The Magic of Planning Sessions

 

Planning sessions are a practice that I have adopted for the last few months (since August). This was first introduced to me by Jennibellie's online class Creative Goal Journaling and I believe that I briefly mentioned this in the Goals, Planning, Scheduling & Reviewing article back in September.

The Planning session, per say, is like a brainstorming session. I have a dedicated Planning Sessions A4 notebook that I use only for these sessions.

You can organise a planning session for pretty much anything you need to get your head around to. I have had planning sessions for organising my coaching sessions with my son, what type of mentoring materials and support he would need from me for his goals, how I will be organising the sessions and what resources I have, working on fears, resistance and procrastination, what I wanted to do with my blog, how I will be organising my new Bullet Journal in 2021, on reviewing my goals' objectives and steps, on how I want to review and plan my weeks after I had access to different techniques. You could very well use it also to plan a trip - even though at the moment with the new lockdown the options are a little bit limited - , organise a house decluttering or redecorating, plan a birthday party or complete a school assignment where research is needed.

The brainstorming nature of these sessions seem, once you start playing with ideas, to flow naturally, which makes it a very organic process. I tend to use different coloured pens for different types of ideas or parts of the process. Here is my "Planning Sessions pencil case":

Using different colours enables you, when you go back, to identify quickly all ideas in one category. Some ideas of questions you could ask yourself to start the process if you're stuck are:

• What do I want to achieve?
• What resources do I have?
• What can I do with them? How can I use them?
• What other resources do I need?
• What are aspects of this project that I need to think about? (that's very likely going to be your categories)
• What could I do for each one?

No filtering, write down everything  that comes to your mind. Something that may seem silly or impossible could very well work as a starting point to develop a useful idea. Sometimes to find solutions, you will need to think outside the box. This process will just do that for you, and more. From one idea flows another, then another, then another...

Once you cannot think of anything else, go through all you have written. Can you expand on any of these ideas? Which ideas do you feel will help you towards your goal? Which ideas do you feel you can do? Organise your ideas. The next step will be to follow the Planning process in the Goals, Planning, Scheduling & Reviewing article from September 2020. These planning sessions can be done when needed.

From this process and also Jennibellie's class was born another, weekly, planning session practice, which I call Weekly Review/Plan. I started by using Jennibellie's template and, little by little, tweaked it to make it my own. Another type I created for my son's coaching/mentoring sessions can be found in the Reviewing part of the Goals, Planning, Scheduling & Reviewing article. Somehow, I couldn't imagine my 15-year old son being willing to answer questions like "What my inner critic said" and "what my higher self knows"! See what I mean?! Here is an example of the layout I have been using for the last few months and how I use it:

Recently, I have been watching the Live Planning Sessions of Creative Dream Incubator on Instagram (every Monday, 4pm UK time - @creativedreamincubator) and this is very different to what I have been doing. It focuses on really exploring your feelings to see what you need, either to heal, to realign yourself, get focused, get out of fear and resistance...  This is something that I definitely wanted to incorporate into my weekly Review/Plan sessions, so, again, my template has evolved to suit my current needs.
My new layout for my weekly Review/Plan session, starting this weekend:

This was the result of my last Brainstorming/Planning Session. Similarly to the other type of planning session, I also use different coloured pens (as you can see on the first layout photo). I find it easier to separate the information, rather than have just one blob of black writing over the 2 pages. And, as a stationary lover, I do have a separate pencil case for my Bullet Journal stuff:

It's all about making it fun ;-)

As we discussed in the Goals, Planning, Scheduling & Reviewing article, reviewing is essential to your process, any process, as it enables you to make the process current to where you are right now. This is not something that you should ignore as it will only create more resistance to your project. For instance, this week every day I have been focusing on responsibilities tasks and chores that, throughout the week, I have had to force myself to do. Doing my quick check-in to see how I felt (using one of the extra questions in the new template), I realised that, not only did I overschedule my days, and, as I usually start with the boring stuff to get it out of the way, only spent my days doing exclusively soul-draining, serious, "adult" and not fun activities. I really felt it in the way that, at the end of each day, I felt exhausted and didn't want to bother doing anything else, which led to scrolling down mindlessly on Instagram for over an hour. What I need is to be more balanced and realistic with what I plan in my days, but also that I need to incorporate PLAY activities where I am active as opposed to passive. Making chores fun is never an option for me (to me associating chores to fun is an oxymoron!), so, I do my chores first thing, out of the way, then I can write a poem, read a book, doodle or start setting up my Collections Bullet Journal - creative, fun endeavours for me - as a reward. I make sure that the serious tasks are done but I won't pile chores onto them to fill my days. I want, while I'm currently at home, at least a third of my day to be fun. If I had just stuck to my original template and not integrated this extra practice into my weekly Review/Plan, I would have never picked that up and would not have re-arranged my tasks in a more efficient way. Some coaching methods regard feelings as unreliable but I don't agree. They help you gauge where you're at and what you can achieve confidently. You cannot run a 20K marathon if you feel exhausted or unmotivated.
So feelings, in my opinion, do matter. They work a bit like a compass. You need to be aware of them and not be a prisoner to them.

This article is just to give you an example of what you can achieve with these two types of Planning Sessions.
Obviously there are many other ways to organise your planning sessions, just search online, which could give you some extra insights and ideas that you may like to try and experiment with - why not do a Planning Session on how to organise your Planning Sessions?!

Happy exploring...