Do You Have a Goal-Setting Process?

byTraeH

316 followers

Updated 9 years ago

One of my favorite books is "The Desire Map" by Danielle LaPorte. It introduced me to the idea of designing my life according to how I want to feel, and it has changed the way that I set personal and professional goals. As I work through this process to set goals to guide me through 2016, I thought I would share my process just in case some of you need a way to establish meaningful goals for the new year:

1. I create a list of feelings for all areas of my life: professional/work, lifestyle, home, family, etc. You can establish categories based on your own life. I ask how I want to feel in all of these areas and make a list of feelings for each category. For instance, I may decide that I want to feel secure or abundant financially and that I want to feel authentic with my writing business.

2. I highlight or list the top 10 feelings from all lists.

3. I narrow that down to a list of 3-5 key core desired feelings for the year. Sometimes, I set one core desired feeling for each area of life, but an overall list often forms due to some feelings repeating in all categories. You just don't want so many focus feelings that you get overwhelmed.

4. I brainstorm things that I can do to create each of those core desired feelings in the upcoming year, and then isolate some of these items as my yearly goals. These will be big things that I want to achieve in the long term. For instance, in order to feel authentic in my writing business, I may need to publish an eBook or send my manuscript out to agents or publishing houses. I may also develop a writer's website or complete the Artist Way course by Julia Cameron. You should have a pretty good list of specific things you can do to evoke each feeling in your life, and then select tasks are chosen and turned into long-term goals.

5. I create an action plan for the year, reducing my yearly goals to monthly goals.

6. Each month, I go back through all of my goals, assess my progress, and set weekly goals for the upcoming month.

7. I break my weekly goals down into daily action steps, resulting in a to-do list.

This is a lot of work in the beginning of the year, but it results in simple steps that I know I need to do each day in order to reach those long-term goals. It is less overwhelming because I focus only on small goals rather than the big picture. Every goal is focused on those core desired feelings too, so they are meaningful goals rather than goals from the ego or randomly chosen.

I feel focused when I do this because I have my list of what I need to do each day to accomplish my goals. This keeps me focused on what I want to accomplish without doing elaborate goal planning throughout the year (though I can make changes or switch out a desired feeling if needed during the year). It's also lots of fun to look back at the end of each month and see how far I have progressed just by taking those little steps each day. It's much like the training here at WA now that I think about it. Maybe that's why I love it here so much.

I'm always tweaking this process, so feel free to share your goal-setting process. You may have some ideas that I can use, and hopefully I have some ideas here that may help others as well.