It's officially 2021! What a joy! What a relief!

If you missed the live Planning with Purpose workshop (or if you made it!), I want to honor the difficulties and weirdness of 2020 and share some bite-size tools with you to help you transition into the new year.

Over the next few weeks, I’m sharing a weekly activity, prompt, or tool to help you get unstuck and plan for the coming year. If you missed part one, you'll find it here.

In this series of 5, we’re focused on these topics:

1. 2020 retrospective and gratitude

2. Hopes and goals for 2021 (Today!)

3. Identify your motivations and purpose

4. What you need to reach your goals

5. How to visualize the future to make your goals come true

Today is day 2: Hopes and goals for 2021

For this activity, you only need:

• a notebook or paper

• something to write with

• a quiet place to focus

Step one: Wheel of Life

This is one of my top coaching tools with clients.

Find a fresh page of notebook.

Looking through each of these categories, what score out of 10 would you give each one? (For example, if you feel great about your health, you might put that at 9 or 10 out of 10 and if you're not feeling so good about your career, that might be more like 2 or 3 out of 10.)

You can write each one out in your notebook and give it a score. Draw the wheel there too if you'd like and you can color in each slice of the pie to show your number of satisfaction.

Step two:

Set a timer for 2 minutes for each of the wheel of life categories (2 min/topic) to rapid brainstorm all of your goals across all of these categories. Write as many or as few as come to mind but there are no wrong answers so do your best to let it flow. You may even be surprised about some of your subconscious hopes and desires that come up!

Step three:

Look over your full list of goals and circle the top 10 (ignoring categories) that are most alive/energizing for you. Let your intuitive guidance lead on this. Rewrite those 10 on a fresh page, leaving an empty 2nd column alongside it.

Step four:

Cross out 5-7 goals from your list of 10, cutting your list down one more time to just 3-5 total goals. We tend to go wild with huge numbers of goals and it can be incredibly overwhelming, leading to us dropping ALL the goals. Instead, by mindfully and intuitively cutting your list down to 5 goals at the most, you've already gifted yourself feasibility.

Optional: Write your 3-5 goals in different places. Look at them often over the next week and see how they feel and what's coming up for you. Do they energize and excite you? Do you need to adjust them so they feel right to you?

What came up for you? What are your top goals for 2021?

If this served you, take a picture of your notebook and share it on Instagram or Linkedin and tag me (@juliafirestonecoaching on Instagram and Julia Firestone on Linkedin) so others can try it too.