Greetings everyone!
As we get ready to welcome in the New Year, it's week 52 and I've been reflecting on the past year and how I can become a better person in 2023. Aside from family gatherings and indulging in some over-eating, I'm also setting some goals for the upcoming year.
Setting goals has been proven to have positive effects on motivation, self-esteem, confidence, and autonomy. Studies in neuroscience have shown that goal-setting rewires the brain and creates new behaviors that help increase the likelihood of achieving the goal.
This time, rather than just typing up a list of goals, I decided to try to round-up my year summary in a short narrative (step 1). It helped me to identify the opportunities I have in this upcoming year, as well as what I call "sources of guilt". These are things that I've always wanted to do, but never got around to, and now I'm feeling guilty for wanting to start new ventures before I address them first.
I also used the narrative form set the intention and themes for 2023 (step 2), then broke them down into individual goals and sub-goals (step 3 and 4). I avoided output goals like "read X books" or "go to the gym Y times a week" and instead focused on the outcomes I wanted to achieve.
Of course, it's essential to stay consistent when it comes to goal setting. I'd recommend setting up a regular review and adjustment mechanism (step 5) that can help you stay in control of your destiny.
My reflections and goals turned out quite personal, so I will not share it. However, I saved the structure in a Notion template, so you can copy it and use it to set your own ambitious 2023 goals. I hope you'll find it useful and have some fun with it.
Here it is - Personal Goals Notion Template.
Here are some useful resources if you want to learn more about goal setting, why it could be effective, and what it does to your brain:
The Science of Setting and Achieving the Goals, by Andrew Huberman
Goal Setting: A Scientific Guide to Setting and Achieving Goals, by James Clear (the author of Atomic Habits book)
What Goal-Setting Does to Your Brain and Why It's Spectacularly Effective, by Geoffrey James