During this Corona Virus hiaitus, many of us imagine we will achieve everything we’ve been putting off in our adult lives. Finally paint the bedroom. Start a topiary garden in the front yard. Do that 100,000 piece puzzle you got for Christmas when you were 13.

Or… write that novel, sell that screenplay, write your memoir.

And we don’t know how long this might all take. Just as we don’t know lots of things. All of this can make us anxious, worried, cynical and worse, hopeless and unhappy.

I think the only thing you’re responsible for is trying to end each day happy. And to do that, what will it take for you? For me, I will be happy and satisfied if I can end this Corona Staycation with some actual progress on something that matters to me.

I’m going to be writing my novel. How about you? That is my Corona Staycation goal.

When you truly want something, it can feel impossible to get there, from here. It is one thing to have a bodacious goal and then sit back and feel proud of your nerve. It is quite another to figure out how to get there, and BE THAT.

Most would say “You have to have a plan.”

But once you start planning, you probably shut down. Your ideas get a little way into the future, and you start disbelieving.

You face resistance.

  • That’ll never happen.
  • No one will want to help me with that
  • I can’t spend that kind of money on this.

How to disengage your brain’s resistance while you plan?

Resistance and disbelief are highly normal in the brain that is contemplating risks and change. It is part of our survival instinct to minimize risk and calculate probabilities skeptically.

Let’s say you have that BHAG (as James Collins and Jerry Porras call it, a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal”) or WIG (“Wildly Improbable Goal,” as Martha Beck calls it) and it feels insane. But you still, irrationally, want that.

What’s the first step? Disengage your rationality. Literally. Our rational brains are:

  • Linear
  • Left to right
  • Chronological

Upset those paradigms.

Planning is considered a linear process, so it is perhaps counterintuitive to do it irrationally, but that is the best way forward, so to speak.

Here’s the tool that takes the resistance and doubt out of your planning. (This tool comes from Martha Beck’s Finding Your Own North Star)

Backwards Planning

As I mentioned above, our brains are “rational” and “logical” when we move from left to right, in a linear fashion and are progressing in a chronological manner. To thwart the inborn skepticism, do the opposite. Make your marks from right to left, and change your planning to counterclockwise, and don’t honor linear paradigms.

HUH? How do you do that?

Put your WIG (or BHAG) on a post-it note and place it way to the right of your massively long piece of paper.  Now look at it. It is glorious, right? And a world away from where you are now. Forget where you are now. Put yourself in that position of having achieved your WIG.

There you are – a millionaire, famous, published, produced, whatever your WIG is – and you ask yourself:

What was one small step I had to take just before I got there?

Start thinking backwards. What was a small step you had to take? If you’re a millionaire, perhaps you landed a big contract. Or maybe you made that money by selling a million products at a dollar profit each. What was that one small step prior to being everything you hope to become?

Write it on a post it note and place it to the left of the WIG. Keep thinking:

What was one small step I had to take to get myself here?

Put that step on a post it note. Keep populating your steps from right to left, from future to present, and before long you’ll have a plan for how to get from here to there.

Also, if you’re not sure what steps to take, it is perfectly reasonable to have steps like:

  1. Ask my friend Joey how to…
  2. Figure out/research how to find an agent
  3. See a coach to help me with that
  4. Find a good way to pay for that investment

Break the linear mold by placing your post-its as they occur to you. You can order them later. But write down all the steps you can think of, and then put them in order. After that spend some time thinking of sub-steps.

For example, The sub-steps to finding an agent might include: researching, querying, asking writer friends for referrals, looking at books like yours to read the acknowledgements. (Most will have thanked their agent.) Pitchfests, etc.

That is the gist of Backwards Planning. It may seem like a simple shift, moving from right to left, and from future to now, instead of vice versa, but it is a shift that absolutely boggles the mind, and therefore circumvents the natural editor, critic, meanie, scaredy cat, and bottle washer.

It’s a good tool. Now go get that wildly improbable goal of yours!

If you have writing goals for the COVID-Vacay, join our 5-week Creative Mastery Class, beginning March 30th. For details go to https://go.decodingcreativity.com/5-week. And feel free to reach out to me via email @ hellojulia@decodingcreativity.com. We can hop on the phone and get your questions answered.