I’m Luke Hanson, Financial Adviser and Director at My Financial Design. Let’s go beyond simply setting goals and move into the realm of achieving goals.
The first step in achieving goals is to Write It! The summer break and the start of a new year is a natural time to be making plans for the year ahead. Whilst there’s plenty of talk around goal setting, what I’m focused on is goal achieving. There’s power in putting pen to paper and writing down our goals. We’re casting vision into the future and giving ourselves a guiding North star. That way every future decision we make can be held up in the light of that written down goal. And we can make a judgment are the choices we’re making day by day, drawing us closer to where we want to be or pulling us further apart. So the first step to go achieving is write it. I suggest having at least one long-term and one short-term goal. So let’s have a look at a short-term goal. At the beginning of the year it’s easy to think about a couple of things we might want to do differently. Perhaps it’s to live a healthier lifestyle, it might be to spend more time with our spouse or kids, maybe it’s to get out and about on the weekend and just enjoy life a little bit more. Amongst some other goals, one of mine is to do some more reading in 2021, but the problem I find with setting new year’s resolutions is that they’re vague enough to be easy enough to put off until later in the year. After all, we’ve got the whole year ahead of ourselves and we don’t need to rush in or keep doing anything step-by-step, we’ve got the whole year and we’ll get to it later in the year. To break this, instead I suggest setting 4-6 week goals. For me it’s to read one book a month, as opposed to just reading more in 2021. I know you’re familiar with the feeling of getting to Easter or getting to winter and thinking, Oh, well, the goals we set for ourselves are probably a little bit too difficult to achieve now, we’ll put them in the too hard basket and we’ll catch up with them later on in the year. But like I said, to break this cycle set 4-6 week goals and we’ll keep ourselves focussed. All of a sudden it’s a lot more feasible to work on our forehand in January, our backhand in February and our serve in March, as opposed to simply improving our tennis game throughout 2021. So whatever it is, we’re setting ourselves to achieve this year, be sure to break them down into manageable timeframes. That way we can stay motivated and keep putting one foot in front of the other as we continue on to achieve and fulfill the goals we’ve set for ourselves. I think this is reached about time for a video. So stay tuned for part two, where we’ll take a look at some long-term goal achieving and how we can go about doing that.