Setting yearly goals by defining your themes

Some people are goals people. Some aren’t.

For me, goals are a major driver of my activities. Over the years, I’ve gotten much more granular about creating detailed action plans behind all of my goals.

This year, I’m bolting on something new to the goal-setting process. I’m defining my year under three themes. I’ll explain this theme concept below, but here’s why I’ve decided to do that.

Some goals require bigger accomplishments and efforts. Others seem a little more granular or tactical. But usually all of your goals can be linked back to a theme or two.

For me, my ability to achieve any one of my goals relates to one of the three themes I’m focusing on in 2019.

Here are my 2019 themes:

Scale up and execute
Live joyfully
Be fearless in everything I do

Here’s what those themes mean to me.

Scale up and execute.

As I look back at the past couple of years, I’ve put a lot of foundational pieces in place in a lot of areas of my life – building an investment firm (Ridgeline Ventures), building a web business (Luke’s Circle), family, health, finances, etc. This year, I have to do a better job of scaling myself. I have to do more building of teams around me and putting systems in place so I can scale my time, effort and mental energy on items where I can create the most value across different areas of my life. Further, this is a year requiring shear execution. I have to execute like mad if I want to accomplish what I’ve set my sights on. And I’m not going to fail on that.

Live joyfully.

I love my life. I express gratitude everyday for so many aspects of it. For the people in it, for the experiences I get to have, for the opportunities I have, for the growth I experience everyday, for so many things. However, sometimes I have a tendency to allow my pursuit of goals create an overriding level of seriousness that is hard to reign back. I don’t laugh as much as I feel like I should and as much as I’d like to. So this theme for me is all about creating joy in my life and others’ lives. If I create joy for others, I’ll make a positive impact and create happiness. And if I’m mindful about living in a joyful state, I’m sure to have a few more laughs than I would otherwise. The irony in this is that in a joyful state I’ll probably accomplish more than I would if I were always stuck in a serious state.

Be fearless in everything I do.

Fear is paralyzing. It could be fear of not accomplishing what we want. It could be fear or worry what others might think. It could be a desire to please others. It could be fear of anything. This is the year to forget about fear. I’m generally a pretty confident guy, but there are times in which I worry too much about what others may think. Then I restrict what I might say or do. This is the year of really stepping up and into the leader I am and leaving all fears behind.

So those are my themes. In order to accomplish any of my goals, I have to follow through on these themes.

How does this resonate with you? Ready to define your themes? I’d love to hear about any beginning of the year goal-setting activities that help you. Drop a comment over on LinkedIn.