5 Questions to Help You Plan Your Year

Now that we’re almost 2 weeks into the new year, how are you doing?

Are you meeting your goals like the fierce strong warrior you keep trying to convince yourself you are? Or, have you found yourself already falling back into old habits, doubts, and fears? Maybe you’re somewhere in the middle and are barely clinging to the hope that 2021 could be “your year.”

Wherever you are, I’m here to share some practical insight (and a healthy dose of tough love) into making and reaching your goals for this year and every year. And, you can rest assured that these practical tips absolutely do not include you chanting into the mirror every morning or under your breath during traffic that you are a fearless warrior or wonder-woman, or that you are light or whatever. I’m not here to ask you to lie to yourself.

In fact, in order to actually reach our goals, the first thing we need to do is get brutally honest with ourselves.

I see life as falling into 5 main categories of health:

1. Spiritual
2. Physical
3. Mental
4. Relational
5. Financial

In order to do this well though, you’re going to have to be painfully honest with yourself.

Maybe you haven’t prayed in months or, maybe you have but the prayers have just been empty words. Maybe you haven’t been as physically active as you desire to be. Perhaps your mental health is in a disarray and you’ve noticed the demons of anxiety and depression clouding your vision. You could be up to your eyeballs in debt with no job prospects and not have spoken to your mother or best friend in weeks.

Wherever you find yourself, you have to allow yourself to be there in the brokenness.

If you sugar-coat where you find yourself in these 5 categories, then you’ll never be able to look at the issues head-on and you will continue in the cycle of wishing you could do more.

The reason you need to be fully transparent with yourself (and with God) when assessing these 5 areas of your life is that once you recognize where you’re at, you can create a practical game plan to work on improving.

You can create real, tangible goals that you can actually hit with a bit of determination, creativity, and good old-fashioned elbow grease.

Once you’ve squared away where you’re at, it’s time to look at where you’d like to be. What are those illustrious goals that you’re pushing towards?

In order to establish my goals, I ask myself these 5 questions (as they relate to each of the 5 categories):

1. What can I do to grow daily in my faith?
2. How can I intentionally fuel and move my body?
3. What are three action steps I can take to improve my mental health?
4. How can I be a better friend, wife, sibling, etc…?
5. What are my financial/career goals for the year and do they align with each other?

Now, this is where it becomes fun (for nutty people like me)! I take my goals and I break them down over the course of the entire year. I literally write down a month to month plan for where I would like to be. From there, I break each month into 4 weeks and each week into 7 days. Each day gets 5 action points.

Here’s an example of how I’m working towards each of my goals this year:

My spiritual goal this year is to allow myself to be in awe of God daily. I’m doing that by reading through Genesis (and maybe Exodus) slowly and intentionally over the course of the year. I am using a guided Bible study with journal prompts and historical context and references in order to help gain an understanding of the full picture of the stories I’m reading in the Bible.

One of my physical goals is to fast more (this is also fueled by a spiritual goal to depend on God’s enough-ness more than my own), so I chose one day each week where I am going to fast from one meal for the first few months of the year, two meals for the next few months, and then eventually a full day.

A mental health goal for me is to make more music because I have found that music is my preferred stress releaser and so I am committing to practicing music for at least 1 hour twice a week.

One of my relational goals is to either facetime or see one friend each week and so I am intentionally setting time aside each week for socializing. My husband and I are also putting our phones away and taking more walks outside with our poodle, George.

My biggest financial goal is to create a sufficient safety net for my husband and me to fall back on if we were to find ourselves out of a job at any point. We are also saving up to provide for our eventual children. So, I am not only working full time but am also seeking out any opportunity that I can to make some side money that I can directly stow away. My career goal is to eventually monetize my blog, so I am committing to writing at least once, hopefully, twice a week.

I’ve broken each of those goals into a daily (or weekly) action step that I can take, but not every step needs to be taken every single day. On the days that I write my blog, I do a shorter workout. I have a side gig on Wednesdays that takes me away from working on music.

For me, I’ve set specific days for specific tasks. I know that I write on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. I am committed to moving my body for at least 20 minutes Monday through Friday. Really, the only task that I actually do daily is reading my Bible.

By taking my big goals and breaking them down into bite-size tasks, I’ve been able to actually reach my goals.

I’ve used this plan for the last 3 years and have really seen a difference in my ability to make and achieve my goals because I’m not just putting a sticky note on my mirror to tell myself a message that at my core I don’t actually believe.

My problem with setting an intention is that the word intention implies no real action. Setting an intention like “this year, I will be light and love to those around me” is just a sentence full of empty words that really have no grounding in reality.

Instead of saying that you are light and love, why not seek out ways that you can intentionally grow in your faith and in so doing reflect Christ’s light and His love in your relationships?

In my life, this has made all the difference. I’m a firm believer in committing to action and not just choosing empty words that sound good but really have no practical implications on our daily life.

Another tip I’ll leave you with is that my spiritual goals fuel and feed into all of my other goals. My ultimate goal for my life is to honor God with my work, my body, my finances, and my relationships.

Our spiritual well-being is the absolute most important part of our lives.

If you don’t have a right relationship with God, then you will inevitably be left feeling dissatisfied and overwhelmed by your not enough-ness. Here’s the good news: you are not enough. And that’s okay. Instead of trying so hard to be enough, rest in Him who is all-sufficient. He will satisfy your every need, whether you hit your goals or not.

We serve a God who calls us to steward our lives well, but we also serve a King who recognizes our imperfection and created a solution: He came to earth and lived the perfect life that we are incapable of, He was brutally murdered on a cross, He carried our sins and failures to the grave and left them there when He rose from the dead on the third day.

Ultimately, Christ is all that matters. I fully believe that if you are placing Christ at the forefront of your daily life, then your goals for your life will begin to align with His will for your life which cannot be thwarted.

So, are you on fire and ready to commit to showing up for your faith and for yourself every day this year? I believe in you, friend. And even in the days where it’s hard to believe in ourselves, believe in Him who is able to do above and beyond all that we ask or think according to the power that works in us — to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.