Hi I’m back with a follow-up post on setting clear goals for the year ahead.  I had hoped to get this up a couple of days ago but it took me longer than I thought to do my 2017 review, described in my last post, partly because I had such a lot of detail in my 2017 goals to look back on.  I was able to be really specific about what I had achieved – and where I hadn’t – I was really honest with myself about the reasons why.  I wrote 6 pages of A4 in all…a new record.  I tracked the achievements by category including personal, work related, home, hobbies, holidays, social activities and books read.  A good reference point to look back on – my list of books read finished at 22 – a personal best and a goal ticked right there – yeay!

So now onto 2018 – steps 2 to 4 of the goal setting process recommended by Brian Tracy along with a few tweaks of my own.

Step 2 – Defining your Goals / Setting your “Why”

• Goal categories – I printed a wheel of life from the internet to work from.  This is just a simple wheel template where you can assign multiple goal categories and mark out from the centre from 1-10 shading in areas to show how happy you are in a given category – 1 not very and 10 being 100% happy.  Of course you don’t need a wheel of life, you can just write a list and score them out of 10 but I find that it really helps me to visualise the areas that I want to improve.  It was also great this week to be able to compare this years wheel with the one I did at the start of 2017 – very pleased to say that I made improvements in every area – albeit some more than others.  The 10 categories I use are taken from Hal Elrod’s book The Miracle Morning (more on that to come).  They are:

Health & Fitness – Personal Growth & Development – Family & Friends – Physical Environment – Fun & Recreation – Career/Business – Finances – Significant Others – Spirituality – Contribution/Giving

• Start by cutting out the completed wheel of life and attaching it to a new page in your notebook.
• Next work on each category at a time and jot down what you want to get done this year.
• Next write down your “Why” – this is the best bit, be as honest with yourself as you can be it can be really powerful looking back as a reminder when you need motivation in the months ahead.
• Next for each goal in that category write a specific goal stated in the present tense as though you have already achieved it…something to do with that crazy unconscious mind again.  As an example – under Health & Fitness – a goal might be to lose weight – once you have written your “Why” you would write something like “I am a size xx” and “I weigh xx” inserting your personal targets.
• Now repeat this for every category until you have a list of everything you want to focus on this year.  Take your time – if you are like me then you may find that some categories are much bigger than others – hopefully reflecting those you want to improve most but aiming to be realistic at the same time.
• Dream 10 – the last part of this step is referred to as listing your “Dream 10” or “Magic 10” – this is where you can be as creative as you want – if money and time were no object what would be on that list…it could be something like writing a book, learning to fly a plane, scoring a 180 in darts (one of mine!), moving to the country or moving to another country even.  Let your imagination go wild. We’ll come back to this part in a future post – again it’s all about sewing the seed.  Giving myself a pat on the back as one of my Dream 10 for 2017 was starting a blog – tick!

Step 3 – Working on your number 1 goal

• When you look through your list of goals pick out the number one goal that will have the biggest single impact.  This is where you can now spend some time making a plan on how you will achieve it.  The first step is to write the goal as follows – I’ll stick with the same lose weight example – so on a new page I would write “I achieve my health and fitness goal to be a size xx, weighing xx by xx date”.
• Now list out all the difficulties that you think you might face – keep going till you can’t think of any more.
• Now list out all the resources that you will need to succeed.
• Now list out who you will need to support you in achieving your goal.

Step 4 – Making a plan

• This time on a new page write your goal as a question to yourself “How can I be a size xx, weighing xx by xx date?”
• Now list at least 20 things you can do – if you can think of more keep going but make sure you list at least 20 ways.
• Now identify 1 thing from that list that you can start right now – today – and go do it!

I think that’s plenty to be getting on with, I do hope this helps you put some structure around setting your own goals.  Rather than being overwhelmed with too many things you can focus your efforts in key areas and you can follow the same process when tackling anything major on the list.  It’s often quoted that 20% of goals and efforts can deliver 80% of value so you might want to bear this in mind when picking your number 1 goal.

In an upcoming post I will share how I adapted and started to follow Hal’s Miracle Morning routine which includes spending time to create a personal vision board, a list of daily affirmations (that directly relate to your personal goals) as well as tips on structuring regular reviews to stay on track.  It was through one of these reviews that I made the decision to stop drinking for a month in December – it really is possible to do anything you set your mind to and for me putting pen to paper is the key.  Some facts from Brian – over 93% of people don’t achieve their goals, less than 3% of people write them down but there is a greater than 40% probability of achieveing them if you do.  Good luck if you take the next step – it can take time but it certainly is worth doing.

Have a great week, back to work for me tomorrow, I am raring to go 🙂 x