Goals Part 1: Where are you now?

A great blog that I follow is The Art of Non-Conformity. Although one of the main topics for the blog is traveling and travel-hacking (very interesting, but not for me); the author Chris Guillebeau has a lot of other great ideas. He has e-books on World Domination, Building an Empire, How to Work for Yourself, and generally has a great outlook on getting things done. I have learned a lot from his blog, but probably the biggest thing I have adopted is conducting an annual review. 

Instead of coming up with vague New Years resolutions, conducting your own annual review involves looking at the past year to see what went well or poorly and what you may have wanted to accomplish but didn't get to. Then you can set short and long term goals for the next year, and break them down into categories such as finance goals, professional goals, personal goals, or whatever you feel like. Then you create an overreaching theme for the year which can help describe or inspire what you have going on in life, or the kinds of things you would like to accomplish.

This year was the first annual review that I have done. I chose to make 2011 my "Year of Growth" and some of the goals I set included:

• Achieving a body-weight of 200 pounds
• Getting a job as a Personal Trainer at the Sports Barn
• Getting my blue belt in Gracie Jiu-Jitsu
• Getting equipment to do personal training in my home
• Read 52 books
• Pay off my credit cards completely

So far I have reached almost all of the goals that I set for the year. I have hit 200 pounds, got my new job, have a good setup for training at home, and last Saturday I got promoted to Blue Belt. Now that I have done this though, it is time for me to review my goals and that is what I am going to be doing most of the day today. Although I have made great progress this year, there are some areas that I have been slacking in, and today will be a chance to revisit my goals and make plans for the remainder of the year.

This may seem like a bunch of boring and time consuming work, but in reality it is a chance to really get inspired and commit yourself to do great things (big and small). It is important to take a step back and look at where you are in your life every so often. Only then can you figure out if you are going in the direction you really want to be, and decide where you want to be going this year. Most importantly though you can create a plan to get there, which will be covered more in the rest of the Goals series.