On Saturday, Evan and I headed to our favorite local coffee shop, Republik, and spent several hours talking out our 2019 goals. They included career goals, personal goals, goals as a couple, financial goals, and more. As ridiculous as it sounds, goal-setting has slowly become one of our favorite things. While our minds definitely operate very differently, we are both driven to achieve and do our best work when we make a plan. Our differences in the way we think often lead to toward heated debates (or, as some people call it, fighting HA), but also very often allow us to approach a situation from multiple angles with a strong strategy. And, as anyone who has ever met us before knows, we love to talk. Like, we really love it. I honestly don’t think we’ll ever run out of things to talk about, but dreaming of the future, making plans, and setting goals is at the top of our “favorite subjects to talk about” list!

Last year, we were strong on the planning and in the first month, but we pretty quickly lost sight of most of them and even forgot several. It wasn’t until we went back and looked through the old goals that we realized how UNintentional we had been throughout the year. We made a lot of mistakes. One of the biggest mistakes was not caring enough about some of the goals we set, which led us to forget quickly and not really care when we didn’t achieve. Those ones were obvious when we reviewed our 2018 list. But, there were also some that we really did want to achieve but just didn’t. We compared those to the ones we did achieve, and from there, came up with a new strategy.

This year, we are more determined to be intentional about our goals. We have placed higher value and significance upon them, so we also have created a stronger strategy in sticking to them and keeping track of how we’re doing. And I’m going to share that strategy with you now! Here are our top 7 tips for achieving your 2019 goals!

1. Focus on your vision: This needs to happen before you even start to set your goals. I find that sometimes, I set goals that don’t really have a long-term reason or benefit. By focusing on what I want my life to look like in a holistic sense, I’m able to more easily identify the things that will push my life in that direction verses things that don’t really matter. This is particularly true when deciding on the number of goals (see next tip!). You might find that the number of goals that you’ve set is unachievable because of sheer quantity. Knowing your vision allows you to rank them and choose the most important ones!
2. Be realistic: If you want to achieve a goal, the first thing to do is make sure that it’s actually possible. This sounds really obvious, but I actually think it takes some thought to truly know if a goal is realistic or not. Think through the practical implications – when and how you’d do it. Do you have enough time? Do you have the resources? Do you care enough about it to make sacrifices in other areas of your life? You’ll also want to consider your other goals and how they all fit together. A realistic list of goals for 2019 is also probably a short list. Don’t make too many!
3. Make them monthly or quarterly, not yearly: We all like to talk about New Year’s resolutions, but why does it only have to happen on January 1? Do you really know all of your goals for the year that far in advance? Making monthly or quarterly will allow you to 1) evaluate your present-day life to add new goals more regularly and 2) check-in to how you’re doing with the previous goals you set and determine if you’d like to continue towards achieving that goal (or check one off as completed!) We sit down monthly to budget and finances, so we are added a goal check-in to this monthly meeting and re-setting the next month’s goals.
4. Have accountability: This one is so important for me personally. While I have a lot of intrinsic motivation on some elements of my life, the day-to-day chore of making it happen will often lag if I don’t have accountability to someone else. Evan is a fantastic accountability partner because we have different weaknesses and can gently point them out to one another and encourage each other to keep going. The additional of Cassie to the HBP team this year means that I’ll also have an accountability partner for business goals. Find someone who will challenge you and isn’t afraid to ask how you’re doing, and check in regularly.
5. Be specific: As a big picture thinker, I’m bad at this one, too! If you’re like me, then this one is super important. Goals need to big specific. If your goal isn’t specific, then it’s going to be very hard to know if you’ve been successful. If the category seems really large, break it down into pieces and figure out what success looks like for that specific goal. And this leads me to my next point . . .
6. Make it quantifiable when possible: If you want to achieve a goal, you need to know it means to achieve that goal. What is a success? What is a failure? How can you measure if you’ve been successful? As a small business owner, this one is SO helpful for me. I don’t have a boss or supervisor to tell me how I’m doing. I am my own boss. By making quantifiable goals, I can measure my own success and keep my business on track with where I want it to go! In our personal life, this is a measurable way to see if we’re on the right or wrong track to our life vision.
7. Reward  yourself: This is the best one! Set up a reward for yourself for completing each goal. It can be big or small, and it should be proportional to the goal you completed. Rewarding yourself gives you that little extra motivation to achieve. Evan and I set a yearly fitness goal for July – November (usually a number of miles to walk/run per week), and we always have a reward waiting at the end. It sounds silly, but this genuinely  gives me the extra push to get up off the couch on any given day and go for a run!

Those are the steps we’re going to use to be successful this year. I am so excited to get started (is that nerdy of me?)! While I’m not sharing my business goals (yet), I wanted to share a few of our other goals for the coming year! Let me know if you’ve set anything similar and we can do it together!

Highlights from my 2019 goals:

Complete Whole 30 & 30-day yoga challenge with Evan in the month of January.

Plan a vacation abroad that doesn’t include shooting a wedding for the month of August-September.

Improve a skill (piano) by practicing it regularly for 10 minutes before the start of work.

Co-launch our new lifestyle blog by February.

Journal twice weekly.

 

If you’d like to know more about any one of these goals or why they are important to me, shoot me an email or comment below!