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Mr Kofi Bentil

Why you need a 20-year personal strategic plan : Kofi Bentil explains

For some people, the next 20 years will find them retired or preparing to take a bow from active work. For several others, however, 2035 will probably coincide with the peak of their professional lives.

While many people look into the future with anticipation, very few have designed a personal strategic plan based on which they model and track the progress of their lives. 

This lack of personal long-term plans with short-term components, is not good for the course of one's life, a planning consultant and management member of Imani Ghana, Mr Kofi Bentil, has said.

Mr Bentil has, therefore, urged Ghanaians to develop the habit of writing down what they intend to do with their lives in the short, medium and long terms, explaining that a documented plan usually becomes a ruler with which one can track the progress of success and failure over a period.

Although most plans can be kept in the mind and followed through over a period, he explained that documenting them put a lot of emphasis and weight on the goals to be achieved, hence the need to always write them out.

He made the comments on Springboard, Your Virtual University, on Joy FM, where he touched on why people must develop a 20-year strategic plan for themselves. Mr Bentil was the guest speaker on the second edition of the show this year, which centred on the need for and guidelines to developing and documenting a 20-year personal strategic plan. 

He explained that a plan guided an individual on how much time he or she had to meet or exceed set goals as well as the level of seriousness the person should put into realising those targets.

On whether or not it was okay for people to develop 20-year plans, looking at the length of time involved, he responded in the affirmative, explaining that what mattered was not the success or otherwise of the plan but the decision to even plan what to do and achieve in the 20-years.

"For some people, 20 years looks faraway but it will come so fast and you will not even realise what happened. Frankly speaking, it does not take long," he said on the show, which is hosted by Revered Albert Ocran of Legacy and Legacy.

He continued; "I am saying this to emphasise the fact that you should forget about whether you will achieve the plan or not. I think that scares people but just put something down in terms of where or what you want to be in 20 years because it will come just like that," he added.

 

Turning Point

Many people relegate personal planning to the background till they get an experience that serves as a wake-up call to plan. Mr Bentil recalls one such experience in his secondary schooldays when, with two months to examinations, he came across a classmate who seemed to have finished learning and was revising for the science paper. 

"It dawned on me that I was going to write the same paper with this colleague who was far more prepared. I resolved to get a particular aggregate and drew up a plan to achieve it. The next two months were highly focused and I ended up achieving the exact aggregate I set as a personal target," Mr Bentil said.

 

Planning and age

Touching on the benefits of a 20-year personal strategic plan, Mr Bentil said it gave the planner the opportunity to know what he or she had done or was yet to do. "For me, a plan determines how much time you are wasting so that you can kick up, back up and wake up in life," Mr Bentil said.

Although developing a 20-year strategic personal plan is important for younger people, Mr Bentil stressed that planning should not be limited by age, given that those above 60 years old could also develop their own 20-year personal plans. 

"It is never too late because the older you get, the more critical it becomes. If you are young, it is critical to plan because it helps you not to waste a lot of time and if you are older, it is important because you have reached the critical portion of your life and you need to be sure what you want to do at what point. So, whichever way it is, the world today requires you to plan," he said.

 

Guidelines to planning for next 20 years

The idea of developing a personal strategic plan for the next 20 years was greatly popularised by the International Central Gospel Church (ICGC) in 2014. The General Overseer, Pastor Mensa Otabil, developed a model on how to plan for the next 20 years, which was widely circulated and adopted by several other organisations.

The four-page document, currently available on the church's website, was used as the blueprint to the development of a personal strategic plan on the one-hour show.

"Even before you start planning, there are four pillars; what kind of person you want to be (your character), what you want to achieve (your accomplishments), what you want to do (your occupation) and what you need to own (your assets)," Rev. Ocran, who doubles as a pastor at ICGC said.

Explaining further, Mr Bentil said the four questions were an interrelated framework for guiding each person's key choices and planning decisions.

Taking inspiration from the saying, 'A good name is better than riches,' he said character was the cornerstone of man's existence, hence the need to plan how to build it in the next 20 years.

Touching on defining one’s dream or purpose, Mr Bentil said it was tied to occupation and assets because it helped the planner to make the most of what he or she wanted to become.

"If you had a dream of becoming something and you are not able to achieve it because of something, do not continue holding on to that dream; move to the next thing and settle for the next best. It is not as if you are a failure if you are not able achieve the one thing you have always wanted to achieve. It just might not be what God intended for you," Mr Bentil explained.

He stressed that one's purpose in life must also rhyme with taking care of his or her children and family, adding that professional pursuit must not be at the expense of caring for one’s family.

He further explained that new-year resolutions, which had become a tradition across the world, were not comparable to personal strategic plans, however short or long such plans may be.

"The resolutions tend to be flippant wish-lists of series of things that you may wish to change immediately or things you wish were present or absent. However, the 20-year plan is more holistic," he said. GB

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