I’ve noticed quite a few people feeling stuck lately.  Whether it’s working toward a personal or professional goal, they describe spinning their wheels (mostly mental) with good intentions, but little progress.  It’s easy to get overwhelmed by frustration and paralyzed in comparing where we are with where we wish we could be. This leads to feeling angry and frustrated and feeds into a negative mind loop, which only holds us back.  At these times, change experts recommend taking a simple small action.  No matter how little, building a chain of small steps can get us unstuck. In this post, I’ll keep it small and simple with a description of an action plan with the hope it can lead to movement in the right direction.  

An action plan is a list of tasks or steps you need to achieve your goal.  It breaks down large goals into smaller steps that build toward the larger achievement.  For businesses, action plans can be complex and detailed to address the totality of a transition.  But for most of us, the smaller and simpler we can make an action plan, the better.  All it really takes is answering the four basics: Who, What, Where and When.  The more specific, the better.  

For example, you’ve wanted to learn Spanish in preparation for travel.  An action plan might be:

• Who – me
• What – Using Babble App
• Where – in the car and in the kitchen
• When – when I drive and when I cook; minimum twice a day for three weeks

Research shows that this little bit of planning can actually lead to significant change.  It helps if you write it down and then track yourself.  Make a check mark each time you do the behavior and have a finite end.  If its open ended, it tends to fade over time.  At the end of the time frame, evaluate your progress and then recommit to a new action plan.  Fresh action plans tend to re-energize us and allow for adjustments based on how things have been and what you’ve learned about your tendencies.  

A key to an effective action plan is choosing the right behavior.  If it’s too challenging, you’ll get discouraged.  If it’s too small, it won’t bring satisfaction.  Also make sure the action you’re going to start making will actually move you closer to your goal!  

Action plans are a way to set ourselves up for success.  In choosing a goal and thinking through the four W’s, we take away the contemplating and negotiation we tend to get lost in.  Rather than reinventing the wheel every day, which offers opportunities to delay or avoid, an action plan clears away the barrier of not knowing what to do, when to do it, and how.  A good action plan can factor in work-arounds to any potential barriers that might throw us off track.  So adding in a few “if…then” caveats can be helpful.  For example, if your action plan is to walk 3 miles in the park after work 3 days a week, but the weather is too hot, you can add an ”if it’s too hot, then I’ll walk in the mall” as a contingency plan.

A good action plan channels the mental energy in thinking about a goal into actually doing something about it.  Taking action makes us feel more hopeful and builds momentum and a sense of competence.  Most often, the first step is the hardest, and once we get going, we keep going.  And another suggestion?  Don’t make your first action plan be googling action plan!  Trust me, you’ll waste more than a few hours sitting in one place reading about action plans made by the United Nations on Child and Armed Conflict and clicking on pretty images of colorful diagrams.  Don’t ask me how I know.  (Perhaps in general googling anything shouldn’t be considered an action.)