My advice; stick to your headings and make sure you are flying in balance and at your planned speed. Try planning a nav-ex flying to some big easy to identify targets. Then do the flight, sticking rigidly to accurately flying the plan. I'm pretty sure you'll discover that actually at the kind of speeds and winds you're likely to be dealing with, your planning works really really well if you just fly accurately. Once you have convinced yourself that accurate flying really really helps, and once you've perfected that to the extent that you can free up a bit of a spare capacity whilst still flying accurately, you'll discover all sorts of landmarks that will help to back up the plan as you go, and you'll be able to fly to harder to identify places.
When I was learning to fly fixed wing, I got seriously lost nearly every time I went up! However, once I discovered that there's no point in planning a flight if you don't fly that plan, it all suddenly worked. The problem is, you go up and think you see a landmark you need, and so change your flight direction too early. Instead; look at the landmark, but still fly the plan. Look out for another landmark that either backs up that you are on the plan, or backs up that you should be flying off on that other route - but keep flying the plan. Only deviate from the plan when you are 100% certain that you are not quite right because you have assessed multiple landmarks and can see where you should actually be going. Try doing that with the easily identifiable landmarks for turning points as I've already suggested, so you know you're highly unlikely to get lost, and just prove to yourself that actually, wind predictions are pretty good, and if they are incorrect, it is rare that it is to the extent that you get totally lost by flying the plan.
Good luck.