My favorite positive affirmation is that there is NOTHING you cannot DO, or BE, or HAVE! I like to repeat that to myself daily. But one must do some dedicated goal-setting, and a lot of goal-getting to get there!

This was supposed to be a New Years post, but unanticipated changes due to my travel schedule forced me to postpone writing it. Thats okay though, travel will teach you a few valuable lessons about embracing change and rolling with the punches. The nice thing about resolutions is that New Years Eve isnt the only time you can make them!

In fact, you can set positive new resolutions for your life anytime you choose! New Years just gives us a great opportunity to reflect on our achievements in the past year and set some meaningful new goals for the year ahead. But you can do this anytime you chooseyou can make yearly goals on your birthday, or on tax day, or you can set resolutions every six months, every quarter, or you can even set monthly goals! You get the picture

The advent of a new year simply serves as a good reminder to reflect on all the progress youve made over the last 12 months and take what youve learned, and build a roadmap for the coming year and beyond.

Its actually better that there has been time for the hype of the New Year to pass by. A lot of people intentionally avoid setting new goals on January 1st because they see New Years resolutions as oh-so-cliche. Or perhaps you set a traditional resolution and already fell off the wagon. Revisiting what resolutions mean now might give you an opportunity to set more meaningful goals this year. So, stay with me here and embrace the change. Dont think of this as a New Years post. Instead, we are going to focus on goal-setting for this year.

Weve already seen how powerful it can be when you set goals for yourself. You wont succeed at every goal, but review your personal development progress at the end of each year to see how much you do accomplish! Simply setting the goals for yourself will greatly increase the likelihood that youll get much closer to your dream lifestyle in all these areas of your life.

So, as you can already see from my experience getting this post out much later than I intended, embracing change means that you dont always get to do things exactly when you planned. But thats okay, just because the timing changes doesnt mean you should throw away the whole plan! Just having made the plan in the first place makes you about sixty percent more likely to follow through on the action than if you hadnt made plans and set a time in your head in the first place. So the timing has changed. So what? You can still follow through. Thats what goal-setting is! Its setting a plannot a commandment set in stone. Dont give up on your goals if you miss your timeline.

Another thing about your goals is that they may change over time, or things may happen that prevent you from achieving them. Or you may simply not put in the effort to complete all of your goals by the end of the year. But what matters most is that you set them. The act of making meaningful, clearly-defined goals, and writing them down, will put you ahead of 95% of people out there, and it will certainly point you much closer in the right direction toward attaining the lifestyle that you desire in the year ahead. I guarantee that if you set ten goals for yourself in 2008, simply the act of setting goals for yourself will put you MUCH closer to achieving your dreams! As Abraham Lincoln said, A goal properly set is halfway reached. Get clear on what you want to accomplish in the next year, and focus your energy towards those ends, and youll likely achieve many of your goals.

Now it seems to be a popular thing to try to create 100 life goals or 100 goals for the new year. (Just do a Google search for 100 goals and youll see how many communities there are out there talking about the number 100!) Maybe its just that the number one-hundred has so much appeal Theres nothing wrong with wanting to go about it that way I suppose, but I think thats going about it backwards. Youve already started out by adding another goal to the top of your pile of things to do: To create 100 goals! But does having any particular number of goals really objectively have any value to you? No. In fact, the number is fairly meaningless, so dont start out with any particular number to reach.

Instead, try starting with the bigger picture in mind. As Stephen Covey said in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Begin with the end in mind. To do this, we will examine what roles we play, and what we want those areas of our life to look like in a year from now.

The necessary first step is to brainstorm your life roles, and other important personal areas of focus. Some goal-setting systems will tell you what categories to set goals for, but I believe you will come up with much more meaningful categories if you reflect personally about what roles you play and what areas of focus are most important to you. This is the system that Tony Robbins uses in his Personal Power seminars, and many other professional coaches (like my friend Tim Walther) use successfully in goal-setting workshops with thousands of people every year.

Think about your work, your family, your hobbies What roles do you play? For example, when I brainstormed, my roles included freelance web designer, business owner, professional networker, peer mentor, writer, traveler, and artist. But perhaps you are a mother, a CEO, an accountant, rock climber, church member, or amateur filmmaker. The roles that we play are different and unique for each individual. But what hats do you wear? What roles are important to you that you want to improve upon in the next year?

Roles tend to sound like titles or jobs, even if you dont get paid for them! They are how you relate to other people. But besides your roles, what other areas of focus are important to you personally? For most people this will include things like personal finances, health and recreation, social life, and so on. But maybe your areas of focus include nutrition, or spirituality, or professional development and training

Take some time to brainstorm and reflect on what roles and areas of focus are most important in your life, and once you have them all written down on a piece of paper, imagine one-by-one what each of those areas of your life could look like in a year. This is called visualization, and its an important tool in attaining your desires. Visualize how much progress you could make towards positive relationships with your family. Or how much you could improve upon your strengths at work. Imagine yourself in a new profession, being paid to do something you love. Or even picture yourself on vacation to some beautiful exotic location! But dont imagine these things passivelyvisualize yourself participating in making those changesin experiencing those improvements and accomplishments. Write down a sentence or short paragraph next to each role and each area of focus about what that picture looks like.

Now that you have your big picture and youve thought about where youre going with each of your personal roles, you finally have some direction. Visualizing what each of those areas of your life could look like one year from now should give you vivid images of what you want to DO, BE, and HAVE. So the final piece of the puzzle in making meaningful resolutions this year is to break those visualizations down into smaller steps you need to take to get there. What are the next actions that will get you closer to your desired outcomes? If you want to buy a new laptop, how much money should you set aside each month? If you want rock-hard abs, how many crunches are you going to do each day?

The best way to set goals that are longer-term than your weekly To Do list items is to start practicing SMART goals. SMART, in this case, is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. You can review these questions in your head as you set goals, or you may want to write them out for each major goal you set.

Specific Is it something concrete, that youll know when youve completed it? This is one big reason why resolutions fail. People often set ambiguous goals that are too broad to be actionable or too unclear to know when youve fulfilled the requirements. For instance, a popular New Years resolution is to get in shape. But how are you going to achieve that? That is only a very murky version of the visualization that weve already practiced above. Now make it specific!

Measurable How will you measure your progress at the end of the year, or how will you know when youve achieved your objective? Think about what specific criteria youll have to fulfill to reach the specific outcome you want. And a good way of measuring may be to keep a notebook of your progress toward the goal, or involving your friends in keeping you on track.

Attainable Is it realistic and possible for you to achieve this in the year ahead, or are you reaching too far? Do you have too much on your plate already? Set goals that will make you stretch, and learn, and grow. But dont set unrealistic, far-fetched goals that will only discourage you when you dont meet them.

Relevant This is actually my favorite of these questions to ask when youre doing these mental exercises, and it is the first one that I ask because it is the best filter because I think it is the most important. Put simply, is the goal important? Is it really going to get you closer to your dreams, and is it really worth investing your energy in? Or should you focus on other, more important goals?

Time-Bound When will you complete this goal? Specifically? By October? In Q1? On your birthday? Remember what I said about being flexible with changes in timing toward the beginning of this post, but attaching a time to your goals makes them immediate and important. Remind yourself regularly that you have a goal to meet. When do you plan to start, and what is your target date for completion?

You may come up with a hundred goals for 2008, or you may come up with just two or three really important goals for the year. I go through my list and eliminate all the non-SMART goals, and I try to focus on the attainability aspect of my goals and think about how much I can realistically accomplish in just one year, so I have about 3-4 top concrete goals for each of my 10 roles/areas of focus.

In my own brainstorming, I found that my most important Roles included Web Designer/Consultant, Entrepreneur, Blogger, Peer Mentor, Traveler, and Artist. And other Areas of Focus for me included things like Social & Relationship-oriented goals, Health & Recreation, and Financial goals. After I settled on these nine top areas of importance for my life, I visualized how Id ideally like to see each of those realms in a year from now What sort of progress would I like to make? What things would I like to learn? How successful can I be in a year? And I not only asked these questions, but I tried to actually put myself in that future realitywhat will it feel like? How will I get there? Is it truly important?

So, once I had the broader picture of where Id like to be in a year (yet still very specific mental images), I worked backwards to think what smaller steps Ill need to accomplish to get to that point. I tried to frame each of my goals into the three areas of things I want to BE, DO, or HAVE, and I tried to frame them in the affirmative, to reinforce to my own brain that I will accomplish these things this year! I also tried to phrase my goals positively, focusing on what I should do to get there, not what I want to do less of. Here are the 24 major goals Ive set for myself this year, broken down by my Roles and Areas of Focus:

I. My goals as a Web Designer & Consultant

II. My goals as an Entrepreneur

III. My goals as a Blogger

IV. Career Development and goals as a Peer Mentor

V. My goals as a Traveler

VI. My goals as an Artist

VII. My Social and Relationship-related goals

VIII. My Health and Recreational goals

IX. My Financial goals

Remember, the more specific you get, the more likely you are to actually achieve your goals! I went through all of my goals to see if they were each Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely, and if they werent, Id throw them out. I wont include each step for ALL of my 24 goals here because I dont want to bore you! But, Ill demonstrate with my first goal how I answered these questions in my head:

GOAL: I WILL HAVE a dedicated portfolio site for my web development work

Now that youve seen my own detailed example of brainstorming Roles & Areas of Focus, visualizing outcomes, and SMART goal-setting for 2008, what are your personal resolutions for the new year? What goals are important for you to achieve this year? If you havent already spent time thinking about meaningful resolutions for the year, brainstorm on this and let me know what you think of my process in the comments.

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Please hit that comment section below and share your thoughts Good luck goal-setting!

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