Pre Flight Questions For Plans and Changes

Are you contemplating a new direction in life like replacing a bad habit with a good one or starting a business or perhaps adopting a spiritual discipline of some sort? How are you going to ensure that the change sticks? Perhaps you can learn something from the airplane production line – how exactly is changing your life like making an airplane?

Recently I got talking to a friend who works internationally for the aerospace industry as a Lean Systems analyst which is to do with making production processes more efficient through an interrelating series of checks and techniques.

I was very interested in how she actually gets the changes to stick which is one of the things a life coach has to be very good at because the pull back to the way things were can be very strong in us. She answered with startling simplicity that the most successful systems are designed so that they are harder to do in any other way. Genius!

So much of our sense of disappointment and failure is down to us failing at a plan that was never going to succeed against the inner elephant from the get go. Why not design your plans so that it would be harder to fail than succeed? Can you apply that thinking to anything you’re devising? It takes some work but the fruits are obvious; I’m all for an easy life.

Here are some questions to run your plan by.

They are attempts to get you thinking more broadly, realistically and creatively. Just to stick with the airplane link, you could use these as a pre-flight checklist.

• Who else will be affected by this plan, what might they say?
• What is going to go to make space for this?
• Are there any negative consequences from achieving this plan?
• Is it within your power to bring this change about?
• What can you do to double your motivation?
• Have you tried to do this in the past and what were the consequences?
• Is there something else you’d rather be doing?
• What might the 3 biggest difficulties be in achieving this goal?
• Is there an easier way to do this?
• What is the wise way to do this?
• What is the kind way to do this?

And now for your comments: