7 Steps to Planning Your Year for Success
For some people, planning can feel awesome. But for a lot of us, “goals” and “plans” can feel very constricting and anxiety producing.
And I think that a lot of that stems from the fact that broadly, we have a way of goal setting and work planning that is not always the most helpful for all people.
It can be very “hustle your face off” or “do whatever it takes” or “If you cared enough, you would work harder” and “If you don’t reach your goals, you suck.”
Yikes. No wonder we avoid it and opt to wing it instead.
But the problem with winging it is that you're just winging it, right? There’s no path forward. You’re going to face a lot of unknowns and a lot of really frustrating days being in reactive mode.
Up until a few years ago, I used the normal goal-setting, year-planning system that most everyone else does.
And then I actually hit my goals.
I thought I'd be very happy when I hit them all. And then I hit them and I wasn't happy. I felt very burnt out.
Then I realized I was just going about the whole process the way most people do, and it just doesn't work for me.
Turns out, it doesn't work super well for my clients either.
But there is a way that does, and it’s what I use now for my clients and my own business.
Here’s the 7 step process I use for myself (and with my clients) to plan my year to achieve my goals without hustle.
1. Set An Intention
So first things first, I start with an intention, both for the next quarter and for the year.
Some people like to view it as a “word of the year”. And it could be that specific, or a phrase or mantra or feeling. Choose whatever is going to resonate with you. Because ultimately, that's all that matters--is that it resonates with you.
It’s your North Star for the year, the thing you go to when you're feeling stuck and frustrated.
So for example, in 2019 I had a mantra: “Release to receive.”
By default, I can be a little bit controlling. And I can sometimes lack a lot of faith and trust in myself and my business. It can be hard to just receive something good and sit with it without wanting to rush on to cross the next goal.
So whenever I would start to feel “oh my gosh, I don't know what’s going to happen next” I would just remind myself release to receive, release to receive.
You don’t have to rush this at all.
Sometimes I'll toss a few words around in my brain for a while and see how they feel. And other times, I just wait to see if one sort of bubbles to the surface.
That actually happened to me for 2020. The word “intention” popped into my head and I knew that was it. I was thinking about something else, and there it was. I want what I do and don't do to be done with intention. I don't want anything to be haphazard. I just really want to be mindful with all of my decisions in all aspects of my life for the whole year.
So no pressure on nailing it down right at the beginning of the year (or quarter). It doesn't mean it won't happen.
2. Set Meaningful Goals
It’s important to set goals that are actually motivating and meaningful to you, rather than whatever goals your industry or society are telling you you should be aiming for.
If everyone in your industry is saying “You have to have a six figure year,” but for you, it feels more meaningful to reach for $40k with specific work hours, that’s perfect! There's nothing wrong with that!
It just has to be meaningful to you.
Maybe you really want to pay for the family vacation. Awesome.
Or maybe it’s a big donation to your favorite charity.
Maybe it’s that you work with one new client a month, right? It's not even about the money. You just want to look back over the year and say, I helped 12 new people. Perfect. That is awesome.
If other people in your industry are parading around their goals and it doesn’t resonate with you, that's fine.
Don't let anyone else guilt or shame you into a different goal.
If somebody says, “You're not dreaming big enough” that’s not their place.
If you resonate with certain goals, those are meaningful goals for you. If you don't resonate with other goals, there's nothing wrong with you. Those are just not your meaningful goals.
Goals or resolutions can also exist in personal life as well as your business life. Because we are not just robots doing business, we are people running businesses.
Which is why it’s also important to keep your goals to a capped number. Maybe three in your personal life and three in your business life. And that's it. Don’t overdo it, friend.
3. Be Realistic About Time
The next thing I want you to look at is what time frame that you want to commit to working within or that you can commit to working within? Because this will really determine what is able to be accomplished.
If you're looking at your weeks, and you need childcare, how many hours of that will you be able to invest in? How many hours? Are there nap times? Are you going to work after they go to bed? Are you going to get up extra early? Are you going to work on the weekends?
There’s no right or wrong answer. There’s only the need to be very, very realistic.
One of my goals for 2019 was that I wanted to take most Friday's off completely. That was really important to me. I also didn't want to work weekends unless I was traveling for my business or I felt really inspired to do a workshop or something like that.
But for the most part, I wasn't going to work weekends and I wasn't going to work evenings and I was only going to work about 20 to 25 hours a week.
But now I'm at a different season in my life. My kid just turned 15 and I don't need to be all over him every second of the day. Whenever I want to be working, I can pretty much be working.
But that also means I could work 24/7 If I really wanted to... and I don't want to. So I had to put constraints in place.
Our families aren’t the only commitments we have.
If you want to move your business forward, then it becomes a question of, what do you need to start saying no to?
Do you need to get off of some volunteer committees? Do you need to find childcare for other days, so you could get in more hours? Do you need to start waking up earlier?
We have to be really real and intentional about our commitments and relationships, and then take that into consideration as we make our plan for the year.
4. Name the “Big Rocks”
Make a list of your non-negotiable commitments. I like to call them “big rocks”.
These could be trips, family vacations, birthdays, school breaks, etc.
Anything that will be disruptive to your schedule, you need to put all of those in the calendar as a set-in-stone thing.
And then after that, you’ll be able to look at your plan and see how all the other parts and pieces are going to go in around those “big rocks”.
5. Work Backwards
Once we’ve got the big rocks blocked off in our calendar, then we go back to what our goal is, and work backwards to figure out what the action steps are that will help us achieve that goal.
So for example, if you say “I want to get three new clients every month,” you need to evaluate: How have I been getting clients so far? Where do I get them from?
Once you identify what worked in the past, then you need to build in time to do those activities that will get you clients.
So if you realize that being a guest on podcasts leads to an uptick in discovery calls, then you get super intentional and strategic. You keep podcasts in your plan.
And then you think, “Okay, well, how many podcasts do I want to be on?” Maybe it's one a month. So 12 in a year.
And when you reach out to podcasts, you're probably not going to land every single one of them. So how many do you need to pitch to? Maybe it's 20 or more.
So you're going to be working backward from the goal to figure out what steps or actions you need to take to reach the result you’re aiming for, i.e. your goal.
6. Identify/Clarify Your Offers
Maybe you feel it’s too hard to set goals. You’re in the fog of decision making!
Maybe you’re still struggling to get clients or you have too much client work or you want to pivot.
There's all different ways you can do that.
There's so many different ways that you can adjust your business model and your offerings so that if you're feeling your time is very constricted, you can actually leverage your time and your expertise in other ways that make it so that you're not necessarily working more but you're bringing in new revenue streams.
In order to make your plan, you need to identify and clarify what those new offers or pivots will be.
7. Keep Going (and adjust as needed)
Keep going! It's important to be consistent and really show up so you can build that momentum that will help get you closer to your goal.
But maybe you're like, “Dang, I thought this would get more traction, but it's just really not,” sometimes things need to be tweaked.
And sometimes they just need time.
So if you have a new program, and you’re disappointed in your launch, it might not be that your thing is terrible or that people don’t want it. Maybe you need to market it differently or for longer.
There could be a million different factors. Don't abandon it all together. Adjust as needed.
Planning is good. It is important because you don't want to just leave your goals to chance. Yes, there are always going to be a lot of variables in there, but you just don't want to wing it.
But at the end of the day, I hope that you know that if you didn't hit a goal, that doesn't say anything about who you are as a person.
It doesn't say anything about your worthiness.
I know it's easy to go down that rabbit hole. But please don't. It will not serve you.
