Making Personal Plans in The New Year

GOALS: The beginning of every year is a good time to set the pace of what you want your life to be that year…

Hanging in a restaurant I recently visited and sighing “life is not about finding yourself, life is about creating yourself”, this inspired me to do something significant that year, to create myself.

A new year is an opportunity for self-creation for many, this was done because of the many mysterious life, disappointments I experienced during my previous years and I had to go through a serious rehabilitation and intimate praying and let things go. It was really a hard transition in my life but I had to calm down, collect myself and admit to change. A new year is time to make new plans and resolutions on grounds that you did not go through with you well. It is an opportunity for strategic personal growth. A personal plan is vital in all this. Motivational speaker John Maxwell one day wrote on his website “personal growth does not happen by accident”. It is not an automatic process and if you want to guarantee growth, then you need a plan like something strategic, specific and scheduled. I had never done this before but I said to my inner soul “a winner is a dreamer who never gives up” yeah I still remember those words I said to myself. We have to always put it in our mind that “...my faith is never a hostage to the outcome but it is in the input because my miracle is never in what I lost...” always put your mind in a state that “it is not where you are going to be the problem, but it is what you are leaving behind to find you”.

Plans help you to lay down the visit for your life. People who have a plan become trail blazers. Most dictionaries define vision simply as “the ability to see”. When we call successful people “visionaries” because they saw into the future, planned for it and when time came they simply acted out a script.

Everyone can be a visionary. First see yourself as unique despite whatever you went through in life. “Haters are people who will broadcast your failures and whisper about your success”. This lifted my spirit and I had to put my head up. Most people are limited by barriers of past experience, culture, finances or society in general to make it.

Plans also enable you to know yourself and strengthen the belief in yourself because you do not become what you want but you become what you believe. I once attended a workshop where we were told to write a mission statement, a vision statement and long and short term plans for our lives. Who are you? Where are you going? How are you going to get there and so on and so forth. It was a very helpful exercise which I would recommend to anybody. It was self-revelatory because it starts with knowing who you are and what you want to achieve. The next step after you know who you are is to see yourself where you want to be. Clearly articulate the level of success you want to achieve. A nearby house, car, business, what is it that you want to bring out of you that particular year. This brings you to the next step. You have to figure out how you will get time there; how to raise capital if you need capital for business or funding for further education or whatever it is this pushes you into action.

Finally, there is also power in writing down all these goals for every facet of your life. Write it all down, write down goals for your business, education, family, marriage, relationship, entertainment, wardrobe, basically in everything you do if it is all thought through and put down in writing, it will all be executed. A written vision is reinforced in your psyche and it is also recorded so that you can revisit it or adjust it as you go along because writing a vision down eliminates time wasting.

Seven questions to ask yourself.

1. What are the things I am most passionate about? What do I love? What work do you do that does not feel like work?

2. What are my greatest accomplishments in life so far? Think about your past experiences and the things in your life that you are most proud of.

3. If my life had absolutely no limits, what would I choose to have and what would I choose to do? Here is a cool exercise; think about what you would do if you had no limits.

4. What are my goals in life? Goals are a necessary component to set you up for a happy future.

5. Whom do I admire most in the world? Following the path of successful people can set you up for success.

6. What don’t I like to do? An important part of figuring out what you want to do with your life is honestly assessing what you do not want to do.

7. How hard am I willing to work to get what I want? Great accomplishments never come easily.