Three Dirty Secrets to Identifying Your Goal

~ The First Step in the How To Reach Your Goals In Ten (Not So Easy!) Steps Series.

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Come in real close.  I have a dirty little secret to tell you.  A little closer.  That’s it.  Good.  Perfect.  I know three dirty secrets to identifying your goal.

Shhh……

You wanna reach your goals this year?  Is this going to be THE YEAR for you?  The best year ever?!?

How are you going to make that happen?  You mean you don’t know?

*gasp!*

In order to come out of the gate flying on January 1^st, you need to know what you are going to accomplish in next year.

What are you going to do to make it the most perfect year ever?  What is your resolution?  What actions do you need to take?  How are you going to set the year up to be great?

You don’t know?

Well, let me help you.

I know three secrets to identifying your goal

And I would love to share them with you.

But first, you need to know something.

There is no quick fix.  There is no get rich.  There is no “do this and tomorrow your life will be grand!”

This is hard

This takes work

There are no easy steps to making this year great.  No overnight successes.

It takes grit.  It takes discipline.  Perseverance.  Dedication.  Devotion.  Focus.

There is no easy way

But if you are ready to do the work, I’m ready to let you in on the secret.

It is going to take 10 (not so easy!) steps to make this year great.

And the first is identifying your goal.

How to identify and set a goal

 1. Review last year

You know that you want this next year to be better than the last one.  But why?  What is it about this last year that you want to improve? Have you sat down to think about it?  Now is the time.  You can’t figure out where you are headed if you don’t know where you have been.

Take some time to review last year.  Look at the year itself – all of the events, the haves, and the have-nots.  What was good about it and what was not? 

Take a look at yourself and the roles you play. 

Were you the wife you wanted to be? The mother? 

Could you have done better at work?  Been better to yourself? 

How was your health?  Your physical, mental and spiritual health?  Your financial health? 

Review it all and see what it is that you want to improve. 

2. State your intentions

Once you know where you’ve been, you need to know where you are going.

This is more than just a goal, more than just a resolution.  In fact, this is more than just 2023 or the next year.

You need to dig, and you need to dig deep.

Where do you see yourself in one year?  Three?  Five?  Ten?

What does your ideal life look like?  What is a perfect day?  What would you do if you didn’t have to worry about time and money? 

What is your ultimate dream, your ultimate purpose?

And… here’s the dirty part…. start digging….

How are you going to get from where you are at to there?

Not sure?

Yeah, me either.

Figuring out how to turn the life we currently live into the life we wished we lived is daunting. Most of us don’t know where to start. The task seems nearly impossible.

One good trick is to start from the end and work backwards.

Start from where you want to be and work backwards in your life.

What does your life look like in ten years?

Okay, now what about five?  You aren’t quite at a ten, but close, so what does it look like when you are halfway to that ten-year mark?

What does it look like when you are halfway to that five-year mark, two or three years from now?

Need some help?  Nadalie Bardo, Founder of It’s All You, Boo can help!  She has created a 60 paged planner for this very purpose – the Slay Your Goals Planner. 

The Slay Your Goals Planner is a printable planner that you can use again and again, to help you identify and declare your goals.  But it does more than that – it helps you create a detailed action plan for achieving your wildest dreams. 

This action plan takes your BIG vision and breaks it down by years, quarters, months, and weeks, ending in daily tasks for you to start on how to create the life of your dreams!

But the best part?  (At least, I  think so…)

The Slay Your Goals Planner dedicates the first few pages to helping you state your intentions!!  These pages really get at the heart of your vision for your life.  It’s good stuff!  I worked through it and was surprised with what I came out with.  I learned a couple of really deep things about myself – I knew what my goal was, but I didn’t know why it was so important to me.

The Slay Your Goals Planner helped me get at that why, which motivates me now more than just a “because I want to” mindset ever did.  The other thing I learned from Nadalie’s section on intentions is my priorities – and let me tell you, what I thought were my priorities were only distractions! Keeping me from my real goal.

If this sounds like it might be you, take a look!  You can get your Slay Your Goals Planner here.

3. Make it smart

After you have done some digging, it’s time to do the dirty work.  You know what you want to do better this year.  You know what your life’s intention is.

You’ve come up with a fool-proof goal for this year that is going to take you from where you are now to where you want to be ten years from now – and it’s going to make this year the best year ever!

You’ve got your why.  Now you need your how.

And the first step towards your how is to make sure that your goal is a SMART goal.

Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time Sensitive

Specific = What exactly, in a nutshell, is your goal?  Boil it down to the basics.  This goal needs to be all about details and nothing about fluff.  Examine your goal and delete all of the words in it that you don’t need.

Take a look at the who, what, when, where, why, and how when coming up with the specifics of your goal.

Measurable = The data, quantity, time, etc. that it will take for you to reach your goal.  You need to be able to measure success.  How will you know you did it?

Actionable = What do you need to do to accomplish this goal?

Do you have everything you need?  Time, energy, money, supplies? Are there any skills you need to learn or anything you need to invest in?

What steps do you need to take to make this goal a reality?

Realistic = Is this a realistic goal?  Is it attainable or is it the pie-in-the-sky?  Do you have all of the resources you need to attain it?  Will it require you to do anything that you do not want to do?  If so, it might not be realistic for you.

Time Sensitive = Give yourself a deadline.  When does this goal need to be reached by?  Make sure the deadline is measurable. There you have it.

The three dirty secrets to identifying your goal. They aren’t easy. They require a lot of work and a lot of soul-searching.  But the work is necessary.  It sets the stage for actually completing the steps to making it all happen on a day-to-day basis.

If you are serious about making 2023 the beginning of the rest of your life, then you need this planner.  It lays it all out for you, in a variety of formats (so that you can pick which works best with your personality) and walks you through your goals, step by step.