As we progress into the beginning of year and create our vision boards, it’s important take it a step further and create concrete goals for how you will achieve this vision. Often times people wonder why their vision board didn’t come true, but manifestation requires action. You’ve taken the first step to visualize the reality you want and now you have to start believing in that reality and moving and acting how that version of yourself would act. This is key to accelerating your goals. Keep reading to find out my tips for how I achieve this.

If you haven’t yet created your vision board, check out my post here on how to create a digital vision board.

Step 1. Pick focus areas

With your vision board complete you should have a fairly good idea of your overall intentions for the year. From here, I like to pick 3-4 broad ‘sections’ to target. For example, last year I picked, mind, body, and food. These 3 things stuck out to me as areas of my life I wanted to focus on for the year that aligned with my intentions and vision board. Other examples could be finances, relationships, career, etc. Pick whatever makes sense for you and your goals.

Step 2. Create high level goals

From these broad sections, create at least 2-3 goals you want to focus on in each of these areas. I tend to keep this pretty high level and broad since these are areas we can focus on all year and you don’t want to make it so specific that it doesn’t allow it to grow with you and change.

Focusing on my food section for example, my two goals were ‘Cook more healthy meals at home’ and ‘Start making things homemade’. Now these are obviously very broad and the metric for achieving this is ambiguous. We will get more detailed in the next step, but these are for you and you should have general idea of where you are today and what level of improvement would make you feel as if you have progressed towards these goals. These allow you to create a short list of the areas you can start making changes in now that will help you progress towards your best self. What I always try to keep in mind is slow progress is still progress.

Step 3. Get specific

Next, it’s time to get specific. At this point you should have 9-12 high level goals that you want to focus on for the year. As I mentioned before, we have all year so starting out in January, I like to pick around 3 different high level goals that I’m most inspired to start with. For these 3 goals, I get specific on next steps I can take today or measures of success I can work towards.

Continuing with my food example, to more specifically work towards cooking more healthy meals at home, I set a measurable goal to limit my eating out to 3 times per week and then downloaded the New York Times Cooking App and created a folder of saved recipes I wanted to try. Then whenever I needed inspiration, I was able to use this folder of pre-chosen recipes to find inspiration. These were two ways I got more specific on how I would work towards this goal. For me, it was important to have some quantitative measurement that I could work on that would help me measure success, but also pairing it with something that will inspire me and help me get excited about cooking meals home when I start to lose inspiration. This combination works well for me in areas that I’m trying to create new habits.

Complete this for your 3 chosen goals and then get started! Don’t worry too much about all the goals we laid out, just focus on those to start and feel free to work towards your others as you’re inspired.

Step 4. Quarterly Check-Ins

I like to make sure to check in on a quarterly basis. I not only review progress towards the goals I’ve been working towards but I also find this the perfect time to introduce more of the high level goals I haven’t started on yet.

For example, in Q2 of last year, I decided to work towards a new hobby, which was one of the goals I wrote down as part of my I wanted to do as part of my Mind focus area. When possible, I find it best to pair up goals when I can that all work together seamlessly towards my overall goals. If you recall from earlier, I also had a goal in the in the ‘Food’ section of working towards cooking more healthy meals at home and making more things homemade. These two goals paired really well with a hobby I had wanted to try for awhile which was starting a vegetable garden. This was something I chose to work on in Q2 and I was able to very easily pair into my other two goals as well since now I had a surplus of vegetables that I needed to use. With the food I grew I was able to make fun new recipes such as homemade tomato soup and also make things homemade by trying an at home pickle recipe using cucumbers and dill I grew.

As your continue throughout the year, continue to check in on progress and add more of the goals on your list into your daily life. I find this a great way to add changes into your life slowly and sustainably. Using this method, by the end of the year you will find your life largely changed and reflecting your January vision board.

Try out these next steps and comment below on the areas of your life you plan to focus on this year! Also, let me know if you would be interested in seeing how I organize all of the goals I described in Notion.

Happy goal setting!

amx