The Life Plan Review Can Measure Other Goals

By Marshall Goldsmith

Although I created the Life Plan Review (LPR) to close the gap between what you plan to do in your life and what you actually get done, it can serve you in additional ways. 

The LPR consists of four steps — weekly meetings where you answer fixed questions with a partner to improve your life; self-monitoring between weekly meetings, a weekly plan review based on its relevance and your personal need, and the importance of not doing it alone. 

When using the LPR, you will notice it provides other benefits. These include helping you define what matters, and making the rigid structure of the LPR work for you. 

You can use the measuring effort of the LPR to push you to define what matters. The LPR consists of four steps — weekly meetings to answer a fixed set of six questions to improve your life; self-monitoring by tracking the questions daily; a weekly plan to determine relevance and personal needs; and an insistence on not doing it alone. 

When Garry Ridge, the longtime CEO of WD-40 (yes, the blue and yellow can with the red top that’s in everyone’s home) reported his weekly scores in our LPR group, he always stalled on, “Did I do my best to find meaning?” 

For six consecutive weeks, he’d write down a neutral 5, explaining that he was struggling to define his criteria for “meaning.” It’s important to know this fact about Garry: He went back to school and earned a master’s degree in leadership after he became CEO of WD-40, which is like an actor enrolling in acting classes after winning an Academy Award. He is a seeker who takes the practice of management seriously, and he’s constantly learning. 

The LPR played directly into this side of Garry Ridge. He was determined to nail down his definition of “finding meaning.” After six weeks of hearing group members describe their criteria for meaning and scratching to find his own definition, Garry showed up with the answer on week 7: “I find meaning,” he said, “when the result of what I’m doing matters to me and helps others.” This might not be an earth-shattering insight to you, but it was to Garry. 

This wasn’t an isolated incident. When Theresa Park, a New York literary agent turned film producer, told the group that happiness to her wasn’t necessarily “a feeling of giddiness,” I could see everyone nodding, treating it as an epiphany that immediately redefined happiness for them. Likewise, when Nankhonde van den Broek, calling from Zambia, talked about her primary goal as a new leader of an organization: “I want to observe the tornado without contributing to it,” she said. The managers in the group applauded that insight, as if they could put it to immediate use.