A Complete Guide to Making This Your Best Year Yet

Three major tasks to change your life for the better

It’s been over ten years since I started this process. And while I have considered ending this practice from time to time, I keep coming back to it. In fact, I have found it to be essential for any success that I have achieved over the years.

In this guide, I will show you three important practices that will help you find clarity, create a plan, and take action towards the goals and dreams that you have in life.

Here are the three practices

• Annual Review
• Life Planning
• Goal Setting

Over the next few minutes, we will review the steps it takes to do all of these practices. And while it might feel like a lot of work, it will be well worth it. In fact, it will change everything.

Annual Review: Start Here

How did this year go for you?

Was it a good year? Maybe it was a bad year? Perhaps it wasn’t good or bad? I get it. I know that some years are great, some are bad, and others really didn’t change the course of our lives at all.

When it comes to planning out your next year, the first place you need to start is with your current year. If you don’t know where you are, you won’t know how to get to where you want to go.

That is why it is so essential to do a year-end review.

Over the past five years, I have completed a year-end review. Each year, I find the ups, downs, and lessons learned to help me for the next year. This year is no different, and it shouldn’t be for you.

In fact, if you want to succeed and achieve more, you need to be reviewing your current life situation. There are three main reasons we need to be doing this every year:

1. Celebrate your Victories
2. Closure for your Failures
3. Consolidate your Lessons Learned

In this article, you will look at these three reasons for review. Each one is also an action step for your year-end review. By the end of this article, you will be able to complete your year-end review and be ready to plan for the future.

Remember: if you don’t know where you are, you won’t know how to get to where you want to go.

1. Celebrate Your Victories

Your victories are important. These are the things that went well in your year. When you look back at the year, you can know that you accomplished something or that something great happened in your life.

When you celebrate the good things in life, it helps you remember good things happen. Even in a bad year, something good has happened. You need to capture these testimonies of success, accomplishment, and happiness for the times when things don’t go so well.

When it comes to your year-end review, ask yourself these questions:

• What were some things that went well this year?
• What accomplishments or achievements from this year?
• What were the happiest moments from this year?

Spend some time writing down the answers to these questions. These answers will help you remember how good your year was. They might fill out a page in your journal or they might fill out several pages.

Action: Write down the answers to these questions.

2. Closure For Your Failures

It is vital to find closure for your failures, disappointments, and difficult situations from this year. If you cannot close the door on these things, you will continue to be stuck in the past and in these situations.

When you close the door on these difficult things, failures, and disappointments you will be able to create space in your mind to create a future that will be excited to chase after.

When it comes to your year-end review, answer these three questions:

• What did I fail this year?
• What was disappointing this year?
• What were some difficult situations from this year?

Again, write down the answers to these questions. Once you have filled out a page or so, you will want to close the door on these things. It’s okay to have a lot of these. But, there is one more important step to closing the door on these things.

Action: Write down the answers to these questions. Then, tape a piece of paper over your answers and write on that paper: “The door is closed.”

3. Consolidate Your Lessons Learned

No matter if your year was good or bad, you will have a few lessons learned that will help you in the future. Sometimes they come from your failures. Other times, they come from your successes.

It is important to capture your lessons learned and then consolidate them down to two or three major themes. This has been hugely important to me over the last few years because they always seem to build on each other year after year.

When it comes to your year-end review, do these three things:

• Write down five to ten lessons you learned.
• Consider these lessons in regards to your successes and failures.
• Consolidate your lessons down to two or three main themes for the year.

These themes will likely inform your plans for the coming year. Most often, they will be lessons that stick with you for a long season of life. I tend to write these down in the front of my journal so I can reference them later.

Action: Follow the steps above and keep your lesson themes somewhere you will see them all year long.

Annual Review Complete

This is your starting destination for creating your success plan for next year. It is the best place to start because you know where you have been and where you are now.

Most of all, it gives you a foundation to have a clear mind for the future.

Clarity is essential when it comes to creating a success plan for your year. When you have a clear mind, you can think outside the box, have stronger goals, and even consider the way you want your life to go.

Lastly, you will be able to chase your dreams and find a lot more joy and happiness in your year if you have clarity for now and the future. This is the first step in creating a success plan to chase your dreams.

A Life Plan: Your Destination

Have you ever stopped at the end of the year and said to yourself, “how did I get here.” Or, maybe you have said, “this year didn’t turn out the way I thought it would.” These are phrases of someone who is letting life happen to them.

You see, when we don’t make plans and create systems to execute those plans, life happens to us. Economies tank, employers disregard you for promotions, marriages crumble and health fails.

Without a good plan, vision for the future, and a system to make it happen this is your reality. This happens to people every day. Yet, no one does anything about it.

There are too many “better luck next year” approaches to life. When in fact, luck has nothing to do with it. Luck doesn’t get you on a treadmill to lose weight. It doesn’t put books in your hand to learn new skills.

All luck does is rob you of your personal responsibility for your life.

This is the problem you face today. No plans and foolish beliefs in luck will ultimately lead to failure or mediocrity. Without a plan, vision for the future, and a good system there is no way that you will succeed in life.

So, today, I am going to help you create that plan.

1. Determine Your Priorities

If you don’t know what is important in your life, there is no way you will be able to achieve your dreams, goals, and the future you desire. Your dreams must line up with your priorities. If they don’t, you will be miserable and you will leave a path of destruction in the wake up of your life.

Your priorities are the most important people and things in your life.

Most people have 8–12 priorities that they keep close to them in life. I suggest writing down ten if this is your first life plan. And make sure you rank them from most important (1) to least important (10).

2. Start with the End

We must start with the end in mind if we want to figure out how to get there. If we don’t have a clear idea of the future, it is hard to hit a moving target as we create a life plan. This is why we must clarify our vision for the future.

Ask yourself these questions:

What kind of life do you want to have lived? Who do you want to be in the future? Where do you want to have lived? Why is it important at all? How did you make it happen?

3. Review Your Priorities

This section has multiple parts. And it is important to touch on each part because this is where a lot of the work happens with your life plan. In this section, you will review each priority considering your purpose, future, present, and action steps.

It is important to remember that you will do this for each one of your priorities. It will feel a little repetitive, but it will be very helpful. Make sure you schedule enough time to do this. Either do it all at once or over the course of a few days.

1. Purpose: Write down your purpose for each priority. Create a statement of purpose for each of your priorities. You need to understand why each priority is important to you. And you will need to understand what your role is for each priority.
2. Future: Write down the future for each priority. You need to clarify what the best outcome is for this priority and you. Consider what it would be like if everything went right. What would life look like if you achieved everything you wanted for this priority?
3. Inspiration: Write down an inspirational quote or Bible verse. This will help you get motivated to do the work you need to do to follow your life plan. Most of all, it will be the thing you can fall back on to chase your dreams for this priority.
4. Current: Write down your current reality for each priority. Document your present situation honestly. It is time, to be honest. When we consider where we are now, we cannot live the lies we feed ourselves anymore about our priorities.
5. Action: Write down at least three actions for each priority. You get to choose the first three steps to take to get there. You have nearly completed your life plan and this is the point where you prepare to do the work.
6. Declarations: Write down a one-sentence declaration for each priority. These declarations will help rewire your mind for success. This will help you get into the right place to actually see your life plan through.

Once you review each priority, you have created your plan. I would keep it in a Word or Google document. This way you can review it at least once a week. The key is to get into it regularly so it is never far from your mind.

Here is what you need to remember: review it regularly, attack your actions, and start to see your life change. This will help you see your dreams come true. And I can’t wait for you!

Goal Setting: Stops Along the Way

There is something really exciting and encouraging about goal setting. I love the idea of setting things to achieve for the year. I know this isn’t true for everyone, but for me, I have achieved many goals over the years.

What I have found is that the more I set and achieve goals, the more I love to do it. But, it hasn’t always been this way. For years, I struggled. I would set goals and then never accomplish any of them.

It was the worst. Until…

I found a quick system that has helped me set, achieve, and love goals. It doesn’t take a lot of work. Most of all, it is something that you can do today and start to chase goals and dreams over the next year.

If you have struggled with goal setting and achievement, this post is for you. It will help you set goals the right way and help you actually achieve them. This is why I write this post, to help you realize your dreams by achieving your goals.

I have shared this before, and I will continue to share it with you because it is exactly how I set goals so I have clarity of vision, create direction, and focus on taking consistent action. The SMARTER goal-setting system is the beginning of achieving our goals.

Below, I will share exactly how to use the SMARTER Goal Setting system to set goals that you can achieve.

Specific

We must be specific about our goals in order to have clarity about our goals. But what does this mean? Being specific about goals means knowing exactly what it is you want out of achieving this goal. Here is an example for writing a book:

“I will write a full-length historical fiction novel by December 31, 2022.”

Measurable

Goals must be measurable. Otherwise, we won’t know how to track and celebrate our progress as we go. The more measurable it is the more likely you will achieve it and the easier it will be to create direction to achieve your goal. Here is an example goal for losing weight:

“I want to lose 30 pounds by the end of the year and weigh 200 pounds.”

Actionable

Goal setting is about moving forward. However, many times we will jot down goals that are simple and “pie-in-the-sky” in nature. If we can’t identify how we are moving forward, it will be difficult to achieve a goal. Many times it is simply in how we write our goal. Here is an example for reading books:

“I will read 24 books by the end of the year.”

Relevant

Our goals must be relevant to our lives. They cannot be something that is impossible to accomplish in your current circumstances. This is where a lot of goals fail because they don’t take into account your current priorities. If you are a father of three kids, working a job, and writing on the side, you may not be able to do some goals. Here is a goal for serving others while living a busy life:

“I will serve on a week-long mission trip by the end of June this year.”

Time-Bound

You may have noticed every goal example previously has a deadline. That is because goals need deadlines otherwise you will never complete them. Sure, some of us like to check the boxes, but most goals fail because they don’t have a definite timeframe. An example of this kind of goal:

“I will pay off all of our debt by December 31, 2020.”

Evaluate

This is the turning point in accomplishing goals. This is where we start taking our action steps and making progress. Many times, people will set a goal and then forget about it. Evaluating should be done on a weekly basis. When we set our goals, we also need to set regular appointments with ourselves to actually evaluate our progress.

Reward

We love to be rewarded for our work. And a reward can help those of us who don’t simply enjoy accomplishing things. Plus, it is a positive reinforcement to continue to chase your dreams in the future. An example for rewards after reading your book goal:

“And once I accomplish this goal, I will purchase a new Kindle.”

Goal Setting Complete

Every year, I see these complicated and long posts about setting goals. But the truth is, it’s not a hard thing to do. There are a few simple steps that help you write better goals.

Once you write those better goals, you can actually take action toward accomplishing them and achieve those goals. But, it takes the right type of goal and the preparation to make sure you take action.

After that, you are steps away from seeing that goal realized and achieving your dreams. So, try this quick system and set your goals today!

Final Thoughts on Making This Year Your Best Yet

This year is going to be your best year yet.

All you have to do is work through these three practices and follow through. That’s it. Sure, saying it like that sounds easy. And I know better than anyone how hard it really is to complete.

All that to say, I wanted to share with you one piece of encouragement:

There are very few things in the world today that we can do that will pay such dividends in the future. If you spend the time to make these three practices part of your life it will pay off.

How do I know?

Well, looking back over the last fifteen years, I have achieved some of the things I have always dreamed about. My wife and I are raising our three daughters on the property of our dreams. I have published multiple #1 bestselling books. And we are constantly unlocking new dreams every year.

But it all started with me taking the time to review each year, create a life, and set goals every year. That way I could know where I started, decide where I want to go, and create the path to get there.

That is what this article is all about. So, start today!

Are you tired of searching for productivity tips?

If so, download your copy of Maximum Work! It is my complete guide to the most useful productivity tips, tricks, techniques, and hacks around.

Download today!

J.R. Heimbigner is a #1 Bestselling Author on Amazon who loves helping people grow in their faith, find productivity success, and help writers become authors. You can connect with him on Medium, his website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Faithful.