How to Set (and Keep) Your 2024 Goals
Creating New Year’s resolutions that stick involves value-led planning, SMART goal setting, and the implementation of reflection practices and strategies that help you stay accountable. Get these three things right, and you’re on your way to a repeatable formula for goal-setting success. Here are my top tips to help set (and keep) your 2024 New Year’s resolutions.
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Anchor to a Bigger Vision
A value-led planning process involves a couple of key elements. Firstly, you need to be able to anchor your goals to your bigger life vision. What’s most important to you in life? What are the key values you live by? How do you express these values and bring them to life?
One popular method for anchoring to a bigger vision is to consider your 80th Birthday. Picture the moment when your loved ones stand up to speak and share memories of your life to date. What is it you want them to say? How do you want them to describe you? What achievements in life do you want to be celebrating? Check out our 80th Birthday Visualisation Script to explore this visualisation in more detail.
Once you have your bigger vision mapped out, then you can anchor your annual goals to this vision, exploring the question: what do I need to focus on this year, to help me move closer to by bigger vision?
Align Your Goals to Your Values
It’s important to set goals that align with what matters to you! Not to what you think you should want in life, but what actually makes your heart sing. Being clear on your top values, particularly your top five values, will help ensure you set goals that have impact and meaning. For example, if ‘love and connection’ is an important value for you, then you need to set goals that allow you to experience this value.
Create Space for Reflection
Looking back on your previous year is an important foundation step for then setting goals for the year ahead. Take some time to celebrate and reflect on the previous 12 months. What are you most proud of? What were your top achievements? What was tough? What did you learn about yourself? And how might these insights help set you up for the year ahead? To help this process, we have a Free Annual Reflections Template you can download, including a Start, Continue, Stop framing to help capture specific insights.
Set SMART Goals
A SMART goal is defined by five key areas that help shape the detail of what it is you want to achieve: (1) Specific; (2) Measurable; (3) Achievable; (4) Relevant; and (5) Time-bound. These simple yet effective characteristics guide you to think more deeply about your goals to ensure they are well formed. For help creating SMART goals, and tracking your goals, check out our Goal Setting Templates, Planners and Reflection Guides. These can be easily printed as a starting point for helping you map your 2024 goals.
Prioritise Your Top 5
Rather than a long list of all the things you want to achieve, focus on 5 core goals that you can keep top of mind for the year ahead. Prioritise your goals based on their potential significance and impact on your year ahead: What are the five key things you want to be celebrating at the end of the year?
Capture a Plan-on-a-Page (yup, just 1 page!)
Capturing your goals or New Year’s resolutions is one of the most important yet underestimated steps in the process. And you need to keep it simple. Think pinned on your office wall or the front of your fridge… one page with all the key details. Sticking to one page will also ensure you don’t overload yourself with too much detail, but enough to capture what’s important and to keep it front of mind. See our Professional Development Plan and Vision Board Resource Guide and Templates for inspiration.
Visualise Success
Once you have the details of your goals captured and written down, it’s time to capture the visual representation of what you want to create. Creating a vision board involves selecting images and words that resonate with your personal vision for the year ahead. This personal connection enhances the emotional significance of your goals, making them more compelling and meaningful. I suggest creating this electronically so you can find the images that speak directly to you and then print it off to have a physical copy nearby. I also have mine as my desktop background plus as a physical insert in my diary. Basically, the more you see it, the more you can influence the subconscious mind on what it is you want to create.
Flex, Explore and Reflect
Now that you’ve done the foundation work, it’s time to enjoy the journey. Keep your goals front of mind, but be flexible on how they may come to life. Be open to exploration and present to the signals and feedback from your environment. Block space monthly in your diary to reflect on what you’re noticing. Be curious about recurring patterns, and reflect on what they might mean. Celebrate the small wins, and embrace the setbacks as learning opportunities. Be open to refining your goals as you go, and most importantly, enjoy the journey.
Download the Professional Development Plan and Vision Board Templates (editable in Microsoft Word)
If you’ve found this summary helpful, and are looking for a quick way to get started, our carefully curated development plan-on-a-page might be just what you need! We’ve created a format that helps you capture all the important elements: theme, vision statement, values, reflections from the past year, and top five SMART goals for the year ahead.
Editable in Microsoft Word, you can either download a blank template to get started right away, or you can download our pre-populated examples for further inspiration - and simply type over them with your own goals. Yup, we’ve made it that easy! Plus we have the template and some examples for your vision board… again, to help set you up for success the best we can. You can thank us later.
Happy goal setting!
