Finding Empowerment Within The Pages Of My Planner
Discover more from Shadows And Thorns
Finding Empowerment Within The Pages Of My Planner
Just My Planner And A Pen...And Maybe Some Highlighters...In My Passion Planner Weekly
Definition from Oxford Languages ·
em·pow·er·ment
/əmˈpouərmənt/
noun
authority or power given to someone to do something.
"individuals are given empowerment to create their own dwellings"
o the process of becoming stronger and more confident, especially in controlling one's life and claiming one's rights.
"political steps for the empowerment of women"
My planners have taken on a life of their own in my world in the past few years.
It started a while back with my Passion Planner. I didn’t know what to expect, as I had never purchased anything quite so…plannerly, for lack of a better term, prior to my first undated weekly journal. I wasn’t sure if I would use it for an entire year or if I would be able of using it for twelve consecutive months, so an undated planner seemed to me like a good choice. If I fell out of love with the concept of trying to get my life in order, I could always set it aside and come back to it whenever it felt the time was right for me to return, if ever.
Before I had finished using the undated planner for a whole year, I had already ordered a fully dated Passion Planner weekly. Now we buy an undated planner for my youngest son and he loves it, when he is in the mood to do so. Here again, undated is perfect for his situation.
What did it for me when I first stumbled onto Passion Planner, other than loving the fact that for every planner they sell, they give one to someone in need, was the ‘How Passion Planner Works ‘ in the front of the planner.
This two-page spread takes you through working through your Passion Roadmap. It walks you through creating your Gamechanger goals of breaking your bigger goals into smaller goals. Next, it explains how you work at your goals by using the weekly layouts. (I am talking about using the dated weekly planner here, although I do believe there is a version of this explanation tailored to every Passion Planner type that they have. Since I haven’t tried out every single one of them, I can’t tell you absolutely what each type says, but I know the explanations are there in some fashion in every planner.)
The last step of the process is to Reflect by using the Monthly Reflection pages. The one part that helps me more than anything, because of my ADHD brain, is going back through the previous weeks of the month, seeing what I had written done to do versus what I had accomplished and how to take what was there and recraft it for the coming month, or let it go because the goal itself wasn’t as important as I have thought or expected it to be in the first place the month before.
This is a step I had never heard of before, never thought of doing before, didn’t even think that I ought to be doing. Now reflecting on the month past is a horse of another color, but going through and marking what I needed to highlight to help me stay on track… was life-altering.
When I picked up my first Passion Planner, I needed to take more control over my life. Even if I had no clue as to how to plan—because I didn’t back then. I knew how to make lists of what I wanted to get done and didn’t think much farther past that.
I had a baby when I was in my early forties. I had already had auto-immune disorders and the pregnancy triggered more or changed the way the issues expressed themselves. I had also had a series of miscarriages before I had my son, as well as afterward. I am not going to go into that here. Let’s leave it at that I had some heavy medical issues on top of depression and post-partum issues and a dying pterodactyl, I mean a chronically screaming baby, who was not colicky, merely extremely sensitive and overwhelmed by the world in general.
I had to rely on my husband and young daughter to help me as I had my hands full with the baby, who became a toddler and was an even more energetic ball of handful. It became the thing for me of letting everyone else handle certain things. For example, I didn’t pull out the Halloween or Christmas decorations from the basement, which I normally did. Nor did I take them back down or put them away.
This went on for a few years. Physically, I recovered from the birth, but not from the increased physical ailments or the other issues. Our daughter grew into a beautiful young woman and out the door she went. Our toddler became a young boy who was still a major handful. That energy! Wow.
But, now I had to step up more because our daughter wasn’t here to help us. This led us to find out she hadn’t been quite as, uhm, circumspect or purposeful in putting things away in the basement, or anywhere else, for those earlier years. Things had piled up. Things had been piled up on other things. Things were lost, shoved who knows where, all of the things I never wanted to hear. Nor clean up either.
Plus, she had moved out. The pandemic hit. I spent a great deal of time sick during the first two years of the pandemic, but never tested positive for Covid-19.
All of that to say, I went to my latest Passion Planner and sat down. (This was years after that initial undated weekly.)
To be honest, I had not even thought about things beyond the next holiday/birthday coming up. In my planner, they asked me to think about more than that. I had to sit and ponder what I wished for in our life in the next three months, the next year, the next three years, and the next five years. For the next three months, I had a bit of an idea. I might even say that what I wanted for the three months needed to be spread out over the next year because there was no way my body would work with me to accomplish all my goals in only three months, not by myself, not even with help.
It took me about three days of journaling, thinking about things, sleeping on things, and wandering through my brain to see if I could find out what I could want for our future, what I wanted, truly wanted as a goal, as a big dream that I was determined to achieve. Eventually, I found something that lit me up, that also lit my husband up as well.
So, I chose what I could handle doing right at that moment, which encompassed three areas for me personally: home, health, and career. I took those broad goals and I began to mind map them out in the back of my planner where there are plenty of pages, both blank and dot grid, where I could do this throughout the year.
I would break things down and break those things down so that my tasks were even smaller, until I felt able to carry out the tasks.
I made a brain dump of those tasks for my goals on another page in my Passion Planner. I created a short to-do list of the things I wanted to accomplish the soonest. I would write a task for each area of my life I wanted to improve down on a day of the week. My overall goal for completing the tasks on my grand list was to do at least one task from each area per week. I needed to build up my stamina. I needed to build up my tolerance. I also needed to make certain that I gave my body plenty of downtime to rest and recuperate due to my illnesses.
I might be two years into that one-year plan, with another two or three years needed to reach the finish line, but I have not stopped moving forward. If I falter, I can always return to my initial mind map and see where I am heading and why. That helps keep me heading in the right direction.
There are months when I cannot manage to finish any tasks. Many of those broken-down tasks I have had to pull apart and break down even further. I had to make things much more simple in order to be able to manage to do them.
Then there were—and are—those times when it’s not that the task at hand is too big or too overwhelming, it’s that I feel too ill, or too exhausted, or whatever else my body throws my way and I simply cannot function on any level. My Passion Planner helps me to be accountable to myself and to my goals. However, it also helps me to not feel guilty if I cannot do something. My planner offers encouragement and reminds me to give myself grace.
Another way I keep myself positive when I can’t find my way out of my funk is to go back through my planner and read what I have done in the days or weeks, sometimes even months before. I can see how much I have accomplished. I can see, in my own writing, how far I have come, and how much farther I have to go. I can see that perhaps I am having a bad day or an off day. I still have my plan in place. I will be able to move forward as soon as I can do so.
If you would like to try Passion Planner for your planning journey, feel free to use my affiliate code.
Go to the website here:
and when you check out use my discount code for 10% off your entire order: TABITHAL487
Interested in reading more?
Throughout the month of August, I will be posting five days a week on my personal blog here.
Throughout the month of August, I will also be posting five days a week on my Medium account as well.