignment, Proximity and Shape all form vital pieces of the information puzzle, along with the skillset to use each of these to mitigate risk and guarantee the likelihood that you'll achieve what you set out to in that moment.

Achieving your dreams and ambitions within your career / business, relationships, finances, health, performance and personal development should be no different.

You have an idea of where you want to be. You probably think that you know what you need to do in order to get there... and to an extent, you're probably right... you do know what to do, in isolation. What you don't know, however, is how to continue to do whatever it is when you're faced with uncontrollables, curve balls, stress, tiredness and fatigue.

Going back to our navigational analogy, in the hills, we risk assess and we have contingencu plans.

We plan escape routes. We consider navigating to multiple attack points instead of going from A to B in order to increase the accuracy of our known location. We use catching features to stop us from walking too far in the wrong direction when we get it wrong. We use the aiming off to increase the likelihood of us reaching our target.

We don't do this when it comes to our life. Instead, we wing it, and hope for the best.

How's that panned out so far?

In my opinion, we should create a 'route card'. One for each of the following six pillars:

Health & Performance

Relationships

Occupation / Business

Personal Development

Finances

Fun, Rest & Decompression

We should also risk assess; What could go wrong? What could get in my way? How can I mitigate this? What should I do if that happens?

An effective way to plan, is to work yourself back. Ask, If I want to be here in 12 months time, where do I need to be in 9? Where, therefore, do I need to be in 6 months, 8 weeks and so on?

Meticulous planning wont entitle you to the outcome. You still have to act upon it and be held accountable. But it significantly increases your chances.