Yesterday I did a pretty lengthy post on planning and goal setting, but to be honest, it barely cracked the surface.
Today I want to get a bit more tactical and talk about the wheel of life and how you need to use that as your guide to goal setting.
But first, as a follow up from yesterday, I asked you to think about and write down the answer to two questions....
What are your values?
What does your ideal day look like?
It starts with that.
Every goal, every decision, and every plan will tie back to those two questions.
So today we're going to dive deeper and go bit more tactical, but please don't go on until you've written down and spent time answering those two questions.
For the few that actually took action and wrote them down, I can all but guarantee improvement right away.
For those that didn't...just remember that ideas are crap and execution is everything :)
So onto this wheel thing.
I believe I got it from Tony Robbins, but I'm not entirely sure.
Just like everything in life, everything I've learned came from the people I've met or the books I've read :)
So, if you think of a bicycle wheel, what holds the tire on?
The rim.
And what's inside the rim so that it doesn't collapse as you ride the bike?
Spokes.
Spokes on a wheel are the best way to think about goal setting.
You have different spokes, and you can make up your own spokes, but these are the ones I recommend.
- Physical
- Family
- Career
- Financial
- Emotional & Spiritual
So, as you look to set goals, use these as your categories, and ideally, you're chipping away at each of them.
Now, the most important thing to remember is it's all connected.
If your physical spoke is suffering it's most likely going to affect your family, your emotions, etc.
Same thing if your financial spoke is suffering, it's going to affect your emotional, family, and career spokes.
So just remember that they are all connected as you go through this journey.
Alright, so where do you begin?
List out each spoke in your wheel of life and write down the answer to the following question for each category.
What does success look like 12 months from now?
Seriously.
If you got to wave a magic wand and have everything come to fruition, what would that category look like?
Paint a clear picture.
Ideally, this is taking your ideal day and values and breaking it down into each subsection.
So for physical maybe it looks like a certain number of workouts per week, a certain event completion, a milestone on an exercise, or a specific pant size.
For financial it may look like dollars in the bank, specific amount saved for retirement, or getting to debt free status.
For emotional it could be doing a gratitude journal every day, with a rank of 1-10 how your feeling that day and trying to get to an 8 or a 9.
For a family, it could be a certain vacation, the plan to have a child, or setting a milestone as a family.
Your specific goals are your specific goals.
Like I said yesterday, I'm not here to tell you what your goals are, that's up to you, but hopefully, this puts some structure behind it.
So you have your values, you have your ideal day, and you have what success looks like in each of your spokes on the wheel of life.
It's time to execute.
Constantly have one action item that you're executing on each day that is moving you towards that "magic wand" scenario.
Once you answer the question "what does success look like in this spoke 12 months from now?" you can answer the question "and are the action items required to make that happen?"
That's it.
It's about execution.
All of this planning is great, but if we don't have any execution of those ideas it was a waste of our time.
You have to know what success looks like for each category, but then from there, it's about a daily execution of something that moves you closer to that goal.
You could set certain milestones or check-ins like 30 days or 90 days.
So if your ideal financial spoke is to have a million bucks in the bank, you can break that down into what that needs to look like a year from now, 90 days from now, or 30 days from now.
However, it's still going to require some type of daily action, and that's where the magic is made.
You're constantly chipping away at this sculpture with daily actions to build your masterpiece.
Daily action.
Daily execution.
This is 1% better at it's finest.
Start to map your wheel out and let me know if you have any questions.
I hope this helped.
1% Better.
Dedicated to Your Success,
Doug Spurling