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My favorite positive affirmation is that there is NOTHING you cannot DO, or BE, or HAVE! I like to repeat that to myself daily. But one must do some dedicated goal-setting, and a lot of goal-getting to get there!

This was supposed to be a New Year’s post, but unanticipated changes due to my travel schedule forced me to postpone writing it. That’s okay though, travel will teach you a few valuable lessons about embracing change and rolling with the punches. The nice thing about resolutions is that New Year’s Eve isn’t the only time you can make them!

In fact, you can set positive new resolutions for your life anytime you choose! New Years just gives us a great opportunity to reflect on our achievements in the past year and set some meaningful new goals for the year ahead. But you can do this anytime you choose—you can make yearly goals on your birthday, or on tax day, or you can set resolutions every six months, every quarter, or you can even set monthly goals! You get the picture…

It’s already three weeks into the New Year, why should I set resolutions now?

The advent of a new year simply serves as a good reminder to reflect on all the progress you’ve made over the last 12 months and take what you’ve learned, and build a roadmap for the coming year and beyond.

It’s actually better that there has been time for the hype of the New Year to pass by. A lot of people intentionally avoid setting new goals on January 1st because they see New Years “resolutions” as oh-so-cliche. Or perhaps you set a traditional resolution and already fell off the wagon. Revisiting what “resolutions” mean now might give you an opportunity to set more meaningful goals this year. So, stay with me here and embrace the change. Don’t think of this as a New Years post. Instead, we are going to focus on goal-setting for this year.

We’ve already seen how powerful it can be when you set goals for yourself. You won’t succeed at every goal, but review your personal development progress at the end of each year to see how much you do accomplish! Simply setting the goals for yourself will greatly increase the likelihood that you’ll get much closer to your dream lifestyle in all these areas of your life.

But I can never keep my resolutions anyways. Why should I care?

So, as you can already see from my experience getting this post out much later than I intended, embracing change means that you don’t always get to do things exactly when you planned. But that’s okay, just because the timing changes doesn’t mean you should throw away the whole plan! Just having made the plan in the first place makes you about sixty percent more likely to follow through on the action than if you hadn’t made plans and set a time in your head in the first place. So the timing has changed. So what? You can still follow through. That’s what goal-setting is! It’s setting a plan—not a commandment set in stone. Don’t give up on your goals if you miss your timeline.

Another thing about your goals is that they may change over time, or things may happen that prevent you from achieving them. Or you may simply not put in the effort to complete all of your goals by the end of the year. But what matters most is that you set them. The act of making meaningful, clearly-defined goals, and writing them down, will put you ahead of 95% of people out there, and it will certainly point you much closer in the right direction toward attaining the lifestyle that you desire in the year ahead. I guarantee that if you set ten goals for yourself in 2008, simply the act of setting goals for yourself will put you MUCH closer to achieving your dreams! As Abraham Lincoln said, “A goal properly set is halfway reached.” Get clear on what you want to accomplish in the next year, and focus your energy towards those ends, and you’ll likely achieve many of your goals.

Okay, okay. So how do you actually do this?

Now it seems to be a popular thing to try to create 100 life goals or 100 goals for the new year. (Just do a Google search for “100 goals” and you’ll see how many communities there are out there talking about the number 100!) Maybe it’s just that the number ‘one-hundred’ has so much appeal… There’s nothing wrong with wanting to go about it that way I suppose, but I think that’s going about it backwards. You’ve already started out by adding another goal to the top of your pile of things to do: To create 100 goals! But does having any particular number of goals really objectively have any value to you? No. In fact, the number is fairly meaningless, so don’t start out with any particular number to reach.

Instead, try starting with the bigger picture in mind. As Stephen Covey said in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, “Begin with the end in mind.” To do this, we will examine what roles we play, and what we want those areas of our life to look like in a year from now.

Brainstorm your personal Roles & Areas of Focus

The necessary first step is to brainstorm your life roles, and other important personal areas of focus. Some goal-setting systems will tell you what categories to set goals for, but I believe you will come up with much more meaningful “categories” if you reflect personally about what roles you play and what areas of focus are most important to you. This is the system that Tony Robbins uses in his Personal Power seminars, and many other professional coaches (like my friend Tim Walther) use successfully in goal-setting workshops with thousands of people every year.

Think about your work, your family, your hobbies… What roles do you play? For example, when I brainstormed, my roles included freelance web designer, business owner, professional networker, peer mentor, writer, traveler, and artist. But perhaps you are a mother, a CEO, an accountant, rock climber, church member, or amateur filmmaker. The roles that we play are different and unique for each individual. But what “hats” do you wear? What roles are important to you that you want to improve upon in the next year?

Roles tend to sound like titles or jobs, even if you don’t get paid for them! They are how you relate to other people. But besides your roles, what other areas of focus are important to you personally? For most people this will include things like personal finances, health and recreation, social life, and so on. But maybe your areas of focus include nutrition, or spirituality, or professional development and training…

Take some time to brainstorm and reflect on what roles and areas of focus are most important in your life, and once you have them all written down on a piece of paper, imagine one-by-one what each of those areas of your life could “look like” in a year. This is called visualization, and it’s an important tool in attaining your desires. Visualize how much progress you could make towards positive relationships with your family. Or how much you could improve upon your strengths at work. Imagine yourself in a new profession, being paid to do something you love. Or even picture yourself on vacation to some beautiful exotic location! But don’t imagine these things passively—visualize yourself participating in making those changes…in experiencing those improvements and accomplishments. Write down a sentence or short paragraph next to each role and each area of focus about what that “picture” looks like.

Now set some goals!

Now that you have your big picture and you’ve thought about where you’re going with each of your personal roles, you finally have some direction. Visualizing what each of those areas of your life could look like one year from now should give you vivid images of what you want to DO, BE, and HAVE. So the final piece of the puzzle in making meaningful resolutions this year is to break those visualizations down into smaller steps you need to take to get there. What are the next actions that will get you closer to your desired outcomes? If you want to buy a new laptop, how much money should you set aside each month? If you want rock-hard abs, how many crunches are you going to do each day?

The best way to set goals that are longer-term than your weekly To Do list items is to start practicing SMART goals. SMART, in this case, is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. You can review these questions in your head as you set goals, or you may want to write them out for each major goal you set.

Specific — Is it something concrete, that you’ll know when you’ve completed it? This is one big reason why “resolutions” fail. People often set ambiguous goals that are too broad to be actionable or too unclear to know when you’ve fulfilled the requirements. For instance, a popular New Years’ resolution is “to get in shape.” But how are you going to achieve that? That is only a very murky version of the visualization that we’ve already practiced above. Now make it specific!

Measurable — How will you measure your progress at the end of the year, or how will you know when you’ve achieved your objective? Think about what specific criteria you’ll have to fulfill to reach the specific outcome you want. And a good way of measuring may be to keep a notebook of your progress toward the goal, or involving your friends in keeping you on track.

Attainable — Is it realistic and possible for you to achieve this in the year ahead, or are you reaching too far? Do you have too much on your plate already? Set goals that will make you stretch, and learn, and grow. But don’t set unrealistic, far-fetched goals that will only discourage you when you don’t meet them.

Relevant — This is actually my favorite of these questions to ask when you’re doing these mental exercises, and it is the first one that I ask because it is the best filter because I think it is the most important. Put simply, is the goal important? Is it really going to get you closer to your dreams, and is it really worth investing your energy in? Or should you focus on other, more important goals?

Time-Bound — When will you complete this goal? Specifically? By October? In Q1? On your birthday? Remember what I said about being flexible with changes in timing toward the beginning of this post, but attaching a time to your goals makes them immediate and important. Remind yourself regularly that you have a goal to meet. When do you plan to start, and what is your target date for completion?

You may come up with a hundred goals for 2008, or you may come up with just two or three really important goals for the year. I go through my list and eliminate all the non-SMART goals, and I try to focus on the ‘attainability’ aspect of my goals and think about how much I can realistically accomplish in just one year, so I have about 3-4 top concrete goals for each of my 10 roles/areas of focus.

Examples of My Personal and Professional Development Goals for the New Year

In my own brainstorming, I found that my most important Roles included Web Designer/Consultant, Entrepreneur, Blogger, Peer Mentor, Traveler, and Artist. And other Areas of Focus for me included things like Social & Relationship-oriented goals, Health & Recreation, and Financial goals. After I settled on these nine top areas of importance for my life, I visualized how I’d ideally like to see each of those realms in a year from now… What sort of progress would I like to make? What things would I like to learn? How successful can I be in a year? And I not only asked these questions, but I tried to actually put myself in that future reality—what will it feel like? How will I get there? Is it truly important?

So, once I had the broader picture of where I’d like to be in a year (yet still very specific mental images), I worked backwards to think what smaller steps I’ll need to accomplish to get to that point. I tried to frame each of my goals into the three areas of things I want to BE, DO, or HAVE, and I tried to frame them in the affirmative, to reinforce to my own brain that I will accomplish these things this year! I also tried to phrase my goals positively, focusing on what I should do to get there, not what I want to do less of. Here are the 24 major goals I’ve set for myself this year, broken down by my Roles and Areas of Focus:

I. My goals as a Web Designer & Consultant

• I WILL HAVE a dedicated portfolio site for my web development work.
• I WILL HAVE a new Apple desktop computer.
• I WILL EARN $60K as a freelancer this year.

II. My goals as an Entrepreneur

• I WILL BE the owner of my own web consulting business.
• I WILL HAVE multiple streams of residual income (through products, training materials, and partnerships).

III. My goals as a Blogger

• I WILL WRITE at least one high-value article each week for Thrilling Heroics (52+).
• I WILL REDESIGN ThrillingHeroics.com.
• I WILL DO one interview each month for Thrilling Heroics.
• I WILL COMMENT on other relevant blogs for one hour each week.

IV. Career Development and goals as a Peer Mentor

• I WILL CREATE a dedicated Mastermind group website with forums to enable remote discussion of personal & professional development.
• I WILL COMMUNICATE with Mastermind members monthly to follow up on their goal-setting and career planning.
• I WILL READ one personal development book each month.

V. My goals as a Traveler

• I WILL COMMUNICATE with international friends once each quarter.
• I WILL PARTICIPATE in online traveler communities like The Thorn Tree Forums and The Couch Surfing Project.
• I WILL LIVE in Thailand for 3+ months.

VI. My goals as an Artist

• I WILL SELL my photography professionally via an online gallery or stock photography community.

VII. My Social and Relationship-related goals

• I WILL CONTACT old friends on their birthdays.
• I WILL ATTEND Burning Man.

VIII. My Health and Recreational goals

• I WILL DO 30+ pushups each day.
• I WILL DO 3 half-hour cardio workouts per week.
• I WILL HAVE a great road bike.

IX. My Financial goals

• I WILL ELIMINATE any credit card balances.
• I WILL HAVE a $2000 emergency fund.
• I WILL HAVE my own self-employed medical/dental/vision insurance.

Remember, the more specific you get, the more likely you are to actually achieve your goals! I went through all of my goals to see if they were each Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely, and if they weren’t, I’d throw them out. I won’t include each step for ALL of my 24 goals here because I don’t want to bore you! But, I’ll demonstrate with my first goal how I answered these questions in my head:

GOAL: I WILL HAVE a dedicated portfolio site for my web development work

1. Specific: I will create an online portfolio with client testimonials, service & product offerings, and business contact information.
2. Measurable: I’ll know this goal is completed when I have a freelance site on its own unique URL that directs potential clients properly to my pipeline.
3. Attainable: I have built numerous websites in the past, so I will easily be able to build myself a business site (it doesn’t have to start out perfect!)
4. Relevant: This is important in order to establish an online home for my business and build instant credibility with potential clients.
5. Timely: I will complete this project before the end of February, 2008.

Now that you’ve seen my own detailed example of brainstorming Roles & Areas of Focus, visualizing outcomes, and SMART goal-setting for 2008, what are your personal resolutions for the new year? What goals are important for you to achieve this year? If you haven’t already spent time thinking about meaningful resolutions for the year, brainstorm on this and let me know what you think of my process in the comments.

When setting your career and academic goals for your business advancement, consider one of these online degrees that will help you manage your time better.

Please hit that comment section below and share your thoughts… Good luck goal-setting!

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