01 Jan Goal Setting (The most wonderful time of the year)
Some people are against goal setting. Choosing an arbitrary time to resolve to make large changes in one’s life does seem a bit odd. However, anyone who knows me knows that I absolutely love goal setting. I use the end of the year to reset, reevaluate, prioritize, and most importantly setting goals for the next year.
Below is how I set goals every year and some additional fun bonus exercises to include as well to spur additional growth.
- Review previous goals: I personally go back as far as I have records (at this point 6 years of well defined typed out goals) The amount of times I have been eerily accurate is fun to see but I also look for trends of the types of goals I tend to miss and what factor in the goal or my life led me astray.
- Choose categories for goals: These have changed year to year (2012: fighting, business ownership, job 2016: Family, Marriage, Gym, Work, Health/Training, Finances, Charity) but generally they are the areas of my life I choose to focus my efforts in.
- Write out 3 goals in CREATE format.
- C-
- R – realistic
- E –
- A – as now (written in present tense)
- T
- E – end state (how will you know when you arrived.)
- Example from 2012: Goal #1: it is December 18th 2017 and I am the UFC Bantamweight Champion. Jason, Martin, Brandon and Eamonn and celebrating in the ring with me. This win will allow me to expand me circle of influence and use my skills as a fighter to reach out and help more people.
- Create sub goals underneath: if you have a goal related to your marriage create sub goals that relate back.
- Check yourself: Look at your list, determine if you can accomplish everything on the list reasonably in 365, make sure your sub goals keep you on pace and feed back to the larger goals they serve and then… get to work
Some bonus exercises for the end of year:
- (Bio and Eulogy) Write your biography in one page as of today today, write another from the perspective of 10 years in the future, and as your eulogy. how do they differ?
- (More Less Same) List every activity which took up a significant amount of your time this year, then add any activities you want to add for the next year. Now next to every activity list out whether you want to have more, less or the same amount of that in your life in the coming year. Put the list on your fridge and check in weekly. This really helps me in finding time to do the things that are long terms wins like sticking to reading more books.
- (Who gets my time) Make expanding lists of the people who have the most importance to you. I make 4 circles with 5, 10, 30, 100 people in each circle. Then look at where you give you time. Do you ignore your wife to pick up a co-workers call? Are you making time for your most important family and friends? Keep this list somewhere highly visible to constantly serve as a reminder.
- (Make it visal) Look at your goal lists, create photos, pictures, or any kind of representation that reminds you what you will accomplish or the reason why you are doing it. The power of suggestion to the brain is an amazing thing.
So go ahead and spend a few hours really reflecting on where you want to be this time next year, make a plan to get there, and most importantly set some reminders in place to check back in on yourself.