Guide to Goal Setting in 2022

It’s that time of year again when everyone is setting resolutions and goals for the upcoming year. If you’re like most people, you probably don’t have a clue where to start or how to make sure they are actually achievable. In this guide to goal setting, we will walk you through the process of setting effective goals that you can actually achieve. We’ll be covering everything from reflecting on your past successes and failures to setting specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound goals. So whether you’re looking to set personal or professional goals this year, make sure to stick around!

Why a Guide to Goal Setting?

Guide to Goal Setting in 2022: 3 Steps to SuccessAs you know, I have some big goals for the new year – like reaching a million people in my career and life. Today, I want to help you figure out your goals and walk you through how to set them and achieve them. There are three phases to my guide to goal setting that I want to walk you through: figuring out what your goals are, how you can attain them, and even if you get close, how you can still feel accomplished. There are three phases to goals: reflecting, setting goals, and goal accountability.

Guide to Goal Setting: Reflection

The first thing I reflected on this year was that I was stuck in the snow for six days in Reno. We went up to Reno as a family, intending to spend just Thursday and Friday night there and then driving back home Saturday morning. But on Christmas morning, we got stuck in the snow in a massive snowstorm – the biggest one they’d had in 50 years. This gave me plenty of time with my family, which is obviously very important to me. But it also gave me some time to reflect and get clarity personally and professionally. So, I want you to ask yourself these questions when it comes time to reflect on the goals that you’re going to set for this year and what you did in your previous years.

Which Goals Did You Achieve?

Which goals did you actually hit? If you set goals last year and you hit them, write those down. What were the goals that you hit and why did you hit those? What was responsible for your success? What was the action or the people or the resources that you had to put towards those goals to reach them? This is really important to document everything that you did in 2021 in order to have the same success – or more – in 2022.

Which Goals Did You Miss?

The next question you want to ask yourself is which goals you missed. Write these down. Make sure you have pen and paper ready. What goals did you miss? There were goals that you wanted to hit and you hit, and there were goals that you wanted to hit that you missed. Write those down, and also why did you miss those goals? What was it? Was it a lack of money? Was it a lack of time? Was it a lack of resources? Was it a lack of network or team? Write that down.

When it comes to reflecting, you have to be completely honest with yourself. Take your time; don’t be in a rush. Turn off your phone and eliminate all distractions. Make sure you’re concentrated on this period because it’s the only chance you’ll have to focus on yourself personally and professionally in these areas. But I want to make sure you write them down because, without this guide to goal setting, you’ll struggle to achieve breakthroughs in the next year.

What Did You Love?

The next thing I want you to think about when you’re going into these goals and in your reflection period is what did you love about this year? What was something that you just walked away with? It was just phenomenal; it was a win of yours. They call it roses and they’re your losses or misses or thorns but what was your rose – what was the biggest thing from the year that you got to take away that you really loved? I know a lot of people were still stuck at home. A lot of people didn’t get to go out and do what they wanted to do because of travel restrictions and all this crazy stuff. But let’s try to find some of the positive things. What was it about 2021 that you really loved?

What Would You Change?

The next question is: what were some of the things that you would change about this coming year? If you could go back and change 2021, what would you change? This is an important piece. What do you love, and what would you change? What would you do differently? Would you have spent more time on sales? Would you have spent more time creating? Would you have spent more time learning? Would you have spent more time around people? I really want you to be honest with yourself. Put that down on paper.

What Did You Learn?

And the last thing is this: when it comes to reflecting, what did you learn? This is where accountability really comes up for you. That you’re going to be able to hold yourself accountable because if you didn’t learn some big things and you didn’t sharpen your skills in 2021, you’re not going to be very successful. This guide to goal setting will identify that for you; you need to understand that learning is an essential part of your growth journey of becoming a business owner, becoming creative, becoming an entrepreneur, or even elevating within your position in your career. So this is something you really need to take into consideration.

Sustained Growth Is the Result of the Guide to Goal Setting

“If you’re not growing, you’re dying,” as many personal development coaches say. This is true–you need to focus on increasing your skillset in every different area of your business or career to make sure you continue becoming better and better. Once you’ve taken the time, whether it’s a day a week, to really reflect, there’s no pressure.

Just because it’s the beginning of the year doesn’t mean you have to do some sort of sprint. Take your time to really reflect on these things and get clarity, and give yourself enough time to be honest with yourself. Will step away from it and come back and get that objectivity and discuss it with people in your network. This is a really big deal that I’m going to talk about here in a minute. But reflecting is the foundational piece of what you need to be thinking about when it comes to setting your goals understanding where you’ve been will help you define where you’re going to go next.

Guide to Goal Setting: Set SMART Goals

Guide to Goal Setting in 2022: 3 Steps to SuccessNow the second phase to this is goal setting, and you can’t have successful goal setting if you don’t have smart goals. By “smart,” I mean that it follows the acronym: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. These are the five key principles you need to be thinking about when writing down your goals.

Specific

The first one is being specific. We want to have 50,000 subscribers on this channel. I can’t get that without asking people like you to go share these videos and subscribe. Actually, readers like you help me participate in that by making those asks in articles like this guide to goal setting. That’s a specific goal, and I have to 5x my channel from where it’s at now. Not quite, but almost 5x.

Measurable

The second facet is a measurable goal is okay how many subscribers do I need to get on a monthly basis to enable the channel to reach that 50,000 subscriber milestone? So, it’s not just 50,000 subscribers at the end of this year that we want. We need to be hitting milestones every month in order to achieve our goal.

Attainable

The third facet is attainable; so how many subscribers can I get on a monthly basis if I continue doing what I’m doing and maybe even up my game a little bit? That number might be different than if you reached out to people who have never subscribed before or don’t watch your channel. So, make sure that your goal is something that you know you can actually attain.

Relevant

Then, fourthly, we want it to be relevant which subscriber milestone matters most right now for our business goals or personal growth goals? If we hit 50 000 by year’s end, is that goal relevant to what we’re trying to accomplish in our business and life? In my YouTube channel specifically, is that a specific goal that actually helps us? Yes, it does. By getting more subscribers, we’re going to be able to reach more people and our community will grow.

Time-Bound

And then making sure that it is time-bound, you’ll notice how I said 50,000 by the end of the year. That is time-bound, but I need to have checks and systems in place along the way. I can’t just get all the way till the end of the year; I need to be tracking these things throughout this time.

Three Dimensional Guide to Goal Setting

Now the next piece for this guide to goal setting, and this is really important for you as well, is I separate my professional life from my business life. A lot of people mesh those into one because they’re just workaholics and all they can focus on at work is their job, and they don’t have time for a personal life. I want to build my business around my life – my personal life. I want the business to be able to give me the resources, the time, the fun, the travel – all the things that I want out of life – without having to sacrifice all those things. If I can’t, I might as well just get a nine to five. That way, I can take control of my future and achieve my professional goals. On a personal level, I need to track and think about these three dimensions of me as a human being: health, wealth, and relationships.

This is what makes me a three-dimensional person and this is what gives me the most success in my life. I need to be thinking about these things: what kind of weight do I want to be, what kind of body fat percentage do I want to have, how healthy do I want to be? What about my mental health? Am I going to a council right? These are all important questions to ask about your health in your relationship. Should I go to marriage counseling? Should I do some couples retreats? Should I take my wife on another honeymoon? Do I want to travel this year alone or with her or together as a family?

Setting Personal Goals

Understanding all these areas of my personal life is really important, as is determining what goals I have inside of that. Because if you don’t have goals to achieve in your personal life and they’re only business goals, you’re going to live a really just poor and boring and uneventful life and you’re going to feel like a slave. I’ve been there and done that, and this is something that I’ve really leveled up in the last few years, and something I want to teach you guys to level up with as well.

It’s important in your personal life that you have fun. You should draw if you like to draw and you’re an artist like me. You should also take the time to read. You should take time to go to shows and concerts and movies, or even video games. I’m not a big video gaming guy; that’s just never been my thing because I’m always trying to focus on being productive. But it’s important to disconnect sometimes. I’ll play Legos with my kids, draw on my tablet, or go to an event with my wife.

Those fun things that are bonding moments with your loved ones and help fill you back up are really important for when you go out and serve your clients and serve the business world and the business marketplace. Something to think about and take into consideration is your personal life. It is a very big part of your business life, and people say that ninety percent of your business problems are actually personal problems. So it’s time for you to take a deeper look into your personal life and look at some of these things, and start setting some really great smart goals.

Setting Business Goals

The last piece of this guide to goal setting, of course, is the business goals. You really need to have some seriously specific measurable attainable relevant and time-bound business goals if you want to level up this is the way to do it. I asked you before what were the skills that you learned in 2021 and what are areas you need to actually increase in this coming year for 2022 to hit some of the goals that you may have missed. Well, these skills are very important for you to learn so you need to write down what your goals are for the skills you want to learn. If you want to get into NFTs, then write that down. Learn how to actually launch your own NFT project if you want to sell stock images and stock vector graphics. Well then, you’re going to need to learn how to do that; that’s going to be a skill that you have to do if you want to learn how to build your own funnel for your graphic design business.

That’s another skill you’re going to have to learn. I’m doing training on that so these videos are going to help you achieve certain skills like that. The next thing to put down as a goal is your revenue. What kind of money do you want to make inside your company and personally? Because I do believe as a professional, as an entrepreneur, and as a business owner you need to start figuring out how to separate your business income from your personal income. This was a big shift I had in 2018 that made a big impact on my career. I went from struggling and just trying to pay myself the scraps from whatever the business had, to giving myself a specific salary that allowed me to have consistency in my life and allowed me to do things like buying a bicycle, getting a gym membership, and traveling more. This was something that really set me free, and something that I want you to have as well.

So you need to think about what kind of revenue do you make as a company, and what kind of revenue do you need to make as an individual? Once you’ve done that, the next piece is understanding the resources and the people that you need to have around you. Who are those people in your life that you want to have? If it’s just you right now and you’re working solo by yourself, and you feel lonely, and you just want somebody to work with, and you want a team, you can join our community. That’s what the Instagraphics Pro Network is for.

Setting Relationship Goals

Maybe your goal is to join a community, or maybe you want to join an organization like AIGA, but you just can’t afford it yet. Maybe your goal is to travel the world and work solo, or maybe you’re not interested in working on a team but you want to understand what kind of team and people you want around you. If that’s the case, you need to write down how many employees you want to have by the end of the year and in five years.

I wouldn’t go more than five years out because life is what’s happening to you while you’re making other plans. So it’s really important to make sure that you don’t go too far out. I would keep your goals within 90 days, six months, one year, and at the very most five years. The last goal that you should be writing down is education. Again, we talked about your skill sets but you also need to focus on your education. I’m constantly focusing on education, whether it’s through mastermind groups, courses, training videos, conferences, events, or webinars. I’m always trying to seek information and knowledge and educate myself, whether it’s something that’s going to apply directly to my business or my personal life. I’m always trying to educate myself on a daily basis.

Guide to Goal Setting: Accountability

Guide to Goal Setting in 2022: 3 Steps to SuccessThe third phase is accountability and the first step to getting that accountability is to actually have an environment that will hold you accountable. If you’re a solo person working by yourself, and you want to have anyone in your corner, you need to change something about your environment. You need to get yourself into a community of other creatives, other designers, other professionals who will hold you accountable. For example, the Instagraphics Pro Group or the Inner Triangle. There are lots of them out there, and you can find them online on meetup.com or in networking groups and chambers of commerce.

Create an Environment of Accountability

You need to change your environment and put yourself in a co-working space, but you seriously need to consider changing your environment when it comes to getting that accountability because that’s going to help you level up the men that I have in my life, inside of my BDB Elite group. They have held me accountable to the degree where I’m taking cold showers that literally make me want to run away from the shower now. But it’s so important to level up my health, and I want to live longer so that I can see my daughter grow up. These men are holding me accountable by setting the example themselves – they’re not just telling me to do it, but they’re actually walking it out. That’s why I want to be able to be accountable and show up for that people and environment, which is huge for your growth and my growth. A big part of actually getting that accountability is sharing, so you need to share.

Share Your Goals

So this is the second point you need to share your goals with your community – on the professional side and in your personal life. Your wife, boyfriend, and friends will trust you more if you are honest with them about your goals. However, you will likely face some pushback and negativity. That’s just part of it, but you need to be able to put that out there to two or three people that you trust, who understand where you’re coming from and know how important your career and your passion for design or whatever it is that you’re doing is. So you need to make sure that you share that with them and ask them to hold you accountable, including asking them to put it as a calendar invite on their phone.

I did that for my buddy Cody. He wanted to hit $10,000 a month. Just before the end of the year, I sent him a message and said, “Hey, I got this reminder that just came up.” That’s what accountability is about—checking in with that person to get them to hold you accountable. And I want you to give this to other people as well. I want you to give the same accountability to others that you’re going to ask for from yourself. So whether it’s your friends, your family, your co-workers, whoever that is, you need to understand that accountability and sharing that with people is the best way that you can get it.

Track Your Goals

And the last piece is for yourself, to track your results. So if my goal is 50,000, I need to break that down and divide it by month. I need to be tracking where I am each month – am I behind, am I above where I need to be? What worked, what didn’t work? What if we are halfway through the year and I want to achieve 2,000,000 in revenue? Have we hit 1,000,000 yet? Tracking your results daily is extremely important because these small wins every day are what will add up to the big goal being achieved at the end of the year. 

You have to have healthy daily habits, so I’m going to create another video for you guys that shows you guys how to have a daily power hour – an hour that you spend with yourself, whether it’s half an hour in the morning and a half an hour at night or just an hour in the morning or an hour at night. You need to have an hour every single morning that is tied into what those goals are that we’re setting for 2022.

Final Thoughts on the Guide to Goal Setting

Guide to Goal Setting in 2022: 3 Steps to SuccessSo this is a lot of information. I hope you were writing it all down if not, you might want to go back and rewatch and reread because this video article is going to help set you up for 2022 with some major success. That’s what I want for you. So I want to hear from you; contact me here or on our social media. Here’s your accountability moment: what is your goal for 2022 personally? Your number one goal? And what is your number one goal professionally? Write those down in the comments. I look forward to hearing from you and I’ll see you guys in the next video article. I’m Adrian Boysel and as always, keep looking up.