amatyultare

December is almost over; the new year is so close we can taste it. Excited? I hope so! Let’s use that excitement to think just a little bit more about what we want out of the new year. Today’s exercise from 31 Days of Goal-Setting is another one that comes from The Fire Starter Sessions: How do you want to feel in this new year? Choose a word or phrase.

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We’re getting closer to having finished our 31 Days of Goal-Setting! We’ve set our purpose and life goals, a five-year plan, our New Year’s resolutions, and our three-month milestones. Today we’re planning the final step needed to achieve our goals. The prompt is: Brainstorm - what do you need to do on a daily or weekly basis to make your three month plan work?

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We’re on the last week of our 31 Days of Goal-Setting challenge. Yesterday we set our New Year’s Resolutions for 2016 - very exciting! Today’s prompt is: Brainstorm - what do you need to accomplish in the next three months towards your goals for the year?

A year is a long time. It’s easy to procrastinate on goals that you’ll get to “sometime before next December”. Plus, it’s really hard to plan everything you’re going to do for the whole year in January. A three-month or quarterly timeframe is much easier to get your head around and gives you a built-in shorter deadline, making procrastination less likely.

(Side note: if you really like the idea of doing quarterly goal planning, you might like the book 12 Week Year. Some of the suggestions I’ll be making over the next few days originate from that book.)

It’s important to note that you shouldn’t try to work on all of your goals in a single quarter, and you certainly aren’t going to complete all of your 2016 goals in just three months. But for now, go ahead and think a little big. We’ll pare things down tomorrow.

One other word of warning - your three month milestone goals should be achievement milestones, and not simply “do X a certain number of times” unless your larger goals is centered entirely around activity X. For example, if your goal for the year is, “start conversations with strangers more often,” go ahead and make a quarterly milestone “talk to 3 strangers”. However, if your goal is something like, “make more friends”, your quarterly goal should not be “talk to three strangers” because that’s an activity, not an achievement. Instead, make your milestone something like “make one new friend”.*

*These examples are all far too vague and not SMART enough, but you get the idea.

It’s December 24th! Those of you who celebrate Christmas may be anxiously awaiting its arrival. Let’s distract ourselves with today’s question from the 31 Days of Goal-Setting: Brainstorm - where do you want to be in one year? What do you want to have accomplished?

Your one-year goals should be a representative slice of your five-year goals! In theory that makes things easy. But of course not all goals are amenable to being split up into neat 20% increments, and in some cases you’re still figuring out how you will achieve your larger goals. Try to come up with one-year milestones that represent meaningful progress towards your five-year plan.

Yes, that does mean that you should make sure every single item in your five-year plan is represented somehow in your goals for the next year.

At this point, your goals should be 100% SMART. Remember, you don’t need to use language that absolutely anyone would understand, but you do need to use language that makes complete sense to you. And at this level, it’s worth it to push yourself to clarify things, even to yourself. When you find yourself writing “improve X” or “get better at doing A, B, and C”, challenge yourself to specify exact what that means and how you’ll be able to tell that you’ve accomplished it.

We’ve reached Part Four, the final section of our 31 Days of Goal-Setting challenge! This section is all about getting into the nitty-gritty of our plans. But remember, it will all be based on what we’ve figured out about what we want to do in our lifetimes and who we want to be.

Today’s question is: Brainstorm - where do you want to be in five years? What do you want to have accomplished?

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Day twenty! We’re about two-thirds of the way through the 31 Days of Goal-Setting now.

Today we’re getting little more specific about our goals and future, but not too specific. The question is, Brainstorm - what dreams do you want to achieve in your lifetime?

Y’all, true story: today may be my favorite of the entire month’s exercises.

While the last few days have been all about states of being and feeling, your dreams are your somewhat concrete life goals. These can be career aspirations, goals related to family or friendships, “bucket list” items - anything that you think “I’d like to do that/have accomplished that someday”.

Here was my strategy for this exercise: Write down absolutely everything that you ever think to yourself “Wouldn’t it be cool if one day I did…”

Think dreamily about being the bass player for a heavy metal band? Want to save enough money to buy a castle someday? Have your eye on running a marathon one of these years? Swear you’re going to write that epic solarpunk series one of these years? Write it all down.

After you’ve finished your initial list, go back and review each of the goal areas from Part Two. This will probably spark some additional goals you hadn’t thought of. Write them down.

Take a quick look through your list of what you want to be from yesterday. Are there any concrete goals related to them that you haven’t already written down? Then go ahead and write them down.

How are you feeling on the 31 Days of Goal-Setting? Yesterday we did a lot of brainstorming, which might have been fun or very difficult.

Today’s prompt has a short answer, although getting to it will take thought. Pick your top few defining phrases. What is your purpose?

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It’s December 16th! The month is officially past the halfway point and we’ve reached Part Three of our 31 Days of Goal-Setting: Finding Your Purpose.

Purpose is a big scary word. Danielle LaPorte calls it “how you want to feel”; Laura Berman Fortgang calls it your “life blueprint” or “who you get to be”. I like that last one - what kind of person do you want to be?

This is still a really big question, so we’re going to take one more look at the past to get our bearings. Today’s question is: What can your history tell you about who you are?

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So far during this part of our 31 Days of Goal-Setting, we’ve been talking about the categories that I’ve proposed. Today, it’s your turn. What other areas of your life, besides the ones listed above, are important to you? How are you doing in those areas?

I honestly don’t have a lot of suggestions here, since the categories are the major areas that I feel strongly about in my life. Image and appearance, perhaps? Religion and spirituality - I am not at all religious, but if you are, that might well be an area of your life to evaluate.

Use your clues from Part One as well - what kinds of goals have you set in the past? What areas of your life do they point to?

I feel like there’s a 12 Days of Christmas joke I could be making here, but I can’t quite flesh it out. Ah well. Our question today for the 31 Days of Goal-Setting is, How are you doing in terms of joy and fulfillment?

Surprised by this question? You shouldn’t be. I almost wish I had made this question the last of our goal categories because it’s tied to all of the other aspects.

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