4 Habits to Help You Plan for the Best New Year Ever
Do you usually head into a new year already feeling scattered and behind? First of all, you're not alone. Second of all, it doesn't have to be that way.
Today I’m sharing 4 intentional things that you can to do to help you have the best year ever!
1️⃣ Be intentional in prepping.
I recommend not waiting until December 31 to start planning for what you want your next year to be like. If we don’t plan ahead, we usually find ourselves frantically flying by the seat of our pants and hoping for the best. Well let me tell you - hoping for stuff doesn’t make it happen. Action does though.
But this is also not me encouraging you to put a butt load of pressure on yourself to have every single goal for 2021 meticulously planned out either. Give yourself some grace as you step up to the plate to create a life you’re stoked about.
I really like to spend the week between Christmas and New Years reflecting on the current year and deciding what I want to carry with me into the new year, what I want to leave behind, and what new things I want to cultivate. That week is usually a slower week and I feel like most people don’t really know what to do with themselves anyway so it’s the perfect opportunity to spend some intentional time reflecting and preparing.
I like to have this thing that I call a Yearly Vision Meeting sometime during that week. It’s a meeting where I both reflect and plan. Here’s what that looks like for me:
👉🏼 Reflect on the 5 Keys to Hustling Sanely and myself these questions:
1) Are there any limiting beliefs that I need to address?
2) What progress did I make on my goals this year?
3) What changes do I want to make in the coming year? For this one, I think about how I spent my time, how I showed up for relationships, and how I took care of my mental and physical health
4) What new goals do I want to work toward in the coming year?
5) What habits and routines do I need to implement to support this?
👉🏼 Choose my yearly word. I’ve chosen a yearly word since 2016 and I love it because it gives me an anchor for the year. Something that I want all areas of my life to point back to. I typically land on my word of the year during prayer, but I’m going to share some tips for choosing one in my upcoming Best Year Ever workshop so if you feel stuck when it comes to preparing for the new year, sign up for the free workshop below:
👉🏼 Make a vision board! I love making a vision board every year and over the years, I’ve changed up how I do it. Instead of focusing exclusively on pictures of specific goals, I like creating a board that encompasses how I want to feel in the new year. With emphasis on WHY what I’m working toward is important to me. Before you can create a vision board though, you have to be clear on your vision - and hopefully that sounds familiar because it IS Key 2 to Hustling Sanely!
Okay so that’s an overview of what goes down in my Yearly Vision Meeting. The second thing to do to help you have the best year ever is:
2️⃣ Use categories to set goals and actually schedule your goals.
I feel like goal setting can be kind of this elusive thing sometimes. People will set random arbitrary goals just to say they have goals but that is silly. Set REAL, intentional goals that you care about. Some years I have 10 goals and others I have 3. You don’t need a certain amount of goals - just make sure the ones you do set are meaningful to you.
To help me not get overwhelmed when I’m setting goals, I like to think of setting goals for certain categories of my life. Here are some of the categories I use:
👉🏼 Family/Relationships
👉🏼 Professional
👉🏼 Health (mental and physical)
👉🏼 Finances/Generosity
👉🏼 Personal Development (Hobbies, Faith, Home)
Once you’ve decided on your goals, put them on the calendar. I like to focus on one goal per month because I have found that when I try to cram a bunch of goals in at once, I get burnt out. I look at my list of goals and plug them into the month that makes the most sense. Then, each month, I know what my focus goal is and I can put my best time and energy toward that goal that month instead of feeling totally scattered and like I’m just grabbing at 15 different goals and once and making no true progress. And yes, some goals take more than one month and that’s okay.
Using categories to set goals and scheduling them out in advance has helped me make drastic progress on my goals over the years.
3️⃣ Understand and honor seasons.
This is important. We are not machines. We were not created to live in constant push seasons back to back. It’s normal and healthy to have slow seasons. It’s really natural for us to be slower and have less energy in the winter months. Nothing in nature blooms all year, right? I’m sure you’ve heard that saying before. Growth is a process and part of the process happens slowly under the soil.
I encourage you to pay attention to your energy throughout the year. Are you going from push season to push season? Or are you making prolonged periods of rest a priority in order to take care of yourself?
July-January was/is a major push season for me in my business. I knew that was going to be the case so I rested a lot last spring. And I plan to rest again this spring from February-July. Now by rest, I don’t mean do nothing. I just mean be very aware of my output. If you are in a push season, make sure it has an end date so you don’t run yourself into the ground. Be aware of and honor your seasons, girl!
4️⃣ Schedule regular check-ins.
This one is easy! Easy to set up anyway but it does require discipline to follow through. So I have these things called Hustle Sanely Habits - and I actually have a whole podcast episode coming next year that dives into them all but it’s basically specific times that I have on my calendar that I know I’ll be checking-in with myself to see how things are going. How the heck can you track progress and make sure you’re in a healthy place mentally if you don’t assess how things are going?
When you don’t check-in and assess, you can easily fall into just going through the motions of life and wind up waking up one day wondering how the heck you got where you are - why you’re so unhappy with where you’re at and clueless as to where you're heading, you know? We don’t want that to be the case for you, so try putting these check-ins on the books for 2021:
👉🏼 Yearly Check-In Meeting (December)
👉🏼 Quarterly Check-In Meeting (January, April, July, October)
👉🏼 Monthly Check-In Meeting
I ask myself different types of questions for each of these, related to the 5 Keys to Hustling Sanely, to make sure that I’m on track with where I want to be going.
If you enjoyed this post, tune into episode 061 of The Hustle Sanely Podcast to listen into this topic!
