2017 Goal Planning: Week 1 of 3
The new year is right around the corner, and for many of us that means setting new goals. It’s a perfect opportunity to go into a new phase; you feel excited and eager to change. However, most of the times that’s all it turns out to be, empty words on a piece of paper, if even that. Success rate: 5%. Because it’s hard, really really hard, to follow through. At least if you don’t have a strategy for how to make it happen. Still, it’s important seize this rare opportunity; the feeling of a fresh start, momentum and a strong driving force. Only this process of sitting down and write down a bunch of new goals is hard enough, but to actually make them happen is a whole different story.. It’s so easy get overwhelmed by all the things you want to do, no matter how excited determined you felt at the time. That’s why we are going to take our time with this one, doing it properly, which means that the coming three week’s will be all about getting clear with our goals and laying out a plan for how to reach them.
The basis for this goalsetting is a combination of Tony Robbins, Brendon Burchard, and some other Gurus that now their stuff. The big difference being is that they do it all in one sitting, and that’s one way of doing it. But I know we all are busy folks, especially in these times, and seldom take the time to do this, so that’s why I’ve spread it over three weeks so we can take time to digest and build up some real motivation. The outline is as follows:
Week 1: The first week will be about narrowing down one main goal in seven different key areas, and also deciding the order of priority of these. We’ll also be getting clarity for why these goals will be pursued – defining our purposes.
Week 2: The second week, we’ll take time to develop a plan for HOW to go about making this happen, we’ll also start the habit of writing down these seven goals each morning to remind ourselves.
Week 3: The last week, we are only going to write down the goals each morning, but also start to make one small thing happen to take us towards those goals, so we get started with each of them! And then, when the new year comes, we’ll be as ready as we’ll ever be to put in some real effort to reach our goals!
Setting Goals is a powerful thing, so I beg you, don’t underestimate the power of this challenge. Remember that the time you put into planning and doing building the base, is going to determine both the direction and the outcome of your future to an incredible extend. Are you really going to be reactive and let what lands in front of you dictate your actions yet another year? Why let randomness control the direction of your life, when you have the capability of taking control and going where you want to go.
HOW:
So the idea of this week is to create a goal list in seven different areas and find the one important thing in each area to focus on. If we don’t make this prioritization, we’ll just get overwhelmed and nothing will happen! Then later on, when we have gotten started and the routine of actively working on our goals, we can extend what goals we’re going after.
The Seven key areas are:
MONDAY:
- Spiritual (The area which is hardest to grasp if you haven’t done any active work on previously, but the area that makes the most difference. DON’T neglect! Breathing, meditation, stress-management, finding your true self. Find your path, but start actively looking for it)
- Health (improve your fitness level, eat healthier and better, sleep more?)
TUESDAY:
- Social: Romance, Family & friends (Want to get a partner, hang our more with your friends and family?)
WEDNESDAY:
- Personal development (developing skills, reading books, learning a language or some other project that you just know you have to go after – maybe starting a YouTube channel!)
THURSDAY:
- Business/career (Do you have a clear direction of where you want to go?)
- Finances (Planning on making a bunch of money? Long-term investment plan?)
FRIDAY:
- Have Fun (What fun things do you want to do this year?)
Action: So take 5-15 minutes, or just keep taking notes and think about it throughout the day, you’ll probably come up with tons of things, write it all down! But at the end of the day, look through what you’ve written down, and highlight the five most important goals, and then chose the one you want to focus on. Finally, perhaps the most important part, write your reasons for WHY you should peruse this goal. The Purpose of investing your time and energy into this. Ideally you write as much as you can, reasons for why you CAN make it happen, reasons for why you MUST make it happen, and all the GREAT things that will happen if you actually make it happen! It will pay of to not get lazy here.
Setting goals is actually super fun! So let your inner child come out and play, and don’t think about HOW you’ll be able to make it happen, that’s for later. Dreaming is about having faith and trusting in yourself that if you put your mind to it, anything can happen. There are actually two viewpoints to this, some think you should keep your goals realistic, and some say go crazy. From my own experience, I’m with the later. You want to go big, you better dream big. But the key is to divide it into different time horizons – the realistic (S.M.A.R.T) goals are for the more specified HOW planning, the incremental steps to take us towards our dreams, while the big picture is to fill us with deeply rooted motivation and direction. Eating healthy, just because “it’s good for you”, can never compete with the driving force of “turning 100 years old while being in a great physical and mental condition”! Again, that’s why it’s super important to very clearly define to yourself WHY this is so important to you, because if it lacks clarity and purpose, it won’t happen.
So, all this means that in the end of the week, you’ll have seven lists with a bunch of goals, but with one main goal for each area with a clear WHY statement.
You’ll need a place to document and were you later can work with you goals, a place that you store all your things in. Personally I recommend “OneNote 2016”, and honestly don’t know how I would go about living my life without it. There’s also another version only called “OneNote” which is simpler and can be found in Windows store, or you can go with Evernote which is another free, as the others, alternative. Either way, you are going to need a place to store and document all your projects and lists. I see no way around it. It’s also a great place for journaling and logging any kinds of stuff. However, for the initial process of just getting your goals out of your head, a piece of paper and a pen will do the job!
That’s all we’ll do this week, it’s busy times now in Christmas seasons, but I want you to really try to understand the tremendous pay off you’ll get if you invest a few minutes each day to do this. Going through this process in step by step will make us really ground ourselves in the goals that will be the foundation for the entire year – perhaps life – that is to come. If you still find it hard to find time to do this, you can join me, as I’ll be doing an approximately 15-minute live stream each day when I’ll be going through this process, which of course you can look at in replay mood and use only as a timer if that suits you!
And, as I said in the beginning of this video, this will be a three-week series to really make our 2017 goals the real deal and not just some faded dreams to feel bad about a couple of months later. Let’s do this!
/Alexander
You’ll Find OneNote 2016 here:
