If you followed me for any amount of time, it’s probably not news to you that I love planning and reflection. They both tend to keep me moving towards an actual goal versus letting life happen to you. They give us intention. Planning without reflection can be pretty useless for most people. So know that everything we talk about today assumes that you will revisit your goal and process on a weekly basis throughout the year. I use Hilary Rushford elegance excellence goals journal in order to do this as well as my day designer daily planner. I’ve used both of these for almost 5 years now and swear by both of them. They may work for you, or they may not, but I encourage you to find some thing that does. 

When I talk about having success in 2023, I am referring to both personal and career-based success. Whatever that looks like for you. From an entrepreneurial standpoint I have a bias towards your business serving your life. And setting it up in a way that makes the life you want cohesive with the business that you want.

That’s what I deem as successful. That might involve a revenue number at your job, or a certain amount of clients, or the creation of a new product that you’ve been dreaming of. Ideally those goals are so that you can travel more, spend more time with your family, do more spontaneous things, or have more time to do more hobbies that you enjoy.

So let’s go ahead and talk about step one, which is of course reflecting on last year. I think in order to determine what you want out of 2023, it’s worth looking at what went well and what didn’t go well in 2022. And then of course providing context to that. The start of my 2022 and all the goals that I had nearly all went to the wayside when I found out I was pregnant before we were even done with quarter one of the year. So no I did miss the opportunity for some of those goals,I don’t consider it a failure that I didn’t do much of what I set out to do in 2022 because life quite literally took on a whole new direction. My focus changed, and there were simply different demands on the table.

Assessing last year and gaps

If you had goals in 2022, be it personal or business based, how did those go? What months were your high months, and what months were your low months? And why was that? What did you find went really really well, and what continued to get pushed to the back burner? Even though maybe you wanted it to be a priority.

Did you rest more? Read more? Go on small adventures more? Did you start investing? Move? Did you start a new career? Provide some context and seasons to your last year.

This is what I believe will really set you up for success in your goal planning for 2023. We can make better decisions moving forward when we know what happened in the past, how we behaved, and why that was the case. That gives us context as to what is realistic moving forward.

Planning your goals

A common mistake that I have fallen into myself, and watch other people fall into every year is choosing way too many goals to accomplish. I see no issue with making a huge list of things that you would like to accomplish, but then categorizing them or looking at if-than type of goals. If you achieve this goal than likely these other three goals get achieved along the way. If that makes sense. 

For example, some thing that is still on the table for Nathanael and I is the goal of being location independent. For us that means living in our home for the majority of the year but may be traveling for three months of the year. This has become much more of a perhaps then a definitive goal with the pregnancy and just experiencing life with the new baby.