How to have the Best Year: 2025 Goal Planning
Are you ready to plan your best year? It is time to start working on our 2025 goals. You have put in the work to reflect on the previous year as well as brainstorm your year ahead. Now you get to take all of that information and figure out what the best year for you will look like in 2025. These are the tools that I will be using to help me with this section:
- 2025 PowerSheets Goal Planner
- Yes & No List Free Printable
- A5 Leuchtturm 1917 notebook
- Cultivated Life Evaluation Guide
- Dual Tip Markers
- Color Coding Sticker Book
Plan Your Best Year: Yes & No List
As you begin to set your 2025 goals I want you to consider what you are willing to say yes to and what you want to say no to. This is something that I started implementing years ago, and if I didn’t do anything else with regards to goal planning for the coming season or year, I would still set up my yes and no list.
What is a yes and no list? It is a list of where you are willing to say yes, and where you have to say no. It is a way to pre-make decisions that will impact your year ahead, and whether it will be your best year, or if it will be a year filled with overcommitments to things that do not matter to you.
What is Most Important?
The entire purpose of the prep work in the PowerSheets is to go through and figure out what is most important to you. This helps you figure out your priorities, and the areas of your life that you want improvement in. However, there are always roadblocks to our goals. One way to manage those roadblocks is to make the decisions ahead of time. Then while you are in the moment, you remember what is most important, and you are able to say yes or no in a definitive way.
Only you can decide what will go on your yes and no list, and you can always change your mind. But, the point here is to pre-make some of these decisions to help reduce decision fatigue. It will remove some of the mental load around life in general, and to make good choices for your goals. Making the decision ahead of time gives you the permission you crave in the moment to say yes or no to a particular situation. This is one of the key steps to creating your best year, so don’t skip it!
Write Your Goals
You have made it to the point where you are going to write out your goals. There are a couple of ways that you can do this. You can write overarching goals for the year. This is what I typically do. And/or you can write goals for the coming 90-days. There is a lot of value in both of these goal-writing methods to create your best year.
If you are not new to following me, you will know that I almost always have big, overarching goals for the year ahead. These goals are not finish line or habit goals. Instead, these are life-direction goals. I want to improve x area of my life. Then, once I have those bigger, life-direction goals, I will break it down into quarterly or seasonal goals. Those goals get broken down into manageable action steps, etc. But, that is the next post.
Right now, I want you to focus on either big, overarching goals for your best year, or you can come up with some shorter-term 90-day goals. You are going to look back over your journaling, and lists that you have made over the past couple of weeks. Then you are going to start putting words on paper.
I want you to remember that your goals do NOT have to be worded perfectly in order to be good goals. Instead, focus on the end result. What is the purpose for this goal? What do you want to achieve? And why do you want to achieve it? Those are the questions. Oftentimes we can get stuck as we try to make sure we have specific wording. But, as long as you understand what the goal is, that is what is important.
Your Best Year: Word of the Year Filter
Remember when we chose a word of the year a couple of weeks ago? Now is the time to put that word to use! Look at the goals as you write them out, think about your word. How does your goal line up with your word or theme for your best year? If it doesn’t seem to line up, why is that? It is 100% ok to have goals that don’t match your word of the year. But, remember that choosing your word is one way to keep a specific feeling throughout the year or season ahead.
If you haven’t had a chance to choose a word to focus on, now is a great time to think about one. As you are writing your goals, does one theme stick out to you? Are all of your goals related to a specific area of your life? Is there a word that can help keep you motivated on that particular area in the year ahead? Look up some definitions and write them down to help you decide.
Take a look at your Goals
Now that you have written out your goals, really look at them. Do they all look like goals that will work for the coming year? Are they goals that will work for the coming season? It is OK to cross some off. It is also OK to tweak them a little bit if you don’t like the way they look.
One thing to remember about planning your best year, and goals in general, is that nothing has to be set in stone. If you get to the second week in January and a goal is not working for you, it is 100% OK to change it, drop it, or push it back to a different season. You do not need to keep your goals if they aren’t working for you.
Remember, the purpose of a goal is to make progress toward your best year, and your best life. You set these goals to put you on a path to success, to live the life you want to live. And, if your goals are not serving you, it is fine to change them.
The goals you set need to be for you. They can’t be for other people. If you are setting goals that require a lot of outside help from a spouse, don’t use those as your personal goals. Those can still be worked on, but they need to go into a family goal category. You want your goals to be the ones that you have the most control over. So, again, take a look and make sure the goals you have are for you.
This is why we spend so much time on prep work! We want to know our why, and to have goals that matter to us. Not because someone says they should matter, but because they actually do.
The Bottom Line
Choosing the goals that you want to work on in the year and season ahead is a very personal process! I hope that this series has been helpful for you as you try to figure out your why, and the things that you want to change most. This is just the path that we are starting our year on, but there are always going to be twists and turns along the way. Having a strong why behind your goals will help keep the end in mind!
If you are looking for more accountability as you set your goals, and move into quarterly action plans and finally monthly projects, please come join my membership community where we are working through goal planning. I would love to have you join us!
