Goal Setting
With the new year fast approaching and less than two months until the end of the year, this is a good time to reflect on your goals for this year and also start planning for next. First reflecting on your goals and progress this year, look back at everything you set out to accomplish and all the progress you made. Recognize how much you’ve accomplished, grown, and learned. Bu t also look to where you could have done better, made more progress, and where you fell short. This will help you take those lessons learned and apply them to your next year.
Goals, which are probably the most discussed Friday Fundamental topic, are absolutely necessary if you want to live your life with intention. David Osborn, author of Wealth Can’t Wait, Miracle Morning Millionaires, and Tribe of Millionaires, talks about creating his flight plan for his life. This flight plan is a set of goals that he uses to live an intentional life. They’re the set of plans to get from one point to the next.
You can create your own flight plan for your life. By assessing where you are now and where you want to go, you can develop a flight plan to get you there. What this really means is creating goals that will get you to where you want to go.
I’ve learned that setting and achieving goals is a learned skill. My personal goal-setting journey started out with New Year’s Resolutions like so many others do. Then I started setting 10X goals, writing them down every day. This 10X goal setting, inspired by Grant Cardone, is great at creating an extraordinary vision. But I found writing down 10X goals every day, I wasn’t necessarily making actionable progress towards them. These 10X goals were more of an intention than a goal, meaning they were my desired outcome, not the action required to get those outcomes. It’s here I started to realize this difference in goals and intentions.
You might have an intention to be fit with <15% body fat and six-pack abs. This is an intention – the desired outcome. Your goals to get that outcome might be to exercise 5x per week for 30 min, only eat sugar 2 days per week, and keep your daily calorie count below 2000 calories. These are your goals. Your intentions are more results-focused, whereas your goals are actions-focused.
Using the flight plan analogy from David Osborn, let’s look at how you can develop your own flight plan. The purpose of having goals is to get you somewhere you are not currently. The first step is figuring out where that is. This is your vision. Your vision is just as it sounds. It’s your vision for how you want your life to be. From work/life balance to family, finances, hobbies, lifestyle, travel, etc., visualize as specifically as possible what you want your life to look like.
From there, you can create goals that will get you to that vision. For example, if you want to spend 3 months per year vacationing with your family, completely unplugged from work, then you need to identify some goals that will get you to that point. You might find that you need to earn $10,000 per month in income for 9 months per year so that you can afford that lifestyle. Great! Now we’re making real progress here!
Categorizing Your Goals
Once you have your vision crafted, it’s time to identify some goals. Breaking your goals into categories is a practice that many high performing people use. You can create categories that fit your life. Some examples are:
- Health, Nutrition, and Fitness
- Relationships
- Spiritual
- Personal Growth / Education
- Finance
- Environment
- Career / Business
You can create categories that fit your life how you want. The entire purpose of setting these goals is to live your life with intention however you want.
It’s okay to change your goals as you go. After-all, you won’t be the same person in a year as you are today, especially when you are on a path of self-improvement. But don’t wait to start setting your goals and working towards them. Start now. There’s no better time. Give some thought to your vision. Build some goals around that vision, and start taking action. Soon enough, you’ll look back on your journey to realize how far you’ve come.
Resources
David Osborn.com
Wealth Can’t Wait
Miracle Morning Millionaires
Tribe of Millionaires
