How to Thrive in 2024: Goal Setting, Visualization, and Planning Strategies for Personal Growth
As the 2023 season comes to a close, this is the perfect time to reflect on the previous year and write the next chapter as we welcome 2024.
I invite you to find a quiet, uninterrupted space to do your year end reflections. I usually snuggle into my warm knit blanket alongside my windowsill. With a coffee in hand and journal on my lap, watching the morning sunlight beam into my living room gives me so much inspiration.
These are a few things I do to help me organize my goals and plan my next steps for the year to come. I hope that this helps you with your goal planning to set you up for a successful 2024 year.
Outline:
- End of year review – 2023 reflections
- How to set goals for 2024
- Creating a vision board for 2024
- Creating a strategic plan
- Final thoughts: Be kind to yourself
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End of Year Review – 2023 Reflections
First, let’s take some time to look back on the previous year. Reflections are a chance to acknowledge how far you’ve come, where you maybe need to pivot, what you need to invest more time in, or leave behind all together if it’s no longer serving you.
How I usually start is by looking at my last years goals or rereading my past journal entries. This helps me connect with all the little thoughts, insights and learnings that I documented along the way. This year I’m using the MD Paper 2024 Agenda to help me plan and organize my goals. The pen I used for these journal entries are the uni-ball Signo 207 and pictured above is the Sakura Ballsign which is another favourite of mine!
I think there is something so special about a personal diary highlighting your thoughts from the past. We tend to forget so much of our lives and I document anything from the little things in life to the major life changes and choices. It shows me how far I’ve come and helps point me in the direction of where I’d like to go next.
5 end of the year reflection prompts:
- What made you happiest this year?
- What is a challenge that you overcame this year?
- What was something unexpected that you experienced this year? What did you do to pivot and how did you feel about it?
- How did you grow this year?
- What are you most proud of this year?
How to set goals for 2024
I love to project ahead and visualize what the end goal is. By visualizing the life that you want, the person that you’re becoming, you can work backwards to take the steps to get there.
somewhere in you is a version of yourself who is just waiting to meet you,
you just have to keep going until you find them.
You can do this by asking yourself which areas of your life are most important to you. Is that your career, relationships, personal development, health? Then by visualizing the long term goals first – the end goals in each of the various aspects of your life – you can create those small, achievable, short term goals that will help you step into the person you are becoming.
I think the more detailed and specific you can get with visualizing that version of yourself, the better. Let your imagination take over and visualize the thoughts, feelings, lifestyle of that future version of yourself. How do they live? What are their relationships with others like? What does their day to day look like?
Creating a vision board for 2024
POV: you are the author of your own story & this is what you created…
I created my first vision board a couple years ago and this is a really fun exercise to help you imagine and create a world for yourself that doesn’t yet exist. Some prompts to help you with getting creative with your vision board:
- Imagine your life is a book containing a series of chapters and the next chapter is unwritten, what are you going to write for the year to come?
- What is your 2024 going to look like?
- How do you want your highlight reel to look on December 31, 2024?
Ideas for creating your vision board:
Put this somewhere you can see it each day to remind you of your 2024 goals.
- create a pintrest board
- bullet journalling
- procreate
- canva collage
- magazine collage
- writing a letter to your future self
my favourite stationary for bullet journalling:
Creating a strategic plan
I’ve always been a dreamer, but I’ve always put limits on myself with excuses of why that would never happen for me. I’ve come to learn that if you really want something, you’re going to figure out a way to get there.
If you don’t know where to start, can you take just one small step forward?
There will be hard work behind those visualizations and it will be the small steps you take to get there that will be the catalyst to changing your life. Have a couple check in points throughout the year where you can review whether you’re on track or if you need to adjust your
Now that you’ve envisioned it, it’s time to make a strategic plan to take action. Your dreams won’t come to life if you don’t put purposeful action into it. Be proactive, ensure you have a couple check points in the year to see if you’re on track and then adjust as you need.
After writing down a goal of where you want to be in one year, ask your self how do you work backwards to get there? What will you need to accomplish in 6 months to get there? Now what about 3 months? In 1 month what do you need to do? You’ve gotta step small to work stepwise to the path you want to go.
what can you do today to help you reach your goals?
Final thoughts: Be kind to yourself
This season of goal setting can be really refreshing, exciting and inspiring as we enter a new year. But sometimes, reflections of the past year can also bring about memories of challenging times and perhaps feelings of self doubt when we feel like we haven’t quite reached the goals we planned.
I just wanted to write this to say you are exactly where you need to be. It’s okay to acknowledge those feelings and frustrations. Meet yourself where you’re at and know that every mis-step, failure, closed door is in your favour. It reroutes you to where you really need to be. As long as you continue to learn, pivot when needed and treat yourself kindly. I know you’re going to get to where you want to go.
Have the happiest New Year, I’m cheering you on.
xx Steph
