New Year- Goal Setting

Whether it be a new year. new month, new week, or even a new day, settings goals should be apart of your life.

I am firm believer that goals drive you to finish your day feeling accomplished and productive. Goals can be simple tasks that you can check off daily or something that you work at everyday.

Today I want to talk about my process in setting goals and creating an action plan to actually accomplish them.

Goal Setting

I’m going to break this down for you in several different categories: personal, relationships, career, health & fitness, and spiritual.

When you break down your goals into smaller categories it helps you narrow in and get more focused! The more detailed your goals are the more likely you are to accomplish your goals and you are 10x MORE LIKELY to be happy! You see what I did there?

Personal Goals:

These goals can be good or habits you want to make or break.

Some examples would be: Read more books, Improve body language, Wake up early, Listen Actively, etc etc

Relationships:

These goals are associated with all of your relationships: friends, co workers, boyfriend/girlfriend, husband/wife, extended family, siblings, and parents.

Some examples could be: connect with a old friends often, More quality time with Husband, open communication with parents.

Career:

These goals are based on your current job or the job you WANT to have!

Some examples: more networking with professionals in your field, expanding your training in your given expertise, improve work performance, strengthen current professional relationships.

Health & Fitness:

This category is very popular this time of year and everyone wants to eat healthy/start a workout routine!

Some examples are: eat more fruits/veggies, cut out soda, practice yoga daily, meal prep food weekly, cut out junk food, workout 3-4 times a week.

Spiritual:

These goals are connected with your spirituality and look different for everyone.

Some examples are: read bible daily, attend church weekly, create a bible study group, complete a daily devotional, pray more.

Now, you can have several goals under each of these categories but keep in mind you are most likely only going to focus on a couple during any given time. However it’s important to jot everything down and not hold yourself back.

This process may take a while and frankly when you are creating your goals it should take a long time. The more thought you put into the goal setting process the better your outcome will be. You also want to be very specific with your goals as it will help you in this process.

You can adjust your goals as they year goes on, add new goals, or even remove something that is no longer relevant.

Tip: Write each goal on a post-it note. Designate different colors for each category. This will make the action plan easier.

Our next step is creating an actionable plan to actually accomplish these goals.

Action Plan:

Now I would like to warn you that this next step is also pretty time consuming. You might be thinking, “but Liz just writing out my goals took forever.” The truth is that anything worth having takes work and if it were easy than everyone would do it. Was that too cliche? LOL

Keep in mind you can split up your goal setting sessions by doing 1 or 2 categories per day and not all 5 categories in one day!

Ok, now lets get on to the Action Plan!

Step 1:

Go down the list of your goals and categorize them by: Daily, Weekly, Monthly. Any goals that do not fit into these categories will be put through a different process.

Daily Goal could be: wake up early, eat dinner with family, create a to-do list for work, drink more water, get 30 minutes of exercise.

Weekly Goal could be: meal prep, attend church, have a meatless monday, read more, complete 2 blog posts, have a date night with Husband.

Monthly Goals could be: attend networking event, complete a book, hang out with an old friend, Go on A hike.

Step 2:

You may have goals that didn’t really fit into the categories above so you want to take remaining goals and split them up into: 1-3-6-9-12 month goals. You don’t have to have a goal for each, these are the options you have in terms of time frame.

The idea between splitting them into these categories is that these goals usually require more time and work to complete. These goals are the more complicated ones you wrote that require you to do a lot of little things before you see the end result.

1 month goal: Lose 5 lbs

3 month goal: Plan an LA blogger meet up

6 month goal: Travel to somewhere new

Step 3:

Begin to clump all of your goals into the same categories. If you followed my tip and did post-it notes than it’s easier. Divide them up by daily, weekly, monthly, and your month goals as well that need more dedication.

This will allow you to see how much you have in each category. Now depending how balanced they are then maybe you need to start moving goals around. You might have put that “daily” you want to exercise, read the bible, meal prep, meditate, read a book, write a blog post, and practice a new hobby. You start to realize that you may want to move somethings around to other categories like doing things weekly or monthly instead.

This step is all about assessing your goals and seeing if it’s realistic to fit it in your day with your job, family, social life, and home-life.

Step 4 *Most Important*:

The next thing you want to do can either be in an excel document, or notebook. Post-it notes may not be enough room for you.

You want to go down each goal within each category and write down a couple things you need to in order to accomplish that goal. We are going to call these “tasks.” You also want to include specifics now to each of your goals if you haven’t done so already. You want to read weekly, well how much, 1,2, or 3 chapters? You want to work out? How many days out of the week, how long do you want to exercise, and what type of exercise?

The more specific you are the better.

Example:

Daily Goal: Wake up Early at 6:00 am

Tasks: set a nightly alarm, be in bed by 10 pm, no electronics after 9, get clothes ready for morning

Weekly Goal: Meal Prep healthy food through out the work week

Tasks: Grocery shopping completed on sundays, research/determine food menu Saturday, allocate 3 hours for cooking on sunday, buy appropriate meal prep containers.

Notice that I am very specific in not only my goals but my tasks as well. Take the time to go down each goal and think about those little things that will help you complete each goal.

Again, this process does take longer but the more time you spend on your goals the more you are likely to accomplish them.

If I said I wanted to eat healthy in 2019 but didn’t take the time to actually plan out how that looks, what do you think ends of happening? You end up eating unhealthy !

This step is especially important for your complicated goals. I’ll give you an example below!

Complex Goal Example:

6 month/summer goal: Travel somewhere New

Tasks: research destinations , look up general prices for wanted destination and deposit needed, determine total spending budget for trip, save $_____ monthly for traveling expenses, book the trip, put in notice at work, look up things you want do/see, buy outfits for trip, etc.

Now you can see exactly what you need to do, how much you need to save, what you need to cut out,etc etc.

Step 5:

You have completed the majority of the work now it’s just following your action plan and ACCOMPLISHING YOUR GOALS!

Believe it or not that was the hard part because now you have worked through each goal knowing what you need to do.

I hope that you found the goal setting useful as well as the action plan. To complete the whole process it should take several days because it is very detailed.

So lets accomplish our goals together because once you have a plan it makes it that much easier! Let me know if you would like to see what my goals are this year and I would love to share them with you!

Well It’s been real.

XOXO,

Liz-Laugh-Love