Before we launch into planning, I feel like I have to give you two admonitions. It is somewhat personal in nature, as I have been tussling with it for years.
Here's the first admonition: Your plan will not be perfect. I can virtually guarantee it.
“In his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps.” Proverbs 16:9
We are human: we will never know enough to have a "perfect" plan. The Bigger Plan, the bigger movement within which our little big plans fall, that is not just the unknown for us. It is the unknowable. So to take our plans too seriously is simply arrogant.
And yet we are on the physical plane to act, "that faith without works is dead." So why do we struggle so to do so? Why are we born to act, but resist it so? We human beings are a funny lot, aren't we? We love excitement, we love progress, we love to move forward.
But for far too many of us, it is that we love to think about planning, doing, acting. The funny thing about the mind is it cannot differentiate very much between thinking of acting and acting. Both trigger a sense of excitement. Yet, as the Irish proverb goes, we cannot plow a field by turning it over in our minds.
There is a part of us with a hard-wired yearning for the unknown: and that is not the mind of the leader. That is the heart of the leader. That yearning is captured beautifully in the opening to every original Star Trek episode where the mission of the ship and crew of the starship Enterprise is read--"... to go where no man has gone before."
Yet, on the other hand, we only want that when it is safe, which means only when we understand it. And that is where the leaders mind (fear of the unknown) can trump his heart (the yearning for the unknown). Can you see the rub?
Life can only be lived forward, and understood backwards.
How can we understand that which is unknown to us before we step in to it to find out? It isn't possible. The only thing you can understand before you step into it is what is known to you. There's an important corollary to this.
Because much of who you are, why you are here and what life really is really is unknown to you (see prior post about the "blind spot"), your plan cannot be perfect. Is that a reason to not plan? That pesky inner judge that holds court continually within finds a slew of reasons to not plan, or to plan half-heartedly, or to half-heartedly execute a good plan. "You will look silly." "You don't even know your purpose. It is therefore a waste of time." "Why risk failing on something you do not even know is real." And on and on.
Let me give it to you straight: all you need to do is to do the best with what you do know now. If you do that, and keep it simple, with every act you take on your imperfect plan, you will perfect it. You have to live that plan forward, and in return for taking the risk of action in the direction of something you know that you cannot truly know or understand beforehand, the imperfection will be revealed. Then what do you do? You adjust. You improvise. And your plan continually shape-shifts. Not in an ADHD way, but in an unfolding way.
And there you stand before it. The imperfect (co-)creator becoming perfected through action. So, if you, too are plagued by an insatiable desire to "get it right" and therefore tend to hold back on planning because you know that you don't know and so why risk failure. Be honest with yourself. You are already failing. You are failing to unfold your full potential at the rate you know you are capable of. So, if you are going to fail, fail forward for goodness sakes.
"You are here to enable the divine purpose of the universe to unfold.
That is how important you are." Eckhart Tolle
There you have it: give it all you got and start from where you are and with what you know. Then, as you act, your action will be rewarded with something you can't buy. With clarity. And with a huge boost in your self esteem and your understanding of yourself, of others and of life. And, therefore, with power. Clarity and power. Those are two allies you can count on in stepping into an unknown you cannot possibly understand but courses through the blood in the veins of a leader...
