How to Brainstorm Your Year Ahead: 2025 Goals
Welcome back to the 2025 Goal Planning Series. If you missed last week’s post you should start there! Today we will be discussing how to brainstorm your year ahead and continue to reflect on the previous year. I will be using a few different resources today.
- 2025 PowerSheets Goal Planner
- A5 Leuchtturm 1917 notebook
- Cultivated Life Evaluation Guide
- Dual Tip Markers
- Color Coding Sticker Book
Do you start to brainstorm your year ahead of time? I certainly do. For some reason, every year, I get new ideas typically in the fall. I know I do not have the time to work on these new ideas through the end of the year, but I don’t want to forget them. Instead of keeping them jumbled in my brain, I write them in my goals notebook.
I have been keeping a goals notebook for close to 25 years at this point. It was way before I knew about the PowerSheets, way before I was married. It gives me a place to journal, reflect, and brainstorm at any point in the year. That is why I recommend you have one in order to brainstorm your year ahead!
Brainstorm Your Year: Where to Start?
This is a chance for you to dream. You get to decide what you want your year to look like, and we will continue to fine-tune your ideas until we get to the end result – your 2025 goals. But, now is the time to consider what you reflected on last week.
What are the themes that jumped out to you in your reflection on the previous year? Did you decide on a word of the year, or at least a word that you want to use as a theme as we work through 2025 goal planning? Was there a particular pain point that you said “yes, I need to work on that!”? These are all ways to start to brainstorm.
Remember, when you brainstorm your year, that does not mean that you have to keep all of these ideas. As we continue through the prep work you may see other themes pop out that you hadn’t thought about before. This is a refining process, and when you brainstorm you are starting to consider your year ahead, not plan it to a T.
What Fires you up & Reflection
Yes, I know, we talked about reflection last week. But, if you haven’t completed yours, now is the time to start thinking about the highs and lows. What were the challenges? And what were the successes? Even if you feel like you may have a lot to work on when you start to brainstorm your year ahead, there are still positives from the previous year that ought to be recognized.
Now is also a great time to list out (or doodle, or map out) all the things that fire you up. What are the things that motivate you to want to keep up with your goals. Or, another way, what are the things you are passionate about?
This can be relationship based, experience based, actual things that you do or have in your home. It is an individual question that will have an individual answer. This is the time to think a bit selfishly about what you love, what do you want to do more of, and what are the most important things to you?
The reason for a reflection is so that you can start to narrow down what you want to work on in the year ahead. It is fine to just write a bunch of goals down, but, you need to understand the why behind those ideas. Remember, we won’t be able to work on every single goal we have an idea for right off, so understanding the pain points and challenges of the previous year will be a way to start to narrow your ideas down.
Brainstorm your year ahead by Evaluating where you are Now
Along the same lines, understanding how we feel in the different areas of our lives now is important. You may not be considering goals in one area of your life, but when you sit down to grade that particular area, you may realize it is an area you DO need to work more on. When you work to brainstorm your year, you need to know where you are starting.
This is a clarifying exercise. It can either tell you that you are on the right track with your brainstorm, or it might make you think about these particular areas a bit more after you give yourself a score.
If you aren’t quite sure how to “grade” yourself in the different wellness areas, a great tool is the Cultivated Life Evaluation Guide. This is a new resource for 2025 which goes through each of the CLE categories with multiple questions to help you give yourself the best representation of a grade for each category. Even if you choose not to use the PowerSheets as your goal planner, this tool will be helpful in narrowing down the areas of your life that may need more nourishment in the year ahead.
A Caveat
You do not need to set your goals in all of these categories. You don’t even have to use these categories at all to set your goals. In fact, I rarely use the CLE categories in the PowerSheets to set my goals. I know that for a lot of people, it is helpful to have these areas, use the grades, and then focus on those areas. And while some of my goals could fit in some of the CLE categories, they inhibit me too much.
Instead, I use the CLE categories as a way to check in on how I am feeling overall in these different areas of my life. I do it outside of my goals, even if I have a goal that could technically qualify under one of those categories.
If you love the CLE categories and want to use them to help set your goals, awesome! If not, let it be another piece of data as you begin to brainstorm your year ahead.
Brainstorm Your Year: Upgrade Your Mindset
There is one more area that we are going to tackle today as we brainstorm your year ahead – we are going to focus on your mindset. It is important to make sure that we do not have self-limiting beliefs. What is a self-limiting belief? All of those little negative thoughts you have about yourself. Thoughts like:
- I’m bad with money.
- I can’t keep my home organized.
- I am a terrible cook.
If in the back of your mind you believe these thoughts about yourself, you won’t improve in those areas. Why? Because your mind is already made up, so your brain doesn’t let you put in the effort to improve.
Instead of these negative thoughts about ourselves, we want to change them to positives. When we change them to positives, it gives our brains the permission it needs to help us make progress and improve in these areas. So, give it a try. Take some time and think about the negative thoughts that you may have about yourself, or your life in general. How can you reframe those into positive thoughts?
The Bottom Line
This week is all about brainstorming. You take time to brainstorm the year ahead, you take time to brainstorm how you are feeling about life overall. Goals prep work is not a sprint for me. I like to take my time to move through everything pretty methodically. That, of course, isn’t for everyone, but it has served me well! Let yourself sit with the information, write down some more ideas in your goals notebook, revisit some of the ideas that came to you last week. Do they still hold up? Or has something else, more important, shown up as you work through brainstorming your year ahead?
At this point, I like to go back through all of what I have written. I take out my color coding sticker book and I will make a key with colors and possible areas of my life to create goals in. Then, I take the mini page flags and every time something jumps out at me, I will put a little sticker there. This will help me gather all of my thoughts for specific categories when I am writing out my goals.
