Nothing can add more power to your life than concentrating all your energies on a limited set of targets.” (Nido Qubein)

Your ability to think, plan, decide and take action determines the entire course of your life. The better you become in each area, the better will be each part of your life and the faster you will achieve your goals.

Personal strategic planning is the tool you use to get from wherever you are to wherever you want to go. The difference between a person who uses personal strategic planning as a central part of his or her life is the difference between a person who rides a bicycle and a person who drives a car. Both will get you from point A to point B, but the car, personal strategic planning, will get you to reach your goals much faster and easier.

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Fortunately, personal strategic planning is a systematic way of thinking and acting. It is therefore learnable, like learning to type with a typewriter or drive a car. There are many different elements of this key skill, but with practice, you can get into the rhythm of thinking and acting strategically for the rest of your life. When you do, your life and career will take off like a rocket. Your success will be assured.

Strategic Planning Saves Time and Money

The reason that strategic planning and thinking is so helpful is that it saves you an enormous amount of time and money. By thinking through the key questions and concepts of strategy, you very quickly find yourself doing more and more of the most important tasks that can move you toward your key goals. At the same time, you do fewer and fewer of those things that are not particularly helpful. You do more things right and fewer things wrong. You establish specific targets for the company and for everyone in it. You greatly improve your ability to measure and track results. You move onto the fast track in your work and in your life in general.

The purpose of corporate strategic planning and goal setting is to increase return on equity. Equity is defined as the actual amount of shareholder money invested and working in the enterprise. The aim of strategic planning in business is to reorganize and restructure the activities of the corporation so as to achieve higher quality and quantity of outputs relative to inputs. It is to improve and increase financial results. It is to achieve superior profitability.

Overall, the goal of strategic planning is to enable the company to utilize its people and resources more effectively. The company will then function better than before. It will be in a superior position relative to its competition. This improvement can be measured in terms of higher sales, greater market share, better profitability, higher returns on invested assets and better positioning for the future.

Designing Your Life and Career through Goal Setting

Personal strategic planning is very similar. However, instead of return on equity, personal strategic planning is aimed at increasing your return on energy. Put another way, it is to increase your return on life.

The equity in a business is measured in terms of financial capital. Your personal equity, on the other hand, is measured in terms of your own human capital.

Your personal equity is composed of the mental, emotional and physical energies you have to invest in your career. Your goal should be to get the very highest return possible on the investment of yourself in everything you do. How well you invest yourself determines your income. This is the focal point of personal strategic planning.

Your Goals and Strategic Planning

You can tell that it is time to revisit your strategic plan when you are no longer getting the kind of results you want from your work or from your life. Whenever you feel frustrated or dissatisfied, for any reason, this is often an indication that you should sit down and ask yourself some good, hard questions. Whenever you experience resistance or stress, or you find yourself working harder and harder only to feel that you are getting fewer and fewer rewards, you should stand back and look at the possibilities of revising your strategy.

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