while goal setting is fun and can get us excited about the year ahead goal planning is even better rather than just announcing what we want to do with the year ahead when we plan a goal we make it so much more likely to actually be achieved we know what we have to do when we have to do it and by taking action on the plan we get things accomplished in this video I'm going to take you through step by step with how I like to plan my goals using one of my actual goals for next
year as an example our first step is to turn to the next available page in whatever writing on you can do this on a scrap piece of paper if you like to but I personally prefer to use a gol planner this is just a journal that is specifically dedicated to planning out my goals doing things like quarterly Reflections thinking about my achievements any challenges goal- getting tactics that have and haven't worked I like to have them all in the same place because then I can flip back through the pages and consider what does and doesn't
work for me as a goal getter and use that information to make further progress in the future on this planning page though I have just put a highlight at the top because I like to have a highlight as a header and we're going to write out a brief description or title for the page that kind of describes what your goal is this doesn't have to be perfectly worded it's just something that's memorable for your goal and in my case I'm calling this one work boundaries while the title just gives us a nice easy to see
caption for what this page is going to be about it is important also to write down what your actual goal is when writing out a goal statement Some people prefer to use the smart system I personally don't like the smart system I don't think it works for a vast majority of goals that we have have so instead I just like to word mine so it's going to be simple easy to remember and it's using wording that resonates with me at the end of the day this is going to be my goal and I need to
be able to remember it and I want to make sure that the wording of the goal doesn't bring up any negative feelings it's something that I can feel connected to in terms of my goal while the heading was work boundaries the goal itself is to set and keep time boundaries for my work hours to increase my time for other life areas while I could have just kept this as set and keep time boundaries for my work hours by adding in that little extra part at the end of the statement it helps to remind me of
my reasoning behind this goal which is the next thing we're going to write down I like to call this section the goal's purpose and it's effectively just the why or reasoning behind the goal now it can be tempting at this point to write out a laundry list of things behind this goal and why you want to work on it but it's actually going to be more impactful if you can get to a root y behind it something that's quite meaningful something that really does resonate with you not only will it be easier to remember that
one more compelling reason but because it's more compelling it means that you're going to be more likely to not forget about this goal and more likely to work on it it is very important at this stage to be honest with yourself don't write down a purpose just because it sounds good or it's what you think other people would want to hear you say with relation to the goal if it's not the true reason behind working on it or if that reason isn't really compelling to you personally then it's not really going to incentivize you to
get to work the reason I've given myself here is to avoid burning myself out allowing me the rest to show up in all of my life areas is the best version version of myself this effectively acts as a reminder to myself as yes you do enjoy your work but if you don't rest then you can't do your best work whether that's in your actual kind of job or work in other life areas too the next thing to think about though is our ideal outcome for this goal what does 100% crazy success look like here this
is our opportunity to dream big thinking about the goal that we've set for ourself what would it look like what would it feel like if you achieved 100% of this to the very best possible version of completion we're not doing this as a way to kind of manifest the goal or anything like that but more so by outlining this ideal outcome we know what we're striving for as we work on it this can also help to incentivize us to work on the goal giving us that reminder of what we're aiming for here what this ideal
outcome is not though is a standard to hold ourselves to and then beat ourselves up when we don't quite reach it while achieving this ideal outcome is you know ideally what we're hoping for that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to happen quite this way especially because we haven't really started working on the goal just yet and we might find that once we start to get underway with it our ideal outcome might actually change for that reason I don't consider this to be something to hold over my head and get all down on myself when my
actual outcome doesn't align perfectly with this Vision but it's a lot easier to take a journey to a destination if you know where you're going in this section we don't necessarily just want to think about the tangible things around the goal but also any thoughts or feelings we're going to have around it once we've accomplished it in terms of the ideal outcome that I've written down for me I've got that I have set work hours both during the week and on weekends that allow me sufficient time to do my work and plenty of time for
fun connection home care and learning I don't feel pressured during my workday and instead have systems that help me get my work done calmly and to a high standard well in advance of deadlines I have at least one dedicated day off each week and I don't work in the evenings my work quality and output rate doesn't diminish from the boundaries I'm keeping now as we know where we're headed and why we're heading there it's time to start thinking about how we're going to get there or essentially what action steps or tasks are we going to
be doing in order to realize this goal this is essentially where we want to brainstorm the different things that we can do to work on the goal whether they be things that we do once or things that we have to do repeatedly I typically like to give myself quite a lot of space to do this part because I don't necessarily know in advance how many action steps there are going to be and the initial list that I'm coming up with I think of this as a brainstorm some of these might get crossed off some of
them might not actually end up being done but because it's a brainstorm to start with it's a lot more low risk we can write things down that seem a little bit silly we can play around with different options for how to realize a goal because often times goal dependent there are a lot of different ways we could take action on it I'm writing my actions list out on the right hand side and you can see I have some different columns running down the left hand of the page these are just to indicate the different types
of tasks I have or how frequently they're going to be done so are they oneoff or are they repeated and if they are repeated how often am I repeating them the initials I'm using here are o for once C for cyclic or monthly W for weekly and D for daily you don't necessarily have to do it in this system you can just write a running list of all the things you want to do doesn't have to have any sorting or organization I just find that this is going to be really helpful when it comes to
trying to take this actions list and putting it into my monthly setups that way I can pull out the things that need to go on a routines or habit tracker I can pull out the things that need to go on a monthly action list or anything like that when thinking about these action steps do give yourself a decent amount of time to kind of think through Ponder the possibilities for how you're going to action this goal but don't get too Lost In The Weeds of it often times I find if I set myself a time
limit for this I'm going to be one more focused on the task at hand and two it means that I have a definite end point so I'm not just sitting here uming and iring trying to think of every single thing and getting it out of my head often times we don't need a perfect plan to get started on our goals so don't let perfectionism in this stage or any of the other ones hold you back from taking the action that's going to get you to where you want to go another thing you can consider when
thinking about your actions list is backwards planning from the ideal outcome you have in mind so taking your ideal outcome what is the thing that has to happen directly before that what has to happen directly before that this won't necessarily be helpful for every type of goal but if you have a goal that's very much kind of Project based it has a set of sequence steps that you need to take it can be a good way to start start your brainstorming once you have your action step brainstorm then it's time to go through and start
to prune back think about any of the ones that realistically you don't have to do them they're not necessarily essential for getting to where you want to go mainly because if you can have the smallest list possible of things you have to do in order to reach the goal then it's going to be a lot less overwhelming and we're more likely to be able to get there the next step we're going to do though is think about how we know we're making progress on our goal I like to call these the metrics of success or
they're effectively the Stones we're going to hit along the way to working on our goal while we do have the ideal outcome that we're aiming for for some of our goals that can feel like quite a way away we might have a long-term goal that we're working on and getting to that end point isn't realistically going to happen in the next week or month or possibly even year so it's nice to have some little winds to hit along the way just so that we know that we're headed in the right direction I like to write
these ones off so that it's a checklist that I can either check off or cross out to say I have done that thing and you might also want to consider how you can reward yourself for this progress as well just make sure that any rewards you're giving yourself don't undo your progress towards your goal for instance if you have a goal around finances then maybe spending a whole heap of money on rewards isn't how you want to play this what are some low cost or free rewards you could use instead I'm not going to be
putting any rewards onto mine mainly because I find that hitting the Milestone is usually enough for me but as I write these down I do try and sequence them in order of when I'll probably hit them this can mean brainstorming in a separate piece of the paper first and then bringing it into the plan or if this is just all of your messy work before you go and write it up formally it's all good to put it in any order on here one of the ways that I find entries for my metrics of success list
is to look over my actions list and think if there are any key actions in there that will feel like a milestone when I've completed them this can sometimes be because they're an action step that comes after a series of other ones so there are other things on the actions list that feed into this or in order to do that Milestone type task I really have to have done some other ones first but otherwise you can just brainstorm for things outside of your task list so they're not so much things that you're going to do
but maybe things that you can achieve through your action taking again just like our ideal outcome you don't necessarily have to hit every single metric of success to get to the end point of your goal but by being intentional about these writing them in a sequential order and having them as things that we can check off along the way it can help keep us more motivated to continue working on our goal before we get into the next stage of our planning process if you're wondering about the system we're using here and the system that I
use for all of my goal setting planning and getting this is what we call Epic goals epic here stands for enjoyable practical impactful and challenging and it's very much a system for people who have found that traditional goal setting systems they've tried previously just haven't really worked for them I was very much the kind of person who was just frustrated by traditional goal setting systems and finding that they didn't fit with me the way my brain works the way my life is so I set out to make myself a system that was flexible enough for
any type of goal I wanted to work on but robust enough that I had a set sequence to follow in order to brainstorm select plan and then action my goals this is the system that I've used with hundreds of students to help them go and achieve their goals and I'd love to help you achieve your goals for 2025 if you're enjoying the content of this video and you want some help for your goal setting for 2025 then I would love to help you there's a link in the description box for where you can find more
information about epic once we have those metrics of success though another helpful step can be timelining these so taking these different steps and thinking about when we want to have them accomplished by again this is not something we're going to hold over our heads it's like oh I said I was going to do this this week and it happened the next week or anything like that but it can help us think about whether the timelines we have in our head for achieving our goals are actually going to be realistic if you have a small laundry
list of tasks that you need to do for this goal and you're like oh yeah I'm going to get all of this done in the first week of the year I mean maybe we could do that depending on the size of the tasks but remember there are other things going on in our lives outside of just our goal workor we need to account for the fact that those are happening too and you might be working on multiple goals at once while I'm not going to be writing a timeline for this goal an example that we
have from a previous goal plan that I made was this one here I like to plan my goals in 13 we blocks or the quarters of the year and because I have 13 cm across in my journal makes it very easy along the timeline though I can just put in the little labels to say when I want to have particular things done you can also use color coding and such to indicate time where you're going to be busy and maybe you don't want to schedule too many deadlines at that time but as said this can
be very helpful for making sure we're not overburdening ourselves or trying to put too much pressure on ourselves in pinch points flipping back to our current goal plan though once we've got all of these stages in with the optional step of timelining then it's time to actually use the information we have on here I typically like to go through my action steps list and think about which one I can reasonably action in the month coming up and I'll move those into my actions list space that I have in my monthly dashboard by just taking out
the things that I want to specifically action in that month it means that I don't get overwhelmed looking at the whole list especially considering some goals that we work on have quite a lot of steps that we need to do as said this is the system that I use to plan out all of my goals because it's flexible enough to be used with any type of goal if you found this video helpful do make sure to go check out epic goals I would love to have you over there with us and help you set your
goals for 2025 but to check out the other goal related content we have on the channel the playlist at the top is where it's at that one includes all of our previous goal related videos including our Deep dive workshops on how to set your goals for the new year so click or tap on that one and I'll see you over there
