“In the feminine model of planning, we have to be willing to trust our hearts and guts and intuitions and future selves and make a plan to fulfill what they are dishing out.” –Mia
Many of the women that we work with don’t love the idea of being a planner.
They want freedom — and a plan feels like the opposite.
I get it.
Here are a few truths about me:
I didn’t want the structure of a plan, but I started listening to stories of very successful women, who worked 3 days making plenty of money, were great mothers, frequented yoga, traveled… all the things. And I realized that they made a choice and charted a course.
Planning — even for people who don’t like to plan — shifts when we shift how we plan. We need to stop putting together a puzzle of all the things we are “supposed” to do when we plan.
When we start weaving a tapestry of what matters most, planning becomes a creative process.
When we get creative and focused on what matters, we’re more likely to keep showing up for planning. When planning this way becomes a practice, eventually our days are composed only of what really matters to us and our destiny.
My favorite definition of planning is this: Planning is just making choices in advance.
When I say that to FLOW members or our audience, women heave a big sigh of relief or give a huge AHA!
Women are often more willing to be a planner when they shift how they think about planning.
If you’ve pushed back against planning, you are probably thinking a lot about masculine models of planning.
First let me clarify, when I talk about masculine and feminine planning, I’m talking about energy, not gender.
The way we plan and make choices as a society is very masculine, and the negative side of that is that planning has largely been about how much we can do. This is why “busy” became a badge of honor, even though it leads to burnout, stress, sickness, and other issues.
That isn’t to say masculine energy in planning is all bad. The problem is the feminine is squeezed out completely.
We need a balance of masculine and feminine energy to make a good plan. Since we are so entrenched in a masculine model, I think most of us need to dive deeper into the feminine.
When we bring the feminine in, the planning process becomes that tapestry of the life we want.
I drew heavily on feminine energy in creating the FLOW Planning Method, a new way of planning (and yes, it works for non-planners). Let’s take a look.
Center
The first step is to center. We want to make choices from the inside out, so we want to be as centered and grounded as possible when it’s time to make those choices. When we are centered, we can make choices that truly honor our future self.
Vision
From Center we Vision. We create a picture and feel the result we want as if we’ve done it. We shift our identities in advance and make the change energetically before we make it physically.
Center and vision together can take as little as 2 minutes, though sometimes we give more time for bigger decisions or longer term plans.)
Decide
With our vision set, it’s time to Decide. When we are deciding how we will spend our time, we often default to what everyone else is doing and what we’ve done before.
