How to Set Yourself Up for a Successful Year Ahead

As professionals, we’re all too familiar with the process of laying out our annual goals, defining milestones and metrics of success, and tracking progress to ensure we hit those metrics. My team had a two-day retreat to lay ours out at the end of last year. However, when it comes to our personal lives, the process of setting, tracking, and achieving goals isn’t always a priority.

Our personal lives are often less structured and don’t have the built-in resources that make setting and accomplishing our life goals as easy — but, here’s a hack: we can take lessons learned in our professional lives and apply them to goal-setting on the personal side.

When I’m thinking about the year ahead, I like to set a vision before I set specific goals. Vision-setting allows me to imagine overarching ideas, gives me a sense of purpose, and guides my decision-making throughout the year. The vision is the guiding post. Then, once my vision is set, I can focus on specific goals.

Here are some tips for vision-setting to set yourself up for a successful year ahead.

Reflect on the previous year.

The first step in setting a vision should always be a reflection on your vision and goals from the previous year — and it’s important to be honest with yourself in that reflection. Release the judgment!

When I do my reflections, I think about each goal I set the previous year and evaluate whether or not I accomplished it. Then, I take it one step further and examine why I did or did not accomplish each goal. What made me successful? What contributed to missing the mark?

Without an overarching vision, goals are just tasks we’re randomly assigning to ourselves — and we’re more likely to fail at them. When I think about the past year, several of the “goals” I set for myself were really just tasks, and I wasn’t able to complete them because tasks, by themselves and without purpose, can become overwhelming very quickly.

Last year, for example, I set my sights on working with a financial planner to organize my personal finances — but I didn’t have a clear vision set. I hadn’t defined how I wanted to organize my finances or what I wanted to get out of working with the planner, so the “goal” I thought I was setting was really just a task, and because it wasn’t part of a larger plan, I didn’t see the process through.

Determine what a successful year means.

The next step in vision-setting for the year ahead is to determine what a successful year means to you. You could start by asking yourself some questions, like:

• What will make your life better in the year ahead?

• What do you need to thrive?

• What are your values, and what can you do to live up to them?

I’m envisioning a year where I work toward good health, spiritual fulfillment, and intentionality around giving back to my community. I’ll consider it a successful year if I have made progress toward prioritizing my well-being, centering my faith, and giving time and energy to the causes that are closest to my heart.

Then, you can determine how you’ll measure your success. Pull from your professional experience: what success metrics might work in your personal life, too? One tool from my professional goal-setting that comes to mind is S.M.A.R.T. goals: setting goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. If I set a S.M.A.R.T. goal in my personal life, I know it’ll be easy to measure the success of that goal.

Another takeaway from measuring success in our professional lives is that we shouldn’t aim to complete 100% of our goals. If we do, we aren’t setting the bar high enough. Instead, it’s better to pick a range (ex: 70%-80%) that you’d be satisfied with, and aim for completing that percentage of your goals for the year.

We have to remember that we can not do all the things, all at once. That’s not achievable. Part of defining success is understanding that we need to spread our goals out — and give ourselves appropriate time to accomplish them. That kind of focus allows us to avoid getting overwhelmed, and instead to create a roadmap for a successful year ahead.

Remember that life happens. Create a proactive plan to reevaluate your goals and the progress you’ve made on them at some point throughout the year. And when that time comes, if you need to readjust, then readjust.

Set your goals and achieve them.

Finally, it’s time to set your goals and take the necessary steps to achieve them. Some tools that I’ve found helpful for staying on top of my goals throughout the year are:

• Writing your vision, and your goals, down somewhere that you’ll see them regularly. It could be a whiteboard in your kitchen, the wallpaper on your phone, or post-it notes that you strategically place around your home — whatever works best for you, go with that.

• Maintaining an organized personal calendar to track deadlines and important milestones. I use Google, which is a great (and free) resource that makes calendar planning and sharing easy!

• Teaming up with accountability partners. If you share similar goals with someone, or you have someone in your life who is invested in helping you achieve a particular goal, then team up with those people and have them help you stay accountable for achieving your goal.

Setting a vision, and setting goals to help that vision come to life, is a beneficial practice. It allows us to adopt a long-term perspective and sets the tone for our personal lives and our work lives. I know when I take the time to vision-set at the beginning of a new year, I feel centered and ready to dive into the months ahead. I hope anyone reading this can set aside some time to do your own vision-setting and continue 2024 with intention.