2023 is almost upon us and it is time to prepare for the year ahead. Now is the time to build off of 2022 and begin setting goals to close in on our ultimate goal of financial freedom and wealth. Setting difficult yet attainable goals for the year timeframe that will build you up to where you want to go is crucial to your progress and ultimately your success. If we plan right and make sure the action steps necessary are taken, there is no reason why you should not accomplish at least 80% of your goals for the year. Discipline, structure, planning, and action are all key drivers to achieving your goals. Before you can look ahead to 2023, however, you must first analyze your successes and failures in 2022 to build off of and set expectations for yourself.
A lookback on 2022
This topic has been covered in some capacity in previous blog posts so we won’t get into too much depth here. When looking back on 2022, you’ll need to pick apart what went wrong and what went right. What goals did you set for yourself? Did you achieve them? Why or why not? Looking back on the year, is it clear how you could have achieved the goals you missed out on? What are some of the biggest failures of the year? Successes? What lessons have you learned that you can carry into 2023? Every single year is a building block from the last. A great way to see your evolution year over year is to keep a journal that you write in for reflection purposes as often as possible, ideally daily. Reading through some of these entries from the beginning to the end of the year will show you how much you’ve grown, failed, and overcome. This can be a great tool that can be used to summarize a year pretty easily.
What’s next for 2023?
To keep things simple and front of mind, I wrote out my goals in a bulleted list format for 2023 on a Google Doc and printed it out to hang right in front of my desk with a check mark next to each goal. This will help me stay on track and aligned with what I set out to accomplish from day one of the year. I will also be able to easily see my progress as the year progresses and the action of checking off those boxes will show me that I’m making progress on the things that are most important to me.
Now that my goals have been written and hung for me to see every day, the next step is to come up with action steps on how each goal will theoretically be achieved. As I’ve learned over the last few years, nothing will ever go exactly to plan and you must know and accept this reality. The purpose of planning out action steps is not to lead you all the way from start to finish, it’s so that you have a clear pathway in your head of what the process may look like and a starting point that will jolt you right into action. In a separate document, it might be helpful to write out a flow of actions that you would need to take to reach a goal. There may be clear cut steps on a progression, or there may be actions that you need to just stay consistent with until you begin to see results. For my goals in 2023, it is a hybrid of these two. My consistent action will ultimately lead me into a progression that will take me to where I want to end up by the start of 2024.
For example, one of my goals for 2023 is to acquire 2-4 properties per month. To do this, I need to be having consistent conversations with sellers and make sure I have a constant influx of motivated leads to talk to. In 2022, I spent a lot of time building out the systems to handle this deal influx so that I can manage them down a pipeline. In 2023, I want to train VAs on how to use the system and move deals down the pipeline in my place so that I can just focus on hot leads to close and develop other areas of my business. This illustrates a hybrid of a progression based goal and a consistent repetitive action based goal wherein my progression is more long term oriented and my consistent action is based on the here and now.
Will 2023 be your best year yet?
2023 is destined to be your best year yet if you just simply choose to plan accordingly and take the action necessary to succeed. Journaling, writing your goals for you to see every day, and mapping out a plan of attack will all help you stay on track and monitor your progress from beginning to end. This is so key to staying on the right path and continuing to build momentum as we get deeper into 2023 and eventually move on to 2024. When we build a catalog of knowledge every year for us to look back on, it makes it that much easier to improve in the following year by learning from our mistakes and tracking everything that is important to us. This is how we grow, reach momentous goals, and become as confident and fulfilled as we possibly can be.