If You Do These Five Things You Will Never Have to Be Embarrassed by Your Person-Centered Plans

The essence of person-centered thinking and planning is to help and support people so that they learn from the experiences of yesterday, enjoy today and look forward to tomorrow, view life positively, and act on the opportunities and possibilities that come their way.

We offer five recommendations to keep you from being embarrassed by your person-centered plans, whether talking with a parent or being questioned by a surveyor.

1. How many of the people your organization supports value their person-centered plan enough to keep it with them? How many use their plans as guides as they make choices and move toward goals that are personally important? Using this measure as an organizational goal adds momentum: if increasing numbers of the people you support value, keep, and frequently use their plans, your person-centered plans will tend toward better quality as will your planning process.

2. Person-centered planning is about relationships. To what extent do you teach your plan facilitators about the skills that produce plans that people value? These are the skills of listening, understanding, being there for someone through the process of planning and implementing that plan. Person-centered facilitators, coaches, and guides are true champions for the process and the person. They are very important in the life of the person receiving support.

3. Don’t confuse a person-centered plan with a person-centered record. A truly person-centered plan is a genuine guide to a person’s flourishing in the coming year, not a cut-and-pasted compliance document. This frees your plan facilitators to focus entirely on the person, to guarantee that each one has help in creating and implementing a plan unique to them—a path to their best possible life.

4. Use The 10 Principles of Person-Centered Thinking to guide the planning process. You can download a copy of the Principles here.

5. Our fifth recommendation may be new to you, but it is a key concept, adding the science of human flourishing to person-centered planning.

Know, teach and use the six elements of well-being based on the thoroughly researched benefits of positive psychology. They will serve you well in many contexts with the people you support, but they’re especially helpful for person-centered planning.

Here are the elements in a nutshell, much-condensed from their original appearance in Martin Seligman’s 2011 book, Flourish. But the foundations of well-being don’t need to be complicated. They need to be adopted, explored and put to use.

•Positive Emotion: Moments of lightness, happiness, celebration, joy

•Engagement: Moments of being in flow with what we’re doing

•Relationships: At least one relationship that helps a person feel a deep sense of belonging, but also acquaintances and people whose role involves assisting the person

•Meaning: Belonging to something you perceive as bigger than yourself

•Accomplishment: Choosing to get better at something, the joy of meeting a challenge, learning something new

•Health & Vitality (added after Flourish was published): Energy, stamina, physical health

Educate your staff on the elements of well-being; teach PERMAH courses in your day programs; make well-being a cornerstone of your organization’s culture. The more you study and work with the elements of well-being, the more you will find them a useful lens through which to view the process of planning and implementation.

Overall, help your staff to remember that the goal is an improved life, not a better piece of paper. Person-centered plans are an active roadmap for the person who is on the lifelong journey of flourishing – greater well-being.

My Plan to Flourish, High Tide Press’s new mobile app for person-centered planning is based on the book, A New Plan: Using Positive Psychology to Renew the Promise of Person-Centered Planning. The app will help you bring to life the elements of well-being for the people you support, giving them a truly person-centered plan they can now keep with them—on their own phone or tablet—as a personal guide along the path toward their best possible life.