Life planning: SMART Goals and Vision Boards
The significant act of life on a daily is that for the most part, you can dictate how well or not the day goes. This is through your mindset, attitude, and daily habits. Often, we use the end or beginning of the year to reflect on months past - what went right, what did not go right, what new things we want to do, or what we can improve. This leads to goals and vision boards and how one can use these to frame their days to come.
If you were to look back on life in 5 or 10 years, one key thought for many will be how much of that time was spent in what one had envisioned for themselves, or just living day to day where the wind blows them. Truthfully, you can take the lead in your life and use this to carve out what you have intended for yourself. Life goals or life plans - target, roadmap, and priorities enable you to frame a picture of this. Know the difference between a goal - an idea of the future or desired result that a person or a group of people envision and commit to achieving and a plan - a detailed proposal for doing or achieving something, identifies ways of making a goal successful. By making your goals SMART goals - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound, you can take this picture and break it down into smaller actionable tasks to make this intention a reality.
You can make use of this YearCompass which is structured to help reflect on the year gone past, and plan for the year ahead. Download here
Steps to identifying goals
The starting point is always the mind, and taking the time out to reflect on life - where you are, where you have come from but now looking toward the future - where you want to be. As you marinate on these thoughts, key areas that one can reflect on can be the following and based on the perspective of planning for 1 year, 5 years, or whichever timeline you intend on using.
Career and professional development Personal development
Family and relationships Marriage and Parenting
Health and fitness Finances and wealth
Community and volunteering Social and recreational
Spiritual well-being and mental health Business and entrepreneurship
After reflecting on all of these areas, it is essential to have the goals associated with them written down. “Write it down. Written goals have a way of transforming wishes into wants; cant's into cans; dreams into plans; and plans into reality. Don't just think it - ink it!” Michael Korda. There are various templates available on the web that can assist you in this process, and YearCompass is perfect to kickstart your goal planning. You can also consider having a personal mission statement - that describes the kind of person you intend to become holistically and word for the year - and affirming, guiding word that you can use to focus your goals and plans for the year. This can be any word i.e. elevate, renewed, audacious, etc. Whatever word you use has to speak to either where you are in life or where you want to be.
Whilst this may be your first time creating your goals or you may be experienced, the 3 part short videos by Marie Forleo can be very useful in guiding you. Marie’s videos cover a decade in review - celebrating your wins, releasing the past, and creating your 10-year plan.
SMART goals and plans in action
Once you have identified your goals and converted them into SMART goals, you will require the motivation and discipline to keep pursuing them on a daily. What helps is an accountability partner(s). This could be family, friends, career, or personal mentors that will keep monitoring and measuring your progress with you. You can make this formal by having regular set meetings such as monthly or quarterly to enforce this.
Time alone to reflect on progress or any adjustments to the goals is equally important with a more frequent check-in, depending on your goals and how you have structured them. You can set regular reminders in your calendar however equally significant is setting time dedicated to the goals and progressing them bit by bit. This is where physical or digital year planners or diaries could be useful, where you can plan by day, week, month, or year, enabling you to plan your time and resources in advance. You can source planners and diaries from the following:
Unikhona - Goal chart planner R75, reusable daily, weekly or monthly acrylic planner R450.
Typo - physical planners, diaries, and calendars starting from R150.
Love Letters Stationery - physical planners and diaries starting at R200, personalised planners and diaries starting from R300.
Khule Ntombela - physical planners starting from R350.
Journal Cue - solitude and gratitude journals from R200.
Cumbooks - physical planners and journals starting from R80.
Alexa Lily - physical daily and monthly edit planners starting from R600.
The Papery - physical planners, diaries, and journals starting from R249.
Etsy - physical and digital planners and diaries starting from R50.
Penzu - free online digital diary, available as computer software or app.
Journey - free digital diary and journal. Available on Linux, Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, and Android phones & tablets.
Grid Diary - free digital journal and planner app. Premium features are subscription-based, $2.99 per month, or $22.99 for the year.
MatseMakeup Ltd - Digital weekly and monthly planner for Ipad. Also printable R120
Vision Boards
When all has been planned and written down, vision boards are a lovely way to bring together all your goals vividly. This can include text or not, but for the most part, it is different pictures put together in a collage view to visually represent your goals. The traditional way of doing this is by having a physical vision board - using a large paper or poster board, cutting out images from magazines, and sticking them onto the board. Once completed, this can be placed somewhere that you look at daily such as your bedroom or workspace. Since digital tools are all around us, it could be simpler to do a digital vision board using Canva, Pinterest, Phonto, and various apps available on Google Play and the Apple App Store such as Vision Board, Visuapp, Freeform, The Landing. What better way to have a daily nudge of your goals than a board in your room or wallpaper on your computer or phone, bringing to focus your life to come which you are preparing for daily.
May your thoughts champion your year.
“Thoughts become things, if you can see it in your mind, you can hold it in your hands.” Bob Proctor
