Goal Setting for 2020

It’s come around again to one of my favourite times of year – that awkward week between Christmas & New Year where you don’t know what day it is and your days are spent waking up late, eating all the leftover Christmas chocolate and generally enjoying a big fat chill before the mania of the New Year begins.

But that isn’t why it’s my favourite time of year. I love it because I feel refreshed from a week off and excited to set myself new goals for the year and most importantly, starting them NOW.

Before I go onto share my tips for setting goals you will actually stick to throughout the year, I wanted to share with you SOME of my goals for 2020. I have goals every year and I write them at the front of my diary so I look at them every day when I go to write in it, and so I’m reminded of what I’m trying to achieve that year, daily.

My goals

• Triple the monthly revenue of my marketing agency
• Successfully launch my new business – a diamond store ( more on this in another post)
• Launch my second instagram channel
• Start my Youtube channel
• Start my podcast
• Travel to Tokyo, Maldives & Rome
• Buy a house in London

So as you can probably guess, I’m going to have a pretty busy year next year working towards all of these goals. I have a pretty good work ethic, but I’m constantly trying to improve it and I wanted to share some tips of how I’ve been able to stay on track with my goals so you can accomplish all of your hopes & dreams in 2020:

• Make the goal actionable. For the sake of this blog post and to not bore you to tears I’ve written my goals above as very vague, non actionable goals. But If I was share with you how they would be actionable, they’d look something like this: – Speak to 10 leads a day and double my minimum monthly retainers to hit my monthly revenue targets – Spend an hour a day planning, scheduling and creating content for my new Instagram channel. – Understand what budget is needed to travel Tokyo, Maldives & Rome so that I can save accordingly.

In essence, by adding actionable, tangible steps to your goal, it makes it easier for you to achieve. If your goal is to lose weight in the New Year, switch your goal from ‘lose weight,’ to ‘ go to the gym twice a week for an hour.’ The more specific you can be, the better.

• Set a time limit – and ideally make it in the first half of the year. The more time you have to accomplish something, the less likely you are to complete it or start it straight away as you won’t feel any sense of urgency. If you’re not sure how to set the time limit, try to break the action down into sizeable chunks. For example, I’m running the London marathon at the end of April, so one of my goals is to run an extra 16 miles from the 10 miles I can already do, in 4 months time. So if I challenge myself to add an extra 1-1.5 miles a week, which is around 4-5 miles a month to my long runs, I will be able to hit my goal. Make sense?
• make yourself accountable – setting goals is great, but if you just tell yourself in your head and don’t do anything else about it, chances are you won’t feel much guilt if you don’t achieve it. Try telling at least 3 people what your goal is – it could be a family friend, a member and a colleague. By telling others you’re making yourself accountable for your actions and know there will be someone checking in on you to see how you’re progressing, which is a great way to stay motivated.
• make it visual – for me this usually means writing them down on a big white board, but this year I’m going to go one step further and create a giant mood board of images and words that showcase how I want my year to look. You may have another method that works better, but doing something to make your goals visual is a great step to seeing your goals come to life.
• remind yourself daily – now whatever you’ve created, make sure to put it somewhere you can look at DAILY. It’s no use writing your goals in the a notebook and then shoving it to the bottom of your drawer. If you’ve written them on a whiteboard, hang it up in your room. If you’ve created a vision board on Pinterest, make it your phone screensaver, or set yourself a daily reminder to look at it. The more often you remind yourself of your goals, the more your mind will be focused on them.
• start NOW – don’t wait for the right ‘time’, a day when you’re feeling good, when you have enough money, when you’ve bought the right equipment- these are all just silly excuses. START NOW. Right after you finish reading this, just dedicate an extra 5 minutes of your time to sit and take the first step towards your goal. It doesn’t have to be a big step, it’s just important that you start.

To my ever lovely readers – hat are your goals for 2020? Do you have any other techniques to make sure you stick to your goals?

Giulia x