The art of high-performance planning

If you strive for success (however you personally define that), you may want to adopt a high-performance mindset. And part of that is to learn the art of high-performance planning.

High-performance planning is basically a particular way of self-coaching, but it’s more focused on a defined time frame for the purpose of optimising your general task performance on a particular day, week, or month. High-performance planning will also help you to monitor yourself, keep yourself focused and hold yourself accountable. So how do you do that?

High-performance planning is all about identifying how you can perform at your best.

You can do that by asking yourself the right questions and then to review your ambitions at the end of the day/ week/ month/ year. Here are some examples of high-performance questions:

What is the most important thing for me to achieve today/ this week?

• What do I need to do to achieve that?

• What is the type of person I want to be?

• What might trip me up along the way?

• How will I deal with that?

You can probably spot the similarities, yet slightly different focus, of self-leadership, self-coaching and high-performance planning: Self-leadership is the practice of understanding who you are, identifying your desired experiences and intentionally guiding yourself towards them. Self-coaching is the art of getting out of your own way by asking powerful questions when you get stuck and/or simply want to accelerate your goal attainment along the way. High-performance planning is a technique you can use along the way to optimise your day-to-day performance.

High-performance planning works great if you use planners to write down your ambitions either in a journal or by using planners. This way, you can frequently and visually remind yourself of how you want to show up and hold yourself accountable.

If you’re using planners, it can also be easier to establish a high-performance planning and review habit by completing the planners every morning and night and at the beginning and end of each new week/month/year. You can design your own questions or planners or use the ones I made like this one:

If you like tools like these, make sure you head over to my Resources page for more.

Maike x