Plan, Plan – Do, Do.

Welcome to week four of my series on permanent change. In week one, we looked at the difference between achievement and life-style change. We completed a worksheet designed to help you get clear on what you’ll need to do to fit change into your life. If you didn’t get that, please go back to “How to Plan a Coup” and go ahead and get your copy of the worksheet from the link there.

In week two, we talked about making room in your life so that you actually can complete a change, or achieve a goal. Last week, we worked on how to believe that change is possible and if you did the work there, you saw how your belief fluctuates day-to-day and you learned how to increase your belief. This week, in honor of national Give Up Your Resolution Day, we’ll take a deep dive into how to trust yourself to actually do the thing you set out to do.

This year, you’re going to stage a coup. Even if you haven’t committed to anything yet, even if you’ve already started and given up. That’s right. No matter how you approach it, you’re going to change this year – whether you plan to or not.

The key to actually achieving your goal is to plan it and then execute the plan. Sounds simple but it’s wicked hard. Here are three planning tricks I bet you’ve never tried.

1: Plan To Delight Your (immediate) Future Self

I’ve blogged a lot about planning but here’s something I bet you don’t think of when you plan – your future self. No, I don’t mean the future you who has the new job, learned the cool coding language or got a great project. I mean the person you’ll be tomorrow when you have to take the first step.

I played a game with myself this week. I wrote down in detail each thing I was going to eat one day ahead of time. Then, I tried to follow my plan. I had said I’d make cereal with skim milk. We had none, and my car was in the shop. I skipped the meal, waiting for my husband to come home. I didn’t have spinach, I went to the store and got it. On it went. It was really hard. Then, I found myself at 5 pm with nothing planned for the time of day I like to sit outside and have a toddy or coffee and read. Bummer. I caved. I had 2 toddies, and from there on, it was a free for all.

I didn’t plan with any consideration for myself. I didn’t think about how much I like my happy hour, I didn’t think about what it would be like if anything went wrong. Folks, that was the opposite of self-care.

I did the experiment again, designing my food plan to delight my future self. I had a plan for coffee and a vita-muffin at 5 pm, I made sure I had everything I needed and I planned food that I would love. I treated my future self like gold. How did I do? Easy Peasy. I stuck to it like glue.

So when you plan what you’re going to do, plan to delight yourself, plan to hit your goal in a way that is all about making the you of tomorrow feel well treated.

2: Plan to Build Trust

Look, trusting that you will do what you say you’ll do is the cat’s pajamas. We work hard to make sure other people believe that we’ll come through at work. Our reputations matter a lot. Why? Because if we don’t live up to our commitments, then we won’t be trusted with the good projects, we won’t get opportunities and we’ll wind up doing the same thing day after day. We want the good work, the meaningful work, the great stuff. We get it by living up to expectations and delivering on commitments.

Dude, it’s the same deal with you & yourself.

If we don’t live up to our commitments to ourselves, we won’t trust ourselves. We’ll hesitate to take on new challenges because we’ve burned our bridge with ourselves. We won’t believe us when we say that we’re going to get a raise, or we’re going to hit our goals, or we’re going to get a better job.

How would it feel to know, one hundred percent, that if you committed to something just for your self, that you would for sure come through?

That feeling? Is insanely good. How do you get it? By planning carefully. Set yourself up to win. I was always very careful not to promise my son anything that I wasn’t going to deliver. When times got tough, I was able to ask him if he believed that I would do what I said. Even though our relationship was strained at that moment, he had to say yes. He trusted that I would do what I said. I felt ten feet tall and at the same time, I felt very grounded. Why? Because I believed it too.

Plan carefully, and remind yourself during execution that you’re building trust with yourself. With that kind of relationship with yourself, you can soar. You can build an amazing life starting right where you’re at.

3: Retrain Your Brain

This is all about execution. This is the DO part of plan / do.

During the execution of any plan, you’ll feel a pull to waffle a bit, to stop and check email, to read one news story, to find a better playlist, to do a bit of “research” on the internet. These things come up as urges. Sudden impulses to quit on yourself and distract yourself.

Humans are hardwired to seek pleasure, immediately, and avoid pain – permanently. The problem is, the pain we experience most of the time is emotional pain brought on by circumstances that our ancestors even a hundred years ago never dreamed of.

That emotional pain is caused by our thoughts.

“I’m a fraud.” “This project is taking longer than I thought and I won’t finish in time.” “I don’t have everything I need and I’ve waited too long.” “I have to make this report perfect or people will think something bad about me.”

The list never ends. No, listen, the list seriously never ends. That’s why it’s key to learn how to allow an urge without answering it. When you feel that pull to check emails, don’t resist it. And don’t give in either. If you resist it, you’ll go home exhausted. Will power is not a good plan long term. And if you give in, the darn thing will become stronger next time.

You have to retrain your brain. You do this by allowing. You notice the urge to check emails. You acknowledge it. ( I try to name the feeling that preceded the urge, such as frustration, or anxiety.) Then you hang out with it for a few seconds. Play with it. Here’s how it looks:

I feel anxious and I want to go find a new playlist to listen to while I work. I think – this is an urge. Why do I want to stop working and answer this urge? Because I feel frustrated. What’s that like? I feel tight in the shoulders. I feel tension in my jaw. Let me hang with this. Can I get more frustrated? Let’s see how I can build it up. That’s interesting. Can I make it less? Make it more again? Am I still OK? Yes? OK, good. That’s an urge. I want to avoid frustration by answering the urge but that will just make things worse. I’m going to go back to work.

That’s the art of allowing an urge to be there and not answering it. The next time I feel frustrated, the strength of the urge to distract myself will be less. If I do that enough, the urges will die down and my confidence will go way up.

To build a great working relationship with yourself – plan to delight yourself, plan to build trust and then make your relationship with yourself a priority, and retrain your brain by decommissioning urges. If you can do these three things, you can stage a coup for the ages.

And that? Is Magic.