Happy 2018 everyone!
So here we are, an embarrassingly long time since my last blog post, and it is a new semester, new year, new start. Last semester was not a very good one for me – hence my absence from the blogging world. I think that I started to get very burnt out after taking my MCAT and it really showed in almost all aspects of my life. But that’s what new years are for, right? This being my graduating semester for undergrad, I needed to start this one out right by putting a lot of thought into my goals and habits for 2018 and then sharing that process with all of you of course!
The Epiphany Phase
After Christmas, I sat down with my best friend to start writing down some goals for the new year but a week later when it came time to write those out into my fresh new planner, they didn’t feel right. They didn’t feel big enough. Or important enough. Or focused enough. So I went on some soul searching for the next few days until I had a bunch of scribbled down “draft” goals that I was really happy with. This is how that went:
On the first of this year, I discovered High Performance Habits: How Extraordinary People Become That Way by Brendon Burchard and used his six high performer habits to guide my goals and resolutions for 2018. His book, along with the excellent goal setting system laid out in my inkWELL Press planner (check out my review of the planner here), really helped me narrow down and hone in on what was important to me for this year.
The Stickie Note Phase
Tonya from inkWELL Press divides goals into six categories, for which I laid out six stickie notes:
- Personal
- Social
- Financial
- Health
- Home
- Deam Big
Then I read through the highlights of Burchard’s six habits and what those meant to me:
- Seeking clarity – for yourself, your social circles, your field of skills, and service to others
- Generating energy – both physical and mental
- Raising necessity – by attaching your goals to an external obligation for you to succeed
- Increasing productivity – the deadlines and goals component
- Having a giving mindset – recognizing what those around you need to succeed
- Demonstrating courage – not caring what others think and taking the leap towards what you want in life
Seeking Clarity
The first step in seeking clarity involved making sure I verbalized what I wanted to do with my life and how I wanted to be remembered so that I could make sure that all my actions were leading those two central ideas. Now, these are big, difficult questions to answer, especially at a young age. If you are really struggling with this, I suggest thinking about the people you admire and look up to. What traits do they have? Chances are, those are the things you value most and they can help guide you to answer these two big life questions. Once I answered these, I made sure to reference them before writing anything else to make sure what I was writing would get me closer to those missions.
Moving on to the four subsections of finding clarity, I divided them into my inkWELL Press categories as I saw fit. For me, that was self in personal, social circles in social, field of skills in dream big, and service also in the social category. You may want to divide them differently, especially if you are using a different planner.
Self: list out all the attributes of the person you want to be both professionally and privately
Social Circles: think about how you can positively impact every interaction you have with others and create lasting connections with those people
Field of Skills: decide which 2-3 skills or subjects are most important to you and then figure out how you can set aside dedicated, undistracted time to master them
Service: reflect on who you are doing this all for outside of yourself and your immediate social circles (e.g., your community, your future patients)
Generating Energy
This was my health section in my planner and for setting these goals, I also used some tactics from Carrots and Sticks by Ian Ayres to create commitment contracts with myself and assign strict punishments for not meeting my goals. I resolved to try my hardest to complete these goals the way I envisioned them because of Burchard’s assertation that only under-achieving people make excuses. The mental energy aspect was a little more defined and involved envisioning what you had to look forward to each day, backed with research showing that you get almost the same enjoyment for anticipating an event as you do from actually experiencing it – double mental energy, who doesn’t want that!
Raising Necessity
As most people would, I assigned my need for achieving to the knowledge that my parents would be able to retire worry-free and therefore allotted it to my social section. The idea behind this one is that if someone else is counting on you to succeed, it is necessary that you do so – a theory backed by research showing that once we commit publicly to a task or goal we will almost always follow through, as highlighted in Influence by Robert Cialdini. In contrast, if you have only assigned your success as a benefit to yourself, you will (consciously or unconsciously) see it as a desirable outcome, but not a necessary one. You can see the problems that this could cause.
Increasing Productivity
Since this was a very goal-oriented habit, I again fell back on Ayres’s principles to assign severe enough punishments that I would think twice before breaking my commitments to myself. Overall, this one seemed pretty simple for me since most of my productivity benefits my schoolwork or extracurricular involvements. I decided to make a schedule out of assigning challenging but attainable study goals each week, which would be met with the punishment of deleting all non-essential apps from my phone for two weeks (we all know how much of a hassle it is to re-download all those apps and sign in again, etc. etc.). My dream big section is where I put all of my school and extracurricular goals so this, in turn, went in that area.
A Giving Mindset
In March I will be ascending to a higher leadership role in my national organization so I wanted to really take a lot of time with this one. Burchard talks about this mostly in a workplace leadership position and hones in on the need to recognize strengths and weaknesses for those around you to better empathize with them and assign them to tasks and teams that will benefit them in the long run. In short, it was about making sure that those around you feel appreciated and important. This is a concept that I want to be sure to embody in my own leadership roles across various organizations and throughout my career – no one likes the doctor that is mean to their nurses!
Demonstrating Courage
For me, this is a personal journey to see life’s obstacles as challenges for growth and to not be afraid to vocalize my dreams for fear that people will call me unrealistic or crazy. In my personal section, I made plans to blog more this year as a way of sharing my goals with the world. I felt like this was a two-for-one since it also suggested to share your goals as a part of raising necessity – all going back to the whole human obsession with caring what others think of us.
Finances and Home
Eight stickie notes later, I was happy with the goals and habits I had decided on with the guidance of Burchard’s book so I only had two more planner categories to fill: financial and home. For me, these hadn’t come up at all through my journey through the six habits of high-performers. Financial goals are always hard for me because as a student, pretty much all of my money is already spoken for, leaving no room for savings. But since I will be moving out of state for grad school this summer, I figured I should probably think about this a little harder than usual. I ended up reminding myself to make a plan and stick to it as far as spending goes and making a few goals involving credit cards and possible new cars. I used the home section as a summary of all the six habits and creating a place to foster those improvements in my life – this one was a little hard too since I don’t really know where I’ll be moving yet and knowing what and where your home it becomes kind of important for setting home goals.
The Pen to Paper Planner Phase
With all my stickie notes planned out, it was time to write it all in the goals spread of my planner. I had decided to do this much differently than I ever have before by writing a big lofty goal or “thing to remember” on the main page and then breaking those down into S.M.A.R.T. goals on the quarterly page. In the past, I have made all of my goals S.M.A.R.T. goals and have struggled to come up with six (the number of bullets that fit aesthetically into the boxes) for each section and then deciding which ones to break up for the quarterly. So far, I am much happier with this new technique. In essence, I have created my one big 2018 mission by answering those two life questions I mentioned earlier and then subdivided into six subject-specific missions that will help lead me to that larger idea of how I want my life to grow. A few of my quarterly goals are still blank for the latter half of the year since I (frustratingly) don’t know where I will be, what academic program I will be in, and what sort of funding I will have – c’est la vie!
January Mission Board and Habit Trackers
Since we not only started a new year but a new month, I also had to do my January mission board. From the yearly goals spread, I referenced the aspects that needed attention in January specifically and separated those out into my seven beautiful hexagons (P.S. I’m really digging the 2018 inkWELL color scheme). I normally take that time to come up with some sort of artsy way to write out my missions with fancy typography and doodles. Recently, that has meant a simple combination of uppercase print and randomly distributed cursive lettering. I decided this year to give that random design a little more meaning and write the measurable (the “M” in S.M.A.R.T. goal) portion in cursive so that it stood out and I couldn’t lie to myself later about if I achieved my monthly goals or not.
Only some of those missions need to be worked towards every day and naturally those that did make it into my daily habit trackers on the monthly mission board spread. Mostly, I’m focusing on health and wellness for January with a little bit of self-learning thrown in there. Which, speaking of, after citing all these books throughout this post, have you wondered “How the heck does she have the time to read all these non-textbook books?!” Well, long story short, I don’t. I have a little secret called Blinkist that summarizes thousands of the world’s best nonfiction books into “blinks” that you can read in fifteen minutes or less. Another long story short, I love it.
The Actually Doing It Phase
I haven’t really gotten to this yet as I conveniently decided that the start of a new year wasn’t reeeally January 1st; as a student, it was the first day back at school. Halfway through my last first week of undergrad and it is going pretty well so far. Stay tuned to see how the rest of this semester plays out!
I hope you enjoyed this post and that it can help you plan out your 2018 goals because it is never too late! I love hearing your thought and questions, so let me know what you thought of this post by dropping by my social media pages: Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, or send me an email.
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