The Importance of Personal Life Planning

It’s often easy to ignore your personal life when you begin laying out your quarterly and yearly business goals. It goes without saying that as a leader you are always thinking strategically about your business: you set up benchmarks for success, discuss your goals and plan for the future business that you’d like to grow. While business planning is second nature to many great leaders, personal life planning is often undervalued and ignored. 

Personal life planning refers to taking the time to think holistically about your life and set up goals and priorities for each area of your life. Business can be one of those areas, but if you are doing personal life planning, it should not be the only area that you plan around. For example, a significant part of my life is family. When I plan for the future that I am working to build, they are an important aspect of that future. To ensure that I am properly building them into my planning, I have to take time to ask questions such as, “how much time do I want to be spending with my family on a day-to-day basis?” and “what resources do I want to be able to provide my children?” 

By asking these questions, I ensure that the work I am doing will help me to build a thriving life and not just a thriving business. Too often, I’ve come across individuals who have built amazing businesses but who, in the process, ignored other aspects of their lives. Personal life planning is a way to ensure that you do not ignore those critical parts of your life.

“You can’t be considered successful in your business life if your home life is in shambles.”

— Zig Ziglar

One way to make personal life planning a practice is to create a personal vision for yourself. Above, you will see some images from our team member’s vision boards. If you would like to learn more about vision boarding, and the powerful role it can play in personal life planning, click here.

Another powerful exercise to envision a future that you want to create is to go through what we call the Legacy Vision tool. This tool captures all that you want to be and do on a ten-to-thirty year timeline, and it will ask you to transport yourself into that future and answer questions such as: 

1. Who do you serve with your business? Who do you serve in other areas of your life?

2. What is your impact? How do you want to be remembered?

3. How long are you working? How much time do you spend with family and friends? What is your relationship with your family and friends like? 

For a complete set of exercises and questions, feel free to download our Legacy Vision Tool. Once you answer the questions and reflect on your future, you will have the information you need to draft a vision for your future. This vision can be one that you create with prose, bullet points or even with diagrams. The point of the vision is to have open space to envision what a thriving life looks like for you.

In Your Corner: Cultivating Leadership Growth with Others

The phrase “It’s lonely at the top” rings painfully true for some of us business leaders. If you are a CEO, you have likely experienced isolation that tends to come with the job. As a CEO, you are responsible for the livelihoods of the people in your entire organization, as well as their families, and your own family. That’s a lot of pressure. Further, if you are not careful, you also might be subject to an echo chamber of your senior leadership team only corroborating your ideas (rather than coming up with novel strategies to reach your goals) – leaving you to solely do the creative work. The point: as CEOs, we can become very isolated and stressed, very quickly. What we need is to develop a network of people around us – people who are in our corner – to confide in, garner creative ideas, invest in, and ultimately give us the confidence and clarity to make decisions in our business.

A good guide for developing such a network is the “Three Cs”: Coach, Cohort, and Community.

The first kind of key relationship in the network you cultivate should be a strategic coach. While we are a biased source with this recommendation, we have seen first-hand the transformation a coach can have on your organization. With professional sports, we would never expect our favorite teams to win games without a good coach. A great coach, like John Wooden, can propel teams to extraordinary success. Such is true with business professionals as professional athletes – a great business coach can act as a trusted guide to propel you to higher levels of success. They can be your confidant, helping to address your challenges by providing an impartial perspective. Further, coaches can bring a deep knowledge of proven tools and execution rhythms as well as reduce stress by helping you to cultivate simplicity in your business. 

The second kind of key relationships that we recommend you cultivate is a cohort. For reference, a cohort is a group of people who share the same experiences to mentor one another. They are the people in your corner – who know your experiences (also CEOs), who have a similar mission to you, who will support you in your challenges, and who keep you in check to your moral obligations. They are the people who will share with you openly, so you can learn from them to reach your goals more quickly. In these cohorts, everyone is mutually invested in each other’s growth, and it is a place to gain wisdom and insight from your peers. Modern Psychology and Sociology backs the benefits of these sorts of relationships – terming them “strong ties” – nurturing ourselves and our ability as leaders.  Many CEOs participate in cohorts already, calling them mastermind groups.

The third kind of key relationships that we recommend you cultivate is a community. In the context in which we are speaking, a community encapsulates the broader reach into the world that you have – the acquaintances in your network from all over. These connections, per a Sociological and Psychological framework, are termed “weak ties”, and they are valuable because they give you broad access to people and resources that can help you further your mission (and you can do the same for them as well). Essentially, these are the people in your rolodex. These are the people that will welcome you into their neighborhoods, partner with you with their organizations and associations, and create mutually beneficial relationships that allows your impact to have a far reach. These are the people to call upon to source talent, strike deals, and organize philanthropic efforts.  With a strong community, you will never have a shortage of people to call upon to solve problems and strategize a better shared future.

With a coach, a cohort, and a community, you will have both the strong personal connections that foster growth, and the access to broader networks (with people and resources) that make your impact possible.