Visioning and Goal Setting

Life planning is about creating a vision of your ideal future. It defines the positive action steps you must take to get you there. It is an iterative process that aligns your short-term decisions with your long-term vision, purpose in life and personal identity.

Visualise what your life will be like after achieving your goals. This vision becomes the positive driving force behind the commitments and actions you will take. It will project you towards achieving these things.

Life planning seeks to answer these big questions:

Who am I?
Where am I in life?
Where I want to be in the future?
What must I focus on to get to where I want to be in the future?
What is going to stop me from taking positive action?

The life planning process allows those who want more from life to live a fulfilled and purposeful life by establishing an ideal final destination with actionable steps for getting there.

This will help you to:

Know who you are and your purpose in life.
Establish a clear vision of what you want to achieve with your life.
Setting goals that are personal and meaningful to you.
Develop strategies and plans for achieving your goals that will realise this vision and purpose in life.
Understand your limiting beliefs and things that will stop you from acting and achieving your goals.
Staying motivated and committed by rigorously executing your strategies and plans without getting distracted by everyday challenges.

Life planning is an ongoing and dynamic process. Your priorities and goals will change over time. When this happens, it is important to stop, reflect and go through the life planning process again.

As you grow in maturity and wisdom, your motivations and priorities in life will also change. An ongoing or regular review is crucial to ensure that the goals you set are still relevant to you.

The 6Ps of self-management

The six P’s of self-management stands proper planning prevents poor personal performance. This is based on this saying, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

This workbook will allow you to systematically work through and document a detailed description of your greatest intentions and hopes for your future. It can be used to integrate your daily actions into your ongoing education, or even as a personal development program.

Educational pursuits, career aspirations, recreational interests, relationships, family and your end-of-life preferences are just some of the areas you need to consider.

Your plan will give you greater clarity regarding your most major life priorities. These are the practical next steps you need to take to intentionally realise your vision and achieve your goals. It is also based on your identity of who you are as a person and your purpose in life.

We all want to be ‘successful’ in life. But we need to make sacrifices, take the commitment to intentionally get there, and overcoming barriers along the way. The journey will not be easy.

Individuals who design their lives by intent are more likely to achieve the things they want than those who do nothing, while naively just hoping for the best.

Hoping or praying is not a strategy. It is not sustainable to build the required foundation for a successful or meaningful life.

We must strategically plan to succeed in our relationships, our careers, our finances, our health and in every task or endeavour we put our hands on.

As the saying goes, ‘He who fails to plan plans to fail’.

Life planning will only serve you well if you wholeheartedly commit to the process and following it fully without skipping through the challenging sections.

Importance of goal-setting

Goals are just well-defined targets that will give you the direction, motivation and commitment needed for making effective decisions and progress in life to realise your vision and purpose in life.

The goals you set will point towards your final destination. The action plans you produce will act as a compass to help you to ‘get there’ as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The goals you set will become your roadmap to your success. These goals are defined by you. It is your guide to your ideal future.

Your goals may focus your actions on:

Developing a new skill – You may want to learn something new, to start a side business, or even to learn to play a musical instrument.
Improving your current skills – You may want to focus on increasing your present value to others by becoming an expert in your chosen field.
Overcoming bad habits or limiting beliefs – You may want to stop smoking, exercising more, or even eating healthier.
Achieving a particular outcome – You may want to achieve healthier relationships with colleagues or friends, to become financially free, or even to achieve a specific career goal.

The goal targets that you choose is personal to you. You are not living someone else’s dreams – hopefully not.

There is an opportunity to design the rest of your life with complete disregard to what anyone else thinks, feels or has to say about the matter.

While you may not be clear about what you want to accomplish in life, this workbook has been designed to help you establish what is most important to you, what are your greatest priorities, and what steps you need to take to get there.

Self-reflection exercise

Take 5 to 10 minutes to consider your life as a whole, where you currently are, where you want to be, what you want and what you do not want.

Complete this sentence – I need to create a plan for my life because …

Why people fail at visioning and goal-setting

Life planning can and do go wrong for some people.

By understanding and avoiding these failures can prevent you from falling into any of the following traps:

Haven’t figured out what you want in life.
Do not see life planning as necessary or useful – having unclear motivations.
Do not take life planning seriously.
Refuse to invest time in the process when it is easier to procrastinate.
Do not have a process or know where to start.
Not having an effective plan.
Not taking the appropriate action or there is no follow-through.
Do not follow the process through to completion.
Fear of not achieving your goals.
Not writing your goals down and be reminded of them daily.
Setting unrealistic or unachievable goals.
Lack of focus, commitment and persistence to execute the plan and realise the goals.
Do not have an accountability partner.

Self-reflection exercise

You must remain clear on why you are investing time and effort into completing your life plan. The power of having clarity about your WHY will help you progress in life and be committed to the action steps.

Take a few minutes to reflect upon your life as a whole. Have you ever tried (and failed) at life planning or goal-setting in the past? What were the main reasons for your failure?

Complete the following sentences:

I have not achieved my life goals to date, because …
I have accomplished some of my life goals, because …