With the end of the year and the new decade being around the corner I've been thinking about making 2020 my best year yet, and committing to live my best life in 2020.
As we close 2019, I am planning to take some time with myself, for myself and I want to invite you to do the same. Self-reflection is so important in our personal growth journey, and what a better opportunity to take some time and self-reflect than the imminent end of the year. If you decide to join, I have created a guide to help you go through this exercise.
Ideally I want to spend 4 hours doing this self-reflection exercise and looking at 2019 in retrospective, focusing on four key aspects:
What am I most grateful for
What have I learned
What have been my biggest accomplishments
What have been my biggest challenges and how I overcame them
After completing this exercise I will spend another 4-8 hours to plan for 2020. I am convince that spending the time now reflecting and planning ahead it's going to pay off throughout the year. With my busy schedule is impossible for me to carve out 8 hours of my time to do this exercise, so I am planning to add 30 minutes to my morning routine from now until the end of the year and leverage weekends, wake up an hour earlier and enjoy that quiet time to self-reflect and plan ahead.
Sounds like a lot of time? Good news! You don't have to invest that much time, you can complete this exercise in your own time at your own pace.
For this part of the exercise I also have created a guide to help you focused on your priorities, and work on setting your goals for 2020. You can find all the tools and resources referenced in this article here: https://leadingyourself.wixsite.com/start/liveyourbestlife
Some of the questions I have included in this section include:
What makes you happy? Yes, I know it sounds like a silly questions, we all know what makes us happy, right? or so we believe. Spending this time answering this question is important, we are trying to live our best lives after all, and therefore we are going to need to be intentional about doing and pursuing the things that makes us happy to feel we are living our best lives.What habits do you want to stop, change or start in 2020?
What qualities do you want to adopt, what skills do you want to develop and what value do you want to enhance in 2020?
Who are the people you want to connect or reconnect with?
What is your definition of "living your best life"?
During this exercise I will be reviewing as well my 10 year goals, reconnecting with them and defining what I am going to focus on in 2020 that will take me closer to achieving them. I also believe is important to spend some time reflection on what is holding me back from achieving them today.
As to defining 2020 goals, this is going to be my approach. After connecting with my 10 year goals, and having those fresh in my mind I am going to grab a black piece of paper and start writing all the dream, projects, goals things what I am most excited to accomplish or work on this year. This is a brainstorming exercise, so let your imagination go, no idea is a bad idea at this point.
Once I am done writing all the things done I am going to grab a highlighter and highlight the one to three things that excite me most and narrow it down to one, and just one thing to focus on first in 2020. To help me narrow it down to one thing, I will ask myself the following questions;
Why is this important?
How will achieving this impact me and others around me?
How important is this dream for me right now?
Once you are able to narrow it down the one thing you am going to start focusing, then you need to make sure you make it measurable and actionable. To learn more about how to do that, listen to Episode 10 of the Leading Yourself Podcast.
Finally the last step in this process is to add all the different things in our calendars. If we say these are the things that are going to make us happy, the things that are going to enable us to live or best lives, then we need to be consequent and make the time every day to work on them, so at the end of the day we can feel fulfilled, energized and happy.
Take advantage of the fact that your calendar is probably not completely booked yet for next year and make sure you block time to invest in all these things. Life will continue to get busy, you'll find yourself trying to fit more and more things in your calendar as the year progress, but just you don't cancel an important appointment with your boss or key customer, promise yourself you will not skip these important appointments with yourself. Being realistic, I'm sure you will miss one or the other, but that should be the exception, far and in between, after having try to fight any excuses, emergencies and conflicting priorities.
To learn some tips to help you keep these things top of your mind and enable you to stay more consistent listen to Episode 10 of the Leading Yourself Podcast. I also have put together a series of additional tools and resources to help you in this journey, you can find them here: https://leadingyourself.wixsite.com/start/liveyourbestlife
The biggest adventure you can take is living the life of your dream
-- Oprah Winfrey --