New Year brings New Achievements!
Every year I will sit down and reflect, however, that is only one part of the process that has helped me to Take Back Control of my life, business, finances, relationships and health.
On Monday, my wife and I sat down to plan out our goals for 2022, which is an integral part of being able to Take Back Control.
The first phase of understanding what you want to achieve is understanding where you are right now and knowing what your dreams are.
There was a phrase I learnt from the great Tony Robbins that is a four step process used to creating achievements and it went like “Dream-Goal-Plan-Action.”
You have to be able to have a dream and vision for what your future will be like, then you must write that down to become a goal and set a timeline for it, create a step-by-step plan to achieve it and then take action on the plan. Seems pretty simple and it really is, although there is one more step that needs to be added to the process which becomes pretty important from my experience…
That step is being able to reflect on where you have been, what you have achieved and what you have learnt, adding the reflection process in with Tony Robbin’s four steps to achievement process is much more effective and is quite similar to the SMART-ER goal principles for creating goals.
SMARTER goals means “Specific-Measurable-Achievable-Relative-Timely-Evaluate and Re-assess.”
Now, you don’t need to know all of the theory, but understanding that this stuff truly works and is really simple to follow is imperative to creating success, taking back control and achieving more from life.
On Monday, when my wife and I sat down to map out our year for 2022, we utilised the processes above in a very simple way.
We sit down and jot down the main categories that we need to grow in each year to feel fulfilment and purpose in life, you don’t need to just do these five, you could add more if you like, but here they are;
Relationships
Health
Education
Career/Business
Finances
Under each of them, my wife and I will talk about what we want to achieve in each of these main areas in our lives for the year and write down our goals and when to achieve them by. However, my wife and I have discussed at length what we want to achieve together and know pretty well where we want to take our lives.
Becoming clear on what your lifestyle will look like together in 5, 10 even 20 years from now is just as important to creating your goals. Which is probably a conversation you should have with your partner, or having a conversation with a friend if you are single, to get a bit more clear on what your lifestyle and dream for your life will look like. (If you need help on getting clear on what your life will look like, have a read of one of my first few blogs here )
Your dream/aim for your lifestyle does not have to be exact, it just has to be a vision of what it may look like and that is when you can start breaking down how to achieve your dreams.
My wife and I do this through reverse engineering, or essentially taking backwards steps from the dream. Let me take you through a quick example of one of our goals.
We want to move into our dream family home, as one of our goals is to start creating a family of our own. The goal required extensive research, financial planning and much more. Thankfully, I am studying to be a financial planner and a mortgage broker, which made that side of things a whole heap easier, and we have also bought a house before as well.
Ps. With experience and knowledge we have been able to make quick and calculated decisions through planning and taking action, that is why you should seek advice from a professional and leverage their knowledge to make the goal seem attainable. Which has led us to be able to make quick decisions like we did for when we bought land and found a builder for our dream home to be built by mid-2023.
First and foremost, we have a dream of creating a family and having a four bedroom home for that family. Once we have the dream, we set a goal pertaining to achieving the dream, which for us was a few different goals under different categories.
Under relationships, my wife and I placed “Start trying to have a baby by December,” under Finances we placed “sell house” and “save $20,000 by end of year.”
Under career/business, my wife decided her main goal was to “remain consistent in her job,” and for myself it was to “start working as an associate planner part-time once we sell the house.”
As you can see, once you have been able to create your dream, the goals are just stepping stones towards it, the goals become your plan and all you need to do is take ACTION on that plan/goals.
Goal setting is imperative to Taking Back Control of your Life-Health-Wealth and using the start of the year to evaluate and adjust goals as needed is an important part of that process.
You could even evaluate your goals every six months, or even every three months. The last two years have shown just how quickly things can change, which means your goals may need to change along with the world as well.
To summarise on how to start writing down your goals you need to;
Get clear on your dream/lifestyle for the next 5, 10 or 20 years
Reverse engineer how to achieve your dream (Ask a professional or someone who has done it before, they can help here.)
Write down your stepping stones (goals/plan) and make them SMART-ER.
Once you have the goals and your plan, purely and simply take Bold Action!
Use the above to help you get clear and if you need any more help, write a comment below and I would love to get back to you on how you can truly Take Back Control.
Until next time, where I will be getting back to the beginner investor series for the last two blogs!
See you then,
TBC
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