Setting goals for the year ahead – Goals for a successful future

Are you looking to make a change in your life?  You might be embarking on a new career, an exciting new project, or maybe setting a New Year’s Resolution.  Whatever your aims, you can improve your chances of succeeding by doing a great goal setting exercise…

If you ask any successful person how they achieved the things they have, you’ll usually always hear about their vision and idea for something.  An idea for success, maybe… An idea for happiness… possibly.  An idea that compelled them to act and make sure it became a reality… most definitely!

Success can be measured in a number of ways and criteria dependant on your own goals in life, and your own set of beliefs.  Success to you might be losing a little bit of weight, it might be buying a new car, or having a top level executive job.  Success might even be something which benefits other people.  It could be doing work for charity, raising awareness of a condition, or providing a valuable service to your community.

Whatever your goals and ideas for success are, you can achieve them with a few easy – yet important – steps.  This article will help you to set your goals for the year ahead and begin creating the future that you really want.

The Technique

We will break your goals down into a few key (and easily digestibe) parts.  This will help you to set specific goals in all areas of your life, and to avoid falling into the trap of spending too much time and energy in one or two areas, and neglecting the rest of your life progression.

Step 1 – Establishing what you really want

For all of the following categories, write down anything that you would like to change.  It doesn’t matter how trivial, or grand that these objectives are.  The important thing is that you write them down.  Don’t worry, we won’t need to achieve all these just yet, and you’re not binding yourself to a personal development contract quite yet!  Don’t think about how attainable these goals are, or what’s stopping you from getting them.  Just be creative and excitable and naive about it.  Write down what you would really want if you could have anything, but don’t forget the trivial things too – those can be the most rewarding and fun to achieve.

• Relationship/Family Goals – How do you want your love life to change?  If you are single, do you want to find a partner?  If newly married do you want to start a family? Whatever your age, maybe you want to devote more time to your parents, grandparents, or siblings?
• Financial Goals – How would you like your financial position to alter?  How much do you want to earn, and when?  Do you want to invest in anything?
• Career Goals – What do you want to be doing?  Do you want to carry on as you are?  Do you want to progress in your current job?  Do you want to change jobs/career?  Do you want to set up your own business?
• Creative Goals – Is there anything artistic or creative that you want to achieve?  Do you want to paint?  Do you like photography? Is there anything else you wish to achieve that’s fun and new to you?
• Contribution Goals – Do you contribute to charity or the community?  If so, what else do you want to do?  If not, do you want to help in your community with anything?  Can you help raise awareness of something worthwhile?
• Physical Goals – How do you want your body to look?  Do you need to put on some weight?  Would you like to lose some weight?  Do you want to start going to the gym, or eating more healthy foods?
• Emotional Goals – Where would you like to be emotionally?  What is happening in your life that makes you happy, and what would make you feel even better?  What’s not going so well, and what would you like to change about it?
• Educational Goals – What do you want to learn?
• Social Goals – How do you feel about your social life, and relationships with friends?  How would you like this to be different?

Step 2 – Working out what you need to do to achieve your goals

For each of the items that you listed in the first step, go through and write down what actions you would need to do to achieve the goals.  For example if one of your physical goals was “drink less alcohol”, then your action could be “Limit myself to two alcoholic drinks, twice a week”.  If your goal was “Do some painting”, then your actions might be “Join an art group.  Take painting lessons.  Visit the Richard Goodall Gallery.”  By doing this, you start to become more attuned to solving the problems that would have previously stunted your thought process.

Step 3 – Prioritisig your compelling goals

Now you should have a pretty big list of goals and actions.  Go through the list of goals and write a number next to the goal, representing how important it is that you achieve that goal.  This will help you to prioritise what you really want.  The scale should be 1 to 5, with 1 being the highest priority, and 5 being the lowest priority.

Step 4 – Being practical about your actions

Go through each of the actions that are required to achieve your goals, and label each one according to its difficulty to achieve.  Write a number between 1 and 5, with 1 being the easiest, and 5 being the most difficult.

Step 5 – Working out how long you need in order to achieve your goals

Compare your list of goals and actions, and estimate how long you’ll need to put into action.  You should label the goals in the number of years they would take to achieve, starting from 1 year upwards.  If the goal is “Eat more healthily” and your action is “eat an apple a day”, this would only take a matter of minutes to put into action, however we class this as a “Year One Goal”

Step 6 – Shortlisting and organising your goals for the year ahead

Work through each of your goals and actions that you’ve labelled as “One Year”, and start to organise them in a way that motivates you to start working towards them.  A good way to do this is to use the numbers we assigned earlier to make a priority list.

Firstly, organise your goals in numerical importance order – All the goals with a “1″ should go at the top, and the ones with a “5″ should be at the bottom.

For each of the actions, start to list them under each of your shortlisted goals in difficulty order, with the easiest at the top of the list.

This process will help you to organise things in a way that helps you build up momentum and determination throughout your year.  You will be able to see things progressing and moving in the right direction in an organic manner by tacking some of the easier action points first.  It’s like getting up a staircase – you need to start by walking up the lower steps so that you can easily reach the higher ones – If you removed teh low steps, you’ll struggle to get the momentum to reach the higher ones.

Step 7 – Review your goals

Have a look through your list of goals for this year.  Does it make you feel good and determined to succeed?  Are you happy with everything in the list?  Is there anything missing?  If you’re not entirely satisfied, work back and see what you can change.

Step 8 – Take action

You’ve got your action plan in front of you now.  You have a set of goals, and a list of things you need to do to achieve them.

• Copy the list onto a chart or large piece of paper.
• Stick the list to your wardrobe, bathroom cabinet, front door, fridge, or anywhere else for you to see each and every morning, day, and night.  This will help you to commit to the goals and keep them fresh in your mind.
• Find photos of what you want to achieve and print them, keeping them wherever you’ve stuck your list.  This will give you a visual cue to achieve your goals.  If you’ve not got photos, do a quick search of Google Images and find something similar.
• Do something each and every day to work towards your goals.
• When you put something into action, highlight it on the list.
• When you complete an action, tick it off.
• When you achieve a goal, circle it.

Good luck with your goals in life.  If you would like further information or support, contact us by email, subscribe to our Twitter and Facebook channels, follow the RSS feed, email us, or leave a comment in the area below.  We’d love to hear from you.