Guided Journaling for Goal-Setting

Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash

I love a good New Year ritual. Though I haven’t always been a big New Year's resolution person (I believe that change is possible any time of year, and I don’t like the pressure many feel to engage in “self-improvement” each January), I do love an excuse to reflect on my intentions and goals for the coming year.

This guided journaling practice is designed to help you reflect on your dreams for 2024 and to help you turn those dreams into specific, achievable action steps.

Though I am recording this practice around the start of the new year, you can use this practice any time you want to set some goals and intentions.

Additionally, I think that there is something nice about practicing along with a guided audio, but if you prefer to have the prompts written out, here is a list of the basic prompts that we will be covering during our time together:

1. Take a moment to reflect broadly on the things you most value, or the areas of your life that you most want to prioritize this year. Keep it broad. These could be things like health, career, relationships, mental health, comfort, adventure, creativity, spirituality, helping others, etc. Feel free to make a bullet point list, or you can also free-write.

2. Looking at the values that you identified in question 1, pick one to focus on for this practice. We are going to call this the theme for the practice. 

3. Write about why you value this theme. Why is it important or meaningful to you? Spend a few minutes reflecting here.

4. Now spend some time writing about what you want this area of your life to look like in the next year. Allow yourself to imagine and dream. No need to censor yourself. In an ideal world, what would this area of your life look like over the next year?

5. Read over what you wrote for question 4. Can you distill your core desires for this theme into one sentence? This sentence does not need to include everything you desire, but it should capture the basic idea. We will call this sentence your intention.

6. Can you come up with at least one goal to help you achieve your intention? How do you want to make your intention a reality?

7. Take a look at your goal and see if you can reword it in the form of a SMART goal. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. See if you can turn your goal or goals from question 6 into goals with the SMART qualities.

8. If you made more than one SMART goal, choose one to focus on for now. For that SMART goal, make a list of small action steps that you can take to achieve the goal. How will you break this goal into small, easy steps?

9. Pick one action step from your list and commit to taking that action step as soon as you can. Sometimes it can be helpful to make the first action step comically small to start building your confidence. No matter how small the action step, make sure you allow yourself to celebrate. You are paving the way toward meeting your goal. 

For the next several months, I invite you to regularly check back in with your intention and goals. Repeat the journaling process as many times as you need, and make sure you stay flexible. If a goal isn’t working, feel free to adjust. Maybe you need to break it into smaller action steps or pick a new goal to help you work toward the same intention.

I hope you find this helpful, and I wish you a happy start to 2024!