So where do you start all planning processes? What steps should you take to turn your dreams of a life, career or business and make it happen? When do you know when to change what you’ve dreamed up to something better? Start here.

1. ASSESS WHERE YOU ARE & WHERE YOU WANT TO BE
You’ve heard it said many times, if you don’t know where you are or where you want to go, you may end up living someone else’s life. There are many free assessments on the web that you can complete that will help you assess your career or business. And if you want, create a Dream or Vision board to help you see into the future.

2. SET YOURSELF UP FOR SUCCESS
Create a performance management process, dashboard, “whatever” to monitor your objectives and action plans. Make it work for you by creating it on paper, or in Excel, or use an online system or a mixture of those. Whatever will help you accomplish this task, do it. That’s about 3 more hours or work to set yourself up for success.

3. GET YOUR REAR IN GEAR
Take what you created and start doing it. Then write down what you’re doing to create a process you’ll follow and tweak as you go along.

4. MONITOR YOUR RESULTS
Before you close down for the weekend, update your monitoring system. This is where you can relate your successes to your actions, and monitoring is usually motivating. For those times when you realize that something you’re doing isn’t working right, you go back to what you created and tweak it so that it is motivating the next time around.

5. GET YOURSELF ACCOUNTABILITY
There are many ways you can get monthly accountability, which really comes in handy. You can get it by means of attending a team meeting, meeting with your board of advisors, being part of a mastermind team or hiring a coach, to name a few, but whatever you decide to do, this is a very important step..

©2010 Maria Marsala, Business Coach, Strategic Marketer, Speaker, Author and former Wall Street Trader.  We help remarkable women CEOs get a life and future from their business by providing accountability, support and a (gentle) kick in the a** when needed.  Subscribe to FOCUS! our tips ezine at Elevating Your Business.com