Goal Setting and Planning
Another year has quickly come and gone making it the perfect time for year-end reflection and new year planning. Goal setting is a powerful process for thinking about your ideal future, and for motivating yourself to turn vision into reality. The process of setting goals helps you choose where you want to go in life. By knowing precisely what you want to achieve, you know where you to concentrate your efforts.
Reflection
Begin by looking back at your activities over the previous year. Reflect and analyze the things you did well and the areas you did not. Be mindful of the latter and be honest with yourself in order to understand the choices you made and how those lead to questionable outcomes. In doing so you will understand what you need to do in the future in order to minimize lessor decisions.
Defining Values
Looking forward into 2019 it is important to re-assess your life values to make sure they are in alignment with what you believe to be important. These should be simple, explicit, and fixed. These will be your guiderails to help navigate your life and benchmark decisions.
Identify Areas to Make Improvement
Before you begin setting goals you first need to identify the key areas of your life that you need to focus on. Start with bigger picture concepts like personal, family, and work. Within each of these you can break them down into increasingly more specific sub-categories. The end-result will be a specific list of areas you want to set goals for. As a simple example these can be career, education, family, relationships, health, attitude, physical, etc.
Define Goals and Set Targets
Spend some time brainstorming and select one or more goals in each category above that best reflects what you want to do and accomplish in the new year. Consider timing so that you have a small number of significant goals that you can focus on. You also need to set specific quantifiable targets for each goal that will help you better benchmark performance throughout the year.
Formulate a Plan
The last and final step involves formulating an action plan. Create a six-month, quarterly, and a one-month plan of progressively smaller goals and targets that you should reach to achieve your year-end goals. Then create a daily to-do list of things that you should do daily to work towards achieving your monthly, quarterly, bi-annual, and annual targets.
Review
Finally, review your plans, and make sure that they fit the way in which you want to live your life. As a check be sure your goals meet the SMART principle. They must be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. If any of them fail to meet these five criteria then you need to go back to the drawing board. Best of luck to you in the new year!
Remember train smart and train hard!
January 11, 2019
JAN
2019