Happy New Year to everyone!! It’s been a year again and now we are about to face a new chapter of our lives. Every new year comes with the new hopes for us, new challenges, new changes and of course new goals we want to achieve in life. Weather the past years had been good to us or not, we are always hopeful for the great things to come at the start of the new year and all throughout. So to be more proactive and productive this year, let’s start with a plan. Let’s start setting up our goals for this year that will guide us on achieving the life we want it to be.
To guide you as you begin to establish your own goals in life, let’s define first what Personal Goal is:
What Are Personal Goals?
Personal goals are envisions of things and ideas you want to achieve in life. In order to achieve them, you must commit on carrying out the plans you laid out to achieve them. As they are personal, your goals are more particular to the development and improvement of yourself. They could be related to your work, home, health, finances or lifestyles. Setting up all your goals can motivate you to stay focus and positive at all time.
Your goals can be specific or not. Sample of specific is “I want to learn how to drive”. While sample of non-specific goal is “I want to learn something new every week”. They can be short-term or long term, measurable or not but most of all should be realistic and attainable. You can set specific target time on achieving them or use the entire year depending on the level of difficulty of attaining them. Non-measurable goals pertain to goals which are not quantifiable and most likely falls on the mental and moral qualities of your personality. Like you want to be more friendly, more polite to others or any other moral behaviors and characters you wish to improve in yourself.
My “Personal Goals”
Below is my Personal Goals sketch. I intentionally made it a little bit fuzzy but you can still read it. Just try hard to read and please I politely ask not to mock them. They might be too funny for you but at least they are attainable for me. Remember they are “personal” so they might not sound good to you but they are to me. They are too personal yet I shared it to give you some hints and clues on setting up your own goals. Who knows we might have the same goals in life.
My goals are classified into 6 categories: RELATIONSHIPS, FINANCES, WORK, HOME, HEALTH and PERSONAL. Let’s begin defining each category.
Relationship Goals
These goals pertain to the interpersonal behavior that you would like to improve to yourself. I know I’m not perfect at being in a relationship but I really value what we have right now with my partner and in order to protect it I know there’s a lot that I need to change in my ways of dealing matters surrounding our relationship. Thus I planned to change a lot in my character, conduct, manner and habits towards my partner (they should all mean the same thing right?). These goals may not be measurable by quantity but the results would be very apparent by how your relationships grow at the end of the year. The relationship goals do not focus only with your romantic partner. It may also include plans about your relationship with your family, friends and even strangers.
Financial Goals
Perhaps financial freedom is one of everyone’s objectives in life. But not everyone gets there though they want it and probably it’s because they failed to plan financially. Here’s where your financial goals come in. These goals refer to the ways to achieve your financial freedom in life. This includes saving, investing, wise expending of money (budgeting), going into business, paying off your debts and liabilities, acquiring assets to generate more income and other sidelines which are necessary in building your wealth. Just be careful in going into business and investments. If you are a beginner venturing to this world, you may need to start on getting a financial advisor or reading and researching a lot more about all the necessary knowledge in this field specially the risks.
Building your financial statement is also a good practice for monitoring and tracking all your income as well as your expenses. Once you get a glimpse of your financial records, you will get an idea which expenses need to be cut off to become more efficient with your budgeting. Creating your emergency fund would also be very important in cases of emergency wherein you’re unable to earn money or in need of a huge amount of money. This will keep you off from getting into a huge debt in cases of unwanted events. Life insurance is also as important. There are life insurances which are being offered in-bundled with investments to help you build your financial wealth while protecting your health as well. Saving for retirement is good too. Saving earlier is better so when the time comes that you can no longer work to earn, you still have some thing to enjoy in your golden years.
Work Goals
If you are still an employee like me who’s still developing financial stability, that would be ok. Its a good start of your financial life. We all needs to settle all our daily and basic necessities and having a good income-generating work is one of our goals in life. However, if you’re familiar about ESBI quadrant (Cashflow Quadrant) by Robert Kyosaki, you should know being an employee for the rest of your life is not the road to your financial freedom. To become one, we need to be on the Business or Investment side which would give us passive income while we are asleep. However, while we are still on the employee quadrant, we must plan to build multiple sources of income as much as we can which will eventually move us to the Business or Investment quadrant. And such, we can list here goals about doing sidelines, online selling, offering services, starting a small business, online tutorial or any other legal means of generating extra money for saving.
Home Goals
If you’re still not have your own house, this could be one of your goals this year. If you have enough money stashed in the bank, why not start getting your own home instead of renting? If you can pay your monthly rent for a house then why not pay it to become yours? There are bank loans which offer low interest to buy your dream house and there is also Pag-IBIG fund which can offer you a maximum length of payment terms. Buying your dream house is a good investment. Unlike cars, house and lots keep on appreciating every year. If you will not avail this year, it might be more difficult to avail on the coming next years as prices keep on soaring. I was very thankful that I made the right decision of buying my own house last 2017 (thru Pag-IBIG Housing Loan) because if didn’t do so, I wouldn’t be able to afford now (2022) because the Equity is now a million.
Now if you already acquired your dream house, I bet you have tons of plan for the development of its design, be exterior or interior one just like me. Just take it slowly on spending for it as you still have other expenses like bills that needs to paid off first. Planning to decorate your house as well as acquiring appliances should be done with regulation to keep you in line with your budget. After all, we just want to make our home to be more accommodating, and relaxing right? And it is truly rewarding and comforting getting home after a long period of work when you see how good your home looks inside and out.
Health Goals
Health is wealth. And you should never forget them to include in your goals list for the entire year and thereafter. Health goals as you know it pertain to plans to strengthen and protect your physical health. And it is as important as your other goals because having a good health means having enough energy to boost your performances in reaching your goals. Good health also gives you focus mind to do things you need to do which are necessary in achieving your goals. Therefore you can list here plans about your exercise program, diet, vitamins and food supplementary intakes, and other daily or monthly routine for you health care.
Personal Goals
This goals pertain to personal values you would like to employ and develop within your personality. These may include attitude, behavior, character, conduct, or ethics that you would like to practice and change for good. Having target goals for self-development is very important in achieving your goals. Values dominantly influence us how we see things in life, how we solve conflicts, how we decide and how we respond to any situations we may encounter in life. In essence, having good and strong personality helps us handle even the most difficult situation of our lives. And these are your personal strengths which will define the outcome of your efforts for reaching your goals.
Insights
As we journey to another year, we all desire to become a better version of ourselves than the last year. We continuously work on self-development and practicing setting our goals is the right start for it. If you want to be motivated everyday, post your accomplished Personal Goals right next to where you can easily see them once you get up in the morning. Regardless of how sleepy still you are, once you read it first thing in the morning, it will perk you up to get you started. Reading it everyday will keep you focus on the things you need to do and just keep doing it everyday until it becomes your routine unconsciously.
To start with your own goals, here’s the link for the Gdrive where you can download my template for you own Personal goals. The zip file includes the font styles I used, a photoshop template which you can use to edit the frame of the template and an excel file where you can enumerate all your goals in life. To give my goals a structure that can be easily tracked and implemented, I made them into a checklist format so I could monitor which goals I have already attained and not. You too can modify this template for your own use. Just one thought from me,… “Make it simple and make it attainable”. That’s all mga kabutingting! Let’s make this year better than the previous years and let’s start it from ourselves.
