This week, Victoria’s Premier shared the roadmap to shift Victorians from our current Stage 4 Lockdown to a moving population and functioning economy by the end of the year. Now, whether you are supportive of the details of this particular roadmap or not, don’t underestimate the criticality of having one in order to get us from where we are now to where we want to be.
If you come from the world of project management, or if you run a business, you would be well versed in the concept of having a roadmap. There’s a start point, an end point that defines where you want to get to, and numerous milestones plotted in between.
But have you considered applying the same concept to your own personal life when you’ve wanted to create different results to those that you’re experiencing right now?
You can. And in fact, if you are really serious about creating something new in your life, you should.
The first step in creating a roadmap is knowing your destination. This is the most important step, yet it is the step that most people don’t take. They want something different, but they don’t clearly articulate what “different” is or by when they want to have it.
The second step is to map out a couple of key milestones. These are the places that you would expect to be at certain points in time as you move toward you goal. For example, if you have a particular result you want to achieve one year from now, you might set milestones at the 6-month, 3-month and 1-month marks.
Milestones break up that big, audacious goal into manageable chunks and keep us from feeling so overwhelmed by the gap between where we are today and where we want to be a year from now, that we don’t even bother starting.
You can think of milestones as mini goals. However, unlike the final goal, milestones aren’t necessarily set in stone.
The point of milestones is to have checkpoints against which we can assess our progress and course-correct, if required, to ensure we stay on track toward achieving our goal. The thing to remember is that when we set milestones, we base our expectations on a certain set of assumptions, which themselves, are based on our knowledge at this particular point in time. As we progress, we learn more and we will find that some of the assumptions we’ll have made will prove to be correct and others, incorrect.
The third key step is to start. Start taking action. Only once we start taking action – starting from where we are, knowing what we know, with the resources we currently have – will the next set of actions we need to take, appear.
The thing is, when we embark on a significant journey of change in our lives, we don’t know, and we cannot know, every single step that we’ll need to take in order to get to that goal. Similarly, we can’t know each and every action we’ll need to take to reach the 6-month mark. But we’ll have an idea of where we expect to be. But remember, setting that expectation will be built on a whole series of assumptions which we make with the information we have right now.
As we progress and learn more, we’ll learn that our assumptions weren’t correct and we aren’t where we thought we would be at that point in time. We might find that we achieve our milestone earlier than we thought we would. Or we might not be as far as we thought we would be. And that’s ok. We just re-set the next set of milestones using what we now know.
When I work with clients we get really clear on 3 things: (1) Wishing for different results won’t get you those results unless you take action; (2) Taking action without a clear destination in mind will simply keep you busy but won’t necessarily get you anywhere; and (3) Not having any milestones to guide you along the way will either stop you from starting in the first place, or will see you getting off track and missing your goal.
The bottom line is that if you are serious about creating change in your life, you are going to need a roadmap: a start, a clearly defined destination with a date by which you want to achieve it, and a set of milestones to break up your journey into manageable chunks that also keep you on track.
