Coaching practices for Five Year Plan Exercise
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Five Year Plan Exercise, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I’ve got exactly one picture of how my next five years go and I keep polishing it, but it’s never occurred to me to seriously imagine a completely different life
- When I do have a free five minutes to move, I waste the whole thing dithering over what to actually do, and by the time I’ve decided the moment’s gone
- I either cling to priorities I set ages ago that don’t fit my life anymore, or I only ever rethink them in a panic when something’s already going wrong
- Whenever I try to narrow down what matters most I can’t bring myself to actually cut anything
- I did the whole exercise once for a big goal and it helped, then never touched it again — and now every new thing I want, I’m back to just daydreaming about it.
Practices that may help
- Draft three Odyssey Plans
Sketch three different five-year lives — not variations on one, but genuinely divergent paths.
Designing Your Life, Made Practical - Design a 5-minute bodyweight routine as your default snack
A repeatable, no-equipment 5-minute routine removes the decision cost from every exercise snacking session.
Exercise Snacking, Made Practical - Run a quarterly focus review to refresh the lists
Revisit and rebuild both lists every quarter — priorities shift, and so should the lists.
Warren Buffett’s Two-List Strategy - Circle your top 5 without negotiating
From 25, choose exactly 5 — the ones you’d feel worst about not doing.
Warren Buffett’s Two-List Strategy - The Ignatian Examen: Five Movements of Daily Review
The Ignatian Examen is a five-step daily prayer and reflection practice developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola: give thanks, ask for clarity, review the day, face what fell short, and resolve what comes next. As a structured reflection method it is centuries-old and widely practiced; its benefits are supported by the broader research on gratitude, emotional review, and implementation intentions, not by trials of the Examen itself. - Run WOOP as a quick repeatable routine
Use the full four-step sequence regularly — it is a few minutes, designed to be reused.
WOOP: Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan - Commit to only a few goals per cycle
Choose one to three goals for the 12 weeks so effort concentrates instead of scattering.
The 12 Week Year, Made Practical - Eight Brocades (Baduanjin)
The most studied qigong sequence: eight structured movements combining gentle stretching, balance, and slow breathing.
Qigong: Evidence-Based Mind-Body Practice - Plan–Do–Study–Act: Deming’s Loop for Personal Improvement
The Plan–Do–Study–Act (PDSA) cycle is a four-step iterative method developed by W. Edwards Deming: form a hypothesis, run a small test, study what actually happened, then act on the lesson before cycling again. Originally industrial, it applies directly to personal skill-building: it replaces vague "try harder" with small, testable experiments and forces honest assessment of results. - The Five Whys
The Five Whys is a root-cause analysis technique developed by Sakichi Toyoda and used in the Toyota Production System: when a problem occurs, ask "why?" five times in succession to move from the surface symptom to the underlying cause. In practice, the right number is rarely exactly five — the goal is to keep asking until you reach a cause you can actually fix, rather than stopping at a symptom. It is a widely used practitioner method; controlled research on its effectiveness is limited, but it is well-supported by case evidence from manufacturing and lean processes.
Related concerns
- Top 5 Goals Exercise
Use the full four-step sequence regularly — it is a few minutes, designed to be reused.
Run WOOP as a quick repeatable routine
- Warren Buffett Goal Setting Exercise
The Buffett two-list strategy asks you to write down 25 career or life goals, circle the top 5, then treat everything else on the list as active avoidances — not "do later" items. The story is apocryphal and its precise origin is unverified, but the underlying principle — that near-priority goals steal attention from top priorities — is consistent with how cognitive resources and opportunity costs work.
- When Qigong Eight Brocades Baduanjin
The most studied qigong sequence: eight structured movements combining gentle stretching, balance, and slow breathing.
Eight Brocades (Baduanjin)
- 12 Exercise Circuit
The original protocol: 12 bodyweight exercises, 30 seconds each, 10-second rest between — done right, it is genuinely hard.
Master the core 12-exercise HICT circuit
- Buffett 25 Rule Selection
The Buffett two-list strategy asks you to write down 25 career or life goals, circle the top 5, then treat everything else on the list as active avoidances — not "do later" items. The story is apocryphal and its precise origin is unverified, but the underlying principle — that near-priority goals steal attention from top priorities — is consistent with how cognitive resources and opportunity costs work.
- Buffett Not To Do List
The Buffett two-list strategy asks you to write down 25 career or life goals, circle the top 5, then treat everything else on the list as active avoidances — not "do later" items. The story is apocryphal and its precise origin is unverified, but the underlying principle — that near-priority goals steal attention from top priorities — is consistent with how cognitive resources and opportunity costs work.
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