“Plans are nothing, planning is everything”
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
The first P in formulating my plan is the plan
Have you ever had a plan but didn’t know you had a plan? Well what is a plan anyway? Specifically, the dictionary defines a plan as a detailed proposal of doing or achieving something. The next question I typically ask is what do I want to do or achieve? A logical question, I suppose. To me, I believe that you have to want to achieve something. Did you evaluate your current situation and say to yourself, their must be something better than what I’m doing or where I am at? Furthermore, we can look at this another way and say, I like where I am at but I feel that I could do better at what I am doing now. So what’s the first p in formulating my plan? Great questions!
“Without deep reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people”
-Albert Einstein
Reflecting on a moment to help formulate my plan
Now that you have answered a few questions about your current situation, you can proceed to start brainstorming ideas. For instance, what do you have access to and what do you feel you are good at? The reason I ask the question this way is because sometimes the individual you are speaking to may not know that they have a talent or skill that they are good at. Like you may not realize a trait you have until someone points it out and tells you what they see in you. For example, someone told me I have a contagious smile. I know it’s not a skill or a talent or is it? I laugh and smile of course, but I don’t look too much into it when someone says that to me and I feel they are just being nice. It didn’t really click in my head until recently when I was reflecting on my past and it made me think of a friend of mine who passed away. Specifically, his mother came up to me and said that when she sees my smile, she remembers the good times with her son, she continued and told me “to never stop smiling”.
“Use your smile to change the world, but no matter what happens, do not let the world change your smile”
-Riya Sarkar
What is the moral of this story?
The moral of the story is that I could not see how my smile and demeanor could impact someone else. It actually made me feel good to help heal another human being who was grieving in such pain. I can’t even imagine losing a child and my heart broke for her. This event happened 25 years ago at her son’s funeral. The reality is that I never understood what she meant until just recently. As in illustration, I was standing in a very long line to pay my respects to my dear friend, her son who was laying in a casket. She left her post where she greeted everyone that came to hug her and she surpassed every single person in the line and walked straight over to me just to tell me what my smile meant to her. As a result of her action toward me, it made me think about how my smile touched her so deeply.
“Your current situation is giving you an opportunity to re-evaluate what you want”
-tashabee
Reevaluating myself to help formulate my plan
I continued to reevaluate myself. I wondered, how could my smile help someone? Do I over analyze it? Do I accept it for what it is? If I could help one person with my contagious smile heal what else could I do to help another person? Is this part of the plan? I already established the fact that I felt good knowing that I helped someone else. So how else and what else could I do to help someone? I have envisioned a dream and I will take my skills, experience and knowledge to formulate a plan of action to help me achieve that vision.
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel”
-maya angelou
The truth is, she is the one who made an impact on me. Crying as I write this blog because of my vivid memory of the event. Who knew, years later I would remember how she made me feel and what it meant to her to see me smile.
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