I want to explore the difference between being in the present moment versus making plans for the future, and why it's important to make plans for the future and dream about the things we desire.
Read on for a tip on how to supercharge your creations and planning, and move into and towards your desires with more flow and more ease.
I’ve written a lot about being in the present moment and why it's important to be in the present moment. To be able to really be in appreciation of life itself. When we come back into the present moment, we let go of worries, anxieties, stresses, because we're just now, we're just experiencing moment by moment, what is happening to us, within us and around us.
And this is fantastic, but I often get asked ‘Well, how can I stay in the present moment and be planning for my future?’
Equally I get asked ‘You keep on telling me to be in the present moment and yet you're telling me to plan for the future and plan what actions I should take today and tomorrow and next month. How is that being in the present moment?’
Let's tackle both of those questions, one at a time.
Firstly, let's start with, ‘You keep telling me to be in the present moment and now you want me to do planning and creation. How can I be doing both and staying in the present moment at the same time?’
I'm sure you've all heard of the saying ‘Fail to plan; plan to fail’. This is a very common saying in project management, leadership, and any kind of planning in the corporate space certainly.
Well, what if we spun a little bit of fun into it? Fail to dream, and dream to fail.
Now I know that doesn't quite ring as cleverly as ‘Fail to plan and plan to fail’, but it has a different energy to it.
When we stop dreaming about what might exist, what could be, we limit our ability to create. We limit our ability to attract into our world something grander than what we currently have. We limit our ability to rise into a frequency that is more connected to and more in alignment with something even greater than what it is that we're currently experiencing.
That is not to say we are not happy with the current experience that we have and we are not experiencing joy and love, but there's always more in life to experience. To settle for exactly the same every single day, we've stopped living. We are simply existing and some might even say when you stop growing, when you stop learning, when you stop expanding yourself, you are in fact dying.
So what does it mean to dream? What does it mean to plan for the future? What does it mean to create? How exactly do you go about doing it without becoming consumed and staying in this future state?
That in itself requires a little bit of discipline.
When you feel that there is an urge within you to sit down and take some notes. When you have had a dream, perhaps that's given you some indication as to something that is coming, something that you need to create; when you've reached a point in your business where there is a little bit of stagnation or perhaps you're in a good flow and there's an opportunity to grow even more.
For me, I love to sit down in between that lovely Christmas/New Year's break and spend some time with myself to really feel into what it is that I want to create in the following year.
These are not New Year's resolutions. These are opportunities for me to tune in to the energy of what that dream might look like.
I write things down. I draw pictures and I sit in meditation with all of that. And then the most important thing, which is what allows us to come back into that present moment, is to allow.
This doesn't mean you don't take any action towards those things. When we take action, we move our body, our subconscious mind, our conscious mind, our whole being, towards the direction that we want to be heading.
When we've really felt into and sensed what those dreams feel like within our physiology, it makes it easier for us to move towards them, but taking action is at the conscious level. That is what is required to really pull the energy of that dream towards you.
I've got a number of things that I do when I'm in this creation dreaming process. I'm writing things down, so articulating what it is that I'll see, what it is that I'll hear, what it is that I'll feel, when I have this thing in my life.
And then I draw because imagery is so powerful. Imagery helps us to remember things more easily. The beautiful saying that a picture paints a thousand words is so true. When we can look at something, look at an image and we know everything that it means; all of the information that is attached to it is very, very clear to us within that one image. And also it's something that you can carry around with you more easily. It's something that you can put on your desk without feeling like somebody else might get into your head or be nosey or be in your mind about some of the things that you want to create in your world.
The next step becomes a little bit more practical. It's actually starting to plan a little bit about what I want to be doing each month for the next six months so that I can be constantly moving towards and attracting my creations towards me.
I use my six-month planner and my Daily Success Planner to help me, to keep me focused and keep my energy connected to where it is that I want to be going.
It can be so easy to become distracted with something and potentially be distracted with nothing, particularly if you are a procrastinator, which sometimes I very much am! Using these tools really helps to keep me on track and keep me motivated.
At the end of the day, at the end of the week, when I’ve accomplished things, I feel fabulous and I feel like I am so much more in alignment with the life that I am creating than procrastinating and staying exactly where I am.
Again, caveat: that is not to say we are not happy, we are not joyful and we are not grateful for where we are right now.
Okay, so the flip side of the question was, ‘How can I be planning and planning and planning, and then also be in the present moment?’
There's not too much difference here. The key is that we are spending specific amounts of time. So as I said, I love to spend a day, maybe two, in between that Christmas and New Year's period, to really sit down and think about and feel into what it is that I want to create for that year.
I’ve done a little bit of dreaming and putting those words and pictures down.
I'll use my six-month planner to write down what it is that I need to do over the next six months to move myself forward towards those creations - being mindful to include things that are big life goals for me. For example, for a little while I was looking to buy property and I made sure that I had actions in my six-month planner and then translated into my Daily Success Planner that included activities that were aligned to my seeking and then buying a property.
One of my favourite things to do on a day-to-day basis in my planner is to have at least one action that makes my day amazing.
As a business owner, I often find that most of my goals can tend to be things that I want to and need to do within the business, but I've become much more conscious to add in little practises and little actions that remind me to do things that are for me and the rest of my life, because I'm not just my business.
So coming back to the question, how do you do planning and not get stuck there and not be all consumed by the future and not be able to come back into the present moment?
It's by applying some sort of consistency and discipline. I love to call it ritual, because everything in your life, when it becomes a ritual, has so much more magic around it. So having a ritual of when you will do your daily planning and action setting, having a ritual for when you’ll sit down and do your six-month planning and review.
I have to admit that doing all of this planning, can seem a little bit overwhelming. I've been a project manager in the corporate world and managed massive projects very successfully and delivered projects to clients and businesses very successfully, on time, on budget, at quality (high-five to my bad-ass-ness!).
But I have long struggled to do that for myself. I would always let myself off for not achieving the things that I said I would or thought I would or committed to doing. I'd let myself off. Not holding any guilt around it because, I mean, who does that serve? But it became too much of a habit.
I was procrastinating more often than I was doing anything, and part of that was a little bit around perfectionism and some beliefs that I had around perfectionism. But not taking action and not moving forward and then wondering ‘why isn't anything changing?’ ‘Why does my business still look like this?’ ’Why haven't I got more clients?’ ‘Why am I still doing the same kind of work that I was doing three years ago?’
Wondering all of those things and really not taking personal accountability for my own actions and holding myself accountable for what it is that I needed to do at a conscious level in a physical way to move towards those creations, towards those desires.
And it's this planning. It's this six-month planning. It's this daily ritual that I have in writing down what it is that I want to achieve every single day in alignment with what it is that I've said that I want to achieve every single month to move me towards bigger and better things and more in alignment with my dreams and aspirations than I currently am now. I know there's more for me.
When we can hold in our hearts that there is always more, more expansion, more growth, we can truly tap into what that is and then take steps towards it.
This is not about those big arse action steps. These are baby steps. What one little thing can we do every single day to create momentum, energetic momentum, physical momentum towards those dreams, towards those desires, towards what it is that we want to experience in our life, in five years’ time and in ten years’ time?
I've already given you some ideas and suggestions around how you can have this planning practise to give you a little bit of extra energy to light your fire, to give you hope for something that is bigger than and greater than and more expansive and loving than what you currently have.
Again, reminder: that does not mean we are not happy right now, we are not in joy, we are not in gratitude. It’s really important that we're not focused on the destination. To receive that every moment now is about gratitude, about love, about being present, and about being happy. That’s so, so, so important that we can feel into that for ourselves now. The journey is so important.
Okay, so schedule into your phone, into your calendar, a day where you would like to spend with yourself to dream. And if you are a big dreamer and you've got lots and lots of big goals, that's beautiful. That's amazing! Give yourself an extra day to really feel into those.
Set some time aside for you, with you, to do this, because this is about your own personal journey and your own personal expansion. We give so much to other people and we don't give enough to ourselves. You deserve to lock in some time for you so that nobody else can take that or put appointments in. That bit is really important.
Next, using one piece of paper per goal, one sheet per dream, write down on that piece of paper what that dream is. Be really specific: what it is that you'll see, what it is that you'll hear yourself saying to yourself and other people saying to you, and what it is that you will feel when you have this thing, when you are living your goal, living your dream.
Now the added bonus is the drawing. If you're not a great drawer, that's okay. You don't have to be. It's just putting something on a piece of paper and making it artistic. Maybe you just want to give your goal a little symbol so that you can put it somewhere as a reminder. Again, like I said, without having to answer all those questions about ‘What does that mean?’ and ‘Why do you want that?’ It keeps it a little bit private … though you can share if you want to.
The next step is to start planning what actions you need to take. I love calling these ‘activation steps’ because we're activating our whole being towards that goal.
These are little baby steps. Think about what you can do in the next seven days to create momentum towards your dream.
Want something structured that you can pick up and play with?
You can buy my Daily Success Planner via the shop, and if you’re interested fill in the Contact Me with the message “I’m a dreamer and I’d like to create better!” and I’ll send you my 6-Month Planner and Goal Setting worksheet.
Sending you love, hugs and magic.
Bhavna xxx
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