8 Effective Steps for Goal Setting in 2018

Have you abandoned your New Year's resolutions yet?

Yes? Don't be embarrassed, according to Business Insider, you're in the 80% majority which abandon their resolutions within 6 weeks. Even though we all know the importance of goal settings to achieve a successful career, start your own business, or flourish in your personal life, not many people can last past January.

Over the years, I have tried many different goal setting methodologies: Live Your Legend, Tony Robbins, dreamlining (Tim Ferris), and vision boards.

None of them worked for me. Some were too simple, some too complex but most I simply abandoned due to lack of motivation.

For 2018, instead of searching for new goal setting methods, I combined the best elements from well-known goal setting methodologies, to create a system that is rapid, effective, and easy to manage.

Step One: Define Your Purpose 

Over the past few years, I didn’t have a clear vision of my life’s purpose, which made the task of defining my goals difficult, and sticking to them impossible.

After trying various methods, I found a technique that worked well: hypnosis meditation. The main idea behind hypnosis meditation is that:

your conscious mind may not know (or be able to articulate) your life’s purpose, but your unconscious mind can do it with ease. 

The outcome of hypnosis meditation is to answer the following questions:

1. Who are you?
2. What do you love to do?
3. The thing that you love doing the most, who do you do it for?
4. What do they want or need?
5. How do they change or transform as a result?

These questions came directly from a TED Talk hosted by Adam Leipzig in TEDx Malibu ‘How to Know Your Life Purpose in 5 Minutes’. I recommend that you watch Leipzig’s TED Talk so you understand how the questions should be answered.

Next, listen to ‘Hypnosis for Finding Your Life's Purpose’ in a quiet place where you won’t get interrupted. Have a journal or a pad of paper with the five questions written down, so that way you can quickly jot down your answers when they come to you.

During the hypnosis meditation video, there are three logical ‘breaks’ where you can record your inner thoughts and answers.

For myself, here are the answers I came up with:

1. Who are you? Fab
2. What do you love to do? Being successful at business.
3. The thing that you love doing the most, who do you do it for? The next generation of my family and friends such as my son, my nieces, and all my friends’ kids
4. What do they want or need? They need various lifestyle choices that will be different from the traditional life path of studying hard, getting a job, and paying off a mortgage for the next thirty years.
5. How do they change or transform as a result? The next generation and my son can have more choices that will lead to a more successful and meaningful life.

Step Two: Set Your Own Goals

The next step is to set your goals for the year. I found it helpful when I used a few pointers from Live Your Legend for setting my professional and personal goals.

You can download the entire workbook from the Live Your Legend web site here, however I only use the first three elements from it. 

Step Three: Reflect on Last Year

Before jumping forward with your list of goals, it’s important to reflect on the important events that happened in the previous year. Consider answering the following questions:

1. Last year, what were your proudest moments?
2. Last year, what were the most exciting moments in your life? What were you doing? Who were you with?
3. Looking back, would you have done anything differently?
4. Were there any instances where fear held you back from achieving the goals you had?
5. What bored you last year, that you hope to change this year?
6. Did you meet any new and inspiring people last year? Who were they? How did they inspire you? 

I found these questions handy to understand and figure out what was important to me and what aspects needed improvement this year.

It's far easier to reflect on the past than to jump straight into projecting the future, i.e. goal setting.

Step Four: Define Your Areas of Interest

Once you have answered the questions, list the core areas of your life where you want to see positive results. 

In this case, try to list down the top five or six core areas, as you will be adding two to three goals in each area. Just from personal experience, I find listing too many goals becomes overwhelming and you will lose focus.

My core areas of interest were: Marriage, Vitality, Wealth, Business, and Family. 

Step Five: Define Your Goals in Each Area

It's important when naming your goals (and areas of interest), to use language which inspires you. Don't take too long, just write them out and we will refine them later.

My goals were:

? Marriage – wife adores me, I adore wife

? Vitality – Boundless energy, athletic/hot body, warrior

? Family – inspire friends/family, grow family & help my son’s growth

? Wealth – grow assets, learn how, bigger place to live

? Business – profit/growth, new ventures & self sufficiency

Step Six: Refine Your Goals in Each Area

Once you have defined your goals for the year, I recommend doing this useful exercise and compare your goals to Tony Robbins' 6 Basic Needs. I prefer Tony Robbins, but you can also use Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. 

Now you map out your goals against the basic needs listed. Here’s what my first draft looked like: 

The idea is it will be easier to prioritize your goals. The goals that touch more areas are ranked higher. For example, "I adore wife" contributes to 'Love & Connection' as well as 'Contribution', so it gets a higher ranking.

You can also easily identify if you are missing goals, or if you are too focused in just one area of needs.

Step Seven: Create a Vision Board

Now that you’ve defined your goals and prioritized them, I recommend putting them together on your personal vision board. Here’s a chance to get creative and gather pictures that will motivate you every day to achieve your set goals. Choose one captioned picture for each area of interest. 

Once you’ve posted your chosen images on your vision board, take a picture of it on your phone and make it as your screen saver on your laptop or phone. Just make sure you place your vision board in a visible area where you’ll see it every day. 

This is what my vision board looks like: 

As you can see, I only have one image per area of interest, so I combine the caption and image to summarize 2-3 goals in each area.

Step Eight: Week-By-Week Tasks

At the beginning of each week, review last week’s progress. Tick off any tasks which you completed.

Then set one to two tasks for the week that will help you get closer to achieving that goal. You can track your progress in your phone or in a journal. 

I’ve been using Wrike to track my week-by-week affirmations below, here is a sample of my week:

Every time I complete a task, I mark it. If I think of something during the week, I add it to my list immediately.

At the end of the week, I review the past week’s progress and set my new tasks for the week. 

The trick is to keep tasks achievable in one week. If you have bigger tasks, take it step by step. Split them into smaller tasks that can be done within a week. 

No matter how big or small the task is, what’s important is that you keep ticking off tasks every week to achieve that feeling of success. The more you tick off on your list, the more motivated you will be and the more chance you'll continue during the year.