I’ve been using a Passion Planner for over 6 years. It’s helped me quit my corporate job, learn new languages, travel the world, and scale my business to multiple six-figures. Now you can do the same! Learn how to use a Passion Planner and take a look into how my year played out for inspiration!
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I’m so excited to be sharing with you how to use a Passion Planner!
We’re also going to take a look at my Passion Planner from this year, what came true, what didn’t come true, what I executed on and how I used it to achieve my goals.
The next step is to prioritize. Go back into everything you have written down and circle one thing in each timeframe that would have the most positive impact and these are the ones you’re going to map out in the next step.
What’s really cool about this exercise is first, it removes all limiting beliefs, without any boundaries. Just write down everything you would love to happen in your life and don’t think, “I can’t do this, it’s too impractical. Why should I even bother?”
You have one life to live and it is not a dress rehearsal, so let’s just go with it because you never know what could happen.
The third step is to create your first passion plan. We are going to choose one of the things that you wrote down. We’re going to set a due date and write down every single step that is necessary in order to reach your goal.
After we do all of this, the rest of the Passion Planner is basically getting you to map out how you’re going to achieve those goals monthly, weekly, and then breaking them down into daily habits and daily tasks that’s ultimately going to lead you to your goal.
The first ever Passion Planner that I got, my friend gifted it to me.
I was still working in a corporate job and going through this exercise really allowed me to think bigger than my current situation and my reality.
It helped me think outside the box, it helped me find people who inspired me outside of the corporate world and it just gave me permission to think bigger.
That is the first step because once you know what you want to attract to your life and you’re unapologetic about it, the Universe brings opportunities and people and it just shows you the way to get there.
But you first have to decide for yourself what exactly it is that you want.
In my past Passion Planners, I’ve written down things like:
With every single one of these seemingly impossible goals, breaking it down into necessary steps makes it manageable.
Instead of your goals being lofty dreams that you want to *maybe* accomplish *one day in the future*, it helps you think, “What are you going to do in this exact moment on this day to get you one step closer?”
In my first Passion Planner, I had written down I wanted to learn how to read and write Chinese.
I could speak it conversationally, but I wanted to be able to text my family and my Chinese friends on WhatsApp and WeChat in Chinese because I wasn’t able to do that.
Chinese is not phonetic, it’s pure memorization of characters. So you really have to know what each character is or else there’s really no way for you to pronounce it or read it.
It’s really funny because sometimes my mom will like go grocery shopping and my parents are completely fluent, it’s their native language, but they’ll forget how to write a word in Chinese and they can’t like spell it out.
Anyway, learning how to read and write Chinese was in my first Passion Planner.
I was at a desk job from 8am-6pm five days a week. I had made it a priority to finally do this, which is something that I’ve put off for years and years and years.
Instead of it being a lofty goal, what I did that the Passion Planner helped me with, I ordered Chinese textbooks, I subscribed to a Chinese newspaper online. I committed to only speaking to my parents in Chinese and I would be texting them little sentences every single day to really practice.
Every single day I learned 10 characters and by the end of the year I was having conversations with my parents, which is exactly what I had wanted to achieve.
That is an example of how you reach your goals when you first set them, and then you decide what you’re doing every day to achieve it.
This has helped me quit my job, start my business, grow my business to six figures and then multiple six figures, live in so many different countries, meet the partner of my dreams, be able to surf and achieve time freedom, location freedom, and financial freedom.
There’s so still so much I want to achieve. I want to start investing in real estate. I want to become a Hollywood actress. I want to start a family.
The options and the things you can do in this life are truly limitless. The only limits that exist are the ones in your mind.
The Passion Planner also gives you weekly challenges. It has reflection questions after every single month and holistic practices to get you intentional about what you want to work on and how you focus your time.
It’ll give you prompts like what is the biggest goal you would like to accomplish this year? Who or what motivates you the most? Write some words of encouragement for yourself to read during hard times.
After the annual planner of what you want to achieve for the year, you have the monthly breakdown.
And then it gives you this little grid for your top priority personal projects and top priority work projects.
You also have a little space in the corner where you can break it down, create a mind map of this month’s game changer that you’re going to focus on after you plan out the month.
You then go into your weekly planner if you have the weekly one, and it shows you a week view.
You can choose whether you want it to start on Monday or Sunday. I prefer on Mondays so my weekends are grouped together and you basically just plan out what are you going to work on for the day.
They also give you a section to list out every single good thing that’s happened because we want to focus on what is going right in our lives and business instead of what is going wrong.
I love that in each of the weeks there’s an inspirational quote and overall feel good energy throughout this whole journal.
We then have top priority personal projects and top priority work projects and a space of what they call a space of infinite possibility where I’m constantly just writing down new ideas, creative inspirations, and a place for me to brain dump when I feel like it.
Towards the back of the Passion Planner, you’ll have empty pages where you can draw, where you can mind map, and at the very back there’s a little pocket where you can add in notes or just keep little mementos from your travels or things that you want to hold near to you at all times.
There’s just so much that you can do with a Passion Planner and I’m really excited because I just got a new one for this year!
Do you want one page for each day or do you want a spread of your whole week?
Like I said before, I’ve been using the weekly one and that is what I recommend. I feel like the daily one might be a little too intense because there are some days where I just look at my planner and I don’t really wanna write anything.
I just want to see what’s coming up and if I’m on track.
So I prefer the weekly one, but some people in the Wanderlover community use daily ones. Both have the same purpose. It really depends if you want to be writing in it and journaling for each specific day or each week.
Next, you want to decide if you want the annual or the academic or an undated planner.
The annual ones start in January, so that is when you’re going to do your mind map for the year.
The Academic one is also dated, but I believe it starts in August. It’s mainly for students who start with semesters.
If you want to start at a random time of the year, they also offer undated Passion Planners and you just have to write in the dates and the months yourself.
Like I mentioned before, there is a Sunday or Monday start.
This depends on whether you prefer having your weekends all at the end, or if you want Sunday to be the start of your week.
I prefer my weekends to be together, but I know different people have different preferences and some of my clients do prefer their weeks to start on Sunday.
I prefer physical planners, but Passion Planner also offers digital planners as well. You can bundle up on both or just choose to have it all online with the same pages and functions.
I had an Academic Planner for part of the year, so I’m just gonna read to you what I had written down on July 24th, 2021.
I wrote in one year’s time, July 24th, 2022, the first thing I wanted to achieve was hang five on a long board. It’s just crazy to think that a year and a half ago I couldn’t hang five because now I can hang ten!
Much of why this planner works is when you have a goal, you get rid of all the barriers to get you there.
I had written down I wanted to hang five on a longboard, and after traveling to so many different surf destinations around the world, there are different factors that help you progress in surfing.
Because I had committed to this, not only was I visiting just any surf destination, I wanted to longboard.
More specifically, I wanted to longboard in a bikini.
Even more specifically, I wanted to longboard in a bikini where I didn’t have to drive 20-30 minutes to get to the beach.
Same thing with anything business related, life related, you start getting rid of the barriers to help you get to your goal faster.
I had also wanted to launch a $20,000 mastermind, which I also accomplished. I had a little checkbox next to that.
With any monetary goal, I always break down the steps necessary in order to get there.
I do this exercise with my clients:
I also wanted to go to Rote for Ragz’ birthday because it’s one of his favorite places in the world. He had been talking about it for years and I hadn’t been yet, so I made it happen.
I also wanted to throw in $10,000 in crypto. This wasn’t my wisest financial decision, but I did it anyway.
I wanted to max out my Roth IRA.
The one thing that I didn’t achieve, and I am no longer eligible, I had written I wanted to be under Forbes 30 under 30, and they already came out with the 2023 list and I turn 30 next year.
But that is completely fine with me, as I already got my Forbes feature!
When we goal map and we set these big crazy goals for ourselves, it’s not black and white. It’s not like you are a failure if you don’t achieve this.
If we set income goals for ourselves, it’s not like our business is a failure if we don’t hit the income goal.
After passion planning so many years, what I’ve learned is you are on this path, it’s coming to you inevitably, it’s already yours.
We’re just taking baby steps every day until it is right. And that’s why I feel no pressure to get to these goals.
I know that I’m going to achieve them eventually.
Like with my first investment property, if I don’t get it by July of next year, so what? I’ll definitely get it within the next few years.
The point is I’m working towards it. I am learning about it and it’s going to be mine.
Same thing with you and your business. If you are currently making $2k months or $5k months and you had written down by January, I want to be making $10k months.
If it’s not going to happen by January, know that it’s going to happen, in March or June or January of the next year.
Danielle Hu is a multiple 6-figure travel influencer, business coach, and Host of The Wanderlover Podcast. She has traveled to over 65+ countries running her online business and surfing in remote tropical destinations. Her mission is to help creatives and coaches achieve time freedom, location freedom, and financial freedom through online entrepreneurship.
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