The point of making a plan is to help yourself trust that whatever you’re working on will come together. It’s not about committing yourself to an exact sequence of steps, and then turning yourself into a machine that executes them one by one.
Plans are helpful when they allow you to feel certain that you can succeed, without specifying exactly how you’ll get there. They can assure your rational mind that it is worth working in the direction that your heart wants to go. They inform your anxious brain that all is well, so it can calm down and you can get going.
This way, a plan can let you lean into intuition. Knowing that you’re doing something that is fundamentally feasible, you are free up to integrate the inevitable twists and turns on your path, allowing yourself to feel adventurous in your approach, and not get stuck when things take a turn.
Plans also help with collaboration. If someone else is going to work with you, they also need to feel confident that whatever you want to do is worth trying. Emotionally, they may already know that they want to be involved. But they may not feel comfortable until they can assure their rational mind that this is a reasonable thing to do.
A plan can provide the courage to trust. It is not meant to detail a specific set of actions, because the best actions cannot be predicted in advance.
The best actions only arise in the moment; they come to us if we are in a state of feeling connected to our vision, while also being present with where we are now. A good plan allows you to relax into that state. It does not specify every action.
The more you can trust in what you are working towards, the looser a plan you can work with. And the looser a plan you can work with, the more joy you may be able to tap into. Working from a loose plan means you can handle, or even use, whatever happens.
So let your plans be as detailed as you need, but no more detailed than that.
Because planning and control are close cousins. We reach for them when we feel afraid, and uncertain about our ability to know what to do. The less we believe in that we are working on, the more planning we require in order to keep ourselves moving. And the more we feel like we need to follow a plan, the less we get to discover and play.
This is why we are most creative and effective when we work on something that touches us deep inside; something we believe in so much that a loose plan is enough for our brain to get on board. Those are the projects we get to be intuitive with, and the ones that allow us to tap in to joy.