Session 17 – Keep It Simple

Action Steps

1. Go back to Actions and make sure you only have 1 or 2 actions listed for each account.

2. Choose the account you’re going to start with.

3. Post it in the GU Leader Community or email me at michael@guidestonegroup.com

Post your response to this question in the GU Leader Community by clicking here. Share one of your new Actions and ask for feedback.

Session Transcript

Welcome back to another session of Guidestone University.

The last couple of sessions we’ve been looking at some quick tips that we can give you to help you to be successful with your Simple Personal Plan. And in this session we’re going to look at a great tip that we learned from some of the mistakes that we made and the mistakes that others made that we were walking through the process with them. And so, we want to help you with one tip. The tip today is Keep it Simple, and there are two parts to this tip, okay?

The first one is, as you are listing your actions for each account, only list one or two per account. In fact, I would encourage you to just list one to get started. But if you have to have two or there’s simple and closely related, you could throw two on there and try to work on those things together.

Let me tell you a quick story. I was working at a university in South Carolina a number of years ago shortly after we started the work on this content. And I began working with one of our team members, and he’s working through Simple Personal Plan. And when he gave me his first draft of his Simple Personal Plan, he had nine accounts of his Simple Personal Plan. And for each account, he had six or eight actions for each account.

Now, if you do the math, even though it is nine times six that would be fifty-four new things, new habits or activities or disciplines that he was going to add to his life, his work and his leadership. That’s going to be very hard to do, number one. And number two, it’s not very simple. I mean that just adds another complexity to your life and work. And that’s not what we’re after here.

What we want you to do is get significant progress in each of these Personal Plan Accounts. In each area of your life, your work and your leadership. And the way to do that is to keep it simple.

So, number one only list one or two actions per account and the second thing that we want you to remember, once you’re done with your Simple Personal Plan, once you’ve completed the document, you list out all of your actions for each one of your accounts, we want you to pick one account and start there.

Let me tell you another quick story. When I rewrote my Personal Plan about 10 years ago, I was struggling in a number of areas. I felt overweight, I didn’t have energy and focus, I felt like I was missing something in my faith life, I felt like I needed to make some significant progress with my children and with my wife. And there were several things and it was almost overwhelming to think about trying to tackle all of this area at once.

And interestingly enough, I woke up one morning and said, “This morning, I’m going to workout.” And at that time, I was just running. That was just something that I enjoyed doing. We were living in Clemson, South Carolina and I had this route that I would run and it was just beautiful in the mornings, and I just got up and I ran. And the next morning, got up the next day and ran the next day. I did that five times that week and created the habit over the next several weeks where I began to get significant momentum in the health area of my life.

And here’s what happened. Because I was making significant progress in the health area of my life it gave me energy to also attack the other areas of my life where I needed to make significant progress. And so I begin to see improvements almost immediately in the faith areas of my life that I wanted to address. I began to see immediate progress in relationships with my children and with my wife.

So, if you are looking at Simple Personal Plan, and you’ve just completed your actions and thinking, “Man, how am I going to get started?” We want you to just pick one area and start there. What you’ll find you’ll keep it simple, just one or two actions in each area and you’ll address one area at a time, then you will find more energy and more focus and more clarity to get progress in other areas as well.

So, here’s our action item. We want you to go back to the sections on Actions, and you’re going to make sure that you’ll have one or two actions listed for each Simple Personal Plan Account.

And then, once you’re done with that, action step number two for this session is, choose the account that you’re going to start with. Whether it’s your spouse or your children or if you’ve included finances or health or rest or self or growth, whatever it is that you’ve put in there, choose one account that you’re going to start with.

And then let us know in the Guidestone Leader Community or email me using my email address that is included inside Guidestone University.

And we’ll see you in the next session.[/text_block]