“Plans don’t work!”

“They have to. Everybody is making plans!!”

“A woman makes a plan” is the title of Maye Musk’s new book. It inspired our conversation over avocado toasts at “Thank you for coming,” a millennial, artist-run restaurant in Los Angeles.

My friend Jodi pushed my yummy scone out of her sight. She got up, walked around the wooden family table and sat down again. Her 2020 rejuvenation plan asks for sugar free meals and hourly sitting breaks.

“Now I wonder how long I will keep this up.”

“Don’t let me ruin your mojo. I am just grumpy about the realization I had this morning.”

I never believed in writer’s block, but for the last three months of 2019 I had one. I met resistance to finish my book, even to compose a blog. To incite a breakthrough, I created a mind map for my publishing goals, a 2020 clear vision plan.

Inspired, my social media followers asked for additional mind map examples. I dug for them in the storage section of my writer’s studio. The pile of creative chaos contained dozens of detailed mind maps on big sketchpads, hundreds of lists in notebooks and many powerful “framing my day” exercises in my Ageless Rebel planners. While snapping pictures for my fans reality slapped me.

My book was unpublished after two years of intense writing. Romantic love stayed locked in my medieval fantasy script and true independence or freedom? My BIG plans had not manifested the way I had hammered them onto paper. Even my vision boards hung unfulfilled in the corners. I saw Woody Allen grin. “’If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.”

My plans were soap bubbles. My vision boards were wallflowers.

Even my small plans hadn’t panned out. I wasn’t running around the lake, engaging in vlogging or blogging regularly and only in my head was I committed to intermittent fasting. As a rebelliously intuitive content creator I see posting plans as fluid and change them according to my mood.

“You’ll find your way too, you always do,” said my friend before she drove off in her convertible, one hand on the wheel, one fist up towards the blue Los Angeles sky. I sat down on the abandoned valet’s bench and stared at Maye Musk’s book. She believed in her words like I did in my power decade of the 80s. At the time my ideas always manifested without planning – until I stumbled into mistakes and cautious lists replaced spontaneity. I would never ever make mistakes again.

“Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.”
Joseph Campbell

The director of my recent months had been Madame Ego, my worst critic. She controlled me with doubts and pushed me to polish my first twenty chapters until I was tired of her demands for perfection and gave up.

I texted my friend, “To make plans work we need mind maps of why they don’t.”

Every manifesting plan needs an obstacle map.

I put “obstacles to my book” in the middle of the page. The arrow pointing to the bottom described my ego’s creation of my stuck reality and what had gotten me there. The arrow upwards was for the subcategory of my negative expectations. The side arrow to the right pointed to limiting beliefs and the left to messages from my inner bullies.

Questions I asked myself

• what do I feel about planning?
• do I believe in my plans?
• when and how did structure fizzle into mush before?
• what has hindered me sticking to my structure?
• whose voice am I listening to?
• what’s the payoff not achieving my goals?
• which demons do I have to slay? (old messages and mindset in my head or embodied in “real” life)
• where does my motivation come from? My truth or society’s demands?
• how does “need” influence my steps?

Every manifesting plan needs an overhaul by our inner team.

I asked my spirit, mind, body and soul for their input to my plan. I observed and asked

• how my body reacted when feeling the steps and goal of my plan (resistance or welcome)
• if my plan mattered to my deepest desires
• if I felt passionate about it
• did my spirit agree to my intentions?
• is my mind satisfied with how I position my writing in the world?
• what does my goal matter to my philosophy of life?

A plan with soul loses its ego constrains and develops into a fluid dance of our inner team. It added giving to my wanting, which is so easy to forget but completes the deal.

Back to my obstacles I suspended my disbelief and transformed them into their opposites, into powers. Luckily our brains don’t care about our doubts, for them, the sentence is a reality.

One of my obstacles had been that I had to do everything by myself. I changed it to the affirmation; “I am supported.” The reward for my fierce appeared with the Bing! of a text. My friend Wendi invited me to a women’s circle about epiphanies. It could have been any other class; I drove the 40 minutes to Beverly Hills solely to support my friend.

Magic happens when the host is your mindset twin. Elise Ballard’s concept of epiphanies added a clarifying angle to the insights that had hit me over several decades. The whispers of my inner knowing often occurred after a drama and always changed my path.

“Epiphanies then are foreshadowing elements provided by our inner screenwriter.”

The higher-powered circle liked the idea, the women between 40 and 65 would buy my book showing that life was co-written by our soul.  When would it come out again? At the end of the discussions each of us opened Elise’ planner on a page “meant for us”. Mine said,

“Don’t worry about making it all perfect, because it’s never going to be perfect. Not-so-perfect is just as beautiful.” (Rachel Blaylock)

I left with the epiphany that soulful plans are part of a never-ending journey towards perfection of beautifully flawed humans. Our actions and baby steps are to fill our cracks with gold. Cracks are cool.

Manifesting plans work when they are aligned with all we are.

My ego sulked. My muse says she’s happy that I made a plan.