Why Your Plan Doesn't Have to Be Perfect

One of the biggest mistakes I made when I first decided to make changes to create a different way to live and work was believing I needed the perfect plan before I began.

On paper, everything looked great. I had a successful 14-year corporate career, but I knew I wanted a different way to live and work. I wanted something that felt more fulfilling and meaningful, and that gave me more freedom.

But because I thought I had to have everything figured out before I started, I got stuck in endless planning, trying to map out every step before taking the first one.

That approach kept me stuck for literally years. The reality is that change rarely happens that way. Yes, it's important to create a plan before you start, but you can't know everything in advance. That only becomes clear once you start taking action and moving forward.

Eventually, I realised that. And that is what started getting me unstuck. Instead of trying to create the perfect plan, I focused on preparing as well as I could, creating the best plan I could based on what I knew at the time, and thinking carefully about what would give me the best chance of creating the life and work I wanted.

The important thing is that plans aren't set in stone. Because once you start moving forward, your plan meets reality. Unexpected challenges come up. New information emerges that you couldn't possibly have known beforehand. Some things turn out to be easier than expected, and others are harder. That's why both you and your plan need to be flexible enough to adapt as you go.

The goal isn't to have a perfect plan or to follow your original plan perfectly. The goal is to respond to what's happening in real time and keep adjusting and tweaking as you move forward.

It's an approach I've come back to time and again in my own life - when I left my corporate career to start my own business, when I moved from England to Ireland, when I moved from Ireland to Canada and decided to build a life on Vancouver Island, and more recently, as I turned 60 and completely redesigned my life and work for this next chapter.

None of those changes started with a perfect plan. And none of them unfolded exactly as I expected. Every one of them required me to adapt, rethink parts of the plan and keep moving forward. Because change is never a linear path.

Looking back, I'm glad I didn't wait for the perfect plan for that first big change. I started with the best plan I could, then improved it as I went. It's an approach I now always take whenever I want to change something, big or small, in my life or work.

If you're thinking about making changes to build a life and work around what matters most to you, remember this: you don't need a perfect plan to get started. Create the best plan you can, prepare well, stay flexible, adapt when appropriate and keep moving forward.